I'm with Stupid (23 page)

“Well, as you know . . . ,” William starts. He recalls the story while collecting our cards; Libby watches him intently. When he’s done she lights an after-sex cigarette and whispers thank you. She needed that. “Pleasure,” he says and gets up. He informs us that he’s off to bed. He has to be up early to work on the book. Knowing that I’ll want to sleep in, I ask how early he’ll be getting up. “Not too early,” he promises and kisses me on the lips. Max hugs his own knees and asks if he can have a kiss, too. William looks at him like he said something funny. “Since when do men kiss?” William says, looking genuinely amused, like he finally got one of our inside jokes. I wonder if he knows Max is gay. I bet not.

Max, Libby, and I hang out at her place for the rest of the night. We laugh, we bond, we make fun of Scientology and Tom Cruise’s smile, which is as soothing as Jack Nicholson’s grin in
The Shining
. We target Maddox Jolie, whom we agree has already hit his prime in terms of looks. We spend a good thirty minutes calling out the celebrities in the latest issue of
Us Weekly
, some of whom are dressed in garish fashions that recall employees at roller rinks. Mostly we ask the important questions: How much money would we have to be paid to sleep with Larry King? And why, come to think of it, is TV journalist Anderson Cooper already gray? He’s like forty and a millionaire. Where’s the stress, Father Time?

I know the moment to call it a night is upon us when Libby kicks off her heels, yawns wildly, and collapses onto the futon, not having the energy to make it the three feet to her bed. “Will someone brush my teeth?” she groggily asks.

“Oh my God,” Max says, turning toward her. “You are completely out of control.”

“Babe, I’m exhausted,” she whispers and in an instant starts faintly snoring.

He looks at me. “Brush my teeth. Her husband is going to have his hands full.”

When I return to my apartment William is asleep. I quickly change and tiptoe across the living room and get into bed. William rolls over and puts his arm around me. He’s still asleep when he does this. I lay next to him quietly, feeling the warmth of his body. It’s a comforting moment, and I try not to think of the fact that it is happening while he is unconscious. And just like that I happily drift off . . .

Sundays are usually complicated days at my place. They involve a lot of moping around while resenting the workweek. But this Sunday is different. It’s painful, yes, but in a different way, and not just because I have to do deli duty at noon in Brooklyn. William gets up at four thirty in the morning. It’s not even the morning—it’s still the night before as far as I’m concerned. He is trying to be quiet and not wake me but it’s no use, all the paper shuffling and finger drumming—not to mention the sounds emitted from his sapphire-colored parachute pants as his legs rub together—would wake a hibernating bear. Everyone and everything, including the dolphins at the Bronx Zoo, know he’s trying to write a book. I get out of bed and walk to the closet.

“You’re up!” he says merrily. “Good morning!”

I look at the top of his head. What’s he balancing up there? William is wearing some kind of crazy box-shaped dunce’s cap with a tassel hanging off it. I don’t have the strength to ask what the hell it is. I take my mother’s earmuffs out of the closet. I’m going back down, but not without my headgear. I put on the muffs.

“Are you cold?” I hear him ask from the beyond. It’s four thirty in the morning. I don’t answer. And what would be the use? He’s wearing a hat, for God’s sake, so why is he asking if I’m cold? Put on a mink, William. I get back in bed and try to fall asleep. My eyeballs are burning.

William’s writing project is more like a lab experiment. By 6 a.m. he is pacing back and forth, faster and faster still, across the kitchen, mumbling to himself in frustration. I am not able to fall back asleep. I watch him from the bed while smoking frantically and praying that his eureka moment will strike like lightning. But it does not. Not at six, not at six fifteen, not at seven or at nine twenty-one. I can almost see him holding the lightbulb over his own head. The whole operation looks like it’s about to run out of juice. Knowing I won’t sleep again I get up and start making the bed. Just as I’m fluffing the pillows William races over to the desk and starts typing. Thank God, no more pacing. But William stops almost immediately. He gets up from the chair and starts the pacing anew. My father was right, I should have the super fix that squeaky floorboard. If William keeps this up he’s going to fall through the neighbors’ ceiling and land in their kitchen sink. I politely inquire whether he’s making progress. I don’t need to know what he’s writing, just when he’ll be done writing it. “I’m working on the acknowledgments page,” he admits. “There are so many people to thank. I’m so grateful to everyone who has supported me over the years. I think I might dedicate a whole page to my dead uncle Dale.”

