Birds like me and Angie roost on Manhattan’s somewhat cheaper, industrial fringes, which in our case is the west teens. Way, way west. However, we’re lucky enough to be on the ground floor of a soot-streaked tenement. Hey, 150 years of grime lends a unique patina to the brick, an architectural style we call brownstain. It’s near enough to the corner to have a storefront, which is where we live. Used to be a soda fountain, and when we signed on it still looked like one inside.
Nowadays the marble soda bar along the living room is an open kitchen and the back, off the storeroom, is the bedroom. We partitioned half of the main room into Angie’s and my studios, and the front where booths still sit in bay shop windows is the living room. We frosted the huge front glass panels halfway to the ceiling for privacy. Metal grating shadows a diamond pattern on the frosted glass from the outside, just to keep folks from throwing a trash can into our living room during the next blackout. What had been a really cool black and white tile floor was destroyed, but a yellow pine floor lay beneath, which after a titanic effort and a bunch of polyurethane now looks like butterscotch.
Yeah, we know it wasn’t too bright sinking moola and effort into a place that isn’t ours. But how else are we—a couple of freelancers—going to get the apartment of our dreams without a sizable down payment? You can only imagine the look a loan officer gives you when you say that you freelance in used taxidermy. He doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
I arrived home at four-thirty in the afternoon, just dodging the worst of New York’s rush hour because I was going against the flow. I got a space right in front of my building, a feat roughly comparable to a suburbanite finding a space next to the handicapped spots at Sears on a Saturday morning during a white sale.
There are basically two kinds of people who live in New York. There are those who take cabs to work, park their Land Rovers in garages, have their laundry “done,” and buy their doorman a cashmere scarf for Christmas. The kind found in Woody Allen movies who really aren’t affected by the mundane urban complications encountered by those of us who take the subway and have to brave the opening of our own doors.
The vast majority—myself notable, I like to think, among them—has to put up with a lot of crap. We live in a city governed not by laws but by penalties. Every day New York sticks it to you somehow. There’s Saturday at the Wash-O-Mat fighting with Broom Hilda in a housedress who’s holding on to a dryer for half an hour just to dry one sock while my pile of wet laundry and I cool our heels. Sunday you can’t get the game on TV because an errant backhoe cut the cable. Monday you tangle with an impotent MetroCard at a subway turnstile; Tuesday the newspaper machine robs you; Wednesday you spend an hour looking for a parking space; Thursday you slip on and almost fall into a pile of stray vomit. And Friday you get a ticket from the sanitation department because a passerby tucked a newspaper into your metal-recycling trash can. It’s one kick in the teeth after another. I’m sure suburbanites have their sundry mishaps at the strip mall, food court, or waiting for tee times, but nobody can deny New Yorkers have more than their fair share of hassles.
We’re a stoic lot. That is to say, New Yorkers don’t get mad, they get even. We do what it takes to stick it to the city or someone else to offset these penalties, usually in some sleazy, compensatory way. Cops might eat free at the deli and offer protection by their presence. Firemen might drink free at the bars that pass fire-code inspections despite basements overflowing with oily rags and loose wiring. Petty criminals jump subway turnstiles, and the defiantly indigent randomly harass commuters out of sheer perversity.
Me? When a newspaper box rips me off one day, I prop it open the next day so a local entrepreneur can make off with the rest. When I get a parking ticket, I move my car to a legal spot, take a Polaroid, and plead not guilty by mail. Hey, even if it doesn’t get me out of the penalty, at least the city loses whatever it anticipated in the cost of processing my plea. And when I need a parking space at my apartment, I establish my own parking rules.
For the price of a cordless drill, I park with impunity in front of my abode. A signpost directly between my building and the adjoining warehouse has a LOADING ZONE—NO STANDING 7 AM TO 7 PM MON–SAT sign pointing up the block. The sign mounted below it, pointing in front of my building, says NO PARKING HERE TO CORNER. An absurd sign, which if posted in front of some guy’s trailer outside Kalamazoo would surely result in someone going postal at the local Parking Violations Bureau. Instead, I simply remove the offending sign when I get home and put it back up when I leave. Hey, it’s part of the American dream to have a parking space in front of your home, practically part of the Bill of Rights. While my block isn’t heavily trafficked, I suppose some locals may have noticed my handiwork. But New Yorkers—every blessed one of them part mobster at heart—don’t rat.
