Well, it took three weeks before I first dropped into Jumping Donuts on the corner of Bleeker and Hudson, where, between 10pm and 5am three nights a week, my girlfriend Nancy worked. This was because it was only after three weeks that I actually realised Nancy was my girlfriend. Or perhaps it was only then that I had first decided that me and Nancy had better get down to talking about whether she was my girlfriend or not.
Because up until then mine and Nancy’s relationship had been like a Venn diagram, you see. Me – one big circle of emptiness, a few abandoned hobbies and passions, the odd regretted infatuation, a dozen fantasies and dreams, and a half finished MA thesis entitled The Reception of Existentialism in the Anglo-American Intellectual Community 1930-1960. Nancy herself was one big sphere of the unknown, one big circle I wanted to eclipse with mine. And then there was that small indefinable intersection where our vacant sets met, our lives collided, or perhaps brushed gently against one another over those 30 years, and it was to that vacuum that I decided to cling.
Sweet, sweet Nancy.
I was 22 and a half at the time and Nancy, well, I never knew her age before our little sets first “venned,” as you might say, in a bar off campus called the South Berg. Johnny Go Go was appearing with the third incarnation of his band that night, The Boy Scout Love Triangle: Johnny Go Go on guitar, his pal and servant Dave Mackenzie on bass and Johnny’s new pint-sized girlfriend Noisy Nora on drums, who always opened her mouth like that girl in Munch’s The Scream as she beat out the band’s primitive rhythms to the song Jean Paul Sartre and Heidegger Get Laid. And as Dave Mackenzie gazed at his shoes and Johnny Go Go broke one of the strings of his Rickenbacker halfway through the second verse, I first noticed Nancy next to me, among the sparse group of friends providing moral support in the cramped cavern of the Berg. It was the way her head bopped with no rhythm, the disjointed movement of her lips out of synch with all melody in that room, that caught my attention. And the tears welling up in her eyes.
For the more Johnny Go Go’s hand began to bleed, the more Nancy appeared to weep to Jean Paul Sartre and Heidegger Get Laid, sobbing quietly without making a noise. Now Jean Paul Sartre and Heidegger Get Laid, with its upbeat Bo Diddley refrain, was not the kind of song you cried to, nor expressed any emotion to for that matter, but saw only as a source of quiet relief that another gig of The Boy Scout Love Triangle was coming to an end. For the songs of the BSLT had never stirred any stronger feelings in me than a mild sense of restlessness, a passing amnesia and, on the odd occasion, acid reflux. And so I knew that Nancy’s despair had nothing to do with what was going on on stage. I knew, or hoped, that Nancy’s grief lay elsewhere. Her grief was, I hoped, existential. Because at the age of 22 and a half, the only kind of love I craved had to have a good, healthy dose of nothingness at its base.
Jean Paul Sartre and Heidegger Get Laid came to its abrupt conclusion and Johnny Go Go grimaced through the wistful ballad Playing with Myself on a Monday Afternoon, two streaks of blood by now smeared across his Rickenbacker, making it look like a half-finished Jackson Pollock. Noisy Nora was already slowly dismantling the drums, Dave Mackenzie was examining some dried chewing gum on his shoes and the guests were retreating to the bar. And yet Nancy still stood there next to me. She bit her lip, cleared the black eyeliner smudge from her eyes and she listed towards me like the Titanic. She was not going to go away. Because she had nowhere to go to. And I, clutching my two volumes of the Partisan Review 1946-47, had nowhere to retreat to either.
“Why are you so sad?” I said, and then wished I had said nothing at all.
“I’ve had a hard week, that’s all,” she sighed.
“A hard week?”
“Just a hard week,” she said, swallowing bitterly.
And then we ran out of things to say.
The gig had by now come to an end. Johnny Go Go was bandaging his hand with a serviette, wincing badly. Noisy Nora was yelling at him from behind her half-dismantled hi-hats, just like all his other girlfriends had screamed at him, all those diminutive percussionists who had entered Johnny’s life and were conscripted into the rhythm section of The Boy Scout Love Triangle. The two volumes of The Partisan Review 1946-1947 weighed heavily in my hands. I knew there was only one thing I could say to Nancy if she was not to slip away. I had to say something existential.
So I said:
“I have a cat in my apartment.”
