Emma Who Saved My Life (63 page)

“Well, I don't understand why everyone's so down on nuclear war,” I heard her say, standing in a foursome of ad people. “I mean, god, the whole business in Beirut—let's put Lebanon out of the world's misery, there'll be no more massacred peacekeeping forces, no more hostages. Drop the bombs. You Reagan fans promised me this man was gonna drop bombs, and I wanna see some fireworks.”

Her foursome was amused, everyone laughed, suggesting a few other places nuclear bombs ought to be dropped: Iran, Cuba, Libya, New Jersey.

“I've said it for years,” Emma went on, “there's a chic to post-apocalypse; it's not gonna be so bad after it all blows over—”

“If you survive,” said one woman.

“Oh it's gonna take much more'n that to get rid of Emma, I tell you,” said Emma. “Reagan's a complete disappointment to me. You know I vote for entertainment value and frankly I'm surprised to find the man becoming a cult hero, popular. I thought he would be impeached by now. The damn country's picking up it seems. You just wait, though. When it starts falling apart it's gonna make great viewing.”

One woman said through a whiny laugh, “You really vote for entertainment value?”

“Absolutely. So does America, only it doesn't realize it yet.”

Emma and her new admirers even got onto John Kennedy and I thought, oh boy, here we go again, it's all over now, but she had 'em in the aisles, she was a hit—trashing Kennedy, sticking up for Nixon, her Antichrist theory of Ronald Reagan, advocacy of nuclear war, her radical reforms of New York City government, why half of what's in the Museum of Modern Art should be burned, a defense of the worst TV shows in the world … She was a Constant—this occurred to me as I think it never had. An unbending Force in the Cosmos. After Emma I've limited my crushes and romances to human beings, and it's behind me, my days of falling in love with Forces in the Cosmos. But you can't blame a guy for trying.

Emma did cut out early on Lisa's party, shirking goodbye duties. That should have tipped me off that she might do the same with me, and I shouldn't have been too surprised, on the Saturday before Emma left New York, to hear this from her on my answering machine:

BEEP!
Well Gil, this is goodbye. I can't see you. What am I going to say after nearly a decade, huh? ‘Well, it's been fun!' I mean, c'mon, let's not do corny maudlin things we'll both one day regret …

By god, Gennaro, I'm having my soppy goodbye and no one is going to take it away from me!

So anyway, so long Gilbert. It's been fun. Ha ha ha. I'll write of course and we'll visit and it will be as if I never left, right? Hey, there's long distance, you know me and long-distance bills—I think nothing of racking up the big numbers.
Then, a pause. Well come on, come on, say you love me Emma.
Bye-bye kid.
CLICK.

No, Emma, no.

I got my coat and went over to 10th Street and pushed her buzzer. I pushed it again. Nothing. I waited until someone in the building came in and let me through the door and I went up to her apartment, where I heard shuffling from within. I tried the door and it was open. If she heard my voice in the stairwell thanking the person for letting me in, she hadn't made it to lock the door in time. I walked inside and all was bare, in packing boxes, in big yard-size trash bags. Oh what emptiness, the abandoned apartment of a friend, those second homes. She was gone. I went into the kitchen, and then to the bathroom … WAIT. Her toothbrush and stuff were still there … then I heard a tinkling in the closet of coathangers jingling against each other. I went to the door of the closet and tore it open in a sudden gesture.

“Fucking coathangers,” said Emma, crouched down in the closet.

WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM NOW EMMA GENNARO?

“It's for your own good I left you that message. You weren't supposed to come over here. You were supposed to curse my name and forget me.”

Would you please give it a break? We have, I informed her, a good 48 hours until you leave for California. We are going to spend it together.

Emma pouted, now standing in the closet. “Go away from me, young boy. I'm no good for you. Your life is elsewhere…”

Would you cut this out?

She stepped out of the closet. “I can't deal with goodbyes. And lately … oh Gil, I have this plan that came into my head and it's REALLY BAD, I mean EXTRA even-crazy-for-me BAD…”

What is it?

“I gotta leave town before I talk myself into going through with my new project.”

At that point I could have been persuaded to come back to New York, so I said I hoped she did stay; I'd help her do whatever she wanted short of robbing a bank. She smiled briefly, ironically, and said I'd be sorry I volunteered. We're not gonna kidnap Lisa's daughter are we?

Emma was quiet a moment. “I don't want to commit myself or rule out any options.”

I insisted on our final goodbye and Emma conceded to spending Sunday afternoon with me. And Monday, your last night?

“No, I got something I have to do,” she said.

I made her swear endless allegiance, no tricks, cross her heart and hope to die. And so I puttered around Manhattan, tried to interest myself in shops and records and a copy of
Backstage.
I sat having coffee in McDonald's looking through Backstage. MY MY, how that little rag still gets to me—it is a listing of cruelty, a roster of hopes one in a thousand can expect to make real. Maybe ten good parts a month pop up in that newspaper and there are probably 50,000 actors who get the gleam in their eye and have their hearts beat faster and suddenly see it all work out, every dream, every ambition. I sat there and read the openings and I shook my head—I hope not to look at you for a good six months,
Backstage.
And I thought to myself once again, maybe this business is for the Reisa Goldbaums, the real talents.

