by Rob Sedgwick
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “My mistake. I feel so foolish.”
“That’s fine, don’t worry about it,” she said. “I hope you find whoever you’re looking for.”
I thanked her and stepped away from the car. A man got into the passenger side, took the baby from the woman, and strapped it into a car seat in the back. They both drove off uptown, leaving me stranded in front of William’s Bar-B-Q Chicken feeling confused and ashamed of myself, my life, and my lack of commitment. I just stopped thinking for a minute and beheld William’s Bar-B-Q Chicken, an establishment that had no issue with commitment and staying power. It had been a bastion to the Upper West Side and Eighty-Sixth Street and Broadway my entire life. Always there. Comforting is not even the right word. It’s more like, when you saw William’s—with its ancient and overly plump neon chicken sign, and smelled the unique smell of its secret-recipe cooking oils and grease that dominated the block, which didn’t smell like grease or oil at all, but more like a hymn if hymns had a fragrance—you felt in your innermost innards that all was right and balanced with the world. It was a smell you could count on. William’s became part of your life’s historical landscape, seeping into your bone marrow and soul. It gave you peace and a moment’s harmony with the otherwise cacophonous, insane, and often mean world. Every time I brought William’s home for Tybalt and Julie, our triumvirate became one heartbeat, a single harmonious being. The whole apartment hummed with this quiet serenity that, no matter what happened in the world, we would be fine, the chicken’s aroma and succulence encircling us as a protective moat.
I just stood and watched the van that looked like our van disappear up Broadway, jumping up and down the road because of bad suspension, wondering what the fuck I had done, or not done, and wondering, if I could do it over again, would I actually do better, or would I still have ended up standing in front of William’s-Bar-B-Q Chicken, alone, feeling this canyon of ache.
—
I got the Twelfth Night gig. Shakespeare. Whoopee. Maybe I wouldn’t drink as much because I’d be working nights?
Life was so ridiculous that I did ridiculous things constantly in order to attack, to outdo the impending awfulness. Better that than to mope around and be limp and sad about it. I stood in my underwear in front of the enormous mirror in my soap opera dressing room, doing impressions of plummy British actors reciting Shakespeare. I made grand, sweeping gestures, pausing for dramatic effect and using the low, spooky register of my voice. I did a great imitation of Yul Brynner in The Ten Commandments: “Moses, if you die id whill bee by your God’s hand, nod by mieen.” He was just terrific, and he looked terrific, and he knew it, parading around like Nureyev gone butch with his muscles all flexed and his pecs all greased. That must have been at least five hundred pushups a day. I wrapped a towel around my head Ancient Egyptian style and peacocked around the spacious room, never losing sight of myself in the mirror, doing my best Yul. “To bee, or nod to bee? Thad izz th questjun.” The more serious you were, the better it worked. I did this constantly in the gym with Seth, and people would give me a wide berth. Seth, that butcherer of the English language, with his severe speech impediment, once asked me, when did Yul become part of my lexion?
“That’s lexicon.”
“Whatevah.”
But now I was Yul doing Hamlet: I trembled, I looked heavenward, I comported myself in elegant, maudlin postures, I never stopped flexing. My muscles rippled impressively, and I found myself very attracted to myself. I was as serious and profound as Helen Reddy singing “I Am Woman.”
There was a knock on the door and then it just opened, no—
“May I come in?”
I was caught peacocking.
“I’m so sorry.” The casting director of the show stood there, accompanied by a gorgeous redhead at least six feet tall, maybe twenty-two, all long legs and lips.
“I heard about the Shakespeare, that’s terrific.” She averted her eyes. “I just wanted to introduce you to Neath. She’ll be playing your wife on the show.”
I gently took Neath’s hand. She tried not to notice the towel wrapped around my head.
“You must be preparing, so we’ll leave, but I wanted you guys to—”
They disappeared as if someone had pressed the rewind button.
I stared into the mirror, maintaining my Yul Brynner persona, the towel still wrapped around my head. I began to bounce my pecs individually, first the right, then the left, then the right, then the left, and so on, never breaking my beloved characterization of the mighty Yul.
