Emma Who Saved My Life (50 page)

Okay, we'll update that.
Tonight,
May 2, 1981, is my new nadir. I got nowhere to live, except with Emma—and I have deeeeeep misgivings about that prospect. My career is yet again in a holding pattern, a classier, more visible one than the holding pattern I was stalled in at the Venice Theater, true enough, but career stagnation has set in yet again. I'm twenty-seven. I am doomed to play young men's roles, teenagers, streetkids, rebellious sons. I am on the verge of aging out of the
only
way I will
ever
make a living. The hairline is receding. I'm flabbier than I used to be (not that anyone can tell when I'm dressed). I don't have the theatrical teenage bounce and energy needed to convince an audience I'm nineteen and when I try to stoke it up, it's forced. I once dreamed of movies and TV but that's looking less and less likely—theater's my ticket and I'm stuck doing summerstock, walk-ons, desk clerks, townspeople, First Stranger, Policeman 2, Young Man 3—these are the roles I have to wrench into respectability on my
ŕ
esu
ḿ
e. But
Rigatonio
was the worst.

“S'more coffee, babe?” said Valene, the waitress at Jackson's Diner. She was a sharp-looking sixteen, a black girl savvy beyond her years with reserves of open-eyed innocence, the daughter of the husband-wife team who ran the night shift. Only so much could be wrong with New York as long as Valenes could be produced on Manhattan Island.

“Starin' out into space a lot there, Gilbert. You got no cream. I'll getcha some cream.” Valene made off with the empty cream tin.

It was Saturday night. I had thought Betsy and I would be going home together, back to her place. I had used some of my after-shave, wore my clean shirt. Not the evening I had thought I was going to have.

“Here's some of our special cream, Gil. I got the special stuff just for you.”

Milk the cow yourself, Valene?

And then she explodes in this high-pitched unrestrained laugh. It didn't take much to make her laugh—that good heart of hers, I think, was a little closer to the surface than in most ordinary people. I wonder how many waitresses or bank tellers or coffee-wagon ladies know that they are sometimes the only connection to humanity for some depressed people in New York—everything goes wrong and there's the coffee-wagon lady, the sweet girl at the cash window, the Valene who gets you a nice full cream tin: All right, I guess I'll live another day after all.

“Cheer up, honey. Don't like to see you looking so down. You in any plays this week?”

I'm in a real stinker, Valene. Everyone's gonna laugh at me.

“Is it a comedy?”

Supposed to be.

“Well there you are. They's supposed to be laughing.”

If they put you in it, it'd be a hit.

“I'm gonna be a star one of these days, Gilbert. You remember I said it.”

I don't doubt that, Valene.

“This turkey you in is gonna be over soon, right? You got some'n else lined up?”

Nothing at all.

“‘Well they's saying it's a bad year for Broadway,” and then she laughs her high-pitched laugh, and walks away. Valene: it's pronounced
Vay
-lean. It sounds like some kind of petroleum product; put some Valene in your tank. A customer put a quarter in the jukebox and suddenly it's an old Marvin Gaye song and Valene is dancing, up the aisles with the coffee, dancing in place at the table, moving this way and that way, sometimes she'd get into a groove so good she'd just have to stop and dance it out. “Coffee at number twelve, Valene,” her mother would announce from the register. “I can't Mama, I'm workin' out.” “I'll work you out girl if you don't get the coffee to number twelve,” said Mrs. Jackson. Valene also sang. She had all the vocal moves down pat, all the Aretha-notes, but it just wasn't … wasn't
quite
on pitch somehow. She sang in her church choir, she had a solo now and then—Mrs. Jackson, though I never heard her, was supposed to be dynamite with a gospel number. Mrs. Jackson invited me to church up in Harlem one time and I don't know why I didn't go … well actually, I do. I didn't go because I'm a white Midwestern wimp who didn't want to be the only whiteboy for miles, so I missed out and I'm the schmuck. But I'm getting ahead of myself telling about the Jacksons. I'd like to tell about the Jacksons because I loved that crazy family and that crazy diner, and the rest of my life was pretty grim by comparison.

Like my agent (ex-agent now, of course) Odessa Benbow.

