Ames The Extra Man

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78227-469-8
Verlag: ONE
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 384 Seiten

A hilarious novel from one America's funniest living writers - like a New York Withnail and I Meet Louis Ives: well-groomed, romantic, and as captivating as an F. Scott Fitzgerald hero. Only this hero has a penchant for ladies' clothes, and he's just lost his teaching job after an unfortunate incident involving a colleague's brassiere. Meet Henry Harrison: former actor, brilliant but failed playwright, and a well-seasoned escort for New York City's women of means. What can this ageless Don Quixote of the Upper East Side have to offer a young gentleman such as Louis? What, indeed... The Extra Man is a story of friendship and frustration, of cocktails and cross-dressing, a hilarious tale for our times from America's most versatile wit. Jonathan Amesis the author of nine books including Wake Up, Sir! and You Were Never Really Here, both published by Pushkin Press. He also created the hit HBO comedy Bored to Death, starring Ted Danson, Zach Galifianakis and Jason Schwartzman, and Blunt Talk, starring Patrick Stewart. He has fought in two amateur boxing matches as 'The Herring Wonder'. He lives in Los Angeles.

Jonathan Ames is the author of eleven books including Wake Up, Sir!, The Extra Man and You Were Never Really Here, all published by Pushkin Press. He also created the hit HBO comedy Bored to Death, starring Ted Danson, Zach Galifianakis and Jason Schwartzman, aswell as Blunt Talk, starring Patrick Stewart. His thriller You Were Never Really Here was adapted for a major Hollywood film by Lynne Ramsay, starring Joaquin Phoenix. The Wheel of Doll is the second book in the series of Happy Doll thrillers that began with A Man Named Doll.Jonathan lives in Los Angeles with his dog Fezzik.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ames, Jonathan

Leseproben

CHAPTER II

Arrival

On the second of September 1992, I drove to Manhattan in my dark blue Pontiac Parisienne. It was a big-boned, handsome car with a cushioned velour interior. It was like driving a living room, and I felt capable of crushing most other cars. It had one hundred and fifty thousand miles and was dear to me. I had inherited it from my father when he died in 1984.

I arrived at Ninety-third Street around noon and I was able to park in front of the building. I buzzed Mr. Harrison from the vestibule, but there was no response. I felt a cold panic. I had called him the night before. He had said he would be home. I was frightened that he was up there and had changed his mind. I had been lured into New York; a horrible trick had been played.

I took several deep breaths and calmed myself. I hoped that he was out or that the buzzer was broken, and I went to the corner and called him from the pay phone. After several rings, he answered, “H. Harrison.” I could hear loud music—a show tune—in the background.

“It’s Louis. I’m at the corner, Mr. Harrison,” I said.

“Who?”

“Louis—”

“Let me turn off the music … I’m in the middle of my dance.” The music stopped. He hadn’t heard the buzzer. “Who’s calling?”

“Louis, your new roommate—”

“Where are you? Broken down on the New Jersey Turnpike?”

“I’m at the corner.”

“Oh, you’re here. Good. I thought you might not show up … Do you need help with your bags? I can get Gershon downstairs to help you.”

“Gershon?”

“He’s someone who carries heavy things for me.”

“Oh … I don’t need any help,” I said.

I unloaded my car—I had very little with me—and in just a few trips I carried up my belongings. I was struck again by the strong smell of sweat and cologne in the apartment. I had liked it when I interviewed for the room, but now my mind was registering doubts and fears. Would I take on this smell, like living with a smoker? And the apartment seemed even smaller and more cluttered than I remembered. And for the second time that late morning my heart fluttered with panic. Was I making a terrible error?

But there was no turning back. I unpacked my sheets and blanket and made my bed. And this little bit of order in all the disorder was comforting. Then Mr. Harrison and I sat down in his room to discuss some of the ground rules of our living together. He sat in his chair in the corner and I sat in my interview chair. He was wearing a green blazer and his tan pants, and bright sunlight was coming in through the two windows and it seemed to bring out the oranges of the carpeting.

“Don’t think of me as your landlord or roommate. Consider me your host,” he said. “And you are my houseguest.”

“Thank you,” I said. It was a nice welcome, but I felt shy in his presence.

Then Mr. Harrison explained to me that it was actually against the rules of the lease for him to rent the room. “So never answer the door if you should hear someone knocking,” he said. “It could be the landlord or a bill collector. If anyone should ever question you on the staircase—though it is unlikely—tell them you are my illegitimate son and that we have only been recently reunited. I’m allowed to have relatives and heirs staying with me.”

