I sit at the bar when the bartender points to a man and tells me the guy wants to buy me a drink. Before I can say yes or no there is a drink in front of me. I taste it and it is weak tea. The man joins me. I put the Chaplin biography in the space between us as armor or as something we can talk about. He is young and blue-eyed and has a mustache he keeps pulling on, keeping his head tucked in at an angle. I wonder if the man’s drink tastes like tea as well.
“Do you like Charlie Chaplin?” I say, holding up my book.
He pulls on his mustache but says nothing.
By this time toothless dancer and me are the only girls at the bar full of men. A guy who could be my father walks in. The toothless dancer flutters over to him, slaps him on the back and grins like they are old friends. This cues the bartender to pour them both a drink and I see that her drink comes out of the same container as mine.
“One more drink for everybody,” Toothless announces suddenly.
“Yay!” the bar men cheer. The Latin man is red in the face and grinning. What seems like moments later there is another cheer and the bartender serves everybody even more drinks and us women even more weak tea.
It’s time for me to dance again.
By the time I am off the platform at 3:00 p.m. the little man can barely stand, and I know he is totally broke because Toothless walks him to the door and slaps him on the back, good-bye. Soon after, everyone leaves and the bar is empty. It’s time to go so I’m gathering my clothes at the end of the day when the toothless dancer approaches me.
“My name’s Doreen …” She smiles.
“Hi …” I say. I’ve never met anyone like her so I am curious.
“You know, you can make a lot of money if you want …”
I want.
“… I’m going uptown to see my agent. Want to come?”
I’m surprised she has an agent, so I go along with her uptown, to an old building in the low forties. It’s the kind of building you’d never know was there unless you were looking for it, shabby inside with peeling paint on the walls. We take a rickety elevator to the fourth floor and her agent’s office, which seems to double as a lingerie shop. There are sparkly bras and panties and pasties spilling out of boxes haphazardly all over the place. He sits at a desk from another century with a slimy cigar stuck in his mouth and the ten or twelve hairs left on his head creeping over from one ear to the other.
“Hey, Doreen,” he sneers, his eyes brightening at the sight of her.
“This is my friend Sonia. She might like to work if you can get her …”
He eyes me. “Yeah, I can get her some work—with the right outfit …”
As he moves to get up I start to back out. When I reach the door I turn and tumble down the stairway and get away as fast as I can.
The next day I find a job frying french fries at Jack in the Box and talk the owner into letting me dress up as a clown to greet the customers.
There is talk of freedom everywhere, but who is free and who is not? I overhear this in the school cafeteria. “I feel sorry for my mother, who never had the chance to work.”
And a bittersweet memory is aroused. I’m seven and sick and tired of having the only mother in the neighborhood who has a job.
“Hey, Ma, how come you work? Don’t you want to stay home with us like other ma’s?”
She gathered me up into her arms, pulling me on the bed. “Are you kidding? AveMaríaPurísima—I wish I could stay home with you kids … nothing would be better for me, but if I don’t work we don’t got enough money to live.”
And now at school I have to listen to girls talk about feminism and how their mothers hadn’t been allowed to live up to their potential. Please!
Seeing the girls at my table toying with their food tumbles me back to the Bronx once again, and Ma struggling to make eight sandwiches out of one can of tuna! Suddenly I need to be around other people more like me. Aretha Franklin comes to my immediate rescue and, draping myself over the jukebox, I play her songs over and over again.
But then I do one better. I eventually go with a Pittsburgh boy who is a student when not in jail for robbing someone. He takes me to Homewood, Pittsburgh’s ghetto, where I feel more at home. Homewood is a ghetto like one I’ve never seen, with private houses, lawns, porches, and barbecue grills in the backyards.
