East Seventh

by Tyler Carey

Mel had lived in a little beach shack just north of Belmar with Betty for about a year and a half. She kept wanting him to settle down into a career though, instead of spending his nights bartending at The Anachronism - a hole in the wall in South Amboy. That hole in the wall meant a whole lot more to him than her, though, and so that was that. A few months after she moved out, he ended up giving up on the bar too, and relocating to the East Village to pursue his films and art.

That bar was a place, though. Geez. I mean, here Mel was near McSorley's and all these other legendary watering holes, but he still longed for The Anachronism. That bar was the brainchild of Don Bentley, a retired rock album cover painter. His paintings had been used by every major label, and with the money from those projects he funded The Anachronism - a divey joint full of interactive art, mindbenders, optical illusions and tasteless toys. Remember those Sea Monkeys advertised in the pages of comic books? Don had about three buckets full of 'em. He assured all the patrons that the little brine shrimp did indeed do little tricks for him, just like the comics assured. An odd duck, Bentley. Another toy - or maybe it was an oddity - was this thing called "Uncle Elmo". "Uncle Elmo" was a little doll with an oversized head, and an oversized hand that was halfway up one of his oversized nostrils. If you pushed the oversized head down, slimy goo spurted out of his nostril. It was disgusting, but Don insisted on demonstrating it on the bar top to anyone who wandered in seeking directions. That place was probably in violation of every health code in the state of New Jersey.

As Mel looked out his window and smoked his ubiquitous cigarette, he watched the NYU kids, genuine hoboes, suits and ties, nurses and monks mill up and down the street. He needed a subject for his next movie. The New York Alternative Filmmakers Festival was in a few months. Deadlines for the competition portion of the festival were fast approaching, though. Since he hadn't settled on an actual 'job' to pay the rent on his new apartment, grants were his best bet to keep his head above water. A bar patron at Bowery Bar told Mel over $12 martinis that a guy could make some good dough peddling his ass on St. Marks Place. Did people really do that sort of thing, though? It sounded hackneyed to Mel. He'd never actually noticed a hustler outwardly soliciting in front of the pizza parlors and head shops. That sort of thing probably existed more in the lyrics of Lou Reed songs than it did in real life. A few blocks over, maybe, but not right where Mel was.

Mel noticed a paunchy lady walking a pug up the block, as he people watched. "Hey!" he said loudly, "Hey, Pooch! Here boy! Here boy!" The pug stopped its thunderous gate and put two paws up against the side of the building below him, and barked.

Mel barked back.

"Leave my dog alone!" snapped the woman, who was wearing a ridiculous looking bucket hat, which just made her look like a day-glo Darth Vader.

"Sorry, lady. I just like dogs is all."

"It's two-thirty on a Tuesday afternoon, and you're just leaning out your window harassing people? Why don't you get a job?"

"I have a job."

"Really?" the woman asked incredulously. "What exactly do you do?"

"I'm a filmmaker."

"That's not much of a job."

"You're telling me," Mel said.

The pug lifted its leg to piss against the front of the copy shop. The storeowner shooed the pug towards the curb as the lady continued speaking. "What do you make movies about?"

"Oh, this and that. Different sorts of things."

"You shouldn't spend so much time indoors then. Get out and meet some people. You don't look like a punk - you just need some direction is all. How are you going to make a movie if you don't meet people?"

"Thanks for the advice," Mel said offhandedly.

"You should take it!" the storeowner bellowed. "Why don't you stop harassing your neighbors and my customers and get off your tuchus?"

"Sorry, Sol," Mel said. He ashed his cigarette outside, hoping to hit the lady or the dog, and then closed the window. Get off his tuchus. Huh. It was early yet, but what the fuck? Felt like time for a drink.

The Cedar Tavern is Mel's watering hole of choice, and it was generally empty that early in the afternoon - that's why Mel likes it. At night, the place was overcrowded, with dot.com millionaires and grad-school beatniks jockeying for space at the bar, or under the TV screens. The place's popularity was two-fold. First off, the bar itself was a beautiful masterpiece of chip carving, which depending on your legend of choice was either discovered intact in a random barn in Vermont, or shipped in pieces from Bavaria. Secondly, the original beats hung out at a joint called The Cedar Tavern. Again, legend and folklore shroud the legitimacy of this. Some claim that it was a more diner-like establishment up by Columbia with the same name that was their hang out. Either way, the up and coming literati of today flock to the Cedar almost as much as to the KG B Bar.

