Chapter 10
Even Rai, who knew him better than anyone else, didn’t know what to make of Z. He made her laugh, he argued philosophy and politics with her, he kept her warm at night, and he had taught her to survive on the street, but she could find no answers to her most basic questions: where was he from? Why was he on the street? What was his name?
These questions troubled Z as much as Rai. Evidence proved that his memory functioned exceedingly well — he could quote long passages of Marx and Lenin — but he remembered nothing from before he was fifteen. Not his parents, not his home, not even how he arrived, naked, in the king sized bed where he woke one morning. In a terrible confusion, he had dug through piles of clothes on the bedroom floor, throwing on the ones that fit and discarding those several sizes too large, then sprinted down the stairs and out the front door, ignoring the bass voice that commanded him to return. He emerged into a suburban idyll that he would always associate with hell, sprinting down one cul-de-sac after another, past perfectly mowed lawns, Victorian façades, and early morning commuters who ostentatiously ignored his tears from behind the windshields of Infiniti sedans.
For Rai, the linear scars on Z’s face marked that lost past, but for Z, the important symbol was the heap clothes. Expensive clothes, men’s clothes. Knowing that detail from Z’s past, Rai was not surprised with the text that he pasted on top of the MTV ad.
“As a wolf to the lamb, so a lover to his lad.”
-Socrates
As they stood in the Christopher Street station to gauge audience response, Rai desperately wished that she would have vetoed the quote. Or insisted that he put it somewhere else. Anywhere besides under the gayest street in New York. Before they had even been able to watch the reactions, the poster had been ripped from the wall, and as they overheard the angry conversations on the subway platform, it appeared that a gay boycott of MTV was in the works. Standing in front of the tattered poster, Z laughed uproariously. Though happy to see an authentically Z-ish emotion from her friend, Rai felt bad about posting the cruel quote. It wasn’t as if gays faced a lot of persecution in fin de siècle New York, she thought, but it couldn’t be fun to come down into your subway station and see yourself accused of carnivorous pedophilia.
“I dunno, Z. I’d be psyched if they quit watching MTV… but I don’t think this is very nice.”
“Nice? C’mon! Gays run this city. They can handle a bit of ridicule. They’re as good a target as anyone else. And we can make fun of whoever we want.”
“Except black Rastafarian Marxists–”
“I gave up Rasta months ago!”
“You know what I mean.”
“But that’s different. Blacks actually suffer because of capitalism. Gay men make more money per capita than anybody else. They can handle a little parody.”
“So could Al Sharpton or Puff Daddy, but we haven’t gone after them.”
“Well, maybe we will. What’s your point? We put up a funny sign, they got pissed. Looks like success to me. It’s what you wanted.”
“All I’m saying, Z, is that I think you’ve let…” she searched for a word, then gave up, “…your own experience get in the way. Oppression isn’t just about per capita income.”
“Look, these wolves have it coming to them. Chelsea Queens, body builders, tight pants white boys with too much money and not enough–”
“Z!” There are many places in the world where one can get away with loud, homophobic slurs. Christopher Street is not one of them. Several large men in tight black t-shirts stared angrily down the platform, looking for an excuse to step in. Just in time, Z noticed them, so he stared apologetically at his shoes. He was not very good at the posture, but it convinced them not to attack him.
On the train they took out of Christopher Street station — and not fast enough, as far as Rai was concerned — she saw the perfect ad for their next quote. Acela, the new high speed train to Washington and Boston, had posted its name all over the car in enigmatic style. Each poster featured a different, random set of capital letters, each beginning with A and ending with B. As she looked at the ads, words gradually appeared from the confusion. “ACATCHUPONKAFKAB” slowly became “Between points A and B, catch up on Kafka.” It was an odd campaign, but people were looking at it.
“That’s the one,” she whispered. “Perfect, huh? And easy to imitate.”
“Yeah.” He was still unhappy that she had not liked his last quote.
“Seriously. Something pithy, huh? That’s what we want.” She stepped up onto the seat and yanked the poster out from behind a broken pane of glass. “Let’s do it. I got the perfect quote from that little black book of yours.” She pulled him out of the train when the doors opened — it was Times Square, and she thought that the library would be a great place to work.
Z did not want to sit in the Rose Reading Room — “If we’re gonna deface fucking public property, let’s be a little more subtle, OK?” — but he accepted a spot under the trees in Bryant Park. The afternoon was sticky — one of those August days for which New York is notorious — so they needed the shade. Z pulled pens and stencils from his bag and set to work.
