Emma Who Saved My Life (52 page)

Five hundred a month, $250 apiece. Lots of space. Elevator smelled like a urinal though, no doorman, halls were long and ill-lit and suggested rape and mugging and untold dangers. On the other hand, lots of buses, a nearby subway stop. The neighborhood was dull. Deserted by fashion people, button-sewers, alteration tailors, cloth-cutters by night, it was desolate by eight p.m. No nearby bars, no movie theaters, no street action—what a comedown from the East Village. I remember moving in, Emma being all aflutter having packed up at the last moment.

“God, I'm falling apart—I've forgotten everything! I've thrown out all the things I wanted and packed all the shit I'd just as soon lose—”

Emma, we'll sort everything out later. We got a cab waiting downstairs full of boxes, come on—

“Be with you in a second, Gil,” she said, rushing to the bathroom. Then I heard the jingle of a pill bottle. She's taking a tranquilizer. Moving is stressful, why not? I'll tell you why not, Emma, because you're taking them at the drop of a hat. But this was not a time for a confrontation.

We weren't very happy, either of us.

Emma comes home from work:

“Today at work, I typed this bitch's letter to Bow-Wow Doggie Biscuits—the woman probably keeps a supply of Bow-Wow in her desk drawer to nibble on. Anyway, I was writing this letter and she types fifteen rough drafts before she gets this crappy letter just smarmy enough to send. And I'm typing it up and I come to the salutation. It says ‘Anyhoo, Anyway,' then ‘Carol Freeney.' What was this? I ask her what all that is and she says ‘Oh that's just a thing I do, it's just how I end my letters.' So I suppress the vomiting urge and go back and type ‘Anyhow, Anyway' at the end of this letter, as I thought she had misspelled
anyhow.
So I take it in to her and she goes no no no, it's ‘Any
hoo
,' and I ask ‘Anyhoo?' and she says ‘Yes, that's just a little thing I do, you know at the end of letters, something distinctive so the client feels something personal is going on here, he can get a sense of my personality.'” Then Emma sighed, smiled a placid, untroubled smile at me. “I just thought I'd make it perfectly clear why I'm going to kill myself. I can't take it, Gil. I'm quitting.”

You cannot quit. I am going to quit
Rigatonio.
We both can't quit; someone's gotta pay our rent.

Emma nodded grimly. “I'm not quitting, I'm just talking. I've been there four months. If I can make it to the sixth, I get major medical and they can pick up my analyst and prescribed medicine.”

Emma, a personal question but please answer it: how much is this Valium prescription costing you?

“Oh it's all on the big bill from the clinic since they have a pharmacy up there and it's all jumbled into the total charge and I ought to work it out sometime, really…”

Go get a bill, let's work it out right now.

“Why do you care so much?” Emma picked up the purse she'd just put down.

Going somewhere?

“I don't want to be late for the group therapy session—it's Tuesdays now, remember?”

I knew she took pills. She'd been doing that for nearly three years, on prescription, all legitimate, and maybe she was the one person who tranquilizers were designed for. She was, after all, more stable than a a few years back; she
had
calmed down. But it made me nervous. Each morning as she was getting up I heard her reach in the medicine cabinet for the pills. When she got home, the same thing (at her lunch break too?), and I even heard the medicine-cabinet door squeak when she was going out with her friends Dina and Joanna, two complete bores who thought everything Emma did was a laugh riot, crazy Emma, kooky Emma, isn't she wild? Isn't she the fast lane with her pills and her wicked mouth and her boozing it up? Emma was slumming with them. She wasn't after friends with those two, she was after an audience. It was from people like me she got lip. Such as: Emma, think how much money you'd have left over if you dropped all the medical nonsense.

“Gil, if you don't pay a lot,” she explained one time, “it's not official therapy. I've been to the free clinics and you don't get taken seriously. I have more respect for someone who takes $100 off me a week, you know?”

Think of the movies, think of the theater, think of the booze, think of the occasional travel we could have with that money—

“There is no discussion here,” she'd say, adamantly. “I need to drop that kind of money so it will hurt me, punish me for being neurotic. Do you see what I mean?”

Not really, then or now.

“Besides, I have to get on my health plan because of my father. I've been on the family policy since I was in college, and now my dad is going in for some kind of tests and my mother wants me off the plan. So I gotta get off.”

