“On what money? On that nonexistent medical plan we temporary workers get? On the US’s nonexistent national health insurance? Spend money that I could be drinking with? Oh I guess I could go to a ghetto hospital. Between the gunshot victims and rape victims and stabbing victims they might fit in a CAT scan. I’m just going to die quietly, in my room. Young poet dead at twenty-four, one year before Keats, just like Keats, except I didn’t write any poetry—a minor difference.”
Round three. Emma bought.
Something by Peggy Lee played on the jukebox, something even sadder and more lost to another era than the others.
“This is ridiculous,” said Lisa, slapping the table. “If we came into a bar like this in Carroll Gardens, full of oldies on the jukebox, a bar all to ourselves, on some day when we weren’t in a mood to get depressed, we would run around saying what a FIND it was, what a cool bar it was, a little piece of yesterday. So let’s stop pretending this bar is the end of the world.”
Another song came on, something called “Moonglow,” Emma informed us, a classic slowdance number. One of the old men got up and lumbered toward our table. Unemployed, his face said, a drinking man, once a worker with leathery hands, a creased lived-in face, gentle to women, you could tell, and with men the kind who would have been in a few fights. “Wouldya like to dance with me, sister?” he said to Lisa, then turning the next second to Emma.
“Yes,” said Emma, surprising us. “But just one dance.”
This was maybe the strangest thing—among an encyclopedia of strange things—I have ever seen Emma do. Both Lisa and I, after a quick perplexed exchange of looks, watched Emma and the man dance together slowly, the man rocking a bit, Emma following unsurely, standing at a full step back from him.
“I didn’t know Emma could dance,” said Lisa simply.
See? Just when you thought you had her pegged, Emma would surprise you. I’d heard her before watch some horrible old out-of-date song-and-dance man on a variety show and say “Oh I feel so sorry for that man, what a bomb his act was … but one time that brought the house down. He still says the jokes with dignity…” And she’d offer to give herself to this man, just like she’d do for the hotdogmobile man. Outside her temp office was a man who sold hotdogs in a little funny car which had a dome and the body was the shape of a hotdog. Emma would come home despondent over the hotdog man condemned to live in the hotdogmobile, with a recording of tinkly whiny music he had to listen to all day. “God, and I’m so sick of the hotdogs he makes…” Well, don’t buy them then. “You gotta buy ’em, no one else does,” she’d say for herself. “It’s so sad. I come up and he goes, ‘Ooooh here’s the pretty little miss, and she can have her hotdog annnnyway she wants it, yessirree.’” And then there was a guy with one leg who vended windup dancing poodles at Rockefeller Center, spread out on a flattened cardboard box. Emma would imitate him: “‘Get your poodles, pretty poodles, look at ’em dance, the dancin’ poodles, arf arf, look at ’em, dancin’ poodles…’” Degradation. I don’t think Emma felt she had anything in common with youth. She could be moved by the sadness of old men, old mislived lives, goodhearted failures, something to do with her father maybe. I’m not going to keep speculating, instead I’ll focus on that memory of Emma and the old fisherman—I have a sense he was a fisherman—shuffling to this dusky saxophone music, Emma’s face soft and kind in the blue light from the jukebox and the aquariums, attempting a brief gesture of beauty amid the full ashtrays and the stale smell of spilt beer.
The music ended. Emma bowed her head a little, the old man nodded to her, a thank you.
“He said I reminded him of his wife,” Emma said, a bit red in the face, now that she was back with us. She scooted beside Lisa under the table and finished off the drink she’d left behind.
Lisa patted Emma’s knee, smiling. “Dead? Divorced?”
“Didn’t ask.”
We all sighed, listening to the next number play on the jukebox. “That was sweet, Em,” Lisa added.
Then we heard the patter of rain outside, first scattered, then clattering down furiously, a summer thunderstorm.
Maybe it’ll cool down, I said.
Suddenly the other old man was up, the first old man trying to restrain him, bring him back to the table. The second old man wanted a dance too. He was very drunk, toothless, crude, wore clothes he must have slept in, lived in for months.
“No thank you,” said Lisa uneasily.
