Two things occurred to me as I went down the stairs. One, for some reason in W. Charles Gruber I had a friend. And, two, for the first time since meeting him, I had not shared a confidence with Don Cook.
Was I trading up or trading down? Was I being corruptible or pragmatic? Was I a prince or a prick? In that dichotomous state did I deliver my bones to the Army of the United States, where persons other than myself would help me render that judgment.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ginnie
1949
It wasn’t much of an apartment, but I really didn’t want it to be. Up till then I had never lived in anything even approaching squalor and somehow I felt that, if I was to develop into anything at all, I had first better experience some of the drearier things that life had to offer. Also, the absolutely last thing I wanted to do was shoot up all my money on frilly duds and fancy digs. For though admittedly a bit of a flip at the time, I did have enough marbles to know that a sixteen-year-old girl in the big city becomes immediate shark bait if for too long she shops drunkenly at Bergdorf’s while living lavishly at the Ritz. Also, to abuse the point further, the prospect of my calling home for more money was so low on my list of “things to do in an emergency” that it came just after suicide and just before going to bed with Walter the Repulsive.
So, squalid it was, my little pad. And meagre it was, my menu. But between the rent and the groceries, I knew I could make it on something like twenty-five dollars a week. That meant that my thousand dollars getaway money (less train fare to New York City and cab fare to Greenwich Village) would last me for almost a year, even if I never got a job. And if, after a year, I couldn’t make it in New York, I’d willingly face up to the fact that I wasn’t worth it and I’d turn myself in to my “guardian” and sit around some other girls school, masturbating and matriculating, until my 400 grand came due, after which I’d turn alcoholic, buy a ballet company, marry Vincent Price, write my memoirs, and die of the dropsy in an Old Folks Home in Darien. So, as you can see, I was not without a plan.
Nobody asked any questions on my first day in New York, so I volunteered no information that might be used against me. I looked older than sixteen, my luggage was presentable, and I had a painting under my arm, which meant that I had either painted it or purchased it (or stolen it)—so the landlord took the first month’s rent in cash, for which he gave me three things: a receipt, a key, and a dirty look.
Like I said, it wasn’t bad—except comparatively. By that I mean it wasn’t the back country of Stamford, but neither was it the puke bucket of Peking. It was all in the way one chose to look at it, and I chose to look at it positively. It was one room with a bathroom and a kitchenette, but it was mine, all mine. The refrigerator worked, the john flushed, the radiator hissed, the bed held, the door locked—Old McMaitland had a flat, ee-eye, ee-eye, oh.
I cried for an hour. Didn’t know it was coming. Never do. I didn’t even know why I was crying. But there I was, one minute smiling with triumph, my paisleyed bags brightening my new kingdom on the Hudson. And the next minute I’m bawling like a kid whose toy poodle got galomphed by an elephant.
I chalked it up to rampant puberty and unpacked. The next thing I did was run out and get a radio because I couldn’t live without Guy Mitchell, Frankie Laine and Patti Page. Then I went out again and got some cleaning things—soaps and sponges, disinfectants and detergents—and I went to work.
The apartment was furnished—technically. There was a broom teethed on by the Werewolf of London, and a mop that Monstro the Whale had spit up. And some pots, pans and dishes that the Red Cross bought from South Africa after the Boer War. But there were no sheets or towels, no dust rags, no toilet tissue, and dishes so greasy I couldn’t get a grip on them—so I went out again, throwing caution to the wind and thirty-five dollars to Woolworth’s, and when I came back I had it all—the whole shootin’ match. From Pepsodent to Drano, my pad was complete, functional, sanitary, staffed, and stocked. I hung up Maggie’s portrait so that it collected the light from my one window, and I was home.
It was a big building, maybe three stories and ten tenants. And mine wasn’t the only basement apartment. There was another, lived in by a black lady named Mona, who, at all hours of the day and night, had men and women lining up outside her door. I, of course, thought the worst, but was wrong. What she was doing was cooking chickens. In those wee hours, she would cook chickens for people. Musicians, mostly. And hookers, I’m sure. But for a buck and a half, Mona would give them a completely cooked chicken. And any time of the day or night, there was a line outside Mona’s door like a hit movie was playing.
