paris, jaylen, and the mayor
chapter 30
previous (flat tire)
next (dog daze)
The strip club we went to was right down the street from my apartment, a ten-minute walk. I passed it every day on my way to work at the organic grocery store without ever giving much thought to what it was, although in hindsight, it could have been little else. It was basically a big black windowless box, with a sign that said, ‘The Pink Room’.
We entered, and although I didn’t really want to be there, the novelty of it all was at least making me forget Maggie’s sexual moaning for the first time all day. Having a few beers helped.
It was a Wednesday night. I had the next day off and so did Tommy, or so he claimed, although I was dubious of that. Point being, it was a slow day at The Pink Room, or at least I assumed it was, because there couldn’t have been more than a handful of tired, lonely-looking men sitting at the bar and in front of the stages and poles. A signed photograph of Mike Tyson surrounded by strippers was on the wall. The lighting was blue and dim, the air adorned in vapors from what I presumed was a smoke machine, although it could have been from the massive amount of vaping happening, or dust, or particulates of sexual desperation.
We got beers and sat down in the front row as a woman performed, and as we watched, I was left wondering: in an age when naked women were available on demand on the Internet, what was so different about seeing one in person?
“Is this really so great?” I asked Tommy, outlining my theory. He seemed bored as well. Restrained in one location, especially someplace where he needed to observe public decorum, was not his idea of a good time. He was providing the money, which he tossed onstage and inserted into the stripper’s thong with the enthusiasm of a convenience store transaction.
“Uh, hello miss. What can I do to get my friend...something more, if you know what I mean?” Tommy asked, jumping his eyebrows up and down. The performer squatted down to him.
“Ya gotta spend more!” she said. Tommy gestured broadly at the money he’d thrown her way. “Like at the bar and stuff,” she clarified.
This was easy enough for us to do as Tommy continued to purchase us Bud Platinums, and we continued to get drunk, he at a much faster rate than I. In the haze of drunken contentment that followed, one of the strippers stepped down toward me.
I realized that what made strippers different than the other naked women you could see online was their humanity laid bare in front of you, and while that may have seemed like a bonus to some of the other men there that night, it made me uncomfortable in that it was hard to reduce someone right in front of me to an object, whereas it was easy to reduce things on a computer screen to merely pixels and digits, even if, intellectually, you knew they were real people.
“What’s your name, honey?” she asked as she straddled me, and my childhood fear of achieving publicly visible erections (literally) reared its head.
“Jude,” I said, with the reluctance I always told anyone my name. “What’s your from?” I stumbled.
“Paris,” she said, doing things that strippers did during lap dances.
“Oh wow! That’s amazing. You’re from Paris but you end up here, in upstate NY! As a stripper! You must have quite the story. Were you born there or...do you speak French?”
She looked at me. “Nah, I’m not from Paris. My name is Paris,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, where are you from?”
“I’m from Veddersburgh,” she said.
“Oh wow, us too! It’s a great little city,” I looked over at Tommy who was performing the arduous task of friend-accompanying-a-lap-dance-receiver with grace bestowed only by a massive amount of alcohol.
I couldn’t tell if Paris was much older than us or much younger. I’d never heard of anyone named ‘Paris’ in our cohort so I was certain this was, of course, a stripper name.
“It’s not really a city,” she said about Veddersburgh. She sounded bored, and I supposed that this was because I was not someone who seemed like they were going to spend much more money, it was a slow night, and this was her job and thus sort of the equivalent to a cashier scanning items just before close.
The song ended, and she remitted her dance with a smile before I could ask her who she knew in Veddersburgh and who her family was, and I realized that perhaps her being from Veddersburgh was more interesting than if she were from Paris.
Tommy and I made the unfortunate decision to go to the bar and ask if they had food, and they replied that they did, and that there were only ten minutes until the kitchen closed, and so we ordered, and I had the absolute worst, well-done burger I’d ever had in my life, a monstrosity covered with wilted lettuce, wrinkled tomato, and a cheese-like substance that was only cheese-like in the worst ways.
