I woke up the next afternoon with a hangover spinning me like I was tied to an overhead fan. I brushed, showered, made a cup of decaf—I had read somewhere that caffeine was related to breast cancer and hypertension—and braced myself before my phone. I went through my phone book and called Primo’s mother back. I was on a strange ride, believing if I tossed him to the wind, I’d be free of him forever.
“Mrs. Schultz,” I began when she picked up. “I was wondering if I could pick up Primo today?”
“What time?”
“In the next hour or so,” I said.
“Do you need directions to get here?” Yes. She gave me overelaborate subway instructions: Take this train to that stop, get in the second car, don’t use that exit, go up these stairs, don’t talk to the newsstand guy …
I left the house and made the mistake of walking down St. Mark’s Place, the overbelly of the seedy East Village. I passed immigrants selling stupidly emblazoned T-shirts, white teenage beggars better dressed than I, tourist bars, and fast-food stands. I crossed Cooper Square to Broadway, where I almost got broadsided by one of those red double-decker tourist buses. Who let those things out of England?
While waiting on the subway platform for the train, I began noticing red spots on my skirt—someone else’s bloodstains from a punkfest I attended a while ago. Even if my shirt was clean, it was way too downtown, far too trashy and revealing for where I was going. While trying to get my mind off my poor fashion choices, I realized some cute guy was circling and seriously checking me out. I looked away in perfect contempt: I’d rather never meet him and always have his love than the other way around. The distant lights of a train were visible at the end of the tunnel. A moment later its doors slid open.
The subway wasn’t too crowded, but it smelled woozily of perfume and vomit. At the Prince Street stop I dashed into another car, and resentfully counted off the stops as the train slowly made its way into the middle of bulbous Brooklyn. Why did I have to come out to see this mother? I never even saw her while I dated her cheating son.
I followed the directions and finally spotted the house. It was surrounded by a brown little lawn and earless driveway. A thorny tree jutted over the bug-squished screen door. I couldn’t see Primo growing up here. I checked my face in the front-door glass. I was transparent and unwashed. I rang the incredibly loud bell, fixed my lipstick, and finger-combed my lifeless hair. Soon I heard thudding sounds coming from deep inside the house, reminiscent of a B horror flick.
The door mysteriously opened, and out wafted the odor of dead pigeons—a smell I knew well from my airshaft. From out of that swampy darkness, Mrs. Schultz edged forward in her high-backed, wicker wheelchair. I was on the set of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? An elderly lady, drunk on cosmetics, extended a pale gloved hand. She wore a colorful floral sundress that extended down over her knees. A white bandanna was knotted around her loose chicken neck. Her silver hair was bunned up. The woman had no real resemblance to Primo, or to anyone else I had ever met.
“You must be Primo’s little pal,” she said, as if to dissolve any sexual involvement, which was fine with me.
“And you must be his mother.” I tried to act like a soap opera character.
“Come on then,” she said, backing up her chair.
When I entered, she closed the door behind me and pointed me down a narrowing hallway. Several dusty oil paintings were squared along the faded floral wallpaper. They depicted empty gray cement sidewalks that looked like the streets I had just passed to get there. I didn’t compliment them; false flattery was my last line of defense. I wondered if Primo had painted them.
Creaking behind me in that scary chair, she herded me into a large living room. Upon the shining oak table, which smelled freshly of Pledge, sat only one stark item, a perfectly sealed package. Its dimensions were roughly six inches square. Printed on a computer label under the logo for the Malio Funeral Home (which was twined around a calla lily) was the phrase, “The Remains of Primo Schultz.”
“Did you have any problem finding the house?” she asked. All I could think was, Poor Primo.
“No.”
“Are you hungry?”
“No, thanks.” She motioned me forward into another room. I rose and walked to a closed door. “This was his room. Open it.”
I did as told and found a bruised and lonely little space, dominated by a large bed surrounded by drawn curtains. On top of the made bed and small desk were the same kind of yellow-and-blue banana boxes that Primo had left behind in my house. There was a stack of obscure magazines that included Howard the Duck comics and old National Lampoons. In the corner was a decal-covered guitar case, also electric. Between the desk and the wall were assorted cellophane-wrapped canvases, presumably his paintings. The one noticeable omission for a Primo Schultz room was a TV.
“This is my little museum to Hal.” I heard the wheelchair squeaking across the wooden floor behind me.
“Hal?”
“That was his given name.” I guess I should have figured that one out. I picked up an old journal called Trouser magazine and flipped through it.
“I don’t know what half of this stuff is,” his mother said, shaking her head. “I never really went through it. I don’t know if it’s garbage or valuable.”
“I guess it was valuable to him,” I muttered without thinking.
