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Chapter IV

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The Grey Life, Chapter III

By Adam Wasserman

I think I will start first with love. A good measure of a man's worth is how much he has loved. But it is not by how much a man has loved alone that we can judge him, but also - and perhaps more importantly - by how much he has shown that love to others. Because if a man loves in his heart but is not strong enough to demonstrate it, then it is as if has never loved at all. He loses the objects of his love one by one, until he is alone. I realized this when I was just a child and have done everything in my power to prevent it from happening to me. How is it then that I have failed?

Shanai never spoke to me about her life at home, so I know relatively little about it. If I pressed her she would grow angry and refuse to speak for hours. Even as I write this I can picture her pouting in the corner, and it makes me smile warmly. Because as she wouldn't hesitate to tell you she thought of herself as an enlightened woman, and that opinion was very important to her. She believed that she was never influenced by emotional preferences or weaknesses, that she could always assess a situation and act in the most rational manner possible, and in many superficial respects she was. But she was hiding from herself. It's difficult to stare our darkest fears in the face.

I do know that Shanai's relationship with her parents deteriorated quickly as she came of age, and when they felt she was old enough she was sent to boarding school. So she told everyone that she grew up in Connecticut, a small state in a part of that extremity of the United States called New England. The school was somewhere near New Haven. From what I know she spent a lot of time in the city. She used to tell me about it when I first knew her. For her the boarding school was a source of authority almost as contemptible as her parents. New Haven was just another place to escape. That's how she came to hang out with pimps and whores.

I remember writing my first pot poems, poems written under the influence of pot. Funny thing is, it wasn't with Shanai, not with Antonius nor the others. It was with some friends of Nicholas. I remember writing several that night.

I have not, nor have I ever had, a supreme understanding of anything, nor am I especially talented at the art of declamation. I used to think when I was very young that I would do something important in the world, something that no one else could have done at that particular time and place. I had so much to give, so much love. I had such a vision, but it was never realized. I wasted away the prime of youth and then my riper years relishing in silly anguish, and in the process lost whatever noble intentions I had started out with. It was difficult the day I realized it.

But when I smoke marijuana, for a time - albeit a brief one - that emptiness within is filled. I can see things as they truly are, looking down as I float above them. Sometimes the things I see console me. But other times, they drive me to weep. I never bothered to explain why, and Sarah never asked. We pretty much remained out of each other's way unless we were horny.

When I'm high I come to appreciate what I never once considered in any way significant before. Thoughts flow with a rhythmic accuracy, comfortably. I've spoken with the Moon, you know, and several gods and goddesses. We talk about human nature most of the time, but occaisionally a young god will try out a little poem on me he'd written for his favorite. I wish I could remember them well enough to write them down afterwards.

One night after I had smoked a joint I had a dream that Aphrodite came and visited my bed. She was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, and such a sweet smell! She was naked, and glowed with a terrible, white light. And she sang. The words were divine, but I knew them for what they were. She sang a song of betrayal and loss, and heartache that would never mend. She sang of loneliness, too, and jealousy. She sang of Shanai. And after she finished, she leaned over and kissed me.

When I woke the next morning Sarah was leaning up in bed staring at me.

"What?" I asked.

"You're beard's gone white."

"No it's not."

But it was. I stood in the mirror for some time, stroking the fresh whiskers. After that I didn't shave my beard shorter than an inch. It's just a silly superstition.

Anyway, back then smoking pot was still new to me. I was very taken with it. One night we were hanging out and I was lying under a coffee table, boxed in, eyes closed and feeling the music course through me. I could see it in perfect forms dancing behind my eyelids. And I wrote those silly poems.

I lost all them except one. Here it is, in its original form:

Punctuation and spelling do much for poetry, but when the ideas are coming so quickly there is just no time for it. There is only the soft, murmuring flow of the words.

Here is what I think I was trying to get at:

When first I wrote those lines like all the others I thought nothing of them. But now, in my old age, I think of them often. It's not that they are very good, but it really is the last time I remember having a creative urge. It's the last time I remember being myself.

