Father’s idea of a “gentle back and forth” was to stare closely at the pictures and then insinuate that they had been doctored, created by the tailor and his wife to discourage customers from complaining about the prices of their alterations.
The other slice of the “back and forth” was when Father would spot the Korean leaving to run an errand. He and I would sneak into the shop and hide in the dressing rooms. When the Korean returned, we would jump out and try to scare him or wait until he was with a customer and start making the noises of a child being tortured.
Contrary to father’s suggestions, the tailor was a master of a little-known Korean marshal art—hapkido. In any case, just before I had arrived at the shop, Father had gone too far and the tailor had decided to teach him a lesson.
That day, my father learned that the tailor’s ability to paralyze others had little to do with blows to the head, but with his knowledge of various points on the human body, which when pressed in the correct manner sent the strongest men to the ground.
When handing my father his slacks that morning, the tailor slipped his finger into Father’s palm. The pain from the tailor’s finger, combined with whatever my father had been drinking the night before, caused him to wobble back and forth and then collapse.
“Knowing that my head was seconds from the floor,” Father recounted, “I had the presence of mind to flip myself backwards towards a bag of clothes near the door.”
“And the woman?”
“The one on the floor?”
He was avoiding the question.
“Yes, Father, the one on the floor.”
He cleared his throat.
“She was carrying the bag.”
“So you threw yourself on top of a bag that a woman was holding!”
“Something like that.”
“And that knocked her against the fish tank?”
“The details are of no importance. Agility of mind and body, my little friend, saved me.”
“But not the fish.”
“Sadly no.”
“And the woman?”
“The tailor stitched her up.”
He paused a moment.
“Do you want me to call your teacher up and talk to her myself?”
“No, that’s fine. I’ll tell her you have jumping Frenchman’s disease.”
“That’s my girl.”
A LEG UP
“HE’S DONE IT again!”
Mr. Crafty was in a state.
“Father?” I replied. It was not really a question.
“Yes, your father. Do you have any idea what he’s done?”
“No, but it’s probably bad.”
“Just ask him!”
Later that evening I did, and this is the story he told:
With Mr. Crafty’s paralysis came the slow but noticeable shrinkage of his left leg. For this reason, Mr. Crafty was in frequent need of having his left pant leg lifted.
In the course of his many trips to the tailor, Mr. Crafty, while waiting for his pants, would (like my father) examine the photographs on the wall. After a particularly rough flu season, the tailor, noticing that Mr. Crafty had lost some weight, considerately offered Mr. Crafty a belt that somebody had left in the shop. The tailor assured Mr. Crafty that if he didn’t gain the weight back, the tailor would take in the waist. Mr. Crafty accepted the belt as his first on the road to a black belt, believing it to signal the beginning of his training in hapkido with the tailor as his master.
Father and the fish tank incident had so angered the tailor that he was now refusing to provide services to anyone in the hotel. Mr. Crafty, with his leg shrinking, his pant leg lengthening, and his nonexistent lessons in hapkido suspended, was furious at Father.
This, according to Father’s telling, led to a confrontation in the lobby in which Mr. Crafty accused my father of insulting Mr. Crafty’s “teacher.”
At this point, Uber-Crafty, who had an irrational fondness for my father and had no idea that Mr. Crafty was in imagined training with the Korean, entered the conversation.
As told by my father, the conversations with the Crafties went as follows:
“Your ‘teacher’? Who could you possibly be talking about?”
“The man who has been training me in hapkido . . .”
“Trained in what? You’re barely toilet trained.”
“If you would shut your damn mouth, you’d learn of a great teacher. A teacher who was once the student of Choi Yong-sool and who, on Shinshu Mountain, received the wisdom of the most skilled and deadly of them all, Takeda Sokaku.”
“Nonsense!”
“I now know hand-to-hand and use of all the weapons: jool bong, dan bong, joong bong . . .”
“And your bong, obviously.”
“While you waste your morning sleeping, others of us are productive—out each day, first thing, making the country hum.”
“Hmm. For the last ten years, half of you has been paralyzed and the other half is the laziest person I know. I don’t believe you can even touch your waist, much less your toes. So tell me, who and where is this teacher of yours?”
My father didn’t need to be told the answer.
Anyone who had been as beaten and humiliated as my father had been by the tailor would never think to apologize. But not Father. Off he went to beg the tailor to take himself, Mr. Crafty, and all the others in the hotel back.
That, sadly, was not the end of it, for each time that Father returned to the tailor in the following years, he would extract some bit of knowledge regarding pressure points. After a while, Father had assembled enough “lethal wisdom from the East” to believe that he could defend himself against any assault. Among the family of delusions housed in my father’s mind, this was the most dangerous.
A CRUSH
ONE OF THE reasons I wanted to get to school early each day was that in the time before class, kids played or talked outside their lockers or met in the cafeteria for breakfast. It was when kids made friends, and that year, I wanted to make friends. I especially wanted to make friends with a particular boy that I had noticed on the playground.
