Emma Who Saved My Life (53 page)

Mrs. Jackson had come down on the bus with them and had a look of stern disapproval: “You two have got the devil in you tonight. Now you both get some coffee in you, and stop talkin' this trash.”

The more Mrs. Jackson got after them, the more they kept telling these foul old stories. “So she tells me,” said Moze, through laughter, imitating a girl's voice, “‘Moses, you sonuvabitch, that's the LAST time yo' hands are touchin' my booty!'”

Mr. Jackson and Moze were in hysterics, and Valene laughed along.

“I think we've had enough of your foul mouth tonight, Moses,” said Mrs. Jackson, hands on hips. “Buncha twelve-year-olds, you are, sniggerin' over
booty.
”

Moze: “You had to see this woman's booty, Evelyn—”

“Tom Jackson,” his wife began, “now you straighten up. You got fifty orders there, now get to it 'fore people up and walk outa here.”

At five-minute intervals this incredible burst of high-pitched hysterical laughter would explode in the kitchen, way up high where only drunk men who've been laughing all night or little girls can laugh. Valene couldn't stop laughing either. “They's talkin' 'bout Booty Patootie, this stripper Moze used to go with,” Valene whispered. “He always talks about Booty Patootie when he gets drunk. I don't think she ever was, myself—I think he made her up.”

I got tickled too. Everytime I went to pick up my orders both men were back there trying to keep a sober face, but we'd all make eye contact and we'd all start giggling again.

“I swear it's been an
hour,
Tom Jackson,” said Mrs. Jackson. “We're slower 'n a stopped drain tonight, 'cause y'all can't straighten out. Now you got Gil goin' too with your wickedness.”

As the night went on and things slowed down, Moze pulled me aside and showed me a flask. I swigged and Moze patted me on the back.

“I saw that,” said Valene coming in for an order.

“You tell your mother and it'll be the last thing you tell her,” said her father.

“I won't tell if you let me have some. What is it?”

“Get outa here, young lady.”

“C'mon, tell me, what is it?”

Her father ushered her out. And Moze told about Booty Patootie, the best-ever stripper to work above 125th. Booty could do the usual things, like straddle the corner of a table where someone would leave a dollar bill, and then—no hands and with great vaginal control—back away in possession of the bill. “There was nothing she couldn't get in there,” said Moze. “You put a pencil in there and she'd write you a letter.” Booty worked this runway. The men would hold out dollar bills for the first act rolled up lengthwise and Booty would sidle up to them and work herself down to it and—gee, there aren't verbs for this, you had to hear Moze tell it—clamp down on the bills. For the second act, the guys who had a little much to drink would roll the dollar bills
width
wise and hold them in their mouths while Booty closed in and took the money. “But that was nothin' compared to the grand finale,” said Moze. In the grand finale Booty Patootie would come out and all the men would be sitting there with their long-necked bottles of beer. She would squat—and it took her a good long time to work herself down in increments of elevation—and pick up the long-necked beer bottle, with the beer inside. Now a first-timer at the club, some poor boy, sixteen or seventeen, who wandered in trying to be adult, got put at the Seat of Honor. If you sat there, Booty picked up your beer bottle, then shook it up and let it foam all up inside her and then fall back into the bottle; then as the other men in this gentleman's club clapped in rhythm, the poor kid had to turn the bottle up and drink it in one take.

“Whatcha all doin'?” said Valene.

“Young lady I told you to look after your business,” said Mr. Jackson, laughing and hiding the flask behind his back.

“Never you mind,” said Moze.

Valene put the new orders down on the big metal cooking table and stormed off. “I just wanted a little sip, that's all,” she muttered.

Moze started talking about poontang, and Mr. Jackson said he hadn't heard anyone call it “poontang” since he was in the army. “You know HOW it got to be called ‘poontang,' don't you?” said Moze. But I didn't get to hear the end of this story as I went out with some orders, as Valene came in.

“What's that I smell, Gilbert?” asked Mrs. Jackson as I breezed past the cash register, laughing, with gin on my breath.

