Craft
by Patrick Gallagher
Mort ventured out of his apartment in search of a stapler and ended up running into all of his friends, who were on their way to the opening of a new parfumerie close to the water.
Jessica Wythe ran a comb of faux ivory through her thick black hair and gazed into the skyline across the river with her usual deceptive absent-mindedness. “Mutton my flower, what ever would you need a staple for?” It was too offhand for the others to laugh, too much like a rehearsal for a joke rather than a joke proper. Rather than laugh with Jessica, they all gaze at Mort twisting his neck looking around him while Jessica’s cool hand rests on his shoulder.
Mort was the only one of their friends who worked in Manhattan, and since today was Memorial Day he had spent the afternoon in the Neighborhood just like everyone else did on the regular. He had tried to make himself useful, or at least his time, and had printed out a kind of anthology of his own out-of-date resumes for filing purposes. He had done so under the assumption that he had a stapler—He had a crystal-clear memory of going out, buying one, and putting one in his drawer, all the while saying to Beverly what a difference it made to have a stapler of one’s own. It was like being the kid who showed up with his own car to the first day doing the paper route.
Mort had looked through his drawers, all of them, unable to remember which one of the drawers had held the stapler, since that day, whenever it was, had been the last time that he had done anything at all with his desk. As the search progressed Mort thought to himself, Shit, maybe I don’t like the present quite as much as the past. He put his hands on his hips, laughed, shook his head, then finally decided what was a self-destructive attitude that was. After a shot of Jack Daniels he scooped up his keys and wallet from off the futon and walked out the door.
It amused Dave Meserole that Mort had dressed himself up in his usual office clothes, despite the fact that he had the holiday off. Dave, who went out to vintage emporia at least three times a week, wore a pink and green horizontally-striped country club polo and a pair of Diesels that he called his sidekick. He was not the only one of his and Mort’s friends who had asked themselves whether Mort owned any clothes at all besides his office clothes. An all-white ensemble of white dress shirt, slacks, and a long white jacket that dangled down to his knees and made Mort look like “Clockwork Orange” turned corporate administrative flunky. Dave tolerated Mort because the girls seemed to feel sorry for him.
With Mort in tow the five of them drifted toward the river with the same effortlessness of that body of water. Girthy but self-confident cumolonimbi drifted by overhead. The Neighborhood might as well have encompassed the entirety of nature: at some point they had all stumbled upon a way of moving which in no wise required that they be anchored to the ground. All they had to do was slide across it. Not so with Mort, who needed to burrow deep underground and hang on to poles in order to live his life. While they breezed up the hill, arms lapping at their sides like the tides, and no one breaking a sweat, Mort spelunked along pumping his arms, his face to the ground and his jaw set, like at the bottom of some canyon in Manhattan.
With only a few exceptions, no one really held it against Mort because they knew that they made money in different ways. He was “network” whereas they were “affiliate,” they were “islanders” whereas he would board the “whaling ship” and shuffle blubber all day long. They called Manhattan “the Spear” whereas for him it was just the place where he worked.
Jenny Berry asked Mort, “So are you coming to this opening with us Mort or no,” and Mort replied, “Um . . . OK. I’ll get a drink.”
Jessica Wythe smiled, laid a restful hand on Mort’s bicep and said, “Five.”
Mort sat on the subway with his bald head leaned against the window, pretending that turning up the white of his trademark high-collared overcoat could provide a semblance of insulation between the hard surface and the molten cracks all over his skull. The magma spread like the gripping tentacles of an octopus on his head, he felt so stupid. He knew that as long as he had not yet reached the office it was not too late to call in sick and he reassured himself that he had not made a final decision.
Peter Chelsea sat next to him. Chelsea dressed similarly to Mort, but in a wide variety of colors, and he always kept the creases razor sharp. He nodded along and checked his email while Mort told him about the end of the previous night.
Mort said, “Whenever I want to go somewhere else, I go to Mike’s. I can just veg there anytime I want, it feels like they’re open any time of any day. And there’s never anyone there.”
