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Maynard and Jennica
Rudolph Delson
A brilliantly inventive comic love-story, set in and around New York at the beginning of the 21st century.Maynard is a defeated musician, a reformed misanthrope who makes a hobby of surreptitiously filming the fashion faux pas of New York City subway commuters. On an uptown Number Six Train, in the summer of 2000, he meets Jennica, a nostalgic Californian and Princeton graduate who calculates that she's been lonesome 68.53% of her adult life. It is hardly love at first sight. But when they meet again at Maynard's film screening, their romance does indeed blossom. And as with most things in life, everyone has an opinion.In the case of Maynard and Jennica, everyone includes: many living and some dead relatives, a blond-bombshell Russian-Israeli scam artist, a hip-hop impresario, a shabby lawyer, a long-lost friend and a writer for The New Yorker. Exuberantly illuminating much that is true and often horrifying about our times, page-turning and wryly funny, Maynard and Jennica remains at heart a love story. Delson has given us a pair of lovers who are human, flawed, complex, at once eccentric and deeply familiar - and in whose story we continue to feel invested long after we've turned the last page.

RUDOLPH DELSON

Maynard & Jennica



Contents
Title Page (#u6c6609e2-0738-5348-aa99-6ce0d301b4de)The First Part. (#uef461633-e866-58a0-bd8b-4a95bdd6ab6d) Joan Tate The Second Part. (#u055429e2-6698-5ee5-b434-0ebf95888976) Maynard Gogarty The Third Part. (#litres_trial_promo) David Fowler The Fourth Part. (#litres_trial_promo) Maynard Gogarty The Fifth Part. (#litres_trial_promo) Nadine Hanamoto and Oscar Dicochea A List of the Speakers in this Comedy. (#litres_trial_promo)The Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo) Jay Mandel Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
This comedy has five unequal parts, and what follows is
THE FIRST PART. (#ubd6778a7-4327-590c-bef2-fc6713522956)


It is quite brief, and purely introductory.


JOAN TATE, tipsy after another revelatory lunch with her son, illustrates her point (early August 2000):
Here’s a famous story. And remember that I am his mother, so the fact that I am the one telling you this—that tells you something. It’s a famous story, and it shows you what kind of a person Manny is.
The year was—.Well, Scott and I had just sold the place on 72nd Street, so it was 1973, and Manny would have been nine years old. We were living in a three-bedroom on West 10th. It was rent-controlled and had twelve-foot ceilings, and you don’t want to know what we paid. We paid one-fifteen a month.
And when we lived on West 10th, Manny would wait for the school bus on 6th Avenue, on the corner, in front of Balducci’s. He went to school uptown, and the school had its own buses. So Manny and Dave Fowler and the other kids whose parents lived in the Village would all wait on that corner together, in front of Balducci’s, for the little squat yellow school bus. There was an air vent that blew warm air onto the sidewalk, and on cold mornings in the winter the kids would all fight over who got to stand under that vent. Dave Fowler, with his little backpack, would time the other kids on his wristwatch so they would all get their turn.
Except for Manny, who didn’t want to stand under the vent, and who never wore a hat, and who wanted to wait for the bus twenty feet away, in the ice and the snow, shivering.
Well, I asked him about it, and he said, “The air comes from Balducci’s cheese counter. It smells like what Dad eats.” Scott had this one unpasteurized Camembert he liked, which smelled like—which you just had to have smelled. Manny said, “Smells are the result of microscopic particles in the air, and I do not want microscopic particles of cheese hitting my head like meteors.” I told him that if he would just wear his stocking cap, then the smell wouldn’t get into his hair. And he said, “Stocking caps are undignified.” Well, I was his mother, I knew better than to try to argue with him about that, but I did ask him whether there was any kind of hat that he would consider dignified. So that he might wear a hat in the cold. And he said, “A bowler.” That was how we settled it. I made Scott take Manny uptown to find him a bowler.
It just goes to show you what kind of a nine-year-old Manny was. And it also goes to show you that he was the same then as he is now: fussy about the unlikeliest things, and picky, and obstinant—obstinate, and prepared to suffer for the strangest reasons. And so now, now when he tells me over lunch that he wants to change? Well, I am his mother—of course I am elated.
He says that the motes—the scales have fallen from his eyes. He says that he is tired of making things difficult for himself, that he’s tired of being in debt. This is the first I have heard about him being in debt, but he’s tired of it. He even told me he wants to take his romances more seriously. Might it be that now, now that Manny is thirty-six years old, I am finally going to get to meet one of his girlfriends? What kind of women is he even attracted to?
JENNICA GREEN, who never has any luck on Valentine’s Day, describes the evening of her boyfriend’s arrest (mid-February2001):
This is so going to make me sound like one of those women, and I so am not one of those women.
All afternoon it was as if the city was as oblivious as I was to what was happening. Right up until two minutes before Arnie called from the police station, the city was, like, intent on being gorgeous. With the snow, and the serenity, and my first afternoon off in months. Deceiving me, you know? All afternoon I’d been communing peacefully with the awnings and the fire escapes and the lampposts. The elegant side of Soho. The wet black iron and the fresh white snow, in relief against each other. The sapphire light, the deep-sea light of a snowy day.
But sure enough, at five o’clock, just as I need to get a cab and get home and get packed, the snow … devolves into sleet.
The pretty drifts on the fire escapes and lampposts? Melting and drooling down, onto me. All the snowbanks on the sidewalk? Melting, simultaneously. The gutters are inundated. Frothing up this … filth. Ice, cigarettes, cellophane, flooding the street. The sewer grates are overcome. Spewing dirty water. Of course my umbrella is funneling the sleet straight into my shopping bags. And it’s dark, and my cell phone starts ringing, but I can’t get it.
Bear in mind, I’d been at work that morning. In my decent clothes. My black zipper boots? Sopping. My black coat? Sopping. The sleeve of my sweater? Like a wick, just sucking all this clammy, icy whatever straight from the stem of my umbrella up to my armpit. If you come from San Jose, California, it doesn’t matter how long you’ve lived in New York, you feel so … vulnerable to shabbiness.
I get to 6th Avenue, looking for a cab. And of course on 6th Avenue the wind tries to mug me. It has its fists wheeling. Wham, across my face. Wham, my bags are flailing around everywhere. And I’m trying to fend it off with my umbrella, but my umbrella is doing that gagging thing. You know, that thing umbrellas do when the wind gets them? Where they look like a cat coughing up a hairball? The only way I can keep my umbrella alive is by pointing it directly into the wind, which blocks my view down 6th Avenue, practically. And my cell phone is still going off, but I suddenly see this cab.
I don’t have a free hand, so I hail it with my umbrella. Getting myself even more drenched. But the cab starts flashing its turn signal. So it’s my cab, right? I got soaked trying to hail it, so it’s my cab. Right?
Which is when the crazy German woman materializes.
The cab had stopped … ten feet away from me? Fifteen? But from nowhere this crazy German woman has appeared and is opening the door to my cab.
She is dry. She has a cigarette in her hand, which she is putting out, and she has a muffin, which she is putting into her pocket. Getting in my cab. Huge, curly, wheat-blond hair with lots of ringlets, all pinned up like a diva’s. Getting into my cab. And, let me describe this coat she is wearing. It’s rubber, first of all, and white, and it goes down to her knees, with a belt and buttons but with a huge fur collar. Like, white rabbit fur. And she is wearing it with a mustard-yellow scarf and turquoise pants. Dry, and getting in my cab. It’s as if she had been waiting in a doorway for me to hail a cab for her. So I lose it. I’m like:
“Hey! Hey! That’s my cab!”
And she just gets in. Just opens the door, gets in, and reaches over to close the door. Ice is splashing me everywhere. My umbrella finally gags on its hairball and dies. My bags are beginning to tear. So I absolutely lose it. I scream, and I do mean scream:
“You fucking cunt … that’s my cab!”
And, all right. I don’t want this story to make me sound like one of those women, so let me tell you why I was in a hurry. Which only matters now to prove that I am not, whatever, a horrible person. So, my plan:
Step 1, at eight o’clock on Thursday night I would meet Arnie, with my bag packed.
Step 2, at eight-thirty we had reservations at Four Noodles, because we’d been warned to have one good meal before we left. Including by Rose, Arnie’s globetrotting grandmother Rose, who told us: “The first thing you do when you get to the island is go to a grocery store. They have avocados the size of my handbag there. You can eat them for breakfast, or lunch with cottage cheese and paprika. Because let me tell you, there is not one restaurant on that island you are going to enjoy.”
Step 3, by ten-thirty, get back from Four Noodles and go to bed at Arnie’s.
Step 4, at seven o’clock Friday morning, the cab comes to take us to JFK.
Step 5, by Friday at noon we are with my parents in San Jose, so that they can meet the man who fathered my cat.
Step 6, early Saturday morning, we leave San Jose for Hawaii, where neither of us has ever been.
Step 7, by Saturday at two o’clock we are on the Big Island, for Valentine’s week.
Notice that there is no step that involves me making bail for Arnie. But the point is, Step Negative One was to go to Soho to purchase a linen top and sunglasses and sandals. And nice soap, because who knows what will be in our condo on the island. And at five P.M., Step Zero was to get into a cab and get home and get packed. But instead this German woman is stealing my cab and closing the door on me, and so I’m screaming at her:
“You fucking cunt!”
Which is when I realize what the German woman is doing. She isn’t closing the taxi’s door on me, she’s pulling it in so that I can squeeze past the puddles and climb into the cab too. And what she says to me, from in the cab, with her Marlene Dietrich accent, is:
“I thought that we share the taxi, if you go uptown.”
Human kindness. She wants to split the cab. I am mortifi ed, because I just called her a fucking cunt. But what am I going to do? I get in the cab.
It’s an Israeli cabbie, or maybe he’s Russian. He’s sort of eyeing us, like, Who are these two nut cases? And, okay. Normally, when you sit down in a cab in winter and get out of the snow and into the heat, it’s like … taking a trip to Hawaii. A hot, mobile island. But in this cab? You sit down, and what you experience, before you even feel the heat, is the driver’s cologne. So heavy, you feel like it will give you a rash. Which is in addition to the rash I’m already getting just from the tension with the crazy German woman. Anyway, I tell the driver Lexington and 83rd. And the crazy German tells him she’s going to 65th at 3rd Avenue. Like, directly on the way, if we go through the park. How convenient, right? What a coincidence, right? And the cabdriver says: “I take 8th Avenue, is faster on West Side.”
So, 8th Avenue in a sleet storm. The cabbie is muttering to himself, but fine. The crazy German woman is eating her muffin and sitting there all prettily, like I didn’t just call her a fucking cunt. And just as I am getting ready to apologize to her, my cell phone starts ringing again. The call is from some unknown number, but it’s Arnie. So I’m like:
“Hey, baby! Where are you calling from?” And he says:
“Ah … a precinct house.”
“Oh no! What happened? Did you get mugged?” He’s offended:
“Me? Mugged? No, Jennica, listen, I’ve been arrefff.”
Because 8th Avenue has the worst reception for my phone. So I tell him:
“What? I’m not getting reception.”
The German woman? Cringing. The smelly cabbie? Cringing. Because of course I am being shrill. Of course they are thinking that I am one of those women. But Arnie is like:
“Fff arrested, and I need you to call David Fowler.”
“Arrested? For what?”
“Fff!”
“What?”
“Mff!”
“Murder?”
And the smelly cabdriver and the crazy German woman both cringe, in a different way. Because now they aren’t sure if I’m one of those women or if I’m a spoiled Mafi a moll.
“But Arnie? Who are they saying you … ?” And he’s like:
“Allegedly, Jennica, allegedly. Fff! Fff!”
“Arnie, I can’t hear a word.”
Which is awful. It’s like, is he all right? Is he getting out? Am I supposed to call Gran Rose and make bail? Am I supposed to call the airline and cancel everything? A minute before I had been worrying about, like, How do I apologize to the crazy German woman? Should I really have spent seventy dollars on that white linen top? Did I remember to give Julie the key so that she could feed the cat? Some worries are a privilege. And all Arnie is saying is: “Call David Fowler! Call David Fowler!” And, David Fowler? He’s a terrible lawyer. Look what happened the last time Arnie went to him. And that was only money, not, like, murder. I tell him:
“Arnie! I don’t want to call David Fowler. Let me call Gran Rose. She probably knows somebody who can …” But he says, totally clear:
“Do not you dare call Gran Rose! Call David Fowler!”
And at this point the taxi’s pretty much at Times Square. I realize I have to get out of the cab; I have to get to a ground line; I have to figure out David Fowler’s number; but mostly, I have to get out of this cab. So I say:
“Driver, I need to get out here, there’s been a change of plans. Arnie, if I’m going to deal, I have to get to a better phone. Tell me exactly where you are.” And he says:
“They say they’re taking me to … the tombs.” Totally creepy.
While he’s saying this, I’m splashing back out onto the sidewalk where the cab dropped me. Outside, everywhere, it’s sleet, and, just, cataracts of ice. But already I’ve spotted the hotel I’m going to make a dash for, and I’m strategizing how to deal with the concierge, what to tell him so he’ll let me use a ground line. And the cabbie is saying:
“Is okay, you two figure out money, is okay.”
I’ve got bags everywhere. I’m dripping all over the seat. But the meter is at almost eight dollars, so I give the crazy German woman a five. Because it’s either that or a twenty. And, totally blasé, she’s like:
“Ja, fine.”
Oh, and as I close the door, I tell her:
“I am … totally sorry that I called you a fucking cunt.” I meant to apologize to her, and that’s what came out. So embarrassing. And when I get my cell back out of my pocket, I realize that I managed to hang up on Arnie.
Right?
So I’m clopping across the sidewalk, sopping wet, sleet running down my neck, trying to make it into a hotel lobby where I can borrow a ground line to call David Fowler, when I hear the cabbie, from up 8th Avenue:
“You are a fucking cunt!”
