I said: “What about you? Do you have a name?”
The man with a wiry head of hair said: “Mahoney.”
“Is that a first or last name?”
“It's just Mahoney.”
I turned back towards the numbers that read 402. “Richie, you took my camera bag with you. If you're not going to let me in, you'll at least need to open the door to hand it back.”
“Oh, this is good.” Mahoney.
Richie remained silent in thought. He finally said: “Is the mafia after you?”
“Probably.”
The door opened, lock still bolted in place, and Richie's eyes peered through a narrow sliver of light. “So, if I let you in, I could wake up in bed next to a horse’s ass?”
“Horses head, you mean.”
“Whatever.”
“Does the mafia actually do that?”
“They did in the movie.”
He shut the door again, lock bolted.
“I think that's just a Francis Ford Coppola thing.”
Richie removed the bolt, opening the door wide enough to welcome me in. Camcorder still rolling, Mahoney attempted to pursue the unfolding drama into 402. I promptly closed the door on the Cyclops.
“Hey, I'm filming a movie here,” he said.
“Oh god, I hope so.” Richie frowned over the Coppola thing.
“Yeah, me too.”
6
LEAH'S BROWNSTONE APARTMENT was on the fourth floor of a narrow building wedged between two other buildings, all heaps of chiseled stone and bricks, which in turn were wedged between others, so that an entire row of brick buildings merged into one entity, and dominated the length of an entire block. Trees and sandwich shops and delis and heaps of bricks over those sandwich shops and delis lined both sides of Bleecker Street, and many of those brick heaps had its own set of entry steps laid with posts of iron. Greenwich Village, it was a hidden pocket of Manhattan, and I loved it. Unlike Cousin Joe’s loft in Gramercy Park, I immediately saw myself living here. More fantasies abounded.
Square footage, however, was entirely a different matter. Living space rationed only one bedroom with a counter and two bar stools that intimately separated their entry room from the kitchen. I thought rent was dramatically overpriced. But then again, the bohemian Dylan days of Greenwich Village was a nostalgic ideology of the past. The other roommate, Richie said her name was Miranda, shared Leah’s claustrophobic bedroom. Or had it once been a walk-in closet? I couldn't be sure. A single in-table narrowly divided the two IKEA looking twin beds (the door thumped into Leah's every time it opened, with scars on the frame to prove it), and very few clothes ended up in their dresser. Richie apparently slept on the living room sofa, which converted into a bed on most nights and sometimes stayed that way for days or weeks at a time until Leah or Miranda forced him to put it away when the boys came over.
I said: “Got anything to drink?”
Richie was sprawled out on one half of his couch bed eating from a Captain Crunch cereal box as an episode of Full House unfolded on the television. He had originally turned to MSNBC. I responded with: What part of running away from it all don't you understand? He promptly turned the station. After that fiasco in San Francisco I wanted to run away from Full House too.
I was a lifetime expert on that show, and for various complicated reasons, which meant any other station would do, especially considering that the Sisters lived in that very row of houses where the sitcom took place. San Franciscans referred to them as the Painted Ladies. Elise and Josephine were next in-line to inherit the property someday, with whomever they were married to at the time. I was beginning to believe it would never be me. The last thing I needed was another explanation, so watched it with him anyway, despite the likelihood that Seinfeld or Friends or the Fresh Prince of Bel Air might be on elsewhere.
“There’s coke in the fridge,” he said, never taking his eyes off the screen. His charcoal t-shirt was still on but he’d managed to lose the pants and dress down to a pair of boxers that depicted a series of bananas being peeled, though a pair of mismatched socks still clung to his ankles.
I opened up the fridge. A box of baking soda and a few blackened bananas greeted me, a carton of orange juice four-fifths drunk, what looked to be a bowl of soup or beef broth and expired milk, Chinese take-out boxes, and three two-gallon bottles of Coca-Cola, one of them Diet. And in the back something was so withered that I couldn't be completely sure what kind of fruit it had at one time been. Something otherworldly might have been growing on it too. NASA should consider sending the Mars Rover here.