Chelsea had come up behind Mort at the parfumerie and whispered in his ear, “So I see at least someone else still works in Manhattan,” right when Mort had been about to hit his drink. Mort had hoped to go somewhere else after getting his stapler, daydreaming that Mike would let him test out the stapler on a handful of the day’s receipts. With a strong feeling of humility Mort surmised that he owed it to Mike., he really did. Very close to the old Monido NutraSweet® works, it was a place where construction workers went that cleared out after Happy Hour. Mort could sit and feel his smooth head for hours on end without having to make conversation. He had first discovered the place when he and Beverly were still together, but his memories of it from that era were “octabenzone” and malformed, like the way that school would look before you got used to it, like in the first couple of weeks or when you were just there to visit. They stumbled into its view, both drunk but in the mood for a last round of shots, after a party at Millicent Kent’s a few blocks East.
Beverly died. Mort moved back to the Neighborhood a year ago and made the bar part of his routine. He asked the gray bearded bartender what his name was and the bartender said, “Mike.” As much as he had looked forward to being at the bar again, he had forgotten the name, so he asked Mike and Mike said, “Mike’s Bar.”
Mort stood at a fence watching the sun go down on the skyline, the crevices and garbage strewn on the vacant lot between the fence growing ever more obscure in the deepening murk, listening to music coast from the parfumerie. The fence sagged under him and the more he drank, the more it felt like a mattress. He tried to imagine what the apartment that he had shared with Beverly would look like if he could distinguish it from the rest of the skyline. It would certainly be nothing that he would be able to recognize. What became clear to him after she left was how hard she had tried to bring him out into the contexts of things, show him how things fit together, and teach him to fit things together himself. But she had left him with crucial lessons still unlearned—Manhattan looked like a giant luminous choral reef, one fungal outcropping bleeding inseparably into the next, and he was the only man left alive who couldn’t make things. Beverly had died trying to coax him into the street, waiting for him on Amsterdam Ave. in the middle of a rain storm, while he stood cowering and shouting for her on the sidewalk. He took off into the street soon enough to watch the collision increase in size as he approached it.
Once he had an idea that he had tried to explain to Jessica Wythe. Mort showed up in the park grinning, his face pink from the strain of the watermelon completely filled up with vodka sloshing under his right arm. All of his friends sat on a blanket that Jessica Wythe had stitched in the pattern of a street map of the Neighborhood. The Neighborhood consisted of seven major avenues that arced like a tremendous rainbow through a peninsula, shaped like the posterior of an unusually well-endowed woman who had just begun to age—the friends could thus treat the Neighborhood as represented in Jessica’s blanket as an amphitheatre, each with a different one of the seven levels to themselves. Sarah Bedford, Billy Driggs, Jenny Berry, Millicent Kent, Buffy Roebling, and Kurt Havemeyer each greeted Mort as he set the watermelon down on the grass and exchanged hugs with Jessica Wythe. Dave Meserole stood off to the side chatting with Mitch Bushwick.
Mort sat down beside Jenny Berry, who bit the last remaining two threads off of a new wallet and handed it to Dave Meserole. He exchanged it for two tickets to see Actin’ Like We Be Partyin’, which his friend Havemeyer had given to him for a chandelier crafted in the shape of the Adidas logo.
Mort puts his hand and Jessica’s shoulder and says, “It feels so good to make things.” Out of the corner of his eye Mort caught Meserole shaking his head and smirking. Mort ignored and it and put his finger in the little groove that he had cut between the triangle-shaped cap that he had carved into the melon and the body of the melon proper. He feels the cut.
Jessica smiled. “Well, I should know,” she says. Mort produced a bag of plastic cups and poured a cup first for her, then for himself. Jessica knit ironic towels, blankets, and crafted alternative fabric softeners in a laboratory that she herself had designed to serve the unique postmodern home improvement needs of the Neighborhood population.
With a slight hesitation, Mort announced, “I’ve been studying my resumes lately. I think that they might actually be a raw material that I could work with.”
