I love pizza. I love a good movie. I used to love swimming, but only in pools, not the ocean, especially after the movie Jaws, which really scared me, though in retrospect I loved the original version. But they were comical by the time they got to the IV and V sequels. I can say the same for Rocky and Rambo. I loved both the originals. I thought I loved the movie Chariots of Fire. While I was watching it in the theater I was mesmerized and resolved to turn my life around. I promised myself that I would take up jogging to the strains of that movie music in my headphones, that I would jog home from the theater. But as I walked up the aisle further from the screen the resolve faded with my opinion of the film. And by the time I got through the lobby and out into the daylight, I was shaking my head at how lame all that slow motion running really was.
I love vacations in big rental houses in exotic places with old friends cooking and drinking and laughing, though I definitely don’t love getting there. I used to love flying, but I don’t love it anymore. Maybe that’s because of 9/11, or maybe it’s because the airlines have squeezed all the love out of the experience.
I love spring. April is my favorite month. No matter poet T. S. Eliot called it the “cruelest month,” I love April because it is so filled with optimism that may never be realized in the chill of September. I love a cold beer on hot summer afternoons. “Would you care for another beer?” “I’d love one.” I love my kids of course, and I try to make it a practice of telling them “I love you” whenever we talk on the phone or video chat on the computer. Sometimes they say it first and I usually reply “Love you too,’ which I mean as an affirmation of how I feel about them and not an indication of my taste in music. That also goes for other family members from grandchildren to cousins, as well as close friends. I can even say it to some of the people I barely know. “I really love you, man” or “Dude, I love you.” It’s because that kind of “I love you” is very non-threatening, almost automatic, like saying “God bless you” when anyone, even an atheist, sneezes. But saying the words “I love you” to a person I might in reality actually love and/or make love to, someone who has seen me in unflattering positions in intimate detail in compromising states and not always at my best, is quite another matter.
It must be a guy thing, or maybe just my thing. I blame it on two divorces and a string of romantic entanglements that ended badly, but I think that just might be an excuse.
I can always manage the other “L” word, “Like,” with very little effort. It trips easily off the tongue without all that “Luh-luh-luh–” stuttering. “I like you. I like you a lot. I mean, I really like you a very lot. A lot more than those other people that I like a lot.”
I did get close to saying the words several times, once in particular, after my second divorce when I began seeing a younger woman where I worked. In the four years that we were “a couple,” she sent me no occasion greeting cards to tell me how much fun I was to be with. She always signed them “Love.” When I reciprocated I signed mine the same, but the “L,” because of my poor penmanship, looked more like an “h,” as in “I hove you.” It became our little private joke, and my little handwriting gaff made it easier for me to express my feelings for her. And that’s the way we went on, loving and hoving, until she fell out of hove and loved someone else.
It’s a lot of water under the bridge, and I am not looking back with regret. I just wanted you to know that I hove you very much. I hove you as much as I have ever hoved anybody. I hove you. There, I said it, even if I can’t find the right word to tell you.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
I Hove You
Don't Call Me Hon!
My ship has sailed and I am standing on the pier waving as it pulls out of port. On second thought, it is more like I am inside the terminal looking through the grimy window at the backs of the people standing on the pier waving at the departing ship. On third thought, I am actually in the men’s room at the back of the terminal standing in front of a urinal trying to pee while all that waving and sailing is going on outside! It seems that I am no longer at the party and nobody is missing me.
I have never really been a player. In my professional life I took the first teaching job I was offered after graduation and I did it for thirty-three years. My social life wasn't much better. Because I went to parochial school for sixteen years, I was so riddled with Catholic guilt about sex I was a semi-virgin when I got married at twenty-two. By semi-virgin I mean that there were two glorious pre-marital occasions, both with a friend’s older sister, once when she was drunk and thought I was somebody else and once when she needed money for a pack of cigarettes. Both times I was so nervous I was hardly there, and both times it was over so fast I had to replay the scenes many times when I was home alone.
During those brief marriage years I must admit that I did a bit better, overcoming my guilt enough to have the occasional dalliance at work. It was the main factor contributing to the divorce. The affairs were mostly with disgruntled Home Ec teachers and unhappily married women who found me slightly less unpleasant than their husbands. After the divorce there were some other escapades with happy hour alcoholics, Parents Without Partners divorcees, desperate housewives and several graduated former students who returned because they remembered me from my long ago “glory days.” But like the postman who never rings twice, they generally never came back for seconds.
As I grew older and whiter and wider there were others, fewer of course, women of a different caliber, who had diminished expectations and lower standards. All had wear and tear, been banged up a bit in the race toward the bright light at the end of the tunnel, all had walked up to the edge, stared into the abyss and stepped back. I gravitated to the halt and the lame, the weak and the infirm, the addled and the marginally insane, woman with bigger scars than mine. They were women met not in singles bars, but in doctors' offices, CVS drug stores and Wal-Mart.
On these occasions the conversation went something like this:
SHE: “Looking through all these old pictures of you, you, um, seem to have put on more than just a few pounds over the years.”
ME: “Oh, yeah? Well, maybe so. But you only have one leg.”