I turn around, and there’s the crazy German woman, half a block up, on the sidewalk. Like, she decided to get out of the cab too, except she’s making a dash for the subway station. And the cabbie is standing there in the sleet with his flashers on, watching her and calling her a cunt.
She jumped the fare. The crazy German woman jumped the fare.
So I run half a block up, through the sleet, to pay the driver, because, whatever, it’s what you do. The crazy German woman hadn’t even given him my five. And while he’s making change for my twenty, he tells me:
“This is why she wanted to get out on 65th. She was going to let you pay for her. She is very smart. But you? Coming back and paying me when you were already out of the car? Not so very smart.”
Like, thanks. Did I mention that you smell? But anyway, what I want to know is: Who was that woman?
ANA KAGANOVA, safe in the Berkshires and inspired with afraudulent scheme, decides how to conscript her husband into herplot (September 12, 2001):
Like every American, I sat yesterday on the sofa and watched CNN. Yeah, eventually people called my cell phone, but my instinct was not to answer. Perhaps I liked the idea that they did not know whether I was alive. I left Monday for the country without saying goodbye, which is what I do when I stay at my husband’s grandmother’s cabin.
All day yesterday I thought, Nobody knows that I was not on the ninety-fi rst floor. But, weiß’ du, at the same time I thought, Nobody knows that I had any reason to be on the ninety-first floor. This is the lay of the land.
In the end I turned off the television, because it is always the same thing that they are playing, and I turned on AM radio. The callers all wanted to know, “Where can I send money?” These rednecks in Massachusetts call AM radio to ask other people what to do with their money.
This is when I realized that these people who were in the towers would be rich. There will be millions of dollars of charity, and there will be millions of dollars of lawsuits, and there will be millions of dollars of reparations, and anyone who was in the towers when they fell will be now rich.
You see who I thought I should in such a circumstance perhaps contact? In order that someone should report me missing? After all, Gogi is my husband. He should report that I am missing, and this is all there is to it.
I went outside, and I had a cigarette, and I threw my cell phone into his grandmother’s pond. Because if I was going to pretend that I was on the ninety-first floor, I would need to destroy my cell phone, without a clue. And yeah, have you ever thrown a cell phone into a pond? In September, the pond is nothing but lilies. The cell phone landed on a lily, and it floated. And I thought, This is my shit luck, the floating cell phone from Finland. Why are the Finns making cell phones that float? I thought, Perhaps there is a kayak? And I can drown this cell phone by hand? But then it sank finally into the pond.
And then I drove half an hour to a pay phone and bought one of these calling cards. I spoke with myself for a minute, in order to get the accent correct, and then I called my husband to tell him that his wife is dead.


And this is
THE SECOND PART. (#ubd6778a7-4327-590c-bef2-fc6713522956)


It is longer, and consists nearly exclusively of statementsmade during the summer of 2000. However,the dead and the inanimate also have their say inthis part, and there are press clippings. Please notethat despite interruptions and digressions, eventuallyeverybody comes to their point. A list of thespeakers in this comedy, should you like one, appearsat the back of the book, after the Fifth Part, onpage 293.


MAYNARD GOGARTYtells us what happened on the subwayand dissects a dilemma (early August 2000):
There was a woman with beauty spots, and a misunderstanding with the authorities—all on a Lexington Avenue local, uptown. She was one of these women who strike your heart and leave it resounding, like a bell. It’s a simple story. But may I give a preface, a brief preface, and then we can discuss what I did wrong?
A preface:
You step onto the subway, the subways constituting a borough unto themselves, with different hostilities and different hopes, a whole mobile county of curiosities, and—there she is! This creature with angelic blood, and a cup of iced coffee, and the scent of some recherché shampoo, and her smile just so. Her halo quivering every time the subway rattles. And you must decide what to do. Do you say something, or do you say nothing?
Dignity would seem—dilemmatically, to require both and yet to permit neither.
The subway is, after all, one of the most dignified places to open an affair. Love should contain a constituent element of irreducible destiny, and destiny is exactly what is lacking when—. When Battery Park businessmen ransom dates with chesty socialites from commercial matchmakers in midtown. Or, or when idle and gelatinous West Side freelancers, suctioned to coffee-shop tables like sea anemones, filter through the classifieds in the Village Voice for ads reading “Woman seeks Manly Polyp.” And destiny is what is lacking when, after months of inhaling one another’s dander, the mustard-breathed attorney commences his case, his lascivious case, against his homely, hot-doggy paralegal. Or, or when the bag boy at Gristedes propositions the Gristedes cashier. Love should not be the spoils of a deliberate campaign or the convenient alliance of a war of attrition. Love should be an instant and supernatural uproar in the soul. It should be the resounding of a bell.
So on the subway, with a beautiful girl, dignity demands action and condemns silence. Because—when the girl with the halo sits down across the aisle from you, it is your one chance for truest love!
However, and contrariwise, subways or no, dignity demands that we, as rational apes, reject delusions, including comforting delusions, in favor of the truth. And it is a comforting delusion to think that every time a beautiful woman sits down across from you on the subway, destiny is trying to bring you happiness. Destiny does not manifest itself in the form of chance encounters with beautiful women. Destiny manifests itself, always, in the form of hobbyhorses, pet phrases, pet cats, nose-picking, and credit card debt. And Sunday crosswords, and the pursuit of “fun.” In other words, your destiny has been riding across from you on the subway for much, much longer than you can ever imagine. Beautiful strangers do not each represent a new form of happiness. Beautiful strangers are like everybody else—dull, demanding, violent, and malodorous.
So when a beautiful woman sits across the aisle, dignity condemns action and demands silence. Because—when you fail to say hello to a beautiful stranger on the subway, you have triumphantly avoided yet another form of—human misery.
To say something, or to say nothing? This is the anatomy of the dilemma presented by love and dignity on the subway, and this concludes the preface.
I was on an uptown local on the Lexington Avenue line, a subway that was doomed to stall at 33rd Street.
I had boarded at the City Hall stop, still woozy from a breakfast meeting with the woman who wants to buy the rights to my movie, and I was taking the contract uptown, to my attorney. It was my quadrennial half-pint of success. I was in media res in the worst way, running an errand for my meager movie on a wet furnace of a morning. My armpits were—have you ever used a droplet of water to test the heat of a wok? While I was waiting on the platform for the train at City Hall, my armpits were informing me that the wok was ready. The woman next to me on the platform at City Hall was wearing a yellow muumuu and carrying a Bible and a blue-ice freezer pack. Bible shut, freezer pack against her chest. Fundamentalist heat, this.
The subway was empty, naturally, when it finally rolled in, since City Hall is the first stop on the line. But I didn’t take a seat. I took off my jacket, draped it over my—moist shirtsleeve, and stood like a jack under the air conditioner, to expose myself to as much as possible of that good dry air. Though I did leave my boater on my head, to protect my scalp.
So! The subway leaves City Hall. And as it makes each stop, the doors open, the beastly day seethes into the train, the doors close, and cool order returns. By Spring Street the woman in the muumuu has cooled off enough to start reading her Bible, and I extract my handkerchief and begin to mop myself up, when I notice—a crucial detail. At the far end of the subway car, the alarm for the emergency brake is sounding.
But I do nothing about it—yet.
Spring Street, Bleecker Street, Astor Place. Our train arrives at Union Square simultaneously with an express train. Fatefully, I decide against doing that bounce across the platform to catch the faster train. I am too hot, and am in no hurry. My lawyer can wait. The fundamentalist in the muumuu leaves, however, thumps away to catch the express, and into our car, from the express train, slips—the woman with the beauty spots. A shapely twist of a woman, dressed in black, with two beauty spots on her right cheek. The doors shut. She sits down at the other end of the car, directly underneath the colicky emergency brake.
Twenty-third Street. Twenty-eighth Street. Shadows and stiff air. The beautiful woman’s halo is vibrating in time to the trill of the emergency brake siren. Thirty-third Street. And just note the pointlessness of the place and time. Thirty-third Street? Ten twenty-five A.M.? In the midst of a primordial heat wave? At 10:25 A.M., 33rd Street—is harrowingly bland. It is nowhere.
But—33rd Street. The train pulls up to the platform, but the doors don’t open. And then, as was foreordained, the train stalls. The electricity weakens and dies, the lights dwindle and quit, the air conditioning expires. We, the passengers, are experiencing the subway as it was in the age of reptiles. The only things still functioning are the alarm on the emergency brake and the public address system, the latter of which the conductor is using to scold us. She is accusing someone of having pulled the emergency brake. “This train is going to be held in the station.” Apparently she is planning to go car to car, looking for the culprit.
Now, you can tell a lot from this conductor’s voice. She is black, young, and calm, but not necessarily always calm—you can hear the potential for impressive intemperance. “People, listen up. We have a brake situation, so you are going to have to be patient. Be patient, please.”
So we sit there and, without the air conditioning, commence to sweat, and we listen, in the darkness, to the whine of the emergency brake. Outside, growing restless, are all the damned souls on the platform at 33rd Street, waiting to get into the train, waiting to be pardoned and released into the cool interior of the 6 train, or rather, the ever-less-cool interior of the 6 train.
The woman with the beauty spots is sipping an iced coffee, at peace in her seat. She is wearing leather sandals, but her feet are enchantedly clean for someone who has been walking about Manhattan in weather hot enough to sublimate the concrete. Her hair is thick and wavy and blackish, pulled back under a knotted white handkerchief, a pristine handkerchief. Eyes closed, soft features, and two beauty marks on her right cheek. Maybe she is Spanish, or maybe Jewish. A sleeveless black shirt made out of something elastic-y, stained in the faintest half-moons of perspiration, right along the bottom of the armholes, which is very sexy, and billowy black linen pants. Sipping her iced coffee through a straw. No milk; she’s drinking it black. And the condensation is dripping onto her hands. She’s got a napkin, a bundle of paper napkins, that she’s using to mop the condensation from the side of her plastic iced-coffee cup and that she’s then holding against her forehead, so she can feel the coolness. Freckles on her shoulders.
Her seat is at the other end of the car, directly under the noisy emergency brake. And I—I see my opportunity. All I need is one teaspoon of courage, in order to do her the dignifi ed courtesy of shutting off that alarm.
JAMES CLEVELAND,age twelve, describes what Maynardlooked like under the air-conditioning vent on the uptown No. 6train (early August 2000):
He was just some tall white guy dressed like an old man. Except he wasn’t old, as in old-old. But he had on old-man clothes, like one of those brown checkered jackets that looks like a tablecloth, and a white straw hat with a brown stripe around it, and a red tie with one of those silver clips to hold it to the shirt. He looked like the geezer who sits all on his own at church and who thinks he behaves better than everyone else and who stares at you and your sister to let you know it. And that was the thing with this white guy—he had a face like he was surprised at something. And when he raised his eyebrows, he had about five hundred and fifty-five wrinkles on his forehead. You know how they add extra lines in music for the high notes? His forehead was like music that has all kinds of notes that are going way, way, way too high.
Chief was like, “Son, he look like he just step in something nasty, son.”
And I said, “Son, you be saying son far too much, son.”
And Chief said, “Your mother be saying it too much. He got a face like something cold just touch his balls.”
But the point being is, ain’t nobody going to pay attention to you unless you make a problem for them. And Brittany and Juney and Shawna were trying to make a problem for the white guy, to see if Chief and me were scared enough to run away. So they got the guy’s attention, and then they flipped him off. And I think the reason they picked him was because of his face.
MAYNARD GOGARTYcontinues undeterred with the story ofwhat happened on the uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):
So, now, out on the platform, waiting to get in, are five black kids, two boys and three girls, twelve or thirteen years old, and they are waving at me through the window. Or at least the girls are waving. Only twelve-year-olds could muster such brio in such heat. These three girls are absolutely—conjubilant. And bear in mind, these kids are perfectly the age to do something simultaneously adolescent and childish: go on a double date, yet wave at strangers on the other side of the glass. They have the look of cutting class—some infinitely tedious summer band camp, perhaps, since the boys have trumpet cases with them. They feel daring for skipping class, for being on a date, and so the girls are giving themselves courage and teasing their young escorts by waving at me. Well—! Naturally I wave back. Naturally I wipe my sweaty brow and wave back.
Which is when the girls show me—their ring fingers. If a twelve-year-old black girl shows you her middle fi nger, you know what it means; but what does it mean if she shows you—her ring finger? So, after a brief moment of racial disharmony in America, the three girls run away, up the platform, laughing. Their escorts watch them vacantly and then look at me vacantly. If you spend enough time as a teacher, especially if you are as subtle a disciplinarian as I am, then you develop a certain indifference to these things. I can see that the boys’ opinion of the three girls isn’t much higher than my own—and then I realize I have accumulated one teaspoon of romantic courage. So I put on my jacket, pick up my attaché, and stride down the subway car toward the woman with the beauty spots, determined to silence that jeering alarm.
Now. A digression on the nature and construction of the cars that run on the Lexington Avenue line. Redbirds, I think they may be called. Anyway, a digression:
At the front right and rear left of every redbird car are the emergency brakes, each of which consists of a little handle shaped like an upside-down letter T, dangling on a wire. The brakes aren’t very sturdy, apparently, because to prevent anyone from yanking one down accidentally, they are protected by metal covers, hefty boxes with hinges at the top that have to be lifted before you can gain access to the brake. If you lift the metal cover, an alarm goes off—or not an alarm so much as a high-pitched electric buzzing, a crude, piercing whistle. Nnneeennneee. It’s flat of A sharp. Nnneeennneee. The alarm doesn’t mean that the brake has been pulled—it means the cover has been lifted. A sharp bump in the tracks will sometimes jolt one of the covers open, setting off the emergency siren until some gallant and savvy rider—par exemple, moi!—has the mind to slap the brake cover back into place. End of digression.
