Outside, on the street, Kathie asked me if I had cried when I saw Carlos. “No,” I said, “did you?” “Yes,” she said, “I couldn’t help it. ”
On the sidewalk outside St. Vincent’s, Kathie suggested that I take Theo to ride on the carousel in Central Park. “What a great idea,” I said. “I am so glad you thought of that.”
Theo and I took a cab to Fifty-ninth Street and Sixth Avenue. I couldn’t stand to look out the window at the city, so I watched Theo watching the city. I never took my eyes off him for the whole trip.
Once we got to the park, Theo got very involved with all the natural rock outcroppings. I had never realized how real they were until I saw him playing on them. Before this day they had always seemed somewhat artificial in my mind. I hadn’t realized how big they were and how many there were between Fifty-ninth Street and the carousel.
Theo seemed to feel no need to get to the merry-go-round. He was happy just climbing on the rocks. But I, who thought I really wanted to make it to the carousel before it closed, kept saying, “C’mon, Theo, don’t you want to ride on the horsies?”
We arrived at the carousel just a few minutes before it was to close. There was a man already slamming down some of the sliding metal doors. Oh, what a violent sound.
We were the only ones on the merry-go-round and it was going very fast. Theo was on an outside horse, and I was on the horse just in from him. I looked over at Theo going up and down to the music and I saw that he was very, very happy. He was purely, utterly, very happy. There was no room for anything else but the happiness that filled him.
I don’t remember who did it first, but . . . no, it was me . . . or was it I? Anyway, I let out with a yell that was sort of half performed and half spontaneously real. In other words, I was quite aware of it coming out of me and how it sounded. And I do know that it was my yell that triggered Theo, and he just lifted his head back and let out with this yelping, joyful cry. It was like out of a movie, only better. His cry just grabbed the whole day by the feet, by the short hairs, and gathered it up. It was pure celebration. It was unadulterated happiness.
That one ride was enough for both of us, and anyway it was clear they were closing the carousel down. Then, on my way out, Theo spotted “the treats.” There was a little display of gum and candy at convenient child level, right on our way out. Theo seemed to know exactly what he wanted. It was what they call a “ring pop.” A sort of candy pacifier. A plastic ring with a giant, glassy, ruby-red candy shaped like a Walt Disney diamond.
I picked up the ring pop and looked around but didn’t see anyone handy to pay. So I just dropped it into my pocket. I’d never done anything like that before, or at least not often, and I didn’t give it a second thought.
As we were leaving, the man closing the metal doors turned and said, “What about that candy, mister?” I was taken completely by surprise. “Oh this?” I said, pulling out the ring pop from my pocket. “What do I owe you?”
“That’s fifty cents.”
Then he suddenly changed his mind and said, “No, give it back. We are closed here now.”
I watched Theo watch me give the ring pop back to the man. Theo was incredulous, but at the same time seemed confused and intimidated by the power of the situation. What was wrong, he wondered, more than he needed that candy.
“Why, Dad? Why the guy say that?”
“None of us want you to eat so much candy, Theo,” I said as I walked briskly up the path, pulling Theo by the hand. Behind us, the carousel man was making a fist with his hand and yelling after us, “Your son is going to end up in prison one day!”
At the top of the hill, just beyond the carousel, I could see the rows of American elms, catching the last of the day’s light. They were all dark and twisting and casting incredible shadows on the green lawn. Should the grass be this green in January? I wondered as I sat down with Theo to gaze at my favorite place in Central Park. These trees, these trees, these beautiful trees.
As soon as we sat down, Theo asked for his bottle, and I pulled it out of my pocket and gave it to him. Then he leaned his head against my body while he sucked. While he drank.
On the way to the subway, every time I saw a cop, I saw the headlines:
MONOLOGUIST AND 3-YEAR-OLD SON CAUGHT RED-HANDED—TALK YOUR WAY OUT OF THIS ONE, MR SPALDING.
Theo and I took the A train home. On the subway I tried thinking about the words “fate,” “necessity” and “chance.” I kept trying to put “necessity” and “sacred” together. I thought also about how I could not imagine living without my children, and how I would either have to die or learn to live without them. I thought about my mother and how she couldn’t live without us, and how she took the more extreme way out. I thought about how none of this day would have been had I not gone alone to P.S. 122 to see the avant-garde drama that fateful night in November of 1989, where, while watching Frank Maya perform, I was tapped on the shoulder by Larry Champoux, who just happened to be Kathie Russo’s boss at the Pyramid Arts Center in Rochester, New York.
“How would you like to come up and perform your stuff at our space?” he asked me.
“Sure, why not?” I said. “Here’s my phone number—give me a call.”
And he did.
And I went.
And Kathie Russo picked me up at the airport.
