My Old Man

by Amy Sohn

  “He ad-libbed that,” Powell said.

  I looked at Joey for help but he just shot me a helpless glance. Everyone was quiet as though I had insulted Powell so egregiously that they were going to bounce me.

  And then, as quickly as if there had been no silence at all, Powell’s face exploded in a wicked grin and he shouted, “Just fucking with you!”

  “You’re out of your mind, Hank!” Kim trilled.

  “You should have seen him after the final dress,” Mira Sorvino said, shaking her head. “I’d never seen a director get so angry.”

  “That’s because I needed you guys to push things one step further. You see, whenever one of my actors gave a real personal, soulful performance in rehearsal I wouldn’t cry or be moved. I’d just think to myself, You think that’s heartache? I’ll show you heartache.”

  “That’s very Jewish,” I said.

  No one laughed. I was Catskills in a white-bread world. “I’m not Jewish,” said Powell earnestly.

  I couldn’t believe he was so slow on the uptake. He couldn’t be dumb enough to believe I thought he was a Yid. There was one other possibility, one I wasn’t quite ready to entertain: that he got my joke but didn’t laugh because it wasn’t his own.

  “You’re not?” I said fake-incredulously. “With a name like Henry Powell?”

  Again there was a moment of silence. Even Joey looked confused. It’s never a wise move to bring a stoner as your wingman.

  “I know you’re not Jewish,” I said. “I was saying it was Jewish of you to glorify your own pain.”

  “I got it,” Mira Sorvino said encouragingly.

  “Rachel was in school to be a rabbi,” Joey said, as though it would explain everything. This was terrific. He was whipping out my Jew card right when I was feeling most out of place.

  “I didn’t know rabbis came like this,” Powell said, with a smirk.

  “Oh, they do,” I said.

  “So what happened? Why’d you drop out?”

  They were all looking at me like I had inadvertently wandered into the wrong party. I was sitting with the nation’s greatest indie director and an Academy Award–winning actress, talking about my crisis of faith. It was like they were begging me to be a conversation-stopper. “I realized I wasn’t sure I believed in God.”

  “You got all the way to rabbinical school before you realized that?”

  “It actually happens a lot,” I said.

  He nodded and ran his hand over his chin. “What line of work are you in now?”

  “I’m a bartender.”

  “It sounds like the setup for a joke.”

  “I know,” I said quickly, noticing the annoyed looks on the women’s faces. “So you going to write another play after this, Hank?” I asked brightly.

  “Nah, I don’t think I could do this again. It took too much outta me. Films I can handle. They’re protracted, yet somehow manageable.”

  “So are you working on a new script?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I’m gonna start shooting this winter if everything goes according to plan with this gorgeous specimen of humanity to my left.” He leered at Kim, who seemed to blush.

  “Are you the star?” I said.

  She laughed and shook her head. “I’m his agent.” I heard “Joy to the World” blasting in my head.

  “She gets that all the time,” Powell said. “That’s the world we live in these days: the agents are beautiful; the models are ugly.”

  “What’s your movie about?” I asked.

  “It’s a memory flick about a murder, very dark. My homage to Berryman.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Ingmar Berryman. The Swedish—”

  “I know who Ingmar Bergman is. I just thought it was a hard g.”

  “No!” he bellowed. “In Sweden, the g’s are soft!” I could never tell when he was kidding and I wasn’t sure he could either.

  “What’s it going to be called?” Joey asked.

  Powell put his face close to mine and said, “Who Killed My Wife?”

  “Good title,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “Titles are very important. I start with the title and go from there. What’s the name of your bar?”

  “Roxy. It used to be a jewelry store. It’s in Cobble Hill, in Broo—”

  “No kidding,” said Powell. “I live in Cobble Hill. I’m on Strong Place. I moved there a month ago.”

  “Really?” I practically screamed. “I grew up there. I’m on Pacific.”

  “Where’s Pacific? Is that near Starbucks?”

  “You go to Starbucks?” I asked in shock.

