Yanik is perched on the edge of a child’s stool now, the blue plastic feet sinking into the grass. He’s holding a fly swatter and a cigarette with a two-inch ash, speaking animatedly to a filmmaker friend in drawling Hungarian. Their language sounds like diamonds rolling around the bottom of a crater lake, lilting and rough at the same time. The two men lean in toward each other, legs draped over their thighs and wrists dangling. Occasional bursts of English reveal that they are discussing a scene the friend shot over the winter.
It was during a historic blizzard that had whited out the entire city. New York normally gives snow a twenty-four-hour window to bedazzle and show off before reducing it to filthy black slush lining the gutters, but this time the powder persevered in the crispy air. Tourists were skiing across Midtown, and everything was muffled under a blanket of crunchy white flakes. Even the hobos were chased indoors by the cold.
Yanik’s filmmaker friend sat at our front window and trained his camera downward onto a man stumbling up the street. I watched from behind him as the guy, dressed in nothing but his shirtsleeves, weaved among the desolate cars, clutching his groin like he was in some horrible pain. He hunched over, jerked forward, and lurched into the soft silence, beating a path into our barren block. I looked up the street and the tenements looked like ghost houses.
There was a sweet hobo named Rex who circled the shelter’s yard that winter and made the sidewalks in front of it his domain. He was knifed right there during that storm. It took so long for them to realize he wasn’t sleeping or drunk that by the time the ambulance pulled up onto the sidewalk, he was frozen solid and partially covered by snow. Two weeks later, we saw the men slipping around in crimson slush. Ma made me look away, and wouldn’t speak until the sun was down.
Back in the garden, a petite, muscle-bound man with shimmering, perfectly moisturized caramel skin walks over to the piñata tree, picks up the stick, and turns toward me, grinning. His disfigured face is smashed in and flattened from a decade as a professional prizefighter.
A gold bracelet glints above immaculately manicured fingers as he takes my wrists and hoists me above a halo of clipped black curls. His lisp bespeaks a series of brain injuries when he asks me, slowly, if I’m “ready to tear thith motherfuckah apaht.” I tell him I am.
I am sitting on the shoulders of George Nelson, another of Ma’s protectors and oldest friends. He’ll come over sometimes to take us to dinner in his big Cadillac that he keeps cleaner than a hospital ward. It will take us an hour to go three blocks because he drives around and around, circling the restaurant, looking for the perfect parking spot where the Caddy won’t get scratched, because it’s his baby. He’ll stop along the way to walk ceremoniously around the car like he’s circling a racehorse, then open the trunk and get something out, like a pristine jacket.
Ma says that’s what happens to people who grow up in filth; they go in the exact opposite direction and become a clean maniac, a germ freak.
Sometimes George will have a flash in the middle of a sentence where his eyes will roll up and freeze under the lids because he’s having a punch-drunk moment and his brain is just having a gap. Then he’ll pick up where he left off.
A jiggling metallic light bounces off the façades and dirty windows, passes through the high branches, and splashes over George’s face. Looking down into his eyes as he carries me over to the noosed piñata, I see that they are crystal brown, like the toffees that old people suck on. Clear caramel.
THE GARDEN PARTY IS OVER. The cowgirl piñata got smashed into a mess of crepe paper fringes. It was filled with sesame candies, glitter, and honey sticks. Alice is packing up the ruins of the cake with delicious frosting, ravaged by the Hungarians. The chili lights are tangled in a milk crate and the rats are nibbling at a trash bag full of paper plates.
I feel different now that I’m five. As we approach our stoop that night, I am aware of something changing. I want to get this stupid dress off me and burn it. I want to run to the roof naked and light up a sparkler.
When we get back into the apartment I rip off the blue lace, go straight to my box of cowboy-and-Indian stuff, and pull out a tube of war paint. Staring out the window, I put two long smears of color straight across my cheeks, under each eye. I stomp into the hall and climb the steps to the roof methodically, Ma in tow. She’s not asking any questions and I’m not giving any answers. I don’t have any, I just feel a push in my belly.
