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“When the revolution comes it won’t make any difference,” Gloria said. “They’ll have a special guillotine for girls like that. With an even rustier blade for the artists who ogle her. These people here don’t matter. It’s MTA workers who need to see her rosy butt cheeks. But no, she wears a trench coat on the subway and reserves her hot little ass for us people who have already seen any number of hot little asses. Barbara Hodes was making see-through dresses in 1971. Eric Emerson wore chaps and a jockstrap upstairs at Max’s, and Cherry Vanilla only goes topless. It is so done. Done done done.”
the character is meant to be obnoxious but this is interesting
Ronnie’s loft had the same high ceilings and industrial grime as Sandro’s, but it was more cluttered. The cakey smell from the fortune cookie factory on the ground floor filled the room, a rising sweetness in the middle of the night. The floor Ronnie occupied had been an Asian import foods warehouse before Ronnie took it over, and he had kept a lot of what had been left behind. Huge barrels that said MSG on them, where he stored the clothes he bought and wore and then threw away instead of laundering. Against one wall were crates of canned lychee packed in heavy syrup, whose labels he said he found beautiful, and meant to do something with at some point. There was a 1954 calendar on the wall, an Asian woman whose prettiness was meant to promote some product, her face faded to grayish-green, smiling under all that lapsed time.
pretty
“The woman toweling her hair. She… it could have been me and you know it. Tell me the truth.”
“It could have been you, yeah. And then what? You think you want to be with me? Act on some desire you felt long ago, that we both felt?”
I bit my lip.
“Look,” he said, and petted my hair. His expression held something like pity. “I have no problem carrying around a small curiosity about lying down with you again. About more than that, okay? Okay? About looking at your cake-box face and your fucked-up teeth, which make you, frankly, extra-cute. About some kind of project of actually getting to know you. Because I honestly don’t think you know yourself. Which is why you love egotistical jerks. But I’ll tell you something about us, about me and about you, and what happens when two people decide to share some kind of life together. One of them eventually becomes curious about something else, someone else. And where does that leave you?”
My heart was pounding. I felt an ache of sadness spreading through me, down to the ends of my fingers.
“You want another Sandro, and I can just screw whoever I want, to keep myself entertained? Because it wasn’t just Talia that he was gifting himself with. It wasn’t just Giddle, either, who, well, see Giddle is like a piece of furniture, necessary but ultimately insignificant, something to lie down on occasionally. And it wasn’t merely Gloria, who has been Sandro’s leftovers for at least a decade, picked up and discarded when he wants. In fact, gee. Name a woman you have met through Sandro, or that he has met through you, and you’ll find that—”
“Stop it,” I said, tears rolling down my face. “Stop. Why are you doing this?”
“To show you the uselessness of the truth,” he said.
Traffic was almost at a standstill. I could have gone between lanes, but I had no place I was trying to get to. A group of people wheeled racks out of Says Who? Plus-size Styles. Farther down the block, two men backed through the broken window of an Orange Julius, each lifting one side of an industrial juicer. They struggled along the sidewalk with it and then swung one two three through the plate glass of a pawnshop.
WE BUY GOLD ANY CONDITION
People knew what they were doing. Like they’d been waiting for the lights to go out.
You had to believe in the system, I thought, to feel it was wrong to take things without paying for them. You had to believe in a system that said you can want things if you work, if you are employed, or if you were just born lucky, born rich.
The city was in the process of being looted. Chain stores and mom-and-pop stores that owners, families, tried to defend with baseball bats, tire irons, shotguns. People said it was despicable that looters would turn on their own, and target struggling and honest neighborhood businesses. Their own. But they misunderstood. It didn’t matter whether looters hit a chain or the local jeweler. To expect them to identify particular stores as enemies and others as friends was a confusion. We buy gold, any condition.
Looting wasn’t stealing, or shopping by other means. It was a declaration, one I understood, watching the juicer crash through the window: the system is in “off” mode. And in “off” mode, there was no private property, no difference between Burger King and Alvin’s Television Repair. Everything previously hoarded behind steel and glass was up for grabs.
so good! love the interspersing of action w political commentary
I woke to a red sun pouring into my curtainless windows, the electricity still out. My night came back to me in pieces almost as if I’d been drunk, the people behind the green door and the way the movie’s mysteries, unveiled, gave way to a night of suspended time, a city unmasked by darkness.
