The Unexpected Salami: A Novel (11 page)

When Frank and I raced to see why Janet had screamed, we saw behind the sheet a feverish, shivering, terrified young man, gnawing his cheeks, choking on chocolate pâté vomit. My one comfort as I think back to that horrifying afternoon, is that Sy Cooper, my
Cinema in the Age of Television
professor, would have loved this universe. Sy would have had his other class (Frieda’s
Tuesday video-production seminar) re-create it with the slow 360-degree pan. Instead of callow mafioso dons-in-training, however, the filmgoer would see three cocky kids of privilege, the sort of kids who studied Film Noir’s and Cinema Verite’s shadows and angles, shocked out of their cocooned, referenced existence.

Janet had crouched on the floor; the two of us were paralyzed, deer in headlights. Frank’s olive complexion, from the Ganelli side of the family, looked greener. He recovered quickest (of course) and found rubber gloves by the sink with which to clear Stuart’s face and throat of his possibly HIV-infected, fudge-colored vomit. I cleaned the floor near the bed with a squeegee mop and rinsed it out by the shower stall. The mop was propped up in a bucket of dirty water for a month afterward, a cat-o’-nine stalk emerging from the millpond.

“You’re going to pull through this, man,” Frank said. He didn’t look so sure. Stuart was oblivious with withdrawal. Janet looked like she wanted to go home. She asked Frank if he thought it was okay to unchain Stuart. Frank nodded. We knew he wasn’t going anywhere, and he was in enough pain.

I answered the ringing phone. Was it the Chinese food delivery guy, lost? It was my mother. Shit!

“Rachel? Didn’t I call Frank? I’m getting ditzy these days. Better start looking into those nursing homes—”

“Not yet Mom, you did dial Frank. I’m hanging out with him this afternoon.” Mom called over to Dad. “He’s eating an orange on the porch. I have to send you and Frank a box. The honeybells from Spike’s Grove are beautiful this year—here he comes—I
have your daughter on the phone—can you believe it, Joe? The kids are ‘hanging out.’” She got back on the phone. “That’s great, honey. You two have had such rotten years. Family is important. But it’s funny, Frank and Brice used to torture you, remember? Sticking bits of Slim Jim beef jerky in your after-school doughnuts. Those two were quite the brats. But you used to get your revenge. You’d bite your arm and say Frank did it.”

“You knew?” I forced a little laugh, acknowledging with a tilt of my head the note Frank had slipped under my nose: “Don’t Tell Her.”

“I’m a woman. We have to stick together sometimes. Men are fucks.”

“Thanks, belatedly.”

“Anytime,” she said, lowering her voice. “Do me a favor and don’t tell Daddy that I sent you that extra $200. You’re okay for money, right?”

“Yeah,” I lied.

“Good.” Her normal speaking voice resumed. “You’re still sending your résumé out? Why don’t you swallow your pride and call Bell Press?”

“I really don’t want to work there again, Mom.”

“Well you should be able to get a meaningful job when you put your mind to it. You always have. You’re going to have to start paying the maintenance soon, kiddo. I’d be a bad mother if I didn’t cut off the charity before you get lazy. Three more months, right?”

“Yep. A deal’s a deal.”

“Let’s talk before Daddy and I leave for France. I’m letting
Frank know which bank has the safe deposit box—in case anything bad happens—you’d forget.”

“Don’t talk like that.” In the background, Stuart was spewing again.

“Better to be safe. When you’re a mom you’ll understand. Can you put Frank on? Daddy and I haven’t heard from him for ages.”

Six hours later, Frank
made us pancakes from an all-in-one mix, while Janet held Stuart’s hand. Janet had led him to the bathroom; he had peed in the shower, the toilet too small a target. He looked a millishade better, but in no condition to be left alone. Frank had been right after all; we had to take turns working and sleeping, like Grandpa Ganelli and the men of his immigrant mettle had.

“To earn money to send for their wives,” Aunt Virginia once explained, “three men would sign one lease and sleep in eight hour shifts.” The previous time she’d babysat for me and Frank, she’d told us about the buckets of tomato skins Grandpa had fed hogs back in Italy.