I remember when Shanai read that poem for the first time. The room was dark and quiet. Only the music was playing, and it was soft. She had a single our freshman year - three doors down from my room, to be exact - so it was small. It was cluttered with clothes and books on the occult and little bits and pieces of her variant personality. And it was shadowy. I think all the missing shadows in the world were present in her room, even in the daytime. Of course, I can only imagine what she'd say to that. She'd probably laugh her throaty little laugh and run one of her hands through her long, silky hair and say, "I don't know if I should take that as a compliment or an insult. My room wasn't that dark!" I guess it wasn't, not really.

I remember her slowly handing the small, yellow post-it I had scribbled the lines on back to me, her gentle, brown eyes eating me up. "I'm lost," she whispered, and I knew from the way she was looking at me that it was her deepest secret. I wanted to kiss her. She wanted to kiss me.

"For better or for worse?" she whispered. Some fleeting emotion leaped across her face.

But I could only shrug in response. How the hell could I have known?

I asked her about the pimps and whores. That's how she called it. It was the spring of '91, the spring before college, the spring she hung out with pimps and whores. One of the first things I asked her was whether or not they were clean people. I don't know why, but it's what I asked. She was quite angry with me. After a while I was able to convince her that I had only been joking.

She told me she sometimes stayed with a pimp whose name was Karl. He lived with one of his prostitutes, whose name was Cherry. I don't think that was her real name, but that's what they called her. And the truth of the whole thing was that they were in love. When Shanai first told me this I figured it was just some romantic prospect swirling about in her head, but after hearing her tell the story enough times I came to realize that she actually believed it were true. And it used to comfort me sometimes, to hear her discribing it. "Tell me about the pimps and whores," I'd ask late one night as we were on the virge of sleep. She'd always begin it the same way. "They were very much in love."

And every day he watched her go off with some strange man about whom he knew little else than the color of his wallet, some man who was going to fuck her, stick his penis into her vagina, get his rocks off, and go back out the way he came in. And several times a day, too. So why did he make her work? Well, as Shanai pointed out to me crossly, he didn't make her work. She worked because she wanted to work. O, I imagine most prostitutes don't do what they do because they like it. Shanai didn't agree with me on that point, but I wouldn't give in. I just can't see how anyone could respect himself afterward. She told me that women could use sex to get power, and that it was a potent weapon. I agreed. But I just don't see how a prostitute has any power in the world at all, because she's not even a concubine. No one cares for the prostitute. They just want to fuck her.

Well fuck you.

"You don't know what it's like there," Shanai told me once, taking a deep drag from her cigarette. She was lounging comfortably on her cluttered bed, her face calm and tranquil. Her shoulders were leaning delicately against the wall because there wasn't enough room to lie down. "You just don't know." And she was right. "Almost every woman who walked that neighborhood was a prostitute. The men there just assumed it."

So how can you judge?

"It was rare when I walked around unescorted that some strange man wouldn't proposition me. The first time I was kind of surprised, but after a while I got used to it." Another deep drag off the cigarette. She spoke as she carried herself. Calm and apparently in control. "A lot of times, they couldn't understand why I was saying 'no'. But I never had any trouble. There was always somebody around who knew I was one of Karl's. I just never went out at night"

"But how could Karl stand seeing her go off with those guys?" I asked. I could only picture myself consumed with jealousy.

"It was just sex," Shanai answered me calmly, shrugging. "Sex wasn't a big part of their relationship at all. It couldn't be. Don't get me wrong. They had sex. Just not as often as a normal couple. It's kind of funny, I guess. He was never jealous of her having sex with other men, just if she enjoyed it or not. Just if she had an orgasm. And she never did with those other men. Only with him."

He cooked dinner for her, and it was ready when she came home from work, whenever that was. And she'd always come home with a fresh flower for him. A red rose.

"He'd always pretend to be mad at her for wasting the money on the rose, but he really loved it. He really did."

When Shanai finally left them, they had already been living together for eight months. But when I first heard about their peculiar relationship I couldn't possibly imagine that it would last.