And Nancy started crying once more. But this was not sobbing out of self pity, nor the kind of snivelling you did because someone no longer loved you, or, deep down you realised in some kind of epiphany, never had. This was the sort of crying where you bit hard into your lower lip, to the point where you may or may not draw blood. This was the sort of sobbing you did when you were staring into an abyss. The abyss of a small cow town, with a tiny campus where the only entry requirements for a degree were your fingerprints and a pulse. The kind of abyss that only a 22 and a half year old rocking two volumes of Partisan Review in his arms could see.
And then Nancy gazed up out of that bottomless pit and she said:
“So, let’s go and see your cat, then.”
I had, I admit, not expected that. I also had to admit that I had never expected to meet a girl like Nancy. I had only ever thought I would read novels about girls like Nancy. Or should I say, rather, read poetry about girls like Nancy. Or not so much ‘read’ as ‘write’ poetry about girls like Nancy, half finished stanzas concocted in my own bedroom when I was 17. And yet there she was that night, in the South Berg, the reincarnation of my own sonnets beside me now, and wanting to see my cat.
So I congratulated Johnny Go Go on the gig, as I had at all the others. I shook his left hand as Noisy Nora half-heartedly bandaged his right, her face crimson and perplexed, and I knew that the third incarnation of The Boy Scout Love Triangle was already doomed. Me and Sweet Nancy then slipped out of the South Berg, me leading the way and she always a few steps behind as we headed up Hudson towards my apartment only three blocks up. We walked at a slow pace, because Nancy insisted on that, dragging out life to its minimum. From time to time she came to a halt by one of the dozens of 24 hour food take-outs that lined Hudson, tut tutting and discarding a half-smoked cigarette on the sidewalk like an unwanted pet one week after Christmas. As we walked, halted, and walked again, I tried to fill out our swelling little Venn diagram with more nothingness.
“Where do you live?” I said.
“Arlington,” she said.
“Ah, near the airport.”
“Not near the airport. Nowhere near the airport.”
Then there was silence between us once more. I shouldn’t have mentioned the airport. It was stupid of me to mention the airport. I should stick to cats, not airports.
“So you like cats, then?” I said.
“I hate cats. I hate animals… But I wouldn’t put them in a microwave.”
Nancy then tut tutted once more and walked to the other side of the street, keeping up a slow even pace and not even knowing where I lived. She walked on her side of Hudson. I walked on mine. A convertible pulled up on my side. Three Frat boys. Three Sorority sisters. They saw my glasses, saw my two volumes of The Partisan Review and index cards. “Fag. Fag,” they said. “Fag, fag,” as their Budweiser cans came raining down on me like a hail of brimstone. Such, sadly, is the plight of the existentialist in this town.
I crossed to the other side of the street where I caught up with Nancy as she was gazing at the logo of Hudson’s Taco Bell, seeking the noumena behind the neon.
“So you hate all animals?” I said.
“I prefer microwaves,” she said.
And then we ran out of things to say once more. We both stared at the Taco Bell logo above our heads for a while. And then I decided to return to my side of Hudson. Nancy remained on hers.
We soon arrived at my apartment, a tiny bachelor pad full of books about Heidegger, Merleau Ponty, Jean Paul Sartre, and Habermas. Full of books, too, sent by my mother over the years, and propped on a pile of bricks by the bathroom: The Book of Fat Guy Jokes, 100 Great Fart Jokes and The Hypochondriac’s Handbook. Because my mother had only the faintest grasp of the basic tenets of ontology and phenomenology. The apartment was blandly furnished, with none of the cluttered clumsiness that you could use to call it a home. A few rugs thrown here and there, the odd books and papers distributed on the floor, but all with sterile premeditation. Nancy took up residence on her knees at the far end of the mattress, my green marble ashtray propped on her knees, worshipping it like a little Buddha. She looked at my cat with resignation and stared at my microwave with disgust. She looked at many things in my flat with disgust. I searched through my CD collection, looking for something that might faintly resemble an abyss:
I put on some Serge Gainsbourgh.
“It’s shit,” she said, staring at the ashtray in her hands.
I put on the Buzzcocks.
“It’s shit,” she said.
I put on the existential Gorecki’s 6th Symphony.
“It’s shit. And don’t put on the Keith Jarrett. It’s shit, too.”
I had exhausted my record collection. But at least Nancy had exhausted her tears. I sat down cross-legged at the other end of the mattress in resignation as Nancy turned the ash tray first clockwise and then anti-clockwise.
“So how are you feeling now?” I asked her, still worried about her tears.
