White Tiger on Snow Mountain, Page 2

  “Psst . . . hey,” I whispered through the leaves. “You’re under arrest.”

  She jumped. “Jesus,” she said. “You scared me.”

  “Sorry. Your smoke drew me in like magic.”

  She held out a pack of Marlboro Lights. “Help yourself.”

  “No. I quit.” I sat beside her, stiffly bending my legs. “Just blow some in my face.”

  She laughed and put the book down, which I took as an official signal that she wanted to talk to me, but we immediately lapsed into silence, an oddly comfortable silence that I found myself reluctant to break. She smoked, and we stared at the view. It was like a corny postcard: Cliffs and trees, a roll of black road, the wide river hurrying by with a tugboat under its arm. On the far shore, another black line, more bunched greens, and above that the city, spread in squares and spires. And the sun touching here and there: A silver spike, a blinking window, the blazing shield of a car. The spinning, broken blades of the waves. And the bridge.

  Her round, tan, smooth knee was just an inch or two from mine, bony, rough, and white. She had lovely hands too, I noticed, as they tapped ashes and toyed with the book. Really they were her best feature, long and finely boned, with a violinist’s tapered fingers. I felt like I could stay like that a long time—sitting in that spot and almost touching this girl, who had that book and those fingers and those knees—and keep on not saying anything.

  “Great job before,” I said. “Saving that kid.”

  “Oh.” She laughed. “I didn’t really save him. He just got scared and swallowed some water. It happens all the time.”

  “Still you should feel good about it. It’s more than I did today.”

  She shrugged and looked straight ahead, but I could see she was smiling.

  “How’s Hart Crane treating you?” I asked.

  She ruffled the pages of the book as if it were her little brother’s hair. “Fine. I just started.”

  “Did you read ‘The Bridge’? Sitting here makes me think of it.”

  “No. Is it about this bridge?”

  “The Brooklyn Bridge. I don’t think this one was built yet.”

  She handed me the book. “Read it to me.”

  “Well, it’s really long,” I said. “Like forty pages or something.” So I read her the “Proem” instead, “To Brooklyn Bridge,” a kind of prologue to the epic that was Crane’s master-work. To be honest, I found it rough going. I mean I had this book, buried in a carton somewhere, and I thought of Crane as a favorite, but somehow over the decades my taste had blunted or sharpened or something, and now that thick language stuck in my mouth like peanut butter. I could barely follow it. Even his double-punning name (Hart! Crane!) now seemed like a bad pseudo-Japanese word-picture. But Lisa loved it. She even read it back to me, and that was better.

  “Do you write poetry?” I asked her.

  She nodded. “But it’s not any good. Do you?”

  “I used to.”

  “He killed himself, didn’t he?” she asked.

  “Yeah. He jumped off a boat.” I told her what I knew about his short, wild life, his uncontrollable drinking, his turbulent existence as a gay man in those times, and of course the final leap. I pointed at the open book in her lap. “I think about that jump whenever I hear this line about ‘elevators drop us from our day.’ And I think of him cruising for sailors when he says, ‘Under thy shadow by the piers I waited.’ Or, ‘We have seen night lifted in thine arms.’ You know what his last words were? As he jumped off the steamship?”

  She was watching me very closely now. She shook her head.

  “ ‘Good-bye, everybody!’ ”

  She laughed abruptly, a short burst, and covered her mouth with her hand.

  “It’s true,” I said. “I think anyway. I read it somewhere.” And then, while I wasn’t looking, she kissed me. It really took me by surprise, and for a second I wasn’t sure what had happened. She just kissed my mouth softly and sat back, watching. Her eyes focused in on mine. I leaned forward and kissed her.

  We undressed quickly, peeling off her shoulder straps and slipping her suit down her legs, pulling off my T-shirt and trunks. She climbed onto my lap, and we jostled a bit until I was inside her, and then we just sat there like that for a while, mouths together, chest to chest, not moving, except for our breath. She stopped kissing me and spit in her hand, then reached down in between us, making a serious face. Then she began to move against me, and grip me harder, and I took her in my arms and pushed her onto her back as her breathing raced and she put her nails into my chest and I brushed back the hair from her eyes. Later, after it was over, we both lay on my towel and she smoked. Again it was silent, but this time the quiet felt uneasy, and when I tried to put my arm around her, she shrugged me off.

