Текст книги "Book of Numbers "

Автор книги: Joshua Cohen

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Текущая страница: 31 (всего у книги 41 страниц)

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Wed, Sept 14, 2011, 10:08 AM

RigdeWood

I’m writing this email at Rach’s request. She does not wish to make this yet a matter for the lawyers.

Rach and I have been intermediately receiving notices that expenses have not been paid on your Metropolitan Ave office for a period now of two months now (July, August). September’s bill is two weeks overdue. October’s bill just arrived. Rach informed you of this in emails of 8/16, 8/22, 9/1, 9/6 (below), to which she received no response. After receiving the second of two late notices (July August) we dully turned them over to Martin & Simon Eisen & Associates PC who according to them had no choice but to turn them over to your agent Aaron Szlai on 8/24 (copied below). We can only guess that Mr. Szlai’s been in contact. What we can’t guess is why you haven’t been or paid? Rach is extremely insensed!!!! September’s bill came 8/16 and was due 9/1 and October’s came today 9/14 and is due 10/1 again. Against Eisen’s recommendation Rach has as of today paid for July and August in full ($680 rent and maintenance × 2 plus $40 × 2 in late fees for a total of $1,440, below), only because the property’s still in her name, plus an outstanding utilities bill of $216.64 cumulative (below). Rach does not wish to deprive you of a workspace that means your support. However she wishes to have the lease taken over and switched to your name ASAP and has informed Vanderende Mngmnt. accordingly (below). Please get in touch or have Aaron or representation of your choice get in touch with Vanderende ASAP, who told us you have not been on the premises. (Onders has been trying to contact with you also and we gave him Mr. Szlai”s phone.) If you do not assume the lease by 9/26, assuming you wish to and we do not wish to threaten, Rach will notify Vanderende of intention to terminate effective 10/31 (Bob Onders the manager stipulates two months’ notice req. but is willing “to forgive September for October conversion”), and forward all damages/fees + moving expenses to you, or whoever. We’re willing to write off our losses but no further.

Sincerely,

Adam Shale

P.S. I’d scrapbooked my entire career especially the stage to which I will be returning this fall and winter, PLaybills, critcial notices (the raves!!), cast photos and scripts, then the film and TV material to 1986, all of which I lost in a fire (Grove St., 1986), and yet I still miss this material touchingly. It was my whole life and the history of many others who miss it. I predict the temptation might be to forget the past but trust me if I say this is a sense you repent. Rach tells me you have many books at the office and papers, p.p.s. also I don’t know if you know but I grew up a bit in that neighbor hood

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Fri, Sept 23, 2011, 9:52 AM

Re: RigdeWood

I still haven’t received a response from you to my email of a week ago but received a response from Eisen, to which I ccopied or bccopied my email of a week ago. Eisen wrote that he’d not received a response from Aaron Szlay and then did or a secretary called Eliza said no one has been able to reach you since August. I’m not prepared to repeat type what he said. What Eisen said about the stalling that it was disingenius. But I’m sure you have a firmer opinion.

We’re taking the opportunity to communicate to you that Rach and I have decided to revise our position on the office for termination instead effective 9/30. Vanderende has been very acomodating and is willing to cut a deal to forgive the dvanced notice if the office is vacated by the end of the month, and so that is what we’ll shift to. You’ll have to arange vacation yourself and if you don’t we’ll arange it for you at significant cost and not to mention loss to you.

Since I’ve been in rehearsals for “The Pryers”(Lincoln Center, previews Nov, opening Dec) I have not had the time to make an appropriate survey of the contents and for Rach it is understandably difficult. Also I have a lot of voice work on the schedule this fall/winter and another deodorant commercial too and Onders who HAS entered the unit (legally, within his rights as Vanderende management) also reports it is a mess and very daunting. It wi;; be understandably difficult if it’s up to us do the clearance alone and though it might appear that I am in the best of shape even for me it would be expensive. After what you did to Rach! After how you treated her!

(to still leave her shoveling up your slop, even after)

Other issues: we would like to know your best delivery address for mail mail (Rach opened some of the envelopes thinking they might be joint concerns, not me). Some books Rach says are review copies and two cordial invitations she said you always got but at least they entertained me, for Dr. Joshua Cohen to address the astrophysics symposia in South Africa, and Dr. Joshua Cohen to participate in a “plenary” on “deliberative democracy” (I had to search that up), at the University of North Texas–Denton (when you search your name you get so many people no you but when for my name all you get is me for the first dozen more two dozen ro so resultant pages). But if you prefer I can just send them to your mother. If preferred.

