NEWSLETTER

In ’69 Gangemi wrote Olt, a 55-page speedball that you should be fined for not having read. He is also the author of The Volcanoes From Puebla, another criminally underappreciated title that critics like to label “transfiction” when really it’s just a damn good book. He sent Vice an entire unpublished, untitled novel made up of loosely connected short stories that are all amazingly funny and dirty and dark. If life were fair he’d be selling millions of books. As it is, he should be your new favorite author.



High School Girls

Story Read by: Comics artist Victor Cayro after drinking a bottle of Tuaca and two full glasses of gin. Click here to open the player in a new window

Near Sixth Avenue a teenage boy was sitting on a stoop. He was reading a comic book, How to Eat Pussy. Nick smiled and stopped to write the title in his notebook. He wondered if a similar comic book existed for the boy’s female classmates, How to Give a Blow Job. He saw the boy look up to watch some high school girls walking past in their t-shirts and tank tops. They stopped so that one of them could light a cigarette. She wore a button that said, “I’m not insensitive—I just don’t care.” Nick looked at the girls, then wrote: “Perfect breasts softly bobbing.”

As they resumed walking, he overheard, “Poison ivy is worse than gonorrhea!” One of the girls reminded him of a couple he knew who had hopes and dreams when their daughter was born. But at school she chose the wrong friends, and now at fifteen was doing an outstanding job of destroying herself. For her unfortunate parents, every day was a nightmare. Their daughter was a cheap little slut, an emerging alcoholic, a punk rocker with piercings, and a high school dropout with track marks on her arms.

The girls were close to their peak. But too soon that saucy innocence would fade, metabolisms would slow, perfect breasts would sag and soften. He wondered if they knew how they were manipulated by advertisers and those who marketed to their demographic. The prettiest girl was snacking on a little bag of potato chips. Nick zoomed forty years into the future and observed a hospital scene: An unattractive woman on a gurney, no longer slim, was being wheeled in for a heart-bypass operation.

Nick felt a kinship with the teenage boy reading the comic book. They were both males tracking tits on a hot afternoon. They were both students of bobbing breasts and equally fascinated by the outlines of nipples under cloth. It was one of the reasons he loved the streets of New York City in the summer. When the boy looked up again, Nick asked, “Do you know the difference between parsley and pussy?” The boy shook his head and Nick smiled. “You don’t eat parsley,” he said.


Landlords

Story Read by: Comics artist Victor Cayro after drinking a bottle of Tuaca and two full glasses of gin. Click here to open the player in a new window

“What are you doing in midtown?” Nick asked.

“I just had a meeting with my landlord.”

“Have you been crying?”

“No,” she said, wiping her cheek.

Zoë told him that she was having trouble with her landlord and had to find a cheap apartment. She lived in a run-down tenement in the East Village. Nick had spent many nights there and knew it was a bad building. The intercom and the lock on the front door seldom worked. Drug addicts were found in the hallways and the mailboxes were sometimes robbed. Zoë had to worry about fires, burst pipes, falling plaster, blown fuses, inadequate wiring, low water pressure, and rapists or burglars on the fire escape. The boiler should have been replaced twenty years ago. When it broke down, as it frequently did, there was no heat or hot water. On some winter days she had to dress like an Eskimo in her own apartment.

Her landlord was a multimillionaire, but he refused to fix her plumbing or repair the holes in her ceiling. His office was on an upper floor in a luxury building overlooking Central Park. Zoë had described him as a greedy slumlord. “You can see the lying, cheating, and stealing right in his eyes,” she said. He wore shiny suits and a pinky ring. His face had the porcine quality of someone who always traveled first class. She said he was heartless, with the brain and instincts of a reptile. She hated dealing with him because he was so rude and ill mannered.

“I just talked with him,” she said. “He was in a good mood, too, and told me he felt all warm inside. He had just evicted a blind widow with two small children.”

Nick had little sympathy for landlords, although as a boy he had built several birdhouses. He remembered helping Zoë fix up her apartment before she moved in. Mouse droppings were everywhere, along with the faint odor of ammonia. One of the first things he did was to plug up all the holes with steel wool and plaster. Then he bought her a live trap to catch any stragglers. He had a second lock installed on the door and fortified her windows against burglars.

Afterward he designed and helped her build a wall of bookcases from wooden wine boxes. She scrounged a set of cushions from her parents’ basement and he set an old door on some cinder blocks to make her a sofa. A lesbian must have rented the apartment before her. Behind the refrigerator they found the evidence, a dusty dildo.

Zoë certainly had a problem, but at least she could find her landlord. His friend Otto had a landlord, as Winston Churchill once said of something else, who was “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Otto wrote checks to the Acme Holding Company, in trust for Jo-Ernie Enterprises, incorporated in the State of Delaware, and mailed them to a post-office box. He had never seen his landlord, nor had the superintendent, rental agent, management corporation, building inspector, or Internal Revenue Service. His landlord had been seen only once, by a Swiss banker.



© Kenneth Gangemi, 2008


CONTINUED
SIX STORIES | 1 | 2 | 3 |

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