She chose me, this blonde Texan who slips away from her raucous posse, chaperones disappeared like tumbleweed in the perfumed air. She chose me— I stood on the beach trying to come up with something, anything, to keep her from leaving. Light from the Hotel Carlton shimmers in still water.
She stays.
A week before, I’d never flown, never been west of Jersey, certainly never lay under a striped canopy on a chaise lounge in Cannes with a woman so firm and sinuous she feels like a replicant. She studies classical piano in a “cow town. She’s applying to The Julliard School. I nod but can't appreciate the audacity of her ambition. (Two percent of the pianists who apply are accepted.) I sense steel underpinning her softness, a furious determination to escape whatever stingy destiny awaits in Texas.
At 22, I have no dreams, no goals, only an amorphous need to live a different life. I don’t even know Columbia’s J-School, my future alma mater, exists. When I describe Gowanus, she doesn’t judge my Brooklyn accent. A 20-year-old who literally grew up on Fort Worth’s “Fortune Road” finds Italian men charming, romantic, exotic—Vivaldi...Verdi...Vinny? This happy misappropriation repeats when I move to Georgia.
Years later, at bar, party, or press conference, I realize that the stranger staring at me “across a crowded room,” and the blinding heat that gaze triggers, has happened before: to both of us. By then, I’ve spent years mourning what might have been.
We promise to write.
I’ve not written a word since Sister Mary Malachy pummeled me for plagiarism—in front of Jean W— a sin I neither understood, nor committed. Now, energized by some potent alchemy, I write. I know nothing of the world. I live in a snow globe on a poisoned canal in a forgotten corner of Brooklyn. Nothing of books, music, poetry, art. I do know cars. Particularly one old car:
“At night, the battleship grey Ford looms atop the gas station’s outdoor lift like a leviathan..."
Ignoring my father’s warnings, I buy it from a leering, gap-tooth punk in the Sunoco station on 4th Ave. and Prospect, squandering my scholarship money, taking two jobs, one a night gig in a liquor store on Williamsburg’s riotous Roebling Street, stoking Joe’s lightning-quick fury.
***
The monster engine roars, rattling houses on Carroll Street. I grin idiotically. A minute later, it spews oil, antifreeze, sizzling bits of shrapnel, like vomit in The Exorcist. By midnight, my father is chasing me down the steps of the Union Street subway station, garrison belt whirling. A few days later, I’m tearing the Chrysler hemi engine apart, using borrowed tools from Honey Christiano in a weedy lot on Nevins Street. I bag and tag each bit like a medical specimen. Its beating heart, an “Iskenderian” racing camshaft, is beyond repair. Replacing it will cost more than the $400 I paid for the car.
I write Ed Iskenderian, a legendary West Coast hot-rodder whose name I know from drag racing magazines, imagining an Armenian Santa in coveralls surrounded by wrench-wielding elves as the Beach Boys harmonize in the background. I tell “Ed” my story, but like the Ancient Mariner I can’t stop, page after page in longhand slowly makes its way from Brooklyn to Gardena, California. Someone reads it and is moved. A month later, a new camshaft arrives—free of charge.
Such manly men, these Californians.
Years later, I apply to Columbia. I have no journalism experience, no elite college diploma; neither academic honors, nor high-powered recommendations. I teach English to aspiring auto mechanics in the school that expelled my father. The final section is a 500-word personal essay. I write 5,000 words, my life story. Someone—I imagine a desk piled with clamoring applications—takes the time to read mine.
I’m accepted.
***
I write on legal pads, crumpled pages carpeting the floor like daffodils. She never writes back. I discover a poet, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Chicano/Apache teaching himself to read in prison, surviving by crafting love letters for murderous men. Baca holds the Yale chair once filled by Allen Ginsberg. His desolate life in Albuquerque’s South Valley is vastly different from Gowanus, and yet familiar:
“Each day my hands hurt for something to have,
and a voice in me yearned to sing...
I wished I had had a chance to be a little boy,
and wished a girl had loved me,
and wished I had a family-but these
were silver inlaid pieces of another man's life...”
***
Months later, her letter arrives, a torrent of words bursting outside the pale blue envelope. Her promises gush like wildcat wells. She’s visiting an aunt in Virginia. I’ve never been to Washington, D.C. I drive straight through in a blue Alfa Romeo with a whining transmission.
We collide, clawing at each other in a pine-paneled motel room.
When we talk, the prize is still out of reach. She’s waiting to hear from Julliard, giving recitals, working menial jobs, volunteering. At graduation, she’s not voted “Most Likely to Succeed,” but “Most Promising Secretary.”
I’m teaching junior high in Bensonhurst. Giggling 7th graders slip me notes on ice cream soda stationery, and the bald principal, hating my mustache and longish hair, plots my exit.
***
She arrives for the Julliard audition.
Afterward, she’s subdued. The big city can overwhelm dreams. We cross the
Brooklyn Bridge, stroll the Promenade. Someone is playing rapid-fire piano in
one of the mansions along Columbia Heights.
“Chopin...” she says.
We retreat to Bruno Rubeo’s Brooklyn
Heights studio, leaving only for meals at Capulet’s on Montague, and briefly.
Eager, inexperienced, kids. I’m overwhelmed A half-century later, I remember
her fragrance in the sheets, the fineness of her hair, the heat, and her
wildness. How Bruno's paintings rattled on the walls.
And then darkness. Weeks later, the
letter arrives, oddly formal. She’s turning Julliard down, staying in Texas.
Later, she’ll earn an MBA in Austin and meet the man she marries, an Arkansan?
