I collapsed on a bench adjacent to the dogrun, lay down on the long wooden slats, and looked up at the darkening sky through the swaying branches. Several lost and homeless locals were fluttering about. I held the bag of Primo in my hand. It made complete sense. Primo was a girlfriend fucker from way back. Zoë was a sexually insecure maniac. She was only what a man made of her. I could effortlessly imagine the two of them together, a psychological yin and yang.
“God, isn’t the moon beautiful?” said a dry male voice. I assumed it was Howard, so I just kept staring at the sky.
Between cracks and fissures in the clouds, I saw the half-moon. It resembled a sideways guillotine blade, just waiting to fall. I felt tears tickle their way down my cheeks.
“Every night it gets a new chance to come up just right. And every morning, no matter how imperfect it is, it’s just washed away.” This charmer was no Howard. He was smooth and talented, but not talented enough.
“When you’re young, you have all these chances, and with time you blow them, one after the other.”
Thirty was a matter of months away—an obelisk to opportunities blown.
“Finally life becomes a very specific thing—and that’s what we are. Ultimately, looking back, I’m beginning to believe that we need to always be fucked up. We need to always have some reason to hate ourselves, something to make us feel eternally incomplete.”
“Why? How come?” I asked, with a very personal despair. I still didn’t look at him.
“Because that’s what it all comes down to. A struggle for forgiveness in an unforgiving world.”
I didn’t buy this, but didn’t feel the energy to dispute him. I figured he must have called my machine and heard I was going to be here.
“When your mother and I met, it all happened so quick. We were in love—simple as that. I would bring her gifts every time we got together: flowers, earrings, chocolate—ask her. I wasn’t making any real money, I wasn’t doing what I do now. I did nickel-and-dime jobs. I drove a bread truck, but I did love her. I’d give her anything I could. She kept saying she wanted a kid, so I gave her one, but I wasn’t ready. I don’t know if anyone is ever ready. I never wanted to be a bad person. I really loved her.”
“She didn’t say much about you. She said you slept around, stole from her, dumped her, moved out West, and then she heard you died.”
“I did a long stretch in jail, and when I got out, as payment for keeping my mouth shut, I got set up in a comfortable position.” He paused. “I never stole from your mother. I borrowed on a Tuesday and intended to give back on a Thursday. There just wasn’t enough money.”
“Give me a break.” I sat up.
“When I lost your mother, I lost the great love in my life. But you were my little girl.”
“So why didn’t you come and visit?”
“I was young. I thought I had forever. But after prison, years gone by, I found a new sweetheart and got married. More years went by. Another divorce. Several layers formed over that old life.”
Every word that came out of his mouth was horseshit, and yet I also knew he was my father. I began crying. As I rose and took a couple steps away, he grabbed me.
“Let go!” I yelled, pushing him hard.
“You’re my daughter, please!” he begged, still clinging to me, grabbing my shirt.
I swung the heavy bag at him, hitting him on his perfectly coiffed crown. He didn’t let me go or stop me. On his knees he held my pants by the belt. I whacked him again with everything I had, and then did it again. He dropped flat to the ground and didn’t move.
I stood perfectly still.
“Lady, you bes’ get outta here, you gonna get in big trouble!” some Latin man said, awaking me.
I tried to stop the bleeding until a female cop came puttering up on a motor scooter. She saw all the blood splattered on me and Joey moaning on the ground. She quickly took his pulse, called something in on her radio, and asked me what had happened.
“I hit him.” I pointed to the box holding the jarred ashes of Primo.
The cop told me to turn around and grab the gate. She patted me down for weapons and handcuffed my wrists together. A crowd slowly formed, drawn by the revolving red light on top of her motorized tricycle. Soon sirens grew in the distance, and an EMS ambulance arrived, as well as another cop car. With a second cop as witness, she asked me again what had happened.
“He was stalking me,” I said, which was half true.
“Did he attack you?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“What the hell is this?” she asked, looking at the torn bag containing the boxed remains of Primo.
“My ex-boyfriend, I was about to scatter him.”
“How did he die?” the other cop asked, holding up the small dented cardboard box. I told her I didn’t know, but I didn’t kill him.
Joey—or Rudy, as was my father’s name—had a fractured skull when they loaded him into the back of the ambulance and drove off. I was taken to the Ninth Precinct and, over the course of the hour, fingerprinted, photographed, and questioned by two different detectives. I told both of them that I thought he was about to attack me.
