Brenda and the F Word

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It’s two days before the riot police are shipped in on Sunday and merchandise is marked down another 75% off what’s already down 50%.
Overheard at check-out in the men’s basement. A guy making small chat with the cashier.
Guy: So I guess you always wanted to be in fashion, huh?
Cashier: You crazy? I’m in corrections. This is part time.”
Guy: Wow! That’s a hell of a commute.
Cashier: No, it’s not. I live in Tuxedo Park. Prison’s right up the road.
Guy: No, I meant between fashion and jail.
Cashier(chuckling): Ya think so? Half the guys shoppin’ down here shoulda been in prison years ago. 
“Amen to that!” says the woman stapling the bags. “Amen to that!”

One last dumb question mulled over a martini last nite.
How come the very rich, suddenly, think obscene spending is “tasteless?” I mean, it was tasteless before, wasn’t it? Before the world went to hell in a fucking shopping bag. And it didn’t stop them. But there is a, somewhat, amusing irony here that occurred to me at Barneys after I bought my husband a $1450.00 German overcoat for $310.00. There are alot of poorer people walking around right now who sure as hell look like they’re filthy rich. People like my husband.

“Discretion is deadly to genius; ruinous to talent.”
                                                        E.M. Cioran  A Short History of Decay

The Dark Man. Romanian. Insomniac. Thinker

And on a happier note:
“How was the party? she asked.
“Fabulous,” he replied. “If you’ve never been to one.”
                                                          Truman Capote

“Home is the definition of God.”
                                   Emily Dickinson

“What we need now is some astonishing fairy tale. I read the other day that cavemen did not paint what they saw but what they wished they had seen. We need that in these lonely, lunatic times.”
                                                           Edna O’Brien

Is Obama our version of that fairy tale, I wonder? More later. 

Remember my post about the disappearing house on Tuesday? I just went back on line to Zillow, hoping, so hoping to God, the house still wouldn’t be there. But it’s back. The little fucker’s back. And the value’s plummeted down another $15,000. Of course, this might be because Zillow lists the local high school as the Garner Correctional Facility. I kid you not. A maximum security prison full of murderers and rapists.

It’s like riding the Hell Hole, owning real estate right now. You strap yourself up against a wall, the thing starts to spin. Slowly. Then it’s spinning so fast, the whole bottom drops out and you’re screaming, your face mushed by G forces, eyeballing the VOID. Which reminds me…The only other ride I ever took. It was at Disneyworld. And don’t even let’s even go there. About how I ended up at THAT Hell Hole. My kids talked me into going on something called the Incredible Journey. A tour of the human body. No problem, I figured. It’s educational. So I sit down in a normal auditorium seat and the lights dim. Pretty soon, we’re rocketing down some coronary artery and I’m so dizzy, I’m going to vomit. I’m curled up in the fetal position, eyes closed, moaning. The screen goes black. The lights come up. Two security guys loom over me. ”Please come with us, ma’am,” they say. Like I’m being arrested for murder. My kids are dead of embarrassment. Mortified. Clutching the arms of these pumped up Disney drones, I ask how they knew I was sick.
“We’re always watching, ma’am,” they said, ominously. “We saw you on the monitor.”

But what came after the ride was even more ominous. We lunched at Winnie the Pooh’s Restaurant. 
“I’d like a nice glass of chilled Chardonnay,” I said to the 80 year-old crone/waitress. She was dressed like Christopher Robin in drag.
“So would I,” she whispered. “But Disneyworld is dry.” 
“No f’ing way,” I said while some over-sized,obnoxious Tigger stuck his paw in my face with a camera.
“What about Cinderella’s castle,” I asked, swatting the paw away with my fist.”They must serve some kind of mead or beer over there. It’s medieval.” 
“No, dear. There is no alcohol permitted at Disney.”

Medieval is right, I thought, scarfing down an inedible salad while a number of obese families in short shorts walked by, knawing turkey legs the size of police truncheons.  

