Emma Who Saved My Life
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Beginning
1974
1975
1976
1977
1978
Middle
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
Ending
Teaser
Additional Praise for Wilton Barnhardt’s Emma Who Saved My Life
Also by Wilton Barnhardt
About the Author
Copyright
TO
Greenpoint, Brooklyn
(1982–1985)
For those who were there.
And for those who missed it.
BEGINNING
IF I had it to do all over again, I think I’d try to find some way to skip being nine years old. Because that’s when it bit me—the Theater Bug, I mean. I ended up devoting twenty-one of my thirty-five years to pursuing stardom on the stage and, looking back, I wonder if the height of my career might not have been when I was nine. It may have been the last time I was totally, utterly secure in the theater.
For those of you that missed my performance, I played Little Jimmy in The Parson Comes to Dinner, a 100% amateur theatrical put on at the Oak Park Community Playhouse, in the suburbs of Chicago. I don’t think I knew the sheer depth and scope of my role until the first night’s curtain call. They clapped at me. I know people generally do that at the end of plays but at nine I hadn’t worked out the finer points and, frankly, I took it very personally.
SO, the next night I figured out that the more I did onstage, the more they might clap for me. The French maid did her scene while I titillated the audience with untying her sash. The woman who played my mother walked on and delivered her monologue while I intrigued the audience with whether, behind her, I was going to knock over a vase. I had one little line: Ooooh Mom, it’s not my bedtime yet, which was to be delivered in a kiddie whine. You’d be surprised how long you can make that line last when you put your mind to it. Oooooooooooh Mahhhhm … About here I shifted my little weight back and forth and looked adorably at the audience in a way that I perfected in our bathroom mirror, and I’d continue it’s not … I mean it caaaan’t be (what a pro! already improvising) my beedddddtiiiiime, right nowww. “Right now” works out to a few milliseconds longer than “yet.”
You might have thought this scenery-chewing would have earned the enmity of my fellow thespians but this was, after all, The Parson Comes to Dinner and I think they sort of liked it (since the audience liked it) and when it came time for my little step forward at the curtain call, the audience clapped even louder than they did the first night, and when everyone had had their portion of allotted applause, the man who played the Parson in The Parson Comes to Dinner scooted me out for MY VERY OWN INDIVIDUAL BURST OF APPLAUSE … and well, that was that. We were off and running. Toward the bright lights of the theater, in summerstock local theatricals, in church camp musicals, in high school productions (I was Joe Football in the Oak Park Follies of 1972, which was revenge since the football-types called me a faggot all the time), then to college at Southwestern Illinois where I was a theater major. I even dropped out of college as a sophomore to go make my fortune in New York, for ten long years, hoping, dreaming, struggling, scheming … and I think, if I’m honest, waiting for it again: that embracing, completely saturating very own individual burst of applause. These days, however—
“Is that typing I hear?”
(That’s my wife, home from work, just walking in the door.) Yes, dear. The autobiography is under way.
“About time! I was tired of hearing you talk about it. How far along are you?”
I’m nine, it’s page two, and would you mind fixing dinner tonight? I’m on a roll here.
“I suppose your starting this project at 4:45 p.m. was not part of a larger strategy to put me in the kitchen, was it?”
Of course not. (This woman knows me pretty well.)
“It’ll mean just sandwiches if I fix it. Poor worn-out fragile pregnant woman that I am…”
She’s not even two months into this and already meeting her demands has become a challenge. Last night I got rooked into driving up to Skokie for Chinese take-out. I can only imagine what the seventh and eighth months will be like around here.
Actually, I can’t imagine it.
I can’t imagine being a father. Between you and me, I thought kids were something other people had. But we agreed this was the right age and the time was right and … I guess the problem is I still have New York on the brain, residual theateritis. No, I’m not going back—I’m happily married, I’ve been working out here for four and a half years now, and I’m looking forward in an abstract way to being the world’s greatest father to the world’s greatest son or daughter. But I was a different person in New York.
