The Unexpected Salami Read online

  I listened in the loft as Frank and Janet compared their assessments of Stuart’s condition. The station played the same Mommas and Poppas song that had been in rotation the night I bid adieu to my internship and DJ-lover.

  Stuart shat on the sheets. He’d been constipated since the night after I met him at Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop. Janet and I rolled him over to change his linen. She put on the rubber gloves and wiped his ass with a dishrag.

  “I’ll do that, Janet,” I said. “You’re going a hell of a ways beyond the call of duty.”

  “It’s not a problem.” I loved her and her loyalty so much that I wanted to kill her. Janet had to go home to feed her pets, and I hugged her.

  “I’ll never judge you again.”

  “Rachel, you’ll be judging me until you die. But it’s okay. I know I pass muster.” I had to hand it to her for that comment. She was getting down the New York stance.

  I hated this all-in-one-pancake-mix world and told it so under my breath. Frank had passed out on a pile of pillows near his stereo. I took one of Frank’s travel books from the bookcase that he carried off the street with a friend—The Lonely Planet Guide to Chile. I ran my finger down the string bean-y map in the front. Frieda once told me about a cultural story she’d been commissioned to produce for a Latino TV show, a freelance video assignment she’d gotten via her Argentinean step-aunt.

  In Santiago a folksinger’s arm was cut off during the 1974 military coup, in the middle of a stadium of his fans. The legend goes that he defiantly went back on stage after the soldiers did that, and played guitar with one arm. Then the fuckers shot him.

  Frank had been to Chile once, and I went to see if he had a tape or CD by that guy on his rack. Victor something. Of course he did: Victor Jara. I listened to a song called “El Niño Yuntero,” which the notes said means “child of the yoke.” It was eerie and soothing. Was Stuart catching my eye? No, he was grimacing into space. The two of us were exhausted.

  I sunk into Frank’s ten-dollar Salvation Army beanbag thinking about Sy Cooper, the month he learned he was going to be fired, the month he told me and Janet to harden our souls. Sy Cooper’s favorite director was Mike Leigh who wasn’t so well known then. It was hard for Leigh to attract a widespread audience for his relentless films about the underbelly of the U.K. While his characters are always no-hopers, Leigh never condemns them or puts them on a pedestal. There are bastards in the lower classes, and there are near saints. The hilarious scumbags are more interesting though. Sy revered Leigh, although not as much as he worshiped Scorcese. Sy was a minor ex-Beat who sold a few of his experimental eight-millimeter films of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to the Museum of Modern Art. He was also an alcoholic.

  After Sy Cooper was turned down for tenure, he decided to inflict a mini–Mike Leigh fest on my poor sucker of a class—three films sated with unsympathetic characters: Nuts in May, Death, and Hard Labour. To top off his ad hoc half-semester-long examination of Leigh’s oeuvre of misery, Sy coupled The Man with the Golden Arm, the don’t-use-heroin Frank Sinatra movie, with John Huston’s Fat City, a dirge of a film about a boxer who’s the toy of bad fortune. But for the last class, his píece-de-resistance: he screened Shoah, the harrowing nine-hour subtitled French documentary on the Holocaust, which we were required to sit through.

  Janet and I sat next to each other during the film. Janet hunched over the desk in her Henri Grethel sweater, ready to puke at the next mention of a skeletal child. I touched her knee under my desk. “I’m going down with you,” I wrote on the corner of my spiral notebook.

  “You’re not going to believe this, one of my grandparents was a Nazi, isn’t that terrible?” Janet scribbled back in tight letters. I blinked theatrically. Was the all-American blood diluted?

  “Were either of your Italian grandparents Fascists?” she whispered hopefully.

  “In Brooklyn? Probably about the Dodgers,” I said, not quite truthfully and loud enough for Sy to hear. The biggest family scandal had happened at my parents’ wedding when my tipsy Grandma Chaika called Grandma Rosa’s visiting cousin, Sergio, a murderer. According to my mother, my grandmas didn’t speak to each other for five years.

  I swear I saw a glint in Sy’s eye when he sat down next to us in one of the many dropped-out student’s seats and said, “Toughen up now, girls, or you’ll be eaten alive.” He was fired that summer for not adhering to the departmentally approved class outline. The establishment might say he wasn’t teaching his students, but Janet and I knew that semester that we were witnessing his swan song.