AUNT PITTI-PAT IN THE TOWER
BY DAVID SIMPATICO
After witnessing the towers collapse on 9/11 and all that has ensued, an openly gay man channels his inner AUNT PITTI-PAT, Scarlett O’Hara’s hysterical aunt in Gone with the Wind, to confront a postmodern world. (Dedicated to the memory of Francis Riccardelli.)
SCENE
A stage
TIME
The present
(A MAN enters, carrying a section of the New York Times.)
AUNT PITTI-PAT: “Scarlett, the Yankees are comin’, the Yankees are comin’, I’ve got to get out of Atlanta before they burn it to the ground, those nasty Yankee devils. Oh Scarlett, I tell you I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do, I simply do not know what to do—where are my smelling salts?”
Atlanta fell all over again in eight seconds. Floor after floor upon floor after floor of steel and concrete and desks and chairs and memos and pictures of the kids slamming down one upon the other upon the next upon ton after ton after ton on top of the heads of the old ladies and MBAs and Billy in the Grounds department picking the onion off of his bagel and all the mailroom clerks and CEOs—110 floors of life slamming down onto their heads just one floor below and flattening them, exploding them, smashing their cells apart like overripe tomatoes caught beneath a mile-high slab of smooth concrete.
In eight tiny seconds Frannie Riccardelli, who was in charge of all vertical movement in both towers, who ran back into the building trying to save the people caught in the elevator cars who had already died behind the closed doors, Frannie Riccardelli with the bad breath and big smile who was my friend since the third week of the fourth grade and asked me to be his Holy Roman Sponsor even though he was two days older than me, Frannie Riccardelli who had five kids and a wonderful wife and a huge smile. Frannie Riccardelli who couldn’t be buried because there was nothing left to bury.
His teeth and eyes and tongue and fingers and ass and blood and bad breath blown to the winds, in a half a heartbeat blown apart unable to resist the mile of concrete crushing down upon his head. His big toothy smile shattered forever except for the memories and videotapes his wife will play for his five fatherless children.
Frannie Riccardelli blown apart while I watched from my fabulous thank you God Greenwich Village loft on the ninth floor facing south with the spectacular three-quarter views drinking coffee on my terrace facing south and loving the view, MY view with the clear blue sky and the smell of morning and not thinking about that plane until it explodes the perfect view from my terrace in the blink of an eye.
On the phone screaming crying shaking watching Atlanta fall in eight seconds, the onl
y thought left in my head “how many people did I just watch die?”, screaming in my beautiful loft with the wraparound view.
Walking around staggering stunned in the sudden quarantine of Fourteenth Street roped off filled with speeding tanks and militia and empty ambulances and tired firemen pulling their feet behind them while the rest of us give a standing ovation on the curb and Virginia the sexy Puerto Rican grandmother who cleans my apartment in the fluorescent green stretch-pants every other week runs out with water and throws her arms around some hunky Irishman covered in dust and death, throws her arms around him and kisses him, MY HERO MY HERO.
Walking around in the gathering dust, the dust in the gentle change of wind, dust and asbestos and concrete and something else floating up from the Financial District, a scent we all recognize in our guts, something sickly, something more than dust mixed in with the smoke and concrete.
Walking around the silent Village surrounded by thousands of smiling faces, Xeroxed in black and white and color, smiling faces of the Recently Lost plastered like wallpaper onto the A&P and Ray’s Original Pizza, smiling husbands and sons and sisters and lovers and daughters and cousins and fathers and mothers and Frannie Riccardelli, all lost and waiting to be found, in some hospital probably, but the hospitals are sad and empty and waiting for someone, anyone to come in—smiling faces blown apart all lost until we breathe them in through our nostrils and down into our lungs. And then we spit them up, gagging.
I can’t sleep anymore. All I want to do is get a gun and kill someone. I mean that in the good way.
Oh, the Times, the Times. I hate the Times, thank God for the Times. Every day the Times picks through the rubble with far greater success than all the rescue workers combined, picking through the smashed remains for the smiling faces, for the lives lost, finds them and reduces them to a smiling face and a headline. “Bronco Busting Boy Scout,” “Loving Son and Broker.” Today, they found Frannie Riccardelli, “Planner of Family Fun.”
They left a lot out. They left out how Frannie and I used to wait until the sun went down in my backyard and catch lightning bugs, how we used to think we could decode their little blinking language and understand them, caught forever in the eternal embrace of a pickle jar.
Oh, Scarlett, Melanie, where in heavens is my sense of humor, I need my sense of—oh, here it is.
(Looking in the newspaper.) Why look, Katie Couric is getting an eighty-million-dollar raise, and I can’t find my Metrocard. Katie stayed up forty-eight hours straight. So did her hairdresser. How much did he get?
Perhaps I’d feel more secure if I read the full story, and not just the headlines on the way to the subway.