My state of affairs worsened when I slipped and fell from that viable “25 to 50” demographic to become a full-fledged, card-carrying A-A-R-Per, and then hobbled into retirement, Medicare and golden-year senior status. Suddenly, or maybe it wasn't that sudden, as my systems started breaking down – seeing, hearing, hydraulic – I became invisible! Like the old soldier, I faded away into the wallpaper. Try as I might to re-invent myself, to change my image by darkening my hair and beard with Just For Men that made me look fifteen minutes younger, up-grading my disco wardrobe and daubing on more cologne, I was a wraith, a phantom, the ghost of many Christmases Past. No one saw me. No one heard me. No one cared. Whenever attractive young women came into a place where I was sitting trying to look “not so desperate and not quite dead yet,” the first thing they noticed was the furniture. “Isn't that a great maroon leather couch in the corner? The one with the patchouli-smelling old guy in the tie-dyed shirt sitting on the end of it.”
But I had seen the handwriting on the wall many years before, the first time my son offered to take me out to dinner at the Pasta House on Third Avenue in Brooklyn where he worked. The staff greeted him at the door, "Ian! Ian!" The young college girls serving our table constantly flirted with him while they over-filled his water glass. “This is my father,” he said as I looked over the top of my menu and smiled from the background at their polite, indifferent nods. My worst fear was that someone would bring me a booster chair!
It was just a matter of time until waitresses everywhere leaned in to inform me in a much too loud voice, “You are too late for the Early Bird Special, dear, but you can order from the salt-free Senior Menu,” inevitably steering me to the back page next to the Kiddy selections.
And when the simple task of filling out things like shipping labels, census forms, and Department of Motor Vehicles applications required assistance, annoyance was often balanced by compassion for my feebleness. I got, “You forgot to sign it here, dear, and you left something out here… and here… and here.”
The evening after my 50th high school reunion downtown Brooklyn, I stopped at Burger King to pee, a routine that has become a ritual, and get a drink to keep me awake and propel me to the next stop along the way to home and bed. A small coffee was a buck, a pretty good deal these days of $4.00 a gallon gasoline. But when I ordered the register rang up up 48¢.
“I thought it was a dollar,” I said to the pretty girl behind the counter, a high school junior, flashing my best smile. “Is this a promotional offer?”
“It’s the regular ‘Senior Coffee’ price,” she said not even looking at me.
“But I didn’t ask for that and you didn’t card me!”
She had just assumed that I was an empty antique, a seedy bump on a park bench, a harmless senior on Social Security, a pity candidate given one of the sops society bestows on those close to death.
That was when I decided to show this little pretty girl not to take me for granted. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and announce: “DON’T DISMISS ME! I AM NOT AS HARMLESS AS YOU THINK! I AM HARMFUL! And to prove it, I am going to SPANK your shapely, even in that Burger King uniform, teenage bottom and then BOFF you! No, I will BOFF you first then SPANK you!" But I said nothing. I thanked her instead and took my bargain coffee to the car to be savored on the journey back to my not too distant rest.
Last week, along with my other scheduled doctors’ appointments, I visited my dermatologist, a man who seems to spend less and less time at further and further distance examining my sagging body during his regular yearly assessment of the multitude of things growing on it. His very attractive 30-something nurse smiled and ushered me into a small examining room, and for a few moments I thought that the old magic was back.
“Now take off all your clothes, hon,” she told me in a melodious voice and handed me a little packet still warm from her body heat.
“You know,” I flirted back, “it’s been a long time since a beautiful young woman told me to take off all my clothes.”
“Oh, you!” She put her hand up to her face as if to cover a blush. “Everything except your underwear, hon,” she said with a bigger smile. “And be sure to put on the robe with the opening to the front, hon. I’ll be back to check in a minute.” And then she patted my cheek. I could feel her smoldering warmth and smell her perfume.
When she was outside I pulled quickly off my pants and rolled them into a ball, my shirt, my socks, my sneakers, everything except my underwear. I pulled on the paper robe with the opening where she said.
I heard her soft knock. “Are you decent, hon?” she asked, popping her face around the door for a look.
My heart was pounding in my chest. I could feel the blood coursing through parts of me long dormant. “Decent enough,” I said, “although you should have seen me in my prime, or even just ten years ago,” I added. “I was more than decent then!” I used my best efforts to suck in my gut and hold closed my too-small paper robe.
“Oh, aren’t you just so cute,” she said. “You must have been something when you were young, hon.” She patted my old gray head like puppy or more like an old dog that can’t or won’t learn new tricks. “You can take a seat over there, hon. The doctor will be right in to see you. Okay?” She wagged her finger at me. “And one other thing, hon. You just might want to put your, um, little man back inside your underwear.”
That was when I knew my ship had definitely sailed.
Whatever Happened to Elaine Kashuba?
In that first hour of my first day of what I didn’t know at the time was to become my life-long career, on that opening Tuesday after Labor Day, which marked the unofficial end of summer, the day before the kids arrived to begin a new school year, I entered the 7th Grade classroom in what they called the “T-Wing.” The “T” stood for “temporary” and “Wing” meant that the sub-standard, U-shaped cluster of prefabricated wooden classrooms was an add-on attached to the real brick and mortar junior high school.