I started enjoying my swan song. I went to the East Village to look up old monuments. The Ruizes' Caribbean Foodstore was gone, the whole block had gone to developers. It would be another few years before they could drive everyone out. Even the East Village—who would have thought it? Eight hundred dollars a month on Avenue D! Impossible. And now there's a chain jeans store near St. Mark's, the streetcrowd is increasingly white yuppie, striped shirts with beige shorts, very frat boy … There goes the neighborhood. They won't be happy, Mayor Koch, the Reaganites, half a dozen landlords I could name, they won't be happy until every bohemian, every
real person,
is off the island, will they? Maybe one day Manhattan can be the tasteless condominiumized suburbs people used to flee to. Ah, I'm out of town—it's not my fight anymore.

Slut Doll is gone, no use looking up Betsy, Nicholas at the Soho was his usual bland self, Joyce Jennings welcomed me with open arms at the Venice (“Of course you'll be back!”) and here's old you'll-never-make-it-in-this-town himself, Dewey Dennis:

“Well, saw you in the big show last year, my boy—always knew it! Always knew you'd pull it out. Aren't you glad I chucked you out the door so you could go on to fame and fortune, ahahahaha! You were always good, Gil. Damn good. Come and audition for us next fall, I think there's something for you here…”

All is fair in the theater world: I shook his hand and wished him well and meant it (the schmuck …).

And Bonnie McHenry fit me in for drinks one afternoon at the St. Regis, which was kind. Oh she'd remember me, sorry it didn't swork out with Odessa, wasn't that a time we had in
Bermuda Triangle,
she'd never forget me, John. I didn't even want to trouble that grand beautiful perfected stage smile of hers by telling her it was Gil, not John. And so the summer ended and it became cooler and approached October, and I went by a few old landmarks and let the fall breeze blow through me; I would stand on the Staten Island ferry, looking out at the harbor, and feel the finality of a number of things. It was time to go.

Let's not pretend I'm superhuman. On-again off-again work is very wearing, very insecure-making. I've proven I'm not a wimp, I've proven I can take it—I've survived most everything. But I wouldn't mind putting my feet up for a while, and giving my endurance-survival faculties a break. I don't want to be begging Jerry and Janie for work in barn-dinner-theater Rodgers and Hammerstein revivals through my thirties. At twenty-three that's adventure, at twenty-seven that's a richly lived life, at thirty that's suicide-inducing.

But, I'm telling you, it's truly difficult to leave the stage. For so long people ask, friends call up: What are you up to? And you tell them I'm mad this week because I'm Hamlet, or I'm drunk and homosexual this week because I'm Brick in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
and next month I'll be nobody at all in an evening of Beckett pieces. Then one day you put all those people away, all the masks, all the gestures and reserves of carefully processed emotion, and people ask you what role are you working on this month … and for once it's your own life, the hardest role of the bunch. You gotta say the lines with a straight face. I was not a great actor. For me acting was pretending I was someone; learn the accent, develop a little shtick, put on the makeup, use every trick I knew and half the time you'd believe I was who I said I was. But you look at a Reisa Goldbaum, someone with a natural gift, and you see that she can reach down into a deep and rich humanity and draw up a true-to-life Williams heroine, a Greek tragic figure, an Ophelia, a Neil Simon one-liner queen. I put on the trappings, she had it in her heart. There was only one role in my heart, only one in my repertoire that could draw upon everything I had, only one I could pull off, in New York or goddam Peoria: myself. I think it was time I dusted off Gilbert Anthony Freeman, gave him a limited run. Let's see if the show can last.

But first, a few Saturday night goodbye calls:

“Oh my god, it's Gil, it's Gilbert Freeman!” screamed Valene in a little girl voice, like a teenybopper. “Can we have your autograph? Oh pleeeease,” and then she fell into giggling.

“Come here,” said Mrs. Jackson, preparing to give me a hug. “Now look here on my cash register. You know how I hate junk on my cash register so I wouldn't put this here if I didn't want it here, 'cause you know how I hate junk on my cash register…” Mrs. Jackson had cut out the
Daily News
review and taped it to her cash register; my name was underlined. “Good to see ya, darlin'. You come back to talk to all the little people—”

No, no, you're the Big People, I promise.

“You want your breakfast special with the runny eggs?” said Mrs. Jackson. “On the house, on the house, sit down there … Valene get that pot for me, it's gonna burn the coffee.”

Mr. Jackson dashed from the kitchen, patting me on the shoulder as he passed, “Well well Mr. Broadway star, come back to see us later on tonight, huh?”

Yes I—

“Sorry, gotta go, son. Gotta run get some butter.”

Mrs. Jackson explained as he ran out the door that the refrigerator was working about half the time and no one could get a repairman. She dealt with a small line of customers.

“Here's your breakfast. I 'spect my usual 200% tip now, remember.” Valene set the plate down and was about to fly off to another order.

I'm leaving town for a while Valene. I'm sort of saying goodbye.