Uh, wouldya believe the Nightowl Special, Mrs. J.?

Valene brought me a cup of coffee and whispered to me, in conspiratorial tones: “I know what y'all are drinkin' back there.”

Really? What, Valene?

“Poontang.”

A plate broke and there was more laughter and Mrs. Jackson had had quite enough. She grabbed Valene's arm and took her into the kitchen. “Now you tell me young lady what your father and this no-account man are up to!” Valene looked at her father who knew the gig was up, so he pulled the flask out of his back pocket.

“And what's in there, Tom Jackson?”

And when Valene told everyone she heard them say it was poontang
even
Mrs. Jackson cracked a smile as Mr. Jackson and Moze rolled on the floor in near-death hysterics. “What?” said Valene. “What's so funny? What'd I say?” Now that Mrs. Jackson turned away to smile and shake her head, her authority was GONE. The whole night was a bit of a Lost Night for Jackson's Diner. Everyone was on their best behavior for about another week.

“How'm I supposed to know what they called it a hundred years ago,” said Valene, concerning the poontang incident. “I ain't gonna be here this Friday, Gilbert, I'm givin' you warning. I got a date. This is THE date and I need to get myself lookin' good. You never seen me when I'm lookin' good, Gil, but when I'm lookin' good I am really lookin' good. You never seen me lookin' good.”

You look just fine in your waitress uniform, Valene.

“Well thank you, but I'm not talkin' 'bout lookin' all right, I am talkin' 'bout lookin' good, Gil. And you never seen me when I was lookin' good.”

Unfortunately, Inez, the earlier waitress, wrenched her ankle and Valene had to work a part of the evening shift. I told her that I could work the whole place and cover for her, though Mr. Jackson didn't approve. “Take your date another time, girl,” he said. But he finally relented, after Valene put the daddy's-little-girl moves on him.

“Shit Gil,” she said looking at the clock, having half an hour to get ready for the Big Date, “I'm gonna lock myself in the john and use the sink for one of my PTP baths.”

PTP baths?

“Yeah,” she said giggling: “Pits, Tits and Pussy.”

She ran to the sink before Mrs. Jackson caught up with her, not quite sure she had heard her daughter say what she thought she'd heard her say.

“You're crazy,” Emma reminded me. “You're getting $100 a week at this joint—that's nothing compared to working at some classy restaurant down in Soho.”

Emma, darling, it was worth $100 a week to hear about the PTP bath.

Summer wore on and soon it was hot and miserable again and as a break from Life before The Fan we decided upon another Subway Adventure. We'd never done the Number 6 out to Pelham Bay. There's a little-known place called City Island, an unbelievably unaltered fishing village surrounded by the metropolis. You could mistake it for a small Connecticut seaport; the Long Island Bay was at the end of the main road (after a connecting bus ride) and there were hundreds of sails and little boats and, most superb of all, a breeze.

“I want clams,” said Emma. “Let's eat 50,000 clams.”

We sat at this outside picnic table while some greasy teenage boy fried up a batch of equally greasy clams. We got beer. We sat and stared out at the sky and ocean; two sailboats sailed toward each other and seemed to be on a collision course on the horizon but for a moment they were one white sail and then two again, having passed through each other.

“This can't be New York City,” said Emma.

No it can't but it is, I said.

“Yeah,” said Emma.

We sat there some more and stared at things, then our clams were ready and we ate them and they were greasy and good and there was sun and breeze and more beer, and a rare sense of calm.

“I want a child, Gil. I want to have a kid who'll be mine and love me and give me something to devote myself to. I know you laugh, but I'd be a good mother.”

She had said this before; I always pointed out that … well, you can guess, the thousands of reasons a single mother would have a problem in New York.

“I haven't been sleeping lately at all,” she said later. “I wake up violently in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep. I've been having all these rape nightmares. I can't even go out anymore; I keep thinking everyone is a rapist, that that jerk from phone sex is out there stalking me.”

Well it could happen, but you've been careful and lucky for almost eight years. It's not something to dwell on, Emma.

“I know, I know.”

How about some more food, beer?