The twenty-four classrooms had been nailed together in those halcyon post-Korean War days, when the suburbs were exploding with people fleeing the City for a piece of Long Island dirt and a parking space. The T-Wing’s purpose was to house the thousand-strong classes of newly entering 7th graders in semi-isolation and prevent them from mingling with the general school population. Apparently economy and not the comfort of so many kids funneling in from the district’s eight elementary schools had been the major consideration when the uninsulated T-Wing with the bouncy floors and vibrating windows was erected. Of course I didn’t know then on my first T-Wing encounter the early fall and spring extreme heat or the bone-numbing winter cold that lay ahead. Ignorance and inexperience were bliss and probably why the 7th grade and most of the new teachers were relegated there. Each September when a new batch of frightened and confused 12 year olds entered the T-Wing for the first time they would invariably ask, “So why didn’t they call it the ‘U-Wing’?”
My classroom was T-3, three doors up on the left side, the odd side, in the corridor that made up the right side of the U. The base of the U was a long empty hall with a small office in the center for Mary Whiting, the new assistant principal. Within it was Mrs. Whiting’s very small private bathroom that made it unnecessary for her to leave her remote T-Wing outpost ever. On the other side of the U were rooms T-13 to T-24, interrupted by a faculty room and a storage area for old furniture and textbooks.
In June T-3 belonged to Miss Kashuba who had tended her resignation on the last day of school after she collected her final check and disappeared. But evidence of her was everywhere in the room, from her name hand printed on a 3x5 index card affixed with tape to the little glass panel in the door, to the ornately crayoned, multi-colored “Miss Kashuba” centered over the cracked slate blackboard directly above her desk, likely student created for extra credit. Posters stapled to the bulletin boards and authors’ names affixed to the wall covered the front of T-3 that was not blackboard including Ernest Hemingway spelled with two m’s. The classroom looked as though Miss Kashuba had fled for her life, taking only what she could carry when the last June bell rang.
At least, I thought, I wouldn’t have to decorate for a while.
Miss Kashuba’s ghost haunted the rest of the classroom as well. In her center desk drawer I found an assortment of teacher stuff – paperclips and rubber bands, safety pins, a math compass that had no place in an English classroom, three leaky ballpoint pens and a handful of pencils with broken points. There were crumbs of lunches past, a half eaten roll of Tums, travel size no-name aspirin and an almost empty bottle of congealed Pepto Bismol, coated on one side like dried out pink finger paint. I tossed it, missing the pail branded in black marker “Ms. K-S,” shorthand, I presumed, for the mysterious Miss Kashuba. I wondered why she would have gone to the trouble of hyphenating Kashuba. It was short enough. Unless the “S” following the hyphen was Miss Kashuba’s married name, “Smith” or “Smyth,” or “Silverman,” making her Miss Kashuba-Someothersomething. Or maybe she was getting married and that was the reason for her sudden departure from T-3. Of course if she were married before her June disappearance she wouldn’t be Miss Kashuba, and if she were planning a summer wedding there was no need for the hyphenation. Was the “Ms.” an indication of her independent spirit? It was a mystery that I pondered while I poured over the rest of her remains – a water pistol, a torn MAD Magazine and matches. Did Miss Kashuba smoke? Or were they taken from a student bent on burning down the wooden T-Wing when no one was watching?
The side drawers contained white ditto paper, lined composition paper yellowed with age and half a box of mimeograph masters to make dittos that made my fingers purple when I touched them. The middle drawer was empty except for a tube of Hazel Bishop Coral lipstick, a bottle of Midol and tampons. And when I fished into the bottom drawer under the jumble of absentee notes, I came up with a pair of lady’s panties – size 7, fringed with lace. Hers? They had to be. They were too grown up, unless I was mistaken about 7th grade girls. Were they a back up pair for the “Days of Midol” when the tampons were too late? I picked up the Pepto Bismol from where it lay on the floor. The hard pink inside had been knocked loose by the impact with the linoleum tile. Some had spilled onto the floor through the cracked plastic bottle and the rest sounded like a baby’s rattle when I shook it. From a hook on the side of the blackboard where they hung I took the small hand broom and metal dustpan, each monogrammed “Ms. K-S,” and swept up the mess. Then I carefully placed the broken bottle, the Midol and the tampons into the pail. I slipped the panties from the drawer and into a folder of my new leather attaché case, a graduation gift from my parents, for closer examination when I had the time. The prospect of getting to know Miss Kashuba more intimately was compelling. And I was twenty-two.
I inspected the rest of T-3 before the 10 o’clock building meeting in the auditorium, poking through the student lockers at the back, the front closet where books never returned to the Book Room lay in a tumbled heap, an old fuzzy sweater covered in cat hair hung from a broken hook and a peeling bumper sticker exhorted, “Go Comets!” in faded orange and black, the school colors. The rusty file cabinet with the broken lock was filled with stacks of unmarked projects and compositions from the previous years. Miss Kashuba was a bit of a slacker.
Then I heard her voice in my ear. “Just you wait, newbie, until those compositions and book reports and class projects start piling up because you have more important things to do with your time than sit around reading them and marking them up with red pencil. Wait until the little gnats are gnawing on your ankles clamoring for their grades. If you make it long enough as a teacher, kiddo, eventually you’ll get tired of marking all those crappy papers with the recurring errors, the alots, its/it’s, your/your and there/their/they’res never learned no matter how many times they are taught. And you’ll run out of excuses for not having their grades, so just to keep them quiet you’ll announce that you lost their papers after you graded them and make up marks. Just be sure to make them higher than they would actually get. That way everyone is happy. In a week you’ll know who’s smart and who’s not.”
