The Perfume Burned His Eyes

by Michael Imperioli

  The truth of the romance has never been completely confirmed. But on that Astorian August morning the woman sang her guts out. She put every possible ounce of feeling into the stirring melody. She must have felt something for the man.

  My mother gave her a big hug after the service. My mother gave everybody a big hug after the service. It was like she was trying to extract pieces of my grandfather’s spirit out of everyone who knew him. Like if she squeezed everyone hard enough it would somehow reconstitute his being and he would rematerialize alive and well before us.

  I miss him. I loved him a lot. It was already a rough summer for me but my concern for my mother outweighed my grief. She was getting high more often and I was scared she would OD and kill herself or wind up in a psych ward somewhere. For the first two weeks after my grandfather’s death it looked like one or the other was inevitable.

  I stayed home as much as I could without going batshit myself. She didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything so I made us sandwiches for lunch every afternoon and more sandwiches for dinner every evening. I am not much of cook. The lunch sandwich would be her breakfast because she slept till two in the afternoon every day. Just in time to turn on the TV and catch her soap operas. The TV would remain on till she passed out in the wee hours. If I woke up during the night I’d turn it off, but very often it stayed on until I rose the next morning.

  It was heavy and oppressive being alone with her every day. It was also hot as all fuck. The air conditioner was broken and she was way too out of it to care. She was sliding down a nasty slope of addiction and depression and there was nothing I could do about it.

  At least once a day she would be sitting in front of the TV watching General Hospital or some shit and tears would just roll down her face. Big watery tears that left trails of dirt and makeup as they made their way south. The weird thing was that she didn’t really look sad. She was blank, no expression, nothing in her face giving away any grief or pain. This unnerved me more than if she were overcome by a loud jag of sobs and crying. I wished she would moan and wail like a normal human being instead of the empty zombified shell she’d become. I was not equipped to deal with her and she’d stopped letting anyone at all, family or friend, into the house.

  And then one day around the middle of August I woke up to the sound of our vacuum cleaner. It had been silent for months. My mother had gotten up early and was giving the house a thorough cleaning. She looked different that day, she was smiling at me but not in a dopey narcotic way. It was a lucid and peaceful smile. Her hair was combed and her clothes weren’t wrinkled. She kissed me good morning and cooked me breakfast in a clean kitchen.

  It seemed like she had picked herself up by the bootstraps, snapped out of despair, and made a decision not to let it all go down the drain. That afternoon she started packing things into suitcases and boxes. I didn’t ask why. When we sat down to lunch (she made chili with Minute rice—my favorite) she told me that we were going to move into the city.

  She may as well have said that we were moving to North Dakota. If you lived in Jackson Heights, Manhattan was that far away. Maybe we would go once or twice a year to see the Christmas tree or the circus. Or if my cousins came up from Florida we would go to the Empire State Building. But not much more than that. And living there . . . well, that was uncharted waters. The city was for rich people or poor people and we didn’t fall into either category.

  five

  My grandfather had a lot more money than I’d imagined. He took numbers in his shop and made loans to his customers for decades. There were piles and piles of cash in a safe he kept in the basement of his house. The lion’s share of this booty went to my mother. I think she got even more than my grandma did, but it may have been that Grandma Betty felt sorry for her and wanted to give her a chance to start a new life.

  Right before Labor Day, my mother and I took a taxi to East 52nd Street in Manhattan. The block dead-ended to a high ridge with the East River and the FDR Drive flowing below. It was a very ritzy block, even I could see that and I knew jack shit about the city. There was a Rolls Royce idling near the corner on First Avenue. A chauffeur wearing a hat was sitting behind the wheel which was on the wrong side, the British side. It was the first Rolls I had ever seen in my life.

  We walked up to a big brick building. A friendly doorman let us in and handed my mother an envelope that bore her name scrawled in black ink. The smiling doorman said his name was Kenny. He had a string-beany Dick Van Dyke type of frame and a very young face. His uniform was too big for his body and he looked like a kid wearing his old man’s clothes.

  Kenny showed us to the elevator and rambled on about the heat and the impending rain. He seemed like a good guy even if he was a bit of a blabbermouth. He left us alone at the elevator and my mother pressed 6. Inside the envelope was a key that let us into apartment 6K at the end of a long hallway.

  The living room was empty and had shiny wood floors. The windows looked out onto 52nd Street. We could see part of the river and the Queens shoreline. My mother showed me the bedroom that was going to be mine.

  She went to the bathroom and I stood alone in the center of the room. There were two windows that faced the back of the very wide building just south of ours. All I could see were windows, maybe a hundred of them. A big wall of eyes or one big fly eye that was trained right at me. I could see people behind some of the eyes. I could watch them go about their daily lives. It was a strange sensation and I felt like it was wrong to be watching them. But apparently they didn’t care. If they wanted privacy they could pull down the shades.

  I waited for my mom in the kitchen. She was in the bathroom for a long time and I started to worry. I killed time looking through the drawers and cupboards but all I found were some chopsticks. She finally came out of the bathroom and asked me what I thought of the place.

