by Tim Sultan
A customer who commuted to Alaska to work on fishing boats for part of the year observed once, “Sunny sure spends a lot of time mallemaroking.”
“Mallemaroking?” I said.
“It’s a word with a very specific definition that is something like: ‘the reveling and boozing of sailors whose ships are frozen into the ice off the coast of Greenland.’ We may not be off the coast of Greenland and we may not be icebound, but Sunny sure acts like we are. In fact, the man mallemarokes year round.”
More than once would it occur to me that the customer base at Sunny’s was unusually knowledgeable.
The first suggestion that Sunny’s lifestyle was catching up to him was the electric scooter that he received from Tone as a present. It was the seated kind that is usually driven by the infirm. He had been complaining about getting easily winded after taking short walks or going up a flight of stairs; a stroll to the pier at the end of the block had become a daunting hike. In the ensuing months, he could be seen periodically taking rides to the nearest bodega for cigarettes and other essentials. It may have been the only scooter in Kings County that had a cudgel concealed in the shopping basket that hung from its handlebars. Sunny had lived in Red Hook too long not to hold on to his old precautions.
One morning he woke not only short of breath but with an unfamiliar tingle below. It felt to him like athlete’s foot…but of the penis. Soon his urine began turning dark with blood and his doctor, suspecting bladder cancer, scheduled a biopsy.
“It’s so cold,” Sunny said as he got in the car and wiped his wet hair from his face. “I feel like a dog pissing against a fire hydrant during an ice storm. While being yelled at!” It was a raw day, rain mixing with snow as we drove the length of Red Hook in the direction of the hospital.
“On my way over here,” I said, “I was thinking there is a symmetry to the fact that we’re going back to the same hospital where the nurse took your temperature—rectally, as I’m sure you recall—to have a camera inserted into your penis. You’re getting it from both sides.”
“A camera? Up my prick?”
By Sunny’s shaky laugh I realized that Sunny hadn’t given too much thought to how a biopsy of the bladder is performed and also that his usually cheerful disposition was sustained by the truism that it’s often best not to know too much. Cancer had begun attacking my mother the year before and I had learned more about our fragility firsthand than I had ever wanted.
“Yes, Sunny. They call it a cystoscopy.” I didn’t possess Sunny’s insouciance and I had read up on the subject after Sunny had called to tell me his doctor’s suspicions.
“Goodness. Medicine has changed so much. I remember I used to get nosebleeds as a child and in order to stop the bleeding, my mother would hold a cold knife against the back of my head. For earaches, she’d put bags of salt on the coal stove. Or warm up olive oil and swab the inside of my ears with her finger. People relied on themselves in those days. My uncle Dominick—the one who raised my mother—he died of blood poisoning from pulling his own tooth with pliers. And if you got really sick, you had to rely on the gods.”
After signing in, we began the long wait customary to hospitals. Sunny asked me to join him downstairs for several cigarette breaks. He smoked, I fretted. I was beginning to have an inkling of just how bullheaded a patient he was going to be. Along with the principle of carpe diem, impenitence had always been his modus vivendi. I knew that this day could still go either way—that Sunny was as apt to suddenly say, “Take me home,” as he was to submit to a surgeon’s ether. When his name was finally called, he gave the exit door one deliberating look but took the gown and slippers obediently from the nurse. Women had always had a great sway over him.
We were alone in the changing room. Sunny sat down on a bench and began undressing and I turned away to give him some privacy and studied myself in a full-length mirror that hung on the wall.
“I look young, Sunny. Not forty. I don’t feel forty. And I sure don’t act forty.”
“No, you don’t, Timmy. Keep the enthusiasm. Stay well. Stay a child for the old life.” He grunted. “My feet get so cold. Here, help me with these slippers.
“Thank you, Timmy,” Sunny said with pleasure. “Putting on a pair of socks can feel better than sex sometimes. You only got one prick, but you have ten toes.”
“You’ve got a way with words,” I said.
“And you with hands!”
I sat down on the bench next to him and Sunny caught sight of me looking at a scar descending from the hem of his hiked-up gown and running down his thigh to his knee.