Which brings me to a phonecall we received from a friend of Rach’s at R ø t how do you change the font 9(used to be I&B), head of global marketing who told Rach she remembered you from a xmas party two years ago but now recognized you in June at the San Francisco airport in June. Possible? You don’t strike me as “a west coast guy.” I am definitely not, though w’ere going out to LA for a weekend in October to record the voiceover of “The Fireplace” for a Pixar project I can’t tell anyone anything about. But anything is possible. Judith Geller (Judy, her name is in San Francisco, black hair, dyed black, short, hair short and she is too, dresses funky)? Also Aaron Szlaw never returned my call about this either.

So you can mpathize that this fall what with the play and the dubbing and the spot for Refresh (deodorant but not na antipersprint) I UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES can let your affairs encompass our life beyond what they’ve already encompassed.

Rachava was so kind and generous to you who were not kind and not generous and selfish. You begrudged her and kept your begrudges all locked up for us to dispose of.

Case close.d

Also today going through a winter clothes container—second closet by bathroom—I noticed you left some nice condition sweaters. Assuming you’re still around the city, it’s only getting colder. Some nice bottom drawer sweaters and a few extra shirts including a very good insulated plaid. So, EMail me your best mail delivery address and I’ll throw in a few pants that don’t fitme anymore (too large), including a beautiful pair of corduroy I’ve never even wear.

Sincerely,

Adam Shale

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10/2

–describe apartment/“flat” I’m in? describe Berlin?

–who’s it owned by? Balk?

–after I left “Iz” I hit two different euro ATMs in two different terminals of AD Int’l for €4,000 on my Bank of America Visa credit/debit, with which I purchased two different tickets to two different destinations on two different airlines leaving from two different terminals under two different passports, wheeliebagged in and out, initially as Principal, again as myself, passport controls, security checks

–took a shuttle to Al Bateen Executive Airport

–was flown to a midforest fascist boulevard airstrip that I still maintain was on the wrong side of the Oder, meaning it was Poland

–was met by Balk’s presumptive agent, Anders Maleksen, a mesomorphic Scando Nordo guy with a buzzcut and barcodey scars at his neck who drove me into Berlin in a beatup grayscale Mercedes, AND WHO STILL HASN’T COME BACK, OR BEEN IN TOUCH, AND HASN’T REIMBURSED ME

–so either Bank of America froze my account for suspicious activity

–or Interpol had them do it

–because of my double absence from the flights

–whose tickets I purchased in cash

– have €166 left

–and just coins in my stomach rattling around, THOUGH IN THIS COUNTRY COINS COUNT

–but then whenever I slot my card in a machine to check my balance and try to withdraw, do they know where I am?

–who are they?

Various things I’d like to tetrate: Whenever I slot my card in a machine to check my balance and try to withdraw, do they know where I am? Who are they? BoA? Kor? CIA/DIA/NSA? Obama? Cheapest closest grocery location? Hours? German phrases to explain I need to borrow a phone? German phrases to explain why I need to borrow it? The correct plural and caloric and fat contents of doners? How to insert umlauts in Tetsuite—Ö döners? The outcome of that football/soccer game the Copt pilots put on in the cockpit from AD and invited me to join them for and I did and there it was opening up in front of me, the sky? Russia vs. either Brazil or Portugal? Anders Maleksen, whether what he said was true about having never been told anything about reimbursing me or if that was all just subterfuge like his refusal to confirm even his relationship with Balk? Whether that treed airstrip he’d picked me up at was across the Oder in Poland like I’d guessed? Who that battered grayscale Merc with D plates BEI2628 was registered to if not to him or Balk? Whether Maleksen was from Australia or New Zealand, or just his accent in English? Why he wouldn’t even stop for a bathroom break but just pissed into a 2L of Fanta Grape while driving? What or who was he afraid of or was it that he was scared I might run off on him? What was indicated by the recordingesque nictitating diode on the keyring he handed me? What if any repercussions will I have to negotiate for succumbing to my impulse to detach the ring from the keys and toss it to the trashcan on my corner?

QWERTY, n, adj: pertaining to the standard English-language keyboard layout, named after the first six consecutive keys of the weakhanded northern row. The computer keyboard is merely a copy of the typewriter’s, whose keys triggered the arms that struck the letters to the page. But if the keys of the earliest models were depressed too fast, the arms would jam. Later models would integrate a lag, a drag. Letters commonly coupled together, like t and h, and q and u, were relegated to different rows or spaced apart, so that no matter how fast the question, the arms wouldn’t tanglge, the letters wouldn’t jumblbe, the page wouldn’t blot. Users became so inured to the resulting keyboard that even as typewriters gave way to computers, it remained: a fossil, and any attempt to backengineer and develop a new layout, placing Who, What, When, Where, and Why in a greater proximity would be wildly inconvenient.

