Fate: Five Stories- IV. Agent Scam #1

In the fall of 1978 I wound up on the mental ward of King’s County Hospital in Brooklyn, after attempting to kill myself. (That’s how I came to bump into the aforementioned serial killer, David Berkowitz, Son of Sam.)

Ironically, I unconsciously used the same faulty method my literary idol, Henry Miller, attempted when he discovered that his paramour, June / Mona, had run off to Paris with her lesbian lover, Jean Kronski, leaving him unmanned and suicidal.

Like me he had turned on the gas oven, blew out the flame, leaving the jets hissing gas, and went to bed, thinking he would awaken in the Land of Lethe. The supposed tranquilizers he’d been given by a shrink friend to end his life turned out to be placebos. He woke up feeling perfectly rested, the butt of his friend’s prank, and no worse for the wear except for the mantle of snow on his shoulders from an open window that probably saved his life from the gas. I had no pills and needed none – I was depressed enough to voluntarily stop breathing. In the end, the gas turned out to be non-lethal, and depression alone per se never killed anyone.

Like Miller, my depression was connected with a woman – one I had broken off with a few years earlier but was still in love with – achingly. Katrina, the love of my life. Her name will be on my tongue when I face the Great Beyond.

Swedish, affable, worldly, and charming – everything I was not – with a ready laugh that sounded like ringing crystal. We’d met during our junior year in college, both literature majors, both only-children, both serious about ourselves and our careers (hers was broadcasting), both madly, blindly, and desperately in love for the first time.

There was a pregnancy – funny how I’ve forgotten that until now – and when I balked, citing my un-readiness for marriage before I’d achieved my literary ambitions, she had the good sense to have an abortion and leave me, just desert for bad-faith lovers such as I. Soon after, she left for Europe to forget about me in the arms of a Dane. I know this because she sent me a “Dear John” letter that alluded to a popular song at the time, Love the One You’re With. I had a mini-break down, assuaged by anti-depressants and Valium, but the trajectory of graduating college and launching my literary career pulled me back into the consuming maelstrom of life.

***

A series of events dragged me back into the cyclical gloom-and-doom thinking I thought I’d escaped, albeit narrowly. I’d been looking for a job for weeks, having taken a studio apartment in Brooklyn Heights, thanks to a grudging loan from my parents (“The last one, pal,” threatened dad). It was a sparsely-furnished garret (of course, a garret in Brooklyn); it cost the same as my hotel room and offered the romantic solitude writers crave, like walks along the fog-shrouded Brooklyn Heights promenade and a dazzling view of the grand citadel of Manhattan across the river at night, the pre-911 skyline winking with Balzacian promise.

As for jobs, the only thing I was equipped to do was teach, and that would take time and money for certification. My typesetter friends back at the Latham promised to let me know of any openings at the dailies, but they had not called. I’d bartended in the Berkshires one summer but this left Manhattan restaurateurs unimpressed, where bartending jobs are prized.

“You gotta kill to get on the stick here,” one manager grunted dismissively, looking over my unimpressive CV. I’d stretched the little extra cash my folks had sent me for the apartment as far as I could. I had a few meals left in the refrigerator. After that … something would come.

***

Serendipity! I got a call from a NYC literary agent, Madame Verushka – with a name like that I should have known better – who’d agreed to read my novel if I took her to lunch. Naturally, my optimism was boundless if naïve.

I met her for lunch at the Russian Tea Room, her suggestion. Luckily I’d had the good sense to pawn my prized Acme carrot juicer in case I had to cover the entire tab, which I did, barely. I began to suspect something amiss when after her sumptuous lunch of poached lobster and caviar, washed down with a liter of martinis (I ordered toast and ice water), she tottered to her feet, presented me with the bill, and told me she’d get back to me as soon as she’d read my manuscript.

I caught her out on the street hailing a cab and handed her my manuscript, which she’d left behind, no doubt purposely. Tossing it onto the back seat of the cab, she plunked down next to it with a sneer and waved the cabbie on. Luckily she didn’t demand cab fare. I have no doubt that my manuscript, my life’s blood, would end up in the trash at the cab pound, without so much as a riffle of the pages.

It was December and the walk across the Brooklyn Bridge back to the Heights was sobering. I was walking because I had no money for the IRT, let alone a cab. It was freezing. My feet were stinging in thin-soled loafers and dress socks; fortunately I still owned a decent wool car coat inherited from dad, which I wrapped myself up in like a blanket.

The mile-long walk gave me plenty of time to dwell on the night’s fiasco. What would Rastignac, the loquacious bon vivant of Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, have said or done differently? A man of high principle, no doubt he’d have snubbed Madame Verushka as a grubbing parvenu, solacing his disappointment in the adulterous arms of Baron Nucingen’s wife, the luscious Delphine, whose charms he was not too high-principled to enjoy. I, on the other hand, womanless, penniless, and un-agented, could not afford the luxury of rejection.

As I approached the bridge’s summit with its defunct, lofty, 19^th century toll gate of granite, I glanced down into the inky waters of the East River – 250 frigid, abysmal feet below.

Vertigo shot through me, wrenching my gut. I teetered, grabbing onto the chain link fence: white-knuckled, holding on for dear life. All the shameful ugliness of the day’s scam welled up. With it, my high resolve to become a writer, my only excuse for living, vanished, leaving me feeling null and void.

And terrified. Who was I? What was I? I tasted the galling attraction of suicide, fueled by existential dread that would obsess me in the days to come.

Fortunately, the high link fence was discouraging. I was prying loose my fingers when a young couple in City College sweats and wool caps – Manhattan’s ubiquitous joggers, day and night – jostled past. Like a zombie, I followed in their festive wake, across the Bridge toward Brooklyn, homeward, feeling my alienation all the more.

***
to be continued
(Read all parts here)

by EH Davis