Yeah okay. But will Nicholas mind my asking her?
“He won’t care, as long as she does the music and the sound effects for the show. Lately I screw up everything I touch at the theater—”
Kevin, you worry too much.
“Nicholas is going to dump me any day.”
Is that so bad? You fight all the time.
“Where’m I gonna live?”
Emma from the living room: “HEY GILLLL … you got one minute to get in here.”
Kevin and I went back into the living room and Slut Doll, ńee Jasmine Dahl, had arrived and was talking to Janet and Emma. “Hi Gil,” she moaned in her monotone.
Jasmine, actually, was the incarnation of monotone. She dressed one way—in black—she looked one way (always frizzed-out jet-black hair, horror-movie white face makeup with her eyes darkly outlined) and she talked in this steady monotonous drawl that allowed no emotions or highs or lows, with lots of West Coast Southern Cal you-know-like-man-kind-of interjections. She was capable—and mind you, she was intelligent—of going on for years about the blandest thing—
“You know it’s like I need eight hours of sleep but I only get about five, you know? I’m like missing three hours of sleep. Because I need about eight hours or I’m not really, you know, I’m not really awake?”
And other times she was quite striking with her ideas:
“My next album is going to be called Pre-Impact Terror, Gil. Remember that plane crash a few weeks ago at O’Hare? Everyone like dies? Well, one of the relatives sued whatever-it-was airlines for $50 million; $25 million for death and damages and another $25 million on their loved one’s behalf for the pre-impact terror they experienced. I mean like you know, that’s art. Pre-Impact Terror. Life is a series of pre-impact terrors, right? You get it? There’s also the sexual connotations…”
Yeah, I’d worked that out, Jasmine. Anyway, Jasmine had arrived and brought one big bag of potato chips which she began to consume all by herself.
Emma had turned the sound down, and switched the channel to escape the visage of Reagan. “How’s it going, Slut?”
“You know, not so good today. Can’t stand it when it’s like hot in my apartment it’s really nasty. I got a new mouse down there.”
Get out of the basement, I suggest.
“Can’t afford anything else,” she whined, between crunches of potato chips. You had to see that basement of a Soho warehouse, walls and floors painted black, doors and windowframes painted blood red, photos of war criminals, engravings of medieval tortures, a library full of torture books, Kraft-Ebing, de Sade, Genet, Burroughs—I only went down there once. Which was enough. I remember our conversation was a variation upon this dialogue:
Jasmine: Want to hear some from my book of Nazi atrocities?
Gil: No Jasmine, not in the least.
Jasmine: Okay, maybe some other time …
Her tables were crates and boards balanced on crates. She had this sofa she’d found thrown out in the street. She’d restuffed it with newspapers. “It’s still a bit wet, you know? I had to drag it home in the rain.” Being with Jasmine always put this question in my mind: How could Emma have ever lived with Lisa and me (happy, fun, positive people generally) and been so miserable, and then lived with Jasmine for a year and been so happy?
“Every day is like scraping bottom,” Jasmine was saying. “The record hasn’t made any money at all. Scrapings, it’s always scrapings.”
Your next one will do better, I bet.
“Dregs,” she said, putting a chip in her mouth, “I’m so tired of dregs, you know?”
Want something to drink, Jaz?
“You gotta start calling me Slut, Gil.”
Okay: Slut.
“I mean, I gotta get used to it, you know? Ever think about changing your name as an actor?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “You know it’s like I walk down the street? Someone yells, hey Slut, you know and I think, fuck off buddy, but he’s like one of my fans.”
You’ll get used to it.
The phone rang and Janet answered it. Kevin in pantomime and whispers hissed “I’m not here, I’m not here…”
Janet cleared her throat. “No, he’s not here … No, I don’t even know a Kevin. Thank you, bye.” She hung up. “Kevin, why did you give out the number if you didn’t want people to call you here?”
“I wanted to be called, I just didn’t want to talk to him. I wanted to see if he’d call me. That was Nicholas…” Apparently tonight was another ongoing fight between Nicholas and Kevin. “Now I’m going to go home and ask if he called me and if he says no, trying to act like he doesn’t care what I’m up to, I’m going to confront him. I am.”
