Jacket Weather, page 10
“Yes, Michael, I do,” she says, as though she thought I’d never ask. “Don’t you?”
“Of course you do. ‘Tickle me, do I not laugh? Prick me, do I not bleed?’”
“Yes! Yes and yes.”
•
Standing on the corner of West 8th Street and Sixth Avenue: traffic stops, the night bristles with shadows, the crosswalk comes alive. Everyone’s out and moving around. There’s a lot coming at you all the time here. Everything’s unexpected, everyone’s a surprise. New York is just so much more information—on a moment-by-moment basis—that it fires your synapses more than other places do. So you’re literally more alive here, or at least more conscious. And there’s a music to all this. I can hear it now while I’m waiting to cross 14th, in the old, warm, friendly world.
•
Two guys went past me on the track and in the break between two songs on my headphones I heard “Linguine?”
“No, fettucine.”
•
We were out walking on the west side. On 20th Street, the leaves had that golden glow of the translucent green grapes in Dutch still lifes: an inner smile. Near Tenth Avenue, we looked in on the seminary grounds. The seminary’s a hotel now. Or part of it is. You can’t go in there anymore.
She said “On a morning like this, when I was married, I would come over and sit on a bench in there. And I was so alone. I was so sad. I did all the right things, I tried so hard, I did every— I put myself in a box. I made myself smaller and smaller until I could fit in this little box. And it still wasn’t enough. It was never enough. And I used to sit here and think What a beautiful world. What have I gotten myself into?”
•
June’s on my bed with a book. On my recommendation, she’s been reading Masters of Atlantis, a Charles Portis novel about a crew of hopeless clucks who start a pseudomystical fraternal order. One of the funniest books I’ve read. She’s reading it stone-faced, like she needs to find out what’s going to happen to these people. She’d no more laugh at them than she’d laugh at real people. She claims to have no sense of humor, though I feel like she might have a stronger sense of reality than I do.
But finally I have to ask: “How can you not laugh at that book?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I feel bad for them. I want them to win.”
She doesn’t have an ironic bone in her body. I think she associates irony with bullying. Really, she’s allergic to anything exclusive. The other day someone mentioned the band Jethro Tull and she frowned and wrinkled her nose. When I laughed, she said “I didn’t like anything about that band, they were always a boy band, something just for boys.” She said it with the same distaste she showed for anything trainspotterish. It’s why she likes garage bands, and why she immediately responded to punk, when it came along: the Dolls, the Ramones were for everybody, not just the pretty kids, not just the popular kids, not just the smart kids, not just boys, not just girls. Prog bands were inconsequential to her not just because they were pretentious and unsexy and mostly the product of cloistered, ingrown intelligence, and irrelevant to anyone’s experience, but because they were exclusionary. They offended her deep-seated Canarsie sense of democracy.
•
About a year ago I went into the showers, there was a big lump of a guy on a white plastic stool, obese, the water blasting on his neck, arms hanging between his legs like it was the end of the line. He lifted his face to the water, it ran out of his mouth. Then an old man came in and started soaping him down. He was only as tall standing as the other one seated. A barrel of a guy, like a wrestler. He soaped the other across the shoulders and under the arms. Got him up and soaped his ass with a washcloth. The big one put a foot on the stool and allowed the old man to clean under the folds of his fat and around his groin . . .
Today Lou pointed out the big one in the locker room, said he was Mateo’s son, that Mateo’s a beautiful guy and the son’s his cross.
“Eats all day,” Lou says. “He weighs five hundred pounds. Ever since they put him on the medication. He can barely get up the stairs. Mateo waits for him at every landing.”
At the sinks, the son was plopped on a stool, letting his father shave him. They were both lathered up, steam rising from the sink. Mateo was shaving them both with the same razor, and only when his father leaned past him to rinse it did the boy king drum his fingers on his knee, just once, to signal the impatience he must have felt while undergoing, for his father’s sake, the mysterious procedure.
•
“We got together Friday and Saturday. Then yesterday we went to the movies. Her husband started a new job, working days. So we won’t be able to see each other as much. She reminds me it’s not forever, and everything between us is good. But when things are good I worry. Sunday without her was a torment of anxiety.
“I feel like Larry Talbot. The wolfman. One minute I’m good. Then I feel it coming on: Oh, no, it’s happening again . . .”
•
Today, Philly’s wearing a black guayabera, pale-yellow slacks, and a pair of PR domino-player shoes, woven leather.
