Emma Who Saved My Life

by Wilton Barnhardt

  On the way home on the subway I dealt with the major issue of the moment: was I going to cry about this? Before I got home, was I going to get all my frustration out of my system and cry like a five-year-old? Yes, I decided I would and slunk off to a corner of the Christopher Street station and did so.

  The only place I was happy was back in the apartment. But that didn’t stop me from taking all my misery out on Lisa and Emma:

  “C’mon, c’mon,” said Lisa, bouncing about in front of me as I tried my hardest to be Byronic and morose, “I’m not leaving until I make you laugh.” She made a silly face like she might for an infant. “Oh geez, Gil, c’mon, you’ve only been at this for … for not even a year yet. You’ll get a break. Cheer up!”

  I’m out of cash.

  “Look,” said Lisa, “just get any kind of job. Lesson One in New York is have no pride. Do anything for rent money.”

  Do you know what anything is in New York? It’s going to a temporary help agency and volunteering to file note cards, account slips, that kind of thing. You go in and the people running the agency look at you with disdain: Can you type? No. Can you work any kind of computer? No, since I can’t type. Can you do stenography? No, since this is 1975 and I’m a guy. Do you do light accounting? If you saw my checkbook you wouldn’t ask stupid questions. What could I do? I could file things in alphabetical order.

  “Can you alphabetize?” asked the fat, immobile woman with the slicked-down hair at the temporary agency, and I said yes (mind you, I got dressed up in my suit for this), and then I was ushered into an inner sanctum to take a test. The assignment is to alphabetize the following ten things: wheelbarrow, lemon, toy, Albert Jones, baseball, Kansas …

  “Well done, Mr. Freeman! You got them all right!”

  Two fifteen an hour. And I took it. That spring morale was not high. I came home one day to pass a fleeing, crying Oriental woman in our hall. When I got inside our apartment Emma explained:

  “That’s Kim Li. A friend of Mandy’s. She’s from Vietnam. I met her last night at Mandy’s and I thought I’d be noble and ask her around for coffee today.” Emma stood up and walked over to the TV. “Saigon is falling and the TV was on and she got upset.”

  I watched the TV showing the evacuation of troops and civilians and anyone who could pay anything to get out before the Vietcong made it to the city and meted out justice. People hanging from helicopters as they took off, their suitcases tumbling to the ground …

  “Kim Li has wealthy parents and they all got out in time,” Emma went on, now going to the kitchen. “I invited her over for penance, Gil. I’m American, I wanted to say, yell at me, hate me, throw things at me, trash our apartment—I’m so sorry what we did to your country.”

  Did you get your way?

  “Nah, she was all for the war, ruling class and all. And you’d think someone from Vietnam could at least be interesting, but she’s not. She wanted to know where to shop in New York. I mean, me, Emma Gennaro, fashion consultant. Gil, where are the Fritos?”

  I didn’t buy them because I didn’t have any money. I stood transfixed before the TV and the rioting crowds, the desperate push to get to the roof of the US Embassy and possibly away by helicopter. If I’d been born a few years earlier, I’d be over there helping them pack, I mentioned.

  Emma stood in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed. “Your death would have been a tragedy but not nearly on the scale of my NOT GETTING TO EAT MY FRITOS after a hard day at temping.”

  I stared mindlessly at the TV and shook my head. What a mess. Another sterling, incomparable first-class job done by that long-running comedy act, the American Military Community After World War II. No good, I said, was going to come out of this fiasco.

  “Take-out Vietnamese restaurants,” Emma suggested.

  I flopped on the sofa and went into brooding-actor mode: I have no money. I have a stupid job which pays next to no money. I am a failure in the theater. I have no career. I will take out an insurance policy, kill myself, and leave the money to Emma so she can eat Fritos for a month.

  “Gil, you know how I am about nutrition.” Emma went over to the TV and gave Saigon a last glance before turning off the set: “I guess this means goodbye.”

  You can eat all my cereal, I suggest—finish out the box of Fruit Loops. I’ll just quietly waste away here on the sofa.