I stared at Frank’s cutlery as he ate his stack of Aunt Jemimas. His fork and knife had once been part of our everyday dinner set. There were black bas-relief circles on their stems, a stainless design to accompany our childhood 1970s orange-and-tan wallpaper. When Frank was done eating, he put on the radio, pricking three holes at a time into the empty blue Styrofoam plate with his fork. The weak-signaled, cutting-edge station WFMU in East Orange, New Jersey, was static hell to listen to; Frank’s loft was less than a mile from the World Trade Center’s master antenna. I tuned the
radio to ninety-seven, which I knew would come in loud and clear. The only reason either one of us listened to mainstream radio was for its nonthreatening distraction from crisis. The New York market is too big for the alternative music we otherwise craved.

“In New York, it’s more lucrative to be number four in the baby-boom market than number one for the post–Baby Boomers,” a station sales executive had explained to me during my summer internship interview. Tony Fedele, the program director, wanted me to meet the whole staff; he was excited to have attracted such an overqualified candidate, the current president of a major university’s school union, to fetch sandwiches for DJs. I even got to meet the infamous shock jock Howard Stern at the sister station across the hall, and he commented on-air that the new intern by the other elevator bank looked like Valerie Bertinelli, but with better bazoombies, and Gary his sidekick hummed the theme song from her old sitcom,
One Day at a Time.
The Adult Contemporary station had a clear-as-a-bell signal. It was owned by one of the Big Three networks, who probably acquired the license soon after Marconi put in his patent. The chief engineer said the two mega-stations could reach Florida under the right weather conditions.

I listened in the loft as Frank and Janet compared their assessments of Stuart’s condition. The station played the same Mommas and Poppas song that had been in rotation the night I bid adieu to my internship and DJ-lover.

Stuart shat on the
sheets. He’d been constipated since the night after I met him at Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop. Janet and
I rolled him over to change his linen. She put on the rubber gloves and wiped his ass with a dishrag.

“I’ll do that, Janet,” I said. “You’re going a hell of a ways beyond the call of duty.”

“It’s not a problem.” I loved her and her loyalty so much that I wanted to kill her. Janet had to go home to feed her pets, and I hugged her.

“I’ll never judge you again.”

“Rachel, you’ll be judging me until you die. But it’s okay. I know I pass muster.” I had to hand it to her for that comment. She was getting down the New York stance.

I hated this all-in-one-pancake-mix world and told it so under my breath. Frank had passed out on a pile of pillows near his stereo. I took one of Frank’s travel books from the bookcase that he carried off the street with a friend—
The Lonely Planet Guide to Chile
. I ran my finger down the string bean-y map in the front. Frieda once told me about a cultural story she’d been commissioned to produce for a Latino TV show, a freelance video assignment she’d gotten via her Argentinean step-aunt.

In Santiago a folksinger’s arm was cut off during the 1974 military coup, in the middle of a stadium of his fans. The legend goes that he defiantly went back on stage after the soldiers did that, and played guitar with one arm. Then the fuckers shot him.

Frank had been to Chile once, and I went to see if he had a tape or CD by that guy on his rack. Victor something. Of course he did: Victor Jara. I listened to a song called “El Niño Yuntero,” which the notes said means “child of the yoke.” It was eerie and soothing.
Was Stuart catching my eye? No, he was grimacing into space. The two of us were exhausted.

I sunk into Frank’s ten-dollar Salvation Army beanbag thinking about Sy Cooper, the month he learned he was going to be fired, the month he told me and Janet to harden our souls. Sy Cooper’s favorite director was Mike Leigh who wasn’t so well known then. It was hard for Leigh to attract a widespread audience for his relentless films about the underbelly of the U.K. While his characters are always no-hopers, Leigh never condemns them or puts them on a pedestal. There are bastards in the lower classes, and there are near saints. The hilarious scumbags are more interesting though. Sy revered Leigh, although not as much as he worshiped Scorcese. Sy was a minor ex-Beat who sold a few of his experimental eight-millimeter films of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to the Museum of Modern Art. He was also an alcoholic.

After Sy Cooper was turned down for tenure, he decided to inflict a mini–Mike Leigh fest on my poor sucker of a class—three films sated with unsympathetic characters:
Nuts in May
,
Death
, and
Hard Labour
. To top off his ad hoc half-semester-long examination of Leigh’s oeuvre of misery, Sy coupled
The Man with the Golden Arm
, the don’t-use-heroin Frank Sinatra movie, with John Huston’s
Fat City
, a dirge of a film about a boxer who’s the toy of bad fortune. But for the last class, his píece-de-resistance: he screened
Shoah
, the harrowing nine-hour subtitled French documentary on the Holocaust, which we were required to sit through.

