CO-AUTHORED BY: DON & KOBOLD
Andy woke late. It was around ten a.m. when he emerged from the shower and brushed his teeth in the usual fashion: fifty strokes for his lower jaw, fifty for the upper and a final fifty for the the frontal bones which speech most frequently revealed. He removed the platinum wig from one of the faceless busts which crowded about the bathroom mirror and fit it snugly to his bald head, adjusting it gingerly while he waited for the spirit gum to dry. It was an uncommonly quiet morning.
Andy’s current boyfriend was named Norman. He was otherwise attractive. Norman was twenty-two, which Andy was not. Norman fancied himself an artist and was reasonably skilled, producing credible renderings of figures and drapery in charcoal. His work was tacked up in one corner of the living room, hung from twine with clothespins like a load of Sunday laundry. After Andy put on his bathrobe and put on a pot of coffee he took a seat on the old blue couch beside the drawings. Behind him, through the windows, fourteenth street honked and steamed. The sky was white, darkened by patches of damp silver. Sam, Andy’s beloved tabby, leapt into his lap. She purred, happy to be scratched. They sat this way together until the coffee was ready.
It was always amazing to Andy how lonely the apartment felt when he and Sam were left to themselves. If Norman had been home there would have been clattering from the kitchen or from the upstairs loft. Echoing footsteps on the spiral staircase. Ridiculous grunting as the young man took his daily exercise on a pad unfurled in front of the door to the office. Norman was not one for conversation and neither was Andy — not before noon, anyway. Still, it made a difference. Human energy.
Norman’s plane was scheduled to land around three o’clock that afternoon. Until then, Andy had no plans. There were things to work on, of course. There always were. When he returned from fetching his cup of black coffee and Sam returned to his lap, Andy searched within himself for the necessary motivation. He found it absent, but this was no great crime. His nearest deadline wasn’t for weeks and Andy had learned over the years that it was better not to force things. The work would come when it came. Until then: what to do?
Naturally, his thoughts turned to gooning. It was a positive sensation at the time: a fad and a concept of higher masturbation in which one maintained a state precariously close to orgasm for hours at a time. The magazines were full of it, Madison Avenue was enraptured and even Dr. Leary was writing philosophical treatises about its salutary effect on cognitive processes. When Andy finished his coffee he stood up, determined to find traction. Sam leapt down and padded to her favorite windowsill. She perched there like a sphinx, waiting patiently for birds to alight on the power lines beyond the window.
Andy left her to the vigil and opened the door of their small second bedroom, which he’d had a decorator outfit as a state-of-the-art goon cave. The walls were covered with shelves and the shelves were full of binders and every binder was full of glossy photographs of women. “Goon sluts” in the parlance of the practice. They were organized by weight, haircut and style of dress. He chose a volume of petite women with pixie haircuts and thumbed to the subsection which depicted them wearing only glasses and basketball shoes. He tried his best to get a session going, but lost interest after about an hour. “Maybe I’m just too homosexual for this,” he said with a sigh. It was the first thing he’d said aloud that day.
Andy was tired of the apartment. He decided to take a walk; maybe catch a train uptown from Union Square and browse the new arrivals at the Argosy. He certainly didn’t want to see anyone he knew personally but he wanted to see people. Luckily there were millions near to hand.
As usual, Andy took care in choosing his outfit. He settled on a simple black blazer with a t-shirt underneath it. Cheekily, he chose a shirt emblazoned with a popular slogan of the American right wing and the nascent moral majority: “NEVER GOON.” It was amusing — but it needed something. He accessorized with a lapel button bearing the opposite message: “ALWAYS GOON.” It was a delightful contradiction. He completed the ensemble with black jeans and black basketball shoes, just like the girls in the photographs.
He descended the staircase from the loft quickly and gave Sam a final pat on her fuzzy flank. “Goodbye, my lady,” said Andy. “Don’t open the door for anyone, especially the police.” Before leaving he fetched a fresh pack of cigarettes from the medicine cabinet in the kitchen. No smoking in the apartment: that was the rule. Three flights later, when he reached the street, Andy sparked his lighter. He inhaled deeply. Tobacco and coffee, pedestrians and cars. He began to walk.
He wended, circuitously, towards Union Square. All around him, the people of the city moved in their strange circuits: students and bums, artists and professionals. There were thousands of incidents, small and beautiful, that caught Andy’s attention for a second or two and were almost instantly displaced. The young people were so pretty, he thought. And so were the old people and the fat ones and the thin ones and the gray ones in their flannel suits, their faces so cute and serious. Soon he found himself at the steps of the subway station. They led down, into shadow.
Andy followed them, deposited his token and took his place on the uptown platform. His cigarette was, by then, extinguished. He had his hands in his pockets as he waited for the train, his eyes moving idly across the sizable noontime crowd. It was an unwritten rule — and an unspoken one too — that eye contact on the street was strictly disallowed. Every citizen of that great metropolis moved about, largely, in a bubble of invincible isolation. Even the crazies obeyed the protocol. They might be screaming their heads off or howling about the second coming but they’d never touch you or address you directly unless you looked them in the eyes. Doing that was the ultimate faux pas: it pierced the pedestrian’s sacred barrier.
To Andy’s surprise, he found that another man on the platform was staring straight at him. Right in the eyes. He tried his best to avoid returning the contact but it all happened so fast; Andy couldn’t help it. As their eyes met, the strange man’s face twisted into a snarl. He stepped up to Andy and began to speak.
The man was bald and caucasian. He might have been in his mid-forties. He was dressed in shirt sleeves with a blue knit tie. He wore a backpack, which Andy found incongruous. He had the bearing of a businessman but the style of a schoolboy. “I can’t believe you’re wearing that,” he said to Andy, in disgust.
