by G. M. Ford
I leaned forward and allowed gravity to pull me down the steep face of James Street. Halfway to the corner, I jay-jogged across both James Street and a suddenly empty Fifth Avenue and headed uptown toward the Y. At Cherry, I pointed myself downhill again, and there she was…the good Dr. Duvall, right in front of me, striding purposefully along in a shiny new pair of Air Jordans and a green-and-white Adidas running suit that made whisking noises as she walked.
I skipped down the hill, into the entrance to the cop’s garage, until I was just off her inside shoulder.
“You believe in the hereafter, honey,” I growled.
Rebecca answered without turning. “I certainly do.”
“Then you know what I’m here after.”
“Where does that come from? That’s so corny.”
She reached back, slipped an arm around my waist, and yarded me up next to her. I stuck my nose behind her ear. She smelled like the great outdoors, according to Coco Chanel.
“Laugh-In,” I said. “Remember? Arte Johnson used to putter along behind Ruth Buzzi, muttering all this suggestive stuff.”
“And she’d beat the heck out of him with her purse.”
“Couldn’t have that now, though, could we? Not here in the latter stages of the sensitive nineties.”
“Oh, no, sexual harassment and all that,” she said.
“Why is everything sexual harassment these days?” I asked. “What happened to regular old run-of-the-mill harassment? Like when I just bust your balls because I think you’re a jerk. Everything’s got to be sexual these days. I don’t understand it.”
She said, “You’re a truly unique thinker, Leo,” and kissed me on the cheek. “It’s your best feature.”
“My best? You must be joking.”
“Sorry, big fella. The other one’s like a baseball pitcher.” She nudged me in the ribs. “You’re only as good as your next outing.”
“I thought it was your last outing.”
“Not in a buyer’s market,” she said.
Arm in arm, we gravitated down Cherry, skidding to a stop on the corner of Fourth Avenue. The crew was visible now. A blot on the urban landscape, milling around on the corner a block north. While a couple of bums in one place were hardly worthy of mention, a full dozen degenerates shuffling around the same corner had, not surprisingly, attracted official attention. A blue-and-white SPD cruiser was pulled to the curb on the east side of Third Avenue, its pair of officers out and milling about, enjoying the late sunshine and trading pleasantries with the crew.
“Uh-oh,” Duvall said.
“Not to worry,” I assured her. “They can handle it. They get a lot of practice.”
By the time we’d covered half the distance, Norman had stepped up on the low brick wall surrounding the Rainier Club and was waving his arms wildly about.
“What in pity’s name is Norman doing?” Rebecca asked, picking up the pace and dragging me along.
“Preaching, I suspect. That’s what they do when they’re told to disperse. They claim they’re having a church service.”
I could hear the voices now. Norman, usually quite soft-spoken, was orating at top volume.
“Also in the day of your gladness, and in your solemn days, and in the beginnings of your months, ye shall blow with your trumpets over your burnt offerings…”
The older cop was leaning back against the fender of the cruiser, enjoying the show as the rookie tried to assume command.
“I’m not tellin’ you again, Red. You get your big butt down from there, or you’re goin’ to jail,” the young cop hollered.
He was peach-fuzz-fresh out of cop school, his hair still cut military-short. He didn’t have to shave more than a couple of times a week, and his training hadn’t prepared him for anything quite like Nearly Normal Norman. At six seven and about two-sixty, Norman cut an imposing figure. The rookie kept looking over his shoulder at his partner, who was using a penknife to clean his fingernails.
Norman saw me coming and stopped spouting.
“Brother Waterman,” he bellowed. “Will you witness and testify for the children of the Lord?”
I raised my right hand. “I will,” I swore.
The cop turned on me like a rabid Chihuahua.
“You want to go with him?” he demanded. “You looking to spend a little time in the lockup?”
“I’ve got a better idea, Officer,” I said. “How’s about if they all go with me instead?”
“Where would you be taking this…this…group?”
