by Iris Smyles
I sat on the floor and tried to calm down. “I’m sorry for bugging, Juice,” I whispered feverishly. “I just got excited. Listen, what do you think about my rapper name being ‘Busta Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’? I could use the medieval spellings of ‘rime,’ ‘ancyent,’ and ‘marinere’ the way Coleridge does. Methinks it would be quite gangster, aye?”
Permit me my enthusiasm. A middle-class suburbanite from the North Shore of Long Island, I found their street lives fascinating. Their stories of Biggie Smalls were to me as exotic as tales of the Dutch Sinterklaas and Scandinavian Yule Goat. Like a child, I riddled them with questions about the California Tupac. “Does he have helpers?” “What’s a cap?” To each they responded wearily, if patiently, first by suggesting that I “seriously, try to chill,” and second by playing me an album called Enter the Wu-Tang.
If aloof in the beginning, Phatso’s “crew” eventually warmed to me. Yes, I rolled my joints differently—borrowing skills from an origami class I’d taken in grade school, I’d developed my own technique, manipulating index cards into gargantuan animal-shaped filters—but they still pulled well, they had to admit, having successfully drawn smoke from a paper elephant trunk. And like this, one joint at a time, they softened. Gangsta by gangsta, they exhaled and said, “Y’a’ight.”
Then I found out they were all graduates of the Wathen School, an elite preparatory academy in Riverdale, that their parents were dentists, lawyers, and the occasional financier, and that each was now enrolled at various private colleges in and around Boston. Their knowledge of the street had come from watching Yo! MTV Raps; their baggy pants, gifts for Christmas and Chanukah; and their stories of Biggie, gleaned from the album’s liner notes. Having gone to public school, I had more street cred than all of them.
They were beyond excited when they discovered my low birth and asked, with real curiosity, if public school was anything like what they’d seen in the movies, if I knew any black people, and what it was like to be the daughter of immigrants.
Yes, my family spoke English at home. “No, only my mother is from Greece; my father was born here in New York.” “I don’t know,” I went on fielding their questions, “if not having alumni in the family negatively affected my college applications.” And then, before I went any further, I suggested they all calm down “and share of my chill pills.” I opened a pack of Smarties and extended my hand.
Though Phatso had also gone to the Wathen School, unlike his friends who hailed from the tony Riverdale section of the Bronx, Phatso was from Arthur Avenue, an area known as the Bronx’s “Little Italy” and the setting of Robert De Niro’s mob movie, A Bronx Tale. “My fatha’s a hustler,” Phatso told my parents over coffee the first and only time they met.
Phatso’s father hustled “surplus” out of a parking lot on 187th Street, which was nice for us, because whenever Phatso’s mom visited, she’d bring leftover inventory from his father’s store. One time she brought five pairs of discontinued Nikes and a giant box of Mexican jumping beans—the beans hadn’t sold well. After she left, we emptied the box onto the kitchen floor and spent the rest of the day smoking pot and watching the beans jump quietly all around us.
“He sells sneakers, wallets, live chickens, basically whatever he can get his hands on,” Phatso told my parents.
My mother blew on her coffee.
Sensing their disapproval, he added, “Mista Smyles, it’s like dis: I’m in love wit’ yaw dawta,” which, of course, only made things worse. Trying to ameliorate the tension, I reminded my parents that I was dating a preppie, that, unlike me, Phatso had gone to private school.
After seeing all the trouble Phatso’s older brothers had gotten into in the neighborhood, his parents had decided to send Phatso to Wathen. Though, if private school solved some problems, it introduced others. When Phatso struggled academically, his parents were encouraged to hire a tutor. And when Phatso’s laziness was attributed to learning disabilities, they were encouraged to hire a doctor. To treat his attention deficit disorder, Phatso was prescribed a battery of medications, the last of which was Ritalin, which he was still receiving in the first months of our relationship.