“Oh,” said Andy. He wasn’t sure what the man was talking about.
“Always goon,” spat the stranger. “I suppose you think that’s really funny.”
“Well, I think it’s funny. Maybe not really funny.”
“It isn’t funny at all. People like you make me sick. At your age, too. Do you know that masturbation rewires the brain? It makes it impossible for people to love each other, chemically. It’s be been proven.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. You should read something besides Life Magazine. Then you’d know how dangerous all this gooning is.”
“Thank you for telling me,” said Andy. “I’m actually going to a bookstore right now. I don’t even think they sell Life Magazine.”
The man turned away, shaking his head. “Idiot,” he said.
The train arrived. The stranger made a big show of walking to the other end of the platform so that he and Andy would travel in different cars.
By 42nd street the train had emptied out enough that Andy was able to sit down. Sitting across from him was a pudgy black man in a baggy sweater which bore the logo of the Georgetown School of Law. As Andy scanned the car, thinking very little, he was surprised again. The fat man in the law school sweater was staring him down. Again, Andy met his eyes without meaning to.
As the train clattered through the darkened tunnels the fat man maintained their unwelcome eye contact. He smiled contemptuously at Andy, who watched as the stranger snaked his hand through the elastic waistband of his stretch pants and grabbed hold of his penis. For the entirety of their trip uptown, the man jacked himself slowly and deliberately, his expression growing more and more intense and more and more demonic. He was gooning. Gooning in spite of Andy. All that because of a slogan on a t-shirt!
Andy reached his stop just before one o’clock. He was relieved that he could get up and leave the angry man to his goonsesh. Once he ascended to the street he lit a cigarette and made his way, unmolested, to the Argosy bookstore. The clerk knew him: knew his work, anyway. They were not quite on a first name basis, but Andy liked her. She had long black hair and a splatter of freckles that covered the bridge of her nose and brought interesting texture to her cheeks. He browsed for a long time and finally decided to buy a new translation of the collected stories of Franz Kafka. As Andy approached the counter to check out, the girl smiled at him and made a comment. “I’ve never read this one,” she said. “I’ve heard it’s very Kafka-esque.”
“I should hope so,” he responded. “If it isn’t I’m going to want my money back. I suppose I’ll have to save the receipt.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said the girl brightly. “I’ll remember you. You’re our only customer who never goons.”
Feeling invigorated after his visit to the bookstore, Andy lit another cigarette and wandered through the canyons of the tall uptown buildings. He soon found himself passing a small French bistro. Feeling peckish, he stopped in and secured a table by the window. Andy ordered a croque-monsieur and an espresso and sat for about an hour, reading his book. He’d just finished The Wish to be a Red Indian and was about to start Unhappiness when he realized that a shadow had fallen over his table. It was the shadow of man: an extraordinary tall man in a smart black suit and a tuft of brown curly hair. He was staring Andy down, just as the others had.
“You never goon,” said the tall man, not even bothering to introduce himself.
“That’s what the shirt says.”
“I guess you’re one of those Jesus freaks. Always telling everyone what to do. This is a free country, you know.”
“I have heard that.”
“Never Goon. God. Don’t you realize that gooning increases focus and productivity almost 60%? Don’t you know about the health benefits? It oxidizes the blood. Makes you more rational, more empathetic. Never Goon. If people listened to crazies like you our whole society would grind to a halt.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes! I’m gooning right now. My whole office does it. 160 micro-jacks per quarter hour; I don’t even ejaculate anymore. I just leak all day.”
Andy looked the man up and down. “If that’s the case,” he said. “Why is the crotch of your slacks dry?”
The tall man snorted. “You must think everyone else is some kind of disgusting pervert. So judgmental. I wear a prophylactic at all times. You’d know that’s standard procedure if you ever bothered to read something that wasn’t written thousands of years ago by a bunch of nuts.”
Andy held up his book of Kafka. “This wasn’t written thousands of years ago. And it’s by just one nut. Two, I suppose. If you count the translator.”
“Go to hell,” said the tall man. He stalked off down the street and hailed a cab, disappearing into traffic.
“How odd,” said Andy, to himself.
He paid for his meal, stopped off at a deli to buy a newspaper and made his way back to the subway. On the way home he had several more confrontations: two more hated him for always and one more hated him for never. He returned to the apartment about four-thirty. Norman was already back. He was lying on the blue couch reading a crumpled issue of Life. Sam was curled up on his chest, purring loudly.
“Welcome back,” said Andy, hanging his blazer on the coatrack beside the staircase. “How was North Carolina?”
“Boring,” Norman sighed. “All my brothers spent the whole time locked in their gooncaves.”
“I had an interesting day.”
“Did you?”
Andy explained the series of confrontations. “The strange thing is that none of them ever noticed the opposite message: they only saw the one they disagreed with. I thought I was being reasonably clever, wearing both. Guess it didn’t come across.”
Norman put down his magazine. “It makes perfect sense to me. People want arguments more than they want support. The imagination is the only place where everyone agrees with you. Reality is disagreement.”
“And the frustration of desire.”
“Sure. Fists need faces. Otherwise we’re just flailing.”
Andy opened a can of cat food and spooned it into Sam’s silver bowl. She leapt off of Norman’s chest and padded to the kitchen as he laid it on the floor. Andy scratched her haunches. “Fists need faces but faces could do without the fists.”
“Tragedy of the world I suppose,” said Norman, returning to his magazine.
“You can handle the tragedy of the world,” said Andy with a yawn. “I’m going to take a nap.”
The rubber soles of his shoes made a hollow sound as he ascended the spiral staircase. “Hey,” called Norman, when Andy was halfway up. The younger man had lowered his periodical and was looking Andy straight in the eyes. “Did you miss me?”
“Never and always dear,” said Andy. “Never and always.”