Rat Bohemia Read online

  An average rat litter is twenty-two little ones and they can reproduce at the rate of six litters a year. Sometime in the 1980s I started to see them scampering regularly in the playgrounds of Central Park. Reagan had just become president and I held him directly responsible. Rat infestation felt like something the U.S. government should really have been able to handle. That’s when I started thinking about getting a gun and shooting each one of them on sight. Picking them off the way hillbillies shoot squirrels.

  That guy, last Sunday, who was throwing bottles? All he cared about was himself. His personal expression was more important to him than other people’s eyes. That’s the kind of attitude that makes this town a dangerous place to live. You never know when it can hit. The shooting in front of The Unique was more reasonable. It was just a bunch of friends killing each other. Don’t have friends like that and it won’t happen to you.

  Chapter Two

  Every morning I go over to the old Veterans’ Administration building on West Twenty-fifth Street and wait on line to go through the metal detectors. The crowd moves slowly so all of us look around at the lobby walls. They’re covered with old World War II murals of white soldiers getting fitted for artificial legs by white nurses in starched caps. The women lift up the veterans’ new legs and demonstrate how to use them.

  Once I make it past the security guards, I have to ride up in the elevators with all the whacked-out veterans scratching and getting into fights. Mostly black and Puerto Rican with a sprinkling of white trash. They usually get off first, and then I ride up alone to the seventeenth floor where there is the Food and Hunger Hotline office. I walk through them to my office and then sign in at Pest Control, wasting about half the day unless I get sent out on a job.

  When I am sitting in Pest Control, hanging out, waiting, I pay close attention to the goings on at Food and Hunger. I want to see everything I can. Everything. I want to be a witness to my own time because I’ve had a sneaking suspicion lately that I’m gonna live a lot longer than most of the people I meet. If I’m gonna be the only one still around to say what happened, I’d better pay close attention now.

  Killer usually stops by the office at ten for coffee and peanut butter sandwiches. Then she checks in at a couple of restaurants to see if they need any prep cooks. I know for a fact that they’re only hiring Mexicans and Israelis. Everyone knows Americans aren’t good for restaurant work. They want to talk on the pay phone and give their friends free meals.

  In the meantime she’s living on forty dollars a week from watering plants for a couple of offices and boutiques. The rest gets paid by the Bed and Breakfast guests she hustles at those four-dollar cappuccino places. Mostly Swiss people or Germans. They think it’s quaint. She gives them a bed and then tells them to make their own breakfast. Then she comes to the office to eat some of mine. We’ve been living this schedule for a long time already. It is one big fat habit.

  You know one thing I don’t like about homeless people? They ask you for a light and then hold on to your lighter for forty-five minutes blabbing on and on about some misfortune. The whole thing is designed to make it seem like they don’t realize that they’ve got your lighter. But the fact is, they know they’ve got it.

  My father always raised me to be extremely polite to black people. To say “Yes, sir” and “Yes, ma’am” and to feel sorry for the hardships they’d endured. Black and white never socialized together where I grew up—or any place I’ve ever heard of, for that matter. But I was raised with some kind of naïve expectation that saying “Yes, sir” would take care of all of that some day. I was never expected to see my family’s own stake in racism. How mediocre we really were and how much we depended on it to be able to put food on the table. I mean, how many white people would own cars today if merit was the only thing that mattered?

  Killer was brought up to be a racist. One night I went over to her place to watch TV and her parents brought over some food. Next thing you know the news came on and it was all “nigger” this and “nigger” that. Her parents had these sharp teeth whenever they said that word. They scrunched up the skin around their eyes. It wasn’t said calmly. Killer knows better but when she gets emotional, that’s what she falls back on.

  Like one time some Puerto Rican guy was beating up his kid in the hallway and Killer said, “Look at that low-rent over there.”

  “Shut up,” I said. “You haven’t had a job in two years. If you had enough patience to stand in line you’d be on welfare yourself.”

  “I’d be on welfare if it wasn’t for the strength of the Eurodollar,” she said as some blond couple rolled over in the bed. That was the way she looked at things.