Point is, so it goes with our own human couplings: After a while, everything starts seeming logical. A failed writer gets used to being blocked. A Yemeni childbride gets used to being beaten. Both qwerty, if in disparate degrees.

Using Tetsuite, its wordprocessor—one feature I hate is how it senses you’re typing an interrogatory and just automatically inserts the punctuation. Also, the Notes tab is lost in the clutter of the Typefaces menu, the notes themselves get lost if margins change, it reformats every numeral into heading a list, respells “algy” as “algae,” and though I turned Tetration.com into a macro it keeps reproducing as a link, and I keep accidentally tapping it, and raising that unmullioned sill—that disconnected window.

Or I’m writing cliché, and it just autoinserts that accent? That acute or grave? As if cliché were French. As if it weren’t universal. Publishers started out by setting their books one letter at a time. The type was movable (it was movable type), which was necessary given that all the letters had to be rearranged into every conceivable order, to spell out every conceivable word—necessary but also wasteful. And so the printers, always working toward efficiency, soon cast metal slugs of words and then, eventually, whole entire repeated phrases. “Love” was not composited of four separate sorts anymore—“l” “o” “v” “e”—but merely of one, “love.” Phrases such as “as it were” or “for that matter”—their equivalents in the European languages—were confined to one continuous line. The sizzle made when a phrase was cast—when the hot hackneyed metal was dumped from its matrix into water to quench—was said to be, in French, cliché. The hiss of clich, clich, clich, cliché. In time, this onomatopoeia was shed, or rather acquired significance. Like: divorcing balding overweight broke male writer. Like: divorcing balding overweight broke male writer has sex with a younger female. Like: benevolent Jew, bewildered Arab. Like: if I remember it, it’s true.

Other things I’d like to tetrate: Is the chair I’m in Biedermeier? Who’s Biedermeier? Or is it Empire? Whose? Louis XIV was the furniture king? Louis XVI was the king whose only memorable furniture was the guillotine? This desk, what type of wood is it? Deskwood? How to pick a drawer’s lock? How to determine whether a drawer is stuck or merely a glued cosmetic forgery? “Casement” windows? Or “casedment”? Is this ceiling “coffered”? Can floors or walls be “coffered”? Are the parquet plat inlays swastikas or is it me who’s bent? Swastika is “hakenkreuz” and the plural is “hakenkreuze” but am I pronouncing either correctly? Who’s the saint in that painting holding his own severed head as ink spouts out from the mouth? What are the pedals of this warped discordant piano called? How to determine whether a pendulum clock is broken or just unwound? How to wind it? No fireplace? No electronics so the remote I rummaged under the divan cushion is for what? That chest? Camphor chest? “Shoji” screens? Or “joshi”? Lacquer, how? Is there anything creepier than the Reich’s kitsch penchant for the Orient? Are the three idols made out of crystal all Buddhas, or is only one of them the Buddha and the others Laozi and Confucius? Which one is wearing the hat?

–I have groceries now NO MORE FASTFOOD! NO MORE MC’D’S! STICK WITH RICE! PLATES @ 12:00/8:00!

–the Visa’s been rejected by Deutsche Bank/Commerzbank/Volksbank/Berliner Sparkasse (multiple locations)

–who are Balk’s contacts in Berlin (besides Maleksen)?

–contact Balk or Maleksen via Myung but how?

–better to go online at café or library or try by disposaphone?

–destroy Principal’s passport or just dispose of it?

–hold onto Principal’s passport

–clean up this shitpit

–pawn the flat’s antiques at pawnshop, or “flohmarkt”

–wait until dark to take out the trash (“restmüll,” the rest of the bins in the courtyard are recycling)

–rejected at ReiseBank/Western Union (multiple locations)

