Jacket Weather, page 5
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“Rao’s expensive, Lou?”
“Nah, not really. Hundred a head. And they give you a lot of food. I know the guy. Frankie Pellegrino. They call him Frankie No. Cuz all he says is no. All day long, people call up: ‘Frankie, can I get a table?’ ‘No.’ ‘Frankie, you got—’ ‘No.’ The place is a gold mine. It’s tiny. Six booths and four tables. And only one seating per night.”
“It’s good?”
“It’s alright. It’s okay. He invited me up there one time, I said ‘Frank. First of all it’s too far. I gotta go to 114th Street? Second, it’s too late. I’m in bed seven, eight o’clock. And Frank. Most important, I cook better food than you.”
I laughed.
He said “I used to get invited there every Thursday night by Tony Dime, he was a wiseguy, but he died now. You gotta have your own table there or get invited by someone who does. Woody Allen’s got a table, Sonny Grosso . . .”
“How’s that work? Obviously Woody Allen doesn’t go there every night.”
“No, Mondays, his table. He’s not coming he calls up: ‘Frankie, I can’t make it.’ Then either he sends someone else or they give the table away that night.”
“I see.”
“I went there once in the day.”
“They’re open for lunch?”
“No, they’re cleaning up. I had to go to 116th Street, see a guy, and it was a hot day, I needed some water. I was parched. So I tapped on the door, they opened up. Two guys were there sweeping up. I said ‘I need a glass of water, I’m dying.’ They said ‘Come on in.’ I didn’t tell Frankie about it, he’d say ‘What’re these guys doing, letting people in?’ They took me to the bar, the guy said ‘I’m gonna give you some water from Nicky Vest’s private stock of mineral water.’”
“Who’s that?”
“Nicky Vest? The bartender, he’s been the bartender there fifty years. Always wears a vest.”
•
The sycamore near the corner of South 2nd and Marcy rustles with my childhood secrets. Secret even from me. Some things, when you notice them, turn out to have been ongoing. That alarm bell started behind the shopping center, when I was a kid in Ohio.
•
I was riding in a Town Car with Jane to Home Depot, my Friday off. Before Jane fired her driver. She was tough, but after a year or two she got past her doubts about me. A Stevie Wonder song came on the radio. She was looking out the window, moving her head.
“You ever work with Stevie Wonder?”
“. . . Yeah,” she said. Her mind was elsewhere.
“When was that?”
“I did his press from 1971 to 1978 or ’9.”
“Those were great years for him, no?”
Madison Square Park was going by.
She said “He used to play at eleven in the morning. You know, like a Motown revue? And they were the best shows.”
“I bet. But he wasn’t still doing those shows when you had him, right?”
She said “I took the Faces to see Stevie there, it was the best day of their lives.”
“You took the Faces to see Stevie Wonder?”
“At the Apollo, yeah. They couldn’t believe it. They were such cute little guys. Like little elves. They always came to see me after that. Whenever one of ’em was in town. Ian, the two Ronnies . . . so sweet . . .”
Eventually I found out there was no one in the music business she hadn’t worked with or crossed paths with.
Once I said “What about Sly Stone? You ever have anything to do with him?”
“No,” she said.
“Really?”
“No. Well. I did his wedding. At Madison Square Garden.”
At Home Depot we made our way up and down. After a while it was hard to tell if we were shopping or just hanging out there.
“What’s with your knee?” I asked her. “Why are you walking like that?”
“I don’t wanna talk about it.”
“Is your knee bothering you?”
“Maybe a little. Only when you annoy me, but I’m not blaming you.”
•
flatbed truck double-parked with a delivery of scaffold
•
Lou’s getting dressed and Philly comes in, they’re at neighboring lockers. I ask Lou what he’s doing today, he says running errands. I tell him we’re going to Park Slope to see friends.
“That whole neighborhood,” Lou says. “It’s all a historic district now. All protected. Even more than the Village.”
“Park Slope, baby,” Philly says. “That’s where I grew up.”