  God that summer was hot. There’s that way that Puerto Rican girls sit close together on the stoops. They have skinny arms and those ten-dollar pink dresses. They smile and wear their hair long with a headband.

  Every day homeless people come into Food and Hunger looking for food, but they only get Contact Cards. I gave Killer one of those cards, but she said the food they advertised wasn’t nutritious.

  One time, before breakfast, Killer walked me to work, but she wanted to stop off at the Xerox store on Tenth Street that was run by some Moonies. They were clean-cut peculiar and wore polyester pants up to their necks.

  “They give away free bread and free Chinese buns,” she said.

  When we walked in it was kind of slow and real hot. It stunk of Xerox fluid. The polyesters had a few day-olds sitting on the counter and a bag of day-old buns.

  “Don’t eat it,” I said. “It’s old pork.”

  “Hi, Killer,” they said, handing her two loaves. Then they turned to me. “What about you? ”

  “I don’t need free food,” I said.

  “Look,” Killer whispered. “Take it. I need it. I’ll give you a fresh one later. For your birthday.”

  “Okay. No, wait a minute. I don’t want bread for my birthday. I want a colander.”

  “Do you think I need a professional portfolio? ” she asked.

  Killer was still thinking about jobs.

  “How is everything going?” Killer asked the Moonies, remembering to be gracious.

  “We’re having problems with rats,” they said.

  That woke me up.

  “Do you have big ones? ” I asked. “One-pounders?”

  “Yep,” they said.

  “Did you put out poison?” Killer asked.

  “Poison doesn’t work,” I said. “They’re too strong. Besides, if you kill one that way it’s just gonna stink up your place and bring maggots.”

  “Did you try traps?” Killer asked, trying to cut me off because she knew what I was about to recommend.

  “Traps don’t work,” I said, ignoring her. “The rats are too smart. They spring the traps and get the bait.”

  “What about walk-in traps? ” one of the Moonies asked.

  “Too expensive,” I said. “Doesn’t work on a massive scale.”

  “Well, what do you suggest? ” he asked.

  “You gotta shoot ’em,” I said. “You gotta get ’em one by one.”

  Chapter Three

  I was born Rita Mae Weems in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York City, U.S.A. on August 1, 1959. My father, Eddie Weems, fixed couches for Castro Convertible. My mother, Louisa Rosenthal Weems, was one of those hollowed-out blonde beauties who made their way to New York via Thereisenstadt and then a displaced persons’ camp. There are a lot of them still walking around. I see them on the subways now and then. But, in Jackson Heights where I grew up, they were a dime a dozen.

  My mother smoked four packages of Chesterfields a day and died of cancer when I was ten. All my memories of her are stained nicotine yellow and accompanied by a deep, painful, hacking cough. Officially, I’ve given up on smoking. I rarely buy a pack. But some days I just do it. The privacy of a good smoke on a cold day.

  Then, at night, I’ll lie in bed clutching my breasts, my lungs, that hold in my chest where the burning smoke sits. My mind rol
ls over as I beg for redemption.

  When I pray, I pray to the Jewish God. I pray to the patriarchal Got—not an energy or spirit—but that old white man with a beard sitting up there deciding things. My mother prayed to him. My grandmother prayed to him. And, as far as I am concerned, that is reason enough. We exist together in that moment of panic where my thoughts turn up to the sky.

  Judaism isn’t that hard to understand. It all boils down to a few basic principles. There is one God. That is sort of the main belief. Second, but also important, is the idea that you can’t worship things. You can’t bow down before idols. I’m not saying that I think this way of looking at things is the only or best way. But it is my burden and my gift because I inherited it from my mother. I don’t care to know what the reason is that I am gay. But when it comes to being a Jew who only has one God, I know for sure that I was born that way.

  My first job was cashier. Then I cleaned up a Catholic school cafeteria. All those girls in green plaid kilts with dusty white skin and matching white food. Instant mashed potatoes. Dishes of mayonnaise. A glass of milk. Instant vanilla pudding. By senior year I started working at J. Chuckles on Forty-second Street in Manhattan. There I earned enough money to buy a camel’s hair coat.