“What was your relationship to the victim?” asked a fresh, new cop.
“He is my father, but I hadn’t seen him in over twenty years.”
I was placed in a small detention cell with another woman who was arrested for dealing on Ninth Street. After a couple of hours, around three in the morning, we were handcuffed together and transported downtown.
I called my mother from jail and gave her the good news: Rudy, her ex-husband of decades gone by, had impostored himself back into my life under the guise of poor, dead Joey Lucas. Upon discovering this, I had clobbered him with Primo’s remains. It turned out Primo was good for something. The district attorney was filing charges against me for assault. Trial, jail, the whole ordeal was on the horizon.
“Wow,” she replied softly, employing her signature minimalist style. Now she had something new to make me feel crappy about.
I was taken down to Center Street, where I was given a trial date and desk ticket. Then I had my keys and cash—five dollars—returned to me and was released on my own recognizance.
The first thing I did when I got back to the neighborhood was return to Howard’s house. When I rang the doorbell, he rang me up.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “I’ve been calling you all night.”
“Yeah, I just needed to be alone.”
“Want to go for breakfast, talk about things?”
“Not really,” I said, slightly pissed that he was so forthcoming when I didn’t need him to be, and not there when I did. Once Numb and I got home, I fast-forwarded through messages from Howard apologizing for telling me about Zoë, and then asking me when I was going to pick up my dog.
After the crappy night of incarceration, I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. At noon, I flipped on the TV to watch the news. To my horror, some pushy female reporter had discovered the catchy detail of Primo’s ashes being used as a weapon. She tracked down Primo’s slightly senile mother, June. I watched as June was asked what she thought about her son’s ashes being used for an assault.
“What are you talking about?” she inquired, slouching tiredIy in her wheelchair, parked in the doorway of her Fiatbush home.
“Your son’s ashes were used to bludgeon a man.”
“Oh, well, that’ll happen,” she replied, almost bored.
“Does this anger you?” the reporter pressed, slightly miffed by her philosophical attitude.
“The Malio Funeral Home gave me the wrong ashes, and I gave them Lucretia,” she recounted with partial accuracy.
“Do you know why the ashes were used as a murder weapon?”
“Oh, my God, no!” she exclaimed, understanding the message for the first time.
“Do you know Mary Bellanova?”
“I never heard of her in all my wildest days.”
By five o’clock other stations were broadcasting the item. One came up with a sidebar story: “It was learned that Mary Bellanova, the East Village resident who attacked her father with her boyfriend’s cremated ashes, had first perpetrated a vicious practical joke. When a funeral director accidentally gave her the wrong remains, a Syosset widow asked for her husband’s ashes back. What she got was quite different.”
The camera focused on the offended party: “That girl gave my son a jar of doggie doo and claimed it was my Edgar.”
I immediately called Long Island information and found the insulted widow’s number, then I called her at home.
“This is Mary Bellanova” I began. “I’d like to apologize for what I did.”
“You have some nerve, young lady!”
“I just want you to know it wasn’t a practical joke.”
“Oh, really?”
“I spread your husband’s ashes at the dogrun in Tompkins Square Park, believing they were my boyfriend’s remains. That’s what I returned to you, soil from the dogrun.”
“Why in God’s name didn’t you just tell me that?”
“I wanted to tell you, but Primo’s mother told me to go back and get the ashes. She was afraid you wouldn’t return his ashes unless you got your husband’s remains.”
“How infantile,” she remarked.
“I agree, but that’s the whole story, and I just wanted you to know. I’m sorry it happened, but I felt like it was my fault and just did what I was told.”
I could hear the Syosset widow sigh sadly, then say, “Edgar always wanted to be cast over a wide-open space.”
“Well, I don’t want to sound cavalier, but one could do a lot worse,” I said sincerely and explained that Tompkins Square was the biggest dogrun in the city. I detailed that it was larger than the Madison Square and Washington Square runs. It was even bigger than the run behind the Natural History Museum and the one in Riverside Park.
“Edgar always liked dogs,” she said.
“They’re so much better than people,” I replied. “They can’t love you enough, and they forgive you no matter how badly you neglect them or treat them.”
“I guess if I want to be with him, I’ll just have to have my ashes scattered there,” she concluded peacefully.
About an hour later, Zoë called and left a message. She quickly broke into tears, going on about how sorry she was about my arrest. She explained that I was her best friend in the whole world. She offered to take care of Numb in the event that I had to serve time. Although I didn’t intend to, I picked up the phone and told her that Numb would be happier with Howard and Fedora.
