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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.
The scene in King Lear that I’d always liked best involved Lear, gone mad, wandering the beach in the storm to end all storms, running into his old friend Gloucester, who has been blinded. There they are: these two people who’ve known each other forever, in the middle of a rainstorm, at the end of their reigns. For a little while, they save each other.
And so, I stayed where I was. I ate my sandwich. He drank his beers. He talked, and talked, and talked, a monologue of Zs and Ks. I smiled. I nodded. He grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard.
When he left, it was dark outside. The day was over. My true love, whoever he was, hadn’t shown up. For some reason, I was happy anyway.
THE NEXT DAY, THE HANDYMAN appeared at my apartment and wired me a buzzer that turned out to be louder than the entire neighborhood combined. Its bleat registered equivalent to my teenage idiotic episodes of leaning against the speakers at grunge-era rock shows.
“So you always know when someone’s coming,” said the Handyman. I protested that the buzzer was likely to make me have a heart attack.
“Nobody wants to be safe,” he grumbled.
“Obviously not,” I said. “I just want to be happy.” I thought I was being lighthearted. The Handyman disagreed.
“Fuck it,” he said. “Fuck everyone.” His eyes blazed.
The disadvantage of addicts, recovering and otherwise: mood swings. The Handyman stormed out of the apartment. A moment later, my buzzer screamed. And again. He rang it for an hour. Finally, I went outside to give him a piece of my mind.
“What are you doing?”
“You weren’t supposed to answer that, mamita,” he said. He was sitting on my stoop, looking calm and dejected. “I’m a crazy motherfucker, but you’re one stupid girl.”
“Probably true,” I agreed. “Don’t do that again, or I’ll call the police.”
“No charge for the buzzer. It’ll keep you safe from people like me, and shit, mami, you look like you need it. You’re too young for me, mamita, young and dumb, just like I was when I was in Montana.”
Carmela materialized, suitcase in hand, followed by a troupe of three neighborhood mutts, and a lagging older woman in worn-down red stilettos.
“You were late, Daddy,” she said, reprovingly. The old lady said something pissed off in Polish. The Handyman replied, also in Polish. She left, grumbling.
“Daddy’s got problems,” said Carmela, looking at me solemnly. “But I love him.”
There was no one in my life that I could say that about. Besides myself, that is. I envied Carmela her capacity for the unconditional. Part of me wanted to be like her, to be able to accept everyone I met. To forgive them their trespasses, their buzzer ringings, their vacuuming. Obviously, I wasn’t there yet. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be.
“See you,” I said to the Handyman.
“Next time something breaks, baby,” he replied.
He swung Carmela up, and she scrambled onto his shoulders like a monkey. I watched them as they walked into the sunset, their two bodies becoming a silhouette of something bigger than both of them.
Zak sat down next to me with a bottle of beer in hand.
“Brittany?” I asked.
“Catastrophe,” he said. “Debacle, disaster, horror, nightmare. You?”
“How about I sing a little bit of ‘Handyman’ for you? I fix broken hearts…”
“No. You know how I feel about easy listening.”
“He was as broken as me, is the bottom line.”
“That’d be life, yes,” said Zak. “And the things that compensate for emotional instability aren’t constant, either, that’s the problem.”
“What would those things be?”
“Things that eventually sag,” he said, sadly.
I put my head on Zak’s shoulder as the sun went down. Maybe love was like Godot. You spent the whole play talking about it, but it never actually made it onstage. You waited anyway. Of course you did.
“Wanna go play video games?” asked Zak.
“Desperately,” I said.
And so, in lieu of love, we went out into the night to kill a few monsters.
