(Please Note: This is a serialized follow-up essay to, and meant to be read after reading “Peep Show.” If you missed ’em, here’s part one and here’s part two and here’s part three)
For many years I lived in an apartment that was one of four in two small two-story Victorians on a San Francisco back street. The apartments all shared a backyard. By the end of the ten years my girlfriend, (then wife, now ex-wife) and I lived there, three of the four apartments were occupied by close friends of ours. The three households cooked meals together at least once a week, watched “NYPD Blue” and the San Francisco “Real World” together, even shared a hot tub for a while, a kind of semi-communal existence. The remaining apartment was occupied by “Hank,” an intense Michael Keaton-meets-Anthony-Hopkins-esque alcoholic sculptor and carpenter. At one point, he was close friends with all of us and would participate in our parties, in the tub, in smoking pot on Friday evenings in the back yard, but during his bad periods (he was both a mean and crazy drunk) he had managed to so insult each of us in one way or another as to permanently alienate himself from the group. In Spring 1996, a few months before my wedding, all the apartments got a letter in their mailboxes from Hank. It was hand-written and photocopied, written in a voice that was unmistakably his – full of passion and paranoia, at times poetic, at times sloppy, at times excessively formal. The letter told the story, once one deciphered it, of how Jamie, everyone’s pal and neighbor who we take naked hot tubs with, was a pervert who went to peep shows all the time. How Hank got this information I will never be sure. It was something I had dreaded all my life, my perversion exposed. It was also one of the things that got me wanting to write about it, the desire to be rid of that secret. For something that I’d been so afraid of, the actuality of Hank’s letter, surprisingly, didn’t freak me out. I took each of my neighbors aside and told them, downplaying it of course, that I had sometimes gone to strip joints. Their response was, in retrospect, obvious, but at the time was such a relief it was almost a disappointment (similar to how I would later feel about some peoples’ responses to “Peep Show”). To a one, my friends and neighbors all said variations of “Eh, whatever,” followed by variations on, “Hank’s a psycho asshole, don’t worry about it.”
***
In Summer 2002, I was back in New York for a few days. It was summer, ten months after my wife had left me for another man, and I was finally feeling okay to pretty good on a consistent basis. I was seeing old friends, walking around Manhattan and Brooklyn in the sticky New York heat, feeling the subdued first summer after 9/11. My last night in town I had planned to stay with my friend Joel and his wife and two kids. That day, after resisting all week, I had left Triste a phone message (We had exchanged brief emails for the first time in over a year just before I left on the trip). I mentioned to Joel that a friend might call me for a late night drink, but I didn’t really think there was much chance of it. At about 9:30, she called. She said she was still at work (word processing and graphic design now, not dancing, to support her career as a poet), but she would be off at about eleven and would love to meet me for a drink at 11:30. She lived at one corner of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Joel lived at another. At about 10:30 I set out walking. It was a longer walk than I thought, and I was full of food and a little tired and drunk. At 11:45, I got there. I saw her through the window. She was sitting at the bar. She looked smaller than I remembered. When she turned, her eyes twinkled and she seemed happy to see me, if a little wary, catlike, as ever. We drank and talked, and my shock that she’d want to see me at all faded as her wariness did too as we became more and more comfortable with each other. For some reason I always expected her to be bored by me, and always felt honored, somehow, when she wasn’t. I was enchanted from the moment I walked in the door. At some point we touched hands, reenacting our first “date,” and soon we moved to a table in the corner and started kissing.
A little while later, when I got up to get us another round, my wallet was gone. In all likelihood, I had left it at our first table before we moved to the corner, and someone had come in and grabbed it and left. But I didn’t remember anyone coming in to the bar, which was empty but for us an the bartender, who lent us a flashlight. Nothing. At one point I went back up to the bar and gave the bartender my San Francisco address and phone number, just in case. He asked if I had looked in my friend’s bag, maybe it fell in there or something. Had he seen her take it? For the rest of our time in the bar, I stewed about it. She had a big sack-like handbag and I kept wanting to look inside, to ask her if I could, if maybe it had somehow, as the bartender had said, fallen in there. But of course, I couldn’t ask to look in her bag. That would be to accuse her of stealing. We drank some more, kissed some more, she bought one round, then a second. She invited me over. She wouldn’t buy drinks and invite me over if she’d stolen my wallet would she? Maybe she would. Just because she stole my wallet doesn’t mean she didn’t like me too. Maybe she was desperate, maybe she really needed money. Maybe she’s a klepto. How would I know? She had a good job, or so she said. How well did I really know her, anyway? Not that well, I quicky replied. We walked to her apartment, around the corner, at about 2:30 in the morning. I was quite drunk and exhausted but still anxious about the wallet. When we got inside, we immediately started undressing each other, and, finally, this once, I let myself fall fully into sex with Triste as I never could when I knew her in San Francisco, when I was married. Afterwards, I fell into a deep, passed-out sleep, and suddenly it was six in the morning and my plane was at nine and all my stuff was at Joel’s and I was getting up in a panic and remembering my wallet and saying omigod sorry I fell asleep sorry sorry I’ve got to go and feeling guilty and apologizing and she didn’t seem bothered at all, just helped me get myself dressed and get out and one more embrace and one more deep wet kiss and I was out the door.
A month or so after that visit to New York, feeling nostalgic, I stopped in at Mr. Bing’s before going to the Lusty. I hadn’t been in the bar in over a year – Mr. Bing’s was part of another era. I still went to the Lusty, though, but less and less frequently, and more out of habit than anything else. It was always disappointing now, since she moved. The usually reticent Mr. Bing recognized me, asks about Sass, “What happen to your friend?” I tell him that she moved to New York. “She really something, your friend.” He smiled somehow benignly and lustily at the same time. I smiled back, awkwardly, wanting to be proud, and ordered a shot and a beer.
