*“Good baby” and “bad baby” are actual advertising terms.
**Years later, at summer camp, I mentioned to some kid that I was on “The Big Help,” and he looked at me wide-eyed. “Oh yeahhh,” he said. “I remember you. They showed you for years, man! ‘Heeeelp!’ But they showed you too much, man; by the end, you were overexposed.”
*Getting my money was quite a task. The Times simply forgot to pay me. I had to keep calling and calling until they sent over my check; they said they had “accounting problems.”
*I always wonder about this on game shows. When someone wins an “all-expenses-paid vacation for two,” I hope they have someone to go with. Those vacations probably expire after a while, and if you can’t find a date, you have to take your mother.
**Read about Wormwhole on this page–this page.
*Very important: after this was written, Debbie Matenopoulos left The View; she was replaced by Lisa Ling. The move undoubtedly hurt male viewership, unless, of course, you’re into Lisa Ling.
GOOD-BYE, OLD PAINTER
One Friday night in July, the summer between junior and senior year, James called and said he was making three hundred dollars a week doing indoor housepainting with a guy named Carlo. Did I want to help?
Now, I was looking for a computer grunt job, something I could put on my résumé and my college applications. But, as James said, Carlo was cool, he paid cash, he was in our neighborhood, and it was painting—how hard could painting be? I thought of the guys who had painted our apartment: they showed up, slopped stuff from a bucket to a wall, ate gyros for lunch, and left. So why not? I told James I’d show up for work the following Monday at 8:00 A.M.
The 8:00 A.M. thing should’ve been my first clue, the first tip-off that life in the paint industry was not for me. I can’t be anywhere at 8:00 A.M. I’m always a little late, like 8:03, 8:07. That was okay in school, where I could chat up teachers until they forgave me. It was not okay with my new boss, Carlo.
I arrived at his work site at 8:08. I could tell it was the right place—paint chips littered the stoop.* It was a nice brownstone, like the one on The Cosby Show. I rang the bell and in two seconds—he must have been right inside, tapping his foot—Carlo appeared.
“You-a gonna come late all the time?” he said, nearly smacking me in the face as he threw open the door. “I’m-a gonna have dese problems with you?”
Carlo was five feet tall. I guess if you were kind, you could have pegged him at five one. But truly, he was five feet, nearly bald, with a scrunched, upturned face. His accent was deep Italian—not from Brooklyn, from Italy. If he appeared in a movie, he would be slammed as a racist stereotype. He wore a white collared shirt and white pressed pants, both covered with coats of paint drops; he held a metal implement** in his hand as if he were going to smack me with it.
“Uh, sorry.”
“I know you sorry. Everybody is very, very sorry, always. But I don’t have a-time for this-a bullcrap.”
Carlo led me into the brownstone—canvas on the floors, furniture covered in plastic, and a ubiquitous gasoline-type odor.
“Now you and James, you-a gonna start work on the shcrape,” Carlo told me. “You gonna—”
“Actually, Carlo?” James interrupted, standing by the wall wearing a baseball cap. He’d been so quiet that I hadn’t noticed him.
“Hey, James,” I said.
“Hey, Ned. Ah, Carlo … I don’t think I’m going to be working with you anymore.”
“What?”
“I need to go on this vacation with my family so I’ll be gone next week, and now Ned’s here to help you out, and … I just …”
Carlo was silent. He looked ready to explode.
“Oh, I see,” he said. “You bring this guy; you decide to leave. Well, you wanna go? You go.”
“Okay,” James said. He nodded at me as he walked out the door.
The whole thing happened so fast; it took me a minute to realize how shafted I was. James had just left me working for an irate foreigner in a job I knew nothing about. I thought maybe I could quit, too, but Carlo was talking.
“So, you gonna start work or what? Come. Forget that guy.” He gave me a paintbrush and led me upstairs.
“Now, look,” he said, situating me by the brownstone’s second-floor entrance. “You gotta paint this whole thing.” He gestured to the foyer. “You ever painted before?”
“Yes,” I lied.
Carlo looked suspicious. “Show me how you hold the brush,” he ordered, crossing his stubby arms. I took the paintbrush in my fist, like the hilt of a sword.