–€118.62 left

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From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Wed, Sept 28, 2011, 11:37 PM

checking

Dear J, stop reading this and get back to work. Two things are bothering me: should I be opening emails with “Dear,” like a letter, and 2.) should I be worried about teensy mental slips like signs of aging? (like not flipping that formula around—it should read: should I be worried about signs of aging like teensy mental slips …) I hope your concerns are slightly more—slightly more—I hope you’re writing. Give me news if you can but if you can’t Just whatever you do don’t come back to NY, where I haven’t been able to sleep so Just up on the roof heeling the tar, clinking two rocks against the glass. The brownstones from here are green Achsa’s settled into Princeton. But of course with her there’s the car issue and she bitches that I’m trying to revert the insurance. She asks me if I know what the payments are. I don’t know how to answer, besides obviously I do, you spoiled bratty bitch of my own raising. Her major will be Econ, which is now called operations research and financial engineering?! or is it !? Mir’s loss was my gain. Now my loss is some asshole fratboy’s gain, but she’s not dating or wouldn’t tell me. For the Econ major most students take a psychology minor. But she didn’t say that. She said something like more than 60% take a psychology minor. Over the phone. Even with the car she don’t come home no mo no mo no mo no mo.

Now, Rach. I can’t have this. Fucking Martinize and Simonize (tetrate it) the Eisen lawyers call. Not to mention the actor guy calls twice a week and last time according to Seth this boy who’s been on phones giving Lisabeth a break—a break from what?—he even tried to pitch a children’s book, a fucking series of children’s books, because, the actor guy said, Seth said, he understands “such things are pitched in series.”! Josh, I can’t have it. I’m your agent, not your personal assistant. And I’m certainly not this kid power forward anymore running pick and rolls like Carmelo Anthony last season (they’re going to regret the lockout, the players arguing over salary caps and revenue sharing while their youths tick away). Don’t get me wrong, I understand what we’re doing and why I have to tie myself and all the office up in phone lies, saying we’ve got no idea where you are, no idea when you’re coming back, but now I’m realizing, with you not responding, it’s true, I don’t, I’m worrying.

You need to get a lawyer (because I’m not a lawyer and my dead parents are on line 2 saying “we told you so.”). You’re going to need Irv Feyer, or maybe like a Spence Rich. I’ll think on which, you’ll think on which, GET BACK TO ME and I’ll handle it. Rach is trying to serve you with papers, and because she can’t or for whatever other fucked delusional reason she’s trying to shame you with this illiterate blog of hers and anything you can do to address it on your own will just exacerbate the situation. Do Not Fucking Comment. Keep doing what you’re doing and DON’T CONFRONT. We’ll get a lawyer to handle everything and make the removal of the blog a stipulation. But only a lawyer can tell you if that’s viable.

The other reason I’m getting personal and legalistic is this: the check, first half, just came. I knew it was coming and I knew we had to decide what to do with it and trust me I considered every option. We need, the two of us, to talk, and if you end up retaining either Feyer or Rich as counsel as I strongly advise, we need to talk with him. Because it’s my sense, again, not as a lawyer, that as the contract was executed and the half advance was sent before a divorce or even papers were served (it’s not like I’m in the position to tell Finn how to time his checks, it’s not like Finn after your fiasco with him in California would put himself out with “the bookkeepers”), it’s my amateur sense that this counts as earned income that Rach can claim, because this is NY, babele, up to 50% of, especially given indiscretions I’ll spare the both of us, and the fact that she’d supported you financially for years, or like a decade. A judge would bankrupt you and a lady judge wouldn’t leave you enough for funeral expenses. I was hoping you’d patch all this up or had been straighter with me.

So, two options to consider (I haven’t taken my commission yet, I haven’t even deposited the check): we can be what Miri used to call “home kosher” on this—meaning we ate whatever on our own but in our parents’ house it was milk separate from meat and never a crustacean—and you get a divorce and only after the divorce the agency cuts you a check and you keep low like the mafia after a heist and don’t flash foxes and Caddys, or we go full on treyf and impatient and you go now and open a new account with a new bank abroad and I’ll have the money routed there and we pray (I have European junketing this autumn)—again, we can discuss this, even with Feyer and maybe Rich.

What else I wouldn’t bother touching on unless I felt you might have a sense of it and would be willing to break the “radio silence” and please enlighten me. I’m also a bit trepidatious like I’m some Hollywood Adam Shale about to be popped by TMZ saying something racist and then I’ll have to go on the Today Show to count up how many nonwhite friends I have. I have 12 nonwhite friends is how many (though Skip Gates has to count for like 10 on his own—my numbers were higher before Octavio Paz died).

But over the last two weeks, or when I went to the Fulton banya I first noticed it, mid-September, wherever I went I was noticing this Asian person. It’s more with Asian women and I’ll never understand this and I bet I’m not unique in this regard but I can always tell from behind if a woman’s Asian. Even with the hair bunned up. It’s not like I’ve spent so much time parsing why, but it’s consistently true, from behind, and I’m only secondarily an ass man, I can always get them. It might be just how they hold themselves. But I won’t get into it. I hate this pc shit. I hate that I’ve been cowered into this tapdance—I swear I’m so concerned for Asian welfare, I dropped Jolly Roger acid and 4F’d the VC, which at the time still meant VietCong.