A Chemical Bank had burned on First Avenue and Fourteenth Street, I heard when I went out in search of coffee (no luck: I bought a warm RC Cola). There had been no available fire truck to come and put out the fire, a suspected arson. The fire had swept through and gutted the building rapidly. Three Chemical Bank employees, either forced under threat of termination to remain on site for security, or voluntary recruits who’d been offered triple overtime, were inside. What was the difference? All three died.
[...] After the war, walking to school in Brera, Sandro and Roberto were pelted with rocks. Their father moved them back up to Bellagio, where the boys were pelted with cow chips, and once misled into a swarm of angry bees that stung and restung them more times than Sandro had thought possible. Was he stung because he lacked natural virtues, ones the children who pushed them into the bee swarm possessed? Had those children stood up to Mussolini? No. Did it matter who possessed natural virtues? No. A blend of good and bad characterized all humans, and to pretend to sort that out was an insult to human complexity. But at the same time, Sandro understood that people only tended to allow their own contradictions, and not those of others. It was okay to be murky to yourself, to know you weren’t an angel, but other people had to be more cleanly divided into good and bad.
Ardito! Your name means courage, as their first commandment went. Run into battle! Victory at any cost!
Switzerland for schooling.
Holidays at Como. Waiting in short pants. Waiting for a shiny car to come and take him. His father’s driver.
The occasional weekend in Brera. Trips to Rome with his father, twice visiting Cinecittà to see producers his father knew. Movie stars. Sports cars like wraparound sunglasses. Umbrella pines above the studio café, Sandro unsure how to speak to his own father. Sipping his aranciata as a camera slid past on a dolly — it was a big black heart, with its two film reels, a heart or an upside-down ass, and the cameraman peered through its viewfinder, trailing the slinky steps of a woman in a white dress.
He had both liked and hated Brasília’s stiff white meringues, which perfectly blotted the ugly history that paid for them. His father’s rubber-harvesting operations in the Amazon had made the Brazilian government enough money to build an all-inclusive concrete utopia, a brand-new capital. The money had poured in. The rubber workers were still there — they were still there now, in 1977—and there were many more of them because their children were all tappers as well. Neither Sandro’s father nor the Brazilian overseers and middlemen ever bothered to tell the rubber workers the war was over. They simply kept them going, doing their labor up there in the remote northwestern jungle. The tappers didn’t know. They believed that someday there would be an enormous payment, if not to their children, maybe to their children’s children. “What is time to an Indian?” his father had said to Sandro that night in the hotel, the Palace of Something or Other, another interplanetary meringuelike building for industrialists and diplomats. “What is time?” his father asked. “What the hell is it? Who is bound to time, and who isn’t?” Sandro became angry. What am I doing here with this old bastard? “Go tell them, Sandro,” his father had said. “Go on up there. It’s only three thousand kilometers, most of it on dirt roads. Go let them know the war is over and they can all go home, okay?”
It was the last time he saw his father.
Everything a cruel lesson. This, what fathers were for. His father taking Sandro, four years old, to the tire factory gates during a strike. The workers carrying a coffin and Sandro saying, “Papa, is it a funeral?” His father laughing and nodding. For me. I’m dead, right? Holding up his hands, slapping his own cheeks, then holding up his hands again. What do you say, Sandro? Do I look dead to you?
damn
[...] hat a relief it was. A vacation from the self, to attend to their needs. Like Giddle, the so-called best friend, but a betrayer who barely had a self, who had a sociopathic freedom from any need for relating. He enjoyed that kind of thing. On occasion. Or rather, he let himself be enjoyed by these women who dictated. He needed a break from his devoted girlfriend, who submitted to his generosity and demanded so little. She was like a daughter. Young Reno. She was both innocent and ambitious and looked to Sandro for direction, and fine, but not all the time. Sometimes he just wanted to forget himself. Doesn’t everyone?
His father had said to him, “As you get older, you tolerate less and less well women your own age.” “You mean you do,” Sandro had said. “Yes, I,” his father said. “That’s right. And I used to think it was because I’d escaped time and women didn’t. But that’s not the reason. It’s because I’m stunted. Many men are. If you are that kind of man when you grow up, Sandro, you’ll understand. You’ll go younger in order to tolerate yourself.”
That’s what it was about, at the end of the day. His father was right. It’s what you can stand of yourself.
brutal