LITMIR.BIZ

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Street has a busted buzzer. I’m coming by your place tomorrow afternoon, to fix yours, ‘cause it’s fucked, right, mamita?”

      “It quacks,” I told him.

      “Yeah, I didn’t like the people who lived there before you,” said the Handyman, grinning. “I gave ‘em a joke buzzer.”

      And with that, they were gone. I moved to a booth and ate my sandwich. I wasn’t sure what to think of what had just happened. It was starting to be clear to me that, though I knew plenty about Greek tragedies, I knew almost nothing about real life. As if that were not enough, I could see my reflection in the window and it looked like an obsessive-compulsive bird had built a nest on my head.

      I ONLY HAD A COUPLE of minutes to feel sorry for myself, before I noticed a guy pressing his face against the outside of the glass. He was tall and pale, with lank blond hair, and looked to be somewhere in his forties. He came inside, walked straight to my booth, ordered a beer in Polish, and without any warning, started sobbing. I signaled urgently to the waitress. She shrugged.

      “Are you okay? Do you need a doctor?” I asked.

      He let loose with a snot-drenched stream of Polish.

      “He says you look like his ex-wife,” the beautiful teenage waitress translated, rolling her eyes, and then went to get him another bottle of Tyskie beer. He opened it with his teeth. Normally, I would have moved to another table, or left the restaurant altogether. I could smell the crazy on him. But that day, I was willing to admit that maybe I was a little crazy, too. And here we were, in a diner in Brooklyn, crazy, at the same moment.

      The scene in King Lear that I’d always liked best involved Lear, gone mad, wandering the beach in the storm to end all storms, running into his old friend Gloucester, who has been blinded. There they are: these two people who’ve known each other forever, in the middle of a rainstorm, at the end of their reigns. For a little while, they save each other.

      And so, I stayed where I was. I ate my sandwich. He drank his beers. He talked, and talked, and talked, a monologue of Zs and Ks. I smiled. I nodded. He grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard.

      When he left, it was dark outside. The day was over. My true love, whoever he was, hadn’t shown up. For some reason, I was happy anyway.

      THE NEXT DAY, THE HANDYMAN appeared at my apartment and wired me a buzzer that turned out to be louder than the entire neighborhood combined. Its bleat registered equivalent to my teenage idiotic episodes of leaning against the speakers at grunge-era rock shows.

      “So you always know when someone’s coming,” said the Handyman. I protested that the buzzer was likely to make me have a heart attack.

      “Nobody wants to be safe,” he grumbled.

      “Obviously not,” I said. “I just want to be happy.” I thought I was being lighthearted. The Handyman disagreed.

      “Fuck it,” he said. “Fuck everyone.” His eyes blazed.

      The disadvantage of addicts, recovering and otherwise: mood swings. The Handyman stormed out of the apartment. A moment later, my buzzer screamed. And again. He rang it for an hour. Finally, I went outside to give him a piece of my mind.

      “What are you doing?”

      “You weren’t supposed to answer that, mamita,” he said. He was sitting on my stoop, looking calm and dejected. “I’m a crazy motherfucker, but you’re one stupid girl.”

      “Probably true,” I agreed. “Don’t do that again, or I’ll call the police.”

      “No charge for the buzzer. It’ll keep you safe from people like me, and shit, mami, you look like you need it. You’re too young for me, mamita, young and dumb, just like I was when I was in Montana.”

       Carmela materialized, suitcase in hand, followed by a troupe of three neighborhood mutts, and a lagging older woman in worn-down red stilettos.

      “You were late, Daddy,” she said, reprovingly. The old lady said something pissed off in Polish. The Handyman replied, also in Polish. She left, grumbling.

      “Daddy’s got problems,” said Carmela, looking at me solemnly. “But I love him.”

      There was no one in my life that I could say that about. Besides myself, that is. I envied Carmela her capacity for the unconditional. Part of me wanted to be like her, to be able to accept everyone I met. To forgive them their trespasses, their buzzer ringings, their vacuuming. Obviously, I wasn’t there yet. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be.

      “See you,” I said to the Handyman.

      “Next time something breaks, baby,” he replied.

      He swung Carmela up, and she scrambled onto his shoulders like a monkey. I watched them as they walked into the sunset, their two bodies becoming a silhouette of something bigger than both of them.

      Zak sat down next to me with a bottle of beer in hand.

      “Brittany?” I asked.

      “Catastrophe,” he said. “Debacle, disaster, horror, nightmare. You?”

      “How about I sing a little bit of ‘Handyman’ for you? I fix broken hearts…”

      “No. You know how I feel about easy listening.”

      “He was as broken as me, is the bottom line.”

      “That’d be life, yes,” said Zak. “And the things that compensate for emotional instability aren’t constant, either, that’s the problem.”

       “What would those things be?”

      “Things that eventually sag,” he said, sadly.

      I put my head on Zak’s shoulder as the sun went down. Maybe love was like Godot. You spent the whole play talking about it, but it never actually made it onstage. You waited anyway. Of course you did.

      “Wanna go play video games?” asked Zak.

      “Desperately,” I said.

      And so, in lieu of love, we went out into the night to kill a few monsters.

       Jack the Stripper

      In Which Our Heroine Meets a Wuss in Creep’s Clothing…

      THE NEXT FEW WEEKS WERE spent in a state of controlled chaos. I went out with guys I met on the subway, guys I met in the bookstore, guys I met in line for stupidly expensive espresso. Varying degrees of dates. Mostly coffee, sometimes a drink in a bar. I went out with a couple of PhD-holding taxi drivers (one was an Indian surgeon, the other an Egyptian psychoanalyst); a Metropolitan Museum security guard who offered to take me home to meet his family in Sicily; a couple of construction workers; a Vietnam vet who was missing three fingers (alas, he had plenty to say about what he could do with the remaining digits); a Long Island City carpet salesman who asked if I wanted to “shag,” and then laughed for a long, long time, pointing hysterically at a section of fluffy carpets. I had a glass of Rioja with a Spanish-accented painter who, in an ill-conceived effort to impress me, told me that the only medium worth painting in was your own viscera. He then gave a long diatribe about people who held down day jobs instead of “doing their art.” The next day, I happened to go into Pearl Paint to buy latex for my living room, and there he was, working behind the counter, holding a bottle of glitter glue, and sounding very much like he was from New Jersey. I went out with a goatee-wearing psychic, who told me I was from Nebraska (no), a Capricorn (no), and about to find Big Love (hopefully). Then he spent forty-five minutes reading my palm, and found a line on it that clearly said I was going to sleep with him (hell no). I went out with one of the annoying New York guys who runs up to girls on the street, telling them they have great hair, and then tries to sell them salon gift certificates. I went out with a matchstick-skinny photographer, who came up to me in a café and told me he was looking for models to

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