But, I’m telling you, it’s truly difficult to leave the stage. For so long people ask, friends call up: What are you up to? And you tell them I’m mad this week because I’m Hamlet, or I’m drunk and homosexual this week because I’m Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and next month I’ll be nobody at all in an evening of Beckett pieces. Then one day you put all those people away, all the masks, all the gestures and reserves of carefully processed emotion, and people ask you what role are you working on this month … and for once it’s your own life, the hardest role of the bunch. You gotta say the lines with a straight face. I was not a great actor. For me acting was pretending I was someone; learn the accent, develop a little shtick, put on the makeup, use every trick I knew and half the time you’d believe I was who I said I was. But you look at a Reisa Goldbaum, someone with a natural gift, and you see that she can reach down into a deep and rich humanity and draw up a true-to-life Williams heroine, a Greek tragic figure, an Ophelia, a Neil Simon one-liner queen. I put on the trappings, she had it in her heart. There was only one role in my heart, only one in my repertoire that could draw upon everything I had, only one I could pull off, in New York or goddam Peoria: myself. I think it was time I dusted off Gilbert Anthony Freeman, gave him a limited run. Let’s see if the show can last.
But first, a few Saturday night goodbye calls:
“Oh my god, it’s Gil, it’s Gilbert Freeman!” screamed Valene in a little girl voice, like a teenybopper. “Can we have your autograph? Oh pleeeease,” and then she fell into giggling.
“Come here,” said Mrs. Jackson, preparing to give me a hug. “Now look here on my cash register. You know how I hate junk on my cash register so I wouldn’t put this here if I didn’t want it here, ’cause you know how I hate junk on my cash register…” Mrs. Jackson had cut out the Daily News review and taped it to her cash register; my name was underlined. “Good to see ya, darlin’. You come back to talk to all the little people—”
No, no, you’re the Big People, I promise.
“You want your breakfast special with the runny eggs?” said Mrs. Jackson. “On the house, on the house, sit down there … Valene get that pot for me, it’s gonna burn the coffee.”
Mr. Jackson dashed from the kitchen, patting me on the shoulder as he passed, “Well well Mr. Broadway star, come back to see us later on tonight, huh?”
Yes I—
“Sorry, gotta go, son. Gotta run get some butter.”
Mrs. Jackson explained as he ran out the door that the refrigerator was working about half the time and no one could get a repairman. She dealt with a small line of customers.
“Here’s your breakfast. I ’spect my usual 200% tip now, remember.” Valene set the plate down and was about to fly off to another order.
I’m leaving town for a while Valene. I’m sort of saying goodbye.
“Goin’ to Hollywood?”
No, just on tour with a play—
“Sorry honey, gotta get this order…” And she was off to do her job. It was a busy night. It came to me: New York will go on without me. It will not stop. It will continue to pulse and struggle and live and breathe through the nights, like Jackson’s, open 24 hours a day, a world of noise and new faces and new characters and new things to talk about and not a helluva lot of time for nostalgia and maybe no time at all for people who thought they ought to move elsewhere.
“Here’s some more coffee, Gil,” said Valene, swishing by. “I see you’re thinking and staring out into space again. You must be thinkin’ ’bout my BIG TIP.” And then she ran to the call of another customer.
Valene’s benediction: “You gonna miss this breakfast special, Gilbert. I know they can’t do that right in Chicago.”
Valene, wherever you are, when people ask me what I miss most about New York, I always say: Jackson’s Diner, 54th Street, the $1.99 breakfast special. And that is no joke.
Then it was Sunday, the official goodbye-to-Emma day. I decided I would take a morning walk on what looked to be an Indian summer morning, a final stroll around the Brooklyn of our lost journals and memories.