There was something depressing about the Village. It seemed to have had it, except its denizens didn’t quite know it. They’d scuff around in sandals and dirty clothes, quaffing cappuccino at coffee houses and coexisting with Oriental lesbians and sequined faggots as though that’s all they had to do by way of paying dues. Oh, some had talent, I suppose. Some could paint and sculpt and knit—but all of them? Hardly. And why couldn’t they see it? I could see it and I was barely an apprentice nincompoop.
It took me awhile to realize that many of them did see it only they blocked it out, huddling together in the Village because they simply couldn’t, or, rather, wouldn’t, take a shot at the outside world—choosing instead to bestow on the Village the aura of Paris after World War I. Well, it wasn’t Paris. It wasn’t even Poughkeepsie. It was just a big, fat hiding place for veterans and runaways, and neophyte hookers and unrevered poets. It was just a big garbage pail that people were jumping into and rattling around in and putting the lid on from the inside.
Yes, I would enjoy Greenwich Village, for what it offered: abandon and rebellion and dereliction. But I would also keep it at arm’s length because it was, at the same time, dulling and meandering and toxic.
On the first rainy day I bleached my hair. Not just blonde, baby, but Harlow blonde, raging blonde, so platinum it was white. I was afire with it. Ablaze. My blood was blonde, my tendons, my toes. The change, though sudden, was natural enough in that my skin was fair and, in the summers, gorgeous with maybe twenty-three freckles. And my eyes, blue-blue, were reborn beneath the vividness of it all, finally seeming as though they truly belonged in that formerly vacant face.
My body, too, once an alien thing, had come together in New York and, in leotards or tight jeans, with my yellow hair in a pert ponytail pointing straight down to my best feature (my ass), there wasn’t a citizen on MacDougal Street who didn’t take me for a ballerina and want me for a quickie.
Fitting action to fiction, I signed up for a modern dance course. Madame Getrude on Jane Street. I did that at night, working during the day in a leather shop that specialized in belts, taking the job because I got tired of sitting in my apartment watching my plants not grow. How I loved working in that shop, for it smelled of boots and saddles and reminded me of home and of my sister’s three riding instructors, those stallionesque men of her diary’s delight, those well-proportioned lads in bulging jodhpurs and constant heat. Just stepping into that shop and handling those belts and I would go moist in the crotch. You might say that, working in leather got me into a lather. More on that later.
I had no friends but wasn’t trying for any. There was something crashingly marvelous about being among all those people, all that life, and not talking to anyone. And I didn’t want to ruin that wonderful isolation with chit-chat and balderdash. Also, putting a clamp on my mouth seemed to sharpen my eyes, turning me into a kind of Christopher Isherwood lens that took snapshots, a million a minute, that I could then reduce to microfilm and file away in that part of my brain entitled: New York City—1949. In which our heroine sets up house in wicked Greenwich Village, bleaches her hair, and tries to discover her true identity.
I lived like that, in the leather shop by day, alone with my reading at night, like something out of O. Henry, the big difference being that I had over $900 in the cookie jar, whereas O. Henry never had that much in his life.
I deci
ded to broaden my vistas. Helping me in that decision was my comprehension of the financial facts of my life—I had a balance-of-trade deficit. I was spending more than my leather-shop salary was earning. I was dipping into my savings, and, if I was to reverse that trend without subsisting solely on brown bread and V-8, I would very soon have to knock over a gas station, or turn hooker, or both.
I discussed the matter with my employer, Patsy D’Amico, suggesting to her that I might work on some kind of commission, say, ten percent on everything I sold over my thirty-seven-dollar-a-week salary. The poor girl then showed me her books, tearfully explaining how she was losing money by keeping me on at anything over twenty-five dollars a week. I pretended to see her point, offering to take a twelve-dollar cut so that they wouldn’t foreclose on her two-bit tannery. Then, after she dried her grateful eyes, I told her to go fuck herself, only I didn’t hang around to see if she did.