His name was Uhura. He had shiny, dark hair, green eyes, and was very pale and skinny. He was also short. It was the first time in my life that a boy seemed to like me.
On top of this, he was the center of interest, amorous and otherwise, of all the kids.
Oh, yes, about that name.
As reported by my mother, Uhura’s mom was a fan of the 1960s television show Star Trek, which she watched as a child. She thought, sometimes amusingly, other times seriously, of naming her children, were she to have them, after characters in the show.
When, years later, she was told by her physician that she was having a girl, the soon-to-be mother began to tell her friends and family that her daughter would be named Uhura, giving them plenty of time to arrange for the “Uhura” diaper bags, “Uhura” engraved picture frames, and “Uhura” onesies.
And as everyone, including Uhura’s mother, joked about a child named after a Star Trek character, they also secretly envied her, thinking that the name would give Uhura that little something extra that every competitive parent in New York wanted for their child.
When Uhura was finally born, it was obvious that she had that little something extra—a penis.
Uhura’s penis had been accidentally missed by the sonogram, and then, surprise, there it was. My mom commented, “Bones would not have missed it.” Bones, I later learned, was the doctor on the spaceship USS Enterprise in Star Trek.
As my mother explained it, Uhura’s mom, too proud and by now too committed, gave her son the name Uhura, knowing that few would understand its origins and confident that everyone, including herself, would refer to him as “Harry.” My mom, recognizing the reference when the two mothers dropped off their kids on the first day of
school, developed a friendship with Uhura’s mom.
—
One of the odd things about Harry was that whenever my dad walked into the classroom, Harry would throw a toy at him or yell at him or even strike him with his fist. Harry made sure to do this just after his mother left the room and before the teacher arrived. My father was not especially popular with the kids in the class, but Harry was the only one who actually attacked him.
My father would brush this off. He knew, I suspect, of my infatuation.
The attacks lasted until that morning when Harry, his head bent forward, rushed full speed at my father’s groin. Relying on his knowledge of human pressure points, Father waited until Harry was just within arm’s reach to make his thumb disappear behind Harry’s earlobe.
Harry collapsed on the floor, where he lay unconscious, surrounded by a hyperventilating chorus of children and parents.
When Harry was able to talk, he told the teacher that it was my father’s fault.
Father, finding the screaming distasteful, had already departed for his morning coffee, and as a result, was not there to defend himself. I tried my best to explain the history of Harry’s attacks on my father, but no one was listening. I was hustled to the principal.
The principal’s office was a predictably unpleasant place. The only seat for those in trouble was a long wooden bench with no cushions.
After Harry had finished telling his lies about what had happened, the mood turned against me. Sitting on the bench, I began to sweat as the principal and his assistants battered me:
“Where’s your father?”
“Was he ever violent with you?” and
“What exactly does he do for a living?”
I inhaled slowly and cracked my knuckles.
“His favorite café; only if you include sarcasm; and if you can figure that out, my mom and I would like to know.”
I had a list of real complaints about my father, which I kept in my I Love Lucy backpack, but none seemed relevant now.
As to what had actually happened in the classroom that morning, I provided the principal with a concise and calm explanation:
“Uhura started it!”
“Uhura?”
“The chief communications officer on Star Trek,” I offered.
“Nichelle Nichols attacked your father?”
“No. Harry. He’s named after her because they missed his penis.”
“He has one now?”
“So I’m told but haven’t seen it.”
The principal’s face told me that he was either new to the story of Harry’s genitals or suffered from acid reflux. I pressed on.
“Without thinking, my father did the only thing he knew to do when his groin was threatened—hapkido.”
“An ointment?” the principal asked.
Now I was confused. I tried to set things right.
“He picked it up from a Korean.”
“Sulu?”
“Was he Korean?” I asked.
The principal felt the story was either too baffling or too close to the loose rock of racial prejudice to pursue, so he let me go. Things quickly returned to normal, except, of course, for Harry’s crush on me (which, in retrospect, I suspect I’d invented).
To my list of enemies at the school, which already included the two most popular girls (Greta and Ana—the latter of whom replaced me as Greta’s best friend following the pool party), my father added Harry, the cutest boy.
The only two who seemed unaffected by the Harry incident were my father (no surprise there) and mother, who believed (proudly) that her husband had administered to Harry what she referred to as the “Vulcan nerve pinch,” and that the entire affair was caused by the hubris of naming a child after a semi-sacred figure.
ARTIE
THE QUIETEST TIME at the hotel was the morning. Unlike those of other residences, crowded with people en route to work, the lobby of the Chelsea was always empty until about noon. The exceptions to this were Stanley (the owner), the one or two people who had passed out in the lobby the night before without ever making it up to their rooms, and the rotation of homeless people who inhabited it.
