Emma Who Saved My Life

by Wilton Barnhardt

  Emma explained it to us as we walked along the crowded streets of Little Italy, the sidewalks taken over by booths and amusements and foodstands. “Everyone knows the San Gennaro Festival is in honor of me, but some will tell you it honors an obscure Neapolitan saint who stopped the lava from Vesuvius at the gates of the city or predicted an earthquake or whose body refused to rot—I forget which.”

  “I want that,” Lisa said, interrupting, pointing to a van selling deep-fried pastries. “That pastry thing in that … passticker … passticher…”

  “Pasticceria,” said Emma, using an elaborate Italian hand gesture.

  We goaded Emma into ordering the triangular cake-thing in Italian, but she got shy. “Nah, I can do my tourist Italian around the apartment but not here—”

  “Ey? Whatsa mattuh?” said Lisa doing a Godfather imitation. “You no part of the Family anymore?”

  “Ssssssh,” said Emma, restraining Lisa. “This ain’t the neighborhood for Godfather jokes.” Emma pointed to the pastry. “Una sfogliatella, per favore, signora.”

  “Whut?” said the large woman in the van.

  “That thing, there,” Emma said surrendering.

  Emma explained that Little Italy Italian wasn’t schoolbook Italian. “Besides,” she added, taking a swig from our mutual jug of Chianti, “you try saying sfogliatella.” And on we walked to take our positions on Mott Street for the big parade. “Anyway, are you guys gonna let me finish this or what?” Emma went on. “San Gennaro died and they drained off some of his blood, and every September nineteenth, in Naples, the priest comes out with this vial of dried blood and shakes it and dances with it and prays over it and puts it up various orifices and eventually they either give up or the blood liquefies. And that means it’s going to be a good year for Naples … which means plague deaths, Camorra shootings, murders and rapes will only be in the tens of thousands.”

  The parade was amazing: they had this five-story model of the Madonna and another one of San Gennaro, and the Madonna one was draped in expensive relics and jewelry from the local church.

  “Looks like a bunch of tinfoil to me,” said Lisa.

  And more amazingly, the Madonna was cloaked in a long robe of dollar bills, each strand of cash joined end to end, representing the parish’s contributions. The Virgin strode by us (supported unsteadily by a group of young men in T-shirts, all desired physically by Lisa); we watched the train of dollar bills flag by.

  “That is just beautiful,” said Emma, after a long swig of Chianti. “I like it when the Catholic church is upfront about its materialism. I expect to be cloaked in dollar bills when we get home.”

  Here I can tell you about what became Emma’s One Annual Joke, which she made as if she had forgotten that she’d done it all the years before. Come Sunday morning, parallel with the festival in Naples, she would rise and present herself to her friends and if she had a hangover (and her blood hadn’t liquefied) then it was a bad year for her and her friends, the surrounding metropolitan area and the world at large; if her blood had liquefied and she bounced out of bed without a trace of Chianti hangover, then there was to be prosperity and happiness. She was generally accurate—at any rate, after her Saturday night bottle of Chianti, two greasy hot sausages on an Italian crust of bread smothered in peppers, a take-out spaghetti carbonara, lots of deep-fried pastry things in powdered sugar, and three cans of beer we had waiting for us back in Brooklyn, Emma emerged from her bedroom unhungover, dispensing blessings for her idolators.

  Brooklyn.

  For the historians taking notes, let it be recorded that it was Emma and I who found the new apartment. Lisa had the only daytime job of any of us, and the only one that didn’t pay shit, although she swore she was leaving New Ideas Marketing Ltd. any day now but the thing about makeshift, just-for-a-few-months jobs is that they always pay enough money to seduce you into staying, into putting off artistic struggle/starvation another month. Lisa spent the day in the Tri-State Area supermarkets sticking happy-face decals on Smile-So-Bright toothpaste buy-now-get-asecond-tube-free display racks. Once we all three were shopping in the Associated for our staples (cookies, cheesey puff-things, generic pasta, liters of diet cola, generic beer, tons of Associated homebrand peanut butter, and one special piece of junkfood apiece, which we allowed ourselves) and Lisa saw one of her display racks, her “artwork,” her Claim to Immortality; she sneaked up with a pen and autographed it. Which is to say that house hunting was left up to Emma and myself (I worked nights doing horrible, menial things at the Venice Theater; Emma was at Baldo’s from 10 p.m. until 3 a.m.). To be honest, throughout the spring we got lazy, always figuring we had months to go before June came and we got thrown out of the Village sublet.

