Gandalph Cohen & The Land at the End of the Working Day Read online

  Gandalph Cohen

  & The Land at the End of the Working Day

  Peter Crowther

  Introduction by Ian McDonald

  “Talk Time”

  Introduction by Ian McDonald

  Listen now. Not a lot of people know this, but in some alternate (and more honest) Earth, Pete Crowther is the man who shot Quentin Tarantino. When archeologists a thousand years up the line excavate the remains of late twentieth century society, they may well conclude that ours was a society that worshipped excrement. Trash, in every manifestation, was sacred. People were defined by what they threw away. The disposable was eternal, and the cultural middens of previous decades were dredged for ‘retro chic’ and ‘ironic cool’. Which is why, in an age when American culture—and that’s Planet earth culture, for good or ill—strip-mines its past and canonizes the ephemeral as ‘camp’, Pete Crowther is the nemesis of the ‘kitsch-cool’ of Quentin Tarantino. Quentin sneers at this stuff; Pete genuinely loves it.

  Listen now. You can hear it in every word on the pages that follow. Pure love for those concrete canyons, those salmonella hotdogs, those step-down bars and cheap hotels. For Pete has seen the true America beneath the neon, the one which defines itself not through cultural ephemera and tiresome jigs of ‘cool’, but by words. For this is how the world is constructed: not by the objects we buy and dispose of, but by the words we speak. People, talking to people, build the world we know and maintain its existence from moment-to-moment. And Pete understands, as do all the true mages, that if ever the Babelogue stops then the world disappears.

  For the true irony is that material things are un-enduring, while words—spoken, heard, blown away in a moment—are eternal. So listen now to the stories we tell ourselves. Nothing deep, nothing profound, no philosophical truths and dazzling insights, certainly nothing cool or ironic, except this: that people, talking to people, keep the world turning.

  That’s what this story—and this bar—is about: words. Words and melancholy.

  There’s comfort in melancholy. Who hasn’t looked at an Edward Hopper painting and imagined themselves at the end of that diner bar, at that table by the window, visible to the world through that sheet of glass and yet utterly private and enclosed? Who hasn?t enjoyed that prospect? For an hour, an evening, maybe a lifetime?

  We’re taught to fear melancholy. In our relentlessly ‘up’ age of creative visualisation and self-help psychobabble, if there’s a single moment of our days when we’re not radiating positivity, then it’s a sign of major personal failure. Let me tell you: melancholy matters. It’s old, it’s a fine vintage. Melancholy allows us to savour the small joys.

  The Land at the End of the Working Day is a place of beautiful melancholy and small joys. It’s that great New York bar where everyone knows your name. Of course it’s downstairs. People wear hats. There’s beer by the pitcher and martinis so dry on the vermouth they’re homeopathic. There’s soft jazz on the pa system and in the corner Tom Waits is practising scales.

  As writers we vainly imagine our words drive the world. We’re not far from the truth, but it’s not the recorded, imprisoned word on a page. It’s the ephemeral word, the spoken word. Words blowing from life to life; our conversations, our jokes, our witticisms and observations, all of them here for a moment, then gone. Can you remember that crack you made yesterday, that great one-liner than came out of nowhere, that simile, that sweet riposte? They’re gone. You throw them into the wind and they blow away. Conversation is perhaps the keenest of small joys. It is much more like a life than a book is. Conversation is one of the things that the Land at the End of the Working Day is about. The truth is another. And those small joys, those tiny moments of communion with another, must be savoured because they are so short and, like spoken words, they blow away.

  This is an urban fantasy. Let me explain that a little. In this time when urban fantasy is a sub-genre in itself, the hoary old medieval dreads and archetypes moved into town with credit cards and driving licences. This is a fantasy purely of and about the city. This is a fairytale of New York. The city is a super organism, the sum and more of the lives and activities it contains—and this is New York, goddammit: the city content about not being the capital of the United States, because it knows it’s the capital of the whole world instead.

  What might be the dreams and fears of the world’s greatest city? Go down to a place like The Land at the End of the Working Day and you just might hear them. We ride a wave of words a million years deep and that wave shows no sign of breaking? yet or ever.