Red Lopez’s voice rose above the crowd. “Your momma’s.”
“Who said that?” The cop strained to see over the crowd.
“It was Joe,” said Ralph solemnly.
“Joe who?”
“Joe Mama,” they yelled in unison.
While they yukked it up, the kid stiff-legged it over to his partner and began whispering heatedly in the older man’s ear. The veteran cop just smiled and shook his head. Not in my patrol car. No way.
Normal hopped down from the wall. “How was I doin’?” he asked.
“You oughta have you a TV program, Normal,” Mary said.
“I didn’t know you could quote Scripture,” I said.
“I been prayed over a lot” was his reply.
I counted noses. George, Harold, Ralph, Normal, Mary, Earlene, Flounder, Red Lopez, Billy Bob Fung, Hot Shot Scott, Big Frank, and Heavy Duty Judy. The gang was all here.
“Let’s go,” I said, taking Rebecca’s arm and starting up the street. Rebecca giggled at my side.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” she said.
“Look at it like they’re your scout troop, or something.”
Wide-eyed, she peered back over her shoulder at the crew, silently mouthed the words “scout troop,” and nearly collapsed with laughter. I dragged her up the street.
Normal strode out ahead, using the parking meters like conveniently placed walking sticks. The rest of the crew followed along piecemeal. Scott, Billy Bob, and Red lagged behind, passing a bag-shrouded pint bottle among them. I pretended not to notice.
I stopped on the next corner and waited for stragglers. When the multitude had reassembled, I gave them the program.
“Everybody here is going to get paid a hundred bucks a day plus expenses,” I said. Always start with the good news. That’s my motto.
As expected, this statement was met with wild acclaim.
“Everybody gets a whole new set of clothes.”
More cheering and calls for a drink.
“You’ve all done this before, so everybody knows the drill.” I had them eating out of my hand. Now for the bad news.
“But,” I continued, “this job is a little different than anything we’ve done before, because of the neighborhood we’re going to be working in. It’s a bit outside our usual stomping grounds.”
“Where’s that?” Frank asked.
“Up at the top of University. The Olympic Star.”
“Oh, hoity-toity,” Earlene said, dancing about.
The cruiser rolled slowly by. The older cop was behind the wheel, leaving the young guy free to glare out over his arm at us.
“I’ll remember every one of you,” he promised out the window.
“That’s what she said,” yelled Red.
I waited while the group shared another moment of mad-cap mirth.
“First thing, we’re all going to go across the street”—I pointed—“to the Y and everybody is going to take a shower. On me,” I added. “Then…”
That was as far as I got before being shouted down. There were several barnyard epithets, a couple of anatomically unfeasible sexual suggestions, and at least one serious aspersion of my parentage. I let them vent. I’d expected as much. What I hadn’t expected was what Harold said next.
“You said ‘we’ and ‘everybody,’” he said. “That mean you and Miss Duvall are gonna shower too?”
A mutinous rumble rose from the crowd. Rebecca squeezed my arm hard enough
to break the skin. Her eyes were the size of hubcaps.
“Sure,” I said.
Forty-five minutes later, I was back on the sidewalk, feeling the chill of the evening breeze as it ran through my wet hair, and knowing beyond question that the image of Ralph would surely go to the grave with me. The girls showed up about five minutes later.
“Okay,” I said. “All in our places with bright, shiny faces.”
“Stuff it, Leo,” said George. “What next?”
“Haircuts,” I said, and started up Third Avenue. As the crew shambled along dispiritedly behind us, Rebecca spoke into my ear.
“If, and I stress the if, I ever talk to you again…we shall never, ever speak of this,” she said.
“These people know we’re coming?” I asked.
“They know someone is coming.”
“Kind of you to spare them the details.”
“If I’d told him whose hair it was they were going to cut, he never would have agreed to it. This is not a sheep ranch, Leo; it’s a salon.”