Nancy rolled her eyes upwards in disdain and sighed a painful sigh. She put the ashtray down on the floor, walked over to my pile of books, flicked cursorily through the Habermas and then more studiously perused the 100 Great Fart Jokes.
“I exist,” she said.
And so I put Nancy’s age at 20. Or perhaps 19 and a half. But I was only 22 and a half, so if a girl only existed, well, there was at least a chance she was the kind of girl I could get on with.
And then Nancy sighed once more, her body now leaning against the book case, slowly rocking back and forth, gently head butting my collection of Habermas critiques, like a Jew at the Wailing Wall. And then she herself began to wail. She wailed loudly, wailed so that my neighbours could hear. A wail of despair and of self-hatred. I had never envisaged Nancy wailing in all those half finished poems I wrote about her in my teenage years. I had only imagined Nancy standing on a bridge staring wistfully into the distance. I had also imagined that Nancy would have big tits, too. But she never howled in my couplets, never head-butted my Habermas. And now I realised that Nancy didn’t have a career. That Nancy only existed. And that of course existentialist chicks don’t have large breasts.
And then she went quiet and turned round and looked at the mattress:
“Can I sleep here?” she said.
“Yes, I’ve got a shirt if you like.”
“I will sleep as I am,” she sighed once more.
Nancy took off her dark brown trench coat, like something from Little Red Riding Hood in Chernobyl, crawled over on all fours to the other side of the mattress and curled up like a foetus, her back towards mine. And there we lay, she coiled up like a Spartan hopolite, and me curled behind her, trying to find a union, trying to get my circle into hers. I breathed in her hair and I still smelt Hudson. Hudson and gyros. And something sickeningly sweet, too. I kissed the back of her neck, ignoring that off-putting saccharine scent that clung to her black polo neck. She elbowed my chest hard. I shifted away:
“It’s strange this, me and you,” I whispered to the back of her neck.
“You don’t know me,” she said.
“Well, at least you’re not crying now,” I said.
“I exist,” she said.
Nancy whispered something else after that, too, which I did not hear as she slipped from being to nothingness. I left her with her empty chronology and I turned onto my stomach, resigned to a night of isolation and insulation. I had known many girls on campus who I had tried to eclipse with my own circle, chicks who had said to me “I am an architect”; who had said “I am an artist”; who had said “don’t worry, be happy”; who had said “you smoke too much”; who had said “I was locked up by my mother in a cupboard for a whole afternoon when I was six years old”; who had screamed in my ear at the gigs of the BSLT “rock and roll baby!!”. But when I came to think of it I had never known a woman in this town who had existed before.
When I woke up around 11, Nancy was gone.
But I still smelt her sweetness there.
Sweet, sweet Nancy.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Boy Scout Love Triangle imploded in the next gig. Noisy Nora refused to play. Johnny Go Go had to soothe and coax her back onto the stage as the third incarnation of The Boy Scout Triangle disintegrated before my eyes. I knew that Noisy Nora would not be back for the third gig. And perhaps Dave Mackenzie would not be there for the fifth. But I also knew that Boy Scout Love Triangle would go on forever. As long as Johnny Go Go was dating Amy Dubin on the sly.
Both times Nancy arrived in time for Jean Paul Sartre and Heidegger Get Laid. Each time she looked as if she would rather be anywhere in the world than in the South Berg, anywhere in the world than beside me. She did not motion towards me, nor even acknowledge my presence. As if she were waiting for someone else, biting her lip, staring at the floor, smoking and half dead. No, not quite dead. Existing. Which, in this cow town, was surely the closest thing to being dead.
And Nancy was crying too, little rivulets of anger running down her cheeks.
“A bad week?” I said, clasping 20 photocopied pages of the Ontological Review.
“Let’s go and see that fucking cat of yours,” she said.
So we returned to my apartment. I had rearranged its faux detritus to create more chaos. I had placed a plate of half finished spaghetti on the floor. I had bought some kind of ethnic statue too. And yet, I had failed abysmally to wipe away the underlying order. Nancy sat at the corner of my bed that second night, reached into her bag, adorned with a black and white photo of Patti Smith. Patti Smith exposing her unshaved armpits. I thought of Nancy’s armpits. Surely unshaved, too. Nancy took out a notebook and a green pen and then started writing things in green ink.
“What are you scribbling?” I said. I fidgeted uncomfortably, cocking my cigarette upwards a la Sainge Gainsbourgh, feeling like a guest, a gatecrasher on my own mattress.
“Things. Ideas. Poetry,” she said.