Jack the Stripper (#ulink_e463d592-beb1-5cf1-a26f-a08f6831e58d)
In Which Our Heroine Meets a Wuss in Creep’s Clothing…
THE NEXT FEW WEEKS WERE spent in a state of controlled chaos. I went out with guys I met on the subway, guys I met in the bookstore, guys I met in line for stupidly expensive espresso. Varying degrees of dates. Mostly coffee, sometimes a drink in a bar. I went out with a couple of PhD-holding taxi drivers (one was an Indian surgeon, the other an Egyptian psychoanalyst); a Metropolitan Museum security guard who offered to take me home to meet his family in Sicily; a couple of construction workers; a Vietnam vet who was missing three fingers (alas, he had plenty to say about what he could do with the remaining digits); a Long Island City carpet salesman who asked if I wanted to “shag,” and then laughed for a long, long time, pointing hysterically at a section of fluffy carpets. I had a glass of Rioja with a Spanish-accented painter who, in an ill-conceived effort to impress me, told me that the only medium worth painting in was your own viscera. He then gave a long diatribe about people who held down day jobs instead of “doing their art.” The next day, I happened to go into Pearl Paint to buy latex for my living room, and there he was, working behind the counter, holding a bottle of glitter glue, and sounding very much like he was from New Jersey. I went out with a goatee-wearing psychic, who told me I was from Nebraska (no), a Capricorn (no), and about to find Big Love (hopefully). Then he spent forty-five minutes reading my palm, and found a line on it that clearly said I was going to sleep with him (hell no). I went out with one of the annoying New York guys who runs up to girls on the street, telling them they have great hair, and then tries to sell them salon gift certificates. I went out with a matchstick-skinny photographer, who came up to me in a café and told me he was looking for models to pose for his “tasteful and artistic nude series.” Much to his sorrow, I didn’t take my clothes off, but I regret to say that there’s a picture out there somewhere in which there is not only far too much leg, there’s a dyed-pink lapdog and a maraschino cherry.
Despite all these dates, I still hadn’t gone out with anyone from my program at NYU. And I was glad. Dating in the Dramatic Writing Program was incestuous, on a Greek tragedy level. One mistake made at a party could find you putting out your eyes during your next playwriting workshop. Anything you did was destined to trail humiliatingly behind you, like toilet paper attached to your shoe, for the next four years. Even if you didn’t remember it, everyone else was writing it down. It’d appear in the classroom the next week, translated into a scene in someone else’s play. You’d end up sitting around the workshop table, impotently explaining why it was not good dramatic logic to include the scene in which the character based on you made out with the character based on the most flamingly gay boy in the program. Why were you making out? You were a girl. Yes, okay, he was a boy, but a boy who, if not for the joint influence of controlled substances and pure desperation, would’ve had no interest in girls. Not that you could even comment directly. All the people in my program were repression made flesh. We sublimated all our vitriol into pages, becoming not just backbiters, but backwriters. I’d dated a bunch of other NYU students, both during the months of my yes policy, and prior, but thus far I’d evaded any of the messes in my daily classes.
However, if someone from my program asked me out now, I couldn’t say no. When I’d put my yes policy into effect, I’d neglected to think about that. Post-Handyman, I’d felt somewhat virtuous. A foray into the nonintellectually bound male. Hadn’t turned out terribly well, but that wasn’t really his fault. I felt comfortable taking the blame for that particular failure, whereas, if I was going to date a classmate, I felt that he should take equal responsibility for any tragedy. He, after all, would have the same frames of reference I did. A Doll’s House and The Three Sisters, The Misanthrope and Long Day’s Journey into Night. A shared vocabulary of this kind of material seemed to me to be a recipe for disaster.
There were several categories of male to be met in the Dramatic Writing Program, and, with the exception of the last two, I was critical of them all:
The Rainbow Bullets. As in, gay like Liberace. One of these was writing a response to Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, entitled The Penis Monologues. He claimed that the penis had been marginalized, too.
The Gayts. Gay-straight men. Obviously gay, but in denial. Usually, these guys would spend their time at NYU writing five or six scripts featuring characters that everyone knew were gay, except the playwright, who’d finish things up with a hetero wedding.
The Strays. Straight-gay men. Dated girls, but used hair products that made girls suspicious of them. Always prettier than any woman in the department.
The Comedians. Interested only in fart jokes. No one ever got a good look at them, because they never removed their scraggly baseball caps. Traveled in packs. Deadly serious.
The Tragedians. Usually strikingly handsome, and in possession of appealingly troubled souls, and extensive knowledge of French new wave cinema. Interested only in making experimental, Warhol-esque films consisting of five hours of footage of the Empire State Building. At night.
The Cult of Personality. Generally, slam poets. They paired wildly mismatched 1970s shirts with nylon workout pants and Converse high-tops, and vacillated between above-it-all silence and rabid ironic monologue. Asexual.
The Do-Overs. The thirty-something guys who were happily beginning their youth again, this time as the only “real men” in a program full of hot eighteen-year-olds.
