by Sylvia Math
Who the fuck is Mick Jagger?
That's what his T-shirt said. He was onstage, reading his poetry in a tiny club in the Bowery, across the street from CBGB’s. Visiting from California, on a book tour.
While I watched him, I tried to decide if I should let him fuck me after the show. The past played in my mind...all the rotten things he had ever done to me. An ugly afternoon on the Ile St. Louis, a nasty morning in Manhattan.
But also, how he looked when he was sleeping. And how he looked riding a skateboard fifteen years ago. How he looked in ecstasy. How he looked when he was boarding a plane. All the times I had watched him go. And come. And go.
The particular memory I settled on while I was watching him read his poems this time was not the afternoon on the Ile St. Louis, or the Manhattan morning...but, nighttime, late nighttime, in the nearly empty parking lot of an upscale grocery store in north Berkeley. He was inside, buying champagne, at my request. I was outside, in very high heels and a flimsy black dress, singing a Stevie Nicks song to myself, quietly, way off-key, drunkenly trying to walk along the lines demarcating parking places, like they were tightropes—arms out all the way. A young but professorial-looking guy came out to his car, and asked me with concern—and bewildered lust—if I was OK. The poet then came jauntily out of the store with the champagne bottle by the neck, no bag. He saw the guy, the situation, how I looked to the guy. Hey babe, need a ride? he asked me.
Yes! I squealed with fake delight, playing along. While the poet pretended to unlock the already-unlocked passenger door for me, the professor seemed alarmed that I would go off with a stranger, but also apprised of the value of carrying a spare bottle of champagne around parking lots. We never laughed or said a word about it after we drove away—it was the perfect conspiracy.
But that is not when I gave in, on the inside. The exact moment when I gave in on the inside—when I knew I would let him fuck me afterwards if we were alone together—was when he read a poem that he he had written to hoax the NYU French department. They invited him to translate a French poet, and come read the originals and his translations.
So he invented a French poet—rescued a nonexistent obscure French poet from nonexistent obscurity—wrote poems in English by "him," then translated them into French with the help of someone fluent in French, then back into English. I gave in when he read the first lines of the first one: "History and Capital had been Astaire & Rogers, but are now Clark Kent and Superman. Taking advantage of the exchange rate, I have acquired a certain afternoon in 1953. Though it meant selling the rights to the word "peignor," and the neighborhood where you first heard it..."
The audience was required to write "a line from a top 40 song" on index cards left on the seats for a "spontaneous poem" after the reading. I sat trying to think of a line, and decided on "they had one thing in common, they were good in bed"—no matter how it was used, it would have to be at least mildly entertaining at a poetry reading.
When the reading was over, the host announced the rules of the spontaneous poem: the three men onstage—the poet, the musician, the host—had to take turns using the audience's top 40 lines, combined with the name of a famous person and someone in the audience, one sentence at a time. But first, the host and the poet engaged in some banter about current events, while the musician sat in a stupor...Blah, blah, blah, blah, the host said, how 'bout those riots in France. The poet said, They already have great labor laws! The host said, Yeah, how many weeks of vacation a year? Forty-seven, the poet said.
Forty-seven?! The musician pretended that he was suddenly interrupted, stunned into paying attention—Wait, what was the name of that country again?Pretty much everyone laughed. The musician was a pop music journalist for a certain highbrow magazine (the best one they ever had, too), giving credence to the idea that only a mastermind can seem to arrive in Times Square on a tractor; stupidity can only be pulled off on command with twice the IQ—one of the many mysteries of math I believe in but cannot and do not want anyone to ever try to prove. In case the proof falls apart under scrutiny, like the way jokes aren't funny anymore if you take them apart to find out why.
Then, the spontaneous poem. The poet used my top 40 shred first: "John Ashbery and (someone in the audience) had one thing in common, they were good in bed." The musician went next, mumbling something about Bertrand Russell…actually, he said "Bertrand Russell” in a clear persnickety tone, like a nerdy 8th grader giving a sanctimonious book report. It was funny enough that we couldn't hear what top 40 line he mumbled after that, over all our laughter.
Afterwards, I quickly snuck out to a cocktail reception for a film about a guy addicted to prostitutes; the poet stayed to drink beer with the poets.