“No. Really?”
He’s wearing an off-white guayabera and loose linen slacks, hair slicked back. He looks great.
“I grew up right near there. Sunset Park. Where Albert Anastasia shot Arnold Schuster.”
“Who’s Arnold Schuster?”
“The guy who ratted out Willie Sutton.”
“Shoe salesman,” Lou says, with derision that borders on pity.
“What, Anastasia was offended? Willie Sutton wasn’t a mob guy, right? I thought he was a bank robber.”
“That’s right,” Philly says. “Willie Sutton was a wanted man. Arnold Schuster spotted him on the subway. He got off the train and called the cops.”
“They interviewed Schuster on TV,” Lou says. “Anastasia was home in his easy chair.”
“Anastasia saw him on TV and picked up the phone. They put six bullets in him.”
“’Cause he was a rat,” Lou says, getting his shopping bag in order. He carries a big plastic Duane Reade handle bag wherever he goes. “Principle of the thing.”
•
Saturday morning after the farmers’ market we came back to the Vermeer and she spent the day around the apartment, no makeup, in a baby-blue Metallic KO T-shirt.
She’s had it forever. She wore it the first Saturday we met up there, and it was old then.
In those first months, we met in the city after work. Holding hands on the darker side streets, pushing into doorways, releasing each other at the subway.
Fridays I was off. I dusted, swept, and mopped the apartment. All in happy anticipation. Then maybe I walked down to Tops, on North 6th, to shop for dinner. Dropped it home. Walked to the other side of the BQE and bought a loaf of semolina bread. Stopped at Fortunato’s for biscotti and carried them back in a white box tied with string. No rush. Got dinner started. Beef stew with a salad of escarole and endive. Or cod stew with tomatoes and fennel and green olives. Lima beans in tomato sauce with celery and potatoes. Once I made rice pudding for dessert. I spent all day getting ready. Then I walked to meet her at the subway feeling enlivened and calm.
Saturdays it was Union Square, as soon as she could get away. We walked through the market for what looked good and then got the train straight back to Brooklyn. Because she could never spend the night, we were always on the meter.
Her bag open on my couch with its already-bent copy of Lunch Poems jammed in there. Her panties on the floor, and the sheets mostly too. Midnight we walked to the subway.
Then I walked back. Under the BQE, trucks blasting overhead, past the locked playground. Up Marcy. Sundays he was home, they showed the apartment. So tomorrow nothing. I’d let myself into the building. Toss the watermelon rinds and go to bed.
•
I’m seeing this as a plein air novel. Written on the fly. Since I quit smoking, a few months after we got together, I’m averse to writing routines. So I write when I feel like it. Sitting on a standpipe. On the train. At the gym. Which is where I am now: downstairs at the Y, across from the pool, watching a swimmer on the other side of the glass. I used to wait here on Sundays so June and I could steal an hour when she got done showing her place. I started carrying a notebook so we wouldn’t lose a moment, since any moment, together or apart, was one of ours. “I sit here watching, blank and alive, like a cat. The lights on the pool, a swimmer’s arm, a splash: all you.”
•
So you walked out of the bus station in LA and got on the first bike that rolled up? Have I got that right?
•
Once, walking home from Elinor and Maggie’s roof party, we stopped at B&H. A woman down the counter had her wrist in a cast.
June said “I always wanted a cast. I never had a cast, braces—none of the things everybody else had in my neighborhood. I wished I could break my collarbone so I could have one of those cool neck braces. I had a little brother, that was it. Couldn’t have a dog, I wasn’t allowed. Not even an invisible dog.”
“How could they stop you from having an invisible dog?”
“Do you know about this? How do you know about this?”
“An invisible dog?”
“We went to a carnival with the Kolodnys, you could get like a—”
“It was a leash.”
“Yes! I thought This is the perfect thing! I’m not allowed to have a dog in the house—this is the perfect solution. I wanted it so bad. ‘She doesn’t need it.’ Gary Kolodny told my father ‘Let her have it! What’s the matter with you? It’s not a real dog!’ ‘No.’”
