My new novel, SLOTH, has just been published by Greenpoint Press.

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What follows is the cover copy, the first ten pages, and a brief excerpt from the middle of the book:

Cover copy:

  “Have you ever tried to convince someone you weren't crazy?” So begins the seduction journal of the unnamed narrator of Sloth. It’s not a mere hypothetical because he’s fallen in love with a TV exercise girl named Holly Servant; he must convince her of his sanity from afar if he’s ever to woo her in the flesh. But how can he win her heart when he’s a waiter--that is, a man who waits in long lines for a living? How can he cut the line to her affections? Women like Holly don’t date the likes of him. So he assumes the identity of his friend Zezel, a former newspaper columnist who wrote under the pen name “Mark Goldblatt.”

  But in this satire of postmodernism, which is also a postmodern satire, nothing is what it seems. Does Holly actually exist, or is she a figment of the narrator’s imagination? Does Zezel actually exist, or is he an alter-ego who takes over the narrator’s journal? Does the narrator have a name, or is he just an excuse to ask questions? (And who’s writing this cover copy, come to think of it?) Nothing of the sort concerns Detective Lacuna. He only wants to know who murdered the male prostitute who used to cruise for tricks out down the block from the narrator’s apartment.

  Sloth is a timeless love story with a rim shot core, a pulse-quickening mystery wrapped in knish skin. You’ll never look in the mirror the same way after you’ve read it.

SLOTH

"He holds enough of torture in his own ubi and needs not the misery of circumference to afflict him; and thus a distracted conscience here is a shadow or introduction unto hell hereafter."

--Thomas Browne, Religio Medici

June 8, 2000:

     Have you ever tried to convince someone you weren’t crazy? By all means, do. Tomorrow morning. Choose a stranger, not an acquaintance. Certainly not a friend--who knows you for the maniac you are regardless. Now, go ahead, explain yourself: “Despite appearances, sir, I am not out of my mind. Quite the reverse, it is sanity itself which moves me to this exercise. Sanity itself which moves me to accost you, to clasp you on the shoulder as we stand here, to speak to you with a familiar voice unearned by familiarities.” With every word, with every gesture, the stranger withdraws. His eyes roll back, full of disdain. Still you persist, gathering his hands into your hands. Now his eyes start to widen. He is afraid. He glances up and down. He fears the stiletto you are about to produce. But from where? No matter, for he has shaken loose. He backs away slowly. As he turns the corner, you hear the sound of his feet. He is running.

     Now these are the most opportune of circumstances. Daylight. Eye-contact. The wry monotone of a sane man’s voice to offset the act. What I propose is far more difficult. For I have fallen in love with an exercise girl named Holly Servant who appears every morning on television. What I propose is to woo her. To woo her from afar at first, to woo her with the words love has written upon my heart. To woo her on crisp, clean acid-free paper--for e-mail is too ephemeral, too case-insensitive, to convey the substance of what I feel. Abelard to Heloise@mortalcoil.org? I think not! No, paper it is. I will woo her on the page, perchance to bed her by my words.

     The air was khaki today on West Forty-Fourth Street. Perhaps the soot on the window had prismed the remnants of sunlight, or perhaps it was the neon-skewed dusk of Times Square at an angle I had not observed before. No matter, I opened the window and breathed khaki air. It smelled of engine fluid . . . of engine fluid and fresh pralines. Sticky poison. But it was air, so I inhaled deep gulps of it. Four stories down, I watched a man in overalls as he stared under the hood of his truck. Steam rose around his head, khaki-tinted steam. He wiped his forehead with a gray rag.

     The praline cart stood fifteen yards to his left, on the southwest corner.

     There was a cluster of taxis at the intersection of Broadway and Forty-Fourth. Their horns were silent. Rush hour had passed. Now was the hour of khaki air, the hour of sticky poison and silent cabs and twilight. Saxophone music came up the street; it was from the blind man who worked the southeast corner, across from the praline cart. He played the same songs on the same street corner every afternoon, four o’clock to eight o’clock, rain or shine; this was his final song, “Yesterday.” As the saxophone sounded, a homeless woman in a Yankees cap suddenly began to sway back and forth and sing:

There’s a dog in the house.

There’s a dog in the house.

There’s a dog in the house.

There’s a dog in the house.

There’s a dog in the house.

There’s a dog in the house.

     As I leaned farther out the window, I felt a sudden drop of water on my head. The sky was cloudless, the khaki air darkening to black; I squinted at the last traces of sunlight across the Hudson River. Then another drop of water hit me. The drops of water took several seconds to worm their way through my hair to my scalp. Then I felt for them, the drops of water, with my fingertips. They were gritty. They had fallen from the air conditioner one floor above my window. As soon as I glanced up, another drop of water hit me in the eye.