Hector, who’s Puerto Rican, points to the shoes and says “Those are nice.”
“They were nice when I got ’em. I’ve had ’em for years. Paul Stuart. You ever been in there, Paul Stuart? ”
“There used to be an actor, Paul Stewart.”
“You’re right! You’re probably the only guy here remembers him.”
“You know what I saw the other night? With Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner—Bogart plays a movie director—”
“Right, with Edmond O’Brien. I can’t think of the name.”
“Barefoot Contessa,” I put in.
“That’s right,” Philly says. “It doesn’t hold up. You know what I saw the other night? City for Conquest. Remember City for Conquest?”
“Sure,” Hector says.
“You ever see that, Mikey?”
“That’s Cagney and Ann Sheridan? The brother’s a composer?”
“Right!”
“Cagney’s a fighter, supports his brother.”
From the next row, Lou says “She had that extra something, Ann Sheridan. That verve or something.” This is after he changed his locker, during a period of not speaking to Philly.
Philly says “At the end, Cagney’s at the newsstand. He hears his brother’s concert on the radio.”
“Yeah,” I remember. “And he sees Ann Sheridan again.”
“That’s right,” Philly says. “He’s blind, but he knows it’s her.”
“He says ‘Looks like everybody from Forsyth Street’s doing alright.’”
•
A moment of synesthesia: while I’m waiting for you here, I’m looking through this notebook. I see a description of what you’re wearing and I smell your perfume. Which persists after I close the notebook, so that I’m sure you must be just about to arrive.
•
THE JUNE AND JANE SHOW
JANE: She used to stop traffic on Canal Street, this one. With her skimpy clothes. Skirts that barely covered her tuchas, legs a mile long, six-inch heels. In the middle of the afternoon. Leather pants that lace up the side. And she’d say [switching to the high-pitched voice of indignation she uses to mimic June]: “What’s wrong with everybody?! What’s everybody looking at?!”
JUNE: I don’t sound like that.
JANE: “Why are they stopped? Why don’t they go?”
JUNE: I don’t sound like that!
JANE: “Why’s everybody looking at me?!”
•
She made it there just as the reading was about to start, straight from work and dressed differently from anyone in the room, red lipstick and a short dress and black nylons and heels—I mean, she looked spectacular, but I knew it made her more self-conscious in a place where she already felt she didn’t fit in. It wasn’t a reading in a bar, it was Dia Chelsea: elevator to the fifth floor, white walls, grey cement floor, metal folding chairs, no amenities, the microphone at a lectern in a circle of white light. She came in just before it started with a bag of four apples, a dozen eggs, and a can of sardines she bought on her lunch hour and tried to make it to the seat beside me unnoticed.
The first reader was an academic. In a dismissive voice, he delivered the usual barrage of cryptic non sequiturs. Anywhere you went, all you had to do was open a tap and out came this same poem. June leaned over and whispered, anxiously, “Do you understand what he’s saying?” I was already annoyed with the guy for wasting our time. But I hated him for making her feel stupid when, after a long day at work, she’d come to a poetry reading in the hopes of hearing something she could relate to.
“It’s just about the sound of the words,” I told her.
“But there are people laughing in the front row.”
“They’re here with him. It’s not you.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not just saying that?”
“I promise you.”
The next reader, on the other hand, was operating in good faith, trying to communicate something besides his own boredom. There was life in his work. June bought three of his books and took one of them up for him to sign. The crowd had drifted out. I watched the two of them from my seat. No one had showed her the way to anything, she’d had to find it on her own. The poet was telling her about India. He asked her about herself. To June, this poet was more glamorous than any rock star. The other books were on a chair with her purse. She was embarrassed to hand him all three. Again I wished I’d known her since she was 14.
•
Last night she calls from the back of a cab after drinks with Steph, giddy and high, to say I make her knees go weak.
“We’re going through Times Square, and I look out and—” Then she sighs. She says “I don’t know what to do with this. This doesn’t happen to me, it happens to people in movies, and Cinderella.”
“Dig it!”
“I’m trying—I’m trying to adjust. You’ve been so patient. But look where we are—compared to where we were!”
•
Today is the world’s bright day: all its buttons and buckles are shining. Before work I’m on a bench outside the Time & Life Building, unwrapping a French pastry she got me this morning, not too sweet, with a few raisins, tearing off a piece while a breeze like unmerited favor plays on my face and what’s left of my hair.
•
Young guy with a backpack in a black suit and a loosened tie, waiting to pay for a wedge of chocolate layer cake in a plastic clamshell.
•
We close our phones at 9:20 but that doesn’t stop the signals we’re sending. They keep going, into the night, into space.
Later, I’m already reaching for the phone before I hear it ring.
“Are you awake?” she says.
“Yeah, I’m up.”
•
The hot metal musk of the subway on a rainy morning. You are coming.
•
She was meeting me at a tailor on Washington Street. My phone rang.
“I’m a little turned around,” she said. “I’m on Hudson and Horatio.”
Lived her whole life in New York, but when it comes to directions, she’s always wrong. I told her to walk toward the river on Horatio. Then I went to the corner and waited.
It was a nothing Saturday. There was no one around. But pretty soon she came along, across the street. She had her hair pushed up under a floppy cap—black and white checks—and she was halfway up the block before she saw me and started laughing. She was the only person on the street, so anyone looking out the window would have figured she’s crazy. Right then she did seem a little zany, even to me. But with everything I could want in a woman—the spark, the joy, the innocence. The party spirit. I wished my father could have met her. I wished he could have seen her walking up that red-brick street, laughing at life.
•
I was tying my shoes. I heard one guy and then another ask Lou how he’s doing. His voice was different.
I went to his locker. “What’s going on?”
He shrugged. “My brother’s sick, they called me. I don’t know why they waited. I coulda gone up there.”
“You mean he’s that sick? Is he conscious?”
He shrugged again.
“How old is he, Lou? What’s his name?”
“Paulie. He’s seventy-four. Which is nothing, seventy-four.”
“How many brothers and sisters do you have?”
“We started at fourteen,” he said. “If he goes, we’ll be down to eight. And they’re all old now. I got a sister eighty-three, another eighty. Even the baby was born 1950. It’ll be one after another now.”
He thought about it.
“We had some fun together, me and Paulie.” With a near smile, he smudged a thumb across his fingertips. “It’s over before you know it.”
He sat there with his hands hanging between his legs.
“He used to drive me around in his car,” he said, gripping a wheel and letting it go. “What’s left?”
Philly came into the locker room.
In a hushed voice he said “Is there a God, Lou?”
Lou jerked his head like You believe this guy?
Philly said “After that train accident the other day, Manny told me there’s no God. So I came in here to ask you.”
“He wants a theological consultation, Lou.”
“Ugats,” Lou said.
•
“Remember this place?” I ask her.
White ornate building on Third Avenue, looks like a cake: Scheffel Hall. The gas lamps still in place.
“Yeah, used to be Fat Tuesday.”
“Remember Les Paul used to play here every week?”
“That’s where I met Johnny,” she said.
“Who Johnny?”
“Johnny Thunders. He wanted me to manage him. Because I got him a show at the Marquee. I told him ‘Johnny, I can’t even manage my own life, how’m I gonna manage someone else?’”
“‘Johnny, you don’t need a manager, you need a keeper.’”
“He liked me because I yelled at him. He wanted an advance for the show. I even got him more money. I think they were getting eight thousand to play the Limelight, I got him ten at the Marquee. Then he demanded an advance. I said ‘Johnny, we’re not doing that. And if you’re going to try and extort an advance out of me, let’s call the whole thing off right now.’ So he asked me to manage him.”
“Where was the Marquee?”
“On the west side.”
“I think I was at that show.”
“I’ve still got all the posters for it and flyers somewhere . . .”
•
“Ladies and gentlemen. The next. Brooklyn-bound. L train. Will depart. In approximately. Six. Minutes.”
•
PLAYTIME AT THE PALLADIUM . . . DANCETERIA DALLIANCE . . . NO CAN TELL AT NO SE NO . . . LIMELIGHT LIAISON!
•
To Tere: “Can you believe we’ve never said what this is? Is it because once you say those words, there’s only one way for things to go? Is it because saying them triggers commitment as a gun triggers a bullet?
“The buyers have got the loan and they’re approved by the board. They close in a week.
“For all the stress, there were a million things that could have gone wrong that didn’t. Her husband could have made it tough but he didn’t go after her retirement money or even grill her about me. She never pushed it by spending the night here, not that he knew about. It never got ugly between them. They didn’t even fight over the place, since neither of them can afford it.
