Love Me (23 page)

How’re your parents?
Fine.
How was the cabin this year?
We missed you.
And the state fair?
Not the same without you.
You still have hockey season tickets?
Of course.

“I worry about you,” she said, nestled against me, warm and naked. “Loneliness is a contributing factor in insanity, you know.”

Loneliness is a vicious circle, I know that. You get to brooding about it and you become poor company.

“Work has always been more important to you,” she said.

“I have no work,” I said.

“That’s the problem, isn’t it. Same thing happens to my poor old geezers with the grocery carts. They’re just trying to be useful, poor boogers. Going around stuffing their garbage bags with cans and bottles and scraps of cardboard—they’re just carrying out a filing system that they alone understand and they wish somebody else did.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Eric, You need women for education, flawed or not. The maiden with little snow white feet, the one with black black black hair, Barbry Allen, the gypsy girl, Kathleen Mavourneen, Jeannie, Fair Ellen—each woman prepares you for the next. You learn the basics from Lady A and you graduate to Lady B, who is grateful to her predecessor, as are C and D and E, and by F you are a quite a fine fellow, mostly recovered from your sulky adolescence and rapacious narcissism and prepared to carry on a conversation, brighten your corner, do light housekeeping, and every so often perform amazing feats in or near the bed. In my case, I married Lady A and then met B-F and now am returning to A, but the effect is the same: educational. And finally you wind up with your true love.

And maybe you turn to her and say, “Remember that little bar in the West 60s where we went after we saw A Chorus Line and there was that pianist with the bad toupee playing the white piano?” and she says, “That wasn’t me. You were with someone else.” But secretly she’s grateful to that woman for teaching you what she taught you about dwelling in harmony, which takes practice. Practice, practice. You, sir, are way behind.

 

 

 

Iris and I lay in bed and drank wine and when it got dark we lit a couple candles. It was just like the old days except we were heavier and wrinklier but in candlelight you don’t notice anyway. We watched
Appointment in Chicago
with James Mason as a corrupt judge, Studs Terkel as a boxer turned reporter, and Stella Stevens as the dancer who loves them both.

“I wish you’d been at MAMA when we dedicated the activity center,” she said after the movie, hoisting herself up, plumping the pillows.

This was a place for the elderly insane to come for a hot lunch and use the toilet or sit and doze or play checkers or read a magazine. It was on West Seventh near the drop-in center for single mothers in recovery and near the Salvation Army and the Dorothy Day Center, so there were a lot of drunk and crazy people coming and going, which irked the mayor who was trying to encourage sidewalk restaurants and boutique brew houses and small theaters—the St. Paul Lifestyle Quarter—but Iris and her ilk were bringing in the tired, the poor, the wretched refuse, the tempest tossed, and when you sit under your Campari umbrella with an $8 glass of Pouilly Fume and a $24 plate of mushroom risotto, you don’t want some old toothless hag to lean over and ask if she can have your baguette, please.

Anyway—there was a crazy old man named Gus, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party U.S.A. He had the card pinned to his red plaid shirt along with about fifty protest buttons, some of museum quality. Gus was a favorite of Iris’s. She liked poor people with Attitude. Old winos who go through the Union Gospel Mission chow line and complain about the lack of seasoning. Gus had given Sandy a hard time about the magazines that the activity center would provide, she having ordered a couple dozen such as
Mother Jones
and
Harper’s
and the
Utne Reader
and Gus wanted
Playboy.
Anyway—there was a grand open house attended by the demented geezer community and a dozen Hansons, the kind and generous family who put up the dough for the place, and their friends and admirers, and the MAMA crowd, and a few innocent bystanders. Unbeknownst to MAMA, Gus had organized a clients’ strike.

