She, meanwhile, was up every night, howling old torch songs back into blasting speakers and swigging Johnnie Walker in nothing but a China red skintight sweater. This perpetually naked tornado of energy and beauty living in his kitchen caused a great deal of excitement in my father’s life. A great deal indeed. One thing leads to another, and they were rapidly entangled.
But over the next three stormy months, my father never really saw Rhonna sleep. As a matter of fact, he can’t recall ever seeing her lie down. Just getting her to sit was a feat, because she was the single most up, physically active person he had ever encountered. Her exercise routines were particularly radical and savage, as was her diet, and her devotion was to staying lean, lithe, and skinny as hell.
Lately, she had been especially vigilant in her exertions, because she felt that she was putting on a little extra weight around the middle, and that wouldn’t jive with the nightclub act she was rehearsing every day at a theater nearby. Her efforts to remove this bump had been unsuccessful, and so at two A.M. that night, from the darkness of his narrow bed my father watched her standing at the stove, shielding something deep within herself and in a flash he realized that she was protecting something: she was protecting me.
“What the fuck are you talking about? I know my own body. I’m not pregnant. If I was pregnant, don’t you think I’d be the first one to know?!”
He insisted, pointing out the evidence, and finally she went out to an all-night pharmacy for a pregnancy test. Within a few hours, they were confronted with an unfathomable truth: they were going to have a baby.
The next morning, shouting and yelping, my father ran straight to the home of his old friend Francesco and his wife, Alba, who had several kids. Alba, seeing that he was terrified, sat him down and in a perfectly relaxed, Italian way, said, “Ilya, this is not something you plan. Babies come with the bread. Each day, the bread is delivered, and one day it comes with a child. There is nothing to do but to accept it.”
When he protested that he hadn’t a clue how to care for an infant, she said, “Don’t worry. The child will teach you everything you need to know. The best teacher in the world is about to be born. They have a device called a scream, and they use it when anything is required. You will know exactly what to do, because the baby will tell you. All you have to learn to do is listen. Don’t dictate, listen.”
My parents never had the intention of being a couple or building any kind of domestic life together, but they made a pact that day: no matter what happened between them, they were going to care for this child, and failing that, they would at least make sure it would be cared for. They agreed: they would respect each other’s wildly different styles; they would never fight in front of the kid; and above all, they would never call in the law. No matter how bad it got, no judge would ever dictate what they needed to do with this child.
They explored all the options for a healthy birth, finally settling on a midwife and home delivery. My mother shelved the whiskey and focused her considerable energy on having the healthiest final trimester anyone has ever seen.
Which brings us back to that sweltering evening at the end of August. My father was standing on the corner of Third Street and the Bowery, talking to his friend Jean-Michel about his new fold-up bicycle. The mischievous young painter was wearing a full three-piece tweed suit, sweating profusely, and my father was lecturing him about the dangers of wool in such heat. Dismissing the mothering, Jean-Michel nodded over his shoulder and said, “Maybe you should tend to your own garden.”
Turning, Ilya saw Rhonna coming through the traffic on their block. Carrying several bags, she was just slightly less concerned than usual with the cacophony around her, and she looked to be in pain. He rushed to her and, as he helped her upstairs, she told him it was beginning.
“I need to swim.”
BY THE TIME SHE returned from Hell’s Kitchen that night, the gigantic moon was bursting from the sky, subjecting the city to its powerful tides. There was no question in her mind that the baby was coming. The scattered contractions confirmed as much.
My father picked up the phone and called the midwife they had been training with. Both of them averse to the concept of giving life surrounded by the sick and dying, they had settled on the most natural birth possible, at home. The nunlike woman they had contracted to help them was allegedly the best midwife in town.
Uptight and stroppy, she was someone who liked to play by the rules, so she and my parents had developed a mutual distaste for each other. Regardless, they had confidence in her, and now they were eager for her to come to the rescue. But their worst fears were realized: she told them that she couldn’t make it. The full moon apparently had every mother in town popping out their progeny. The midwife inquired about the frequency of the contractions, and when they told her they were few and far between, she said that in the morning, she would send another midwife.