“Goin' to Hollywood?”

No, just on tour with a play—

“Sorry honey, gotta get this order…” And she was off to do her job. It was a busy night. It came to me: New York will go on without me. It will not stop. It will continue to pulse and struggle and live and breathe through the nights, like Jackson's, open 24 hours a day, a world of noise and new faces and new characters and new things to talk about and not a helluva lot of time for nostalgia and maybe no time at all for people who thought they ought to move elsewhere.

“Here's some more coffee, Gil,” said Valene, swishing by. “I see you're thinking and staring out into space again. You must be thinkin' 'bout my BIG TIP.” And then she ran to the call of another customer.

Valene's benediction: “You gonna miss this breakfast special, Gilbert. I know they can't do that right in Chicago.”

Valene, wherever you are, when people ask me what I miss most about New York, I always say: Jackson's Diner, 54th Street, the $1.99 breakfast special. And that is no joke.

Then it was Sunday, the official goodbye-to-Emma day. I decided I would take a morning walk on what looked to be an Indian summer morning, a final stroll around the Brooklyn of our lost journals and memories.

I started at the Heights, the tree-lined streets and rich people sleeping in late, and then after a lengthy sit on the Promenade to look at Lower Manhattan, the hundreds of skyscrapers, the nameless buildings for the nameless jobs, those still-miraculous bridges spanning the East River, I moved on to our old stomping grounds, South Brooklyn. Someone was in our old apartment. There was an out-of-season snowflake taped to the window, a family with a child was there now. I had heard somewhere that Sal's had changed hands so I didn't go in search of it for fear of seeing it yuppified into a Parisian cafe or worse, torn down—no, it will remain in memory forever serving up the Earlybird Special, an infinity of 4 a.m.'s strung together by late-night chatter, waitress laughter, the aroma and sounds of the sizzling grill, frozen in that blue fluorescent glow. I walk along to the Flatbush Avenue Extension and the city within the city is awakening—there's a man by the pay phones talking loudly, attracting attention: “You put down my name … you put it on the books right now, yessir…” He clutched a beer can in a sodden brown paper bag. He was fortyish, in a T-shirt, Cuban, I think. “Lester T. Maron, M-A-R-O-N—you put it down because I'm going to kill the son of a bitch. I'm an honest man, I'm telling you…” Then a police car pulled up; the crowd, me included, stepped back. “Now Lester,” began the officer, getting out of the patrol car. “You know you're not going to kill him, we been through this before…” Lester struck a noble pose: “Lester T. Maron, M-A-R-O-N, and I'm just telling you before I do it…” Harmless, after all. I walk on to the Donut House (one of a million on Flatbush, the doughnut capital of America, I bet). I order a coffee regular—the nectar of the gods! dispensing that sweet, taut fix on the morning—and a crumbly cake doughnut and the Haitian proprietor brings it to me: “Halloo my friend,” followed by this unreally white smile. His relatives are already spreading blankets on the sidewalk out front, an array of homemade trinkets, jewelry, Caribbean wood statues, incense, a few Christian relics, a little voodoo. Two young boys, ebony black, all arms and legs, crouch in the morning sun as the noise of the street gains strength, a loud radio plays to their side, an island beat—zouk music, there's an LP for sale on the blanket. “Skashah the beegest theeng in Haiti meester,” said one boy, all smiles, all hope for a purchase. “Used record cheap for you.” Five bucks. Okay, sure. Now I'm walking down Flatbush with a Haitian record under my arm, past the Chinese laundry, past the Greek coffee shop next to the Korean fruit stand—three hours in Brooklyn and you touch the world!—and I stop in Franco's Pizza for a cold drink—it's 110 degrees in there, the ovens are going. “They say it's getting hotter every year,” said the old man in the tomato-smudged white pizza-man suit behind the counter. He brings my Coke in a big Pepsi cup. “Them damn spray cans, those antiperspirants, that's what's doing it,” added the man. “Hey Willie,” he went on, talking to the man in the postman's uniform, dumping salt on a slice of pizza. “Watch it with that salt, it'll raise your blood pressure.” Willie chuckled: “If I thought it'd raise something else, I'd put it on that too!” The old men laugh. Ah Brooklyn, you eat, you drink, you sweat, you wither poor fragile, neurotic Manhattan across the river. And now I'm rounding back to the subway, back to my Upper West Side tastefully decorated apartment with the gray carpet that matches the walls, my mauve bedroom. Church is out in Park Slope. I see a black woman walking with her tiny six-year-old son in his robin's-egg blue three-piece suit. Mother is tremendous, rocking back and forth as they walk home from the service, a great maternal hulking form that has no doubt been racked by all the injustice and loneliness the American city can provide, but look at that walk, look at the head unbowed—does she know a white-boy transient from the Midwest considers her the bedrock of this nation? She walks on holding that little boy's hand in her orange-pink Sunday dress with yellow lacy trim and a big white spring-garden hat with plastic marigolds affixed. You better leave your Fifth Avenue sense of fashion and sophisticated eye back in Manhattan where it belongs, because in Brooklyn, my friend, it will prevent you from seeing the human heart.