  The idea of moving scared me. The rooms were big, the building in a fancy part of town; it was all too foreign. And my mother hadn’t told me anything about what our life here would be like. There were too many unknowns: Where would I go to school? Was she getting a job? Was it a temporary move and we’d go back to Queens in a few months? Or did my mother meet a new guy at some point and he was the one renting the apartment for us and now she was going to open one of the closet doors and Jerry or Jim or whoever the fuck would appear and introduce himself as my new father? I was scared of all the questions and even more scared of the answers.

  I opened the refrigerator, expecting it to smell bad. It didn’t. I took that as an okay sign. There was nothing inside except an open can of Coke. I emptied it into the sink.

  My mother asked me the same question again: “What do you think, Mitt?” She was the only person who called me that.

  “It’s nice” was all I could manage to say.

  She sat down Indian style in the middle of the living room and asked me to sit across from her. I did and then I noticed that she was still on the pills.

  “I think we owe it to ourselves. No?”

  She waited for me to reply but I didn’t.

  “We had a rough year and I think a new beginning would do us both a world of good.”

  Still no answer from me.

  She stared at me and smiled. She did have a lovely smile. And if a drug was responsible for it, well . . . so be it. Pills or no pills, I think she was genuinely happy that day.

  As for me, I can’t really say I was unhappy. Yes, I was afraid, but I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t going to miss anybody from my neighborhood. Maybe Willie a little bit. Maybe not. I wasn’t so attached to anyone except my Grandma Betty and my mother assured me we would be seeing her at least once a week. I mean, we were only fifteen minutes away from Jackson Heights by taxi or train. But psychologically it was another story. For me, the East River may as well have been the Atlantic Ocean.

  “When do we move in?” It was my first real question about our new life. It would also be the only one I asked that day.

  “The movers are coming Friday mornin
g. We have a lot of work to do, Mitty.”

  Friday. Wow. She was wasting no time.

  We took the elevator back down to the lobby. A different doorman was on duty. He smiled at us as we walked toward him but his attention was immediately drawn to the entrance. A short, skinny guy dressed in all black with big dark sunglasses and very short bleached-blond hair stumbled his way inside. He had on a black leather jacket even though it was ninety degrees.

  He smelled bad. Like cigarettes, booze, BO, cheap perfume, and something like kerosene or the gas from a stove with its pilot light out. I was sure the doorman was going to throw him right out. He looked like the junkies I would see hanging out by the Roosevelt Avenue subway station hustling change for a token or a shot.

  But I was wrong.

  The doorman motioned to my mother and me to wait a second as he graciously greeted the man in black. “Hello, sir.” He smiled as he said it.

  “Hey, Arthur,” the guy mumbled in a low voice. No doubt he was fucked up on something. “I might be getting a package in a little bit. Send the kid right up.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  He may have been high but he certainly belonged there. The doorman actually tipped his hat as the skinny guy propelled himself through the lobby in jerky spurts. He came right toward us and my mother and I had to move quickly to get out of his way. I don’t think he even knew we were there.

  As he passed us I saw that the hair on the back of his head had a cross shaved into it. Not the Jesus cross but the cross the German army wore as medals. The Iron Cross. I watched as he went into the elevator, pushed a button, and then sat down on the floor Indian style, just like we had done minutes ago. He slumped his head down like he was exhausted and disappeared behind the closing door.

  “So we’ll see you Friday?” the doorman said to my mother.

  “Yes, Friday.” Mother looked at her shoes.

  “Anything I can do for you, please let us know.”

  My mother thanked him.

  “Welcome to 446 East 52nd Street!”

  He held the door open and we walked out onto our new block.

  six

  I sat on the edge of my bed in apartment 6K. It was around dinnertime and still lots of daylight left. I could hear footsteps on the ceiling above me, voices and shouts from the sidewalk and the building across the way, helicopters chopping the sky, ambulances and police cars wailing through the street, and maybe worst of all the incessant elevator lurching through its shaft.

  How could I possibly live this way? How would I find any peace? I couldn’t believe how much I could hear. I thought I was used to lots of noise. Jackson Heights wasn’t exactly Hicksville. It was a pretty busy place and we lived close to the main drag, but there was no comparison to East 52nd Street. I wanted to tell my mother that this couldn’t work, that it was too much for me to handle and I needed to go back to Queens.

  I held my tongue and we went out for dinner. We walked to the Wellington Restaurant (a diner in actuality) a few blocks away. My mother told me that I would have an interview the next morning at what she hoped would be my new school. She said it was a private school which I took to mean a religious school. This was bad news. I was not happy at the thought of Catholic nuns and priests running my life.

  But I said nothing. I kept to my strict policy of not asking questions about what was happening in our lives. The only thing I asked about was the soup of the day.

  It was lentil. I ordered it and it was very good. They gave us loads of free breadsticks, little packs of crackers in cellophane, and foil-wrapped pats of butter. It seemed like an extraordinary amount of food to give away. We barely made a dent in the pile even though I gorged on it before, during, and after my soup. The waiter even gave us a paper bag and insisted we take the remainder home. Besides the doormen, he was the first friend we made in the city.