“Someone else? Who?”
My father was distraught, but my mother was cool. Splayed out naked on the hardwood floor, stretching and sweating, she let out a laugh. She heaved herself into the bathtub and said, “I couldn’t give a fuck. I never liked that uptight bitch anyway.”
Knees jammed into her teeth, she looked into my father’s terrified eyes and said, “I’m happy she’s busy.”
They made it through the night without a birth, and in the morning my father went down and cleared himself a spot in the mayhem to wait for “someone else.” He was wracked with worry, sure that they were going to be given a second-rate apprentice, some fool even less knowledgeable about childbirth than himself. They were headed for disaster.
Through the steaming heat and the crowds of human trash, he saw the shimmering mirage of a jewel. A tiny, elegant woman with a shock of silver hair in a purple silk Saari was making her way through the filthy masses with the graceful strides of a prince. She was holding a piece of paper and checking it against addresses in doorways.
When he saw her his breathing slowed. He sat up straight and watched her navigate the shit show. With perfect authority, she walked straight up to him and said, “You must be Ilya. I am Asoka, your midwife,” and shooed him inside. She followed him up the stairs at a clip, firing questions at him in an Indian-British accent hybrid.
“Where is the mother? How often are the contractions? What are the nature of the contractions? Hurry, hurry, hurry.”
She burst into the apartment and proclaimed: “Yes, I am a replacement. We have never met before, and you are probably worried about my qualifications. Let me tell you, I have birthed five thousand children with my bare hands, many of them at the foot of the Himalayan mountains. I know what I’m doing. Let me examine you. Get up! Why are you lying down?”
This is the nature of America, a place where immigrants who were doctors and master surgeons in their own countries come to find streets paved with gold, and end up driving taxis. By some idiotic bureaucratic oversight, my stunned parents had stumbled into the care of this wizard, who was not only first rate, but one of the most masterful midwives in the world. Someone who had birthed children under the most extreme conditions—from elevators to mud huts, from Bombay to Liverpool—who the United States didn’t recognize as qualified for a birthing license. They could not have felt safer. They were delighted, in awe, in love.
Asoka Roy put her hands on my mother’s misshapen belly and made a rather sober face. Feeling around, she discovered that I was backward, sitting spine to spine with my mother.
“Get up, get out of bed, grab a rag, and wash the floor! Like this.”
Asoka dropped to her knees and began to demonstrate what she called “the Rock,” a sweeping motion with the arms, dragging a rag back and forth across the floor, an activity that moved my mother’s hips and was meant to reposition the baby correctly in the birth canal.
This was her philosophy: A woman giving birth is not sick. You are as healthy as you will ever be. You are doing what you were designed to do, and your body is performing what it was put he
re to perform, and the last thing you will do is act ill. The best thing you can do is use your body and generate as much activity as possible. This was music to my mother’s ears.
Having revolutionized their view of childbirth and assured them that there would be no delivery that night, Asoka went home to sleep. When she returned the next morning, she found my mother in a new state. She was in agony from more frequent contractions, and when Asoka examined her for the second time, naked on the wooden floor, she found that the baby had not yet turned. On top of that, my mother was dilating very slowly, so it was going to be a long haul.
After thirty hours they were all delirious. Rhonna’s belly was stretched beyond anything she could imagine, and her formidable vocal cords were shredded from the screams.
At some point, with that much prolonged pain, your mind loosens and your body takes over. Some ancient mechanism kicks in and puts you into autopilot. You have no control. Things are just happening inside of you.
Thirty-five hours in, my mother rolled up her eyes and checked out, leaving my father, nature, and Asoka Roy each with a hand on the reins.
