A few years ago, some putz I was sleeping with inadvertently changed my life forever. Please; allow me to explain.
There was something sort of magnetic about this guy from the moment I met him. Granted, I was drunk at the time, however he still seemed to have the most infectious personality I had ever been exposed to. He possessed a superpower: was able to immediately transform any passerby into his best friend, willing to take a bullet for him. That power resides within the confines of his seductive, know-it-all smile and crystal blue eyes.
Our time together was brief and harried with his merciless commitment to mirth making and merriment. It was an attractive quality to me at the time, now it seems relentless. It was always an unnatural fit, me being an apprehensive, social-climbing nebbish and him being the Prom King.
Still buried deep in my journals from years past, I have pages upon pages of stilted prose about the size of his hands as compared to my torso and the way his cigarette smoke danced around our bodies intertwined. He brought out an ethereal quality in my writing that has been somewhat lacking since. The day I met him, I stole his ring that was made from a bent spoon that I pawed at mindlessly throughout the two months that I devoted entirely to him. I liked to think that by wearing his ring, I would be inhabited with his magical powers of congeniality.
We had met on New Year’s Eve a million years ago at Don’t Tell Mama’s, which is this faggoty tourist trap of a piano bar on West 46th Street and named after a lyric in the musical “Cabaret”. Moments before the ball dropped, the bedeviled charmer flashed me that hypnotic smile and I could instantly feel the butterfly chrysalides form on the lining of my stomach. He sweetly begged to be my New Years’ kiss and I was more than happy/drunk to oblige. We had just the right amount of champagne to pretend to know all the lyrics to Auld Lang Syne and caterwauled gibberish along with the crowd as the ball dropped just a few blocks away. He then sweetly begged for me to go back to his his apartment and, again, I was more than happy/drunk to oblige.
The next morning when I woke up in his arms, I could feel the caterpillar pupa in my gut as it began to push through its chrysalis casing and emerge as a butterfly, taking flight through my digestive system. The creature, having learned to flutter its wings amidst the sour remnants of champagne and vodka cocktails was likely dealt an irreversible shortening its already brief life expectancy. Regardless, I wasn’t entirely sure of what to blame for my nausea, so I quickly coated the bile with a fine layer of brunch. As I sopped up my runny eggs with burnt toast, he took the opportunity to stare across the table and into my soul with his remarkable crystal blue eyes.
In the two months that we carried on (that is, before I sent him off to join the rest of my misbegotten ex-lovers on the boulevard of broken dreams), we went back to that same shitty piano bar where we met to relive some nostalgia for the day-and-a-half gone by. He walked into the bar like the pied piper about to buy a new fife. He hurriedly set to work endearing himself to all those people he would never see again, which to me still sounds like a lot of misspent effort and anxiety.
If you’ve never been to this joint I’m talking about (and who could blame you), there is a long row of tables that heap on top of one another running along the wall to the right of the entrance and a piano on a platform. The drinks are watered down and the wait staff is often violently rude.
This one particular night we went, we were ushered to a cramped but prime position in the middle of the long banquette. It wasn’t a few minutes before the people sitting to our right and left were transfixed by the swinging pendulum that lay behind my boyfriend’s eyes. He tired of this group and, still basking in the glow of his recent converts, broke his gaze as he set his sights on more challenging prey. There was a table of unsuspecting middle-aged ladies sitting in the back corner singing the “bah, bah, bah” part of Sweet Caroline. He desired to make them his. Forever.
He excused himself and climbed around the mountain of people that now surrounded him and stealthily approached his bridge and tunnel specimens. I was left to swirl the ice that was melting at the bottom of my glass. I eventually excused myself from the polite conversation I got stuck with to find out where the hell my date was hiding. As I reached the back of the bar, I heard my name as a shrill exclamatory cry, 8 voices in perfect unison. He’d had his way; the women were already his.
They quickly regurgitated all of the information they had been taught about me, their leader’s betrothed. They clamored with glee and celebrated their celebration. It was girl’s night in the big city! I made pleasantries and they told me how lucky I was to be going home with the most popular guy at the bar and precisely which aspects made them drool with envy. This is when things started to go from “Twilight Zone” to “X-Files” on the barometer of crazy.
As I mentioned, there were 8 women sitting at the table. My arrival at their table prompted the attention of 7 but the dude, let’s call him “Rasputin”, was looming over the woman sitting at the head. Periodically throughout juggling the advances of the 7, I would steal glances at the sequestered one and her new overlord. The two of them looked so deeply connected that it felt as though they could levitate above the crowd. His hands were on her shoulders as she stared back at him, doe-eyed. But then the next time I looked over, she was crying.
