Something Great and Beautiful

by Enrico Pellegrini

  Young waiters like me took orders, took business cards, and wondered when the gold rush would start.

  My gold rush didn’t start too badly that evening. The first customer was a lady from Jersey dining before going to the opera. At first I thought her stingy, as she used the libretto for Turandot to line up each dish on the menu with its price. But she left me a 25 percent tip. Then two Broadway actors sat down placidly, like horses in the sun.

  “So what do you recommend as an appetizer?” asked one of the two actors, looking at me. “No, no, I’m allergic to seafood. And what about a steak tartar, with no egg, cooked and not raw, and a lighter meat instead of beef like chicken?”

  Sometimes taking orders was a way of getting to know people. At other times it was a complicated process. I wrote something down, crossed it out, wrote it down again, and now and then I was distracted, remembering what was about to happen, in just a few hours, and across that low tide, in the distance, I thought I could see two green fires. Even though the Maestro had taught me how, that night it was really tough to wait.

  “And are the artichokes tender?”

  “They’re so tender,” I said, smiling.

  Toward nine-thirty, a new customer came in. A sudden calm descended on the chaos of Gino’s, like a whaler entering port. Behind the bar, Angelo raised his eyes from the bottle of dolcetto he was decanting, and Michael smoothed the gray sideburns at his temples. This must be Lucien Verger, I thought. His solemnity was emphasized by the fact that no one dared to approach him as he stood by the PLEASE WAIT HERE TO BE SEATED sign.

  He sported a round, perfumed figure and was dressed in layers like an onion. Over his navy-blue suit he was wearing a green MIG-20 bomber jacket. Here was my angel investor. I was standing there in front of his table with my notepad open, in front of my benefactor, to whom I owed my first paid job. You don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression, I said to myself.

  “Tell me, kid, can you put down your notepad and look at me?” said Lucien Verger, losing interest for a moment in the menu. “Right, look at me carefully.” He smiled. “Tell me, do I look like an ogre?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, surprised.

  Verger took off his glasses, his egg-white nose sticking out over his cheeks even farther. Although he claimed to be French, everyone said he was Greek. The long red hair, which grew beneath his completely bald crown, moved a touch as a waiter passed by too closely.

  “You know what I mean. Do I look like an ogre?”

  “You look more like an angel to me,” I said, smiling.

  “Then why will no one ever come out to seat me in this restaurant!” he said, pointing at me in a fit of rage.

  I decided to answer the question with a question. “Perhaps because people become a little shy around someone as important as you are?” I suggested smiling.

  “No, because I am a fucking ogre!”

  So I’ve ended up with a masochist angel investor, I thought. You never win.

  Around eleven that evening, Michael closed the door from the inside as the waiters were setting up tables with clean linen for the next day. Gino started to count the cash; the restaurant didn’t accept credit cards. On Thursday nights you could find more money in Gino’s cash register than if you robbed the ATM machine on Sixty-second and Lex.

  “You’re going to see the girl now?” asked Gino as he sipped coffee and looked inside the cup.

  I felt another match lighting in my stomach.

  “You know it’s dropping into the teens tonight,” he added.

  “They said it’s going to be the coldest night of the year,” confirmed Michael. “People are staying home.”

  “Thanks, kid,” said Verger, leaving. Then he wrapped some dollar bills around his business card. Since he thought he didn’t have friends, he gave his card to everyone he met. The loneliness of successful people, I thought. He smiled. “If it doesn’t work out with the girl, give me a ring. I have plenty!”

  When I emerged from the subway, a thick layer of light blue frost already glazed the street. I sat down on the same bench, in front of her house, where I had been sitting that morning. The temperature continued to drop. I looked up and noticed that her window on the second floor was still dark. She must still be at work. The wind from the upper bay was stronger and icy but I couldn’t feel it.

  Every car that turned the corner, every passerby, every nothing…it could be her.