Asoka realized that if someone as powerful as my mother was unable to ride this out, they would need help. She looked into Ilya’s beleaguered face and said, “We are taking her to the hospital.”
The little woman and the skinny boy carried Rhonna, screaming the whole way, down three flights of stairs. As they came to the shattered glass of the front door, my father looked out and saw the unimaginable: the gigantic men’s shelter was having a fire drill. Seven hundred sweating bodies were teeming over the block and pushing their way up his stoop. Seven hundred shirtless, Newport-smoking vagrants, shouting and hurling things, their voices like thunder, shaking the buildings.
Asoka squawked and my father snapped to, pulling the door open. At that moment, her legs in my father’s hands, fingernails digging into her midwife’s arms, my mother let out a showstopping scream.
A sea of men, the kind who carried knives in their teeth, went silent. Seven hundred faces turned toward the embattled trio. In awe of the most natural wonder, the sea parted. Hands came out to support them, and slowly, carefully, she was brought down the five concrete steps, bellowing from depths she didn’t know she had. Someone brought a taxi from the corner, and they laid her into the backseat, Asoka with Rhonna, Ilya in the front; they drove through the reverent crowd, and as they turned uptown on the Bowery the parting closed behind them and the roar erupted again.
THE BIRTHING ROOM would be arranged according to my mother’s requirements: lights out, music on—jazz, reggae, and blues. Asoka placed my exhausted, overwhelmed father at my mother’s feet and ordered him to hold her leg. She told him to soothe her, help her breathe. She elbowed away the doctors and nurses to ensure that my father was a central part of the arrival. Five thousand births and you learn to take no shit.
There was an enormous amount of pain and screaming. I crowned, but I wasn’t going any farther. Asoka gave my mother a little cut, and suddenly, I arrived. I had come out backward, covered in slime and blood, but I was a living, breathing little creature.
They put me on my mother’s chest. My parents had made a point of not asking my gender, because they had no preference, it changed nothing for them, and they wanted the surprise.
Wrapped in blankets, breasts stretched so big they felt like cement, my mother looked down into the face of a tiny baby girl. To her, I looked like a mango. To my father, I looked like Winston Churchill crossed with a dried apple.
At that moment, both parents hovering over me, my tourmaline-blue eyes popped open. Bang. Hello. Perhaps my infant intuition was trying to catch a glimpse of what would be a rare sight: the two of them together.
My father had been scribbling potential names on napkins for weeks. He was leaning toward a high and a low sound, a line and a disc, an on and an off, a moon and a demigoddess. Jupiter’s moon, iO. The most volcanic object in the solar system. Now it was settled.
A FEW HOURS LATER, my ma was ready to go. The doctors tried to convince her to stay the night, but Asoka had demolished their authority before going home to sleep, and Ma wanted to get the fuck out of there.
We went up to my grandparents’ house and they took me out for a walk on my first night in this world, bundled up in blankets like a papoose.
Over the next few weeks, my parents took me to jazz clubs, and the theater, and the dance floors at the Limelight and Danceteria. They put me right there on the table and let well-wishers come flocking. Rhonna was going to make sure she didn’t raise a shy kid.
Us
Chapter 3
Fernando
Lower East Side, summer 1989
MA ALWAYS SAYS THE DAY I WAS BORN WAS THE HOTTEST day New York has ever seen. Today she took that back.
“Today,” she says with a clenched jaw and eyes burning with furious excitement, “is the hottest motherfucking day this town has ever had to melt through.”
From where I am I can see the street steaming. Nearly naked bodies all around me are glistening with sweat and glitter, writhing to blaring samba music. I’m at the front corner of a float, moving down Avenue C in the annual Brazilian Day Festival, which is a roaring parade of referee whistles, cowbells, and thunderous beats. As far as I can see, there are women in thongs and headdresses, shirtless men in tiny shorts, and every variation of yellow and green, the colors of Brazil’s national flag.