  “You know, I’m not entirely unreligious,” Emma said once. “I do pray on occasion, suburban Catholic upbringing notwithstanding. I’ve been praying for the woman and her two little brats to die in a plane crash coming back from Provence and leave us this apartment. We could be squatters.”

  There were no plane crashes and slowly, grudgingly we started hauling ourselves all over the rat-infested, lousy, overpriced, dilapidated, dangerous world of cheap New York apartment hunting. We would sit in the Prato, Emma and I, and circle ads with a red crayon and then look at the paper, go nahhhhh, and talk ourselves out of getting up and going to look at the place.

  “Don’t hand me this garbage,” said Lisa, being a bitch one day. “You’re not looking hard enough. Stop messing around.” So she joined us next weekend, and then we were all irritable and frustrated.

  We packed up completely, everything in boxes, and we were reduced to living out of crates, suitcases, and overnight bags. Emma arranged to stay with Mandy, who was going through some changes and wanted company, even if it was Emma on the couch. Lisa bit the bullet and asked to stay with Susan. Lisa chipped in and I stayed at the YMCA. Three people not having any fun.

  So we met at Mario’s Coffee Shop in the East Village to compare notes after living separately and apartment-searching for four fruitless days. Lisa hugged me for a whole thirty seconds, a defeated woman. And Emma shocked us both—she showed up last—by giving us a big hug and a kiss each.

  “God, I missed you both,” she said, turning red a moment later, checking my eyes to make sure I didn’t make too much out of the platonic kiss. We’re up to three kisses now. Yes, I was keeping score. “Our apartment,” Emma continued, “must never die. As God is my witness we will be roommates for life. I love Mandy but I’m going crazy over there.” She sank into the booth at Mario’s beside me. “And every place I’ve looked at is a slum dwelling.”

  It had been a typical week of apartment hunting: Lisa had almost been raped by a landlord, Emma saw a great place except for the rats that came running out of the bathroom when she opened the door, I opened up a kitchen cabinet which contained no fewer than one million cockroaches which went up my arm and you can envision my unmanly screams, dancing about trying to get them all off me.

  “But there is some good news,” added Emma to our tales. “Mandy has discovered her Lesbian Self.”

  But we thought she was in Emma’s Celibacy Support Group.

  “Well she was,” Emma explained, “but Mandy decided she wasn’t really celibate, but rather that she had been repressing her lesbian tendencies. So she’s going out now with Kim Li—”

  Your Vietnamese friend?

  “Well there are so many Kim Lis in my life. Yes, my Vietnamese friend.”

  Lisa smiled for one second. “Great. I’m happy for them. What does that have to do with us?”

  “Kim Li, wealthy refugee that she is, has a car. And Mandy asked if we could use it, and we can. We can hunt for apartments with a car! That oughta spice up apartment hunting.”

  It sure did. And slowed it down more than ever. Our borrowed car was a NEW TOY to play with, wheels, automotivation, the road before us, the highway song, bridges, tunnels, intersections, places we’d never seen …

  “I want to go to that p
lace called Fresh Kills,” said Emma, looking at the city map and the Dutch-named inlets on Staten Island. “I envision a gritty cop movie, some serial killer who deposits the bodies of his victims at Fresh Kills. I see Sinatra or William Holden as the crusty detective standing over the corpses, police cars, sirens, he looks up, shakes his head, ‘Someone has a real sick sense of humor, sergeant…’ I could sell this screenplay, Gil, don’t laugh.”

  July 10, 1975. Ten days had elapsed.