June 10:

     Think me not insincere, gentlemen: I do love Holly Servant. Though I am by no means a sincere man, nevertheless, I am of a second spirit where Holly is concerned. The visible beauty of the flesh, it was once believed, testified to higher virtues of the soul. The inside was reflected on the outside since God made the world not to deceive man but to sustain him. And oh what virtues I discern in Holly Servant! Cut to close-up: there are angels aglow in her eyes, cool blue seraphim who whisk from side to side as she calls out the cadences. “C’mon,” she urges, “just ten more, nine more, eight more, now seven . . . ” From the bare floor of my studio apartment, I find within me the final ten. The muscles of my stomach feel like hot wires, and sweat trickles into my eyes, but still I find her ten more. As much as by her eyes, I am driven by the sing-song of her voice, the lilt even as she launches into twelve minutes of aerobics. Now, though, I only watch--for the sake of the downstairs neighbors. Yet also for my own sake, for I watch the dizzying metronomic dance of her areolae, shining like tulips through her leotard. By the end of the segment, she has sweated her various definitions into the cotton. Then, at last, the cool-down. She rolls her head from side to side, strands of her pixied blond hair clinging to her moist back and shoulders. She stresses the cool-down especially. “Make sure to give yourself at least fifteen minutes for your heart rate to come down--and never exercise to the point of pain or exhaustion.” Common sense, to be sure, but she takes the time to caution us, to belabor the safety factor. Because she cares. The emphasis on the word “never” is desperate--as if she’d never be able to forgive herself if even one viewer overdid it. Then at last she signs off, and always with a piece of wisdom or a metaphor: “Life is like a card game, and the Sunrise Workout is like your ace in the hole. Play it, and rake in the chips for the rest of your life.”

Dear Miss Servant,

   And you are dear to me, Miss Servant. That sounds presumptuous, I am aware. Nor is it my custom to address letters to people I have not met. But I have broken with custom, perhaps with decorum, in this case--because certain instances arise in life which beg, which even demand, words. So I write to you, for I cannot speak them. Fate has determined us strangers, and I would not broach Fate beyond these several lines. Nevertheless, you have grown dear to me. Yours is the first face I see every sunrise, the first voice I hear every morning. Let me tell you about my alarm clock. It is a shrill thing, a loud electric buzz, set on a stand beside my bed. As I sleep, the clock rests less than a foot from my ear. When it goes off, it annihilates whatever dreams are left inside me--I am not awakened so much as galvanized. That was before, of course. Now I welcome the sound, welcome the annihilation of my dreams. For the sound has come to signal your dear image on my television, your kind words within my room. When you speak to me of life, I am filled with hope. For myself, of course. But also for the world. Life is good, Miss Servant. Though babies starve in the Third World, though holocaust hangs upon the air, though disease and violence race through the streets of our major metropolitan areas, despair has no place in the heart of man. Let him only look to the Sunrise for his inspiration.

Sincerely yours, etc.

     Hours have passed; I am no longer certain of the time. The letter is posted. But how the images linger! How the images move me, how they move my fingertips across the keyboard! Oh, let me celebrate love in the name of Holly Servant: She who would have me touch my toes twenty-five times per day, in her name I touch many things besides. Was there a life before Holly? Naturally, yet it was something less than life. Those were dim disembodied days, up perhaps at the crack of noon--to wait. For that is, in fact, the livelihood I have chosen, the livelihood I have invented.

     I am a waiter.

     That is to say, again, I wait. It began one morning at the Department of Motor Vehicles. (What better place for an autodidact?) I stood on a line that bent twice before it angled into the single arc that circumscribed the entire second floor of the building. My nose was buried in Kafka when I happened to overhear a conversation between two suits in front of me; they were commiserating, in deep cynical voices, over the sums of money each would lose in the hours until their turns came up. Finally, I took pity on them. I suggested, without a thought of profit, that if one of them would lend me his mobile phone, I would be glad to call them when the wait had wound down to fifteen minutes.

     They eyed me with suspicion at first. But then, perhaps sighting Kafka, shrugged at one other, and the taller one unholstered his black telephone. When at last I summoned them, and when at last their turns came up, I received a tip of one hundred dollars. Plus, they wrote down my name in one of their black binders--a gesture I have always found complimentary. Within a week I was receiving two or three requests per day. I became a familiar face not only at Motor Vehicles but also at several downtown post-offices, outside theater openings and movie premieres, at Knick and Ranger Ticketron outlets, etc. Nor was I highfalutin: I would sit in cars until alternate side of the street parking regulations went out of effect or in limousines as their drivers stepped out for fellatio. Always, of course, I scaled my fees in accordance with the client’s ability to pay.

