Great Kisser (11 page)

Tony Cardinali, the singing waiter, was leading his band that night. He was in his late 40s. He would come up to us, sit down at our table, and say something like “When Napoleon and Dante were in prison, they did their best work,” and jump up and run off again. I got hooked on Vinnie's the night Tony's little band needed a tambourine player, and Tony held out the tambourine to me. I looked around. Tony smiled. He handed it to me. I timidly shook it, and then I got into it, and it was the happiest feeling, being part of it … family. When my only businessman friend, visiting from Toronto, spotted Tony and watched him one night at Vinnie's, he had said, “That's the most neurotic person I've ever seen,” and turned away emphatically. And that was that, as far as he was concerned. Then he looked at me quizzically: “You seem to have a special feeling for him.”

Tony lived on Pleasant Avenue (the neighborhood were I once lived with Julie) on one of the last streets left of Italian Harlem. The lights burned all night in his apartment. He was always ablaze with grandiose plans and obsessions. He told me that he jogged around the field near his house every night from 3
A.M.
He was obsessed with Madonna. “I loved Madonna from the start,” he told me. “I saw she was out for blood. When they tell me to lift her over my head, I won't say I'm not sure I can do it. I'll say how high and for how long? I want to go to France so I can tell her I also spent two months in the blizzard like she did. So I can look her in the eye and say, ‘I've been there.'” As he said this, Tony gave me the courageous look he would give Madonna. He did 500 pushups at night with Madonna's picture beneath him. By the time he finished, he said, he would collapse and alternately cry and laugh and yell out, “Madonna!”

Tony was a devout Catholic. He crossed himself when he sang love songs. On rare occasions he would say “God bless you.” And you did feel blessed. Vinnie had found Tony singing with his guitar in Washington Square Park twenty-five years earlier and had taken him home and added him to his collection of misfits and saints. Everyone rooted for Tony, to find a girl, to go beyond Vinnie's and become a professional entertainer.

This place was always serving up epiphanies for me by 2 or 3
A.M.,
and I wasn't sure if they were real or if I was drunk. But they were a hell of a lot better than what a synagogue, a church,
The
New
Republic
or Elaine's had to offer.

On New Year's Eve, Tony sang “Heart of My Heart” to us when I entered the restaurant with Karen. Near midnight, he sang the Little Jimmy Scott song, “Dedicated To You,” and he segued into a story while his band of three played softly. “The other night,” he told the audience, “I went to a 24-hour ATM in a supermarket and saw a pile of money on the floor. I see a bunch of fifties on the top. I picked it up. I pretended to shop for the next twenty minutes. I was waiting. I couldn't just say to anyone, ‘Is this yours?'

“All of a sudden an old woman goes up to the counter. She starts getting into a fit. I see her freaking out. And I know it was her. So I wait still to hear what her words are. And she says this has never happened to me before: I cashed my paycheck and I seem to be missing my week's pay. I went up to her and said, ‘Don't worry, don't worry. I think I've got what you're looking for.' And I handed it to her. Instead of taking the money, she backs away from it and starts to cry. And she holds her hands in front of her face and says, ‘I can't believe that you're giving this to me.' And she starts to say a little prayer.

“I give her the money. And then she goes. Five or ten minutes pass, and I leave the store and now I'm on Sixth avenue. As I'm walking, I see someone. It looks like the same woman. So as I walk up, I don't get close to her. It's late at night, it's 3
A.M.,
she can be afraid. She might think I wanted a reward, and it wasn't what I wanted. So I tried to keep my distance from her, but still I was automatically catching up to her. Could it be that she wants me to catch up? So what I do was catch up to her, but don't acknowledge her. I keep on walking, and now I'm like half a block away.

“So she has a chance to look at me and know who I am. And make a choice: either talk to me or not. So I'm slowing down. And she's right behind me, at the side of me. And I can hear her, she's softly crying. So I look straight ahead and I say, ‘You know, I'm a singing waiter down at Vinnie's. And I've been studying this song. And the words go—I'm going to try to remember them. It's a new song for me.' And I begin, in a straight-ahead manner:”

And Tony sang his gift to her:

If I should write a book

that brought me fame and fortune too

that book would be, like my heart and me,

dedicated to you ….

Tony came over to sit with me and Karen between sets. He had a new tale of hopeless passion to share with us. He talked of spending time during the past summer on the beach on the Hamptons and falling in love with a stranger, a married woman who lived along the route he jogged on. He had actually stopped and spoken to her once. And the following days he would keep jogging further and further. He noticed that after a certain number of miles he would reach her house, and then reach a windmill, and after a while reach the far rocks. And he noted how far apart these landmarks were.