  “Are you OK?” I asked.

  She nodded but continued to face away, smoking methodically as if burning through this cigarette was a chore she was determined to complete. I tried to look at the scenery. Then a scary thought crossed my mind.

  “Lisa?” I touched her shoulder. “Listen, was this, you know, your first time?”

  “First time what?”

  “You know. Are you, were you, a virgin?”

  She frowned at me, with a look that mingled derision and pity.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Don’t you know anything?”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “If you’re a virgin, you bleed. And it hurts and the hymen breaks and everything.”

  “OK, sorry.”

  “Don’t worry.” She snorted and put out her cigarette. “You’re not the first guy to fuck me. Or the second. And I’m on the pill, so it’s fine.” She lit another cigarette, clicking her lighter and blowing the smoke out with a sigh. Then she looked back at me, eyes bright. “But I guess you better still worry ’cause I have VD and AIDS.”

  “What? What’re you talking about?” I felt a wave of panic, more nausea than fear.

  “I’m just kidding,” she said very softly, realizing she’d gone too far.

  “What a fucked-up thing to say.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Sorry, I said.”

  “What a fucked-up thing to say.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “Not mad,” I said, and it was true; the hollow feeling in my belly was not quite fear or anger. “But I kind of feel now like you jinxed us, you know what I mean? Like it’s bad karma. Like a broken mirror or something. You gave us bad luck.”

  “Sorry,” she said again. We both sat there, still naked, and went back to staring at the view. A couple of barges went by. Traffic on the Henry Hudson was heavy, yet the bridge itself was light. It occurred to me that, unlike most vista viewers at that moment, we were actually facing east, away from the sunset, although the moon was nowhere to be seen. But the river’s darkness seemed to be swelling, leaching up the banks and into the blackening trees, like their roots were drawing it in. In the city, the shadows of the buildings deepened, as if each were a door slowly opening onto deep corridors and basement stairs. Already the bridge beneath us was fading. Its far side was gone. She flicked her cigarette away in a bright arc, and I thought: This world will manage with no more poems about it. Just one last bored young girl, talked out of her clothes, and by poor old Hart no less.

  “Hey,” she said, and it was really getting dark now, the bridge was lit and the bugs were out, but she sounded cheerful again, and when I looked closely, she was smiling slyly at me. “Are you sure there isn’t anything I can do?” She put her hand on my inner thigh and whispered into my ear. “Isn’t there anything special, an act of atonement I can perform, that will get rid of the curse?”

  She giggled as I moved her hand farther up my leg. I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  We Happy Few

  They say there are no coincidences, that nothing in this world truly happens by accident. So perhaps, deep down, I really meant to show my penis to my entir
e class. After all, that one seeming mistake began the adventure that changed my life.

  Or maybe I just suck at computers. I only intended to expose myself to one particular student, Sunhi Moon, a twenty-something Korean girl in the English conversation class I taught at a community college in Queens. It’s the same old story: a plaid skirt and white knee socks, a few giggles followed by a heated discussion of dangling modifiers and some cutely dropped articles (I mean articles like “the” and “an,” not, alas, the aforementioned knee socks or skirt), leading to an increasingly wild, if idiomatically incorrect, iChat affair, (“I wants you into me!”), then to a picture of a slender, rosy, headless body blooming in my in-box one morn, and, finally, my own doomed response, the fatal crotch shot I snapped and, unwittingly, sent to my whole class email list.

  Imagine my surprise the next evening, when I showed up to teach and found security waiting. They seized my faculty ID and, fearing lawsuits, dispatched a grief counselor to my class. I signed a paper agreeing to never again set foot on campus and wandered, stunned, into a winter landscape that had switched from day to night behind my back. I raised a silent cry to the moon. O mistress of perverts and fools! The wind howled back and shook the stop signs. The stars, rarely seen, gleamed suddenly like the points of falling knives. I rode back to the city and an AA meeting, where I raised my hand to grand applause. It was the anniversary of my twentieth year clean and sober.