***
An older sister, pale, lissome,
languorous, spun-gold hair in a bun arrives in New York with her dwarfish
lover, Cynthia. Suzanne is an actor. Her Texas friends all seem to have last
names for first names—Sloan, Patterson, Mason—and trust funds. They orbit a
Dallas-Paris-Manhattan universe; some, lost boys and girls, costumed in
thrift-store clothes and ragged motorcycle jackets. Later I’ll see them
wandering thin with addiction on Christopher Street, at CBGBs, in Times Square,
in the trailers of trucks parked under the West Side Highway.
A year passes. I’m living in a tiny
walk-up on Hicks and Pineapple behind the Saint George Hotel, taking Chaucer
courses, barely making expenses with the $25 a day I earn substitute teaching.
My blue Alfa is destroyed when a hitter in a Chevelle runs a stop sign on State
Street and broadsides me. The passenger door handle brands a bloody “L” on my
forehead.
Branded, I imagine, like a Texas steer.
On a Sunday, my doorbell rings, likely
a Jehovah’s Witness. Hundreds live nearby and work on The Watchtower newspaper.
Mornings, they walk single file carrying identical brown paper lunch sacks;
evenings, they return, no laughter, no teasing, no flirting, an Orwellian
vision. The bell buzzes again...again. I stumble downstairs, pull open the
vestibule door ready to confront another midwestern drone with black bible and
bad haircut. I’m in my boxer shorts. It’s the only way to drive them off.
A blonde pushes a bouquet at me.
Lilies? The scent pungent and
overpowering.
“Vincent...we we're in the
neighborhood,” the blonde drawls. “Thought to stop by.”
I recognize that lilt. It’s Suzanne
and Cynthia, Batgirl and Robin, only in poodle skirts and shredded fishnet
stockings.
“It's 6:00 A.M.”
Cynthia shrugs, bored.
“Would you like coffee?” It's what my
mother would do.
“Sure thing!” chirps Suzanne.
Only it’s not coffee. It’s ham and
eggs, toast, fruit, cheese, whatever else is in my fridge. An hour later
they’re asleep on my couch.
The lilies? Wilted, plucked out of
Raccuglia funeral parlor’s trash bin on Court Street. Another wild night
dodging unwanted advances—Suzanne’s version of events—of the bull dyke manager
of an Upper Westside art house, a story I'll hear repeatedly. Always in the clutches
of dirty, rich old men, drag queens with long nails, shady producers, crooked
agents, perverse casting directors. Life as silent film melodrama.
Days later, they’re still crashing on
my couch, perfumed vampires who sleep all day and disappear at night. I think
this is cool, living with two avantgarde women, though nothing sexual happens.
They take over the bathroom, and I cede them the mattress in the bedroom. Some
nights when I’ve got to study, I ignore the doorbell, hoping they’ll disappear.
Suzanne, clever girl, wedges a matchstick in the buzzer.
When she shows up with Bart, a
haggard, curly-haired male prostitute who cruises the Meatpacking District,
it’s too much. We never fall out—she’s too lively, and my only connection to
her vanished sister.
***
1980. I’m a reporter in Atlanta. Not a
word from Texas in 15 years. At a newsstand in Peachtree Center, I’m glancing
at Fortune or Money, when an attractive, impeccably dressed blonde on the cover
jumps out at me. “Adrian Brown” is a financial planner for heiresses, dowagers,
divorcees, widows—a rousing success in a male-dominated field. Assured, cocky,
confident. Living In Little Rock, she’s married into a prominent family, and
connected to Hillary Clinton’s Rose Law Firm. A thing, long-buried, rips at my heart.
I’m successful too but haven’t the heart to contact her. My fantasy is still
wrapped ‘round me like a cloak.
***
On June 14, 1985, TWA Flight 847
enroute to Rome is hijacked by Arab terrorists, diverted to Algiers and then
Beirut, one hundred thirty-nine passengers aboard. In Beirut, a 23-year-old U.S
Navy diver named Robert Stethem is executed, his body dumped on the tarmac. For
17 days, passengers and crew are beaten and threatened, those with
Jewish-sounding names singled out; some 40 hostages disappear into the
war-ravaged city.
At Newsweek, it’s a “scramble the
jets” moment, everyone running everywhere at once. One hostage, Jimmy Palmer,
is from Little Rock. I’m assigned with a photographer from Chicago to interview
Palmer’s family, stay until the crisis resolves one way or another
Days later, I call Adrian Brown. She’s
taken aback, then pleasant, polite, curious about what I do and why. When we
meet, she looks at me thoughtfully. She's elegant, very wealthy, and
successful, and doesn’t remember the person she was. Her husband runs the
family’s steel fabricating company. Her mother-in-law is a Junior League
doyenne. Adrian lives in the very best neighborhood, looks as taut and trim as
she did at 18. The thought of her moving in the same circles as Bill Clinton sickens
me. There’s no “strangers across a crowded room” moment. We talk, but not about
the past.
As I’m leaving, I pull out the packet
of her letters I’ve saved for 20 years and hand them to her. On the outside of
one envelope, she’d scrawled in girlish hand,
"De-Liver, de-letter
De-Sooner de better!"
She grins. Her composure cracks, but
only for an instant. She hugs me so hard.
Dawn is breaking in Beirut.
***
More years later, I encounter Suzanne
in Los Angeles. I’m trying to peddle a screenplay without success. She’s a
masseuse, a cottage industry for failed actors. She’s been diagnosed with
uterine cancer and has no health insurance. We visit a half-dozen doctors, none
willing to help. She tells me Adrian fled her Arkansan marriage and moved to
California with “a bodybuilder.” When I check, Adrian has three more names. In
2025 she’s living in London with an Iranian businessman.
I lose track of them.