“I mean, it really was kind of selfish for him to just die. I mean, I’m seventy-two years old, but I can’t afford to die yet.”
She kept talking, as if trying to make Primo’s ghost feel guilty. I turned her off and scanned the room. There was evidence of a hectic, youthful life. A collection of ticket stubs on a bulletin board, tacked there hastily twenty years ago and fated to remain there for what would probably be the next fifty years. They were from various hip concerts he’d attended during the late sixties and early seventies: Television, Captain Beef heat, and Rush were among them. There was a ripped ticket to the Bangladesh Concert. None of them had admission prices above four dollars.
I flipped through what looked like the first edition of The Whole Earth Catalogue. Under it was a yellowing rubber-banded stack of brochures announcing:
END THE WAR IN VIETNAM RALLY
12 Noon
Saturday October 12th, 1971
Washington Square Park
It was clear that he was supposed to hand them out but didn’t—probably why the war dragged on. Yellowing pages gave mini-reviews of the band he was in during the late eighties, Infant Mortality. I found a stack of cassettes, presumably a demo the band put together. The name of the tape, “DO OR DI,” was printed in generic white address labels. There were cards with gilded lettering announcing a group show where his artwork was scheduled to appear, and a stack of multicolored pages entitled “THE NATIONAL POETRY MAGAZINE OF THE LOWER EAST SIDE,” dated from the early eighties. Mrs. Schultz rambled on as I kept flipping until I made a real find, a poem:
Despite a worldkinds telling and detailings
and meticulous recordings:
of symptoms, signs, and syndromes,
of its palpitations, pustulations and abrasions,
of its scabs, blood flows, of its impairments and impalings,
of muscular deterioration, of neurological disintegrations,
of its endless clottings, twitches, stoppings and failings,
no doctor yet can calm the pain
not even a soothing balm has been discovered
to relieve the inflamed affections
of a brusquely uncoupled lover.
It was a better poem than the one he wrote me, and now it was too late to dump him—at least figuratively. On the other side of the page was that goddamn line drawing, no different from the one of me. Instead of circular eyes, hers opened like zippers. It was difficult to believe that the rock-and-roll despot I had auditioned for—such an absolute terror—could inspire this yearning. I located another poem delightfully entitled, “Fuck You Fuck!” that read:
Go ahead—Kiss to your heart’s content!
—it won’t make you any goddamned younger
or any more in love.
And I can laugh much longer
while thinking how the both of you can’t believe
either hasn’t or will ever kiss another
to wilt and wither this one.
My eyes started growing misty as Mrs. Schultz murmured, “Christ, I’m starving. You hungry, dear?”
“Sure,” I replied politely. Remaining thin and attractive in America was a chronicle of hunger.
She spun in reverse, turned ninety degrees, barely missing a glass cabinet, and zoomed into the kitchen like a Pakistani cabbie. I followed. She ordered me to take down a can of StarKist Tuna. I removed it from the cupboard, but confided to her that I didn’t really want tuna.
“In my day we ate as given,” she muttered, told me to open another drawer, and instructed me to take out a box of Entenmann’s cinnamon rolls. She told me how to open the box. She told me where the right knife was. She told me which plate to put the boring pastry on—the china, not the plastic. She criticized me for cutting more than a proper square.
“What do you want to drink?” she asked.
“Water,” I said simply, because I didn’t feel like being instructed in making coffee.
She asked me to bring the dish of crappy pastry into the dining room. So I sat before her and ate the week-old cinnamon rolls as she waxed on, trying to spin Primo’s death into guilt. Her life would be lonely now. Who would call her for Mother’s Day? Who would come over for Christmas? In the course of the next twenty minutes, while thinking of a way to get the hell out of there, I caught a glimpse of an old photo and saw Primo wearing a sailor outfit.
“Holy shit,” I said, without intending to curse. “Was Primo in the navy?”
“No, that was his father.”
“Oh, yeah. He does look older.”
“We met during the war,” she began. “He was so handsome. But he was not a stay-at-home type.”
Maybe he just wasn’t the stay-with-you type, I wanted to say. “Is he still alive?”
“I don’t know. We divorced soon after Primo was born.” She looked out the window. “You know how it is.”
“Oh yeah,” I replied. Fathers in this day and age have a way of vanishing. “Frankly, I always wanted a daughter,” Mrs. Schultz eventually confided. “I always liked my boy, but it wasn’t easy being a single mother. It was difficult dating. If I brought home a boyfriend, Primo would have a fit. I would have to find places outside to be intimate. Primo was such a temperamental child; he had an artist’s temperament.”
“With all the work he did,” I said, pointing toward his grim cave, “it’s a damned shame that he never made it.”