Jessica poured some of the watermelon of Mort’s plastic cup and into an earthenware cup that Lawrence Graham had blasted for her birthday a few years earlier. “You’re thinking in precisely the wrong direction, dearest Mutton,” she said. “You have to think about things that people can use, not things that can use people.”
Meserole got up and walked away—Jessica and Mort were alone on the blanket and the sunset made it hard to tell which corners they were sitting on, whether it was possible that one of them had migrated to the wrong side of the tracks. Mort laughed. “What, may I ask, could be more useful than a resume?”
“How about a blanket?” she asked. She pointed downward toward her own work and then flexed both of her muscles as a display of prowess. “Or . . . maybe a basket. There are as many ways to innovate as there are to go on a picnic.”
Mort shook his head, with his next swig from the watermelon he became drunk and thus relieved. For the rest of the night he was off the hook from his plans. “I used to think all of that could wait, those . . . creature comforts,” he said.
Jessica smiled. “So did I,” she said. “Until I moved to the Neighborhood. If you want, you can always move back to the City.”
The drama and intensity of the skyline increased until it reached its fever pitch, there to remain all night along, at which point Mort noticed that the music from the parfumerie opening had just died down and the conversations had ended. He took for granted that his friends were gone and didn’t ask himself where they went. Instead he gazed at the lights, all of the stars from the empty pastel-blue night sky burning up the earth, and listened to the droning combined sounds of all of the sounds.
Sarah Bedford strutted beaming into the parfumerie with her arms spread wide, embracing the entire space and everyone in it. She wore a black halter chiarakruza maternity dress, the symbol that if you didn’t know before now now you did, her heels clacking thunder like cathedral bells. Mort watched the way that their friends put their hands together and “folded” for Sarah with a spirit of knowing comic exaggeration, but at least a degree of sincerity, and he realized that this was the big unveiling, the press conference, the “tarp”. They were her friends, so this single gesture, wearing a new outfit that did not even fit her yet, was enough to tell them unmistakably what was on her mind. This was the moment that she had chosen to “tarp” it, and Mort was there¾he felt lucky to have let his stapler jet from his own personal map after all.
He had four more drinks, all free since this was an exclusive opening, and watched Sarah chat with everyone else. He approached her and said, “You know, I’m really happy for you and Brent.”
“Thanks, but my husband’s name is Trib,” said Sarah. She bit her lip.
“I’ve always kind of, you know . . . been in love with you,” said Mort.
2.)
Beverly’s skull was caved in in its rear hemisphere and Mort could feel the shards of skull diverge from one another and sink into her soft brain when he tried to pick her up off of the street. Working, wearing white, drinking—these had all been his mourning, these had been his tribute to her. He had castrated himself before the altar of the Neighborhood, and why? Because he couldn’t castrate himself before her.
He knew that being in the Neighborhood meant he had to make something with his own two hands, and it struck him one morning that his resumes might as well be filmed. If Mort had a library of his past resumes at his fingertips, then he could flip through it month by month and figure out which moments in his personal life correspond to which developments in his professional career. He got the idea to do it—like a flip book, so that he could flip through it and watch himself growing while he drank—when he remembered that it had been a week after Beverly’s death that he finally taught himself to install Microsoft Access.
At least a year before starting his current job three years ago, Mort was rejected for a legal assistant job because at the time he didn’t know how to install Microsoft Access. “Yes,” they told him over the phone. “But we’re looking for someone who can install Microsoft Access.” Ever since then he had lived in fear that Access or some other murky threat from an unexplored region of the Microsoft Office suite would deprive him of a future opportunity. Beverly in particular had been embarrassed by it. He assured her that he had learned every single aspect of Office besides that one and this was her response: “Well, why don’t you learn it then?” And no matter how many times he repeated himself he could never make her see that there was no reason, no excuse, it was all just a matter of timing—he could say to them, “I might as well ask you why you called me today instead of tomorrow or yesterday,” although, as he acknowledged, if he did they would never call again.