I dumped the ungraded papers into the pail, to preserve Miss Kashuba’s reputation and to make room for my own papers.
During the following days I learned a more about Miss Kashuba from the veterans who populated the teacher’s lounge I discovered in the main building where they ate, smoked, napped and played cards. Her first name was Elaine and that teachers’ first name were closely guarded secrets to be kept from their kids at all costs, lest they run around the building calling their teachers Wayne or Fred or Hortense. And one of the many official memos included in the “First Day” envelope directed teachers to address one another as Mr., Mrs. or Miss Whatever.
Some of the things I learned about Miss Kashuba conflicted. She left because she “burned out” on teaching after only five years. She had a better offer for more money that she couldn’t refuse. She had to resign to avoid legal action for a “little indiscretion involving a high school junior,” a boy in her first year class who returned all grown up to thank her personally for everything she had done to and for him. She was single, a player. She didn’t leave to get married. She wasn’t pregnant and she didn’t leave to have an abortion, or to give birth to the young high school junior’s bastard in a distant convent or with relatives out of town, at least as far as the people who knew her knew. Though her “flighty nature and eccentric personality” didn’t preclude her possibility of maybe getting pregnant wherever she might have landed. I gleaned from these conversations that Miss Kashuba wasn’t much liked by most of the females on staff, though she was very popular with many of the male teachers, single and married. Her resignation was another example of her impetuous nature, So go she did, after the end of the school year party, without a good-bye to anyone. She drove off into the summer sunset in her new red Chevy Chevelle SS convertible and a young guy at her side. No one had heard anything from or about her since the day she disappeared.
In mid-November a postcard arrived from Venezuela with one sentence: “Glad I am here! Ms. K-S,” and an arrow drawn in ink pointing to a thatched hut in the center of other thatched huts in a clearing surrounded by of tall jungle vegitation. Some speculated that Miss Kashuba had joined the Peace Corps and was winning the hearts and minds of brown South American people one heart and mind at a time. Others thought she was there growing marijuana.
And still Miss Kashuba (I couldn’t imagine ever calling her Elaine) remained close by – in my class, my mind, my heart and my ear. She spoke to me during those harrowing first teaching days of filling out index cards (“Last name first, people. Last name then first name! And print.”), alphabetical seating charts and book distribution, where I had to invent unique student numbers for that would identify me as the teacher, the class period and year (“Scal-101-64”) and copy them correctly into each student’s book and on each student’s index card so that book collection or accountability for lost books would be easier the following June, or just trying to keep the little nits and gnats in their seats without popping up like Jacks in the box and rushing my desk with their problems and concerns: “Did I do this right?” “I don’t understand what you said to do.” “Can I go to the Boy’s Room?” “My nose is bleeding!” “Ted Fuchs stole my pen!”
“You better get tough with them,” she told me. “This isn’t ‘Camp School’ where everybody has fun and you are the social director. They don’t all have to like you. So if you think of it more like a medium security prison you’ll have a better chance of survival. Don’t smile until Thanksgiving, and don’t show weakness. They can smell weakness – and fear! And if they do, they will have you hanging out the window by the end of the week.”
She was there that first Parent’s Night when a father interrupted my nervous presentation to call everyone’s attention to Ernest (two m) Hemingway clinging to the wall. “His name is misspelled,” he said pointing at the error. “Isn’t that a bad example for students in an English class?”
I hemmed and hawed. I could have blamed it on the teacher who had previously occupied the room, but I didn’t. Instead my face grew hot and I began to perspire, soaking the collar of my white shirt. And then Miss Kashuba was standing behind me. “If you had tenure you could tell the old fart that you really don’t give a shit. And when you have a little more experience and are able to think on your feet, you’ll have explanations ready for such emergencies.”
“I will do that,” I heard myself saying, “not often, but from time to time. I’ll make intentional mistakes – just to see if anyone catches them – who’s paying attention. It’s a fun way to make the students part of the learning process, and–” I added, “– a way to get extra credit.”
Perfect! Some of the parents smiled and nodded their approval. The next morning I had an official memo from the principal in my mailbox instructing me to remove old Ernie from my wall. I did.
Gradually, as I grew more secure, traces of Miss Kashuba faded. Inside T-3 my bulletin boards replaced hers – free color photos of cute baby animals and book cover posters from the Scholastic Book Club. The writers on the wall gave way to “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” compositions, book reports recommending “this book to all my friends,” illustrated haiku, short stories where everything was only a dream and student created advertising projects like Sammy Luban’s “Hershey, Hershey, Hershey Brown Is Beautiful!” poster. He sent it to Hershey hoping they would use the idea and received a personal response signed by the vice-president of Hershey. The letter explained that Hershey was America’s number one candy bar and they didn’t need to advertise. For his efforts Sammy also got a 5 lb Hershey Bar and a $25 gift certificate.
Just before the spring break that first year, someone stole my “Ms. K-S” desk chair and replaced it with a straight back wooden one that didn’t tilt. All my investigative questioning was to no avail. My search failed to turn up the missing chair. It wasn’t in the T-Wing, which led me to suspect it had been spirited off to the main building where some strange ass was resting in the very place where Miss Kashuba’s ass had once resided. The following September I liberated a brand new desk chair with lumbar support from a new teacher’s classroom in T-16. I chalked it up as my “right of seniority.”