When he got back to New York, he said, he now jogged around the track near Pleasant Avenue with the woman in mind. “I pace myself,” he said, “so that I know when I've gone far enough so that I would be passing her house, when I would be passing the windmill, and when I would be at the far rocks.” He visualized those settings, reliving his lost love, when he fact he was just repeatedly going around the same track.

He would never leave Vinnie's and risk the mean streets. He would go around and around the track. How well I understood him.

It was now 11
P.M.,
one hour until the new year.

I looked around at the Italian girls with their red lipstick, their perfume, their black stockings, their long jet black hair. They looked just like the girls who stood on the Italian streets outside Junior High School 16 in Corona, Queens when I was 13. In those days I could not bring myself to even look at them (although I peeked) for I would burn alive. They gently teased me as I threaded my way through packs of them, my eyes averted, holding six school-books to announce my brilliance and hide my upright prick. “Hey, Mister Intellectual,” they called out, “you can't read all them books.” The only time I ever spoke to them at all, I actually said, and I quote: “Indeed, I ponder.” Oh yeah. Mama mia. That's what I said. And my fear of fucking would shadow me like the scarlet letter.

Across from Junior High 16 was the tiny store that had a sign in the window that advertised a strange, unknown food to me: “Pizza, ten cents.” The moustached, smiling, middle-aged handsome Italian man stood in the window holding his shovel. He opened the doors of the brick oven and stoked the gleaming red coals. And brought forth the hot thick delicious Sicilian slice, tomato and cheese and heavy crust, and handed it to me on a cold winter day.

Karen now came toward me. She was holding a pizza box. “I brought you something,” she said. Her eyes were dancing. I opened the box to find Vinnie's painting: the red awnings, the moon overhead, the little Vinnie's within the big Vinnie's, onions, peppers, anchovies, olives. And then I noticed that above the restaurant, Vinnie had painted the windows of the apartments where his family all lived: Vinnie and his wife and children and grandchildren.

And I wanted to climb through those windows.

We waited for midnight.

Karen stared at me. “Your black bushy eyebrows say so much. They drop—boing—whenever you disapprove of something. Sitting across from you in your apartment in Vancouver, even before you'd ever touched me, I spotted that. They always give you away. And not only your eyebrows—then there's your eyes and your nose and your mouth.”

I held Karen in my arms and kissed her. My Karen, who was incapable of infidelity or even one stray hostile thought of me. Who saved me from the mean streets and from myself. Who wanted to be only with me, as much as I wanted desperately the wider camaraderie, the give and take of friends, of scores of writers and artists and historians and scholars. Who'd gone through life by my side avoiding history and politics and still couldn't fathom the hotcoffeed, smoky, upper West Side intellectuals, the descendants of
Partisan Review
and Dwight MacDonald and Delmore Schwartz and Paul Goodman for whom ideas, learning were actually more important than hair styles, aging, weight or hair loss. Karen, who really just wanted a nice bar with a couple of drinks, not this seething potpourri of Irving Howes and Philip Roths and Stephen Dixons and Arthur Millers and Stanley Elkins.

Karen, who became sober for me. Who would walk through fire for me. Karen, who was worth more than a hundred juicy, red-lipped, black-stockinged, curvaceous, black-haired, smoky dark Mediterranean women of child-bearing age in dungarees stretching over their beautiful round asses.

Karen still waited to see my reaction before expressing an opinion, or even knowing what that opinion might be, about a book, a movie, a play, a concert, a song, a politician, an idea, a soup, a piece of toast. And if I told her she was doing that, she would promptly hasten to not do that if that was what I wanted, and insist passionately that she was not doing what I did not want her to do and was throwing herself totally into the kind of spontaneity that would please me. And that went for sex as well.

If I told Karen she was too sad, too repressed, too controlled, she would storm heaven and earth to prove how happy, liberated and free she was. I would assure her she'd done everything right. “You're sure?” she'd say. “I'm sure.” “Because—” “I'm sure. You were great.”

I waited for midnight.

On New Year's morning I awoke to Karen's crying softly.

“I dreamt we were in the Caribbean, doing a native dance together,” she said. “You didn't like the dance, and you walked off.

“I was walking with another guy, but then I said to him, ‘Do you know where my Michael is?'

“And I woke up so relieved to find you beside me.”

Later, I heard her crying again behind the bathroom door. I knocked, and she opened it. “Even in that idyllic setting,” she said, “I knew no other man would be enough for me. I need you so much.”