Turned out she was right. The crew waited outside Maison de Paul while Duvall and I went in. Mr. Paul himself was waiting.
He confronted Rebecca. “Surely, Mees Duvall, you cannot expect my staff to—”
She cut him short. “They’re all clean,” she said.
“But, madame…” he insisted in his phony accent.
I pulled out a wad of hundreds as thick as his wrist.
“Fifty a head,” he said with a sudden Bronx lilt. “Plus tip.”
Rebecca supervised the styling. I took the first shift next door to the Owl Tavern for beers while we waited for the rest.
It was nearly seven before we were completely reassembled. The last line of sunshine burned candy-apple red out over the Olympics as we marched uptown to Westlake Center. Without the sun, the air was more like fall and the electric breeze from the passing busses the sole source of warmth. I stopped outside the espresso stand.
“Okay. George, Frank, and Judy, you guys go with Rebecca. The rest of you come with me.”
“Where they goin’?” asked Ralph.
“We’re going to gussy them up so they can work inside the hotel. They need some different stuff.”
By this time, they were pretty much grumbled out and resignedly went along with the program. An hour later, it was all over, and they were splendid. They now carried their old clothes in a motley collection of paper sacks, which littered the bricks.
I’d equipped them from the ground up. New shoes, socks, and underwear. Shirts and slacks. New winter jackets, maybe a bit much for the current weather, but something that would serve them well in the coming months.
They were still prancing around, high-fiving and modeling their new outfits, when Rebecca showed up with the others. The crowd went wild.
Big Frank wore a gray pin-striped suit with a blue tie. His tasseled loafers squeaked as he walked across the pedestrian mall. Heavy Duty Judy was resplendent in a flowered silk pantsuit, bright yellow shoes, and a matching bag. The transformation was remarkable. Together, they looked for all the world to be a wealthy out-of-town couple in town to see the sights. And George was even better.
In a dark blue double-breasted wool suit and red power tie, George looked so good he could have been the mayor. “Oh, Georgie,” Earlene trilled, “what a babe you are.”
“This monkey suit hurts my neck,” he complained.
“You were a banker. You always wore a tie. I remember.”
“I had less necks then,” he said.
“Okay,” I hollered. They ignored me. Red Lopez and Hot Shot Scott were waltzing. Norman held Billy Bob Fung under one arm and Flounder under the other. Mary appeared to be helping George tuck in his shirt. George appeared to be enjoying it. Somebody was doing a Bert Parks impression.
“There she is…Miss America…”
“Could I have your attention, please?”
“…there she is…your ideal…”
“This calls for a drink,” I screamed.
It worked every time. They sang my praises and took me literally. Turned out no less than nine of them had something to nip on secreted somewhere on their persons.
I held up a hundred-dollar bill. “I’m going to get you all back to the Zoo by cab,” I announced. More hosannas. “The rest is for a couple of rounds on me when you get there.” I took several bows and waved like the queen.
“Bonnie says you can use the old cooler out in back to change clothes in. It’s important that you keep what you’re wearing now in real good shape. For the first couple of days, it might be best only to wear the outfit while you’re working; otherwise, if you look bad in that neighborhood, you’re going to get pinched for sure. Okay?”
The mob was fickle. As quickly as my stock had risen, it now plummeted. No way were they putting that old crap back on.
“Okay, okay,” I relented. “But you gotta stay neat and clean.”
Scout’s honor, all of them. Behind them, at the corner of Pike and Third, Rebecca had corralled three cabs. Two Gray-Tops and a Yellow. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” I announced, “your chariots await.”
I slipped George a hundred and watched as they thundered over toward Duvall and the cabs. In the gloom, an even dozen bags of old clothes squatted among the rough stones like fungi.
We drove separately, which was fine with me. I was in no hurry. As I turned right onto Eastlake and the traffic thinned, I found myself behind one of those new Honda vans, sporting a yellow bumper sticker that read, HONK IF YOU ARE JESUS. What the hell. I gave a little toot. The driver stuck an arm out the window and shot me the finger. I figured it came with the martyrdom territory, so I honked again.