  “You are looking, aren’t you?” Lisa asked, running out of patience with us. She said Susan billed her stay as “one big slumber party,” and was overly affectionate, and spoke eloquently about women sleeping beside each other, an openness between them, something foreign to men … “Just find a place goddam soon,” she added on the phone to Emma and me, huddled in a pay booth. Lisa was desperate for money as well, none of us having really enough for a down payment, so she took on extra weekend work, going out to supermarkets herself and standing behind a display booth for Connecticut cheese and the Connecticut Cheese Association which was pushing something called Connecticut Edam. She would go out to Queens and stand there in a red and yellow uniform with a big sweatshirt with CONNECTICUT CHEESES: EAT ’EM! on it passing out cubes of Edam cheese on the ends of toothpicks; she was asked to write down occasional comments which no one gave her so she had to make them up. She told us about bending down to put an I LOVE CONNECTICUT CHEESE hat on a little kindergarten-age boy when she had a moral qualm about children walking around with advertisements on them, oblivious instruments of capitalism. “And on top of all that,” said Lisa as her phone money ran out, “I’m constipated like you wouldn’t believe from eating all that goddam—” Click, dial tone.

  Lisa wasn’t the only one desperate. Emma was staying at Mandy’s, and three was a crowd where the new young lovers were concerned and in the last two days they had begun fighting about what Americans knew at home about the war, then over whose turn it was to do the dishes.

  “I’m not going back to the DMZ tonight,” said Emma as we were driving around. “I know what. We’re spending the night in Jersey. I have some real cool cousins there. Haven’t seen ’em in a while but they are real cool—really, I promise.” However, a little drunk and in the dark with both of us tired Emma got lost and couldn’t remember anyway whether it was Mayfair, Montclair, Montrose, Madison, Middleborough, Morristown, whatever M they lived in, and all the expressway exits looked like the one. So at 11:30, utterly used up, we pulled into the Admiral Halsey Rest Area on the New Jersey Turnpike to spend the night.

  I pointed out that everything we owned was in the trunk and, as I climbed in the backseat, that we might get raped by motorcycle gangs.

  “Nobody pays toll to come rob people, Gil. We’re safe here,” Emma insisted, struggling to get comfortable in the front seat, dodging the handbrake.

  We were quiet a minute.

  “I was about to wreck the car I was so sleepy,” said Emma. Pause. “But I’m not sleepy now.”

  If we were quiet we could get to sleep, I said.

  Emma clinked change around in the front seat. “I got some more good news,” she said. “We don’t have enough change for the toll tomorrow.”

  Shouldn’t have had that coffee and candy bar at the Quick Stop Restaurant. The Quick Stop was part of the Admiral Halsey Rest Area.

  “I don’t suppose these fluorescent lights ever go off, huh?” she asked. This began a series of comments at ten-minute intervals designed so she wouldn’t be the only one awake …

  “I’m not comfortable, Gil. I hate this. Is the backseat better?”

  Later: “When I’m famous, I hope Indiana will name a rest area after me. Think they will? I’ll insist on that. No cash awards, no plaques, no statues, no foundations or scholarships—I want a rest area. With a Quick Stop Restaurant. Restrooms where gay men can meet.”

  Later: “We’re under the flightpath for Newark Airport. Do you remember the plane landing on the Van Wyck Expressway? What if this is the night a plane mistakes the rest area lights for the runway lights? Something to think about.”

  Later: “Did you fart?”

  No I did not fart; it was New Jersey. The refineries and chemical firms and gasworks. We were dying from toxic fumes, I suggested. Good night, Emma.

  “Yeah we gotta stop talking.”

  Good night, Emma.

  “By the way,” she added, repositioning herself once again in relation to the handbrake, “I think this qualifies as the Official Low Point in our New York Years, the nadir.”

  And when I was drifting off, almost asleep …

  “I don’t understand how people fuck in cars. I can’t even straighten out my legs … it’s like that room in the Bastille, that Room of Little Ease where you couldn’t stand, sit, straighten up. All across Nebraska and the Great Heartland tonight people are doing it in cars, defying all odds, all physical laws.”

  I volunteered to show Emma how it was done.

  “Ha, ha, make me laugh, in the Rest Stop. Halsey wouldn’t approve.”

  In a spirit of futility: Good night, Emma.

  “Night.”

  Sound of a plane passing over.

  “Gil?”

  Yes.

  “I have to pee.”