William begins to pace again. I repeatedly ask no one in particular to please make him stop the racket. Eventually William stops. I inhale the smoke of my twenty-ninth cigarette and look up. He is in the middle of the kitchen, staring at me, an expression of concern on his face. I ask what’s the matter. “You are smoking an awful lot,” he says. “Have you ever considered quitting?” I don’t blink. “You really should. It’s bad for you.”

Now let me just say how much I hate—really, truly hate—when people tell me smoking is bad. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video is “bad.” Smoking is good. I don’t need to be told it’s bad. It’s not bad for me. It keeps me alive. Come to think of it, my smoking benefits both of us tremendously. If I stopped smoking right now William would die, just like his dead uncle. I’m not a morning person. I should point this out to the Samaritan before he gets ahead of himself. I like to smoke and will continue to smoke forever and ever. And as long as C. Everett Koop is under my roof, he’ll have to put up with it.

I shake my head no. It had not occurred to me to quit. “You should,” he says, “and when you do quit we can cleanse the apartment by burning elephant dung, which is a great incense.” He walks over to give me a hug and adds that he hopes I live two hundred billion years. “Thank you,” I bitterly respond. “You’re generous and sweet.” William tips his hat like a gentleman. But what is this hat for? Seriously, it looks to me like a dunce’s cap slash ice bucket. Did he give himself a time-out or ground himself after a cocktail party? I touch the fabric and ask if it’s made of felt.

“I don’t know what it’s made of,” he says, “but it’s called a fez, it’s my favorite hat. I wear it sometimes when I’m writing. It inspires me.”

Here we go again. “I thought the flag inspired you. Because if it’s not inspiring you we can take it down right now.” William informs me that he is inspired by both the hat and the flag. He adjusts his fez and/or ice bucket and asks if he could watch some TV. He needs a rest. I tell him to go right ahead. My answer “inspires” him to lunge recklessly for the remote, dive onto the couch, and hit the power button. “Great!” he cheers, changing channels. “Maybe
Alf
is on.”

I get ready to leave for the deli. As I am walking out William screams, “
Melrose Place
, even better!”

The Polonia deli is located on the corner of Nassau Avenue and Manhattan Avenue in a predominantly Polish neighborhood. Like a rectangle, the store is long but narrow. Extremely narrow. My parents could afford to move into a bigger space, but my father won’t hear of it. He’s been in the location for a quarter of a century, and it suits him just fine. Polonia sells every kind of meat imaginable—bacons, loaves, sausages, hams, livers, head cheeses, loins—as well as imported candies, drinks, jams, spreads, and canned vegetables. You can even buy Polish newspapers, magazines, and greeting cards. There are other delis in the area, in fact there is one two storefronts down, but everyone favors Polonia even though most of the meat is overpriced. What Polonia has that the competitors do not is my father, who knows everyone by name, knows what they need even before they know it.

When I open the door I am confronted by a sea of people, four deep, pressed against the counter, all yelling at once. I can barely hear the jingling bell over the glass door. My father does not believe in customers taking a number: It’s first shout, first served here. It reminds me of the stock exchange. Hanging from metal hooks over the counter are hundreds of sausages: garlic, smoked, fresh. And behind the counter are four men taking orders. Well, three men and my brother, to whom I nod as I walk in. The three men are wearing white paper hats and white smocks that on the back read
POLONIA
and bear the Polish nobility crest: a white eagle wearing a crown, its fierce talons ready to grip something. My brother is wearing the smock but has retained possession of his baseball cap, which is pulled low, as always.