“Oh, goodness! We-a gonna have problems.” Carlo took the brush and scolded me like a little boy. “I ask you if you paint before, you tell me ‘yes.’ You can’t-a even hold the brush. You paint before, huh? Yes, you paint-a your face. You never paint-a the house.”
“Sorry, I—”
“Shut up! I show you. Take the brush like so.”
Carlo took the brush from me so gingerly, so lightly, that it was hard to believe he’d been yelling a minute before. He held it daintily, like a pencil, with three fingers behind the handle. He traced it through the air like a fairy sprinkling magic dust.
“That is how you-a do the paint!” he said. “You gotta have-a the nice hands. Do you have-a the nice hands?”
I was totally lost. “Yes, I—”
“Take-a the brush the right way, then.” I took it, trying to hold it with Carlo’s ethereal grace.
“Oh my god! You awful! You don’t know the first thing! I gonna have to train you from the beginning! You want to leave now?”
I hesitated. I did want to leave right then, but that wouldn’t make me much of a man, would it. “Nah, I’ll stay.”
“Okay, good.” Carlo’s voice mellowed considerably. “You don’t need to be ashamed, you just don’t a-have no eshperience. I have forty-five years eshperience. You got none. So you have to learn, see?”
I nodded.
For the next hour, Carlo showed me how to paint. He did all the basics: dipping the brush in the bucket, tapping it against the sides three times to get the extra paint off, flipping it up to keep the paint from leaking, putting it to the wall with flat, broad strokes, or, alternately, “cutting” the wall, with the brush turned sideways to get a fine edge. He was gentle and patient, if profane.
“Now, you can’t be skimpy with the paint. You gotta put a lotta paint on the wall. Like with the girls, do you do it halfway? No, you go all the way. Right?”
“Um, I guess.”
“I gonna be back in a half hour. I want to see this room painted good, you hear?”
“Yeah.” I dipped the brush in the paint can; as I bent down, something hit me in the head and fell to the floor. I picked it up. It was a baseball cap. Carlo had thrown it from across the room.
“He-he-he-he-he!” he shrieked—Carlo laughed like a four-year-old. “That’s your hat. You gotta have a hat.”
I put on the hat and kept painting. Within a half hour, I’d made a mess of everything. I remembered what Carlo told me, but it just wasn’t working: the paint kept dripping off the brush and landing on me, running down my arms, plopping in fat drops on my hat.* Carlo returned as I was doing the ceiling, trying desperately not to fall off the ladder.
“Mama mia!” (He really said that; I wouldn’t make it up.) “I could take my money, throw it away, and still, it’s cheaper than you, because I don’t have to clean up after you! I give you an hour, and you not done with the room. You work like an old man!”
That ended up being one of Carlo’s favorite lines. “You like an old man; I supposed to be the old man. You not just a hundred-year-old man. You a hundred-twenty-year-old man!”
“Come, we’ll find something else for you to do.” Carlo led me up the brownstone’s staircase. “You see these?”
I couldn’t see too well because the baseball cap covered my eyes. Carlo was pointing to the spindles that held up the banister. The house was four stories high so th
ere were at least one hundred of these decorative posts.
“You gotta paint all these,” Carlo said. “White. If you-a get paint on the steps, I kill you. If you-a let paint drip downstairs, on the rugs, I kill you. You spill, I kill you. Okay?”
“Yup.” I had done a more precise estimate. There were one hundred fifty spindles. The job would take days.
“Get started.” Carlo left to do Carlo things. I began with the first spindle.
• • •
Three hours later—and it wasn’t a bad three hours, once I got into the pace of things—Carlo came back upstairs.
“Hey, you do a-pretty good!” he nodded, inspecting my work. “No drips, good. Time for lunch.” I leapt down the stairs, careened out of the brownstone, and ran down the block, still pretty much covered in paint. I bought an iced coffee, some lemon pound cake, and a newspaper from Connecticut Muffin (a local trendy coffee shop), then sprinted back to the brownstone to eat. Carlo was there on the stoop with a sandwich.
“What you got?” he asked, pointing at my newspaper.
“Oh, this, it’s just something for me to read at lunch.”