  I must have shut my eyes and hours passed but I wouldn’t term what I had as sleep. It got light and trucks started noisily pulling out, planes landed every two minutes at Newark, and so we got up thinking it was nine or something, but it was five A.M. We spent the rest of our insufficient toll money on more coffee at the Quick Stop where Emma tried to flirt with a zitty teenage busboy, asking him how we got off the turnpike without paying toll. We surrendered to the inevitable and Emma got issued a ticket at the tollbooth and the license number and registration were taken down for the files.

  “Kim Li is not going to be happy about this,” said Emma as we drove out of sight of the tollbooth. She tossed the ticket out the window, so I imagine by now Kim Li is really unhappy about it. “First the napalm, then parking tickets. A raw deal all around,” she added.

  It was 6:30 and we were up with the commuters, actually preceding them a little. We went to Brooklyn (via the free Brooklyn Bridge) and Emma with her new money-machine bankcard volunteered to pay for breakfast. We parked the car in Brooklyn Heights, the richest neighborhood in Brooklyn, where all the writers lived (Emma said), and we walked around waiting for something to open, heading south past the Arab section, then back around to the city hall and down an urban warehouse-filled street until we came to a wonderful diner with a chrome façade, a real workin’ man’s diner, Sal’s, a place of breakfast specials and taxi drivers finished with the night shift, plump waitresses in tight polyester uniforms you could see the bra straps through, big cantilevered Brooklyn waitress bras, women who got all the orders right, knew how the boys wanted their eggs, attended with unconscious precision to the refilling of the coffee cup.

  “To hell with Manhattan,” said Emma, savoring the working-class pre–7 A.M. coffee. “Let’s live in Brooklyn.”

  We turned to the Brooklyn real estate pages in the Times, out came the Official Red Crayon, and we circled away. Emma’s eyes wandered to the Queens listings. “Far Rockaway. One block from beach, two bedroom, back yard. One fifty per month,” she read. “Where is that? Far Rockaway.”

  The waitress coming by to refill our coffee answered, “Oh you don’t wanna live out there dearie. Furtherest point on the New York subway system—George!” she yelled, looking over her shoulder, “your mother’s in Rockaway Park—how long’s it take by subway?”

  George, a cab driver, said two and a half hours unless you got an express during rush hours. But still, two hours, easy to the City.

  “But the name is nice,” Emma said, musing.

  “There’s Rockaway Beach,” said the waitress, topping off my coffee, “then Rockaway, then Far Rockaway because it’s the furtherest away. Furtherest stop on the New York subway system. It’s out on the island across from Jam
aica Bay. You got milk in there, honey?” she asked, looking at the milk tin. There wasn’t and she went to get more.

  “You looking for a place?” said the cook behind the counter.

  “Yes,” said Emma, playing the situation artfully, “but here in Brooklyn. My mother was born here, and we had to move to California ’cause my Dad worked in the press office for the Brooklyn Dodgers…”

  THAT WAS GENIUS. We had no fewer than five numbers when we left Sal’s (“You tell my sister, I sent you, her brother Harold,” said a bus driver from South Brooklyn) and we went to work.

  South Brooklyn, south of the Heights but north of almost everything else in Brooklyn, is almost as nice as the Heights but not quite. We made our way to Harold the Bus Driver’s sister’s place along tree-lined streets. This place was the one.

  It had four rooms and a cramped bathroom—a living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms, and Mrs. Dellafini said Lisa could use the basement for painting as nothing was down there but the heater and the fuse box and a utility closet (and rats and mice, Lisa would later report), and Mrs. Dellafini also said she’d rather have two than three but since we were nice (Emma gave the Brooklyn-roots routine again, plus told her I was her brother) that would be all right but the rent had to go up $40 a month to $240 (which sounded steep to us then) and Mrs. Dellafini said she was a widow and her husband died in the first-floor apartment where she still lives (and where we kids were to come if we had a problem) and she lived with him for thirty-five years and she had some good times and some bad times but she saw him through and she loved him very much but he was dead and Life Went On and she was taking a pottery class now.

  My memory’s pretty good, huh? No, I didn’t keep a journal—I kept someone else’s journals, Emma’s. She’d kill me if she knew (well, she wants to kill me anyway, but we’ll get around to that). I didn’t steal them. Emma kept throwing them out, cursing her poetic/writing talents, so once in the trashcan, I figured they were public domain.