Yo-yo
new fiction by Yaron Dotan
Yo-yo
I suppose there were some ethical lapses along the way, but before you judge me too harshly ask yourself the following questions: Do you think bridges should be sturdy? Do you like helping people? Do you believe that the search for true love is a noble quest? Well, I do. And besides, me and Balázs didn’t drop out of college––or, shall I say, liberate ourselves from it––just to be shackled to a deep fryer or galley slaves shelving shampoos under the lash. No. We had bigger plans. And as seemingly perverse as the whole enterprise might seem to people who didn’t understand us, I can say with a clear conscience that I was helping the world in no small way. It’s the reason why I was waiting in the shadows with a razor blade in my pocket.
Maybe someday I’ll have a brick and mortar, but for now there’s no flashing sign and no wares spread out for perusal. What I have is myself. I’m my own representative and I my own storefront. If you’re looking for me look for the guy in the motorcycle jacket with the zippers. (I know it’s a little too big, that it doesn’t fit right, that it hangs over my shoulders awkwardly, and maybe even looks a little ridiculous, but by now it’s my trademark so I’m sticking with it.)
I’m also a bit of a skin-case, but I don’t mind. I think pockmarks give me distinction, a sprinkling of gravitas, the look of someone who’s been through something, like Papillon, or a chipped bust by any one of those famous Greeks. But no one seems to notice. Instead, everyone fixates on my Adam’s apple. It’s a big embarrassing distraction. It bobs up and down at the most inopportune moments and people can’t help but stare. I could be in the middle of telling them where pirate’s gold was buried, and they still wouldn’t be able to help themselves. Their eyes see-saw. They struggle to remember what we were talking about. If turtlenecks were back in style that’s all I’d wear, but they aren’t. Anyway, if you’re looking for me do me a favor and don’t look for that.
The whole thing started with a stupefying gesture. The times had called for it, scattered as they were with wonders and signs. In Rockaway a bleary-eyed wino swore up and down that he received nightly visits from a three-headed rat. No one gave him the time of day till he snapped the picture that appeared in the Post. On Sutphin Boulevard a garbage truck exploded and was engulfed in flames so intense that the fire fighters couldn’t put it out. Even though it stunk like hell people gathered on lawn chairs to watch until only a black skeleton remained. In Jackson Heights an off-course 737 flew so low that people cowered under store counters and in between parked cars. The gods needed to be placated. If they weren’t who knew what might happen? They demanded something raw, imaginative, vicious, and completely rational. In another era we’d be vaulting virgins into hissing volcanos. But this was 1999. That’s why me and Balázs set our minds on achieving perfect 0.0s.
The scholarships dried up. Our parents stopped sending money. Being expelled would have sounded cooler but we were impatient, so we dropped out. We stretched whatever cash we had by moving into a cramped studio apartment next to a fire station in Queens. He got the bed. I got the couch. The sirens went off at all hours and you could barely hear yourself think, but no one wanted to live there so we got a deal.
I didn’t mind the sirens. I actually liked them. They heralded a sobering reality. And it was only too bad more people didn’t heed these important warnings. We certainly hadn’t heard them from our professors, the hacks. They had big bellies and no guts. And do you think the student body was any better? Their only goal was to swim endless laps in a sea of childish validation buoyed by hollow materialism. But not us. We passed on the chestnuts. It was no less than a declaration of independence: For when in the course of human events blah blah blah … Balázs and I were going to invent our own paths. And every time we heard some self-important schnook spewing empty clichés, we turned to each other and crowed in unison, “The Age of Nothing!”
In order to support our shiny new speculative realities, we needed to earn as much as we could at a minimum of effort. We didn’t have much work experience, but we were equipped with a useful observation. Back when we were still enrolled Balázs and I always noted how light the paper-writing assignments were, and how lazy the students. The only people lazier were the professors. But for us it was nothing. We were the kings of skimming, the barons of bullshitting. Those skills could be monetized. I tacked flyers all over community college campuses and Balázs was taking calls before I got home.
Queens is filled with recent immigrants desperate for success. Whenever we picked up the phone, we heard accents of every kind––you name it, from Bengali to Somali. It’s gotta be awful hard to move to a new place and make it. A college degree means a lot in America and much more to new arrivals. Besides, you have to respect people with the courage to reach out for assistance.
And then of course there were the engineering students. How was an essay on Huckleberry Finn gonna help them design better bridges? A bad grade would only hold back an otherwise promising egghead. Like I said earlier, I sincerely believe that bridges should be sturdy. After all, guarantees of safe passage are one of the hallmarks of civilization. You don’t have to think about me the next time you cross a bridge. I don’t need a pat on the back. I’m just happy to make a contribution, which is more than most people do. You could argue that these engineers were missing out on an education, or that we were enabling a culture of deceit, but they obviously felt otherwise, and I say best to leave them to their math.