“My gunshot wound. You might say it was the beginning of my notoriety.”
“I thought the time you heisted a safe was the beginning of your notoriety.”
“Nye. That was just the beginning of my disrepute. And mind you, the culprits of that crime were never apprehended.”
“I see. Well, go on. I suspect there’s more to it than your run-of-the-mill bullet wound as you never seem to do things in an ordinary way. Not even being shot.”
“Ha. There’s a lot of truth to that, Timmy. In fact, in this case, you might say I was my own quarry.”
Suddenly I found myself hoping there would be further delays that afternoon. I was finally going to hear the rest of the story that Sunny had begun the night we went to see George Plimpton.
“It was 1956. I was discharged from the Air Force shortly before Thanksgiving of that year and I had moved into an apartment in San Bernardino. I was about to begin attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles. Everyone I knew had gone home for the weekend except my friend Butchie and we were feeling a little sorry for ourselves. So we decided we would shoot a rabbit for our Thanksgiving meal. I was never much for guns, not even in the military, though as a boy I used to make zip guns from car aerials. Twenty-two caliber. Anyway, Butchie was able to borrow a pistol but as we’re driving out to the desert I’m starting to think, ‘I can’t shoot a fuckin’ bunny rabbit.’ I was probably remembering the rabbits my grandfather used to bring me as a child. We were drinking some beers and when we get out there, I said to Butchie, ‘Why don’t you just throw some of these bottles in the air and I’ll shoot those instead.’ The gun was a single-action revolver, like you see in the old westerns—with a hammer that you have to cock with your free hand before each shot. And it came with a holster. The real McCoy.”
Sunny stood up and went into a gunfighter’s stance, his feet firmly planted in his fresh pair of no-slide slipper socks, his right hand hovering over an imaginary butt while his own flashed from the gap in his gown.
“Gary Cooper in High Moon, Sunny?”
“Ha! High Moon. I’ll have to remember that one, Timmy, but actually, I was thinking El Topo. That’s one of the greats. Well, by the time I manage to draw the gun out of the holster on my first try, the bottle had already fallen back to earth. So this time, I cock the hammer beforehand, you see.” He pantomimed pulling the hammer back and carefully slipping a pistol into its holster, and then returned to a tense crouch, ready to gun down the next nurse who opened the door.
“Butchie throws another bottle in the air like he’s releasing a fuckin’ dove.” Sunny pitched his left hand upward, acting out both parts now. “I slap my hand against my hip and…Pow!”
Sunny fell back on the bench, gripping his thigh as though he’d been shot all over again.
“The bullet tore right through my leg. I thought I was a goner, Timmy. There was so much blood. I don’t know if it nicked an artery or what. Butchie got me up and helped me to the car and lay me in the backseat and drove me to the hospital and by the time we arrived, it looked like an animal had been slaughtered back there. He carried me out and left me on this grassy hill while he ran inside to get help. I don’t know if you know the painting Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth?”
“I was one of those students that art history professors, all professors for that matter, prefer to forget. Distracted.”
“
Well, it’s of a girl lying in a meadow and gazing up at this farmhouse. There’s a real tranquility in that painting and when I first saw it later it reminded me of that feeling I had when I was lying in that grass. I could just feel my life draining out of me but I felt very much at peace. They were of course able to save me, and my leg. But I would develop gangrene afterward and need a vein graft and end up in a VA hospital here in Brooklyn. But the part of the story that really got me was the headline in the local newspaper the next day. It read: ‘Man Outdraws Self.’ ”
Sunny roared.
“There I was! ‘Man Outdraws Self.’ I made the paper! I was immortalized. Well, by the time I got home to Brooklyn, I had such a limp from the infection, my mom treated me like a war hero. Meanwhile, I’m like the biggest fuckup there is. But as it turned out, shooting myself was the beginning of a real transformation for me. The doctors were so kindly and while I was recovering in that hospital they began bringing me art books. Books on Vermeer, Courbet, Rembrandt, Picasso. These doctors were some of the first authority figures who treated me with decency and encouraged my artistic ambitions. I ended up spending the better part of a year there and when I was released I took the train straight to Manhattan. I wasn’t going back to Red Hook. I was going to be an artist.”