“You know I am writing too,” I said, sitting at my end, writing nothing.
“What do you write?” she sighed, staring up at the ceiling.
I told Nancy about myself, leaning my head against the Tiger Tom stuffed toy my mother had bought me to block the draughts during those Midwestern winters. I told Nancy about my thesis about existentialism in America. I told her about my adviser, Professor Regensberger, who said my thesis would be turned into a book. I told her that Professor Regensberger had even mentioned my name at conferences. That I was writing about big things, big ideas. He said how my ideas were important, ground breaking for a small, dead-end campus like this. I told her I was going to go to the University of Chicago to do a Ph.D. That Professor Regensberger was going to recommend me. But I also told her that I hadn’t seen Professor Regensberger for longer than five minutes in the last three months, that Professor Regensberger had looked at my early chapters and corrected every comma without mentioning anything about the ideas. That Professor Regensberger was no longer interested in my ideas, but only in my commas. Still, I told Nancy about the ideas in my thesis, about Habermas and Heidegger and the communication of ideas, and said I didn’t care about commas.
And then Nancy sighed. She yawned ostentatiously. She feigned her own death on the mattress. I thought I had killed her with existentialism. But then she sprang to her feet.
“Could you excuse me one moment?” she said.
Her face had turned ashen. Her lips trembled. I knew she was going to cry again. She got up, went to my bathroom and there I heard her put the lid down. But I heard no one peeing. Instead she sat there and screamed. She screamed for five minutes. “Oooooooooooooohhhhh Jeeeeeeesusss. Fuuuuuuuuck.” She broke something inside, too. Kicked things. I then heard her head banging against my shower cubicle. But I knew there was nothing substantial in my bathroom. Nothing precious there that I needed to replace.
When Nancy came out a small pool of water was seeping into the room from the bathroom. She sat back down on the mattress and glared at the wall.
“That’s not writing you’re doing,” she said.
I sank back into Tiger Tom in despair.
“Then what is it?”
“Scribbling,” she said. And then she began to write some more.
That was the last time I told Nancy about the Reception of Existentialism in the Anglo-American Intellectual Community 1930-1960.
And as Nancy continued to write, crossing out one sentence and starting another, I slowly moved over the mattress until I was sitting cross legged in front of her, both of us staring at the ashtray, which suddenly filled up the void of that intersection where our lives met. And then I leaned over to kiss her. I tried to prise open her lips. But at first they could not be prised. Then, for a brief moment her lips parted, her hands still gripping the marble Buddha. But then, with my tongue seeking asylum in her mouth, Nancy whispered “no” and my tongue was unceremoniously deported. I hesitated. I tried to pull her closer to me, but felt friction in her listless body. I then pushed myself on top of her, not too aggressive of course, just to set the ball in motion. She lay on the mattress below me, offering little resistance. She just went dead in my arms.
“You are weak,” she said, staring at my forehead, staring at some imaginary hole between my temples. “You should go to the gym.”
Such was foreplay with an existentialist.
I gave up. Wounded, I beat a hasty retreat back to the stuffed tiger. Nancy then stubbed out her cigarette, crawled over to the other side of the bed, curled up in a ball with her back to mine. And there we lay, side by side, our bodies brushing against each other, exchanging a modicum of warmth, like North Korea and South Korea.
“You’re weak,” she sighed from her side of the mattress. “So fucking weak.”
The following morning, I woke up and Nancy was not there. I hadn’t expected her to be. But the smell of her tobacco lingered. The smell of her armpits, too. I inhaled her odour trapped in the long giant stuffed Tiger Tom that Nancy overnight had removed from by the door and placed as a buffer between my love and hers. And lurking below that odour was that sickly sweet smell. A smell I could not put my finger on. I inhaled it and immediately felt sick.
Sweet, Sweet Nancy.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
A few weeks later I was up on the tenth floor of the campus library filling up my index cards with nothing of substance. I found a cucumber wrapped in a condom and smeared with Vaseline sandwiched between the thick black volumes of Phenomenological Investigations. But then again I always found a cucumber smeared with Vaseline on Thursdays next to the shelf with Phenomenological Investigations, and other soft unpalatable things under my feet, too. Existentialists and perverts gathered in fairly equal numbers on the tenth floor. And another Venn diagram brewed in my head.
