Emma Who Saved My Life (51 page)

It was going to mean the dreaded bear hug, or worse … kissing the … NO! NOT THAT! Anything but that! I decided I better cut this short before a real demonstration of fealty was called for. So I ran to Odessa, tried to embrace her, got it over with, assuring her that neither Matt nor I had ever slandered her—I tried, Matt, I promise I tried to get you out of it too. Alas, Matt later denied nothing and stormed out, ending their affiliation. Odessa—we both realized—made this big show of being the sensitive best friend, your surrogate mother (“Huhney, I'm an artist too in my own way—you are my work, you are my devotion…”) but in reality all the hurt-Odessa, wounded-Odessa stuff was crap: she was a MEAN old bitch who was plotting her revenge, she would get you back. I heard her afterward, after Matt got signed for this movie, say, “He'll be sawwry he ever crossed my path—just wait till I get ahold of the Page Three at the
Post
—I'll call Tommy at the
Post,
I will, and tell him about Matt's
boyfriend.
That'll make intristin' reading, won't it?” Then an evil cackle. I made a mental note: Leave on good terms.

I would always depart Odessa's office on 42nd Street and feel worthless, prostituted, for having hugged Odessa, and I repeatedly fought the feeling:
It's starting again,
it's turning bad—every three years or so you hit the slump and this is it.

“But Gil, huhney, if this show goes to Broadway—”

Odessa, NO WAY.
Rigatonio
is two hours of actors degrading themselves, the jokes aren't funny, it's an insult to Italian-Americans everywhere, the music is thin, the book is nonexistent, the producer is an idiot—

“Gil darlin', this is not your first time out, huhney. A little professionalism, hm? Would you rather
not
have a paycheck?”

Yes, here, Betsy, was where I should have spoken up and told Odessa
yes,
I'd rather starve than sink in a project that was willfully, inevitably doomed. But was I bringing in the big bucks for Odessa? Was I some kind of big-name star that could afford not to take a job? No, I wasn't. Odessa might well have been relieved to get rid of me, one less unemployable actor on her books. So I was a trouper about it.

As Betsy reported, I intended to move into a place with Emma within the next month. Emma's lease was running out, mine was running out at the Ruizes'. It was a simple matter: we had to go out and find a cheap place we both liked in a fascinating neighborhood near a subway stop. With twenty days to go before moving day, I don't think either of us had as much as opened the Real Estate page in the paper.

After rehearsal, I would trudge to Emma's (formerly Emma's and Janet's) place and drink all her booze.

“Another fun afternoon in Queens?” she'd ask, proffering a bourbon and soda in the act of opening the apartment door to let me in.

(On top of everything else, this bomb was opening in
Queens,
at the Jackson Heights Playhouse. It couldn't even crawl respectably to Boston or New Haven or Philly or downtown at a small experimental theater. Queens. As close to the heart of the New York Theater World as Saskatchewan.)

“See how packed up I am?” Emma asked, with outspread arms.

I can't say it looks like you've done a thing.

“That's because I
haven't
done a thing. After enduring work it's impossible to come home and do more work.”

Emma had this full-time job now. She had made more money, actually, doing temp work. She had landed this primo set-up where she typed in law case books on a computer for law firms through the night—$14 an hour, $20 an hour on weekends. But she claimed that wasn't enough money for her.

“I gotta get a permanent job with major medical benefits,” she kept saying. “These psychiatrists and pharmacists are eating me alive.” You could not go to see them, I suggest, not take so much medicine, I add. “My life is completely
together
these days, Gil. Why stop doing what's brought me back to mental health?” And so she stopped temping and took a job at Hutchinson & Parks, a public-relations firm. She wrote hype for various products.

Emma flopped down on the sofa. “Today was a red-letter day in my writing life,” she said.

Yeah?

“Wanna see what I produced, what I wrote, what my mind and talents and
craft
engendered?” She craned for her purse which hung on the back of a nearby chair. She fished out of it a folded Xerox of a letter. “Enjoy,” she said, handing it to me.

Dear Client,

Congratulations! Our man in the field told us your Pansy-Fresh Room Deodorant display rack and poster was
front and center
in your place of business … and WE appreciate that. We really do. Accept the pocket calculator as our way of saying thanks for your support on the 1981 Pansy-Fresh “Always Fresh” campaign.