“Is there anything at all I can do?” she pleaded, hungry for forgiveness. I told her I wanted to know everything. She told me how Primo smooth-talked her every time she called for me. How he said that he always wanted her more than me. One weekend while I was away at my mother’s out on the Island, the two met at a club. They talked, danced, got drunk, went to my place, and screwed. She blubbered through tears whenever she got into the dirty parts.
“I thought you didn’t find him attractive,” I said, puzzled. “I mean, you had your opportunity.”
“What can I say?” she gasped through tears. “He showed me all this attention, and I couldn’t get away from him. And … and I guess the fact that you went for him showed me that he had some worth.”
“So it was just a one-time thing?” I asked hopefully.
No such luck—Zoë said they would meet two, three times a week, usually at her place, sometimes in my apartment. It went on for months. They must have had great sex, because she wept painfully.
“Mary, there’s something else, and this is the most difficult of all.” She paused. I couldn’t even imagine. “I was with him when he died.”
“What?”
“We were doing it when …” Her voice trailed.
“What!”
“I was the one who killed him,” she burst out crying. “I tried everything to bring him back. I did CPR and mouth-to-mouth. And when I realized he was gone, I cleaned him up and left. I didn’t want you to know what had happened.”
I hung up the phone. Fuck her—I didn’t want to know she even existed. I wasn’t sure what power Primo had or what neurosis compelled Zoë to commit such an act of betrayal, but it was unforgivable.
So Primo had something in common with John Garfield, Errol Flynn, and Nelson Rockefeller: all allegedly died happily. Sometime later, I saw the death certificate. It was right there in black in white: “Evidence of Viagra abuse.” In the East Village, that soiled and unkempt fountain of youth, there was no such thing as growing old gracefully.
In the course of the night, my phone machine gathered up a bouquet of messages from people I hadn’t bumped into or spoken with in years. Howard called again upon hearing of my arrest. This time he was even more remorseful and contrite. He asked if there was anything he could do. I didn’t pick up.
The last odd call that night was from Sue Wott.
“I saw in the news what happened to you, and I just want you to know I’m sorry,” she said reluctantly.
Since I felt I had done her an injustice, I picked up. “Thanks for calling.”
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“More or less,” I replied and added, “I just learned that Primo cheated on me with my best friend.”
“I could’ve told you that before I even met you,” she remarked.
“There should be a name for it—best-friend-sexual or something. He must have been stimulated by betrayal, like the notion he was getting away with something. Like doing something behind his mommy’s back.”
“I don’t think half the girls he slept with even knew he was with someone else,” she said, which oddly lessened his guilt.
“I really didn’t join your band because of Primo,” I slipped in.
“Then why did you!” she barked back.
“You know, I confess that I went to the audition because I was curious, but I sure as hell didn’t go to rehearsal after rehearsal and take all your crap for that cocksucker.”
“So why did you?” she asked again, this time calmly.
“I guess because it gave me hope. It gave me a belief that I was doing something in this awful neighborhood that might lead to something bigger. I enjoyed the whole process.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter anymore,” she finally said after a long pause.
“Why not?”
“I just got a seventy-two-hour notice of eviction taped to my door.”
“The judge didn’t decide in your favor?” I remembered that her case was coming up.
“No, I knew he wouldn’t,” she said. “It wouldn’t bother me so much, but I hate to put the kid through this, and it means I lose the free alcoholic baby-sitter.”
“What is she doing?”
“Jane’s moving back in with her family in Fort Lee.” Sue paused and added under her voice, “Forty-three years old, and moving back in with her family.”
“You know, I have a spare room,” I heard myself saying.
“You?” Even she couldn’t believe I said it.
“Yeah, my roommate just moved out.”
“Is that an offer?” Finding apartments in this city, even shares, was a minor miracle.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I don’t have a job right now. I can’t even pay my half, and I guess I might be going to jail.”
“Well,” she said hopefully, “if you get off on probation, I can get you a job.”
“What kind of job?”
“It pays well,” she said without telling me. For a glinting instant I expected her to say stripping or at least phone sex. “It’s designing websites.”
“Wow,” I replied, “but I don’t know anything about it.”
“I can teach you. It’s not that hard if you have half a head, and you can work your own hours.”
“Well, I don’t want to get my hopes up, because I still might be going to jail.”
