TUESDAYS WITH DIOGENES (9/22/09)

1.

I don’t live in New York anymore. Which, for the purposes of this story, is just as well. When I did live in New York, about thirty years ago, the streets were full of homeless people – sleeping over the blasts of hot air that came up from the subway grates, or on broken benches in the parks, or at the Port Authority Bus Station. Sometimes you found them sleeping in the lobby of your building – particularly if you lived on the Upper West Side, as I was at the time I left town, where doormen were (then) rare.

But Rudy Giuliani kicked them out, because they uglified his city – and they were annoying too, even if they weren’t cadging for cash. Annoying by just being there and reminding you of something, like there but for the grace of God … and last week’s paycheck …

He kicked them into New Jersey, which was already ugly. If they were smart, they somehow hiked down 95 and ended up in Florida. You know, weather matters a lot when you don’t have a roof.

They don’t uglify Palm Beach, where I live. You would think Palm Beachers would let them into their town so they’d know there were people around who were uglier than they. But that’s not how they see it. They actually think they are beautiful (they should be, for what they spend on it). So they look down on people who are simply ordinary. They don’t need to feel superior to a real human mess.

Where the Florida homeless actually sleep I have no idea. But if I want to find one, I simply get on 95, drive to an exit, and come to a stop at the light.

Of course, I never wanted to find one. What the hell for? If they say they’re willing to work for food, what work do I have for them? I’m not going to replace my chef or my gardener with a homeless man; even if it turned out they were better at the work, I have a reputation to uphold, and I can just imagine what my fired chef would gleefully tell my neighbors on Jungle Road. And my butler is required to know what Palm Beach expects of me.

The good thing is that, as I’ve noticed, they’ll only walk down one or two cars when the light is red, holding out something like a KFC bucket for cash. They don’t go any further, even while the light’s still red. Either they’re lazy, as Ronnie Reagan said, or they’re pre-discouraged. They figure the thing is useless. Why court rejection?

I can understand that. I don’t like rejection myself, even though it’s been thirty years since I’ve experienced it. Well - one little one ...

So I had never spoken to one of them. Before Diogenes.

It was a Tuesday afternoon, about 2:30, on a very hot, clear September day. Temps in the low 90’s. Relentless sun. Who says Bentley knows how to air condition a car?

I don’t work – not in the sense that I have to be anywhere. My fourth novel sold ten million copies, as did my fifth, sixth and seventh. After that, I ran out of ideas. I tortured myself over that a while, until I realized that, financially speaking, I never had to write another word. And that I didn’t need to punish myself for having nothing to say. If everyone who had nothing to say did that, we’d be swimming a sea of agony. I hadn’t met anyone for two years who had had something to say. After I realized how apparently happy they all were at being idealess, I figured I could be comfortable in that state.

Of course, I was kidding myself. As I soon found out.

I usually spent some part of each day at my financial advisor’s. I forgot – they call themselves wealth managers now. In their world, if you have ten dollars, that is your wealth. Of course, if that’s what you’ve got, you don’t get through their door.

I had spent many years under the financial guidance of one or another zhlub at outfits like Smith Barney and E.F. Hutton-that-was. Until I realized that they had gotten rich having as little knowledge of finance as I had had of writing. I made a few lucky guesses; so did they. I finally figured out that if every college kid was going to work on virtual Wall Street, there had to be plenty of “wealth managers” who were dummies and had no clue.

So now that I had street cred – bundles of dough – I went looking for someone who advised only the very rich. I assumed any one who survived in that business had to be good, or they would have been found floating one night face down in the Intracoastal. Thank God I avoided Madoff – although I have to say a lot of the local Jews told me I had to go with him, and that if I did I would get invited to dinner at the best homes. I figured that anyone who did not wish to have dinner with the author of four blockbuster novels, unless he banked with Madoff, was someone it wasn’t necessary that I meet.

The guy I had now – it was a woman, actually – had given me some excellent advice. And, so far, no bad advice, which is far more important. There was something about her that made me want to sleep with her. I wasn’t sure whether it was her somewhat attractive looks – actually, her tiny turned-up nose was her only alluring feature – or whether it was her competence that was seducing me. In the end, it didn’t matter, because she said no. That was the little one.

This particular Tuesday I was headed for her office, to make another futile attempt, when I was distracted by one of my peculiarities: I needed to eat a cheeseburger at a dirty restaurant. I suppose they reminded me of happy days of yore, eating cheeseburgers in my innocence on Thompson and Bleecker Streets. Like, I happened to be in Nobody’s, on Bleecker Street, the night David Clayton Thomas got his ear bit off in there.

This was not a healthy practice – but then I had no healthy practices.

I protected my unhealthy practices furiously, since I assumed they had been one of the reasons for the success of my books. Which is why I never went to a shrink, even when I needed one. I didn’t want them to mess with the sources of my creativity, even by accident. Neither I nor they (the generic “they”, i.e., the shrinks I didn’t go to) had any real concept of what those sources were. As far as I knew, if they’d adjusted the way I flossed my teeth, my creative urges could have been wiped out by the change. As it turned out, it wasn’t my dental habits that killed them. I have no idea why I can’t write.