Jasmine—Slut, I mean—was halfway through her bag putting handful after handful of potato chips in her mouth robotlike. “Gil, how much did you get for the commercial?”
Three hundred and fifty dollars. For a day’s work.
Emma ran to the TV. “Look, the show’s over…” She turned up the volume again. First up was a carpet outlet ad:… thousands of carpets, thousands and thousands of carpets!
Kevin: “Geez that guy is such a moron—where’d they find those cheap suits he wears? And he also does those TV-appliance store ads.”
Janet flopped down in the beanbag chair. “That’s where Gil’s gonna end up, sugar. He’ll can the theater and do TV ads.”
I’ll have you know that guy makes $1000 a shot, I said. Pay me a thousand bucks an ad and I’ll sell carpets too, thousands and thousands of carpets—
Emma: “Quiet! The next ad’s up…”
It was mine. It starts with Dad walking out his door into his front yard—we hear lawnmowers, birds, children playing. It’s America, all right. You know, it took me fifteen years to purchase my family’s home …
Kevin: “He’s cute, Gil. That’s your daddy? How about Sugar Daddy?”
Everyone sssssshed.
… I think insurance is the wise decision, not just for me and my money …
“No black person,” said Janet, “has ever stepped foot in that neighborhood.”
“The garbagemen?” suggested Emma. A pillow was launched by Janet in Emma’s direction. Jasmine shovelled potato chips into her mouth, staring intently at the screen.
I’m with Garden State Assurance Trust for her sake. His “wife” walks out the door, wiping her hands with an oven cloth and her apron on: Come to dinner darling! she sings.
“Don’t do it,” said Kevin, “she’s no good for you!”
“Where are you, Gil?” asked Janet.
And I do it for my little girl … Here comes the Little Girl, about nine years old, a real pro, her fifteenth commercial, according to her stage mother who was with her on the set. Little Girl rushes in: Daaaaddy!
I’m about to come on, I warn.
And I do it for my boy … (This is me. In a football jersey, ambling up the front walk. I pitch that football to Dads, a nice spiral: Catch, Dad!)
Everyone is in hysterics watching this. Emma is doubled over and Janet is shrieking with laughter. It gets better, I yell.
… and one day it’ll help my son go to college. Father is mussing up my hair, heh heh heh, father and son, football. It’s time for my next great line: Don’t worry Dad, I’m going on a football scholarship! Mom, Dad, and the Little Sister all laugh: hah hah hah hah hah … And now the announcer breaks in: Garden State Assurance Trust … For the whole family.
End of ad. Scorekeepers at home will realize this is football role number three.
Applause all around the room.
Emma laughs, “Brilliant! A masterpiece! We’ve got to get it on videotape. Ask the station for a copy.”
My voice was so high, I said. I don’t have that high a voice—
Everyone: YES YOU DO!
It was like a Mickey Mouse imitation …
Jasmine put down the potato chip bag, shaking her head. “Anyone recognize that family? Is that your mom and dad?”
“A little too white
for me,” sang Janet.
“My father would have hit my mother by now,” said Kevin.
We delighted ourselves by recasting the commercial with Emma as the Little Girl: Daddy daddy, does it cover my psychiatrist’s bills?
Later on:
“Gil,” said Emma, pulling me aside from the conversation and into the kitchen. “Can I ask a question? Why didn’t you invite Betsy to this? I did ask you to invite her.”
She couldn’t make it.
“She’s in publishing. They lead boring lives there; I’m sure she had nothing better to do than be here.”
Okay okay. I didn’t ask her, actually. She wouldn’t fit in and Kevin is an acquired taste, so is Jasmine, Janet can be sharp sometimes and hard-line dykeish and you are much smarter than Betsy and I had this vision of it being socially awkward and weird, that’s all.
“Well okay,” said Emma. “I’ll meet her one of these days. I’m sure she’s a swell person.” Emma was making an effort here and so I felt almost guilty for not asking Betsy. Emma had also noticed once before that Betsy didn’t get invited to my opening-night parties, when there were opening nights. That’s because I always wanted to end up drunk with the cast or go back to the Village with Emma and watch bad TV and not sit up until three a.m. talking about anorexia, herpes, who did what to her at work, her ex-boyfriends, her salary disputes, the new very boring yuppie outfit she’d bought—god, that woman was NOT my style.
