Gabrielle Taylor's "Cockluck"
March 25, 2002
At 8:43am Bertram woke, showered, shaved, pulled new socks and shirt and underwear from plastic bags, and went straight to the back house. He slammed the side of his fist once against the door. The door drifted open, clanked against the chain, and stopped.
"Hello? HELLO?"
He reached in, unhooked the chain, went inside, and tripped on a pile of black garbage bags. It was dark. The orange polyester curtains were shut. He pushed them open. He flipped on the kitchen light switch and got no light, but in the pale morning sunlight he saw the kitchen table, next to a bead-curtained archway into the living room, covered in plastic bags of plastic-sealed groceries. The fridge top was choked with full brightly-coloured yellow, blue and green bottles of cleaning supplies. Three half full bottles of orange antibacterial soap lay on a heap of moldy dishrags in the sink. Garbage bags were neatly stacked against the wall between the fridge and the stove.
Kelly sluiced barefoot through the bead curtain, bent over, and pulled a pair of orange suede sneakers from under the table. She squinted at Bertram and pulled the curtains shut. "I gotta go out," she said. "You can look at the place. It's not locked."
"When are you going to pay your rent and clean up? The place is listed for rent."
"Bruno and Kristen are gone. I've got to clean up by myself. I'll have it okay by the end of the month."
"What if someone wants to see it today?"
He heard her lacing her shoes. "I've got to go. Sorry man." She pushed past him.
"How can you live like this," he yelled after her. "How can you live with no power and rags rotting in your sink?"
He threw the curtains back again and pried open the windows above the sink and in the wall near the door. He heard a phone ring and plowed through beads into the living room. There were no curtains; sun streamed over garish wallpaper, an old plush couch with orange flowers and a brown wood-patterned pressboard coffee table with angled screw on legs. The coffee table was covered in chicken wire slathered with rough white plaster. The phone was jammed between two sofa cushions. Bertram yanked it free.
"Hello?"
"Is Kristen there?"
"No, I'm sorry, she's not."
"Where the hell is she? She's supposed to work today."
"I don't know. I'm looking for her too. Do you have another number for her?"
"Uh, no, sorry man. If you find her tell her if she misses work again she's fucking fired."
"If you see her tell her if she doesn't pay her rent she's fucking evicted."
The woman laughed. "Right," she said, and hung up.
The bathroom was off the living room, and had only one small marbled window. The bathtub was three inches deep with rusty water and the toilet brimmed. He closed the door and climbed the switchbacked wooden stairs to the bedrooms.
The first bedroom contained only an unmade legless bed, a box of crumpled women's clothes, and a long purple velvet curtain sewn with violet skeleton-key squares. The second bedroom was empty but for a decrepit black vinyl chair covered in duct tape, a large black vinyl beanbag, a tiny metal desk with fake wood top and an empty six-inch deep drawer. There were four plastic and chrome schoolroom chairs and a small stack of red bricks.
The last bedroom he guessed was Kelly's. There was an indigo iMac on a clean and unworn high-backed green computer desk piled with burned CD-Rs. Her futon lay on the floor covered with rumpled sheets and torn blankets. An open copy of Maxim lay face down on her bare, yellow-stained pillows. An anemic strawberry ivy hung in the window and there were four bricks stacked behind the door. Below the window were boxes and boxes of cameras and camera equipment, digital and SLR. The closet was stacked with tripods, and boxes of black and white prints crammed the shelves. Bertram glanced at a few. They were all female nudes.
The upstairs, he remembered, was once an open loft with wonderful light from all directions. The light was stil good -- good enough for three artists to scratch up Judith's doubtless tall rent -- but poorly finished drywall cutting the space into rooms gave a tenement quality to the whole house. One kick, he felt, would accordion-collapse down all three intruding rooms.
The plaster and chicken wire, he realized as he descended to the living room, were sculptures of oversized rotary dial telephones. Some were actually sandpapered smooth and painted with pastel lacquer and silver paint picking out the half-moon hooked return. Some had giant hands clutching them, made of pantyhouse stuffed with cotton and sewn into fat fingers and plushy palms. One of the telephones had a little wooden stick man climbing out the holes in the mouthpiece.
What he had taken for wallpaper was actually an enormous collage of bright red and green and yellow and black monotypes and etchings taped atop each other. Some of Kelly's monochrome nudes were tacked at the edges like caviar on a blini. He recognized a couple of women from the bar; they were actresses that had, he recalled, said they found a "good deal" for headshots. Pretty women. Pretty enough.
The houses full of trash felt alien and unhomelike. His old apartment was tiny and had a dozen problems, but he knew them all. Now he felt uncomfortably beholden to Judith, even if he was working for her. His bar came from Maruska's tenacious hard work and his home from his sister's romantic manipulations. He felt a thousand tiny pulls of commitments he never would have made intentionally and which were now consuming his life.
Posted by gtaylor at March 25, 2002 10:10 PM