SIXTEENTH AVENUE In memory of Rudi Klotz (1946–2016), who was there We knew when we signed the lease we could not afford the rent, not even with five of us raking in tips on top of minimum, but the landlord took a kited check Paul managed to cover, so we decided to wait and see and made ourselves right at home. Bobby grabbed the best room. (That was Bobby.) I took a room in back, with Anne and Paul on one side and Jennifer across the hall. Salvation turned up in the person of Mimi, Bobby’s new girlfriend. Mimi had a job in film: makeup artist to the stars, only not those you’d normally associate with her line of work. Without them, she was nothing— that is, without their blemished backsides, canvases for modern miracles of cosmetology performed on the low-rent sets where Mimi was in demand. But her job took a toll (late nights of shooting, too often in some hole over a sports bar, with rats gnawing at the circuitry), so Mimi came up with a plan: our apartment— fourteen-foot ceilings, Georgian windows, gleaming wood, turn-of-the-century charm and all—would serve as soundstage for Magna Cum Films weekdays nine to five for a fee that, if modest, was supplement enough to rescue our household. Her solution was ideal, at least for a while. Even clean-freak Anne forgot to scrub the recalcitrant Max Factor skid marks off Paul’s nubby beige sofa, already stained when he’d hauled it home from Goodwill, and none of us had issues with the crew, always polite and professional, or the cast members, who more often than not were fully dressed when we got home (sometimes they’d join us when we sent out for pizza after work). And when Mimi dumped Bobby because he’d screwed one of the fluffers (Mimi was away at her stepmother’s wedding), she kept a cool head and refused to let her pride jeopardize a business deal. Anyway, there’s no real story here—dramatic arcs, of course, slight or greater, as the case may be (callow infidelity on Bobby’s part, as noted; use of leftover film stock to record couplings not undertaken for commercial purposes— that was Mimi, when she was still with Bobby, but later she forced him to destroy their oeuvre, and wept as he set it on fire; Jennifer trolling the garbage for pizza crusts and condom wrappers, sealing them with Varathane onto a ground of plywood and then framing each of these collages for a show called Order Up, mounted at a coffeehouse to volleys of mixed reviews; an April Tuesday of dappled light disrupted when our landlord let himself in unannounced to ream the kitchen drain and, once inside, discovered plain incontrovertible evidence of our illegal transaction with the local pornographers), yet what’s missing is a plot, properly speaking, with rising action, a climax (not the kind that figures in the money shot), and a dénouement, maybe a moral tag, too, something like “We made the rent but all got crabs from the shag rug—never again” or “My mother was lucky to finish high school, my dad had to line his worn-out shoes with cardboard and I grew up listening to these narratives of penury and could have learned something, but my bohemian rhapsody lacks originality” or “Who could believe we thought the landlord would let anybody turn this place into the set for She Came on the Green Tortoise?” No, nothing was that cut and dried. That’s not the way things go down. There was no definitive ending unless you want to count things like Bobby’s sentence (five years and eight months for a credit card scam he claimed was fail-safe), but even that came after Anne and Paul married and moved out. Jennifer applied to art school, got wait-listed and, while waiting, took a temp job in a bank and started eating red meat and wearing power suits. She’s still there, last I heard. And our place on Sixteenth is still there, just as it’s stood for more than a century, but now its abundant light falls on the sleek dark heads of two Chinese toddlers whose hardworking immigrant parents, up to their necks in the quotidian consequences of their procreativity, have no reason to suspect visitors from a ghost world of klieg lights and lube, spectral guests who might not agree that the language of film is universal.
Originally published by Cosmopsis Quarterly, 2008.
NOTE: “She Came on the Green Tortoise”: The Green Tortoise is the common name of any of the long-distance tour buses operated by Green Tortoise Adventure Travel. She Came on the Bus is a 1969 pornographic film directed by Curt Ledger. (“Two beautiful young women take a terror-filled journey in a hell-hole on wheels!”)
Love!!
Such a pleasure to read!