     No, nothing is served by such particulars, I concede. Especially since the letter to Holly Servant is posted. The sun burned against my forehead as I slid the mailbox shut. For an instant, I stared into the sun. Then I closed my eyes, and the sun was inside my head. 

June 21:

     Still no answer, but I find no reason for concern. There are, to be sure, channels that correspondence with celebrities must follow--secretaries, agents, bomb squads and the like. I have no illusion that Holly Servant’s eyes will be the first inside the envelope. Meanwhile, life goes on. Yesterday, her message cut to the very core of the modern ennui: “No one likes to exercise,” she declared. “But everyone likes to look good. If we exercise, we look good. It’s as simple as that.” How true! How true! Ours is a tradeoff existence, a bargain basement of spiritual beads and trinkets for which we pay blood--this, in anticipation of a greater reward on the higher floors. But what if there are no higher floors? What if the escalators lead nowhere?

     Holly’s point, indeed, was driven home in an unanticipated way last night. As I hurried past Full Pockets, the male strip-joint over on Eighth Avenue, I was accosted by a bruiséd kid. (I prefer the poetic “bruiséd,” accented in a nineteenth century tubercular manner, to “gay,” which is too optimistic, or “homosexual,” which is too clinical.) And he was a kid, maybe seventeen or eighteen, and whether he was bruiséd by nature or by necessity I haven’t a clue. But he grabbed me by the left arm and shot me a desperate bruiséd look. The only words he spoke were: “Want to party?” Now the first thing I thought was how fortunate he was to have chanced on me, since I wasn’t going to lash out. From his looks, the same suggestion had cost him in the past. There was a blue-green half-moon, a perfect crescent, beneath his right eye, a cracked tooth in the front of his mouth, and a scar down the center of his chin. And there was a plea in his voice, a moist desperation in the three words he spoke, a plea too in the way he clung to my right arm. . . .

     Yet I declined; I shook loose without saying a word, wrested my left forearm from his grasp and hurried the rest of the way home.

     Decorum, gentlemen! Decorum, at all cost!

June 27:

     Critical questions are the cross I bear. This is perhaps the effect of too much time on my hands, or perhaps too much starch in my diet. Zezel lectures me about my diet on a regular basis. Zezel is not his actual name; I withhold his actual name in case this journal should fall into the wrong hands. But I will allow this: Zezel is a friend of mine, perhaps a dear friend. Perhaps the dearest friend I’ve ever had. Perhaps he is my lover. Except you already know I am not bruiséd. No, Zezel is not my lover--even though there is much to love about him. Think of Zezel as short. Think of him as thick, short and thick. Think of him under wisps and curls of thinning blond hair. No, Zezel and I are not lovers. Nevertheless, he is concerned with what I eat. As we sat in the corner booth of the Kosher Deli last week, he shook his index finger and cautioned me against a side order of potato pancakes. “Too greasy,” he said.

     “The world is too greasy,” I said.

     “Which world? What is your reference?”

     “This world.”

     “The one the Jews control?”

     “No, not the media . . . I mean, the very quiddity in which we find ourselves.”

     “So it is written,” I said.

     "So it shall be done.”

     “Spare me your speech acts.”

      Zezel smiled, “Do I smell a nominalist?”

      "I stink: therefore, I am,” I said, then, after a pause: “Good shtick?”

       “Good shtick,” he said.

       Then we started to eat.

       Zezel is an odd case. He is my dearest friend, yes, but an odd case. Once upon a time, when we were young and able-bodied, the two of us planned to become writers. Men of our words. But who would have believed us? Even after I lost faith, however, he persevered. For several years, he wrote unsigned obituaries for a local paper; then he graduated to unsigned fillers, then to unsigned news, and he wound up, before he turned thirty, writing a weekly human interest column for a well known New York tabloid under the alias “Mark Goldblatt.” (He refused to explain the significance of the name, if any. Probably, the sound of it amused him.) His columns were, on the whole, unremarkable--folksy, sentimental pieces as far removed from Zezel’s true self as the byline from his true name. Regardless, he kept to his schedule of a column every seven days for exactly fifty-two weeks.

     Then it happened.

     Where once he had been prolific, prodigious, knocking off unpublishable novels and mock epic poems between columns, now his output slowed and then ground to a halt. He began to miss deadlines. The first week, the paper reprinted an old column. The second week, they withheld his check. Still, he could not write. He was blocked. He telephoned to tell me. “Why not just write?” I asked. “Whatever comes, comes.”