So I turned off 95 at Atlantic Avenue, intending to go east into Delray Beach and eat a burger in a place I knew to be disgusting enough to satisfy my urge.

As I sat at the light, I noticed to my left, off the roadway under the 95 overpass, one of those big concrete tubes they use for highway drainage projects. Work on Atlantic Avenue had been going on for a while. As it happened, the tube was laid horizontal to the avenue, so I could see through it from my driver’s seat. Or almost through it.

Because curled up in the tube, like a snail, at the end closest to me, was the dirtiest man I had ever seen.

He might have been dead, for all I knew. He didn’t move. And then I saw him open his eyes and fix them on me. And even from fifty feet away I was caught by those eyes. I saw that they were brilliant, which suggested brilliance behind them. And I knew, though I didn’t understand why, that I had to talk to him.

There was no place to park on Atlantic around 95, so I pulled off onto the grass to my left, turned my blinkers on, got out and took a long look at the front left tire, which was not in the view of the traffic coming off 95. Then I ambled over to the concrete tube.

His long hair was ratty and matted. It wasn’t so much he was coated as that he was thoroughly smudged. He wore a stained Hawaiian shirt, stained khaki pants and a pair of holed tennis shoes. No socks, but nobody around Palm Beach wore socks. I figured this was his concession to local style.

His eyes continued to engage mine as I approached him. When I got nearly to him, he grinned – his teeth were surprisingly good – and said: “Okay, ten bucks, I help you change your tire. Far as I can see, it ain’t flat – but for ten bucks I will play along with your delusion.”

“It isn’t flat,” I answered. Assuring him that I knew.

“So then why you come over here?”

“Because I wanted to talk to you.”

“Talk to me,” he drawled, still grinning. “You mean to tell or ask?”

“I’ve got nothing to tell you.”

“I bet you do. But go ahead, ask away.”

I crouched, so as to get my face level with his. He didn’t look any better from closer up. But he didn’t look any worse.

“You live here?” I asked him.

“Not particularly. Plenty of these tubes all over the place.”

“You’re like a hermit crab.”

“Accurate simile.”

That set me aback. And had me leaning forward, too. “Are you disabled?” I asked.

“In a way.”

“What way?”

“That’s a awful personal question,” he scowled. “From some Bentley-driving stranger.”

“Sorry,” I murmured.

“It ain’t physical. I can walk, I can talk, I can lift my own weight, and my dick comes up when I want it to.”

I couldn’t imagine what chance he would get to use it. He knew that’s what I was thinking, and he laughed.

“You be surprised who wants to fuck me.”

“Would I?”

“Sure. Might be one of your neighbors. What they say – no accounting for tastes?” He saw that had intrigued me. “Jaguar pulls up to this corner near every other day. Parks right where you did. Fuck in the back seat. Sweet thing, always wearing pearls. Don’t take her dress off, just hike it up, sits on my lap and rolls on my Johnson. Don’t wear undies. None of them do. Secrets of the clean pristine. Come like a locomotive.”

“And after that?”

“After that? She reach out and hug me, hold me close. Sometimes she start to cry. Say she wishes she could take me home, but … “you know how it is.” I say “How is it?” But she don’t answer me. I say, “Look, if I’m good enough to fuck, I’m good enough to love.” And she says, “I do love you. Now get out of the car.”

I said: “Doesn’t that bother you?”

He laughed again. “Why should it? I don’t want to live her life. She take me home, I be gone inside a week. She have to come back here to find me, and it start all over again.”

“So you like your life …”

“Not what I like that matters. More what I want to avoid.”

“Which is?”

“You want to know that, better next time bring a chair. You ain’t got the knees for that conversation.”

“You’ll talk to me again?” I said, a bit surprised.

“Yeah. Any time she ain’t here. She gets priority, out of respect.”

I asked: “Do you talk to her like this?”

“No. She climbs right on. But I would, if she wanted to. Don’t know a thing about her, and she don’t know a thing about me. Kinda sad, you know. But the fucking is glorious.”

"That’s rare,” I chuckled.

He picked up a hand and stuck a finger out at me. “That what you think? Nobody’s fault but yours, Bentley. Every fuck is glorious, far as I’m concerned. She could stink of puke, it still be glorious. She letting you up in her innards. She giving her secret to you. You understand that, and you give her back what she giving you, ain’t no such thing as an inglorious fuck.”

Wish I’d known that thirty years ago.

“What’s your disability, then?” I went on.

“I don’t think like normal people do.”

“You mean you’re learning disabled?”

“Me?” Now he guffawed. “It’s you all who can’t learn what I know.”

And I heard myself saying: “Teach me.” And meaning it. Shocking myself down to the soles of my shoes.

“Ask the right questions,” he said. “And listen to what I respond. You manage that, you way ahead of the rest of them. You think you can do that, Bentley?”

I promised: “I will try.”

He leaned back and closed his eyes. “I be in this tube next Tuesday.”

Copyright 2009 Aram Schefrin

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