DORIS
[indignant:] What do you mean by that?
CHARLES
You knew he was drinking himself to death anyway—you said as much yourself—
DORIS
I never said anything of the sort. Just what are you saying?
CHARLES
I’m saying, we should have seen this coming, that one day the old fool would just … would just walk out in front of a bus, drunken, stumbling—
DORIS
Don’t talk that way about him! You shouldn’t say such things now that he’s … that he’s … What are you trying to do to me?
I swear, Bonnie—I was griping to myself—if you don’t stop ending your ad-libs on a question for me to answer, I’m going to wring your neck …
CHARLES
[I laugh darkly, like a madman:] I mean, in a way it’s merciful that he stepped, the old fool, in front of a bus—a tourist bus! Here in Bermuda! A tourist bus in Bermuda! What a fitting end for that rotten man—
DORIS
DON’T say this, no, no! [working up to hysterics]
CHARLES
It’s true Mother. You knew he was a goner with his drinking—he was dragging you down with him—
DORIS
It’s not true!
CHARLES
He was turning you into an alcoholic so you could both go together. What do you think all that nonsense about his watch was? He was a dying man … he wanted to make his peace with me but … but no one had won our little war yet—there couldn’t have been any peace.
Bonnie turned to me, gave me an approving wink—I’d explained the watch and matched Smalley’s dialogue perfectly.
To cut a long long, eternally lasting stage moment short, we got more inspired as we went along, explaining all the loose ends, inventing stuff ten times better than the original. I, for instance, hurled Father’s watch to the ground after brooding over it, cursing my father, saying I didn’t want it, refused it. Later, toward the end, after we both had staged numerous hysterics, I knelt down before the watch to reassemble it.
CHARLES
[tears running down my face, sniveling:] No, no, I’ll put it back together Mama, I’ll do it, I’ll get it fixed. You heard him didn’t you? Daddy said he was going to give it to me—you heard him right? He said he was going to get it engraved … to his son Charles … [sobs] I’m sorry Daddy, I didn’t mean to break your watch—I … [more sobs, I’m stalling for time here] Uh … [some more tears, wipe your nose, laugh a little bit] … See it’s almost like it was, huh Mother? See? You can almost hear it ticking … [oh shit, I’m doing a Timex commercial, change tacks:] … no, no, I’ve broken it. It’s too late, too late for me …
DORIS
[running to me, kneeling beside me:] No honey, we’ll get it fixed, we will … [She kissed my cheek and whispered into my ear at high speed, “How do we end this damn thing?”]
The watch business went over great—I heard shuffling and quiet sniffing. The audience was in the palm of our hands. God, could you believe it? We were having fun suddenly, taking our play where we wanted it to go … Bonnie went over to the broken vase, racing me to it, lest I get to the material first:
DORIS
[picking up the pieces:] We have to piece things together, don’t we Charles? We have to go on. Like this vase … [uh oh, I could tell she just put herself out on a limb there] We’re all broken up now, and uh … we need to come together … [she’s suffering—should I run help?] … we’ll have to fix this like we have to fix our lives. [I’ll help her.]
CHARLES
[putting a hand on her shoulder:] Forget that Mother. It belongs to the hotel. [She must have forgotten this wasn’t our home, the way she was talking about the vase, so I thought I’d remind her.] It doesn’t matter. Leave it alone.
DORIS
[thinking fast, saves it:] But the flowers. Whenever a vase breaks, it’s the flowers you worry about. They need to be put in water and cared for, just because … just because the pretty world they were in is broken and gone … [Very nice, Bonnie!] I’m like these flowers, in a way, Charles … [Oh crap, Bonnie, leave it alone! You had it, now you’re messing it up!] … and you too. Can we go on together? You and I?
But there was panic in Bonnie’s eyes. What was wrong? She was distressed—she was signaling something to me. What?
DORIS
I just wish somehow this nightmare would end … this evening somehow would be over with. Finished …
Good Lord, she’s forgotten her cue to the stage manager to end the play! No problem, I’ll say the line, which was … What the hell was that line? It’s gone out of my head completely. Over the river and through the woods … As the sun sinks slowly into the west … And so ends another day … shit, what was it?