We got back to my apartment, where I had only managed to lure Tommy with the promise of going back out later on, but seeing as it was a Wednesday night and the city seemed dead, I didn’t really see the point and knew we’d be staying in the rest of the evening if I could keep him contained.
Tommy got bored right away, and we started to smoke weed in my living room with the TV turned on to Napoleon Dynamite. “I love this movie, man,” he said, smoking from my bong, collapsed into the sofa like he was in a 90s ad for anti-drug use.
“I still don’t get it,” I said.
When Napoleon was doing his interpretive sign-singing, the sound of my upstairs neighbor’s car on the gravel of the alleyway came crunching through my rectangular little basement windows as their headlights briefly illuminated the room. He sat there idling in his Nissan Juke for an absurd amount of time, the thumping of his bass rattling my window.
“Does he always do this?” Tommy asked. I laughed.
“Sure does.”
Then there was the single, caustic woop of a siren, and the red and blue lights flashed through the window.
Tommy and I went quiet and muted the TV. These were the days of paranoid weed-smoking, when even the slightest hint of a police presence made one think they were destined for a knock at the door and a full cavity search just for indulging in a little bit of ganja.
A car door opened and closed, followed by the sound of footsteps down the alley toward my neighbor’s car. We got up on our toes by the sliver of a window, peeking out at the shoes of a cop beside my neighbor’s Nissan.
“I just watched you pull in here and sit for 20 minutes,” we could hear the officer say.
“Yeah, man, I was on my phone. I live here, bro,” my neighbor replied.
“Is this your car?” the cop asked.
“Who the fuck else’s car would it be?” my neighbor complained.
“License and registration, please,” came the officer’s inevitable demand.
“I don’t have my license on me. Got the registration, though. It’s in my glove compartment. You good with that?” my neighbor said, a bit of sarcasm bleeding through his voice.
There were the sounds of fumbling and shifting of papers.
“You’re driving without your license. How am I supposed to know you live here, then?” the cop pressed.
“You’re the one with a computer in your ride, man,” my neighbor shot back.
“What the fuck, this is absolute injustice, Jude-dude. You know this man. That’s your neighbor, isn’t it? He lives upstairs?” Tommy whispered to me.
“Yeah, he does,” I said, unsure of what to do. Tommy knew what to do.
“I’m going up there,” Tommy declared. Before I could stop him, he went out my front door, up the steps, and into the alley. All I could do was follow.
The officer, a large man with a thumb-like appearance, turned sharply, hand on hip, perhaps even on gun, but softened when he saw us in the light of the streetlamps.
“This guy bothering you?” the officer asked, his eyes flicking between me and Tommy. “Saw him pull off in here, music blastin’, and he’s been sitting here for—”
“Bothering us? He lives here,” Tommy interrupted, his voice sharp. He waved toward the car. “He’s your neighbor. Right, Jude?”
“He lives here, upstairs from me. I live in the basement. Name is Jaylen, Jaylen Lewis, says so on the mailbox,” I said, my bravery having somehow rocketed in light of Tommy’s forthright confrontation. I immediately saw that the officer recognized us as high drunkards, that he had made a mistake, and that his night would be immensely better off if he simply dropped the matter now.
Tommy took out his phone, which was, for once, not dead, and began to record, speaking loudly: “Classic American profiling here, folks,” he said loudly. “A man accosted in his daily parking spot because—what? The assumption is he couldn’t possibly own such a vehicle? For the crime of playing music too loudly? And what else—what other reason could we guess?”
As he did so, the officer wrapped things up with Jaylen, nodded to us with a smile curved as a pencil, and got back in his squad car and went on his way.
Tommy turned to Jaylen. “Hey, man, sorry about that!”