I tried to recall the last time I had laid eyes on the family digs. I’ve reached that point in life where I constantly underestimate how long ago it was that something happened. If my first instinct is three years, it’s always been at least five. Worse yet, my confusion seems to exponentially worsen the longer the time frame involved. Any utterance of mine concerning something as ancient as, say, ten years or so ago can instantly be translated into a span considerably closer to twenty. My first instinct said Bill and Ellen Levine had lived there for six years, so using the new and revised Waterman approach to time estimation, I figured that made my last visit to this neighborhood, conservatively speaking, about ten years whence.
I crested the side of the hill on Taylor and drove down until I almost ran into Crockett Avenue. In the driveway, my mind’s eye saw the shadows of the various low-slung chariots of the fifties and sixties that my old man had owned and that we’d washed out here on Sunday afternoons. In the streets, I could imagine the nights of the parties. The cars of my parents’ friends lining the narrow street on both sides, leaving only a thin nerve-racking slot for passersby. But what were the neighbors going to do? It wasn’t like you could call the cops on my old man or anything.
The younger guys drove gleaming triple-finned Pontiac convertibles half a block long, while the more substantial drove big three-porthole Buicks with plush seats and wide white tires. But it was the Caddies that interested me. The vast fleet of Cadillacs, black or dark blue, resting nose to tail around the hill like chrome Conestoga wagons, belonged to the real downtown movers and shakers.
The recalled smell of gasoline reunited me with a forgotten fascination concerning the gas tanks of certain Cadillacs. The ones where you pushed a little button in the taillight and the whole light assembly swung straight up, revealing what was to me, for some childish reason, a precious pearl of a gas cap. I’d wait until the party was in full swing, then sneak out of the house in my pajamas to circle the block, looking for the right models, and I’d try them all, just to make sure they worked.
Rebecca’s blue Ford Explorer sat square and high in the driveway. Duvall, on the other hand, slouched curved and low on the front steps, leaning back against the risers, staring out at the street.
I took a seat beside her. “Hiya, toots.”
She look
ed over her shoulder at the house. “It’s huge,” she said. “When I came up before, it was full of people; there was all this scaffolding over it and all these trucks around. It didn’t seem so big and imposing then.”
I threw an arm around her shoulder. “It’s just a house.” “I can’t believe your mother didn’t like it.” “She liked it just fine. It’s just that it wasn’t up on Capitol Hill, where she figured a swell like the old man should be.”
Rebecca dangled the keys in front of my face. “Shall we?” I rose and offered her a hand. “After you, madame.”
I pulled her to her feet. She got the keys right on the first try, swung the big rounded door open, and disappeared; I took a deep breath, stepped inside, and was stopped in my tracks.
The place bore almost no resemblance to the theater of my childhood. The house, as I remembered it, was a place of heavy drapes and dark wood, where silence and shadow were valued above all. A place to whisper rather than shout. To turn on more lights rather than open the drapes. All that was gone. Hell, the stairs were gone.
Used to be that when you walked in the front door, you were faced with a wide expanse of stairs leading to the second floor. To what my mother called the Ballroom. To the right of the stairs was the front room; on the left, the parlor; and behind the stairs, the kitchen and servants’ areas.
They’d gutted the place. Now all was light and airy. What appeared to be a rough-textured plaster had replaced the dark wood. The narrow, twelve-pane windows had been removed, the openings expanded and new white windows installed. We stood in the middle of the gigantic front room, which now rose above us for the full two stories of the house. Whatever the upstairs looked like, one thing was for sure: the Ballroom was long gone.
“How’s your checking account?” Duvall asked.
“Pretty good,” I said. “Why?”
“Because everything you and I own, separately and collectively, doesn’t begin to make a dent in furnishing this room. The other eleven rooms I don’t even want to think about.”