I kick the door open with a karate move and rush out into the noisy darkness. The lukewarm air washes over me and I tiptoe around the edge of the roof so as not to wake the neighbors.
Ma is behind me, holding her tiny Minox B spy camera, watching.
I stand at the very edge of the sticky black tar ledge and look out over the snarling city. I’m not thinking, but I’m intent on something beyond what I can see. Something is burning up that I can’t place. I clench and unclench my fists. I wiggle my toes. I scratch an itch on my ankle with my foot. I want to scream over the street. Something is aggravating my insides that wants out.
I pull my underwear down, and right there, standing up, I piss.
Chapter 5
Alexander Nevsky
The Bowery, November 1990
ALL HER FRIENDS SPEAK BROKEN ENGLISH.
Ma likes boys with broken teeth and crooked minds, especially if you’re from Eastern Europe. If you’re hollow eyed, with transparent skin, hemophiliac, with black humor, she loves that. If you can live on a couple of potatoes, if you can build an instrument from garbage, if you speak like Dracula could be a relative, she’s yours.
Augustos is the caretaker at the Anthology Film Archives, an immaculate red-brick cinema two blocks from our house that plays only weird art-house movies. It’s an old building on the corner of Second and Second where they screen all the stuff that’s too strange for general consumption.
Augustos told her he played the saxophone and that they were having a party at the cinema and we should come. It was a huge crew of Lithuanians, flying around, drinking hard liquor, laughing monstrous, old European laughs. They had thirteenth-century gaps in their teeth and big silver rings on their thick jointed worker fingers. They were a joyous bunch, despite clearly being near starvation, with their old weathered peasant faces. A vampire’s ball, heaven for my ma.
Lithuania was somehow crossed with Greece, thus the Greek sounding names: Dalius, Audrius, Augustos. But they were extremely Eastern European and they’d served in the Russian occupation armies. They hate the Russians, because they served in those armies. We met two brothers, Dalius and Audrius. Audrius was a video artist and a sculptor, and he told my ma, “With Germans, you know when you will die. With Russians, you know how you will die.”
Audrius explained that Jonas Mekas opened the Anthology cinema in the early seventies. The building is an old police fortress, with catacombs downstairs. They had an architect thin it out, and the catacombs were filled with tables for actual filmmakers, painting on film with spindles, cutting and splicing, etc.
Jonas Mekas came here in the forties, and Audrius told us that Jonas was having lunch with Salvador Dalí while “brother was in concentration camp having leg eaten by dog.” Audrius showed us an old photograph of a man in a concentration camp with his leg being eaten by a dog. It was a man they knew, so we figured it was Jonas’s brother.
The Lithuanians have parties that go on for several days. Dalius, the younger brother, is a great rock and roll drummer and shreds up the basement with his endless practicing. The sound of his drumming echoes through the catacombs, where he rehearses for days on end, playing on everything—the pipes, the garbage can lids, the trap kit drums down there. Ma loves the backbeat he does, so we go down and she’ll dance. He started giving me lessons. I love banging on the drums and making my ma shake around the creepy rooms.
She got the brothers some work doing hard labor jobs, the same ones she does herself, with Stucco Sam, putting up walls, so Audrius would introduce her at parties as “the heroine of
New York,” and we got carte blanche to see the movies for free. She says we slip in because I’m cute.
EVERY YEAR our landlord will call and say, “We’d like to give you a turkey,” because, basically, we’re rat-ass poor and they’ve got some government-surplus turkeys or something. We have to run and grab one or they will be gone, but Ma doesn’t trust them. We bring the turkey back to the apartment and stare at it sitting there in a frozen hunk on the kitchen floor and she says, “Surprise fucking surprise. What’s the trick up the sleeve behind this shit? Is it radioactive and they needed to dump it on somebody?”
A roast turkey is a feast for a posse like the Lithuanians, so it’s a big deal that the landlord has given us one for free.
