Brenda and the F Word

So where was I yesterday when I stepped out for a cappucino at Dean&DeLuca?  I was talking about how Mo decided to get into the antique business. “How do these guys in the store know this chair belonged to Queen Anne,” he says. “I didn’t know it was a style. I didn’t what it all meant. I just knew it was something I wanted to get into…”

Occasionally, it seems it was something his clients wanted to get into, too. “There was this one night, a gorgeous Polish girls leaps right out of a cassone. She was playin Dracula. I tried to explain to her the cassone was a work of art, not a coffin.” 

Difficult as it is to envision Mo as some kind of day glo barista (this was in the 60’s), serving up 25 cents cups of espresso to everyone from Ukrainian and Polish locals to hippies, poets, and merry pranksters, the proof is still here at Metro. Lurking off in a remote corner and shrouded in dust, Mo points to one of those fabulously elaborate, albeit ancient, Italian coffee machines. “I’m tellin ya,” he adds.”Everyday in that cafe was like Tombstone. It was the cafe too tough to die. In the middle of a poetry reading, when a trouble maker, Big Brown was making trouble and we stepped outside to square off, I knew I could be an antique dealer.” 

After forty years in the trade, the same might be said for Mo himself. Strutting and bouncing around on the balls of his feet like a bow-legged boxer in the ring, he dodges the stacks and stacks of art books and the thousands of auction catalogues that teeter everywhere: on the floor, on benches, on stools, and tables. Then he talks about ‘the game,’ the hunt. ”I been all around the world, in suites at the Beverly Wilshire in L.A., in Rome and Belgium and Paris and remote little towns in the Alps. I used to hang with ‘the oak boys’ in England, too. (The ‘oak boys’ are England’s most prestigious group of antique dealers.) But like many dealers who reach a point of critical mass in their careers (Rumor has it, Mo still keeps ’stuff’ in storage everywhere from Denmark to the UK.), it’s the memories of roads less traveled; of his own precarious beginnings that bring an imp-like glint to his eye.

“This was way back. At the start of things. We drove for 400 miles or something to a farm in Ohio. I got my helper with me, an ex prize fighter from the old neighborhood. We get there and there’s mud everywhere. The place is a mess. I walk to the barn and the farmer’s standin’ in the door. I see enough behind him to know there’s real stuff in there. Then I hear growlin’. It’s a big, I mean, big, big dog.”
“What about your dog?” I say to the guy.
“What about him?” he says to me, all innocent lookin’.
“The dog’s hunched up, ready to leap, right? He comes runnin’at me and I slap it on the rump. Next thing I know, my helper’s headin’ to the barn.
“Look out!” I shout. “The dog!”

“The dog grabs hold of him, bites these chunks outta his arm. He’s screamin’ and bleedin’. So we drive to the vet, see if maybe he needs rabies shots. And the whole night in the motel, he’s swearin’ and howlin’. But there’s no way I’m leavin town without the stuff. I’m goin to the sale no matter what. I told him I saw the vet, while he was lookin at the guns in his office and the vet said “Dog’s clean.” You shoulda seen the bruises on this guy. But we bought almost everything and of course, he never forgave me.”

“Too tough to die.” That’s Mo. But it is precisely this streak of reckless obstinacy, this explosive mixture of fearlessness, curiousity, and arrogance, that has made Mo one the world’s most legendary dealers. In fact, the only time, he ever actually displays humility is when he touches or talks about a piece. The respect, the love, is palpable. “Somebody asks me to pick out the best piece here,” he says, rubbing the top of a chest the same way you might rub a child’s stomach when it hurts. “Well, that’s like asking the mother of eight children to pick her favorite. There’s something good even in a bad piece, you know? It’s like bein’ human.”

Mo’s feelings for these objects is so fiercely personal, so defiantly alive, the act of parting with them, that is, of selling them, is synonymous with a form of abandonment; of desertion.It may be the intimacy of this particular relationship that also explains his somewhat unorthodox attitudes towards clients. “Sure, I need clients. I like clients.But what I’m really looking for is a lunatic like me. That’s why I hate all those interior desecrators. I don’t want somebody in here buys a piece cuz it matches the color of the fuckin carpet. I want somebody who feels and sees the character of a piece. That’s where the value is. It’s got nothin’ to do with the price, or even who owned it, or where it was made. What I hope for with a client is what I call the depth charge feeling… You get down to 800 ft. and BANG! You don’t know when it will happen. But you live with a piece long enough and you get up one night because you can’t sleep and it hits you. You see it. You feel it.”