All the time the rusty file cabinet in the back of my room slowly filled with my own personal effects and ungraded papers.
Over the years rumors of Miss Kashuba continued to circulate though fewer and further in between as those who had known her personally moved to other schools, retired and died. Joanna Bender, a Home Ec teacher, reported seeing Miss Kashuba in Brooklyn wheeling a carriage with twins through a shopping mall while dragging a toddler by the arm. “And she was fat and unkempt.” Mr. Franks, a flamboyant-bordering-on-gay social studies teacher said she tended bar in The Pines on Fire Island during the summer. And Tony Palumbo, a math teacher and former boyfriend, said that she had moved to become a showgirl in Vegas.
In my head her voice grew fainter, but it never disappeared completely. My mind often wandered as I wondered what Miss Kashuba was doing that very minute I was teaching The Raft, a 213 page non-fiction book by Robert Trumbull about three World War II naval airmen adrift for thirty-four days on the Pacific in a leaky rubber raft. The book’s potential was overshadowed by the ho-hum manner the story was told. It put the kids to sleep and me on automatic pilot, especially after two or three years reading it with five classes. The whole thing might have been better condensed, reduced to a short story, a single page, one paragraph. “The plane crashed. The three guys got into a raft. The survived 34 days with almost no water and the very little food they caught. They were rescued. Period.” I thought about Miss Kashuba as I read about Old Yeller’s demise to the sobbing classes, and at the end of Daniel Keyes short story, “Flowers for Algernon,” when re-retarded Charlie Gordon says farewell to Miss Kinnian in a note asking her to put flowers on his dead mouse Algernon’s grave – “Good-by Miss Kinnian and Dr Strauss and evreybody. And P.S. please tell Dr Nemur not to be such a grouch when pepul laff at him and he would have more frends. Its easy to make frends if you let pepul laff at you. Im going to have lots of frends where I go. P.P.S. Please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard....”
Sometimes I thought of Miss Kashuba while I stared through the cracked glass of T-3, across the grass of the open space between the U arms of the T-Wing and I watched Mrs. Whiting’s rectangular bathroom window illuminate. The light projected her moving silhouette against the frosted glass and the unsuspecting assistant principal sat and stood, sat and stood all day, every day in the course of her administrative duties. My head filled with images of the lithe and supple Miss Kashuba in the Peace Corps peeing in the bushes, tantalizing all those South American men with her straight white American smile and her big American breasts. The conjured pictures of her traipsing through Europe on $5 a day armed only with her backpack, a bottle of Midol, some loose tampons, a supply of birth control pills and a back up pair of underwear excited me.
Passing through the various stages of my life – marriage, parenthood, divorce – I wondered where she was in hers. Had Miss Kashuba ever married? Did she have kids? Had she suffered the pangs of life and collected the scars of living it along the way? Did she find true love in the arms of Juan García Quesada, her Venezuelan coffee farmer? Was she – is she happy?
To this day Miss Kashuba is with me still, well beyond my teaching career and deep into retirement. We have grown old together, Miss Kashuba and I, grown wider and wiser, slower and whiter. I think of her at the oddest moments – during visits with my various doctors, before a routine colonoscopy, standing in line at CVS waiting to have my Lipitor refilled. Has she ever been seriously ill? I think of her while planning vacations. I wonder if Miss Kashuba has ever been to Australia? And I think of her on those long nights when I am alone and can’t sleep, wondering if she is alone and sleepless too. But mostly I think of Miss Kashuba, wherever she may be, whenever I see hanging on the hook in my basement that small hand broom and metal dust pan with the faded monogram, “Ms. K-S,” the very one I took with me on my last day.
Monday, August 23, 2010
In the Jewish neighborhoods he was known as the master of vegetables. The orthodox women hardly talked to him, except to call out their orders in Yiddish, enough of which he understood, or to haggle about his prices or the accuracy of the weight on his scale that hung from the side of his wagon. To them he was Morris, the fruit man, the maven of tomatoes. And even though his name wasn’t Morris, he always answered to it. And he used the Yiddish he had learned to sweet talk the women who complained the most. “I will never get rich if all my customers are like you,” he said with a smile, always throwing a little extra into the bags to keep them happy.
On the Spanish blocks he was to produce what El Exigenté, the demanding one, was to coffee. The kids chased along beside the peddler on the sidewalk pacing his tired horse, Bianca, an old swaybacked mare that was more mottled gray than white. Some urged the horse to giddyap, while others shouted for her to whoa. Most times the old mare just ignored them. Sometimes she raised her tail and dropped “road apples” on the pavement while the little kids laughed and pointed. The older boys on their bikes circling the wagon like the cowboy and Indian movies they’d seen at the Loew’s Oriental on 86th Street at the Saturday matinees, picked them up and threw them at one another. They called to Roberto, el rey de frutas y verdures, the undisputed king of the fruits and the vegetables, to toss them some of the bruised fruit the over ripe bananas he pulled from the bins on his wagon to keep his stock fresh. And he always did. He prided himself on the widest selection of items, from succulent summer peaches to the most exotic melons, from string beans to eggplants, never too young, never too ripe and never bruised.
