The Ten Dollar Misunderstanding
(A Short Story Attributed to C.R. Sullivan)
As a callow young man just turned 25 I moved to New York to become a star.
When at last entering America’s greatest garbage can, at least it was so in the 1970s, my Dodge’s doomed valves played a xylophone paean to victory. It was then I wished my name upon a star. I remember it well.
In my case the stardom I craved was for my writing. I wanted to be a great writer and knew I could become one.
Fame, renown, such typical obsessions were my motives.
“By Chester Sullivan . . . By Chester Roy Sullivan . . . By C.R. Sullivan.” Always searching in my head for the most compelling permutation of my name that would best adorn, and sell, my published works. Sweet illusions that in time would pop spontaneously like ripened pimples.
Pride above all was the greatest, and worst, of my attributes. It still is, 40 and more years on.
Tell me why people who are compelled to write wish so fervently for a unique renown of their own?
At my small State college I had striven to be and was the resident hero of my several creative writing classes. Aspiring coeds had flirted about me flitting their pretty wings against me.
I suppose writing was my means to being admired. My talent was so palpable that I found it too credible for disbelieve.
Going to New York then without knowing the city at all. Going where I knew no one. With no place to live, no work. Not even a safety net back home to catch me in case things didn’t go my way. Going there in free fall.
How presumptuous! How oblivious to what I was doing. Myopically self destructive.
I brought along only a few dollars. A trunk came along filled with sparse possessions. And above all my talisman. An overly used Hermes 3000 typewriter.
I came to believe the Hermes contained multitudinous tidings of great literature latent in its grimy keys. It could bring me messages from the Gods.
I knew this sudden and brave decision of mine to cut and tie my own cord placenta meant struggle and suffering. It called for ambition. For striving. Even perhaps for pain. Not too much of that I hoped as I drove for the first time through the Lincoln Tunnel.
Adrenaline made me sick to my stomach. Also, the constant charging ahead, my very own personal diaspora 1500 miles long. I was very self conscious of my ‘Kansas The Wheat State’ license plates.
It was a propulsion into glory. Arrogance fueled with gasoline, almost on empty. But talent to burn, of that no uncertainty. There was an abundance of everything except money.
As soon as I had rented my derelict one room in a half-abandoned tenement in the East Village, the very first moment I found myself alone in that bare room–mattress on floor and nothing more–I had my typewriter out page inserted. Such serious stuff.
Please God make me great, that was my unarticulated supplication as I girded to start my masterpiece.
In the beginning I mainly recall staring at that page as if to enchant it into filling up. Also staring at my window, my one tall skinny window. It opened onto the fire escape where ugly starlings perched partying so loudly they ruined any contemplation. Staring, wishing them all dead.
Ebullient staring at the beginnings there, my promise latent in everything around me. Or otherwise despondent and wishing that like the starlings I could be made dead.
Staring at my first New York cockroach crawling between my knees. Wishing it dead too, innocent that it was but one of the hundreds to come.
I also contemplated my skinny selfhood. Staring at my mind, myself, to the point of self hypnosis. Staring down the lengths of those stark immigrant-worn floor boards warped into waves undulating over so many submerged generations.
I did at last begin. Typing out Chapter One. Then “By C. Roy Sullivan,” then crumpling that for “By Chester R. Sullivan”.
I had a freshly-bought ream of paper. No dismay at the sight of it. My novel was there waiting for me in 500 pages of invisible ink.
Then suddenly, I went ‘click’. Just like that. I found my authorial voice. I unleashed myself. The typewriter and I were off soaring in a clatter of keys to make my fortune in words, in the grand poetic novel that was bursting to come out of me. Stellar.
The mechanics for this were flames bolting from my finger tips onto the green keys. Coupled with the joyous ping when the carriage return slammed back advising me I had just won a whole new space, another blank expanse to compose myself upon.
The novel started to arise incorporeal as incense from the Gods word-messenger word machine. One hundred words a day to begin with. Or less. Then I gained to 200 words. Then on and on.
Delirium. In between writings I sat and accomplished more staring, there was nothing else I could afford to do or had the courage for. It was enough to revel in myself.
Such exuberance aside that was an increasingly lonely, frightening time for me.
The East Village was reduced to the size of my tenement room. Looking from the fire escape charred buildings lined 7thStreet for as far as I could see. Troy after Ulysses. Constantinople after the Turks. My street was littered with leavings from the fifth Sack of Rome. I was on the death star of Western Civ.