“What kind do you want?” she’s yelling from the kitchen. “The management’s pushing baloney tonight. It’s forming a wall in the back of the fridge.”
Peanut butter and mayonnaise on white Wonder-type bread.
Silence. I wait for the comment.
“As if the morning sickness wasn’t bad enough. That I have to craft such atrocities with mine own hands…”
You know when I said I was only secure in the theater once, when I was nine years old? I can think of another time. When I decided it was time to leave New York and take a long break. Maybe for the first time in ten years I really felt like my own person, in control of events for once, and part of my happiness was having the theater in proper perspective. Also, I was probably looking for an excuse to go home. Which is ironic. Because sometimes here in Evanston with the next few decades of my life chiseled in stone before me—well, the rest of my life, really—I wonder if lately I haven’t been looking for an excuse to go back.
1974
IT was still a time when people moved around the country by Greyhound bus. That’s how I moved east, and it meant my introduction to New York City was through the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Lisa, my only friend in New York, was going to meet me at 2:30. She showed up at 3:15, but forty-five minutes late is pretty good for Lisa.
Now I very much wanted to look like Coolness Itself so I went to Male Prostitute/Pot-Heroin-Cocaine Central, the men’s room, to Freshen Up, and there I am before a dingy mirror trying to look tough, New York tough, Gil in the big city … nope, it’s not gonna work. I’m still five-ten, I’m still a wimp, I can barely lift my suitcase. I am however a man in my own time: brown, aggressively tangled hair to the shoulders, a tie-dyed T-shirt (yellow with bursts of white—I loved that old thing), a denim jacket, a very patched-up thin pair of ratty jeans, my peace-sign belt-buckle and, for christ’s sake, my HEADBAND—just for New York, to let the nine million know how with it I was. God. You know that bank robbery in Tulsa? That series of liquor-store holdups in Nebraska? The old couple in the trailer park I killed for 50¢? That I can live with. What I’ve never been able to forgive myself was being so obviously a just-off-the-bus, immature twenty-year-old.
Because Lisa was late I decided, unchaperoned, unassisted, I would take a first step outside into the metropolis. The bus station is right on 42nd Street so there I was five seconds later walking against the tide of teenage hooker runaways, fourteen-year-old junkies, police busting some black guy for something, old men stumbling out o
f the porn-sex shops. I beat a retreat when this over-made-up transvestite tried to put his arm around me (“Nice headband, sugar”). Gosh, New York City. Mom will be so thrilled when I write her all about it. We’re going to have to take this city, your new home, Gil, slowly, in small doses. Back to the bus station coffee shop to wait for Lisa.
Lisa.
Oh I cringe when I tell you what was most on my little mind as I entered New York, riding in through the Lincoln Tunnel, my face pressed to the green bus glass trying to take it all in from the Jersey side of the Hudson. My name in lights? How was I going to be a star in record time? Nooo, my big concern was if I could kiss Lisa on the lips. I never had. This was a good excuse, I figured, since I hadn’t seen her in four months. We would be sharing her sublet for a year, after all. I had decided not to return to my junior year of college and instead come to make my fortune in the big city and, while I was being romantic, why not kiss Lisa with a Big Romantic I’m-a-Man-Now Kiss. Adults did that kind of thing and I was an adult. Somewhere on the bus ride between Southwestern Illinois University and Port Authority, I can assure you Lisa, I ceased being the theater-department sophomore jerk and became a full-fledged budding-actor-in-New-York jerk.
At 3:15, there she was.
“Gil!” She ran to give me a hug.
Lisa! (All right, get those lips into position …)
“Let me look at you,” she said, holding me at arm’s length, hands on my shoulders. Damn. Kiss was out. “You’re early…”
No, I’m not—I said 2:30.
“I thought you said 3:30, honey. Sorry. Where’s your junk?”
It was one overpacked suitcase, in a locker.