“If you do go to jail,” she said, “I’ll hold your place until you get back.” She giggled at this, and so did I. Then she added, “You know, I’m probably not the easiest person to get along with.”
“That’s okay, I am,” I responded jokingly.
“What time do you get up in the morning?” she asked.
“Nine if I’m working, eleven if I’m not.”
“I don’t get up until noon,” she replied. “We won’t have any problems.” She agreed to come over tomorrow and give the place a look. I spent the evening trying to battle anxiety by watching television, but it was so dumb that I had to turn the volume off. I was amused by how many shows made brief use of New York exteriors only to have their real action filmed on Los Angeles soundstages. My tired eyes couldn’t endure the radiation emanating from the screen, so I began turning down the brightness. Only cop shows actually made an effort to shoot entire scenes on the streets of New York. But this made me feel like a hypocrite because I hated being detoured due to film shoots. I wanted them to shoot in New York City, but without bothering me.
By one in the morning, I turned the TV almost black. The cumulative depression of the entire day manifested itself into a free fall. As though my phone understood me, it rang. For the first time in eons, I picked it up without screening.
“Mary, are you okay?” It was Howard.
“This hasn’t been my very best day.”
“You remember what I said?”
“Remind me,” I responded, not disguising my impatience.
“I wish I were with you,” he submitted and backed into silence.
“Well, why aren’t you here, then?” I asked. Ten minutes later he was. We didn’t really do anything but hug and kiss, yet he was good at it. Eventually we fell asleep.
Howard and I went for breakfast, and then he started his long walk uptown to fetch a fresh batch of manuscripts that needed copyediting.
“Gardening books,” he shivered.
A half hour later, Sue Wott came over with her little boy and inspected the empty room.
“This is twice the size of the place we have now,” she said cheerfully to the child as though it was their choice to move.
“This place stinks,” he said candidly, as kids tend to, then he followed the dog into my room.
Turning to me, Sue said, “Now I just got to get people to help me move.”
I didn’t volunteer anymore, but she wasn’t afraid to ask, “You couldn’t help me, could you? I’m packing up all day, so I should be ready around five.”
“I don’t move well,” I hinted politely. “Can’t you ask Norma?”
“Oh, Norma will be there, but Marilyn is out of town.” She lowered her voice so the kid couldn’t hear her. “And they’re going to put my stuff out on the sidewalk tomorrow morning.” A pause elapsed. The child returned with the dog.
“Sure,” I said, but I had to ask a final question that was lodged in my head like an arrow. When her kid chased Numb back into my room, I asked, “After Primo left you with a kid, you said you didn’t blame him. Why not?”
“Because that was all my idea. Hell, he said up front he didn’t want one, couldn’t support or handle one. Actually, he did do me one big favor. He had me sell his paintings under my name because he knew an art collector who would pay more for them, and he gave me half the money.”
“Just half.’”
“Primo never gave all of anything. But he gave enough. The cash paid for the birthing expenses.” She looked up and smiled. “All that was years after we broke up. Hell, we even made the kid after we broke up.”
“You mean, you got pregnant by him after he cheated on you with all those people?”
“There are two reasons for that, which are really the same. He’s the only guy I ever loved, and he’s the only guy I ever slept with.”
I stared at her in disbelief. What could I say? She thanked me for my help and told me she would see me at her place that evening. To make my job easier, I called Zoë at work. I figured I could convert some of her guilt into backbreaking labor. She agreed to meet us at Sue’s place, Howard was unreachable, but the call-waiting beeped as the phone rang. It was Helga.
“I saw what happened in the news. I’m sorry I couldn’t stick around.” She had come and gone before the planned Primo-scattering.
“You couldn’t help me, could you?” I asked.
“Need an alibi?”
“No, actually, a van.”
“A van?”
“Yeah, at five o’clock tonight.”
“What in the world for?”
“Sue Wott,” I said. “She’s being evicted.”
“Good, I hope the bitch suffers.”
“She has, but you shouldn’t blame her for Primo being an asshole. She was cheated on just like you and me and everyone else, and she’s got a kid who doesn’t deserve it.”
“Look, there are two types of people, those who can forgive and those who can’t. I wish I could forgive, but it’s just not in me,” she said.
“How can you forgive Primo and not her?”
“Because Primo was just being Primo.”
“And she was just being herself.”
Unable to argue further, Helga wished me a good life.
It turned out that the girl named Pearl with the van was moving Sue tonight.