All right, all right—do what you want with your life, have your major medical, drop tons of money on doctors and pills. As for me, I'm on the way up. I've passed my Low Point in my New York Years. True, I don't have a girlfriend, no career prospects, I'm in an apartment I don't much like with a friend who needs a drug rehab program, but it's turning the corner, getting better each and every passing day, yessir! In fact, 1982 is gonna be mah yeeeeuh …

Then Gil had a bad day at work:

“Mr. Kline,” whined Charity for the hundredth time.

I was in the middle of my scene, of course. Antonio, played by Gilbert Freeman (in the same bar as Florence, Papa and most of the techies, drunk by noon).

“I have to say,” said Charity, “as a professional, I don't much like the pace or blocking of this scene…”

It was my scene she referred to. I am front, center stage. I have a monologue. It follows a courtship sequence with Elisabetta. We sang a song at each other in which the gimmick was that every word ends in an extra
o,
like:

ELISABETTA
: My Antonio-io/I think you should go-io
Lest my mother and my father find us here …

ANTONIO
: Oh my caramissima/how about a kees-ima
To my earnest wooings lend an ear …

Naturally, Charity didn't want to get off the stage.

“I think,” she said, pacing, a look of concentration on her face, “it would be better if, while Antonio is talking about me in his monologue, I could come out on the balcony to hear him, you know? And while he's talking about me, I hear what he says?”

Uh, I think it's a bad idea, I say. He mentions all her money and her fortune, right? Now if she hears that she can't possibly be torn between him and Rigatoni which is necessary—

“I think Elisabetta's a more complicated character than that. She might know he's after her money, but not mind—”

Charity, that's just
unbelievably
stupid.

“Excuse me, I've been in the business for a lot longer than you, and I think I know a little bit more about theatercraft than you, Mr. Freeman—”

All you know how to do is hog the stage, baby—

“All right, all right,” said Silas, standing in the front row of the theater. “I think—”

Garth W. Kline (of Garth W. Kline Enterprises): “I think the girl's got a point, Si. They're here to see Florence Crayfield and they're here to see Charity Glenn—”

EXCUSE ME MR. GARTH W.—which stands for WHO-THE-FUCK-ARE-YOU—Kline,
no one
on the Planet Earth or the surrounding galaxies would show up, would shell out money, would expend any energy for the likes of CHARITY WHO-THE-FUCK-DOES-SHE-THINK-SHE-IS GLENN! Why don't you turn over the whole goddam play to her—make it a one-woman show! Inasmuch as this collection of WASTE PRODUCT is a show. And what you know about theater can easily be put in the driest, emptiest SMALLEST, TIGHTEST place imaginable which conveniently for you happens to be Charity Glenn's—

(It gets a little obscene here.) Let's just say I was home early that day. Emma found me when she came in the door from work.

“The fact that you are halfway through that bottle of bourbon suggests a hard day at work,” she observed.

A
last
day at work.

“Uh-oh.”

I'm at a crisis point, Emma. My career as an actor is over. I no longer have the will to do shitwork. I will starve in obscurity for worthwhile projects, I will rake in money for trash, but I will not starve for trash. Goddam Charity Glenn. She was running the place, her and that old asshole, Garth W. Kline …

“Of Garth W. Kline Enterprises,” Emma repeated deadpan.

I smiled. Pour me another.

“We're going to celebrate your walking off the set,” she said after I filled in the whole story. “Like me and the robbery last year, I'll take you out for an East Village crawl. Let me get out of my yuppie costume…” Emma went to the bathroom, ran some water, locked the door. I was waiting for it. I walked over to the door so I could be sure: the pill bottle jingled. Oh well. Emma's a blast on those pills, relaxed, confident, together. She can probably kick the habit when she wants; Emma has a way of picking things up and dropping them, like her punk phase—

Aaaaiiiiii!

Emma! What is it? What's wrong?

The bathroom door opened, Emma was wide-eyed. “Charity Glenn! Lollipop!”

Huh?

“She was Lollipop! I knew I'd heard the name!”

Uh, Lollipop—

“Lollipop, lollipop, la la la lollipop / Lollipop—”

The worst TV show in history! The child star! The one you've always wanted to murder!

And we started laughing. One's career destroyed by Lollipop! Imagine, nearly twenty years of being a horrible spoiled child-star theater brat—we couldn't breathe! Lollipop! The phone rang.