No job, no unemployment insurance (because of my age and the fact that I had never applied), little Ginnie Maitland looked for new work; and, though the Village had many possibilities, she began to feel that she’d no longer like to labor as a salaried menial but as an entrepreneur with her own business. (Shit, somewhere down the line, someone on my father’s side had done it or else how come all the money?)
I read the Classified section of The New York Times, looking for “business opportunities.” A lot of people had ideas or growing concerns, but needed capital, and I had over $900. Yes, I was willing to invest it, provided that whatever I put it into had a good chance of success, not that I was any judge.
I thought I had it in a clothing store that featured only suede. I loved their name—Easily Suede—and I went down to chat with the owners. But if that stuff was suede then I was queen of Yugoslavia, so I got out of there almost before I went in, the smell of hairy tar-paper rebounding in my nose as I walked further down the street to where destiny truly awaited me. For what should I stumble upon but a brand new store front, shiny and seductive, all glass and chrome with its name in confident caps:
Kosher-Japanese Cuisine
SAYONARA
permitees: Sy Fein & Ira Tanaka
I went in even though the sign on the door screamed in Day-Glo pink that the Grand Opening was still two days off. It was all clean and Formica, little booths in red vinyl, candles in squat fish-net glasses, adjustable chandeliers hanging on single strands that one could raise or lower with the snap of a wrist. And on the walls: on one side, framed travel posters of Japan; on the other side, likewise framed posters of Israel (which, at the time, wasn’t two years old so all that the posters displayed were camels against a Star of David).
There were two men sitting deathlike in a corner booth, like new additions to be picked up by Madame Tussaud on her next buying trip to Greenwich Village. One was about fifty and Caucasian. The other about thirty and Oriental.
The Caucasian looked up at me. He was quaint, Humpty-Dumpty in a sleeves-rolled-up C.C.N.Y. sweat-shirt, that revealed enormous forearms, like Popeye’s. He had a round, flushed face and a full crop of rust-colored hair that began at the very top of his head, giving him the look of a bald man who had gotten his head caught in a rusty porthole.
“Sign says two days,” he said. “Come back in two days and we’ll still be here, in this booth—dead.” And he waved his hand as if to dispense with me magically. He was Sy—Sy for Seymour, I guess—Sy Fein, and he was always able to see the darker side of life.
The other man, the Oriental, was Iri. Iri Tanaka. He was smaller than Sy in every dimension and every direction. He tried to smile at me because that’s what Orientals do if you just stare at them and say nothing. “What the man is trying to say,” said Iri, “is would you mind leaving us alone?”
“What’s the matter?” I asked, a little aggressively because I sensed a business opportunity and knew that it had to be pursued. “This is a very nice place.”
“Make us an offer,” said Sy, immediately beginning to laugh, slapping Iri on the arm and quipping, “gallows humor, eh? Eh?”
“Yeah, hysterical.” Iri got up and went into the kitchen, muttering Japanese, tossing a napkin ahead of him and kicking it further along.
Sy stood and said “Oy.” He said “oy” every time he changed his position. It was like a sound his body made. The Tin Man creaked, Sy Fein oyed. Beyond that, they were similar in that each of them wanted a brain. “I’d have my head examined if I could afford it. But when a man puts his entire life’s savings into a new and stupid venture, he’s got nothing left to shoot on a psychiatrist. That’s the long and the short of it. Period and goodbye.”
“I guess I don’t understand,” I said, but I was beginning to.
“Okay, Blondie, I’ll tell you.” He wanted to talk out his misery and I was elected. “You see this place? Beautiful, right?”
“Right.”
“A beautiful American story. A Jew-boy and a Jap. Kosher-Japanese food. Not easy. Not even legal, I suspect. But if he don’t tell Hirohito, I won’t tell Ben-Gurion. So, here we are—a nice place, yes?”
“Yes.”
“No!” And his arms flew apart, as if they would fly off. Then he tugged at one of the chandeliers, bringing it down to mouth level and speaking into it as if it were a microphone and he were introducing two leading heavyweight contenders. “Ladies and gentlemen. We are in hock to our eyeballs!” Then he looked at me curiously. “Why am I talking to you? Who are you?” And he tugged at the chandelier and it shot up to its previous height.