  CHLOÉ VERDI

  May 4, 2009, New York City

  he prosecutor shook his head in disbelief. “Porn? Really?”

  ROSSO FIORENTINO

  January 11, 2008, New York City

  told you it wasn’t going to work,” said Lucien Verger in his Franco-Greek English as I felt two arms hoisting me up off of the sidewalk and dragging me somewhere inside.

  When I opened my eyes, a 3,000-watt lamp blinded me. Was I in an operating suite? I tried to clutch at something. A short guy named Rex was calling out, “Snow White, Behind the Scenes Part I!” and someone crouched between a girl’s legs was throwing away the third razor. Where the hell was I? Lucien Verger paraded in front of me in a white bathrobe, his hairy red knees sticking out. I slowly remembered that I had dragged myself to the address listed on his business card.

  “You know what my great-uncle always said?” said Verger, sitting on the couch where I was lying. “Beat your woman every night. And if you don’t know why, she will.”

  As he untied my shoes, I realized that I couldn’t feel anything from my waist down. I was frostbitten. He then rubbed another finger of rum on my lips to get my circulation going.

  “And you’ve been too good to her,” said Verger. “Especially if she’s an ex-junkie.”

  “But Chloé doesn’t—” I gave a sudden, hard cough.

  “You told me that. She’s unstable, her arms are like Swiss cheese, and she doesn’t drink. Ex-junkie, big time…But check out all the sexy chicks here!”

  “And you’re a sexy boy,” said a sweet voice. Two nails, which looked slightly bitten notwithstanding the nail polish, caressed my face. “My name is April.”

  I continued to look around more and more confused, wondering where I could possibly be. Rex, the director, called again, “Quiet on set, camera rolling,…action!” With those magic words an almost total silence descended over the room. You could only hear the bip bip of the digital camera. The girls were lined up against a wall, well coiffed and with bright gloss on their lips, and they said things that made no sense like “I was in seventy films last year,” or “I’m always faithful to my boyfriend except when I’m in bed.” Since she had called me “sexy boy,” I realized I was waiting to hear what April had to say.

  “It’s my first girl-girl scene,” said April, smiling, sounding both shy and proud. “Since I was fifteen my dream has been to work with Marie Alice.” While the camera followed her, she again caressed my cheek with two fingers. “But I still like sexy boys!”

  Finally, with a slow pan the camera moved in on Marie Alice, who was completely naked. She had tawny red hair and her beauty spots were scattered on her clear shoulders like a handful of pepper.

  “Maybe you know everything about me,” she said, spreading her legs and revealing her pubis, which was as bare as a peeled apple. “But did you know that I was born in Moscow on Valentine’s Day?”

  “Cut! Okay, girls!” said Rex, applauding briefly. “Please, Marie Alice…You’ve been a bit under par lately.”

  “Please, M.A.,” said Verger.

  “But what’s this?” I said, holding my head with both hands. “Weren’t you supposed to be a big shot, a tycoon, an angel investor? You produce porn?”

  “Porn fairy tales,” specified Verger sorrowfully. “Mainstream porn is no longer selling. Internet and YouPorn are killing us.”

  o the soft, eighties tones of “I Like Chopin,” a gaf
fer pushed a coat rack with the film’s costumes into the room. The costumes seemed even more deranged than the girls’ lines. There was the Walt Disney blue tulle dress for Snow White, and the dwarfs’ clogs, pointy hats, and matching outfits.

  I tried to move my toes, which were still stuck together inside my socks. “I Like Chopin” went the song again. That had been my first slow dance. But I didn’t think of my first love, Kerry, with whom I had danced to it, or of Marinella. I thought of her, and what had happened earlier that night.