So! I stride down to the emergency brake, and I draw to a stop in front of the beautiful woman. Her eyes are closed, but they flutter open when she hears my footsteps coming. I draw to an emphatic stop—and administer a single, decisive whap.
The alarm falls silent. The woman looks up. For one twinkle, I enjoy her pretty eyes. She is about to say something, presumably thanks, when a drop of sweat from my wrist falls onto her pristine white handkerchief. We both watch it fall together.
“Pardon me—I just meant to—ah.”
Because I am who I am, I had paused dramatically to demonstrate what I was doing. I had frozen in place with my arm next to the brake box, to show my gentlemanly intentions. So there is time, while I am stuttering my apology, for—a second drop of sweat to fall on her handkerchief. Gah! She gives me a crushing look—a look that means, in Manhattan, Stay away, you crazy—a dumbfounding look when delivered by a woman with two ideal beauty spots. It was as though I’d spat on her while asking her to spare me some change.
So I retreat. And I think to myself, as I retreat, What is this beautiful woman doing on an uptown No. 6 train at 33rd Street at 10:25 A.M.? But I retreat. I retreat, and I take a seat, and I sweat, and I straighten my hat, and I settle my defeated face into a frown. At which point, in a rage, looking for her culprit, enter the subway conductor.
JENNICA GREENfails to explain what she was doing on an uptownNo. 6 train at 33rd Street at 10:25 A.M. (early August 2000):
I was going to buy a six-hundred-dollar cat. Which, I know. But hear me out.
I live on the third story of a red brick walkup on Cark Street, in the West Village. You’ve seen these sorts of buildings. The kind with tiny black-and-white tiles on the floor of the entryway and coppery mailboxes. Where the copper has this gummy feeling from the scraps of glue left behind where the previous tenants have taped up and then torn off their names over the decades. With a narrow cinder-block stairway painted chocolate brown … like, Hershey-quality chocolate brown. I have a rear unit, with a view of the backs of some brownstones and their gardens and some ailanthus trees in the alleys, and with a fire escape leading down into the courtyard. Which supposedly makes my apartment ideal for burglary. I moved in, and my mother said … like, forget that the apartment is spacious and bright, and has parquet floors except in the kitchen and bathroom, and has some redeeming features even if it is too expensive … like, forget all that, what my mother said was:
“It sounds ideal for a burglar.” I said:
“That’s why I have renter’s insurance, Mom.” And my father was like:
“Those policies are a scam. And insurance can’t protect you from a determined rapist.” It’s like, Thanks, Dad, for reminding me.
Anyway, the six-hundred-dollar cat.
On Monday I got home. It was seven-thirty, about. And it was one of those dusks in July and August where the sky is thick and white, the color of a poached egg. I had walked home from the subway slowly, so that I could look at everyone in their heat-wave clothes, and when I got home, there in my copper mailbox, I recognized her handwriting immediately, was a letter from Nadine Hanamoto.
Nadine Hanamoto, who was my best friend in San Jose, California, in 1989, and who was my first cosmopolitan friend. And, okay, cosmopolitan in San Jose, California, in 1989 … so, cosmopolitan with caveats. But Nadine Hanamoto, who I haven’t heard from in I don’t know how long, and whose feelings I think maybe I unintentionally hurt. So I start reading her letter before I am even up the stairway as far as the first landing.
Dear Jenny,
She’s the only one who ever called me Jenny, so already it’s kind of poignant, right?
I’m sorry to send you such a possibly weird letter.
She said she called my parents to ask for my address. She was so happy and impressed that I was still surviving in New York City. What was my neighborhood like? What was my apartment like? Was it “illustrious”? The letter was handwritten in green ink, six pages long, and so I flipped through it, just assessing the volume of it. And on the back Nadine had drawn two blue-ink boxes around one green-ink paragraph, to make sure that one paragraph would catch my eye, if nothing else did.
George (that George) just bought an apartment in Manhattan, and he says he wants to meet you. He says he forgives you for standing him up in 1989. How hilarious if the two of you hit it off.
My parents apparently told Nadine I was single.
I’m reading this as I open my front door. And, I leave my air conditioner off while I’m at work, to conserve electricity, so when I walk in, my apartment feels like, whatever. Poached. But I put my bags down and sit on one of the barstools at my little rolling kitchen island, and I’m reading Nadine’s letter in the heat. So it’s absolutely silent in the apartment, no air conditioning, no television, no loom construction going on next door. Even my refrigerator, which is so huge and so poorly insulated that it spends twenty hours a day in the summer rattling its fan, just to keep my whatever, my mixed salad greens from wilting … even my refrigerator was quiet. So I’m reading in silence, and then there is this noise. Like, a burglar in my apartment.
MITCHELLandSUSAN GREENdiscuss their daughter’s aspirationsto illustriousness (early August 2000):
M: She was reading those particular books that high schools still think teenagers need to read, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and Great Expectations. And she came away with the lesson that we as a family had done something wrong that there wasn’t more intrigue in our lives. She read MadameBovary, and the lesson she came away with was that Emma Bovary was a perfectly reasonable woman.
S: What she really enjoyed were all of those books by J.D. Salinger.
M: “The Greens are not illustrious.” There were about six months when that was her refrain, her constant refrain. She thought it would be romantic if there were invading armies we had to flee, or if we were …
S: She wanted to join the leisure class.
M: … or if we were winning a fortune shipping boatloads of spice on the high seas, or if the family was harboring an assassin, or if there was incest secretly afoot.
S: And there was incest afoot, on your side.
M: What, Simmy and Lala?
S: Well?
M: That was no secret. They bragged about it. My father’s parents were first cousins.
S: Jennica thought we led boring lives. What do you tell a sixteen-year-old? “Be grateful you live in peace and comfort”? And expect that to be the end of it? “Nothing interesting ever happens to us. All you and Dad ever did was go to college and buy a house and have us.” I told her she could say whatever she wanted to us, since we were her parents, but she shouldn’t just go around telling other people that she thought they led boring lives, because she would hurt someone’s feelings. She said, “At least hurting someone’s feelings would be interesting.” What do you say to that?
M: And it’s not as if our family is notable for its ordinariness. I mean, the stories your family has about the war?
S: Or that cousin of yours.
M: Cousin of mine?
S: In Israel, with the skin disease and the spa.
M: Oh, he is a freak. Robby, with his friends from EST.
S: Robby. Oh, he was awful. Those showers we had to use.
M: Nineteen eighty-one. Susan and I went to Israel and left the kids with Susan’s parents. We visited my cousin Robby at his spa, outside Haifa. These people, at the spa. They thought that magnetized mud would halt the spread of certain cancers. This kind of pathetic fantasy. People dying for their ignorance. Just losing weight and disassembling their minds out there in the desert. Talking in EST jargon about the chemotherapy conspiracy, over dinner in their communal cafeteria.
S: And what dinners. Quinoa with yeast sauce. Kelp salad.
M: Robby’s spa was macrobiotic. He served seaweed grown at some awful kibbutz somewhere that he wanted to take us to visit. The only Jewish socialist solar-powered aquaculture tanks in the world. In his converted Toyota pickup, he wanted to drive us halfway across Israel with his Russian girlfriend. Who was the worst of them all. A wraith of a woman, talking about Talmud and rising signs versus moon signs and Kabbalistic poetry. As if she’d only learned English from Robby himself.
S: Oh, I am so glad we got that ticket to Rome instead.
M: What a tragedy we left Gabe and Jennica behind. That trip would have taught her something about illustriousness.
S: We told her, my mother and her parents escaped Hitler, your father’s grandparents moved to the Bronx from Russia with nothing and worked in cigar factories and pencil factories, my father’s family has that whole fascinating side in Venezuela, the ranchers, and the one cousin in New Zealand. And she says, “It’s just you guys who are boring, it’s just my parents. The whole Green family is interesting except my parents.” What do you say to that? But you see what it is she likes about New York City.
M: And since when aren’t we interesting?
NADINE HANAMOTOweighs whether or not the Greens wereillustrious (early August 2000):
I don’t think Jenny ever appreciated that she lived in a house where no one was insane. I mean, you’d go over to the Greens’, open their refrigerator …
My family’s refrigerator was, like, some gross, burned fried rice that my mom made, my dad’s beer, and some limp celery. You know ants-on-a-log? Where you fill a celery stalk with peanut butter and sprinkle it with raisins? If you made ants-on-alog at my family’s house, the celery would be the least crunchy part.
But you’d go over to the Greens’, open their huge new refrigerator, and in the condiments compartment, like: pickled herring, pickled grape leaves, four kinds of mustard, salsa de no-pales, anchovy paste, smoked Riga sprats, some jar fi lled with Susan Green’s homemade mayonnaise, every single possible variety of salad dressing. Susan Green’s homemade jams, with these labels that Gabe created with their dot-matrix printer. And that was just the condiments. In the meat drawer, all these white packages, deli wrapped: smoked salmon, Havarti, roast beef, head cheese, two different kinds of salami, a whole, real liverwurst, blood sausage, Gorgonzola, three kinds of Brie, deli pickles.
You open up their pantry doors: Nutella. Three kinds of rye bread, six different kinds of vinegar, and a complete Tupperware dream set filled with three kinds of rice and two kinds of sugar and four kinds of flour, and whole-wheat wagon-wheel pasta and tomato-infused fettuccine and spinach-infused spaghetti and a mountain of ramen. The Tupperware sales guy would open this pantry and stand tippy-toe with pride.
This is the Greens’ kitchen.
I’d be over there, and I would be pleading with Jenny to let me eat, but there was always some reason why we had to wait. I’d be like, “Please, just let me put some blue cheese on these Wheat Thins.” Jenny’d be like, “No, I think my mom is making Schmüchlblärchl tonight, so we should wait. You can have an olive maybe.” So I’m devouring the Greens’ olives, famished. Jenny’s eating nothing.
Susan Green would come in with a paper sack full of groceries. I’d be like, Why? Why? Why is she buying more? When there is this whole gorgeous picnic in the fridge? And Susan Green would be like, “Well, Nadine, you can have those olives if you want, but tonight I’m making Schmüchlblärchl.”
It didn’t matter what was for dinner, it was always worse than what was already in the fridge. Because Susan Green cooked some weird shit. Jenny and Gabe were totally brainwashed. Susan would be like, “You should stay for dinner, Nadine. Tonight we’re having the Apricot Dish.” And she’d be chopping apricots into a frying pan full of ground turkey sautéed in cumin. And Mitchell Green would come home from work and be like, “Smells like the Apricot Dish! Let’s put on La Traviata.” Then they’d all start arguing about which opera to listen to while eating the Apricot Dish. Gabe would say, “So long as there are no arias in a minor key, because minor keys inhibit digestion.” I’d be like, What are these people talking about? And Jenny would be saying, “The best thing with the Apricot Dish is the goat’s-milk yogurt.” And Mitchell would be like, “I agree,” and start burrowing through their fridge for the goat’s-milk yogurt.
Jenny and I would set the table. With napkins and napkin rings and wooden bowls for the salad. And then, at seven P.M. sharp, they’d all sit down together at this table for six. Susan, Mitchell, Jenny, Gabe, me, and one chair where they would balance all nineteen kinds of salad dressing they had brought out for Susan’s shiitake mushroom and red bean salad. And out would come the Schmüchlblärchl and the Apricot Dish and some mashed potatoes. They’d all be like, “Yum! The Apricot Dish!” I’d be like, Why? Why are we eating fried apricots and turkey with goat’s-milk yogurt? When there is deli meat right in the fridge? And rye bread in the breadbox? The Greens aren’t insane, like my family, so why, why must we suffer? Meanwhile, Mitchell would be like, “Nadine, this is an important aria. This is where Violetta declares the folly of love,” and he starts singing along. And I’d be making myself swallow the Schmüchlblärchl and thinking about the pastrami and the mustard.
At my house, dinner was at eleven P.M. My mom would burn some rice and eat it in front of the TV. Setting the table meant asking my sister to move over on the couch. My sister, who would be eating ants-on-a-log.
JENNICA GREENagain fails to explain what she was doing onan uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):
And here’s why I can’t explain it just like that: because I have to explain about California before I can explain about New York. Or, like, about San Jose before about Manhattan.
I mean, San Jose.
I am from San Jose, California. A city of never quite one million people. Well, city? Municipality. Sunny, and quiet, and always a little brisk at night, and the summers never humid. With lawns and lanes, all spread out sort of low, across the flats of this valley, the Santa Clara Valley. Where before I was born there were orchards.
And there was such a sense of shame about the orchards! The first mention by any of my teachers of, like, the deportation of San Jose’s Japantown in World War II? Junior year of high school. But the first mention of the annihilation of Santa Clara Valley’s orchards? Second grade, Ms. Rappe, Trace Elementary. We thought Ms. Rappe was mean, because she made us do multiplication a year early. And because she yelled at us sometimes. She had an allergy to chalk dust and so she used the dust-free kind, which was shinier and crumblier than regular chalk and which made that horrible noise on the chalkboard, but if we even peeped when her chalk inevitably scratched, she would yell at us. And she would yell at us if we called her Mrs. instead of Ms., like, “I learned your name, you should learn mine.” But despite all that, she still maintained some popularity because of her two Great Danes, these mammoth Great Danes that she would bring to school a few times a year and let the smallest kindergarteners ride like ponies during recess. For example, Nadine Hanamoto was tiny enough to get to ride Ms. Rappe’s Great Danes when we were in kindergarten, although she and I only became friends later, in the ninth grade, when we had English together. Anyway. Ms. Rappe was forever nostalgic about the orchards. Cherry and apricot and pear orchards. And, along the ridges of Santa Clara Valley, to the south and east, cattle ranches, on estates granted by the king of Spain. She was forever waxing sappy, and forever making us do coloring projects involving the Spanish missions and local fruits and fruit blossoms. She told us it was our civic duty to save the coastal redwoods because they were the last real trees left.