Stanley’s father, who was born in Hungary, purchased the hotel in the 1940s. Stanley took it over when his father became ill. He had been running it ever since.
To Stanley, the hotel residents fell into two groups, those who weren’t paying rent and those who weren’t paying enough rent, a view that caused great agitation within Stanley. He was there in the lobby every morning to express that agitation.
People in the hotel were not impressed with Stanley’s suffering. Stanley, they pointed out, lived in a grand apartment in a very fancy neighborhood far from the hotel. The hotel, in contrast, was well over a hundred years old and showed every year of it.
As tenants passed through the lobby, Stanley would announce how much rent was due and that it had not been paid. It was humiliating. Most of those who owed rent would call the front desk to check if Stanley was in the lobby before exiting the hotel. On those occasions when Stanley left to get a coffee at the Aristocrat, a swarm of tenants would rush out of the hotel.
For those who could not wait for Stanley’s caffeine break, there was another option. A couple times a day, an employee from the hotel would move from floor to floor collecting trash on a cart. When full, the cart was taken to the basement on the service elevator, rolled onto a platform, and then lifted up from the basement directly to the sidewalk on Twenty-third Street. Bypassing the lobby, the cart went unnoticed by Stanley. One resident who was behind on their rent would hide among the trash bags. Quite often I would hear, “Hello, Nic,” “Give my regards to your parents,” or similar greetings from the trash bags as they passed me in the hallway.
But it was not just those who were delinquent on their rents who feared Stanley. Even if a tenant paid on time, Stanley was upset with them, for he took the regular payment of rent as a sign that the tenant was paying too little and that he (Stanley) had been outsmarted in the lease negotiations. My father was in this group.
“How can you live with yourself?” Stanley would ask my father as they passed each other in the lobby.
“Do you have any idea,” Stanley continued in a pained tone, “what I pay in electricity? In taxes? And the unions, oh, the unions! They’re killing me!”
My father would reply with something like . . .
“Unions? Stanley, the only people who work here are guests you overcharged and who are trying to pay off their bills.”
Or . . .
“Stanley, I renegotiated my rent a week ago.”
But nothing mattered, for the very next day, putting his arm around Father’s shoulders, Stanley continued.
“When you first moved in, I thought, ‘This is a good man.’ But I must be honest with you: I’ve been having my doubts. Every day I ask myself, ‘Would a good man, with a good family, pay his landlord so little?’ It makes me sad to think that.”
This would be accompanied by a moistening around Stanley’s eyes.
A man who preferred strong coffee in the morning to strong emotion, my father joined the person who hopped on the garbage cart.
But there was one person who didn’t care about Stanley.
His name was Artie, and I met him for the first time one morning when I was waiting in the lobby for my mother to take me to school, and Artie came through the front doors. He was in his fifties, with thick dark hair, an athlete’s body, a James Dean swagger, and, as I noticed when he passed, a flask in his back pocket.
Before Artie reached the elevators, Stanley appeared from behind the front desk.
“Artie, I need to talk to you.”
“You do? Well, that’s funny because I need to talk to you!”
“Artie,” Stanley pleaded, “come into my office and we can discuss it quietly.”
/> “No! We’re going to discuss it here!”
Stanley touched Artie’s elbow, coaxing him toward the office. Artie shook it off.
“I know what you want, Stanley.”
“You do?”
Artie pulled out his wallet.
“YOU WANT MONEY!”
Stanley waved his hands frantically as if to shake off Artie’s suggestion.
“Artie, please . . .”
Artie was now tapping his wallet against Stanley’s chest.
“How much fucking money do you need, Stanley? What? You aren’t rich enough? What? Living across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Fucking Art isn’t enough for you? And you didn’t even earn it! You got your money from Daddy! An itty-bitty daddy’s boy!”
Artie moved in to finish him off, sticking his finger into Stanley’s face.
“You tell me! Right now! HOW MUCH FUCKING MATZOH DO YOU NEED?”
“Matzoh? Artie, I beg you . . . .”
“You heard me, Stanley, mu-cha-cha.”
“Muchacha?”
“Will this do, Mr. G-R-E-E-D-Y?”
Artie pulled something from his wallet and flipped it at Stanley.
“A tensky,” announced Artie triumphantly.
Stanley scurried back to his office.
Artie pulled the flask from his back pocket, took a swallow, and by the time it was returned to his pocket, he had, with his other hand, retrieved a bottle of mouthwash from his motorcycle jacket. Standing at the elevator, Artie took a shot, and then, just as the elevator door closed, spat the fluid in an effervescent green arc into the center of a nearby wastebasket.
MY BABYSITTERS
A DOLL IN a dollhouse. That was Jade.
Unlike other babysitters, Jade, who worked in the evenings, was available all day, and with her apartment in the hotel, it was very convenient.
Trying to Float Page 4