Foul old ugly Napoleonic five-foot mutant woman, gray dirty moplike wig balanced sloppily on her round head, a face that looked like a cross between Queen Victoria in later years and a purebred boxer, lipstick that would always turn clotted and brown and a cigarette always one-inch long, always dangling from those greasy brown lipstick-lips, all wrinkled and anus-like from years of smoking. I danced with her one time at some social function and she grabbed me in her pudgy tiny sweaty hands and I thought of England and put my arms around her and it was like hugging a lawn-sized garbage bag full of water, and she talked up at me nonstop, swaying drunkenly, blasting me with martini breath and hors d'oeuvre breath (she drank constantly, her breath was always some amalgam of booze and the last thing she'd eaten). She had no sex or social life, so her clients—controlling them, invading their privacy for professional reasons (ha ha)—became her life, her obsession.

Each visit to Odessa meant being pressed into Odessa, subsumed, envaginated by Odessa: “Give your Odessa a huhhhhg, there…”

Conversely, there were days she could not bring herself to move from behind her desk and that chair piled with pillows that stank of her. Odessa immobile: “Huhney, on that thayre table, could you git poor Odessa her pahncil, ovuh thayre, THAYRE on the table—no, to the right … yezz, that's it, huhney…”

Odessa's one joke, delivered in her thickest most put-on cheesy Texas drawl: “Yes, my name's Odessa. Guess where I was born. Hm?”

Odessa, Texas?

Amid shrieks of hyena-laughter: “Hyoooston, darlin'. But you can't name a girl
Houston,
now can you? A-ha-ha-ha…”

Most Southerners you meet in New York are a blast. But she must have been Confederate Revenge, hatched in the last days of Sherman's March, 1865. (Or … maybe she wasn't even Texan. She was such a thorough old phoney, she might have been putting that ridiculous accent on for the last twenty years.)

Bonnie McHenry, my actress-friend from
Bermuda Triangle,
had recommended me to Odessa as Odessa was her agent too. This was her big favor to me. “Odessa's a bit much, Gil, but she gets the job done,” said Bonnie.

“Gilbut, huhney, 1982 is gonna be
yawr
yeeuh—huhney, it is, I
swayre.
Listen to your good buddy Odessa!”

She also
managed
some of her clients. Her spiel:

“Now, I can be your agent, huhney, but you can also have me as your manager. I can manage you, darlin', the way you need to be managed—the press, the right people on your arm. A great careeuh is a finely managed thing…”

Yeah, and a manager-agent gets 20% as opposed to the 10% an agent gets. But, you know, it wasn't greed that motivated this push to be my manager (she brought it up every time I saw her). She mostly wanted to manage my life, my personal life, gossip columns, affairs, sex, she was a voyeur, she wanted to live a life through her clients, she wanted to own them. What made her worse was all the frustration she felt in never knowing anything about our personal lives, because we never told her
anything.

The phone would ring, Odessa's pudgy hand would grapple with the phone, prop it under her jowls and chins, and listen, sucking intently on the cigarette. “Uh-uh … ugggh … yeah … mmmmmm…” All varieties of grunts and nasty guttural noises. “Yeah, I know, I know, baby, I know about him. He
is
a rough director—he's a complete bastud, you're right…” She'd roll her eyes. “Nancy huhney, darlin', you
cayn't
walk out now, it's gotta go and it's too good for yawr careeuh … Just put up with him, darlin'. You're a professional.” At this, she nearly left the chair registering the opposite. “That's right. You get famous in this and you can traysh the man in the
Times
when they interview you. You know I'm with you, darlin', alllll the way—Odessa loves you, yes she does! Yes, bye-bye, baby,” and then she'd set the phone down: “Neurotic bitch, worryin' my pretty little ass to death over her booolshit.”

Odessa thought backstabbing her clients would endear her to the ones in the room, but we all figured we'd be the “neurotic bitch” or “stupid queen” or “dumb-ass boy” when she hung up the phone on us as well. And the merest hint that we were dissatisfied with her agenting, that we wanted more pay or better roles, would be met with high indignation, beating of breasts, the stricken gestures of Greek tragedy.

“My doctor says Odessa it's gonna keel you dead working your heart out for those
ungrateful
people. I cayn't believe Nancy said that about me—we'll just see if she gets invited to Odessa's Famous Texas Barbecue this year, won't we?”