  My mother, Louisa Rosenthal, was born in Bremen and lost everything during the war. I, Rita, am named for her mother. My brother Howie is named for her father and my older brother Sam is named for her brother. Rest in peace.

  She married my dad, a Catholic. But my mother was a person who could not care about things like propriety. She just went through the motions. What could the neighbors do to her now?

  “Your mother liked the worst,” my dad said a hundred thousand times. “She liked bratwurst, teawurst, and knockwurst.”

  But he pronounced it “woist” like Huntz Hall in those old Dead End Kids movies. It is the way most white people in Queens actually talk.

  My mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. She had that fragile, German, movie-star sensuality. She had blue eyes and soft lips. Her mouth was shapely. Her hair was fine and bright. But her eyes were nothing, flat. That worked, though, for the completed beautiful victim look.

  I have a photograph of her in a suit with shoulder pads, when she first came to New York and worked as a clerk at Woolworth’s. She had thick lipstick and pale empty eyes. On the way to work some fashion photographer saw her on the bus and invited her into his studio to take a few pictures. Her face was slightly twisted. She held a sultry cigarette.

  “Your mother was like Marilyn Monroe,” my father said. “A real doll.”

  There are a few other photographs. Louisa and Eddie at Niagara Falls. Louisa and Eddie at Rockaway Beach. Louisa and Eddie eating a Kitchen Sink ice cream sundae at Jahn’s Ice Cream Parlour. The kids are in that one too. Me, age three, sitting on my father’s lap. Sam, age seven, happy, benign, acting just the way kids are supposed to act. Howie, age ten, looking to the side at the wrong moment, ice cream all over his shirt.

  Here is one of the classic Weems family stories. It stars me, age two, sitting in the stroller at the German deli near the house where Louisa bought her teawurst.

  “I’m not happy,” I reportedly announced in a booming bawl.

  “Why not? ” Mr. Braunstein asked from behind the counter.

  “I’m not happy,” I repeated. “Because my daddy isn’t here.”

  Where was he? Off in a car full of tools to some richer person’s more expensive house in a better neighborhood of Queens or Kew Gardens or Forest Hills or some place in the city or out on the island, the North Shore. He held the nails in his mouth and spit them out into place. He carried a hammer in the sling of his work pants thinking about the good old days in the army during the war. Mr. Handsome G.I. Listening to the crap on the car radio. My dad knew all the songs.

  Now, after a night of smoking I lie in bed, terrified.

  “What am I doing with a cigarette in my hand?” I ask myself stupidly. “I’ve got to be out of my mind.”

  These days everybody is dying. Not just my mother. There’s no illusion left to let a person feel immune. Invincible is over.

  Chapter Four

  I didn’t get my mother’s hair. Sam got it. Mine is blonde and brown, a sign of mixed race. Howie looks even darker, real black Irish, and that’s fine. But this in-between kind of washed-out blah sort of shut me down in the beauty department. I got blue eyes, true. But I also got blue skin, really pink nipples that look paraffin-coated. No pubic hair on the insides of my thighs. Thank God. Whenever you see pubic hair in a movie or magazine the girl has never got it down the insides of her thighs. But, in real life there are miles of it out there. There is wall-to-wall carpeting in every household in America. Some girls get embarrassed and some act like they never noticed. But there is a discrepancy between most thighs and the ideal ones. Mine are kind of ideal.

  I grew up. I got jobs. I moved far away from my destiny. No husband. No night school. No screaming kids in snow-suits and strollers. No trappings. Not trapped.

  My first lover was rough, knowing, leathery. She held my blue body. I was so young I didn’t know what lovemaking was. This woman was about forty, named Maria. She was sizable, weighty, assuredly handsome. I had no expectations. I couldn’t give anything back. As we were doing it, I just couldn’t be free. Lovemaking seemed to revolve around the shifting of weight. It had to do with climbing onto Maria’s body. Her whole skeleton was involved. But when she opened my lips and put her mouth on my clitoris I couldn’t react. It was too specific. The rest of me felt lonely. I was sixteen. I had no extra flesh. Maria masturbated in front of me. I sat between her legs staring like it was a television set.