DORIS
Can you, darling, end this nightmare for me? Can you figure out a way to make all this awfulness go away? [Her eyes were flashing that special onstage SOS only other actors can pick up.]
Oops, for the first time we were drowning. The audience was stirring, and we were losing them. No, how unfair! We’d been so astoundingly brilliantly divinely inspired up until now (well, I mean considering we only had to be as good as Smalley). This was pathetic: Bonnie was now breaking down and crying, for want of anything else to do.
CHARLES
What is it Mother?
DORIS
Nothing, no, I can’t tell you …
Oh this stinks, this really stinks. More audience restlessness. Actors can sense the mood out beyond the footlights like you wouldn’t believe, telepathically. We were floundering. Wait. What was Bonnie doing now? She was … she was unbuttoning her blouse. What was she up to now? Wait … I think I know what she’s up to …
DORIS
Do you remember how it used to be between us? [Her eyes, her body seemed to shrug, seemed to say “I’m desperate, I gotta do something.”] When it was you and me and … and he wasn’t around …
CHARLES
Mother what are you doing? Please tell me.
DORIS
Don’t worry I just want to hold you … hold you like I used to hold you … [She had taken off her blouse and was stalling about lowering her bra straps; the audience was certainly back in the palm of our hands now … ] Come to me, dear. [Her eyes said: Oh shit, why not? as she lowered her straps.] Come to me, darling. Come to Mother.
CHARLES
Mother, no, what are you doing?
DORIS
We’ll go away together … [She exposed her breasts and reached out for my hand. She drew me closer—I decided to get into it, tremulously touching her breast like a child, nestling myself there like a big baby.] We’ll go home together, away from all this awful brightness and sun and heat—and and
CHARLES
[mumbling from her bosom; we were fishing for the line—on the tips of our tongues!] Yes yes, the weather, it’s the weather isn’t it? I mean, the weather is so depressing and we should go home.
DORIS
Yes, it’s time to go home! The weather is bad and it’s time to go home!
No response.
CHARLES
Yes it’s clouding up.
DORIS
Clouding up and time, time my darling to go home home home …
That did it. The stage manager ordered the lights to dim, the curtain to fall. And as they did Doris finished up—
DORIS
We’ll go back home and make new lives. Back to Ohio.
Blackness, darkness all around. The pause. THUNDEROUS APPLAUSE!!
Bonnie and I ran backstage to SCREAMS, to SCREECHES of excitement and praise and adoration from the backstage crew: “You did it! You did it! Damn you, you fucking did it!” It was like the end of a soccer match, we were fallen upon from all sides, hugging, embracing—Brent cut through the crowd and piled on too. “I don’t believe it,” he said, tears in his eyes. “You were marvelous, superb!”
Bonnie and I pulled ourselves apart and looked at each ot
her, our eyes immediately overflowing with tears, nervous-release crying.
“We did it, didn’t we, baby?” she sniffed. Then we hugged each other tight enough to do damage to internal organs. Then we started reliving it, comparing notes:
“Did you get my last line? ‘Back to Ohio.’ What kinda goddam asshole last line was that! Back to goddam Ohio! It just came out of my mouth!”
What about me and the watch? What about her showing her tits?
“Well I had to do something—they were getting ready to get up and leave out there! And hey, it’s not as if they’re bad tits, right?”
No Bonnie honey, they are the best pair of tits I have ever seen in my life!
The stage manager interrupted: “What about curtain calls?”
Brent: “Can’t do one without Tucker—the audience will wonder why he doesn’t come out. Let it go—turn up the house lights.” Brent threw himself into Bonnie’s bosom (she had been fiddling to get her bra back on for two minutes). “Bonnie, you were superb—you … you showed your tits, god bless you!”
“Yeah,” she said triumphantly, “I showed my tits!”
“You showed your beautiful tits!” Brent repeated, hugging Bonnie, jumping up and down with her in their embrace.
Bonnie was handed a scotch and soda which she downed in one. “Well what the hell? After you suggested it, I sorta thought I might like to do it after all—so I got my chance, right?”
