Later I felt bad for emptying my pockets. I hear people all the time shouting, “You think I stole something? Call the police.” I always wonder why they’re making such a big deal out of it. Why not just prove you haven’t stolen anything? I think.
Both times this month I’ve proven myself innocent, but the security goons never apologized. They just said, “Hmmmm,” and on leaving, both times, I condemned their entire race: Fucking Koreans. Goddamned…whatever people who wear turbans are.
Both times I was accused, I was dressed for cleaning apartments, wearing shabby clothing and smelling like Ajax, or Apex, I guess they’d call it. Does this mean I should wear a suit when running out for supplies and change back into my rags after returning to work? Of course, this is nothing. If I were black, I’d get this several times a day. And I’d be really angry all the time.
July 5, 1992
New York
I woke up to someone crying, “Ma, Ma! Help me, Ma. Open the door. Ma. Ma. Open the door.” It went on for hours and the voice was odd-sounding, not like a child’s but more like a man’s.
I asked Helen and she told me it’s Franny, the Italian woman who lives downstairs and will turn one hundred years old on Monday. Her daughter lives on the same floor and looks after her with the help of a hired Jamaican woman who comes at night and on weekends. When the daughter leaves town, Franny gets worse and screams for her mother, her brothers, her sisters, all dead. When Helen went down this morning, Franny told her to go fuck herself.
“Can you beat that!” Helen said. “The language on that one. A hundred years old with a mouth like that.”
July 23, 1992
New York
I worked with Patrick, who told me that last week Richie was arrested and then released on a $100,000 bail his father paid by putting up his taxi medallion. According to Richie’s story, he was coming out of a bar when two men tried to rob him. They started fighting, and after the first guy ran off, Richie hit the second in the face with a beer bottle—hit him so hard, in fact, that the bottle broke. The police pulled up to find Richie standing over the bleeding, unconscious body, and it got worse when the guy, who is now expected to be blind in one eye, fell into a coma. I would never attempt to rob Richie. First off, he’s huge. He’s strong and he isn’t afraid of anything. You can tell that just by looking at him.
August 15, 1992
New York
I went to France with a passport so new it was still warm and five books about serial killers: Robert Berdella, Billy Lee Chadd, Henry Lee Lucas, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Ted Bundy. The worst of them smiled when their mug shots were taken, though it has to be said they were all pretty bad. Interesting was how many were disappointments to their mothers, who were hoping for daughters rather than sons. One of the five (I can’t recall which, as they all ran together) was sent to school in a skirt and bonnet. That sounds so old-fashioned, a bonnet.
While in Normandy we drove through the countryside, sometimes with a mission and sometimes aimlessly. The villages looked like I thought they would—tidy yards, stone houses, window boxes spilling over with flowers. Hugh’s house is in La Bagotière, a hamlet. Maybe twenty-five or thirty people live there, nobody fancy. The Gs across the road raise sheep, horses, chickens, and rabbits. They’re in their mid-sixties and live with Madame G.’s mother and Mr. G.’s sister Brigitte, who has Down syndrome and spends her days at an outdoor table laying down dominoes. She wears very thick glasses and though she doesn’t talk much, she’ll hold out her hand if you hold out yours first. The teenage boy next door is mentally retarded, as is Sandrine, two doors up. That’s a lot for a hamlet this size, one in every ten people.
Hugh’s house is stone and he guesses it’s maybe three hundred years old. As of now there’s no running water or electricity. I spent my week helping him empty it out and clean it. Plumbers and electricians came by and I didn’t understand a single word any of them said. We stayed a half a mile away in a house owned by Hugh’s friend Genevieve, a pharmacist, and her husband, Momo, who holds some sort of elected office.
When the week was over, we went to Paris. There are any number of stores there that time seems to have forgotten. At one of them I bought five rubber noses. That’s one for every serial killer I read about while I was in France.
August 20, 1992
New York
Today I did a cleaning job for a forty-two-year-old named Tommy who was short and slight and answered the door in his robe. He wore socks as well, and the toes of them were pulled forward and flopped around when he walked. At the start of the day he sent me to the storage place to buy twenty-five boxes. These were added to the thirty he already had, most of which were half full of things he had failed to unpack during the three years he’d lived in his apartment. One particular box contained a $2 bill, a place mat illustrating various sources of vitamin C, a book titled How to Be Funny, several manila envelopes, and dozens of lists and scraps of paper with messages such as “I am denying myself food in order to grow as a person” and “Hunger is a state of mind” written on them.
In the afternoon he sent me to his new apartment, where I measured the windows and then went to the hardware store to buy child guards for them. “Do you have kids?” I asked.
He said no but was worried he might have friends over, and that some of them might fall out the windows.
“Do you have a lot of blind friends?” I asked.
Tommy has fifty identical stainless-steel plates, and three times a day he broils himself a steak. In his freezer were two hundred portions of fish, each labeled with the date and what kind it was: 1/18 cod, 2/29 red snapper, etc. I asked and he explained that he had gone through a seafood phase before turning to steak. In his closet were dozens of pairs of suspenders, many of them neon-colored, along with bow ties and hats. He is an only child. His father died “from drinking,” and his mother lives in Massachusetts. He asked me to return tomorrow and help him some more but, either fortunately or unfortunately, I’m already scheduled to work with Bart.
September 4, 1992
New York
Walking down 8th Avenue, I fell in behind two muscled gym queens. When a car alarm went off, one of them turned to the other, saying, “That’s the Puerto Rican national anthem.”
“Really?” the other guy said. “That’s actually their anthem?”
September 5, 1992
New York
Yesterday the man Richie hit with a bottle died; this according to Patrick, whom I worked with today. Richie was out walking one of Herman’s dogs when the cops stopped and asked him what it was like to be a murderer. In response, Richie punched one of the policemen in the face and knocked him out. That got him arrested again. The guy can’t stay out of trouble for the life of him. He’s sweet when he’s sober, as sweet as they come, but he’s already killed two people. The first murder occurred when he was a teenager. Now he’s, what, thirty?
September 27, 1992