Dissident Gardens (17 page)

“How long’s he want to go?” said the coach lazily, after McMillan had drilled maybe fifteen line drives.

“What do you mean?”

“Up to you.”

“The tryout’s over?”

“Tryout?”

“That’s what we came for.”

“Word from the office to allow your son to toss some batting practice. Favor to Bill Shea I heard.”

There went Heuman’s whole career, that day on the mound under the jets. His day in the sun. The Sunnyside Gardens kid who’d once thrown batting practice to the Amazings. Too bad Lenny hadn’t come with a camera. Without photographic evidence the moment misted into legend, the dentist willing to tell it if you asked, never if you didn’t. He didn’t burnish—I never threw to Kranepool, no, nor Choo Choo Coleman, no, he’d explain patiently, nor Art Shamsky. Shamsky wasn’t with the team yet. He’d speak with no disappointment, it had done nothing to shake his National League devotion, no, the dentist was a fan, though any subsequent visit within Shea’s walls he’d pay for a ticket.

Not Lenny. The Mets never got one Liberty Dime from his pocket. Lenny Angrush had no need for this team of confabulated Lovable Losers. He knew too many authentic ones starved for love.

The Greenroom
. The young NBC production assistant greeting Miriam Gogan as she disembarks Rockefeller Center’s Studio 6A elevator is an unmistakable freak-in-containment, eyes pinwheel-spinning his pleasure at being recognized as such, above a Vandyke beard and lips as soft and red as a teenage boy’s. She supposes the recognition is mutual, for though Miriam has pinned her shoulder-blade-length frizz into a neat castle perched high off her neck, and selected from the depths of her closet the canary-yellow pantsuit retained for appearances at civic forums, public bureaucracies, and bail hearings, also donned modest jade earrings and an unchunky silver necklace, she doubts this straight costume cloaks her own pot-drenched pupils, dilated-to-meet-you at one in the afternoon. The assistant invites her into the program’s “greenroom,” reminding her as they go that though today is Tuesday, taping has already been in progress—would just now be finishing—on a Thursday segment of
The Who, What, or Where Game
, the quiz show on which Miriam Gogan has been selected to be a Friday contestant. They film—he explains this as they move past reception, through glass doors, and into the corridor—they film the episodes in bunches, two on a Monday, then three on a Tuesday, keeping the host, Art James, from having to work for more than two days to put a week of shows in the bank. This also saves on hotel nights for the episode champions, who reappear on the panel
the day following their victory, carrying over for as long as a week before the show resets with three fresh contestants on a Monday. So if they hurry inside Miriam can watch, on a video monitor, Thursday’s final round—“Pot Limit,” in the show’s language—and judge the play of the winner, who’ll face her when she steps onto the set. The other new player, Miriam’s future opponent, too, is waiting already in the greenroom, but, according to this kid, he doesn’t look any too formidable—an accountant, a nobody. It is today’s likely winner she ought to worry about: Peter Matusevitch, a hipster advertising man, he’d begun on Monday—yesterday, that was—and had been winning “all week.” The goofy bearded boy in a suit babbles this way at her, as he leads her into the foam-insulated and carpeted chambers of the inner studio, his apparent injunction to make the contestants comfortable melding effortlessly with stoner palaver, that droning fascination with everything. Here were the restrooms, Miriam must know a hell of a lot about current events to get selected to be on the program, too bad you can’t see the Chrysler Building through this window, did she want some coffee? The weird fudge of days that pertains in this place, Monday containing Tuesday, Tuesday containing all the rest, seems of a piece with the assistant’s fog of approximation.

In a more general way, finding the sweet young head waiting here to meet her is all of a piece with Miriam’s New York in the new decade. As though she’s invoked him, smoked him into being. It was once the case that, in pursuit of such essences, such encounters, you migrated from the drab gray lands that extended in every direction, seeking a small enchanted quadrant. MacDougal Street, Mott Street, Bleecker Street, a brick cellar on Barrow where a jazz trio’s instruments lay gathering dust. Hipsterdom’s tiny population glommed new members, those days, at an appreciable pace. Anyone arriving on that postcard-size scene had by all appearances grown sideburns just five minutes before, seeking approval of the essential few who’d each personally gotten turned on by either Allen Ginsberg, Mezz Mezzrow, or Seymour Krim. If back then you saw Tuli Kupferberg or Ramblin’ Jack Elliott on the street you not only greeted them and were greeted in fond return, you knew that Elliott was as much a New York Jew as Kupferberg, an open secret to all but the squares who paid to see his cowboy shtick.