  Emma sat on the arm of the sofa. “Gil, Fritos are important to me. It is important in the daily diet to have one representative from each of the Four Food Groups. A caffeine, a sugar, a booze and a grease. Now I had coffee and a doughnut this morning, and I’m going to drink cheap beer tonight. That leaves a grease. I haven’t had my grease today—I was counting on it. You said you’d buy some Fritos since it was your turn.”

  I groaned unmoved into the sofa pillow.

  “Gil,” she said after a moment. “New York doesn’t get much better than this, I hate to tell you. You know where I temped this morning? Excellence Products, Inc. Do you know what they make?”

  I silently shook my head.

  “Those little plastic guns you can fire candy BBs into your mouth with? They make those. Lisa’s part-time job is Xeroxing other people’s drawings for the new 1975 image for Little Milkmaid condensed milk. This is how we get by.”

  Yeah, but you can write poetry, Emma, when you get home, and Lisa can paint. I can’t act without being up on a stage.

  Emma thought about this. “All right, I wasn’t going to do this unless things got desperate…” They’re desperate, they’re desperate. “… But I know this, this COW, Rachel Dennis. She was at my last temp agency. Her husband is a casting director at some off-Broadway theater.”

  I sat up. Call him, pay him off, sleep with him! I suggested.

  “Gil, this is going to cost me…” She winced. “Before I left the agency I reported her to the president for being utterly worthless and incompetent. I called her a cow to her face. I’d have to grovel, to abase myself.”

  I looked at her wide-eyed, all puppy-dog sadness.

  “God, she was pretentious,” mused Emma, thinking back. “She always name-dropped about the people she met at her husband’s theater. And they were all nobodies too. If you’re gonna name-drop name-drop Rosemary Harris and Al Pacino. She would go on and on about Bobby Carew—last night at the opening, I saw Bobby Carew, you know, Bobby, Bobby Carew. I mean, geez, the guy plays the salty sailor on the Chunk-a-Chunk Tuna ads.”

  He’s higher up the show business ladder than I am, I reminded.

  Emma stared hard at me.

  I’ll probably have to move back to Oak Park, I threatened, adding incentive.

  She reached for the phone. “Oh no you don’t … no one’s breaking up the Apartment of the Gods.” She dialed, muttering, “And NO ONE moves back to the Midwest while I’m around—is that understood?”

  Yes ma’am.

  And that phone call began a chain of events that led to my first job in the theater, the Venice Theater, scourge of offBroadway. Wait. That sounds ungrateful. Ungrateful to Emma, to Dewey and Rachel Dennis, to all the good people (two or three of them) at the Venice. I thank you all. Thanks to you, Venice Theater, I survived my first few years.

  Now. THAT BEING SAID:

  The Venice Theater, where I worked, where I slaved, where I hauled stones on my back and built pyramids and dug canals and comprised a sizable percentage of the American workforce—the Venice Theater was the WORST, the dregs, the nadir, the lowest ebb of New York theater imaginable. It was antitheater. If you worked there long enough, you would get less talented. It was a void to which the outcasts, the losers, the hopeless of the New York theater world made their way to die, to fade away, gracelessly, a place of ignominy … It began that spring, after nearly nine months of filing files for $2.15 an hour. I was interviewed by Rachel Dennis’s husband, Dewey, Assistant Director of the Venice Theater, a big bearish guy, a beard and potbelly, a loud laugher, radiating opinionatedness. Dislikable on sight. He talked at me and talked at me and aske
d about my feelings concerning the ART of the Theatuh, what purer higher sentiments drew me toward this magical wonderland of stagecraft and, for my part, I agreed with everything he said, I licked his boots, humiliated my flesh, I sucked up to his pencil sharpener, I would have performed sexual acts on his stapler—

  “Well,” says Dewey, “I see you’d fit in real good around here. We’ll be in touch.”

  That was the big kiss-off. You may have recognized it.

  Time goes on. I get a call in May that Mr. Dennis has put my name in a file for possible replacements since two people were leaving before the summer. I called back and talked to a raspy-voiced secretary who sympathetically explained the positions had been filled so I figured that was that. Then I got another call a few weeks later, and the same raspy secretary said one of the guys had left for Yale School of Drama and had jumped ship (no doubt recognizing the Titanic when he saw it) and would I consider joining the Venice?