I started at the Heights, the tree-lined streets and rich people sleeping in late, and then after a lengthy sit on the Promenade to look at Lower Manhattan, the hundreds of skyscrapers, the nameless buildings for the nameless jobs, those still-miraculous bridges spanning the East River, I moved on to our old stomping grounds, South Brooklyn. Someone was in our old apartment. There was an out-of-season snowflake taped to the window, a family with a child was there now. I had heard somewhere that Sal’s had changed hands so I didn’t go in search of it for fear of seeing it yuppified into a Parisian cafe or worse, torn down—no, it will remain in memory forever serving up the Earlybird Special, an infinity of 4 a.m.’s strung together by late-night chatter, waitress laughter, the aroma and sounds of the sizzling grill, frozen in that blue fluorescent glow. I walk along to the Flatbush Avenue Extension and the city within the city is awakening—there’s a man by the pay phones talking loudly, attracting attention: “You put down my name … you put it on the books right now, yessir…” He clutched a beer can in a sodden brown paper bag. He was fortyish, in a T-shirt, Cuban, I think. “Lester T. Maron, M-A-R-O-N—you put it down because I’m going to kill the son of a bitch. I’m an honest man, I’m telling you…” Then a police car pulled up; the crowd, me included, stepped back. “Now Lester,” began the officer, getting out of the patrol car. “You know you’re not going to kill him, we been through this before…” Lester struck a noble pose: “Lester T. Maron, M-A-R-O-N, and I’m just telling you before I do it…” Harmless, after all. I walk on to the Donut House (one of a million on Flatbush, the doughnut capital of America, I bet). I order a coffee regular—the nectar of the gods! dispensing that sweet, taut fix on the morning—and a crumbly cake doughnut and the Haitian proprietor brings it to me: “Halloo my friend,” followed by this unreally white smile. His relatives are already spreading blankets on the sidewalk out front, an array of homemade trinkets, jewelry, Caribbean wood statues, incense, a few Christian relics, a little voodoo. Two young boys, ebony black, all arms and legs, crouch in the morning sun as the noise of the street gains strength, a loud radio plays to their side, an island beat—zouk music, there’s an LP for sale on the blanket. “Skashah the beegest theeng in Haiti meester,” said one boy, all smiles, all hope for a purchase. “Used record cheap for you.” Five bucks. Okay, sure. Now I’m walking down Flatbush with a Haitian record under my arm, past the Chinese laundry, past the Greek coffee shop next to the Korean fruit stand—three hours in Brooklyn and you touch the world!—and I stop in Franco’s Pizza for a cold drink—it’s 110 degrees in there, the ovens are going. “They say it’s getting hotter every year,” said the old man in the tomato-smudged white pizza-man suit behind the counter. He brings my Coke in a big Pepsi cup. “Them damn spray cans, those antiperspirants, that’s what’s doing it,” added the man. “Hey Willie,” he went on, talking to the man in the postman’s uniform, dumping salt on a slice of pizza. “Watch it with that salt, it’ll raise your blood pressure.” Willie chuckled: “If I thought it’d raise something else, I’d put it on that too!” The old men laugh. Ah Brooklyn, you eat, you drink, you sweat, you wither poor fragile, neurotic Manhattan across the river. And now I’m rounding back to the subway, back to my Upper West Side tastefully decorated apartment with the gray carpet that matches the walls, my mauve bedroom. Church is out in Park Slope. I see a black woman walking with her tiny six-year-old son in his robin’s-egg blue three-piece suit. Mother is tremendous, rocking back and forth as they walk home from the service, a great maternal hulking form that has no doubt been racked by all the injustice and loneliness the American city can provide, but look at that walk, look at the head unbowed—does she know a white-boy transient from the Midwest considers her the bedrock of this nation? She walks on holding that little boy’s hand in her orange-pink Sunday dress with yellow lacy trim and a big white spring-garden hat with plastic marigolds affixed. You better leave your F
ifth Avenue sense of fashion and sophisticated eye back in Manhattan where it belongs, because in Brooklyn, my friend, it will prevent you from seeing the human heart.
Bye-bye, Brooklyn.
“Is booze gonna make this worse or better?” said Emma, after I arrived at her empty apartment on Sunday afternoon.
Worse, I said, if we get drunk. But one drink would be good.
“I have the dregs of five bottles to finish up, that’s why I ask,” she said, going over to a packing box on top of which five bottles stood. “How about a Kahlua and Curcao, hm?”