A decade later, Greenwich Village has exfoliated its vibe outward, encompassing the whole island overnight. Sure, hippiedom had daubed the planet with its paisley virus, doped flower kids adrift and hitchhiking anywhere. But Manhattan’s variation is more intricate and compelling. New Yorkers, a strain of the human species too consumed with mercantile striving to brook interruption, have, with typical acquisitive impatience,
turned on
without
dropping out
. Any given old format, like, say, an NBC quiz program run out of Rockefeller Center, now bleeds with dressed-up freaks along the lines of this kid. No fuckups, they carry the city’s tasks forward with as much alacrity as the type of go-getter they’ve replaced, even if in wry quote marks.

Peter Matusevitch, the advertising executive who is the week’s champion so far, plainly shares in the same benign conspiracy. Miriam, seated now in the comfy oasis of the greenroom with the assistant and the accountant, studies her soon-to-be-opponent on the video monitor there. Matusevitch is outfitted in a wide-lapelled mint suit, sports an elegantly waxed mustache, not so large as to be silly, keeps his longish hair combed neatly over both ears, and speaks in tones both insinuating and sweet while he eliminates the previous pair of
Who, What, or Where Game
opponents, as though wishing to convert the tiny violence of their dispatch into a kind of seduction. As soon as this operation is completed Matusevitch enters the greenroom in person and Miriam enjoys another easy exchange of mutual recognition, this at a higher level than the older-sisterly affection she’d granted the assistant: Matusevitch really is a fox. Even if Madison Avenue is, basically, satanic.

Not that Miriam is shopping, except in that, yes, older-sisterly way she shops, on behalf of the single chicks of the Grand and Carmine Street communes. Stella Kim, for instance. It is Stella, her current favorite, with whom Miriam has gotten high just before taking the subway up to Rockefeller Center, and Stella who’s volunteered to keep an eye on the toddler while Miriam competes on the show. Tommy, the loving dad, having coop-flown again. Reverting to Woody Guthrie, a man of his people who couldn’t stay home, he’d picked today to journey by train up the Hudson, to play a set to bolster the spirits of the ragged band of Quaker protesters keeping a death-penalty vigil at
the prison in Ossining, a thing Miriam liked to call his Gig of Sisyphus. Though that might actually describe Tommy’s last decade. The career that Miriam, having made herself staunch behind, the great everywoman behind every great man, tries not to consider. Stella Kim would for instance dig Peter Matusevitch very much.

And likely the reverse, Stella Kim being a fox herself. Stella Kim being really somewhat special, really quite a lot more than another of Miriam’s dopey commune girls. For it is more generally the case that Miriam, having surpassed the dread age of thirty, mother of a two-year-old, collects to herself living emblems of her earlier self, even if they are mostly without a clue, contain barely a notion behind their brush-shined waterfalls of hair. Nevertheless Miriam enfolds them within her sphere, plays older sister and girlfriend, purveyor of good grass and serious knowledge, to the barefoot and thank-Christ-for-the-Pill-not-pregnant lilies of the counterculture. Those subject, if they are lucky enough, to the special ironic burden of the chauvinist hippie boyfriend. At least Tommy Gogan is Irish, is famous, or had been, and has donated his fame and other, more material prospects to great causes—alibis unavailable to the hordes of ponytailed schlubs still looking to their chicks for laundry duty. So many of these are NYU girls, or dropouts from Bard or Vassar or Stony Brook, come awash in New York. Good churchgoers right through high school, members of Monkees fan clubs, tentative abusers of bathroom-cabinet amphetamines, victims generally of the stupefying effects of the suburbs. Miriam, usher to the city, unveiler of its occult corners, would have older-sistered most of these types even at seventeen, fresh from dropping out of Queens College.

