by Warren Adler
They would have dinner at Joe Allen’s on 46th Street, making a standing reservation, usually on Thursdays and timing their meal to arrive at the theater, depending on the walk, about fifteen minutes before curtain so that they could glance over the playbill. Of course, they knew all the salient facts about the show in advance. At Joe Allen’s, the exposed brick walls were festooned with row after row of posters of shows that had flopped, an ironic satirical flourish that spoke to those who immersed themselves in such theatrical lore. Naturally, the three friends had seen every one of the shows. In their lexicon, however, there were no flops, only financial disasters, which had nothing to do with the quality of the offerings. To the three women every play was wonderful in its own way.
At dinner, they would often discuss the relative merits of each show identified by the posters, often disagreeing, sometimes loudly, with the critic’s pans that had contributed to the play’s failure to attract an audience.
“They are so cruel,” one of them would say, usually Emily, who was the softer and more compassionate of the group. She was also, as Sara would often remind her, less discriminating and therefore more likely to praise every show on the basis of it being there at all as its prime achievement. In many ways her two friends agreed with her.
“Look how hard those people, on the stage and off, work to create these wonderful shows for our benefit. Why do people have to be so mean and harsh? There are plenty of folks out there who would enjoy the show, if only the critics would not express their biased opinions.”
“You have a point,” Charlotte was bound to say, trying to be a peacemaker between Sara, who had a tendency to be somewhat harsher in her criticism, and Emily, although they never allowed conflicting opinions to get out of hand. The fact was that all three of them were accepting of what they saw on the Broadway stages, valuing the experience itself above all. They often would see a play two or three times and, of course, would attend all revivals, comparing them, mostly unfavorably, to the originals.
After the show, they would invariably go to Sardi’s where they would order champagne cocktails and a slice of cheesecake and revel in being in the society of many of the stage actors who would have dinner at Sardi’s after their performances.
What was remarkable about their theatergoing was that the three of them would always attend together. If one was sick, the other two stayed home until the third recovered. It was as if, they often joked, they had become one person. They never ever addressed the subject of what might happen if one of them died.
Sara Harris was the first to encounter this inevitability. She was, by then, sixty-five years old and had been diagnosed with cancer. During the immediate aftermath of chemotherapy, she could not attend the theater outings and although she insisted that her two friends go by themselves, they refused.
“Look,” she would remonstrate, “we all knew in the back of our minds that something like this would happen some day. Be realistic.”
“We are, Sara. Like the three musketeers. One for all and all for one.”
“That is ridiculous,” Sara would reply.
“Not to us,” Charlotte agreed, winking at Emily. “The experience would never be the same.”
As her illness progressed and it became more apparent to Sara that she would not recover, she continued to press the point that her two friends should not curtail their theatergoing life because of her illness.
“I’m dying, girls.” She had chuckled. “How many death bed scenes have we seen together? How shall I play it? Noble? Fearful? Regretful? Drawn out like in Shakespeare? Cynical like in Shaw? Heck, I loved my life, especially with my dear friends. So the producers will have to sell my empty seat. Shall I cry for their loss? No way. About the only thing I would regret is that I’ll miss out on the new plays.”
“Don’t talk like that, Sara,” Emily would say, tears rolling down her cheeks. At tragedies she was always the first to cry.
“True to form,” Sara snickered. “After all, it’s only make-believe.”
She knew this was an unusual comment for her to make. It was never make-believe. In fact, to all three of them, it was truer than life. Such a statement, Sara knew was a harbinger of her inevitable demise. She was preparing them in the only way she knew how, dismissing herself from their company, giving them permission to go on with their passionate obsession with live theater without her, diminishing her role. It was hard going to convince them.
Finally when it was obvious that the end was near, her two friends sat beside her. By then she was having difficulty breathing, but her mind was still operating and she had decided on a course of action for her ultimate disposal.
“I want to be cremated,” she told them, “and I want my ashes to be scattered over Shubert Alley.”
Emily and Charlotte exchanged puzzled glances.
“Can you promise me that, girls?” Sara said.
“Of course we can,” Charlotte said, already contemplating the logistics of such an action.
“What a wonderful idea, Sara,” Emily said. “Isn’t it, Charlotte?”
“I love it,” Charlotte exclaimed. “It is a perfect dramatic moment. Where else but Shubert Alley, right smack in the heart of the Broadway theater district. What an absolutely lovely idea!”
“Perfect,” Emily agreed. “That’s exactly what I want as well.”
“And me,” Charlotte said.
“I can go peacefully now,” Sara whispered.
They were the last words Sara would speak.
Arrangements were made by the two friends, even above the somewhat ingenuous protestations of Sara’s children, but in the end, knowing how their mother’s passion for the theater had dominated her life, they agreed. By then, Sara had become irrelevant to her children’s lives. It was a condition both of her friends knew well since it had impacted on their families in the same way.
