Emma Who Saved My Life (3 page)

Well it's a jungle out there.

“Yeah right,” she said, rolling her eyes, “and that kid was a con, because last week I saw him again doing a routine about being thrown out of retarded school and his mother being sick and in intensive care and how he can't take care of his mama. I mean, if you didn't know, this stuff would break your heart. This one woman across from me just coughed up a handful of coins. I was thinking, hm, first week in town, huh?”

Strange city.

“This town,” she said lighting cigarette number three, “particularly the crime, the streetcrud harassing you, the panhandlers and the goddam hippie leftovers—it gets to you, as you trudge back from your $2.50 an hour job, you know? If you stay here long enough, you wanna form a vigilante squad, you want Dirty Harry to come clean the streets. You're ready for a Goldwater comeback.”

Now now.

“Three months ago I was a McGovern Liberal. I would have given my body to Eugene McCarthy. Now I sound like my mother back in Milwaukee, for christ's sakes.”

Speaking of family, how was her brother?

“Don't ask,” she said. “he's still doing his Love Generation routine in San Francisco. It's just like Washington Square, over a block or two. We'll walk through it on the way to see Emma. I mean, hey, that stuff's nice, beads and sitar music and people selling earrings made out of tinfoil, but come on, you can't keep living that way. Aren't you glad we had our older brothers and sisters to do all that dumb shit so we didn't have to?”

The waitress slung the check on the table: “Have a nice day.”

“Well I wasn't planning on it,” said Lisa, “but if you insist.”

It was great then, that afternoon—I hadn't one
ounce
of an idea of the sheer grind of living in New York, day to day. Walking around Washington Square, with Lisa narrating, seeing the colony of activists, artists, jewelry-makers, guitarists, people selling beads and African batiked cloths, pottery, their knitting, the pamphleteers, people waving petitions, Jews for Jesus, brochures about federally funded abortions and harassment of homosexuals by police; someone pinned a flower on me asking for a donation to the Temple of Universal Love, whatever that was; there were the better-dressed hippies sidling up and offering one-word drug pitches (“Snow? Hash? Weed? Pills? Horse?”), the teenage juggler with a hat full of coins in front of him because he was very good, the buskers harmonizing only half as good as Peter, Paul and Mary on the song they were attempting, the ill-nourished runaway who was beyond persuasion, circles under his eyes, pallid, on something, “Can you give me some money, man, huh, can you?” Lisa put a quarter into his hands, thinking perhaps of her brother in San Francisco (who got messed up really bad on drugs), and he pocketed the money without acknowledgment and stumbled through the crowd, intent on the next handout. Washington Square in 1974, the last hurrah of the dying '60s. Even more mysterious than how the Love Generation came about in the U S of A, God's Country, was how completely it was to disappear without a trace by the mid-'70s. Yeah, I know, a lot of the “idealism” was self-serving and self-indulgent, but you look around now at every smart, talented person rushing to get in the door of the nearest investment bank and you can't help but think back on August evenings as late as 1974 when there was something beyond the color and the music, a spirit (I know, yucky word, but what else do you call it?) that the United States might have done well to hang on to a little longer. This seems a long time ago.

“Playtime's over,” said Lisa, pulling at my sleeve, “we'll come back and mess around later. Let's get something to eat.”

I followed Lisa as we approached the eastern edge of the Village, where things began to look even seedier, the shops untrendy; the posters and signs turned more ethnic (Ukrainian and Italian, with misspelled English translations underneath), the people a little more worn-looking either from having to work grueling daily jobs, or from being unemployed.

“We're headed toward Baldo's Pizza, if I can remember where it is. That's where Emma works.”

In a pizza place?

“Yeah,” said Lisa, “because poetry-writing doesn't bring in too much. Gotta support your habit.”

Was Emma any good?

Lisa slowed the pace a bit. “Yeah I think so. Then I don't know anything about poetry. Or theater for that matter—so you're safe too from critical opinion.”

Did Emma know about art?

“Good god, Emma knows about everything. More than me about art, more than you about theater. She's scary. Sometimes I have second thoughts about asking her to move in as our third—I'm going to feel so stupid.”

Tell me again, I said, how you met Emma.

“I put all that in a letter to you —what were you doing with my letters?”

Lisa NEVER wrote ANYTHING TO ANYBODY—pay no attention to her.

“How I met Emma?” Lisa paused and decided which rundown, dangerous-looking street to take. “I met her at a Susan-party. She's staying with Susan—poor girl—until she moves in with us. Emma wanted to meet you first before she moved in, though, so make a good impression … we've passed this porno bookshop thing before haven't we?”