Janet and I sat next to each other during the film. Janet hunched over the desk in her Henri Grethel sweater, ready to puke
at the next mention of a skeletal child. I touched her knee under my desk. “I’m going down with you,” I wrote on the corner of my spiral notebook.

“You’re not going to believe this, one of my grandparents was a Nazi, isn’t that terrible?” Janet scribbled back in tight letters. I blinked theatrically. Was the all-American blood diluted?

“Were either of your Italian grandparents Fascists?” she whispered hopefully.

“In Brooklyn? Probably about the Dodgers,” I said, not quite truthfully and loud enough for Sy to hear. The biggest family scandal had happened at my parents’ wedding when my tipsy Grandma Chaika called Grandma Rosa’s visiting cousin, Sergio, a murderer. According to my mother, my grandmas didn’t speak to each other for five years.

I swear I saw a glint in Sy’s eye when he sat down next to us in one of the many dropped-out student’s seats and said, “Toughen up now, girls, or you’ll be eaten alive.” He was fired that summer for not adhering to the departmentally approved class outline. The establishment might say he wasn’t teaching his students, but Janet and I knew that semester that we were witnessing his swan song.

I needed to toughen
up. My ex-flatmate was a long way from recovery, but I had to go to work. I had twenty dollars left.

When Frank woke up, he took over as watchdog. I went downstairs to the corner of Bowery and Grand in search of cheap eats. I bought one-dollar bags of food from Chinese street stalls: broccoli, skinny purple eggplants, six hard-tofu slices, and a fish, species unknown.

I walked home to the apartment to water Mom’s succulents, an emotional break from the loft drama. There were bills for the phone and my student loan payments, and a no-more-excuses jury notice with which I had to contend with in two weeks time. Thank God my parents were picking up the maintenance for another few months.

I played the one message: “Hi, girl, it’s Veemah. I’m back again. I had to sit in on a new show in London.”

Veemah and I had been the only two incoming freshman girls out of five thousand who’d checked both Physics and Media on our college roommate compatibility forms. I was envious of her vision; from the time she was fifteen she knew that she wanted to develop new planetarium shows. “I hear from Miss Frieda that you have a sexy houseguest from Australia. We’re going to smoke you out if you don’t call soon to fill us in.”

I left a message. I knew she wouldn’t be home. “Hi, Veemah, it’s Frieda. I have a big mouth, and I don’t know what I’m talking about. Call me.”

I had to be back at the loft in an hour. I ate humble pie and called Temp Solution again.

“Rachel Ganelli?—Oh sure—you’re still available for temping? I was sure by now you would have secured a full-time job with all that professional experience. Well, I have one job for thirteen an hour, there’s no word-processing involved, but if you didn’t want that school job—”

Okay, bitch, let’s move this along. “Oh no, Selena. I’ll take what you have. I’m in a bind for money. What does it entail?”

“Well, we don’t send many people over there. You have to be ready to deal with it.”

I didn’t care what the job was. Broke is broke.

“It’s a publishing group, but they have, well, pornographic magazines.” When I didn’t say anything she proceeded as if each word was being strung on jewelry wire. “They need a receptionist. The work isn’t hard, but the last person we sent thought that the job was so demeaning that she walked by lunchtime. We haven’t felt that there was someone adequately hardskinned to send over. I wouldn’t have them as a client if I had a choice, but the owner’s our vice president’s cousin, and well, the work is yours for the asking.”

“Is this
Playboy
?”

“You should be so lucky,” Selena said almost sweetly.

Porno pics I can deal with—as long as I didn’t have to venture out in that cafeteria hairnet.

I was supposed to
work at Taitler Inc. for a week, until their receptionist returned from vacation. I made sure I wore the closest thing I had to a potato sack. The office was in a regular midtown glass tower on Madison Avenue, a leftover thousand feet of office space that the law firm on the floor hadn’t yet gobbled up. There was no sign on the door that said
TITS INSIDE
. Just a plain brown plaque. I was told to ask for Greta, who turned out to be the office manager. A coiffed woman I’d mistake on a bus for a Park Avenue trophy wife.

“Have you been informed by your agency of the type of operation we are in?” Greta asked. She didn’t want a repeat of the suffragette scene from the previous week.