The Last Manly Man (21 page)

“Jeez, Mike, this is really a bad time. I've got people coming over. Did I congratulate Veronkya on her amazing feat? If not, please give her my best, etc. I hope you're well, too, not too tired …”

“Robin, give me five minutes, will you?”

Liz buzzed in. “Gus on line two. He says it's important.”

“Another call,” I said to Mike. “Hold on.”

Click.

“Hello?”

“Robin, this is Gus. Look, I feel like I let you down. You ran out of here last night. It's been so hard to get together. I've been down this road before, if you don't want to see me anymore, tell me, don't play these games.…”

“Gus, I do want to see you again. You've misunderstood. I have another call. Can I call you later? Are you still in town?”

“Yes …”

“Great. I'll call you.”

I clicked back to Mike.

“Hi, Mike.”

“Hi, Robin,” he said, and sighed, a sigh heavy with disappointment. Speaking of letting people down, I was letting men down left and right.

“Robin,” he said. “I'm thinking it might be time to settle down a bit, that this playing the field thing, it isn't working for me anymore. It's easy to say that you can avoid being hurt, and hurting others, if you keep it nonexclusive and light-hearted, but it doesn't work that way for very long. Pain is part of the game. It's unavoidable. When Veronkya took that leap it confirmed everything I've been feeling.…”

Here it comes. The big dump. No! I thought. I won't let this happen. I won't let him do it. A few more days with that crazy trapeze artist and he'd change his mind, I knew he would. He always did.

“Mike, I have to go do an interview. I'll call you when things settle down, okay? I apologize, but the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans, etc., you know? Gotta go,” I said, and hung up on him.

I called the courier service to find out when they delivered on my street. When they got back to me, they said the delivery guy usually delivered there around noon, and then took lunch. I had an afternoon interview though, and budget figures to crunch and turn in. I'd have to run home between my interviews to check for the hat.

First, I had to shoot a Daddy and Me class, all work-at-home fathers whose wives worked outside the home, and their toddlers. We had just enough time to do it and get me back by lunch. The dads were pretty manly for Mr. Moms (a term they, to a man, despised, by the way) and enjoyed telling dumb guy stories about their ignorance when they took over the child care, and the innovative ways of nurturing they came up with, from games to trick your kids into helping you with the housework to “make watercolors with seltzer instead of tap water. The kids love the bubbles.”

Though there were two million of them in the U.S. alone, some of the fathers felt isolated, especially in suburbs where most of the at-home parents were women.

“This is the wave of the future,” said the Daddy and Me leader. “
American Demographics
magazine foresees one in three two-parent households could have a dad at home in the year 2000.”

When the crew dropped me off at home at lunchtime, I looked to make sure there were no fistfighting thugs about, or Mrs. Ramirez, and went quickly inside. There was a delivery sticker on my mailbox, noting that the parcel had been left with the super, who was actually just the temporary super, filling in until Phil came back from India. I knocked on the temporary super's apartment. There was no answer, so I wrote a note and left it for him.

How long would I have to wait? I wondered. This was going to blow my sked out of the water. I had an afternoon interview with a sociologist who specialized in male leisure activities, and budget numbers to crunch and turn in.

Well, I thought, that's why God made flunkies … er, employees. To dump your work onto. Using the cell phone I'd borrowed from Sally, I called ANN and began delegating. Though the company bean counters would disagree, the budget numbers weren't a priority—that job I could delegate to Shauna the associate producer, who despite having no self-esteem had good math skills. She didn't have the proper security clearance for even seeing those figures, but what the fuck. Rules are for robots, as my friend Tamayo likes to say. When I asked Liz to reschedule the afternoon interview, Liz begged me to let her do it. Right, send a blind girl to do a TV interview, a litigious blind girl, I thought, who wasn't insured for fieldwork. On the other hand, it was an interview she could handle, low on visuals, and it would save me a lot of time later.

One of the key differences between men and women, Wallace Mandervan had written in his book
Men Made Easy
, is that men will bend rules and take risks to get things done.

“Okay. Do the interview,” I said to Liz.

Next I beeped Jason, with the message: “Waiting for hat at home.”