How do I prepare for BioTerrorist attacks? How much Vicks Vaporub will I really need?
I thought I was lucky because I got through AIDS in one piece, but now I have to worry about Dirty Bombs in Times Square, just when my career is taking off. Everyone’s a critic.
I bought a cell phone when we started bombing Kuwait, I mean Afghanistan.
Personally, I liked the theme music for the Gulf War better.
The night I became one with my Pitti-Pat Within—you remember Pitti-Pat, Scarlett O‘Hara’s hysterical, snuff-swilling paranoic aunt with the sausage curls—anyway, I remember sitting in front of my television when the new kid on the block interrupted all programming, and stood in front of our American Flag, and said, Okay, come on now everybody, I won the election, that’s all there is to it, let’s eat. He interrupted all Friday night programming, including Buffy. And I thought for sure there would be a riot in the streets, I mean when was the last time we had our very own coup d’etat?
I was like a bird trapped inside a closet, bouncing off walls, flapping for cover, grasping at headlines or snippets or sound bites for some refuge from my fluttering paranoia and the revolution going on outside my door—Atlanta is burning, where are my smelling salts?
But there was no revolution. No reaction. No crowds breaking glass and stealing jeans and torching cars. Nothing.
And don’t you know that Good Ol’ Boy got just what he wanted, like a spoiled little rich kid entitled to something he wants simply because he wants it. Daddy’s little boy with dime-store eyes. Daddy’s little boy. I didn’t vote for him. I’d fuck him, but I wouldn’t vote for him.
I remember thinking when we invaded Kuwait, I don’t even like those people. They’d kill me just because of who I choose to sleep with. Like I said, everyone’s a critic.
I guess someone somewhere must think that this whole thing was a good idea. I wish I could understand that, I truly do. Like David and Goliath. I mean David got tired of hiding in his stinking little caves while the Giant stomped around the villages, tired of watching his children play hopscotch with land mines and having his tongue ripped out and fingers cut off and vanishing with muffled screams into the night while the Giant gives a helping hand and blind eye to the loss of lives and fingers and tongues and gouged eye sockets, supporting regimes and training fanatics who run riot until they bump into David practicing his aim, David who finally pokes his brown little head out of the cave and hits a goddamn bullseye.
Atlanta is burning. The sky is falling. Where are my smelling salts?
Frannie Riccardelli. Planner of Family Fun.
All that fire, burning, Atlanta, Afghanistan, Wall Street, Kuwait. They all look the same. Those poor little children hiding in the hills, in the caves. Under desks. Running down the fire stairs. Roasting, trapped in elevators ninety-four stories high. Heroes sacrificing their lives smashed under concrete as they try to save the dead. They all look the same.
I shouldn’t think too much. Stick to the headlines. Because otherwise I start to think too much.
I start to think too much about why Atlanta is burning. And why David hates Goliath. And why Kuwait and Afghanistan sound the same. And why it all seems to be about the deed to the Holy Land and stepping into five-thousand-year-old shit and the millennium hanging over our heads like the sword of Damocles with a nuclear warhead and the Second Coming and Golden Parachutes and the Battle of Armageddon and Economic Globalization and the fall of Enron and Oil Concerns in the Middle East and Dick Cheney on the Board and will the real AntiChrist please stand up with the sky falling down upon our heads and the world changing forever in eight seconds and Frannie Riccardelli’s bad breath.
(HE picks up an empty pickle jar.) I remember the night the wind changed, the air was filled with concrete and dust and death, I ran inside and found an old pickle jar. I took the jar out on my terrace, into the cloud of air swirling with the souls of the dead. I opened the jar and caught the air, like lightning bugs. I scooped as much air as the jar could hold, all the dust and death and pain and breath and hopes and dreams floating in the dusk. Scooped them into the jar so I could always have them. So I could always remember.
(HE unscrews the jar, puts his face in it and breathes in deeply.) The Tarot Card for Change is the Tower. Bolts of lightning smash a High Tower, which falls to the ground in a million pieces.
The Tarot Card for Change is the Tower. It brings a moment of quick and explosive insight, allowing us to see through the hidden.
The Tarot Card for Change is the Tower. When the dust has settled, it ushers in a new age. An age of illumination. And healing.
Smelling salts. They clear the head. They make you think.
THE COST OF LIVING
BY BRAD SCHREIBER
At 17, YOUNG MAN recalls his first lesson in economics and labor negotiations, while lamenting the fact that the only constant in life is, in fact, change.
SCENE
A stage
TIME
The present
YOUNG MAN: There’s something going on . . . that’s frightening me. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s not a plot. It’s not just aimed at me. It’s affecting everyone. But nobody has noticed it . . . except me. What am I talking about? I’ll tell you. Just don’t mention where you heard it.
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