I know one person in Bed Stuy. A black man. We had a drink last spring. “White people are ruining my neighborhood, again,” he said. “I left Ft.Greene to get away from gentrifying. But they’re following me.”
It’s a new twist on an old story. And I keep thinking about it as follow our Googled directions from Manhattan, across the Williamsburg Bridge and down a deserted three mile stretch of Broadway.  We’re headed for a restaurant owned by two Italian friends. It’s called Saraghina. Where the hell would we be without Google maps, I wonder as we race past jerk chicken joints, African hair braiding salons, and my first glimpse of an Eye on The Sky. I’ve read about them in the Post. They’re these new $40,000 NYPD surveillance vehicles and they tower above the streets like giant metal insects. Watching, watching, and waiting for trouble. You don’t see them in Greenwich Village. Not yet, anyway. 

But they’re a new breed of immigrants, these Italian friends of mine. They’re from the North not the South–from the Veneto and cities like Milan and Rimini. Unlike Mr. Gupta, my tattooist and Ahmed, the foodrunner, they’re educated, monied. But very much like their predeccessors who arrived at the turn of the century and shared tenements with Jews on the Lower East Side, they’re also ambitious, shrewd. “The happiest cynics on earth.” This is how Fellini described his fellow Italians. He was right. But I am as infatuated with them as ever. They go where others, like me, fear to tread. Because here we are on this far- flung corner of Halsey and Lewis St. in the heart of Bed Stuy. And there is it. A black wooden facade with white letters. Saraghina. The name of both a prostitute in Fellini’s 8 1/2 and the most famous osteria in Rimini.. 

I walk through the door into a roar of deafening chatter. Sometimes, I think it’s pathological, this need on the part of Italians to talk. I remember a beach at Vernazza, back when cellphones first invaded Italy. I was the only one swimming. Tight, little bunches of Italian men and women, stood knee deep in water, talking. Their arms, hands, and fingers, a blur of frantic movement. Some of them were even talking to friends who lay, splayed out on the sand, twenty feet away. Everyone in this room is Italian. And I’m in paradise–me with my Foreign Accent Syndrome. Sveva, Madda, Laura, Edu, Kiko, Fulvia. The words just keep tripping off my tongue as we exchange hugs and kisses. The “architect” is a set designer. The room is so quietly, so discreetly chic and intimate, so perfectly distressed, Armani himself would pay a fortune to pack it and plant it in the middle of an Emporio mall. There isn’t a single false note. (Except for the fact there are only two black people.) The walls are wood, painted white with dark wooden cabinets for plates and glasses. You grab your own. A couple of farm tables, crowded with children, sit in niches. And the wood burning stove glows with heat and sparks. Like ocean and stars. Just speaking the language makes me want to weep with joy.

“Eccola grande diva!” shouts Edo as he slides another pizza into the oven with a spatula and grins.
“What do you think?” he adds, chin pointing at two curly haired kids devouring dinner. “And this!” he adds, arms spread as if to embrace the space around him. “$3500 a month. Plus the garage. We’re opening up a store, too,” he says. “Try finding THAT in Manhattan.” This is a man who came here eighteen years ago with nothing but a desire to party. He launched a small, now defunct, fashion house that continues to generate millions in licensing fees. Now he’s married and opening a restaurant. As the night closes in and children scramble beneath our feet, shouting for more,  I think of this absurd irony. While the rest of the world still fantasizes about retiring in Italy, the young, smart Italians, all search for a way out. “E un incubo,a nightmare!” says Sveva. “Impossibile anche per noi. ” When a beautiful, young Italian woman says Italy is impossible, the world is in a sad state, indeed. But oh! How lucky we are to have them here  teaching us what Luigi Barzini once dubbed, “the art of inhabiting the earth.” 

Double Wow! Down again from 675,420. And get this. For that very special person in your life, there is a copy of the book available for a mere $151.40 plus $3.99 shipping. You’d think they could throw in the shipping, wouldn’t you? 