"What ever happened to them?" I asked her once. We were in Antonius' apartment, fried off our asses. I was having fun watching the smoke trail through the air, imagining dragons fighting in slow motion. Shanai was next to me, playing backgammon with Canine. I could hardly see him through the smoke and the dizzy warmth that clamored through my veins.

"Who?" Shanai asked me. Her eyes, red like the fire that was burning within me, focused dully on my own. Canine was playing with his shoelaces.

"You know," I said rather seriously. For here was the girl I loved and at the time it seemed as likely that I would lose her as not. "Karl and Cherry."

"Oh," she murmured, running a hand through her thin hair. She seemed to be thinking.

"Are we gonna play?" Canine asked loudly.

After a moment Shanai shrugged her slender shoulders. A look of sadness passed over her face and somehow it looked comfortable there. She took a drag off her cigarette before replying, staring with detached disinterest at the floor, "I don't really know. I tried to find out, to go back at the end of the summer, but I couldn't find them. And nobody I asked could remember them. But I knew some of their faces. I remembered them from the neighborhood. But they all told me the same thing. They didn't know any Karl. They didn't know any Cherry. They told me they never had. But they had been there - I remember - I remembered their faces -"

I always wondered what happened to them, whether or not they were able to forge some meager happiness for each other out of the drudgery of their lives. But life is just full of tragedies, so, really, who am I to judge?

In case you are wondering my name is David Berkowitz, and yes, I am Jewish, although I lost my faith in that kind of religion a long time ago. My father was a doctor - his practice was on Fifth Avenue, near F.A.O. Schwartz - and mother, well, I guess she was a professional housewife, although until I was sixteen I always thought she was a professional bitch. I never got along with my parents. My father was never home, and the fact that he could get beeped away at any moment, even while he was fucking mother, really pissed her off. Mother grew into one of those rich, spoiled, New York housewives who liked to throw lavish dinner parties, go shopping at those depressingly elitist stores on Fifth Avenue, and eat at fancy restaurants with obnoxious waiters. I assume that she married my father chiefly to attain what in her youth she could not have: material possessions and social stature. I'll always remember her with lines around her face, as if she were cracking. Deep, hard lines that were like trenches. It never really bothered me that mother and I didn't get along. We mostly tried to stay out of each other's way. If we didn't, we'd fight, and our disputes could get pretty nasty. I remember one night I threw some dishes against the wall in the kitchen, screaming at her for being such a fucking bitch. She retired to the music room and cried quietly to herself.

I was born in a New York hospital on 2 April 1972 and grew up in Riverdale, which is such a nice word for a part of the Bronx, with both my parents and a maid. My brother Patrick was born two years later in February of 1974. I still miss him.

Shanai always said that a part of me resented my father. She said I was angry that he hadn't been able to shield me from mother, because the truth is that once in a while I detected an actual ray of warmth from the man. But it was just a promise, and I never saw was behind it. Anyway, I resent my father for his aloofness, but that's not the point. At the time, I didn't give what she said a second thought, but lately as I set to beginning this horrid manuscript I've been wondering at many things she told me.

Drusus calls me a fool. He's still surprised that I think about her after all these years. It bothers him. But what he doesn't understand and has never understood is that the one thing I've learned from all of this - from my life - is how to forgive. That and the fact that he's still so romantically ashamed relieves me of any lingering anger. Yes, maybe I am a fool, a tired old man with nothing better to believe in. When Drusus says these things to me I just smile knowingly and change the subject.

So I didn't love my parents. Sometimes, at awkward moments, it bothers me that I never cried over their deaths. But they were strangers to me; I try not to think about it.

There seem to have been three extraordinarily important people in my life. The first, but the one I loved the least of all, was Anne. She was my first in a lot of things. My first girlfriend. My first fuck. My first heartbreak. We met in Maine, at an international summer camp, when I was very young. She was French, you see. And we were in some sort of lust that I mistook for love. It didn't take long, either. We met the first night, at a dance the management arranged so we campers could all get acquainted. It was in a large hall, made of that highly industrialized wood that they'd like you to think was chopped and treated right there, in camp. It was a dark, spacious place with soft, flashing lights and loud, pulsating music. They were serving exotic, non-alcoholic drinks on one side of the room out of paper cups with a slab of lemon. I remember sitting on a picnic bench placed randomly by the bar. Anne was standing not three feet away gazing deeply into the pack of throbbing bodies across the room. She turned and saw me looking at her.