Speaking of my opening nights, there were only three others that year. After Bermuda Triangle, I stayed at the Chelsea for the next show, Children of Auschwitz (a real downer based on journals and poems and drawings from young people in concentration camps; I was a reciter). After that I got sent out to a Long Island community theater to do View From the Bridge—not a banner career move but my agent was keeping me working. Odessa, my agent. The one Bonnie got me signed on with. I hated that woman with a passion and … wait, we can’t go into her atrocities here. Let’s just say that for the whole of 1980 she would put her arm around me and say, “Gil, HUHNEY, 1981, I swayre, is gonna be yooooour yeeeeuh.” The last thing I’d done was play F. Scott Fitzgerald in this thing called Aficionados (another stab at trying to make Paris in the ’20s come alive). It was an odd audition.
“My god, Mr. Freeman,” cried the director who was also the writer, “you ARE F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Midwesterm näive! What an accent.”
I really sound that Midwestern?
“You are the incarnation, Mr. Freeman, of an ear of corn! You are Nick Carroway—I see you before the green light, tomorrow we will run faster, waves ceaselessly borne into the … dark night of the, whatever.”
So I got the role. Which was mostly me fighting with the woman who played his wife, Zelda. The central plot turned around Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein getting drunk and screwing while abusing each other, she rides him around like a horse, he boasts he’s the best lover in the world as he passes out—lots of Paris-in-the-’20s squalor. Lots of dialogue like James Joyce walking on and saying: “Gee, Ernest I have this great idea for a modern book!” and Picasso walking on and saying: “Stop! I must paint you all!” Real historical recreation. This gem had closed three weeks before my commercial hit the airwaves.
Anyway, back to my Commercial Debut Party:
“One more thing,” said Emma, about to leave the kitchen with me, “do these jeans look all right?” She spun around and took a step back so I could observe her.
They’re great.
“My butt is as fat as you’ve ever seen it in your lifetime, isn’t it?”
(You know, dear reader, between you and me, yes it was. In the year Emma and I weren’t speaking, she’d gained a little weight. Late-twenties female, perfectly acceptable earthy Italian-American weight—not remotely a turnoff, nothing that required the language of elephantiasis and obesity that Emma invoked.)
“I’m a beached whale. I am not just pear-shaped, I’m the whole goddam orchard down there—”
Give it a rest, Em. You look fine. Now can I ask you a question?
“What?”
I’ve been thinking about my commercial—the all-American kid. And Aficionados where the guy said I was the Midwest Incarnate. Don’t I project anything … dangerous? Exciting? Even a little bit exotic?
“No, not at all.”
Nothing?
“You are the cream of the Midwest, Gil. The guy you take home to Mother.”
But not the guy you take on a dirty weekend to Acapulco.
“Well, yeah, maybe in real life, but onstage you’re pretty clean-cut.” She smiles here, looking away. “You know, you’re a bit of a prude, Gil.”
I AM NOT.
“Come on, let’s go back to the party dying in the living room without us. First I’m changing jeans, though—I’m throwing these fatass WIDE LOAD jeans away. I’m going to buy a corset…” She went to her room to change.
I went into the living room and sat between Kevin and Jasmine. I asked Jasmine if she was free this month to do some work for the theater. We needed a soundtrack to our experimental show and since she was an “audio artist” it would be great if she could do it for us. The money wouldn’t be much—
“Gil, what do you think I make? I make no money at all. I’ll, like, sweep up your theater if you pay me.”
I thought if you made records, you made money.
“Well think again. Dregs, I’m so tired of dregs…”
Emma craned her head out of her bedroom: “Gil? Could you come here a minute, please?”
I went into Emma’s bedroom and she shut the door. I could tell something was wrong.
“While we were sitting out there . .” She sat on the edge of her bed, shaking her head in disbelief. “… I’ve been robbed.”
