THE MEN'S PLANET II:

The Apartment

Deanna, one of the tenants in my building, could complete the daily crossword in the N.Y. Times but had no common sense whatsoever. Her cleaning lady, Sara, a Brazilian lesbian with no top teeth, was an animal fanatic and a know-it-all. She lived in East Harlem with twenty-seven cats and two dogs. She couldn't bathe in her own apartment because the bathtub was entirely filled with kitty litter, so she showered in clients' homes. Sara's favorite item of apparel was a man's sleeveless undershirt, which highlighted her muscular arms.

Deanna was close to 50 and was warm, loving, and generous. In fact, she had been President of the Baptist Students Union at college until she smoked her first joint. The only time she was rude or nasty was when you asked her for some pot. She liked to maintain a hefty stash.

She was also a slurry, sloppy but amiable drunk. The more looped she got, the more sentimental she became.

Once I was hanging out there and she got a call from an uncle in his 80's.

"Oh, my dearest darling, I love you, I'm going to move down to Tennessee and take care of you," she slushed.

"Yo, Deanna, shut-up!" I kept saying.

Her cat Tubby had been neutered long ago and ever since had maintained a permanent vigil on the kitchen floor, hoping to guilt-trip someone into throwing him some extra kitty nuggets. He must have weighed twenty pounds Deanna explained that neutering a male cat would cause him to overeat. Every time she drank, she would pick him up and sob, "I should never have cut off his balls! " She was the kind of person who liked to say the same thing all the time. I wondered if she realized she was doing this.

Three times a year, Deanna's sister Denise from California would visit and spout annoying new age truisms about self-esteem and co-dependency that would impel Deanna to drink and smoke even more.

Her best pal Bettyann was the grimmest person I had ever met. Anxiety, and not maternal instinct, oozed from every pore. Nonetheless, at age 37, she decided she wanted a baby but she didn't have any prospective "fathering" candidates. So she picked up a guy in a bar and told him that if she got pregnant, she was having the baby. He, naturally, thought she was kidding. Pretty fucking funny. Then, when Hillary the Horrible was born, she was enraged when the poor schlub wouldn't play daddy.

When Hillary the Horrible wasn't hurling paint on to a wall or sticking a crayon up her snatch she "liberated" toys from her one terrorized playmate. Her desire to eviscerate a small dog recalled Jeffrey Dahmer. Dear Deanna benevolently looked on. "She's a sociable girl," she would say fondly.

Deanna was but one of a whole building full of eccentrics, myself included. We had a tenants meeting and it was like a scene out of Fellini's "Satyricon." Jean-Claude, replete with toupee and wooden leg was there, as was Catherine, a tall, elegant blonde filmmaker who had recently married a short, beer-swilling, tobacco-chewing illiterate black guy with a giant tumor in his cheek who used to stand out on the street asking me to "give him some pussy." Iona the opera singing cat lady was resplendent in sequined headdress. She had written a letter to the tenants and posted it on the bulletin board in the lobby describing how her apartment was "hot as a Brazilian jungle." Once she approached me, looking like a corpse in her long maroon velvet gown, with her pasty white skin and overly dyed black hair, and said, "You think you're better than me. All you have is an ego and nothing to base it on." I was tempted to reply, "You're right, I do think I'm better than you and I have a lot to base it on," but I didn't, because I know she's crazy and I feel sorry for her. The next day she said, "Hariette, I'm sorry. I'm on Prozac and it makes me very aggressive." Elmer D., my psychotic downstairs neighbor, never one to miss out on an opportunity to give the landlord a hard time, was there as well. He was crazy but I didn't feel sorry for him. I didn't even feel bad that he had purportedly spent his adolescence in a juvenile detention home, forcibly fellating older male inmates.

Janine chaired the meeting. The subject was the rock club that Ron Wood had opened up in our basement. The noise was preventing people from sleeping and functioning. A representative from the club patiently listened to everyone's complaints.

"I have something to add," Iona trilled. "I am a cat, meow, meow, meow!"

Janine, a bi-sexual poet/junkie/stripper from Smith College, had been my entree into the building. I had been teaching writing in San Francisco during the heyday of gay liberation. I even saw two guys fucking on their front porch. On every corner was a bar outfitted with "glory holes." Walking down Castro Street, I felt like a Black in South Africa. Starved for testosterone, smarting from rejection, I moved back to Manhattan.

Janine had offered to sublet me her apartment. She lived on and off with her boyfriend on 14th Street. In fact, many prior subletters' possessions were still under her bed, along with a broken stereo receiver, a broken manual typewriter, and a steamer trunk filled with waterbugs. On the wall were seven broken mirrors. Janine later explained that this was some kind of voodoo ritual.

My mother and my nuttiest brother, Karl, helped me to move in. Karl had just gotten a doctorate in Soviet history but had been unable to secure any teaching jobs. Apparently, he had been going to job interviews wearing overalls, since he considered business suits to be "bourgeois." My second nuttiest brother, Leon, moved to Canada to escape fascism when Nixon was elected president. My third nuttiest brother, Frederick, published a newsletter detailing trade agreements between socialist and capitalist countries. By 1992, he was unemployed. I would have been named Rosa, but then my grandfather, Harry, died.

Have you ever heard the expression "red-diaper baby?" I was told the phone was tapped as soon as I learned how to speak. Till the age of 6, I feared that the family dog was really an FBI agent dressed in a dog costume. There was a Marxist literature class at my summer camp. The terms "bourgeois decadence" and "capitalist alienation" were thrown around my childhood home as casually as curses in a naval barracks. Not to mention my fondness for the Black Panthers' "fascist running dog lackey of the imperialist pigs." My family hoped I would one day write a "socialist novel." The fear and paranoia my parents instilled in me about the FBI, CIA, etc. persisted until I became a crime writer and attended the Secret Service Christmas party in Washington, D.C. on December 23, 1987. All the feds present thought I was a DEA agent and tried to hit on me. A lifetime of fear evaporated. Just like that.

Standing in Janine's bedroom, I noticed a whip on the wall over the dresser. I hoped my mother would not see it, or, if she did, would repress the perception entirely, as parents, both left-wing and right, tend to do when dealing with uncomfortable truths. Naturally, on cue, Karl said, "What the fuck is a whip doing on the wall?" I later asked Janine.

"When I was at Smith, I supported myself by working as a stripper," she said. "So when I was onstage I would call men up and then whip them. I considered this a feminist act."

For the first few months, Janine kept telling me to be extra secretive.

"If the landlord finds out I'm subletting, he'll kick you, me and all our stuff out of the apartment."

I pictured a paunchy, cigar-chomping, greasy-haired thug surrounded by leg-breakers kicking down the door. Then, one day the bell rang and a really handsome blond guy in Ralph Lauren threads said, "Hi, I'm the landlord. You must be the person who's been subletting since January. I just came by to check the radiator."

I convinced him to rent me the first apartment that became available in this rent-stabilized building. In N.Y.C. today, this could take a decade. But there was a family on the top floor with a foster daughter. The Chinese husband died of a heart attack. The Irish wife, Gladys, became an alcoholic and attacked the Indian daughter with a knife. The city removed the child from the home and rescinded Gladys' support payments. Without that income, Gladys couldn't afford her rent and was evicted. Gladys moved into the Women's Shelter and grew a moustache and I was poised to replace her when the landlord, who is Ukranian, told me he was morally obligated to rent it to recently emigrated fellow Ukranians.

"Don't talk to me about moral obligations," I exclaimed. "Your Cossack ancestors conducted pogroms against my Jewish ancestors in Russia, and drove them from their villages, so, karmically, you owe me a home."

I moved in the next day.