“End of the month, June will be packing up and moving down to Jane’s, a few blocks away. I never thought it would happen, but here it is.”
•
738 GREENWICH VILLAGE GARAGE 742
•
THE JUNE AND JANE SHOW
JANE: Thirty years, she didn’t come here.
JUNE: Can you blame me? You didn’t come here either!
MIKE: Why, what happened?
JANE: She found a bug in her salad.
JUNE: I didn’t find him, he climbed out of it!
MIKE: What kind of a bug?
JANE: A cockaroach! Just strolling along—
JUNE: A live cockroach! And Mark Satlof—before I could say anything—picked up the bowl—
JANE: [Laughter]
JUNE: —picked up the bowl and ran away with it!
JANE: And then the waiter came, he was very apologetic—
JUNE: He said “Can I get you something else?”
JANE: “No, thank you.” In that little voice. He said “Is there any way that I can make this up to you?” “No, thank you.” Then out comes the manager. “Miss, anything on the menu! Anything at all!” “No, thank you.” With that tone. Very polite.
JUNE: What would you have said? You’d have said “Fuck you, I’ll never eat here again!”
JANE: “Miss, is there anything at all we can—” “No, thank you.” Very proper, so it sends a chill down your spine.
•
Lou calls to say he picked up the magazines. A big stack this week: the usuals plus Real Simple, with fall checklist and decluttering ideas.
He says “I left you a package at the desk. I left you some prosciut’.”
“You didn’t have to do that, Lou.”
“It’s the Citterio. You know that one?”
“Sure, it’s good.”
“I left two packs of it.”
“Why two? Won’t you eat it?”
“It’s the three-ounce pack, you make one sandwich.”
“Thank you, Lou.”
“Nice and pink. Because the dark red is too dry.”
“I’ll use it tonight.”
“The pink is soft.”
“Maybe I’ll cut it up in the salad.”
“You have to leave it out. I take it out of the fridge and let it get to room temperature, so it’s got the full, y’know. I wait till the fat softens up—”
“Yeah, till it gets a little translucent.”
“Riiiight, riiiight. Usually I have it with mozzarella, but I didn’t have any mozzarella. So I left you a small roll of brie.”
“Lou, it’s great but it’s too much. Thank you. I’ll pick it up now. I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Of course you do. ‘Tickle me, do I not laugh? Prick me, do I not bleed?’”
“Yes! Yes and yes.”
•
Standing on the corner of West 8th Street and Sixth Avenue: traffic stops, the night bristles with shadows, the crosswalk comes alive. Everyone’s out and moving around. There’s a lot coming at you all the time here. Everything’s unexpected, everyone’s a surprise. New York is just so much more information—on a moment-by-moment basis—that it fires your synapses more than other places do. So you’re literally more alive here, or at least more conscious. And there’s a music to all this. I can hear it now while I’m waiting to cross 14th, in the old, warm, friendly world.
•
Two guys went past me on the track and in the break between two songs on my headphones I heard “Linguine?”
“No, fettucine.”
•
We were out walking on the west side. On 20th Street, the leaves had that golden glow of the translucent green grapes in Dutch still lifes: an inner smile. Near Tenth Avenue, we looked in on the seminary grounds. The seminary’s a hotel now. Or part of it is. You can’t go in there anymore.
She said “On a morning like this, when I was married, I would come over and sit on a bench in there. And I was so alone. I was so sad. I did all the right things, I tried so hard, I did every— I put myself in a box. I made myself smaller and smaller until I could fit in this little box. And it still wasn’t enough. It was never enough. And I used to sit here and think What a beautiful world. What have I gotten myself into?”
•
June’s on my bed with a book. On my recommendation, she’s been reading Masters of Atlantis, a Charles Portis novel about a crew of hopeless clucks who start a pseudomystical fraternal order. One of the funniest books I’ve read. She’s reading it stone-faced, like she needs to find out what’s going to happen to these people. She’d no more laugh at them than she’d laugh at real people. She claims to have no sense of humor, though I feel like she might have a stronger sense of reality than I do.
But finally I have to ask: “How can you not laugh at that book?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I feel bad for them. I want them to win.”