We spent the entire afternoon in pre-surgery as the beds around us filled and emptied with patients. I read to myself and aloud to Sunny to pass the time, sensing that people wondered how the two of us were related. I was too old to be a grandson and I didn’t have the eyes, nose, lips, or chin of a son. Various doctors and nurses and residents periodically came by to take his vital signs, insert an IV, pose questions, and fill out paperwork—any excuse, it seemed, to spend time with the patient whose chart said Antonio Balzano but who instructed everyone to please call him Sunny.
“Listen to what this writer says. A Nobel Prize winner, actually. From Mexico. ‘Neither the phallus nor the ass have a sense of humor.’ ”
“Oh?”
“ ‘Being sullen, they are aggressive.’ ”
“You know that I don’t read books, Timmy, and I can’t really speak with authority to what it is that it is that this author is saying, but he must have had very limited experience in life. I mean what is more ridiculous—and diverting, I might add—than the prick and the ass?
“Look at what my prick is putting me through today. There had better be humor involved and the only way the mind can respond is with a sense of humor.”
An anesthesiologist came over with a clipboard. “Do you have any allergies?” she asked, and Sunny crinkled his brow as if in thought and replied with great seriousness, “Why, yes, I do. I don’t seem to be able to take women’s perfume any longer.”
She smiled shyly and after she finished writing in his chart, she began rolling up his sleeve to take his blood pressure.
“I thank you,” Sunny said.
“I’m not done yet,” she replied.
“I thank you anyway,” he said.
As she walked away, Sunny said to me, “Seeing Anastasia smile is like seeing a little piece of God.”
“Her name’s not Anastasia. It’s Dina. Dina, the anesthesiologist. The way you muddle things is like a gift from God, Sunny.”
There was no place and no situation where Sunny did not consider flirting to be the most suitable form of communication with a woman. Naturally he flirted with customers at the bar, but also with waitresses taking his order, with receptionists taking his name, with nuns casting him in their pageant, with nurses inserting catheters, and with anesthesiologists about to put him under. I had seen him flirt wordlessly and from great distances. While sitting in traffic once, I noticed how he looked across the street and gave a smile and a little wave to a young woman sitting by a window. She responded in kind. He often asked aloud, “Where would we be without women?”
To most women, there was an innocence to his flirting since he was usually one, and often two, generations older than they. To Sunny innocence was the very point of flirting. He was in love with falling in love and he would sometimes say, “The dance can be beautiful but just don’t get into the ring, Timmy.”
“It’s funny how all these memories become buoyant and bob on your consciousness,” Sunny said after a while. “You catch them before they sink again.”
“What’s bobbing on your consciousness now, Sunny?” I asked.
“Well, I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier how you’re not really feeling your age. I don’t know whether I told you of this experience I had not so long ago with my friend from childhood, George Hunt?”
“The one who talked you into joining the Air Force?”
“Yes. Matter of fact, I wouldn’t have shot myself if it hadn’t been for him just like I wouldn’t have nearly drowned if it hadn’t been for you.
