The Year of Yes (5 page)

Carmela removed a bright purple walrus, a packet of crayons, and a mystery sandwich from her suitcase. When I asked the Handyman what it was, he told me that it was her favorite, mustard and marshmallow fluff. I slid a few pieces of paper across the floor toward her, and then went to my computer, thinking that at least I could do my homework. I was thigh-deep in a class called Image of the Other, and was supposed to be writing an essay on Josephine Baker’s subjugation via a miniskirt made of bananas. I’d been more inclined to write a comparative of Baker and Carmen Miranda. Why were these women wearing fruit, anyway? The class was largely composed of privileged white kids, and most of it was spent watching things like
Cabin in the Sky
and
Imitation of Life,
and listening to the frustrated sighs of the professor, a big name in the field of race and media studies. Classes like these were making me wonder why the hell I was paying an obscene amount of borrowed money for knowledge that I would never be able to apply to the real world. Sure, I’d seen
Birth of a Nation
in its twelve-hour entirety, but it wasn’t the kind of thing that caused a human resources manager to hire you on the spot.

When the Handyman finally emerged, Carmela repacked her case, handed me her drawings, which were, somewhat traumatically, portraits of me, and marched out the door.

“Everything fixed?” I asked the Handyman. My head was itching wickedly. I hoped I wasn’t going to remove my newsboy hat to discover all my hair fallen out.

“The shower’s good, but I’m not,” said the Handyman.

“How come?” I asked.

“‘Cause you’re not walking out of here with me.” He winked. Clearly, he was blind. I was hideous. Maybe the wink was the result of something in his eye. Pierre arrived to check the progress of the leak, and was just in time to smirk at this.

I’d show him. Day one of the Year of Yes, not quite like the fantasy version, but what the hell. Wasn’t that the point?

“Absolutely,” I said. “Yes.”

“Yes, what?” said the Handyman.

“Yes, I’m walking out of here with you. As long as you’re inviting me.”

I had the satisfaction of seeing Pierre’s eyes bulge, and his tattooed koi flip their tails.

“Let’s go, then, mamita,” said the Handyman, who did not even seem surprised, but instead offered me a cigarette, and put his arm around me as though we’d been together forever.

“Give me a minute,” I said, and went to wash my hair. It had turned out, unsurprisingly, not at all red. Some of it was orange. Some of it was blackish. Some of it was green. It hung in long, straight, hideous strands. I squinted at myself for a moment in the mirror, and decided that I’d had enough.
I got out my dull scissors, pulled a hank of hair over my shoulder, and hacked it off. Two feet of tresses dropped onto the bathroom floor. My head felt thrillingly light. I continued to chop, ending up just above my shoulders, and then, in one of those bad impulses you can never afterward explain, I cut myself some Bettie Page bangs. Crooked. Of course.

As the result of a crippling first-grade year, which the teacher spent trying to make me a rightie, I’d never properly learned how to use scissors. Usually, when people saw me cutting, they thought I had cerebral palsy. I had to cut the bangs shorter. And shorter. The last time I’d had a haircut this bad, I’d been five, and my mom had gone away for the weekend, leaving my sister and me with our father. She’d come home to find my dad looking sheepish, and my sister and I sporting super-short, slanted bangs that made us look like we were recovering from brain surgery. Screw it. I kept snipping.

I maneuvered my face into the one expression that made them look even: one eyebrow raised high, and the other crunched down. There. That was not so bad. I fluffed it up to the best of my ability, smeared on some red lipstick, and went outside to meet the first man of my new life.

The Handyman didn’t comment on the haircut. Maybe it looked good. On the way out of the building, however, we encountered Zak.

“What the fuck did you do to your hair?” he said.

“Cut it,” I said.

“Why?” he said.

“Because,” I said, getting defensive. “I should be able to cut my hair if I want to.”

“It looks completely weird,” said Zak. He had never been known for his delicacy regarding feminine beauty and lack thereof. “And the front is crooked. Did you know that?”

I rearranged my face into the expression.

“How about now?”

“Now your face looks weird.”

The Handyman cleared his throat. I’d forgotten about him.

“You know Mario,” I said.

“Mario, the handyman,” Zak said, suspiciously. I could see the memory of the exploding toilet flashing before his eyes. “Why are you here?”