Within fifteen minutes, he was downstairs, in drag, buzzing me.

The first thing he said when he got upstairs was “Did the hat arrive yet?”

“Yeah, the super picked it up, but he's not home.…”

“Old guy on the first floor?” Jason asked. “Big potbelly, wears an undershirt?”

“Yeah.”

“He came in behind me,” Jason said. “Tried to pinch my ass.”

“Well, Let's go get the hat then. But on the way down, watch out for the blue-haired old lady with the Chihuahua. She's armed and dangerous, and I'd hate to get into a shootout with the old broad.”

“Okay,” he said, and had the nerve to look at me like I was the loony one.

“Did Dewey say anything today?”

“He's out like a light. Stirred a bit and snorted, but didn't come to.”

“What about the meeting you had last night?”

“I met with an advance man for the boat and crew arriving this week for the liberation. He knows nothing. He was supposed to get the lowdown from Dewey. So it looks like we're flying by the seat of our pants on this operation.”

We knocked for about five minutes before Nico finally came to the door. He'd had a few belts of booze already this morning, enough to make my eyes water as he stood in the doorway of his deliberately unlit apartment. Jason and I both stepped back safely away from his depressing aura of stale liquor, spoiled food, and lonely old manhood.

“A parcel for you? Yeah, sure, it came,” Nico said. “I gave it to you a little while ago, on the stoop. Don't you remember?”

“Not to me.”

“Yes, I did.”

“No, Nico, you didn't.”

“Hey, whatcha trying to pull on me? I know I gave it to you? Are you trying to get me fired? Mrs. Ramirez was there. She saw you too. You and she argued. Don't fuck with me, girls,” he said, slamming the door in our faces.

“Gave it to you?” Jason said. “But how …”

“Sssh. I'm thinking,” I said.

Now it all added up, the cabbie, the deli guy asking if I wanted two of the same newspapers, Mr. O'Brien thinking he'd seen me on Eighth Street when I wasn't there.

I had a doppelgänger, and in my own neighborhood.

“Maybe we should talk to this Mrs. Ramirez,” Jason said.

“First, let's try my neighbor Mr. O'Brien,” I said. “Back upstairs.”

When we knocked, “Mrs. O'Brien” shouted through the door, “Who is it?”

“Robin Hudson.”

She removed the board from behind the door and opened it. A steamy gust of spicy cooking blew out at us.

“Yes?” she said. The little Filipino lady was wearing a dark black wig. Little silver hairs poked out from underneath it.

“Is Mr. O'Brien here?” I asked.

“I don't know where he is.”

“Do you know when he'll be home?”

“No, I don't. Why do you want him?”

“I just want to ask him a question about a woman he saw …”

“What woman? One of his—” She used a foreign word I'd never heard before, but from the way she hissed it out I took it to mean “whore.”

“Nothing like that. A woman who looks like me,” I said. “He mistook her for me once.”

“Oh. I don't know anything about that,” she said. “But if you see him, you tell him to come home.”

She shut the door just as I said, “Okay.”

“Mrs. Ramirez?” Jason suggested.

“Unless I can think of some quick alternative,” I said. I couldn't.

“Okay. Keep your gun handy, and make sure you don't let on you're a man in women's clothing,” I said. “She's a religious nut, has a bubble in one of her brain veins.”

For all the years I'd lived in the building, I'd gone out of my way to avoid Mrs. Ramirez's door, a difficult task at times because my friend Sally lived on the same floor. Now I was poised in front, gone to meet the devil herself. There was noise coming from inside, people talking in Spanish, a tinny sound like a television or a radio.

“Cover me,” I said to Jason.

I knocked. Inside, her Chihuahua Señor started yapping, and you could hear her sliding the metal plate away from her peephole.

“What do you want?” She shrieked through the door. “I need to speak to you, Mrs. Ramirez,” I said as sweetly as possible.

“What?”

“I need to speak to you.”

“You need to what?”

“Turn your hearing aid up! I need to speak to you,”
I shouted, and doors started to open, partway, up and down the hall. Sally must have been out or she would have been there like a shot, trying to find out what was going on.