  Job description: Sweeping up, helping out, finding props, working costumes, subbing for dressers, working in the shop to build scenery, printing and proofreading programs, phone sales in the advertising department, doing admissions, working in the ticket booth, matinee ushering, and as New Boy in the theater, bringing in the standing order of doughnuts for Saturday mornings. The pay? $60 a week, and it could have been worse … but, son, this is The Thee-ah-tuh, fill in the speech about A Great Future Lies Ahead.

  And I was ONE HAPPY BOY, I tell you. I ran all the way back to Carmine Street, proudly down the streets of Manhattan which had become the place I worked, the place I lived in officially now for real, and I wanted to take Emma in my arms and mess up that shoulder-length dark hair and kiss her one hundred times on the lips. (I always wanted to do that anyway, but now I had an excuse.) Emma was not home, however, and Lisa was, so I did it to her.

  “God, this is news—this is your big break!” said Lisa. “Do we have enough change to get a bottle of wine and get drunk?”

  We had just enough, $1.99. Enough for the jug of Chianti-flavored wine you could get at Gino’s Delicatessen down the block. We ran there together and counted out our pennies for Gino.

  “When are you going to get to act?” Lisa said, taking my arm for the walk back.

  Not right away, I figured. (Boy, was THAT right.)

  “Aren’t you excited?” she kept asking over and over.

  Yeah, I was excited. An illustration: Me, sitting outside the Venice Theater, the day before I start work, in the pouring rain, 45 degrees, watching the personnel file in and out of My New Home, the new place I belonged, imagining myself in that actress’s arms, imagining myself impressing that important-looking director (it was the janitor), wondering who that jerk was and what they said about him (it was the executive director), making friends that (enter string music, swelling violins) would last my whole life long, characters in my memoirs, already being written. In the euphoria of my new employment, I extrapolated (1) understudying, (2) the long-awaited Big Break, (3) being the director’s pet (“Who’d have thought that stockboy was going to be such a talent? I want him for everything we do here—he’s a draw”), (4) great notices, (5) dumping the Venice Theater, getting an agent, moving up to Playwrights Horizons or Circle in the Square, (6) my Tony acceptance speech (“When I began work in 1975 at the Venice Theater, who would have thought I was going to be here, accepting this, tonight? Dewey Dennis, I love you man, I owe it all to you. But mostly, let me say that I share this award with my best friends—Lisa, Emma … this is for you too…” Orgasmic applause), (7) movies, going Hollywood, which is so laid-back after the New York scene—

  Slam of door. “I’m home, fan club!” Emma was back.

  “Gil has news,” Lisa blurted out. I told her about my job before Lisa got a chance to and then I got to give Emma a big kiss. Emma, you saved my life.

  She shrugged, smiling. “Nyehhh…”

  No really, you’re a lifesaver.

  “Well, just let me watch what I want on TV all the time.”

  Lisa ran into the kitchen and then out again brandishing the Chianti bottle: “Ta-dah! Party time! Where’s the corkscrew?”

  And then, on my night of triumph, a crisis. We couldn’t find the corkscrew.

  “It’s not in the bathroom,” yelled Emma.

  “… Or under the sofa,” said Lisa, on her hands and knees. “Oh hell, I think we left it at Janet’s. We could call Janet.”

  “No, she’s as poor as we are and she’d want to come over with our corkscrew and there’d be less wine for us.”

  Do your trick, Emma, I suggested.

  “What trick?”

  The swordsmen-in-the-Italian-cavalry trick you were telling us about. It was in some book. If you take your sword and slide it down the neck of the bottle, hitting the rim consistently from all sides, the cork will break off with the rim of the bottle evenly. Or so Emma said.

  “Gee, my sword’s at the cleaners,” said Lisa.

  Will a kitchen knife do?

  “No,” said Emma, looking about the apartment, “we need something heavy and metal and … hey, how about the shower attachment in the bathtub?”

  So there we were, standing above the bathtub, huddled in the bathroom, watching Emma clink away at the Chianti bottle with the attachment-hose thing you use to wash your hair with—

  SMASH. Glass everywhere.

  “Goddam it…” Emma muttered, inspecting her hands for splinters of glass.