  “Are you outta ya mind? I go to D’Amico.” D’Amico was a coffee place on Court Street that had been around for fifty years and sold roast coffee and sandwiches. I’d gone in there a few times but the local Italians who patronized it smoked cigarettes in the back and sometimes the smell made me so sick I had to leave. “They make decent cappuccino there,” he said, “which is all I drink. It’s smoother on the stomach than coffee, which was the cause of my first ulcer.”

  “You don’t mind all those crazy people?”

  “I love it. Everyone there should be institutionalized or incarcerated!”

  I cast a glance at Mira Sorvino. She was sipping her drink and glaring at me. I had to step off Powell’s tip. You don’t win a man’s heart by alienating his friends. “I have to tell you, Mira,” I said, “I think your choice to do nudity was very brave. I loved that moment in Act Two when you ripped your shirt open and said to Joey, ‘You wanna know me? This is me!’ ”

  “That was tough for me,” she said, “but I felt it was central to the moment.”

  “Those knockers made me very happy,” said Powell. “Put a naked girl in a show and it makes it a hell of a lot easier to show up for rehearsal.”

  “I loved that you weren’t just naked, but angry naked,” I said. “It was very sexy.”

  “Funny thing about nudity,” he said. If it were a late-night public television talk show, this would have been the moment when he leaned back and took off his glasses. “A couple years after I graduated Queens College I got a job as a stage manager in a tiny off-off-Broadway theater on East Ninth Street. One of the shows was an experimental production and in the last scene everybody in the play was supposed to get naked and simulate an orgy. This was post-Hair and at that particular point in time nudity was da rigga.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Da rigga,” he said. “That’s French.”

  “Oh!” I said. “De rigueur!”

  “That’s what I said,” said Powell, frowning. “Da rigga. The actors were doing a lot of acid at the time, sometimes even while they acted, and during the final scene, a dinner party, which was supposed to develop slowly, I noticed one a the guys acting strange, forgetting his lines. I was watching this from up in the booth. At a certain point he begins casually removing his clothes, one item at a time. But you see, this wasn’t the part when they were supposed to do it. The naked part wasn’t till page seventy-six and we were only on fifty-one. So he keeps stripping until finally, as though it’s written into the script, he moseys over to a corner of the stage, squats down, and takes the most enormous dump I ever seen in my life.” He paused and grinned wickedly.

  “Oh my God,” said Mira Sorvino.

  “Are you serious?” said Joey.

  “Evidently he had taken some magic mushrooms before the show and lost control of his bowels along with his mind. The audience was shifting in their seats. The cast members didn’t know what to do. Some were continuing with the scene, others broke character and gaped openly. I knew that if ever there was a time a stage manager was needed it was now. But my ass was like Fluffernutter on the chair. The lighting guy was screaming at me to do something. People were walking out. Finally something snapped inside me. I yanked off my headset and ran down.”

  “You cleaned up the shit?” I said.

  “No! I ran out of the theater! It was one of those situations wh
ere there’s nothing you can do but run away!”

  His face was blank, poised like a freeze-frame, his eyes bright, his tongue glistening. He stayed in this tableau for three solid seconds, threw his head back, and laughed at the top of his lungs: “Heh heh heh heh heh!” Then he stopped just as abruptly, his mouth still frozen in a smile, and glanced at us eagerly like he was cueing us to join in. Immediately we let out affirming chuckles too, at which point Powell erupted in another louder, longer wave himself. It was as though he couldn’t experience anything as funny unless he had company. He was boisterous but lonely, and something about that combination made me want to know more.

  “When Sam Shepard taught playwriting at Davis,” I said, “the class met in the scene shop and sometimes while he was lecturing he would just go over to a prop toilet in the corner and take a piss in front of the students.” I nodded to emphasize that there was a scatological through line from his story to mine, but Powell just said, “Shepard’s overrated,” stood up, and walked out into the crowd. A few minutes later the women followed.

  “Powell likes you,” Joey said.

  “I totally blew it with that Shepard line,” I said.

  “He gave you a lot of attention. He doesn’t give people attention when he doesn’t think they’re worth his time.”

  “But what about Mira Sorvino? They seem to have some history.”