The history is, between the world wars, developers started cutting down the fruit trees in Santa Clara Valley and subdividing the orchards. So by the time I got to high school, in 1986, you could tell the age of the shade trees in San Jose by the age of the houses. Like, “That’s an Eichler from the fifties, so that maple must be in its thirties.” Eichler was this notorious developer, to be mentioned only with distaste. It was a point of ridiculous pride in my family that our house was built in 1924 and was in the Rose Garden District, which Eichler hardly touched. And that our house had wood-frame windows, not aluminum. And that instead of having a swimming pool in our backyard, we had cherry trees, and a cement fountain of a shepherd pulling a thorn from his foot that came from a 1920s Sears, Roebuck catalogue. I knew about all of this before I knew how to multiply, about Eichlers and wood-frame windows and fruit trees versus shade trees.
And if there was a big earthquake, I knew how to turn off the gas.
I mean, just, this atmosphere of desolation, in San Jose, as a teenager. In 1985, when I was thirteen, the City of San Jose started a redevelopment campaign, “San Jose Is Growing Up.” With a purple-and-pink logo that was the exact color combination I would have picked for my bat mitzvah if I’d had a bat mitzvah. The city planted these sycamores, these gangling sycamores, along 1st Street and San Carlos Avenue. And they proposed a new downtown convention center and a new downtown shopping concourse and a new downtown light-rail corridor. And the Fairmont built a twenty-story hotel on Market Street. It was San Jose’s tallest building. Twenty stories, salmon pink, with an open-air swimming pool on its fourth-floor patio. After the graduation ceremony from middle school, Herbert Hoover Middle School, the dare was to sneak into the Fairmont Hotel and go for a swim. Except no one would admit to knowing what county bus line would get us from our graduation ceremony at the Rose Garden over to Market Street, because familiarity with the county bus lines was shameful. So instead we all walked over to the Rosicrucian Museum, twenty or thirty of us, in our navy blue vinyl graduation gowns. And we kicked each other with the chlorinated water from the fountain surrounding the Rosicrucian statue of the hippopotamus god. And then we went home and felt exquisitely desolate and waited for high school to start.
This is San Jose. This is where I am from.
MITCHELLandSUSAN GREENexplain about the bat mitzvah (early August 2000):
M: She complained and complained, and we relented.
S: You relented. I never needed any convincing. She said, “I don’t believe in Torah, you don’t believe in Torah, what’s the point?” And I said, “Look, you’re missing the chance to have a big party and make some money.” She said, “I’ll get a job if I need money.” And I thought, What more can you ask from an eleven-year-old? Jennica is very sensible when she needs to be.
M: But can we say we would have let Gabe quit? Would we have let him, as a boy, at age eleven, drop out of his Hebrew classes? We tried very hard to be evenhanded, but would we have let Gabe quit?
S: Well, Gabe never complained, so it was never an issue. But Jennica hated those classes. And I can’t say I blame her. She never became friends with a single one of the girls at that synagogue. Nor did Gabe, I might add, with the boys. And, the mothers. These women were just so … Asking me wasn’t I anxious about keeping the kids in public school. Good riddance. I told Jennica, You may not marry any right-wing evangelicals; otherwise, as far as religion, do what you want to do.
M: It’s more than that. She should marry a Jew.
S: Mitchell has some opinions about this.
M: I don’t have some opinions, I have one opinion. Jennica should marry a Jew. I had the same opinion about Gabe, and his wife is Jewish. And it’s just my opinion. I’ll let the fiancé know my opinion, and then I’ll keep my mouth shut.
S: And Jennica did get a job, when she finally did need money. Not just in college, but very early on in high school. She wanted to join the Los Gatos Rowing Club, but Mitchell put his foot down about the fees, which were very high. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars, to join a rowing club. So Jennica got a job at Yogurt U.S.A. and paid her own way for three years. Because she wanted to be on a rowing team.
M: She said that there was no point in being Jewish in California. Remember this? “Why won’t the Green family admit that there is no point in being Jewish in California? We aren’t wandering in the desert.” And then she joins a rowing club.
JENNICA GREENsuccumbs to nostalgia; the uptown No. 6train, forget it (early August 2000):
All of which is background for why it was so … poignant to get a letter from Nadine about her brother.
I said Nadine was cosmopolitan. Which … fine, caveats … but sophistication is always relative. What I mean is, by the time Nadine and I became close, in high school, she had tastes and some opinions. She was nearly through with her parents and was buying herself a used car, with her own savings, she said. And she was making her own arrangements with a city, on terms she seemed to be negotiating for herself. Which was impressive to me. It was like she was the sole proprietor of her own flea market. All these curiosities, these five-and-dime thrills. She would always be chewing on hard candies with indecipherable Asian wrappers. Licorice? Sesame? Taffy from, like, Korea? Or Thailand? She wouldn’t tell me unless I put one in my mouth. She bought them at Vietnamese and Salvadoran groceries, and she wore such a straight face as she defied me to eat them that I would laugh until I choked, practically, out of anxiety about how rancid they would taste. Her car radio was incessantly tuned to this one schizophrenic station, KFJC, that never played any song you knew, so riding in her car there was always some unrecognizable noise happening in the background. I would be like:
“Who listens to this?” And Nadine would be indignant:
“Who cares who listens to it? The point of music isn’t to be able to tell other people that you listen to the same things they do.”
“The point of music also isn’t to be able to tell other people that you don’t listen to what they do.”
“How about the point of music is enjoying yourself?”
“How about I only enjoy myself if I actually recognize what’s playing once in a while?”
“So listen to KFJC more often.”
When she was fourteen, Nadine had lied about her age and gotten a job at a Subway Sandwich, so that by the time we were sixteen, when I was earning $4.25 at the yogurt place, Nadine was already working at the artsy movie house in Los Gatos for, like, $6.85 an hour, which seemed like a fortune in 1988. But which in retrospect … it should have been obvious that Nadine’s finances didn’t really make sense.
She shopped secondhand, of course, which was a revelation to me. I mean, how did she know about the Salvation Army in Redwood City? I guess it was a revelation to me in general, how much one could know about a city. Every Goodwill or Savers in Santa Clara Valley, Nadine had been there and knew what they had. Nadine was the first one to start wearing vintage T-shirts. Like, faded blue, child-sized Garfield T-shirts. She squeezed into them by cutting off the collars. This one Garfield shirt that she wore, when my brother saw it, he was like:
“Garfield?” And Nadine said:
“Garfield’s cool.” And my brother was bewildered. He couldn’t tell if she was kidding. And then there was Nadine’s Peugeot.
GABRIEL GREENtells us about Nadine’s Peugeot (early August 2000):
I have these conversations with my sister that I don’t have with anyone else. And one theory is that it’s because she’s my sister, but another theory is that it’s because in Santa Cruz I don’t meet a lot of people who lead the kind of life Jennica leads in New York City.
Take how Jennica eats.
Rachel and I have visited Jennica in Greenwich Village a couple times, and there are definitely some pretty good grocery stores near her, but the food is so expensive. Five dollars for a pint of supposedly organic strawberries. Two-fifty for one bunch of kale, and they don’t even have lacinato kale out there, or purple kale, or rainbow chard, or even red Swiss chard, so Jennica’s basically eating monoculture greens. She buys “mixed salad greens” for seven dollars a bag, triple-washed with who knows what. And to get this stuff home, which is only two blocks away from the grocery store, Jennica throws all of it into plastic bags. There is a husk on her corn, corn that Jennica’s store sells in April … there is a rind on her grapefruit, grapefruit that gets flown in from Florida … but still, Jennica puts the corn and the citrus into plastic bags. Her supposedly organic red peppers, which cost six dollars a pound, come in a foam tray under shrinkwrap, but she puts them in a plastic bag. And then the checkout girl puts all of Jennica’s little plastic parcels into two or three more big white plastic bags, and then Jennica walks the two blocks home, where she unpacks all the bags and then throws them in the same trash bin where her corn-husks and citrus rinds go, because they don’t do compost in New York City.
The last time we were out there, Rachel and I gave Jennica a whole set of hemp shopping nets as a present, to use instead of plastic bags. Jennica was like, “They won’t let me use these! Not in New York!” Instead she hung the nets up on her bedroom doorknob, and now she uses them to dry out her dirty gym clothes.
I mean, Jennica drinks her water from a so-called water purifier. Which means that she only drinks water that has been sitting for hours on end in a plastic Brita jug. I told her that New York City has the best drinking water in the country, except maybe for water from rain-catchment devices, and what she said was, “Obviously I know that, Gabe. But you can’t trust the pipes in old buildings.” What she really meant was, “Everyone I know drinks their water from a Brita water purifier.” So yes, Jennica buys her organic fair-trade coffee, but when she makes it, she makes it in a drip machine, with Brita water, with a plastic cone, and with a reusable nylon filter, so she’s basically pouring boiling hot plastic water through a membrane of plastic and then ingesting it straight.
Not that the consumption of plastic polymers that mimic human hormones necessarily will play the same role in modern America that lead poisoning played in ancient Rome, or necessarily contributes to infertility or dementia. But it’s possible. I’m only saying it’s possible. So that is another theory about Jennica’s phone calls: dementia.
Anyway. Jennica will call me up. It will be four-fifteen in the afternoon for me, but in New York City it’s seven-fi fteen, so Jennica will be walking home, and she’ll be all perky and needy. But in California, I’m still at work, and in my IT Department, four-fifteen is the catatonic hour. I’ll be like:
“Beh.” And perky Jennica will be all:
“Gabe, I need you to tell me everything you can remember about George Hanamoto.”
And then it’s my job to tell her everything I can remember about George Hanamoto. We don’t talk about Rachel, or the baby, or the latest ridiculous thing that Mom and Dad said about the fact that Rachel and I are having a baby, or anything else; we have to talk about George Hanamoto. What I remember about George Hanamoto is pretty much nothing, except the fi stfi ght with Old Man Bersen on the day of the Loma Prieta earthquake. Jennica’s on her cell phone, walking through New York City. In the background, what I’m hearing is sirens and screaming people and drivers leaning on their horns and trucks with no suspension hitting potholes and motorcycles without muffl ers. It sounds basically like Jennica is walking through rush hour in the apocalypse, but what she wants to talk about is George Hanamoto. Or, like, my phone will ring:
“Beh.”
“Gabe, I need you to do that voice that Nadine Hanamoto used to do with her Peugeot.”
When we were in high school, Nadine had this Peugeot, some mid-seventies model. It was a loud car, and when Nadine drove it, she would always be coaxing it along, like, “Oh, you want to be in third gear, don’t you? You want to know why I won’t take you out of second, don’t you? Oh, poor baby. You wish Mommy would give you the unleaded gasoline, but Mommy can only afford the regular. Let Mommy put you into third. Yes, yes.”
Jennica hated the voice, because she couldn’t do it right, which became a joke in itself. But now, ten years later, Jennica suddenly wants to hear me do the voice. It’s as if she can’t cross the street in New York without thinking about California. Where is all this nostalgia coming from? And yes, one theory is that all siblings have these conversations with each other, but another theory is that Jennica just isn’t happy in New York City.
JENNICA GREENcontinues to fail to explain what she wasdoing on an uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):
About the letter from Nadine.
Nadine’s father was Japanese and her mother was Mexican. Which is fascinating, come to think of it, but which I hardly thought about at the time; at most, I envied how exotic Nadine looked. Her father was hardly around, but Nadine’s mother, Perla Hanamoto, was always there, and always formidable, with huge reserves of energy to direct against Nadine. Unless she was making the effort to smile, Perla had these deep lines from her nose down to the corners of her lips, the lines of discontent. Whenever I went over to their house … this ranch-style house with aluminum windows, at the border of Willow Glen … she always interrogated me about my academic plans, as a way to needle Nadine. Was I planning on graduating with my class or taking the equivalency exams to graduate early, like Nadine? Was I going to a university or to a community college, like Nadine? Was I going to Junior Prom or was I skipping, like Nadine? She would open the door to Nadine’s bedroom, her boxy, eastern bazaar of a bedroom, to nag Nadine about something, and Nadine would just say:
“Later, Mom, okay? Bye.”
That was alien to me, that refusal to engage your parents. But Perla Hanamoto certainly loomed judgmentally enough around that house, and Nadine’s older sister, Theresa, was their mother’s, like, deputy.
And, Theresa and Nadine. Really, they were the funniest people I had ever met. It’s hard to explain, but when they got going with each other? Like, Theresa would come into Nadine’s bedroom because, whatever, their mother was angry with them about the refrigerator. And Theresa would have a plastic takeout box with her, holding it like clinical evidence. She’d kick herself a path through the Salvation Army sheets that Nadine had hung from her ceiling and whatever random mannequin parts Nadine had lying around her floor, in order to get to Nadine’s bed to confront Nadine with the takeout box.
“Nadi, regarding this specimen from the fridge.” And Nadine would be like:
“I said I’m going to eat it.”
“Right. You said that … last week.”
And I would recognize the box. It would be from a month before … some enchilada from El Cacique, which was Nadine’s favorite taqueria. Theresa would be like:
“Nadi, when I asked you about this specimen of enchilada last week, I figured you knew about … the mold. I told myself, Nadi’s not squeamish, she’ll scrape the mold away. I fi gured, Nadi is tough enough.” And Nadine would say:
“Would you just shut up and put it back in the fridge? Because the longer it stays out, the faster it will go bad.” And Theresa, like, pressing ahead:
“So, Nadi. Last week the mold was only on the left, on top of the rice. Now I observe three kinds of mold, all of which have spread from the moist lower regions where the rice was to this large lump in the middle, which I believe to have once been an enchilada. I am going to attempt to lift the lump.” She’d be, like, prodding the enchilada with the handle of a fork and making a face. “I have successfully lifted the lump. And my question is, Nadi, have you smelled this? Are you … tough enough?” Like, pressing the tray in Nadine’s face. And, Nadine would fi x her face against the odor and say:
“I’m totally going to eat that.”