I won’t deny that there was something in it for us too––ten dollars a page. You could write the equivalent of a current events report and come away with twenty or even thirty dollars in under an hour. That’s good money, no question, but a modest return for a far greater good. In years to come people would stop me in the streets and have me hold their babies and bestow blessings upon me and maybe even shed tears for the great near-selfless strides I took to propel their lives beyond arbitrary limitations.
Our goal, Balázs repeatedly insisted, was to write solid B papers, to blend in with the herd; to submit papers stripped of anything remarkable, papers that were boring but solidly built. The professors needed to be kept happy and comfortably dozing, fat docile cows munching away at our insipid offerings. Just one stray peppercorn might be enough to arouse suspicion, and the last thing we wanted was to endanger our precious clients. If an accusation should be leveled against any one of them, Balázs warned, they would not be able to defend the papers they submitted as their own. They would be expelled. We worked hard at creating these relationships (and nurturing dependence). It would be a pity to lose a client. And of course, there was the danger that they might turn against us.
These were very important concerns, and I held great respect for them. But everyone has their weaknesses and mine is a habit for inspiration. That’s what led to the big blowout with Balázs that morning. I hadn’t meant to wake him, but I had a commission to finish and was seized by a fit of manic typing. I was close to the end when I saw his tangled head separating from his messy corner. He sat over the side of the bed in tennis shorts and black socks, face creased, grimacing like Baudelaire with a hangover. Then he crossed the room and snatched the paper out of the typewriter, as if he were pressing snooze, and passed out with the page crumpled in his fist.
I don’t like messing with people when they’re asleep, but that page contained indulgences, harmless little nothings if you ask me, but things that I knew would annoy the hell out of Balázs. I tugged at one of the corners, but his grip was too tight. Then I tried the old waiter’s trick, hoping to pull it out in one clean sweep, like a tablecloth, but that only succeeded in ripping the paper in half and waking him up. Now he insisted on reading his scrap. This he did aloud with mock grandiosity: “Pissarro and his fellow conquistadors turned their gaze with mounting greed from Atahualpa, abject and in chains, to the Inca gold, an emperor’s ransom filling a room eight feet high, the lustrous sunset of a spectacular empire, waiting to be melted down and sent forthwith to a faraway kingdom.”
Balázs turned the pages next to the typewriter over and saw the cover sheet. “This is for an English as a second language class?” he cried out, heaving with exasperation.
“I stand by what I wrote!”
He threw the papers up in the air and they rained down onto the dirty laundry, beer bottles and takeout containers cluttering our floor, and for which you couldn’t ransom a cockroach.
“Keep it up and you’ll get us both busted!”
“Alright-alright, forget about it,” I said, and extended a friendly hand, which he left hanging. “I’ll dumb it down no problem. Peace?” He took my hand and gave it a weak squeeze. “Great. Let’s get started.”
It was the end of a late winter. A clear day with a glorious sun rising over the marvelous beiges and grays of Queens, the kind of day that brings big changes. The store fronts were dripping with melted ice. Thawed snow revealed the soggy tips of last autumn’s cigarette butts. Frozen newspapers emerged like wooly mammoths from permafrost. The neighborhood used to be nothing but old Jews, but in the course of one winter it was almost entirely Chinese. Just this year, old Tibor’s candy shop, which had been boarded up since forever, was turned into a Chinese grocery. Tibor used to be a fixture in front of that store, mumbling zany Yiddish maxims to himself. Now there were live fish in a huge aquarium staring out the window at the bus stop. They hovered in the water, big-lipped, small-finned, gills-swelling, watching recent arrivals from Uzbekistan, Haiti and the Philippians get on the bus. They even watched me and Balázs walk by and who knew what they made of us before they were fished out and decapitated.
We turned the corner onto Kissena and I ducked past Blockbuster. It used to be Schertzer’s Secondhand. Then one day, while Schertzer was rummaging through the everything box, Dr. Franzblau’s prophecy suddenly came true. Schertzer grabbed his chest with one hand, then the other. In his desperation, he knocked the box over, scattering its contents everywhere. Before he crashed with a terrible thud onto the cracked linoleum, as his eyes were fading, he saw the spilled nuts, bits, and bolts sprout into a vast forest of video cassettes. It was a total transmogrification—one worthy of Ovid, if he’d lived in the outer boroughs. Anyway, now I couldn’t show my face in the place. The late fees I owed were staggering, many times the value of what I had borrowed. I suspect that they even kept a picture of me behind the counter and there may have been a warrant out. It was all over a copy of Zefirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. I was obsessed with Olivia Hussey’s performance. I watched it over and over whenever I felt lonely, which was a lot these days. Balázs couldn’t stand it, and I don’t blame him. But there was something about the way her magnificent too-long black hair cascaded over her shoulders, the way it fell thickly down the small of her back. I kept pausing and rewinding. When I mumbled something about Romeo being one lucky bastard, Balázs combusted like a matchhead. “Have you seen how it ends?!”
