Sunday Memories: Dead Shoes Walking

The 12th street corner is now just one big nail salon filled with many women and a few men taking their manicures very seriously.

But once upon a time, a long long time ago, it was two stores.  There was the laundry mat run by the Chinese family who had lived in the neighborhood since the 1840s.  And next to that, in a sliver of a space, was the tiny, narrow, dusty, chaotic Second Avenue Shoe Repair shop.

The shoemaker was an old man in his 50s, originally from Turkey. He had a Russian refugee who worked as his assistant.  Every Friday night the shoemaker would close up the shop at 5 p.m., send the assistant home early and put out a little feast for a couple of us tenants who lived upstairs.

There was the cat-like set designer who, the minute it turned 1980, moved to Hollywood.  (Rumor had it she became famous).

There was the bigger-than-life 60 year-old booming voice character actor from the second floor who lived with his nephew (which made everyone laugh but I think that guy really was his nephew because I kept running into both of them with women who looked like they were being paid to be there).

And then there was me, recently kicked out into a new life and wearing heels for miles thinking it made me a woman.

We would crowd into the shop, pull the gates half-way down and drag out all the old chairs along the ancient wooden counter.  The shoemaker would then pull out an old violin more beat-up than his counter and play the only thing he knew - The Beggar from Istanbul. Over and over and over again.

We would nod along, laugh, eat all the olives, nibble at the salami and cheese and finish off the bottle of red wine.  The more he played the more we drank the better he sounded the more he played.  And soon a second bottle would be dusted off and opened.

It was the perfect way to end the week of my first of many low-paying clerical jobs. I'd sit like a 1940's movie star in my high heels, smoking my Dunhill cigarettes, sipping wine and hoping no one noticed I was eating most of the free salami and cheese because it was a great meal I couldn’t afford.

The 1980's came. Schneller sold the laundry mat and the shoe repair spaces to a richer tenant.  Like most young people, I didn't quite understand the profundity of end-over-dead-it’s-never-coming-back-again.  I didn’t get the irreversibility of so-called progress. I still thought one day it would stay-the-same-not-erase-familiar-home. I thought there was still time left to reclaim things lost.

Me and the Russian refugee assistant both went down the street to the competition - Mr. Fontana's across the street from St. Marks Church.

With a shop much bigger than the Second Avenue Shoe Repair, but equally dusty and chaotic, Mr. Fontana was much more selective. The old Turkish shoemaker would fix anything for a couple of bucks, but Mr. Fontana didn't hesitate to fling the item back at you and say, "No. Too cheap. I don't do that." Or something like that because his accent was a mix of New Jersey, Queens and Italy and, with the machines running, all I could understand was if I wanted his repairs I'd need to upgrade the quality of my footwear.

If you didn't pick up your shoes in time Mr. Fontana would wait a while - like a year or a couple of months and then he'd sell them. I went in there regularly asking if anyone in my size had been negligent.  I scored two pairs of ankle boots made of Italian leather, worth hundreds and sold to me for weekly grocery money. I also scored two Armani wing-tips for the man I loved for $50. (When he wore them he took my breath away and when he left me unexpectedly I was so angry and devastated I threw them away in a commercial mob-run garbage truck).

Then the 1990s and the naughts unfolded, and like a car crash in sudden slow-motion, the neighborhood became exclusive, filled with rich people dressing like how we dressed in the 1970's when we were broke, only their clothes were much better quality and cost much much more than the black wool overcoat I bought off of Henry in 1977 when his neighbor the old man died and they found 13 of those overcoats and Henry pulled them out of the trash and sold them to everyone at the bar for $5.

Watching versions of my old $5 coat being worn by young people who never seemed to have to go to work, I would step  into Mr. Fontana's shop and feel for a brief moment stay-the-same-not-erase-familiar-home.  I now understood the profundity of end-over-dead-it’s/he/she/they are-never-coming-back-again.   Listening to the deafening noise of the machines, nodding to the Russian assistant, I’d pray the shop would last longer then I did so that I could grow old and face my own mortality in some familiar setting.

The one time I got up enough nerve and asked to take a picture of Mr. Fontana's shop, the batteries died after the second snap.

And shortly after that, Mr. Fontana got an eviction notice - 90 days to get out.

And shortly after that, a coffee shop moved in so that coffee aficionados wearing expensive black overcoats and black boots from the 1980s could enjoy their $5 cup of java.

