(I’ll give Emma this: she could put together a string of insults where there was nothing left standing … what a pro.)
Emma, I said at this point, just LEAVE, go home, go away—
“I’m just hitting my stride, Gil—”
Keep your voice down. Let’s move this to the hall.
(We moved it to the hall.)
“I bet this Connie number was on her knees in the interview—”
Emma, that’s enough! I am FURIOUS with you!
“She’s gonna dump you like yesterday’s devalued pork futures, Freeman, and you’re gonna have to come crawling back to me—”
You are the most selfish person I have ever met. I don’t think you’re my friend—I think you just pretend to be my friend; I don’t think you know anything about friendship—
“Bullshit Gil, it is because I am your friend I am saying come away from these stupid shallow phoney—”
My life is not going to be lived like your life, Gennaro! It is going to be FUN, it is going to have ALL kinds of people in it, I’m not going to condemn everything that moves, and I don’t want to be neurotic and work up a virtual CULT of my problems like you do—
“Well I got some problems, okay? That’s me, that’s the way I am—I’m doing real well to be as good as I am given how messed up my life is—”
WHY is it messed up? It’s not messed up, except for what you do to drag yourself down: you’re smart, you’re talented, you’re pretty—
“I’m not pretty.”
I’m tired of it Emma. You don’t need friends, you need a cassette tape—get Jasmine to make you one, over and over it can play back to you: Yes, Emma you are smart, yes, Emma you are pretty, yes Emma—
“I’m mad at you too, Gil,” she said, and I saw her eyes fighting Emma-when-criticized tears, and her cheeks redden. “I thought you and Lisa were going to go the distance with me and both of you are becoming bourgeois bores—she is not going to be a painter and…”
And I’m not going to be an actor, is that it?
“You tell me! How many times have you auditioned in the last six months. You’re still nowheresville in the goddam Venice Theater after they’ve thrown you out the door—oh of course, how could I be so foolish? I know what you’re doing! You’re putting your dick in somebody—that’s reeeeeeal important, that’s a life’s work! There’s a committed artist for you—”
Connie cleared her throat. She was now in the hallway too, standing in the door.
“Emma. Emma Gennaro,” Connie said, walking slowly toward us. “Gee that name’s familiar. Weren’t you on the bombing raid over Hiroshima in ’45?”
“It’s a pleasure to bomb at your party, Con.”
“Well sweetie, it’s the last one you’ll have the pleasure of trying to ruin. Why don’t you just move along home now so I can have Gil back? There are some people dying to meet him back inside.”
“Really Con? What happens when they find out Gil has no liquid assets to invest?”
Connie managed an annoyed smile. “Coming Gil?”
Emma poked my arm: “Or would you rather go to Sal’s?”
No, I said quietly, I don’t want to go to Sal’s, goodbye.
Emma just stared at me, mercilessly.
I’ll call you sometime, I said.
“Don’t bother,” said Emma, turning. And as she walked away in a shaken voice she said: “Don’t bother calling me ever again.”
Connie and I watched her disappear. Connie turned to me, not a hint of curiosity about what had transpired. “Dramatic girl, Gil. Be glad you’re done with that.”
We went back to the party. Class act, that Connie. She knew she had triumphed so she didn’t rub anything in, prove sarcastic, remind or recriminate over Emma, she never mentioned her again, that is, the rest of that evening, which was the next to last time I ever saw her. We had one more very bitter lunch after that, but that concerned something else.
“Connie’s unforgettable,” said Saul, sitting beside me on the sofa. It was late in the party, down to fifteen or so, everyone had broken off into quiet conversation, dark corners (Connie had lit candles all around, put some soft jazz on, the kind of jazz that has never been listened to, only talked to or screwed to) and we sat there going through Saul’s pack of Gauloises which were just about to kill me.
I said, In her way, Con is a health freak as I began coughing. Instant lung cancer, those cigs.
“Yes, that’s a relatively new development. The jogs around the reservoir in Central Park, the vitamin program, the sauna and workout room at Golam Brothers.” Saul laughed darkly. “You met her almost a year ago, huh?”