Which, maybe you had to be there.
And then there was their brother, George. The oldest sibling. Who had been gone for ten years. He had run away to San Francisco when he was fifteen or sixteen, and he was never mentioned. And the day his name finally came up was the day of the Loma Prieta earthquake.
MAYNARD GOGARTYtells the story of what happened on theuptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):
Enter the subway conductor.
She is young, black, with one of those tight, heavy MTA uniforms on. She is a buxom conductor, but her uniform has compressed her chest into a flat breastwork of civic authority. And—the redbird trains are designed such that the conductor has to hustle back and forth from one car to another, depending on whether the train has pulled up to an express platform or a local platform. I mention this because apparently we were in the car that the conductor used as her headquarters at express stops, so the fact that the conductor was investigating our car implied that she had already searched one entire half of the train looking for her culprit, the entire down-track half of the train, and had found nothing.
So! Enter the subway conductor. Those doors between subway cars are always hard to get apart, but she just thrusts them wide with one wrist and shouts at the whole carload of us, “Anyone here touch the brake?”
The woman with the beauty spots—looks at me. She wants to verify that I will confess that I did in fact close the cover of the emergency brake. I realize that either I turn myself in or I will be denounced. So as the conductor is hurrying past, I say, “Madam? The cover on that brake there? It was open, and so I shut it.”
The conductor looks at me with—wrath!
“You touched the brake.”
“No. The cover was open. The little metal box, the cover. I shut that.”
“You touched the brake.”
“No. This was after the train had stalled. I shut the cover. Because the alarm was sounding.”
“The alarm was going off,” she said with disgust, “so you decided to touch the brake.”
So then—then! She turns away from me and reopens the box over the brake.
What theEMERGENCY BRAKEhas to say for itself (earlyAugust 2000):
Meee!
MAYNARD GOGARTYtells the story of what happened on theuptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):
The conductor pretends to inspect the brake, but—what is there to inspect? The woman with the beauty spots just sits there, underneath the conductor, eyes shut, wishing for her privacy back, until finally the conductor gives up, turns to me, and asks, “You think maybe the alarm was going off for a reason? Like something is wrong and you shouldn’t be touching the brake?”
She hasn’t properly shut the cover, so the alarm is still bleating at us. But she leaves it bleating and unlocks the closet in our subway car, her little closet for the express stops, and she goes inside, saying, “I am not done with you.”
“But I did nothing wrong.”
“I’m telling you, I am not done with you.”
At first she is tinkering with some of the controls, shouting with the motorman over a telephone. But then—the lights and air conditioning come back to life. She leaves the closet, leaves our car, and then the side doors spring apart and 33rd Street heaves its flames into the subway car.
Over the hoarse public address system comes her voice: “Thirty-third Street. Grand Central next. Stand clear the doors.”
In her voice I can hear, she is not done with me. But as I am awaiting my trial, the two black boys—who knows where the three girls were hiding themselves—the two black boys with the trumpet cases board the subway car. One of them is chubby, the other one is skinny. They sit down not far from me, open up their trumpet cases, and begin admiring each other’s graffiti pens. That is what they were toting in their trumpet cases—vandal-sized permanent markers.
JAMES CLEVELANDtalks television (early August 2000):
Brittany and Juney and Shawna flipped off the white guy. I said, “Why you all trying to get us in trouble?”
And Chief said, “You a coward, son?”
I hated that, because it was like he was trying to prove something that didn’t need to be proved. But when the subway doors fi nally opened, Brittany and Juney and Shawna ran to get on a different car, and so it was only me and Chief that got on board the same car with the white guy. And Chief was talking all loud, like, “I’a fucking show you, son, I’a fucking show you.” He was talking loud, and I couldn’t tell whether Chief was scared or not, which I also hated. He was saying, “Son, it is fucking hot in here.”
And yeah, it was hot on the subway. My jeans were like they just came out of the drier. And the white guy, when we got on, he was right there, like he was on safari, in his mad layers of clothes. I saw this show on thirteen about the Sahara. “Funding was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.” It was about slaves in the salt mines and Timbuktu and camel caravans and all that. The nomads keep cool by wearing lots and lots of layers of clothes. And that was what it looked like the white guy was trying to do with his mad layers. But it is bullshit about layers being cool, because the white guy had a whole Congo River of sweat coming down his face. That was probably what the cold thing was that touched his balls—it was probably sweat.
The only seats were right next to the white guy. So that was where me and Chief sat, right next to the white guy. And Chief, he was trying to show off he wasn’t scared, so he opened his case and took out the pens. And he whispered, “Who the coward, son?”
Everybody was looking at us, so I tried to look normal, like, “Ain’t nothing to see here, folks.” Pretending the pens weren’t nothing special at all. But I was holding the pen in my hand, and the train conductor walked right in.
MAYNARD GOGARTYtells the story of what happened on theuptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):
The doors close on 33rd. The train leaves the station like a dog on a leash—lingering behind to sniff the stains on the platform, then jolting ahead, down the tunnel, already smelling the urine of Grand Central. And I, like the rest of the train car, am gawking at these boys and their pens, and their—bravado in displaying them. They are, I believe, quite illegal under Mayor Giuliani.
Reenter the conductor, to execute me right there on the linoleum floor of the uptown No. 6 train with her MTA-issue revolver. She is sturdy-footed, quite obviously used to riding in trains without holding on. She straightens her uniform with a tug at the belt—as if anything that tight could really become displaced—and seeing her, the chubby boy claps his trumpet case shut and the skinny kid shoves the pen he’s holding between his legs.
YVETTE BENITEZ-BIRCH, the conductor, quotes her brieflecture (early August 2000):
Jonas was the motorman, and he found the problem up front. It was just a brake in the third car, and so once Jonas found it, we were back up and running. Whatever that gentleman had done, that condescending gentleman in the white straw hat, it wasn’t responsible for stopping the train. But there was something about him that made me think he needed a talking-to.
I told him, “Mister, I don’t know where you’re from. Maybe where you’re from they let you touch the emergency brake. But here in New York City, we ask our customers not to touch the emergency brake. Understand?”
He said, “But madam! I am from New York City.”
I told him, “If you are from New York City, then you should know not to touch the brake.”
He said, “But touching the brake is exactly what I didn’t do.”
I was thinking, I do not have time for this—I do not have time to be called “madam.” But there were two little boys sitting there, and one of them said, “Hey lady, he lying.”
I thought, Now why would this skinny little boy call the man in the white straw hat a liar? I knew the man in the hat hadn’t pulled the brake, but like I said, there was something about him that I did not like. I thought, Let’s see what the boy has to say.
MAYNARD GOGARTYpresses ahead with the story of whathappened on the uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):
The skinny kid says, “Hey lady, he lying.” This is a tone of voice I recognize from my students—the sanctimony of a child who is trying to cover up his own misbehavior.
His chubbier friend says, “Shut up, son.”
But the skinny kid insists, “No. This is what happen.” And then he tells a tale to be reckoned with: he tells the conductor that he and his friends were outside the train, that the girls were teasing me, and that I got mad and pulled the brake so that I could make a citizen’s arrest. A citizen’s arrest—such is the fancy of youth. But in the midst of this tale, and timed perfectly to corroborate, the door between our car and the next car up lurches open and the three black girls appear—looking for their lost escorts, no doubt. The instant they see the conductor, all three girls squeal “Oh shit!” and scurry back the way they came—letting the heavy door lurch shut behind them. But they had served destiny’s purpose: they had corroborated the boy’s story.
The conductor may be masterful at being bossy, but—she’s gotten in over her head here. She grabs the overhead bars, blocking up the entire aisle with her skepticism and her grimace. The train is slowing down, as the trains always do in that last stretch before Grand Central. The two black kids clearly think they’ve told the truth, but they do not know what the adults are going to do.
I say, “Madam, I have no idea what these children saw.”
The skinny boy says again, “He lying—he the one that pull the brake.”
And this is when the woman with the beauty spots speaks.
She says, “Excuse me? I saw it from right here. All this man did was close the box. Those boys are the real, like, troublemakers.”
That like—very sexy. Sexier than the sweat rings in her shirt. Like, the watchword of eternal youth. But—what a gorgeous and irrepressible snitch! Cooperating with the authorities! To save my sweaty and luckless hide! Again I ask you: What was she doing there?
JENNICA GREENstill fails to explain what she was doing onan uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):
All right, so, the letter.
Dear Jenny,
I’m sorry to send you such a possibly weird letter.
And then Nadine tells me everything that’s happened to her in the last ten years. She got a divorce four years ago from the guy she married when we were twenty, so maybe it’s for the best that I didn’t go to that wedding after all, she says. She doesn’t know if I ever realized how upset she was at the time, that I didn’t come. She apologizes, anyway, for having been angry with me; she knows I was at Princeton and it was hard for me to find the money to fly home on short notice. Anyway, she promises to forgive me if I come to her next wedding.
His name is Oscar Seventeen-Other-Last-Names Dicochea.
She says he works as a counselor in the prisons and he is devoted to fixing up Mustangs, which is how they met, and he is an avid birdwatcher. Also he has two kids from his first marriage, who stay with them weekends. She adores the kids, who are super-smart firecrackers, but it’s hard, she says, because by the time the kids get used to living by Nadine and Oscar’s rules, the weekend is over and they have to go back to their mother. Also Nadine is pregnant, due in late December. Oscar’s kids are convinced that they get to name the baby, and they want to call it Dick O. Dicochea. Also Nadine and Oscar bought a house in Fresno, which needs a lot of work.
This kind of a letter. Your best friend’s life story.
The whole thing just gives me this feeling that I am … un-reachably far away from the place where real life is carried on. And that I have nothing to report. Like, what have I been doing here in New York? Playing with water? While everyone was back in California, working with … redwood? There are as many kinds of homesickness as there are kinds of common cold, and that’s one of them: the sudden feeling that you could have been so much happier if only ten years ago you had stayed put.
I almost forgot the best thing!
George (that George) just bought an apartment in Manhattan, and he says he wants to meet you. He says he forgives you for standing him up in 1989. How hilarious if the two of you hit it off.
And it was like, am I finally going to meet George Hanamoto? And will he be as funny as Nadine, and as exotic and good-looking? So I am thinking this … in my perfectly silent apartment, my broiling hot but perfectly silent apartment … there is this noise. Like, someone is in my apartment. A burglar is in my apartment.
And, from my kitchen and bedroom, you can hear everything that happens in my neighbor’s kitchen and bedroom. I tell people that I can hear what happens in my neighbor’s bedroom, and they immediately think, Ooo! As if what you hear from your neighbor’s bedroom is always Ooo! It’s more like, if your neighbor has a dog, you can tell when the dog needs its nails clipped. Or, in my case, you can hear your neighbor building his loom, or whatever. But all the noises that come from my neighbor’s apartment are muffled in this particular way, and this sound, the burglar sound, as I’m sitting at the kitchen island with Nadine’s letter, is not muffled at all. It’s crisp, it’s in-the-room-with-me crisp. Someone is standing in the alcove behind my refrigerator, where the recycling is, which is the one part of the kitchen I can’t see, and is taking a knife out of a crinkling plastic bag.
And my reaction? My brilliant reaction? I freeze. Not, like, I grab my cell phone and run out the front door. No, I freeze. I sit there and wait to get hit over the head by the intruder. And then there it is again, the noise. The burglar is definitely in the alcove, and he definitely has a knife in a plastic bag. And apparently he’s having serious problems getting the knife out of the plastic bag …
So anyway, it’s a mouse. In my recycling.
I don’t even try to actually spot the mouse. I just leave Nadine’s letter on the kitchen island and run to the pet store on 6th Avenue. And I do mean run, because it was almost eight o’clock, and I didn’t want to wait another day for my cat. Because I’ve always wanted a cat, and I’m tired of never doing the things I most want.
GABRIEL GREENdiscusses whether or not his sister does thethings she most wants (early August 2000):
After college, she didn’t take any time off; she didn’t go to Thailand or Peru or anywhere. Three weeks after graduating, she started her first job, as an analyst for Hoffman Ballin. And the result was, for three years she never left America, never had a real vacation.
I would tell her, “Jennica. Take a leave of absence. Go to Thailand for a month. You can have massages every day, you can do an intestinal cleanse, you can take cooking classes, you can go to a yoga retreat on the beach.” She said she couldn’t take off that much time until she quit, and she didn’t want to quit until she found a new job in the arts, because the arts were her passion. I would tell her, “So start applying! You need a vacation.” But she didn’t want to start applying until she had paid off her student loans and saved up an emergency fund. I told her, “You don’t need an emergency fund. In an emergency, you can move to Vietnam. You can live the life of Riley there on nothing, on, like, three thousand dollars for six months.”
But no. Instead she had an apartment in Greenwich Village without any roommates, and she bought herself clothes, and every month she put the maximum amount into her 401(k). And so it took her three years to finally pay off her student loans and quit her job at Hoffman Ballin.
And yes, then she got herself a job in the arts, doing “development” at the New York Public Library. Meaning she was organizing parties for the library’s rich donors. But between when her job at Hoffman Ballin ended and when her job at the library began, she only gave herself ten days of vacation, which she used to go to Paris. And because of how little the library paid, she converted her emergency fund into an emergency clothes-and-restaurants fund.
And after barely two years at the library, she decided to quit. She said, “The library has some serious staffi ng problems.” What she meant was, “I am the best employee the New York Public Library has ever had; I’m the last one to leave every day; I do my own work and everyone else’s work too; I’m working harder at the library than I did at Hoffman Ballin.” She said, “If I’m living this sort of life, I might as well be making enough money not to have to deplete my emergency clothes-and-restaurants fund.” It’s like Jennica is so concerned with living sustainably in some financial-slash-prestige sense, but she doesn’t even think about whether she is living sustainably in an emotional sense.
