Jacket Weather, page 8
•
Lou runs into a guy he knows who’s carrying a bag of laundry, walking with his wife.
Lou says “What’re you doing?”
“I’m doing laundry.”
“How come she doesn’t do it?” Lou says.
“What century you living in?” the wife says.
He’s telling me this at the Y. He says “Can you imagine those guys who came over here in the fifteenth century—men like Pizarro and Cortés—can you imagine those guys doing their own laundry?”
“It was the fifteenth century, like you say. And that’s who we’re looking at for correct behavior? Cortés? Who does your laundry?”
“I do.”
“So?”
“I’m zulo zul’,” he says, throwing the upward chop that dismisses all dispute. “It’s a different thing.”
He follows me into my row buttoning his shirt.
“If you can take it,” he says, “alone is better. When I was with Catherine, I come home, she made all kinda plans for us, we’re going here, we gotta go there. Who needs it?”
Hector comes in from the gym.
“How’s Philly?” he says.
“He’s in mourning,” Lou says. “He’s mourning because his woman left him.”
“Well,” Hector says, “if my woman left me, I’d be sad also.”
“He’s a mamaluke. First class.”
•
One morning in the summer we first got together, her hair was twirled above her head on the pillow like she was going up in flames.
“You’re my secret weapon,” she said. “You’re my favorite thing. Anywhere. You’re better than dark-chocolate ice cream, you’re the best Rolling Stones song. Don’t think for one minute that I don’t know how lucky I am. Because I do.”
“If you think you’re the lucky one here, I’ve got you fooled.”
“You know nothing.”
“We’re both lucky,” I said. “Any two people who find each other are lucky.”
“But we’re luckier,” she said. “Michael.”
•
Always in the past I’ve been able to imagine an afterward. Now I can’t. It’s blank.
There’s no after-June.
•
ALL-NIGHT BLOW PARTY IN POGUE’S HOTEL ROOM . . . MSG BACKSTAGE ENCOUNTER, TRANSATLANTIC FLING! . . . CLOSE QUARTERS IN THAMES HOUSEBOAT!
•
Lou’s talking to a guy in shorts with a long white ponytail and a walking stick. Not a cane but a staff. His name is Roy, he’s 92 years old, still working. Lou introduces me, as he always does, as one of the top guys, a top writer. Roy’s writing his fifteenth play. He teaches at the New School, Shakespeare and fiction.
Lou asks him the secret of his longevity.
Roy stops to think. As though he’s just now considering the question after 92 years, he says “I don’t know . . . I never drank much. Try to be careful about what I eat. And my wife takes very good care of me.”
“You’ve got a wife!” Lou says. “You’re lucky you’re still alive! Usually men die younger when they’ve got a wife.”
I’ve gotta laugh. “Well that’s a—”
“You’re wrong,” Philly says, from his locker.
“That’s one way to read the fact that women live longer.”
“You’re wrong anyway,” Philly says. “Married men live longer.”
“Zulo Zul’! You got no wife!”
“And I’m dying!”
“You’re lucky to be free of that girl.”
Philly says “Y’know, Lou, everything’s not as simple for me as it is for you. You read an article, you eat a sandwich: you’re happy. The simple pleasures are enough for you. They’re not enough for me.”
Lou, shaking his head, steps into his pants. Another man is making his way through. Puss like an undertaker.
“Wake up, Lou,” he says.
•
It’s been a hundred degrees, like a pizza parlor out there. At night it goes down to 92, the hydrants open, the curbs running, two cars double-parked with all their windows down pumping music, one salsa, one rap. You go to sleep with the fan blowing and wake up with the fan still blowing on the same day again.
•
“Morning, honey.”
“What time is it, Michael?”
“It’s about ten after five.”
“I’m having a wonderful dream.”
“Oh, sorry. You stay there.”
“They changed Fifth Avenue. All the facades, back to the original way. And they’re letting people go in and out, to see the houses.”
“Okay, have fun.”