We spoke for the first time on the patio out back. It was a warm night and the sky was cloudy. You could see a small bright patch above us where the moon was trying desperately to peek through, almost like a jealous lover. Anne didn't speak any English. That first night, with the warm wind blowing around us, caressing us, gently lifting up her skirt so that I could catch infuriating glimpses of soft, warm flesh, she spoke little. I had only two years of French in school to prepare me and it really didn't help very much. My capacity for French was to grow, though. The first words I learned from her were faire la pipe, which is to give a blowjob. I think I loved her even then. And I think she loved me, too, loved me for my innocence, loved me for my naïveté and my hunger.

I met her at the ripe age of fourteen, although I told her I was fifteen. In fact, she died thinking I was a year older than I really was. She was seventeen, you see. That's why I was so intimidated, why I had to pretend that I was only two years younger than her. That summer, the summer of 1986, I lost much more than my virginity. I lost my shy innocence as well. We were only together for two months, but somehow we really got into each other's heads. I truly believe that, back then at least, the emotion was geniune. You see, Anne was the first girl I had met who was in such control of herself. Her favorite sexual position was on top, facing my feet, so I could reach my hand around and rub her clitoris. I can still remember those summer nights, lying on a soft blanket somewhere, the starry night a background to Anne's beautiful body as if those stars were there only to be her background, my hips grinding into hers with mystic rhythm, sounding out a hallowed cadence. Anne was on the pill, you see, and at that age I didn't cum very much, so I never wore a condom.

When Anne left I was crushed. For the first few, disillusioned months, we wrote each other with a fervent dedication. I often wonder what would have happened if our relationship had lasted until the following summer, but it didn't. In December of that year, a couple of days before her birthday, I received a letter from her that was short and to the point. How like her. It sort of went like this:

You, whoever you are, are the third person in the world that I have told. The other two are Shanai and Drusus. That's it. I never told anyone else because it's no one else's business. That's it.

The second person I have ever loved, as you should already know, is Shanai. About that I need not say anything more.

The third person, whom also I love dearly, is Drusus. Not in the same way as Shanai and Anne, of course. Our love is unique to itself. And of the three of them he is the only one left. Everyone else has gone away, even those people I didn't love, who didn't seem so important at the time. They've all departed, abandoned me here in this exceedingly unfamiliar world. All, that is, except Angst, and I am thankful for him.

It's been so long, and my memories seem so eerily distant now that nothing is left standing, that sometimes I find myself wondering if any of this really happened. I look around and nothing is as I remember it, as if it were all a dream. Yes, a dream. I live here with Angst now, but he's quite senile. He sometimes thinks we're all back in college and starts asking me where his Copenhagen is. It's sad to see, really, but I don't mind taking care of him. He is my friend, and I have never abandoned a friend. Besides, it gives me something to do, preparing him for the long road.

When Drusus dies, I think I will send Angst to the best nursing home in the country and calmly shoot myself.

We all went to school at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1991-1995. As you already know, the first semester of my freshman year Shanai lived two doors down from my room. We both lived on the second floor of our dormitory. It was called Gildersleeve Hall. Shanai had a single, but I had a double, and the bureaucrats at the housing office did not deal me a decent roommate. His name was Fred, and he smelled terribly. All his clothes, too, but worst of all were his bed sheets. I don't think he changed them twice each semester. The room was constantly filled with an acrid odor, something like stale sweat. My friends wouldn't hang out in there. The whole year I lived with him he never had a single close friend. He was usually in our room, and that annoyed me because if I wanted to be alone his inevitable presence would drive me out into the throng of petty socialites that occupied the rest of the university. Sometimes I'd walk in and he'd be staring emptily at the wall. But most of the time he slept. Some days he slept fifteen hours. Sometimes I felt bad for him. Other times I thought he deserved it. But now I know that no one deserves to be alone.

