Kamikaze Lust Read online

  As stories of the strike tapered off, the bartender turned down the sound on the TV sets in favor of classic rock: The Doors. A table opened up, and we grabbed it. Tony ordered more shots. “What should we drink to?” he said.

  “Let’s drink to the dead couple,” Michael said. “What were their names?”

  “Ida and Marvin Salinger,” I said.

  “Here’s to Ida and Marvin.”

  “Cheers.”

  Etcetera. Etcetera. Etcetera.

  Everyone drank again—except for me. I’d already had two shots and couldn’t risk another. I hated getting drunk, though I’d learned not to make a big deal about it. If I had to I could quickly dump a shot on the floor, cover the glass with my whole hand and pop it back against my mouth while pretending to swallow. It worked every time.

  “We need more margaritas,” Tony said.

  “Don’t they come in any other color?” Shade asked, and the next time they came back blue. She grimaced. Eyeing each other across the table, I remembered the blue M&Ms. I’d never known anybody so affected by primary colors.

  The drinks kept coming, but we were tired of drinking to Ida and Marvin. “Anybody got a paper?” Michael said. “Get the obits. We’ll drink to every goddamn dead person in there.”

  Shade hurled a copy of The City News at him.

  “This is getting sick,” Carrie said, wobbling up out of her seat. “Doesn’t it bother any of you that this morning two people were alive and because of some modern Joseph Mengele tonight they’re….” She shook her head back and forth.

  “Aw, come on now, sit down,” Tony said. “We’re just goofing. If we started taking this shit too seriously we’d all be running for the cyanide.”

  “I know, I know.” She took a deep breath and smoothed out her skirt as if she’d learned it in some dress-for-success seminar. Rule #9: Straight Clothing = Straight Thinking. “Look, it’s been a monster day, I’m calling it quits.” She picked up her briefcase and swung her blazer over her arm. “See you guys,” she said.

  We said goodbye and then fell silent, as if Carrie’s disappearance might force us to address our presence at The Corral. I could hear Jim Morrison’s trippy baritone being eclipsed by the clanking bottles and background chatter.

  “What’s up with Carrie?” Michael said.

  “Gee, I don’t know,” I said.

  “Don’t you start flipping out now,” Tony said.

  “Give her a break,” Shade said. “She was following Kaminsky.”

  “Poor Rachey,” Tony reached over and patted my head.

  “I was just getting comfortable here,” I smiled and let him put his arm around me. “And this was so easy, a tailor-made, front-page extravaganza. Shit.”

  “Yeah, missing out on the story of the century must suck holy rat cock,” Tony said.

  “It’s bigger than a rat, Dibenedetto,” I took his arm from my shoulder and stood up.

  “Oh nice, asshole, you scared her off, too,” Michael said.

  “Mind your business, sound-bite boy,” Tony said. Then, running his thumb and forefinger against his mustache, he looked up at me. “Come on, I’m sorry, you can come back.”

  “Relax, I’m just getting a soda.”

  I had to break away from them, if only to drop the tough-girl act for a few minutes. At the bar, I ordered a diet Coke and bummed a cigarette from the bartender. Though I’d quit a few years ago, smoking was an ongoing battle. These days my resolve was to not buy them, but the way I felt when I took that first drag, as if the smoke going inside helped make sense of everything happening outside, was similar to Carrie smoothing down the wrinkles on her skirt. I took a deep drag, thinking, cancer sticks. Aunt Lorraine had never smoked a day in her life and she got it; genetics weren’t on my side.

  I put out the cigarette after a few drags and on my way back to the table bumped into James. He was wearing his coat and, like me, seemed a bit awkward amid the streams of tequila shots and smoke and rock-and-roll.

  “Strange day,” he said.

  “It’s my birthday.”

  “Thirty?”

  “Plus one.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “Nobody does. Leaving?”

  “Yeah, I have to get back to Jersey, I want to put my kids to bed.” He pulled the belt of his tan raincoat and smiled. Shade was right about the Asian mensch thing. James was a good guy, and though only thirty-four himself, he seemed much older than the rest of us. Maybe it was the raincoat.

  “Take care of yourself, okay?” he said.

  “Yeah, you too.”

  I watched him walk out, then scavenged another cigarette before returning to the table.

  We stayed out late. Very late.

