Stuff

Gazing at a thin, light brown carpet, I waited in the lobby of a medical clinic on a midwinter afternoon. It was sparsely furnished, and shadowy in the fading light. Nurses passed me by. One quietly approached me. I only saw her hands, and the curve of her breasts beneath her white dress, as she placed a tray of syringes, individually wrapped, before me. They were small, tuberculin syringes, with the needle already attached. I waited for her to apply them to me, but she left the room. I think she expected me to use them on other patients. The idea intrigued and excited me somehow, especially since I had just quit a demeaning security position. I felt flattered to be trusted with the care of patients, but I was anxious. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. Instead I practiced on myself, puncturing my skin with five or six needles. Soon, blood was drizzling down in several directions, all over my arm, forming a pool on the floor. Now, though, the floor was the muddy, tiled surface beneath my security desk where, the summer before, I read Freud...I heard voices to my left and looked over my shoulder. Women from the bar next door were passing through the hall. One of them stopped briefly and peered at me. I hoped she wouldn’t be repulsed by the blood.


As a guard I had to do regular tours. Relieved from my post, I would close my book, get off my wooden stool, and clip the two-way radio to my belt. I would analyze my dreams as I went, staggering half asleep through the corridors of the deserted building, wearily wishing for the sun to rise in the eerie, early morning. When I went home to bed and slept, the deserted building became a girls’ dormitory. My blazer disappeared, my clip-on tie, my polyester pants, my shirt with its iron-on badge. Naked, I went around hitting keys in showers and bedrooms, weaving among hundreds of girls in bras and panties, nighties, or naked, as I was.


Deb was a beautiful, voluptuous cocktail waitress from the bar, which had a door right by my desk. She used to come over to me in black tights, a long white shirt, and short black culottes, and ask for a section of the paper. One afternoon, as I was doing the crossword puzzle, she put her arms around my neck, wrapped herself around my body, and whispered in my ear, “I want to read my horoscope.” It was an easy favor to grant, but Deb was like a siren, tempting me to keep a job made more memorable by other favors I had to grant, requested with more frequency, fulfilled with less pleasure.


There was a weekly--or biweekly--ritual that summer. “Cosmo wants to talk to you,” Mungai , or Thuo, would say, calling me over to the main desk. “Have a good night my friend,” Gomez would say into the receiver before handing it over to me. “Hey Gordon, how are you tonight,” Cosmo would say. “I’m all right.” “I have a question for you.” I would imagine him sitting around a table then, at quarter to twelve, playing Trivial Pursuit with his girlfriend and her kids, stumped on a question about Freud. But he wasn’t the type to play Trivial Pursuit. In any event, he wasn’t the type to cheat if he did. Someone had pulled a no-show and he was asking me to get him out of a bind. “I guess I could do it,” I would say. “Thanks a lot, pal. I appreciate it. You really bailed me out.”


It was my second night on the site. Linwood Caler, the guard who had trained me, had come in drunk and over the edge. He was from Jonesport, Maine. I thought it must be a Welsh name. Jones is a common Welsh name, like Thomas or Evans. Like Dylan Thomas or Dave Evans, the Edge. A guy over the edge from a town on the edge of Maine, full of Welsh Americans: American Dylan Thomases, American Edges. Linwood came down to Boston to live with his ex-wife, who was pursuing a new teaching career and needed him to baby-sit their children. Now he was homeless, because she had evicted him. He looked for apartments in The Globe. Once he asked me how to get to South Boston. He kept all his belongings in a big duffle bag under the main security desk and slept outside the Federal Reserve Building.


Linwood had the most melodious Down East accent I had ever heard. When I spoke with him, I felt as if I had been transported to the shores of Jonesport, Maine. The salt air outside of Russia Wharf, my security site, on Fort Point channel, full of sea gulls, dissolved the huge complex of old warehouses converted into architectural offices on whose wavy wooden floors I did my rounds at four in the morning, thinking about Freud.


Linwood also had nasty looking scars on his right wrist. I wondered if those were razor marks, or if he was left-handed, but I never asked. Freud wrote about a dream he had in which his former mentor had instructed him to vivisect his own body. He related this to the self-analytical work he was doing at the time. I had read this before I had the dream about the syringes. I had also seen Linwood's scars before that dream. Naturally, Freud knew many people who had mutilated themselves, many Linwood's. I didn’t know many, but I knew some. Linwood's scars were scabious, as if recently healed. A friend once showed me scars on his left wrist. They were deeper than Linwood's, and further up his arm. Linwood's were right beneath his palm.


Much has happened since then. Last night, I dreamt that I went on a two-day trip to California. I wanted to swim in the Pacific Ocean. I was walking up and down beaches along the coast. I think I was in Malibu. I couldn’t find L.A. Maybe I was nearing San Diego. My friend Steve Scales had just got his Ph.D. in philosophy there. I hadn’t seen him for ten years. When we were in prep school together, we used to go out after lunch in my 1970 blue Beetle and get high on the golf course. I was reading Eastern philosophy and German mysticism at the time. Walking around pools and sand traps, I would try to prove to Steve that God exists.


I checked into a hotel. I found a stereo case in my room. There was a cardboard box of CDs in the bottom cabinet. I put on the White Album. Just then, the hotel room turned into my studio apartment, as if I had woken up. The CD became the vinyl copy of the White Album I had bought in a used record store when I was twenty. I used to bathe myself in the music of The Beatles. Once, sick in my room for a week, I listened to all of it. I lay languidly back on my bed, exploring a rash of chicken pox on my belly, thighs, and penis. The scene switched back to the hotel. I went into the lobby. It had a swimming pool which was also a beach. I didn’t have a bathing suit, so I swam in my underpants. I stole someone’s towel. I was back in my room again, but the walls had disappeared. I was alone on wet sand with the hotel furniture.


As I got ready to leave, I started looking through the CDs in the stereo case. I was counting them and stacking them up. There were two, neatly stacked piles of seven each. Suddenly I discovered that the CDs were really cameras, high-tech models of varying sizes. I had bought them, and with money I didn’t have. I thought my sister Jen might like them. “Little Jen with the sharp eyes,” my mother calls her. She is a photographer. I’ve never even taken a picture, except for once in the Villa Borghese in Rome. Two young English women stopped me on the front slope and offered me their camera.


My mother thinks Jen should have a camera collection. My mother herself collects bottles. When she was young she collected pictures of dogs. Her own mother collected owls. My mother is always haunting flea markets and yard sales for curious items. She once found a ponderous, leather-bound tome of English poetry from the turn of the century called “Gems for the Fireside.” She gave it to me for Christmas. I was with her once at a kitschy antique show where she was poring over a table of dusty old Brownies and other clunky, metal artifacts, trying to choose a camera for Jen.


My brother Andy is a photographer too. He has an amazing variety of cameras. He also collects guitars, cigarette lighters, and knives. He lives life on the edge. At two in the morning, he goes out on the deserted streets of New York City with his tripod, to do extended exposure photography. By exposing the lens for a minute or longer, he can take shots in the dark without a flash. He showed me a picture two months ago of a remote Manhattan bridge underpass next to a barbed wire fence, lit up in an eerie way by streetlights. He was focusing on a row of dumpsters beneath the bridge, he told me. A policeman had pulled over as he was setting up his equipment. The policeman got out of his squad car and swaggered over. “What are you doing,” he drawled. “Taking pictures,” Andy said. “Of what?” the policeman badgered. “Uh...stuff.”*


*This story originally appeared in The Queen Street Quarterly, Toronto, Ontario, in the summer of 1997.