Great Kisser

by David Evanier

  Dean, gliding through life, so effortless, so much fun, so warm, the handsomest, funniest man in the world and not mean like Frank. I watched him with the women, Judy Garland, Ann-Margaret, how they cuddled up to him and how he protected them. Dean, take me by the hand and show me how to get laid. How to glide. How not to fall apart when my shoes pinch or a waiter ignores me. Or a pretty woman looks at me with contempt.

  I had wanted to walk up to him in L.A. to thank him for keeping me going, or maybe just sit with him and keep him company. I was afraid he would stare blankly at me.

  The Italian emigrant shoemaker to the stars, Pasquale diFabrizio, had a special feeling for him. “When I came to this country,” he told me, “Dean had me make him fifteen pairs of velvet slippers. I knew he didn’t need so many. He did it to help me out.”

  Dean was buried a couple of blocks from my house in L.A. beside his parents, Guy and Angela Crocetti, in an alcove called the Sanctuary of Peace. I went there and talked to him, and I wept and kissed his gravestone. This was the moment when a woman’s breasts, her hair down to her waist, became more important to me than the book I was reading. And I told him how much I wanted to kiss now, to give. I was not the lonely little fuck I had been, but it was so late and I had so little time.

  I walked to Robert Greenberg’s house in Venice on a sunlit day in 2001, expecting to find a beachfront condo. But it wasn’t. It was a plain apartment house, a little raggedy. I even expected to see him lounging on the patio in shades reading Variety or The Nation, a blonde on his lap, laughing that cackling laugh. I found his name on the mailbox, and another unknown name: Stein, and I quickly walked away, afraid he might see me.

  This is fifteen years we’re talking about, since I last saw him. Afraid Bob would look at me with that soulful gaze that shot through me, size up the situation in a second: same hang-ups, same old shit.

  I walked on the boardwalk alongside the beach. “Michael!” Bob whizzed up to me on his bicycle, a little boy perched on his back seat. I acted surprised.

  He held out his hand. I looked at him, moved forward and embraced him.

  Hello, my brother.

  “Do you live here?” I said.

  “Yeah. This is Adam,” he said, and I touched the cheek of his child.

  He was the same, his beard whiter but his shoulders broader. He was still short but still looked tall.

  “I’ve been remarried seven and a half years. Did you ever meet Judy Stein?” Ah.

  “No,” I said. “You look great. Been working out.”

  “Gotta stay alive.”

  A young man in a clown outfit with a red bulbous nose walked up to Bob and Adam, and without a word, blew up a balloon, handed it to Adam and walked away.

  No comment from Bob. This was the Venice Beach, the sun was bright, there was laughter everywhere, the psychics sat in their booths, and everyone ate ice cream.

  “Are you living here?” he said.

  “Yeah. I just got here. Eight months ago,” I lied. “Actually a year.” It was six years. Even my Jazz Bakery T-shirt said 1996. Schmucko. “Breaking into the industry,” I said. “How you doing?”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ve got a mini-series lined up.”

  We exchanged cards, waved. I watch my old friend bike away, and thought: I’m still lying to him after all these years.

  And he still forgives me.

  I fucked him good, although I did not realize it at the time. After he left for Santa Monica, I’d published a story in 1985 about how he sold out, the leftie who gazed soulfully at bank buildings in the Santa Monica moonlight. I wrote about how we had struggled in the Village, about the canvas bag, how he encouraged my writing, and about his wedding. And how Bob, his teeth rotting, and Linda thumbed their way to L.A.

  So when he began to make it in L.A. as a director, I let him have it. He was a good person, I wrote, but not good enough. He liked money. He was in too much of a hurry and didn’t learn his craft (he had volunteered this insight into himself; I just stole it). And I wrote about visiting him in Santa Monica and of the sounds I heard in the next room of Bob and Linda doing birth exercises, laughing, kissing, laughing, kissing.

  And how I silently wept.

  I felt rage against him for being all that I wanted to be: a loving person, a father, husband and lover. A man.

  And years after I got back to New York I wrote the story. In some ways Bob comes off looking much better than you as a person, a literary critic told me then. Well yes. Of course. I balanced it. I kept an objective voice. That way I sliced him up better.