And she trembled in my arms as she had trembled when we met, thirty years before.

The Man Who Gave Up Women

I

I stare at the lit memorial candle that commemorates my father's just departed life. He has been gone a week.

When they called me in Los Angeles from the nursing home in Roxbury to tell me he was dying, I thought he was tricking me again. I'd been back and forth a dozen times. He would never die. I couldn't even afford the plane trip to New York. I waited a day, then I borrowed the cash. I arrived the next day. He died alone.

I remember as a boy knowing that my father had a large penis, and also knowing that he didn't know where to put it, how to insert it, where it went, how to stick it in.

After the stroke, in the nursing home, when my father could mainly make guttural sounds (although he made himself understood when he said to me, “Give me five dollars”), could no longer see or hear, could not read
The New York Times
, he began to give up.

But still, when a nurse was kind to him, he reached up to stroke her cheek and she kissed him.

In the last year he would make lullaby motions with his hands, holding them, clasping palm to palm against the side of his head, indicating he wanted to sleep, to die, get it over with. Ninety-five years was enough. But the doctor got down on one knee to talk into my father's ear and said, “Izzie, I know you want to go out into those hills out there like the Indians and fade away. But as your doctor I can't let you do that. All I can do is try to make you as comfortable as it's possible for you to be.”

Money was the dance between my father and me for fifty years.

When I was a boy, he held out a dollar toward me. I started to take it. He withdrew it, smiling, a big tease. “Not so fast,” he said.

A lecture followed about my ingratitude. Then: the bill extended again. My hand out. The bill withdrawn. “Don't be in such a hurry.”

I wanted to kill him.

II

I really was a cute kid in those days, my prick sticking up in front of me, my high hats and canes, miming to Jolson records. Wherever I was, my father would find me. I'd pick up the phone in the boarding house hallway, or he'd find me in the schoolyard where my friends would watch him bobbing up and down like a puppet, or he'd treat me to lunch at the Automat, where he always drew a crowd. He would pummel away, the same monologue, not hearing the replies I barely uttered, knowing there was no use. Sometimes I mouthed the words along with him as he spoke.

Are you alone? Tsk, tsk, tsk. It's terrible to be alone. I'm alone like a dog. Don't worry, kid. You've still got your father in back of you. If you fail, so what? I'm here to buck you up. Buck up! Be like me! I know. I should have let go of you. I ruined you. I'm only kidding. But it's true. You're weak. You have your father to lean on. I know you try to write. I don't understand a word of it. I can't help it, Michael. I'm not educated. Don't blame me for the way I am. I didn't have the help of all the therapists I've given you. I'm not bright like you are, but you ought to make up for me. I was always alone. Are you alone? It's terrible to be alone. I was too sensitive. Are you sensitive? I was so awkward. Are you awkward? Be honest with me, Michael. You're my son. I'd get so excited with the girl I couldn't learn the dance steps. I'd forget to count. Do you dance? I'm your father, Michael, you shouldn't hide anything. Are you a genius? How could the apple fall so far from the tree? What do you do in your room all day? At least I had wonderful friends. I know you say you have friends. But you can tell me the truth. When I die, Michael, the world will be your oyster. I could go anytime. I'm not well, and I'm not so young. I'm 38, 40, 45, 50, 55, 60, 65, getting old, Michael, 70, 75, 80, 85, 90—I have a crick in my neck. I have nothing to look forward to. I'm so bored. When I die you'll have enough money to travel to Paris and write, beautiful women on your arm. The will is in the bank. The will is in the desk. The will is right over there. I'll leave the room now. I hope you don't read it. Don't be in such a hurry. You shouldn't want your father to die. Don't get so excited about it, you can hardly wait. Be civilized. Your eyes are sparkling. There's so much hate in you. You hate me, yet my entire life is you. I gave up women for you. I gave up delicatessen for you. You blame me for everything. I know: I really did ruin you. I'm sorry, Michael, forgive me. I didn't have help for my emotional problems like you did. You understand, so you should forgive me. I mean well. A father means well! And what if I don't? You're a lucky boy! I look around at all the cripples and I feel great! Michael! Life is not easy for anyone. Friendship, honor—nothing matters but money. Mommy was a good kid, even though she tried to poison me. It was silly, I had no insurance to speak of. Michael, why was my father so mean? Please tell me. You're the genius. Buck up, kid! I'm more important to you than all the girls and all your friends. You should break down the door to see me. Because when I die you're going to have a ball. The will is in the First National Bank, Chase, Chemical, in Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, in vaults E, G, H, A, D, V. So don't worry, kiddo. You see? You've got it made.