On the day of the event, a bright sunny spring day, they carried the vase in which Sara’s ashes were kept and had lunch at Sardi’s where they ordered champagne cocktails for three. The waiter, who had known them for many years, understood the gesture. When he put the third cocktail down in front of the empty chair on which they had placed the vase of Sara’s ashes, he crossed himself and nodded respectfully. Holding back their tears, they raised their glasses and clinked the third glass in memory of their absent friend.
“It will never be the same,” Charlotte sighed.
“Never,” Emily agreed.
Although they ordered cheesecake for old times’ sake, they had no appetite and did not touch it. In any event the Sardi’s management picked up their check and their waiter refused their tip.
“You see,” Emily said. “They always considered us a member of the theatrical family.”
“Without us, where would they be?” Charlotte replied.
They left the restaurant and carried the vase the short distance to Shubert Alley. A light breeze had risen and they attracted little attention from the people that milled around looking at the posters and shopping at the store that sold theatrical memorabilia. They had determined that they would scatter parts of the ashes at various points in the alley.
Charlotte tipped the vase and spilled a small amount of ashes into the breeze, watching the specks float away. Then they moved to another part of the alley and repeated the process.
Suddenly, the sound of earsplitting sirens broke the street din and a phalanx of police cars approached the street at either end of the alley. People in orange protective gear descended on the alley and quickly relieved Charlotte of the vase. Then they swiftly handcuffed the two women and herded them to a waiting police vehicle and shoved them inside, slamming the door behind them. Two people in protective gear accompanied them into the vehicle.
Both women were too stunned to speak. Aghast and frightened, they exchanged glances of complete bafflement. They felt the vehicle move and heard the si
rens screech above their heads. They heard the crackling sounds of walkie-talkies as the people in their orange gear spoke in hoarse whispers through their masks. Neither woman could make out the words being spoken.
Charlotte was the first of the two to muster some semblance of composure.
“What have we done?” she asked, perplexed, barely able to comprehend their situation.
Is there a law against spreading ashes? she wondered. Did such a law warrant this bizarre response? She was too confused to ponder such questions and the people in the protective gear were not able to communicate due to the screeching noise of the siren.
After a while, the vehicle stopped. The door opened and the men in protective gear brought them into a building and led them to a room in which a table and two chairs were provided. The women’s handcuffs were removed and they were ordered by a disembodied voice to be seated. They noted that there was a mirrored surface on one wall of the room from which they quickly deduced they were being observed.
“Why are we here?” Charlotte asked the disembodied voice.
“On suspicion of endangering the health and safety of our citizens,” the voice said.
Again Charlotte and Emily exchanged confused glances.
“Are ashes of dead people lethal?” Charlotte asked. She was quickly gaining confidence.
“We are analyzing the material,” the disembodied voice said. “You are being temporarily incarcerated for the protection of others.”
“Why are you analyzing the ashes?” Emily suddenly interjected. She, too, was beginning to regain her equilibrium.
“We can’t take chances,” the disembodied voice said, although Charlotte could detect a kind of diminishment of authority. “Anthrax is a deadly poison and is transmitted through the air.”
“Anthrax?” Charlotte cried, totally confused. She looked toward Emily, who shrugged.
“It can be deadly,” the disembodied voice said. “There have been incidents. Don’t you read the papers?”
“No,” Charlotte said flatly and truthfully. It was, however, clear to her by now.
“You think Sara’s ashes are anthrax?” she said to the disembodied voices.
“Idiots,” Emily said, proud of her sudden militancy. “You thought our dear friend’s ashes were anthrax.”
There was a long silence at the other end. After a few moments the door was opened and a group of official-looking men and women entered. One of the party, obviously the person in charge, addressed the women.
“The preliminary analysis has confirmed that it was not anthrax, but human remains. Please accept our apologies, ladies. We were just doing our job.”
The two women looked at the group confronting them.
“You people,” she began, hesitating as she surveyed the faces. “Do you think…” She paused, embellishing the drama of the comment from years of viewing such an action on the stage. “Do you think we would endanger the lives of anyone in the theater district?” She looked toward Emily.
“These people just don’t understand the joys of theater. Now if you can give us back Sara’s ashes, we will proceed with fulfilling her last wishes.”
They were handed back the vase.
“Sara would have really enjoyed this,” Charlotte said as they passed through the crowd of officials.
“She loved surprises,” Emily agreed.
Big Judy
That summer we rented Mrs. Miller’s garage in Long Beach, Long Island. It had been converted into a two-room shack. One was a bedroom with a double bed and another three-quarter bed jammed into its foot. The other passed for a living room with a table and chairs and a toilet. There was a shower outside. It was a dump. We called the place the “Den of Iniquity.”
In our minds Long Beach was still classy then. It had nice tree-lined streets with pretty single-family houses. Lots of people lived there all year round. It was a big step up from Rockaway where we had summered for years when I was a kid, right up to the end of my college days. In Rockaway, our crowd stretched out for half a block in the sand and at night we hung out near the jukebox in front of the penny arcade on the boardwalk at 55th Street and danced the Lindy. We knew everybody.