“Whatsa mattuh, uh? You don’t like me? She danced with him. You can’t dance with me, sugar pie? Huh sugar pie? Heheheheheheh…”
Let’s go, I said.
“Hold it hold it,” the man said, tottering, “I adn’t had my dance with the girlie yet. Want my dance with the girlie. C’mon…” He put his hand on Lisa’s arm too firmly; she shook him away.
“Barney!” called the woman behind the bar, coming to intervene. “I’ll dance with you, Barney, dance with me,” she said. “Here. Here. C’mon, take my hand—”
“I wanna dance with the girlie—”
“No no, here I am. I’m dancing. You’re not dancing with me. Ah, therrre we go…”
We got up and left, stood under the awning for a moment, charted a course for the subway stop, ran through the rain and rode home, where we didn’t want to be, where it was still hot, where we were wet and sticky from dirty city rain, where we were half-sobered from a half-drunk and felt mildly sick and restless, where we still were depressed.
Lisa decided enough was enough, and the next week she formulated a plan of action to keep us from turning all our weekends into the Manic-Depressive Ward. I would work on a new audition piece, she would work on a new painting and try to place it in a gallery, Emma would work on new poetry and give a reading at the Coffeehouse on Bleecker. As it turned out I didn’t need to audition for anything, as a Dream Role came along and fell in my lap.
A Children’s Theater reprisal for the millionth time of Peter Cottontail. Arnie Schmeen, Jr., approached me, hand on my back, him and me, old buddies. Schmeen had just the role for me: Papa Bunny.
No way, I said. Politely, of course.
“It means an extra $60 a week—two performances at $30 apiece.”
All right, I’ll do it.
Papa Bunny, in a bunny suit, white pancake, a little ball of cotton on the end of my nose, and I had to hop around and say lines like C’mon little Bun Buns, let’s hippity hoppity awaaaaaay over to the carrot patch for dinner! Hippity hoppity hippity hoppity … And then I jumped up and down with both feet with a lot of eight-and nine-year-olds in tow behind me (students of the Children’s Theater Consortium). I told no one. NO ONE. Not Mom, not Dad, not friends. This WAS NOT my New York Stage Debut, do you understand? I could deal with my own Private Hell—I got by for two weeks undetected—as long as nobody knew about it. Emma and Lisa somehow (was it you, God?) found out.
I’m not sure how they found out but I suspect Monica or someone called from the theater and said that a Saturday matinee had been canceled due to lack of interest, or something like that, and Emma made conversation and asked what I was doing in it, dressing? working props? and Monica or whoever went, why no, he’s Papa Bunny! And anyway with that piece of knowledge they decided to drop in one afternoon and see me on the big stage. I picture Emma going, “Well we have to go down and see him; it’s his New York stage debut, right?” and Lisa would have reservations, saying, “Gee, I don’t know, he obviously didn’t tell us because he was embarrassed.” And Emma would say, “Embarrassed in front of us? Nonsense…”
And so, once upon a time, it is Saturday afternoon and the kids in the audience are wild and throwing things and talking throughout our speeches and me and Mama Bunny are rolling our eyes and it is all we can do to get through the act, and the little kids playing the Bunny Children (the Bun Buns, as the script calls them) are upset because no one is listening to them and Benny Bunny gives his little speech only to have a wadded up program thrown at him, anyway it is just the End of Civilization As
We Know It, and there I am going Now Bun Buns follow me, and hopping about in time to this xylophone music and there, out of the corner of my eye, are Lisa and Emma, not knowing whether to laugh or put their heads in their hands for SHAME, and they see I spotted them so now they can’t get away quietly and unnoticed, they have to stick it out.
So there I am backstage after it’s over, staring at myself in the makeup mirror, listening to Julie (Mama Bunny) rant about what a thankless job this turned out to be, and then in the mirror I see the door crack and two heads, Lisa’s and Emma’s, peek through, and they say a sheepish “Hiiiii, Gil, it’s us,” with a little nervous laughter.
Come on in, I say.
“We just had to come see you,” said Lisa.
“It was your New York debut, Gil, we couldn’t not come,” Emma said quickly, although underscoring that this was my New York debut fell with a Big Thud and everyone grew quiet in the dressing room.