  “He tried to sleep with her at the beginning of rehearsal but she rejected him.”

  “Why?”

  “She thought he was too sleazy.” I wished he had chosen not to share that. No girl wants to know her heartthrob’s another chick’s table scrap—even if that chick is a celebrity.

  As we sat there I kept eyeing Powell, waiting for him to come back, but people kept coming up to him to congratulate him and it became clear he wasn’t going to return. Finally I told Joey I was leaving and went over to Powell, who was talking to Nathan Lane. “Reinvention is overrated,” Powell was saying.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” I said, smiling wanly. “I just wanted to say I’m leaving, Mr. Powell. It was an honor to meet you.”

  “You as well,” he said archly. He was so hot and cold—the kind of guy who could turn the asshole on and off in an instant.

  “Feel free to stop by my bar,” I said. “Bergen and Smith. Or maybe I’ll see you at D’Amico someday.”

  “But you said everyone there was crazy,” he said.

  “Then I guess one more can’t hurt,” I said, and exited stage right.

  Moms With Thongs

  WHEN I got home I found Liz on the stoop, smoking a cigarette. She didn’t have any roommates but she only smoked outside. My secret theory was that she liked to scope the three Dominican guys next door who played dominos on the sidewalk. They were there every weeknight from April till whenever it got cold—they put a small card table out, smoked cigarettes, listened to Spanish radio, and laughed loudly at each other’s jokes. I’d known them five years, since I moved onto the block. Virgilio was short and in his forties with a sweaty face and thick glasses, Levi was in his sixties and wore a white Kangol cap, and Mariano was a hot daddy with a gorgeous wife and baby girl.

  “Hellooo!” Liz screamed when she saw me. “What a delight to see you, my sweet Racheleh!” I sat down next to her as she gave me a bear hug. “I’m so glad to bump into you. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about the other night.”

  “You have?” I said, incredulous at her uncharacteristic self-awareness.

  “Of course! I’m mortified that Gordon had the nerve to throw a Black Power hissy in front of your parents.” Perhaps I had overestimated her.

  “Wouldn’t you be mad,” I said, “if it were some hook-nosed Jew?”

  “That would never happen. Jewish mascots don’t move product. But I’ll tell you one thing: that’s the last time I take a black guy to Banania. He got so mad he dumped me! It started out as an argument over the painting but then we got onto other crucial subjects such as my unwillingness to take him up to Chappaqua.” Liz’s parents had made a fortune in real estate and lived down the road from the Clintons, and judging by the family photos Liz had shown me, they were snooty, cold, and assimilated—Ice Storm Jews. “He accused me of being a closet racist,” she said, “I accused him of being too PC, and he said he never wanted to see me again.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “He was so slammin’ in bed,” she sighed. “I mean, the man let me rim him for hours. He had literally the most delicious rectum I have ever tasted.”

  Liz was obsessed with men’s butts, and more particularly their assholes. When she wanted to express admiration for a guy, she would say breathlessly, “I wanted to bury my face in his wrinkled anus.” She also enjoyed having her own asshole violated, and said the reason she loved black guys was because they were more open to doing so.

  “How am I going to survive without Gordon?” she moaned, looking up at the moon as though it should answer. “He made me feel so good about myself. He told me I had the perfect-sized tits. Do guys ever tell you that?”

  I looked down at my rack. I can hold a pencil under each breast. I can hold candles. I’ve lost quarters in my bra only to find them weeks later, with receipts, and small pieces of black licorice. Men do not tell me, “You have the perfect-sized tits.” They say, “You have the biggest tits I’ve ever seen.”

  “Actually, no,” I said.

  “I don’t know what I am going to do without him,” she said. “I already ordered four new vibes for the box but it saddens me too much to have to use them.” She had told me once that she kept all her sex toys under the bed in a Sigerson Morrison shoe box. “I mean he was so good in bed. I came like half a dozen times each time we had sex.”

  “Half a dozen times?” I said.

  “Yeah, spread out, but still. He was so into me being on top. I guess because he rode horses so often, when he was in bed he wanted cowgirl. It’s my favorite position.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the clit stim.”