I unlocked the front door to my apartment and sensed Angie wasn’t home by the cigarette smoke hanging in the air.
“Otto!” I yelled, hefting the crow onto the soda counter. “You’re smoking!”
“Ah, vhat you do!” Otto tossed aside the curtain leading to the back workshop. “My God,” he gasped at the crow. “Eetz good, eh?” He stepped up and slapped the bell jar, then took a step back and tweaked his sharp little beard, scrutinizing my acquisition.
“You were smoking in the house, Otto. Bad. No smoking in the house.”
“I dunno. Eet not lookink.” Otto was still squinting at the crow, his heavily wrinkled face scrunched in deep thought. “Maybe ve must new vood, eh? Bird maybe new vood.”
I stepped up to my little Russian wacko and grabbed him by his chinny chin chin.
“No smoking in the house! Backyard.” We’ve got a patch of soot out back just for him.
“Vhat smoke?” He threw out his hands. He gave me his puppy look, like I should be ashamed of swatting him over the nose with a newspaper.
“C’mon, you nincompoop,” I snorted, waving him to follow me outside to the car.
“I dunno. Vhat ninipoop?”
Angie’s a freelance jeweler, so Otto helps her with her piecework—soldering, polishing, etc. And he fixes up some of my taxidermy—combing, cleaning, mounting, painting, etc. He’s what you’d call an old-world, Soviet-refugee artisan, as handy with a brush as with a rotary hobby tool. More important, he’s old-world cheap, though often very annoying. Angie discovered him in the subway back when she commuted to a diamond-setting job on 47th Street. On a crowded subway platform, he’d assemble one of those suitcases on folding legs that contained a traveling workshop. He billed himself as Otto Figs It. Wail You Weight and actually came to do brisk business soldering brooch pins, adjusting watch bands and eyeglasses, sewing stray dangling coat buttons, and tightening loose ring settings. But after shooing him out a few times, the cops decided to bust him one morning. Angie came forward, bailed him out, and paid his fine. He had no money to repay her, so the post-Soviet gnome was indentured to help Angie with piecework jewelry. As it happened, he also demonstrated a talent for primping used taxidermy. After his debt was paid, well, I guess you’d have to say we’d gotten attached to him, like a barn cat.
Within the hour, Otto and I had everything unloaded and the trailer folded once more into the Lincoln’s trunk. When we got back inside and Otto had a chance to inspect the new stuff, he became riveted by the possibilities posed by the bobcat with the missing butt.
“Garv, ve must maybe special. Ket, eetz good, eh? Maybe, ket, eet out come vater, for bird, eh? Maybe, Garv, ket in mouth of great large bear. Great large bear eat ket, eh?”
“Tree stump. Cat from tree stump.” I handed him a cup of coffee. “All these antlers, caribou. Clean. You clean antlers. Understand?”
Otto looked aghast. “Yes, of course. But ket, eet maybe in small car, eh?” He flashed his stainless-steel Soviet-era dentistry at me. “Very amusink, eh? Keety ket in keety cat car?” He burst out laughing, slapping his knee. His booming laugh is very literal: haw, haw, haw—
The door slammed. Angie was home.
>
“Yay!” She dropped her bags and threw her arms around me. “My favorite birthday present: my boyfriend! What’s with him?” She jerked a thumb in Otto’s direction. He was still in the grips of hilarity.
“Hiya, kiddo.” I gave her a kiss. “He’s out of his tiny, infinitesimal mind, that’s what.”
She tossed her coat over a caribou rack. “Wow, lotta stuff you got.”
“Ket, eet maybe in balloon . . .” Haw, haw, haw . . .
“Otto, did you finish that polishing?” Angie sniffed the air. “Otto, no smoking in the house!”
Otto stopped laughing. “Polishing. Of course, yes, I polish. Ket, eet very good, yes?”
I hooked Angie’s arm. “One of these days, if we can afford it, one of us is going to kill this evil little man. Bury him in the backyard.”