Yes, a clients’ strike. MAMA and the Hansons were providing these crusty old flea-bitten snot-ridden wretches with a place to park their grocery carts and come in and take a load off, and Gus had organized the demented in a strike. The first demand was “The center shall be under the direction of the people who need it, not the wealthy elite, and shall be renamed the Eugene V. Debs Center for Social Change.” And the second demand was: “Let us see tits.” Gus and his revolutionary crowd bided their time until the mayor came to the podium to render his remarks about our multicultural society, and then Gus started pumping his fist and chanting, “We Want Tits, We Want Tits.”

Iris laughed. I hadn’t heard her laugh this hard in a long time. “Gus is drunk, of course, on that Salty Dog wine, one of those screw-top wines, the kind that doesn’t go with your meal, it is your meal, and the bottle fits nicely in your pocket so it won’t fall out when you fall down. Which he does. What a goofball. Poor old people, hacking and wheezing, flapping their gums, brain cells fried, all of them chanting, ‘We Want Tits,’ and Sandy trying to shush them and she gets hold of Gus and he pulls away and his shirt gets ripped and Gus knows enough to fall down and start yelling bloody murder, and the Hansons, who really are
extremely
nice people, look around at each other and think, What in God’s name have we just gone and spent four million dollars on? So there’s a lot of donor regret going on, and the cops arrive in two patrol cars and they find an old man on his back with a rip in his shirt and his left eyebrow slightly sprained, but you know how cops are these days—very professional, everything by the book, so they start filling out forms and they call the EMT wagon, and Gus is now the star of the show, they’re taking his blood pressure and vital signs and the cops are collecting the names of eyewitnesses, and Gus is screaming about Vietnam, the Palestinians, Cuba, Nicaragua, Salvador Allende, the family farmers, the coal miners, Wounded Knee, the whole shopping list, and now a crew from Channel Five Eyewitness News arrives and instead of boring speeches by do-gooders, they’ve got themselves a wounded old man, and they hoist the antenna for their live cam and one of those TV ladies with beautiful molded hair begins her live report, talking about the irony of poverty in the midst of affluence, and she holds the microphone toward Gus—his lifelong dream, freedom of speech in front of an actual audience—and he hoists himself up from his bed of pain and cries, ‘Fuck you, all of you.’ It was hilarious. The Hansons are Lutherans, you know, and Mrs. Hanson leaned over and said to me, ‘This is not our sort of thing at all.’ So they head for the exits, and the next day they offer us an additional million dollars to take their name off the building. Which strikes me as kind of spendy, but... I say, never trust people with charm.”

 

 

 

We had a lovely two days, we two. We made a truce. She didn’t object when I took her over to La Reserve in Minneapolis and ordered a fine Château Haut-Brion, and I didn’t object when she talked about the emergency nursery for parents in crisis and the transsexual hotline.

“Why don’t you stay longer?” she said. “A year or two?”

“I hate to leave New York in defeat,” I said. “Soon as I have me a success, I’ll think about coming home.”

I’d gotten undressed and was brushing my teeth, and Iris walked into the bathroom stark naked, holding a condom with a snake head painted on the tip.

She explained that it was for birth control in the Amazon rain forest. With all those vast tracts of rain forest being destroyed to make coffee plantations, the forest peoples are left homeless, but without the trees there is more light to read by so literacy has gone up, and with all those rainy days, there is plenty of time to read, and plentiful coffee, which has led to more sex, so they need birth control, but then they found that the Amazonian plumed egrets were eating the condoms and choking to death, so they put snake’s heads on them, which seems to scare off the egrets but also scares off the forest people, who are superstitious about snakes, and so the birth rate has gone through the roof.

She handed it to me. “Put it on, I want to see how it looks.”

I said, “I need to get hard first.”

“Well, why don’t you?”

That’s my Iris. On our kitchen wall is the sign:

DEFINE THE NEED.

DEVELOP A PLAN.

COMMIT RESOURCES.

So I did. I committed my resources and we completed the project and the next morning I performed some follow-up and flew back to New York.