Despite (or perhaps, thanks to) these feelings, Mo is a man who has never fit in. “I’m not the kind of guy uptown invites to dinner, ya know? But even when I was a kid, I was an outsider.” Of course, all artists are outsiders. And Mo with his brilliantly idiosyncratic, unerring eye is most definitely an artist.”People think I’m deep, dark, maybe dank,” he says.”But I’m not from Central Casting. For me, all the stuff in here is part of a symphony. People say, “Hey! Why you gonna kill yourself now to get this little stumpwork toilet box?”

“Well, honey, the guy who writes a great symphony,” he says.”I need a cymbal here.”
And somebody says to him, “What for. Whaddya need a guy stands up, makes a noise, and sits down to read the newspaper?”

“But the cymbal is part of the symphony, right. It’s gotta be there or it’s not complete.”

All of which is what makes Mo’s departure from the antique world so immensely sad. How many dealers continue to put passion over profits and prefer to sit in the dark, surrounded by the things they love, rather than pay something as mundane as an electric bill. “What ya gotta understand,” Mo adds, as he wends his way through the labyrinth of “stuff” and out the door to the street, is this: You don’t find a piece, it finds you.”

Fuck. This is the third try at posting… Talk about turbulence! But here we go.

Imagine a full moon on a sweltering, hot August night in Greenwich Village. A young man turns the corner on Broadway, saunters along 11th St., and suddenly stops and stares. He squints. He rubs his eyes. Half way down the block, a magnificent 17th century refectory table sits in the middle of the sidewalk. Spluttering candles in a pair of Elizabethan pricket sticks shed a mysterious, magical light on a scene that is as surreal as a Fellini film. At one end of the table, a beautiful blonde plucks at the strings of a harp while at the other end, Mo holds courts in a throne-like Rhenish chair. Sipping from a bottle of beer, he chomps on a dead cigar and flips a steak on his hibachi grill. They’re a tradition, these summer banquets at Metro. And now they’re finished. Gone. Mo has, finally, decided to give up the ghost and close up shop.

Mo, as he is affectionately known both in and out of the neighborhood, hasn’t washed the windows at Metro in over fifteen years. Like the windows at Turbulence, a somewhat grander, more spacious gallery nearby which he recently shut down, they’re so thick with soot and grime, seeing what lies behind them is a bit like peering into Aladdin’s cave. Inside, there’s a bizarre mix of trash and treasure, half-chewed dog bones, a red rubber ball, a fantastic tapestry-covered wing chair. When he ushers you through the door and into the gloom, gold glitters. Gold on ornately carved Venetian mirrors, their glass wavy and pocked with age. The furniture: prie dieus, armoires, Italian cassa pancas, and caskets gleam with that dull, polished patina that comes only from centuries worth of hands gently rubbing the surface. There are statues of saints and the Madonna, and angels. Angels with wings wide open, suspended in mid-air.
“I’m in heaven,” you say.
“You’re in hell,” Mo chuckles.”I haven’t sold a thing in months.”

This is one of the many mysteries about Mo. How he manages to be perpetually broke while accumulating more and more priceless furniture. “I’d rather buy another great piece than pay the Con Ed bill,” he announces. Tugging open a desk drawer, he pulls out a stack of termination notices to prove it. This is a man so possessed, so devoted to collecting, he lives like a pauper in a single room with a one-eyed cat, a decrepit black Labrador, and a stunning Swiss wife. (A wife one can only hope or assume must share his obsession.)

“So ya wanna talk?” he says. Closing your eyes for a moment in the gloom, you hear the muted shriek of a distant siren and a raspy, Bronx born voice that sounds exactly like Jimmy Cagney or Edward G. Robinson.

