Emma Who Saved My Life

by Wilton Barnhardt

  Each visit to Odessa meant being pressed into Odessa, subsumed, envaginated by Odessa: “Give your Odessa a huhhhhg, there…”

  Conversely, there were days she could not bring herself to move from behind her desk and that chair piled with pillows that stank of her. Odessa immobile: “Huhney, on that thayre table, could you git poor Odessa her pahncil, ovuh thayre, THAYRE on the table—no, to the right … yezz, that’s it, huhney…”

  Odessa’s one joke, delivered in her thickest most put-on cheesy Texas drawl: “Yes, my name’s Odessa. Guess where I was born. Hm?”

  Odessa, Texas?

  Amid shrieks of hyena-laughter: “Hyoooston, darlin’. But you can’t name a girl Houston, now can you? A-ha-ha-ha…”

  Most Southerners you meet in New York are a blast. But she must have been Confederate Revenge, hatched in the last days of Sherman’s March, 1865. (Or … maybe she wasn’t even Texan. She was such a thorough old phoney, she might have been putting that ridiculous accent on for the last twenty years.)

  Bonnie McHenry, my actress-friend from Bermuda Triangle, had recommended me to Odessa as Odessa was her agent too. This was her big favor to me. “Odessa’s a bit much, Gil, but she gets the job done,” said Bonnie.

  “Gilbut, huhney, 1982 is gonna be yawr yeeuh—huhney, it is, I swayre. Listen to your good buddy Odessa!”

  She also managed some of her clients. Her spiel:

  “Now, I can be your agent, huhney, but you can also have me as your manager. I can manage you, darlin’, the way you need to be managed—the press, the right people on your arm. A great careeuh is a finely managed thing…”

  Yeah, and a manager-agent gets 20% as opposed to the 10% an agent gets. But, you know, it wasn’t greed that motivated this push to be my manager (she brought it up every time I saw her). She mostly wanted to manage my life, my personal life, gossip columns, affairs, sex, she was a voyeur, she wanted to live a life through her clients, she wanted to own them. What made her worse was all the frustration she felt in never knowing anything about our personal lives, because we never told her anything.

  The phone would ring, Odessa’s pudgy hand would grapple with the phone, prop it under her jowls and chins, and listen, sucking intently on the cigarette. “Uh-uh … ugggh … yeah … mmmmmm…” All varieties of grunts and nasty guttural noises. “Yeah, I know, I know, baby, I know about him. He is a rough director—he’s a complete bastud, you’re right…” She’d roll her eyes. “Nancy huhney, darlin’, you cayn’t walk out now, it’s gotta go and it’s too good for yawr careeuh … Just put up with him, darlin’. You’re a professional.” At this, she nearly left the chair registering the opposite. “That’s right. You get famous in this and you can traysh the man in the Times when they interview you. You know I’m with you, darlin’, alllll the way—Odessa loves you, yes she does! Yes, bye-bye, baby,” and then she’d set the phone down: “Neurotic bitch, worryin’ my pretty little ass to death over her booolshit.”

  Odessa thought backstabbing her clients would endear her to the ones in the room, but we all figured we’d be the “neurotic bitch” or “stupid queen” or “dumb-ass boy” when she hung up the phone on us as well. And the merest hint that we were dissatisfied with her agenting, that we wanted more pay or better roles, would be met with high indignation, beating of breasts, the stricken gestures of Greek tragedy.

  “My doctor says Odessa it’s gonna keel you dead working your heart out for those ungrateful people. I cayn’t believe Nancy said that about me—we’ll just see if she gets invited to Odessa’s Famous Texas Barbecue this year, won’t we?”

  Oh yeah, the Barbecue. This annual trial took place in the late summer. Odessa would set a date and cancel, set a date and cancel—apparently we were supposed to hold open whole months to accommodate this affair. (“Of course, Gil, people would give their eye-teeth to come to Odessa’s Famous Texas Barbecue—the whole theater wuhhrld is gonna be there. It’s a thang—an event!”)

  No one came for pleasure, actually. It was just another of Odessa’s loyalty tests.

  “Gil, now you ARE gonna be there, right huhney? Hm?”