“Yangie, maybe I go to smoke, eh?” Otto tromped back behind the curtain. We heard the back door creak and slam.
I wheeled Angie in front of the bird. “Happy birthday.”
“Oh, Garth.” She gasped. “It’s fabulous!”
I could tell she really liked it.
“How old do you think it is?” Her green eyes brightly admired the specimen, turning the jar on the counter.
“Probably done in the forties by a bird fancier. Too nice to have been done by a hobbyist—Dudley the fastidious exception.” I cocked my head and admired the bird’s hunched stance, partially spread wings, and open beak. An apt posture for the vociferous crow.
She looked closely into the bell jar. “Looks like he’s mounted on cedar root, to keep the bugs out, and under glass to keep the dust off. And a good heavy hardwood base to keep it from getting knocked to the floor. Perfect, sugar, perfect. I love it.” Angie brushed her short blond hair from her face and carried the bell jar over to her other crow, the black one, wings spread and mounted on a spooky-looking branch I found in Washington Square Park. I’d salvaged him from the remainder of a tourist museum diorama on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.
“A bit smaller than the last one you gave me?” Angie squinted.
“Albinos run a bit small. They thought it was a raven. Can you imagine?”
Angie answered with a scrunched face, the one that transmitted derision.
“Who?”
“Gunderson, the guy I bought it from, and another guy. But it’s a crow.”
“Garth, it’s a real one of a kind.” Angie slid the bird onto the table and her arms around my neck. “You did it again.”
“Don’t mention it, babe. Stick with me and—”
“You’ll cover me with dead things, yeah, I know.” She rolled her eyes around the apartment and nodded in the direction of a small, dusty TV under the wings of an owl. “I don’t think we’re ever going to graduate from that thirteen-inch color television.”
The comment stung, and despite my shrug Angie realized her faux pas. She grabbed me around the waist.
“Garth, you chase that old funk of yours outta here. You know I don’t care about the TV. I love you and our life together just the way it is.”
“If I could find a slightly used Sony Trinitron, cut back the gums, polish the teeth, put in a new tongue, repair the ears . . .”
“So where you taking me to dinner?” She wasn’t one to let me enjoy self-pity. Angie pushed me away suspiciously, hooking her caiman purse from the bear cub umbrella stand. Yup. The purse had been for Valentine’s Day.
“Besides . . . I’ve got some terrific news, something else to celebrate. You ready? Peter Van Putin.”
I nodded, clearly not knowing who he was. Or perhaps not remembering.
“Peter Van Putin, the HUGE fashion jewelry designer?”
“Ah.”
“They want to see my portfolio!”
“Whoa! And if they like it?”
“Then there’ll be an interview.”
I smiled, put my hands on her waist, and gave her a kiss. “Sounds like a done deal to me. Once they see the quality of your work, your designs, and, well, you in person . . .”
“Oh, stop snowing me.”
“I’m dead serious, sugar.”
“Well . . .” She almost blushed, but then turned suspicious again. “So, where is it this year?”
“I thought you liked last year’s dinner.”
“Kabul Tent was a delightful restaurant.” She inspected my hair, an unruly mane of dirty-blond locks that I barely keep caged with the help of Level Ten gel. She jabbed at it with her fingers, trying to tame it. “Really, I didn’t mind sitting on a cushion on the floor—”
“Eclectic dining.”
“Or eating goat chunks with my fingers from a giant communal pile of rice—”
“French food is so rich.”
“But did you have to pay for the meal with a vulture?” Angie gave my hair a cross look and folded her arms.
“They still have that bird.” I directed her to the front door. “It’s perched right over the hookah pipe. Otto!”
Tossing aside the curtain, Otto swept back into the living room, a cigarette clenched in his teeth. “Ve go?”
“No, we go, you stay.” I snatched the cigarette from his teeth and dropped it into his coffee. “No smoking in the house or I won’t let you work on the kitty cat.”
“But of course. I up the lock, eh?”
“But of course!” Angie and I called back as we exited.
