I mentioned this before, that something funny happens to my perception of time in near-death situations, as when that Zed jerk was coming at me with his samurai sword. Time stops, and a specific memory can preoccupy me for hours, days, years. So as I crashed through that second-story window and took that dive, which a chronometer might have timed at a the tenth part of a second, I was spending an entire summer in Washington, DC, with Joy and her gay friend Jon, who kept making passes at me. It was 1992 and I had just obtained my BA. Joy had been my history professor, and afterwards a friend. She got a job at American University and invited me to stay with her in DC. I found a job in the Hershey's Ice Cream store in front of McPherson Square, where her friend Jon was the manager. Jon was very committed to being gay, or rather to making you accept the fact that he was gay. It was the most important thing on earth, being gay. I kept saying that it made no difference to me what he was or into what orifice he chose to insert his penis, provided it wasn't one of mine, but he just used that as proof that I was an homophobe typique, because I wasn’t man enough to try it. That was another thing that annoyed the crap out of me. He kept dropping French words for no reason; and when you asked him what they meant, he'd give you this snide grin which meant that you were a big fat idiot for not speaking French. He was a graduate student in history or something at American University, and he kept dropping names of critics and authors whose books you were supposed to know by heart or you were a big fat idiot and an homophobe typique. Gay Jon. He was a serious nuisance. If it weren't for the free ice cream at Hershey's, I'd have quit much sooner than I did. For some strange reason, Joy adored the guy; she said he was super bright and super witty. Sure he was. This is how witty he was: he groped me and pinched my behind whenever he got a chance, insisting that I had to give it a try, that if I didn't try it I was prejudiced, just another homphobe typique. What a jerk. I never saw him after that summer, but I heard he moved to New York. Joy was oversexed too that summer, and I wasn't that happy to accommodate her either, I confess. I don't know what it is about DC in the summer, but everyone's so damn horny. Horny and righteous. That's another thing. Everyone's so damn righteous. Everyone's an activist of some kind or another. Gay activist, Native American activist, tobacco activist, breast cancer activist, pork activist, dairy activist, Jew activist, African-American activist, transgender activist, peanut activist, dog activist, rape activist, youth activist, Hispanic activist, truck activist, green activist. It's disgusting. Everyone's righteous and everyone's horny. Maybe it's the heat. It's hot down there; it's hissing hot. It's a horrendous city in every way; never go there. Jon took me to one of his pink-activist events. I didn't want to go, but it was work. Hershey's had an ice cream concession stand at this gay pride parade/concert; and Jon made me wear a pink T-shirt and a pink apron, with the effect that I was propositioned about five hundred times in three hours, and sustained a good number of amorous advances. It was fun in a way. They kept writing me their phone numbers on napkins and stuffing them in my pocket. For some reason, about a third of them were named Kevin. Anyway, by the end of my shift I had about fifty phone numbers. I thought I'd phone each of them, make a date, and then not show up, just to fuck with them. But then I had a better idea. Jon, who was working right beside me, didn't get even one phone number and he was pink with envy. For about a week afterward, he had nothing to say but this: "How come you got fifty phone numbers and I got nothing? I was right there! You're not more handsome than I am!" He insisted that the majority of the phone numbers were addressed to him, that I was just a proxy, that everyone knew he was the manager and he was gay one, that if they stuffed those napkins in my pocket it was for me to pass on to him. I disagreed, and grinned in his face. "You're not even fucking gay!" he cried. "What do you need those phone numbers for?" I reminded him that he'd been trying to get me to swing his way for months and that this was my chance. He cried, "Give me those napkins! You don't have any use for them, you homophobe!" I waited a week, enjoying his rage, and then one day, as he was begging me to hand over the treasure, or just one, just one napkin, I made him an offer. I said, "A hundred bucks per napkin." His eyes popped wide open, his jaw dropped. He didn't speak to me for the rest of the shift. The next day it was more of the same; he ostracized me the entire shift, and then, toward the end of it, he hissed, "I'm not paying you a hundred bucks a napkin!" I said I didn't mind; I was happy to forget about those stupid napkins; in fact I'd burn them first thing I did when I got home. This enraged him beyond anything I had seen before. He went from white to red and back again. He said, "How much do you want for the entire batch?" I thought about this. Fifty times one hundred is five thousand. "For you," I said, "four thousand." He offered me two hundred and not a penny more. I said three thousand. He said three hundred. And so on. We negotiated for about an hour, and in the end he bought my fifty napkins for 1,200 bucks. Jon stopped harassing me after than. I think he began to respect me. I wasn't just an homophobe typique; I was a man of business, and gay business at that. My friend Joy, however, was getting pretty sore with me about that time, because I wanted us to be friends and I didn't care about the benefits. She said if I thought she had invited me to stay in her apartment for free just as a friend and without benefits, then I was an utter moron, and since she hated morons because she was so fucking bright because she was an associate professor of history at American University, she kicked me out.