There were a few folks sitting at tables enjoying a late lunch, a young girl sitting at one end of the bar, reading Dostoevsky, and the bartender. That was it. Mel sat down on a stool and ordered a Corona with lime. He wasn't a regular, yet, but the bartender smiled amicably as he slid the beer across the counter. "Anything you'd like to watch?" the bartender asked.

"Your call," Mel said, and took a swig of his beer. The bartender channel-surfed like an attention-deficit-disorder addled toddler. Eventually he settled on an encore showing of last week's "Band of Brothers" - the new HBO drama about young men on the European Front during World War II. Mel hadn't caught any of the show yet - damn the high cost of cable! - but was intrigued. His grandfather's anecdotes of World War II seemed almost foreign. The idea of dropping everything you had to strap on a uniform and join a battle. It seemed to go against everything Mel had learned in the touchy-feely days of 1980s elementary schools.

"You're a lucky bastard," a voice at the other end of the bar said. Mel looked up to see an old man settling into a seat under the TV set. He had a beat-up and stained porkpie hat on, which he left on as he removed his blazer and folded it over the back of his chair. His cane, bearing a brass handle in the shape of a laborador, was placed gently in the corner. The old man was wearing a light-blue shirt of starched broadcloth, covered with a thick set of burgundy suspenders. Burgundy is what he ordered, too. "I said, you're a lucky bastard," he reiterated.

Mel took a sip of his beer and leaned in. "Excuse me?"

The old man smiled. He had an aquiline nose and fuzzy white eyebrows that were veiled by the hat. "The movie, or show, or whatever the fuck it is..." He pointed to the TV set directly above his head with one hand, and reached into his pocket with another. He removed a few pink pills and took them with the glass of burgundy the bartender placed in front of him. "You can leave the bottle," he said as an aside to the bartender. Returning his attention to Mel, he asked, "You've never known the horrors of war, have you?"

"No, sir," Mel said. He was going to take another sip of his beer, but he hesitated. "I'm only turning twenty-five in October."

"Born in 1976, eh? The Bicentennial, by golly-gosh." The old man chuckled to himself and rolled his glass back and forth by the stem. "So, I guess you were too young for the last war. When was that 1991?"

"I don't know if I'd call that a war."

"What? People died, didn't they?"

"Not like that," Mel said, pointing to the screen, which showed a team of soldiers trying to overtake a tank with only their feet and rifles.

The old man looked at the screen, furrowed his lower lip and nodded. "No, I suppose not." He nodded once more, and sipped his wine. "And I guess you'll probably be too old for the next one."

"What next one?"

"Next war, dummy."

"You don't think we'll have another big war, do you? I mean, we survived the Cold War without going to war with Russia, we worked out that thing in the Balkans without turning it into a major war... It looks like things are pretty smoothed out," Mel said.

"I was there for that one," the old man explained, "and if I left with one decision it was that war was part of our cycle as animals. Seems every generation's had one. You know, there's never actually been a time in history when there hasn't been a war going on somewhere? Sure, America hasn't had a full scale war since 1991, but there's gotta be pygmies or someone beating the shit out of each other right now, some dictator plotting a new acquisition...something..."

"My name's Mel."

"George. George Legge. Sorry if I've seemed a bit melancholy," he said. "That program's pretty darn accurate, y'know."

"I guess so. So, where were you stationed?"

"The Philippines. Nasty shit, that. All the crap they talk about from Vietnam, it all started in the Philippines during WWII. Guys sneaking up on you from trees, shooting in the darkness...Evil shit. Evil shit."

"Why'd you go?"

The old man reached in his pocket for another pink pill, as he poured himself another glass of burgundy. "You want me to give you the patriotic speech about how I didn't want to speak German, and wanted to protect Lady Liberty, or do you want me to tell you the truth?"

"The truth never hurts," Mel said. He signaled the bartender for another brew, and lit a smoke.

"Pshh," the old man snorted as he shook his head. "Sure the truth hurts! Hurts like a motherfucker!"

"Okay, tell me the patriotic version, then."

"I already did! But I'll tell you the truth, anyway. The truth is is that I waited until I was almost your age to enlist. You know how old I am? I'm eighty-three. I was your age when I enlisted in 1943!"

"Why'd you wait?"