She doesn’t have an ironic bone in her body. I think she associates irony with bullying. Really, she’s allergic to anything exclusive. The other day someone mentioned the band Jethro Tull and she frowned and wrinkled her nose. When I laughed, she said “I didn’t like anything about that band, they were always a boy band, something just for boys.” She said it with the same distaste she showed for anything trainspotterish. It’s why she likes garage bands, and why she immediately responded to punk, when it came along: the Dolls, the Ramones were for everybody, not just the pretty kids, not just the popular kids, not just the smart kids, not just boys, not just girls. Prog bands were inconsequential to her not just because they were pretentious and unsexy and mostly the product of cloistered, ingrown intelligence, and irrelevant to anyone’s experience, but because they were exclusionary. They offended her deep-seated Canarsie sense of democracy.
•
About a year ago I went into the showers, there was a big lump of a guy on a white plastic stool, obese, the water blasting on his neck, arms hanging between his legs like it was the end of the line. He lifted his face to the water, it ran out of his mouth. Then an old man came in and started soaping him down. He was only as tall standing as the other one seated. A barrel of a guy, like a wrestler. He soaped the other across the shoulders and under the arms. Got him up and soaped his ass with a washcloth. The big one put a foot on the stool and allowed the old man to clean under the folds of his fat and around his groin . . .
Today Lou pointed out the big one in the locker room, said he was Mateo’s son, that Mateo’s a beautiful guy and the son’s his cross.
“Eats all day,” Lou says. “He weighs five hundred pounds. Ever since they put him on the medication. He can barely get up the stairs. Mateo waits for him at every landing.”
At the sinks, the son was plopped on a stool, letting his father shave him. They were both lathered up, steam rising from the sink. Mateo was shaving them both with the same razor, and only when his father leaned past him to rinse it did the boy king drum his fingers on his knee, just once, to signal the impatience he must have felt while undergoing, for his father’s sake, the mysterious procedure.
•
“We got together Friday and Saturday. Then yesterday we went to the movies. Her husband started a new job, working days. So we won’t be able to see each other as much. She reminds me it’s not forever, and everything between us is good. But when things are good I worry. Sunday without her was a torment of anxiety.
“I feel like Larry Talbot. The wolfman. One minute I’m good. Then I feel it coming on: Oh, no, it’s happening again . . .”
•
Today, Philly’s wearing a black guayabera, pale-yellow slacks, and a pair of PR domino-player shoes, woven leather.
Hector, who’s Puerto Rican, points to the shoes and says “Those are nice.”
“They were nice when I got ’em. I’ve had ’em for years. Paul Stuart. You ever been in there, Paul Stuart? ”
“There used to be an actor, Paul Stewart.”
“You’re right! You’re probably the only guy here remembers him.”
“You know what I saw the other night? With Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner—Bogart plays a movie director—”
“Right, with Edmond O’Brien. I can’t think of the name.”
“Barefoot Contessa,” I put in.
“That’s right,” Philly says. “It doesn’t hold up. You know what I saw the other night? City for Conquest. Remember City for Conquest?”
“Sure,” Hector says.
“You ever see that, Mikey?”
“That’s Cagney and Ann Sheridan? The brother’s a composer?”
“Right!”
“Cagney’s a fighter, supports his brother.”
From the next row, Lou says “She had that extra something, Ann Sheridan. That verve or something.” This is after he changed his locker, during a period of not speaking to Philly.
Philly says “At the end, Cagney’s at the newsstand. He hears his brother’s concert on the radio.”
“Yeah,” I remember. “And he sees Ann Sheridan again.”
“That’s right,” Philly says. “He’s blind, but he knows it’s her.”
“He says ‘Looks like everybody from Forsyth Street’s doing alright.’”
•
A moment of synesthesia: while I’m waiting for you here, I’m looking through this notebook. I see a description of what you’re wearing and I smell your perfume. Which persists after I close the notebook, so that I’m sure you must be just about to arrive.
•
THE JUNE AND JANE SHOW
JANE: She used to stop traffic on Canal Street, this one. With her skimpy clothes. Skirts that barely covered her tuchas, legs a mile long, six-inch heels. In the middle of the afternoon. Leather pants that lace up the side. And she’d say [switching to the high-pitched voice of indignation she uses to mimic June]: “What’s wrong with everybody?! What’s everybody looking at?!”
JUNE: I don’t sound like that.
JANE: “Why are they stopped? Why don’t they go?”
JUNE: I don’t sound like that!
JANE: “Why’s everybody looking at me?!”