I like his friends. One of them is a barber with a girlfriend and a brand-new baby. They live in a little house and it seems the whole neighborhood, from old ladies to little kids, adores this child because they all come by for a chance to hold little Nikki in the air and to look at her with love, love, love like she is a new Christ. But Nikki’s mother, a girl around my age, is angry all the time, especially at the barber. I don’t know why she’s so mad at him—the barber seems so sweet; he smiles all the time when he’s not dropping down tired from working two jobs. Between being a barber by day and driving a jitney cab by night I figure this guy hardly rests. Still, I watch the young mother seethe because he is not doing enough.
One night my boyfriend and I double-date with them. We meet in a bar and have peach brandies and milk, then go to my boyfriend’s parents’ house for dinner. I am surprised that his mother is a doctor and his father a lawyer. The world is upside down and mixed up when a doctor and lawyer give birth to a college student who becomes a jailbird because he likes to steal, isn’t it? The mother serves us chicken, and even without seeing the packaging I know it’s Kentucky Fried, which means she’s putting on this dinner party under duress. Then I see that she is a little afraid of my boyfriend! Why is she afraid of her son? My boyfriend does seem a little crazy, but he tells me it’s really an act to keep him from becoming someone’s “boyfriend” in jail.
Right after dinner the poor barber falls asleep, making his already infuriated girlfriend become even more unhinged with outrage. What will be their way out?
I have one foot in Homewood and another foot in school, and I suddenly feel I must grow a third foot to keep in New York, where a bunch of young Puerto Ricans called the Young Lords had taken over a church right across the street from Grandmother’s house. All this talk of freedom reminds me of them. They were militant, angry, and wanted to give out free breakfast to poor kids just like the Black Panthers did in California. They set garbage on fire. My brother-in-law, Bill, said they were stupid to mess up their own neighborhood even more than it already was, that they should’ve messed up a rich neighborhood. “Hoodlums,” said my uncle Ángel. “Look what they’ve done to the neighborhood, like it wasn’t dirty enough.”
But what flourishes up in my mind is that these Young Lords also said we should be proud of being Puerto Rican. Did they mean my family, too? Should I be proud of having a father like mine? And am I supposed to like “machismo” and letting your husband throw coconuts at your head if he wants to?
I’m slipping and sliding among these three worlds when my jailbird/student from Homewood starts telling me what to do and how to dress. I tell him to go jump in the lake and drop dead and he gets mad enough to strike me, making me bounce against the fence we are standing near. As I rebound, that old white-hot fury washes over me and I strike back with force coming up from my toes and shooting through my arms to my fists to his face. The last things I see before I connect with his nose are his beautiful brown eyes widening in surprise.
When the world falls back into place and I see the fence and the walkway and other students instead of a curtain of red, he is walking me back to the dorm, glad to be rid of me, I think.
But I am left with anger. Anger becomes my companion, sitting up on my shoulder at all times, entering a room before I do.
The next day I skulk in to read the notices in the hall of the Drama Department and become annoyed that I have been assigned a show. Why am I annoyed? Didn’t I come to this school to be an actress? Reading on, I see that I am to be in a show called Godspell and wonder what that word means, anyway. The show is to be developed by the cast. Aha! I knew it would be something like that. The reason
I am in it is that it hasn’t been created yet! Perfect—a part in a play that doesn’t exist. I should’ve known.
Why couldn’t I be cast in a play about life in America? I gloomily answer my own question. Because spics like me aren’t part of “life in America,” at least as far as I can tell. I can’t be in plays like Our Town because we don’t live in “Our Towns.” We live in “Our Barrios”—secret neighborhoods no one knows about but us.
I decide to get a cup of coffee and listen to Aretha Franklin for a quick pick-me-up at the cafeteria, but a sudden cold rainstorm forces me into the student union. Doubly pissed now, because I’m cold and wet, I sit and glance at the television. Something on the screen startles me. It’s a favorite actor, Burt Lancaster, old now, counting from one to ten as the numbers flash over his head. Then there is a zany animation scored with a song sung by a rock-and-roll voice I can’t quite place. I stay and watch until adorable actor James Earl Jones appears and astounds me by reciting the alphabet in a deliberate manner as the letters flash over his head. I think I am watching a show that teaches lip-reading.