“Mario the cowboy,” the Handyman corrected. “I’m taking your girl to dinner, amigo.”

Zak looked as though he was going to choke on suppressed laughter.

“My girl?” he said. “I’m just going inside.”

“I’m just going out,” I said, only partially believing what I was saying.

CARMELA WALKED TEN FEET in front of us, pretending, no doubt, that she was a princess being attended by a couple of servants far below her station. She didn’t even look back to see if we were behind her. The Handyman seemed to know everyone on every street corner. He greeted women ranging from seventeen-year-old Polish girls to their gray-haired grandmothers. He donated a buck to the yellow-eyed Kielbasa Dude, a career drunk who perpetually hung out on Greenpoint Avenue clutching a booze-filled brown paper
sack and a sausage. He waved at the proprietors of the bodegas. He nodded at the waitresses in the Thai Café, which, despite its unlikely location deep in Polish Brooklyn, made the best green papaya salad in the city. It was as though we were traversing a
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
arranged specifically for the Handyman.

I walked next to him, and wondered how I’d managed to live in Greenpoint for as many months as I had without getting to know anyone. I recognized the cast of characters, of course, but the Handyman knew them by name. I’d been pretending I didn’t really live in my neighborhood. Most of my time, by necessity, was spent in Manhattan anyway. Greenpoint was where I slept. When I slept. The neighborhood had, in my opinion, very little to recommend it. Greenpoint, obviously named early in an optimistic century, had nothing green to boast of, unless you counted the complexions of its residents, upon catching a whiff of the famous Greenpoint Sewage Treatment Plant. Or, perhaps, the neighborhood’s moniker referred to Newton Creek, which divided the northernmost tip of our neighborhood from Queens, and which was euphemistically classified as “precluded for aquatic life” due to the massive Exxon oil leak that had, for years, been drooling into the creek’s already sewage-contaminated waters. This did not keep certain neighborhood eccentrics and teenagers from cannonballing off the disintegrating India Street pier, and dog-paddling in the slurry. The Handyman seemed to thrive in this neighborhood. For the first time, I thought that maybe I could, too. I’d been rejecting my new home. If I was giving up on no, it was time to give up on that, too.

In between yelling hellos at hipsters, bums, and babies, the Handyman conducted a running monologue of his history.

“So, mamita, it used to be heroin for me, but I got clean of the devil, and now I’m here. Montana was where I came straight from Colombia, three wives ago. Her mamá, we never got married, ‘cause I got smart.”

I was alone amongst my friends in thinking that dating recovering addicts was actually not the worst thing in the world. They always told you their story, right up front. It was a refreshing change from persons addicted to other things: emotional warfare, codependence, Harold Pinter plays. At this point in my life, it seemed worth dealing with the addict’s night sweats, sievelike memory, and “bad liver and broken heart,” as Tom Waits put it, in order to get to his stories. Where else could I hear tales of piano bars and mystery scars, ballads of long-dead cronies named Mac, stories of jonesing for a hit of something or other and somehow ending up married to a waitress, and buried alive in a diner Dumpster by fried egg sandwiches? Stories like the Handyman’s.

Carmela dropped back to listen.

“Daddy also had a big mess with cocaine,” she told me.

“I was getting to that, baby,” the Handyman called after her, but she had resumed her place in front of us.

“Montana?” I asked. I was feeling pleased with myself for remaining unfazed in the face of the Handyman’s story. He was twirling his hammer with the panache of a marching band vixen. The zippers on his motorcycle jacket flashed in the sun. His spurs, yes,
spurs,
jingled. His teeth were white, and his skin was tanned, and it seemed that, even though he
was a walking contradiction, a motorcycle-riding Colombian cowboy, nothing bad had ever happened to him.

“Dude ranch. The Flying Bull. We called it the Flying Bullshit, mamita, but it was not a bad place to be. First I was the dishwasher, then I was the cook. And Montana! Baby, you gotta get your sweet ass to Montana!”

Carmela led us to a restaurant called the Manhattan Triple Decker. It was neither in Manhattan, nor three stories high. One story and a lot of eggs. She greeted the aged Polish man behind the counter, and then graciously accepted his lift onto a bar stool. Without being asked, he brought her a strawberry milkshake. Clearly, she was a regular.

“I was bringing the powder to the cowboys, baby, and they were out there, on their horses, high, high, high, and all because of me, their dishwasher. Man. Those days are dead and gone now, dead and gone.”