Of all the things - and believe me, there were more - that annoyed me, the worst was the nasty habit he had of jerking off while I was in the room. We had bunk beds, and almost every night when he thought I was asleep he would lie down on his stomach, pull off his underwear, and proceed to rub his cock along the mattress, like he was fucking it. And the bedsprings - I don't think he ever knew how much noise he made. I never had the heart to tell him to stop, though. How embarrassing that would have been for the both of us.

So I ended up spending most of my days over at Antonius' with Shanai, and also with my freshmen friends upstairs on the third floor, and later on at the Kai house. Of my freshmen friends were Angst, whom you've already met, Lee, a tall, lean Vietnamese boy, and Drusus, who needs no introduction. Of all the friends I was to have I was always the most fond of them. We all had our girlfriends, too. Drusus and I were the most serious about ours. I had Shanai and Drusus was fucking Nancy, whom I had dated briefly the first few weeks of school. They really were a great couple, though, and my jealousy was lessened over the years by the fact that he truly cared for her, and she him. For better or for worse he and I were to remain friends, even though it bothered me for a long time afterwards that he was quite willing to give up our friendship for her.

Lee was to become a computer programmer for NASA with a high level security clearance. He could never tell us exactly what he did in those cold, gray buildings in Houston. In later years he was involved with the construction and deployment of the first space station on the moon. Several years ago he died of a heart attack while taking a bath. He had been in the middle of the development of a manned voyage to Mars, I think, some mining project. He left behind a son and two grandchildren.

Angst went on to become a failed writer, although he did have a brief period of moderate success, and ended up working at a greasy, roadside diner somewhere in Illinois. Recently he arrived for the last time bedraggled and weary at my door. He was divorced twice and never remarried. Like myself he has no children but he does have two younger brothers in Boston, both of whom are wealthy lawyers. I think his brothers are assholes. They hardly call anymore.

Drusus lived in Lagatoke, Pennsylavia, with his wife Nancy for many years. Not too long ago she died of cancer. They had two daughters who are now prominent physicians, one of whom teaches gross human anatomy at the Johns Hopkins medical school, and an array of grandchildren. Such wonderful children they are, yet doomed to live in this dark world of little food and brigandage. I found it difficult to explain to them that people didn't always live this way. Drusus bloomed into the writer that all of us wanted to be. Two years after we graduated from college he managed to put out a bestseller. His first book! Imagine that. I always knew he had it in him.

I live, as you already know, with Angst in Santa Cruz, California. I own a small clothing store a few blocks away, although it's closed now. I like it where I live. There's no smog up here, not like in Los Angeles where I spent a great deal of my life, and the winters are pleasantly spring-like. And San Francisco is such a wonderful city - at least it was, before the Race Revolts and the coming of the Famine. Anyway, between taking care of Angst and the store, there is little time for me to think. That's good, I guess. Because sometimes I get so caught up trying to remember that it's quite difficult to return to the present. Have you ever tried to answer a question for no particular reason that someone posed to you half a century ago? It's scary, especially when you're all alone. And I've been alone for a long time now. Sometimes the call for the past is so strong that it scares me. Sometimes I feel the acute fear that one day, after traveling that sometimes happy road through memory, I just won't come back. I want to be six feet under before that day. Of course, my hands can still roll a good joint, and that always relaxes me.

So now you know the beginning and the end, or you have some vague notion of them at least. All I have to do now is fill in the middle parts. I've never told anyone this story, either, at least not to someone who wasn't in some way directly involved with it.

But now that we're looking back, even if only for a moment, I just have to sit and mourn the silent statues crowded around me. They're all statues, except for me, Angst, and Drusus, but even in our battered bodies I can hardly discern any flesh. Their faces have turned stiff, and each morning when I look in the mirror I can see the gray creeping up on me a little further, too.

My life has hardened around me, just like those damned images. Hardened images. So what can I make of it all when I don't understand what's happened?

Ah, Shanai. I wish we could smoke a bowl together, one last time. There's so much I never said to you.

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