•
Philly’s band is playing on Christopher Street, a place called the 55 Bar. So June and I go down for the first set. It’s early, 7:00—the sun is out—we sit at a table with Lou and Patsy and Hector from the Y.
Halfway through the set, I need to use the toilet. It just comes over me—I’m in a hurry. But it’s one of those bars where the bathroom’s behind the stage—you climb over the band—so I leave June at the table and go to her place. From Christopher Street, six or seven blocks, up Seventh Avenue. Takes me twenty minutes, there and back.
By which time the set’s finished and June’s out front. Guarded by Lou. And Patsy and Hector, his deputies. Lou won’t leave her till I get back. Or let her go. So Patsy and Hector have to wait there too. Though they don’t know what it’s about, exactly, it’s Lou’s deal. June’s telling Lou she lived her whole life in New York. Plus it’s the West Village in 2012, not Avenue C thirty years ago. Plus it’s only a few blocks. Plus the sun’s in the sky. No can do: Lou’s alert to the street, with Patsy and Hector sort of dozing off beside him. When I walk up, Lou hands her over. He says he’ll see me in the morning and waves down a cab for Patsy. And Hector says he’s gonna go.
•
Black sidewalk door propped open on cellar stairs. Garment racks on cobblestones.
•
“Thanks for asking, T. Things are good with June, except I had a dream last night about a shiny black monkey who was calling me, somewhat disrespectfully, I felt, ‘Mister President,’ and in response I BIT HER ON THE ARM in my sleep.”
•
“How’s dinner?” she said without opening her eyes.
“Good! We just went to Elephant.”
“What’d you eat?”
“I had the spaghettini.”
“You had that sundae, didn’t you?” Eyes still closed.
“I had the sundae. The Carmen Miranda.”
“That’s not what it’s called.”
“The Lili St. Cyr.”
“It’s the Scarlett O’Hara. What Pete have?”
“Pete? Pete had a slimming salad and a modest slice of blueberry pie. Me? I ate half a loaf of bread and a big plate of pasta and topped it off with a hot-fudge sundae. For I am Gargantua. And I’m lumbering out of your forests to flatten your cities and set fire to your lakes.”
•
“Tere, it comes on like chemicals or something. I go from elation to blackness and fear. I know she’s busier than I am at work, so our experience of time is different. I know that. But I feel like a fish tossed up on a riverbank. Drowning in air. In the past hour alone, there’ve been sixty separate minutes when she hasn’t called or written me back. If I can’t stand it, how can she?”
•
“Yeah, Mike, this is Lou. I couldn’t talk to you before because I was in the dentist. But anyway, so, sounds good, I can get those items tomorrow morning no problem. Aright. And, uh, I wanted to talk to you about that dinner! It was very good! And the price is right, and they give you good portions! It’s unbelievable! Aright. —The chicken Parmesan is better than Gene’s, ’cause it’s bigger, crispier. Better—thicker. Very good. More authentic. Alright: later. I just polished off a pint of Talenti: it’s a gelato. Delicious! Sicilian pistachio. I ate the whole pint. It’s on sale at Whole Foods: three ninety-five. Usually it’s like eight dollars a pint. So half the price. Problem is, you can’t stop eating it. They got about ten flavors: caramel, sea salt, this, that. Peanut butter chocolate—so many flavors, but I stuck with that one. Alright! I’ll be in touch.”
•
Black ribbed sleeveless shirt, black miniskirt, high black boots. Full moon through fast-moving clouds. I grow fangs.
•
ON THE ROAD WITH BILLY BRAGG: TOUR BUS CONFESSIONS! . . . TWO EMPTY SEATS ON A FLIGHT TO DALLAS . . . MY NIGHT WITH THE DEAD BOYS!