33
I’m a freshman at Bennington College when I find out from Ben that, after selling all of his art to make what would have been an enormously lucrative real estate deal, the deal has gone bad. I come down to the city at his behest that weekend, and he tells me that we will be moving down in life from 127 East Seventy-Fifth Street to the Ritz Tower on Fifty-Seventh and Park Avenue, home to such icons as Norman Lear and Neil Simon.
The doorman has white gloves. Everyone inside of the building is in tuxedos. The bow ties look real and not clip-on. The red carpet is thick and important, and it covers the walking part of a gleaming marble floor. There are mirrors everywhere. It must be a hundred paces from the front door to the elevator. There is a concierge desk. The concierge guy has paper-white skin with cemented-back thin white hair and says hello to us in a French accent. He knows what’s going on with everybody. He shakes his head as I walk by with Ben; this is unnoticeable to anyone but me.
Ben takes me to the nineteenth floor. Before he opens the door, Ben tells me the place is being renovated. He opens the door to the dining room area. It’s a mess of construction, but it’s huge. The floor is—like the lobby—slick, shining marble. Then we go to the living room, which is also under construction. The living room is the size of a basketball court. This will be Ben’s room. The forty-foot-high ceiling is adorned with some vast Sistine Chapel–esque painting. The stained-glass windows are the colors of wine you would in see in the finest cellars; there’s a Romeo and Juliet balcony; Mom and Ben’s bathroom is the size of Detroit.
I burst out laughing.
Ben is confused. “What’s so funny? Why does everyone laugh when I show this place? Son of a bitch.”
When he’s finished the tour, Ben finally tells me that this apartment—if that’s what you want to call it; it is more like a castle on the nineteenth floor—was William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies’s love nest.
“You mean the guy from Citizen Kane?” I ask, really impressed because how can you not love Orson Wells?
“Yes,” says Ben. There’s no irony in his voice.
Ben tells me later that you can cash checks downstairs with the concierge. I don’t have a checkbook at this point and I don’t know how to write one.
Nikko and I find the Blarney Stone down the street. The Blarney Stone is the type of bar where people drink professionally, so even the obviously underage are not carded. Nikko says he’s started to drink martinis because you get more bang for your buck. And boy do you ever. It’s all booze and it’s only three bucks. Dynamite. We have two each and walk out into the wincing sun. Drinking in the middle of the day doesn’t work for me. You walk out into the broad daylight like a vampire from the coffin-like ambience of the Blarney Stone and the sun hits you full on and you want to die.
Soon after this, Nikko discovers Trader Vic’s at the Plaza Hotel. I would love to hang out at the Oak Room bar upstairs, but Linus (who has come into town to visit and brought a bunch of cocaine for a surprise) says to me, “Dear boy, put it right out of your mind. They would never take us in the Oak Room. We look like vagabonds. Trader Vic’s has very appropriately dim lighting, so we won’t look as bad as we actually do. And the only reason anyone goes there is to get completely trashed, so they won’t notice anyway.”
Seth, who has come with us, agrees. “You just want to go to the Oak
Room so you can fulfill your Cary Grant fantasy.”
He, of course, is right. Cary Grant is at the Oak Room in North by Northwest, trying to find his mother to go to Theater before he is apprehended by the bad guys. My mother takes me to Theater all the time and then to drinks and dinner, and more drinks afterward at high-toned restaurants. We have impossibly sophisticated conversation and enjoy each other’s company immensely. The alcohol takes us to dizzying heights of whimsical insight. I yearn for the Oak Room. But Nikko, Seth, and Linus say we’re going to go downstairs, into the bowels.
Trader Vic’s has a Hawaiian theme, so it’s as if you’re on vacation and it’s all right to get beyond trashed. Hawaiian leis are draped over our necks as we walk in; Hawaiian island music is piping through the whole place. It’s like we’re in our own private fish tank as we are led to a private table. We are handed the thick, novel-sized drink menu. I ask what the strongest drink is.
The Honolulu waiter says, “The Queens Park Swizzle.”