Even more amazing news?
Zillow. com (Your Edge in Real Estate) 
Our country house has FUCKING disappeared. I type in the address, the satellite photo pops up, and there is no FUCKING house.(sorry–that’s two f words) I guess, if it’s gone, this solves some of our financial problems, right? We can file an insurance claim and run away to Montenegro. But seriously, what gives here? How come the alarm company didn’t call? Did the realtor burn it down? I sincerely hope the military doesn’t depend on Goggle Earth when they’re zeroing in on targets. Although, this might explain why we bombed the shit out of that Chinese embassy, by mistake, ten years ago. Gotta go. Gotta call my husband and celebrate. 

Fuck! Dragging my heels for sixty blocks this morning. Limbs locked, thoughts jammed. Then I turn the corner. 
“Nothing dull here,” says the the sign on the side of a white van. It’s parked outside my building. “BSHARP” reads the license plate. Must be a message from the gods, I think.  I have never felt so dull witted. But every year, this same van circles the neighborhood, stopping to sharpen kitchen knives and garden tools. When my mother was a kid, it was a truckful of gypsies, of tinkers, that showed up at the back door of my grandmother’s house to do the job. This time, it’s a wizened old white guy, his skin as brown and leathery as an alligator. He’s holding a bouquet of lethal looking scissors.
“Name’s Leo,” he says, shaking the tips of my fingers with one hand. 
“How’s business?” I ask with a smile.
“Ask him,” Leo says, waving the scissors and nodding towards a bright red SUV pulled up behind him. ”All this stuff is his.”

The word ”BREATHE” is scrawled in white script across the windshield. another message from the gods, I think. But the letters are so big, I don’t know how the guy can see the road. The car’s got these enormous floating, silver hub caps and the woofer in the sound system is making the sidewalk shiver. A very large, bald black man sits behind the darkened windows, pounding on the steering wheel. I BREATHE deeply and flee inside my building.
 

“Cullerton! Cullerton!”
It’s Joe, the homeless man. (The one who doesn’t spend my money at Dean&DeLuca.) He’s shuffling across the street, straight through a red light, with one hand up like a traffic cop.
“Got a smoke? Gor a smoke?”
“Sure, Joe. No problem, no problem.” 

Unlike Joe who repeats himself because of his illness (or because noone listens to him), I have a tendency to repeat other people’s verbal tics, not to mention accents. On contact. There was the summer I worked up at the Scottish bakehouse on Martha’s Vineyard. By day two, I had a burr so thick, customers would ask me to repeat myself because they couldn’t understand a thing I was saying. Wrapping up their sausage rolls and shortbread, I’d regale them with imaginary tales of my life on the Firth of Forth. They loved that. The Firth of Forth. (Now, my son lives in Scotland. One of his room mates is even a piper.) The point is, I recently read an article about a disease called Foreign Accent Syndrome. Apparently, it happens to people who’ve had some kind of traumatic head injury. They wake up from a coma and suddenly, hey! They’re like Russian or Pakistani or French. I’m thinking maybe that time I was toddler and peddled my tricycle down two flights of stairs might have triggered the onset of the disease. I even mentioned this to my husband a week ago. We were enroute to a dinner uptown and within minutes of stepping into the elevator, I was chatting away to the operator in his own native brogue. (It usually only takes me two or three words to determine a person’s nationality.) Ends up the guy was Lithuanian. 
“I’ve always wanted to go to Ireland,” he says as the bell signaled our stop at the 14th floor. “You have such lovely accents.”

But all of this is neither here nor there because after I’ve given Joe a couple of cigarettes, he reaches out to touch my hand. He holds it. In twelve years, Joe has never held my hand.
“Your name,:” he says. “Your name is Brenda, isn’t it. I’ll call you Brenda from now on.”
“No, Joe,” I say. “Please.Please call me Cullerton” 
“It makes me sound like an English public school boy,” I think to myself on the way home.

Why would you go to bed with something that could rip your face off? I just don’t get it. I don’t get sleeping with  200 lb. monkeys. Period. I don’t get drinking glasses of wine with them. I don’t get bathing with them. It’s fucking peculiar. It’s even more peculiar when you sleep with a monkey and try and explain away the fact it mauled your best friend’s face because she changed her hairstyle. The guy was an animal, for Christ’s sake. And yeah… I know. Alot of guys are animals. But still…It’s like sucking the snout of a 1,000 lb grizzly bear a la Treadwell or  putting little leather booties on dogs. God gave bears big claws and dogs, paws for a reason. And it wasn’t so they could wear leather booties or make out with men . But I digress. I always digress. Enough for now. Back later. 