Then we started fanning out, starting jobs, following the money, which is why we stepped up to Long Beach, a few miles up the beach from Rockaway. Jackie was already in his father’s retail coat business in Harlem and I was the editor of a small weekly on Long Island. Hesh was with us, too, that year. He had just started in his father’s garment manufacturing business and had his own car.
A few weeks before that summer began, North Korea had invaded South Korea and Truman had declared a police action and the U.S. was sending troops to Korea. We had all missed doubleU-doubleU-2 by a hair, and the idea of war was far from our minds. The vets had come back and were getting established. Some of the people in our crowd were getting married. We were all twenty-one and, at that moment in time, none of us had permanent girlfriends.
But girls were very much on our mind. In fact, that was the principal reason why we had rented Mrs. Miller’s converted garage. We had a place to take them. Remember in those days we all, girls and boys, still lived with our folks. Few of us had cars then. This was before anybody in our crowd made it.
We’d barrel in to the “Den of Iniquity” after work on Friday night, jump into sport clothes and hit the boardwalk in front of the Nassau Hotel. A huge crowd of boys and girls about our age would gather there and eye each other until by osmosis groups would intersect and, if we were lucky, we might pair off. In those days this might lead to what they called heavy necking, which meant you might get your hands inside a pair of panties and, if you were really blessed, you might do some dry humping and get yourself a hand job. Things were opening up, though, and girls were supposed to be getting a lot bolder. You wouldn’t have known by the experiences of the three of us.
In the context of today’s world this might sound awful and insensitive, as if women were merely considered sex objects. They were to us, of course, but, deep down, both genders were looking for the same things. You got it. Love! The kind that Frank Sinatra sang about. The kind of love that made your heart ache with longing and the fear of losing it drove you mad with jealousy. Parting, losing one’s love, gave the worst pain imaginable. Finding a girl to love and love you was the most important thing you could do. That was a fact although few would admit it.
Of course, we hid this craving for true love behind lots of noisy macho and exaggerated reports of our sexual peccadilloes. In those days, too, virginity was a prized possession. The girls were taught to save it until marriage. The boys were supposed to come to the marriage bed with experience, a double bind if there ever was one.
But don’t forget, the technology of birth control was pretty basic. You wore a condom or pulled out in time. Girls were worried sick about getting pregnant. Abortion was illegal and those who did it were sleazy and unsanitary. Sex was a dangerous game, we knew, but well worth the struggle and the risk. Lucky you can’t see the tongue in my cheek.
The three of us were barely okay in the pick-up department. I was pretty good-looking then and had my share of stares, but my tongue would hit the roof of my mouth and stay there when I tried to make an aggressive approach. Jackie was no better and Hesh was short. He had to make do with a kind of clown approach.
Some nights we just stood there in front of the Nassau hotel, cracking jokes, fooling around and hoping that some girls would make the first move. We were just about the worst there was on first moves. How we envied guys like Ziggy who was part of our Rockaway crowd and could make out like crazy even in Long Beach where the girls were slightly more stuck-up than the Rockaway females.
Ziggy wasn’t even clean-cut. He had a cap of curly hair hanging low over his forehead, a big nose, swarthy skin and dark eyes. His father was a butcher. But he had a line on him like a magnet and dark eyes that could fix
a double whammy on any girl who came into his field of vision.
“Hey, doll,” he would say, immediately getting intimate by putting both hands on their shoulders and looking deeply into their eyes. “I’ve never yet met a girl like you, who is both good-looking and mysterious.” Inside of five minutes he would have them eating out of his hand.
“You just compliment them, is that what you do?” Jackie would ask.
“It’s all a question of sincerity,” he would say. “They believe in me.”
“God, you must have plenty to spare.”
“More than enough.”
“I’d be happy with your seconds,” Jackie would say. We all would’ve.
“Sometimes I get so damned bored with it I haven’t even got the will to unzip my fly.” Ziggy liked to flaunt his abundance.
It was Ziggy who came up with Big Judy.
It rained a lot that summer. When it rained you couldn’t go to the beach or the boardwalk and everybody disappeared, especially the girls. Our way of killing time on a rainy Sunday afternoon was to play poker. It usually grew into a big game, about seven guys. We played for what was then considered high stakes, a quarter and a half.
One Sunday Ziggy shows up with Big Judy. God knows where he found her. She wasn’t bad looking for a big girl, not too much in the belfry. She had big tits and an ass to match. We tried to question her, but she shrugged a lot in answer to our questions. What we got out of her was that she lived with her grandmother in a house in Long Beach for the summer and that she was now working as a salesgirl in a store somewhere.
Ziggy was sweet to her, holding her around the shoulders and occasionally giving her a peck on the cheek. We hadn’t started the game yet and were just sitting around the table getting rid of the restlessness. Also, it wasn’t often that we had a girl present.