“Yo, thank ya’ll,” Jaylen said, stepping out of his car holding a bag full of chips and candies. Jaylen was a nice guy, as far as I could tell from our limited interactions. He always collected my Amazon packages for me and he had two cats which I could hear running wild every night, and I implicitly trusted other men who owned cats. He was around our age, certainly not much older.
“No problem,” I said, but it felt to me like we had done nothing except perhaps be patronizing in a situation that maybe Jaylen could have handled himself.
“Last time I get down to Andersen’s so late for some munchies,” he said. “I know you’re Jude right, you live in the basement, who’s this?” he said, gripping and pulling our hands in the way cool guys do.
“Tommy Goodspeed, at your service sir,” Tommy said, bowing in a way that stabbed me with a rapier of embarrassment.
“I know you’re smoking weed sometimes, Jude, my man,” Jaylen said, putting his arm around my shoulders as we got to the entryway. We shared an entrance to our brickwork building. “How about I smoke you up, fam?”
The coolest thing about smoking weed is that it’s an intimate way to get to know someone, sort of like having beers or drinking in general, but the mutual sharing of a single orifice of smoke and the philosophical-if-silly nature that conversation tends to take under its influence enlightens you to someone in a more guileful way than inebriation (although we were drunk too), in our case via a joint rolled and lit by Jaylen as we sat in his apartment and his cats purred and bounced around us.
We played FIFA on his PlayStation and exchanged pleasantries, Tommy taking far too long to explain the relationship between him and I as friends, skipping past the superficial and driving straight to the heart of things in his direct manner:
“Jude and I, we are like brothers, man, brothers of the Veddersburgh family. We had each other when we had no one else, we were neophytes, new kids, all we had were books. And into the books we stepped, we had our own little world didn’t we Jude-dude? Jude is one of the few who can read things the way I can, we can kind of read the symbols of the universe presented to us as they are, you know? We know how to interpret the signs, speak the language of God. That’s what life is really all about, putting stuff out in the world and then listening for the echo of what it sends back, and Jude here is a master of it, he’s a great writer. Yeah, we had it good, people think Veddersburgh is destitute and maybe it is, but we’re kings there, because we appreciate it for what it is, lost greatness, but great potential yeah? Just like me, just like us…”
The upstairs apartment was far nicer then mine. It had two full bedrooms, black leather furniture, and the room we were in had big-screen TV and a record player and impressive vinyl collection.
“You live here alone?” I asked Jaylen between Tommy’s ramblings. My question was a thinly veiled attempt to discern what the rent might be compared to my own, if he had to split it or not.
“Yeah man, it’s dope, it’s a dope spot,” he said in his rich, smooth voice.
“What do you do for a living?” I pried. He was playing FIFA against Tommy, and Tommy was destroying him, and it was evident that Jaylen was not used to being destroyed. No one could beat Tommy at video games, unless maybe he was impaired by mushrooms.
“I’m a software engineer,” he said.
“What’s that like? Isn’t that like, doing long division, hammering out ones and zeros, doing dry-ass math and cooking up algorithms all day? I could never have the aptitude for that,” I said.
He laughed. Before he could respond, Tommy said:
“Programming is like grafting new branches of a tree, continually evolving from the base to the branches to the leaves, speaking the language of electrodes and coaxing them into new patterns and uses, compiling the cellulose into new paradigms of giving and receiving…”
Jaylen laughed. “Electrodes? What the hell? Dude, you’re a trip. I mean, I guess he’s kinda right though, it is more like what he said. It’s not really math. It’s more, like, you learn how to speak to the language of computers. It’s like syntax is grammar, sort of, and you read the code like a book and that’s how you troubleshoot, you kind of see the narrative and fill in the gaps.”
“Where do you do that?” I asked.
“I work at a place that creates tooling for financial institutions…”
“I mean like, where’s the office?”
“In there,” he said, nodding to one of the bedrooms, inside of which I could see a desktop workstation with two screens and a hard-drive glowing with RGB colors.