  I needed to toughen up. My ex-flatmate was a long way from recovery, but I had to go to work. I had twenty dollars left.

  When Frank woke up, he took over as watchdog. I went downstairs to the corner of Bowery and Grand in search of cheap eats. I bought one-dollar bags of food from Chinese street stalls: broccoli, skinny purple eggplants, six hard-tofu slices, and a fish, species unknown.

  I walked home to the apartment to water Mom’s succulents, an emotional break from the loft drama. There were bills for the phone and my student loan payments, and a no-more-excuses jury notice with which I had to contend with in two weeks time. Thank God my parents were picking up the maintenance for another few months.

  I played the one message: “Hi, girl, it’s Veemah. I’m back again. I had to sit in on a new show in London.”

  Veemah and I had been the only two incoming freshman girls out of five thousand who’d checked both Physics and Media on our college roommate compatibility forms. I was envious of her vision; from the time she was fifteen she knew that she wanted to develop new planetarium shows. “I hear from Miss Frieda that you have a sexy houseguest from Australia. We’re going to smoke you out if you don’t call soon to fill us in.”

  I left a message. I knew she wouldn’t be home. “Hi, Veemah, it’s Frieda. I have a big mouth, and I don’t know what I’m talking about. Call me.”

  I had to be back at the loft in an hour. I ate humble pie and called Temp Solution again.

  “Rachel Ganelli?—Oh sure—you’re still available for temping? I was sure by now you would have secured a full-time job with all that professional experience. Well, I have one job for thirteen an hour, there’s no word-processing involved, but if you didn’t want that school job—”

  Okay, bitch, let’s move this along. “Oh no, Selena. I’ll take what you have. I’m in a bind for money. What does it entail?”

  “Well, we don’t send many people over there. You have to be ready to deal with it.”

  I didn’t care what the job was. Broke is broke.

  “It’s a publishing group, but they have, well, pornographic magazines.” When I didn’t say anything she proceeded as if each word was being strung on jewelry wire. “They need a receptionist. The work isn’t hard, but the last person we sent thought that the job was so demeaning that she walked by lunchtime. We haven’t felt that there was someone adequately hardskinned to send over. I wouldn’t have them as a client if I had a choice, but the owner’s our vice president’s cousin, and well, the work is yours for the asking.”

  “Is this Playboy?”

  “You should be so lucky,” Selena said almost sweetly.

  Porno pics I can deal with—as long as I didn’t have to venture out in that cafeteria hairnet.

  I was supposed to work at Taitler Inc. for a week, until their receptionist returned from vacation. I made sure I wore the closest thing I had to a potato sack. The office was in a regular midtown glass tower on Madison Avenue, a leftover thousand feet of office space that the law firm on the floor hadn’t yet gobbled up. There was no sign on the door that said TITS INSIDE. Just a plain brown plaque. I was told to ask for Greta, who turned out to be the office manager. A coiffed woman I’d mistake on a bus for a Park Avenue trophy wife.

  “Have you been informed by your agency of the type of operation we are in?” Greta asked. She didn’t want a repeat of the suffragette scene from the previous week.

  “Yes, don’t
worry.” I tried to look nonchalant. “I’m a regular sex shop customer,” I said, which, considering my recent purchase with Janet, was mildly true. Greta looked at me for a second like I was a flasher. She showed me the key for the restroom in the desk drawer, demonstrated the straightforward phone system, and gave me a list of the employees and the fake names they used on the job. Harry Dershowitz was “Moe Turner.” Sherri Ng was “Wendy Hurtz.”

  “You might get heavy-breathing calls,” Greta warned, “but don’t worry, it’s horny teenagers who think there must be a naked woman on the other end of our subscription line.” She handed me an assortment of Taitler Inc.’s magazines—in case adult bookstores called with orders. I looked them over while waiting for the aroused teen brigade to ring. The publications were, in a word, smut. A mag for every special interest perversion, a concept not unlike Bell Press’s extremely specialized science journals.