Breathless, I answer …

“Gil, this is Odessa,” I heard. Her most joyless, serious no-nonsense tone; the Texas drawl nonexistent (proves my theory …)

“I heard about your little stunt today. Do you want to explain yourself?”

You're my agent. You're supposed to get me work that will build a career, not end one. That was amateur local two-bit doomed-to-fail one-week-close theater. You gotta do better by me or I'll go elsewhere. Get my career out of the goddam basement.

“I think that's enough. You go back and you apologize to Charity Glenn and the director and Garth W.—”

NEVER.

A pause. “Our professional relationship is terminated. Bye-bye.” Click. Emma is looking on, biting her fingernails. I ask her what the date is.

“Thirtieth of May, Gil.”

New update. Gil's Low Point of his New York Years: May 30, 1981.

Time goes on here. I don't have it in me to go audition anywhere. I sit around the apartment all day and watch the morning movie, the afternoon movie, take the bus to the Village and watch a movie there, come back in time for the evening movie—

“Gil, get a job,” said Emma.

I got enough money for this month's rent, don't worry.

“I mean, so you'll be occupied. You got to pull yourself back from the abyss.” She looked at me seriously. “You want a Valium?”

Yes I did want one. But I wasn't going to take one.

I wandered the theater district instead. The only drug I could use that day was Jackson's Diner coffee.

“You out of that play you hated, sugah?” asked Valene, refilling my cup.

Sure am.

“So why you so sad?”

Everything's going wrong, Valene. I'm twenty-seven. I'm supposed to be famous by now.

“Look Gil, I'm sixteen and I ain't famous. It takes time. I'm prepared to wait till seventeen…” And she was off to take another order. I watched her wait on tables, followed her as she passed the jukebox, followed her as she passed the window with the
HELP WANTED
sign in it. Wait.

“Gilbert,” said Mrs. Jackson behind the cash register, “it doesn't pay what you're used to, I'm sure. Two dollars an hour, plus tips—you keep your tips—11 p.m. 'til 6:30 most mornings. It ain't easy work now.”

I'll take it, Mrs. J.

“You shittin' me?” said Valene, absolutely amazed I was going to work nights with her. “You? You sure? You shittin' me?”

“Better watch that mouth,” said Mrs. Jackson behind the cash register.

“We gonna have a good time, don't you worry,” said Valene giving me a wink.

Jackson's Diner was owned by Grant Jackson, and it was his brother Tom who was the Mr. Jackson I knew, who as Grant's little brother got to run the night shift. Tom never got to see his wife Evelyn so he brought her in to work behind the cash register. Moses the dishwasher and part-time cook (we called him “Moze”) was an old crony of Tom's father, about in his late sixties. Valene had just dropped out of school last year and the family wanted to keep an eye on her, I suspect, so she was a waitress. She was a great New York waitress—a natural talent: the care and attention to the water glass, the coffee cup, her omniscience, as she refilled cups and glasses without bothering the customers. She knew when you wanted some more to eat:

“Better get to that cherry pie, Smitty. It's gonna get all dried out and nasty. You wanna piece of that right now, hm?”

And she knew when you didn't want to eat:

“You don't want that chili. Daddy's just opening a can back there—it's old storebought stuff. I'd go for the beef stew 'cause I had some of that myself. 'Bout the same price.”

There were cabbies and ticket-box workers and janitors and policemen who would take their breaks or get off work at certain times through the night and Valene had a little pad behind the cash register that listed the exact ETA—John the barman at 2:30, coffee light; Ed the cab driver at 3:15 on the dot, black coffee, two cups, etc.

Moze the dishwasher was an old bachelor man and his glory days had ended sometime in the '50s I gathered. But he had the raciest, lewdest old jokes—jokes so rife, so low and dirty that … well, you know, now that I think of it, they weren't that dirty,
he
was that dirty. He had this greasy laugh, this wheeze, and this low whisper and a way of licking his lips and looking about him to make sure no women heard what he had to say. That was a definite peril, actually. Mrs. Jackson hated smut and wouldn't stand for Moze and Mr. Jackson to be cutting up back in the kitchen. Moze drank a little now and then (“About one time a month,” Valene told me, “Uncle Moze goes on a bender and has himself a time”) and once, but only once, I recall Moze and Mr. Jackson coming in at 10:30 a little drunk—it was someone's birthday.