“Anyway, there was a knock on the door of the bar and when I opened it, there was an old man standing there and he said to me, ‘You know who I am?’ I peered at him and I really couldn’t figure out who he was. But there had been a girl who’d lived around the corner when I was a kid, Patricia Esposito. And my friend George Hunt had married her. And I saw Patricia Esposito standing behind this old man. So I said, ‘You’re George Hunt!’ I hadn’t seen him in over fifty years. My best friend from when we were kids, you understand. I invited them inside and we sat at the first booth in the bar and it was strange—I looked at him and I was able to reach into the structure of his face, but his spirit was gone. He was not at all like the George Hunt I knew. He was dead. He was alive but he was dead. I can feel him now saying, ‘Sunny, don’t say that.’ But he was. I asked him if he would like a drink and he said, ‘I can’t drink.’ We had a short conversation. We never said anything about the past. It was almost like the past didn’t exist. And I know he didn’t want to regard the past because he had a hell of time with it, too. His father had died when he was young and his mother got married again—to this little guy, this near-midget Lip-Lip Leo that everyone made fun of. That the kids threw rocks at. To be the son of Lip-Lip Leo’s wife, you wanted to crawl in a hole. It broke George’s heart. And not long after that visit, I received another visit—this time from George’s sister who came with her husband and I sat with them and talked for an hour. In my mind I said to myself, ‘My goodness, all these people that it is that I’m meeting from those days—they’re like old people. Am I that old?’ In my mind I said it would have been a good thing not to ever see them again because I was holding these memories in my imagination. I remembered George as a child, a teenager full of passion, and his sister as being very sexy, very beautiful. And now I’m seeing them and they’re old and the only thing that hasn’t changed is me. I don’t feel old. I guess I am old but I don’t and did not regard myself as being in the same place they were. It was not too long thereafter that I heard George had passed away. I regard that reality now and I regard the memory of what it was like in the early days when we were all young and enthusiastic and possessed all these dreams as to what we were about to do—embark on life. And I feel very blessed because I’m still embarking, aye? And all these other things I’ve held in my imagination have fallen to the quest of the reality of life. And that’s good. This moment is real. This moment is sweet. I have this.”
In the late afternoon, Dina, the anesthesiologist, returned and told him that he would be going into surgery shortly. Sunny said, “Timmy, I wonder if you could hold these for me?” He reached into his mouth and took out his teeth and handed them to me. His face caved and he looked at me with embarrassment and I felt a surge of pity. He had always hated the inauthentic. I promised that I would bring them to him as soon as he woke up and I was allowed into the post-op room. “Thank you, Timmy,” he mumbled. “I love you, you hear?”
Dina took one hand to walk him to the operating room and with the other he held on to his IV drip pole and as the two slowly shuffled away, he turned to look at me over his shoulder. He didn’t have to say it. What a candy store life can be.
>
* * *
26
Exposition Fermée
The cowbell above the door clanged as I entered Ferdinando’s and the mayor of New York looked up from his spaghetti. He was seated at my regular center table, along with the police commissioner and their two consorts. I glanced at Frank and said, “It’s all right, Frank. We’ll sit somewhere else.” He grinned and spread his hands as if to say, “Whaddyagonnado.” I had continued coming here weekly for a decade now, mostly alone after my friends moved on. Once, Frank squeezed my shoulder from behind mid-bite and said, “Teem. You’s like the captain that stays on the sinking ship. Loyal, know what I mean?”
On this night however, I had arrived with old friends in tow. Ferdinando’s was nearly empty as usual and we sat down two tables over from the mayor. As his party was finishing their meals, he stood up and began making small talk with the only other customers, three middle-aged married couples sitting alongside us. I had been mulling over whether to invite him to Sunny’s for a drink when the mayor leaned in close to one of the husbands. “Do you know what the secret to a successful marriage is?” he asked.
The man shrugged.
“Make your wife think she’s getting laid when she’s really getting fucked!”
Sunny had always maintained that it only takes “one fuckin’ banana” in a bar to spoil it for everyone else. After we paid our bills, the mayor and I went our separate ways.
As I drove down Van Brunt Street, thinking to myself that the sight of the billionaire monarch of New York having dinner in Red Hook was an omen of sorts, I passed a celebrated French restaurant that had opened next to a funeral home. High cuisine in a low-rent neighborhood is its own passport to success in New York. A few blocks farther, just past a retro-nautical diner, silhouettes peered into Red Hook’s newest liquor store, the first in memory where the goods were displayed conceptually—the gin laid out in a claw-foot tub—rather than precautionarily (behind bulletproof glass) as is custom in the city’s dodgier precincts. The store, named after its Alabaman owner, was already renowned far beyond the borders of Brooklyn for its exhaustive selection of whiskeys and bitters. The words “small-batch bourbon” and “artisanal bitters” should strike fear into the heart of any urban preservationist and they struck fear into mine. Admittedly, I was not so much a preservationist as a reservationist—I had reservations about anything that might help transform the desolation of Red Hook into a neighborhood resembling its northern cousins, Greenpoint and Williamsburg, once-run-down industrial areas that had lately been revived into something called nouveau grit.