But I am really taken aback by the street scene depicted because it reminds me of every neighborhood I have ever lived in.
And then a beautiful black couple appears. He is handsomeness personified with a mustache. She has a smile that goes on for miles.
I am amazed when I realize that in all the years I watched television in the South Bronx I hardly ever saw any people of color. But I am watching them now—on a show called Sesame Street.
First rehearsal of this unwritten show Godspell—five girls and five boys dressed as clowns act out Bible stories in a chain-link-fence enclosure—like a schoolyard. We all laugh and joke and the director directs nothing at all, except to tell us to act out the stories in any way we want to. I like screwing around onstage. Finally we force the lead clown, Jesus, onto a box, spread his arms out, and tie them to the fence with red ribbons. When our Jesus cries out, “Oh God, I’m busted,” I zoom back in time to the Bronx, and sad-eyed cassock-wearing Father Fitzgerald and church, but I am struck that with all the religious instruction I suffered through, I had never heard any of these cool stories—except for one about Christ and Mary Magdalene, the whore. During rehearsal it becomes an exchange between a blues-playing musician and a flower child. The show needs some rock and roll and the director recruits a family of red-haired young brothers from his hometown who compose rock music with lyrics from hymns everyone has heard of but me.
My costume is a dress, a headband with a feather in it, and a fringed bra worn on the outside. On opening night I feel free and loose and happy to find a gag toy in my pocket put in by the costume designer. It’s one of those party favors that makes a noise and unfurls as you blow into it. Looking around I notice that we all have gag toys in our pockets, which we find and improvise with on the spot during the show.
And with the final component in place—the audience—a miracle happens. They laugh at everything we do.
It’s the end of our first performance. I’m at the back of the house with fellow actor Robin Lamont, a blonde girl always sweet, nice, and somehow true. She is usually dressed in a man’s white T-shirt and raggedy jeans, but now, like me, she is dressed in a clown outfit. We look at each other and break into each other’s arms, flabbergasted by the depth of feeling the show arouses in the audience and in us. My mind is flooded with ideas and connections—the harder the audience laughs, the more sorrow they will feel in the end! To register despair, make a joke about it!
Then it’s great guns going full blast, four performances at the university, the director telling us he’s taking the show to New York and who wants to come? I jump at the chance, Robin, too, and before we know it we are in a dirty little theater on the Lower East Side. New Carnegie Mellon alumni actors I sort of knew come on board. One of them is a beautiful girl with long red hair, whose confidence I envied the few times I came across her at school.
Rehearsal! Performance! Am I flying? I think I am! My feet aren’t touching the ground—I must be flying! Wait—am I naked? Yes … no … I feel naked and bold even though I have clown clothes on. I look at the audience and think, hey—I dare you not to look at me, suckers!
After the last performance we hang around for a meeting with producers and composers and I register real-life drama unfolding before me: the director holding on to his partner’s hands for security, and the disappointment in the faces of the actors who will be replaced. I know that I am part of the winning team, and though I don’t know why, I am not surprised because I am not scared.
Old and new cast members come together in giving the new composer as difficult a time as possible. We want confusion onstage! Spontaneity and craziness is where it’s at! We are even irritated by the producers’ insistence on coming to rehearsals.
“Why couldn’t they just wait until opening night to see the show, like everybody else?” our new Jesus quips.
I am given a sexy song that I get to sing straight to the audience. Just the kind of stuff I’ve been flirting with and doing in the show before real music was involved. But can I sing? No! But I can make believe I sing—so I do!
After rehearsals the cast visits Robin’s parents’ brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. I’m shocked at its beauty, with a recreation room on the first floor, a parlor with a baby grand piano on the second, living areas with beautiful sofas and chairs, a lovely patio, and even a terrace off her parents’ room. I have never seen such luxury, not even at my father’s old boss’s house. We all hang out there, even sleep over sometimes, and one day I wait for Robin to come out of the shower and I look at the way she is dressed—white man’s T-shirt, army surplus jeans, homemade macramé belt, cheap fabric old lady sandals, just the way she dresses at school.
