U fucking N
by Michael GrotskyI was still diddling around the World Wide Web when the phone rang. This time I answered it,
ready to jump in with both feet if it was another sales call. That’s not a bad way to let some shit
go and it’s a lot safer than doing it on the road or with some other shmuck in a bar. So I answered
and for a second I was disappointed when I heard Major Magpie’s voice.
He was an old school buddy who had, as they say, risen in the world. Risen like Lazarus, it seemed to me. Now he was
a PR flack for a cable network and he was working on something at the U.N. I had seen his name
in passing in an article recently and knew he was in town. It had been a good while since we’d
spoken but I recognized his hustler’s voice immediately.
“Bliss!” he crooned, “how the hell is it hanging! Still holed up in Brooklyn I see. Same
number.”
“Major Major,” I said, “a little roach told me you’d call. How the hell are you?”
“Super!” he screamed – he was always a booster. “And I’m in New York on a story, at the U
fucking N!”
“I thought you never left L.A.,” I said.
“Bliss, I try like hell not to. I go into sensory deprivation without the amazons there abusing
me! But this job is sweet. And I thought of you!”
“Sure, man, let’s do lunch, right?”
“No, Bliss, I’ve got work for you. You still got a jacket and tie somewhere? I need an assistant
pronto for a couple of days, some write-ups, fact-checking, that kind of thing. Good pay too.”
I was surprised and, I must admit, moved that Magpie had thought of me. I desperately needed
the money and getting away from the convolutions of my novel would do me good. I hadn’t even
shaved in a week and comparisons to Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining were becoming
apt.
Magpie was quite the character, a beautiful and repulsive mix of buffoon and Irish storyteller.
One of my favorites involved a tale he told about his father introducing him as his ‘alleged’ son.
He’d never really gotten over that remark but in compensation he could scald an audience over
beers with his misadventures. A couple of days of the Magpie could put wind in my sails, an
infusion of much-needed cash in my pocket, and get me the hell out of this cell my landlord
obscenely called a ‘sweet down home studio.’
“You’re on” I told him. “When do you need me?”
“Eight a.m. sharp. Meet me in the lobby. And Bliss, make sure you’re with me. One hundred
percent. We gotta look good.”
“Major, for a confidence man you don’t have much confidence in your fellow man.”
“Exactly,” he replied.
I took a long walk to clear my head, I performed the necessary ablutions, I put my clothes
together, I set the alarm, I even went to bed early. But I couldn’t sleep. So I read from Mailer’s
The Spooky Art and here and there he did lay down a few golden nuggets. Boxing is one of his
obsessions and training therefore is big for him. The writer, for Norman, is like a boxer, doing
battle with his art and his muse and his unconscious. The unconscious has to be trained, he says,
but more importantly it must be respected. If you say you’ll be at your desk in the morning to
mine what it has to offer you’d better be there, because if you stand it up often enough it’ll turn
it’s back on you sure as any woman. But if you respect it and show up every morning as you had
vowed the night before, well, the unconscious will reward you, it’ll open up and invite you in.
Keeping the appointment is half the battle.
It was like any kind of training – consistency and follow through even when you were dead to
rights was the only way. Otherwise it all went to haphazard shit. I renewed my vows of
dedication, and as I finally slipped into the delights of my own waiting unconscious I looked
forward to the entertaining freakishness of a day with Major Magpie at the U.N., another kind of
unconscious, a collective, world-wide unconscious.
I awoke early, had a leisurely coffee and stepped into a nice hot shower. I stayed under the water
dissolving the night’s load of dreams for a good long while. I might have heard a strange noise at
one point but it didn’t really register; there were so many noises inside and out of this old
building that anything short of total disaster wouldn’t attract anyone’s attention. But when I
finally turned off the water I heard it all right. The doorbell was ringing, the phone was ringing,
there were voices yelling in the hall, someone was pounding on the door. And there was water
cascading down the walls of the bathroom from the apartment above.
I grabbed a towel and stepped into four inches of water. There was more water in the hall and it
was already streaming through the living room and into the bedroom. There was fucking water
everywhere! It was running down the walls, all the walls of my place.
Just then firemen broke through my triple-locked front door with crowbars and axes. The
apartments below mine were flooding too and they’d just reached my floor thinking the source
might be my place. They rushed passed me in their rubber suits and rubber hats and rubber
gloves yelling instructions that only seemed to increase the chaos while I stood there in my towel
with shock on my face, my mind going blank but feeling like I was still in the last dream I’d had:
a dream of water but something pleasant, a tropical beach and a woman in a bikini playing in the
waves.
“You Bliss?” one of them was asking me, his dark rubbery presence leering up in my face.
“You gotta get outta here – now!” he ordered. “The whole place is flooding. The pipes is burst.
Put this on.” Somewhere he’d found my bathrobe and he shoved it into my hands. It was wet
too.
As he hustled me out the door I heard the answering machine come on. I knew it would be
Major Magpie, cursing me and cursing me and cursing me. I wasn’t going to make it to the U.N.
He wouldn’t believe why I hadn’t shown up. What did it matter, I’d blown it and that was that.
Now all I had was a weak cup of coffee in a diner, a damp robe, and the cold comfort of
contemplating what seemed to me like a Borgesian mystery. Because in my mind the whole
fiasco was related to Mailer’s warning to respect your appointments with the unconscious, a
respect I had certainly flouted many times. This time my intentions had been good, one would
have to admit the gods had been against me, but what made a chill slide up my spine – and ring
the amusement park bell in my brain – was the unnatural confluence of Mailer’s warning about
the unconscious and my unmet appointment at the symbolic U.N. I realized that I never did have
a rendezvous at the U.N., that those two letters of abbreviation referred to nothing more than my
own guilty failures to show up and respect the unconscious of which I demanded so much and
returned so little.
I ordered another cup of Joe and turned my attention to the tattooed legs of the waitress as she
leaned over to fill my cup.
“Tough day?” she said without a smile.