“Kind of ripe, is this how Leah eats?” I closed the door.
“If only you knew.”
“Is that your answer to everything?”
“If only you knew.”
I searched the cabinet and selected a vintage glass from the 1981 movie The Great Muppet Caper, rinsed several water stains from its edges and then proceeded to fill it.
“I wouldn’t drink that if I were you.” Richie stuffed another several pieces of Captain Crunch into his mouth and chewed on them, mixing it with a swish of Coke from his I HEART NY mug.
“It’s just tap water.”
“Do you care for your life?”
“No, not really.”
“In sunny Southern California the Promised Land is likely flowing with milk and honey, and I’m sure your faucets sparkle of compressed stardust and continually drip with AQUAFINA, but here in the Big Apple we only drink brand water from the bottle.”
I said: “New York City ranks in the top of the world’s drinking water. Even Mayor Bloomberg says so.” Richie opened his mouth to say something, but I quickly intervened. “I know, I know. If only I knew.”
“I was going to say, it’s your health, but I think I like that catchphrase a whole lot better.”
Returning to my side of the couch bed, Richie took one glance at my Muppets glass, filled to the brim with faucet water, and wrinkled the diamond-tip of his eyes. “There’s an estimated thirty-two million rats inhabiting the New York underworld, you know.”
“That’s a lot of rats.” I sipped from the glass.
“And only eight million people.”
I added up the math. “Wow, four rats for every boy…. and girl. Jan and Dean could write an east coast song about that.”
“My point exactly, how can you drink the same stuff that rodents pee in?” He filled his mouth with another handful of Captain Crunch.
“How can you and Leah and what’s her name…”
“Miranda,” Crumbs spilled from his lips.
“Yes, Miranda… eat that stuff in the fridge?”
“Good point.” He stuffed another helping of the Captain into his mouth. “So Leah brought you all the way out from Los Angeles.”
“Long Beach, actually.”
“Long Beach, New York?”
“No, the other Long Beach. Didn't you know that's where Leah is from?”
Richie shrugged. “She may have brought it up,” more shrugging, “I don't know, she never really talks about her past.”
“It’s located approximately twenty-five miles south of Los Angeles, though technically it’s the same county, and on a really clear day you can make out the Hollywood sign all the way across the basin from Signal Hill. A lot of people don’t know this, but Long Beach is the most diverse city in America.”
“Horse-feathers,” he said.
“I know, it’s difficult to believe, but you really can see the Hollywood sign on a clear day.”
“There’s no way Long Beach is more diverse than New York City or Brooklyn.... or Dumbo.”
“I earned my Master’s Degree from the University of Wikipedia, so….”
“My entire point is Leah brought you all the way out from the land where sidewalks are made from the collected spit of Robert Downey Jr. and Johnny Depp, and that says something.”
“I’m not sure if that’s how concrete is actually made.”
Just then Richie’s ce
ll phone rang. It was another first generation iPhone. The Weather Girls, It's Raining Men, was its ringtone. He grudgingly rose from his bed to retrieve it. Whoever his caller actually was, based on his low display of energy, I assumed it wasn't a news announcement to look out his window at the stunning change in weather.
“It’s Leah.” He whispered her name from the kitchen counter before answering, as if she might somehow overhear him. And then he answered it. “Hey girl,” he said with an extra coating of flirtation, all to the glamor of stereotypical homosexual linguistics. He apparently had the ability to turn it on and off when he wanted to. Mostly he just left it on.
REPUBLICAN BLUE had finally met its Thursday night curtain call, which meant she was on her way back to see me. A butterfly sputtered to life. Maybe my arrival at JFK didn’t work out exactly as my own election campaign promises had dictated, but the extended weekend was still young, and Leah and I were budding with youth. We’d probably stay up all night rummaging through high school memories and chatting about such trivial subjects as our favorite Hellenistic playwrights and Mongolian throat singers. Except why did she call Richie and not me? I checked to make sure my cell phone was on. There had been a long list of unidentified callers, none of them Leah or Elise. More from my mother, but that was to be expected.