The ER Visit - Part One: Begin the Beguine

I beat the ambulance to the ER. Because when the MTA is working, it works.

Penny, the home aide jumps out and shrugs, "She's fine. Cursed me all the way up." We both knew Florence was O.K. but good to do it by the book.

I do my "look in eyes, shake hands" with both ambulance drivers just in case we run into them again. They recount the various comments Florence made on the way up.  Judging from their attempts at diplomacy, it is clear it’s not their usual "pick-up-sick-old-lady" run.

The ER is packed with a lot of old people ranging from normal old sick stuff to normal old dying stuff. We get parked in a corridor. Penny splits back to the apartment. Good time to catch up on the incontinence-laundry pile.

Hospital Rule Number One: with an old person who spent the last month in bed refusing to do anything except pretend to sleep while listening to the radio, do everything you can to keep their clothes on no matter what hospital personnel request.  Because you know once they come off it will be impossible to get them back on.

So Just Say No.

Say "Pull up her shirt and hook her up to the EKG that way."

Say "You don't need her in a gown for the X-Ray because doesn't it just goes through the clothes?"

Say "She is not being checked into the hospital I'm in charge of my mother's care we are going home so I'm not putting her in a gown."

Don't say that last one out loud. Yet. But be prepared to say it a hundred times later.

The X-ray technician asks, "Are you related?"

"Daughter."

"That's related."

Because I rarely call Florence "Mom" I'm often mistaken for the home aide.

A couple of hours later, we're moved to a better and much less drafty part of the corridor because the all stalls are still packed.

A whole bunch of cops  and firefighters wheel in a crazy old man, a nostalgic reminder of the 1980s when Reagan cut funding and the mentally ill poured onto the streets the next day to become the new homeless. He is handcuffed to the wheelchair. As he passes us, it sounds like he is screaming "Stupid Spirit!" which I think is a pretty imaginative curse. One of the women cops corrects me. "Stupid fill in any ethnicity you want..." We listen to him scream for the next hour the following:

"You fucking Nazi."
"You fucking Spic."
"Why am I handcuffed?"
"Get these fucking handcuffs off me."
"Nazi, Nazi, Nazi, Nazi Hospital. I didn't want to come here."

In between the screaming, Mr. Nurse Cee tries to draw Florence's blood. But people keep going back and forth with stretchers. So he has to step out of the way a lot. He doesn't get much. I sing musical numbers to Florence as he takes another stab at it.

“Door Chimes! Phone Rings! In Comes Companeeee!”

The screaming old man quiets down - either he got moved or sedated. The firefighters and the cops head out. The really cute firefighter says to the other really cute firefighter, "What do I know? I'm just a stupid Spic." The woman cop complains to her partner, "I don't wanna leave my handcuffs here."

Dr. Hottie is young, cute and moves like a jockey - that small butch-in-command mojo swagger.  You can tell he's going to be a great doctor. He asks Florence, "Are you home?" Florence says, "Well, I'll call it home..."

I have been holding her hand during everything. My nose itches.  I scratch it and smell her urine. Find a hand-sanitizer dispenser and clean both of our hands.

"Have you ever taken care of anyone like this before?" Florence asks me.

shopping bag full of urine

He's short, noticeably short, almost like a jockey but with the girth and waggle of a pit bull. Dashing mustache - salt and pepper. He always seems to be wearing matching Bermuda shorts and guayabara and even when he isn't, he looks like he wants to. In colder weather a windbreaker and a cap. He carries either a shopping bag or, if it is a busy busy day, a big, black plastic garbage bag and he goes to all the drug treatment centers and methadone clinics, hidden away on third and fourth and seventh floors of garment district buildings that still haven't upgraded to a better clientele, and he collects all the urine samples and specimens needing to be tested for drugs and disease and occasional health.

So fast emptying locked fridges and tin medical boxes, never caught the act, always seen after the fact usually as he slips into the elevator his shopping bag fuller and fuller of little capped bottles of many people's pee.

Sunday Memories: Macy's Chewing Gum

It was much more proletarian. Whatever you needed - service or clothes - it was there and it was affordable. On the rare occasion something new was about to be purchased we would don our clean and neat apparel and take the IND to Herald Square.

Unlike the spectacle of today, the Macy's then was florescent lights and huge long floors filled with circular racks that spun around like those little pinwheels kids used to play with before video games came around.