The Handyman ordered a hamburger. I got a grilled cheese.

“Couple of the guys, they were the real thing, and the rest were the guests from everywhere, everybody who wanted to ride horses and pretend they were in a Western movie. Everybody liked the coke, though; man,
mi amigo
in the kitchen got me hooked up and before you knew it, we were selling the shit to the whole town. I could ride, back then, mamita, as good as the guys who were out there year-round. I had a horse I liked, and I used to ride all over the ranch, high out of my mind! And shit, baby! Did I tell you I could lasso? I lassoed whatever I felt like. One time, I put a loop around this chica in jeans and cowboy boots, and damn, damn, damn, mami!”

He paused for a moment, lost in the memory of a girl I pictured as a lot like the big-haired Rodeo Queens of my
high school. There’d been one who’d been famous for the constantly visible outline of a Trojan in the back pocket of her skin-tight Wranglers.

“So, what happened? How’d you end up here?”

“He got busted,” said Carmela, turning to give me the first smile I’d seen from her. A bewitching, missing-toothed grin. She slurped her milkshake. “And then he got my mommy.”

“I met her in jail,” said the Handyman. “I was in for only five months. They busted me, but they busted me on the wrong day. I didn’t have shit. They wanted to put me away forever, but instead, they had to put me away for no time at all. She was my cellmate Victor’s wife. Fool wouldn’t see her, got pissed over some small shit, thought she was fucking his brother, so I went out and there she was.”

“The most beautiful woman my daddy had ever seen,” said Carmela, happily.

“Her name was Maria,” said the Handyman.

I was enchanted. I’d started writing a tragic motherless-child-and-widower story in my head. Death in childbirth. Grieving widower, scarred by a criminal past, trying to hack out a living through fix-it gigs, little daughter raising herself on mustard-and-marshmallow sandwiches. Horrible as it was, it appealed to my drama-saturated nature. I was already considering how I’d adapt it into a hybrid of Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and Sam Shepard. I was envisioning my Pulitzer. My Tony. My Oscar! The trifecta, balanced on the bookshelves I’d finally be able to afford.

“What happened to her?” I asked softly, ready to comfort him. He started laughing. Laughing hard. Slapping his knee at my apparent stupidity. Carmela drew some milkshake up
in her straw. She shot it, with perfect accuracy, at the Handyman’s cheek.

“Damn, mamita, whadda you think?” The Handyman wiped his face, still laughing.

I protested that I didn’t know. How could they laugh about something as tragic as this? What kind of people were they? Had they no compassion?

“She ran off on the back of a motorcycle with some fucker she met in the 7-Eleven. Left me with this one, still a baby. I had to raise her on a bottle, yeah, Carmela?”

“Yuck,” Carmela confirmed.

“And now, we gotta go. Somebody on Eagle Street has a busted buzzer. I’m coming by your place tomorrow afternoon, to fix yours, ‘cause it’s fucked, right, mamita?”

“It quacks,” I told him.

“Yeah, I didn’t like the people who lived there before you,” said the Handyman, grinning. “I gave ‘em a joke buzzer.”

And with that, they were gone. I moved to a booth and ate my sandwich. I wasn’t sure what to think of what had just happened. It was starting to be clear to me that, though I knew plenty about Greek tragedies, I knew almost nothing about real life. As if that were not enough, I could see my reflection in the window and it looked like an obsessive-compulsive bird had built a nest on my head.

I ONLY HAD A COUPLE of minutes to feel sorry for myself, before I noticed a guy pressing his face against the outside of the glass. He was tall and pale, with lank blond
hair, and looked to be somewhere in his forties. He came inside, walked straight to my booth, ordered a beer in Polish, and without any warning, started sobbing. I signaled urgently to the waitress. She shrugged.

“Are you okay? Do you need a doctor?” I asked.

He let loose with a snot-drenched stream of Polish.

“He says you look like his ex-wife,” the beautiful teenage waitress translated, rolling her eyes, and then went to get him another bottle of Tyskie beer. He opened it with his teeth. Normally, I would have moved to another table, or left the restaurant altogether. I could smell the crazy on him. But that day, I was willing to admit that maybe I was a little crazy, too. And here we were, in a diner in Brooklyn, crazy, at the same moment.