All empty there. Destitute and most disquieting. No one left for me to impress. Not even an Attila.
How can one be renowned when there’s no one around?
At night I heard belligerent voices coming up from the street, along with an occasional shout or even a scream. Rarely, there were gun shots.
Incongruously, in my forsaken tenement the only company were the Starlings and the coming and going of stentorian ghetto blasters below my window. The young of the glacial late night getting off on Thelma Houston and Donna Summer.
In between the passaging of belting cacophony from third world briefcases the building fell into ominous silence. Broken sometimes by vague sexual yips from down the hall or the heart stopping sounds of the beat up woman next door. Her agony coming to me softly through the wall and therefore all the more terrible.
To make this go away I decided a little dope was in order. Just enough grass to soften this brittle TV-reality.
Surely I deserved a genuine occasional high to turn down the unbearable New York volume. Some mild euphoria to lessen the shock of what pitched and rolled on my mind’s TV screen. Tube about to burn out.
No more than a college high maybe to give my genius a bohemian booster-rocket lift off into the outer space of my novel.
At university I smoked often. Taking a toke or two before starting an assignment for writing class. Stoned every weekend, stoned in bed with girlfriends.
Sex I found could be replaced by weed-invoked memories.
Typewriter on the floor my legs entwined with her, her supremely lovely Italian design. With her Swiss tooling. That was like copulation itself, a women incarnate before me.
But for writing, in New York poverty and isolation, I drank Blatz beer from the closest bodega. At least it was an affordable inspiration even if it didn’t send me soaring up to the literary stratosphere I aspired to.
It was too cheap. I wanted weed, a fistful of joints for my work. My writing would never depend upon it, I told myself, it would merely be its facilitator.
But how to get some?
There were whores and dealers lined up shoulder to shoulder in Tompkins Square park, just at the corner of my street. They accosted me with their wares every time I needed to cross through the park. Those sorry addicts blemished and blotched.
Ah but I was too proud, too intimidated, to stop. Too bashful and skittish. Nothing horrified me more than making a fool of myself.
Here I didn’t know the processes, rules, the social contract. I wasn’t even sure these poor devils spoke English. Surely they were illiterate so a discussion of James Joyce was out.
Young Chester was lean, well muscled, a face and a body that drew attention on the streets of the City. This too was a matter of ego, of pride. I matched with my writing in a tasteful ensemble.
People stared, some whistled. My freshness date showed too clearly on my behind. I hated such attention and fled from it.
Virginity in New York must be hidden, whatever kind of innocence it might be–it is on the most wanted list, hunted by various kinds of hunters, bounty hunters, by those who want your body and those who want your mind, or soul–to save, use and discard, buy, destroy.
I protected myself against all manner of imagined ridicule and dangers by almost never leaving the room. I went out only for hunter-gatherer forays for beer and lots of cheap junk food inedibles.
One chapter! Exultation. Hosanna On The Highest. Plump Titianesque courtesans in my lap.
Then disaster came knocking. Without notice five hundred words a day braked, my wordometer turned down to 300 words, then 100 words per diem.
At last the first Two chapters were completed. But done
at a miserable creep. Achieved whimpering at a halting limp. I worked disbelieving I’d been reduced to a disheartening hand to hand combat for word by word!
Eventually it happened. I couldn’t begin the third chapter. Not a sentence, not a word, not a letter.
Siting on the mattress hunched over the typewriter, fingers clutched into claws — Nothing. My fingers had no fire in them. They had burnt out.
The Hermes became my near-death old Dodge on a frozen morning. It refused to start.
A blank page had been rolled into the typewriter. By me? Prerequisite for a beginning. I’d typed ‘Chapter Three’ top center. That was all.
Days on end the empty page mocked me. Desperation consumed me every evening. I drank more and more beer.
I began to avoid the sight of my beautiful Hermes. I covered it with the pile of my dirty laundry. No good.
To evade I placed it outside on the fire escape where the Starlings could shit merrily upon it. My typewriter became splotched in white Rorschach blots.
Cornered, I prayed. Once. On my knees, drunk, before the typewriter—starling excrement washed away by my tears. I even lit the tall cheap glass candle holder I’d bought from the Bodega for a bit of kitsch decoration.
The Madonna of Guadalupe, hands clasped, the miraculous decal beginning to peal.
My page didn’t even rustle.
That cruel page. A plague page itself. That contemptible, cold tenement room. What had I done?
I had to get away. That or slash away at my wrists.
