Short Story: The Organization

Manhattan – This was at the height of my poverty, and shit, I’m not one to talk about poverty – I’m sure another bout of it will strike me at the most un-needed moment, when everything matters most. But anyway, I was twenty-two years old, hungry, broke, and working like a maniac on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn trying to save the environment. I was what they called a “canvasser” – basically a bloody hound looking to scrape some cash from the passing by New Yorkers, coming up to them out of nowhere and asking them to “support the environment.”

It worked basically like this – I’d approach someone who seemed concerned about the environment and ask them if they care, usually they would say yes – then I would convince them to join the organization and give us a minimum of $10 a month. Each time I felt like a dog, and I knew I was one – but my personal survival was way more important then their $10 a month. When you live in New York that’s all you really care about.

I didn’t know a soul in the city except for my good friend Noel, who later became my sister’s girlfriend – she was a beautiful photographer, who would take wild and noble travels across the deep and dirty South with another photographer friend of hers and document the vastness and strangeness of the South, a South that had been forgotten and buried beneath time, rivers, bushes, and stagnant ideas. N oel, however, lived in Brooklyn and I lived in Harlem – and so we rarely saw each other. Instead I made friends with the street kids that I worked with – the lonesome immigrants from California, Prague, Seattle, Africa, and from all over the world. This was the only job in the city that probably hired anyone and everyone, shit – they didn’t even care if you had a working visa – if you could get them cash from anyone, then you were fit to work.

Perhaps the worst thing about the job besides sucking the blood of the innocent passers-by was the fact that you were on your feet the whole damn time. Soon you’re feet got used to the pain of standing for hours – and you got no days off if it rained or snowed. We were pretty much beggars for the environmental non-profit. I remember one time we were working in Midtown, during a bleak and rainy day, the people that day passed us by unnoticed and nobody signed anyone up . All of a sudden as we’re working we start noticing that something’s going on with the crowd – people are rushing suddenly, almost on the verge of hysterics – it turns out that the New York Yankee Corey Lidle crashed his small airplain into a skyscraper in Manhattan. Nobody knew what the fuck was going on, some thought it was another terrorist attack – and so its raining like hell, we’re cold and starving, and our “team leader” is pushing us to ask the people to join the environment – it was at this point that I realized that I didn’t give a fuck about this job. It was October 16, 2006 – and I knew that I had to quit this job, simply because I couldn’t handle the physical and the mental aspects of it – plus, I was nothing like the New Age hipsters that I worked with – I didn’t believe in peace, and more importantly I didn’t believe in the methods of the organization – I was still a devoted Marxist, and believed in a military uprising, and that revolution through violence is the only way out, especially if it was for the environment.

At the end of the day I’d head to a small dive in Harlem, known to some as the Rage. It was a fitting name – for it seemed like the only reason the locals went there was to let out the rage that had been building within after a long and fucked up day at work. All the other kids from the organization would go to more mainstream bars, but I preferred the dark and grimy – the smuttier and filthier, the better. There I got to know Sami, she was in her late thirties and had been coming to the Rage since she was nineteen years old – she played pool with me, and often teased me that I didn’t have a girlfriend.

“Are you a faggot?”

“No,” I’d say to her, “I just got out of a relationship.”

It was a lie. The truth was that I had a fear of women, and the relationships that I did have with the girls in Cleveland were all dysfunctional and filled with depravity and betrayal. I did long for a woman’s touch, that beautiful realm of softness and peace -- but the truth that I had discovered along the way was that love is a dirty whore, and the more attached you got the worse it got – and I always got attached. Hell, a woman could blow me a kiss from across the bar and I’d be in love. I still had to the learn how to scramble through the beauties and the whores. I still had to learn that most often then not it was impossible to tell the difference.

The bartender was Mani, a Hispanic guy in his mid thirties who worked as a DJ at a club in Chelsea on the weekends. He would often buy me the first shot and beer, for he knew I was a regular, and most importantly he knew that my bi-weekly paycheck was only $435. Though the bar attracted a slow, pathetic, and dingy crowd – most were in their late thirties to late sixties – the music that Mani played kept me alive – Slayer, Radiohead, Against Me!, and all the good shit that after a few shots of Jack and a countless amount of PBR’s only re-instated the notion that the world is fucked and you’re a lone cowboy just looking for a peace of the pie.