  When we first walked into the diner I thought he’d be mean. Busing a table with great speed, he was curt and gruff when we entered.

  “Two?” he said, and jerked his head toward a small table in the corner near the bathrooms.

  My mother asked if we could have a booth.

  He stopped his work, looked up at us, and scratched his shoulder. “Anywhere you like.” He smiled wide and made a grand, sweeping horizontal arc with his arm. The smile revealed a big gold incisor below his bushy black mustache. The tooth so big it reflected light off the overheard fluorescent, and beamed a thin blue ray right between my eyes.

  He wasn’t nasty at all, just busy. In time I realized that was how most of the city’s people were. They seemed cold and unkind on the surface but it was simply the armor necessary to live tightly among millions. Beneath the shell you could usually find the goodness.

  Right after we ordered our meals, I spotted the guy with the Iron Cross in his head. He was sitting in a booth next to a woman with long jet-black hair. She sat between him and the plate-glass window nibbling on a muffin and sipping tea. He was pressed tight against her.

  He wore the exact same getup as before: black leather jacket, T-shirt, pants, and the big black sunglasses. She wore a matching pair. He had a full plate of food in front of him: a cheese omelet with bacon, fries, and well-done toast.

  He didn’t touch it at all.

  Not a bite.

  He wasn’t even holding a fork. He just sat with his head erect looking straight ahead. The large glass of OJ next to his plate was full to the brim. He didn’t take so much as a sip. The only time he moved was when he reached for his woman’s hand. He intertwined his fingers with hers and had her hand in his lap for the remainder of the time we were there. Resting on his knee, their hands caressed each other, twisting and turning on each other, both restless and gentle. It was tender and sweet. I couldn’t take my eyes off them and I didn’t know why. He was certainly strange-looking and weird-acting but the way the two of them were together in the booth made me feel good. Maybe it was because they were obviously so very much in love.

  When we got back to our new home I felt much better about the place. I think it was a combination of the gold-tooth waiter’s hospitality and the blond guy holding his girl’s hand so affectionately that calmed me down.

  I sat on my brand-new bed. My mother had bought new furniture for the apartment and trashed all of our old stuff except for two end tables that once belonged to my great-grandmother. Legend has it that she brought them from Poland.

  I could hear a man shouting in the street: “Back it up!! . . . Keep her coming! . . . Keep her coming!!!”

  The shouts didn’t bother me at all. I put my head on the pillow. The elevator was moving less frequently but there was still a lot of noise coming from the street: trucks, cars, buses, sirens, voices . . . None of it disturbed me that night.

  All the sounds blended into one big hum of white noise like a steady wind or a patient tide.

  I passed out cold till morning.

  seven

  My new school was supposed to be this very modern and progressive institution of learning. But aside from being much smaller, it’s not all that different than Newtown, the big public high school I went to in Queens. The Hobart School is in an old redbrick building on East 63rd Street in Manhattan. It’s philosophy is to develop intellectual freedom, creativity, and inquisitiveness in its students and to instill a sense of compassion and respect for oneself, one’s peers, and one’s society.

  Or something like that.

  Their cutting-edge educational strategy was to coordinate the things we were learning in all of our classes and keep the themes consistent across all subjects. I thought the approach to be complete bullshit and the common course threads they prided themselves on had to be stretched real thin in order to appear synchronized and harmonious.

  For instance, at the start of our junior year we focused on the Louisiana Purchase in American history; in math we dabbled in a very rudimentary overview of political economics; in English we studied the effects of colonization on language, or was it the effects of la
nguage on colonization? And in science we studied the interior waterways of the United States, particularly the Mississippi River. Music class was all about the Delta blues even though that particular form of music came about 120 years after the Purchase.

  What invariably happened was that one or two of the classes would exhaust the current topic before the others. This would initiate a chain reaction/domino effect that would undermine the precious syncopation that Hobart held so dear.

  So by December it was John Brown and the abolitionists, The Sound and the Fury (okay, I guess), an introduction to trigonometric functions (you’re starting to lose me), and oil extraction in Saudi Arabia (what the fuck??). In music it was West Side Story because we were supposed to be reading Romeo and Juliet in English class—but our study of The Scarlet Letter took longer than expected and cut into the time originally allotted to Faulkner.

  Socially, in many ways it was just a smaller version of the same old shit. You could separate all the kids into the same little boxes you’d find anyplace else: jocks, nerds, druggies, brainiacs, and sluts. The boundaries of these personality types were a little blurry at Hobart, though. There was more overlapping between species and more fluidity in the grayzone kids who drifted between categories.

  What Hobart did lack were the Cro-Magnons: the psychotically deranged violent types who stalked the halls of Newtown High. For this I was grateful; there was no love lost leaving that lot behind.

  The biggest demarcation at Hobart, however, was economic, the Great Divide separating the scholarship kids (who needed to show financial hardship and a modicum of academic merit) from the ones whose parents paid the sticker price (and had to prove even less scholastic ability).