He had six resumes printed out, knocked them clean into line on the surface of his desk, his futon on the floor behind him. He decided not to print out anymore because this number already felt heavy, like a manly accomplishment. When he looked through them, however, he realized that they told no story of growth. With each year the resumes grew more antiseptic and impersonal—from one year to the next he shaved off another extracurricular career from college, another fanciful pseudo-skill that he had never really learned but which represented future glamour that he had always held out as within his reach (e.g. PhotoShop, gone 2003; origami, Spanish, gone 2005). Rather than even putting on weight he seemed to have committed himself to some kind of ritual starvation as the years had progressed.
He felt hollow and impoverished. The only way to restore a semblance of dignity was to go out and find the tools with which to complete the project (e.g. a stapler, some more computer paper).
“Have you heard of this guy Dave Meserole?” asked Peter Chelsea. “He makes hip chandeliers.”
“Fuckin’,” said Mort. “I don’t know.”
“What do you make, Mort? Don’t think that no one’s paying attention. Don’t think that no one knows.”
“What are you doing taking the subway anyway, Peter. You always take cabs I thought.”
The subway slid to a stop and with the opening doors Mitch Bushwick appeared as though on cue. With a vacant, fatigued look, elsewhere every bit as much as if he were his own illegal immigrant servant, Bushwick pushed a cart laden with terrycloth, denim, and plastic bags bulging, ready to pop with spools upon spools of bright-colored thread like bunches of grapes.
If Mort thought back on when it had begun, it had probably been junior year of college when Mitch Bushwick brought some kind of T-shirt-making machine to campus. He made money first making versions of the shirts that the school itself sold in order to promote its prestigious image, only with drug-related motifs, but then the operation became even more lucrative when he branched off in a more avant-garde direction.
Unlike Mort, Peter Chelsea had worked on the T-shirt collective with Bushwick and they exchanged an elaborate secret handshake after Chelsea stood up to greet the dazed, cart-pushing old friend and Mort remained seated. Mort sighed, huffed, pinched the bridge of his noise.
A simple menu. Mort felt a tremendous longing for the laminated ambience and sterile, cloned virility of the many Irish pubs that freckled East Midtown. There could be nothing better on a day like this than to eat one of their burgers as his breakfast—suddenly the bagel that he was about to purchase at the deli across the street from his office seemed like something that he might have outgrown long ago, like he had been buying it for too many years now. Not a day went by when he didn’t say to himself, This bagel is too dry. Today his own mouth was dry enough that there was just no way for him to take it. What if he started his day with a pulpy-pink, moist, sweet burger with a crisp sheath of iceberg lettuce and a mealy tomato. Like Dad used to make.
Mort sat down after Mitch turned around and pushed his cart out into the fray at Union Square.
“So,” Mort said. “How’s Mitch doin’?”
“You could have asked him yourself,” Peter said.
“No, I mean . . . That guy,” Mort said. “Fuck it—forget I said anything, forget I even remember his name.”
“Whatever you say, boss,” Peter said.
They shook hands when Peter’s stop arrived, Mort’s was still two stops away. Suddenly Mort realized that it wasn’t even nine, but he already felt like the day was over. It had already been enough for one day.
At work he stood in the kitchen and tried to strike up a conversation with Lenore. His thoughts of burgers, beer, and pervasive Irish-American imagery still dogged him. “Alcohol is my only escape,” he said.
“So, get some help then,” said Lenore. “Have you thought about getting some help? Are you drunk now?”
“No,” said Mort. He bit his lip. “It’s not as simple as that anyway.”
“It never is.”
He made a fist as she left the kitchen. Under his breath, he said, “Fuck you, Lenore,” then turned on his heel and headed back to his cubicle.
Crob was there waiting for him when he got there. The boy shook his head and pinched his angular hips with his little Crob claws with the same fake esprit de corps as ever. Whenever Crob tried to act like this he always held his mouth with his lips pursed in the exact same position throughout the entire length of a conversation, he looked like a cardboard cutout also because of his weirdly lifeless skin’s inability to generate any shine, glow, or hue. He looked like a potato chip.
What do I look like to a boy like that? Mort asked himself. He must think I’m pretty gullible, acting that way all day long, every day. Unless he doesn’t know he’s pretending . . .