I could hear Leah's voice in Richie's receiver, deciphered very little to nothing but understood plenty. Leah wasn’t coming home anytime soon. That much was clear. She pronounced my name though. I distinctly heard a casual, perhaps even sterile mention of Joshua.
“Mm-hmm, he’s right here,” he said.
She didn’t ask to speak with me. And then Richie frowned from the counter, probably out of sympathy. My spirit sank.
Richie finally set the phone down. “She says to tell you she’s going out with some of the cast members to this party in SoHo and expects to arrive home late….” He looked at the time on his phone. “Really late; it’s her last week as America’s favorite First Lady, you know, and everyone’s competing for a piece of her.”
The windowpane of my heart shattered.
“What do you mean her last week?”
“Wow. That girl really is sparing on the need to know.” Riche took in a deep, concentrated breath, and sighed. “This is really her last week performing Isla Elliot. It's the end of an era.”
“I might have heard something about that.” Actually, I'd heard no such thing. “I guess there’s always tomorrow.”
Richie plopped back down on the bed. “I guess it’s just us then. Not exactly an episode of Friends, is it?”
I gazed around the apartment. “No. I guess it’s not exactly as I imagined.”
“I can’t blame you. Very few would. I mean, just look at Leah. She’s practically world famous now, the next Mary freaking Martin of Broadway, and she still lives in this dump.”
“Maybe she’s saving it for a rainy day.”
“I guess. I never know what that girl’s up to half the time. And then there’s Full House. God, I loved this show when I was a kid. Just look at them.” He nudged his chin at the television screen. “It’s hard to imagine that anybody could live like that.”
“Like Danny, Uncle Jesse, and Joey?”
In this particular episode, Joey was presently sitting at the kitchen table listening to anxiety-ridden music while a cement truck smashed through the bay window and surrounded him in a sludge-like pond of wet concrete and Jesse and Danny put their very lives on the line to stop it.
“Mm-hmm.”
“That’s not hard to imagine.”
I just wasn't in the mood to explain the whole San Francisco situation and my relationship to the Painted Ladies with him.
“No?”
“Well, the dump truck pouring concrete into their kitchen is the run of the mill day-to-day stuff of my life.”
“Of course,” he said with assurance.
“What’s hard to imagine is me living in a place like that.”
“I’ll toast to that.” Richie raised his I HEART NY mug. The rim of our glasses clapped. And then we laughed at the ridiculous antics of all three male adults in a very childlike household. If only.
“Look Richie, I’m kind of tired,” I finally said at the closing credits of the next episode. Uncle Jesse smelled beer on DJ in that one, and didn't believe her claims to sobriety. It all ended well. They always do. If only real life was like that. “As comfy as I am at your side, do you have any idea where I might sleep tonight?”
“You mean we’re not bedding together?”
“I wouldn’t count on it.”
“So much for foreplay,” he stuffed another helping of cereal into his mouth and chewed.
“I’m fine with the floor. In my line of work airports make excellent hotels. I’ll even curl up in the tub if I can lay down some padding. I just need to know where.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Miranda’s out for the night, spending it with her latest boy toy or something. You can sleep in her bed.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. Leah won’t mind.”
I peeked into the room. It was scattered with a confusing assortment of clothes that had likely been vomited from the very sick dresser, half of its drawers hung open. Elise would have felt at home here.
“Which bed is Miranda’s?”
“It’s the one furthest from the door.”
Several shirts and a pair of jeans were scrunched together in one corner pile of her bed, with a single b-cup bra draped across the pillow. I got the impression that Leah and Miranda stayed here as little as possible, utilizing this expensive rented space as a chaotic dressing room like the hinds of their stage productions. A single butterfly scurried to life.