  Taxi after taxi, car after car, had stopped in front of the same spot where I was waiting. But it was always someone else coming out: a heavy man in his fifties, an Asian woman and her dog, a young guy carrying a guitar…Every time I could feel my pulse speed up when the taxi stopped and the door opened, and then slow down again when I realized it wasn’t her. Gradually my vision became blurred. The wind was blowing harder in my face, and my eyes were watering, and the water was turning into frost on my eyelashes. I could now only see a few feet away. Sometimes a shadow would go by, until one stopped. A match lit in my stomach. Her breath was condensed in the cold air that smelled of snow. A thousand matches lit in my stomach. A taller, broader shadow was handling a pair of keys…All the matches went off at once. Why? How? What was Franz doing there? Before they could see me I ran back to the subway.

  “You really want to be on film, Rosso?” said Verger. “Aren’t you all frostbitten?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Of course you must be on film,” April said, unbuttoning my trousers. “You’re so cute!”

  The magic words, “Quiet on set, camera rolling,…action,” descended again over us. Marie Alice was lying on a sofa bed, in the middle of the room, in her Snow White blue tulle dress. With a bit of gel in her hair, a dusting of glitter on her cheeks, and her fresh breath that smelled of Apple Halls, she really looked like Snow White.

  The male actors, on the other hand, were annoying and not at all dwarflike (except for their exceptionally large genitals). They operated in sync like a special squad. Sneezy came from behind, Dopey was on top, and the others arrived one by one. Being regular guests of Playboy TV seemed to have gone to their heads. Sometimes they jumped up and down on the sofa bed yelling. Sometimes they laughed and pointed at me while I attempted to engage in some action with Jen and April, despite my left foot being frostbitten.

  “And what is that supposed to be? An orgy?” they said, mocking me. “We already have Sleepy, you know that!” Or they tried to intimidate me. “Watch your back! Better once with Snow White than seven times with the seven dwarfs!”

  At around two in the morning someone cleaned off the seats of Verger’s limousine and we went out to shoot the exteriors. To keep costs down everything had to be shot just in a few hours. The girls took a break; they had worked hard and were tired, and were all having vitamin drinks while looking at the moon. The male actors were even more tired; they seemed utterly exhausted.

  After we all got in, the car merged onto Third Avenue. Outside the temperature was rising and wet snow was falling on the street.

  “Rosso, are you up for the next scene?” asked Rex, the director, giving a dirty look to the male actors who sat breathless and bunched together at the back of the limousine.

  I nodded.

  “Thank God someone came to work today!”

  “Where are you from?” April whispered in my ear.

  “Italy,” I said, instead of New York.

  “Wow, Italy. Is that what makes you so good?”

  “Now, let’s not get arrogant, Rosso,” Rex cautioned me. “Let’s keep our eyes on the stars and our feet on the ground.”

  The limousine curved gently over the wet snow and the camera again began doing its bip bip sound, but Marie Alice was exhausted. Her eyes were big and anxious, and the silver sparkles glittered quietly on her cheeks.

  “You can’t even fake an orgasm anymore, M.A.,” said Verger shaking his head, desolate.

  Around four in the morning the crew took us back home. Since she also lived in Queens, Marie Alice walked a stretch of the way with me. I was heading back to Uncle Spiro’s.

  It was snowing heavily now and a strip of white gathered on the roofs of Astoria. The air was clean. Marie Alice’s mood was better, because they had given her the blue tulle dress, and she kept it slightly lifted so that it wouldn’t get wet.

  “You know, you really amazed me,” said Marie Alice breaking the silence. “They always expect everything of us girls, but for male actors the expectations are much lower.”

  “Why did you quit ballet?” I asked.

  Marie Alice slowed her walk to catch her breath. Her exhalations condensed in the freezing air.

  “When I was a little girl my mother took me to dance class every day. Then one day she went away with a friend of my uncle and stopped taking me. Being a strip dancer paid better than being a ballerina, and films paid even better. But it wasn’t only a question of money…maybe it just happened.” Marie Alice dabbed at her eye makeup, which had smeared from crying. “But if I go on like this, I guess they’ll fire me…” She turned around and looked back. “And why have you sunk to my level?”

  I too looked back at the clear tracks we had made in the snow.