We found it after fifty wrong turns:
BALDO'S PIZZA
, in flashing pink neon. Inside there was a waiting area with green and white and red patterned floortiles, Italian flags, several posters of a national soccer team on the walls, postcards from awful places, and one-dollar bills glued to the cash register under a sheet of faded yellow tape. There was a sample pizza out on display that looked like some modern art conceptual-thing, all dried out, the tomato and cheese a surreal red and yellow, all sort of glazed over in grease.

“You think it looks bad,” said a woman behind the counter, “you oughta taste it.”

And that was Emma Gennaro.

She was covered in flour (one got the impression more flour lingered in the air than ever went into the pizza at Baldo's), but I could still make out that she was about an inch taller than me—a tall girl, lean, angular, with long straight brown hair that got tossed back angrily a lot, or in disgust—a trademark gesture. I'm not good at describing people. Just think of a pretty Italian-American girl who is not an immediate knockout—not Sophia Loren—but in five minutes or so, after getting used to her, she's quite striking, made very striking by her hand gestures and expressions that seem to take up all the space in the room. Give her ten minutes and you'd be convinced she was a beauty, but now that I think back I'm not so sure anymore—the photos could go either way. I'm not much help, am I?

Gee, I haven't described Lisa either. Let's see … Lisa was the pretty girl in high school who was popular and Class Secretary, looked like she belonged in an Ivy League college recruitment catalogue, the girl in the stylish outfit—yes, she wore outfits—sitting by the river that reflected willows and rowers and swans; and she looked like the kind of girl who might be the only cool member in her sorority but dropped out of it once it got too cliquish and stupid but she might not mind your knowing that she got into it in the first place. You could see her as a woman in business, but you could take her camping too—she wasn't conservative-looking, really, just clean and bright and dressed tastefully, just not her own tastes. Even when she had a punk phase (that's later on) she looked stylish, nothing too outrageous or jarring. It doesn't seem like someone who would want to be an artist, does it? She should own a bookstore or something.

“What is this, the UN?” yelled a big man with hairy shoulders who stormed out of the back room in a U-necked t-shirt, he too covered in flour. “I pay you Emma to talk or to dish out pizza?”

“Yeah, you pay me next to nothing to dish out the worst pizza in town,” she said, waving a finger at him provocatively.

“Whadya mean woise pizza?”

“I mean when I wanna pizza I go down the street for some; that's what I mean by the woise pizza.”

When she wanted to, Emma could really lay on the Italian-American routine, the singing insults, the exaggerations and drama, the gestures. She was a quarter Italian and she told me the family history a few times, full of hard work and immigration and American Dream and bootstraps and fingers being worked to the bone. Gennaro is Neapolitan, but in the late 1800s her family moved north so they could make something of themselves, married Milanese, then took on America, Ellis Island and all that, settled in New Jersey, then Indianapolis as of the last generation, her hometown. Catholic guilt? “Nah,” she'd say, “I wish I had been brought up stricter—I'd have an excuse for being so screwed up. I went to a suburban Catholic church, never confessed anything, went to mass at Easter and Christmas.” Any longings for the Old Country? “What old country?” she'd ask. “New Jersey? I wish I had had a richer ethnic upbringing—it'd give me an excuse for being so screwed up. My folks tried hard
not
to be Italian—I can't speak Italian worth beans. Some people here in New York get fish on Fridays and Grandma telling folk tales and Grandpa drinking grappa after mass, and all that, but nyehh, I had Indianapolis and shopping malls, Girl Scouts, all kinds of Americana and crap.” Difficult childhood in conservative Indianapolis? “Not really. It's a nice place, a nice boring place. I was too boring back there to mind it. But I'm interesting now. Sorta wished I had grown up in Little Italy, the mean streets with all the passion and drama.” We looked at each other and simultaneously said: “It'd give me an excuse for being so screwed up.”

“Do me a favor,” Emma was saying, “and fire me—do me a big fat goddam favor and fire me, get me outa this place, willya do that for me? You think I like seeing people come in here all the time, DYING for a pizza, hungry, starved for pizza, and take a pathetic look at this garbage and whisper, gee, let's go someplace else, it doesn't look very good here? Hey, and don't walk away while I'ma talkin' to you!”

Baldo came back from the kitchen: “You're talkin' to me?”

“Yeah I'ma talkin' to you.”

Baldo locked Emma in a big embrace, a cloud of flour flying up from the apron: “You gonna apologize 'bout my pizza, ey?”

“Hands off, hands off—you mess me up like you mess up your pizza…” Both were laughing at this point. “You gotta meet my roommates,” she said, fighting him off. “This is Lisa, this is Gilbert.”