“Yeah, well—” She looked off in the distance. “He came pretty close.”
By the sad, faraway look in her eye, I sensed that she was done socializing. I rose, looked at my watchless wrist, and declared I had a rendezvous. Mrs. Schultz nodded, picked up Primo’s ashes, and was about to put them in a Loehmann’s shopping bag when she paused and looked at the neat, angular box containing the remains of her only child.
“Does anyone really believe for an instant that this is all that’s really left of him?” She kissed the kraft paper that covered the box, pressing her tacky red lipstick onto it, then dropped it into a bag and handed it to me.
I bowed down and gave the old lady a quick embrace, which was really just a shoulder clench. She smiled and told me not to be afraid to call if I needed anything. I promised her that I would call even if I didn’t need anything, which was a bold-faced lie.
While waiting at the Brooklyn station for the Manhattan-bound train, I flipped through copies of different fashion magazines. “Are you going to buy that?” the Indian newsstand operator asked. I closed the Elle and walked fashionably away. I battled sadness on the trip home, yet when we finally reached Manhattan and the train started filling up, my mood shifted. I remembered the line drawing Primo did of Sue Wott with the soft narrow slits. Asian eyes, I had read, were adapted to the snow-blinding climate of frozen Asia during the Ice Age. This was my ice age. Primo’s line drawing of me didn’t look half so attractive as the one he did of her—the girl of his dreams and nightmares.
If this wasn’t bad enough, for about ten minutes while stalled in the White Hall station, some fat old hippie made goo-goo eyes at me. His short arms were covered with old algae-colored tattoos, and his big beer belly made him look like a lecherous bullfrog. I placed the bag holding the cube that was Primo on my lap to conceal myself as much as possible. It didn’t stop there. When I got off the train, up to the light of day, it was as though I was on a harassment conveyor belt. First a row of street-lunching stevedores made comments as I walked up Eighth Street toward Kmart. At Cooper Union, a man walked right behind me, chugging out a series of vile anatomical comments. Perhaps lack of exercise and crappy eating habits make a fellow horny. If this male annoyance unit had a nutritional breakdown label, his fat calories would definitely have exceeded all other items.
When I finally opened my door, the answering machine had just clicked on and was recording a message: “Good news. We’ve picked you.”
It was the target of Primo’s affections—Sue Wott. I snatched the phone off the horn and said, “Can I ask you a few questions?”
“You don’t have to pay a percentage of the band’s operating expenses,” she explained. I could hear a kid screaming in the background.
“Is that your child?” I asked politely.
“Yes, but he’s not part of the deal.”
“Who’s the father?” I asked in that interstice of levity.
“A man. Are you Crazy and Beautiful or not?”
“Can I think about it?” I asked, looking at myself in a hand mirror.
“No, I need an answer right now.”
“Now?”
“We already booked space and have a date lined up. I would’ve called you earlier, but we had to hear from one last girl in the Mica Shits.”
“You picked me over someone else?” I couldn’t believe it.
“Sure, but they couldn’t follow orders and you had bigger boobs, so you won out.”
If she were male I could sue her, but because she was a brash chick I could only ask her where and when they were meeting: two tomorrow afternoon at the same studio where I had auditioned.
“And bring your own bass this time,” she growled.
“Two in the afternoon! How about during weekdays?”
“We’re mainly planning to rehearse in the evenings. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She hung up. I lay down and, while trying to decide whether or not to take a nap, I fell asleep.
It was early in the evening when Joey woke me up on my machine, saying that he heard there was a great restaurant in my neighborhood, did I want to join him. I picked up. Of course I did, only in these classy overpriced mess halls where you got to wear a nice dress and tasteful makeup and have waiters treat you like a queen, only then did I feel like I had any worth. An hour later we met outside the Gotham Diner, where he talked about the travails of his long day.
“At the collection agency?” I asked, slicing up a segment of leek in a wonderful mustard sauce.
“Yeah, it’s amazing. People think they can just take the money and walk.”
“How do you collect the cash?”
“Mainly through lawyers—we get a ruling, and then we’ll put a lien on them or grab their wage or tax refunds.”
“It sounds depressing.”
“It is for them. But hey, they should be thinking about that before they place the bet.”
“What bet?”
“I always think of the money as a bet. Life’s kind of a gamble, isn’t it?”
“You are such a philosopher,” I commented. After dinner, dessert, aperitifs, a stroll to my apartment, a walk of the dog, and television, there was the joy of sleep.
Late the next morning, I thought about looking for a better job. I also thought about shaving my legs and waxing my bikini line. Each seemed equally inconceivable. By one-thirty I was out the door, heading to the first band rehearsal of my life.