The Gurus. The thirty-something guys who didn’t notice the eighteen-year-olds, and therefore were fervently desired by all of them. Usually yoga teachers on the side.
The Professors. Though there were rules against dating one’s students, they were not well enforced. A side effect of writerly repression was that several people in the program were obsessed with scripting sadomasochistic onstage sex. The rest of the unlucky workshop participants would have to pretend to be actors, and read the scenes aloud. “Ohh, ahh, yesssssss. Pleeease, plunge my head into a bucket of pee.” Nothing could have been more unappealing. Except for the semifamous professor in charge, lech-erously informing my friend Elise that she looked as though she’d been really turned on during her reading of a rape scene.
Zak. Lovable, but not dateable, given the roommate situation. Zak had his own in-program dating woes. He’d had a brief interlude with the blonde Russian babe that all the straight boys in the program followed around. Something undisclosed had gone wrong. Now he was forced to hide every time he saw her.
Griffin. Lovable, but not dateable, given that, other than Zak, he was my only male friend in the department. He, Zak, and I formed a triumvirate of late-night intellectual obnoxiousness. When Griffin was in our kitchen, Zak and I were allowed to be as loud as we wanted to be, because he’d charmed Vic and could do no wrong. Griffin was a small Greek guy from Indiana, and in possession of a talent for making anyone, in any room he walked into, fall instantly in love with him. All of his female friends had tried to sleep with him at some point, and I was no exception. In my case, I’d hung out with him one night until 4:00 a.m., eating his trademark bad pasta and drinking wine. When it was too late for me to go home, he’d given me his bed.
“You can stay in here with me, you know,” I’d said.
Griffin had taken a couple steps toward the bed, then a couple back.
“I can’t. I’m from Indiana,” he’d finally said, and flew from the room, his pillow clutched to his chest. It wasn’t that he was confused about his sexuality. It was that he was one of the last men on the planet who believed in sleeping only with people you loved. He’d later revealed that he’d spent the remainder of the night conflicted. We were close friends. It was possible that we might really get along. Should he go back in? Should he not? What was really being offered?
“Yes,” I’d told him. “It was what you thought.”
“Damn it, damn it, damn it,” he’d replied, but the moment had passed, and we’d never been inclined to get naked again. Soon after, I’d hooked Griffin up with Elise, who’d conquered his resistance through a combination of sexy ankles, fishnet stockings, and braless stirring of pumpkin risotto. Now, she was taking him shopping for small, soft sweaters in the women’s department, and introducing him to the joys of high-thread-count sheets. He was slightly ashamed of how much he loved this, and worried that he’d be recategorized into a Stray. He wasn’t. He was his own thing. There was no one on earth like Griffin, and that was half of why I adored him.
THE ABOVE CATEGORIES, combined with my work overload, caused me to keep my head down whenever I had to make an appearance on the seventh floor of 721 Broadway. The boys of the DWP weren’t even on my radar. Therefore, the first time I met the Boxer, I was dismissive. He was part of the Do-Over category, and in the grad program. Not bad looking. None too tall, but making up for it with great arm and chest muscles, due to the fact that he worked out at a boxing gym. Blondish, close-cropped hair. Sexily broken pugilist’s nose. It did not occur to me to be interested in him. The thing that made me reconsider the Boxer was his voice. I heard this great, raspy boom echoing across a crowded classroom, and I looked around in spite of myself.
The class was taught by a famous avant-garde playwright. He’d assigned us the first page of Kafka’s The Castle, not a play, mind you, an unfinished novel about a poor guy trying in vain to get into a very low-rent heaven. We were supposed to do we knew not what with it. The playwright sat in the back of the house, grimacing his trademark sexy grimace. We were not experimental enough for him. His plays involved dreamlike realities and absurdist dialogue seeded with spectacular one-liners. He was a superstar for a select audience. I pretended I’d read the play the teacher was known for, but I lied. I was only interested in Sam Shepard, and I had too many day jobs to spend any time on my homework. I was getting by solely on my smile, which I spread indiscriminately around the department, hoping it would get me forgiven for not working up to my potential. When my turn came around to show my interpretation of The Castle, I sent the Boxer into the booth, to speak over the God mic, and flung all the other men in the class onstage, where they opposed my friend Ruby in her quest for a place to sleep. It was a sort of no-room-at-the-inn situation, which went surprisingly well the first time around, and heinously the second, when the professor made me repeat what I’d improvised. After class, the Boxer came up to me and told me he thought it had been “not bad.”
