Notes. From the Upper West Side. A novel by Dan Wrench. Chapter 4.
Feel the Hate. When I told the park about the lady who chased me and said she wanted to fuck and fuck me and how she got annoyed when I said, beg your pardon what, a couple times? He said, you know, Paul, I've never known why any woman would want to fuck you. I mean, look at you.
Your abs suck. You have toothpick arms. Your pale. You have a stupid laugh and a square haircut.
It's an offense against reason that you should arouse desire in a woman. That somebody thinks she has to get drunk to tell you she wants you to fuck her. Well, it shapes the foundations of reality as I know it. I'm pretty sure a park saying things like that is one of the reasons why I'm in therapy still.
And that tells you what? Jessica asked not long ago. It tells me I'm not sure what I'm doing hanging around park. I asked.
It sounded better than, I don't know. You're asking me? She asked. Not exactly what you would call witty reposts, but I like to call it therapy.
This is Dr. Jessica. Tall and a little androgynous. Long brown hair like she should be hiking someplace.
Looks that sneak up on you like no makeup and plain clothes that make her body look like a flat plank. But after a while of watching her move and smile and you're noticing stuff like her great legs and rack. And pretty soon you're thinking about how her ass is the perfect pear shape for a tall, fin-ton boy and how if you bend her over her desk that pear shaped ass would make such a plateau that just the sight of it would pull the cock out of your pants. Sometimes I like to imagine her blowing me on top of a bed roll during a hike through a national park.
She takes my dick out of her mouth just long enough to say, you have no idea how long I'd wanted to do this. She always says those exact words. So you've known Tony Park for how long? She asked in the real world.
It's something like 25 years, right? She inherited me from the therapist to inherited me from the therapist to inherited me from my college therapist so she had a buttload of notes on Park. I guess I keep thinking he'll change. I said, I really wanted to smoke.
That isn't legal indoors in New York. I liked it when I was legal because I didn't get so nervous. When she heard me say I thought Park would change, she hung her head like her neck had been broken. Her hair fell across the desk the way it falls across my chest when she's sucking me off in the bed roll fantasy.
Jessica's been my therapist for a few years. We're friends, which adds a nice dimension to the bed roll fantasy because in that fantasy we're both cackling about how stupid my wife and her husband are. She calls her husband the hubster in real life. In the bed roll fantasy she calls him No Cock Bob.
I'd like to know how you expect Tony to ever get any better. She said, don't answer that. Just let me remind you that you can't get a smoothie from Starbucks. I thought she could do better than that metaphor wise.
I mean, it's only a matter of time before Starbucks starts selling smoothies. Am I right? Park is Starbucks. And the smoothie is something besides what he always says which depresses you.
He said, but it isn't just what Park says that depresses me. In fact, the noise that inevitably and invariably comes out of his mouth contributes only a small fraction to the shit swamp that is the experience of no embarb. The rest is the simple fact of his existence. For some reason, through no effort of his own just through numb, blind, retarded luck none of the karmic rules apply to him.
If you don't play by the rules you're supposed to end up sucking metaphoric balls. You're supposed to pay a price, a fine jail time, social ostracism, no sex, disease, nervous breakdowns, something, except if you're Park. Then you can burn down churches and children will hand you flowers. And to that the fact that he's convinced his dumb luck is something the universe owes him and I think you can start to feel the hate.
You know why I hang around, Park? Still, I ask Jessica when I had time to think about it. I want to be there to see the look on his face when his luck runs out. Yeah.
But in the meantime, the rest of his have to watch while some quantum mechanical glitch lets him live like something between a sloth and a shark without ever paying a price. For example, jobs. If you're constantly blowing off jobs, you're supposed to end up in the poorhouse. Or in a little room over a grocery store in Brooklyn.
Or in a residence hotel in Harlem collecting welfare checks. But Park blows off his day jobs, his income jobs, right and left, and what he gets in return are offers for higher paying day jobs. No shit. Park and I had this friend, Teddy Pelton, who decided to help out his old pal, Parkie, by giving him a job.
I was sitting with the two of them outside on a summer day two years ago. It was the sidewalk in front of some restaurant in Hell's Kitchen that sets tables out whenever the temperature gets above 60. It turns out Teddy's pretty annoyed with Park. So the conversation for about five minutes after we sit down is pretty terse.
Hey. Hello? Cool. You know, one word shit.
Then Teddy tells Park to do something the next day at the job and Park refuses because it's beneath his dignity or something. So Teddy really bears down on him and says, dude it's your job on the line, you understand? It's your job. And Park says, man I guess I can either find a new job.