•
She made it there just as the reading was about to start, straight from work and dressed differently from anyone in the room, red lipstick and a short dress and black nylons and heels—I mean, she looked spectacular, but I knew it made her more self-conscious in a place where she already felt she didn’t fit in. It wasn’t a reading in a bar, it was Dia Chelsea: elevator to the fifth floor, white walls, grey cement floor, metal folding chairs, no amenities, the microphone at a lectern in a circle of white light. She came in just before it started with a bag of four apples, a dozen eggs, and a can of sardines she bought on her lunch hour and tried to make it to the seat beside me unnoticed.
The first reader was an academic. In a dismissive voice, he delivered the usual barrage of cryptic non sequiturs. Anywhere you went, all you had to do was open a tap and out came this same poem. June leaned over and whispered, anxiously, “Do you understand what he’s saying?” I was already annoyed with the guy for wasting our time. But I hated him for making her feel stupid when, after a long day at work, she’d come to a poetry reading in the hopes of hearing something she could relate to.
“It’s just about the sound of the words,” I told her.
“But there are people laughing in the front row.”
“They’re here with him. It’s not you.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not just saying that?”
“I promise you.”
The next reader, on the other hand, was operating in good faith, trying to communicate something besides his own boredom. There was life in his work. June bought three of his books and took one of them up for him to sign. The crowd had drifted out. I watched the two of them from my seat. No one had showed her the way to anything, she’d had to find it on her own. The poet was telling her about India. He asked her about herself. To June, this poet was more glamorous than any rock star. The other books were on a chair with her purse. She was embarrassed to hand him all three. Again I wished I’d known her since she was 14.
•
Last night she calls from the back of a cab after drinks with Steph, giddy and high, to say I make her knees go weak.
“We’re going through Times Square, and I look out and—” Then she sighs. She says “I don’t know what to do with this. This doesn’t happen to me, it happens to people in movies, and Cinderella.”
“Dig it!”
“I’m trying—I’m trying to adjust. You’ve been so patient. But look where we are—compared to where we were!”
•
Today is the world’s bright day: all its buttons and buckles are shining. Before work I’m on a bench outside the Time & Life Building, unwrapping a French pastry she got me this morning, not too sweet, with a few raisins, tearing off a piece while a breeze like unmerited favor plays on my face and what’s left of my hair.
•
Young guy with a backpack in a black suit and a loosened tie, waiting to pay for a wedge of chocolate layer cake in a plastic clamshell.
•
We close our phones at 9:20 but that doesn’t stop the signals we’re sending. They keep going, into the night, into space.
Later, I’m already reaching for the phone before I hear it ring.
“Are you awake?” she says.
“Yeah, I’m up.”
•
The hot metal musk of the subway on a rainy morning. You are coming.
•
She was meeting me at a tailor on Washington Street. My phone rang.
“I’m a little turned around,” she said. “I’m on Hudson and Horatio.”
Lived her whole life in New York, but when it comes to directions, she’s always wrong. I told her to walk toward the river on Horatio. Then I went to the corner and waited.
It was a nothing Saturday. There was no one around. But pretty soon she came along, across the street. She had her hair pushed up under a floppy cap—black and white checks—and she was halfway up the block before she saw me and started laughing. She was the only person on the street, so anyone looking out the window would have figured she’s crazy. Right then she did seem a little zany, even to me. But with everything I could want in a woman—the spark, the joy, the innocence. The party spirit. I wished my father could have met her. I wished he could have seen her walking up that red-brick street, laughing at life.
•
I was tying my shoes. I heard one guy and then another ask Lou how he’s doing. His voice was different.
I went to his locker. “What’s going on?”
He shrugged. “My brother’s sick, they called me. I don’t know why they waited. I coulda gone up there.”
“You mean he’s that sick? Is he conscious?”
He shrugged again.
“How old is he, Lou? What’s his name?”
“Paulie. He’s seventy-four. Which is nothing, seventy-four.”
“How many brothers and sisters do you have?”
“We started at fourteen,” he said. “If he goes, we’ll be down to eight. And they’re all old now. I got a sister eighty-three, another eighty. Even the baby was born 1950. It’ll be one after another now.”
He thought about it.
“We had some fun together, me and Paulie.” With a near smile, he smudged a thumb across his fingertips. “It’s over before you know it.”
He sat there with his hands hanging between his legs.
“He used to drive me around in his car,” he said, gripping a wheel and letting it go. “What’s left?”
Philly came into the locker room.
In a hushed voice he said “Is there a God, Lou?”