  XII: Home

  On one of my last days in L.A., a producer I was speaking to on the phone was having difficulty reeling out a coherent sentence to me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I had a 90-minute massage yesterday. Since then I’ve been unable to think clearly or speak.”

  I had gone to L.A. to live, and spent all my years there missing New York. If a movie was based in New York, I would skip the plot and peek behind the actors to gaze at Central Park, at the streets, the restaurants, the shops, the skyline. It was time to go home. To Manhattan. To the Brooklyn Bridge, St. Marks in the Bouwerie, Arturo’s, Forlini’s, Central Park, the New York Public Library, The Writers Room, Cooper Union, Rao’s, the Ensemble Studio Theater, New Dramatists, Judson Memorial Church, Gino’s, the New York Society Library, the Amato Opera on the Bowery, the Strand Bookstore, the Cherry Lane Theater, Gotham Book Mart, Zabar’s, the Corner Bistro, Arthur’s on Barrow Street, the Pink Teacup, Village Cigars on Sheridan Square, the Hungarian pastry shop on 113th Street and Amsterdam, to every street that had associations for me of a world I would never cease to love. The Peacock Cafe on Greenwich Avenue, the Blue Mill Tavern on Commerce, the Orchidia Restaurant, the Negro Ensemble Theater on Second Avenue and the decaying Automats were gone, but there were new oases of beauty and sanity too: poetry reading at the Cornelia Street Cafe, The Housing Works Book Store, the reborn Thalia, the subway murals at every subway station painted by children and adults, the revivified Grand Central Station. New York, more beautiful than I had ever known it. The city as I had dreamed about it since I was a kid.

  I still wandered in the footsteps of those who were great, the streets of Brooklyn, under the bridge where Carson McCullers and Thomas Wolfe and Harvey Shapiro and Capote and Louis Sheaffer lived. I stood outside the brownstone on Montague Terrace where Thomas Wolfe wrote his magnificently misconceived Of Time and The River—as imperfect as Look Homeward, Angel was perfect—and Louis Sheaffer wrote of O’Neill, and the brownstone where Auden wrote “August, 1939.” And the smells of the bakeries on Court Street and the walk across the bridge, looking down into the harbor and the National Cold Storage Company. I was mesmerized by what was beautiful; the Butler Library at Columbia, the reading room of the New York Public Library, the brownstone on Sugar Hill in Harlem where Langston Hughes had lived. I had annoyed Ralph Ellison with endless letters and kissed the copies of Invisible Man and Call It Sleep and In Our Time and The Williamsburg Trilogy and Death of a Salesman. I was still my own worst enemy and best friend.

  On my first week back in New York, Karen and I sat two seats away from an elderly woman in the Angelika Cinema. We were about to watch Sidewalks of New York.

  Before the movie started, the woman turned to me and said, “Would you tap me if I fall asleep?” I said I would.

  During the course of the movie, I must have glanced her way at least twenty times (perhaps five times at Karen), and felt a twinge of resentment that this stranger was taking my attention away from the film. Her sideways, slanting posture made it difficult to determine, in the darkness, if she were awake or not. To tap or not to tap? But I did tap her once. At the end of the film I said goodnight and she thanked me and gave me a great smile.

  Such a confession of vulnerability, the genuine eccentricity of it, an elderly person not afraid to reach out to be touched, and being touched: not likely at the Sunset 5 next to Crunch. Nine years older now, I know we are all in this togeth
er.

  A few days later I saw the girls on the subway. There were eight of them, beautiful Latina girls of 18 or 19, in bloom. They cascaded into the subway car like trilling birds. They were celebrating one of the girls’ birthdays, and they rapped together and sang out in unison: “Girls! Girls! Girls! Girls!” But mostly I could not understand a word of what they said or sang, they were so noisy and they were laughing and chattering at once. Their smiles, their joy and energy was so infectious, they were so devoid of malice, that I grinned at them. They spotted a tired, wasted black man of thirty in the corner of the car and they called to him, “What shall we sing to you?” He looked at them; they seemed to have woken him up or he had wandered into a dream. He was shaking his head and grinning. “What do you like? We’ll sing whatever you request. We like you.” And they sang, “I think I want you baby, I think I want you too, I think I love you baby, I think I love you too.” And he bobbed his head, smiling, not quite believing it. Then he got into it.

  When I got to my stop, I got up to leave. They called out to me, “You like us! We like you.” I waved.