I think we can do without vomiting on our last day together.
“Could be symbolic,” she sang.
We drank a mixture of peppermint schnapps and Kahlua and a touch of Grand Marnier … in Emma’s leftover skim milk. It took you ten years, I said to her, but it seems you finally mixed a halfway good-tasting drink.
“It’s not bad at all,” she said between sips.
Do you remember that Bicentennial beach trip and all the—
“Aaiii!” she screamed, plugging her ears. “We agreed. No nostalgia, no looking back. Just the future, just progress and new directions. Today we’re going to keep the level of conversation to Soviet work slogans, okay?”
Okay.
“I should tell you what I almost was going to do.”
This is your stay-in-New-York plan?
“Well part of it. I should tell you … no, let’s save it, save it for wherever we’re going.” She looked to the window and outside it was gray and overcast but not rainy. “What happened to the sun? It was nice earlier.”
City Island again, I suggested.
“Been there. We’ve never gone … shit, where’s the subway map?” She got up to poke through a box full of odds and ends. “There’s two subway lines we didn’t do. The A line all the way out to Rockaway Park and that C extension thing.”
I liked the C. We’d never ridden on the C.
“They’re both out on the same line really, out to Far Rockaway.”
Nope, never did go there, I said.
“Let’s do that. That’ll take the day. And I want to see the Atlantic. Later next week I’ll see the Pacific and that will seem very strange.”
Maybe there’s a poem in there somewhere.
“Yes,” said Emma facetiously, “to be included in my next collection, Emma’s Ocean Poems. Behold the sea / It is so green …”
Sorry I said anything.
And out the door we went, Emma composing doggerel sea poems:
“Let us go down to the sea in subways—yes, we see here Gennaro reflecting modern technology in the form of the epic—Let us go down on ships in the sea … no, Let us go down on men in ships …”
I should end this here and say we never got to Far Rockaway. I should be clever and literary and say the line was shut down and we had ridden all the trains in the New York City subway system but the C, and hence we never never got to Far Rockaway, and (swelling strings:) life was like that too, was it not? So often in this world you don’t get to that place that sounds so beautiful, seems as if it would be paradise, solve all your problems … Emma and I never loved one another, she never (well so far) got to be a major poet, I never got to be a famous actor really, we never really got to Far Rockaway. Unfortunately, this is my life and we DID get to Far Rockaway. There’s a lot to be said for never getting to Far Rockaway, I am here to tell you.
“Where the hell are we? This is taking forever.”
There are only local trains on Sunday, Em.
“It’s been an hour and we’re at Euclid Avenue. Where is it on the map?”
We found it. Two-thirds there.
“Now that is a name to conjure with.”
What?
“Far Rockaway. It took some poetic sensibility to decide to name the area known as Rockaway that was farthest out Far Rockaway. They usually do East Rockaway, or something boring like that.”
Yeah.
One A train went to somewhere called Lefferts Boulevard and the other A train went to Broad Channel where we would transfer to the elusive C. After Kennedy Airport and the stop for Aqueduct Racetrack the train (not under the ground now) goes up on stilts and crosses Jamaica Bay. Now this is a real Unvisited Attraction of New York—this rattling, wobbling, self-disintegrating train teetering on this rickety bridge for a mile over the expanse of Jamaica Bay. I’ve never seen an equal thrill on mass transportation (save for the railingless Williamsburgh Bridge crossing, but that’s death-defying mass transit and this was sightseeing).
“We’re all gonna die,” said Emma. “I’m surprised they haven’t used this Jamaica Bay business in a disaster movie yet.”
There were sailboats out on this still, overcast day, drizzle now coming down. Everywhere was marshland and there were long-legged birds in clumps of grass, storks or something (I don’t know birds), and the clattering train scattered a flock of ducks and they took off over the glassy bay, just for a few yards, and settled down again, causing ripples to spread out over the calm surface.
“The day is like wide water, without sound,” said Emma. “Except for the subway train, I mean.”
Something told me that wasn’t an original line.