“Look, let’s drag it to Seventh Avenue and hail a cab there,” she said, tossing her hair, her beautiful long frizzy blond natural ’70s full head of hair. “Never,” she said, “try to go crosstown in a cab or it’ll cost a fortune. Stick to going up or down the avenues—you’re there in no time.”
Three months in New York, and she was an expert, she was a zany-madcap-young-girl-in-New-York, and boy did I want to fall in love with that.
We got our cab. I’m in the back with my suitcase, head out a window, looking at skyscrapers, the mark of the newcomer.
“Headband’s new, isn’t it?” Lisa asked.
No, had it forever. (Okay, that was IT for the goddam headband.)
I was fascinated by everything that passed by, Lisa was jaded and blaśe. I asked questions, she answered them …
“Oh this? This is the garment district, actually. Oooh look at that rack of fur coats. Still waiting for a rich man to give me one.”
And then the Village, western half, not yet yuppified in 1974. Following a brief tour of Lisa’s sublet, owned by a single mother with two kids who were in Europe for a year, we went to Lisa’s favorite Village cafe and sat at an outside table.
“Think he’ll do it tonight?”
Who do what?
“Nixon resign. Where’ve you been?” Lisa pulled out the last of her cigarettes. “I’m quitting you know. This … this is the last cigarette I’ll smoke during the Nixon administration. Emma’s got a friend at Newsweek who says it’s a sure thing, he’ll step down tonight. Which oughta be a relief for Susan.”
Susan wasn’t a Nixon fan?
“No, I mean her party—she’s the person whose party we’re going to tonight. I wrote you about her parties. They’re famous. Susan’s Soho Parties. I wrote you all about them, how incredible and bad they were, remember?”
No she didn’t. I only got one letter from Lisa the whole summer and that was the one that invited me out to move in with her.
“I did too write about Susan’s parties. Anyway, we’re going to one, so, uh, psychologically prepare yourself. You’re gonna meet every loser in New York tonight—these parties are great for the old ego, I’ll tell ya that.” The waitress made a near pass and Lisa leaned out to flag her down to no avail. “You saw that, didn’t you? She saw me, she saw me…”
I could get used to Cafe Life, I thought. This was the Cafe Prato and if the waitress noticed us we were going to have cappuccinos. Lisa went on talking about work and herself and her new easel and other stuff, while I thought about my luck. Lisa (two years older than I was, a graduate of SWIU), had left for the big city upon graduation, got a sublet for a year in the Village. June 1974 to June 1975. She’d had two roommates lined up but they had a big falling out and weren’t speaking, so there was Lisa left holding the lease. I wrote her and said—I’m cringing again—how Southwestern Illinois was holding me back, how I should move to New York and take my chances, how I was better than any of my classmates, knew more than the directors, etc. And then surprise: Lisa writes back and says, DO IT, drop out, come move in with me and this girl I met named Emma. Would I mind living with two women? Me, a sexually frustrated college sophomore with a strong crush on Lisa, object to moving in with two women in New York City in a snazzy sublet in the Village? WOULD I MIND?
“Anyway, it’s a Nixon Resignation party tonight at Susan’s,” Lisa said, inhaling and exhaling her last cigarette seriously. “She was going to make us dress up like Watergate criminals or Pat Nixon or something, but I talked her out of that.”
I wanted to know more about Susan.
“No you don’t,” Lisa said, smashing her cigarette out in the ashtray. “You don’t know what a state of grace you are in right now. She’s four hundred pounds and she wears these…” She shook her head. “No describing her. You have to meet her.”
The waitress passed by again, ignoring Lisa’s exaggerated semaphore to get her attention. “Did you see that? They hate me here. I spend all my money here and they hate me.”
I ventured: Susan is sort of a friend?
“Oh god no. No one really likes her, we just like going to her loft parties. She’s rich. I can’t feel guilt about despising her and drinking her booze because she can afford it. Can’t feel sorry for anybody rich for some reason.” Lisa looked sadly at the smoldering butt. Then she went inside the cafe.