Lou jerked his head like You believe this guy?
Philly said “After that train accident the other day, Manny told me there’s no God. So I came in here to ask you.”
“He wants a theological consultation, Lou.”
“Ugats,” Lou said.
•
“Remember this place?” I ask her.
White ornate building on Third Avenue, looks like a cake: Scheffel Hall. The gas lamps still in place.
“Yeah, used to be Fat Tuesday.”
“Remember Les Paul used to play here every week?”
“That’s where I met Johnny,” she said.
“Who Johnny?”
“Johnny Thunders. He wanted me to manage him. Because I got him a show at the Marquee. I told him ‘Johnny, I can’t even manage my own life, how’m I gonna manage someone else?’”
“‘Johnny, you don’t need a manager, you need a keeper.’”
“He liked me because I yelled at him. He wanted an advance for the show. I even got him more money. I think they were getting eight thousand to play the Limelight, I got him ten at the Marquee. Then he demanded an advance. I said ‘Johnny, we’re not doing that. And if you’re going to try and extort an advance out of me, let’s call the whole thing off right now.’ So he asked me to manage him.”
“Where was the Marquee?”
“On the west side.”
“I think I was at that show.”
“I’ve still got all the posters for it and flyers somewhere . . .”
•
“Ladies and gentlemen. The next. Brooklyn-bound. L train. Will depart. In approximately. Six. Minutes.”
•
PLAYTIME AT THE PALLADIUM . . . DANCETERIA DALLIANCE . . . NO CAN TELL AT NO SE NO . . . LIMELIGHT LIAISON!
•
To Tere: “Can you believe we’ve never said what this is? Is it because once you say those words, there’s only one way for things to go? Is it because saying them triggers commitment as a gun triggers a bullet?
“The buyers have got the loan and they’re approved by the board. They close in a week.
“For all the stress, there were a million things that could have gone wrong that didn’t. Her husband could have made it tough but he didn’t go after her retirement money or even grill her about me. She never pushed it by spending the night here, not that he knew about. It never got ugly between them. They didn’t even fight over the place, since neither of them can afford it.
“End of the month, June will be packing up and moving down to Jane’s, a few blocks away. I never thought it would happen, but here it is.”
•
738 GREENWICH VILLAGE GARAGE 742
•
THE JUNE AND JANE SHOW
JANE: Thirty years, she didn’t come here.
JUNE: Can you blame me? You didn’t come here either!
MIKE: Why, what happened?
JANE: She found a bug in her salad.
JUNE: I didn’t find him, he climbed out of it!
MIKE: What kind of a bug?
JANE: A cockaroach! Just strolling along—
JUNE: A live cockroach! And Mark Satlof—before I could say anything—picked up the bowl—
JANE: [Laughter]
JUNE: —picked up the bowl and ran away with it!
JANE: And then the waiter came, he was very apologetic—
JUNE: He said “Can I get you something else?”
JANE: “No, thank you.” In that little voice. He said “Is there any way that I can make this up to you?” “No, thank you.” Then out comes the manager. “Miss, anything on the menu! Anything at all!” “No, thank you.” With that tone. Very polite.
JUNE: What would you have said? You’d have said “Fuck you, I’ll never eat here again!”
JANE: “Miss, is there anything at all we can—” “No, thank you.” Very proper, so it sends a chill down your spine.
•
Lou calls to say he picked up the magazines. A big stack this week: the usuals plus Real Simple, with fall checklist and decluttering ideas.
He says “I left you a package at the desk. I left you some prosciut’.”
“You didn’t have to do that, Lou.”
“It’s the Citterio. You know that one?”
“Sure, it’s good.”
“I left two packs of it.”
“Why two? Won’t you eat it?”
“It’s the three-ounce pack, you make one sandwich.”
“Thank you, Lou.”
“Nice and pink. Because the dark red is too dry.”
“I’ll use it tonight.”
“The pink is soft.”
“Maybe I’ll cut it up in the salad.”
“You have to leave it out. I take it out of the fridge and let it get to room temperature, so it’s got the full, y’know. I wait till the fat softens up—”
“Yeah, till it gets a little translucent.”
“Riiiight, riiiight. Usually I have it with mozzarella, but I didn’t have any mozzarella. So I left you a small roll of brie.”
“Lou, it’s great but it’s too much. Thank you. I’ll pick it up now. I’ll be there in a minute.”