•
I had to get a grip on myself before I drove her away. So I went uptown to talk to my friend Ken. I knew him in San Francisco, when we worked at the same place. Then he left to become a therapist and I lost touch with him. Ten years later I’m walking through the Rockefeller Center subway station and here he comes, with a new partner, Jens, and a practice in New York. And it was as natural as anything to run into him—in fact, this made me suspect that coincidence doesn’t surprise us. We pretend to be surprised because that’s the convention, but deep inside, where we’re in sync with the nature of things, we’re unsurprised. Anyway, I went up to meet him at Fine & Schapiro, a kosher deli across from their apartment. But it turns out they’re not supposed to have friends as clients. He said he’d give me a couple of names.
•
A cloudy August morning, “Diamond Dogs” comes on and it’s early November. One of those overcast, windless days, like life in a diorama.
•
On the Rockaway ferry, we pass a small lighthouse.
“They built a lighthouse here on land?” she says.
“Lighthouse is always on land.”
She’s silent, looking out the window.
“That’s the point of a lighthouse,” I tell her, “to warn you where the land is.”
She looks at me. Then she goes back to looking out the window.
“Where do you think a lighthouse should be?” I ask her.
“Don’t speak to me.” Then: “I’m not a seafaring person. I’m a city person.”
•
I’m sitting with a plate of food on my lap in a house in New Jersey when a photo album comes my way. And there’s a picture of June, maybe 12 or 13, from a wedding or bar mitzvah. Taller than her cousins, pale, peculiar, dark circles around her eyes. Someone has put her in a ridiculous pale-blue party gown and yanked her hair into an approximately presentable style.
There’s really no sign that in a few years she’s on a bus to California and this is all fading behind the green Pennsylvania mountains. Or no sign except that she’s so out of place.
Once I asked her why, in every picture of her as a kid, her hair’s been straightened and chopped in bangs.
“All they knew how to do was compare us to everyone else. And they knew that I didn’t look like everybody else. My mother would get out the scissors and chop it off. And at the time when I was growing up in the seventies: straight hair. I was just this tall, gawky, frizzy-haired freak, in my parents’ eyes, listening to music.”
When I got to know her family, I couldn’t see much of them in her. She’s self-created. She’s the girl in the Lou Reed song whose life was saved by rock and roll.
In that party picture, she’s looking right at you. You can see she’s stranded there, an embarrassment, with no awareness that fitting in here will turn out to be the last thing she wants. That life isn’t like this. That her real life is out there, waiting for her.
•
The sky had gotten darker. Sunday afternoon, all the windows were open wide. I’ve realized only lately how happy I can be just watching her. Going about her business. There’s something mysterious about it. Every once in a while I notice that she isn’t me. She was standing at the window with her arms folded. There was a crack of thunder, a crack and then a roll. She looked up, looked down. Then the rain came straight down all at once. She had her hair up, her glasses on. She bent to see under the open window, and I could tell she was sniffing the air at the screen. She straightened up. She caught me watching and she was self-conscious. “The rain smells sweet! Can you smell it?” Then she went back to watching, arms still folded, alert to its magic, in this never-to-be-repeated afternoon of her one life.
•
Philly was on one of the couches by himself. Something about him caught my attention, a quietness. I walked over.
“Philly.”
He stood up. “Hey, pal.” He had a sad little smile.
“You okay?”
“Aah, I got girl trouble,” he said. He was quite altered.
“Anything you want to talk about?”
“Nah,” he said. “Thanks for asking.” Then he walked off toward the stairs.
I remembered a morning when he came in talking about their night at the Carlyle.
“Made a reservation in the name of Dr. Frederick Sherman,” he said. “When I go to restaurants uptown I always pose as a doctor.”
“Doctor Philly.”
“That’s right. This way they all make a fuss over me—‘Your table is ready, Dr. Sherman.’”
They went to see Bettye LaVette, it cost him nearly $500. He said it was worth it. The Bemelmans Bar, where they went first for a drink (martini: $18), was the greatest place in New York, and Bettye LaVette was the greatest soul singer in the world, better than Aretha, better than anyone you could name. For dinner he had Dover sole ($65).
That same morning, I got on a stair machine next to Lou.
I said “Philly had a good time at the Carlyle the other night.”