“You read, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t care for the reading,” he said, fluttering his hands. I dug into my pound cake. “The reading, it’s not for me. It’s-a bullcrap.”
“Hmmm, yeah,” I mumbled, while chewing. So Carlo didn’t read. He was making thousands of dollars a week. Nothing for me to judge.
“The people who read, they a-think they know everything, but they don’t-a got no common shense. Like you. I know you a smart guy;* I know from the beginning, but you ain’t-a got no common shense at all.”
“Uh, thanks.” I was engrossed in my newspaper and was already learning to tune out Carlo when he got insulting.
“You gonna go to college?” he asked. “What college?”
I had an automatic response to that. Whenever anyone asked me about college, I got it out of the way—quickly. “Probably Harvard.”
“Not a good idea. You gotta go to the college a common shense! He-he-he-he-he! C’mon, no more lunch. More work.”
I went back inside and did fifteen more spindles. Carlo didn’t let me leave until 6:00, which meant I had worked a ten-hour day with a half-hour lunch break. I trudged home (the three-block walk was a lot longer than it had been that morning) and vegged out in front of the TV for four hours. Then I slept.
The next day, I learned the horrible secret of painting: you can’t change clothes. Everything you wear on the job is going to get ruined, so unless you have five outfits to burn, you wear one pair of pants and one shirt the whole week. The sweat of each day dries in your clothes, and the next day, the clothes themselves begin to sweat, old sweat blending with new, everything blending with the sweet gasoline smell of the paint.
The second day, I worked with rollers. Now, it’s easy to use a roller in some art class;* it’s a lot harder to put one on a six-foot stick and cover a ceiling with an even coat of primer.** I moved too fast: paint flew off my roller in evil drops, landing in my hair and on wood cabinets, which I had to clean very quickly to avoid decapitation by Carlo.
My boss started asking me about my love life on day two. “You have a girlfriend?” Carlo said while I painted with the roller.
“Yes,” I lied. If I said no, I’d probably get yelled at.
“Well, that’s nice,” he mused. “I hope she is a beautiful flower. Like my wife, a beautiful flower.”
Carlo had two classifications for the women of the world: “fake women” and “beautiful flowers.” When we sat on the brownstone’s stoop for lunch (never ate anywhere else), he would gesture at women passing by.
“You see that? She is disgusting! The lips, the nose—all fake. Not real. Not nice to touch, not at all. I can tell.” I would nod.
Or, “There! Now that is a beautiful flower. Look at-a how she moves. Natural like the wind.” Carlo could get quite romantic. “Like my wife. You want just to hold her. A beautiful flower.”
I could never tell the difference between the beautiful flowers and the fake women. It bothered me. I would have someone pegged as a fake woman, and then Carlo would christen her a beautiful flower; I’d have to take a second look. He was always right.
Another painter, Carmello, came in on alternate days. Carmello was like a young Carlo with hair. He loved the “Lite FM” radio station. He would only paint a room if Lite FM was on, and he sang along with it in a spectacularly out-of-tune voice. He called me “Joe”: “Hey, Joe, bring me the wide scraper.” “You did a nice job on these banister things, Joe.” “Don’t forget to clean out the sink, Joe.” I got used to it.
Working for Carlo, however, was mostly not cutesy anecdotes. It was abuse. If he thought I was working too slow, he would come up behind me and hit me—never very hard—and curse at me. I withstood it; I figured it was just part of growing up, having a malevolent, profane dwarf boss who disdained reading. Mostly, I thought of payday, Friday, when I would receive those crisp one-hundred-dollar bills.
But Friday afternoon was a long time coming, especially in the same clothes I’d been wearing all week, and by 5:00, when Carlo opened his astonishingly thick wallet to hand me three hundred dollars, it just wasn’t worth it anymore.
In a movie, I would have stayed with Carlo. I would have taught him how to read; he would have taught me how to seduce beautiful flowers. I would have mellowed him out; he would have toughened me up. We would have learned from each other—the hardened foreigner and the self-important kid—and, in the end, I would be crying at his funeral. Instead, I called Hector.
“Dude,” I said. “It’s Ned, and I have this great job, if you want it. I can’t really do it anymore.… ”
*When you paint a house, I learned, paint chips get everywhere—out on the stoop, in your clothes, in your hair. It’s like they’re possessed.