  I didn’t know about anybody else, but I couldn’t face the thought of going home to my solitary crib. As people scattered away, Shade and I gravitated to a table full of bundlers who all seemed to be named Bill. She was drunk; I’d been faking it for the last couple of hours. I stayed quiet, turned down drinks when the Bills offered despite Shade’s exasperated stares. The feeling I’d experienced earlier with Tina Macadam returned, only now I was skeptical of Shade. For someone who’d just this afternoon joined the ranks of the newly celibate, she was acting quite flirtatious. All of the Bills wanted to take her home.

  She was having none of that, however. I could tell by the way she clung to my arm as we finally left the bar and entered the cool, damp night. More than once here in New York I’d seen her work the persiflage, smiling wide-eyed for the boys, and then use me as her foil. She was more talk than action, but I was neither.

  We took a taxi back to my jeep, and I drove Shade to her apartment. Before climbing out, she leaned closer to me and smiled. “You’re a good kid, Sliver-Twit,” she said, spinning a dipsomaniacal derivation of the name that was no longer my own.

  “Thanks,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say and the way she looked at me sometimes, the way she was looking at me now, made any words at all seem redundant. She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. The next thing I knew the passenger door slammed shut. I watched her climb the steps of her brownstone and disappear behind two sets of glass doors.

  ORIFICE POLITICS

  I ended the first week of the strike at the dentist’s office. Camille the dental assistant propped open my mouth and slipped the slurpy, suckling tube beneath my tongue. Water laced with mouthwash showered into the plastic cup. The hairs on my arms stood in collective shiver as Camille hummed to “Top of the World” by the Carpenters.

  “She’ll be in in a minute,” Camille said, trying her best at comfort before Dr. Janis started her drilling. I sat back and wondered why I’d kept this appointment, how my first trip outside since the strike began had me choking the metal beads of the spit-bib.

  The last few days had been a fog of frozen pizza and six packs of diet root beer, monotonous words springing from my television set. Only when armed with the channel clicker was I safe from the mocking jeers of my laptop and microcassette, the ridicule of my barren reporter’s notebooks. The tools of my trade had given me structure, now all I had was television. And I gave over willingly, letting in the call-in shows and sci-fi sitcoms, the Spanish Harlem hit parade, microorganism hour, Le Soufflé. Shows blended into each other; like a pure-bred zombie, I formulated interactive character plots, tracked stray Cheerios from channel to channel. I forgot to feed Freddy until she dug her nails into my arm and drew blood. We started smelling like the litter box.

  Then there was the onslaught of phone calls from Aunt Lorraine beginning on the morning after the double suicide, waking me at seven when I’d been out so late the night before. “So that’s your Doctor Kaminsky?” she asked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “He’s not my doctor,” I assured her. Though I was tired, the way she said your kept me alert. It was the tone she used when Mom was badgering her, and I would have to interfere, because like it or not, Mom was mine. Just as she was Aunt Lorraine’s sis
ter-in-law. But I had no such claim on the suicide doctor. I couldn’t even speak of him and Aunt Lorraine in the same breath, let alone imagine bringing them together for a cup of coffee.

  Besides, how bad could her cancer be if she was calling me a few times a day. There was such verve in her voice. “I just want to talk to him,” she said.

  “You have plenty of people to talk to.”

  “Who, your mother? Rowdy? You tell me, who? Everyone’s so tip-toe, hush-hush, and get out. Nobody says anything.”

  “What do you want from them?”

  “I don’t know, I just need to talk to somebody…somebody who understands. I’m dying, you know.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “Say it if it makes you feel better, but you have no idea.” I don’t know if saying it made me feel any better, but it did help to dull the impact of her words. At least until the next phone call. The problem was we had such easy access to the phone; each of us confined to bed with everything around us grinding to a halt. By the time Camille called reminding me of my appointment with warnings about not filling cavities at this stage—the adult mouth being a bottomless pit of foreign matter, its lacunae home to more toxic garbage than a Staten Island dump—I could hardly refuse an opportunity to shower, dress, and leave my apartment.

  Camille, still singing to the Carpenters (not a cloud in the sky, got the sun in my eye), clicked her heels against the floor in time. I was so focused on her routine I didn’t notice Dr. Janis coming in until she was standing over me, rapacious blond mane swallowing the shoulders of her freshly pressed lab coat. She smelled like she’d just come in from the street. In her hand was the shiny, silver Novocain gun.

  “You don’t really need it,” she said.

  “Oh, yech, I do.”