Robbed? But we were—
“The goddam open window. I opened the gate so the breeze could get in, while I sat there and typed today…” Emma’s desk with all her writing paraphernalia was by the window, which led out onto the fire escape. There was a folding, padlocked grill that Emma always kept locked. But on this scorcher of a day she had opened it as she sat there and worked on poetry. Then there was the party for my commercial. Maybe two hours had elapsed, but that had been long enough for some crook to crawl down the fire escape, reach in, get her typewriter, her clock radio, her cassette tape player, her Instamatic camera, a cheap wristwatch that was lying on her dresser, and a twenty-dollar bill lying near her bed. The burglar must have ransacked her room while one room away the party carried on loudly.
“Gotta give the guy points for audacity,” she said, numb. “My own damn fault. Leaving that gate open. You turn your head for a minute, relax your guard for a moment and POW the City reaches up and…” She trailed off.
You’re not insured, huh?
“Of course not.”
Emma, I’m sorry. I sat beside her on the bed and put my arm around her shoulder.
“I want to blow some street punk away with some big gun, Gil.”
I know you do.
“God. Such cheap old crap too. That typewriter is used and dented and the fraction signs don’t work and…” I know, I know. “And that camera. It’s worth nothing—no pawn shop would give you a ten for it. But the film—my god!” Emma realized the film of Janet’s and her surprise birthday party for Jasmine was still in the camera. “I’ll NEVER get those people together again, behaving themselves … Cock and Jasmine didn’t even hit each other once.”
(I had missed this occasion because of a rehearsal. Jasmine was thirty, so they had thrown her a Happy Twenty-first Birthday party. The band was there, her manager was there, three of Slut’s ex-boyfriends were there, including Cock. When Lisa caught up with me to tell me about her and Jim’s engagement, she told me that Emma had been living it up with Jasmine in Williamsburgh: 1) Emma had gone to a tattoo parlor for a skull-and-crossbones but chickened out, 2) Emma had shaved the sides of her head and sported a mohawk but was so embarrassed that she didn’t go out of the house for a month,
3) Emma had lived with Cock for three weeks when Jasmine went to L.A. for some record-promotion thing, 4) Emma was getting wildly drunk and trying a variety of drugs hanging out with that crowd, and finally, 5) When Jasmine went west, Emma took over some of Jasmine’s phone-sex clients. I had assumed that, in that environment, the celibacy was a thing of the past. That guy Cock. Every suitor’s nightmare: a six-foot-three skinhead bass player with great biceps, a biker tattoo, biker’s boots, looked like the Fascist-dreamboy in leather and an SS cap, a legendary sexual endowment and an IQ off the low end of the scale—a guy if he was any dumber you would have to water him. Every woman’s dream. I wasn’t going to ask about what they were up to because I didn’t want to know.)
Emma was steely: “It’s back for a while to the phone sex, I see. I need a lot of money quick.”
I hate the thought of you having to do that—
“I got no choice. It’s quick cash … see what I mean? In your heart, you’re a prude.” Emma vowed to make the money back in a month and this time buy all new things, nice things, decent typewriter. “And while I’m at it, I’ll get a .45 Magnum too.”
Emma, I said, you don’t get robbed everyday. I’ll take you out tonight. We’ll get drunk. We’ll do bad things. We’ll have an East Village night out.
“You got it.”
8:45 p.m. The St. Mark’s Bar and Grill. Kevin went back to Soho, Janet stayed in to work on an article for the Womynpaper. Jasmine, Emma and I are having double chilled Stolichnaya vodkas, no mixers.
“Soho,” says Jasmine, “if you’re not in a big rich decorated loft, is a cesspool. Third-world living conditions. Dregs, I’m so tired of dregs—”
Get outa here. I’m on Avenue A, stepping over junkies, dodging the gangs, avoiding the drug busts, living in a century-old Puerto Rican slum and you’re handing me SOHO?
“I have mice.”
So? I got rats.
“I got cockroaches. This big.”
I got cockroaches THIS big. They fly around my apartment holding lamps and kitchen implements aloft.
(A favorite New York pastime: the Who-Has-It-Worse game.)
9:30 p.m. The Grassroots Bar.
Emma Who Saved My Life Page 32