“You work from home? At a computer? All day?” I was shocked that something so marvelous existed, that someone I knew did it and made it seem possible.
Tommy began to fall asleep on Jaylen’s couch, and we were all feeling burnt out for a Wednesday night, my feelings of incompetency and failure regarding Maggie having been buried under a night of experience, and so I woke him up, said goodbye to Jaylen, and we went back downstairs to my apartment to go to bed.
My body woke itself up at five in the morning despite my hangover, conditioned as it was by my early morning schedule at the grocery store. I made for the bathroom and found Tommy curled like a fetus in my hallway, pants half off, a puddle of piss in front of him sinking into my carpet and a log of shit extending from his rear, his mouth open, penis on the carpeted floor.
I couldn’t believe what I saw, although I considered he had probably drunk about sixteen beers of high alcohol content, while I had only had eight. I felt guilty, like I had put him there, all because I didn’t want to face the discontent of my breakup. I bent down amongst the suffocating smell of his shit and put my finger to his nose. He was still breathing. What to do?
My decision was to step over him, pee, go back to bed, and allow him to wake up and discover himself, not least to save him from embarrassment but maybe leave him to clean up himself, as I was sure he would do. And sure enough, an hour and a half later, I was awakened by him stirring in the hallway, swearing quietly to himself, scrounging through the kitchen and bathroom for paper towels or some other cleaning products, the toilet flushing and re-flushing. The smell dissipated, replaced by a septic bleach-iness, and once it seemed his efforts had died down, I opened my door and went out to the living room.
It was clear he had no intention of telling me of the condition he woke up in. He sat on the couch, pale-faced and gaunt, looking at his phone half-heartedly.
“Want to get breakfast?” I asked, rubbing my eyes. “There’s a coffee and bagel place down the street that’s amazing.”
“Sure,” he said. “I feel like a possum that’s been run over in the night.”
“Tommy,” I said, sitting beside him, putting my hand on his shoulder. By the way he flinched, I could tell he knew then that I had seen what happened, but we didn’t speak of it. “This was a mistake, a mistake on my part. You can’t do this. This is going to kill you. You need to get help.”
I was ready for an assault of pretentious proportions, of simile and adverbs. All I got was:
“I know. I know, Jude-dude.”
“We can’t keep doing this. If there’s anything you need you let me know, but I can’t endorse this.”
“I know.” He wouldn’t look at me.
“What’s going on in that brain of yours?” I asked, pushing him with my shoulder. He chuckled like it pained him.
We went to breakfast and on the way passed a homeless guy who called himself “The Mayor”. At night he’d walk around trying to shake people’s hand and ask them for money for his “re-election campaign”, to be “mayor” of our neighborhood, but during the day he’d loiter somewhere with his grocery cart full of stuff and have a sign by his hat that said, ‘CAMPAIGN FUND’. He had a dog with him, a scraggly mutt with some kind of growth or tumor extending from its stomach like a fifth leg that was hard to look at.
“Hey ya’ll, still seeking re-election, you hear? I promise pussy for everyone, day one,” The Mayor said. I’d heard him say this before, but I wasn’t sure how he planned to keep such a promise.
Tommy stepped toward him, took out the remainder of the cash he had planned to use at the strip club, which was substantial, and placed it in the guy’s hat.
“THANK YA! THANK YA SIR!” The Mayor said, saluting. Tommy saluted back. We walked on.
“The longer I continue to live, the greater the chance I become that man,” Tommy said when we turned the corner.
“You really think so? No, you have your family. You have me. Things could get so bad for you, but you’d always have somewhere to fall back on.”
“Until I drive them all away. Like I’ve almost driven you away. You are sooner to casting me out than you’d care to admit.”
“No, you’ll never be that guy,” I said, convincing myself.
“Does he have it so bad, though?” Tommy said. “He has no bills to worry about, no family to please, no friends to be accountable to. All man needs is his faithful canine companion. And he, at least, seems to have that.”
next (dog daze)
previous (flat tire)