After one of them, I’m flopping around. Life is great. Linus is still managing to stick his pinkie out a little bit even though it’s crooked, so he’s hanging in there. Nikko laughs loudly but clearly, and Seth, as always, has everything under control. Linus hands me the packet of cocaine so I can go to the bathroom and freshen up. I do a quick one-and-one on the back of the toilet, and when I get back to our table I am revitalized. Life is a down ramp and I’m about to launch. I’m a white Don Ho.
I have another Queens Park Swizzle. The world spins. I do more coke. The world stops spinning, and I am reborn once again. Trader Vic’s is a vivid Hawaiian paradise. Nikko and Seth go to the bathroom to freshen up as well. They too are reborn. And chatty. We are all chatty. Chat, chat, chat. About nothing, but we are all so high we think we are fascinating. Now the only thing missing is women. We all want women. Not Linus. He wants to go home to the Ritz and pass out. “I’ve had one too many, dear boy,” he mumbles woozily. He tries to pull himself up from the table and falls smack down on his ass. We lift him onto his seat and prop him up like Norman Bates’s mother until the nice Honolulu waiter comes back with our change, then we all carry Linus back to the Ritz.
We deposit Linus onto one of the many couches in the basketball-court-sized living room with the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The parents are away for the weekend, as always, so no one will mind. But I still want a woman, badly. It’s the coke, the booze, the late night, and the fact that I’m twenty.
I go to Nikko’s room and drag the trunk full of porn we’ve collected over the years into the parents’ room, where I’m staying for the weekend since they’re not there. The magazines are classics: Hustler, Club, Playboy, Gent, Swank, Screw, XXX Porn Stars. But they’re seriously not doing it for me. It’s about four in the morning, and I start to put my clothes on to go out into the world and score my first hooker.
Seth enters my parents’ room. “What are you doing? I’ve nevah seen so much porn on one bed in my life.”
“I’m trying to whack off, but it’s not happening.”
“Hyapatia Lee. Nice.” He is referring to a starlet featured on the cover of XXX Porn Stars. She is billed as a full-blooded American Indian porn star, and she is squatting down with her glorious back and perfect ass flush to the camera, wearing the highest heels possible, looking over her shoulder in a full Indian headdress, and licking a lollipop.
“Yup, but even she’s not doing it for me,” I say, gnashing my teeth in a coke frenzy. “I need a real woman.”
“You mean you’re going out to find a hooka? It’s four in the morning and we’re on Park Avenue. Whea are you going to find a hooka at this hour?”
“Twenty-Third and Second.”
“Ah. Yes.”
This is a well-known hooker area. There is a beyond ravishingly sexy black woman around that neighborhood whom I saw in my drunken travails a couple of weeks ago, and I pray she will be there and glad to see me. I take a cab down to Twenty-Third Street. I am cranked up on coke, Queens Park Swizzle, and prayer. My sex parts are all hopping.
There she is. Wow. She looks dead at me. She’s stunning with a gleaming chocolate skin tone, a sinuous athlete who looks like she ran the hundred-meter dash in college. Every muscle ripples. She must be six feet tall, and in the blurry four thirty light she looks even better than Hyapatia Lee. I want to run amok on her body.
She looks at me like I couldn’t possibly know the meaning of stupid.
I’ve never done this before. I am unschooled. What’s the proper etiquette? Do I say please, thank you and excuse me, or I’m sorry? Or do I go straight to business?
I opt for business. “How much?”
I don’t know what I’m asking how much for, so I’m hoping she’ll take the reins from here.
“Fifty.”
I only have thirty dollars. Please take the thirty.
She’s gorgeous, and her obvious disdain for me makes me want her even more.
I reach for the money, thinking the sight of the hard cash will change her mind, but the moist crumpled bills just look like I’m offering her a melted candy bar.
“Fifty.”
She is all business, stern. She is strong, she is invincible, she is woman. I wonder if she does domination. She seems to hate me so much.
“I’ll be right back.”
I flag down the nearest cab back uptown.