Stella Kim, Bronx-born Hunter grad, survivor of another staunch Red mother, and self-savvy hot ticket, has the capacity really to show Miriam to herself eight years younger. Or so Miriam would like to believe. They’d met, a year earlier, at Yippie headquarters, during a meeting for a call to solidarity with Cesar Chavez, Miriam honing in on Stella’s fitful intensity even before the girl bummed a smoke. “Waste of time,” Miriam told her as they left the meeting early, to snag falafels and amble to the park. “I haven’t touched iceberg lettuce for a year now, big news. Boycott’s too slow, let me show you.” She guided Stella to the Associated on Eighth Avenue, where they smoked
dope behind the Dumpster, then, once inside, loaded their hand baskets with heads of iceberg and bunches of migrant-exploiting grapes. Around a corner, when no one looked, they excavated an open-casket freezer and buried the lettuce and grapes beneath pounds of plastic bags of frozen peas and carrots. “Only takes about ten minutes in the ice to wreck the lettuce. They might still be able to sell the grapes, but they sure won’t taste right.”

“Cool,” exclaimed Stella Kim, impressed for certain. “But what’s the baby food for?”

“A baby. C’mon.” She dragged her home to show off Sergius and Tommy, no feminist shame in the nuclear family, leastwise not on a night when Tommy had stayed home trying to tease into place between the infant’s lips a bottle, stand-in for her laden breasts, which began jetting in instantaneous response the moment she and Stella walked through the door to hear the father pleading with the bawling child. Stella Kim, unflappable, introduced herself to Tommy and then with a sly smile produced an extra couple of glass jars of Gerber, apparently booted into her macramé purse while Miriam paid for those she’d taken to the register. There are few tricks you can teach this girl, who conveys a certain Weather Underground vibe she’d acknowledge only in cipher remarks, passing behaviors. It is Stella, in fact, who has taught Miriam to use slugs for subway tokens, matte disks punched from rolled steel, purchased from a maker in Brooklyn—Stella who, with enough of these in that purse to coldcock a policeman, has gifted Miriam with handfuls. Miriam has used one of the slugs to ride the F to the Rockefeller Center studios today.

It was with Stella Kim that Miriam, the famous rememberer, the memorizer of factual nonsense, one day found herself calling out her own long bluff and writing in to the game show to become a contestant. Miriam’s absurd ease with dates and names and geography so impresses her cohort, though this aptitude feels to her merely her legacy under Rose Zimmer’s nurture, Rose who would barely settle for less, and a skill Miriam truthfully finds less amazing in herself than she finds it amazingly lacking in her husband and his friends and her friends too. It was Stella with whom she sat at home caring for the kid with the television on, calling out answers invariably an instant before each contestant could do so, and at Stella’s exhortation—“Why
not win some of their funny money, if you already know all the answers anyway?”—that she jumped for a pencil and scribbled down the address as Art James read it out: “All it takes is a postcard with your name, address, and telephone number to the 3W’S, P.O. Box 156, New York 10019.” Stella who understands how badly they could use the green, while Tommy remains stranded in a valley between recording contracts, a valley Miriam secretly fears may not in fact prove crossable in their lifetimes.

That this is Stella Kim’s business to understand, more even than it is Tommy’s, is for Miriam as unremarkable as is her talent with facts. For Miriam it may always be this way: the male principle a kind of distant banner flying over her life, marking an allegiance unquestioned yet also in some manner fundamentally esoteric, out to lunch. Whereas beginning with Lorna Himmelfarb, or even earlier, and never more than in the instance of Stella Kim, Miriam’s lady confidantes are the ground beneath her feet, the earth itself. Perhaps also even the feet with which Miriam feels herself planted on that earth. Root and body of herself in another. So it is Stella whose eyes Miriam feels she sees through, as she sizes up the killer-hipster mustachioed adman Peter Matusevitch, as well as the other, possibly nonincidental competitor there in the greenroom, the stocky accountant who now presents himself as Graham Stone. Stone rises to take Miriam’s hand and bow slightly. Knowing the rigorous screening with which she found herself faced to be granted an appearance on
The Who, What, or Where Game
, no opponent ought to be discounted. Stone has plenty of lascivious sparkle in his eye, too, and for that matter a strange, merkin-like beard blanketing the underside of his chin, perhaps masking a double chin, but also signifying the eligibility of an accountant for entry into the Aquarian age. So until Art James joins them in the greenroom, Miriam is the only one present without facial hair.