If I had wanted them to come I would have invited them, I said simply enough, not a note of recrimination.
“Yeah well,” sighed Lisa, “you know us.”
“You know, it’s all gonna get better from here,” Emma said, bending down to kiss my cheek, still white with bunny makeup. “You look cute in the bunny suit—god, I’d give anything for a picture. I mean, c’mon Gil, laugh a little. This is, like, a typical struggling episode; you’ll look back on this and laugh.”
I am a grown man out there in front of people who think I’m stupid in a bunny suit and I agree with them, I said, and I added that if Emma had even warned me I could have found a better show, a better time for them to see this thing …
Lisa patted me on the shoulder. “We’ll see you when you get home, okay? We’ll go out and do something.”
I noticed some crumpled paper Lisa was carrying and asked her what it was.
She faltered. “Oh, well, now, yeah this uh,” she laughed as she unwrapped this bundle, “is some flowers—we just thought, you know, debut and all, we’d get you some flowers.” She put them down on the table. They were very pretty.
“We’re goin’ now,” said Emma, and they left all smiles, all plastic oh-god-this-was-a-mistake smiles. And I went to the bathroom, after saying a normal goodbye to the kids, after talking a little more with Julie, after putting up my suit, scrubbing my face clean of makeup, and I cried, feeling like such a NOTHING, a nothing that was not merely aware of being nothing, but rather a nothing that had been kicked around and degraded on top of being nothing. And it was one of those cries where after you were done you didn’t feel any better, just tired of crying. I did not go straight home but went to movies and stayed out until 2 a.m. so I could come home and the girls would be in their beds already and I wouldn’t have to talk to them, and they must have known I was doing that because they didn’t wait up.
Whereas I was forgiven for not telling them I was onstage, Emma was not forgiven when she gave a reading at the Coffeehouse on Bleecker and Thompson and didn’t invite us or tell any of us, and we only found out because Lisa passed by there and Emma’s name was on the chalkboard as one of the poetry readers the previous night.
“It’s no different from what Gil did,” said Emma, when confronted, trying to defend herself.
“Not telling us in your case is very different,” snapped Lisa. “Gil was in a bunny suit reading someone’s else lines, but you were reading your own poetry. What’s more you told us you hadn’t written anything new.”
“Well I hadn’t,” said Emma, “it’s all old stuff. I didn’t want you to come see me back up there doing old stuff.”
I didn’t believe that, I said, digging in, avenging myself. I’d seen her working on new stuff. She just didn’t want to share it.
“Are your poems about us?” asked Lisa coyly. “Trashing out your friends who love you at the Coffeehouse in verse?”
Emma took this badly and left the room.
We all were artistically frustrated and frazzled that summer, getting on one another’s nerves something awful. Of course, if it had been this sour all the time we wouldn’t have stayed together as long as we did. I remember, thinking in no particular order, the time Lisa came home with spiky hair, a T-shirt on under a leather jacket, black capri pants, spiked heels.
“What happened to you?” said Emma, wide-eyed.
“I’m punk,” said Lisa.
Punk?
“Yeah, you know, like the Ramones and Sex Pistols and New York Dolls and all that. I’m counterculture. Hey guys, I’m a rebel.”
“No you’re not,” said Emma.
“I’m working on it, I’m working on it,” said Lisa, a hint of a smile. “You guys gotta support me on this, okay? I mean, I’m getting nowhere artistically, right? I walk in in my knit sweaters and plaid skirts, Miss College Coed, with my portfolio and before I show them a single slide the gallery owner says, sorry, we have no openings for a secretary. I don’t look like an artist. I go through Art News—I don’t look like them, they don’t look like me. Until now.”
Emma loved it. “Is your work going to turn angry, spiteful, revolutionary?”
Lisa nodded blandly. “I’m consumed with rage. Angst.”
That’s a start, I said.
“You gotta do something vile, epater les bourgeois,” Emma mused.
“Paint a lot of sexual things,” Lisa said, considering it.
Something dirty, I suggest.
“Yeah,” Lisa went on, “I could do lots of vulvae and labiae and clitorides—”
“Very good,” applauded Emma.