“Well, I—”
He pointed toward the kitchen in which Iri had disappeared. “I would have sold him but he has no value as he was made in Japan.” He walked around, touching tables as if they were marble and chairs as if they were thrones. “I’ll make a long story short only because I find it boring. Every dollar we both have, every yen, is in this place. We have the finest of everything. Stoves, refrigerators, pots and pans of such a chrome you could wear it on your Chrysler. A sprinkler system could have put out Chicago. Auxiliary generator you could light up Venezuela. And clean? Even the cock-a-roaches are clean. I make them shower every day with Dial. You’re waiting to hear the catch, right?”
“Right.”
“So here comes the catch. Ready?”
“Ready.”
“The catch to the whole thing is this—” He yanked down another chandelier and yelled into it. “Thank you, Mister Sonofabitch Union! After all our expenses you make us put up a bond for our waiters and dishwashers—two weeks! Two weeks advance for seven momzas who won’t do anything except get their beautiful hands dirty!” He snapped the chandelier and up it went as he pointed again to the kitchen. “The cooking he does. The buying, worrying, and glad-handing I do.” He tried to calm down. “So, all right, we say, to get it going, to get it off swinging on a star—we will work for nothing. Zip! Me and the Jap—no pay, no love, no nuthin’.”
“Excuse me, but I never heard of Kosher-Japanese cuisine.”
“The reason you never heard of Kosher-Japanese cuisine is that there is no such thing. It’s all in the mind. A dream. A vision that comes to me in the night and says ‘Sy, for openers half of New York is Jewish. Next, with the war over for years, having a Jap cook on the premises can be very chic. So, Sy, make a partnership.’”
“I still don’t follow.”
“You don’t follow for two reasons. One, you’re not a businessman. And two, with a ponytail and a tochis like that, everyone follows you, so what are you worried about?” He looked at me searchingly. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Thank you. I needed a good laugh.” He continued with his catharsis. “So my friend in there, who has been working as a cook in the home of a wealthy manufacturer of Jewish clothing, and has managed to pick up a few pointers on kosher cooking—you following yet?”
“I think so.”
“Nifty. So he sees me and I see he and we work out a scheme because in me you are looking at an old pro from the resta
urant business.” He shouted into another quickly yanked-down chandelier. “I have failed in five previous restaurants and have a right to sing the blues except six is my lucky number and, by Jesus, this time I am gonna make it!” He almost threw that chandelier back up into the ceiling, after which he faced me. “Still with me, Blondie?”
“Yes.”
“Splendid. So we have this idea, me and Iri, in which I call him Ira instead of Iri because what’s in a name anyway? And we come up with ‘Sayonara’ which in Japanese means ‘So long, buddy. See you later when your legs are straighter.’ A play on words, yes, but a nicely turned phrase nevertheless. And we raise $7500 and we get a license to sell the pee that passes for Japanese beer and we’re in business, right?”
“Right.”
“Wrong. Seventy-five hundred dollars goes immediately down the toilet because fully staffed and ready to throw out the first ball guess what?”
“What?”
“You ready?”
“Ready.”
“We have not money to buy food! What with having to pay deposits for the Electric Company and the Water Works, and having to mortgage Baltic Avenue to post a bond with the fucking union—pardon my fucking—I can’t buy a fortune cookie! I can’t even buy a hot washcloth a fella shouldn’t have to use his sleeve after a plate of pastrami-teriyaki. Still following?”
“Yes.”
“Glorious. So as we speak, my partner is in the kitchen with Dinah, hopefully committing hara-kiri and naming me as beneficiary. And I am in here, talking to a cutie-shiksa while, inside, my gall bladder is attacking. If you have a pencil, I’ll write a note. ‘Pardon me for killing myself and please take care of my cat’”
“How much do you need?”
“A three-cent stamp, the letter should reach my wife without being returned for insufficient funds.”
“How much do you need for your food?”
“You have investment capital?”
There Should Have Been Castles Page 9