  One of the best things about being a sober alcoholic is that, no matter how low you sink, your experience can still help others by letting them forget their own problems and laugh at yours. So my sorry tale that night—freshly fired, nearing eviction, an old single with crumbling molars—won their hearts and hugs, but I prefer to be loved from a distance, anonymously, and after sucking up a little warmth, I left the church basement alone. I was shuffling down the powdered street when a voice stopped me.

  “Hey! Wait up!” My interlocutor was a vigorous sixty, pink with specs and a tidy white goatee. Snow melted on his warm, smooth skull. No doubt some sad slob like me, wanting to make friends. I thought of running, but I’d probably slip and bust a hip, so I set my teeth in a smile.

  “I like what you shared,” he said. “I like your realness.”

  “Thanks,” I said, while my realness was thinking, “Fuck off.”

  “But it sounds like you need a job. My name is Dr. Tony.”

  Dr. Tony, or Dr. T, as he claimed to be widely known, was an ex—drug addict and ex-convict turned counselor to the stars, out in LA, of course, where he sold the weak and wealthy something called a sober companion—basically a paid buddy who hung around and kept you from getting drunk. This was a controversial idea in AA and NA, which frown on profit motives. And we help only those who seek our help. In Dr. T’s business, often it was a family or board of directors that demanded its wayward son or CEO be monitored. In effect, the sober companion was a babysitter, trading his dignity and values for three hundred dollars a day, plus expenses.

  “Sounds great,” I said. “How do I begin?”

  “I actually have a client in mind,” Dr. T said, “someone I think you’ll really connect with. Derek Furber. A terrific young writer.”

  “Fantastic,” I managed to hiss through my frozen grin.

  Back in the ancient ’80s, when I was just beginning to degenerate, I too had been a terrific young writer. My book of short stories, Shoot to Kill, detailing the life of a young art-damaged junkie in the East Village, sold surprisingly well, and for a short time I became a literary celebrity, which basically meant free drinks in a few clubs and free passes at a few girls, all of which I took. Over the next few years, I shouted on a record with a punk band (the Scum, first single “Shooting to Kill”), wrote a screenplay (Shoot to Kill, sold but never produced), and tried to write a play (unfinished, working title Shoot to Kill). I want to emphasize that I did each of these things exactly once. Then, for a long time, I did nothing. In fact, when I was forced, later, by rehabs and shrinks and the IRS, to reconstruct my past, there were whole years I couldn’t account for: I nodded on the couch, in the sunny spot by the window, and petted my girlfriend’s cat. I went to the corner bodega for a Snickers. You think being a punk-rock writer/junkie was thrilling? It was, briefly. But in the end it was like being a mailman, making my daily rounds, snow or rain, in my torn sneakers and moth-eaten coat, stomach twisting, guzzling Pepto from a bag. In abandoned buildings where the homeless shat. In alleys where kids picked their pimples and fingered their guns. In shooting galleries where, if you died, you got thrown out with the trash.

  That was another lifetime. Today I am remarkably healthy, considering. I do yoga (stiffly) and run (slowly). I eat vegetables and fold the laundry. I water my neighbor’s plants. I even quit smoking. But I didn’t write a word. I tried at first, but I couldn’t get started. Then I took a break. Then I decided it didn’t matter anyway. The world wasn’t weeping for my unwritten books. Now when people ask what I do, I say: “I’m a teacher.” Or: “I proofread legal documents.” Or: “I hand out jalapeño humus dip at Trader Joe’s.” I say, to myself, mostly: “I’m alive, motherfucker.” What else do you want?

  Two days later, I was on a plane to LA. After checking whether I had a driver’s license, a social security card, and a criminal record (yes, yes, and yes), Dr. T had briefed me on my mission. Derek Furber was the twenty-five-year-old author of Down Time, a fictionalized memoir or memorialized fiction about his life in Beverly Hills, where he sold drugs to his high school friends and their famous parents. He was busted, sentenced to community service, and ended up coaching some team (debate? polo?) of inner-city youth, which rapidly led to his own redemption, a plug from Oprah, and the bestseller list. Now young movie stars were competing to play him in the film, models were competing to play his girlfriend in Vanity Fair, and he himself was due, in a week, to accept the Lionheart Award, presented annually for a Work of Literature That Exemplified the Human Spirit and the Power of the Word to Change Lives. The only problem was, he couldn’t stop getting high.