I push my way to the stockroom and put on a white smock—I’m not down with the paper hat, either, hair in a bun will have to do. I jump behind the counter and am immediately overwhelmed by the chaos. These folks are hungry. I yell to Henryk, asking if our parents are here. He shakes his head no. A man shouts at me in Polish. Here’s the other thing. Everyone who enters Polonia orders in Polish. They have to, or they are ignored. The workers are straight off the boat, in a manner of speaking, so if you don’t address them in the native tongue, good luck to you. “Three pounds of liver sausage!” the man says to me, trying to push his way closer. Three pounds of liver sausage. I nod. Where’s the liver? I look through the deli case and spot it. I remove what looks like three pounds and weigh it. It’s six. I take some off the scale and weigh it again. Still not right. I do this a few more times, have it almost right, give up trying, then move to a machine that prints out the labels. I wrap the meat in white paper and hand it to him. He takes it and moves off. That was not so bad. Next an old woman pushes past people like she owns the place and shouts at me. “Half a pound of pork loin, one baked pâté, six prune pa˛czki, and . . . !” What, wha . . . ? She adds something I don’t understand. I look around for a pen to write this down. There is no pen. I ask her to repeat the order and she fires it off again. I locate the pâté and the pa˛czki (Polish doughnuts with filling in the middle) but tell her we are out of prune. She demands strawberry. I get six and in the process forget the rest of the order. “Pork loin!” she yells. I get the pork loin then attempt to use my very bad Polish to collect the rest of the order once more. She says it but I am paralyzed. I find myself standing dumbly behind a counter, listening to an old woman emit unintelligible sounds. Then Henryk rushes over. He speaks to her in Polish that is so far superior to my own that I fall into yet another trance. He leads me to a section of the counter. “Kiszka,” he says. “She wants a pound.” Kiszka. I nod. It’s a sausage-shaped item, filled with barley and beef blood. My father cooks it at home on a skillet and it stinks so much you have to cover your nose. It smells like, well, beef blood. Henryk takes it out of the case and quick as lightning weighs it—perfect on the first try—wraps it and hands it to the old woman, who nods at him approvingly. She asks him who I am. He responds that I am his sister. “Oh,” she says. She looks at me carefully. “Tell your father I said hello. He’s an old friend.” Henryk tells her he will. She leaves. He rushes back to his orders before I have a chance to thank him. And then it starts all over again.

By the end of the day I’m more physically exhausted than I’ve been in years, and I probably got one out of thirty orders right on the first try. I have never had to provide service with a smile, or service at all, for that matter, and my shitty Polish is a grave obstacle here. I don’t know my ass from my elbow. When the store finally closes I begin the process of cleaning up. My back and neck are burning. I am polishing the blade on one of the meat-slicing machines when Henryk walks over and unplugs it. “Unplug the machines before doing that,” he advises. “It’s safer.” I nod.

After cleaning the counters I sweep the floor. One of the workers, Josh (given name Jasua, but everyone calls him Josh), scrutinizes my technique. He removes a large dill pickle from a glass jar on the counter and sucks on it like it’s a cigar. Josh lives in Queens, doesn’t own a car, and, according to my father, gets picked up from work by a different woman each night. The last time I saw him he was wearing, under his white pants, a leopard-skin-patterned thong that peeked out when he bent down. I’m pretty sure he’s wearing it again. My father keeps him around because he’ll work seven days a week if asked. He’s never turned down extra hours, and he’s always asking for more. “So the big city girl is sweeping floors, huh?” he says, wiping pickle juice from his chin. “We never see you here.” I tell him that I’m just helping out my father. I squat down and with the broom push some litter into the dust pan. “You missed a spot,” he says. Henryk walks past carrying two boxes stacked on top of each other, one marked
CANNED BEETS
, the other
SAUERKRAUT
. “Can you give me a hand?” he asks Josh. Josh sets down the pickle and jumps to take the top box. I hastily sweep up the bits of litter I missed to prove I can do it. Throughout the day the other workers—and the customers—eyed me suspiciously, like they knew I was not one of them. I know Josh thinks—and rightly so, based on the evidence—that I’m too delicate for this labor.

Henryk sets down the box in front of a shelf, Josh sets the other box next to it (he’s definitely wearing the thong), then walks back to the counter and for a time resumes his pickle sucking while Henryk stocks the shelf. A car horn beeps three times. “That’s my ride,” Josh says. He walks out, sucking loudly on the pickle, the paper hat still on his head.

When I return home that evening stinking to high heaven like beef blood and pork, William is on the bed, the phone against his ear. I take off my coat and head for the fridge. “I know,” I hear him say into the phone, “but writing is so hard . . .” He must be talking to his mom. He told me yesterday he was planning to call her. I hope he’s calling collect. I’ll have to bring that up when he gets off. “Uh-huh,” he utters repeatedly. “Uh-huh.” His mother must talk as much as my mother. This will take a century.