That night I made my way back through all the dirt and tiredness of Hudson, a river of gyro juice and chilli sauce under my feet, three volumes of Phenomenological Investigations under my arms. But ahead of me I saw a pool of halogen light breathing life onto the sidewalk outside. I had passed Jumpin Donuts a thousand times before and rarely ever looked inside. But this, the 1001st time, I hesitated as I caught sight of Nancy out of the corner of my eye, standing behind the long counter, donned in an amber and blue pinafore, a jug of black coffee in her hand, her pinafore lightly dusted with white powder. And Nancy, I could see, was smiling.
I had never seen an existentialist smile before.
I had never seen my girlfriend smiling before.
If, that is, Nancy was my girlfriend.
I went inside and sat on the stool closest to the door, as far away from Nancy as possible. I took out my index cards from my backpack, opened the first volume of Philosophical Investigations and cursorily read a text about “secular confession” in Kierkegaard and Walt Whitman. Outside I saw the tail end of the running between the convertibles and the frat types on the one hand and the existentialists on the other. Inside I smelt the pervading Bismark Twists and felt the menace of small talk around me.
Nancy was pouring a biblical flood of coffee into the cups of two young students with thrift store shirts and baby goatees hiding anonymous puppy faces. The “poets” tried crossing their legs this way and that. They tried to shape their words with self conscious articulation. They tried to squeeze a little assurance and erudition into their puffed up faces as the other waitress on my side of the cafe stuffed cream custard into the puffed up dough. The “poets” bombarded Nancy with a series of questions, each time their bravado deflating like a slow puncture: What do you do when you’re not working, Nancy? Where do you come from? Do you study? What’s your favourite movie? Questions I had never asked Nancy, secrets I had thought too puerile to ask a girl who existed. And over and over again, when Nancy retreated to serve another customer coming in for a take out of half a dozen vanilla custard twists, the “poets” said to each other: “That Nancy’s so fucking sweet.”
The two “poets” left after an hour. Their places were taken by three engineering students, Lebanese I believe, smartly dressed in shirts and ties. They were more forthcoming than the “poets”, their bodies leaning a little over the counter, rather than away. Their questions were more suggestive, too, although in good taste. What is your telephone number, Nancy? Would you like to come with us to New York for the weekend, Nancy? How about Paris? Do you have a boyfriend, Nancy? Would you like to have a boyfriend? Nancy smiled and said nothing as she glided from the back kitchen to the counter. She poured them coffee and blushed.
The Lebanese students eventually abandoned their gentle assault. One of them even kissed her hand before he left. Nancy blushed again. “Sweet, sweet Nancy,” they called her over and over again, and unlike the “poets” they called her “Sweet Nancy” to her face. Before I could take one of their vacant seats, it was taken by a drunk in loud red braces over a frilly white shirt that made him look like a parody of a German composer. He stank of alcohol, too. The “composer” stared at Nancy, following her movements as she cleaned the coffee machine, emptying the filters, putting fresh ones in. Then he shouted out “Hey, Nancy, when was the last time you had sex?” And then “Hey Nancy, do you fake your orgasms?” The “composer’s” words were designed more for the other customers than Nancy, who giggled uncomfortably. The other waitress then came to Nancy’s rescue. “Hey, shut the fuck up, Hines!” she screamed with the voice of a walrus. Her arms were tattooed; her strawberry blonde hair was tied into a pony tail that almost strangled the scalp. “Nancy’s had a hard day. I’ve had a hard day. And I’m not taking any more bullshit from you. So shut the fuck up, Hines”. Hines giggled, but was subdued. “So how are you, Mary?” Hines asked the other waitress. “Just shut the fuck up Hines,” said Mary as she pumped a life blood of jam into the dough. And then Hines smiled meekly at Mary, got up and started dancing, waving his hands as if conducting an invisible orchestra, encouraged by the other customers.
At 4:55am, with the place now almost empty, two cops came in, fat and friendly, taking their seat where the “poets” had begun the evening. They shared a joke with Mary who laughed raucously yet emptily, drowning the place in her own presence. They asked Mary if Nancy had had any trouble that night. They asked Mary to take care of Sweet Nancy, to make sure Nancy found a nice boy. And Mary put her arm round Nancy as Nancy removed her apron, whispered something in Nancy’s ear, a girl’s piece of gossip, a girl’s view of a dirty world filled with dirty men. Mary laughed once more, showing her pierced tongue. And Nancy blushed. By now her arms, her pinafore and her shirt were covered in a thin film of caster sugar.