Bianca knew the daily routine, weaving her way slowly up and down the one way streets, stopping in front of the same houses whether he was on board holding the reins or walking beside her on the sidewalk calling, “Fruit man! Fruit Man!” She knew to turn just one block before the black neighborhood began where the people wanted everything for nothing, and she headed back toward the Italians in Bensonhurst. That was where they lived and where she knew he would put on her feedbag.
One late afternoon of a particularly long day, she was especially restless and exceptionally hungry, despite the occasional apples he had fed her along the route. She had complained all morning until well after noon, while he negotiated prices with the customers. That was when she snorted, clumped her metal shoes on the warm asphalt, neighed and pulled the reins free from where they were loosely tied to the wooden brake next to the empty seat. Without warning she began to move and soon she was trotting away. He called at her to stop and cursed, shaking his fists at the horse as he chased after her on his old legs, but when she turned at the corner he watched her disappear into the traffic, pulling wagon and spilling fruits and vegetables on the street behind her.
A long hour later, perspired and hot, wiping his face with the bandanna he always carried folded neatly in his back pocket and used as a cloth when he ate his lunch, he found her standing docilely at the curb 57th Street waiting for him on in front of the Mrs. Mascucci’s house, where they ate lunch every day. The peddler had known her husband from the old country, and after the man died he made it a point to stop there each day and look after her.
“What happened to you, Fonz?” she called to him with easy familiarity in Italian, using the shortened form of Alfonso that was his real name. “We thought maybe you fell off. Or maybe the gypsies on Second Avenue took you.”
The other women laughed. They had already picked through the fruits and vegetables and filled their own orders and weighed them before Fonz arrived. They used the assorted paper bags he carried on the wagon, making change and leaving their payment in the cash box that was in the driver’s seat.
“We watered the horse with the hose and gave her a bucket to drink, but it looks like she wants to eat.”
“Ah, signora,” he answered in the same Neapolitan dialect, “I knew she would be here.” He smacked the horse on her haunch and the sound made Bianca lift her head and turn back her ears. “This horse knows the route better than I do, and she is quick to remind me where to stop and when to move on. But today she made me take a long, hot walk in the sun. You are a bad horse,” he said in a scolding tone, “and should be made into glue.” But then he rubbed her spotted coat lovingly.
He found the old leather feedbag in the seat on top of the wagon and filled it with oats. Then he slipped the bag over her muzzle and set the strap behind her ears. When he saw that she was quietly munching he retrieved his own lunch, a sandwich made by his wife on Italian bread and wrapped in waxed paper, along with pieces of fruit that were bundled in a brown cloth sack. “I tell my wife, signora, I don’t need the fruit,” he said on more than one occasion. “That I have more fruit on the wagon than I could ever eat. But she insists. You know how women are. And she packs it anyway, fresh figs from the tree.” He showed her. “And sometimes maybe a home grown tomato or two from the garden.”
They climbed up the front steps to the little table and four wooden chairs she prepared for him every day with a carafe of home made red wine and two glass tumblers. He first pulled out her chair and then his own before he opened his bandanna, placed it carefully on the table and laid down the sack of food. She turned over the tumblers and poured some wine for the both of them, half a glass for her and a full one for him. It was their ritual, one they had practiced for years.
“Giuseppe,” she called to her grandson who standing on the sidewalk watching the horse shoo flies with her flicking tail, twitching her leg when the landed there, “you go get the jar of cold water from the ice box for Fonz,” she said in accented English. “And some glasses. But don’t drop them.”
When the screen door slammed behind the boy she reached into her pocketbook and pulled out a brown bag that she handed over to him. It was another of their rituals, one started more recently after her grandson, a finicky eater at best, discovered the fruit peddler’s lunch one afternoon and the man offered part of his sandwich to the boy. Every day after that he looked forward to Fonz’s arrival and lunchtime, relishing whatever the man unwrapped, eating things he would never consider even trying when his mother cooked it. Over the weeks he had devoured yellow squash flowers egg-battered and fried golden brown with onions, cold zucchini circles sliced thin and sauteed in olive oil, marinated in vinegar and garlic with fresh mint leaves that added flavor, green peppers over-stuffed with seasoned breadcrumbs, steamed artichokes that looked strange and tasted delicious, and even fried calamari that made his throat close whenever he smelled it cooking in his mother’s kitchen.
Soon the boy returned with the water, balancing three fragile glasses that he set down carefully on the table.
“So, Giuseppe, shall we see what Mrs. Fonz packed for us to eat today?” he asked, winking at the woman. He unwrapped his sandwich and nodded. “It looks like una bella frittata of potatoes and eggs and some peppers and onions too. And for you?” He handed over the other bag that the boy opened, peeling aside the aluminum foil to show him. “Eggplant parmesan,” he said, looking at the little hero sandwich, the heel of the Italian bread overflowed with eggplant in tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese. ”Better than what she made for me, I think. Maybe we can trade,” he joked, but the boy bit into the sandwich and chewed contentedly.
“Your mother made eggplant last night,” his grandmother said, “and you wouldn’t even taste it.”
“That’s because her eggplant isn’t as good as the kind Mrs. Fonz makes,” he said with his mouth full.
And for a few minutes they both sat in silence eating their lunches. Fonz finished his wine and she went to pour him a second glass.