Audrius has taken a shine to my ma. They’ve been spending a lot of time together, and last night he came back to the apartment with us. We were walking home with him and we found this old enamel washtub big enough to fill a large oven sticking out of the trash. Audrius laughed his Nosferatu laugh, climbed into the mountain of garbage, pulled it out, and we took it back to our house.
This morning, Ma got up real early to figure out how to wrangle the frozen fowl, by now sitting in a puddle of pink fluid, its wrinkly white skin looking frighteningly human as it thawed.
I woke up because the house was boiling from the oven being on, and found them rubbing the whole thing down with olive oil and herbs, stuffing raisins and berries and dry rice up its ass.
They stuck the bird in the basin with the rice and fruit up its fanny, poured six or eight inches of olive oil on it, and put it in the oven to cook. The thing was literally swimming in an olive oil bath.
After many hours the rice simply burned up. It was still hard and greasy, but the turkey was done. Somehow, by laughing and flashing the screwed-up teeth that she loves, Audrius got my Ma to try a tiny piece, even though she doesn’t eat meat. They decided it was too good not to share, so the three of us took the basin by its sides and gingerly carried it down the street to the Anthology, the turkey drowning and us slopping oil onto the sidewalk.
This being Thanksgiving, it’s one of the most depressing days of the year. Even the bums have found somewhere to go, except the real despondent ones, the ones that have no idea of the date. It’s getting cold at night but the heat is not yet rising through the subway grates, or streaming under the locked church doors to warm their cardboard apartments. They’re still out there on the empty, gray streets.
Ma reminds us that this is a day of many suicides. She has a poem about the subway on Thanksgiving Day, where absolutely no one is walking around, and the hobos are freezing or sleeping on the trains, and it’s such a gloomy, cold, dark thing.
There are new boys working at the theater, and when we walk in they are astonished and thrilled at our offering, because they too were trying to escape this deathly depressing day. This cements our permanent spot on the guest list as far as they are concerned.
That’s how we got in to see Alexander Nevsky so many times. I can’t even count. It’s a movie from the thirties about a Russian warrior who saved his people in medieval times, on horseback.
The Gothic Germans, with “Heil Hitler” hands on their helmets, come to destroy and conquer Russia, carrying a tiny organ that plays only a few creepy, dissonant notes. The head German wears a long white beard to his waist and a white floor-length robe, in this frozen tundra. A kind of ghostly camouflage in the snow and the blinding white projector light.
They’re carrying him on sticks, the German army warriors, and picking up the little Russian children and tossing them into burning pits. The Russian children look like me—hollow-eyed kids, with the Germans dropping them into giant flames.
There are huge battle scenes with Nevsky and his cavalry, after which the women wander through the burning frozen landscape, between dead horses and their dead lovers and sons and husbands lying there on the white earth. The creepy musical notes make it feel even paler and more desolate. In the burning devastation there are a lot of knights giving thanks, to God, to Alexander, to the weather, and to the thin ice that swallowed up the German army.
Ma got the soundtrack record and we play it at home a million times. I draw along while she describes scenes from the movie that the soundtrack recalls. I draw one of the landscapes and call it “The Burning Pit.” She loves it so much she puts it up immediately. She says it’s a great drawing and shows it to Audrius when he comes over.
MA AND THE LITHUANIANS will be friends for a long time. Eventually Dalius and his little classical piano player wife will have ten kids, who will tear around on their scooters in tiny fur vests. He and the wife will break up and he’ll move into a cramped little room in a boarding house in Brooklyn, where he’ll love feeding the squirrels outside his windows. It’s all about giving away what you don’t even have, and that’s what my ma loves so much: gangster socialism, ghetto generosity. He’ll go to his construction jobs all day and drink all night and play the drums at his gigs.
Audrius will drop dead at a party while talking to somebody, real close to his face, just poof, heart stop, fall to the floor, cold dead. Ma will say, “It’s a horrible thing, but what a funny scene for my dear Audriosi.”