  I remembered the start of my life, when blacks and Latinos bowed their heads on the subway. I thought of Lucy, the black maid who came to clean our apartment once a week. Lucy spoke in the slurred, whining singsong cadence, the forced Aunt Jemima merriment, of the Negro in those days, the half-voice that said, “I am of no consequence whatsoever.” I remember Lucy entering the apartment and saying, “Tha’s old Lucy, that’s me right heah … hee hee.” My mother kept a separate dish to feed her, so that our food would be kept pure. Lucy sat in a corner eating. Sometimes, during the week, my mother would forget which dish it was, and have a fit. She gave Lucy our castoff clothes.

  All those first days of my return to Manhattan were freezing after sunny California, with snow and piercing wind and cold rain. Each day I walked across the shining necklace of the Brooklyn Bridge, the icy winds lashing against my face, wondering why I did not feel the cold. I was filled with an inner warmth that seemed to lift me, as if I was in a carriage in a bitter storm.

  Like that woman in the theater, I was home.

  XIII: Family

  I once asked a therapist why Italians had been so kind and supportive to me through my life. “Why shouldn’t they be?” he sighed. “You love them so much.”

  On New Year’s Eve 2002, after a year back in Manhattan, I the lonely Jew sat with Karen at Vinnie’s, an Italian bistro in the Village that I had adopted as family, as close to family as I was going to get. I had come to love this place. Karen and I had gotten to know Vinnie himself, who was elderly and frail, in his brown leather vest. He frequently sat with us. Gradually he had come to realize how much I loved his place, and then, when I wrote about the restaurant, he realized I was a writer. “I thought you were the guy who delivered the pizza,” he said. He had begun to paint, and showed us his latest painting. It was like primitive art, a drawing of Vinnie’s itself. It was shaped like a pizza, with pepperoni, onions, black olives, anchovies and peppers on the edges. Vinnie had painted the deep-red-awninged entrance of the restaurant, the windows with plants, the armless Mona Lisa sculpture, and fancifully lodged inside the large entrance was a smaller version of the restaurant: a little Vinnie’s within the bigger Vinnie’s. A moon hovered overhead. The restaurant was selling it for a hundred dollars, and Donna, Vinnie’s daughter, whispered to us she had secretly bought several of them to make her father feel his painting was popular.

  Tony Cardinali, the singing waiter, was leading his band that night. He was in his late 40s. He would come up to us, sit down at our table, and say something like “When Napoleon and Dante were in prison, they did their best work,” and jump up and run off again. I got hooked on Vinnie’s the night Tony’s little band needed a tambourine player, and Tony held out the tambourine to me. I looked around. Tony smiled. He handed it to me. I timidly shook it, and then I got into it, and it was the happiest feeling, being part of it … family. When my only businessman friend, visiting from Toronto, spotted Tony and watched him one night at Vinnie’s, he had said, “That’s the most neurotic person I’ve ever seen,” and turned away emphatically. And that was that, as far as he was concerned. Then he looked at me quizzically: “You seem to have a special feeling for him.”

  Tony lived on Pleasant Avenue (the neighborhood were I once lived with Julie) on one of the last streets left of Italian Harlem. The lights burned all night in his apartment. He was always ablaze with grandiose plans and obsessions. He told me that he jogged around the field near his house every night from 3 A.M. He was obsessed with Madonna. “I loved Madonna from the start,” he told me. “I saw she was out for blood. When they tell me to lift her over my head, I won’t say I’m not sure I can do it. I’ll say how high and for how long? I want to go to France so I can tell her I also spent two months in the blizzard like she did. So I can look her in the eye and say, ‘I’ve been there.’” As he said this, Tony gave me the courageous look he would give Madonna. He did 500 pushups at night with Madonna’s picture beneath him. By the time he finished, he said, he would collapse and alternately cry and laugh and yell out, “Madonna!”

  Tony was a devout Catholic. He crossed himself when he sang love songs. On rare occasions he would say “God bless you.” And you did feel blessed. Vinnie had found Tony singing with his guitar in Washington Square Park twenty-five years earlier and had taken him home and added him to his collection of misfits and saints. Everyone rooted for Tony, to find a girl, to go beyond Vinnie’s and become a professional entertainer.