I was secretly touched by this notion of illegitimacy, and then Mr. Harrison said, “And you should think of your rent as a gift to me.”

I told him that I wanted to pay for the first week right away and I went to my room and got my wallet. I handed him the sixty-two dollars and he feigned surprise, but he quickly put the money in his pocket and he said, “So kind of you, so unexpected!” And I realized he was saying this in a very loud voice in case anyone, like the landlord, was listening through the door.

Then Mr. Harrison had to leave for a lunch date and I was left alone in my new home. I went to my room and finished unpacking.

All my shirts and coats and pants fit into the armoire, and my underclothing went into the filing cabinets beneath the kitchen table. I had sold many of my books to Micawber’s, but had kept a box of my young gentleman books and I piled these on the floor and along the windowsill.

And having my books around me, seeing their familiar spines and covers, like family pictures, was very good and reassuring: I had all of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels; Waugh’s Brideshead and A Handful of Dust; Maugham’s Razor, and three volumes of his short stories, the reading of which are a great substitute for travel if you can’t afford to go anywhere; a collected works of Wilde; several of Wodehouse’s Jeeves; and Mann’s Magic, and a volume of his diaries with photographs of the Swiss clinic that had been the inspiration for The Magic Mountain. I also had Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, a Russian young gentlemen story; and Cervantes’ masterpiece on the most famous older gentleman, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha.

I also brought—not for reasons of gentlemanhood—a well-worn copy of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia sexualis, the famous nineteenth-century study (219 case histories) of aberrant human sexuality (pre-Freud) that I had been secretly holding on to for over ten years. I didn’t read from it anymore, but it was very important to me and I couldn’t part with it. I put it with my underwear in the filing cabinet.

That first night, I lay in bed and I was homesick for Princeton. I was almost twenty-six years old, but I felt like a little boy. I actually turned my face to my pillow and I smothered a few tears, but then I stopped. I was afraid that Mr. Harrison would discover me. Our rooms had no doors. So I listened to the pigeons moan and I tried to read Mann’s diaries.

Mr. Harrison had come home from his luncheon in the late afternoon, napped, and then had gone back out for a dinner. His engagements were mysterious to me. He returned around eleven and put on the television. He invited me to join him, but I declined out of shyness and stayed in my room trying to read and not to cry.

After an hour of television, he shut it off, and I listened to him prepare his bed and then brush his teeth in the kitchen sink. Then he passed through my room on his way to the bathroom. He was wearing a tuxedo shirt and a blue bathing suit with white tubing along the edges. A black eye-mask was propped on his forehead. It was a remarkable sleeping costume. I was only in T-shirt and boxer shorts. He closed the door to the bathroom and I listened to him urinate and then prematurely flush while still urinating, which I found puzzling.

He came out, the Long Island motor was still churning in the toilet, and he stood at the end of my bed and said, “Do you have earplugs for sleeping?”

“No, I don’t. But I am a sound sleeper.”

“Well, in New York you should have them. They’re quite wonderful. They’ll change your life.”

“I’ll see how it goes,” I said, and then I tried to make a joke with him. “That mask makes you look like the Lone Ranger.”

“I need it for sleeping,” he responded quite seriously. “I prefer to think that I resemble the Phantom of the Opera.”

He took a step to head out and then looked at my book. “What are you reading?” he asked.

“Thomas Mann’s diaries,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows in a suspicious way. I had a feeling he was thinking about Death in Venice. He then said in a friendly tone, “If you like we can have readings at night to help us fall asleep … I think a chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh would be very good, followed by some Rabelais.”

“Sure,” I said, laughing a little, my homesickness leaving me.

“Well, gute Nacht,” he said and strode out of my room, reminding me that he still thought I was Aryan, a lie whose revelation I wanted to postpone.

The Next Event

One of the first things I had to learn about New York was how to park my car without getting tickets. Mr. Harrison, who also had a car (a Buick Skylark, he said), told me that the “polizei” would certainly be after my Parisienne, that tickets generated money for the city, and I would have to accept this as a fact of life. “It’s entirely unjust, but think of it as a duty to the King,” he said.

I found that if I read the signs carefully I could avoid tickets, but I was worried that my car, though it was old, might be vandalized. It was a 1982, but I kept it in good shape. My father had always lectured me on the importance of changing the oil, and never letting the gas go below half a tank, so as not to run dirt through the engine. He took care of his cars because they were his livelihood; he was a traveling salesman.

He sold furniture to schools and nursing homes and prisons. His territory was New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It was a difficult business; institutions held on to their old furniture for as long as they could.

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