"Because I didn't want to get killed, dummy! I didn't want to ship out some godforsaken place that I could give a damn about, just to prevent it from waving the wrong flag! In 1943, America didn't really know much about why we were fighting the war. We didn't really understand totalitarianism and the holocaust and imperial roulette. I was a kid like you who didn't want to get shot."

"So why did you end up enlisting?"

"Because I was sick and tired of being ridiculed by my family and everybody I knew for not enlisting. If you didn't sign up, you were a pariah. I wasn't 1A for the draft, due to my age, but that was no excuse as far as most folks were concerned."

Mel wondered for a second if being 25 would have excluded the old man from the draft during WWII, but he knew better than to argue. He decided to just keep things moving. "And so, you think another war's a coming?"

"Sure! That fucking peacenik we had in office until this past January did nothing but fuck us."

"And every intern."

"Huh?"

"Nevermind."

"Seriously!" the old man said, "Every time we got into a scuffle with somebody, Clinton took a poll to see what to do next! He did everything by proxy! In the process, we stepped on a lot of toes!"

"But, you think we'll go to war over something like this?"

"Pretty damn likely."

Mel sipped his beer silently.

The old man's words resonated in Mel's mind on September 11th, a few days later, when the war started. He dashed down to the Cedar Tavern, as everybody else ran past him towards Union Square, away from downtown, but the old man was nowhere to be found. Mel joined the crowd and headed up to the park. As they watched the buildings burn and fall, suddenly nothing seemed very important anymore. Nothing. Not his films, not his life in the city, not his fight with Betty, not the chance of him going off to war. Sadly, not even the buildings falling. Everyone went numb. They couldn't handle the realization and grief of what they were seeing, so they just shut off their emotions. Mel was one of the first to move away from the crowd, as the gravity of the situation began to dawn on them. He walked past McSorley's, which was somber for the first time since women walked in there some few dozen years before, absentmindedly past the copy shop, past Brewski's, and then back to the copy shop and his apartment above.

The light on Mel's answering machine was flashing. He hit the button, and his mother's voice pealed out in tears, begging him to call. He hit the button again, and his brother's voice left a much more reserved message restating over and over again, "I know that you had no reason to be in those buildings, but please just call me to confirm. I know that you had no reason..." Lastly, he listened to the message from Betty, which was classic lovable tough-as-nails-Betty, "Look, you sonofabitch, I know that we're supposed to hate each other right now, and I know that you don't work downtown, but I'm worried about you. I'm coming into the city, and I'll sit outside your apartment all goddamn day if I gotta, until you turn up. Give me a call on my cell phone to let me know you're alright." Everybody in the northeast was trying to get as far away from the city as possible, but Betty was going to find a way in, just to nursemaid him. Mel pictured her walking against traffic in the Lincoln tunnel, towards Manhattan.

Mel opened a beer and called his mother. All the lines were jammed. As he waited for a connection, Mel thought back to an old EC comic he'd read as a kid. Tales From the Crypt or something. It was a story about a guy who had pretended to be dead, to cash in his life insurance policy. He had rigged up an elaborate coffin with a telephone wire, so that after he was buried, all he had to do was call his collaborator to come dig him up. Anyway, the guy got buried and started to dial the phone, only to get no connection. The twist ending was that it was the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and all the phone lines in the country were tied up by a populace afraid of the war, trying to reach out and touch someone. The end panel was of the guy losing oxygen as he kept trying and trying to get an operator. Mel had always figured that the phone system had developed by such leaps and bounds since then that during a major catastrophe, you'd be able to reach somebody.

After thirteen tries, Mel finally got his mother on the line. She was weepy, and worried about her baby who lived all the way across the river in Manhattan. Mel was worried about her, living all the way across the river in Redbank, NJ. Everyone was so used to being so close together, through automobiles, trains and cell phones. When those conveniences were removed or at best limited, it seemed that society fell apart. In that respect, the terrorists had won. Mel didn't know what to say to comfort his mother, and likewise, she couldn't even begin to understand how castrated and terrifying it was to be in Manhattan on that now infamous day. After a few minutes of clichés and ministrations, Mel said, "I'd better go, Mom. They probably want us to keep the phone lines open for emergencies." Yes, she said, she had heard them say something about that on the news. He promised he'd keep in touch, though.