  This place was always serving up epiphanies for me by 2 or 3 A.M., and I wasn’t sure if they were real or if I was drunk. But they were a hell of a lot better than what a synagogue, a church, The New Republic or Elaine’s had to offer.

  On New Year’s Eve, Tony sang “Heart of My Heart” to us when I entered the restaurant with Karen. Near midnight, he sang the Little Jimmy Scott song, “Dedicated To You,” and he segued into a story while his band of three played softly. “The other night,” he told the audience, “I went to a 24-hour ATM in a supermarket and saw a pile of money on the floor. I see a bunch of fifties on the top. I picked it up. I pretended to shop for the next twenty minutes. I was waiting. I couldn’t just say to anyone, ‘Is this yours?’

  “All of a sudden an old woman goes up to the counter. She starts getting into a fit. I see her freaking out. And I know it was her. So I wait still to hear what her words are. And she says this has never happened to me before: I cashed my paycheck and I seem to be missing my week’s pay. I went up to her and said, ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry. I think I’ve got what you’re looking for.’ And I handed it to her. Instead of taking the money, she backs away from it and starts to cry. And she holds her hands in front of her face and says, ‘I can’t believe that you’re giving this to me.’ And she starts to say a little prayer.

  “I give her the money. And then she goes. Five or ten minutes pass, and I leave the store and now I’m on Sixth avenue. As I’m walking, I see someone. It looks like the same woman. So as I walk up, I don’t get close to her. It’s late at night, it’s 3 A.M., she can be afraid. She might think I wanted a reward, and it wasn’t what I wanted. So I tried to keep my distance from her, but still I was automatically catching up to her. Could it be that she wants me to catch up? So what I do was catch up to her, but don’t acknowledge her. I keep on walking, and now I’m like half a block away.

  “So she has a chance to look at me and know who I am. And make a choice: either talk to me or not. So I’m slowing down. And she’s right behind me, at the side of me. And I can hear her, she’s softly crying. So I look straight ahead and I say, ‘You know, I’m a singing waiter down at Vinnie’s. And I’ve been studying this song. And the words go—I’m going to try to remember them. It’s a new song for me.’ And I begin, in a straight-ahead manner:”

  And Tony sang his gift to her:

  If I should write a book

  that brought me fame and fortune too />
  that book would be, like my heart and me,

  dedicated to you ….

  Tony came over to sit with me and Karen between sets. He had a new tale of hopeless passion to share with us. He talked of spending time during the past summer on the beach on the Hamptons and falling in love with a stranger, a married woman who lived along the route he jogged on. He had actually stopped and spoken to her once. And the following days he would keep jogging further and further. He noticed that after a certain number of miles he would reach her house, and then reach a windmill, and after a while reach the far rocks. And he noted how far apart these landmarks were.

  When he got back to New York, he said, he now jogged around the track near Pleasant Avenue with the woman in mind. “I pace myself,” he said, “so that I know when I’ve gone far enough so that I would be passing her house, when I would be passing the windmill, and when I would be at the far rocks.” He visualized those settings, reliving his lost love, when he fact he was just repeatedly going around the same track.

  He would never leave Vinnie’s and risk the mean streets. He would go around and around the track. How well I understood him.

  It was now 11 P.M., one hour until the new year.

  I looked around at the Italian girls with their red lipstick, their perfume, their black stockings, their long jet black hair. They looked just like the girls who stood on the Italian streets outside Junior High School 16 in Corona, Queens when I was 13. In those days I could not bring myself to even look at them (although I peeked) for I would burn alive. They gently teased me as I threaded my way through packs of them, my eyes averted, holding six school-books to announce my brilliance and hide my upright prick. “Hey, Mister Intellectual,” they called out, “you can’t read all them books.” The only time I ever spoke to them at all, I actually said, and I quote: “Indeed, I ponder.” Oh yeah. Mama mia. That’s what I said. And my fear of fucking would shadow me like the scarlet letter.

  Across from Junior High 16 was the tiny store that had a sign in the window that advertised a strange, unknown food to me: “Pizza, ten cents.” The moustached, smiling, middle-aged handsome Italian man stood in the window holding his shovel. He opened the doors of the brick oven and stoked the gleaming red coals. And brought forth the hot thick delicious Sicilian slice, tomato and cheese and heavy crust, and handed it to me on a cold winter day.