“Hey, I did Latin.”
“Dead end though,” said Emma a moment later. “Georgia O’Keeffe and Louise Bourgeois. They’ve sort of done the female sexual symbol to death. What’s good and punk? Self-destructive. You could do like that guy did in Paris that carved off his penis in public.”
Lisa considered it. “I don’t have a penis.”
“Use Gil’s.”
I discouraged this.
“Maybe I can rage against crap culture,” said Lisa. “You know, happy faces and I FOUND IT religious stickers and Keep on Truckin’ and CB shit.”
“Nyehhh,” said Emma, “Pop Art, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Warhol, they parody pop culture. Pop culture parodies itself.”
“I could do nudes,” said Lisa, going through the kitchen to get a beer. She eventually passed the can around. “Why don’t you pose for me, Emma? Come on. No joking. I’ll do your portrait.”
“If you get famous everyone will see me nude. Through the centuries.”
“You’d be a great subject.”
“They’ll say you were imitating Bosch.”
“I’ll make you a Botticelli.”
“I’m a terminal Rubens.”
Lisa beseeched me as well but neither of us would strip for her. “Philistines!” she cried. “You’re standing in the way of Art!”
But it wasn’t long after that, after a brief spell of getting along, that Emma had her big disaster, the Night of the Living Dead, she called it. Lisa walked by the Coffeehouse and Emma’s name was posted for that night’s poetry reading, and so Emma was duly confronted again.
“All right, all right,” Emma said, “but if you come you better cheer a lot.” It was to be an evening mostly of oldies but of a few new ones she was eager to try out on the crowd—perhaps this would begin a new phase in her writing. “Yes,” she’d say, “I am leaving my Worthless Phase and beginning my Mildly Tolerable Period.”
And so we went down to the Coffeehouse to get an anonymous middle table where we could seem like the crowd when we cheered and not just Emma’s friends up front. I never told Emma this at the time, but although I loved to hear her read, I HATED going down to the Coffeehouse and hearing other people read their pretentious trash—like the guy on before Emma. Talk about insufferable. His name was Trigger Rothberg (give me a break, already), in his late forties and he got up there looking weary and time-worn (instead of a talentless clerk which is what I suspect he was) and he would br
ing up an ashtray and a bottle of whiskey and a scotch glass, and go through an elaborate ritual of pouring some, and then bumming a smoke from the audience:
“Anybody got one for me? Filterless? You, sweetie—thanks,” he’d go on as he accepted the cigarette, lit it up. “We poets never pay for our own smoke, heh-heh…”
Oh get outa here.
“Some of you know me, others of you don’t,” he’d begin, assuming a wise, old-man-of-the-road pose; he’d name-drop Kerouac and jazz artists and laugh, chuckle, oh yeah, there was the time—heh-heh, did he tell this one? He had an old crony in the crowd who’d yell for him to tell it anyway, and he’d tell how he and Ginsberg were “pushing boo one night up in Harlem, he and I…” He was at a party with Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio was there, and there were tales of hanging out with people on “that goddam blacklist.” After enough of this he’d shake his head, shake his head and chuckle again, oh he’d seen so much. He’d begin to read: “And they told him/You can’t come in here boy ’cause you’re black/and the Man is like that sometimes … And they told us in ’56 that it didn’t make no difference/But we knew/It made a difference … The Man is like that sometimes…”
Lisa pantomimed gagging herself, leaning over to whisper, “Gil, Emma’ll have a clear shot with this guy leading off.”
But trouble broke out. He went on too long and someone told him to sit down, and he told them they were too young to appreciate the ’50s, and then the boy told him he was an old fart talking shit and, what’s more, shit nobody cared about. The old fart’s crony stuck up for him, and finally the master of ceremonies, a skinny Jewish guy named Joel who ran the Coffeehouse, emerged and made conciliatory remarks—“Another night, Trigger,” he said, patting him on the back, “come back next week and read again”—and then we all clapped for him just to get him off the stage.
Emma was introduced. She came out, adjusted the microphone beside the table where she opened up her notebooks. She read a few youthful reminiscences, a poem about New York, and then a long self-analyzing poem …
Emma Who Saved My Life Page 18