We sat there without saying anything. They brought our order. I had a tuna melt and a chocolate egg cream, June had a classy discreet cold borscht. I was picturing her as a kid.
“Did you have a bike?”
“Of course I had a bike, I was everywhere on my bike. Used to go around the block to get a slice . . . Carvel . . . Used to play ringolevio . . .”
“What is ringolevio, exactly?”
“It’s like hide-and-seek but more sophisticated.”
“How’s it more sophisticated?”
“There’s a song.”
•
Sometimes I wake up thinking what’s outside the window is what was outside my bedroom window where I grew up, with the sound of far-off lawn mowers moving among the apartment lawns and the other sounds of a summer morning. Today there were voices from the street, one guy blaming another for showing up two hours late last night on dope. I wouldn’t have heard that from my room in Ohio. But it took time and reasoning to believe there was something out there other than the view from that boy’s room.
•
Hot Brooklyn morning I walk to the subway behind two kids who’re so into each other they can hardly walk straight. They’re just sort of knocking down the street. The universe collapses for a second when a dump truck bounces over a metal plate, but do they notice? Nah, they’re inside it like you’re inside a hangover. I recognize it right away, it’s coming off of them like fumes in the heat . . .
•
“Okay, Tere, it happened. The package from AARP. Of course I’ve been getting spam for Cialis for years. And lately it’s been Silver Singles, hip replacements, reverse mortgages, funeral plots, and those electric carts people in the rest of the country buzz around on with a bag of Doritos and a little American flag. But yesterday I got the big envelope by U.S. mail, welcoming me to old age. AARP card and application, letter of introduction, decals, a bumper sticker, sample issue of the magazine, return-address labels, cardboard visor, the whole bit.
“Then I go to see Philly’s band at a bar in the Village. As his alter ego Ollie Boy Lester, Philly fronts a jazz band, and some of the guys from the Y go to show their support. I’m at the bar with him before the set, he says ‘Do you know Patsy?’—another guy from the locker room. Patsy says to me ‘You grew up with him in Brooklyn?’ Now, Philly’s sixty-four. I ain’t even fifty. Maybe to Patsy, who’s frail, jaundiced, and disappearing down the tunnel of the years, it’s all the same.
“Later, Lou puts him in a cab. It’s a struggle, Patsy’s trembling, one of the new cabs you have to climb up. Lou gives him a hand.
“Cab pulls away, Lou says under his breath ‘La vecchiaia è brutta.La vecchiaia è carogna.’
“Translation: Old age is ugly. Old age is carrion.”
•
“Tell me again what a burrito is?” she says.
How’s that for Brooklyn attitude?
I start to describe it, but she’s already decided it’s not for her and stopped listening.
“I can’t believe you never had a burrito. Even by accident. On the road. From a gas station or something.”
There’s a pause as she’s scanning the menu card.
“What else?” she says, distracted.
“What else what?”
“What else?” As in What else is on your mind?
•
SHAFTWAY
•
So there was Neil Z and Bennet and Jerry and Larry, got it, and possibly David Fricke, okay. Anyone else on the Rolling Stone staff? Other periodicals? Okay. Just let me— Frank Zappa’s microphone tech, was it?