On the in-table, Dr. Ellie Alexander's bestseller, Babies Are Atheists, made itself known. Its cover depicted a blushing Ellie completely naked, arm barely covering those Babylon balconies, with her only other free arm holding a crucifix over the inner thigh, and beaded rosaries draped from her neck in-between the crack of her breasts. A red stick-it note had been folded as a bookmark about two-thirds of the way through. Was it any coincidence that Ellie was Elise's old college roommate, and still one of her best friends? The Naked Atheist and I, as she was most recently known, didn't really get along. I actually blamed her for a lot of Elise's recent misguided ideas about religion.
I picked it up and huffed. “You've got to be kidding me.”
If Dr. Alexander heard me, she only thought to bare her pearly teeth in response. I returned her to the in-table face down, so as to avoid looking at or thinking about her Winnebago’s all night, and peeked my head back through the door. “Alright then, I guess I’ll see you in the morning?”
“You’re kidding, right?” Richie.
“I was thinking of beating the heat by jogging through Chelsea or maybe SoHo and across the Brooklyn Bridge, or maybe all the way up to the Upper East Side, through Central Park, with a tour of Broadway coming back.”
And besides, wasn't sleep a womb thing?
“The Upper East Side, Jeez, that’s practically halfway around the world. You’re one of those go-getters who wakes with the sunrise, aren’t you?”
“Sometimes I even get up before.”
Richie sighed. “Lord, have mercy.”
7
I HAD ALREADY DARKENED the bedroom light when I handpicked a couple of Miranda’s clothes off the right side of her bed, what looked to be an unwashed sleeveless workout shirt, a sports bra and black spandex, set them on the other half, lifted a corner of the sheet and slid my body in. The b-cup bra, I removed it from the pillow before setting my head down, and considered leaving my jeans on except for the obvious discomfort. I discovered a pair of Miranda’s thongs underneath the sheet while wrestling each pants leg over my ankles. I made sure to set them into the pile too. And then I laid there for a while, forty or fifty minutes, before finally drifting into a dream where that female mannequin from the Frank McCormick department store (I'd dreamt of her a cou
ple of nights earlier) stepped out of the shower in a ritzy hotel bathroom, completely and flawlessly naked. I was sitting on the edge of a king-sized bed when she invited me in to kiss her, and kiss her, and touch her wet sagging breasts as I kissed her, and rub my hand over her spine and the soft human tissue of her ass as I kissed her.
“You'll be safe with me, honey,” she said.
Another warm body slipped into Miranda's sheets followed almost immediately by a blood-curdling scream. I wasn’t sure where I was at first, or if I’d woken up from my sex fantasy at all, and sat up with a boner to make sense of the darkness. A bulb flicked on from the other room. It produced a pillar of light penetrating through the doorway, and I caught sight of a woman’s silhouette as she picked up what looked to be a pink dumbbell, probably ten pounds in weight, and threatened to smash my face in with it.
Two other silhouettes promptly charged into the room. Screams of this nature usually dictate that sort of immediate response time. One figure was about my height, muffin-top above the belt line, boxer shorts and V-neck tee, head gleaming from the backlight. Richie. The second was much taller, wiry vegetable-top for hair, and a red eye glowed from the bulge on his shoulder. Mahoney; the latest scene from his movie. Action.
“Whoa. girl!” Richie held her back by throwing his arms around her from behind, gently setting one hand over the dumbbell. “Don’t damage Leah’s goods before she has the opportunity to open it up and play with it.”
“Who’s the perv?”
“Oh momma, this is good,” the videographer said from behind his massive Cyclops eye. It was his only intrusion into the conversation.
“Oh, him? He’s just the wedding photographer.”
“The wedding photographer…”
“Yeah, he flies all over the country taking pictures of couples on their wedding day and stuff, and they pay him big bucks for it. He explained the whole thing on the drive over. You and I are in the wrong business, girl.”
Goodnight Sometimes Means Goodbye (Wrong Flight Home, #2) Page 12