I sat there alone a minute, reviewing the essential fact of the day: I was in New York. Ta-da.
“They’re snotty inside this place as well,” said Lisa, returning with a pack of cigarettes. Before I could ask if Nixon had resigned: “There is obviously some confusion about what I said earlier.” She flung the cellophane wrapper off in a single gesture. “I was referring to this pack of cigarettes. I don’t buy another pack until what’s-his-name is sworn in. Actually,” she went on, as she lit up, “I’m really chain-smoking to celebrate your being here and rescuing your college chum from bankruptcy and eviction.” Then she sunk her sharp fingernails into my arm. “You ARE moving in, aren’t you?”
Yes yes yes. No turning back now.
For Our Audience at Home: Yeah, Lisa knew I had a crush on her. She enjoyed it. No intention of letting me do anything about it, of course, but it certainly didn’t bother her that I was going to be adoring and worshiping around the house each day. Give it time, I thought. I grow on people; I’m like an industrial solvent, I’ll wear you down …
Lisa licked her lips and tossed her hair back characteristically. “What did your parents say when you told them you were moving in with me, a Modern Woman of the World?”
It wouldn’t matter what they thought, I told her. They weren’t happy about my dropping out and they were set against my moving here and I’m sure Mom didn’t care much for my living with a Woman of the World, but HEY, what am I, a kid? I told Lisa I was on my own and I didn’t care what my parents thought one way or the other.
Which wasn’t entirely true. I moved out with $400 I had saved and Mom gave me another $400 and I never told anyone that she gave it to me, lest I seem less independent. They really hated the whole idea—for them New York was where you went to be killed while your neighbors looked on, land of drugs and garbage strikes and—you had to hear my mother pronounce this for what was probably the first time in her life—hoe-moe-sex-yoo-uhls, which would be chasing h
er son down Broadway and back, day and night. Hey man, like, they wanted me to finish my degree, and that wasn’t my scene man; you know, get a haircut, get a job, a concept right up there with Peace With Honor—the Establishment, man. I shouldn’t parody how I felt at the time. Sorry.
“I guess your parents think we’re sleeping together or something,” said Lisa. (What was this—Parent’s Day?) “They probably think I’m leading their little boy astray.”
Wasn’t it obvious I was so astray already? We laughed together, ha ha ha. Sex with Gil. What an idea.
Lisa and Gilbert, Their Early Years:
I met Lisa my first year at Southwestern Illinois. She was the resident advisor on the girl’s hall in the same dorm, for our Sister Floor, and there was this Hayride Hoe-down Night and each guy was assigned a Pixie and we had to buy little gifts for—
NO, THIS IS TOO STUPID. Let’s just say she was a junior, I was a freshman, and we liked each other a lot and I went and sat in her room a lot and ate her homemade cookies a lot and I was flattered that she didn’t throw me out and thought I was mature enough to be seen with her, and I don’t know what she got out of it, but you might just have to accept the fact I’m a Fun Guy and people sometimes like me. Anyway there was this fellow, Ted, and they were going out for—no, correct that: they were breaking up for years, longer than most marriages last. Nations rise and fall in the time it took for them to work out the fine details of breaking up. Now I see they were very immature, but back then that struck me as Real Life Drama because sex was involved which meant it was mature and important, which shows you how little I was involved with sex at the time.
Didn’t take long, huh? Onto SEX, this author’s almost-favorite topic. I’m warning you now—I like making lists, categorizing, analyzing, and I also warn you everytime I’m sure I’ve gotten it sorted out, I’m wrong. Nevertheless (and I’m not alone here) women in my early twenties fell into three distinct categories. We got room here, don’t we?
1. The Only-Good-For-One-Thing Girl who is only good for one thing, and it was the ’70s and everyone was rushing around telling me this was unliberated and sleazy and dishonest, and there’s more to life than losing your virginity which is what I spent my late teenage years trying to do. I lost it over and over again with girls like this. But what the sensitive young man of my era should desire, I knew, was