“Ya ever see that movie with Humphrey Bogart? It was black and white, the one when he runs an antique shop. It was during the war, see? And the store’s a front. There’s Nazi spies all around. It’s the usual story. A troubled broad with a gun and alot of dead bodies. That’s when I figured it might be fun to get into this business.”
When I ask him to be a little more specific about why he first entered the business, he grins.
“I betcha’ ya never heard of Johhny Nightime, right. Well, he was this guy couldn’t be clocked. He’d show up every Friday at a crap game with three hundred bucks in his pocket. And he’d lose. Next week, he’d show up and lose again. Nobody ever knew where he got his money. He couldn’t be clocked, see? And I didn’t want to be, either. I didn’t wanna be a doctor, making fifty grand a year or a taxi driver, making eight. I just wanted an adventure.”

Wildly improbable, mesmerizing, and largely true, Mo’s adventures seem to have sprung straight from some pulp fiction novel into flesh. “I was born down the block from Yankee Stadium but never seen a ball game,” he laughs. Educated at what he calls a “Hebrew school”, he claims that his mother, a Sephardic Jew, was so neurotically tidy, she covered the family furniture in plastic wrap. “That’s
why I love a great patina.” (It might also explain his aversion for overly restored furniture and his refusal to wash the windows.) At 16, he ran away from home with his best friend, Lacey, and lived in L.A.’Muscle beach, you ever heard of it?” After a short stint in the army, (short because he says it drove him literally nuts) and a job working the Alaskan oil fields, Mo returned home to the Bronx in the late 1950’s. “I was the best Damon Runyonish longshore bookmaker you ever saw.” he says with a wink. There was also a period he attended Hunter College. But it was some kind of “trouble with the boys” in the 60’s that forced him to leave the Bronx and move downtown. “I opened a cafe on the Lower East Side,” he explains.”And what a joint that was. My wife went loony. But that’s when I started collectin’ stuff. I’d go into these stores and touch like a Queen Anne chair, and I’d say to myself “How do these guys know this chair belonged to Queen Anne?” I didn’t know it was a style. I didn’t know what it all meant. I just knew it was something I wanted to get into…”
To Be Continued.

Oh and please note. Mo is one of the world’s most famous, respected dealers in medieval and Renaissance furniture.

Brenda and the F word is now listed as a NOTABLE BLOG by The Mighty James Wolcott on his site at Vanity Fair. Long live the King and his kindness. Now back to pitching hay for the horse in back. (See below)

Yesterday, twenty minutes after I wrote my post about my husband hiding things all over our apartment, I received the following e mail.

Subj: Information on Mare
Date: 1/27/2009  10:55 Eastern Standard Time
From: Lisa.Davis@Sternbottom&Tate
To:    Brendawhatever@wherever

Dear Brenda:
I was copied on your e mail searching for a home for your horse. Can you give me some information?
How old is she? When did she have the foal and where is the baby? Has she been used strictly for breeding purposes? What are the reasons for giving her up?
Thank you for the information.
Sincerely,
Lisa

Reply:
Subj: Information on Mare
Date: 1/28/2009 9:44 Eastern Standard Time
From: Brenda whatever@wherever
To:     Lisa.Davis@Sternbottom&Tate

Dear Lisa,
The mare is four years old. She had the foal three weeks ago and we gave the baby up for adoption. (To a lovely family on E 4th St.) As you might imagine, breeding has become a bit complicated here as space in the back shower room is tight for one fucking horse, never mind two. As for our reasons for giving her up… Sunday she ate thirteen rolls of jumbo paper towels and four tubes of Crest toothpaste. Also her whinnying is annoying the neighbors.
Looking forward to hearing from you soonest.
Best,
Brenda

Saturday nite, we dined with J., a lapsed dystopian, and his lovely wife, E.
“I’d actually describe myself as more of a survivalist, Brenda,” J. says. (I would add that J. is whipsmart, an insatiable reader, a scarpel sharp critic, and an obsessive mushroom hunter.) Over a straight up Stoli martini (always with an olive), I laugh about the article in the New Yorker, the one about the oncoming Dark Days, that kept me up till dawn last week. I also confess to my own dystopian moments. Avian Bird  Flu, for instance. I was big into Chicken of the Sea during that scare. And my doctor (who keeps a small boat in the back of her car for quickie Manhattan exits) wrote out a few scrips for Tamiflu. I did not, however, go to quite the lengths J. describes:
“Four years ago, the hall closet was my emergency control center. Pounds of batteries, gas masks, bandages, a water purifyer (so we could drink from the Hudson), antiobiotics, hunting knives…”
“Hunting knives,” I splutter. “What the fuck were you planning to hunt in New York City?”
“Self-defense, Brenda. Self-defense.” 
“And what about food?”
He chuckles. “No problem there. My wife stocks the kitchen everyday as if it were Armeggedon.”
“So what changed your mind?” I ask. “Did you cheer up or something?”
“I don’t know. I just know all that’s left now are tons of dead batteries, the gas masks, and a wall of empty water bottles.” 
“Empty?”
“Yeah. The water evaporated,” he says. “The bottles just collapsed. They’re full of nothing but air now.” 
Which is when I ask if dystopia might be a symptom of depression.
“Nah!” J says. “It’s a hobby, Brenda. It’s just another hobby that keeps guys busy.”