See? She makes interesting decisions. She always wants to dress and eat and live so that everyone will think, “Oh, she’s friends with successful people.” But at the same time she wants to pay her own way. Rachel says, “A lot of women feel like that; money is different for women than it is for men. Women aren’t raised on the assumption that they will always be able to just make as much money as they want.” That’s one theory, but another theory is that Jennica is a Green and that we Greens all have money issues. If you put a Green in New York City and tell her to pay her own way and keep up appearances, of course she is going to work all the time.
For years, whenever Jennica came out to San Jose, which were the only vacations she would take, Rachel and I would beseech her to move to Santa Cruz. Last year, when everyone in America was moving to the Bay Area, we told her that if she moved to Santa Cruz, I would teach her Web design and Rachel would teach her to surf, and Jennica and I could go into business together doing Web stuff and Rachel and Jennica could go to the beach together every morning for exercise, and we could all buy a bungalow together somewhere, and all go shopping at the Staff of Life together and restock our communal dry goods … But Jennica wanted to stay in New York. “I feel like I haven’t done everything I want to do there yet,” she said.
When she finally quit the job at the library, she went back to Hoffman Ballin, this time to run their personnel department. She said, “Gabe, I promise I’ll quit Hoffman again as soon as I have a down payment saved.” Fine, a down payment … inManhattan. You want your older sister to be happy, but you also know that there are certain things your older sister is never going to be able to do. She lives out this self-fulfilling prophecy of anxiety. She’s successful because she works hard, but she only works hard because she is stressed out about being successful. She’s only happy because she’s unhappy. Right? I mean, I don’t mean to be harsh. But what could ever happen that would let her prove her success? And Jennica can’t live in California, because she thinks that successful people only live in New York.
JENNICA GREENnearly explains what she was doing on anuptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):
You may know this pet store. It’s on 6th Avenue and it displays Jack Russell terrier puppies in the window, or whatever’s in style. And it has this gigantic, bitchy, hoary macaw at the front of the store that sits dead still until you are right next to it and then screams its name in your ear.
I got to the pet store just before eight P.M., but it turned out that it was open until nine, so I sort of … perused. The aquarium section was very dreamy: like, dark, except for the purple lights in the tanks, and with that bubbling sound from the fish toys and with that weirdly good, silty smell? So I was dipping my finger into the water to pet the aquatic plants … Touching the turtle’s feet. Crinkling my nose at the mice. They had this whole pen of mice just beside the aquarium aisle, living in an inch of sawdust and tunneling into a stale loaf of oat bread. You feel bad for pet-store mice, since they obviously are sold as food for snakes, but I guess not bad enough that you aren’t going to buy a kitten to kill the house mouse that’s in your kitchen. Because, if it wanted to, my house mouse could go live in the loom next door, or whatever it is that guy is building, but pet-store mice have no escape.
I was working my way toward the kittens when the owner lady finally came over. She was like:
“The last time you were here, you were expressing some reluctance. You said you had issues with spontaneity and indulgence, and that you were concerned with how cat ownership by single women was perceived by single men in New York. We were discussing whether or not you should premise your day-to-day decisions on the likes and dislikes of the hypothetical male love interest.”
I like this owner. Very student-radical-feminist-turned-small-businesswoman-divorcée. Mid-fifties, obviously hanging around the Village since college for who knows what reason. You know, still smokes two cigarettes a day, wears these earthy clothes she bought in the early eighties. So I said:
“Well, he’s not hypothetical. His name is George and we’re being set up on a date by his sister.” I mean, I didn’t want the owner to think I was utterly hopeless. “Plus, I heard a mouse.” And she said:
“Okay, so you’ve reached a stage where delay is no longer emotionally viable. That’s healthy. Is there one of these kitties you have your eye on?”
And there wasn’t, really, which was one reason I kept going back. Because, I don’t want just some random cat. I want a hulking cat. One that will kind of spill over the edge of whatever he sits on. And a very intelligent cat. Because some people have these airhead cats, who obviously are unsettled by everything that is happening around them, and antsy. I don’t want one of those. I don’t want a cutesy cat, or a spastic cat. I want a cat that’s jaded. Affectionate, but coy. And I want a cat that is world-weary and a little wry. I want a well-read cat, a fat and autodidactic cat. I was trying to explain this to the lady, who … I like her, but she was giving me this look, like, Am I going to make a sale? Finally she asks me:
“Have you been to Practical Cats?” Which is their sister store, on Lex and 78th, and which only sells cats. A kitten from Practical Cats can cost from five to eight hundred dollars, but, for example, they have cats where they guarantee the cat will learn its own name. They’ve bred them for that. So she gives me their card and sells me a litter box and a bag of litter and one of those catches-the-mouse-alive traps that don’t work. And as I am going, the macaw, like, hollers in my ear.
WhatTHE MACAWhollered (Summer 2000):
Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!
JENNICA GREENfinally explains what she was doing on anuptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):
Anyway, that was Monday night. When I got home from the pet store, I set up the mousetrap, turned my air conditioner on low, and ate my leftover falafel salad out on my fire escape. Where there are no parquet floors radiating heat, and where there is a breeze to keep me cool while my air conditioner gets started, and where the only wild rodents are pigeons. And squirrels. I decided that I liked the idea of going on a date with George Hanamoto. We could get white wine at a rooftop bar somewhere; I’d been fantasizing about rooftop bars since the start of the heat wave. Maybe there was one with a pool, like on the fourth fl oor of the Fairmont. Anyway.
And I decided that I liked the idea of a store called Practical Cats. I could take a few hundred dollars out of my money market account, which supposedly is the account I use to save up for my down payment, but whatever. And I work in midtown, where Hoffman’s administrative offices are, but Tuesday morning I had a meeting at the downtown office, where our traders work, so after that meeting I could take an early lunch and go shopping for my five-to-eight-hundred-dollar cat. Which is why I was on an uptown 6 train at 10:25 A.M. on a Tuesday.
MAYNARD GOGARTYcomes within a whit of finishing the storyof what happened on the uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):
So! Half a minute south of Grand Central on an uptown No. 6 train. The skinny black kid has denounced me to the authorities, and the woman with the beauty spots has in turn denounced the skinny black kid to the authorities, saying, “Those kids are lying, and their cases are full of graffi ti pens.”
The conductor decides to take charge. She says, “Miss, I know that Mr. Peanut here”—meaning, alas, me—“didn’t pull the brake. It was someone at the front of the train.” Apparently she heard this from the motorman when she was in her booth. “I am just telling Mr. Peanut to keep his hands to himself with the brake box.” Meanwhile she is considering the boys’ trumpet cases, and so now she says, “Show me what you’ve got.”
Well—then I have my brainstorm. Oh, it cut right through the old hot and humid brain haze, this brainstorm of mine did. Follow me: if I could confuse the situation for just a moment, the conductor would have to go back into her closet to announce the next stop. Then the boys could escape when the train doors opened at Grand Central, and then I would have a lovely segue into conversation with the beauty-spotted woman on the way to 51st Street. And I knew that the woman with the beauty spots would stay on the train at least as far as 51st Street, because if she were getting off at Grand Central, why would she not have stayed on the express train back at Union Square? Ah-ha! Is my brain not infallible?
I say to the conductor—audaciously, “You are not going to search the boys’ trumpets.”
The conductor says, “Mister, I have had enough from you, and I have heard enough of your so-called opinions. Either everyone wants me to call the police in here or these two boys will show me what they’ve got.”
So! Pointing my attaché at the woman with the beauty spots, I say to the conductor, “Madam. The lady here misinterpreted what she saw. There were no graffiti pens. Very likely she saw two rambunctious black kids—.”
And just as I’d predicted, the conductor goes back into her booth to announce Grand Central. All right—mea culpa! Mea own regrettable culpa. I shouldn’t have implied that bigotry was at work in what the beautiful woman said. I shouldn’t have implied that she was only denouncing the black kids because they were—black. But I meant only to diffuse the situation. I would apologize to her on the way to 51st Street.
What I’d forgotten was that the black boys had dates in the next car up, so naturally they weren’t going to get off the train, not without their girlfriends. And I also didn’t account for another possibility.
YVETTE BENITEZ-BIRCHannounces that the train is goingexpress (early August 2000):
You cannot make it too clear for these people. I said, “Fortysecond Street, Grand Central Station. Transfer to the 4, 5, and 7 trains and the shuttle to Times Square. Ladies and gentlemen, listen up. Listen up, people. This train is making express stops only to 125th Street. Express stops only. This train will not be stopping at 51st Street, 68th Street, 77th Street, 96th Street, 103rd Street, 110th Street, or 116th Street. If you want to stop at 51st Street, 68th Street, 77th Street, 96th Street, 103rd Street, 110th Street, or 116th Street, get off this train and get on the local immediatelybehind.”
You cannot make it too clear for these people.
When we had left 42nd, I went back into the car to straighten things out. The condescending gentleman in the hat was still there, and the two little boys who had called him a liar were still there, but the woman in black was gone. She’d exited the train at 42nd to catch the local. God’s truth be told, I was relieved that the woman was gone. I do not need all this insanity. I got enough grief.
I said, “I am only surprised that you all didn’t get off the train.” I told the boys to leave the TA’s property alone, and I gave the condescending man in the hat a look to say, Mister, you are not forgiven, but you are dismissed. And then I went back in to announce 59th.
JAMES CLEVELANDtells the stupid ending to the story (earlyAugust 2000):
It’s a stupid ending to the story, I’m warning you.
For example, if you make a show about camel caravans in the Sahara for thirteen, you better show me two caravans crashing into each other in the desert and fighting. If they don’t want to fight, it’s your job to make them fight. The point being is, don’t tell stories if they only have a stupid ending, and I’m warning you that this story has a stupid ending.
Everyone left the car but me and Chief and the white guy. And the white guy had a look on his face like this all was just about what he had been expecting.
So I said, “Hey, mister.”
And Chief said, “Son, shut up!”
But if the guy in the tie wanted to get us in trouble, he would have done it already. I said, “Hey, mister, they not trumpets.”
And the guy said, “I know.”
So I said, “Then why you said they was?”
And he said, “I was trying to be nice. Stay out of trouble with those pens.” And he wanted to know where we got the cases from and if we did play the trumpet.
So I said, “We in band camp.”
And he said, “I thought maybe so.” And then he said, “I’m a musician too, and we musicians need to stand up for each other. But the trumpet is a noble instrument that deserves your respect. Don’t you neglect it.”
Making me feel guilty, like I was supposed to be practicing trumpet all day. I told you it was a stupid ending. The interesting part was later, after me and Chief ditched Brittany and Juney and Shawna.
MAYNARD GOGARTYprovides an epilogue to the story of whathappened on the uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):
I have no epilogue to the story of what happened on the uptown No. 6 train. So may I untangle myself from the res that I am inmedia of here and tell you about how I sold the rights to my fi lm, or do you demand an epilogue?
Fine, then—an epilogue:
Prevailing wisdom—that oxymoron—prevailing wisdom has it that there is something exceptional about New York, some ineffable spirit to Manhattan Island, an esprit de pays above and beyond that esprit de corps that supposedly typifies New Yorkers. The esprit de pays is the notion that Manhattan cannot be improved upon. It has something to do with how the city manifested itself in 1948 or 1957 or 1994. When, six weeks after moving into student housing at NYU, some aspiring bachelor of arts condemns as “gentrification” a proposal that a reviled East Village pervert parlor that sold only beers and massages be replaced with a bright Duane Reade that sells floss and fl oor polish and flowers? That’s the esprit de pays. When salaried Democrats braggadociously complain about the twenty-six thousand dollars they spend so that their child will not have to participate in the public schools? That’s the esprit de pays. When levelheaded retirees send lachrymose letters to the Times bewailing the fact that the MTA is retiring the horror-show redbird subway cars in favor of sleek, airy trains designed in Osaka? That’s the esprit de pays. I reject this lunacy. Because if you subscribe to the esprit de pays, then of necessity you also subscribe to the belief that the only way to be happy is to leave New York.
One form that the esprit de pays takes is the insistence—by the young and the lusty—that missed opportunities are romantic, that it is romantic that in New York no one meets anyone twice. Bosh! Esprit de pays! It is not romantic that no one meets anyone twice in New York—it is appalling! Because it means that if you believe in being reserved, you must always be alone.
So there is your epilogue, you—optimists. There is the epilogue to the story of the woman with the beauty spots whom I met—once—on a No. 6 train, uptown. Where was I?
I believe I was about to tell you about my visit with David Fowler, my lawyer, my pro bono lawyer, who will be advising me on the contract to sell the rights to my movie.
There has always been an air of default about my friendship with David. We are friends because—after knowing each other for three decades, what else can we be? Our fathers collaborated on this and that, and our mothers were always of a mind, when we were children, as to the merits of a particular teacher or the imbecility of a certain principal. In other words, I was always sent to the Fowlers’ to play—board games.
It was revolting and infuriating. David and his younger sister chewed on all the game pieces. We would play Monopoly, and when I finally controlled an entire run of properties and could begin the development of Pacific Avenue with those little green Monopoly houses that represent the first wave of urban renewal, the eaves of my newly erected units would not be properly aligned because David’s sister had gnawed on the roof lines. We would play Risk, and when David amassed an army of little plastic cubes to pour across the Bering Strait from his stronghold in Alaska, it was an army riddled with teething marks. The things children are expected to endure! Obviously, David always won. He knew all the rules to every game—he loved the rules—and if you ever threatened his victory, he would surprise you with some new rule that prevented you from doing what you wanted to do.
By a certain age—eleven, twelve—I anyway preferred my own company, and the piano, to anything else.