I worked to shrug off the heebie-jeebies that were then attacking my spinal column after I saw that. Seemingly, I was the only person in the room that noticed; perhaps in our time together I had become immune to his particular brand of conjury while all the others drank the Kool-Aid. As she wiped the tears from her chin, I wiped the furrow from my brow. I kept on jabbering with the gals, pleasure as usual. Soon, he hugged her, paid our tab and led me by the hand into the bitter winter winds of Restaurant Row.
As soon as we got outside, I was able to call into question his patented blend of shameless and creepy.
“What the hell happened back there?” I demanded.
He played dumb at first and eventually offering a dismissive, “Oh, THAT!” He went on to explain, “It’s something that I don’t like to discuss, but, well, I am gifted. With communication. You know. Like, with the dead.”
Buh? “And what exactly did you say to that woman to make her cry?”
He grabbed my hand and pulled me over to a parking meter at the curb. “That woman’s husband spoke into my ear when I walked back to that table. He told me what she needed to know. She should have been enjoying this night with her friends instead of fretting over all that’s come and gone. This is her only now.”
I went on to treat him as if he were a guest on my brand new talk show that was filming on the curb on Eighth Avenue. I was inherently eager with my questions. “So, you can communicate with the dead and that woman’s husband spoke to you? Does this type of event- and we can call it an event- happen often?”
“Not too often. No,” he assuaged me, hoping that I wouldn’t label him as some kind of freak. “But I can identify people’s guardian angels and sometimes I can be contacted by someone that just wants to deliver a message, like tonight. Honestly, I didn’t want to tell that woman what her husband had to say, but he insisted. And I’m glad that I did. Afterwards, she seemed so relieved.”
This is when I realized that any favors I had paid him in the past few weeks now indebted him to me in the form of a public private reading. I began to call his powers into question:
“If you think you’re so gifted, what can you tell me about me? Is there some phantom that watches over me; that makes sure I leave the house at the right time and I find my keys at the exact moment I needed them?”
“Yes,” he said. “More or less.”
“Wait. I have a guardian angel?” He nodded. “And you’ve seen this person appear as some ghost that floats around me?” He nodded. “Well, you’re going to have to be a little more specific. Like a name. Tell me its name.”
Without so much as blinking, he replied. “Ida.”
That was when I had to pucker my ass cheeks to make sure I didn’t soil my manties. The hair on my arm would have been easy to braid if I had a moment; it was standing straight up and fully exposed as my skin had regressed due to the gooseflesh.
Ida was the name of my great grandmother. She was my mother’s father’s mother. To my knowledge, I had never engaged anyone in a conversation about Ida seeing as I had never met her. My grandfather never said much about his mother and she died many years before I was born.
Oh, and she was an artist.
My footsteps stuttered. “What is it that she wants me to know?”
“That you’re not living up to your potential. Great things will come from you if you choose your way correctly. You picked the wrong path at a fork in the road some time ago. You’ve been walking away from your capability and soon will lose your way completely. You need to turn around. Now. You need to head back.”
I gulped cold air back in. “What is the most powerful image in my family’s past that influences my present and future?”
“Jeremy,” he said, “there are things you cannot unlearn. Make sure you truly desire the answers to the questions before I continue.”
I clicked my tongue. “Go on, Zoltar.”
“Fine,” he guffed. He touched his ring on my hand. “The gates of Auschwitz.”
(At this stage in my writing career, most of the people reading my work know the precise time of my last bowel movement and how much the water splashed in the bowl. However, if you for some reason have stumbled upon this without knowing me from Adam, allow me tell you a crucial moment in my family’s history. My grandfather’s entire immediate family was murdered at Auschwitz. There. Now you’re all up-to-speed. And stupefied.)
He and I had never discussed these details.
Still, he went on. “I don’t know if you can feel it, but there is an entire army of the fallen that marches behind you. They perished while you have been chosen. You are the chosen one. You are the one that will have his name in history books because theirs have been forgotten. You are now their voice, so you must speak.”
This news sent me into a complete tailspin. I mean, he should have known better to say something so severe to a stupid 23-year-old that couldn’t make artistic vomit if he stuck his finger down his throat. Now it’s my responsibility to vindicate the dead. No pressure. Apparently they want me to know that there is so much work to be done. It took weeks for me find solace in the words atop the gates of Auschwitz. “Work Sets You Free”.
Two weeks later, that same boyfriend told me saw a dead girl floating around my bedroom. He was right, there are some things you cannot unlearn. I slept the night sleeping in a ball and then dumped him the next morning.
The great work had begun.