I was saved by an awning, which acted as cushion and springboard. I bounced from the awning onto the street, and I might have cracked my head open, and broken every bone in my body, had Hannah not been there to soften my impact. I don't know if she was running away or if she just happened to be standing there, or if she had seen me and was trying to soften the impact, but in any case I knocked her unconscious and was saved. It took me some time to figure out who it was. I was pretty knocked out too. What I saw was this: somebody stretched out crooked on the ground, face up, one of the ninjas who had massacred those ironic Nazis. I was convinced this person was dead. My instinct was to run the fuck away, but then I noticed this person had breasts, and I knew who it was. I took off the ninja mask she was wearing, and sure enough: it was Hannah the Jewess, who was gorgeous despite being very unattractive. She had on a pair of Ray-Bans, which had been broken by the crash and were sitting askew on the tip of her nose. I took them off her, put them in my pocket, and dragged what I thought was a dead body across the street behind a big construction bin.
I pressed my ear to her chest, and I heard a heartbeat. She was not dead. I sat down beside her, rested her head on my knees, and as I waited for her to come to, I admired her outrageous beauty. Her skin was rough and spotty, with traces of bad pubescent acne; her nose was crooked, and had a scar or a wart on the bridge of it; her chin receded; her eyebrows were thick, for a woman; her ears were big too, and so were her teeth, and her hair was dry and frizzy. But for some crazy reason she turned me on. God, she was hideous and gorgeous at the same time. It was driving me mad. I stroked those scarred cheeks. I wanted to kiss them, her hair, her nose, her mouth, her breasts, her everything. What if I did? There was no one around, not even her; she was unconscious. But as I was thinking of this, there came a grunt and she came to. She came to in a start. She sat up, she saw me, and she groaned. She said she had a headache.
And what do you think I did? I grabbed her bat and I screamed, "I want to know what the fuck is going on here! Where is my sister? If you don't speak, I'm going to bash your head in with this bat!"
"Okay," she said. "Okay, okay, okay, okay. Don't hurt me. What do you want to know?"
"I want to know," I said, "who this Joe bastard is. I want to know what you are doing here. I want to know where my sister is. I want to know how you got her fucking tooth."
She said, "Okay, okay, okay."
I said, "Stop saying okay."
She said, "Yes, okay."
I said, "Speak."
She spoke, and pretty soon she was in a kind of trance. She was raving about Joe. Joe was a genius, Joe was the brightest man she had ever met, Joe was a great man, a charismatic man who understood Darwin and the gods. Joe had a dream, Joe had a vision, Joe was no ordinary human, Joe had a project for humanity.
I interrupted this panegyric: "What's with the teeth?"
"The teeth, yes," she said.
"What's with the fucking teeth?" I said.
"Your sister," she said. "Don't you know?"
"I don't fucking know," I said.
"Your sister's got the teeth," she said.
"What teeth?" I said. "You have her tooth."
"The Führer's teeth," she said.
"The who?" I said.
"The Führer," she said.
"Huh?" I said.
"The Führer," she said.
"Huh," I said. I knew who that was. I'm not an idiot. "Why don't you say his name?" I said.
"He has no name," she said. "He's the Führer."
"You're fucking Jewish!" I cried. "Aren't you?"
"I know," she said, purring. "But. Purr. You don't understand. Purr. There is something. Purr. About those men. Purr. The authentic ones. Purr. Their uniform. Purr. Their armbands. Purr. Their swastikas. Purr."
I wasn't interested in her twisted sex fantasies. I said, "Where did my sister get those teeth?"
"I don't. Purr. Know," she said.
"Why does Joe want those teeth?" I said.
Here she resisted, and I had to threaten her again with death by bat.
She stopped purring. She said Joe wanted to insert those teeth in his mouth. She said when he did that, he'd become the new Führer, and she'd kiss him and kissing him she'd kiss the Führer and kissing the Führer she'd kiss the entire universe and so on and so forth.
I said, "Shut up. I'm not interested in your twisted fantasies. Where the fuck's my sister? You extracted her tooth?"
She nodded.
"Speak," I said. "Where? How?"
"We broke into her apartment," she said, "where she's been hiding. In Chinatown."
"We?" I said. "You and who?"
"One of Joe's men," she said. "Zed. Joe sent us. He said if she didn't give us the teeth, we were to tear out one of her own teeth. She didn't and so we did."
I stretched out my hand. "Where's her tooth?" I said. "You have it?"
She searched one of her pockets and extracted it.
I snatched it from her hand. "Get up," I said. "You're taking me to Chinatown.