“I still don’t understand,” Sarah Bedford said.
“It’s on the level of . . . the level of doing stuff, of how things actually happen . . . that you’re better than me,” Mort said. “That you’re better than I am, excuse me.” He emptied his cup into his mouth and crunched on a piece of ice.
He closed his eyes, as a way to savor the crunch more fully, and bumped into a group of three men. They looked down at him like prison guards, and when he heard Sarah and Jessica behind him laughing, he felt relieved and grasped after the sound—they were his line back to the beach.
Lawrence Graham’s frisbee collective had thrown the party in one of the old siloes of the Monido works, and Graham had all kinds of friends who the others didn’t know, so the place was crowded and rowdy. Sarah laughed and said to Jessica Wythe, “Mort is trying to figure out a way to say he thinks I’m cooler than he is.”
Mort was already on his feet pouring himself another drink at the long white-cloth table. “No,” he shouted to be heard above the rumbling din. “It’s more complex than that. I mean . . .” He put down his plastic cup and gesticulated as though grasping at tiny, invisible threads of spider silk that somehow had a mainline to the answer. The frustration showed in his face and Sarah and Jessica looked away.
He staggered away from them toward an alcove, in which their old college friend Myra Meeker had set up a display of mittens, aprons, work gloves, and waders stitched from scraps of army surplus burlap. She and Lawrence Graham called it synergy, Mort called it art. Mort gazed wistfully at her wares dangling from their tiny aluminum hooks like the bare leg of an old-west prostitute over the top of a baby grand piano: such jagged patchworks of color were they, each one of them looked like diagrams of plate tectonics for totally different camouflage-hued planets.
Who is paying for this? Mort wondered. Does someone have to pay for this, or do ideas just pay for themselves?
He said aloud, “I guess I wouldn’t know.” He could think of no idea that he had ever held in his head longer than it took to scribble it down on one, maybe two pieces of paper. He picked up his drink again and shouted at Sarah Bedford, who was now on the opposite side of the huge rotund room. “You make things on a more sophisticated level than I do, you have a grasp on the innards of technology.” He took such a drastic swig from his cup that ice ended up all over his shirt and then on the floor. Jessica saw him approaching and tugged on Sarah’s hand. “You have to see what I do all day, the way I grovel like a slave in front of these machines.” Sarah and Jessica both turned and left, then Mort squeezed his cup until it broke and flung what remained of it across the room.
He heard feet stomping in an empty auditorium. A mouth approaching a podium. Stomp, stomp, stomp—Dave Meserole was in Mort’s face knocking Mort’s knees together. Mort was seated up against the wall, ass squeezed into the place where the floor and the wall meet.
Mort grinned. “You’re really pomping my tomps,” he slurred.
Meserole stopped, crumped his hands together in fists. “What? What the fuck did you say?”
“Fort,” he said.
Meserole tried to grab Mort by the lapels of his jacket and hoist him up. Mitch Bushwick and Jessica Wythe nudged Meserole out of the way, took Mort by one bicep each and dragged him across the room to the sidewalk outside, where they dumped him in a car.
Before they closed the door, Mort said, “Why did you have to fob my poops?” and giggled uncontrollably. It was a high-pitch giggle with an innocence about it that made all three of them very cold.
Mort came home and found Beverly waiting for him in her usual way. The color of an overripe peach, half of a bottle of Yuengling emptied into her throat from a plastic wine glass. The other half was still in the bottle on the table looking like a cat standing on its hind legs, paying him tribute after his return from work. Beverly sat on the couch with her tiny bare feet curled under her wide hips, her bright red hair tumbling down over her white blouse.
He sat down next to her on the couch and swiped a tug from the perched bottle.
“How’s it goin’?” he asked.
“Well, fuck you, too,” she said.
Mort stood up. “What the hell is wrong?”
“Don’t you wanna kiss me?”
Mort hardened. “I did,” he said. “Until now.”