I then mention my husband’s secret trip to Costco that morning. I believe that shopping at Costco is a latent form of dystopia. I hate Costco. I hate the gargantuan, bunker-like building, the robots pushing gargantuan carts. I hate the size of everything at Costco, including the bill. Which is why my husband not only drives out there secretly but also attempts to hide the purchases when he gets home.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to hide THIRTY rolls of jumbo paper towels, TWENTY jars of mayonnaise, and TWENTY pounds of coffee in a New York apartment? How bout fifteen tubes of super size toothpaste, Q tips, and two 10 lb. containers of detergent? No. I don’t think you have a clue. I don’t think you have a clue, either, what it’s like trying to LIFT a 10 lb container of detergent. Not unless you’re Mickey Rourke or the fucking Hulk (Yes, I know that’s 2 f words.) 

But none of this deters my husband from trying to hide it all, anyway. Far from it. What he can’t HANG from coat hooks or stuff into closets, drawers, suitcases, and cupboards, he stores in the car. That’s right the car. When we visit friends who’ve given up caffeine, this seems like a great idea. We just pop out to the driveway and bring in a pound or two of Bustelo. (es mas cafe!) Ditto if they happen to be running low on paper towels and toothpaste or mayo. We’re not guests. We’re like those guys in Europe who still make a meager living, driving grocery trucks into remote towns and villages. In our case,  the remote towns and villages are in places like Greenwich and East Hampton. We could, of course, store the excess merchandise at our house in the country. If we ever went there. 

This shopping habit of my husband’s drives me as insane as I drive him insane, buying in teeny, tiny quantities. Cigarettes, for instance. I absolutely refuse to buy cartons.
“Jesus, Brenda. They’re three bucks cheaper up here.WHY can’t I buy you a carton?”
“Because I might quit tomorrow,” I say, arms folded across my chest. “It would be a waste.”
“Oh my God!” he bellows, hand hitting his forehead. “Who are you kidding.”
I know this refusal has nothing to do with quitting and everything to do with denial. It’s about a failure to admit that I actually smoke.Which, after thirty years, takes some doing, let me tell you.

The thing is, we’re both cheap. He buys in bulk to save money. I buy in teeny, tiny quantities to save money. (and space). So why can’t we just get along? We do. Get along, I mean. After all, I do my share of hiding, too. (new books, new towels, “steals” from sample sales.) But at least, we’re not hiding dreadful secrets. Better, much better, that my husband should continue to hide paper towels and toothpaste than another woman.
I’d end up hanging her from a coat hook.

“Fuck!” I mutter through gritted teeth. “You can stop now.”
Once again, my foot is in the hands of Mr. Gupta, the gentlest man I have ever paid to hurt me. He’s “refreshing” my tattoo, punching white pigment into the blank pages of my open book. 
The book is on my ankle.
“A very sensitive spot,” says Gupta. (I’m sure he says this to all the girls.)
As I casually clutch the armrests, I realize that the pleasure of our disjointed conversation will more than compensate for the occasional wince of pain.
Today, we touch on everything from his mother’s flight from Lahore during Partition in 1947. “She was Hindu. It was beyond imagining,” he says. “The horror.” To his anti-hero, Gandhi.”His last, dying word was the name of a Hindu goddess. That one word did more to divide Muslim and Hindu India than anything the British ever did.” 
Then we talk about his immigration. The irony. “India is the land of opportunity now. Our daughter is already thinking of university in Bangalore.” 
There is also a brief verbal skirmish about women and their place in Indian society.
“We worship women, Brenda. They are our goddesses. We were even ruled by a Queen. There are still statues of Victoria all over Bombay.
“Being worshipped is not the same as being free, Anil,” I say, knowing full well this is a battle I will not win and therefore not one worth losing a friendship over. So I digress and ask him why he chooses skin as a canvas for his art.
“All that work and it just walks out the door,” I say. “You never see it again.”
“All art is made to walk out the door,” he says.”The point of it is doing it. It’s the process.”
 Right.
We even talk about movie stars. Anil has tattooed more than a few.
“She was haggling over the $50 consultation fee for another family member,” he tells me.
“I’m spreading your name all over the world,” she says. “I’m making you famous.”
“I am already famous,” I say.”That’s why you’ve come to me.”
We talk about other things, too. Things too personal, too private, for blogging. But when I make a connection between his own atrociously painful childhood and the fact he has chosen a profession in which he inflicts pain on others, he erupts into hilarious, belly shaking laughter. I’m suddenly struck by the thought that there are some men who should never be thin. 