That night everyone was talking about the plane that hit the building – and everyone would say, “shit, I thought it was a terrorist attack.” I was the only person in the city that day that didn’t really give a damn – someone did mention it to me while I was standing on the street like an idiot trying to get someone to sign up – but it didn’t scare me, nor did it have any affect on me at all. I just wanted to get drunk and get the fuck out of there.

“Shit Sami, I seriously felt like throwing my sign-up sheets in the trash can and just saying ‘fuck you’ to the team leader.”

“You should have Alex.”

“Sure,” I sigh, “where the fuck am I gonna get the money?”

“Well, you can always start whoring yourself out.”

I smile and cheer Sami, “Sami, you can be my pimp.”

“Cheers.”

As the night progressed more and more people would enter. Sometimes chicks from Columbia would stumble in, probably because they looked up local dive bars online and found this shit hole – they’d walk in, look around, get sick to their gills and get the hell out. I used to love watching this scene. I could almost see the look of doom befall their painted faces – and I’d yell across the bar, “come fuck me!” That would probably last in their memory for a good while, and they would repeat those moments over drunken martinis in SoHo.

Anyway – that evening, after about ten shots of chilled vodka, and on my fifth PBR Mani invited me over to smoke weed in the back. The sweet thing about the Rage was that hardly anyone of any importance came there, and so you could get away with murder and nobody would know or say anything.

The rain was still falling, and the cold was setting in – my feet were soaked, and we stood against the wall making sure the rain didn’t hit us.

“I’m quitting, man.” Mani said as he passed me the joint.

“What the fuck? Why man?”

“I hate this place, I don’t make enough money bro.”

Mani spoke with a Spanish accent – I don’t know exactly where he was from.

“Well shit man, hope you stay in touch.”

“Yeah dude, I’ll be back – I mean, I do live down the street.”

“When are you quiting?”

“Tonight’s my last night.”

“Fuck, dude.”

“Yeah.”

We both stood watching the rain roll down from the dirty roofs of Harlem, and the thudding and clunking noise that it made against the windows, garbage cans, and puddles made us think of how insignificant we were, in our poverty. There wasn’t much to say – I felt bad for Mani, it sucks that he hadn’t been making enough money – he was probably one of the best bartendar’s I’ve ever had, and perhaps one of the only friends I’ve had.

“Well shit dude,” I said, “we’ll have to get you hammered tonight.”

“Fuck yeah bro.”

We walked back in the bar with a cold shiver coming over us, and I was nice and stoned – and started to text my old friends in Cleveland. That’s what happens when you move to New York all alone – you become a beggar and then a drunkard – you text your friends saying that life is grand, just so nobody thinks you couldn’t make it – but in reality the city is a death squad walking the streets looking for the next victim; and though the city is beautiful and vast and buildings reside upon buildings, there is a sense of awesomeness and emotional coldness, and it will get to a man – especially a young man, who is alone. You have to keep your cool here, and make sure you say the right thing at the right time – cause saying the wrong thing at the wrong time at a wrong place, that’s just gonna fuck you up.
By 3:30 Mani was closing down, and almost everyone had gone home – Mani kept buying me shots and I kept picking songs from his iPod. Sami had left by then, and I had down another five shots – they were going through me like water. After closing the doors we could smoke cigarettes inside the bar, and since it was his last night we decided to drink as much liquor as possible.

We talked politics and the differences between Hispanics and Whites.

“Why do you guys have those little mustaches,” I asked laughing.

“I don’t know – why are you such a fucking douche.” He said laughing.

He always said the word “douche” with the worst possible accent, so it was pretty much impossible to understand him – and often you’d have to ask him to repeat it like ten times, which proved to be hilarious in itself.

By morning we had finished two bottles of whiskey, and Mani got into a whole mad rage about how he missed his ex-wife and how he wished he had a child to pass on his family name. At one point he tried to kiss me –and told me that if he could choose he’d rather be born as a woman, cause then he’d be a “fucking slut, just sucking cocks all day.” I told him he’d make a great slut.

We laughed hard and perhaps for that reason I walked home drunk out of my mind at seven in the morning – yet totally satisfied and blissfully laughing about it all. I had a ravenous hunger and searched like a dog for a place to buy some good food – but the only thing that I saw was fried chicken and burger joints. That should always gave me a rotten feeling in the stomach, especially after a good night of drinking.

I reached into my pocket and found a soft pack of Camels – but it was empty. And as I walked home, stepping into puddles and avoiding traffic lights, I felt a sinking feeling come over me – I had to go to work in a few hours, and soon the whole thing would repeat itself again – and it seemed very much like a passage through Hell.

November 12, 2007