Emma Who Saved My Life (35 page)

Forensic tournaments? Sounds like this generation's attempt at
The Parson Comes to Dinner,
Steve, Jr., this time in the role of Little Jimmy. There's theater in Chicago, I suggest, a healthy growing small scene—

“Nyeh, it's all in New York. I'm moving there after college.”

What do your folks think?

“Dead set against it.”

Steve, Sr., in the next room: “They can't even make pizza in New York as good as we do in Chicago…”

(Yeah, Steve, Jr., I'm thinking, you deserve your escape from the Midwestern Mafia. I could sit here and discourage you, I could say the theater is all a racket, I could say it's magic and love and all that stuff, I could make you want to get on the next bus, and I could scare the hell out of you. But instead I'm going to give you Joyce Jennings's phone number, and Jerry Gardiner's agency number.) You tell 'em I sent you.

“Gee thanks, Mr. Freeman. Can I ask a question?”

Sure.

“Do you miss it?”

Every day.

And then when I was about to leave Sophie corners me, and after discussing my expectant fatherhood, she asks:

“Heard you tell Steve, Jr., you missed New York every day. You're not thinking of going back now, are you? It's a little late now, Daddy-to-be.”

Nostalgia's no crime. Nothing serious. I'm writing this dumb book to get New York out of my system.

“Just wondered. You lit into Steve with the passion of a New Yorker.”

(Oh yeah. After the second feeding, that jerk got onto New York pizza again. I'm sorry. Chicago is nice, but New York is better—pizza is all we need look at to prove this. In Chicago it's bread, a big pan of greasy fried bread with a bit of goop on top. I want my thin, limp, triangular slice of pizza for $1 with the orange grease lying in pools atop the rubbery cheese, all forming one brilliant gestalt—I picked that up from Sophie the sociologist—and I'm sick of Chicagoans who haven't been ten miles from the Loop running down New York. Chicago pizza isn't proper pizza, it's pizza-flavored QUICHE!)

“I'm not sure you've got New York and a few other things behind you.”

Yeah, but I'm working on it.

“Want to go down to the lakeshore? Walk off the blintzes?”

And that's where we went. And the night was overcast and the clouds caught the city's faint orange glow in a way that seems peculiar to Chicago. And there was the lake which also had the vague glow of city lights and we sat and listened to it contentedly lap the shore. No, it's not the Atlantic Ocean, it's not Coney Island or Far Rockaway, but it's grown on me, it grows on me more and more every year.

Back to the story.

1979

MY answering machine:
Hello. This is Gil Freeman and I'm not home. If you are calling about a temporary job, a part, or anything that may mean money for me, PLEASE, I'm begging you, leave your name and number and I will get right back to you as soon as possible. Thanks a lot.
BEEP!

I couldn't have been poorer. One hopes that one's accommodations continually improve but mine were going down, down, down … from the luxury of a Village sublet with money in my pocket to run-down Brooklyn to Hell's Kitchen and now Alphabet City, the Lower East Side,
lower
being the operative word. I lived on Avenue A (hence Alphabet City) and as a rule, you should never live anywhere in New York designated by letters; this holds true citywide. Avenue A was slumland: heroin addicts in alleyways, homeless everywhere, bums up from the Bowery (which is nearby) for a change of scenery, the leftover druggy hippie-types mingling with the Puerto Ricans driven down from the West Side when that neighborhood gentrified and the PRs got summarily evicted. The last place in New York (to answer the question you might be asking) that you could rent a place for $200 or so a month.

I lived in a virtual prison cell. It was a one-room “studio,” with a dripping sink, a rickety table that held my hotplate, a rusted icebox underneath; there was a bookcase I made from bricks and planks, beyond which was my mattress on the floor, far as possible from the dripping sink. My clothes when they were clean were kept in the suitcase near the slit-in-the-wall window; when they were dirty, they were piled at the foot of the bed. Didn't do much formal entertaining in this phase of my life. With each move I was steadily decreasing my living space—if the progression kept up, I'd be living in a bus station locker soon.