Yeah. After that play where I was the football hero. She said I looked good in the football uniform. We had lunch a time or two and then she dropped out of sight and then I called her up and … well, here we are.
“She had a bad year last year,” Saul said, studying me. “She probably told you about it.”
Well no. Bad year? Thought Connie never had a bad year.
Saul looked intensely at me. “She told you, didn’t she?”
Told me? Told me what? I thought: no, she’s not got some fatal cancer or something, I hope. Am I the last love of her life? Has she got six months to live?
Saul, after my silence, looked up to the ceiling. “No, she didn’t tell you. That’s a shame too, I thought she might have started dealing with that. I see not.”
My mind was full to capacity. What is it? I asked. She’s not ill, is she?
Saul turned solemn, but not too solemn. “Well yes.”
Tell me.
He cleared his throat, a half smile, a shake of his head. “No, nothing serious, just inconvenient, and you shouldn’t be alarmed because you may not have got it, and there’s no reason necessarily that you will get it like I did. I mean herpes, genital herpes, is only passed when the sores are extant and otherwise you might never know…”
Connie was watching us while embroiled in another conversation, looking over at us, smiling when I caught her eye, not confident, wondering what we were talking about. As for me, I just sat there (Saul got up to get me a drink), thinking absolutely nothing—experiencing a true mental void. And when the thought-machine began to crank up again all it could think was:
Oh my. Oh my. Oh no.
MIDDLE
I’m interrupting this narrative for a progress report … Mother is six months pregnant, and Gil the Father spent yesterday driving out from Chicago to his childhood home in Oak Park, dragging a crib down from our attic, accidentally scraping paint off the living room walls at my mother’s and breaking off a leg of said crib. T minus three months and counting.
I’m currently still stuffed from this meal I went to last night. I’m at this big family do, the Mandlikovs, with Sophie (you’ll meet her in a bit). God, when Russian-Americans get together to eat they do it unto the death—the kind of food from Eastern Europe that makes cement in the stomach, cheeses meeting cabbages meeting minced meats meeting creams. I crawl to the sofa to fall asleep while the family has its reunion around me, and as I fall asleep I hear Sophie’s half-brother Steve going on about New York:
“… It’s a cesspool. What did you say, John? Ha ha, I think a nuclear bomb is the only answer.”
I turn over and tune him out. (That guy gets on my nerves …)
Later on, he’s at it again:
“I don’t know why anyone would live anywhere else but Chicago. L.A. is a mess with the crime and the gangs, and New York saw its day in the ’50s…”
Uh, no. There’s that certain breed of Chicagoan that just can’t accept the fact Chicago might not be Paradise on Earth.
“We’ve certainly got the art of New York—”
(Geez, not even close.)
“—we have a finer symphony orchestra. And theater. Now we have a theater scene that, though not as big, certainly matches in quality the dying New York theater scene, now in its death throes. There’s not a playwright in the country that wouldn’t rat
her open here—”
I get into it: That’s just not right, Steve. New York is still the theater capital of America. Look I was in New York theater for ten years there—there’s no comparison.
Steve blanches. “But I read an article in the Tribune…”
I duck out of this one. I go back to the dining room to pick at leftovers. The women are all in one room, some are sewing, some are trading recipes, these matriarchs comparing their children’s futures. There’s this little crepe thing filled with cottage cheese and spices—don’t know what it’s called—and I’m running one of these decadently through a pile of sour cream—
“Mr. Freeman?”
I turn and it’s someone’s kid, but I’ve forgotten who.
“I’m Steve Mandlikov, and I was wondering if you’d talk to me a minute.” Out goes his hand. Firm handshake that seemed to commit him to liking you. Good-looking boy, healthy and fresh and clean the way Midwestern teenage guys can be. Hey waita minute, this is Steve the Asshole’s kid, Steve, Jr.
“You see, I’m thinking about being an actor. And Aunt Sophie said I should talk to you because you were in New York, in the theater. Were you really on Broadway?”
