Absurdistan

Multicultural Studies (my academic major), I would roll over three blocks to the bank’s filigreed skyscraper and perform my filing duties for a few hours.

My colleagues regarded me as something of an oddity, but nothing compared to the young man who dressed up as a hamster during lunch and wept violently in the bathroom for exactly one hour and fifteen minutes (a fellow alumnus of Accidental, needless to say). Whenever the wisdom of having a sleepy Russian Gargantua clattering around the already tight quarters came up, I merely had to say something like “Malevich!” or “Tarkofsky!,” letting the reflected sheen of my countrymen’s accomplishments glisten off my Multicultural Studies medals.

Eventually the hamster got fired.

Life for young American college graduates is a festive affair. Free of having to support their families, they mostly have gay parties on rooftops where they reflect at length upon their quirky electronic childhoods and sometimes kiss each other on the lips and neck. My own life was similarly sweet and free of complexities, with only one need unaccounted for: I had no girlfriend, no buxom hardworking ethnic girl to urge me off the couch, no exotic Polynesian to fill my monochrome life with her browns and yellows. So every weekend night I would trudge up to these rooftops where Accidental College graduates would huddle together next to groups of students from similar colleges, their conversations forming barbed networks of privileged fact and speculation stretching from the Napa Valley to Gstaad. I basked in this information, making witty observations and absurdist jokes, but my real purpose was more traditional: I was looking for a woman who would accept me for what I was, for every last pound of me, and for the crushed purple insect between my legs.

There weren’t any takers, but I was beloved in my own way. “Snack Daddy!” the boys and girls would shout as I ascended the narrow stairways to their rooftops. Back then the girls drank buckets of bitter champagne through straws, and the boys swilled forty-ounce containers of malt liquor, wiping their mouths with the back of their skinny ties. We were trying to be as “urban” as possible without passing into caricature, our eyes briefly skirting the darkened constellations of housing projects pressed menacingly against the distant horizons. I would stand to the side of the snack table, letting my fat settle around me in protective layers as I jabbed a long carrot into a bowl of spinach feta dip. The girls regarded me as a safe confidant, as if my weight had rendered me a beloved uncle. They hoisted buckets of champagne to my lips while complaining of their passing boyfriends, those diffident young schlemiels who were also my close friends but whom I would readily betray for just one occidental kiss tasting of spinach and feta.

Filled with champagne, I would return alone to my endless Wall Street loft, take off my clothes, and press myself against the windows, letting the city lights flicker deep inside me. On occasion I would wail this deep-sea arctic wail invented specifically for my exile. I cupped what remained of my khui and cried for my papa five thousand miles to the east and north. How could I have abandoned the only person who had ever truly loved me? The Neva River sprang, unprompted, from the Gulf of Finland, the Nile from its Delta, the Hudson from some prosperous American source, and I sprang from my father.

Feeling lonely, I would talk out loud to the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, which I had nicknamed Lionya and Gavril, begging those two iconic hulks to make me more like them: lean, glassy-eyed, silent, and invincible. Sometimes, when a helicopter passed overhead, I would get on my knees and beg to be rescued—to be hoisted beyond the party-filled rooftops and billowing deck umbrellas onto a secret landscape, an inverted New York whose buildings were dug deep into the ground, the water towers and mansard roofs striking through the center of the earth, much as I wished to strike between the sweaty thighs of my former classmates—those infinitely clever and unflappable girls carved out of soft Californian rock and Roman tufa who breathed more inspiration into my life than all the pale Marxian offerings of the Accidental College Library combined.

And then one day I got lucky. Here’s how it happened. During my lunch break, I often liked to take a couple of chicken parmigiana sandwiches and a gallon of caramel fudge into a bar on Nassau Street, which, for those unfamiliar with this part of Manhattan, runs parallel to Lower Broadway into an uncharted fourth dimension, one part Melville, two parts Celine. There, I would round out my meal with a few vodka shots while talking to my lunchtime friend, a spindly middle-aged Jewish stockbroker from Long Island who had long given up on ever encountering human warmth or arousing the love of a woman. His name was Max, of course.

