Emma Who Saved My Life
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Authors: Wilton Barnhardt
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Contents
Additional Praise for Wilton Barnhardt's
Emma Who Saved My Life
Â
TO
Greenpoint, Brooklyn
(1982â1985)
For those who were there.
And for those who missed it.
BEGINNING
IF I had it to do all over again, I think I'd try to find some way to skip being nine years old. Because that's when it bit meâthe Theater Bug, I mean. I ended up devoting twenty-one of my thirty-five years to pursuing stardom on the stage and, looking back, I wonder if the height of my career might not have been when I was nine. It may have been the last time I was totally, utterly secure in the theater.
For those of you that missed my performance, I played Little Jimmy in
The Parson Comes to Dinner,
a 100% amateur theatrical put on at the Oak Park Community Playhouse, in the suburbs of Chicago. I don't think I knew the sheer depth and scope of my role until the first night's curtain call. They clapped at me. I know people generally do that at the end of plays but at nine I hadn't worked out the finer points and, frankly, I took it very personally.
SO, the next night I figured out that the more I did onstage, the more they might clap for me. The French maid did her scene while I titillated the audience with untying her sash. The woman who played my mother walked on and delivered her monologue while I intrigued the audience with whether, behind her, I was going to knock over a vase. I had one little line:
Ooooh Mom, it's not my bedtime yet,
which was to be delivered in a kiddie whine. You'd be surprised how long you can make that line last when you put your mind to it.
Oooooooooooh Mahhhhm
 ⦠About here I shifted my little weight back and forth and looked adorably at the audience in a way that I perfected in our bathroom mirror, and I'd continue
it's not ⦠I mean it caaaan't be
(what a pro! already improvising)
my beedddddtiiiiime, right nowww.
“Right now” works out to a few milliseconds longer than “yet.”
You might have thought this scenery-chewing would have earned the enmity of my fellow thespians but this was, after all,
The Parson Comes to Dinner
and I think they sort of liked it (since the audience liked it) and when it came time for my little step forward at the curtain call, the audience clapped even louder than they did the first night, and when everyone had had their portion of allotted applause, the man who played the Parson in
The Parson Comes to Dinner
scooted me out for MY VERY OWN INDIVIDUAL BURST OF APPLAUSE ⦠and well, that was that. We were off and running. Toward the bright lights of the theater, in summerstock local theatricals, in church camp musicals, in high school productions (I was Joe Football in the
Oak Park Follies of 1972,
which was revenge since the football-types called me a faggot all the time), then to college at Southwestern Illinois where I was a theater major. I even dropped out of college as a sophomore to go make my fortune in New York, for ten long years, hoping, dreaming, struggling, scheming ⦠and I think, if I'm honest, waiting for it again: that embracing, completely saturating very own individual burst of applause. These days, howeverâ
“Is that typing I hear?”
(That's my wife, home from work, just walking in the door.) Yes, dear. The autobiography is under way.
“About time! I was tired of hearing you talk about it. How far along are you?”
I'm nine, it's page two, and would you mind fixing dinner tonight? I'm on a roll here.
“I suppose your starting this project at 4:45 p.m. was not part of a larger strategy to put me in the kitchen, was it?”
Of course not. (This woman knows me pretty well.)
“It'll mean just sandwiches if I fix it. Poor worn-out fragile pregnant woman that I am⦔
She's not even two months into this and already meeting her demands has become a challenge. Last night I got rooked into driving up to Skokie for Chinese take-out. I can only imagine what the seventh and eighth months will be like around here.
Actually, I can't imagine it.
I can't imagine being a father. Between you and me, I thought kids were something other people had. But we agreed this was the right age and the time was right and ⦠I guess the problem is I still have New York on the brain, residual theateritis. No, I'm not going backâI'm happily married, I've been working out here for four and a half years now, and I'm looking forward in an abstract way to being the world's greatest father to the world's greatest son or daughter. But I was a different person in New York.
“What kind do you want?” she's yelling from the kitchen. “The management's pushing baloney tonight. It's forming a wall in the back of the fridge.”
Peanut butter and mayonnaise on white Wonder-type bread.
Silence. I wait for the comment.
“As if the morning sickness wasn't bad enough. That I have to craft such atrocities with mine own hands⦔
You know when I said I was only secure in the theater once, when I was nine years old? I can think of another time. When I decided it was time to leave New York and take a long break. Maybe for the first time in ten years I really felt like my own person, in control of events for once, and part of my happiness was having the theater in proper perspective. Also, I was probably looking for an excuse to go home. Which is ironic. Because sometimes here in Evanston with the next few decades of my life chiseled in stone before meâwell, the rest of my life, reallyâI wonder if lately I haven't been looking for an excuse to
go back.
1974
IT was still a time when people moved around the country by Greyhound bus. That's how I moved east, and it meant my introduction to New York City was through the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Lisa, my only friend in New York, was going to meet me at 2:30. She showed up at 3:15, but forty-five minutes late is pretty good for Lisa.