  And we heard her talk of nothing else for weeks before:

  “It’s difficult trying to do a full day’s work and plan for this extravaganza—it’s about to keel me. I wonder sometimes why I do it, but we who have a natural gift for entertainin’ are obliged in New York to persevere. My doctor says Odessa don’t do it, don’t work your fingers to the goddam bone for these people, but what would a year be without Odessa’s Famous Texas Barbecue, hm? Besides, you, my clients, are my family…”

  As far as I could see, all she ever did was melt down a block of Velveeta cheese and plop down the pan next to a bag of Doritos. Sometimes the Barbecue would not even include barbecue, but something much cheaper like tacos, which you made yourself from her bowls of dog-food orange-greasy meat, brown withering lettuce, pink tough tomato cubes, and the ubiquitous grated Velveeta. Odessa would be running about in a Stetson hat and, help me Lord, cowboy boots, being the most ridiculous person in New York, drunk out of her mind by mid-afternoon (terrified that no more people were going to show up), vindictive and petty by late afternoon (“This is the second Famous Texas Barbecue Henry has missed—I’ll fix that no-talent…”), and ready to pass out by five. Her passing out was preceded by her being deposited on the sofa for a half-hour of chain-smoking, barking out orders (“Don’t put so much ice in my goddam margarita this time,” adding as an afterthought, “Huhney”), squawking and laughing maniacally after her own repeated jokes, and sometimes a morose period where all her bitterness and muttering scorn was given vent before she fell asleep.

  My friend Matthew, a fellow-actor and Odessa-client, would turn to me and say, “Well the old girl went all out this year. She dropped at least twenty bucks.”

  Matthew ran seriously afoul of Odessa and was kicked off her client list—in fact, he’s been in a movie since, so the best thing he ever did was to depart the Odessa Benbow Agency. Matthew always seemed to be leaving Odessa’s office when I was coming in, and often we’d stop and compare our going-nowhere-fast careers. We’d meet for drinks some afternoons and we’d leave notes for each other on the agency bulletin board, scribbled quickly and stapled shut. We agreed one drunken night that Odessa really did have anus-lips, and it was impossible to watch her suck with her wrinkled lips on a cigarette, and even worse to watch her put on lipstick, that slimestick applied to those puckered, wizened lips, then the play of her mouth as she patted her lipstick and smeared it all evenly … ullch, I’m getting sick just thinking about it. ANYWAY, Matt would leave me notes like:

  Anus-lips was in good form today. Shoulda heard her sucking up to Neuro Nancy today on the phone. Drinks tonite? 8 at McKinley’s?

  —MATT

  Anus-lips is on a diet now! If you come at lunch hour you can see her eat this cottage cheese shit with raw vegs. Imagine Anus-lips chewing cottage cheese, talking with her mouth open, her big fat face. I need a drink—8 at McK’s?

  —MATT

  Well Odessa got curious and opened one of these messages one time and freaked out—“Aynus-lips! Aynus-lips! How cuuuuld he SAY such a thing about me, Gloria, Gloria…” And Gloria the secretary, fighting off laughter (I suspect), said it was some kind of joke. I got called in and asked about this and I said that I didn’t EVER know Matthew to call her names and that the note must not refer to her—

  “I know it’s about me, Gil. I sat right there and offered that boy cottage cheese and raw veggies from my own little contay-nuh! I’m so huht, I’m so huht I cayn’t sleep. You don’t feel that way about me, do you Gil? Hm baby? You think I should be called AYNUS-lips by the people I love and work my finguhs to the bone for?”

  ALL I could do not to laugh, so help me god …

  “Tell me, Gil, tell me you dawn’t feel that way about your old friend Odessa, hm? You’d never call me AYNUS-lips, wouldya?”

  I knew it was going to cost me.

  It was going
to mean the dreaded bear hug, or worse … kissing the … NO! NOT THAT! Anything but that! I decided I better cut this short before a real demonstration of fealty was called for. So I ran to Odessa, tried to embrace her, got it over with, assuring her that neither Matt nor I had ever slandered her—I tried, Matt, I promise I tried to get you out of it too. Alas, Matt later denied nothing and stormed out, ending their affiliation. Odessa—we both realized—made this big show of being the sensitive best friend, your surrogate mother (“Huhney, I’m an artist too in my own way—you are my work, you are my devotion…”) but in reality all the hurt-Odessa, wounded-Odessa stuff was crap: she was a MEAN old bitch who was plotting her revenge, she would get you back. I heard her afterward, after Matt got signed for this movie, say, “He’ll be sawwry he ever crossed my path—just wait till I get ahold of the Page Three at the Post—I’ll call Tommy at the Post, I will, and tell him about Matt’s boyfriend. That’ll make intristin’ reading, won’t it?” Then an evil cackle. I made a mental note: Leave on good terms.