In desperation I chose to flee even if that was indecent exposure, like diving naked into the horrifying East River in January.
To go venturing out at night I had to once more take courage from Blatz. But this time not too much. I wished to survive the outing.
A most cold night for my adventure. I felt real gratitude for my winder coat.
Going I tentatively hugged the dim light-ways leading out of the East Village. Lots of hidden barking dogs announced me along the way.
The beer had been a mistake. I had to stop twice to whiz in the shadow of shadows closely wary of rats. My breath came in white clouds, Sanctus Spiritus. At least I was alive.
I walked quickly—I’d learned as best I could, as intently as possible—a fast near-run walk with the cool indifference of the blind New York eye to everything in its way.
Rules: never ever carry a map or camera; never look at anyone full in the face. Never stop to look indecisive about for the way forward; Keep moving even if in the wrong direction.
Only perverts and the weak were stymied by it all. Shrug away any hand reaching forward for harm or help. Shake a ‘no’ at any request for whatever. Just don’t stop for any cry for help.
Leave the dying to die. Leave the Buffalo Hunters to their frostbite fate.
Never mind, some scent of fresh air gave me away even as I tried so damnably hard to melt into the scary night.
My face still shone. That was it. High Plains cleanliness made me a bitch in heat. Clothes carried a soapy hick betrayal.
College clothes. I could hardly afford new ones. Or perhaps it was the softness of my pink skin, my face rosy with youth and health. Or the clarity of my middle class eyes. Something clarioned my virginity.
My pants in those times rode tight across my ass and crotch, same as one would wear in any small college town in the 70s. It all made me fresh meat in that once upon a time evil City.
It brought me the chorus of ‘oh my’ from drag queens huddling in flimsy coats against the inimical wind chill factor, desperate for my attention and body heat.
Surviving the first outing night by night my walks grew longer and longer. I walked because I dreaded using the subway–confused by all the enigma. IRT, BMT, IND.
I found it a diverging hell of passages taking me nowhere, to no one I knew.
Futile, I knew I couldn’t score even with opportunity. This frantic roaming I called my cannabis crusades. They were just as effective.
I couldn’t write, I couldn’t score. Maybe I couldn’t fuck? Probably not, it had been a while. I could get no satisfaction.
Driven onward frightened silly the soles of my feet began to burn alive. I imagined leaving a vapor trail of stinking Nike rubber and barbeque flesh.
From the East Village my incoherent scramble took me at last all the way up 34 blocks and five long blocks over to discover 42ndStreet.
Ah yes. Dope abounded there, sold and used publicly. A kid of party without end, under crime-fighter lights.
Forty Second street from the Port Authority over to Sixth Avenue suited me fine. A simple straight line like everything at home.
The street’s devious lights and febrile night sweats, no matter how low the temperature, drew me helplessly along with the throng of strangers sure as summer grasshoppers to a wheat field.
The throng was also a lit one, twice over. No matter my autodidactics in New York street walking I still stood out even there, in motion an amber wave.
But the parade of forlorn theaters were almost normal if you didn’t look too closely or had forgotten what normal looked like.
Everything was for sale. Fine. All I wanted was marijuana.
That made it imperative to select the spot for shopping well. I was so damnably shy and picky. In the end I elected to choose from the theaters, far more preferable than a corner or doorway. Warmer too.
Walking the street back and forth as nonchalantly as if I’d been born on it, one particular hulking movie theater began to appeal to me.
No special reason, the important thing was that a stringy trail of unassuming men made their way into it. They’d stay for a few minutes and then came out.
That was what I was looking for. They were obviously scoring. They couldn’t be watching a movie. Not there. Who’d want to in that sinister pile of shit.
Upon consideration I realized that the theater I’d chosen for my means of turning the fire back on in my hands and palpitate my occipital lobe, was the biggest of them all.
It held up, sort of, an enormous slattern marquee dwarfing the street like the prow of the QE2. Marquee announced ‘Adult XXX.’
Above the street the old building rose into pure chiaroscuro, no more than two or three puzzle pieces of light breaking its shades of obscurity.
Simulacra of a time-rotted glory, florid with dripping black mold, about to collapse upon me in great clods of botulism-riddled devils food cake.
So at last, no more evasion, I barged my way to its doors.
Paid my fare.
Made my way in.
My Nike soles oozed the accumulated dog shit I’d trailed up with me from 9thstreet. Soles smacked, loud clapping hands to make me wince, smearing what looked like apple butter on the frayed carpet.