  For men obsessed with big butts, there was a periodical called Cr-ASS; women were still giving the standard blow-jobs and getting laid, but each photo was set up so that their behinds took up half the page. There was Black Lesbo Pussy, and Shaved Pussy. I gasped when I saw Incest World. One spread featured a bald middle-age man, with a nose discolored by either skin cancer or alcohol consumption, licking out a young girl’s vagina. I swear I saw him in the office heading toward the water fountain, a fortyish penny-loafered man who later introduced himself as the owner of the company.

  “You’re doing a great job,” he said. “You’d be surprised how many girls can fuck up reception.” I’d gone low before, but this was touching the core of the earth.

  Instead of calling the FBI Child Porn taskforce, I calculated thirteen by thirty-five hours, thirty-seven point five if I took a half-hour lunch for the week, and grit my teeth. The money wasn’t great, but I had Stuart to support for at least a little while. It wasn’t fair to ask Frank to lay out money.

  An assistant art director I recognized from Bell Press (a dim and tan-in-February bull who had once asked me if Ganelli was a Swedish name) appeared in the late afternoon to drop off freelance mechanicals. We pretended not to know each other.

  Nine hours had elapsed back at the ranch; when I returned Stuart was sitting up. “Well, hi,” I said, surprised. He had showered, too. I had interrupted Stuart and Frank in an instructional game of two-up, an Australian coin-tossing game that World War I soldiers, the diggers, had played to pass time. I guess Stuart thought an American quarter was an okay substitution. Frank had ordered another pizza.

  “Hi,” Stuart said, embarrassed. He was scratching himself on the arm.

  I rested my butt near where they were sitting. Stuart still smelled metallic from withdrawal, with an extra whiff of apple pectin shampoo. “I didn’t expect to see you up yet. What have you been talking about?”

  “I told Frank about me dog Sylvester.”

  Stuart had a dog named Sylvester? In our two years as flatmates, he told me three intimate facts: an almost boastful claim that his father was killed in Vietnam picking up a dead baby stuffed with a grenade (which I didn’t believe); his heroin-teeth acknowledgment; and that he’d do anything for Melissa, the girlfriend who’d started him on the downward spiral. It wasn’t the time for jealousy again, but did everyone always have to fall in love with Frank’s charm?

  “I was about to tell Stu about your turtle,” Frank said, flipping the quarter—obviously not a good flip since Stuart took a handful of Frank’s jelly bean pile.

  I tried to mimic Frank’s easy style. It sounded forced. “Frank convinced me that turtles like merry-go-rounds and got me to leave Mertle on our turntable for hours. He died of dizziness, I think. My mother found my dead turtle spinning round and round.”

  Mom had made Frank explain to me that he had done a bad thing and that he was trying to fool me. She tried to follow the Quaker discipline model at our school—no corporal punishment, unlike Colin’s Catholic school with its ruler-wielding nuns.

  (“They hit you for anything,” he’d once said, tying up the kitchen garbage—Stuart had long abandoned his job responsibilities. “Sister Patricia once slapped my wrist for my tic acting up.”)

  When my Grandma Rosa insisted I go to Sunday school if I was going to go to Hebrew School, Mom made sure she found a class taught by a retired divinity professor who was too riddled with arthritis to hit us. Quakers want to be sure that their kids understand what they did wrong; Frank and I learned early on a good bullshit story could get us out of anything.

  “I loved that turtle,” I said, and Stuart offered a sympathetic smile.

  “But not as much as Brice loved Cookie,” Frank added.

  “Cookie?” Stuart asked.

  “A fuzzy yellow chick my friend Brice took home from school when I was nine.”

  I hadn’t thought of this in years.

  “Cookie was hatched in our classroom incubator,” Frank continued. “Everyone got to take a chick home for a few days, but Brice refused to bring his bird back. His divorced mother indulged him, and let Cookie grow into a chicken in their apartment. Cookie shit on everything and pecked holes in their couch until one of Brice’s aunts made his mom send it away to a farm upstate.”

  “Did Brice see Cookie again?” Stuart asked, a three year old distracted from a bleeding knee.

  “I don’t think so. Anyway, chickens make lousy pets,” Frank finished. “There’s a reason you break their necks and fry them.”

  Stuart laughed out loud. His whole face lit up; he could have been a cousin from Odessa, who emigrated the previous week into our kooky, capitalist family. Frank and I knew this story cold, even though years had passed since one of us had retold it. Stuart came from a childhood without narrative. He was taking sanctuary in ours.