We’d grind up the pills with a spoon, snort the white powder through a dollar bill off a hand-held mirror, and pretend we were Colombian drug lords. We’d yell at each other for hours in badly accented English. “Oh, no ju don’t!” I’d scream when he failed to pass me the joint fast enough. When we tired of that, Phatso would move to the couch, where he’d throw pinches of salt at me in lieu of confetti, as I danced and sang Paula Abdul songs in the foreign accent I couldn’t shake, having been born and raised in the Democratic Republic of Foreignia. “It’s a small socialist dictatorship off the coast of Cuuuuuva!” I’d yell, out of breath, shaking my hips ecstatically. I’d go on dancing and explaining to him about my lonely childhood at the city orphanage where I grew up (having been secreted away following the assassination of my entire family, Foreignian royalty who’d perished in the peasant rebellion of 1978), where my only comfort had come from a single Paula Abdul cassette, which I’d played repeatedly until it warped. “Straight up, now tell me, is going to be you and me forever, oh, oh, oh . . .”
Phatso had been doing well at the Wathen School up until his sophomore year, when a scandal broke around his tutor, who, it was discovered, had been writing all of his papers.
“The kid got the job done,” his father told the headmaster, underlining the fact of Phatso’s recent spate of As. “What’s it matta’ how?”
Expelled, Phatso moved to Manhattan and got a job in TV.
It happened like this: For the last year, Phatso had been coming into Manhattan every weekend to tape a public access show with his red-headed friend Allen, a Wathen classmate whose parents had recently divorced. Turning the custody battle to his advantage, Allen had agreed to move in with his father only on the condition that he’d have his own spa bathroom. There, the boys created Pre-party with Allen and His Fat Friend, a talk show taped “Live from Allen’s bathroom!” in which Allen took bubble baths and interviewed his various toys and pets—a life-size Chewbacca doll and his mother’s dog Mittens—while Phatso sat on the adjacent toilet reading magazines, laughing, and adding occasional comments like a junior Ed McMahon. As the show went on, Allen would wash his hair and apply a rejuvenating mask. Then, toward the end of each episode, Allen and Phatso would appear in terry cloth bathrobes and matching towel turbans, side by side before white marble his and her sinks. Like that, they’d introduce the final segment: a five-minute documentary Phatso had made during the week, featuring man-on-the-street conversations he’d conducted with the odd characters who hung around his father’s “store.”
Airing after midnight on Manhattan’s public access channel, Pre-party quickly developed an underground following. With a vocal fan base of downtown scenesters that included Andrew McCarthy, Steve Guttenberg’s brother-in-law, and the rapper Ice-T, news of the show soon reached executives at FOX, where the boys, two weeks after Phatso’s expulsion, were offered a six-episode contract. Still taped in Allen’s bathroom, instead of toys and pets, Allen now interviewed celebrities, while Phatso, leaving his neighborhood behind, began reporting live from exclusive events—concerts, video game festivals, movie premieres, and award shows all over the country.
Pre-party was a dream come true—one episode gathered the entire Wu-Tang Clan into Allen’s bathroom; they brushed their teeth and trimmed their beards as they chatted with the boys about school supplies and bitches—that lasted three months. Despite its ardent following, like so many cult hits before it, the show was canceled, leaving Phatso adrift in Manhattan at seventeen.
I met Phatso a year and a half later and knew nothing of his brush with fame, nor the source of his confidence, which was as perplexing to me as it was attractive. While most persons his age, or any, are deeply self-conscious of their flaws, Phatso carried himself almost regally, as if to say with every gesture that he had a very good reason for being
overweight, which was simply that he deserved more space than everyone else. And then, if there were boys more handsome (and there were—Donald from the dormitory), none were more fun. Whether lining his building staircase with pillows for us to slide down or wearing disguises to eat at the diner across from his apartment, Phatso and I always had a great time.
We laughed a lot.
Until we began to argue.
About stupid things. Like his refusal to believe that America had been settled by Europeans.
Because his tutor had been doing his schoolwork for so long, Phatso was startlingly uneducated, and his ignorance coupled with his confidence began to irritate me more and more.