Chapter 6
Cutting My Hair Off
New York and London, August through September 1991
IT’S BEEN A LONG SUMMER. A LONG YEAR, REALLY. I STARTED kindergarten at my new school, P.S. 3, in the West Village, which has been fun. The teacher is a nice Irish lady, and the kids are pretty cool. There’s this one girl, Colette, who I like a lot. She’s tough, from the Bronx. She’s skinny little thing like me, but her skin is mahogany and she has patches of ivory near her mouth and her eye. She’s beautiful. We’re friends now.
School got out in June, and Ma and I spent the summer going to the beach. We took a trip out to Montauk with Ma’s Australian friend and his kids, and we almost burnt the damn house down with a brush fire. The neighbors got real mad at him, so after that we decided to stick to the city.
Brighton Beach is the next-to-last stop on the F train out in Brooklyn. All the Russian and Ukrainian immigrants settled there because the setup and the view reminds them of Odessa, where my poppa’s maternal grandparents are from. They call it Little Odessa.
The area has a wild, Jewish gangster vibe, like anything could happen and probably will, what with Soviet ex-navy toughs with Star of David tattoos swilling pitchers of vodka in the boardwalk restaurants, wearing mobster track suits and rapper bling.
Saturdays are a hilarious Ukrainian wildlife parade. The older Jewish emigrés walk up and down the seaside promenade in fluorescent nylons and huge Versace shades, like a runway show out of a ninety-nine-cent store.
Sometimes the wind kicks up and it’s a blackout sandstorm, people ducking into the restaurants and waiters struggling to hang huge plastic curtains to keep the sand from piling up in the pierogies and the platters of flounder à la crème.
The really old people weather it all and get up for no one. They stick it out on the beach like bleached buffalo skulls in the gathering dunes of filthy sand.
When it dies down the parade is on again.
Sometimes, on holidays, a ring of Hasidic men dance in circles accompanied by some genius pianist fallen to playing yada riffs on a crappy keyboard with massive speakers hot-wired to a car battery or a lamppost. Ten feet away is a man selling Russian pop mix tapes with photocopied jackets, blasting his wares as loud as he can pump it on his massive speakers.
The cacophony of the promised land, Brooklyn, US of A, or the next best thing “till we meet in Jerusalem.” Little Odessa.
It’s also the best place to get knishes and pierogies. There’s a place called Mrs. Stahl’s, big and open and fluorescent lit, where they sell huge, overstuffed knishes for $1.25 straight from the ovens right behind the glass. Boys covered in flour serve them up to you at the counter, and nobody speaks English, just how Ma likes it. We get potato only, and slather them in gallons of mustard. Ma doesn’t stop ea
ting to breathe when she gets to Mrs. Stahl’s.
Then we hit the beach with a vengeance. We always go to the left at the boardwalk. That’s our spot, our second living room in the vast outdoor house of New York City where my ma actually lives, her real home.
I’m superstitious about switching spots, so by now we know a lot of the regulars. The grandmas and grandpas who came to New York in the depression bring their cheap beach chairs and let their saggy wrinkles hang out in the sun.
There’s one real skinny old guy in tight shorts who plays paddleball with me, slowly. I like him because he knows all about Sherlock Holmes, so we can discuss the cases in detail, me struggling sometimes to understand what he’s saying through his thick accent. There’s Abel, the round redhead in the micro-Speedo with the barrel chest and the big laugh. He likes my ma, but I think he’s a sleaze so I always shoo away.
Ma goes out into the water, leaving me with the old man, and swims way out into the deep green, oily waves. She does laps up and down the entire beach, from the abandoned Coney Island parachute tower to the first rocks of Far Rockaway. I’m talking miles, back and forth, for four hours.
My pop told me that on our trip to Positano when I was six months old my ma hit the water at sunup, leaving us together. Ten hours later she reappeared on the horizon in the setting sun. She told us all about a town she discovered down the coast, and the next one after that, Amalfi, and about a sweet freshwater spring in the sea rocks somewhere where she got a drink. Pop would say she is like Odysseus: she has to have help from some spirits in the waves.
She is calm after she comes back into port, back to me on the beach with my old man sitter, smiling and strong. I entertain myself building elaborate sand castles, reading books, playing with the kooks.
Darling Days Page 4