Slaves of New York by Tama Janowitz

tour guide at the wax museum. "Admission to the museum is five dollars," she says at the door. "The museum will be closing in fifteen minutes."
    "Don't you remember me?" you say. "I'm the person who gave you a lobotomy, who shipped you off to Hollywood."
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    "If you say so," Brace's wife says. "Thank you."
    "I made a mistake," you say. "I did wrong. I have your ticket here; you'll go back to Bruce."
    His wife is willing, though she claims not to know what you're talking about. "But what about my job here?" she says. "I can't just leave."
    You tell her you'll take over for her. Quickly you rush her to the airport, push her onto the plane. You tell her to look after Bruce. "He can't live without you, you know," you say.
    You wait to make sure her plane takes off on time. A sense of relief comes over you. You have nowhere to go, nothing to do; you decide to return to the wax museum and make sure it's properly locked up for the night.
    You have the keys to the door; the place is empty, the lights are off. Now you wander through the main hall. Here are Michael Jackson, Jack the Ripper, President Reagan, Sylvester Stallone, Muhammad Ali, Adolf Hitler. You are alone with all these men, waxy-faced, unmoving, each one a superstar.
    Something violent starts to kick, then turns, in your stomach.
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    life in the pre-cambrian era
    I forgot that my mother planned to pay me a visit that day. Or I would have cleaned up. Maybe. Now I, Marley Mantello, hesitate to speak too highly of myself. But even as a toddler, reenacting imaginary scenes of death on the roof of my mother's run-down house, garbed in a matador's tweedley-dee, it was obvious—to myself, to my mother—that I was a boy genius.
    Example: my Hollywood-inspired paintings of the Crusaders fighting the Moslems, and in the sky, emblazoned in black letters, the word "GOD." And beneath this word a black cross. Not bad for a kid of eight. But what good does any of this genius do me? There are times when I think that to leave my mark upon the world is simply to curse it with another smear. . . .
    After art school I became a starving artist. I starved with a vengeance. My mother approved. All this was for my art. Still, in another sense, it didn't matter one way or the other: I knew I wasn't going to live very long, I expected to keel over at any minute. Every day I had to think carefully: Was I well enough to get up today? Did my stomach hurt? Was an unhealed cut on my finger a sign of cancer? What should I eat for breakfast? And none of these things would have been enough to get me out of bed except for the fact that I had to go paint a picture.
    But as much as I wanted to paint, often it took me most of the day to prepare myself for it. First of all, I had to go to the
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    bank to take out another dollar or two. I am a fast walker, but my bank is very far away. It was one of those big banks on Wall Street, an unusually gloomy place, built in a neofascist-religious style. It should have had one of those big organs at the back, or at least a baptismal font. If my bank had had any sense, it would have commissioned me to turn the interior into a chapel. It would have been a real investment for them. It gave me great pleasure to walk down there, even though it generally took me about an hour. I liked the fact that my bank was far away, this way I wasn't tempted to spend money as quickly.
    On the streets crowds of people were staggering this way and that, newly released from their office tombs. Grim faces, worn down like cobblestones, never to make anything of their lives. These were the worker bees and drones, who had been imprisoned in American thought-patterns since birth, with no hope for escape but the weekly million-dollar lottery. Walking at a slow speed, which drove me crazy. But what would have motivated them to move more quickly?
    I stood out. With my long, lanky stride, my scuffed Italian loafers, and my beat-up, faggoty Italian jacket. It had deep pockets on both sides,