chin and whispered, “I want to be transported.” The word ricocheted through the rotunda as I opened my mouth to speak.
BLIND GALLERY
My friend gets a travel grant and leaves town. I take over some of her shifts, working for a blind gallerist on the Lower East Side. He’s not one of those blind people who you forget is blind. He won’t let you forget. He begins every few sentences, “Now, I don’t know if you know this, but I’m blind …” He is very erudite and with-it and his friends are always coming over to read him art reviews, The New York Review of Books, new poetry, new literature, on and on. But if you are me and you ask him, “Say, did you read the such-and-such article in The New Yorker,” he’ll reply, “See, the thing is, Joe, I’m blind.” Choking on laughter, he adds, “Can you imagine a blind motherfucker like me reading, uh, The New Yorker and some shit?”
My boss speaks through his teeth with a sense of strain and release, as though he is always simultaneously inhaling or exhaling a hit of pot. A breezy and hip walking bass drifts perpetually from the stereo behind him. He has a phone next to him and he makes calls all the time. But if the phone rings and I pick it up and it’s for him and I turn to him and say, “Hey, so-and-so is on the phone,” he replies, “I can’t talk to him. I’m blind! Tell him I can’t talk. He’ll understand—he knows I’m blind.” Sometimes my boss takes naps in the middle of the day. Sometimes, when the phone rings, he wakes up and picks it up. Yawning, he whispers, “Yeah, I’m in meeting right now. Mmmm, bye.” When I ask him how he curates shows he mutters, “I got people I trust. I rely on their opinions.”
I am quite diligent the day I start. Because my boss cannot monitor me—not visually, anyway—I don’t feel rebellious like I do at other jobs. On the contrary, I feel a sense of honor and responsibility to take care of business with efficiency and care. When my friend calls him from out of town to see how things are going my boss says, “This Joe motherfucker is professional as shit. That motherfucker is PRO. FESH. UH. NAALL!” He deems me to be so professional that he soon decides to hire me on for a while. Even after my friend comes back to town. I work shifts on the days she doesn’t.
I have forgotten to mention that my boss’s gallery is in his apartment. He sleeps on a couch in the living room. In the morning he wakes up, sits up, and swivels his body, placing his feet onto the floor. The setting transforms around him: magically, he is at work. Interns began flooding in. Well, one intern. “Is fatso here yet?” my boss asks.
“No, not yet,” I say. “She’s not fat,” I add, thinking that he might not know, since he is, after all, blind.
“Yeah, let’s give fatso a call,” he replies with a grin. “Let’s get ol’ fatso on the horn. See when she plans on, uh, rollin’ on in here.”
I have various duties. Sometimes I handle development. Joe, can you call this rich motherfucker and see if he’ll wire some money into our account?
Other days I oversee marketing. Joe, could you, uh, order a bike messenger? See if he can take this postcard invitation to our next opening up to Yoko Ono? I just heard on the news that she’s back in town.
I also work in programming and one day my boss has a special mission for me. “Joe, listen. This friend of mine, a poet, uh, passed away.” I nod solemnly, though my boss can’t see me. “I mean this motherfucker just dropped dead,”
“Oh, thanks,” I say, tucking the check in the right pocket of my jeans.
“I’d go over there myself,” he says. “But, you know … I’m blind.”
First I try simply to find booking information on the website of the bar, which I know to be a downtown destination of NYC literati. There are no instructions, just a phone number. I dial it. Nothing. So after leaving the gallery that evening I walk to the bar.
I climb a tall flight of stairs up to the second floor. I enter a dimly lit room. The air smells sick and sweet—the floor and tables are breathing into the room the stale vapors of years of spilt beers. A distorted, grungy bass line plays repetitively on the PA. A modest number of customers line the room, leaning against walls with their drinks, chatting in corner banquettes. The center of the room is empty.
A woman with messy jet-black hair sits at the bar, hunched over a half-drunk martini. She’s got an unlit cigarette between her fingers. She conducts the air with it as she talks to the bartender. Occasionally she absent-mindedly draws it to her lips, before glancing downward and seeming to silently remind herself that in New York these days you can’t have it both ways: no smoking inside, no cocktails on the street. I sit down at the bar, one seat away from her. The bartender is slender with a long ponytail.
“What you want?” he asks me eventually.
“Hi,” I reply cheerfully. “I actually just came in to get some information. I work for a gallerist, a blind gallerist, who is trying to organize a memorial reading for a friend of his—a poet who just passed away—and I need to know who I can talk to … about booking. A reading.”
“Yeah?” the bartender says, lifting his chin, “Well I’m such a fucking bartender that all I can do is pour a drink.” He turns and walks away from me.
“Can I get a gin and tonic?” I ask.
“Five,” he says. I slip him seven.
“So is there a number or an email address that I can give to my boss?” I ask, adding, “I would really appreciate whatever you have.” The bartender reaches for a book of matches, and tosses them at me. The XYZ phone number appears at the top.
“Thank you,” I say. “But I already dialed this number and there was no … info …”
“Give it up!” The black haired woman laughs, tapping the filter of her unlit cigarette. My eyes follow imaginary ashes as they fall from the end of it into her now-empty martini glass. The bartender snatches up his shaker and refills her drink. “You’re not going to win. Can’t you see that?”
“Win?” I repeat. “I don’t need to ‘win.’ I just need to book the reading of a dead man’s poetry. My boss would have come himself, but he’s blind! You are such a ‘bartender’, I understand that,” I say, raising my voice as the bartender moves into the storeroom, out of sight. “And I bought a drink from you. Now can you please let me know who I can talk to?”
After several moments the bartender reappears in the darkened opening of the storeroom. “Leave,” he says. “You leave now.”
He’s got a vodka bottle in his hand. The woman leans on the bar with one elbow, and swivels to face me with a crooked smirk, twirling her now limp and wrinkled cigarette as though she’s flashing a weapon.
“I’m not leaving,” I declare. I am emboldened by duty, and also by gin. I am not here for myself—not here on my own time, my own dime. No, I am on the job. On the clock. The setting of work surrounds me like an aura. Furthermore, I am here as a representative of the dead and the blind. “If you want me to leave, you’ll have