•
I take Lou his magazines and wind up sitting on the couch with him for half an hour while he waits for Father Joe. I tell him I spent six fish yesterday on a pint of fresh figs, he says he turned down the strawberries at Union Square because they were $12 a quart. I tell him I have a friend in San Francisco who goes two days a week without food and cite the ancient Egyptian proverb that says a quarter of what you eat feeds you and the other three quarters feeds your doctor. Further, I point him to a theory that fasting allows the liver to stop producing a growth hormone that causes cancer. Lou tells me about the calf’s liver at Le Zie, à la Venezia. I tell him I don’t eat liver and he asks what about vestedda (spleen)? As if to illustrate our discussion, a man appears at the top of the stairs in a summer-weight cap and short-sleeve shirt, with a belt cinched around a pair of suitpants of about the same vintage as the Marshall Plan. “Here’s a V-man,” Lou says. He points out anyone who lives at the Vermeer: “Another V-man,” he’ll say. “This guy’s a V-man.” He introduces me to Gene, the man in the cap. Gene says he’s 96 years old, never sick a day in his life, last time he’s in a hospital was in North Africa, in 1944, with appendix. Lou asks him about his appetite. Gene says “I don’t eat much. But I never did.” Lou and I exchange a meaningful nod. Then Father Joe comes in, another bird-light nonagenarian, all smiles, radiating goodwill and a clear conscience, and Lou gives him a Danish and today’s papers, and Lou and I walk down the street. He tells me he’s going home to make himself, though he knows he shouldn’t, a soppressata sandwich, because he’s got the soppressat’ in the fridge and it shouldn’t go to waste, and anyway who can resist?
•
I grabbed a handful of curls. The window shade dragged against the wall. When I came it tore out of me like something barbed—something I didn’t know was even there.
After dinner we went again. Then I stretched out beside her and sank my face in her hair.
She said “Oh my God. You’re my revenge. Against everything.”
“I feel like a chopped-down tree.”
•
We walked out of the Giglio Festival and under the BQE with a bag of zeppole. I had the zeppole, who’m I kidding? Behind us, the lights on the rides were blinking in the dusk.
She said “I hate that ride, that gravity-defying ride.”
“I give ’em all a wide berth. What rides do you like?”
“I like the Cyclone.”
“Doesn’t surprise me that you like roller coasters.”
“That’s what I like, Mike: I like punk music and roller coasters.”
•
Sometimes when we got separated in a public place—we’re in a store, I don’t see her—I had a moment of How’d I get here? Like maybe I was waking up, and there was no June after all.
•
I found Lou on the stair machine, climbing nowhere, with the Daily News over the monitor and the other papers in a stack on the floor behind him. I put five copies of Fortune on the stack.
“Lou, we went to a wedding this weekend I met a guy eats nothing but raw food.”
“Supposed to be very good for you,” he said. “There’s a whole movement now.”
“This guy cured himself of diabetes. And Lyme disease.”
“I believe it.”
“But where do you get protein?” I said. “You can’t eat raw beans.”
“Tofu?” he said. “Is that cooked?”
“I dunno.”
He thought about it.
“Prosciut’ isn’t cooked,” he said. “They cure it. You could eat that.”
“That’s right. All the prosciut’ and capocol’ you can eat. You’re onto something, Lou.”
•
After dinner I walked to Graham Avenue for an ice. I walked back on Conselyea, as the leaves darkened and the color drained out of the sky. A GTO convertible was parked at the curb with the top down. And there between day and night I heard the wind in the trees, and felt it moving out of my past, through my life, on my face.
•
slithery seams of tar in the street
•
We wake up at the Vermeer on top of the sheets with the windows open wide. Same temperature as last night.
She says “I feel like I was drugged.”
“It’s like you’re dragged back into the same day.”
“That’s exactly right.”
“Like you slept on the sidewalk.”
“Are you ready for coffee?”
“Or the hood of a car.”
She’s on her way to the kitchen.
“June—”
“Bun.”
“Like a migrant worker who slept in a ditch.”
“Do you want hot coffee, or iced?”
•
the smell of a dead mouse in the weeds in the morning
•
She said “I’d like to get even closer to you, but I can’t.”
“I know. If it were up to me, we’d sift together like sand, until we were inseparable.”
•
Seven a.m. and the day already smells like something that’s been in a dumpster overnight.
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She got off the bus in LA, a guy on a motorcycle rolled up beside her, and she got on.
•
In the subway between Sixth and Seventh, the guy selling incense has got the whole tunnel choked with nag champa: “Take a look take a look take a look!” Upstairs, the sky gets darker and darker, almost black. And then the rain comes down in a white hissing torrent, the little rooftop trees are bent with it, but behind the rain, the sky has already lightened.