Now I very much wanted to look like Coolness Itself so I went to Male Prostitute/Pot-Heroin-Cocaine Central, the men's room, to Freshen Up, and there I am before a dingy mirror trying to look tough, New York tough, Gil in the big city ⦠nope, it's not gonna work. I'm still five-ten, I'm still a wimp, I can barely lift my suitcase. I am however a man in my own time: brown, aggressively tangled hair to the shoulders, a tie-dyed T-shirt (yellow with bursts of whiteâI loved that old thing), a denim jacket, a very patched-up thin pair of ratty jeans, my peace-sign belt-buckle and, for christ's sake, my HEADBANDâjust for New York, to let the nine million know how
with it
I was. God. You know that bank robbery in Tulsa? That series of liquor-store holdups in Nebraska? The old couple in the trailer park I killed for 50¢? That I can live with. What I've never been able to forgive myself was being so obviously a just-off-the-bus, immature twenty-year-old.
Because Lisa was late I decided, unchaperoned, unassisted, I would take a first step outside into the metropolis. The bus station is right on 42nd Street so there I was five seconds later walking against the tide of teenage hooker runaways, fourteen-year-old junkies, police busting some black guy for something, old men stumbling out of the porn-sex shops. I beat a retreat when this over-made-up transvestite tried to put his arm around me (“Nice headband, sugar”). Gosh, New York City. Mom will be so thrilled when I write her all about it. We're going to have to take this city, your new home, Gil, slowly, in small doses. Back to the bus station coffee shop to wait for Lisa.
Lisa.
Oh I cringe when I tell you what was most on my little mind as I entered New York, riding in through the Lincoln Tunnel, my face pressed to the green bus glass trying to take it all in from the Jersey side of the Hudson. My name in lights? How was I going to be a star in record time? Nooo, my big concern was if I could kiss Lisa on the lips. I never had. This was a good excuse, I figured, since I hadn't seen her in four months. We would be sharing her sublet for a year, after all. I had decided not to return to my junior year of college and instead come to make my fortune in the big city and, while I was being romantic, why not kiss Lisa with a Big Romantic I'm-a-Man-Now Kiss. Adults did that kind of thing and I was an adult. Somewhere on the bus ride between Southwestern Illinois University and Port Authority, I can assure you Lisa, I ceased being the theater-department sophomore jerk and became a full-fledged budding-actor-in-New-York jerk.
At 3:15, there she was.
“Gil!” She ran to give me a hug.
Lisa! (All right, get those lips into position â¦)
“Let me look at you,” she said, holding me at arm's length, hands on my shoulders. Damn. Kiss was out. “You're early⦔
No, I'm notâI said 2:30.
“I thought you said 3:30, honey. Sorry. Where's your junk?”
It was one overpacked suitcase, in a locker.
“Look, let's drag it to Seventh Avenue and hail a cab there,” she said, tossing her hair, her beautiful long frizzy blond natural '70s full head of hair. “Never,” she said, “try to go crosstown in a cab or it'll cost a fortune. Stick to going up or down the avenuesâyou're there in no time.”
Three months in New York, and she was an expert, she was a zany-madcap-young-girl-in-New-York, and boy did I want to fall in love with that.
We got our cab. I'm in the back with my suitcase, head out a window, looking at skyscrapers, the mark of the newcomer.
“Headband's new, isn't it?” Lisa asked.
No, had it forever. (Okay, that was IT for the goddam headband.)
I was fascinated by everything that passed by, Lisa was jaded and bla
Å
e. I asked questions, she answered them â¦
“Oh this? This is the garment district, actually. Oooh look at that rack of fur coats. Still waiting for a rich man to give me one.”
And then the Village, western half, not yet yuppified in 1974. Following a brief tour of Lisa's sublet, owned by a single mother with two kids who were in Europe for a year, we went to Lisa's favorite Village cafe and sat at an outside table.
“Think he'll do it tonight?”
Who do what?
“Nixon resign. Where've you been?” Lisa pulled out the last of her cigarettes. “I'm quitting you know. This ⦠this is the last cigarette I'll smoke during the Nixon administration. Emma's got a friend at
Newsweek
who says it's a sure thing, he'll step down tonight. Which oughta be a relief for Susan.”
Susan wasn't a Nixon fan?
“No, I mean her partyâshe's the person whose party we're going to tonight. I wrote you about her parties. They're famous. Susan's Soho Parties. I wrote you all about them, how incredible and bad they were, remember?”
No she didn't. I only got one letter from Lisa the whole summer and that was the one that invited me out to move in with her.
“I did
too
write about Susan's parties. Anyway, we're going to one, so, uh, psychologically prepare yourself. You're gonna meet every loser in New York tonightâthese parties are great for the old ego, I'll tell ya that.” The waitress made a near pass and Lisa leaned out to flag her down to no avail. “You saw that, didn't you? She saw me, she saw me⦔