  I would always depart Odessa’s office on 42nd Street and feel worthless, prostituted, for having hugged Odessa, and I repeatedly fought the feeling: It’s starting again, it’s turning bad—every three years or so you hit the slump and this is it.

  “But Gil, huhney, if this show goes to Broadway—”

  Odessa, NO WAY. Rigatonio is two hours of actors degrading themselves, the jokes aren’t funny, it’s an insult to Italian-Americans everywhere, the music is thin, the book is nonexistent, the producer is an idiot—

  “Gil darlin’, this is not your first time out, huhney. A little professionalism, hm? Would you rather not have a paycheck?”

  Yes, here, Betsy, was where I should have spoken up and told Odessa yes, I’d rather starve than sink in a project that was willfully, inevitably doomed. But was I bringing in the big bucks for Odessa? Was I some kind of big-name star that could afford not to take a job? No, I wasn’t. Odessa might well have been relieved to get rid of me, one less unemployable actor on her books. So I was a trouper about it.

  As Betsy reported, I intended to move into a place with Emma within the next month. Emma’s lease was running out, mine was running out at the Ruizes’. It was a simple matter: we had to go out and find a cheap place we both liked in a fascinating neighborhood near a subway stop. With twenty days to go before moving day, I don’t think either of us had as much as opened the Real Estate page in the paper.

  After rehearsal, I would trudge to Emma’s (formerly Emma’s and Janet’s) place and drink all her booze.

  “Another fun afternoon in Queens?” she’d ask, proffering a bourbon and soda in the act of opening the apartment door to let me in.

  (On top of everything else, this bomb was opening in Queens, at the Jackson Heights Playhouse. It couldn’t even crawl respectably to Boston or New Haven or Philly or downtown at a small experimental theater. Queens. As close to the heart of the New York Theater World as Saskatchewan.)

  “See how packed up I am?” Emma asked, with outspread arms.

  I can’t say it looks like you’ve done a thing.

  “That’s because I haven’t done a thing. After enduring work it’s impossible to come home and do more work.”

  Emma had this full-time job now. She had made more money, actually, doing temp work. She had landed this primo set-up where she typed in law case books on a computer for law firms through the night—$14 an hour, $20 an hour on weekends. But she claimed that wasn’t enough money for her.

  “I gotta get a permanent job with major medical benefits,” she kept saying. “These psychiatrists and pharmacists are eating me alive.” You could not go to see them, I suggest, not take so much medicine, I add. “My life is completely together these days, Gil. Why stop doing what’s brought me back to mental health?” And so she stopped temping and took a job at Hutchinson & Parks, a public-relations firm. She wrote hype for various products.

  Emma flopped down on the sofa. “Today was a red-letter day in my writing life,” she said.

  Yeah?

  “Wanna see what I produced, what I wrote, what my mind and talents and craft engendered?” She craned for her purse which hung on the back of a nearby chair. She fished out of it a folded Xerox of a letter. “Enjoy,” she said, handing it to me.

  Dear Client,

  Congratulations! Our man in the field told us your Pansy-Fresh Room Deodorant display rack and poster was front and center in your place of business … and WE appreciate that. We really do. Accept the pocket calculator as our way of saying thanks for your support on the 1981 Pansy-Fresh “Always Fresh” campaign.

  As you know the Pansy-Fresh giveaway is underway—some lucky customer from the New York area is going to an island paradise of their choice (in connection with the ad: “A tropical paradise in your living room”). But read the fine print! One of our lucky distributors is going to be Tahiti-bound as well! Could it be you? Please don’t miss the opportunity of filling in your entry blanks. Only three weeks left to enter! Figure it on your new calculator!

  Once again, thank you for your support. By providing a consistent outlet for the Pansy-Fresh Room Deodorant giveaway and by selling our scent-sational product, you are a valued member of our Pansy-Fresh team. Keep up the GOOD WORK!

  Sincerely,

  Kay-Anne Madden

  Vice President,

  Pansy-Fresh Marketing

  This woman is a vice president, huh?

  “Oh she never sees it. We have one of those automatic signature machines that signs hundreds of these letters. It’s all a sham to make the distributor feel involved, and not just a tool, a cog, a stooge.”

