Read Online The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats by Hesh Kestin - Free Book Online Page B

Miller. Norman Mailer.”
    While I searched for more, she spoke. “Delusional faggot, talentless nut-job, pathetic self-promoter. In that order. You know what those three have in common? Mistaking noise for achievement. You know how a Brooklyn intellectual commits suicide?”
    “Is this going to be personal?”
    “He jumps from his ego to his IQ. You, child, are exactly the kind of person who could use a solid dose of psychotherapy. In a year you’d probably discover things about yourself that would make your hair stand on end.”
    “It already is.” We had stopped at a corner waiting for the light to change. “You want to get a cup of joe? There’s an espresso place on the next—”
    She looked at me with something between disdain and amusement. “The short answer is no.”
    “What’s the unexpurgated?”
    “No, thank you.”
    “Very nice,” I said. “Did anyone ever tell you it’s not polite to be curt with people?”
    “Many times,” she said, stepping into the street. Just at that moment a cab came hurtling around the corner from Lexington. I grabbed her arm. “I saw him,” she said coldly.
    “Good,” I said even more so. “Then I’m sure you can find your way home safely without me. Terri, Esther, whatever, it’s been fun.”
    Abruptly she took my arm and led me like a blind man across the street. “Don’t be such a pussy,” she said. “I only rag people I like.”
    “Oh, I’m so fucking relieved.”
    She continued holding onto my arm when we got to the other side. “Like who, like whom—it doesn’t really matter. I was trying to say, Like
you
. You’re fucked up.”
    “I’m glad somebody noticed,” I said, so pleased to have the arm of this ravishing woman she could spit at me and I’d be happy. “Why am I fucked up?”
    “How much time do we have?”
    “Where do you live?”
    “Seventy-third.”
    “Then I guess we have four blocks. We could walk slower. Or stop for coffee.”
    “Nice try,” she said. “But I wasn’t kidding. I have a patient.”
    “I could wait. What is that, an hour?”
    “Fifty minutes. Then I have three more. Besides, there’s only two ways a kid like you, a nice kid, Russell, but a kid, is going to see the light. The first is really intensive psychotherapy—”
    “Because...”
    “Because you’re fucked up. You don’t like responsibility because it means commitment, and you won’t do that. You give off all the scents and sounds of the critically abandoned. An orphan. It’s you against the world, and you don’t like either one, you or the world. You want women in your life but not one woman, because if you have only one you’re afraid she’ll walk out on you. Did your mother walk out on you, emotionally?”
    “She died when I was a kid.”
    “Bingo. Your father?”
    “Passed when I was sixteen.”
    “Were you close?”
    I had never really considered the question. “We sort of lived in parallel worlds. We shared the space of a life, but there wasn’t a lot of contact.”
    “In Nazi Germany, Vichy France, Soviet Russia, any autocracy, a guy like you would be easy pickings. You need a hero. You can’t get close to a woman except to fuck her, so you do that as a sport. You might as well be riding a horse. With a guy like you there’s an empty space where most people have a model for how they should live. Usual stuff: warm family, Thanksgiving dinner, playing catch with the old man, mom forgives your faults, even loves them. Or it could be the opposite. A real mess. Bad family, bad model. Or more usually a mix. Nobody gets the brass ring every time. Some people come out better, some worse. But a kid like you—”
    “I’m twenty-one,” I lied.
    “But a mature gentleman like you, with nothing in the model department, he’s desperate for someone, some thing, to create his life around.” She hung onto my arm as if I were the strong one. “So what is it like, being alone?”
    “It’s okay.”
    “I wasn’t looking for a value