But how in awe, how much I admire this couple. Their humor, their grace, their intelligence. When he’s done,  we finish our boiling hot cups of sugary, milky chai. “I buy it from the Punjabi deli,” says his wife.”They’re Sikks.” And I am reminded of a dinner my family once shared with Ahmed. Ahmed is a food runner and a busboy at our local steakhouse, The Knickerbocker. He is a Muslim, of course. A native of Bangladesh. One Sunday night, he invited us to a restaurant on E. 6th St. owned by his cousin. Until that night, I had no idea that this frenziedly festive, colorful street known as “little India” was not Indian at all, but Pakistani and Sikk. While his wife sat at a seperate table, smiling but neither speaking nor eating, Ahmed and his daughter joined us for a seven course banquet. 
A master of that hugely human, Muslim gesture, he bowed slightly from the waist and touched his heart with his right fist before speaking about 9/11. “Steve, my boss, brought us altogether that morning. I was afraid. He kept me there for hours. Till I felt safe. Then people took me home. New York has been good to me.” 

New York has been good to Anil Gupta, too. Although he freely admits to his rabid dislike of Pakistanis and Muslims, he and Ahmed now share the same streets. They share the same taste in food and addiction to chai. They share the same hopes and dreams for their children and their futures. Perhaps, this is why New York is the love of my life. City of paradox and perpetual revelation. Tough, tortured, all embracing, it is a city of stories, stories as Shirley Hazzard says about Naples, that are “deeply, profoundly lived.” 
Yes, it’s young, new compared to most. But the experience, the collective experience, of those who come here to begin their lives afresh is not. New York is me. It is a city that seems to careen between wild extremes. Even the street signs speak to me in terms of those extremes: Don’t Litter. It’s Selfish. Get off the Grass. Don’t Even Think of Parking here. This is language I understand–intimate, personal. It wastes no time in cutting me and everyone else down to size. 

This is the wonderful thing about New York. It’s bigger than all us. And, somehow, I find comfort in that. This city is, for me, what religion is to others. I believe in it. No matter how dwarfed or diminished I might feel; now matter how my own hopes might dwindle, I can not imagine abandoning it. Like Anil and Ahmed and 8.2 million others, it is the only place I have ever felt I truly belonged.

As I limp out of Mr. Gupta’s studio, he gives me a great hug and hands me a copy of Mother India. (This film is to India what Kurosawa’s films are to Japan.)
“You watch it three times,” he says to me. “And then you will get it.” 
“No problem,” I say with a smile.
He chortles. “It’s three hours long, Brenda,” he adds. “And today’s session is on the house.”
I grin. I go home and that night I prolong both the pleasure (not to mention the pain) of another too brief encounter with the Gutpas. I watch the movie. Once.

Yeah. Well so much for wishing my life were another Groundhog Day. Tuesday now feels as far away as Tiflis. (that’s Tiflis not syphilis.) Early this morning, like 3 am early, I’m skimming this article, The Dystopians, in the New Yorker. All about the oncoming Dark Ages, bridge and tunnel apocalypse, global collapse, city dwellers (ie me) living like squatters on worthless real estate. I lie there, tossing and turning, my eyes popped open as wide as a kid watching a shark swim up against an aquarium window. What the FUCK, I’m thinking. What am I doing to prepare for these dark days ahead? I’m blogging about bathing and Buddhists at Bergdorfs. I’m shopping for towels. Huh? You’re what? I’m shopping for Egyptian cotton towels at ABC. (Reduced from $55. to $15.)And how insane is this? I’m stuffing those towels into beat-up old D’agostino bags. I’m embarrassed to be seen toting an ABC bag. That’s right. I’m ashamed.  