“How come you didn’t tell me you were rich, Robin?”
“Huh?” She laughs and proceeds to dry her long blonde hair by flipping her head back and forth so violently I think I hear her brains rattle. The cast becomes inseparable at her house and many move in while we rehearse, but how do I tell my parents I want to join them?
“I’m doing a show,” I casually mention to Ma.
“¿Qué, qué?” my mother asks.
“It’s part of the schoolwork I do …”
“Pero, are you going back to school?”
“I don’t have to be in Pittsburgh to be in school. This is part of my schoolwork. They are going to pass me anyway.”
“Oh …”
Then to my father.
“I’m going to stay downtown with some friends …”
“¿Qué?”
“To be much closer to my job …”
“Oh …”
“I’ll be safer …”
“Ajá …”
And it’s as easy as that. I could’ve told them I was going to keep house for seven dwarfs and they’d say, “Okay.” And why wouldn’t they, really? I’m high on rehearsals and want to leave my family behind with their boring problems. Forget them—I couldn’t share the Godspell experience with them any more than I could smoke a joint with my grandmother.
I feel high as hell without drugs in rehearsals, in a mental state I have never been in before. Keyed up, poised, and alert for something to happen, though I don’t even know what it is. I receive information like a plant, by osmosis. I make unconscious connections between choreography, harmonies, and gags. My mind is full of every thought I ever had, though specifically I think of nothing. I find ways to do things in rehearsals while I wonder how I ever came to those solutions. They just seem to happen naturally. In the evenings my mind is full of unarticulated questions. I am exhausted.
“Sonia …” It’s Robin calling out to me in disbelief one night during dinner, as I plummet into sleep with a ham sandwich in my mouth. But I have to sleep quickly and hard so I can sort out ideas while I dream. I begin to know when notions become intuitively clear, and the best way to perform something makes itself known to me through no efforts of my own.
&nb
sp; Every night, entering from the back of the theater, I sing in a sexy, syrupy Mae West way. A man looks in his program so I get right in his face and say, “It ain’t in ya program …” I see a priest and say, “Ya colla’s on backwards, Fadah,” and I find it perversely satisfying when, just for a moment, he actually moves to adjust it. I love to rip the covers off people and put them on the spot.
I expand my part during the run. Suddenly I’m peeling down my sweat socks as if they are stockings, or straddling the edge of the cyclone fence, and shimmying up and down the end of it like a stripper on a curtain.
My mother, sister, and brothers come to see Godspell at least once, not like Robin’s parents and their friends who come several times a week. But the theater is very foreign and expensive and difficult for my family, and the story of Jesus Christ told by clowns is too weird for Ma to bear, and besides it makes me uncomfortable that I am happy to see their backs as they make their way to the train after a performance.
Little Eddie comes to the show. His face is eager, his eyes owlish in aviator glasses and masses of curl sprouting from his head, and I remember the arguments he and his dad got into because of the length of his hair. But why is he still living at home? Doesn’t he want to fly high and get away from the family, like me? I give a great performance that night.
“You sang flat!” he teases.
“I did not!
“You did, too! You telling me?”
Though he should know—by this time he is an accomplished musician, a professional, playing with greats like Mongo Santamaría and Gato Barbieri. I don’t know if I sang flat or not, but I think I was good, and I know he thought so, too. But how can I share more with him? He is part of the old world I want to get away from—his loyalty to his mother, Bon Bon, and his physical closeness to home proves that.
I don’t detain him when he comes because I am extra eager to return to visiting bars, then later to Robin’s house with all the cast, to drink Constant Comment tea and smoke and listen to music. Besides, who cares about anything that happened before Godspell? Not me. Ha-ha! I have freed myself to do whatever I want to do—the show is successful, I am successful, and I don’t need anybody to tell me so.
Becoming Maria Page 20
