Helen Keller Really Lived: A Novel

"Here’s a story, détka"

Helen Keller Really Lived 147 Here’s a story, détka: Halloween 1978, and I was on the southbound platform of the Metro into Manhattan. Tipping my hat to the holiday as well as my new, pending nationality (a green card was a coming), I’d gotten myself up in cowboy getup—a pair of chaps from the secret costume box in the basement of the Scarsdale house (a souvenir of my former foster dad), over levis that I’d later shove into my backpack, along with a blue gingham check shirt with pearlized buttons and a dirty white felt Stetson, both from the Goodwill. I’d also picked up a white domino for fifty cents but the only affordable cowboy boots I could find must’ve once been a 148 Elisabeth Sheffield cowgirl’s—powder blue with three-inch heels. A bit too golubóy for the kid from Odessa, so I’d stuck with my high tops (then still a virile red). Backpack cushioning against the concrete wall, I sat memorizing the names and symbols for fifty common ionic compounds (I had a General Chemistry midterm the next morning ). Only as the scent of cannabis sativa pulled my nose up out of my textbook, did I see them—a group of what I took for fellow SUNY Purchase students (one I’d seen coming out of the Visual Arts building), all in what I took for costume. Although what the hell they were supposed to be, as they stood passing around a joint, I had no clue. Two of the girls were dressed in French maid outfits: stiff white headpieces, abbreviated black dresses that barely covered their white ruffled asses, little black aprons—only the aprons were pinned with postcard reproductions of abstract paintings. Images of red balls floating over black squiggles like clumps of pubic hair that I would later learn, under Irwin’s tutorship, were Adolph Gottliebs. The boy in the group (who was also the kid I’d seen emerging from Visual Arts) wore a black plastic bag with holes for his head and arms as a top, cut off jeans that showed off his pale but chiseled legs, and a coil of garden hose over his shoulder, one end of which he’d duct taped to the gas mask he wore over his green grease painted face. Neither his costume nor the two girls’ made any sense but at least they were erotic in a weird, Dadaist way—you knew they were somehow about sex, even if you weren’t sure how. But the third girl’s was about nothing but looking ugly and stupid: a big puffy brown ski jacket that only made her already bulky mass even bulkier, with a pair of kid-sized white gauze wings attached to the back, along with a little cap topped with a tin foil wrapped wire coil—a half assed Helen Keller Really Lived 149 attempt at a halo. Evidently she’d wanted to be an angel but either couldn’t afford or fit into the rest of the costume (one size-fits-all robe or no). I saw her looking over at me and gave her a pitying smile. But instead of looking away in embarrassment , she smirked: “Hee Haw.” Only later that night, after I described the fat chick’s costume to a Times Square colleague, a cute, red-headed runaway from Rochester, New York who’d come out as “Raggedy Andy,” did I discover that she had been dressed as a figure of speech rather than of fun. Or as one of my Halloween tricks put it, when I dropped my levis and turned, cheeks chapframed : “Holy shit!” But why am I telling you this crap, this kaká, about Timor when he was still tiny, with a rather remarkable tush (hence the john’s expression of appreciation) but a less than perfect grasp of idiom? Because you would have gotten it, even if you didn’t get it: felt the tension of the inside joke, coiled to spring in your face. In fact, that’s one of the things I appreciated about you—your ability to read people and seize their meaning, taking what you needed for your own ends. You’d have gone up to that puff coated tëlka, complimented her on the clever costume —then asked her to help you out with train fare. I was the...