He called an hour and half later: "Where are you." I am going back to Williamsburg, I said. I am leaving the island. Come and meet me at the church in Little Italy where Scorsese shot part of Mean Streets, he said. We met there often—to go in search of a bathroom in a bar to fuck in. I had stopped allowing him in my apartment since the afternoon on the Ile St. Louis. He couldn't physically hurt me very much in public. Not for long, anyway...
OK, I said.
Where are you? He text messaged me 20 minutes later, from the church on Mott Street. I am in the Virgin Superstore, waiting in line to pee, I lied. I was still standing in front of the L train, smoking, in a Xanax haze, contemplating just going back to Williamsburg to fuck another lover—whose thrall seemed dangerous also, but with a tenth of the voltage—in order to refuse to fall under the poet's thrall again. Competing thralls that couldn't cancel each other out...except maybe... another math trick that works sometimes. (The one that might use part of the formula fire: the number between four and five.)
Meet me at Underbar instead, I said. I am really mad at you now, he replied, enunciating both his consonants and vowels.
At Underbar, I got a ginger ale and checked out the bathrooms—good place to fuck: full length doors, little rooms instead of stalls. Clean concrete floors. A single orchid on the counter. Everything sterile and expensive. Crisp cleanliness like ATM twenties, at the freshly mechanical beginning of their circulation into filthy fragility. I went back to the lounge and sat on a velvet couch to wait for him—not long at all. He is very tall—can stride across town faster than a taxi. And he did seem mad, which excited me.
He got a beer, took a big sip—half the bottle at once—and spit it all over the front of my black silk camisole, soaking my breasts. It was dark; no one noticed.I didn't react. Did you guess it was me who contributed the Eagles line, I asked instead. No, but it was the best one so I used it first. The rest of them were crap. What were the rest of them? I asked. I forgot, he replied. Me too. Wasn't one of them by Warren Zevon, though? Who cares, he said. Will you suffocate me like Betty Blue when it's time? I asked. I might do it before it's time, he said without hesitation. That was an excellent reason, in my opinion, to get up and walk slowly into the door marked "W" for women. He followed and locked it behind us.
He gave orders: Turn around. Take off your skirt. I liked it, especially how his voice gets deeper when he's telling me what to do. <redacted, four sentences.>
For a moment, I was standing so that I could see inside the toilet. The toilet was black marble, inside and out. I could see the outline of myself in the water, like in a black pool. Look at that, I said. He looked over my shoulder into the clear black toilet water. You could only see a lit silhouette—the curve of my breasts to my waist, a riot of mussed up hair. It was feminine and primary and seemed to exist on its own rather than as a reflection of me. I didn't have to explain that to him. He said, we could report it to the Vatican—a sighting of the Virgin in the toilet of a bar for investment bankers. I laughed; he…<redacted, three sentences.>
Then a line formed outside—we could hear women chattering while they waited their turn. Witnesses. No more <redacted>. It was hard and fast after that, and he put his hand over my mouth while he was fucking me to confine the soundwaves coming from my throat to a small hot radius warming his hand.
When we came out, two women—very Upper East Side, very early 20s—looked shocked at first, then smiled with a kind of gleeful wonder I didn't realize was possible upon seeing such a sight. Could anyone be that innocent, that easily charmed or scandalized by people fucking in the bathroom of a bar? Does it even count as a transgression? Maybe it was just how we looked—me with smeared lipstick, him in the who the fuck is Mick Jagger shirt, obviously and dumbly postcoital, trying to make an absurdly dignified escape.
We took the stairs quickly out of Underbar, back up to 17th and Park. See, we just expanded their possibilities, he said. Like, remember the first time you read On the Road? I laughed a cigarette laugh at his sarcasm, sitting on and crushing an expensive potted plant of some kind outside the W Hotel, lighting up. Why would anyone read On the Road twice, I said, uninterrogatively, while taking a deep drag. Why would anyone read Goodnight, Moon twice, he replied. He always wins; one of his finest qualities.
Neither of us had anything more to say. We walked in silence towards that big digital whatever-it’s-counting clock in Union Square, and the Virgin Superstore. Bite me and leave a mark so I have something in the morning, I asked him, and he was doing it before I finished asking.
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Sylvia Math fled California for NYC, loves Rockaway Beach, and has a big, floofy cat who meows a lot. Her writings appear in X-R-A-Y, Hobart, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
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