As you know the Pansy-Fresh giveaway is underway—some lucky customer from the New York area is going to an island paradise of their choice (in connection with the ad: “A tropical paradise in your living room”). But read the fine print! One of our lucky distributors is going to be Tahiti-bound as well! Could it be you? Please don't miss the opportunity of filling in your entry blanks. Only three weeks left to enter! Figure it on your new calculator!

Once again, thank you for your support. By providing a consistent outlet for the Pansy-Fresh Room Deodorant giveaway and by selling our scent-sational product, you are a valued member of our Pansy-Fresh team. Keep up the GOOD WORK!

Sincerely,

Kay-Anne Madden

Vice President,

Pansy-Fresh Marketing

This woman is a vice president, huh?

“Oh she never sees it. We have one of those automatic signature machines that signs hundreds of these letters. It's all a sham to make the distributor feel involved, and not just a tool, a cog, a stooge.”

Well, I say, smiling. It's money.

Pause. I was waiting for it: “I'm a complete whore, Gil. What if future literary historians discover I had anything to do with shit like this? ‘Scent-sational,' Gil. Did you catch that?”

Yeah I caught that.

“‘Scent-sational.'
Utter whoredom.
God, I felt better about the phone sex.” Sadly, the phone sex had ended as before, with some middle-aged creep trying to trace Emma's number, calling her up, saying he knew who she was, that he was going to get her and consummate his love for her. She called the police, she got new locks for the door, she got paranoid, and now, just as well, she was moving.

“So no, to finish my thought,” she went on, “I haven't packed. And when Janet left for Jersey, she left me all this crap of hers, every feminist gazette and newspaper for the last twenty years. I'm supposed to haul this library around with me, I take it.”

Let's have another bourbon. I poured them.

“Any luck on a new apartment?” she said, after a sip.

None whatsoever.

“Well hell it's getting desperate. Let's go to a realtor and pay a fee. We're both working.”

I'm not working, I'm digging my own grave out there in Queens. We got our co-stars signed today. Florence Crayfield is the actress—

“That old bag still alive?”

Yep. And the daughter is going to be someone named Charity Glenn.

Emma stirred. “I've heard of her.”

I couldn't tell you from where. She's done a lot of TV work I think, playing teenagers, child prostitutes, young girls raped in prison, usual family TV fare.

“I know that name from somewhere else…” Emma mused. “Well, they're not exactly big names are they?”

No, they pitched the thing to everyone respectable. Florence Crayfield does local game shows, opens shopping centers, turns out for the celebrity car wash. No one really “working” would touch this thing: a fledgling, sure-to-close musical in Queens.

“Gil, you've been in worse things,” Emma offered.

Yeah, at twenty-three, at twenty-five. It's getting old. I'd rather do waiter work than this.

Rigatonio,
music and lyrics by Gale and Audrey Cooper, responsible for
Beaver!,
a musical romp based on
Leave It to Beaver,
very camp, very bad, closed in three days, and for
What's Your Sign?,
a revue based on the signs of the Zodiac, everyone in stupid costumes (imagine Pisces, imagine Cancer) singing songs and telling jokes about their respective characteristics … Their last two projects hadn't gotten
this
far. The book was by Dik Kline (yeah, he spelled his name D-I-K) who had never written anything produced before. Do you think he had some connection to Garth W. Kline, our producer? Garth W. Kline introduced himself the first night:

“Hello, cast, crew, staff, my name is Garth W. Kline, from Garth W. Kline Enterprises, and this is part of a new, a brand-new division of Garth W. Kline Enterprises, Garth W. Kline Productions, and you'll be seeing that name on your paychecks, heh heh…” That was a joke. “I want you to know that we're family, that I'm open to you and your ideas and together we'll take Garth W. Kline Productions to the same success we have had with Garth W. Kline Enterprises…”

Lord, if you could grant us lowly thespians one wish: Save us from
businessmen,
show us Thy mercy.