“You’ve got to write down everything,” said Brent, “everything that you did tonight so you can vaguely imitate it tomorrow, okay? We’ll go on with Don, strike Tucker from the program, have them reprinted—”
“Hey everybody!” Bonnie yelled to everyone backstage, her mind far from tomorrow night: “Brent’s taking the whole crew out for drinks and we’re hanging out all night until tomorrow’s reviews, okay?”
Cheers and whoops all around.
“You’re gonna need $500 minimum so I hope you got some money in the bank,” Bonnie told Brent, giving him a half-friendly poke. And then she turned to me, in the relative quiet, as everybody milled about, reliving bits and pieces, preparing for the drunk ahead of us. “Gil, that was classic. Even if they shred this thing, even if we bomb–we know what we did. I remember you telling me about not being able to get an agent. After tonight my agent is your agent—I’ll get Odessa to sign you on. Wouldya like that?”
YES I WOULD LIKE THAT.
Tucker was roused, sopping wet, and stumbled forth from the dressing room. Brent cried, “Hank, guard the door. Let no one backstage until we get Tucker out of the way.”
I went to take a shower and when I got back, Bonnie (looking like a million) was ready to party. Brent flew by, a new man—the stage manager, Gary the producer, everyone was waiting on me. What a night it was going to be! That is Pure Joy, you know, post-theatrical partying, after a coup, after a success. The drinking, the dancing, the late-night breakfast across from Sandy’s Newsstand waiting for the newspapers to be dumped in bales there, five a.m. There’s a glow, a shared spirit not unlike criminals who’ve robbed the Vatican must feel, conspiracy, inclusion. Emma would cite me as a violator of the New Order, but Love too. Emma.
Hank stopped me in the hall. “Oh Gil, I’m sorry. Some people were here for you, Jim and um…”
Jim and Lisa.
“Yeah, I’m sorry. I thought you’d gone on to the bar. They left some flowers outside.”
Damn. Well, that’s all right Hank. Hey, was there anyone named Emma out there waiting to see me?
“Don’t think so.” Hank smiled a wide smile at me. “That was great out there tonight—really something. You know they’ll be talking about that for years here. You were great.”
Well, it happens. Miracles can occur.
We just got by in the reviews—the News liked the play and not the actors (except for “the subtle genius of Broome’s stagecraft,” wouldn’t you know), the Voice quibbled but generally found it Smalley’s best work, the Post praised Bonnie and said Bill Freeman was someone to watch (not spell his name right, but watch, definitely watch) and all of them liked Bonnie’s tits.
“You laugh but these tits are gonna keep this old bomb running till Christmas,” she cackled before we all stumbled home at six-thirty a.m., tired beyond description.
And speaking of miracles, major and minor, when I got home and fell toward my bed/pile of dirty laundry, I thought to reach over half-asleep already for my answering machine:
BEEP! All right, all right, this is Emma. I saw you last night, you were brilliant, I am jealous because you have talent, because you are God and I, I as you know, I am a piece of shit, I am dung, I am lower than the low … this is an apology. Although we were both a little—NO, scratch that: it was me, all me, all my fault, I am shit, dung, refuse, rubbish, ORDURE—I am ordure, Gil. I am … New Jersey. I stand out on a corner and I violate the sanitation laws—people rush up to me with their poop-scoops. This is an homage to you Gil, I’m doing your lousy one-liners. Dross? You want to talk dross? Detritus? Scrim? Crill? Slag? I’m in the Outer Darkness, Gil—that’s where I’m calling from, you oughta see the rates. You wanna hear gnashing of teeth? Here: gnasssssh gnasssssh gnasssssh … Remember in Suddenly Last Summer where Katharine Hepburn says most people’s lives are trails of debris, except she doesn’t say duh-BREE, she says DEB-ry. Well I’m DEB-ry. (Emma’s Hepburn imitation:) Yez, poooooor Emmah, she was olways DEB-ry DEB-ry DEB-ry—CLICK. (That must have been the record for talk on my answering machine; she could always talk fast.)