Yeah. (Oh boy. I see myself here—a vision of Gil, twenty years back.) Let’s sit down and talk about it.
“You heard of Forensics?”
Carving up dead people?
“No, like speech and debate tournaments? Well, I won the dramatic monologue state championship this year for Illinois…” He paused because people are usually impressed at that point. “And I’m going to the national tournament in Seattle. So I’m not a no-talent if you were thinking hey this kid’s probably a … a no-talent.”
Forensic tournaments? Sounds like this generation’s attempt at The Parson Comes to Dinner, Steve, Jr., this time in the role of Little Jimmy. There’s theater in Chicago, I suggest, a healthy growing small scene—
“Nyeh, it’s all in New York. I’m moving there after college.”
What do your folks think?
“Dead set against it.”
Steve, Sr., in the next room: “They can’t even make pizza in New York as good as we do in Chicago…”
(Yeah, Steve, Jr., I’m thinking, you deserve your escape from the Midwestern Mafia. I could sit here and discourage you, I could say the theater is all a racket, I could say it’s magic and love and all that stuff, I could make you want to get on the next bus, and I could scare the hell out of you. But instead I’m going to give you Joyce Jennings’s phone number, and Jerry Gardiner’s agency number.) You tell ’em I sent you.
“Gee thanks, Mr. Freeman. Can I ask a question?”
Sure.
“Do you miss it?”
Every day.
And then when I was about to leave Sophie corners me, and after discussing my expectant fatherhood, she asks:
“Heard you tell Steve, Jr., you missed New York every day. You’re not thinking of going back now, are you? It’s a little late now, Daddy-to-be.”
Nostalgia’s no crime. Nothing serious. I’m writing this dumb book to get New York out of my system.
“Just wondered. You lit into Steve with the passion of a New Yorker.”
(Oh yeah. After the second feeding, that jerk got onto New York pizza again. I’m sorry. Chicago is nice, but New York is better—pizza is all we need look at to prove this. In Chicago it’s bread, a big pan of greasy fried bread with a bit of goop on top. I want my thin, limp, triangular slice of pizza for $1 with the orange grease lying in pools atop the rubbery cheese, all forming one brilliant gestalt—I picked that up from Sophie the sociologist—and I’m sick of Chicagoans who haven’t been ten miles from the Loop running down New York. Chicago pizza isn’t proper pizza, it’s pizza-flavored QUICHE!)
“I’m not sure you’ve got New York and a few other things behind you.”
Yeah, but I’m working on it.
“Want to go down to the lakeshore? Walk off the blintzes?”
And that’s where we went. And the night was overcast and the clouds caught the city’s faint orange glow in a way that seems peculiar to Chicago. And there was the lake which also had the vague glow of city lights and we sat and listened to it contentedly lap the shore. No, it’s not the Atlantic Ocean, it’s not Coney Island or Far Rockaway, but it’s grown on me, it grows on me more and more every year.
Back to the story.
1979
MY answering machine: Hello. This is Gil Freeman and I’m not home. If you are calling about a temporary job, a part, or anything that may mean money for me, PLEASE, I’m begging you, leave your name and number and I will get right back to you as soon as possible. Thanks a lot. BEEP!
I couldn’t have been poorer. One hopes that one’s accommodations continually improve but mine were going down, down, down … from the luxury of a Village sublet with money in my pocket to run-down Brooklyn to Hell’s Kitchen and now Alphabet City, the Lower East Side, lower being the operative word. I lived on Avenue A (hence Alphabet City) and as a rule, you should never live anywhere in New York designated by letters; this holds true citywide. Avenue A was slumland: heroin addicts in alleyways, homeless everywhere, bums up from the Bowery (which is nearby) for a change of scenery, the leftover druggy hippie-types mingling with the Puerto Ricans driven down from the West Side when that neighborhood gentrified and the PRs got summarily evicted. The last place in New York (to answer the question you might be asking) that you could rent a place for $200 or so a month.