I checked out this tiny real-estate-page ad that led me to Avenue A and this grocery. I went up the block, I went down the block, but no, I had the address right and this place was a grocery.
RUIZ CARIBBEAN FOODSTORE
 … and in smaller, hand-painted letters underneath:
SNACKS
•
FOOD TO GO
•
COLD BEER
. A short, plump, balding man (with a few strands of side hair combed across his shiny head) met me with a smiling if not somewhat distressed expression, peering out the store window. He ran out to the street to escort me into his shop: “You here for the apartament?”

I was led inside.

“Back here, through the store, eh?” I followed him as we wound through the narrow aisles of the store … junkfood of all varieties, chips, pretzels, bag after bag of cookies, corn chips and tortilla-things; canned vegetables, followed by pet food and baby diaper products, a cooler with the Cold Beer, a greasy cardboard box filled with plantains. (C'mon confess it: How many fellow Midwesterners have purchased plantains thinking them bananas? Ever bitten into a plantain expectantly awaiting a sumptuously sweet banana? Yummmm …) All the shelves were yellow—the paint was cracking and peeling—and an ancient layer of dust coated everything; the aisles themselves were so narrow that you had to sidle through them or else sweep everything onto the floor with your coat. Senor Ruiz and I went through the store, out the back door and into an outdoor court enclosed by fences topped with cut glass shards and barbed wire; beyond this “garden area” (there was a tiny plot of dirty grass and a spindly tree growing up from it) there was the Ruiz's house and they were renting out the ground-floor room.

“See plenty of space! Plenty of space!” said S
ẽ
nor Ruiz as he swung the door open. He had to be kidding—maybe in San Juan this qualified as plenty of space. “You gotta sink. You gotta, eh, room here for you bed. You gotta window…” A small frosted-glass window that made all the light look gray. “You gotta ploog for you electric things, here.” S
ẽ
nor Ruiz held these luxuries as major selling points, it was obvious. “For the toilet you come out of the apartament…” I followed him back out into the courtyard, and followed him through a second door. “… and you and my family can share thees toilet here. It has a bath and that is the toilet bowl.”

Let me get this straight: I have to cut through the store, across the courtyard, one key for the store, one key for the apartment, and one more key for the family entrance and the bathroom?

“Only three keys. Only three keys.”

Don't know about this …

“It ees cheap, very cheap for you.”

How cheap.

“Soo cheap, my wife she say, Raul, Raul why do you—”

How cheap.

“I say $300 a month.”

I'm sorry, s
ẽ
nor, I think I better look elsewhere.

“No I make mistake: $250.”

I don't think so. How about $150?

S
ẽ
nor Ruiz was distressed again, his eyes filled with emotion, his voice thickened … “No, no, we need the money. I rent from my own house, you leeve with my family, you go through my store. If I do not need no money, I no do thees, you know?”

I sort of followed that. How about $175? (One seventy-five was my limit actually; Gil's Rule of Rent: never accept a monthly rent more than a week's take-home pay.)

We haggled.

I realize now poor Senor Ruiz was really in a tight spot. He had fixed up (so to speak) their ground-floor room to rent and then realized that the tenant had to cut through the store every night. If that was 3 a.m., the Ruizes could never be sure that the tenant wasn't swiping food off the shelves of the store. So he had to rent it to someone he could trust, or at least convince himself was honest. I've always had an honest face.

We agreed on $195 a month. No contract.

“We make a deal, we shake our hands, eh? You name? Ah, yes, come for a cup of coffee, we talk some more…”

Best coffee I ever had in my life was the coffee I got at Ruiz's Foodstore. Some Caribbean blend.

“Heel, I want you to meet my wife…” Heel. He could never accept that
Gil
had a hard
G.
I corrected him for a while but that got him onto “Jill” and “Heel” was preferable. Friends (not that I had many after leaving the Venice, being on the outs with Emma, rarely seeing the Yuppie Lisa) liked calling me Heel as well.

“Nie to meetoo,” said S
ẽ
nora Ruiz, a tremendous Hispanic woman, equal in bulk to her husband. Her command of English couldn't really have been called a command.