  The needle bit into my outer gum area no worse than Freddy would do. I cringed, turned my head slightly, and saw Dr. Janis’s shoes—cherry combat boots. I trusted her.

  Within a few minutes my throat felt numb. Dr. Janis snapped a rubber glove over each of her hands, and I thought of this reporter I used to work with who mangled clichés. She once told me the problem with men—and this goes back to the mid-eighties—was they were becoming too sensitive. “It’s like you have to treat them with rubber gloves,” she said. At the time I found her stupidity hilarious, although now, I wondered whether she might have been on to something about handling life with latex.

  Dr. Janis pulled down my lower lip with a rubber-coated pinkie. As she reached for the drill, I felt the muscles in my stomach contract.

  “Relax,” she said. “It won’t be that bad.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Remember your abscess?” Dr. Janis leaned forward. I could hear the piercing whir of the drill. “You thought you were going to die, remember?”

  “Ich was…grosch.”

  “But you lived to tell.”

  I nodded affirmatively. I lived. Aunt Lorraine was dying. I imagined her sitting in a chair like this, only instead of Novocain the gun pumped liquefied Seconal, Nembutal, or whatever hemlock of the moment. Dying should not be like going to the dentist. It would have to be less stressful.

  “You’re so jittery today,” Dr. Janis said. “It’s just a couple of cavities.”

  “I told you, she’s on strike,” Camille interjected.

  “Oh, right, right. So what do you do now?”

  I shrugged.

  “Hey, we have that guy, maybe she can write for him,” Camille said, her short, Betty Boop curls bouncing into my peripheral view. “You know, Phillip, the one who does those farm magazines.”

  “The Weekly Cow.”

  “No, it’s Cow Week.”

  “And what’s the other one? My favorite.”

  “He’s got like tons.”

  “Suburban Hog, that’s the one I’m thinking of,” Dr. Janis said, nursing a subtle sparkle in her eyes. “They’re big in Texas.”

  “Huge in Texas,” Camille said. She and Dr. Janis smiled at each other.

  “I don’t think Rachel wants to write about farm animals,” Dr. Janis said. “You don’t, right?”

  I gave as much of a grimace as I could manage given that my mouth was propped open by Dr. Janis’ hand. I could smell my saliva on her gloves and was feeling too much pressure from the drill against my jaw. Lest my tongue lunge to stop it, I pointed to my mouth and said what surfaced as: “Uh-gunkkah.”

  “More Novocain?”

  I nodded, and she slipped the metal gun between her thumb and forefinger. This time I couldn’t feel the needle.

  Lying back supine, legs propped up in the rigor mortis of the moment with Dr. Janis drilling deep into the estuaries of my enamel, I couldn’t escape the carnality of modern dentistry. I wondered how Dr. Janis dealt with it. I once asked my ex-fiancé Sam, the gynecologist-in-training, how he could look inside vaginas every day and divorce himself from the notion of sex. “Oh grow up, Rachel,” he sneered. Some pussy doctor he turned out to be. But by then sex had become our Issue with a capital I, as Shade would say, and we’d made it into counseling, a dehumanizing experience if ever there was one. I hated the therapist, the way she prodded and probed, with Sam sitting there oafishly, convinced she could shed light on our “problem”: my inability to achieve orgasm with him. With anyone.

  Because I could come alone, if I concentrated hard enough, masturbation had always seemed a miscarriage of the act itself. Like the now-taunting gaze of my impotent microcassette and laptop, my solitary orgasms reminded me of what I could not otherwise do. Echoed the psychological peanut gallery (in accents of dreary German no less): But are you sexually frrrrus-tra-ted? Of course I was sexually frustrated, but I didn’t normally have time to think about it, just as I didn’t normally have time to deal with cavities.

  “You’re getting a little mushy above the bicuspid area,” Dr. Janis said after she’d finished drilling. She suggested I use a soft-bristle brush as we walked together to the front desk. “Take a couple of Advils if you feel any pounding,” she said.

  I nodded, my jaw liquid as a Salvador Dali clock. Camille ran my American Express card through the computer.

  “And call us if you want to talk to Phillip,” she said.

  I looked up. “Phillip?”

  “The cow guy.”

  “Oh sure, thanks,” I nodded, thinking, over my unemployed body. Cow Week? I’d rather stay in bed all day eating frozen pizza straight from the box.