Rai was impressed. Not just with her friend’s ability to steal art supplies, but with his æsthetic sensibility (in her mind, Rai always spelled the word with an æ). During the last several months, she’d feared that they had been drifting apart, but now, as she handed him his pens, that distance faded away. She felt the intimacy of a nurse handing the scalpel to her surgeon, the private passing ammunition to his gunner… At that moment, his intellect impressed her much more than his homophobia had annoyed her.
Z prized his intellect. Rai knew that. He liked to think of himself as a proletarian intellectual, the sort Marx imagined as the leaders of the revolution, who could see through the clouds of confusion that allowed most people to countenance injustice. In Rai he had found a mind as supple and unconventional as his own, and teaching herself his theories on philosophy and politics had made him happier than any other time he could remember. Unfortunately, when she began obsessing over Russian novels, she had moved her outside of his sphere of expertise. Pushkin did not contribute to his dreams of revolution, so he had never read him — and as he had informed Rai, he would never waste his time that way.
Though Rai understood the strain it had caused in their friendship, she needed her novels. However she tried, she could not put down a book by Dostoyevsky or Chekhov or Gogol or Turgenev; even the more esoteric Beily and Bulgakov possessed her. She knew that the sufferings of a Moscow aristocrat were not hers, but somehow their struggles to find meaning in a meaningless world helped her.
That meaning had not included Z, and she knew that he resented it. That’s why he was so jealous of Mike, why he made fun of every book he stole for her. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Rai knew she was jumping the gun, that she had no proof that graffiti philosophy would return them to the garden of Eden. Even so, under the trees of Bryant Park, she suddenly felt as close to Z as when they had first met.
Perhaps a week after she had run away, lonely and wondering how much longer she could stay away from home, Rai had been perusing an exhibit in the National Museum of African Art when Z, drawn toward her by what he always called, “the tightest ass this side of Marrakesh,” asked her about the Malian masks she had been examining for the last half hour. Though Z’s appearance had frightened her, fear of solitude had overcome fear of him, and they began to talk — first about Africa, then politics, then life on the street. Rai forgot her homesickness, Z forgot years of misery, and eventually the guards had to escort them out the door at closing time. As they walked across the Mall in a teasing argument, Z realized that he hadn’t once thought about her ass since they’d begun their conversation.
That night, in response to Z’s persistent attempts to turn their intellectual chemistry into something physical, Rai made it abundantly clear that their relationship would never include sex. Furious, he stomped off to the other side of Rock Creek Park, and Rai surprised herself by following him. Finding him left her even more stunned: he had collapsed on the dirt with a blissful smile on his face and a needle in his arm.
Even in sheltered Vanillaville, Rai had known that such a world existed — the cops that came into her middle school classes had pounded the dangers of heroin deep into her head — but the reality of it shocked her. No, she wasn’t frightened or freaked out: she was shocked by the pleasure she felt at the sight. It made her blood flow, it struck her as adventurous and exciting, and it gave her something to do.
The ambulance Rai called from a pay phone arrived quickly, but the paramedics showed Z little respect when they saw the needle in his arm. Rai held his hand as they rushed to the hospital, then filled out the paperwork with invented names and dates as nurses tried to clean his blood stream. By the next morning, it was clear he would live, but without Medicaid or insurance, the hospital wanted him out of the ER as soon as possible, so Rai found herself supporting a huge, weak body as they limped out the front door.
“Look, I don’t even know who you are,” she said as she sat him down on a bench in the sun, “But I just put myself on the line for you, so we’re going to make a deal.” She had also liked the feel of those words on her tongue. They felt responsible, independent, even adult. Like the heroine of a fantasy novel.
Z couldn’t understand the contradiction between the shy, thin voice and the determination behind it, but he nodded. “OK, what–”
“As long as we’re friends, you’re never going to use that stuff again.”
For a while, Z argued that he couldn’t quit without methadone, that he couldn’t get methadone without a Medicaid card, that he couldn’t get a Medicaid card without a birth certificate, but Rai did not relent. Finally, frustrated, he asked, “What the fuck am I going to do? Have you tie me to a tree while I detox?”
“Fine. I’ll bring you food.”