“No, grazie, signora,” he said. “Bianca and I still have miles to go before the day is over.” He reached into his pocket and removed a folding knife that he opened and wiped carefully on his bandanna. “But maybe some of this.” He picked up the large red tomato his wife had packed for him. He cut through the skin with the sharp blade, creating perfect precision slices uniformly thick without damaging the fruit. He handed over one of the slices to each of them.
“Good luck with that,” she said biting into hers. “This boy never eats tomatoes. He even has butter on his macaronis.”
“What?” Fonz asked. “You don’t like tomatoes? What kind of Italian are you? Sicilian?” he joked.
His grandmother laughed and shrugged her shoulders. “Ah, what can you do? His father’s family is from Sicily,” she said with a tone that was lost on Giuseppe.
“Well,” he said, turning his attention back on to boy, “I am a tomato expert, you know. Not only do I sell them, all kinds, plum tomatoes your grandmother makes into her delicious sauce, big red tomatoes for salads and for slicing with olive oil and oregano. But I grow them too. And I have eaten them cooked, raw, red, yellow and green, for more than sixty years. Even in my breakfast cereal! So I am quite the expert. Maybe you just think you don’t like them because you haven’t tasted these special tomatoes from my garden the way I like to eat them.” He pulled two slices of fried potato from his lunch, large almost perfect circles, and he put them on each side of the tomato. “It’s a very special potato-tomato sandwich,” he said and handed it over to Giuseppe.
The boy held it between his fingers like a cookie, examined it, and after the slightest hesitation he took a bite. A smile spread across his face. “Delicious!” he said. “I love potato-tomatoes,” and he gobbled it down in three bites, looking for more.
His grandmother laughed again and she shook her head. “Only from you, Fonz,” she said. “Only from you.”
Fonz nodded and patted the woman’s hand. “As with so many things in life, signora, it is all in the presentation,” he said.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
New York State of Mind
Once when I was
shopping Trader Joe's
in San Diego I noticed
the dark-haired check out girl
who was definitely not
Southern California.
"You don't look like
you're from here," I said
and smiled, and she said,
"Well then, where do
I look like I'm from?"
and I said, "Back east,"
and she said, "My family’s
from New Jersey."
When a guy at the other
check out asked,
"Do I?” I said, "No,
you look like you're from
back there too," and he said,
"Pennsylvania"
with great pride.
Then the girl asked,
"Where are you from?"
and I said, "What the
fuck do you care?"
And they both answered,
"New York."
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Red Haired Girl at the Author Night
Cute little red haired girl
six or seven
in clashing bright pink blouse
stands in line with Mom
and others waiting
to get their books signed.
Thinking she is alone
she dips her finger
deep inside her nose
working feverishly
with dexterity
until –
Eureka!
– it dislodges a prize
she examines
like discovered treasure
an unrefined nugget
that she mindlessly
takes to her mouth
before she mines
the other side.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Out Of Port Authority
I haven’t been on a bus with toilets since I was fourteen, since that memorable summer my parents took me to the Catskills Mountains on the only family vacation we could afford. It was long before iPods were invented to kill time or portable DVD players to help ward off motion sickness. There weren’t even cassette tapes. My only diversion was staring through the bus windshield counting the utility poles rushing past and regularly asking my exasperated parents, “Are we there yet?”
That was the summer I learned how to french kiss. My teacher was Flossie Higgins, the sixteen years old daughter of the owners of Maple Lawn Guest House, who served tables in the dining room three meals a day and serviced some of the lucky sons of the guests in the Rec Room between meals after their parents were asleep and snoring on the creaky guest house beds. Ah, Flossie, whose real name was Florence, how her name comes up still in my dreams, mixing memories with desire!
Growing up as I did in Brooklyn, I rode the subways everywhere. Sometimes I took the city buses without toilets, though some of the riders left urine samples behind, the more considerate ones in soda bottles; those less concerned just used the seats. During the years I taught junior high school, I traveled in yellow school buses smelling of rancid tuna fish and fetid Parmesan cheese that the pine cleaner never got completely out of the rubber mats, on countless, endless field trips with hordes of loud teenagers screaming, “Are we there yet?”
“You’re a brave man,” a friend said when I told her I was taking a Greyhound out of the New York Port Authority up to Keene, New Hampshire, to pick up the car I had bought, sight unseen on the Internet. “But you’d better carry some mace or pepper spray at least, and an aerosol can of Lysol,” she added, “just in case.”
I didn’t understand her warning until I arrived at the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 8th Avenue in New York City. The bus terminal is the stuff of legends and movies, but not the romantic kinds like The Orient Express, or the ones where long-lost lovers meet after a lifetime of separation. Stories like that take place on trains or under the clock in Grand Central Terminal, and the hero is always someone lovable like Tom Hanks or a pre-meltdown Mel Gibson, and the leading lady is Meryl Streep or Glenn Close or a willowy Uma Thurman. In movies like that the hero somehow discovers that Meryl or Glenn or Uma conceived a son before he shipped out overseas and she was forced to endure society’s condemnation for bearing the child out of wedlock and faced economic misery raising the boy, an adorable moppet violin prodigy or savant, on her own because she never married or even loved another man. And Tom or Mel lost his memory or an arm and a leg in a decisive battle in the war, but when they are reunited that doesn’t matter to her, because she is a nurse who can care for him, and she loves him, she’s always loved him for the man he was and not for the one he has become. No, movies of the Port Authority ilk feature young Jodie Fosterish waifs from Kansas or Nebraska who have run away to New York City looking for a life of glamour and end up exchanging sexual favors for lunch money in bathroom stalls with foreign sailors on shore leave during Fleet Week, or traveling sales men waiting to take the bus to Scranton.