The hot storm surge inside the theater reeled me back. Sirocco with halitosis.
That visit has come to be one turning point for me in my early New York days. I felt no threat taking my place in that enormous almost empty hothouse hold, a gloomy Ark for a handful of survivors sitting most primly apart, sentenced to isolation, wrapped in their anonymity.
The theater had obviously been meant to be art deco. Still was in its decline. The splendor of yore lay dimmed in its midnight-in-the-park lighting, distorted under a palimpsest of mustard gas and deep layers of cigarette smoke sediment.
Phantom pieces of decorations were still visible near the lights of the exit signs. Some also framed the proscenium.
These were apparently from a designer’s astral plane of opium visions. Done in sleek geometric intertwinings. They mixed with intimations of blood red and gold planets. Unknown to astronomers.
Most memorable to me of that long since demolished hallucination was the vast arching ceiling so high above one had to tilt back the head to see it. It was a Cosmos in electric lighting, an expanse of Hollywood stars.
It had been built to twinkle down its blessings from its pretend constellations upon perhaps-2000 secretaries and their boyfriends. An audience packed in under its starry sky to cuddle while Gone With The Wind blew them away.
Some stars had burned out, I noticed. Extinguished perhaps in a Hollywood end-of-time fantasia. But most still twinkled. I like them. They seemed to me a beguilingly blessing upon my own head.
This XXX Adult was my first New York communal event. But that was not important. Sitting safely by myself, watching badly acted straight porn, gigantic breasts flopping like fish out of water, cavernous snatches gaping, I stayed ever on alert for hints of telltale commercial transactions.
Urgency made me impatient. Grass once bought I be off fast for the long walk home, delivering me back to my 90 watt dump.
First thing after forcing the police bar lock back in place I’d light up. Inhale. Hold the smoke. Die and be resurrected.
Then I’d pass on in confidence to that painful next page. It would be finished without a problem, even if it had gotten stuck inside me like a golf ball turd.
The first page of my third chapter had rested inside the typewriter for so long that the paper had curled up. That intractable next page had turned New York gritty to the touch.
But coming soon the page would fill and become as existentially delighting as an Ennio Morreconi soundtrack. Lost world chords amplified, plucked on a Fender electric.
At the back of the theater two grand staircases led upward to a balcony. Twice I caught the furtive movement of a man-form sliding up to greet the stars.
After a few minutes the homunculus would slip back down the stairs and out the door.
There it was! There discovered at last. The headwaters of my quest.
Drugs! Reefer! Without a doubt. And safely procured.
Chester was not stupid. I’d insist on a test toke before buying. For that I even had a booklet of Zig Zags in my back pocket.
All clear, aisle and the stairs, so I proceeded. I did the same slow pantomime that the others used as they disappeared up into the Amazon night. Moving without muscles to the sleaze tune from the screen. I took the left staircase. It seemed to have more light.
Walking up the sloping aisle I foraged my hand into my front jeans pocket to check again that my precious $10 bill was still there.
In Kansas that would be the price of half a lid of good smoking stuff with lots of seeds and stems to snap, crackle and pop your consciousness. In the City? Who knew. Surely I’d get at least 10 loose joints.
At the top the balcony opened up into a wonder world afloat above reality. It seemed grander and vaster and so close to the stars you wanted to stretch up and join them. Already I felt stoned.
My eyes couldn’t seem to adjust. I’d arrived at the ocean surface in a black-hole black out. The light from the projection booth was no more the frail white eye of a bathyscaphe probing for live matter.
To my surprise it was empty. Not a shape to be seen sitting, moving. Not a sacred soul except mine. Too hot up here, I took my winter coat off and guarded it under my arm.
Long rows of seats swept away vaguely in a grandiose loneliness as if a pandemic had stolen the audience away and left no one to give a damn.
But then I saw them. At the very top of the balcony. A few wraiths in human forms, stood pressed it seemed into a small pack. Their cigarettes burnt like fireflies in a flight formation.
Closer in I saw these were men standing together against the top back wall to the far side of the projection box. Maybe five or six of them lounged there. I made out that they stood shoulder to shoulder between the last row of seats and the back wall of the balcony.
Arriving at last at the top I side-stepped swiftly down the row of empty seats. The near I made it to the group of men the more I felt their eyes taking me in, glittering in abandon. Too much dope, I thought.
When I arrived at the edge of the pack I didn’t know what to do so I gave them what I thought might pass for a ghetto salute. Saying something like “how you hanging?”