  After that I just started talking, blabbing on and on. I told her everything I did all day and what I was expecting to do tomorrow. I told her about every song on the radio and which ones I liked, which ones did not deserve to be hits. I told her about the time, when my mother was sick, that some strange accented distant relative I’d never seen before or since, took me to a store in Brooklyn to buy some clothes for the first day of school. I wore size 6X. I didn’t understand why we had to go all the way to Brooklyn until we climbed up these shaky wooden stairs to the shop. The place was run by a group of friends who had all been in the same concentration camp. The clerks had numbers on their arms and screamed at each other like they were home in their kitchens. I was so small, their numbers were eye level and kept swinging past my face.

  The second time Maria picked me up from work and made me keep on all my clothes. She was smart. Passing her hands over my young breasts, there was no direct touching. No contact. That was the first time in my life that I ever felt sexy. That was the first time I ever felt that thing. Desire.

  Further down, I thought. Please put your hands further down. I got angrier and angrier as her hands stayed the same.

  “You’ve got to ask for it,” she whispered. She said it like a threat. “You’ve got to ask for what you want.”

  “Put your hands down there.”

  “Down where?”

  “In my pants.”

  She lifted me onto her lap and fucked me fully clothed.

  “You are a brave young girl,” she said. “You’re a darling girl. Keep your clothes on and it will always feel good.”

  The next and final time together, it was my turn to touch. It was an inquiry. I hadn’t yet discovered shame. But Maria’s cunt didn’t open to my fingers the way mine had to hers. That’s when I realized how trust shows in sex. It has nothing to do with how they act or what they say. It shows physically. I learned, instinctively, the telltale signs.

  Being a salesgirl was a trap. That was clear from the start. Dad’s new girlfriend Erica worked in sales and she was obviously trapped. The staff at J. Chuckles was trapped. The manager was trapped. Even the customers were trapped by the lousy selection of overpriced clothes. I knew that I was only seventeen. I knew I was young. This job was just a moment. It was just about saving up for a camel’s ha
ir coat. The coat was so dashing. It was substantial. It was something I had never seen before except on the back of a woman on line at Cinema One.

  Saturday afternoons, after work, I went to Shield’s Coffee Shop on Lexington Avenue and had an egg salad sandwich on rye. One dollar and five cents with a pickle on the side. I sat at the counter, exhausted, and stared out the window at the people on line at Cinema One. It was New York couples at Christmas time. The kind that went to foreign films. They had good taste. They weren’t tacky little hitters from Queens. The girls in tight jeans and sparkle socks from my neighborhood spent their whole lives smoking Marlboros in front of candy stores. Their boyfriends died in car accidents or never got rid of the drug habits they’d picked up in Vietnam. Those girls wore blue eye makeup. They listened to Elton John and Yes and Black Sabbath at parties. They listened to Tommy by the Who, and Bachman-Turner Overdrive. They did quaaludes with their older boyfriends and then eventually used needles and drank tequila right out of the bottle. They never saw foreign films. I hadn’t either, but I would someday. That was the difference.

  Outside the couples were standing on line. I ate my egg salad slowly, watching. Framed by the picture window was a distinguished older couple. The man wore a topcoat. His wife’s hair was done. She linked her arm into his. They both looked ahead while discussing so they could watch and comment at the same time. Behind them stood a younger version. The woman’s cheeks blushed pink. She had gold earrings. The younger guy wore a scarf and a jacket. His hair was long, hatless. Behind them stood two women, arms linked as well. They were engaged, laughed easily. One had to bend over slightly so the other could speak into her ear. And then something happened that changed my life forever. The two women kissed, romantically. The one nearest the window wore a camel’s hair coat.

  The next Saturday was Christmas Day. As soon as I could get out of the house, I took the Seven train into the city directly to Cinema One. I sat down in the virtually empty theater and watched the same foreign film those two women had watched. It was called Cries and Whispers.