And in high school David became an enthusiast of role-playing games—of games that required you to fi ll out paperwork. The purpose of the paperwork was that, once complete, you were permitted to pretend that you were an elf in an iron bikini or a dwarf with a “plus-two ax.” David immersed himself in this, and when we were fifteen and going to Chatham, he tried to recruit me into his—coven, a coven which, it seemed, consisted of just him. He would sit in his room alone all summer, memorizing the rules but never actually playing the game. He even would draft his own proposed rules—how to battle ghosts, how to build a golem—and he would submit them to the publishers of these rulebooks, hoping that his bill would become a law and soon every elf in America would have to follow the Fowler Amendment when calculating the rate at which rust accumulated on her iron bikini. This—is my lawyer.
DAVID FOWLERdoes not tell a sockdolager about Gogarty (earlyAugust 2000):
Fellow I know from the City Bar works in entertainment law. Smart guy, doing very well for himself. Says, “It’s not entertainment law that’s interesting, it’s entertainment clients.” All right, Gogarty isn’t a client exactly, he’s a friend, but wait until you hear this sockdolager about him.
Manny Gogarty calls on Monday. And you know, if I have free time, which thankfully isn’t always the case, I lend him a hand, pro bono. I tell him to come by, and Tuesday morning he shows up in my reception. Comes in, covered in sweat from the subway but still looking dapper, as always, with his briefcase and his hat. And I guess he hadn’t seen my new office, which I share with a few other attorneys, other solo practitioners, because the first thing he says is, “I like this space, it suits your utilitarianism.”
I say, “It’s respectable.”
“Absolutely! Artificial ferns. Wall-to-wall carpeting, no doubt very easy to vacuum. Eight-foot ceilings with the asbestos tiles, very easy to rewire.”
I tell him, “Look, don’t scare me, those tiles aren’t asbestos. I don’t want a place that makes the clients think I’m wasting their money.”
“David,” he says, “I have never felt that you’re wasting my money.”
There is no talking to Gogarty except you feel like he’s passing judgment on you. Him telling me “I have never felt you’re wasting my money”? When he’s never even gotten me a thank-you gift? Yes, Gogarty, in fact, I do run a business, and I do have paying clients.
He says, “I think you’ve found your niche here, David. This office really goes with your look.”
“My look? What look?”
“Your shoes.”
“My shoes.”
“Black ‘leather’ tennis shoes with black stitching, black nylon laces, and thick black rubber soles.”
“What, Gogarty, you’ve got a problem with my shoes? I can wear them for anything. I can wear them running, I can wear them to court with a suit. I own one pair of shoes, they cost me forty dollars.”
“And this office space meets the same criteria. That’s what I’m saying. You are an indefatigable ascetic.”
“How’s your mother, Gogarty?”
“I am her only disappointment.”
“Your grandmother?”
“The same. Strong as a tortoise.”
Never does he ask me about my kids or my wife. You know, he’s good at heart, but he’s got such a stiff manner. Is it that he’s morbidly shy? Is it that he doesn’t want to intrude? Is it all part of his endless philosophy of dignity? Anyway, he gives me the contract. I tell him, Look, I can tell you what this says as a legal matter, but I can’t tell you whether it’s a good deal as a business matter—I know nothing about this industry. He says he just wants to understand what he’s signing away and how much money to expect. I tell him I’ll take a look. But I ask him, out of curiosity, Who’s the attorney who wrote this?
FRANNY CLEMENT, the attorney who wrote it, gives us a tourof the reception area of Herman Nathaniel LLP and tells us abouther meeting with Maynard Gogarty (early August 2000):
In our reception area, along with the white leather chairs and the white marble coffee tables and the white, muggy view of Jersey City, New Jersey, is an enlarged replica of a famous Japanese bonsai. Now most bonsai are planted in earthenware trays that are as shallow as wasabi dishes, but the trough holding our bonsai is made from marble and is over two feet deep. And instead of being only a few inches high, our bonsai trees are over twelve feet high. And instead of dwarf pines, the trees in our bonsai are fully mature junipers. But otherwise our bonsai is a to-scale replica of a planting of seven trees that was given as part of a famous dowry in seventeenth-century Japan. Welcome to Herman Nathaniel LLP; our receptionists are allegedly happy to bring you a beverage while you wait.
Now, Mr. Gogarty did not exactly look at home in our lobby. He was standing on an open patch of white marble tile, as far as he could be from our bonsai and our chairs and our receptionists, with his old brown briefcase leaning against his calf as if he were afraid to set it down on any of our four white marble coffee tables. And he was ventilating himself, one hand pumping the breast of his jacket in and out to get air to his chest, the other one beating his hat up and down beside his cheek to get air down his collar. He was dressed for summer, but so was Gene Kelly in Inherit the Wind.
But let me come to the point. The reason I had invited Mr. Gogarty down to our offices was that one of my clients is ITD Records, of Long Island City, New York. ITD stands for “intent to distribute.” As in “possession of a controlled narcotic with.” Obviously, ITD is a pro bono client. And they had just signed a new performer who was so very, very prolific, but so very, very unconcerned with copyright difficulties. Puppy Jones! Now, for the most part I had been able to track down permissions for Mr. Jones, but Mr. Gogarty seemed to hold the exclusive rights to his own music, and seems to have sold Mr. Jones a CD at Sundance for five dollars, with no contact information.
Isn’t that quaint? And isn’t that the sort of thing I want to spend my time on, at one in the morning, after I am done with the work for our paying clients? And isn’t it generous of the partners in the Intellectual Property Department at Herman Nathaniel LLP to allow their sixth-year associates to take on as much pro bono work as they like, but only as long as it “does not interfere with other assignments”?
MAYNARD GOGARTYmoves right along (early August 2000):
I knew from her voice on the phone that Franny would be black, but I wasn’t expecting her to be so—short. An air of seriousness about her, which I always trust and admire, but it was beaten in with sarcasm, which I sometimes distrust. She had extravagant artificial braids affixed to her scalp by one of those mysterious methods hairstylists have, involving seared knots. But her skirt was a conformist gray, and her blouse was that ditto-ink purple that people are wearing this season, and wrinkled at the elbows. So—a short, sarcastic woman carrying an accordion folder.
She took one look at me and my boater and decided to hustle me out of her office. She insisted that we—talk—over breakfast, and she led me to a deli a block and a half away, just far enough to vanquish any reservoirs of cool I had gathered in my shirt while in her lobby. May I tell you what she ate for breakfast, this woman who wants to buy the rights to my movie?
Bivouacked in the middle of the deli to which she led me was—a breakfast buffet. Many different dishes, each one isolated, like radium, in a deep aluminum pan and suspended above a steaming bath of water. One hundred dishes, one single uncanny smell. Uncanny because it is the same smell that is in every deli in Manhattan now, a mixture of dishwater and barbecue sauce. Some dishes had their own aluminum spoons or tongs; other dishes did not. So, for example, if a man wanted a late breakfast of waffles and bananas, he would have to use the tongs from the sausage links to pinch up each—sodden waffl e, and would have to use the spoon from the ranchero-style scrambled eggs to fish bananas out of the fruit cocktail. Did I mention, too, that there were chicken wings? Not a popular breakfast item, chicken wings, but, aswim in their sauce, in their oily red and fatty brown sauce, very psychedelic.
For breakfast Franny had stewed strawberries over Belgian waffles, with ketchup-coated hash browns on the side—except the hash browns were more like hash pales. When she attempted to stab one of her stewed strawberries with her plastic fork, the strawberry would slip away from her and bolt for safety toward the hash browns. But Franny would not give up. She would pursue the strawberry, with her fork, into the mire of the ketchup, where she would be able to spear it at last, and then—she would eat the ketchup-covered strawberry. This is how breakfast is taken by the woman who wants to buy the rights to my movie. Me, I drank coffee.
While Franny ate, she felt she could be casual with me. She said, “Now, shame on you, Franny, shame on you, but—I have not seen the movie.”
I told her, “It’s not too late. It’s playing on Saturday at the Pioneer Theater, the one behind that—pizzeria. You should come. It seems there is a problem with the pizzeria’s piano; otherwise I would accompany the fi lm live.”
“Like a silent movie!”
“Or, well, when I think of a silent movie, I always think that something is missing. A silent movie is a movie that is missing sound. I prefer to think of Unseemly as missing nothing. Unseemly is not so much a movie minus sound as a piano recital plus miraculous light show.”
“The proud father! But tell me what it’s about.”
That question, always that question, that question of what something is—about. So I told her what my movie is about, and I gave her the long version, including how I built the hidden camera and how I set my ambushes. Then came the awkward moment. It always comes.
She said, “It sounds like the kind of thing I’d never see on HBO.”
And I said, “Yes, well, a dignified life does, after all, involve very little television.”
And she said, “We all have our weaknesses.”
And I said, “I suppose so.”
There we were, she looking at me as though I had insulted her, and I baffled as to what I had said wrong. Something in my expression makes people believe that I am not—nice. Something in how I look at the remains of their buffet breakfasts.
Franny finishes her ketchupy strawberries, and out comes her accordion folder, and out comes her contract, and out comes the truth. Her client is not interested in buying all the rights to the movie, only the rights to the music. He is not even interested in buying all the rights to the music, only the right to use certain samples—in hip-hop. In other words, she wants me to sell Unseemly for scrap. She explains the terms to me, and I—.
Hope is the most private emotion. I won’t bore you or embarrass myself by relaying all that I had hoped. But I had hoped, without telling anyone, for so much. Despite all the backwater film festivals and despite all the debt—I had hoped for so much. And now Unseemly’s run was nearly through, and—there it was: Franny Clement represented a record label that represented a singer who wanted to sample my music. That was what my hopes had been reduced to. I told her I would look the contract over, but—I knew I was in no position to refuse. How could I refuse? My personal credit card debt from the movie being another res that I am in media of.
We said goodbye, and I slogged over to the No. 6 train with the contract in my attaché case, in order to go uptown, where David Fowler could help me assess my quadrennial half-pint of success.
PUPPY JONESrecounts his trip to the Sundance Film Festival (early August 2000):
Mr. Maynard Gogarty! The man changed my philosophy.
I was living in Venice at the time, Venice Beach, California, and I had my little thing going on as Deejay Peejay. At the time. And some friends had some friends who had a condominium in Park City, Utah, and they told me they would give me five hundred dollars, plus tip, plus drinks, plus a bed, if I would spin at their Sundance party. Five hundred dollars was equal to my rent in Venice. At the time. They told me, “You can get a ride to Park City with Bez, the half-Asian bisexual.” You see what I’m saying.
I’m saying fourteen hours in a Mercedes from Venice Beach, California, to Park City, Utah, with a half-Asian bisexual actress named Bez Bekamilui. Dreadlocks, industry talk, daddy is in real estate, boyfriend is in Sydney, Australia. Complaining about being celibate because her boyfriend is in Sydney, Australia. You see what I’m saying. We left at seven in the morning. She did her yoga, she didn’t shower, she got in her car, she picked me up in Venice with the equipment I rented, and we drove to Utah. Fourteen hours, smelling her unshowered bisexual hooch-naynay yoga sweat. My feet up on the equipment I rented because there’s not enough room in her trunk. Bez talking about pornography, eating her McDonald’s french fries. Dipping the McDonald’s french fries in the Thousand Island dressing, telling me it reminds her of come. You see what I’m saying. I’m saying Jones is still smelling her hooch-naynay over the smell of the french fries.
We get to the condo in Park City, Utah, which turns out to be nowhere near Park City, Utah. It’s late at night, and they assign me to a loft bed. A loft bed in the living room. This is the bed that the families put the eight-year-old in when they rent the condo for skiing. Puppy Jones in the baby bed, Bez Bekamilui in a bedroom all by herself. No respect for the deejay. You see what I’m saying.
The next morning at nine A.M., Bez comes into the living room to do her yoga and her chanting, and she wakes Jones up. Rest of the condo sleeps through it, but Jones wakes up. Half-Asian bisexual yoga going on six feet underneath Jones? Half-Asian bisexual ass in the air, with the incense burning? Who’s Jones making coffee for? But Bez sez: “I don’t drink coffee, I brought my own yerba maté. I’m into the maté latte.”
Bez sez she’s going to see all the short films that morning after her mate latte. Who’s following behind her? Who’s following behind her like a good little puppy dog? That’s all I’m saying. All I’m saying is at twelve noon, Jones and Bez go sit in the dark together. Where they see a short film by a Mr. Maynard Gogarty.
Mr. Maynard Gogarty: director, cinematographer, pianist, destroyer of worlds. Here is a man who is doing the work! In the theater, in the dark, Bez expropriates Jones’s box of jujubes, puts it between her legs. A jumbo box of jujubes is right up in there next to the hooch-naynay, and Jones doesn’t even notice. I don’t even notice, because I am being shown Unseemly, by Mr. Maynard Gogarty. And when the movie is over, there is some Q and there is some A.
Bez wants to leave, but I tell her, “No, I want to hear the man.” So we hear some Q, we hear some A, and I sez to Bez, “The man is a genius.”
And Bez sez, “He’s just full of himself. He was insulting the other directors, and they knew it. It was rude.”
Bez did not want to hear the message. Mr. Maynard Gogarty’s movie was addressed to her soul, but her soul was not ready for the work! But Jones’s soul? Ready for the work! I’ll fi nish off the story for you about Sundance. I do my Deejay Peejay thing at the party. A little of this, little of that, home at four A.M., five hundred dollars in my pocket. Plus drinks. Plus tip. Minus the cost of the cab to take me and the equipment back to the condo, because Bez never came to the party to get me.
But next morning, nine A.M., there she is with her yoga and her chanting, burning the incense and waking me up. Who’s out of his cradle in the treetops, making coffee and maté latte?
“Sorry I didn’t see you last night, Bez. Want some maté latte?”
And she tells me, “Yeah, sorry. I wanted to come to your party, but I was tired. Also, I met this guy last night? Who needs a ride back to L.A. today? So do you think you could find another way back to Venice?”