  Well, I say, smiling. It’s money.

  Pause. I was waiting for it: “I’m a complete whore, Gil. What if future literary historians discover I had anything to do with shit like this? ‘Scent-sational,’ Gil. Did you catch that?”

  Yeah I caught that.

  “‘Scent-sational.’ Utter whoredom. God, I felt better about the phone sex.” Sadly, the phone sex had ended as before, with some middle-aged creep trying to trace Emma’s number, calling her up, saying he knew who she was, that he was going to get her and consummate his love for her. She called the police, she got new locks for the door, she got paranoid, and now, just as well, she was moving.

  “So no, to finish my thought,” she went on, “I haven’t packed. And when Janet left for Jersey, she left me all this crap of hers, every feminist gazette and newspaper for the last twenty years. I’m supposed to haul this library around with me, I take it.”

  Let’s have another bourbon. I poured them.

  “Any luck on a new apartment?” she said, after a sip.

  None whatsoever.

  “Well hell it’s getting desperate. Let’s go to a realtor and pay a fee. We’re both working.”

  I’m not working, I’m digging my own grave out there in Queens. We got our co-stars signed today. Florence Crayfield is the actress—

  “That old bag still alive?”

  Yep. And the daughter is going to be someone named Charity Glenn.

  Emma stirred. “I’ve heard of her.”

  I couldn’t tell you from where. She’s done a lot of TV work I think, playing teenagers, child prostitutes, young girls raped in prison, usual family TV fare.

  “I know that name from somewhere else…” Emma mused. “Well, they’re not exactly big names are they?”

  No, they pitched the thing to everyone respectable. Florence Crayfield does local game shows, opens shopping centers, turns out for the celebrity car wash. No one really “working” would touch this thing: a fledgling, sure-to-close musical in Queens.

  “Gil, you’ve been in worse things,” Emma offered.

  Yeah, at twenty-three, at twenty-five. It’s getting old. I’d rather do waiter work than this.

  Rigatonio, music and lyrics by Gale and Audrey Cooper, responsible for Beaver!, a musical romp based on Leave It to Beaver, very camp, very bad, closed in three days, and for What’s You
r Sign?, a revue based on the signs of the Zodiac, everyone in stupid costumes (imagine Pisces, imagine Cancer) singing songs and telling jokes about their respective characteristics … Their last two projects hadn’t gotten this far. The book was by Dik Kline (yeah, he spelled his name D-I-K) who had never written anything produced before. Do you think he had some connection to Garth W. Kline, our producer? Garth W. Kline introduced himself the first night:

  “Hello, cast, crew, staff, my name is Garth W. Kline, from Garth W. Kline Enterprises, and this is part of a new, a brand-new division of Garth W. Kline Enterprises, Garth W. Kline Productions, and you’ll be seeing that name on your paychecks, heh heh…” That was a joke. “I want you to know that we’re family, that I’m open to you and your ideas and together we’ll take Garth W. Kline Productions to the same success we have had with Garth W. Kline Enterprises…”

  Lord, if you could grant us lowly thespians one wish: Save us from businessmen, show us Thy mercy.

  We had a director, Silas … Damn, I can’t remember his name, but then he had no personality, no purpose except to sit beside Garth W. Kline and agree with everything Garth W. Kline said. If Silas dared to direct an action, block a scene—“A little to the right, Gil”— Garth W. Kline would be up, saying, “I think left, actually,” and Silas would go yessir yessir. Garth W. Kline, founder of Garth W. Kline Aluminum Siding, Garth W. Kline Plastics, and Garth W. Kline Refrigeration Units, all subsidiaries of Garth W. Kline Enterprises.

  The plot? It was sort of a free-form rhapsody on the subject of Italianness—on the stereotype, rather. We’re all running around in Renaissance costumes, as if it’s Verona in the 1500s. Mrs. Lotsamoola is Florence Crayfield (drunk before lunch each day) and she has a lovely daughter, Charity Glenn (an insufferable BRAT who seems five but was actually a little older than me, who was making $20,000 up front to my $275 a week before taxes). Meanwhile, there’s a lowly pasta-maker in town (modern dress, chef’s hat, not-so-comic anachronisms) and he has a son, Rigatoni Fozzuli. Papa Fozzuli has two great numbers in the first act; “Meatballs”—