“That’s why it’s called New York!” I screamed, red-eyed and frustrated, angry because he was ruining my high, “because there is an old York in England!”
“You think I’m dumb enough to believe that!” he yelled back, before taking a large swallow directly from a liter of Coca-Cola and burping the words “You’re wrong.”
“New Amsterdam—Amsterdam, New Orleans—Orleans,” I went on, trying to prove my point, while he lay on the couch shaking his head stubbornly.
We dated for a hazy pot-infused year and a half. Or was it two? Our relationship ended around the same time mine did with weed. As the billowing clouds of marijuana smoke cleared, so, too, did my love for Phatso. After, we remained friendly. And I continued to smoke pot every now and then, too. But never again would I look at him or to the smoke with such wonder.
It would be a little while before I fell in love again and so, on lonely nights, I’d pick up a bottle of whiskey and pack up my collection of Slime—from the A&P nearby, I’d amassed multiple colors and kept them in their original plastic 25-cent globes—and head over to his place. We’d joke around much as we had before and, much like before, he’d eventually start to chase me, pleading with me to relent and just have sex with him, though now, instead of ending up in his bed beneath him, I’d end up outside his apartment door alone, buttoning my coat in preparation for the walk home.
The trouble with us is that we stayed young too long.
—DOROTHY PARKER
Adventures with My Parents
The Liquor Store
I ARRIVE BY TRAIN for a weekend in Long Island. My father pulls the car up, and I duck in from the rain. “We need to stop at the liquor store,” he says. “If I forget, your mom will kill me.”
We take Straight Path to Deer Park Avenue, where there’s a big Crazy Billy’s flanking the street. “Are Crazy Billy and Crazy Eddie related?” I ask.
“That’s a good question, Iris.” He thinks for a moment. The signal light clicks. “No.”
We run through the parking lot, splashing through the puddles.
Crazy Billy’s is huge with row upon row of every variety of booze: shots in test tubes, plastic rifles filled with rum, and chocolate scotch-filled bottles decorating the checkout counter.
My father immediately attends to the mission. Pausing in the entryway, he pulls a slip of paper from his pocket, dons his glasses, and brings the sheet toward him, then away again. Toward. Then away. Then he takes out a second pair of glasses, putting those on top of the first. My father layers glasses the way WASPs do sweaters. Prescriptions are a wasteful extravagance when you can buy a whole stack of readers at Wal-Mart and apply as needed. “Here we are,” he says, finally able to make out his writing. He reads out the name of a fine $5.99 chardonnay, and an employee overhears him.
“Right over here, sir.”
“Good, good,” my father says, heading straight to the bottles. He looks them over carefully and engineers a plan. “All right, Iris. Let’s tank up!”
He gathers five or six bottles in his arms, as many as he can hold—my father’s not a big drinker but likes to buy booze the way he does spectacles—then puts them back down, deciding there must be a better way. He calls to the lady who helped us, “I need two cases.”
Saturday Morning
“Mom! Mom!” my father yells. “Where did you hide my glasses?”
“How do I know where you left your glasses,” she says in her Greek accent, which, because of its staccato, sounds always a bit menacing. “They’re probably in the bathroom with your Scientific American.”
“They’re not. I checked. You did something with them!”
“Go look now! I’m cooking.”
He disappears and returns a moment later, shaking his head. “No, these are my broken glasses!” he says, holding up the one-armed pair.
Mom brings a knife down on an onion.
“That’s okay, I can fix it,” he mumbles, looking from the broken pair to the trees beyond the kitchen window.
He puts on his shoes and goes out.
An hour later he comes through the kitchen door, walks over to his desk, and rummages through a drawer. He pulls out a laser pointer, a handful of finger puppets, a pair of X-ray glasses, a rubber pencil, and some string left over from a box of cannolis—“Jackpot!” he says, holding up the string.
After twenty minutes, he puts his glasses back on. “There,” he says, having used the string to fasten a twig in place of the missing arm. “Hey, Mom,” he says. “Check it out!”