  —Ian McDonald

  Gandalph Cohen

  & The Land at the End of the Working Day

  Waiting for his drink, thinking about Tom ‘Ankles’ Talese—an epithet (of sorts) earned over many years as a result of the fact that Tom spends so much time so far up the Chairman’s ass that his ankles are usually the only parts of his anatomy visible—McCoy Brewer watches himself in the large mirror propped up behind the bottles on the back counter at The Land at the End of the Working Day, playing back the events of the past few hours.

  The Working Day is a two-flight walk-down bar on the corner of 23rd and Fifth that not many people know about, even though it’s been here for almost eight years and is just a block away from ‘The Dowager of 23rd Street’, the Chelsea Hotel. It’s there that the tourists go with their Nikons and their Pentaxes, capturing each other’s vacuous smiling face on cheap film—a strangely talismanic process that somehow imbues their empty lives with a little art and, maybe, just a little history— to take the shaky and badly-cropped results home to bore their friends at the end of interminable dinner parties for which the level (not to mention the sheer invention) of last-minute cancellations never ceases to surprise them … strange illnesses and bizarre accidents, such as obscure relatives (from equally obscure out-of-state towns) who have cut off their feet with a lawnmower.

  In the early hours of a clear morning—spring or fall, summer or winter—when Jack Fedogan’s booze has been flowing and the conversation has been just right, you can walk up the Working Day’s steps and out onto the waiting street, and you can maybe hear Dylan Thomas eternally whispering to Caitlin that he’s happier here than anywhere else, and her telling him she feels that way too, their voices drifting on the Manhattan breeze the way only voices can drift, moving away for a while and then moving back, saying the same things over and over like cassette ribbons, proving that no sound ever dies but only waits to be heard again.

  So, too, do the voices of James Farrell—who really was the hero of his own book, Studs Lonigan … and don’t let anyone tell you different—and Arthur B. Davies, Robert Flaherty, O. Henry, John Sloan, Thomas Wolfe and Edgar Lee Masters, all of whose names are recorded forever on a plaque fixed to the red brick wall of the Chelsea, the ancient echoes of their soft words wafting up the ten storeys past ten little cast-iron balconies, there to drift around the gabled roof and maybe roost a while, watching the sun come up across the East River and the distant smoky towers of fabled Brooklyn.

  There are other voices, of course, and if you strain real hard maybe you’ll even pick up Martha Fishburn, a native of Des Moines, telling her husband Garry he drinks too much as he stumbles up onto the sidewalk of many months past … or Nick Hassam, a British would-be writer of American detective fiction, telling both the street and his wife of one week, Nicky, that he’s having the greatest honeymoon anyone could ever have, that this is the most magnificent city and she the most wonderful wife.

  The people who come to The Land at the End of the Working Day are no strangers to the voices that ride the cu
rrents around 23rd Street. Just as they’re no strangers to the voices inside Jack Fedogan’s fabled bar.

  Most nights, the ambiance in the Working Day is just about right: not too many people so that it’s crowded but enough so’s you don’t feel like a single coin shuffling in a lint-lined pocket, bereft of old friends and realizing you’re the next one to go. But no matter how many people, there’s always laughter in the air, and talk, and company.

  Tonight is different somehow.

  It’s different because the place is just about empty and it’s different because the night itself is different … hesitant and expectant, its cosmically existential heart as alive to the myriad possibilities that confront it as a lightbulb is to the eternal promise of a daily dose of electric current.

  McCoy Brewer watches the reflected world through the big mirror, accepts his dry martini and nods to Jack Fedogan, who grunts obligingly and then shuffles along the bar trailing his towel down the polished surface while McCoy takes a slug of almost pure gin. Almost pure because Jack Fedogan’s dry martini means he simply immerses a glass pipette into the vermouth, waits until most of the liquor has evaporated or dripped off onto the waiting tissue, and then briefly submerges the now little-more-than-scented implement into the waiting highball glass of iced gin. Strong but good.