“That’s a class joint,” Lou said, while reading the Post. “If you ever wanna impress a broad, that’s the place to go.”
“Expensive,” I said. “He paid sixty-five dollars for a plate of fish.”
“Dover sole,” Lou said.
“That was a four-hundred-dollar night for him.”
“Four sixty-five,” Lou said, turning the page.
•
THE JUNE AND JANE SHOW
In a Town Car, Times Square, six p.m.: Jane up front with her driver, Pedro, June and me in back . . .
JANE: Joe [Sicari, her neighbor] called me the other night he wants to go for a walk. So we walked . . . along West 12th Street to Hudson and then back again, and then he decided we should go to Good Stuff Diner, and then I got very angry at Good Stuff so we left Good Stuff—
JUNE [laughing]: Why did you get angry?
JANE: Because—I spend a lot of money in there. I really do. And there was nobody in there. And, um. And I know they get very crowded around two or three because there are clubs around there and they’ve already had three shootings. But it’s too early for them, and lots of booths and tables and everything, so Joe says “We’re just gonna have a cup of coffee.” So the man says “Would you like to have a cup of coffee at a table by the window?” I said “No I’d like to have a cup of coffee in a booth.”
JUNE: Yeah.
JANE: And he didn’t want us to sit at the booth so I just said “I’m leaving, goodbye. Have a good time with—”
JUNE: So what’d you guys do instead?
JANE: So. Then Joe said “Why don’t we go in the Donut Pub?” and I said “Okay, let’s do that.”
JUNE: Ohhhh no . . .
JANE: I’m still on the No Donut Diet, don’t worry. But—
JUNE: But you did manage to eat what?
JANE: Nothing, no no. But, in the Donut Pub now, there’s a man, an older man, and he’s in there doing magic tricks for everybody and he’s got these puzzles on the counter, and . . .
MIKE: I’ve seen him in there.
JUNE: So you’re going to the Donut Pub too now?
MIKE: I like to keep abreast of developments in—
JUNE: When were you in there?
MIKE: I was in there with Pete or something. And this magician was there.
JANE: He’s really good. And he’s really sweet. But he twawks like dis, y’know, he’s got that very Bronx— I can’t even do it, but I mean it’s really thick. And—he’s very smart, and very very clever and he makes up a lot of these things. But he’s also trying to sell them, he—
MIKE: Puzzles, right? Little wooden puzzles.
JANE: Yeah, also he has little pieces of plastic, and then he’s got this other thing where you make a pyramid out of all these different pieces . . .
MIKE: Right, right.
JANE: But I mean it’s impossible. So, little by little people are coming in—everybody’s playing these games, and now everybody’s trying to share information—
JUNE: [Laughter]
JANE: —“How do ya do this?”—
MIKE: [Laughter]
JUNE: How fabulous is that? It’s so— It’s like a real moment.
JANE: Yeah! A New York moment, absolutely. But I mean it’s a riot because everybody from every kind of walk of life comes in and he somehow engages each one of ’em, and they’re all playing with his stuff and all talking to one another: “Well, did you do this one? I can’t do it—what’d he say to you?” And the police they came: “Sean! C’mon!”
JUNE: [Laughter]
MIKE: The cops were playing too?
JANE: Yeah, the cops know him, everybody knows him, I mean he’s a very—
JUNE: I wonder if I’ve seen him, if I—
JANE: I think you would know him, he’s not, y’know, he’s not exactly a looker— And, y’know, he’s got the kind of face you’d kinda remember?
MIKE: Does he dress in a particular way?
JANE: Yeah. Terrible. He had some kind of a black T-shirt? and black pants, and nothing fit right, y’know—
MIKE: But he’s not dressed like a magician or anything.
JANE: No no.
MIKE: And how does he get any money? If somebody buys a puzzle, or do you give him a tip?
JANE: You can leave a tip in his tip jar, but he doesn’t hassle you—“And don’t forget to leave a tip” every five minutes, nonea that. Y’know. And he tries to sell his puzzles. But he doesn’t tell you fifteen times.