Emma smiled at me. “It is, in point of fact, mine, but it has been traditionally misattributed to Stevens for some time now.”
Then the train approached this island causeway and a station out in the middle of nowhere, Broad Channel. The conductor announced through static and mumble that this was the last stop, change here for the A and the C for Far Rockaway. We got out of the train and stood on the platform, looking at whom we had for company.
“Pretty run-down looking lot, huh?” said Emma, a bit chilled, sidling closer. “This is still New York, isn’t it? This island. Ought to be New Jersey, some old fishing port on the shore that has gone to seed.”
There were two teenage boys who looked bored, an old woman who kept going to the edge of the platform to spit, a young fat girl who stared to the vanishing point of the train tracks wanting the next train to arrive before the boys had a chance to remind her she was fat, and old men, those salty beach-type of old men, ex-fishermen maybe, or perhaps tenants of the welfare hotels. There were a lot of faded hotels on these ex-resort beaches that the city used to house homeless and derelict people—it always seemed the old people got sent to the beach hotels. Coney Island was the most striking example. It was possible, I guess, to have spent one’s youth living it up when these resorts were thriving, when these fishing villages were prosperous, and then to have been sent back there, old and penniless, to fade away with the landmarks of your era.
“Let’s go to Rockaway Park first, and save Far Rockaway for last,” said Emma as the C creaked into the station.
These elevated trains out on the sandy banks across Jamaica Bay were really in rotten shape; the mist and the salt rusted everything and the train squealed and made unbearable noises as rust met rust, wheels didn’t turn smoothly, and the stations were the least modernized as it was a lost cause to keep them nice. The stations were graffitied halfheartedly, the signs announcing the stops were torn down or so erased in spray paint as not to exist, perhaps a comment from the young people who had to grow up there. The train came to its terminus at Rockaway Park, and we got out to walk to the beach.
“Ah the Atlantic,” said Emma, sighing. “The sun sets in the Pacific, you know. Imagine a sunset over something like this every day if I want to see it. Just drive out to the rocky cliffs and sit back and look.”
Ha, Palo Alto isn’t exactly on the shore.
“Yeah but I could get to the shore in a car faster in California than I can get to the Atlantic by subway here. The mountains too, Gil. Yosemite and redwoods right in my backyard.”
Yosemite is in your backyard the way Washington D.C. is in our backyard, Emma. California is not the size of Brooklyn.
“I want to drive places. It’s un-American to be confined to buses and subways. I want freeways, freeways I c
an speed on. I want convertibles. New York is the goddam L train, California is wind in my hair, the top down, sunshine. Look at this shit.”
I didn’t know which shit she referred to, the boarded-up beach shops, the trash-strewn strip of sand, residue of oil spills toward the shoreline, the reeking public toilet under the veranda you viewed the beach from.
“The weather. This drizzle. It doesn’t drizzle in Palo Alto.”
Oh it does too, come off it.
Emma looked out to the horizon, vague though it was. “No, there’s only sunshine in the Golden West, I won’t hear otherwise. Let’s go inside somewhere.”
We got a bagel at this bakery (I had heard the best bagels in New York City—no paltry claim—were in this bakery along the main drag of Rockaway Park and IT IS TRUE), and then we found a diner place and had a wonderful, life-restoring cup of coffee, a big round mug you could warm your hands with. There are no bagels out west, I warned; the Cult of the Diner is East Coast.
“Yeah but the Cult of the Truck Stop, which I like even better, is Western. Would you stop sticking up for this place? I’m trying to leave New York and not be homesick as hell and nostalgic—and I love New York as you well know—and you’re not helping me. You should pile on abuse.”
I’d stay if you stayed, I said. Maybe not realizing it until I said it myself.
Emma didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “Don’t tempt me.”
I could be talked back into staying, and I bet you could too. In fact, I bet if—
“NO,” she interrupted firmly. “I’m all packed. I’m going to school. True, I’m going to be sitting in some West Coast pretentious poetry seminar with some twenty-one-year-old simp criticizing my poetry, some pretentious professor telling me to restructure every poem I write—”
Emma Who Saved My Life Page 48