There’s a beautiful old farm fifteen minutes from our house in the country. (The one we toyed with selling before killing the realtor, remember?)Anyway, the farm covers acres and acres and sells everything from zinnias at a dollar a bunch to heirloom tomatoes, fresh eggs, pepper, corn, and eggplants. You weigh your purchases on a rusty scale, drop your money in a tin can outside a shed, and leave. I’ve never seen a light on in the house. Not once. Occasionally, the dirty, white curtains on the ground floor move, mysteriously, and a pair of eyes peer out before disappearing back into the gloom. 

Joel, the man who actually does the farming, refuses to answer any questions about the owner. “If it’s none of my business, it certainly isn’t any of yours,” he says, one Sunday afternoon. He’s stepping ever so carefully, you might even say, tenderly, between rows of perfectly planted string beans and peas.  It took two years of these Sunday visits before the man would talk to me. 

Joel’s a typical, tight-lipped Yankee, gentle as hell with his vegetables but as hard as a stone with humans. Sixty odd (like extremely odd) years old, he wears steel rimmed glasses, knee-high green rubber boots, and overalls. The lines on his face are literally etched in dirt, in earth. He works this piece of rocky, New England land and drives home to a mail-order Russian wife. “She kept the house pretty nice when she got here,” he says on the same afternoon. “Now she just wants to sit around or catch a ride on one of those motorcycles that race through town on Sundays. I don’t know what I’m going to do with her.” 

“Bury her in the basement,” I, suddenly, hear my husband mutter.  Because while cradling four of his prize heirlooms and babying them into straw baskets, Joel has also dropped a few bombs about the Jews. “I”m a reader,” he says.” Went to Bowdoin. I write, too. But it’s a Jewish cabal, the publishing business. There weren’t any Jews up here when I was a kid, just some summer people. I guess there’s probably more of em, now.”
“Yeah,” I want to say. “Like my husband who’s standing behind you, giving you the fucking finger.”

At any rate, it’s the realtor who pulls back the dirty white curtains and reveals the story of the house. It’s straight out of that Jimmy Stewart movie, It’s A Wonderful Life. Only in this version, the irascible, greedy Mr. Potter is played by a woman. A woman, who like Mr. Potter, is also in a wheelchair. 

“It’s one old lady, no family. Just a nephew,” the realtor tells us. “You ever see him smiling on his tractor. Well, you’d be smiling, too. He inherits it all. His aunt she was a loan officer at the town bank. She’d help people who were having problems with their loans. Some help. She’d pay off what they owed then buy the property for next to nothing. There was no plumbing in that house till fifteen years ago. She pumped water from the well. That’s how cheap she was. She had a stroke a while ago. There’s a nurse living in there with her, now. But nobody, I mean, nobody owns as much land in this town AND the next town than her. And they don’t come any meaner, believe me.” 

I believe her. My father had a massive stroke at 53 and turned into a cantankerous, stingy Mr. Potter, too. But for some reason, I’ve always romanticized the Yankees. Their tough, shut mouthed insularity. The fact they hate owing anyone, anything. Maybe that’s why I’m so shocked to learn that this town, a small New England town still full of locals, is suffering the same miserable and terrifying fate as the rest of the country. I figured the Yankees would be immune; that they were too smart to be so stupid. 

Before escorting our realtor out the door, she “shares” one last story about Main St. ”I call this the infinity effect,” she says. “I had a family in August. The house they’re buying is a real colonial. Same family for generations.  1.3 million. The guy calls me and says he’s lost his job in Danbury. They’re not moving. We’re two days before the closing, right?  So he’s also lost his hundred grand deposit. But the family is all packed up and ready to go. So’s the family that he’s buying the house from. But here, here’s the kicker..There’s also the family that sold their house to the family that owned the colonial.
Like I said, it’s crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it.”