Buying new was so significant an event my sister and I both remember the dresses one year we were allowed to choose. Mostly we were sent off to find the loose rubber bands that were discarded by the sales ladies. Florence always needed rubber bands and this was an efficient method of procuring them. Once found, we were then allowed to sit under the racks and in lieu of gum which was "bad for us", chew a couple of our newly found rubber bands while we waited for nothing new to be purchased.

A Car Ride to the Doctor

The day was bright.  There was something clean and crisp in the air.  Not spring.  February.

On any kind of day, it takes an army to get an old person who can’t walk or breathe normally to the corner of Broome and Columbia where the car service waits.

The dispatcher only gives you three minutes to get to the corner. And when you get there the driver insists you were told one minute. Still, on this day the driver waited; sunny, clear days that are not too cold are slow. All the old people who can walk without assistance take the Avenue A bus then.

I greeted this guy with the smile I greet everyone and anyone I have to enlist to help me take care of Florence.  It says: isn't she cute this little old lady practically toppling over and dying in my arms and I'm only 3 inches taller than her but clearly I'm her daughter just look at the cheekbones and we even still dress alike parka, beret, sneakers look how much I'm caring for my old mother aren't we a sympathetic sight?

And like the car service guys before him, this one smiled back and lightened up about it taking us more than three minutes to get to the corner.  That gave me hope he would be good natured about waiting at the Curb of Insanity at Beth Israel's outpatient facility while I dodged a billion other car services and Access-A-Ride vans to run in and find a wheelchair to bring out to the car.

The car zipped onto Delancey. I had about fifteen minutes of not-panicking before we got to the Curb of Insanity.  At the red light, Florence read aloud all the signs in the window of the last remaining Spanish-Chinese restaurant in the city. "Apolo. Restaurant. Lunch Specials. $8.95. That's expensive."

We watched the stores fly by.  Turning up First Avenue, the street looked like an empty Sunday, a wide boulevard of another city maybe in Europe - stately and gracious, the buildings suddenly with character, not tarted-up tenements with $2000 a month rent for a studio.

“The day is beautiful” Florence murmured.

“Yeah,” I said. “Look at those trees.”

"I’m not interested in nature!" she snapped.

pork pie and ersatzlachs on Avenue A

Packed weekend sidewalk filled with thin beautiful young people with Ph.Ds in looking too cool for fuck. The 20-something kid in a pork pie hat walking and talking like an expert, points back to the little candy shop and speaks smugly into his friend's very expensive video camera. "What's an egg cream? Where's the egg? How come they call it an egg cream if there's no egg? I don't know." He acts like his not knowing is the candy store's problem. Not his.

That candy shop on Avenue A was the only thing open at night for twenty, thirty years when A was the dividing line between walking home to Grand Street or being a junkie and/or too poor to move away. Those egg creams were sometimes better than love. Sometimes, they still are.

Sunday Memories: In three acts G dies in Manhattan in 1993

I
He’s in Cabrini on 19th Street. The nurse who loves him the most is six feet tall and just finished becoming a woman. Her hands are huge. She could pick G up when he was bigger and now as he dwindles into the bed she still swoops him up into her arms and we see how much he has left from how small he is in her arms.

His family comes in from Queens to visit. Four of G’s six brothers are wearing his suits. They are either too tall or too short, too thin or too fat for the suits. Looking at them in G’s clothes is like looking at G in funhouse mirrors.

When they leave, G turns to M “Couldn’t they have just waited until I died?,” he asks.

II

I turn the corner onto 14th street to go to the wake at the funeral home and see the big straight brother who hates gay people beating the shit out of the thin delicate gay brother who in his own words is “a screaming queen.” Somebody calls the cops. The gay brother’s suit, formerly G’s, is ripped in many places.

III

It’s the day of the funeral. I turn onto 14th street to go to the church across the street from the funeral home. Cop cars line the street. My heart sinks. It’s only 10 in the morning. More trouble already? When I get to the steps of the church I find out it’s just Law and Order setting up for a shoot later on in the day.

The Map to My Heart

Little Asian girl about four years old, a NY city subway map firmly in her mouth - it protrudes down like a single buck tooth. She holds, with all this commitment, her mother's hand, who juggles a stroller and cell phone, lost on the corner of 27th and Broadway.