The Fuck Up by Arthur Nersesian Read Free Book Online

me.”
    “She said that? Well, I’m sorry but there are no openings.” I gave him an insider’s smile.
    “Come on, Nick.” I took the liberty of using his first name. “Tanya said just yesterday that there was an opening.”
    “One second please,” he said and then looked behind me. He addressed the girl in the ticket booth, “What’s all this about a manager’s opening?”
    “What?” she replied.
    “This gentleman claims that you’ve been telling him about some kind of manager’s opening?”
    “No, not her,” I corrected, “Tanya told me about it.”
    “This is the only Tanya I know.”
    “I must have the wrong place,” I muttered.
    Without a further word, he turned and went back to his office. Two Tanyas in two days, what a fluke. I smiled apologetically at the present Tanya as I left, but she only gave me a nasty expression. At least she had a job. As I walked away, I felt increasingly foolish. Half way up the block, I turned and yelled back, “Fuck you, Tanya!!”
    I didn’t know of any other theaters on Twelfth Street and wondered if I’d gotten a bum steer. So I wandered down Twelfth and stopped into the Strand Bookstore. There, I took the elevator up to the seventh floor to drop in on Kevin. Helmsley had introduced me to him a couple years earlier, when he was working part-time in the basement and had just entered some Columbia master’s program. Over the years, Kevin had slaved his way up to the rare book room. Whenever I wanted to buy a book, I brought it up to Kevin and he would purchase it for me with his employee discount. We talked a bit about books and finds. Eventually he had to get back to cataloguing books, so I went downstairs and browsed a while. Fortunately nothing caught my interest. I wouldn’t have been able to afford anything anyway. I wandered with increasing worry along Twelfth, eastward. At least, if all else failed, I had enough to get a slice of cheese babka at Christine’s Coffee Shop on First Avenue.
    At Third Avenue, on both Twelfth and Eleventh Streets, NYU dorms were erected around 1986; students rinse the area. But back in the early eighties parking lots filled the sites. The emptiness was a marketplace for prostitutes. They would hook their tushies on car fenders waiting for a trick. I remembered their tight bright clothes were making promises that their wasted bodies couldn’t keep, and for a while I watched the middle-aged, fat-assed men decelerate their long American cars with Jersey plates and consider the day’s slim pickings.
    The morning had started with hope for a good job, but that belief was slowly sinking with the sun. Each of the blocks went by without a theater. In despair, it seemed somehow appropriate that these lost souls were stationed here. Each of them must’ve had a day like this when their hopes started strong and erect, but slowly, one by one, all possibilities dwindled until they wound up on a street like this one, watching other girls hanging their sides on fenders like meat on a hook, waiting for a buyer. Seeing this they must’ve figured, “I’ve got nothing else going,” and then joined the others.
    Looking northward up Third Avenue, I noticed a guy walking with a pretty blond boy in a sailor’s outfit. Together the pair walked, arm in arm, heading toward the sleazy porn theater half a block up. The entrance of the place was circular and covered with dirty brown shag carpet, a giant orifice. Above it proudly flapped a flag: “The Zeus Theater.”
    Quick as a fart came the revelation. This was a theater near Twelfth Street! Even though AIDS was widely known, this was about a year or so before the Post ran headlines like “Grandma Dies of AIDS.” The hysteria was still a ways off. Between the NYU dorms and the pandemic pandemonium, the Zeus Theater had little chance of survival. It was closed down in the late eighties. Instead of taking the view that I’d be exposing myself in a pathogenic porn theater, it looked like just