Baldo tipped his silly Italian pizza-chef's hat to Lisa. “Her I seen before here. Pretty face, I remember that. You—” He meant me. “—You I don't know. You livin' with these two? You are? A baby like you? Gonna be nothin' left of you, sonny boy. This one'll kill you—” He recommenced his tickling attack on Emma who was now armed with a garlic shaker.

“How 'bout a faceful, huh? Get your hands away from me. I think it'd be nice if you gave my friends a pizza slice. It's Gil's first slice of pizza in New York. Not that this shit is pizza.” She dodged another lunge of Baldo.

“Free slice?” he cried, slapping his forehead, looking to the ceiling, beseeching the gods. “What am I? The return of Mayor Goddam Lindsay? I look like Welfare to you little gurl? Scuze me but the soup kitchen is that way to the Bowery, ey?”

We got three free slices and they were terrible, but even bad New York pizza is better than a lot of good things and I was happy to be eating a slice of it, walking along the East Village, down St. Mark's Place, where the trendy, filthy, fashionable and wretched all meet and intermingle to this day (“very NYC,” as Lisa would say), with Lisa on one side of me, Emma on the other. Wow, Gil in New York with TWO WHOLE WOMEN!

“Let's get drunk,” said Emma, holding her hands to her face. “God, my hands have permanent pizza smell. I go to sleep smelling this stuff—I dream about oregano. Every night, pizza dreams, like Disney—little pepperonis jumping on my pillow, the Dance of the Garlics—”

“You're right, let's get drunk,” interrupted Lisa.

I was on a budget so I asked why we should buy drinks if there was free booze at Susan's party.

“Yeah, but you need to be drunk,” said Lisa, “even to go drink her booze. You need serious alcoholic conditioning beforehand. And sometimes the drinks there are atrocious.”

Emma nodded. “On St. Patrick's Day she had a green Irish whiskey crushed ice punch, which … ulllch, it looked the same coming up as going down.”

Lisa added, “And the refreshments—good lord. Third world African nut paste, and Indian grain mix and, oh god, if it's vile and sick-making it's out on the table.”

“Joan's in charge of food tonight,” said Emma, which set off a string of curses from Lisa.

We settled on an Irish bar called The Irish Bar and it was done up in green foil and shamrocks and little plastic leprechauns hung from the liquor racks and the gruff man behind the counter and the quietly sodden lot inside didn't seem connected to or responsible for the frivolous decorations. We found a booth with lumpy, badly stuffed vinyl upholstery, but it was toward the back. Emma went to get three 50¢ beers.

“This is a drinkin' bar,” said Lisa, scooting into the booth beside me. “It's a drinkin' man's jukebox too. About ten versions of ‘Danny Boy.'”

Emma put down the beers; Lisa lit up a smoke. As we had no mutual acquaintances, Lisa and Emma began telling Susan stories and Susan Party stories, giving me a rundown of the legend of Susan before our eventual meeting.

Three Most Popular Susan Stories:

1. He Was Masterful, a.k.a. I Came Seven Times

Time: A Susan Party, sometime in the spring

Place: Soho loft

There was Her
e who was a male model and very gay and very stuck on himself and he began to brag that he could screw anything that moved and perform admirably and that he should be a gigolo, etc., so after a while his friends prodded him in the direction of Susan and said “What about her?” and he said he
could
do it but he wasn't going to, but then his friends accused him of lack of resolve, that perhaps he had met his match, so he got real drunk and stumbled over to make a pass at Susan, who had never had a chance with such a hunk before. Susan ran around soliciting advice, making sure everybody knew about it—of course, she was really a lesbian separatist as she had made clear many times before and she hated men but for the experiment of it, the wildness of it—and she was wild (“You know me, I'm just crazy—I'm mad, I'm perfectly mad! I do all kinds of crazy things; I'm that way, you know?)—so she should just go ahead and do it, and it was politically correct sleeping with a gay man anyway, she figured. Well the core group of her acquaintances (couldn't quite say “friends”) all agreed that no matter how bad Susan wanted to tell them allllll about it, they would act like it was no big deal, which made sense because Susan had claimed “hundreds” of lovers and there was no reason for her to run around as if this were her Big Score. It just about drove her crazy—she tried to work her Night of Passion into every conversation, she'd start discussions with strangers about it but she couldn't get much of a reaction out of anyone. So her story, which she told repeatedly, got more honed, more sensational. “Welllll,” (Emma did the imitation, low raspy smoker's alto) “… he was masterful, an artist…” (Emma did a long draw on the pretend cigarette, a disinterested look into the distance) “… a craftsman. I was like a block of marble, a
big
block of marble and he was, like, a sculptor…”