I left Jumpin Donuts at that point without an answer. I walked up half a block to the Burger King and there I took up position as I waited for Nancy to emerge a few moments later. She stood outside Jumpin Donuts, neither surprised to see me, nor underwhelmed. She took out a cigarette and began to smoke. And then she walked up to Burger King. She stood there for a few moments examining my face. That rosy glow I had seen all night in Jumpin Donuts had gone. All that vulnerability and helplessness had evaporated. And now there was just a sense of bitter disappointment in her eyes. And that fucking abyss once more.
We started walking back up Hudson, she on her side of the street, me on mine. After a while I crossed over to her side. I caught up with her outside Taco Bell. There were so many questions I could have asked Nancy then, put a category on things between us. But all I was able to do was look at her Patti Smith bag and I knew all I could do at that moment was lie. Lie to Sweet Nancy.
I said:
“My cat misses you.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Sometimes I saw Nancy on the campus bus that brought in students from the suburbs whose driving licences had been suspended. I would see her on those rainy days when I could not be bothered to walk to the library. Nancy usually occupied a seat at the back of the bus, her head leaning against the window, drawing circles in the steamed window, mystical symbols it seemed to me, or something suitably esoteric. Sometimes I sat a few seats away. Sometimes I sat opposite. Once I even sat next to her. Just to observe. Just to put a category on things.
Once or twice I saw her in Big Bear, too, navigating a shopping trolley with little forward momentum. I hoped to fathom her existence, her etre pour soir, in Big Bear. But all I saw of Sweet Nancy was that she bought the bulk of her provisions from the macaroni and cheese section. All I knew was that Nancy never spent more than 7 dollars 50 cents on furthering her etre pour soir. And before I ever mustered the courage to approach her, ask her whether or not she was my girlfriend, Nancy was always gone. But I knew that Nancy wanted it that way.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
But mostly I saw her at Jumpin Donuts, where I always occupied the stool closest to the exit, just in case Nancy got uncomfortable with me there. After all, I didn’t want to come down on her too heavy. I would just bide my time.
The waitresses on my side of the counter usually took a shine to me. After all, I never gave them any hell like Hines and the other reprobates did. I just drank my coffee and sat there quietly. And they respected that. They sometimes asked me what all my index cards were about. I told them about Heidegger and Sartre and The Reception of Existentialism in the Anglo-American Intellectual Community 1930-1960. But they usually only had a few minutes at a time to digest my thoughts on Heidegger before they had to go back to the donut machine, or joke with the refuse guys who always came in at 3am. And then some of them like Mary would slip me some lemon twists for free and forget about what I had said to her about Heidegger.
Mary told me she wanted to get into film. She told me she’d done a few “shorts”, mini film diaries, mainly of people sitting on benches, and a 20 minute narrative about a small skinhead boot-making factory on the East Side. She sometimes invited me up to her apartment above Jumpin Donuts to see her “shorts”. And then Mary was no longer some hard, tough Aztec warrior, nor a walrus, but soft as a seal, all emotional blubber. And I would nod politely, change the subject as I saw Nancy out of the corner of my eye, blushing at the English lit grads who used long words like “deconstruction” with my love and tried to seduce her with subordinate clauses and earnestness. I tried catching her eye at these moments, but Nancy acted as if I wasn’t there.
After a while Mary was replaced by Vanessa on my side of the counter, thin and invisible and still with acne in her late twenties. I took Vanessa out on Wednesdays, sometimes. We went to the Micro cinema where we would watch Slovenian and Kazakh films, films which I did not understand, but which I knew Vanessa studied closely with that glazed look of hers as if she were hypnotised. I asked her if she liked the films. She said “yes” and “no”, depending on her tastes. Because Vanessa didn’t like to talk much. Sometimes, after the films, we went to one of those vegan places on King Avenue, where from time to time, I would see Nancy sitting on her own, scribbling things in that notebook of hers, rolling her eyes and scribbling out. And even there I heard some of them call her Sweet, Sweet Nancy.
Vanessa in turn was followed by Brenda who shaved her head like Sinead O’Conner, a recent graduate of the Faculty of Contemporary Dance who danced like a cross between a robot and a sunflower. I would sometimes watch Brenda stretching in the back room, and sometimes in her apartment above Wendy’s where I would lie on her couch on those nights when Nancy wasn’t working. And Brenda would make her strange arching movements whilst I underlined Either/Or for no particular reason and Brenda told me that her boyfriend was beating her with a sigh.