The sun crackles down on hundreds of smiling faces, including my friends Little Sean and Badu, who are hanging off the float with me. Everyone is dancing or singing or playing an instrument, sweating and dehydrated. Several people have climbed onto the back of our float in exhaustion and passed out.
My friends and our chariot are enclosed in a sea of samba school students dressed in all white, hitting giant drums in unison that hang from their waists. It’s like an army band, only with a sexy South American rhythm. You can hear the rumble coming from ten blocks away.
I’m so slathered in SPF 70 that my headband keeps slipping down my face. It’s hard for me to hold on to the edge of the float because my hands slide off. Sean’s mom’s boyfriend built this monster of a rolling contraption out of a real boat. He put it on wheels, put a motor in it from a car he took apart, covered the whole thing with sheets and decorations, and now, somehow, it’s moving toward Houston Street. I’m sure it’s going to fall apart any minute, so I hold on as tight to the edge as I can, swinging my hips to the music and sliding back and forth.
Ma is on the street in front of us, cutting a path down the avenue with tight, hyperactive samba steps, in a sparkling bathing suit hung with glittering tassels that shake with her waist, arms in the air. She dances alongside a fleet of women with bright cloth head wraps and voluminous dresses called baianas. They’re doing choreographed partner dances with men in tight pants and shirts with big, open collars who swing the women out so that their dresses sweep past them and curl back around.
I love this parade. I love the Brazilians. They have so much life. They love to dance, they love to sweat, they love music, and they love it loud. Ma is in ecstasy when she can dance freely like this with these people. I watch her move like an animal fulfilling nature’s intentions, sweat pouring from her body.
A space parts between some of the drumming students, and a guy in a purple sequin suit appears on the other side of the crowd. He seems to be honing his focus on my ma, spinning toward her, kicking his legs and waving his forearms. He’s a damn good dancer, this guy. Ma spots him and smiles in that demure way when she’s willing to consider a dude, and he takes his opportunity.
Poppa stopped living with us right around when my first tooth came in. They couldn’t get along. They were never meant to. They couldn’t share a life, much less a cramped space, so he found the nearest loft he could and moved out. Now I spend afternoons with him and his new girlfriend, Rita. She’s Brazilian, too, and pregnant.
Ma and this dancer guy circle each other, moving like it’s their last
day on earth, flailing wildly with every ounce of energy they have in them, ignoring the fact that the heat index probably broke an hour ago and even the sun is eager for the moon to take over.
His muscular shoulders are nearly popping the seams on the back of his sequin jacket. I can’t even imagine how hot it must be inside there, but he doesn’t take it off, he just keeps dancing.
He smiles at my ma, flashing bright white teeth that contrast the darkness of his skin and the jet black of his hair. A gold chain glints on his broad chest, and every time he kicks his legs I notice the ferocity with which they snap back under him.
AS WE MOVE FARTHER DOWNTOWN, it gets hotter and hotter and people are starting to disintegrate in the swelter, but Ma is getting more and more energy. Miraculously, so is purple sequins guy, and they are orbiting each other like burning fire planets, spinning faster, kicking higher, dipping lower.
The band members have started to peel off their shirts and are upending bottles of water over their steamy heads. Just when you’d think it was a lost cause, though, the leader jumps back out in front of the troops and starts banging on a cowbell and dancing to his own beat, furiously blowing on his whistle. With his white T-shirt tied around his head, sweat pouring down his dark face, he starts bounding back and forth in front of the drummers, corralling them back into action. We hit a red light at First Avenue and he uses the pause to coordinate a unified commencement. Ma and suit guy are still dancing, watching the drummers merge back into each other’s rhythm. They are the fuse that erupts the parade.
Everyone congregates back in the parking lot of Cuando when they’re done, all fired up and yelling and still playing music, high off the energy of the crowd.
Cuando is a massive abandoned public school that stretches across the better part of Second Street, between Second Avenue and the Bowery. It has no electricity, but lots of artists and junkies squat here.
Darling Days Page 2