We had a director, Silas … Damn, I can't remember his name, but then he had no personality, no purpose except to sit beside Garth W. Kline and agree with everything Garth W. Kline said. If Silas dared to direct an action, block a scene—“A little to the right, Gil”— Garth W. Kline would be up, saying, “I think left, actually,” and Silas would go yessir yessir. Garth W. Kline, founder of Garth W. Kline Aluminum Siding, Garth W. Kline Plastics, and Garth W. Kline Refrigeration Units, all subsidiaries of Garth W. Kline Enterprises.

The plot? It was sort of a free-form rhapsody on the subject of Italianness—on the stereotype, rather. We're all running around in Renaissance costumes, as if it's Verona in the 1500s. Mrs. Lotsamoola is Florence Crayfield (drunk before lunch each day) and she has a lovely daughter, Charity Glenn (an insufferable BRAT who seems five but was actually a little older than me, who was making $20,000 up front to my $275 a week before taxes). Meanwhile, there's a lowly pasta-maker in town (modern dress, chef's hat, not-so-comic anachronisms) and he has a son, Rigatoni Fozzuli. Papa Fozzuli has two great numbers in the first act; “Meatballs”—

There's a speecy spicy speecy spicy meatbaaaawwwlll,

On top of a pretty pile a spaghetti for yooooou

A speecy spicy speecy spicy meatbaaaawwwlll,

Plate a pasta for your luncha

It don't costa very mucha

But you musta not say BASTA/to my pasta

fazoooo!

You don't have to know the music to that one to get the idea. The second showstopper was “Rigatoni,” the title number. Papa Fozzuli comes out on stage cradling the baby Rigatoni and is trying to think of a name for him …

A name upon ya/like lasagne

Ah, that ain't right for yooooo …

Call a fella/tagliatelle

What's a papa to do?

Papa Fozzuli goes through every pasta name in the book until he decides to name his kid Macaroni Pepperoni Rigatoni Fozzuli—his mama calls him Rigatoni for short. This number includes a pizza tossing sequence where instead of a dough pie, Papa tosses the dollbaby up and down like a pizza. Inevitably, the man playing Papa (usually in the bar with Florence Crayfield, also drunk by noon) would drop the baby in rehearsals.

I played Antonio, the greedy suitor for Charity Glenn's (Elisabetta's) hand. Of course, I'm going to lose out and Rigatoni, poor boy from the streets, wins her favor. By the end of the play we get (1) a peasant grape-stomping scene, (2) a lot of godfather-Mafia jokes as Rigatoni is pursued by Verona's sixteenth-century equivalent of the Mob (in '30s gangsters' suits, of course), (3) a subplot of drunken friars and nuns, (4) a Mussolini takeoff, and (5) an Italian film director who wants to put Elisabetta in the Commedia dell'Arte. A jumble of stereotype, a rich interwoven tapestry of insulting kitsch.

“
Rigatonio,
huh?” said Emma, giggling over the script. “I feel it is my duty to point out that
rigettare
is the verb ‘to vomit.'” Otherwise Emma loved it. “It's brilliant, Gil—makes me proud to be a quarter Italian-American. Why are you complaining? If you
tried
to write something this bad, you couldn't do it … It's a masterpiece!”

And as rehearsals went on, it became obvious to me that I was going to have to throttle Charity Glenn.

“Mr. Kline,” she'd nag, in mid-scene, 10:50 at night, everyone tired and cranky. “I think this needs another verse. Why would she wander out on this balcony waiting for love and just sing one verse?”

Garth W. Kline explained that the songwriter only wrote one verse of her first-act song. It would be reprised in full at the end.

“It's not worth my while singing just one verse. I want another verse—look, people are here to see this Elisabetta fall in love—I mean I need a bigger scene.”

And what a stage hog she was. Lingering at doorways, holding notes forever, always a piece of business to distract from other people's scenes. And the worst thing for me was I HAD NO ALLY, I had no Bonnie McHenry, I
alone,
apparently, seemed to think this was trash.

Neither Emma nor I could deal with apartment hunting so we gave in and called a realtor. In a week we found one acceptable place, Seventh Avenue and 26th, a big ten-story building full of old people hanging on to their leases and their beautiful, spacious, last-century apartments.

It was up-and-coming, promised our agent.

“What's the name of this up-and-coming neighborhood?” Emma asked.

“It's so up-and-coming,” said the agent, “it doesn't even have a name yet.”