Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [33]
“Well, then where the fuck did I get crabs? Huh?”
“Would you relax? Maybe you got them from the sweatpants I stole from the gym.”
The New York Knicks had taken over the school’s gym, the least used gym ever constructed on American soil, SUNY Purchase being an arts school. Other than the couple hours a week that the acting department practiced fencing there it was totally deserted. So the New York Knicks took it over and now the parking lot was full of BMWs and Cadillacs and seven-foot-tall men roamed the halls of the gym, asking me if I’d seen their massage therapist. Their lackey would come by “the cage” and dump their gargantuan sweats in the laundry machines behind my desk. The cage was the name of the check-in area where I worked, which housed fencing swords and face nets and squash rackets. I checked IDs and handed out towels to sweaty actors who wrapped them around their necks like Kate Hepburn walking the Connecticut shore in 1942. Mostly I sat at the desk and read because hardly anyone ever came through.
One day I stuffed some of the Knicks sweatpants into my backpack. It wasn’t like their financial officer was going to shut down the franchise because of a bloated sweatpants budget. When I got them back to my dorm I realized I’m five-seven. These sweats, while seriously thick and plush and a nice classic navy color, were about a foot too long. You couldn’t roll them up, either, because the cuff was so thick your ankles looked like you had elephantiasis. I cut them and made shorts out of them.
The other problem with the stolen sweats was that they didn’t say “New York Knicks” on them anywhere, so I’d trot them out expecting enormous recognition for my winning shorts but to other people they just looked like navy cutoff sweatpant shorts.
“Aren’t these shorts cool?” I’d say to Emma, my friend from the city.
“They all right. They’re not all that if that’s what you’re askin’.”
“They’re New York Knicks sweats.”
Emma looked me up and down. “They don’t say New York Knicks.”
“That’s because these are their private sweats. You know, like their private collection. These are theirs, not that massmarketed shit for fans. You can’t buy these.”
“So where’d you get ’em?”
“I stole them.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. From the gym. From the Knicks.”
“Oh. That’s cool.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. They wear these. They rehearse in these.”
“Practice. The Knicks don’t rehearse. Shit.”
So I had to have this long, tiring conversation before I’d get the recognition I deserved. It just wasn’t worth the trouble. At an arts school, no one’s impressed with the Knicks. If they had been sweats that Kevin Kline rehearsed in while doing Shakespeare in the Park with Meryl Streep, somebody might have given a fuck.
“I don’t think I got crabs from Patrick Ewing,” Martin said. “I only wore those once and then I waxed my car with them. They were too goddamn big.”
By the time I deduced that I got the crabs from borrowing a nightgown over Thanksgiving break from one of my best friends from high school, Maggie, a real traditional Westchester slut, I was no longer concerned with proving my fidelity to Martin. Martin had become a man who commented on my “freshman fifteen” and forced me to go jogging around campus with him, a man who knew I had become bored by him, a man who was obsessed with Tiffany’s. More than any young marriage-crazed woman from New Jersey, that man loved that little robin’s-egg-blue box. He was always giving me necklaces and bracelets from there. He even gave my three sisters Elsa Peretti necklaces at Christmas. Martin could be too traditional. Like when I peed in my bed when he slept over one night after a big night of drinking he acted like an outraged English butler he was so crispy about it. My feeling was I’m sorry if my urinating in the bed, my bed by the way not your bed, interferes with some kind of image you have of me, but just because you give me things from Tiffany’s doesn’t mean I’m the girl in the Tiffany’s ad in the New