Z never understood exactly why he accepted the stupid plan. Perhaps he saw Rai as his only chance for redemption; perhaps the suicide attempt had left him addled; perhaps he was still enchanted by the quality of her ass. Regardless, he found a place in the park near Cleveland Circle, allowed Rai to tie his ankle to a tree and burn the knot so he couldn’t untie it, and sat down to prepare for three days in hell.
As she had promised, Rai brought food and water to the tree. She sat close by him, even caressing his hand in the rare moments when he slept, or when his fury left him too exhausted to hurt her. She had never seen pain like the symptoms of withdrawal, not even in the faces of Christ in the National Gallery of Art, or in the stories of the martyred Macabees. Finally, on the fourth morning, the sweat had stopped, the cries had quieted, and his face was almost as handsome as when he had first approached her.
Rai took out her pocket knife and cut the rope. That night, they had hopped a train in Union Station and hid in the bathroom each time the conductor passed. When morning dawned, they had arrived in New York.
As she followed her friend onto the A train, she felt like she had in those first days. They were together, linked by a common purpose, brothers in arms… she giggled at the string of clichés that passed through her head. Happiness, however, did not keep her from paying close attention to the other people in the train.
“God is dead!”
-Friedrich Nietzsche
As Z had expected, the quote was a hit. Acela ads confused most people in the first place, but the simple message on the A train caught everyone’s attention. As a downtown train slowed to a crawl after the Port Authority, Rai saw one passenger point it out to a complete stranger; they began an intense conversation about the holocaust.
After the quote provoked a fascinating argument between a butch lesbian and the priest who sat beside her, Rai noticed Z grinning like a little kid, then glancing around to see if she shared his enthusiasm. It was a strange sight.
A Hasidic mother covered her two sons’ eyes when she saw the false Acela ad, so of course the kids squirmed around to see it better. “How can God be dead, Momma?” asked the older after he could finally read the words.
“Elohenu hayah!” the mother insisted. “Our God lives. This is what happens to people when they listen to the lies of the Reform synagogue.”
This idea made Rai laugh, but then she also began to feel guilty. Was her project going to cause these kids to lose their faith? She stepped across the car and sat down next to the boys. The mother looked concerned that an Arab ruffian would sit next to her sons, so Rai quickly mouthed a prayer in Hebrew (“Baruch hatah Adonai…”) to calm her. As the mother turned away to look at the route map, Rai whispered to the younger boy, who was about ten, “Elohim hayah qen. But don’t let that stop you from reading Martin Buber.” She slid back to the other end of the car.
Over the past eighteen months, Rai’s attitude toward religion had changed several times. When she first came to New York, she’d enthusiastically attended temple every Sabbath at an intellectual Conservative congregation near Columbia. She’d met quite a few people that she liked — mostly students and professors — but as she got to know them, they started to ask too many questions. She was perfectly willing to talk about “How much did Reb Maimonides owe to the Arab logicians?” but the moment the conversation became, “So, where are you living?” she needed to step back. That last question, asked by the mother of a cute but shy boy who always sat in the back of the shul, had erased her final argument against Z’s proposed migration to Florida.
Rai spent some time studying Kaballah. In an angry mood after her break with the synagogue, she concluded that she liked the Emanations on the Left much more than those on the Right — good and blessed spirits were just so boring. Soon thereafter, the Miami sun having banished that black, cynical mood, she decided that mysticism was just silly — even if Moshe ha-Leon had been Sephardic.
She got one great benefit from the experiment with mysticism. She learned that she loved to taunt the Hasidim and the Lubavichers. Sometimes, when she was really bored, or when Z had abandoned her for a long-term affair, she would go over to Williamsburg or Crown Heights, find an old man with forelocks, and shout, “You wouldn’t know the Shekhinah if it bit you in the ass!” or “The Zohar was written in the 14th century, you schmuck!” From time to time, a couple of young men would try to chase her down, but Rai had always been fast on her feet, and she reveled enough in their anger to justify the risk.
After she had left the synagogue in Morningside Heights, it didn’t make much sense to follow the liturgical calendar — there are not enough Jews at a typical soup kitchen to make a minion — but Rai did try to pray on holidays. Mostly, her Judaism had become a way to say — whether to other homeless people or to the Muggle masses of the world — that “I am not one of you.”
In the end, for all her ups and downs, she thought that Judaism was important enough that she didn’t want two little boys to lose it because she’d agreed to quote Nietzsche on the train.