There were three kids. A young, shrill daughter named Manuela who put on too much makeup and wore these midriffs and tube tops so one was always confronted with her chunky, huge fourteen-year-old breasts. “You no wear that outside ona street!” S
ẽ
nor Ruiz would yell from behind the cash register when Manuela would try to slip by. (Since all egress went by the Ruizes' cash register and by S
ẽ
nor Ruiz, he was sort of the Colossus of Rhodes, the sentry, no one entered or received permission to go but through him.)

There was Rickie (a lot of Puerto Rican guys, even in Puerto Rico, I'm told, go by American nicknames). Rickie was fifteen and trouble and continually breaking his mother's heart and running in gangs, showing no respect here, no respect there—most fights upstairs (in high-volume Spanish) were over Rickie. I had one major contact with Rickie. I bought a six-pack of beer once and he saw me, followed me to my room, knocked on my door, came in and acted like my room was his property.

“You. You actor, huh?”

Trying to be.

“You famous?”

No.

“You gonna give me a beer?”

What about what your parents would say?

“Fuck my parents.”

I gave him a beer. He looked through my records.

“Ain't got nothin' here but shit.”

Sorry. What did he like?

“Heavy metal, man. Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Kees.”

I don't have any Kiss. How about the Rolling Stones, which was as heavy as I got.

“Fuck the Rollin' Stones, man.”

But I put on the cassette of the album, the one with the song with the line: “There're some Porta Rican girls just dyyyyyin' to meetchoo!” and he liked it after all.

“Shit man, can I borrow thees?”

He was going to sit out on the street with his friends and his $180 box radio (jambox, ghetto blaster, boombox … no one ever did settle on a name for those big radios) and blast it over and over. I lent my tape to him and that's the last I ever saw of it. A minor concession, I figured—if I ever got in a hassle on the street he and his pals might come to the rescue.

And finally there was Johnnie, called Juan by his Mama. Johnnie was the oldest at sixteen and he was quiet, almost as if he was subdued, yelled into submission by his noisy family. He grew up in San Juan and moved with his family to New York when he was seven. He seemed to remember Puerto Rico with very little affection. Johnnie would come down about once a week to look through my books.

“You sure read a lot of books,” he said.

Oh not at all, not compared to some people. Half the shelf was stuff Emma gave me.

“Emma. She you lady?” he asked, smiling.

No. Not anymore.

“Yeah, yeah,” he nodded wisely, “women. Ahh. What can you do?”

I appreciated adolescent sympathy, the sincerest around. For this, I conspired to give him a beer from the rusted icebox.

“My Mama hate to see us with beer, you know? That's why Rickie ees
so
estupid. I do everything I wanna do but I no get caught. Rickie he so estupid he alllways get caught, and then they have a beeg fight, Mama Papa and Rickie. I am smart. He is not smart.”

That's how it looked to me too. I lent Johnnie some books. He picked up
Gravity's Rainbow
—I talked him out of that one, not being able to finish it myself. Take
1984,
I said, and
Catcher in the Rye
and an anthology of modern poetry.

“I'm gonna be a great writer too, man,” he told me.

One day when I was walking home Johnnie was hanging out untypically with Rickie's streetcrowd. One boy started making fun of me (“Hey you actorfaggot, hey … hey turn around…”) and I heard Johnnie join in just to be cool in front of his crowd, and he was too embarrassed, I think, to come around to see me again. He left the pile of books outside my door one night, returned. And I should have found him and said I understood why he joined in and I'm ten years older and I don't care it didn't bother me and he and I should still be friends but I didn't. I just hope he didn't feel too guilty and get a little messed up by it, because he was a sensitive kid who shouldn't have had to grow up on Avenue A.

One day on my answering machine: BEEP!
Hey Gil, Lisa. Gotta talk to you about something—you haven't been home in the history of the world. Could you pick me up some jalap
ẽ
no sauce? Hola. Qúe tal? Como es
as, amigo? Ha ha, just kidding. There's something big I have to talk to you about—it's so exciting! Call me, call me, call me.
CLICK.