Brenda in turn was followed by Patti, then by Lisa and by others whose names now slip my mind. Some of them I spoke to. Some I never spoke to at all. Mostly they had a soft spot for me, although often they didn’t care. Many had circles I fully eclipsed with mine, chock a block we were with shared hobbies, gossip, fears and thoughts, till there was no empty space left, till we almost suffocated one another on my side of the Jumpin Donuts counter. But still I saw Nancy out of the corner of my eye, maneuvering her blue collar hips between the coffee percolator and the chocolate Bismarks, still trying to work out what was going on between me and her.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
And then came Amy.
The first day Amy worked at Jumpin Donuts the customers ignored her completely. On the second day, however, two “poets” arrived with goatees cling wrapping confused faces. For a while the two poets stood there in the middle of the aisle not sure where to sit. They looked over at Nancy on the far side, elbows propped on the counter, talking to a truck driver, examining the calluses on her hand. They looked over at Amy, her pinafore covered in glaze, her face crimson with embarrassment. After some hesitation they plumped themselves down in front of Amy.
They asked her:
What do you do when you’re not working, Amy? Where do you come from? Do you study, Amy? What’s your major? What’s your favourite movie? Do you like Camus, Amy? And Amy went red and whispered her non-committal answers. And I looked at Nancy, at her hard steady gaze. I looked at the two truck drivers on Nancy’s side, who cracked a few jokes with her and I knew underneath that irony was something hard and physiological. “I’ll get that Nancy to suck….” was all they murmured as Nancy walked away. But Nancy heard their dirty talk as she prepared a Mocha. She turned around and stared at the two men. But she did not blush. Instead she smiled a criminal smile.
I waited for Nancy outside that night, waited with an important announcement.
“My cat’s died,” I said.
Nancy took the news in her stride.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The first time I heard Nancy laugh was when Cat came to work on my side of Jumpin Donuts. It was in the summer of ‘88 and the night the skate punks were interrogating the new girl with the shaven head but the face of an angel: Would you like to come with us to Chicago for the weekend, Cat? How about Toledo? Do you have a boyfriend, Cat? Would you like to have a boyfriend, Cat?
And that’s when I saw Nancy engaged in banter with one of those fat and friendly cops. She was smiling at some lurid comment they had just made. And then she began to laugh at what one of the cops had just said. Her laugh lasted longer than any joke would merit. She began to shriek until she was red in the face. She laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed. All the customers turned round and laughed, too, laughed at Nancy laughing. The joke was milked for all it was worth and yet when everyone, including the cops had stopped laughing Nancy continued to guffaw. And when Nancy at last regained her senses, they turned round to gaze at Cat once more. But Cat did not laugh. Cat only blushed.
And then, after about ten minutes, Nancy began to chuckle to herself once more. She began to laugh out loud as if she would burst her lungs.
And that’s when they began to call her Crazy Nancy.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
“What’s your name?” they asked the new girl on my side of the counter on the last night I ever came to Jumpin Donuts.
The girl blushed as if she had forgotten. She was 19 years old at most. She looked this way and that, and in her nervousness dropped the box on the counter. The Bismark Twirls rolled towards the poets who helped her clean up the mess.
“What’s your name?” one of the poets asked again.
She blushed once more and she whispered something that no one could hear.
“You’ll have to speak louder,” teased the poets.
Again she said something inaudible.
I looked over at Crazy Nancy. She was sticking her tongue out at one of the truck drivers, a lurid glottal movement. She leaned right over the counter at him and tried to play with his long, dank hair. The truck driver looked embarrassed, put up with Crazy Nancy’s toying for a moment, then politely but curtly pushed her hand away. Crazy Nancy laughed again, called him Big Boy, put her hand in his mane once more and the truck driver was losing patience. “Just cut it out Nancy,” and Nancy laughed once more, retreating to the coffee percolator, cleaning up the dried liquid. The truck driver looked over at me, mimed with his mouth.
“Fucking crazy bitch, that Nancy.”
“What’s your name, sweetheart?” the poets continued their gentle interrogation of the new girl on my side.
This time the girl, violet like a May Day parade, just avoided the question and worked away at making fresh boxes for future orders.
And everyone laughed.
There was a young boy there on Crazy Nancy’s side, too, that night, with thick lensed glasses and a pony tail. I had never seen him in Jumpin Donuts before. From time to time Crazy Nancy cupped her hands and whispered something in the boy’s ear. As she whispered she looked right at me. In all those years Nancy had never even given me a glance when she was in Jumpin Donuts. But there she was now conspiring against me. From time to time she would step back from all this whispering and howl with laughter. The boy smiled, too, shyly, and he looked over to me with a beseeching look in his eyes. And I knew she was talking about me, laughing at me after all these years.