  It’s a little after six pm and McCoy feels the winter in his bones.

  The drink helps some, but only some, managing to dispel the memory of the darkness of the early evening streets but failing to touch the greater ebony gloom in McCoy Brewer’s soul. He feels it course down his throat and he slides sideways onto a barstool, already thinking of the next martini and the one after that one. While he thinks, he watches the people in the mirror-world behind the bar.

  Over in back, in one of the booths, a woman sits against the wall, a lady lifted straight from the musty dog-eared pages of a Jim Thompson paperback original, her nylon-stockinged right leg propped up along the length of the mock-plastic cushioned seat, the high-heeled shoe hanging from her foot and swinging to and fro in the narrow aisle that gives onto the ornately carved three-foot-high balustrades separating the booths from the tables. She’s sipping a cocktail, her fourth since five o’clock, and she looks as though she’s nowhere near finished yet. Almost as though she can feel him watching her, the woman glances up and looks across the tables into the big mirror, sees McCoy looking at her through the glass, sees his eyes, and smiles briefly.

  McCoy nods, lifts his own drink and raises it in salute, watching his own reflection and that of the woman lift their own glasses in response and in the silent camaraderie of drinkers, two characters in a lost Edward Hopper painting, swimming the dark seas of nighttime and solitude.

  The woman’s name is Rosemary Fenwick—a fact which McCoy will learn later—and she is drinking Manhattans to the memory of a husband and son she left behind in Wells, on the New England Atlantic coast, almost a year ago, seeing their faces in her mind’s eye superimposed on the face of the man in the barroom mirror, never having heard from them in all that time, silently wondering, now, this night, what they’re doing.

  Only one of the tables has people sitting at it. It’s a quiet night in the Working Day, unusually quiet. But maybe it has something to do with the mood of the streets outside. Sometimes the streets have a frenetic quality, a nervousness that splashes up unseen from the pavement and the sidewalks and seeps into the people of Manhattan like radiation, giving birth to uncertainty and a need to consolidate and re-group, maybe around a cocktail or two or a couple pitchers of beer.

  The streets disguise this activity under a cloak of subterfuge … worries about money, about health, about work and about the faithfulness of partners. But it’s the city and, deep down, most people recognize this, though only a few acknowledge it. For nothing that ever happens in the city happens without both its knowledge and its approval.

  At the table midway between Rosemary Fenwick and McCoy Brewer, two men sit hunched around a pitcher of beer. They’re exchanging stories, telling jokes. Telling them in the slurred tone that comes with the temporary abandonment only liquor can give, laughing as they recount and sometimes even before they hear the punchline.

  Jim Leafman works by day in the City’s Refuse Department, collecting garbage … sometimes picking up broken and discarded memories thrown out along with the ends of greening cheese and bacon rinds. His wife, Clarice, is having an affair with a salesman who sells office furniture, wood-veneered desks with pull-out work surfaces, and who lives one block away from their 23rd Street apartment. She thinks Jim doesn’t know about it, but Jim knows. He’s smelled the cologne that isn’t his and he’s imagined the hands that aren’t his traveling around his wife’s body, imagined Clarice whispering No … no, but really meaning Yes … oh, yes! … something Clarice hasn’t said to her husband in a long time, a time that Jim has measured only in gained pounds, thinning hair and punishing credit card bills.

  Jim has parked up outside the man’s apartment building, sitting out on the street in a ’74 Oldsmobile that’s two parts yellow and eight parts rust, its muffler held in place with hope and Scotch tape, watching the doorway, nursing his old .38 in his lap like it was a baby, waiting for the traveling salesman to show. Jim has seen this guy, seen him a couple times now, watched him strolling along the sidewalk like he didn’t have a care in the world, strolling along in his Gucci loafers and his soft-woven plaid jacket, pants with front creases that could cut meat, immaculate hair swept back and held in place like Cary Grant or an underworld hoodlum out of a Scorcese movie. Then, on these occasions, Jim has glanced in the rear-view, seen his own jowly face and pasty complexion, and he’s decided that a guy doesn’t deserve to die simply because he looks good any more than a guy deserves to die simply because he looks like a small-town department-store-window mannequin, its plastic skin worn and dented by the years and the constant magnified sunlight.