Knife suspended, she looks up. “You look ridiculous.”
“I think it’s cool.”
He smiles and holds his Scientific American at a distance so as to demonstrate the utility of his work.
The Supermarket
My father pushes a shopping cart through the narrow isthmus of the produce section, his focus fixed on the list’s next vegetable. In hot pursuit of red onions, he steps blindly in front of an elderly man several years his junior.
Rattled, the man looks up from a bottle of discount Metamucil. “Hey, what are you doing? Watch where you’re going!” the man scolds.
My father regards him coolly as other seniors, tomatoes and squash in hand, turn from their carts to see the altercation.
“Calm down, Grandpa!” my dad says, laughing at his own zinger. My mom, pretending not to know him, watches from the other side of the aisle. “Crazy old men,” she says to the woman next to her, before covertly motioning toward my father to meet her in the parking lot.
Jericho Turnpike
“Look out!”
“Look out for what?” my father says, jerking the wheel aimlessly.
“There, there. Red light!” my mother yells.
“You’re gonna get us killed! I thought I was gonna hit a deer or something!”
Two minutes later:
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” my mother screams.
Without stopping, my dad narrows his focus on the road. Eventually he pulls over, turns to my mother, and says, “What’s up, Mom?”
“We missed the entrance,” my mother says, exasperated. “Why didn’t you stop? Didn’t you hear me yelling ‘Stop’?”
“I thought you were yelling ‘Pop,’” he says calmly.
“Why would I be yelling ‘Pop’? What the hell does ‘Pop’ mean?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I was trying to figure out. I thought you’d lost it.”
Ten minutes later:
“Shit! We’re on the wrong side of the road!” he says, swerving.
“Huh?” my mom says, coming to from a passenger-side nap.
“It’s a good thing one of us is awake!”
“Like it’s my fault you can’t drive!”
“You’re supposed to be the navigator. I can’t drive AND look at signs!”
“I don’t know how I’ve put up with this man for forty years.”
“Careful, Mom,” he says, “or I’ll trade you in for a thirty-five-year-old.”
“Like anyone else would put up with you.”
“Don’t make me come up there!” I say from the back seat.
Saturday Afternoon
I appear in the living room, where my dad’s watching TV with his eyes closed. Like Cassandra, I announce, “We’re out of Whoopee Cushions.”
My dad op
ens one eye. “Impossible!” He picks up the remote and shuts off the TV. “Let’s get the finder!” he says, meaning my mom.
We repair to the kitchen, where my mom’s listening to talk radio and cleaning a large roasting pot. She bangs it back and forth in the sink.
“Iris says we’re out of Whoopee Cushions.”
“What?” she yells, over her percussion.
My father turns down the radio and repeats, “Iris says we’re out of Whoopee Cushions.”
“Impossible!” She drops the pot with a loud bang, wipes her hands on a dishrag and, wordlessly, leads us into the office/laundry room, where she opens a large filing cabinet labeled “Taxes.”
“Your mother’s amazing,” my father marvels. “She can find anything!”
Stopping on one of the folders, she reaches in and pulls out a brand-new Whoopee Cushion, still powdery in its bag. “Last one,” she says, handing it to me.
I unwrap it, inflate it, and disappear into the basement.
The Basement
The TV’s on and my older brothers are lying on the couch. Teddy, supine with his hands in his pants, is engrossed in an episode of Star Trek, while Alistair is seemingly asleep, though I know what he’s doing—“reclaim[ing] a third of [his] life for Learning, Personal Development, and Self-Improvement.”
In high school, Alistair bought a series of cassettes called Learn While You Sleep. By accessing his subconscious directly, they promised to improve his memory by up to 75 percent. “Suppose you could attain the knowledge you need and want without having to study for hours,” it said on the box, above a picture of a man sleeping, his cranium translucent, his brain glowing blue and green. “With our proven sleep-learning techniques, you’ll wake up refreshed AND smarter!” Once he got the tapes, his thirst for knowledge became unquenchable, and no one, not even my parents, could keep him from a nap.