Soon Ma called to say that we had a two-o’clock meeting with a good, yet economical trial attorney—in the past year his record had been six and two. I tried to keep busy to fend off the anxiety, but it didn’t do much good.
By one, I had started getting ready to leave when I got a phone call from the detective handling my case. In a tightly wound statement he said, “Thank you for your help in the recent investigation. We’re sorry if we caused you any discomfort. No charges will be filed against you in this case.”
“Why not?” I asked, slightly suspicious, before breaking into utter relief.
“Do you prefer if they were?” he asked, perhaps joking.
“No, fine. Thanks. Bye.” I hung up.
I called Ma and gave her the good news.
“You’re kidding,” she said. She had just finished dressing and was about to drive to the LIRR station.
“I just got the call,” I responded.
“But I called all those lawyers and made arrangements for a loan and everything.” She went quiet, and then I heard a sound that I don’t remember ever hearing; I heard my mother crying.
“Mom, it’s okay,” I said softly.
“I know” she replied. “I just … the whole thing. I was so worried about you. I mean, I would’ve given anything to get you out of this, and …”
“I know.”
“And your father was such a fucker, and for him to return to our lives like this—” Tears started coming to my eyes, and the more I tried to restrain myself, the more they fell.
“Thanks for all the help,” I sputtered. “You know how I feel about you, Ma.”
“It damned well better be love,” she blasted.
“Or you’ll come right over and beat the crap out of me.”
We both laughed, and I promised I’d come home over that weekend to get into one of our good old-fashioned fights.
It was a warm and sunny afternoon, and I felt this immense sense of gratitude just being able to sit in the park with the dog and a cup of coffee. Even though thirty was on the horizon, the idea of not having to spend time in jail made me feel like I could relive my twenties all over again.
By the time I finally brought Numb back home, there was a message on my machine. It was from the man formerly known as Joey: “Mary, they asked me to sign a complaint against you. Of course I couldn’t. I told them I attacked you and you defended yourself. I knew they wouldn’t press charges against me ’cause I’m the one that just came out of the hospital with bandages around my skull. Look, the reason I didn’t tell you who I was is ’cause I didn’t think things would turn out the way they did. I didn’t even expect you to respond to my e-mail, let alone turn out to be you. Then, after meeting you, the reason I kept calling you was because I fell for you. I loved knowing you…. I love you. But I guess if love means anything, it means respecting the wishes of the other person, even if that means leaving them alone. I grew up in a world where a guy got to keep anything he could get away with. It takes some of us longer to grow a conscience than others. Anyway, this is to let you know that losing you, losing a family, is the biggest fuck-up in my life, and if you ever need anything, money or support or advice—you got it. You have a father who doesn’t just love you, but is tremendously proud of you. See, I never thought I could make something better than me—but you’re it.”
I couldn’t have typical parents like everyone else.
By the time I recomposed myself, I knew that eventually, after a few weeks tops, I’d have to call the son of a bitch. I’d have to curse him out and then reconcile, because that’s all life is, a series of battles and treaties.
It was a quarter after five by the time I arrived at Sue Wott’s.
“I guess I can’t yell at you,” she said, as I huffed and puffed up to her apartment, “but in the future, if you come this late for practice, you’re not going to be as lucky.” That was her nasty way of inviting me back in the band.
Zoë, Norma, Sue, and myself all carried her crap down the stairs and packed it into the back of the van. As we took turns going up and down the stairs, carrying bigger items together, I thought to myself that all together, we could’ve made one hell of a Jerry Springer episode. Primo was a stage in our lives that we had all passed through, specifically when we were feeling our worst or just too young to know better.
Sue’s roommate sat on her sofa, sipping from a bottle of chardonnay and quietly watched as we moved Sue out. Even though she was being evicted tomorrow, the inebriated cohabitant didn’t pack a stitch, as though intent on sinking with her repossessed ship. She was ripe for a Primo type.
The four of us worked well together, bringing everything down into the van, then shuttling it over and carrying it up into my apartment—all done in under three hours. Afterward we went out for sushi nearby. That evening, Sue was a genuine pleasure to be with. Each of us, for different reasons, felt a general sense of relief. Zoë was witty, and Norma was wide awake. We had a great time and spent hours sitting, chatting, drinking, and laughing.
Amazingly, Primo’s name never even came up.
East Village cats and dogs (like Numb) are up for adoption at:
Social Tees
125 East 4th Street
New York, New York
212-614-9653
(ask for Robert)