So I noticed her from behind. At the Fulton banya. Then at Gourmet Garage, and I’m never at Gourmet Garage (I’d given Lisabeth a week off for a family reunion in Maine—because every weekend is a family reunion in Maine if you own Penobscot Bay—and she usually manages the menus). Remember Svetlana? Does this link work, tetset.com/svetlana.muzhikhoyeva or you’re the expert do I have to put a www.? After you left I went online, and regot in touch with “Sveltelana,” put her back on the rotation, but just the moment we’d gotten copacetic again, now that she’d turned 30 and turned her back on all the horrid shit women have to deal with in their 20s, not least of which their appraisals of themselves, their attempts to square their mothers’ and then their own assessments of ability or beauty with their ambitions, and then further with their prospects, anyway, all of that crashed, we burned, and though the time before it was about marriage, or my refusal to ring her, this time it was about a wedding and wasn’t my fault in the least, just bad luck though not nearly as bad as yours, no offense, my luck’s the only thing I’m guilty of because otherwise, I didn’t do shit. I just happened to have a lunch with an editor at Viking, junior editor, very young, very cute, Bard or Amherst grad handjob in the bathroom at a Paris Review party cute, but it was strictly a welcome to the business let’s get acquainted lunch and as we left The Breslin who was it I met? “Svetlelana” was just out from getting fitted at David’s Bridal with a lace gang of bridesmaids for one of their regular Russian nuptial orgies, and yelling at me, smacking me, stalking away with her fellow bridesmaids and the blushing bride, the junior editor fleeing crosstown weeping, and as I was about to head back into The Breslin to wash up and decompress another sazerac who was it in a Red Sox hat loitering on the sidewalk like she was checking the health inspection grade but checking me instead like a homeless harpy, and then she ran for it?

The Asian—stalking me to just about every other lunch and spending more time hanging around Achsa and me during her visits than Sveta my Svetichka ever did, and I’m sure you can put this into better Hebrew for me, but I was davening, God YHVH, Father of my fathers, don’t let her shoot me down with Achsa around or before our tix to Merce Cunningham’s farewell at the Armory. But then she’s like God herself, this Asian, in all places at all times, though managing always to be far enough away from me and inconspicuous to cabbies that I thought she might be two Asians, or four, or more, and even jumping into Bill’s on 54th and blarneying a bartender who’d once temped for me into letting me exit through the broken filing cabinets of the Prohibition sewer tunnel that let me out on 55th to come around Madison to get her face, head on, she’d turned, was gone. But then she’s outside my office. Outside my fucking building. At the fucking cardiologist’s, like she knows what she’s doing to me. Always in that Red Sox hat, and that’s what drives me crazy—also, can you imagine my bloodpressure coming through Koreatown?

I went through all the Asians I’ve ever repped, all the Asian women I’ve ever repped (so counting up my nonwhite friends nontheless), no likelies, so she’s either a sub I rejected, or related to us, our us, which would be worse. Because I can say this with total confidence. I’m sure I never fucked her. It’s difficult in life, to go against the conventional wisdom, to oppose all the entrenched norms and institutions and dogma, like Copernicus and Galileo, Spinoza, Marx, Pancho Villa, Rosa Parks, like Duchamp going readymade and Dylan going electric, and this is mine, my stand, my own two feet on the garbage day street with that scrawny flat just unfuckable ass always in front of me and then behind, face brimmed, averted. Unlike every other male American Jew, I have never had a thing for Asians. I’ve loved women of every race, and if I haven’t loved them equally it wasn’t from any bias, just my diet or circulation, poor sleep habits. But an Asian fetish? No. Have I ever thought of them as unobtrusive and subservient replacements for my mother? No. Have I ever thought of anyone as a replacement for my mother? Maybe my sister, maybe me for my sister’s kid, maybe Elaine Kaufman, until we got into a fight over Norman Mailer, maybe Norman Mailer.

Have to go now. Calls to return to what was once called “the coast.” Back in the days when 12 channels broadcast for only 12 hours a day, the pitcher’s mound was 15 inches and the designated hitter didn’t exist, the bestseller lists were 30% Jewish. When the pinnacle of technology was mutually assured atomic destruction, and women, who were basically typewriters—wait …

Really really can’t wait for that away msg, aar

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