  Camille handed me my credit card, and I was then let loose onto the crowded streets of midtown Manhattan on this too-sunny October day. Off to the picket line with the residue of Novocain palsying a side of my face.

  At home, my answering machine blinked a torpid two. I paced, listening to the tape scuttle back to the weary iambs of Aunt Lorraine’s voice: “Your Doctor Kaminsky was just on again. He is such a spunky fellow, and so good at his—” I jammed my finger on the fast-forwarded button. If only repression could always be this easy.

  There was another message; Ethan confirming dinner tonight. I’d canceled our last two appointments as I did often with ex-boyfriends of the married variety who after one drink became sloppy and nostalgic about how great the two of us would have been together now that he was conveniently affixed to somebody else. All right, this only happened with Ethan. But he did say he might have work for me, maybe a celebrity-stroking piece for the glossy fanzine he edited. I heard some of his writers were swimming in cash, and Ethan himself had all of the trappings of financial success—the TriBeCa loft and summer house in the Hamptons, the fast car and bland bandshell of a wife.

  Cordless pressed against my ear, I walked to the window, but instead of Ethan I called Shade. Dusk skipped down the street in a dervish of blues that sent the bright orange sun sinking into the Hudson. Cars honked, a child cried for her mother, and Shade wasn’t home.

  Trading the phone for a pair of 7 x 50 World War II binoculars I found a few weeks ago at a flea market, I spied people walking down Broadway, jackets tossed over t
heir shoulders, some wheeling babies in strollers, others carrying flowers in paper wrapping. Sentimental fools lapping up these last stolen moments of summer. I wanted someone to get hit by a bus.

  And where was Ms. Teesha Marie Simpson on this evening oh-so-balmy? Off somewhere with Tina Motorcycle, no doubt. I tried to imagine it…Shade sitting in a dark bar, tilting her head back and laughing, her mouth open so wide you could see the silver fillings on her bottom molars—I loved that, the way she laughed as if nothing had ever felt so good. I thought about ringing her cell phone, but then I might appear too interested in her whereabouts, or simply psychotic, when she picked up and I didn’t have a single thing to tell her. I often worried about people thinking I was crazy.

  Instead, I called Ethan and said yes, we were still on.

  We met at a little bistro near his office. I ate a grilled chicken salad and drank two glasses of wine through our standard punctilio: small talk of careers—or lack thereof in my case, though I was careful not to seem too desperate for work—and friends we had in common from journalism school. After dinner we took the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building and pushed our noses into the grooves of the tall, metal fences, looking down on the lighted buildings of Manhattan as the sticky breezes blew Tropic-of-Cancer waves beneath the bucketing sky. I was feeling a little tipsy, Ethan said he was sober. I got vertigo, he didn’t. I practically fell into his arms up there on top of the world, and, though it seemed as sappy as Camille the dental assistant singing the Carpenters, I let Ethan take me home.

  Blame the makeshift romance, blame the wine. Or blame it on Shade as I would the next day, but that night I was to break my sixteen months and three weeks—give or take a few days—of celibacy. It wasn’t the sex I’d missed, it was that I was beginning to forget my own body. I needed to be touched. And Ethan was there.

  I liked kissing him more than I remembered. He’d become aggressive, his tongue running along the surface of my gums, his lips sucking mine as if through me he could finally breathe.

  Soon enough, our clothes were flying overhead, and we were naked with his head planted between my legs, for a long, long time. Ethan was not one to give up easily—this I remembered. But what first felt good soon turned cold and my mind started wandering…don’t forget to call Aunt Lorraine…and where was Shade, goddammit?…I wanted a cigarette, but would have to hit the deli on the corner and buy a pack of Marlboros, no, something lighter, if I was going to buy a pack.…This was pathetic. Woody Allen had done so many of these scenes it was hard not to imagine myself a split-screen vision, and with Ethan going at it like a lawnmower. It was a shame, because one of the things about being with someone you haven’t been with in a few years is you want to show them how much you’ve improved and on that score I hadn’t made much progress. I thought about throwing in an oooh here, an aaah there, but couldn’t. Beyond comprehension was the fact that I often faked being drunk, pretended more than once to be a lawyer to get my hands on legal documents, frequently lied my way into interviews, yet I couldn’t fudge an orgasm! This had to stop. I grabbed Ethan’s hair and lifted up his head, which for all I knew he’d mistaken as my climax. Then again, he would know better. But he was breathing canine-hot like the weather, and I was just ready to be done with it.