  “So, hey,” Frank said, “how’s the new temp job?”

  “Okay. It’s a magazine company.” I sat down on the mattress. I smiled at Stuart. Maybe he wasn’t such a sore on humanity. “You can come back to my apartment tomorrow, and I’ll help you look for work. We’ll put our brains together, okay?”

  “Jesus, Rachel,” Frank said, “Stu’s barely back from the dead. Getting over the need for the Man is hard shit.”

  A need for the Man? Stu? Please. “I’m saying it’s okay if you want to move back into the apartment. I took a job this week. You don’t have to worry about money for a week or so. You can watch TV or something. And Frank has a shower stall, I have a bath.”

  “Whatever,” Stuart said. I gave Stuart an uncomfortable “you survived” hug and left them alone for a few minutes while I chilled out by the radio.

  No one had moved the dial since Frank last turned it on. It was the top of the hour. Richard, the ingredient-reading DJ I’d bonked during my internship summer, played the station ID audio cart. He announced the time and the weather. Then he popped in the contest cart from the promotions department. Oh, sloppy, Richard. I could hear him putting in the cart.

  The promo featured Richard’s voice over an old INXS hit, “What You Need.”

  “Give us watcha need, watcha need,” cooed lead singer Michael Hutchence.

  “I know watcha need,” Richard said, “two tickets to Madison Square Garden for the June sixteenth Foster’s Down Under Tour featuring INXS. Opening act is the Tall Poppies, who’ll perform their hot new hit ‘Gnome.’ Listen for your chance to win.” A second of Phillip’s chorus kicked in, “Like a Gnome I’m contorted. I’m a Gnome”—, and then the climax of the promo, a final “watcha need!”

  I clenched the armrest of my chair in disbelief.

  Richard went back live to the mic. “On your mark, listeners, the ninety-seventh caller gets a stuffed koala from the Steiff Toys World Heritage animal collection, and a chance to enter our grand prize drawing. Five grand prize winners and their guests will be driven to the INXS concert in a stretch limo, and escorted to their front row seats. Up next is Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, with one of my favorites, ‘Young Girl.’”

  I heard Frank asking Stuart about the best
pizza slice in Melbourne. They had not heard a word of the promo. I kept my mouth shut about this sudden development, a new concept for a Ganelli. I shut off the radio and put up the kettle. I looked for the bible Aunt Virginia gave me for Communion but settled on Frank’s new copy of Halliwell’s Film Guide. I put my finger on Citizen Kane. Let the wild Indians storm the cabin; I had strength in my heart. Frank moved past turtles and chicks, and was on to describing his first two-wheeler to Stuart. I was not having fun.

  7

  Colin: TRAVEL

  Phillip’s crazy call came the night Hannah started converting her cats to vegetarianism. She was propped up on a neckroll and pillows, poring over recipes from a vegetarian pet cookbook. I couldn’t believe it. I told her that animals shouldn’t be subject to human morality, and she insisted that I was forcing my steak-and-eggs Australian morality on them. “It’s okay to determine what kids eat,” she’d said, “so why not cats, as long as it’s good for them?”

  “One of my old schoolmates back in Seaford was so attached to his dog that he’d share turns having licks on an ice-cream cone. They both came down with the flu.”

  “Your story has nothing to do with our argument.”

  I think it did, but in any case, you can’t tell me it’s right to make a cat eat tofu.

  There was another reason I was sulking. We hadn’t had sex since the week we’d met after the gig at Lounge. I didn’t want to be a brute, like her last boyfriend, the conductor, who she claimed forced sex on her. But I lay there, lusting for her great cheekbones and her unbelievable spine that flowed through her petite body. Not to mention those perky white norgs.

  Hannah had on peach satin underwear from Georges, one of a whole drawerful of horny, not-too-revealing underwear. Hannah never put it all out there; that’s what got me barred up the second she got undressed. Lately, she limited my advances to letting me feel her groin through her panties with my feet, which she thought were beautiful and graceful. (I secretly think my feet are pretty great, too. They’re among the few parts of my body I don’t have complaints about. Even the little toes are in perfect proportion. I could be a male foot model.) Hannah’s eyes were a glassy gray; they set off her red hair. A frigid stunner who I wanted to fuck about every five seconds.