This bar had something of a gimmick, and an effective one at that—its barmaids wore nothing but bikinis. If you bought yourself a specially priced tequila, they would pour lime juice into their considerable cleavage, sprinkle some salt on top of that, and invite you to lick up this mess (after which you downed your shot). Today the “body shot” is an integral part of American courtship, but back then it seemed to me and Max like the height of depravity.

One afternoon we were making merry along with some other Wall Street miscreants, urging two blond barmaids to kiss each other, which they sometimes did for a big tip, when a new staff member came along dragging an artificial palm tree behind her (the theme was tropical). I caught her attention at once. “Holy fucking shit!” she said, dropping the palm and making a cute motion as if rubbing her eyes. “Whoa, daddy!”

“Be nice to Misha,” one of the barmaids growled at her.

“Yeah, that’s the first rule of the house,” another snickered. I was known as a very generous tipper and would occasionally spring for an abortion. Although all the barmaids were from the Bronx, and uneducated, they treated me as something of an innocent child, as opposed to the rooftop girls from Accidental College, who deferred to me as a wise old European. My point is that poor people often have a wisdom and cunning all their own.

“Chill out, bitches,” the newcomer said to her colleagues as she slipped out of her jeans to reveal her tightly sheathed mons, packed like a six-shooter in a holster. “I like this guy.”

“I think she likes you,” Max whispered into my ear, pinpricks of his spit gently tickling my face. He put his palms on the bar and dropped his head into them. He often ended his lunch hour feeling unwell.

“Hi,” I said to the young woman.

“Hi yahself, jumbo,” she said. “You like these?” She lifted up her breasts with her thumbs, after which they somehow managed to rise on their own, like shy animals peeking out from behind a hedge. “These make you sweat, mister?”

“Very much,” I said. “But I’ve got pretty nice ones myself, miss.” I cupped my beauties and rubbed my nipples hard. The other barmaids laughed, as usual. “Get Misha behind the bar!” one of them shouted.

“Dang, mister, you funny!” the new barmaid said. She reached behind me and pulled down on my hair. “But when I’m behind the bar, boy-o, you keep your eyes on my titties. I don’t need no competition.”

“Ouch,” I said. She was hurting me. “I was only joking.”

She stopped pulling my hair but continued to hold on to it, her palm stroking the preliminary fold of my neck. Her breath was awful—sour milk, rubbing alcohol, cigarettes, post-industrial rot. But she was beautiful in an impoverished kind of way. She reminded me of a lovely olive-colored mannequin I had seen in a store vitrine. The way that mannequin was casually bent over a billiard table, cue in hand, suggested she knew a lot more about the sex act than any woman in Leningrad, even the trollops at the Red October Hotel. My new friend, likewise, looked like she was privy to all kinds of information. She had a large, pretty face set off by small brown mestizo eyes, her pallor a bit gray from sun and vitamin deficiency, and a globe of a belly that looked half pregnant (with processed foods, not with child) in an arousing way. Her breasts were ponderous. “You Jewish?” she asked me.

Max woke up immediately upon hearing “Jewish.” “What? What?” he said. “Whad’you say?”

“Yes, I am a secular Jew,” I said proudly.

“Knew it,” the girl said. “Totally a Jewish face.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute…” Max mumbled.

“Look at your pretty face,” the girl continued. “I love your little blue eyes, mister, and your big fat smile—oh, dip! If you lost some weight, you could be one of those fat movie stars.” She brought her hand around to touch my chin, and I bent down to kiss it, in contravention of the bar’s unspoken laws.

“My name is Misha,” I said.

“Desiree’s my bar name,” she said, “but I’ll tell you my real name.” She bent forward, her fast-food breath jolting me out of my antiseptic Accidental College existence and into the world of the living. “It’s Rouenna.”

“Hi, Rouenna,” I said.

She slapped me across the face. “At the bar you call me Desiree,” she hissed.

“I’m sorry, Desiree,” I said. I did not notice the pain, so taken was I by the prospect of knowing her real