TheyComeCrawling

They come crawling from all across America to her decrepit movie theater on Tenth Avenue and 49th Street. The woman behind the token booth window often imagines the points of origin from where they’ve come: the subway station down the street and around the corner, the crosstown bus stop on West 49th Street, Times Square’s blinking advertisements a few blocks over, a taxicab awaiting the fumbling in wallet for fare, a car parked discreetly a few blocks away near an office building . . . 1989 is just another year.

She gets up at nine every morning, washes her wispy hair and smokes her cigarette before taking out the rollers from her hair for the day; she chews on her bagels rather voraciously as she listens to Paul Harvey on the radio. She walks down two flights of stairs from her railroad flat on Eleventh Avenue, and enters a store to buy the day’s worth of groceries. She doesn’t like to leave the admission booth once she starts, except for trips to the bathroom; she likes sitting behind the thick glass partition, careful not to stare into the men’s faces and wonder how far they’ve come here.

***

They come crawling from all across America—oh yes she’s seen them all: the farmer boys wearing snap-button Western shirts, the businessmen’s loosened silk tie and rumpled handkerchief stuffed in a pocket, the teenage Bronx pickpockets with large bulges in tight jeans, the overly effeminate clotheshorses with bags from Bloomingdale’s, the silent flint-eyed older men with polyester trousers and Cuban heels, the tiny Asians in Americanizing T-shirts and Levi’s, the tall skinny blacks in Adidas and sweatpants, the moustached Puerto Ricans still groping about in the new English language, the deaf men readjusting the volume on their hearing aids, the men in wheelchairs whose eyes speak disappointment in knowing they will never be touched in the darkness inside, the men with their forearm canes debating whether they should try going through the turnstile or not . . .

She imagines stories of their lives, wracked with loneliness as much as hers. Small-town boys transformed into streetwise hustlers, shy boys transformed into wily predators in men’s rooms, aging boys transformed into members of their neighborhood’s health clubs, skinny boys transformed into drag queens, fat men transformed into nightly prey in the park: She shakes her head as if she’s seen one Paul Harvey story too many. Sometimes, late at night when she is masturbating, she recalls the truly gorgeous men with sudden clarity: the broad shoulders, the thick hands with trimmed nails as they open their wallets, the chiseled jaw, the cold but mesmerizing eyes. As she gives them their tickets, she wonders, Why do the beautiful ones have to be in there when they could be in love, holding hands and whispering sweet nothings elsewhere, like in the West Village? They could show how much more possible it was for two guys to stay in love. The Gay Pride weekend every June was never enough, although that was the biggest moneymaker of the year, easily compensating for the yearly losses.

She reads the Star, the National Enquirer and the Post, knowing full well that the beautiful ones never have quite everything. She reads the gossip closely, reassuring herself that she is not the only one with obsessive desires and secrets. She imagines herself, her name plastered across the front page with a younger and more slim version of herself, the reckless daughter of an equally reckless millionaire and slumlord, now passionately involved with both Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman. Those are the kind of men, not always a smooth handsome but a rather gritty clean-shaven, that she has a weakness for. When there is a long stretch of no one coming in, she gets caught up in such reveries and forgets to finish her cigarette.

***

They come crawling from all across America, their dreams and declarations of love marking them different from everyone else’s. The sophomore lust for the phys ed coach or geometry teacher soon turns into something else, something larger than themselves. They want cock, and they are driven time and again to unzip trousers and jeans of strangers seeking the same thing.

Everything they do is a desperate measure.

They hide their desires with their wedding rings given by their childhood sweethearts, 60-hours-a-week jobs, house repairs and Friday nights out with the boys in the Blue Goose Tavern. They guzzle beers — why, anything else would do just fine! — and snigger at cunt jokes while slapping each other on the back. They do not like being alone, except when they have to whack off to those private dreams of making out with one of the more benevolent Friday night buddies, and they are careful to keep busy. Even the TV must be on when they read the daily newspaper, mentioning how tired they’ve become again because -- because -- you know how bosses are, don’t you? They fall asleep, pretending the warmth of their wives to be emanating from Jack or Bill or Tom’s body; sometimes they have to get up to jerk off at the toilet — they won’t admit to themselves how excited they are about the prospect of fishing alone with Jack or Bill or Tom. They need all the reasons to enjoy being trapped in their marriages, and to remember why they are waiting. They allocate some of their money into a private savings account, waiting for the day they will flee to the big city and seek out the worst parts of town for those smoke-wafting movie palaces, filled with streetwise men who’ve been there and back. It’s only temporary, they tell themselves, but the conviction never sticks long enough because before they know it, they are driving back to those places.

***

They come crawling from all across America, the jugular veins in their necks throbbing with desire and disgust as they try to act suave pulling out their wallets to pay the rather exorbitant admission fee. In a glance they memorize — just in case! anything could happen in those places — the features of the fat woman whose curls are too obvious, but they do not look back. They are too afraid of the looks they might get from the passersby on Tenth Avenue, and of the scant possibility of being recognized.

The woman looks nonchalantly, almost defiantly, into the eyes of gawking tourists, and continues reading the Post when she notices a five-foot-ten blond trying not to make his cumbersome walk as obvious with his forearm crutches. She resists the impulse to smile — why, she feels quite touched! — and acts bored as she takes in his balding forehead, his gold-rimmed glasses, his thin lips. The crisp ten-dollar bill is tendered, and she pushes the ones into the window tray. She knows his kind: He’d rather wait in the dark and have cold hands fondle him to an empty orgasm instead of feeling the cold glances of rejection on the streets of the Village. Darkness is a salve for those who come here; she’s insisted more than once not to make the aisles, or the men’s restrooms, any brighter than they are.

As soon as the man takes his ticket and hobbles to the turnstile, she imagines what it must be like for him. What if his canes get stuck, or fall to the floor after he rests them on the other side of the turnstile? It must be always so humiliating, and she often wonders why he bothers to come here, or anywhere else for that matter. But he has to be careful not to dwell on why he comes to these places. He looks like his name could be Tony: “Tony, you’re so sweet, I’m surprised you don’t even have a boyfriend by now; Tony, don’t use your canes as excuses for not having a lover; Tony, your handicap is all in your head.”

She senses from his movements that he wants more than ever to spit back, “No, it’s not! Would you sleep with a cripple?”

She watches him lift his canes over the turnstile, probably relieved that the turnstile is not as difficult as some subway turnstiles are. He is ecstatic that he’s been able to look reasonably graceful in getting inside. There, she knows, he will walk slowly, letting his eyes accustom to the darkness. He moves carefully, plodding slowly across the flickering light ricocheting from the movie screen on hands stroking crotches. He looks up, staring quite brazenly into their eyes, as he knows he will be noticed anyway. It’s possible one of them might want to slip into the darkness later, just when he thinks everyone has forgotten he’s a cripple -- well, it’s happened before. She knows what it feels like, too. Nobody wants a fat woman of a certain age.

***

They come crawling out from all across America, and she feels different as she watches Tony stumbling his way out. Was he pleased? There is no indication on his face of what has happened, only stoic expressions of effort with his canes.

Later that night she weeps for the strangest reason. She cannot ask his name, and he cannot share his story. All that’s left is her imagination.