On a normal morning, what would Jones have said? Because Jones is such a puppy dog? “Okay, Bez. I’ll find another way back to Venice. Just like I found another way back to the condo last night. I’ll just ignore that you’ve been swinging your hooch-naynay in my face for three days and that you promised to take me back to California.”
But this is not a normal morning. This is New Year’s Day. Year One, Post-Gogarty. Seeing the man’s film and listening to the man’s A when the man got a Q, it changed my philosophy. So when Bez sez, “Do you think you could find another way back to Venice,” I say, “No, Bez, no, I do not. You were supposed to take me back, you shall take me back. You shall inform the other dude of your mistake, and you shall take me back.”
Do I even need to tell you that she took me back? Do I even need to tell you that she is not being faithful to the boyfriend in Sydney, Australia?
DAVID FOWLER delivers his sockdolager (early August 2000):
The sockdolager. On his way out, after he’s given me the contract, I ask Gogarty if he’s seeing anyone these days. He draws to a halt, theatrically. Takes off his hat, which he had just put on.
“Is what I’m telling you confi dential?”
“Gogarty. It goes without saying.”
“I’ll be needing your help with a divorce in a few months’ time, David.”
“Who’s getting divorced?”
“I am.”
“You are. From who?”
“My wife.”
“Your wife. This is some sort of metaphor, Gogarty, or did I miss something? For example, the wedding? Your wedding ring is what, invisible?”
“That’s why this is confi dential.”
“Okay. I apologize. Start from the beginning.”
“Remember Ana, the German girl, the photographer, the maniac?”
“Very vaguely. She was in your life, when, mid-nineties?”
And I did remember her. She lived with him at the place in Gramercy. She was a gorgeous girl, but a bit terrifying. When she learned I was a lawyer, she said, “How can you stand all these typical days you must have?” A real charmer. But then again, maybe the bad attitude is what she and Gogarty liked about each other. Gogarty starts to tell me about this divorce he needs, and within two sentences I cut him off, because I don’t want to be disbarred. Not for some INS bullshit!
ANA KAGANOVAdefies a polite question about what her typicalday is like (early August 2000):
Typical days are for other people, weiß’ du? You want to see my typical day? Here, here is my typical day:
STEFAN MAYRreports on the front page of Berlin Blick (June27, 1979, translated from the original German):
EXCLUSIVE! ONLY IN B. BLICK!
“I Came from an Ape”
EAST GERMAN BEAUTY ESCAPES COMMIES INSIDE WORLD-FAMOUS GORILLA
BERLIN, 27.6: When the 1.8-meter-tall, eighteen-year-old Venus from Karl Marx Allee walked into the police station in Wedding last Tuesday, the officers on duty could not believe their eyes. But when she told them how she escaped from the East, it was their ears they could not believe! In an exclusive interview with B. BLICK, Ana Kaganova told of her fl ight to freedom—inside a gorilla!
“I always dreamed of life in the West,” said Ana, who sat with a B. BLICK reporter this weekend and unfolded a harrowing tale of intrigue, romance, and courage! “I only needed an opportunity.”
Love gave her the opportunity in May, when her West German boyfriend, a student whom she met at a youth conference in Danzig last winter, made contact with a smuggler named Wolfi.
“Wolfi wanted six thousand marks to bring me west, which my boyfriend was able to borrow from his parents and his friends,” Ana said, enjoying an American cigarette and a French café au lait at a bar off the Ku’damm. “The next step was for Wolfi to meet me in the East. For several weekends we met for beer in Marzahn, where he traveled on a fake day pass as an Austrian diplomat. He wanted to establish a pattern, so that we would not raise suspicions on the day of the escape.
“On the fourth visit, he told me he had a plan. I was to meet him the next Saturday morning at ten o’clock, but he would tell me nothing more!
“I couldn’t tell anyone what I was doing, or thinking, and yet I had so many people to say goodbye to! How could I tell them that I might never see them again? And yet I was in love, and I had so many hopes for my new life of freedom!”
When the appointed day came at last, Wolfi arrived in a truck, accompanied by a stranger named Klaus. All three climbed into the truck’s rear cabin, and they closed the door behind them.
“At first I didn’t know what to expect. Wolfi still had not told me the plan. I thought that maybe he was going to hide me inside the wheel panels; I had heard of such escapes before. But I never could have expected what was waiting for me instead!
“Inside the truck was a stuffed gorilla!”
It was Bobby, the prize possession of the Commie Museum of Natural History. Bobby the Gorilla was born in French Africa in 1924, but in 1928 he was purchased by the Weimar authorities at the Berlin Zoo. Bobby was among the first great apes to arrive in Europe, and his gentleness and size made him the zoo’s favorite attraction and Berlin’s leading citizen. Even as the dark hour of Nazism descended on Germany, Bobby provided hope to decent Berliners, an ambassador of peace in troubled times.
When Bobby died in 1934, at the young age of ten, all the newspapers in Berlin ran obituaries commemorating his heroic life. And so, in a bald play for public sympathy, the Nazi authorities had Bobby taxidermied and put on display in the Berlin Museum of Natural History.
Ana picks up the story from there: “Wolfi had impersonated a museum curator from the West and had convinced the head of the Museum of Natural History to lend him Bobby for one week, as part of an international exhibition on the history of taxidermy in Germany. And the museum believed him!
“Wolfi had faked many documents, including the necessary insurance bonds from the West. And he had all the necessary paperwork from the East to bring Bobby through the checkpoint. All we needed to do was get me inside Bobby!
“Klaus was an expert taxidermist brought in especially for the operation. It took Klaus four hours to open Bobby up, carve out a place for me to curl into, and then sew Bobby shut again. But this is exactly what he did!
“It was very uncomfortable inside the ape. Bobby smelled like chemicals, and it was hard to breathe. I had to sit with my head between my knees, because that was the only way for me to fit inside Bobby’s belly.” The Amazonian Ana demonstrated this feat for B. BLICK’s photographers, in the full-color recreation attached.
“At the border, I was very nervous! I heard the border guards questioning Wolfi, but all the paperwork checked out, and so they let us through! Then it was just a matter of letting me out and sewing Bobby back up.
“For the next week I hid in a hotel room in Wedding with my boyfriend, until we heard from Wolfi that Bobby had been safely returned to the East. And then I went straight to the police to tell my story! I was so happy to be free at last!”
Both “Wolfi” and Ana’s boyfriend declined to be interviewed by B. BLICK for fear of prosecution by the West German authorities for their roles in faking the necessary paperwork. The Museum of Natural History could not be reached for comment.
ANA KAGANOVAaddresses, sort of, a polite question about whather typical day is like (early August 2000):
This is the sort of typical day that I had in 1979. Now my typical day, I have to get from Hano a donkey head.
I do have in actuality the one typical thing, which is to go to the bodega and buy coffee in a paper cup. This is the true symbol of America, the paper cup for coffee, with the plastic lid so that the coffee is not spilling. In America you can hurry while you drink a cup of coffee. So there for you is my one typical thing.
But today my goal was that I needed to charm Hano so that he would give me the donkey head. He already promised that he would give it to me, but when he made this promise, he sounded reluctant. I think perhaps he does not trust me with it, because I have told him too many stories and he thinks I am a criminal. I told him for example what I do when I must style a shoot that has no budget and we need for example an anonymous black sweater: I buy it from the Gap, and I use it in the shoot, and I make sure that the model is not stinking it up with her armpits when we are in the sun all day on the beach at the Howard Johnson’s at Asbury Park in New Jersey, and then I return the sweater to the Gap for the full refund. Hano said, when I explained this to him, that one day I would be arrested. He is never alarmed, but this story about the Gap alarmed him. And I think when I asked him would he give me the donkey head, he thought, Oh no, Ana will lose it to the police.
My idea was to bring therefore breakfast to Hano, as a charm, because he goes always early in the morning to his studio without eating. So I stopped at a Chinese bakery and spent ten dollars on rolls. Ten dollars buys a gargantuan bag of Chinese rolls, but even after I bought the rolls, I felt that I needed more of a charm. So I bought also crabs at the Chinese fish market. The blue crabs, that are alive. They were very hale, and did not have even bubbles at their mouths, even though they were in a tub without water and it is August.
With the crabs and the rolls I arrived finally at Hano’s lobby, and got the visitor pass, and took the elevator up. He has a studio on the ninety-first floor of Tower One at the World Trade Center. It is so tall, this Tower One, that you must change elevators at a sky lobby on the seventy-eighth floor. And you meet always the ugliest people there. But this is where Hano has his studio, down the hall from the boys who did the balcony thing. I came to his door, and he was at work on something that was built from glass.
“Hi, Hano! I have brought you breakfast.”
“Hi, Ana.”
“What do you mean, ‘Hi, Ana,’ as if every day I am coming and it is not a surprise to see me. You! How are you?”
“You called ahead and I am getting you past security, so it cannot be a surprise.”
“You can try despite this to be happy.”
This is how he is, always not impressed. To make his point he scrubbed his glass sculpture for a while still before he got up to kiss me. Hano has all of his hair shaven off, and he has the eyes that often gay men have. Weiß’ du, the deep eyes, with dark eyelids and very feminine eyelashes. With these eyes and his hair shaven off, Hano looks like a man from the future. He said “Hi” while he kissed my cheeks.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Yes, Hano. Look what I have along for breakfast! Delicious.”
“God in heaven! They live. They are a wonderful blue. We perhaps can boil them alive in my coffeepot?”
“Do not be this way. Act surprised at my crabs. What sort of demon are you that you every day eat blue crabs for breakfast and are not surprised when I bring you beautiful crabs as blue as the sky?”
“Look, Ana, it is August and the sky is gray. I am surprised. Do you have butter for these crabs?”
“Do not be this way. I have also along twelve kilos of Chinese pastry.”
“God in heaven, breakfast!”
“Now you act surprised.”
We sat on the floor and ate the Chinese pastries. Hano makes recreations. He sewed a recreation of the golden dresses from this painting by Klimt with the many girls and then hung them on a rack under the plastic dry-cleaning bags. This sold for many thousands of dollars. He did the same for this Raphael with all the philosophers. But now he is tired of clothes and dry-cleaning bags, and he wants to build a glass freezer. What he imagines is to recreate the menu of a Dutch still life, with pheasant and fruits and bread. And then he wants to put all of it in Ziploc bags and freeze it in a glass case, like leftovers. But this was very difficult. Because his freezers have mist and icicles. So while we ate, we put the blue crabs into one of his failed glass freezers.
HANO MOLTKEexplains the pantomime eyes (early August2000):
Ana had seen the donkey head at one of my parties in Red Hook. When she asked if she could borrow it for a shoot, I said by all means. I only wish that she had not made this gesture with the blue crabs. What does she want me to think? “Oh, Ana, you are so surreal, because you brought me live blue crabs.” I already knew that she was a little bit of a fiend, without the crabs. She is proud that she is a fiend. In the morning, if she needs to go downtown, she waits for a businessman to hail a cab on 2nd Avenue, she asks him if she may share the cab, and when they have gone almost all the way downtown and have stopped in traffi c, she gets out and walks away. She does not say anything or pay anything, she only walks away. She thinks that businessmen will not chase her, because they are too rich and too busy. I told her that someday she would be arrested, and she laughed at me. So she is a little bit evil, I think.
But the donkey is a little bit evil too. Michael and I bought it in Honduras, and I paid too much. But one feels silly in these villages trying for a bargain, and how could I resist a stuffed donkey’s head? Originally it had glass eyes, with corneas that were orange, but those I took immediately out, because they made the whole donkey look haunted by regret. When we were back in Red Hook, Michael and I had it over our dishes, with no eyes. It was very spooky. But then the cord that held it up over the dishes snapped, and the donkey head in the middle of the night fell down and broke Michael’s porcelain. Also the hide got wet and started to smell funny. Michael said that the donkey was therefore a thing of evil and must go to my studio.
But it was Michael who found for me at a yard sale the plastic eyes from a pantomime horse, which I sewed over the original eye sockets. And now the pantomime eyes give the whole donkey head a comic appearance.
I asked Ana, while we ate the Chinese breads, for what did she need to borrow the donkey head, and she said, “It is for the NewYork Times Magazine.” This is standard for her, to hide at first her true motive, until you have agreed to her plan. Ana asked me to do her a favor and lend her the donkey head, but in fact the favor is not for Ana, it is for the New York Times Magazine. Someone has a new line of denims for winter, and Ana wants to do a shoot inspired from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So she needs my donkey head, because of this donkey man who is in A MidsummerNight’s Dream. She wants to have a model in her shoot who will be naked, except that he will wear the jeans, naturally, and the donkey head. And he will float in the middle of a flock of fairies, who will be nude except for their wings. It all seems very crass to me, but Ana must have quite a budget, and so for her it must be a triumph. Every photographer whom I know is obsessed with this New York Times Magazine.
ANA KAGANOVA explains her obsession (early August 2000):
Tja, I have to make money somehow.
NADINE HANAMOTOexplains Jennica’s obsession (early August 2000):
Jenny hasn’t told you how obsessed she was about George when we were in high school, and it’s because she’s embarrassed. It didn’t start on the day of Loma Prieta, either. Loma Prieta was just what brought it to the surface. We were sitting in my car a few minutes after the earthquake, listening to KGO. And the callers and the reporters were like, the earthquake was magnitude 8.0; the Bay Bridge has had an epileptic seizure and has fallen over into the bay; there has been an avalanche in Santa Cruz and the redwood grove at Elfland is now on top of the roller coaster at the boardwalk; the seventeen ounces of plutonium that they store at U.C. Berkeley have melted down and now Telegraph Avenue has become the new Chernobyl; this was the big one. And we believed it, because it was on KGO. And so I said, “I wonder if my brother is okay.” And because Jenny was obsessed, it became her mission to find my brother.

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