Or bend over and take it in my ass. Now which one would you choose if you were me? I thought Teddy was gonna burst into tears. Then he got really mad and said, you fucking lose Kevin.
You're fucking dead in need to now. Do you understand? You have no job. You're fired.
Yeah, Teddy's not what you would call the strong silentype. Picture a short, flabby guy with glasses and a haircut like the one you see on the universal Mexican immigrant in the movies. But it gave me hope for mankind seeing Park get reamed like that. I was sort of expecting the ground to open beneath his feet and swallow him up.
But it didn't. Park looked pretty sober for a sec like somebody slapped his face. Hey, Teddy. He said kind of quiet.
What? Anybody ever tell you you scream like a bitch? Teddy shook his head and pushed his glasses up on his nose. You are such a fucking asshole, Park.
He said, Park laughed. Then Teddy laughed. They were laughing. But of course you are still fired.
Teddy said. So, Park took a month off, slept until two every afternoon and dicked around in Hell's Kitchen lifting weights and bitching about the state with his libertarian pals. Then when the month was over he got a call offering him a better paying job than the one he had with Teddy and Teddy gave him a reference. And Park doesn't think it's strange.
It's what he thinks he has come into him. Can you feel the hate? Okay, that was the job's example. Here's the sex example.
We, me and Corinne Jr. and Park and a friend of Jr. named Christine who Park wanted to fuck, showed up one night at Cleopatra's Needle on Broadway. The needle is a jazz club with a horseshoe bar in the center and a gigantic TV screen hanging above it.
The sound is turned down on the TV so you can watch hockey while listening to live jazz. The needle is always dark. It isn't big. It doesn't have a lot of tables and the ones it has are all small.
So when four people like me and Jr. and Park and Christine come in they have to slam two tables together. So right at the beginning we have an order again. Christine who was this hot blonde forty year old who spent all day on a treadmill, says to Park, hold on, hold on, let's slow it down.
You know I have a boyfriend. And she gives him this big grin. Like a hard plastic dome just dropped out of the ceiling to cover her and now she can't be touched. Anyone else would have slowed down and gotten chatty, you know.
I mean chicks have boyfriends. They might be interested in an eventual fuck on the side but if one says slow down I need to size you up for us then you slow down. I mean, assuming you want to get it in her. But not Park.
First he just stares at her. Then she looks down at her salad and starts back into the conversation they were having about politics. I'm watching this and I know that nothing good is about to happen. I know this because I see this look on Park's face that I recognize from decades of part nuttiness.
It's a look where you can see he isn't really listening to the conversation anymore but to a stream of ideas making noise in his head. Like the look a cat gets when it's just confirmed that yes there is something moving in that corner. Wait a minute, Park said after she got into why she's green. You just got done telling me that my skin isn't worth touching and you expect me to care what you think about the fucking min farms on Cape Cod?
She stopped talking and leaned toward him like she hadn't heard him. He kept going. I don't care what you think about Obama or how your day went. If you were fucking me maybe I would care but what?
I'm going to listen to you talk then I'm going to talk then you're going to say oh look 11 o'clock gotta get home and blow my boyfriend before he doses off. For some reason Junior thought that was really funny even though Christine was supposed to be her pal from someplace. Tony! She said with this great big smile on her face.
Ball tasting twat. At that point Park never smiled at the door during the whole thing just stood up and put his napkin in his chair. I'll settle up if you later, Paul. He said to me the dramatic turd.
And then he turned around and walked for the door and everybody. I mean everybody sitting under the hockey and waiting for the jazz musician to come off their break watch and go. Wait! Wait!
Christine said as he went everybody watched and go all the way out like it was a play and the curtain didn't fall until he was all the way out of sight. When he was gone Christine turned around. Her face was burn red. What a fucking asshole!
She said. Then she got into an argument with Junior who seemed to think that Park had just busted her and she should take the busting like a grown up. They ended up laughing about it and the three of us agreed that Park needed to get a lot less caffeine. Then a few days later Christine called up Junior and said she was busy dislocating her jaw on Park's cock.
That's what's really pathetic about this. I said to Jessica the therapist when I told her the story. Park thinks she owes it to him to bend over and take his cock like it's the least she can do. And she does it.
I sat down and twisted my fingers around. It's what I do when I don't have a cigarette to shake out of the pack. You know who I feel sorry for Jess? Who?
The boyfriend. Jessica laughed and laughed. Notes from the Upper West Side is a work of fiction. The people depicted in this work do not exist.
Notes from the Upper West Side copyright 2013 to 2014 by Dan Rench.