  “But if somebody’s using their hand it really doesn’t matter what position you’re in, does it?” This was the way I’d always gotten off with David and I’d never really given it much thought. I’d only slept with two other guys before him—Sam Rubinstein, my boyfriend the first two years of Wesleyan, who usually made me come by going down on me, after which we’d have sex, and John Suk, the Korean guy who had devirginated me at a party senior year of Stuyvesant and didn’t make me come at all.

  Liz regarded me as though I had walked into a toga party wearing street clothes. “Oh, sweetie,” she lamented gravely. “Get with the times. This is the hands-free generation. You don’t know about CAT?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Coital alignment technique.” She glanced at the garbage cans behind the gate in front of the building and picked up a stained pin-striped pillow that was resting on the ground.

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “Calm down, it’s mine. I threw it out this morning.” She placed the pillow on the sidewalk, flicked her cigarette into the street, climbed aboard, and began gyrating in slow motion like a recently institutionalized lap dancer. Her hands were on either side of the pillow and her face was just a few inches from the sidewalk.

  “You see?” she said. “Grind, grind. And around, and around and around.”

  After a few more thrusts the domino players started pointing and talking loudly in Spanish, egging her on. “Looking good, Leez!” Virgilio shouted.

  “Cómo estás, Virgilio?” she said, waving cheerfully. The window to the apartment building opened. A fat teenager stuck his head out and flashed her a big thumbs-up.

  “Okay. I got it,” I said, lifting the pillow out from beneath her and depositing it back in the can. Liz was like an eccentric older uncle at a family gathering: you can’t stand being around him for more than an hour but you can always count on him to make the night more entertaining.

  “So what should I do about Gordon?” she sa
id. “It’s so rare to find a guy who doesn’t have rimming issues, and rarer still to find one that’s hung like his own horse.”

  “Go to that Caribbean restaurant on Atlantic and Hoyt,” I said. “Brawta. They get a good bourgeois black crowd.”

  “Nah,” she said. “I have to stop dating these shines. They’re too high-maintenance.”

  “Shines? No wonder he dumped you!”

  “I wouldn’t have so many problems with men if I could figure out how to be more like you. You date the right kind of guys. Good boys.”

  “That’s a horrible thing to say.”

  “It’s true!” she said. “What about David?”

  I’d met David in my first month of RCRJ and somehow he became my boyfriend before I had a chance to decide how I felt about him. I was in the cafeteria carrying my lunch tray, headed for my usual table by a poster of Chagall’s Music in a dark corner where nobody else liked sitting, and when I got there I saw someone in my seat. He was a tall, lanky pale-faced guy with shoulder-length red hair, and before I could find another spot he said, “I’m sorry, was this table taken?” I didn’t want to be a total asshole and I hadn’t made that many friends, so I shook my head no and sat down across from him. He was a second-year cantorial student from Cambridge, the son of a concert violinist. Almost all the male cantorial students were gay, so my instinct was to dismiss him as a prospect. But he shook my hand without giving me a total dead fish and over the course of our conversation he mentioned the Red Sox, so I optimistically told myself there was a chance he was a breeder.

  He was funny and thought I was too, which was good since almost all of my classmates regarded me as though I was some weird rabbinic freak of nature, beamed down from Frisbee U. They mocked the fact that I wore barrettes in my hair and 1940s dresses, instead of the typical Jansport knapsack, jeans, and T-shirts. David wasn’t like that. He was actually wearing a Sebadoh shirt the day we met, and he wore oxblood Doc Martens.

  He told me his mother was brought up Irish Catholic and later converted when she met his dad. He said, “So that makes me a McJew.” He kept dropping Yiddishisms, with lines like, “The first couple weeks of classes it was such mishegoss I could hardly keep my head on I was so fakakta,” but it came off more charming than Linda Richman–cheesy. He had warm blue eyes that twinkled when he laughed and his hair was shiny and thick. At the end of lunch when he asked if I was single I shot back with, “I’m not single. I’m unaffiliated,” and he laughed and laughed.