We heard Mrs. Ramirez unbolt several locks and then her door opened slightly. Thanks to heavy brocade curtains, her apartment was also kept very dark, the only strong light coming from a fringed red lamp and the portable television.

“I've got a gun,” she said, while Señor barked.

“I know you do,” I said. “I just have a quick question. Did you see Nico give me, well, someone who looks like me, a parcel just a while ago?”

“Did I …” She looked confused. She said something in Spanish to Señor, who immediately shut up, and then said to me, “Someone who looks like you?”

“Yes, Mrs. Ramirez. It wasn't me.”

“It wasn't you?”

“I was at work at that time. It wasn't me.”

“You're not the drug-running whore?”

“No. I'm a TV newswoman,” I said, something I'd been trying to convince her of for years, but she'd never listen. “See, this is my NYPD press pass.”

This time, she looked at it, moving it back and forth in front of her until her eyes were able to focus on it.

“Oh,” she said.

“Who is the drug-running whore?”

“I don't know her name. She's a redhead, used to live on Eighth Street until she moved into this building … but she didn't move into this building … that's you.”

Now she moved back and forth until I came into focus for her.

“Do you know where on Eighth Street she lives, the building, or even the cross streets?”

“I don't remember. It's a redbrick building, around Avenue C, or maybe D. Does she still live there?”

“Chances are,” I said. “What did she say when you saw her today? What did she do?”

“She was looking at the buzzer, and Nico came out, said he had a package for her. Nico went in to get it. Then she saw me and started screaming at me to leave her alone. She swore at me.”

“Nico gave her the parcel and what did she do?”

“She left, swearing at me. Said she was going to beat my … a word that rhymes with grass … one of these days. She ran away. She's afraid of me,” she said, and she said it with some pride.

“Thank you, Mrs. Ramirez. I appreciate it,” I said.

It would have been nice to hear an apology from Dulcinia Ramirez for all the grief she'd put me through over the years, but under the circumstances, I was satisfied when she said, “You're welcome.”

“Would you girls like to come in and have a cup of tea?” she asked in a sweet, almost frail voice. Gone was the shrill, knifelike voice of hate I had known so well. “I have cookies, too, from the Italian bakery.”

“Some other time, Mrs. Ramirez. Thanks a lot.”

“Are you going to look for her?”

“Yes, Mrs. Ramirez.”

“I'll come with you. Maybe I'll remember the building,” she said.

Despite my protests, she insisted, and she was the only realistic lead we had. There we were, the four of us, a clumsy redhead, a little old lady and her Chihuahua, and an animal rights freak in drag, a semi-armed posse walking down Avenue C, looking this way and that for thugs and ne'er-do-wells. Go ahead, make our day. It was weird, too, because Mrs. R. had a rep. People walking toward us would catch sight of her and cross the street quickly to avoid her.

As we walked, she told us some of the secrets she knew, or thought she knew, about the neighborhood, this place used to be a crack house, that one harbored a known wife beater, now in jail, there was a nest of anarchists in that building, and so forth. Despite her penchant for busting other people, and particularly public urinaters, I noticed she didn't bother to scoop up after Señor.

Unfortunately, Mrs. Ramirez couldn't remember the building where my doppelgänger lived. Of all the things for her to blank out on. We walked Eighth Street between Avenues C and D three times with no success, stopping strangers to ask, “Do you know someone who looks like me, lives around here?”

“It might be that building,” Mrs. Ramirez said, and then quickly changed her mind. “No, it's not that one.”

Mrs. Ramirez was getting tired and confused. Very quietly she said, “I want to go home.” Jason offered, in falsetto, to walk her home while I stayed to try my luck with strangers. I gave him my keys, and we agreed to meet back at my apartment. I felt exposed, alone, as Mrs. Ramirez walked away with Jason.

But finally I hit pay dirt.

“Oh yeah, I know who you're talking about,” one man on Eighth Street said to me. “I don't know what building she lives in. But I've seen her. Go to the deli. If you want to learn the secrets of a Manhattan street, ask the guys who deliver for the nearest twenty-four-hour deli.”