     “It’s not that simple,” he explained.

     He was right, of course, it wasn’t. He was blocked and then some. He was dammed. Not a trickle got through, not a sentence, not a word. He trembled even to sign his name. The paper canned him after he missed a seventh consecutive deadline.

     Perhaps he ought to seek professional help, I suggested.

     He stabbed me in the left hand with a salad fork. He stabbed me without a word, then lunged at me again, across the table at the Kosher Deli, and I took three stitches between the third and fourth knuckles. It was an awkward moment in our friendship.

     Afterwards, in the emergency room, he wept, and then at last I realized he would never write another column. He used his resume of publications to secure a university line, and he has since recovered to the point that he can scrawl brief comments on the backs of his students’ essays. But he no longer thinks of himself as a writer and will not acknowledge conversational references to his work. He has renounced that part of his life and all of his acquaintances from that period.

     Except me.

***

Sloth excerpt #2: The narrator's journal is interrupted by "Mark Goldblatt" . . .

"DOPPELGANGED: A LOVE STORY"

by

Mark Goldblatt

      He was urbane. He was erudite. And he was thoughtful, in the literal sense. He could discuss Onan without a blush. He could discuss Byron and distinguish obscure red wines. Tenure track from the get-go, he was goddam seminal in his field, but he is of no special interest save to remark that Guy Gunther once stabbed him in the hand with a salad fork because he hated them sissy boys.

      Guy Gunther indeed is of no special interest save that, for some unknown and perhaps unknowable reason, he is after me.

      And I, if I may speak openly, am especially interesting.

      But I am no sissy boy. For a long time, it has been my dream to become the first one-legged hockey player to skate in the Stanley Cup Finals. Two obstacles remain in my path: 1) I have both of my legs; 2) My stickhandling leaves something to be desired. Nevertheless, I am resolved. It’s like Guy Gunther used to tell me before our falling out: “You’re nothing in this world unless you’re first. Second is chicken shit. Look at Buzz Aldrin. Look at the Chrysler Building.”[1]

      He might as well have mentioned Kohoutek--which served me at the time far more than it served the astronomers. To wit: “We’re going to die,” she said. “The comet, the planets, even the phases of the moon are unequivocal in this regard.” Thus, we joined. She with the intensity of doom, and I because I am me, and because I like to relate to women in a full and open manner. The warm tides of the Sargasso engulfed me, those dying generations lost amid the mackerel-crowded C. Ever it was: Her expression distracted, her hair gyred by the wind, her face framed against the constellations, she was fixed upon me, fixed beyond me. She was fixed, and then at last she broke. Her very ponderousness heaped out of my hands. She panted. She moaned. She cooed and bayed: Her mind moved upon silence. As the sun came over the horizon, we fell apart. She smiled and whispered, “Guy Gunther sends his love.”

      She bared her teeth.

      Guy Gunther! Guy Gunther! Why must you torment me? You flung my bullfrog against a hot brick wall, and I said not a word. You hammer-threw my goose into a tombstone; the purple guts splashed across the name, the dates, everywhere. You killed all my animals, and still I loved you like a brother. You bastard! You sadist! You fuck.

      Mon frère.

      So after that I was more careful. Kohoutek had fizzled, but what mattered was still intact. Summer was i-cumen in, the moist heat settling on my skin like maple syrup. Come June, I ate a power lifter. She was a flyweight and could press ten pounds more than our combined mass. Her thighs were as hard as tire rubber, clamped vice-like about my temples. She reclined upon the weight bench, her reps at the burn, and I, knees planted, her diligent spot. Our lips met. She tasted of underneath. Sweat ran in rivulets down her rippled stomach and converged to a single stream at the delta. From here, I imbibed as well. But she was all sinew, no substance. She held that Jacques Maritain had added nothing to the basic wisdom of Scholasticism. Her reading of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity was equally cursory. I wanted out.

      She said, “What’s wong wif my wittle huggy-poo?”

      “I don’t know,” I replied. “It’s just not working for me anymore.”

      “But why?”

      “How can I answer that? It’s everything. And it’s nothing in particular.”

      “Hegelian!” she cried.

      “You needn’t resort to name-calling.”

      So she resorted to violence. But I was too fast for her. She threw looping roundhouse rights that had no chance to connect. Even her jabs, she telegraphed; she dropped her shoulder, and I ducked her from one end of the gym to the other. Exhausted, she collapsed beside the pommel horse. After a mandatory eight count, she began to weep.

      “I’m sorry,” I said.

      “Sure,” she sobbed. “It’s so simple for you. You don’t have to spend six hours a day with dumbbells. You get to go out, meet people. I never meet anybody.”

      “Then why keep at it?”

      “Sometimes I wonder . . .”

      She threw in the towel the following morning. She got soft, and then she got pregnant, after she got raped, and then one morning she was gone. Such is the sic transit of our inglorious mundus. We gather our memories about us, sift through them for lessons, an eye ever towards that Final Judgment, those Scales and Balances, that Twice-Checked List. Then something like Kohoutek happens along, and we panic. We’re not ready yet! We haven’t yet achieved that higher plateau! We’re still unfinished, half-baked! God hasn’t been square with us, creeping up like that. So to hell with it! To hell with the high road! Confident of our damnation, we desecrate, we fornicate. Kohoutek fizzles, and we repent. We sally forth to start anew.

      High shticking aside, I put the sad doings of the weight room from my mind; I sallied forth to start anew. Seduction, however, has its own dialectics, and soon thereafter I scored an ice-skater. She was a sugar-plumbed fay of a girl, a whisper of pink across the cool white plane. The subtle scratch of her blades charged my senses, stiffened my strides, and the faint flowered scent of her hair trailed into my face. From one end of the rink to the other, we cut crisp eights across the ice until at last I addressed the delicate frills of her tights. She tensed against my fingertips, slowed into my embrace. “Dare we?” she inquired. But the frozen pink reluctance of her daiquiri had begun to melt. A sudden lift. She posed above me, her legs at 9:15, and I accused her through the rum-sweet soak of pink cotton. Then I set her down, and we parted for the compulsories: I tossed my sweatshirt across the ice, shredded my pants across my blades, deposited my briefs along the rail. Then I threw a couple of salchows just to keep warm. Moments later, she had stripped naked. She performed first a single, then a double lutz, her pink elfin breasts hugged under her arms. Then she dropped to a sit-spin as I drew nearer, followed by a flying camel into a double axel; for a finale, she hopped aboard the old vanguard, and we glided as one towards the end of the ice. As she sat on the rail, I gave her five-point-nine out of a possible six.

      “Love,” she moaned.

      And I moaned, “There are other things.”

     So indeed there are. But often we lose sight. If love were excised from the experience of man, enough would still remain to ease his passage, to grease his slow slide back to nihil. Epistemic literature would still remain. Epistemic literature and the prehensile thumb. It might be argued, in light of these, that love is superfluous, a redundancy wrought from the overlap of the angelic and material realms. Or not. Certainly, I have loved. For instance, there was Amy.

      Amy!

      Amy: Once upon a time every bell chimed Amy. Every one, from the pubescent Amy of the recess bell at the grammar school down the road to the rapacious Amy of the dinner bell at the soup kitchen on the corner, every bell rang out Amy upon Amy with each wanton sway to and fro. And I would walk the street every Sunday morning to bathe in an ocean of masses. And my doorbell was pitched to a dear lilting Amy. And my dog wore a tiny cowbell before she died. The love, of course, was unrequited. For I know nothing as deadly to love as an actual whiff of the well-beloved fish. For if a rose is a rose, and a spade is a spade, and a horse is a horse, then a fish is a fish. (Of course, of course.) If a fish were a rose, a man might bleed to death. From his tongue. So at last to ensure that my love would be pure, I pre-conceived Amy. As the Sabbath sun washed across the windows of another roach-ridden motel, I rolled off Miss Congeniality and called her “Amy.”

      “Who’s Amy?”

      “Just someone,” I replied. But from the very beginning she was more, much more, than the mere flesh she lacked. For in my own image I made Amy: And when she was good, she was very good. Imagine a waterfall of tangled brown hair, a hint of fresh strawberries forever on her cheeks. And beneath that hair were high ideas, and behind those cheeks were great and gorgeous words. To come into Amy was to come into knowledge, to come into art--for the first time I felt redeemed in the act. The poetry of Keats played upon her lips. Now more than ever seemed it rich to die. And always Amy received my death, received my ashes into her dust. Yes, and if perchance I rose again, rose again from the ashes of a too sudden death, she received my resurrection with Constance and with Ardor. Neither of whom I ever bothered to invent, for the mere orifical possibilities did not interest me because I had Amy.

      Still, I could not make her love me. Perform, yes. Float up and down the shaft of my penis--to be sure. But love I was unable to engender. Whatever passion I aroused in Amy never quite wrought a wound, in the way that love must wound. The anguish was absent from her eyes, utterly. And although I never asked, there was no doubt in my mind whence the difficulty. The very idea of Guy Gunther hung between us, a scrim though which only our shadows passed.