According to the Dystopians, what I should be doing is turning my paltry CD’s into gold ingots. More like pebbles, maybe. Or gravel. I should be out beating the streets, looking for a new job. A different job. Wake up, Brenda! Wake up and smell the coffee. Make a decision. Stock up on tuna not towels. I mean, what is UP with that? How are towels gonna help, unless there’s another great Flood? Do something. Dump the real estate. Buy a boat. Gather up your gold gravel and head for the hills. Do something constructive with your life. Like your friends. Build an entire city, from the ground-up, an architect’s ideal city, in China. Open a brand new high school in Greenwich Village. Crawl out of bed at 4 am to write your fifth novel before jumping on the subway for your full time job at the U.N. Stop sitting around down here like Chicken Little, waiting for the sky to fall.

I’m talking male tits and unisex tats at the Russian Baths on E. 10th St. God! How I love this dilapidated joint on the Lower East Side. Another perfect place, if not at sea, to let go and float. To drift.

It’s Sunday. I’m dripping sweat in the dry heat sauna. And my oh my!…How handsome is he? This man lathering me up with soap suds and whipping my back with his fresh oak leaf broom. High cheekbones, skin as smooth as stone, Genghis eyes. A Mongol, he says, who has given up his horse for this subterranean kingdom beneath the street. A kingdom of steam, of wet, white tiles, brick, and cool, blue plunge pools. “Eight years here and 20,000 platzas,” he adds while pummelling my neck and shoulders. Every muscle, every nerve, every thought obliterated. Then whoosh! Another bucketful of polar cold water.

It’s thirty bucks to get in and there’s room for everyone. (Everyone but the two partners, Boris and David, who came to bloody blows years ago and now operate the business on alternate days.) Otherwise, it’s a people’s paradise: bulked up, tattooed Russians grunting through push-ups and squats, fat, bearded Hassidim, silent, haughty, Swedish models, and the young, heavily hung-over, dragon and serpent skinned twentysomethings.

As the Mongol ties a loose toga like robe around my waist, I close my eyes and think of other hammans: the baroque splendor, the gilded mosaiced pools at the Gellert in Budapest,  the mosque like dome and century old marble slabs in Sofia, the fabulous art deco palace on Rue de Rosiers in Paris. It’s a condo now. But back then, it was just like once upon a time…Even the Arab masseuses were sightless, blind. Ah! The baths I’ve known…Long, lazy afternoons sweltering in a bagna at a dacha near Moscow. Hands holding a rusty boat ring while dunking my head beneath the weedy but cool, green waters of a rushing river. 

This description of the ceremony involved prior to visiting an Istanbul hamman is one of my absolute favorites. From a memoir, Portrait of A Turkish Family, by Irfan Orga, it takes place in the early 1900’s before the last scarlet fezzed Sultan, Shadow of God as they once called him, surrendered the tattered remains of an Ottoman Empire to Ataturk’s new Republic.

“I well remember the flutter my grandmother caused on the day she announced that on the morrow she would go and bathe. It practically paralyzed the administration, so to speak, at the house. Preparation was necessary. Special foods had to be bought and cooked and packed. The private rooms had to be booked….Inci was instructed to sort out clean linen and silk bathrobes and innumerable towels that would be required. Bars of rose scented soap and Eau de Cologne were brought from their hiding places before everything was packed in monogrammed hampers. All in little embroidered cloths, which were kept only for this purpose, with bags of lavender placed between each layer…”

Needless to say, getting to the 10th St Baths is a lot less complicated these days.

P.S. Enormous thanks also for other weekend baths at our nearby friend’s/neighbors. The tub is a claw-footed, white porcelain monster with shiny silver taps that reminds me of English country houses. No frayed Persian carpets or mahogany loos but thick, fat towels rolled up in straw baskets, Milk crystals, and steaming hot water! Heaven, especially when you’re reading Taj Mahal and dreaming of ancient Moghul days in the hareem at Agra. 

And yes, I know, no fuck today!