“Where do I get my bus?” I asked the bored clerk behind bulletproof glass when I picked up my ticket. He barely opened his eyes and nodded toward the escalator that was carrying people into the darkness below ground level.
The first thing I noticed as I got closer to the waiting room was that it had too few seats for the teeming people desperate to escape from New York, the schizophrenics who had escaped to New York, and the homeless who had been dumped on the streets in front of the terminal in the hopes that they would find the ways and means to get out of New York and become New Jersey’s problem. The second thing was that, unshaved and dressed in my ill-fitting elastic waist drawstring pants with the zipper perpetually at half-staff, my worn sneakers and an army field jacket rescued from a thrift store hanger, I looked pretty much like all the others who were waiting.
“Are we there yet?” one grizzled man shouted from the corner. “I told you once,” he answered his own question. “No you didn’t!” the argument went on. And when he saw me watching him from afar he demanded, “What you looking at, chump?”
“Please, sir,” a frantic guy with crazy eyes blocked my way and pleaded, “I just need a couple of bucks more so I can pay for my bus that’s about to leave.”
I fished into my pocket and handed him a damp dollar. I did it again on each of the three times he passed through targeting the newcomers, before I finally thought it might be a scam!
Spotting an empty seat and ignoring a suspicious looking stain on the cushion, I slipped into the chair beside a large biker with Billy-goat beard and prison tats crawling up both his arms and circling his neck. His pirate earrings slapped him in the face whenever he turned to eye me or check out the three college girls who were bent under their backpacks and probably returning from spring break in Cabo San Lucas.
Someone with Turret’s in blind-man Ray Charles sunglasses on the other side of me shook the entire row of seats every time he flinched and cursed. He obsessively rolled, unrolled and re-rolled the cuffs of his pants to optimize the view of his black engineer boots, the fashion likes of which I hadn’t seen since I owned a pair in 1959. Then he flinched and cursed and started the entire routine again.
A disembodied voice announced my bus and I vacated my seat, sticking slightly, just as the pleading man tumbled in for more bus fare, accompanied by the shirtless guy in dread locks I had seen on an earlier visit to the Men’s Room showering in the sink. I broke for the gate and joined the lineup already camped in front of the glass door anxious to board – a band of little Peruvians in short-brimmed fedoras transporting live poultry, a Joe Buck looking midnight cowboy in hand-tooled cowboy boots and a black Stetson, engaging in a heated exchange with a Ratso Rizzo look-alike.
When the doors of the loading bay swung open the bus was just as I remembered from my youth, only smaller and not as luxurious. We rushed to get good seats. The Peruvians stowed their chickens in the overhead bins and then commenced a pan flute concert up front, breaking in unison into El Condor Pasa, while Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo took places midway. A pimp and two really desperate looking “ladies of the street” staked out the last three rows next to the toilet and were setting up shop on the bench seat in the back. One of the girls winked me an invitation and patted the empty place next to her. The pimp glared. I nodded at him, politely declined and dropped into an open seat by the escape window, directly across from a mother nursing her infant and toddler twins who watched me curiously.
The bus motor roared, spewing noxious fumes into the cabin before the driver closed the door, and eventually we all settled into the tedium of travel – the sounds of snoring and crying children, the too loud cell phone conversations and the bobbing heads, mostly in the back of the bus.
Around Bridgeport the toilet backed up, sending blue water and toilet paper up the aisle, making the facilities unusable and travel to the back of the bus a hazard. But I had no intention of going there, or going at all, even after one of the twins got bus sick and launched projectile vomit tinged with the hint of tuna and the aroma of Parmesan cheese that grazed my carry on. The smell brought back a flood of memories, making me almost nostalgic for those long-gone glory days of junior high school trips to the planetarium and the reptile museum.
With each stop more of my fellow travelers disembarked. Somewhere in Vermont I must have napped for a while and when I opened my eyes with a start I was looking into the bus driver’s face. His hands were going through my pockets.
“Are we there yet?” I asked and he jumped back.
“I-I thought you were dead,” he stammered. “Honest. I was just looking for some ID.”
The empty Greyhound was parked in the lot behind Home Depot idling in the Keene darkness. Apparently I had arrived with nothing very monumental occurring on the trip. Ratso Rizzo didn’t die in the cowboy’s arms to the swelling strains of “Everybody’s Talking At Me.” The pimp and hoes were gone. And except for a dark stain on the seat across the aisle, the nursing mother and her kids had disappeared without a trace. Even the Peruvians had flown the coop with only a few chicken feathers to indicate they had been there at all.
My dinner at the diner was ordinary. Later I settled into the Keene Cut-Rate Motor Inn, but I didn’t get much sleep. Noises from the adjoining room where the “ladies of the back row” had apparently set up shop, kept me up. In the morning I waved to them as they boarded another Greyhound. And after breakfast I went to pick up my new car for my solo drive back to New York.