  “Oh, this is nothing,” I said, smiling. I felt two tears flow silently down my cheeks. “I’ve done so much worse.”

  CHLOÉ VERDI

  May 4, 2009, New York City

  he prosecutor this time could not summon the courage to face the blue magnetic flag of the State of New York, but simply murmured, “So, the first investor of the company was a porn producer?”

  ROSSO FIORENTINO

  January 27–29, 2008, New York City

  ’d had a strange dream. I’m with a girl. I’m trying to give her pleasure, but it’s not working. I try with my penis, I try with some electric toy. Nothing. She’s not feeling anything. She wants me to put a foot inside her. I’m afraid of hurting her. When I put all of my head in, to my surprise I see someone else inside the girl: a policeman who’s looking for his squad car. My hands are bloodied. I’m holding the electric toy that continues to vibrate. I sense the pressure of the policeman’s gun against my neck. I’m waiting for my execution. I’ve always been waiting for it.

  “Did I hurt her?” I ask.

  “No, to the contrary you succeeded,” says the policeman. “You gave her pleasure. I shall knight you. What is your family crest?”

  I suddenly feel the relief of bad news becoming good. I was expecting to be executed but instead I’m being knighted.

  “What is your family crest?” asks the policeman again.

  I wipe my bloodied fingers on the electric toy. “Five burgundy stripes on a background of gold…”

  Slowly, the edges of the ceiling came together. The ceiling was so close to my face I could smell the paint. In the other bunks my roommates were still snoring loudly. Outside it was snowing.

  t eight o’clock that morning I went to check on the renovations at 6 Astoria Boulevard, which was around the corner from where I stayed.

  “Where are the gringos?” asked Miroal Bontes, a very chatty Portuguese contractor who constantly drinks Dr Pepper. He had completed the job, following my plans, and turned a pet bird shop into a bakery. I double-checked: the brick oven was there, the counter too, and the walls had just been repainted light melon. There was a fresh smell of paint. Through the small windows I could see the curtains from the restaurant next door. Always good to have some action around.

  “Where’s the money?” asked the contractor again.

  “I don’t have it now,” I said, taking the can of Dr Pepper from his hand and putting it inside my trash bag. “I’ll pay you next time.”

  When I got off the subway at Fifty-ninth and Lexington for my second meeting, it was ten o’clock. The cold, clean air strengthened the sense of
well-being I’d woken up with. The flags of the Plaza Hotel were waving in the sky high and proud, and Central Park was beautiful in the snow.

  I thought again about last night’s dream, funny it was about my family’s crest. True, somehow different, yet I decided to take it as a good omen.

  My next meeting was with Martin, the bum-economist who lived under the grating on the northeast corner of Sixty-first and Fifth. I passed FAO Schwarz to my right and stopped at the grating.

  “Where are the gringos?” said Martin’s rough voice from inside. It seemed that everybody was asking me the same question. To compensate him for his services, I would typically bring Martin empty cans, which he then took to Lincoln Center to turn into cash. “Not cans again!” he said.

  Under the grating, from the top of an iron ladder, I caught a glimpse of his blond beard and two intensely blue eyes. The metal gate opened. I clung to the steep ladder, wrapping my trash bag of empty cans around my wrist, and climbed down. Martin’s basement was not welcoming. It was empty, cold, and the floor was a carpet of gum and cigarette stubs that passersby rained down upon him.

  “You’ve drunk one hundred Red Bulls in two weeks?” asked Martin, reluctantly taking the trash bag I was carrying. “Seven cans a day?”

  “And how much dope did you smoke?”

  The smell of black afghan that was rising from the grating was so strong that it dizzied even the Pierre Hotel’s doorman.

  “When the fuck are you going to pay me with cash?”

  “This baby needs every penny right now,” I said, handing him the business plan. I wiped my mouth nervously and held my breath. “I made the adjustments you recommended. Will this work, Martin?”

  Martin took a long drag of hashish, until he coughed, and commenced reading the plan.