Chapter 3
Angie and I met at a company Christmas party. Some pals of mine were trying to make it in the film business and had taken jobs as paralegals while they wrote screenplays and tried to find opus backers. Back in the early eighties, the big New York law firms were starved for paralegals to catalog warehouses of documents for the many corporate mega-lawsuits. At the time, my college degree landed me a dirt-pay job at a used-record store. But I had a dozen pieces of inherited taxidermy—my grandfather was a big-game hunter—and had struck upon the whizbang idea of renting the stuff out to make some extra cash. I advertised in free classifieds and, sure enough, found gainful employment for my lion, Fred, in a Broadway play that ran for three years. Fred’s not a huge lion, about seven feet long nose to tail, but he has a full mane. He’s mounted on a wheeled mahogany platform, on all fours and snarling at some imaginary threat. As youths, my little brother Nicholas, Fred, and I used to ambush trick-or-treaters. Bursting forth from the philodendron’s shadow, Fred’s casters wobbling and squealing frantically, we’d chase clowns, pirates, hobos, and ghosts down the driveway like a panicked flock of ducks. The result? Pinfeathers in their wake. Spilled Mary Janes, Pixie Stix, orange UNICEF boxes, and candied wax lips marked their flight path down the driveway. Hey, for scoring Halloween treats, it beat the hell out of going door to door. Our parents always wondered why no kids ever came by our place for candy.
Of course, my friends thought I was nuts trying to start a taxidermy rental operation, and they tempted me with becoming a paralegal too. Paralegals got cabs home, free food, business trips, and company morale parties with all the beer you could drink. At twenty-four, there’s not much more a male of the species could want from life. Except a female.
That’s how I ended up at a holiday booze cruise on a boat around Manhattan.
Amid the hubbub, I spied a particular female with a cast on her right hand and forearm. With her left hand, she was trying to assemble cold cuts into a sandwich. It was touch and go.
“Who’s that?” I asked a pal.
“Angie. She’s a temp. A jeweler with a broken wrist. Give her a try. If you like the smart type.”
“Smart type?”
“Does the Times crossword over a single cup of coffee. The rest of us can barely do the Jumble.”
I watched as this “smart type” cradled a paper plate on her cast and began to turn. Someone bumped her, she stumbled, the plate fell to the floor, and she stepped on her sandwich. I thought that was pretty funny until I saw her eyes begin to tear with frustration.
She began angrily slapping cold cuts onto a new piece of ry
e. I sauntered over, scooped up the squished sandwich from the floor, and cradled it in my hands.
“Kinda looks like one of those squirrels you find flattened on the highway.”
She turned and scowled at me.
“You know, the ones that dry up into a disk and you can pick them up and throw them like a Frisbee?” I dared a cajoling smile and flung the sandwich into the East River. It flew more like a clay pigeon that had been shot, separating into its components on the way down. She still wasn’t smiling, and this was my A material, if you can believe it. By all rights I should still be single.
“Yeah, well, here, let’s try again.” I gamely began making a turkey sandwich. “I’ll make the next one.”
“I don’t like squirrel meat.” Her green eyes bored into me disapprovingly. “Possum.”
“Possum?” I tried smiling harder.
“Make the next one possum,” she deadpanned.
So I made her a faux possum sandwich, gave her half, stomped on the other, and flung it starboard. It split apart again.
She rolled her eyes in disgust. “You gotta use more salami, with white bread and butter to cement it together. Make the next one jackrabbit.”
I was pretty sure she was stringing me along to make a complete fool of me. I’m used to having girls go “eeuuww” with this brand of persiflage, a shrewd pickup tactic akin to dropping a frog down a gal’s dress at the church picnic. What was I thinking? Youth is wasted on the wrong people, as they say.
But she was right: With butter, white bread, and a stable luncheon meat, the rabbit sailed like a Frisbee. What can I say? It was true love.
That was back in the days when we used to dance all night at parties and clubs. But you find that by your late twenties, your peers are nest-building. Career and the urgency of reproduction quickly subjugate frivolity. Parties, once fun, turn into wet-bar think tanks about insurance, personal finance, and real estate, with portfolio malaise the inevitable finale. And once the gang has kids, well, the most you can hope for are barbecues, awash in feebly disciplined children and talk of C-sections, day care, and bowel movements. So much for hootenannies.
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