Mel lay back on his tattered sheet-covered couch and turned on his TV. Nothing came in but static. He flipped to another channel. Nothing but static. Finally, he got a faint signal from ABC. It took him a minute to understand why, but then it clicked that most stations in the area were broadcast from the top of the World Trade Center. Mel sat and catatonically watched and listened to Peter Jennings trying to explain what had happened and why. Planes landing in Canada. The Pentagon had been hit, too. Early, very early, indications pointed to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Names that Mel, and few Americans, were highly familiar with. Mel recalled something about the Taliban blowing up statues, and he recalled bin Laden's name from the attacks in the Sudan, but none of that fit together for him as to why America had been attacked so viciously. After five or six hours of witnessing and rewitnessing a pale two-dimensional representation of what he'd seen fairly up close earlier in the day, Mel slipped out the door wandered. The copyshop downstairs was closed. Most of the businesses in what was now being labeled "Lower Manhattan" by the news were shut. Closer to NYU, Mel found a few watering holes that were open and crowded, but quiet. Bars that usually had sports on round-the-clock all had CNN blasting Aaron Brown's latest updates. Mel decided right then and there that he was going to crawl into a bottle and stay there for a few days.

Betty had other ideas.

When Mel staggered home at about ten o'clock, after a dozen or so Coronas and god knows how many of those little hamburgers they served on MacDougal street at all the sports bars, he found Betty on his steps. She was sitting there sobbing. When Mel put his hand on her shoulder she slugged him.

"I thought you were dead, you asshole!" she bellowed.

Mel shrugged and rolled his eyes. How could he have let this beautiful flower escape him? "Why don't you come on upstairs?" he asked.

"Oh no!" she said. "I didn't come all the way out here to fuck you, if that's what you think!"

Mel rubbed his eyes. "I don't think I could if you wanted me to, Betty. I just drank most of Mexico's beer. But it's getting cold, and there's nasty dust in the air, and I wouldn't leave you sitting here after coming all the way in from New Jersey." He opened the door to the lobby and walked up the stairs. Betty was talking, but Mel wasn't focused enough to understand her - he was trying his damndest to fit that big door key into that tiny lock on his apartment door. As soon as he got the door open and they got inside the apartment, Betty started crying again. She grabbed Mel and held him tightly to her. She was no damsel in distress; Betty was a tough woman. But as September 11th taught us, it doesn't matter how tough you are - it's okay to be scared.

Mel awoke next to Betty on his bed. He went to his window and looked out, groggily. He never had much of a view to begin with, but now what little he could see over the apartments across the street was shrouded in smoke. A thin film of dust lined his window sill and the furniture closest to the window. Mel turned on the TV and picked up the phone to call his Mother.

"What are things like there, dear?" she asked.

"I don't know. I still can't really process it," Mel said. He couldn't process much of anything through his hangover. "There's a lot of dust, a lot of smoke. The streets outside are the quietest I've ever seen them in the morning." Betty rustled the sheets in the background and garbled something through the pillow.

"...Have you got company?" asked Mel's mother.

"Uh, well, yeah. Y'know."

"Sure, sure. Any port in a storm, and it's a heck of a storm."

"Yeah, it's actually, uh, Betty." Mel got silence at the other end of the line from his Mother. "You still there?"

"Things aren't that bad, dear," she said.

"Yeah, well, I think we both needed somebody around right now."

"It's none of my business. You have groceries, right?" Mel's mom asked. "Not that she could cook if she tried," she mumbled.

"Yeah, I've got some food."

"Good, because it looks like a lot of the shops there are picked over, from what they said on the news. Remember, if things are bad, you can always come stay here for a few days. The trains are running again."

Mel thanked his mother for the offer, and said goodbye. For some reason, Mel's thoughts kept going back to the old man, and the second world war. As Betty woke up and showered, Mel leafed through his record collection. There it was. Tiny Tim sings America's Patriotic Songs. He put the record on his turntable and began to think of how this could be a movie. The old man, the war, patriotism... There's a sign shop on St. Mark's Place that has wartime propaganda signs in the window... Mel left Betty, still in the shower, to walk around St. Mark's to pick up things for his next film. He got some green plastic toy soldiers and tanks at a card shop, one of those signs (the one he bought showed a pair of evil looking eyes looming out of the shadows, with troop transports rolling into the background, with the caption, "We're coming for ya, Adolf!") and a bag of sand at a gardening shop all the way over on Sixth Avenue.

Betty was pretty ticked by the time Mel got back. "I started to wait breakfast for you, but got tired of waiting, so...there're your eggs." She pointed at a chilly pile of grayish goo.