We’ve got to hurry. Someone who looks that incredible and is that nasty won’t be without clients all night.
How and where am I going to get fifty bucks? I am a heaving, throbbing mass of sexual frustration. I’ve got to score the money somehow.
The concierge.
I get to the Ritz, fly out of the cab, and sprint to the concierge, who happens to be there at five thirty in the AM.
“Can I get fifty bucks from you?”
“Oui, monsieur. Do you have a check?”
No, and I couldn’t fill one out if I had to.
“No, sir, I don’t. Could you just front it to me and I’ll pay you back?”
Front?
“I will charge it to your apartment.”
He looks at me as if I am not long for this world and he could not care less.
I hop the next cab and fly downtown.
The sun is inching up, orange juicing the sky.
I get to Twenty-Third and Second—and she’s gone without a trace. My fantasy has been destroyed. It’s now pale dawn. I get a cab back to the Ritz and hustle past the concierge. Linus is up and, as is always the case after he awakes from a blackout, surprisingly lucid. I tell him what happened.
“Oh Rob,” he says. “You are such a fucking Turk, man! Are you crazy? You don’t do hookers from the street, man. What on earth were you thinking?”
“She was gorgeous and had an amazing body.”
“What is it with you and the amazing bodies? What of the spirit and the mind? She probably had some horrible disease and was going to take you down with her. My goodness! What would your poor mother have said if she found out?”
34
I thought Neath, the new chick playing my soap opera wife, was really starting to dig me. She hit me a lot and told me how “bad” I was—bad in the good sense, in that I demonstrated an indifference, almost disdain for my immediate environs, the world, my bosses, caste systems, and the Upper East Side. Most people would call it petty, contrary, or stupid, but Neath was twenty, so I was “bad.” This was good, because I was in desperate need of some distraction other than alcohol, illegal substances, and hookers. To really get her going, I told her of my real-life legal situation. This impressed her to no end. When we passed each other in the hall, she grit her teeth at me, snarling like some dominatrix model that belonged on the cover of a depraved issue of Vogue. We ran our scenes together, and she told me how nasty I was and that she wanted to scratch me all over.
It was all a big, gooe
y turn-on.
Thank God we had this line of communication, because normal conversation with her was like watching paint dry. Twice.
“I loved it when I first met you in your underwear. I’m so glad we just barged into your dressing room like that. How sexy, how au natural, and what a body.”
“But didn’t I look silly with the towel on my head like that?”
“I thought you’d just taken a shower.”
“No, I was being Yul Brynner in The Ten Commandments.”
“That’s what I love about your acting, your being the character. You’re so there when I’m on set with you. Who’s Yul Brynner?”
“Do you know anything about football?”
“No.”
“He was the quarterback for the New York Jets in the sixties and he won a Super Bowl against the heavily favored Baltimore Colts. Biggest upset in football history.”
—
“Robbie, you’ve got to fuck that chick,” urged Moss from behind the bar, a perennial swizzle stick clenched in his jaw. “She’s incredibly hot.” His fingertips beneath his chin, he flicked at his beard as if to check its coarseness.
Then, absentmindedly, “You should bring her in here.”
I looked around at the depressing surroundings of here, where the walls were slicked caramel-goopy with uneven coats of cheap shellac and the air always smelled of stuffed ashtrays soaked in Thunderbird.
Maybe bringing her here was not such a hot idea.
Here…Brats…
Moss poured me the tequila that I would never pay for. In times like this, and in all times, I would sit on my perch at the bar where I knew everyone and they were happy to see me. I’d be tense coming in, but with that first shot, the boiling poison would knife down my gullet, and when I felt the heat in my gut, any problems I had would be gone like they never happened. And I would smile and laugh too loud about nothing. At first you had to chase the tequila (called Te-kill-ya in heavy drinking circles) with a beer because you would gag on its fire, a trail of scalding acid that had to be put out, and the beer would soften the edge, but after a while, you could drink it straight because you couldn’t feel anything, and for a little while life was the perfect wave. Then you could just forget about the injustice that happened to you during the day and throughout your life.