**It was a scraper, as I would soon learn—the tool used to remove old paint from walls, like a chisel with a flatter edge. Carlo called it “the shcrape.”
*Despite that hat—I’ll never know how—lots of paint ended up in my hair, and it wouldn’t wash out in the shower. I had to wait for weeks until it wore out.
*Getting compliments from Carlo was much tougher than getting blood from a stone. It was like getting, I don’t know, a full-featured fax machine from a stone. I was very proud when he complimented me.
*Art class was something I lost all respect for in my painting career. When you slop noxious oil-based gunk from bucket to wall for eight hours plus, the thought of painting for fun becomes stomach churning. I challenge any art student reading this to paint your own house—you’ll end up a mutual-fund analyst.
**Basic terminology: primer is the white paint that you put on a surface before you put the final, colored paint on. Primer has to be totally even.
GETTING SLOPPY WITH POPPY
I met Poppy over the summer. I was going to a birthday party in the Village. On my way, walking down East Fourth Street, I passed four Hispanic guys playing dominoes. They were on the sidewalk, sitting in folding chairs at a makeshift table, keeping score on an old Marlboro carton. Their leader was this wild-haired, shirtless old man with thick round glasses.
I’d learned how to play dominoes a year before, while interning at my parents’ office. So I stopped, leaned against a car, and watched. I wasn’t there ten seconds before Poppy smiled at me.
“Hey, you wanna play?”
I suspected treachery. Maybe they were hustlers. “Um … I don’t have any money.”
“So? We don’t play for money—we play for fun. Sit down!”
Poppy got up. I took his seat. “You want something to drink, my friend?” he asked, patting my shoulder. “Beer? Soda?”
“No, thanks.” I didn’t feel comfortable taking beer from this guy just yet. Besides, I wouldn’t have time for beer. I was only going to play one game.
He grabbed my hand. “The people, they call me Poppy. Wha’
s your name?”
I couldn’t tell him it was Ned. Too dorky. If I was going to play dominoes with these guys, I needed a new name, something edgy and streetwise.
“Skitch,” I said. I’d always wanted to be called Skitch.
“Skitch?” he snorted. “No, cabron,* what is your real name?”
Okay, so Skitch was too fake. I needed something neutral.
“John.”
“John, my new friend, welcome!” Poppy raised his head to the sky. I sensed a ritual coming on. “Yes, welcome to East Fourth Street, the capital of the world! You wanna beer?”
This time I said yes.
Two hours later, I was still there.** For those of you who’ve never played dominoes, the game is like hearts or bridge. You play in teams of two; the strategy is figuring out what the other players are holding.
It’s addictive, especially when accompanied by free beer, which Poppy never stopped providing. As my new friend handed me a second, third, and fourth Bud—no questions asked—I began to understand how things worked on East Fourth Street. Poppy was the king. He had free rein at the bodegas:* he could have complimentary chips, salsa, beer, gum, whatever. If I offered to pay for these items, he would give an automatic staccato response: “No, cabron, everything has been bought and paid for in full!”
The other players were almost as entertaining as Poppy. We had Fumo, the silent Confucius look-alike who sat in for two games and left promptly, as if he had a meeting to get to. Poppy said he was homeless. Then there was Old Tony or Old Frankie—I forget which—a timeless geezer who kept a cigarette drooping from his lips at all times and didn’t seem to care if it was lit.
Other members of the East Fourth Street community came to see Poppy—not to play dominoes, but to pay tribute. They slapped him on the back, made sure he was doing all right, gave him beer, talked about the weather, and left with a handshake. Sometimes, to Poppy’s delight, they asked him about President Clinton and Monica.*
Poppy had strong opinions about the Clinton and Monica scandal. Whenever someone mentioned it, he began howling, “Clinton y Mooonica! Ayyy! I tell you, these Republicans, cabron, awful. They try to kill the president for nothing! Clinton, he did not even do it to her, just a little thing with a cigar!” The cigar was of particular interest. Poppy would rhapsodize about it. “He should have smoked it! Destroy the evidence! Aaaa!”