Next message: BEEP! That ends the abasement-and-humbling portion of our evening’s entertainment, but before we bring on Guido Fozzuli and his Dancing Poodles with the Dancing Lasers and Dancing Waters, let us have a word from Miss Emma Gennaro! [Emma made this kssssh noise into the receiver to sound like the applause of millions.] Thank you, thank you, oh please—that’s too kind. Yes, I’m back and I’m here to speak to you tonight about a serious subject: Gil Freeman. He has been struck with that crippler of young adults, Life Without Emma. Only you can help. Send all your money to me. And when you’ve done that, I urge you, I beg of you, to make Gil pick up that phone—go ahead, you know you ought to—pick up that phone and call Emma. You know in your heart that it’s the right thing to do. And now back to Guido Fozzuli and lasers shooting the dancing poodles, or the poodles making dancing water, or—CLICK.
That voice. Some voices speak to you from outside your body and some speak to you from inside, and my imaginary Emma Voice, the one I heard in my head, the one that said all the intolerant, insensitive, hilarious and 100% honest things, the voice I heard in my head when something happened she should have been there for, THAT voice had gone off the mark a bit, wasn’t quite what she really sounded like, and hearing the real Emma I realized that time—just eleven months—had deprived me of so much. I played the tape over and over again, saying to myself yes, yes, that’s what I missed. That’s what I can’t do without any longer.
1980
IN September I made my TV debut, in a commercial for the Garden State Assurance Trust, a local insurance company. At Emma’s and Janet’s new East Village apartment, we gathered to watch this command performance.
Emma turned on the TV:
It was Ronald Reagan: It’s time to look back for that which made America great, its integrity, its goodness—
AAAAIIII! Janet, Emma, myself and my theater friend Kevin screamed in unison: TURN IT OFF!
“Damn election year,” muttered Emma. “You can’t get either Ron or Jimmy off the TV—there’ve been ads for one or the other every five minutes.”
“Ronnie Ray-gun, the Black Man’s Friend,” said Janet scowling. “And he’s probably gonna get in too.”
“What kind of choice is this election? It’s gotta be the worst ever,” mused Emma.
Nixon or pro-Vietnam Humphrey?
“Yeah, that was bad.”
Pro-Vietnam Johnson or pro-Vietnam Goldwater?
“Forget I said anything,” Emma shrug
ged. “It’s always bad, isn’t it?”
Janet brought everyone a beer. “The world’s being run by old men, Gil. Brezhnev is a hundred ’n eighty and may or may not be dead, the Ayatollah is in his hundred ’n eighties too, and Reagan is in his hundred ’n seventies. Those old men who keep hangin’ on, the kind who never die.”
Try the TV again, Emma.
Emma turned back to the channel my commercial would be on.
Americans will never cower before a foreign government, will never negotiate with terrorists … America will not be held hostage …
“Of course true to my doctrine,” said Emma, “of voting for entertainment value, I’ll vote for Uncle Ronnie.”
“You may get your way on World War Three,” said Janet.
Emma’s buzzer sounded. We figured it was Jasmine.
Janet and I kept watching Reagan: The Great Society has failed. No one believes anymore that the welfare system of the United States is healthy. Fraud, welfare, swindling is now accepted in the cities of America. In Newark, New Jersey, a welfare queen there took the government for $270,000, masquerading under fifteen different names …
Janet dipped into black-stereotype-speak: “Now Ronnie chile, you talkin’ bout my Aunt Sadie now! We gots us some Ripple on that money and played the horses and got us a Cadillac with a fuzzy pink interyuh…”
“Well,” said Kevin, camping it up. “He’s got a good-looking son, that ballet dancer. Although Ford still had the best-looking presidential kids of all time—Steven Ford, you remember?”
Dream on, Kevin.
“Gil,” he said, hopping out of the chair, “can we talk a moment in the kitchen?”
Sure. Kevin and I went to the kitchen. Kevin worked with me at the Soho Center for Experimental Theater. He was the gay lover of Nicholas who owned the place. Emma always described Kevin as a Muppet. He was twenty-four or so, big bushy blond punked-out hair, he sort of bounced about with floppy gestures, and the expressions on his bright, blond face were exactly what he felt: Kevin ecstatic, Kevin moping, Kevin cross—not an ounce of deviousness or guile in him, apparently.
“Will you ask Slut Doll to do the theater project?” he asked, once we were in the kitchen. “I mean, I’m no good with things like that…”
Emma Who Saved My Life Page 31