I began to rage inside. Rage with jealousy. I felt like I was losing her.
“So, what’s your name, sugar?” said one of the poets on my side.
And now the new waitress, emboldened, empowered perhaps at last could say her name:
“Nancy,” she said.
“Nancy?” asked the poet in all incredulity.
“Yes, Nancy.”
And then everyone laughed.
“Hey, Nancy. That makes two Nancys now! Crazy Nancy and… Sweet Nancy.”
And everyone laughed at the absurdity of it all. And Crazy Nancy laughed the loudest, laughed right in my face, laughed as she stroked the boy’s pony tail and stuffed him a whole bag of blueberry twirls.
The humiliation continued, all through the night until all the customers had all gone, except the two fat cops and the boy, still sitting and drinking his coffee and Nancy still whispering and giggling in his ear. I left the donut shop at that moment. I walked a few steps up from Jumpin Donuts, took up my position outside Wendy’s with a single volume of Mind and my ice box with my index cards with all those notes I had accumulated on The Reception of Existentialism in the Anglo-American Community and I waited for another ten minutes until the boy came out. He was even more fragile there out in the street with his thick glasses and his slouch that his leather jacket did little to hide. He walked up towards me without at first noticing me. When he got close I suddenly charged at him, flapping, yelling nonsense:
“You looking at Nancy, eh?” I screamed. “Think you can just come in and get Nancy, eh? Well, fuck you! Fuck… fuck… you!”
The poor boy stepped back, trembling in disbelief as I flung my ice box at him, missing him by a mile.
“Looking at what? I don’ know what you mean, Sir”
“I saw you whispering things… flirting with her…”
And then the boy began to smile that same beseeching smile I had seen a few moments before.
“But… like… Nancy’s…”
“Nancy’s what?” I was out of breath.
“Nancy’s like… like kinda fruity… she’s Crazy Nancy… and she’s…”
“She’s what?”
The boy looked at me apologetically, shrugged his shoulders and said:
“She’s fucking old dude…”
And then the boy smiled. He could see I was suffering. He had a sort of dim-witted empathy that a boy who had not experienced the emotions I had in Jumpin Donuts had.
“Jesus, dude,” he said, calmer now. “She just wanted to get you jealous. She said it was so easy to get you jealous. She said you were her boyfriend.”
And then the boy shook my hand. It was the handshake of a man who knew that the joke was on me.
A moment later Crazy Nancy came out of Jumpin Donuts. She lit up a cigarette and walked straight past and headed up Hudson. I approached her.
“My cat’s died,” I said.
And Sweet Nancy hesitated. She looked behind her and then back towards me.
“So, when’s the funeral?” she said.
And then we walked up the street together in silence just as we had on all those nights before, she on her side of Hudson and me on mine. And then, as we passed the old Taco Bell, Nancy began to cry once more. She was crying like she hadn’t cried for all those years.
I was 52 years old now. And Nancy, well, Nancy was still nineteen and a half.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
When we got to my place that night, Nancy didn’t write anything in her notebook. She just lay down on her stomach, and breathed heavily. I inhaled the scent of caster sugar, the lemon twists, the Bismark twirls and blueberry puffs. Sweet, Sweet Nancy.
“You’ll never understand me,” said Sweet Crazy Nancy from her side of the mattress. She then moved a little closer to me, closer than she had been ever been before, till she was brushing against my side. She turned her face towards mine. She put her head on my chest.
“I know,” I said. I instinctively turned my back to her, curled up into a ball. For now Nancy was my girlfriend there were new obligations to consider, new rules, new fears. I felt her breathe against my neck, her arm around my waist, clinging to me. With my elbow I gave her a sharp knock in the ribs. She still clung. I elbowed her once more. At last she released me, retreated to her side of the mattress. I heard her sigh and then she fell asleep.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The following morning, Sweet Crazy Nancy was not there. I hadn’t expected her to be. That night I thought about seeing a film. But I didn’t want to see a film. So I went to the Berg instead. The Boy Scout Love Triangle was playing that night. I arrived halfway through Jean Paul Sartre and Heidegger Get Laid, an ageing Johnny Go Go on guitar, and Amy Dubin on drums, her mouth open like the girl from Munch’s The Scream.
I did not go to Jumping Donuts that night. And I never saw Nancy again.