  According to Dr. T, Furber was bound for disaster. You simply do not go on Oprah with your face numb and call her Opera. He’d become so risky that he’d had to sign a contract promising to sober up and prove it on demand by pissing in a cup. If he failed, he’d forfeit his movie deal, the Lionheart, and everything that went with it. He was getting out of Dr. T’s fancy Malibu rehab on Monday. My job was to escort him home, through a series of hurdles, and finally to the Lionheart back in New York. Dr. T gave me his book to read on the plane. I fell asleep on page six, during his parents’ divorce, somewhere over Pennsylvania.

  The exact address of Freedom Ranch, which I am legally obliged to withhold, is known only to a select handful of wealthy screw-ups and a few million Internet users but you take Sunset to the ocean and make a right. I recommend a bright winter day. The fresh hills glittered with dew all about me, and the eucalyptus trees, shedding long peels of droopy bark to show the whiter meat beneath, soothed the worn linings of my New York nose and throat. As the mist burned off, a clear blue heaven expanded above the ocean, which struck me blind for a scary second as I hit the Pacific Coast Highway: countless tiny beads of diamond light jumping across the waves.

  I turned up a dusky road and was met by two goons in a golf cart, who told me that I’d be joining “a group encounter already in progress.” I could only pray that I wouldn’t have to remove my clothes.

  The encounter was held under a thatched roof, open to the salt breeze and commanding a five-star view. The group? Well, their haircuts and tans were better than usual, but however impressive the names on the wristbands, it was still a rehab crowd: itchy, scratchy, nervous, patchy, smoking too much and laughing too loud, endlessly rearranging their lighters or cell phones or limbs with the compulsive restlessness of the profoundly uncomfortable. And there, in the lead, was Dr. T himself, the elf who’d appeared in my whirlwind. With his shining dome and the modest muffin overhanging his belt, the man glowed like a burni
shed good luck charm. No wonder people paid so much to rub against him.

  He put his hands together, shanti style, and declaimed. “I want now to invite my higher power, the universe, and all of our higher powers to enter my spirit here today and speak through my heart instead of my mouth.”

  Or other orifice, I thought, while the rest shut their eyes. It is a strange feeling, when everyone around you has closed like sleeping flowers, and you are the one soul on guard. But I was not alone. As I scanned the faces—even the hardest looked vulnerable without their watchtowers—I spotted a wooly head above the flock. Two dark eyes darted between a mop of dark hair and a fashionably fuzzy beard. An ironic charmer’s grin found me, as if to say, “Just look at these suckers.” I somehow knew, this was Derek F, my new best pal.

  My first date with Derek was awkward. I drove back down the coast while he sat silently behind dark sunglasses and filled the car with smoke. Wasn’t that considered rude nowadays? I’d become strongly anti-smoking since I quit.

  “Sorry, but do you mind putting that out? It’s bugging my eyes. Probably dry from the plane or something.”

  “What? Oh, sorry.” He flipped it out the window, a billion-dollar fine in these parts. I cringed, imagining the forest fire raging on the news, but held my tongue. Two reprimands in the first five minutes was not the way to warm a new employer. Which raised the larger issue: Who’s the boss?

  “First stop is Century City,” he said, settling that question. The sun lit the edges of his beard with gold fire, and the glare off his watch stung my eye. “I’ve got a meeting with my agent.”

  The agency’s headquarters was in a glass fortress with a hole cut in the center, presumably for Will Smith to chopper in, but we left the car with valet parking, still pretty impressive to me. An elevator whispered us up to a vast waiting room that held a few million in art—Day-Glo graffiti splotches, a conceptual hat sculpture that was also a real hat—and an Amazon in a black minisuit clicked over. Her heels, headset, and tight bun made her seem like an angry android, but she smiled at Derek.