I lived in a virtual prison cell. It was a one-room “studio,” with a dripping sink, a rickety table that held my hotplate, a rusted icebox underneath; there was a bookcase I made from bricks and planks, beyond which was my mattress on the floor, far as possible from the dripping sink. My clothes when they were clean were kept in the suitcase near the slit-in-the-wall window; when they were dirty, they were piled at the foot of the bed. Didn’t do much formal entertaining in this phase of my life. With each move I was steadily decreasing my living space—if the progression kept up, I’d be living in a bus station locker soon.
I checked out this tiny real-estate-page ad that led me to Avenue A and this grocery. I went up the block, I went down the block, but no, I had the address right and this place was a grocery. RUIZ CARIBBEAN FOODSTORE … and in smaller, hand-painted letters underneath: SNACKS • FOOD TO GO • COLD BEER. A short, plump, balding man (with a few strands of side hair combed across his shiny head) met me with a smiling if not somewhat distressed expression, peering out the store window. He ran out to the street to escort me into his shop: “You here for the apartament?”
I was led inside.
“Back here, through the store, eh?” I followed him as we wound through the narrow aisles of the store … junkfood of all varieties, chips, pretzels, bag after bag of cookies, corn chips and tortilla-things; canned vegetables, followed by pet food and baby diaper products, a cooler with the Cold Beer, a greasy cardboard box filled with plantains. (C’mon confess it: How many fellow Midwesterners have purchased plantains thinking them bananas? Ever bitten into a plantain expectantly awaiting a sumptuously sweet banana? Yummmm …) All the shelves were yellow—the paint was cracking and peeling—and an ancient layer of dust coated everything; the aisles themselves were so narrow that you had to sidle through them or else sweep everything onto the floor with your coat. Senor Ruiz and I went through the store, out the back door and into an outdoor court enclosed by fences topped with cut glass shards and barbed wire; beyond this “garden area” (there was a tiny plot of dirty grass and a spindly tree growing up from it) there was the Ruiz’s house and they were renting out the ground-floor room.
“See plenty of space! Plenty of space!” said Sẽnor Ruiz as he swung the door open. He had to be kidding—maybe in San Juan this qualified as plenty of space. “You gotta sink. You gotta, eh, room here for you bed. You gotta window…” A small frosted-glass window that made all the light look gray. “You gotta ploog for you electric things, here.” Sẽnor Ruiz held
these luxuries as major selling points, it was obvious. “For the toilet you come out of the apartament…” I followed him back out into the courtyard, and followed him through a second door. “… and you and my family can share thees toilet here. It has a bath and that is the toilet bowl.”
Let me get this straight: I have to cut through the store, across the courtyard, one key for the store, one key for the apartment, and one more key for the family entrance and the bathroom?
“Only three keys. Only three keys.”
Don’t know about this …
“It ees cheap, very cheap for you.”
How cheap.
“Soo cheap, my wife she say, Raul, Raul why do you—”
How cheap.
“I say $300 a month.”
I’m sorry, sẽnor, I think I better look elsewhere.
“No I make mistake: $250.”
I don’t think so. How about $150?
Sẽnor Ruiz was distressed again, his eyes filled with emotion, his voice thickened … “No, no, we need the money. I rent from my own house, you leeve with my family, you go through my store. If I do not need no money, I no do thees, you know?”
I sort of followed that. How about $175? (One seventy-five was my limit actually; Gil’s Rule of Rent: never accept a monthly rent more than a week’s take-home pay.)
We haggled.
I realize now poor Senor Ruiz was really in a tight spot. He had fixed up (so to speak) their ground-floor room to rent and then realized that the tenant had to cut through the store every night. If that was 3 a.m., the Ruizes could never be sure that the tenant wasn’t swiping food off the shelves of the store. So he had to rent it to someone he could trust, or at least convince himself was honest. I’ve always had an honest face.
We agreed on $195 a month. No contract.
“We make a deal, we shake our hands, eh? You name? Ah, yes, come for a cup of coffee, we talk some more…”
Best coffee I ever had in my life was the coffee I got at Ruiz’s Foodstore. Some Caribbean blend.
Emma Who Saved My Life Page 26