  “Don’t spill any of the wine, whatever you do,” said Lisa.

  “I could be bleeding to death and you’re worried about the wine … There are probably glass fragments in the wine now.”

  A gloomy pause.

  “Wait a minute,” said Lisa.

  She came back with some Wipe-Away Paper Towels and a bowl. Lisa was at New Marketing Ideas Ltd. making cardboard display racks for Wipe-Away Paper Towels, so consequently we had a gross of paper towels which we used for everything, including stationery.

  “We’re gonna strain the wine,” said Lisa. “We are not pouring that wine out—we can’t afford another bottle.”

  Lisa held the paper towel taut and Emma poured the wine through it and it drained into the bowl below. But Emma got worried that some small glass fragments had gotten through, and after all, popes and Chinese emperors and Caesars were always putting ground glass in people’s food to kill them, so we strained it again with a new towel and Emma poured Bowl No. 1 onto the paper towel to drain into Bowl No. 2.

  “Strange taste,” said Lisa, after toasting My Glorious Future.

  “Tastes like Wipe-Away,” said Emma. “Absorbent but not precocious, a distinct aftertaste … a two-ply wine.”

  Well, when you don’t eat, a third of a bottle of Chianti can hit you pretty hard and make you giddy, and our drunken evenings, like this one, usually ended up on the roof, up the fire escape. The Carmine Street roof wasn’t as good as Susan’s, it was blocked in on all sides, but you could look over to the street. It was ten p.m., the street was still hopping, a vendor on the corner selling beads and belt buckles, down below a busker we called the Tambourine Man because he could only play two songs over and over, “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

  “Here’s our chance to kill that guy,” Emma said, “we bean him with a flowerpot. He’s got to get a bigger repertoire if he’s going to play outside our window.”

  “It’s cold up here,” said Lisa. “I’m going down, bye-bye.”

  Emma and I lingered.

  “‘Hey Mr. Tambourine Man,’” recited Emma, “‘play a song for me.’ Now what kind of song can a tambourine man play? Dylan is God, but have you ever thought of that?”

  I put my hand on Emma’s shoulder. She seemed to freeze. I told her thank you again for helping me get employed. After I’d kissed her on the roof at Susan’s party she had followed up that encounter with so much celibacy talk, so much I’m-through-with-sex I got the message: you don’t do it for me, Gil. So I laid off. But she’d kissed me co
ngratulations that night. Pretty pathetic, huh? We get two kisses in almost a year of time, both platonic, and I’m rushing back for more rejection. I kiss her again; I aim at the lips but she turns her head just a bit, so I get the right half of the mouth, and she tries, so it won’t embarrass me, to kiss back a little.

  “Gil, you know…” she began in that you’re-just-my-friend tone of voice all women have perfected by the age of sixteen.

  That wasn’t a romantic kiss, I said, that was a thank-you friendship kiss. (Which was a lie; I shouldn’t have ducked out there.)

  She breathed heavily. “Look I just gotta get some things straightened out in my life first, you know? I’m happy for you and all that, but I’m still where you were a month ago: nowhere. My journals suck, my poetry should line the bottom of a birdcage. I’m getting uglier each year—”

  That’s crap, Emma.

  “I am not pretty enough or talented enough to have sex at the moment. Or at least enjoy it if I had it.” She smiled and turned to the back fire escape to go back down. “I publish a book of poems next year, I’ll sleep with the New York Giants.”

  I’ll try out tomorrow. Does this offer extend to the waterboy?

  She shook her head, laughing. “Don’t mess things up, Freeman! It’s great, the three of us, just as it is.”

  Not an auspicious celebration, but we’re talking about the Venice Theater so maybe it was appropriate. And I can’t even drink Chianti anymore. Living on the fringes of Italian neighborhoods and buying countless bottles of $1.99 Chianti (“Uh-oh, this Chianti is made in Ohio,” said Emma once, dourly looking at the fine print) finished off my appetite for that wine. An exception, however, could be made for the San Gennaro Festival in Little Italy, during which great quantities of Chianti were necessary for getting Emma drunk. Emma Gennaro, predictably, considered this saint’s celebration her personal holiday.