  After some thought, on one of these occasions, Jim has also decided a woman doesn’t deserve to die simply because she wants to do better. But these decisions have taken their toll and Jim Leafman is now in need of a joke.

  So, too, is Edgar Nornhoevan, one-time-big but now slimmed off some, slimmed off a little too much some … like the guy in the Stephen King book who just keeps on losing weight and can’t do anything about it no matter how much chow he puts away. Edgar Nornhoevan, bearded and full of bluster, even though it feels like he’s passing broken glass when he pees, a thin trickle that falls from his penis in drops instead of powering against the back of the stall the way he hears other men pee when he’s standing there, concentrating on his flow the way his doctor has told him. This same doctor has told Edgar it’s a problem with the prostate and he’s having Edgar take pills that seem to help a little. But Edgar has also had some tests, one of which involved the doctor running a tiny seeing-eye down his penis and then staring, one eye closed, into the end as he twisted the thing around inside Edgar.

  Lying there with his dick feeling like it was on fire, feeling like he needed to pee worse than ever before in his whole life, all 53 years of it, Edgar watched the doctor, saw him frown, twisting the tiny seeing-eye back and forth in his belly, heard him let out a tiny groan, an Oh, dear oh dear groan, like the doc was seeing something that he didn’t want to see, something that didn’t ought to be there in Edgar Nornhoevan’s stomach, something maybe like the thing that burst from John Hurt’s guts in that Alien movie a few years back.

  The doctor told Edgar, as he was pulling his pants on—Edgar, not the doctor—still feeling like his dick was on fire, that he was going to send off a swab for analysis but that, certainly—that’s the word he used: certainly—the prostate seems unusually large. The results came back two days ago, since which time Edgar has been hitting the juice … drinking for two, is how he tells Jim Leafman.

  So, yes, Edgar needs to laugh right now.

  “Hey Mac,” Jim Leafman shouts across to McCoy Brewer, “you too good to sit with us these days?” Jim has
just been told a joke about a guy with a bad flatulence problem which ends with the line ‘You’re wrong about the smell’ and he’s still laughing. Jim laughs a little louder and harder than he needs to do mainly because he’s covering up the fact that until a few minutes ago he didn’t know ‘flatulence’ was just a two-dollar word for ‘farting’.

  McCoy turns around and beams a big smile, raises his glass and moves away from the bar, moves a little reluctantly, reluctant because he doesn’t really want to talk to anyone right now. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone because he’s just lost his job, this very day, his job with the Midtown & Western Trust & Loan, the only company in the city with two ampersands in its name. Right now, staring in the big mirror, McCoy Brewer doesn’t care squat about ampersands—he just wants to come to terms with corporate speak, words like ‘downsizing’ and ‘outsourcing’, words he doesn’t know whether they’re hyphenated or not.

  As he walks across, McCoy hears Jim Leafman keeping the fart joke rolling with a few one-liners, schoolyard rhymers like, “He who smelt it dealt it,” to which Edgar Nornhoevan says, pointing his finger in mock accusation, “Hey, you do the crime, you do the time!”

  McCoy pulls up a chair, says, “Hey.”

  Jim waves him and carries on chuckling, shaking his head as he pours another glass of beer from the pitcher.

  “Hey, listen up now,” Edgar says, leaning across the table, resting a hand on McCoy’s arm by way of greeting. “You ever wondered why a man’s dick is shaped the way it is?” He looks at Jim, sees he’s not about to get anything reasonable by way of a reply and turns to McCoy. “Mac?”

  “Uh uh,” McCoy says, truthfully.

  “I mean,” Edgar goes on, looking around to see if anyone is listening, forgetting that, apart from the woman, the woman who always seems to be in here, so regular she’s almost like one of the chairs or a pile of beer coasters, “you know-” He draws the shape of a penis in the air in front of him, accentuating the large end of the shaft. “—Why it’s wider at the end than it is on the shaft?”