Don’t get me wrong. Balázs is a terrific guy. He’s my best friend. He’s super-bright and he may be a genius. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who lobs quicksilver at mental calcification with greater fury. Besides, we were business partners in a growing concern with franchise potential. Sure, he could be moody from time to time, but he was harmless. Only today felt different. Even though Balázs gave off the appearance of calm I could tell that he was in rare form.
We were walking past a water-logged sewage grate next to the beer and soda wholesaler. It was caked with soggy leaves and grimy thank you-bags. That’s where Balázs lost it. He got down on all fours and huffed the putrid fumes, as if he were an oracle. Then he ranted about how this trash was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. “It justifies smashing the David to bits,” he cried, voice trembling, “that tired old statue.” He examined a crushed Sprite as if it were the Hope Diamond. “Oh, it’s long overdue,” he whispered, as tears welled in his eyes. Then he began to rave about something he called ‘divine rot’ and soon he was practically foaming at the mouth. I appreciated what he was saying but people were staring. I tried to get him to quiet down some, but then he turned to me with flashing eyes and called me a suck up to the system. He left me no choice but to spend the rest of the walk trying to find an even more hideous pile of garbage and a more powerful expression of its beauty.
Busses continued rumbling by and the two of us walked on in silence. I think Balázs was feeling a little embarrassed over the outburst, but at the same time he was very proud. He marched on, always a half a step ahead of me, making no move to avoid slush puddles. Best to leave him be, I thought. Let him cool off. We passed Utopia Parkway and continued down the pike before we came across piles of boxes in front of an old faux-Tudor. They were soaked through and already falling apart. This was an opportunity for me to give a dazzling oration on the nature of Contemporary Beauty. But I felt bad and decided against it. Balázs was not in a good place, and I didn’t want to show him up in any way. We poked through the boxes and found an oval shaped class photo from the twenties, from when people still got dressed up to be photographed. Balázs tried on a droopy fedora with a feather in the band. I found a meerschaum with a well-chewed stem, someone’s favorite pipe, yellowed by a lifetime of usage. It didn’t take long to figure out that these were the discarded belongings of a dead man. Then we discovered a cast iron rooster with an uneven green patina poking out of the snow. I pulled at the cold metal, but it was stuck. Balázs helped. We shook it back and forth till we dislodged it from the frozen jumble. It was a weathervane.
“Look at this thing,” I said. “It’s kind of heavy.” Balázs couldn’t help marveling at it too. “What’s it doing in Queens?” I wondered.
“We have to take it,” he said. Which is what we did, taking turns carrying it.
We arrived at the park and sat on a bench. It was time. Time for exploding suns, off the chart tremblors, and dangerously accelerated cell divisions, time for what we did best, for radical speculation about the meaning of life. Time to get lit. We loaded the meerschaum, sparked, puffed, and passed. I surveyed the wrinkled tree trunks and naked branches, feeling the onset of warm abstraction. “Imagine if we had no central nervous system,” I mumbled. Balázs made no indication either way, and I could tell he was ignoring me. I made believe that I was cloaked in rough bark, bending to the wind, drinking up the melted snow. I felt birds and squirrels bouncing off my limbs, unafraid, and the itch of insects boring holes in my body.
I glanced at the sun and was temporarily blinded. I lowered my eyes to the horizon, following the flashing purple dot as it receded into the distance, past the trees and rooftops and over the tip of a faraway church steeple.
Balázs cleared his throat, snorted, and hocked a loogie into the snow. The breeze picked up and I thought I smelled a whiff of sewage.
“We need to start our own revolution,” he murmured.
“That would be something.”
“Too bad we don’t have the masses on our side.”
“Or the guns.”
“Or much of an idea for that matter.” He grimaced and I felt sort of sorry for him.
“But we do have this,” I chirped, and pointed at the weathervane.
“So?” he said, raising the brim of the droopy fedora.
“What if we replaced a church cross with it? We could do it at night. It would be like a heist with masks and ropes, a kind of metaphysical caper. People would come to church the following morning and their cross would be spinning spastically, as if God was speaking to them, the god of the four winds, an Old Testament type god. Of course, we’d have to time it with weather forecasts if we wanted to do it right.”
“It is not so unusual. There are plenty of churches in Europe that have weathervanes on their clock towers.”
“Maybe, but not in Queens.”
“If you’re going for that angry god thing, don’t you think a lightning rod would be more suitable.”
“Yes, but would that read?”
“What if we built a chimney top instead using real bricks and cement. We could light a little fire inside just before services.”
“But what would that mean?”
“Or maybe an old TV antenna,” he said, suddenly manic. “Or even a radar dish.”
“Yeah, but we have the weathervane.” I could tell he was resisting because he loved the idea but couldn’t stand that it wasn’t his. He needed ownership. “It’s getting late. I have a new client to meet. Why don’t you choose the church?”
Yaron Dotan has a BA in English from Queens College and an MFA in drawing from Tufts University. He has published short stories in Expat Press and Blood + Honey (forthcoming in June). His Dickensian early life and even crazier friends prepared him to write this story.