We shared other classes, it turned out. One was with my most beloved professor, Martin, a Guru in his own right, who always carried about twenty-five pounds of obscure and wonderful books in a beaten-up leather bag and delivered his lectures in a distinctive growl. Martin and I were close cohorts, often drinking wine after class and trading volumes. He had a pack of young male acolytes, who could usually be found trailing behind him, hoping that some of his elusive combination of brilliance, eccentricity, and badass sense of humor would rub off on them. In one of Martin’s classes, I read aloud a prose piece about the ridiculous loss of my virginity, and the Boxer laughed so hard I thought he might have a coronary. He asked for my phone number, and though Vic had again admonished me for giving it out, I did. He’d laughed at my jokes, goddamn it. My ego was enamored. Also, even though I’d seen him carrying a well-thumbed paperback of Raymond Carver stories, never a very good sign in a prospective boyfriend, I thought that the boxing made up for it. It gave him a certain working-class appeal, a grounding in the physical that convinced me that he’d never try to knock me out with references to Rushdie.
We went out to a sports bar (a sports bar! I rejoiced. It was so not my taste, and since I thought my taste had historically sucked, anything in opposition to it seemed like a great idea) and watched baseball. He had another friend with him, who was possibly there to evaluate me. I was wearing the wrong thing. Red dress. Far too sexy for a bar full of televisions and beer. I feared that my dress made me look desperate, and so I spent the entire evening tugging at it, trying to make it less bombshell and more windbreaker. Not possible. The Boxer said almost nothing to me the whole night, and I went home, feeling dweeby.
When the Boxer called me later that week, and asked if I wanted to meet up that night, I was surprised, but pleased.
“Meet me at six,” he said, and gave me an address on Broadway. Maybe he liked me after all. I could see myself liking him. He was intelligent, funny, and a gentleman! He hadn’t even tried to kiss me on the first date! I revised my opinions of him, and decided that he was just old-fashioned. Nothing wrong with old-fashioned.
LATER THAT NIGHT, I walked down the street in search of our meeting place, expecting dinner, and maybe a play, given that we were roughly in the theater district. The neighborhood got less and less likely as I walked. I checked the address. Maybe I’d gotten something wrong. There was nothing on this corner. Nothing, that is, but something called Flashdancers, A Gentleman’s Club. I’d seen this place advertised on the tops of taxis, a busty blonde in four sequins and a smile, offering herself up to traffic. Despite the fact that the sign was neon, I deluded myself into thinking that “gentleman’s club” meant the sort of dark, oak-paneled bar where you might find F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway drinking expensive scotch and smoking tobacco peddled by cigarette girls. I didn’t think I could just walk in. Probably, I thought, I wasn’t even allowed. I walked up to the big, bald guy standing outside, and nervously asked him if I had the right address.
“You wanna go inside?” He grinned at me. Gold tooth.
“I’m supposed to meet someone. But is there a restaurant? I think I might be lost.”
“Yeah,” he said. “We have an all-you-can-eat buffet.” He winked, in a friendly manner. I looked at a sign posted next to the door, advertising the buffet. I felt happier. This was good news. Maybe it was one of those secret New York places. There was a club downtown, for example, that you had to access through a tunnel that started in the storage room of a grocery store. The clammy, dark passageway was the epitome of creepy, but if you had enough faith to get through the vault door at the end, you hit paradise: an old speakeasy, with swing music, velvet couches, and great martinis. I couldn’t imagine that the Boxer would actually take me somewhere sleazy. We had to go to school together, after all, and it’d be too embarrassing. I peered into the dark hallway beyond the door, but couldn’t see anything.
“Do you think he’s inside already?”
“Shit, I don’t know. You wanna go in, or you wanna stay out?” The bouncer was looking impatient.
“I guess I’ll go in.”
“That’s twenty bucks.” He stuck out a palm as big as my face.
I’d never been to a bar that had such a big cover charge before. I dug in my purse, but I only had eight dollars.
“Only because you’re a chick. Get in before I change my mind,” said the bouncer, waving me in for free. I wadded my money into my purse and ducked through a curtain.