Oh yeah, the Barbecue. This annual trial took place in the late summer. Odessa would set a date and cancel, set a date and cancel—apparently we were supposed to hold open whole months to accommodate this affair. (“Of course, Gil, people would give their eye-teeth to come to Odessa's Famous Texas Barbecue—the whole theater
wuhhrld
is gonna be there. It's a
thang
—an event!”)

No one came for pleasure, actually. It was just another of Odessa's loyalty tests.

“Gil, now you ARE gonna be there, right huhney? Hm?”

And we heard her talk of nothing else for weeks before:

“It's difficult trying to do a full day's work and plan for this extravaganza—it's about to keel me. I wonder sometimes why I do it, but we who have a natural gift for entertainin' are
obliged
in New York to persevere. My doctor says Odessa don't do it, don't work your fingers to the goddam bone for these people, but what would a year be without Odessa's Famous Texas Barbecue, hm? Besides, you, my clients, are my
family
…”

As far as I could see, all she ever did was melt down a block of Velveeta cheese and plop down the pan next to a bag of Doritos. Sometimes the Barbecue would not even include barbecue, but something much cheaper like tacos, which you made yourself from her bowls of dog-food orange-greasy meat, brown withering lettuce, pink tough tomato cubes, and the ubiquitous grated Velveeta. Odessa would be running about in a Stetson hat and, help me Lord,
cowboy boots,
being the most ridiculous person in New York, drunk out of her mind by mid-afternoon (terrified that no more people were going to show up), vindictive and petty by late afternoon (“This is the
second
Famous Texas Barbecue Henry has missed—I'll fix that no-talent…”), and ready to pass out by five. Her passing out was preceded by her being deposited on the sofa for a half-hour of chain-smoking, barking out orders (“Don't put so much ice in my goddam margarita this time,” adding as an afterthought, “Huhney”), squawking and laughing maniacally after her own repeated jokes, and sometimes a morose period where all her bitterness and muttering scorn was given vent before she fell asleep.

My friend Matthew, a fellow-actor and Odessa-client, would turn to me and say, “Well the old girl went all out this year. She dropped
at least
twenty bucks.”

Matthew ran seriously afoul of Odessa and was kicked off her client list—in fact, he's been in a movie since, so the best thing he ever did was to depart the Odessa Benbow Agency. Matthew always seemed to be leaving Odessa's office when I was coming in, and often we'd stop and compare our going-nowhere-fast careers. We'd meet for drinks some afternoons and we'd leave notes for each other on the agency bulletin board, scribbled quickly and stapled shut. We agreed one drunken night that Odessa really did have anus-lips, and it was impossible to watch her suck with her wrinkled lips on a cigarette, and even worse to watch her put on lipstick, that slimestick applied to those puckered, wizened lips, then the play of her mouth as she patted her lipstick and smeared it all evenly … ullch, I'm getting sick just thinking about it. ANYWAY, Matt would leave me notes like:

Anus-lips was in good form today. Shoulda heard her sucking up to Neuro Nancy today on the phone. Drinks tonite? 8 at McKinley's?

—M
ATT

Anus-lips is on a diet now! If you come at lunch hour you can see her eat this cottage cheese shit with raw vegs. Imagine Anus-lips chewing cottage cheese, talking with her mouth open, her big fat face. I need a drink—8 at McK's?

—M
ATT

Well Odessa got curious and opened one of these messages one time and freaked out—“Aynus-lips! Aynus-lips! How cuuuuld he SAY such a thing about me, Gloria, Gloria…” And Gloria the secretary, fighting off laughter (I suspect), said it was some kind of joke. I got called in and asked about this and I said that I didn't EVER know Matthew to call her names and that the note must not refer to her—

“I know it's about me, Gil. I sat right there and offered that boy cottage cheese and raw veggies from my own little contay-nuh! I'm so huht, I'm so huht I cayn't sleep. You don't feel that way about me, do you Gil? Hm baby? You think I should be called AYNUS-lips by the people I love and work my finguhs to the bone for?”

ALL I could do not to laugh, so help me god …

“Tell me, Gil, tell me you dawn't feel that way about your old friend Odessa, hm? You'd never call me AYNUS-lips, wouldya?”

I knew it was going to cost me.