Oh young Chester.
Nothing to do except sit down and wait for business to commence. Worn out seat halfway collapsed under me. At last that prompted a reaction. A gutted amusement seized the men.
“Papi. Hombre hermoso. Gran hombre. Todas partes. Chacho.” These unintelligible unknowns came followed by kissing sounds.
How irritating it was to feel like a stranger in your own country. Except, well, I knew New York was not my land. Not theirs either.
Keep you cool, Chester. This will be over in a couple of minutes.
My own voice comes clear at last. “I want to buy . . .”
Like the lookout whistle in Westside Story this made the
Men swing into a choreography. They shuffled about to stand in a row behind me even closer together than before and smack up tight to my seat back.
After a bit of jostling and arm punching one alone hopped the two rows forward to sit directly in front of me, back towards me.
Only a moment though because in a puff ethereal as reefer smoke, dark arts in the movie theater, that slim form come to parley with me suddenly whipped around. In a hop he’d planted both his knees in his seat leaning his body against the back.
Like that the meager form paused, hunched forward toward me over the seat, nothing but his outline showing, so strangely perched. He sat close enough I could smell the onions. Theater air suddenly thickened with ravening intent. For me it was an out of body experience.
“I want to buy . . .”
At that he took fresh young Chester, nice looking Chester, Chester so tender and new. Chester Roy Sullivan.
Before I could peep peep ‘stop’ in surprise or lower my hands in protection the fellow attacked me. Avid fingers moved. Prehensile art.
One swift motion my shirt was up. Another and my belt lolled unbuckled. Two thin fingers worked for a second freeing the jeans button. Zipper slid down faster than a thought for help. Without pausing he shimmied my tight pants and underwear to my knees.
I’d been flummoxed completely leaving me with high lifted eyebrows and the international sign for surprise on my kisser.
Both my legs were grabbed behind the knees and I was scooped up in a single motion. It left me halfway off my seat.
He looped my Nikes, tangled pants and all over his seat back draped so each calf was wedged in the crevasse on either side of where the seats joined. Both legs went up and were pulled wide apart. That way I was a mud stuck John Deere.
“Stop! You don’t understand. I want . . .”
“Shhh, mi amor.” Finger to the side of his nose.
All I was doing was lolling inert. A broken spring probed my bare ass, bleached legs splayed out above my head. My inguina spread dappled in starlight.
A woman on screen gave an ode to joy as she was impaled by a cucumber.
It might have been suddenly done as begun. I had no idea. Commotion behind me of sheer enthusiasm. Someone there lit a lighter, then another and another. Sensation of the men back there glorying in me, bending in their twinkling cigarette lighter flames for a closer worshipful gawk.
Their flickering glow gave me a first glimpse of my ravisher. I exhaled a basso profundo ‘toot’ between tight lips. Same sound of a kid back home tooting across the head of an empty Dr. Pepper bottle.
He was a Puerto Rican kid. Even I recognized that. No no, not older than me. Not a man. Couldn’t have been 18. Less. Looking at him looking at me with that untenable saucy grin I knew he wasn’t yet even 15. Oh fuck. Oh no God, for sure 14! A mere boy.
I’d just committed sodomy. My first criminal offence. And a serious one at that. Rikers Island here I’d come.
Obviously the kid was intrigued by me. He stared me down, olive skin, big Latin eyes that looked far older than I felt.
Young Chester was worthless. Young Sullivan felt sick to his stomach. Chester Roy Sullivan couldn’t get his pants up over his butt.
“Estas Bella, Man. I do you again for free!”
That did it. Legs were yanked loose, jeans came up fast, shirt went back in place. I was up and ready to fight or run.
No coat. “Where’s my coat?” Anger rose in my voice.
In a panic I checked my pants.
“You stole my $10! That’s two weeks of Blatz. What about the reefer! What about the joints?”
They broke up at that, shattered into shards of daggerous jeering. “B-l-a-t-z?” they chorused turning the word into a long passing of tight rectal gas.
“Reefer? Hey man don’t do no dope. Don’t ya know it’s bad for you?”
From 3 miles up and away I heard the first blank page of my third chapter flip free of the Hermes and go tumbling.
It went down down down to land on mean tenement floor boards.
The boys themselves had just been whisked away into the darkness.
On screen, nothing new. In the heavens above, nothing new. In me nothing new because I had been turned old. Unnaturally old.
Looking up at the crazy ceiling it was then that I think I saw a shooting star.