She picked up her glass of Yuengling, emptied it out over his head, and then threw it across the room where it shattered. Mort stood up and marched away from her, but she chased after him until he turned around and subdued her by cupping her whole, soft face in his hand and forcing her to get down on her knees. One of the things about Mort that aggravated Beverly was his absence of authenticity and spontaneity; staring out at the room from between his clenched fingers, she suddenly laughed at herself, and asked whether herself she was Happy now?
On his way home that day, Mort had been nervous because he planned to take her to see a show on Broadway the next night, Five Forty Five, an adaptation of the popular "pope" starring Reginald Horton, about the lives of people from their generation, for whom “five” means cool and “forty” means work. The tickets had been extremely expensive, and Mort hoped that they were going to enjoy it.
In his dream Mort struggled to break himself free of an elaborate piece of iron head gear that wrapped around both of his jaws so that he couldn’t shut his mouth; his rebellious teeth knocked and knocked against the cold, granulated cases. As he stirred awake, the first feeling he had was in the palm of his hand, slapping the floor with the fervency of a television lawyer slapping a judge’s desk in chambers. Then he felt his teeth, knocking big, round chunks of plastic. He horked, spat, and in his hand found two big spools of thread with one more still in his mouth.
The man standing over him, his arms folded and his legs astride, eclipsed the only source of light in the room but Mort could tell that it was Mitch Bushwick because of his diminutive stature and warped, S-shaped posture. Wealthy and accustomed to leisure though everyone knew Bushwick was, the man had been born to look like he had spent too much time pushing carts. Mort was about to laugh, but froze when he realized that he had heaped dozens of Mitch’s T-shirts together and buried himself in them like a womb; this was where he had passed out, this was where he had woken up with the taste of vomit in his mouth.
Mort did the only thing he could do, stood up, tried to look Mitch in the eye once without falling down, and left. Swaying on his heels, he traced an S on the concrete floor—somewhere in Mort’s mind the idea of a renovated former motorcycle repair shop clanked like a pinball in the moment just after a tilt—to match that of Mitch’s own small, bizarrely elaborate spine.
When he reached Mike’s and saw that it was closed, he suddenly realized how drunk he already was and laid down in front of the locked door and tried to sleep it off on the sidewalk. In the dead of night he couldn’t see the dark red soot that spackled the pavement, and didn’t care about breathing it in. In his mind’s eye Mort caught just a speck of Mitch Bushwick, whose venture capital Mort had just squandered, but not so vividly that his mind did anything but enclose a thumbnail print of the little man’s frowning face inside an iris cut of pure oblivion, like Truffaut submerged in evil.
Mort was on the sidewalk when the light turned green. She spread out her arms like Christ: “It’s me, baby, I’m Jesus—I can take it!” she exclaimed. “Can you?” The cars grew steadily louder. When he started to run for her, she stared him down, laughed with a triumphal air, and folded her arms, as though she actually knew that she had won their last fight.
The next morning Mort was found soon enough—the pallor of his naked body, the gleam of his sweat in the riverside sunshine, gave him the look of a beached dolphin. It seemed that his expensive corporate casual office ensemble had been stolen by desperate types over the course of the night. He had been stumbled across by Reggie Fulton and Jimmy Flatbush, two concerned citizens at the end of their own slightly more restrained bender. They hoisted him up and dragged him with his meaty arms over their shoulders to a nearby vintage clothing emporium. Their friends, two girls who worked behind the counter there, laughed invitingly at the opportunity.
No one would be in for hours, and the ones who were would be down to rubberneck. Sipping intermittently from their daily pitcher of mimosa, Sarah Greenpoint and Molly Sackett, dressed him up in a cool green-yellow Newport Lights baseball shirt from 1979 and a pair of “deck” acid-washed jeans. They even accessorized Mort, giving him a Ric Ocasek watch and a pair of rainbow-colored, Gallagher-esque suspenders. His eyes still rolled back into his head, he never interrupted them with more than a soft groan. Then they dropped him off in one of the dressing rooms, where, as the signs indicate, permanent surveillance is maintained.
When Mort finally recovered consciousness, the rising din of the midday rush separated from him by just a slatted wooden door, he sat on the little bench and looked in the dressing room mirror until he recognized the person who he saw there.