"Oh," Mel said. "Thanks."

"You only had two eggs, so I thinned 'em out with milk."

Mel sat down at the cold toast, cold eggs and cold coffee. "Not a problem," he said amicably, "It'll do."

"It'll do? Sheesh."

Mel didn't reply and just dug into his food. It wasn't bad; just cold.

"So, what's all this?" Betty asked, pointing at the shopping bags Mel had piled near the door.

"Oh, that's stuff for my next movie. I've got to put it together quick. There's a big competition coming up."

Betty looked through the bags. "Sand? Toys? What is this crap? When are you going to get a real job?"

"I do have a real job. I bartend one night a week."

"Really?"

"Well, when a bartender's sick, I cover. I get a night here, a night there."

"You're delusional. How are you going to pay rent in Manhattan on that?"

Mel put down his fork. "I thought you came out to comfort me, not to take my inventory."

"No, I came out because we need each other. We're good together."

"Well, call Melody Beattie. You're a textbook co-dependent, Betty."

"Me? You can't even fix your own breakfast. First thing you do in the morning is call your mother."

"This is what I'm talking about! Look, obviously you don't like me, so why'd you come out?"

"Because I love you! And I don't want to see you throw your life away!"

Mel toyed with his eggs. "How can you still love me? You walked out on me."

"I walked out on you because I didn't want to see you rot anymore. Spending all of your time at a bar, making bad movies."

"My films are great!"

"You might think so, your cronies at the bars might think so, heck even some critics and art fucks might think so, but you'll never be able to make a living off of stop-motion pictures about cigarette butts!"

"So what does that say about you?"

"Huh?"

"That you keep coming back to try to change me."

"I'm...I'm not..."

"I thought so."

Betty walked out. This time for the last time.

Mel spent the afternoon filling his shower basin with sand, arranging the green plastic soldiers and tanks, and taping up the sign on the white tile wall. As he got his camera going, a phalanx of soldiers and tanks were slowly moved from his living room carpet, past the kitchenette, through the bathroom door, across the tile floor and across the sand in the shower basin. The last shot was of the propaganda poster. We're coming for you, Osama. Mel kept playing the Tiny Tim album over and over again. Once he edited this and synched it up, it was going to be perfect.

That night, after another round of Coronas, Mel flipped the channels. CBS was back on the air, probably from the top of th Empire State Building, and a very fuzzy NBC was barely discernible. David Letterman started out his show with no intro music or anything. He just very seriously started to talk from his desk about the events of the past two days. Mel popped a blank tape in his VCR and recorded this. He figured this would probably be the only time when you'd see Letterman just being himself, and talking about important things. In a kitschy way, this was historic. Letterman's monologue was very stern, but his voice quavered occasionally. He ended by saying, "I've got...I know I might be saying this just for myself...I don't know, but I've got to say just one more thing. Some people are saying that all of this may have happened over being a different religion than the people that attacked us, and if that...I don't know...I don't know if that makes a damn bit of sense to anyone." He went to commercial on the brink of tears. Mel was sure that most of America was, too. When Dave came back a few minutes later with Dan Rather who did break down into tears, it was as if he only then began to understand how deeply America had been violated.

"And the Siegelman Prize for Best Short Film goes to Mel Stone, for 'Visions of Wartime'." The audience applauded, as Mel walked up the short aisle towards the lectern. "We felt that Mr. Stone's ironic anti-war film captured the angst and resentment that all of us have towards the Bush administration for thrusting us into war. His parody of 1940s propaganda films was sheer brilliance." Mel ruffled his brow. "Any words, Mr. Stone?"

Mel took the certificate and check, and sighed. "This was actually...uh...a pro-war film. It was inspired by the 1940s pictures and by the sacrifice of our citizen soldiers during World War II." The master of ceremonies shuffled her feet uncomfortably. "I don't believe that the Bush administration has thrust us into war, I think that war was thrust upon us by the devastating events of September 11th." The audience was silent and uncomfortable. "I...uh...salute our soldiers, and uh...if you want your check back, I'll understand."

"Um, no," said the MC. "You earned it. Dali said something about misleading art being the greatest art in the world."

"He did?" Mel asked, outside the range of the mike.

The MC covered the mike and hissed, "Work with me here!"

Mel smiled and posed for a photo. I hope they get the message of the film right in the papers, he thought.