I stayed away from
The New Yorker,
hoping to avoid Tony Crossandotti, and then one day, he knocked on my apartment door. I looked through the peephole and there he was. He looked like he could snap my neck like a pea pod. He wore a white suit and a pearl gray shirt and a green tie. I was going to stand there very quietly and wait for him to go away but he put his eyeball up to the peephole and said, “Open up, dog breath, or I’ll open it for you.”

So I opened.

“Sorry,” I said. “The doorman didn’t ring up and tell me you were coming.”

“I know all the doormen up here,” he said. “They know who to tell and who not to tell.” He strolled out on the terrace as if he owned the place and looked out toward Broadway.

“You must get to see a lot, living up here. Lot of nookie in those apartments. You got a good pair of binoculars?”

I shook my head.

“Here,” he said. And gave me a pair. Brand-new. I put them to my eyes and saw a woman with red hair standing at a window, weeping. She was fully clothed and in the process of tearing up a piece of paper. I could see the return address on the envelope: San Luis Obispo, CA.

He said he would like a cup of coffee with milk and sugar. So I went and got it for him. When I returned, he’d taken off his jacket and his shoulder holster and was relaxing on a chaise, the holster and a blunt-nosed revolver sitting on a glass-topped side table. I set the coffee down beside the revolver.

“My grandpapa came over from Sicily and got into the landscaping business. He loved flowers and trees. And he was agreeable to burying dead bodies that people brought to him. It was a service. Sometimes people get into a bind. They’ve got a body and what do you do with it? So they’d come to his landscaping concern and give him a hundred and he’d toss the corpse on his sod truck and it was gone, it was taken care of, they knew they could trust him. That’s how he operated. All those big mansions on Long Island with the nice green lawns running down to the Sound. He did all those lawns. They were fertilized by the mortal remains of losers. Nature’s way. You lose, you die, you become part of something better. It sure beats getting fitted with concrete shoes and feeding the lobsters.

“He was a simple man, my grandpapa, and he did business the Sicilian way. If he liked you, he couldn’t do enough for you, and if you crossed him, he would rip your heart out of your chest and eat it. It was that simple. He was a stand-up guy. You always knew where you stood with him. If you could see the sun shine, it meant he liked you. If you were dead and your eyes and mouth were full of dirt, it meant you’d done a bad thing.

“What you’re probably wondering is how we got our hands on the premier literary magazine in America; right?”

I said that I only wanted to know whatever Tony thought I should know and no more.

He said that his poppa won The New Yorker in a poker game with a rich guy named Fleischmann, who was three sheets to the wind and couldn’t tell his jacks from his jackhammer. Harold Rossi was Poppa’s buddy from their army days in Paris, when Poppa was on General Pershing’s staff and running a wholesale liquor business on the side. Gin and bourbon were rare in France, and the doughboys had no taste for fine Bordeaux, and Poppa did very well in wartime, as did Harold Rossi, who edited the army newspaper,
Stars and Stripes,
and was one of Poppa’s better customers. They both returned to New York and kept in touch after the war and Poppa opened a drinking establishment in midtown, and that was where the poker game took place. It was four in the morning and Mr. Fleischmann was going down like the
Titanic
and trying to go home and they kept propping him up and pouring gin into him and he was out of cash and writing IOU’s and on this one hand Rossi folded and Fleischmann stayed and Poppa won the pot with a pair of fours. A heart and a spade. Two double deuces. And he scooped up the pot and looked at Fleischmann’s IOU and said, “What’s the New Yorker? A hotel?” And Rossi said, “It’s a magazine. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it. Except my name’s Ross now.” This was in 1928 or so.

“Poppa got interested in writing and he wrote a memoir about growing up in Nebraska and sent it to
The Saturday Review
and the editor took a very negative attitude and said, ‘You’re not from Nebraska’ and he laughed. Poppa didn’t like to be laughed at. You’re aware of the fact that
The Saturday Review
is no longer in business ?”

I was aware of that.

“Poppa wrote poetry, too. He was in Leavenworth, Kansas, for a few years and joined a poetry club and—I got one of them here in my billfold.” He handed me a sheet of white paper, folded. On it was neatly typed: