I walked next to him, and wondered how I’d managed to live in Greenpoint for as many months as I had without getting to know anyone. I recognized the cast of characters, of course, but the Handyman knew them by name. I’d been pretending I didn’t really live in my neighborhood. Most of my time, by necessity, was spent in Manhattan anyway. Greenpoint was where I slept. When I slept. The neighborhood had, in my opinion, very little to recommend it. Greenpoint, obviously named early in an optimistic century, had nothing green to boast of, unless you counted the complexions of its residents, upon catching a whiff of the famous Greenpoint Sewage Treatment Plant. Or, perhaps, the neighborhood’s moniker referred to Newton Creek, which divided the northernmost tip of our neighborhood from Queens, and which was euphemistically classified as “precluded for aquatic life” due to the massive Exxon oil leak that had, for years, been drooling into the creek’s already sewage-contaminated waters. This did not keep certain neighborhood eccentrics and teenagers from cannonballing off the disintegrating India Street pier, and dog-paddling in the slurry. The Handyman seemed to thrive in this neighborhood. For the first time, I thought that maybe I could, too. I’d been rejecting my new home. If I was giving up on no, it was time to give up on that, too.
In between yelling hellos at hipsters, bums, and babies, the Handyman conducted a running monologue of his history.
“So, mamita, it used to be heroin for me, but I got clean of the devil, and now I’m here. Montana was where I came straight from Colombia, three wives ago. Her mamá, we never got married, ‘cause I got smart.”
I was alone amongst my friends in thinking that dating recovering addicts was actually not the worst thing in the world. They always told you their story, right up front. It was a refreshing change from persons addicted to other things: emotional warfare, codependence, Harold Pinter plays. At this point in my life, it seemed worth dealing with the addict’s night sweats, sievelike memory, and “bad liver and broken heart,” as Tom Waits put it, in order to get to his stories. Where else could I hear tales of piano bars and mystery scars, ballads of long-dead cronies named Mac, stories of jonesing for a hit of something or other and somehow ending up married to a waitress, and buried alive in a diner Dumpster by fried egg sandwiches? Stories like the Handyman’s.
Carmela dropped back to listen.
“Daddy also had a big mess with cocaine,” she told me.
“I was getting to that, baby,” the Handyman called after her, but she had resumed her place in front of us.
“Montana?” I asked. I was feeling pleased with myself for remaining unfazed in the face of the Handyman’s story. He was twirling his hammer with the panache of a marching band vixen. The zippers on his motorcycle jacket flashed in the sun. His spurs, yes, spurs, jingled. His teeth were white, and his skin was tanned, and it seemed that, even though he was a walking contradiction, a motorcycle-riding Colombian cowboy, nothing bad had ever happened to him.
“Dude ranch. The Flying Bull. We called it the Flying Bullshit, mamita, but it was not a bad place to be. First I was the dishwasher, then I was the cook. And Montana! Baby, you gotta get your sweet ass to Montana!”
Carmela led us to a restaurant called the Manhattan Triple Decker. It was neither in Manhattan, nor three stories high. One story and a lot of eggs. She greeted the aged Polish man behind the counter, and then graciously accepted his lift onto a bar stool. Without being asked, he brought her a strawberry milkshake. Clearly, she was a regular.
“I was bringing the powder to the cowboys, baby, and they were out there, on their horses, high, high, high, and all because of me, their dishwasher. Man. Those days are dead and gone now, dead and gone.”
The Handyman ordered a hamburger. I got a grilled cheese.
“Couple of the guys, they were the real thing, and the rest were the guests from everywhere, everybody who wanted to ride horses and pretend they were in a Western movie. Everybody liked the coke, though; man, mi amigo in the kitchen got me hooked up and before you knew it, we were selling the shit to the whole town. I could ride, back then, mamita, as good as the guys who were out there year-round. I had a horse I liked, and I used to ride all over the ranch, high out of my mind! And shit, baby! Did I tell you I could lasso? I lassoed whatever I felt like. One time, I put a loop around this chica in jeans and cowboy boots, and damn, damn, damn, mami!”
He paused for a moment, lost in the memory of a girl I pictured as a lot like the big-haired Rodeo Queens of my high school. There’d been one who’d been famous for the constantly visible outline of a Trojan in the back pocket of her skin-tight Wranglers.
“So, what happened? How’d you end up here?”
“He got busted,” said Carmela, turning to give me the first smile I’d seen from her. A bewitching, missing-toothed grin. She slurped her milkshake. “And then he got my mommy.”
“I met her in jail,” said the Handyman. “I was in for only five months. They busted me, but they busted me on the wrong day. I didn’t have shit. They wanted to put me away forever, but instead, they had to put me away for no time at all. She was my cellmate Victor’s wife. Fool wouldn’t see her, got pissed over some small shit, thought she was fucking his brother, so I went out and there she was.”
“The most beautiful woman my daddy had ever seen,” said Carmela, happily.
“Her name was Maria,” said the Handyman.
I was enchanted. I’d started writing a tragic motherless-child-and-widower story in my head. Death in childbirth. Grieving widower, scarred by a criminal past, trying to hack out a living through fix-it gigs, little daughter raising herself on mustard-and-marshmallow sandwiches. Horrible as it was, it appealed to my drama-saturated nature. I was already considering how I’d adapt it into a hybrid of Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and Sam Shepard. I was envisioning my Pulitzer. My Tony. My Oscar! The trifecta, balanced on the bookshelves I’d finally be able to afford.
“What happened to her?” I asked softly, ready to comfort him. He started laughing. Laughing hard. Slapping his knee at my apparent stupidity. Carmela drew some milkshake up in her straw. She shot it, with perfect accuracy, at the Handyman’s cheek.
“Damn, mamita, whadda you think?” The Handyman wiped his face, still laughing.
I protested that I didn’t know. How could they laugh about something as tragic as this? What kind of people were they? Had they no compassion?
“She ran off on the back of a motorcycle with some fucker she met in the 7-Eleven. Left me with this one, still a baby. I had to raise her on a bottle, yeah, Carmela?”
“Yuck,” Carmela confirmed.
“And now, we gotta go. Somebody on Eagle Street has a busted buzzer. I’m coming by your place tomorrow afternoon, to fix yours, ‘cause it’s fucked, right, mamita?”
“It quacks,” I told him.
“Yeah, I didn’t like the people who lived there before you,” said the Handyman, grinning. “I gave ‘em a joke buzzer.”
And with that, they were gone. I moved to a booth and ate my sandwich. I wasn’t sure what to think of what had just happened. It was starting to be clear to me that, though I knew plenty about Greek tragedies, I knew almost nothing about real life. As if that were not enough, I could see my reflection in the window and it looked like an obsessive-compulsive bird had built a nest on my head.
I ONLY HAD A COUPLE of minutes to feel sorry for myself, before I noticed a guy pressing his face against the outside of the glass. He was tall and pale, with lank blond hair, and looked to be somewhere in his forties. He came inside, walked straight to my booth, ordered a beer in Polish, and without any warning, started sobbing. I signaled urgently to the waitress. She shrugged.
“Are you okay? Do you need a doctor?” I asked.
He let loose with a snot-drenched stream of Polish.
“He says you look like his ex-wife,” the beautiful teenage waitress translated, rolling her eyes, and then went to get him another bottle of Tyskie beer. He opened it with his teeth. Normally, I would have
moved to another table, or left the restaurant altogether. I could smell the crazy on him. But that day, I was willing to admit that maybe I was a little crazy, too. And here we were, in a diner in Brooklyn, crazy, at the same moment.
The scene in King Lear that I’d always liked best involved Lear, gone mad, wandering the beach in the storm to end all storms, running into his old friend Gloucester, who has been blinded. There they are: these two people who’ve known each other forever, in the middle of a rainstorm, at the end of their reigns. For a little while, they save each other.
And so, I stayed where I was. I ate my sandwich. He drank his beers. He talked, and talked, and talked, a monologue of Zs and Ks. I smiled. I nodded. He grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard.
When he left, it was dark outside. The day was over. My true love, whoever he was, hadn’t shown up. For some reason, I was happy anyway.
THE NEXT DAY, THE HANDYMAN appeared at my apartment and wired me a buzzer that turned out to be louder than the entire neighborhood combined. Its bleat registered equivalent to my teenage idiotic episodes of leaning against the speakers at grunge-era rock shows.
“So you always know when someone’s coming,” said the Handyman. I protested that the buzzer was likely to make me have a heart attack.
“Nobody wants to be safe,” he grumbled.
“Obviously not,” I said. “I just want to be happy.” I thought I was being lighthearted. The Handyman disagreed.
“Fuck it,” he said. “Fuck everyone.” His eyes blazed.
The disadvantage of addicts, recovering and otherwise: mood swings. The Handyman stormed out of the apartment. A moment later, my buzzer screamed. And again. He rang it for an hour. Finally, I went outside to give him a piece of my mind.
“What are you doing?”
“You weren’t supposed to answer that, mamita,” he said. He was sitting on my stoop, looking calm and dejected. “I’m a crazy motherfucker, but you’re one stupid girl.”
“Probably true,” I agreed. “Don’t do that again, or I’ll call the police.”
“No charge for the buzzer. It’ll keep you safe from people like me, and shit, mami, you look like you need it. You’re too young for me, mamita, young and dumb, just like I was when I was in Montana.”
Carmela materialized, suitcase in hand, followed by a troupe of three neighborhood mutts, and a lagging older woman in worn-down red stilettos.
“You were late, Daddy,” she said, reprovingly. The old lady said something pissed off in Polish. The Handyman replied, also in Polish. She left, grumbling.
“Daddy’s got problems,” said Carmela, looking at me solemnly. “But I love him.”
There was no one in my life that I could say that about. Besides myself, that is. I envied Carmela her capacity for the unconditional. Part of me wanted to be like her, to be able to accept everyone I met. To forgive them their trespasses, their buzzer ringings, their vacuuming. Obviously, I wasn’t there yet. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be.
“See you,” I said to the Handyman.
“Next time something breaks, baby,” he replied.
He swung Carmela up, and she scrambled onto his shoulders like a monkey. I watched them as they walked into the sunset, their two bodies becoming a silhouette of something bigger than both of them.
Zak sat down next to me with a bottle of beer in hand.
“Brittany?” I asked.
“Catastrophe,” he said. “Debacle, disaster, horror, nightmare. You?”
“How about I sing a little bit of ‘Handyman’ for you? I fix broken hearts…”
“No. You know how I feel about easy listening.”
“He was as broken as me, is the bottom line.”
“That’d be life, yes,” said Zak. “And the things that compensate for emotional instability aren’t constant, either, that’s the problem.”
“What would those things be?”
“Things that eventually sag,” he said, sadly.
I put my head on Zak’s shoulder as the sun went down. Maybe love was like Godot. You spent the whole play talking about it, but it never actually made it onstage. You waited anyway. Of course you did.
“Wanna go play video games?” asked Zak.
“Desperately,” I said.
And so, in lieu of love, we went out into the night to kill a few monsters.
Jack the Stripper
In Which Our Heroine Meets a Wuss in Creep’s Clothing…
THE NEXT FEW WEEKS WERE spent in a state of controlled chaos. I went out with guys I met on the subway, guys I met in the bookstore, guys I met in line for stupidly expensive espresso. Varying degrees of dates. Mostly coffee, sometimes a drink in a bar. I went out with a couple of PhD-holding taxi drivers (one was an Indian surgeon, the other an Egyptian psychoanalyst); a Metropolitan Museum security guard who offered to take me home to meet his family in Sicily; a couple of construction workers; a Vietnam vet who was missing three fingers (alas, he had plenty to say about what he could do with the remaining digits); a Long Island City carpet salesman who asked if I wanted to “shag,” and then laughed for a long, long time, pointing hysterically at a section of fluffy carpets. I had a glass of Rioja with a Spanish-accented painter who, in an ill-conceived effort to impress me, told me that the only medium worth painting in was your own viscera. He then gave a long diatribe about people who held down day jobs instead of “doing their art.” The next day, I happened to go into Pearl Paint to buy latex for my living room, and there he was, working behind the counter, holding a bottle of glitter glue, and sounding very much like he was from New Jersey. I went out with a goatee-wearing psychic, who told me I was from Nebraska (no), a Capricorn (no), and about to find Big Love (hopefully). Then he spent forty-five minutes reading my palm, and found a line on it that clearly said I was going to sleep with him (hell no). I went out with one of the annoying New York guys who runs up to girls on the street, telling them they have great hair, and then tries to sell them salon gift certificates. I went out with a matchstick-skinny photographer, who came up to me in a café and told me he was looking for models to pose for his “tasteful and artistic nude series.” Much to his sorrow, I didn’t take my clothes off, but I regret to say that there’s a picture out there somewhere in which there is not only far too much leg, there’s a dyed-pink lapdog and a maraschino cherry.
Despite all these dates, I still hadn’t gone out with anyone from my program at NYU. And I was glad. Dating in the Dramatic Writing Program was incestuous, on a Greek tragedy level. One mistake made at a party could find you putting out your eyes during your next playwriting workshop. Anything you did was destined to trail humiliatingly behind you, like toilet paper attached to your shoe, for the next four years. Even if you didn’t remember it, everyone else was writing it down. It’d appear in the classroom the next week, translated into a scene in someone else’s play. You’d end up sitting around the workshop table, impotently explaining why it was not good dramatic logic to include the scene in which the character based on you made out with the character based on the most flamingly gay boy in the program. Why were you making out? You were a girl. Yes, okay, he was a boy, but a boy who, if not for the joint influence of controlled substances and pure desperation, would’ve had no interest in girls. Not that you could even comment directly. All the people in my program were repression made flesh. We sublimated all our vitriol into pages, becoming not just backbiters, but backwriters. I’d dated a bunch of other NYU students, both during the months of my yes policy, and prior, but thus far I’d evaded any of the messes in my daily classes.
However, if someone from my program asked me out now, I couldn’t say no. When I’d put my yes policy into effect, I’d neglected to think about that. Post-Handyman, I’d felt somewhat virtuous. A foray into the nonintellectually bound male. Hadn’t turned out terribly well, but that wasn’t really his fault. I felt comfortable taking the blame for that particular failure, whereas, if I was going to date a classmate, I felt that he should take equal responsib
ility for any tragedy. He, after all, would have the same frames of reference I did. A Doll’s House and The Three Sisters, The Misanthrope and Long Day’s Journey into Night. A shared vocabulary of this kind of material seemed to me to be a recipe for disaster.
There were several categories of male to be met in the Dramatic Writing Program, and, with the exception of the last two, I was critical of them all:
The Rainbow Bullets. As in, gay like Liberace. One of these was writing a response to Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, entitled The Penis Monologues. He claimed that the penis had been marginalized, too.
The Gayts. Gay-straight men. Obviously gay, but in denial. Usually, these guys would spend their time at NYU writing five or six scripts featuring characters that everyone knew were gay, except the playwright, who’d finish things up with a hetero wedding.
The Strays. Straight-gay men. Dated girls, but used hair products that made girls suspicious of them. Always prettier than any woman in the department.
The Comedians. Interested only in fart jokes. No one ever got a good look at them, because they never removed their scraggly baseball caps. Traveled in packs. Deadly serious.
The Tragedians. Usually strikingly handsome, and in possession of appealingly troubled souls, and extensive knowledge of French new wave cinema. Interested only in making experimental, Warhol-esque films consisting of five hours of footage of the Empire State Building. At night.
The Cult of Personality. Generally, slam poets. They paired wildly mismatched 1970s shirts with nylon workout pants and Converse high-tops, and vacillated between above-it-all silence and rabid ironic monologue. Asexual.