I inspected Primo’s old Fender Bass. It was tattooed with odd and torn stickers. Under its neck between the last two metal frets were scratched E, A, D, G. I didn’t have an amp, so I couldn’t hear the actual sounds that twanged out. I was running late, but I grabbed a cup of coffee downstairs.
I followed the path I took to the audition, down the street, into the old building, up the rickety elevator to the third floor. The little room was like a decompression chamber, packed with three girls and their supplies. They were playing when I showed up. After they finished their little jam, Sue said, “You’re allowed three latenesses, and then you get fined a dollar for every minute. That’s how we do things, you dig?” I didn’t respond, and she wisely didn’t push it.
What the fuck was I doing here? I wondered as she screamed at Norma, “Are those drumsticks tuned up? Finding the rhythm from you is like getting a pulse from a heart attack victim.”
When Marilyn started laughing at the little insult, Sue turned on her. “You came in too late and stayed too long. And by the way, we’re supposed to begin at E, go up to A, and then back to E, remember?” Sue played in E on her acoustic guitar as she sang the lyrics: “Don’t jerk off beforehand.” Then to A—“Then go limp and blame me-e-e, man …”
Noticing me looking at her in amused horror, she asked, “Hey, new girl, I hope you brought your pick?”
“Cool it, cupcake,” Marilyn replied.
Sue didn’t respond. After this short, abusive break, equipment and people were squeezed to one side. A space was created to stand, and a worn-out practice amp was pointed out for me. I strapped on my bass and plugged it into an extra distortion pedal that Marilyn had that allowed me to modulate my sound.
Sue discussed the type of music the Beautiful and the Crazy were trying to attain; some hazy point between punk and pop. We played four songs. Even though it was my first session, and I hadn’t played since college, the looseness of the band was not all my fault. Norma missed beats. Marilyn was frequently out of tune, and Sue kept forgetting her lines, which was unforgivable, considering she wrote all the damn songs.
After an hour of instrumental torture, we stumbled and bumbled through the remaining four songs. All were faintly accusatory toward men, but the level of sarcasm and wordplay redeemed them; “Colder Than a Witches Tit” and “Poontang You” were among my two favorites. One tune, “The Ache,” was loosely based on Primo’s insulting poem to Sue. After a second hour, when two of the simpler songs had been shaped and polished into something discernible, Norma started dropping her drumsticks. Sue called a fifteen-minute break and asked her drummer if she was able to continue. Overly ambitious, Sue had rented out three hours of rehearsal time, far too much for attention-deficit-disorder-suffering East Villagers like ourselves.
Sue gave Marilyn five dollars and told her to buy us all some coffees and a box of Pepperidge Farm cookies. I wondered where Sue got her cash, and if she was still stripping—or maybe it was from all her late fees. Before we began the second half of our rehearsal, Sue stared at my instrument. It was covered with fading and peeled decals from years gone by.
“Holy shit,” she finally broke through the gaze of contemplation. “I recognize this.” It didn’t even occur to me that she could trace it until she said, “This is Primo’s fucking Fender!”
“Primo?!” I said fearfully, and had this strange fear that she was going to throw me out of the band.
“Where the fuck did you get it?” She picked it up like an old acquaintance with whom she’d had a bad falling-out.
“He sold it to me,” I replied.
“You know him?”
“Someone introduced us. He was trying to get some money quickly.” I knew she’d recognize this as Primo’s style.
“The bastard!”
I considered telling her about his demise—this was my opportunity to come clean—but in that instant I didn’t want to jeopardize my band standing, so I innocently asked, “Did you know him?”
“Aside from being my husband through most of the eighties, he screwed two of my friends as well as my sister, who I still don’t speak to.” She didn’t mention child abandonment or nonpayment of child support, which comforted me.
“Did you love him?” No sooner had I asked this than I regretted it.
“You know what love is,” she embarked as she stepped into my personal space, “Love is a contract, and he never fulfilled his part of it.”
I was dying to ask her if Primo was the father of her Amerasian kid, but she clapped her hands loudly and announced that she had to talk to everyone. She filled me in on their upcoming events. In two weeks we were scheduled to play at Mercury Lounge, then a few days after that we were going to have a showcase performance with two other girl bands, including Emily’s band, Crapped Out Cowgirls, and Purple Hooded Yogurt Squirter.
“Don’t you think we should practice more before going out?” I asked.
“We’re going to rehearse about a half dozen times before the Mercury show,” she explained. Tomorrow we’d meet again.
Norma the geriatric punkster lived on Second and Seventh, so we tiredly walked east together. Sue and Marilyn, the human pincushion, headed north. Once home I checked my messages. Alphonso, the ruffian I had met in the strip joint, asked for a rematch. I was too tired to think about it.