“Yeah maybe later. I feel like my celibacy is my strength—I know that sounds like bad wimmin's poetry, but I think that way. A rapist could just destroy all that—it would shatter me…”

Emma, please, what's the use in dwelling on it?

“My poetry really sucks lately,” she said, as a way of changing the subject. We then talked about all the new social diseases and how at least Emma wasn't going to get gonorrhea or herpes or syph or VD (no, I'd not told her about my problem yet—WHY BOTHER, huh?). And we talked about all the looneys on the street.

“I was reading where Hinckley was going to be released one day, after shooting the president,” said Emma. “He'll probably end up selling the TV rights, writing a best-seller like the Watergate criminals—it's all pretty disgusting. I used to find this kind of American-circus thing funny.”

Yeah, me too.

“Reagan is an actor. He was shot by a creep with TV crime-show fantasies who wanted to shoot the president to impress a pretty actress—and the whole thing is played out on TV, the shooting, the hospital heroics … I love TV but this is ridiculous. You know, I could understand some Nicaraguan rebel or some Arab terrorist knocking Reagan off, some Berkeley protestor who had a heartfelt belief that Reagan was evil—I could have lived with someone like that shooting him. But I can't accept the mediocre American kook with the mediocre motives, who doesn't go to jail even, who is negotiating publishing packages when I can't get ten years of serious poetry published—no, no, Gil,
this will not do.
”

I know.

“And this last, this last six years or so … what kind of garbage era has this been? Ford, Carter and Reagan. It was folkies then it was disco then it was country and western and urban cowboys and then it was '50s revivals and then it was punk and new-wave and '60s revivals, and I'll tell you one thing they won't revive: ANYTHING from the late '70s and early '80s. What a goddam washout.”

Well there's been no war, no major civil strife, no riots—

“No nothing; there's not been anything. I'm sorry, Gil, I wish I didn't feel like I was living in lousy times but that's the truth.”

Yeah, but the '20s had gangland violence and Prohibition and virtual fascism and head-busting; the '30s had the Depression; the '40s had the war; the '50s were as backward as a decade could be; the '60s had Vietnam and riots and assassinations … when would you have preferred to live, Emma?

“Oh right now. But those decades, Gil,” she said, raising her finger, “had
style.
I miss style. It redeems so much.”

Ah c'mon Emma, this is the Golden Age of Cynicism—things are just bad enough to set up your jokes. You can't make one-liners off Auschwitz or Hiroshima. When else would you have been happy to live? Make peace with the late twentieth century.

Emma smiled again. “I'll make peace with some beer. Your turn to buy.”

On our long, hot walk back to the bus stop, Emma stopped at a public restroom and had me go in to make sure no rapist was lingering inside. After inspection she went in and I heard the jingle of the pill bottle. I tried to convince myself I did not hear it but I heard it.

“We've really settled down, huh?” Emma said in the subway train on the ride back.

Whadya mean?

“We're a regular married couple. We oughta get married for the tax break.”

What about sex, children, all that?

Emma smiled, she was flippant: “Take a mistress, then.”

It was pretty companionable, so comfortable, day-in day-out routines, watching the TV together, our spare time spent with each other. No doubt at all we cared in our own exasperated way for each other. But something was missing—no, not just the sex, not just the physical thing. Something I couldn't put my finger on.

“Just stop nagging me about the pills, bozo,” she added, nudging me.

I would hear the pill bottle jingle each morning when I got home from the diner, and she was about to leave for work. Why would anyone need a tranquilizer to get up in the morning—you need other drugs then, caffeine-like, upper-like. Wait. Maybe she
is
doing other drugs … I knew someone like that at the Venice Theater, uppers in the morning and downers in the afternoon and up and down it went, every day, for years. I'm lying there in bed thinking: Ah, maybe there's no harm in this. No, maybe there's lots of harm in this. I should have it out with Emma, I'd tell myself. It would do no good, I'd also tell myself.

So I did what any friend would do. I discussed this issue behind her back with another close friend. I went to see Janet in Hoboken.

Should I be worried about her?