Cameos
Here comes Hugh in his truck, turning heads. Hugh Cosman in a 1953 Ford
F-100, the special deluxe edition pickup, with the rounded fenders, and the
clamshell hood stamped from one sheet of steel. The horn button on the
steering wheel says 50th anniversary, 1903–1953. You lose that horn button
and good luck finding another one. Other details: the boomerang-shaped
ornaments on either side of the hood. Originally they were chrome, but when
the truck was built the manufacturer wasn't putting nickel under the chrome,
because nickel was a defense-appropriated material. Korean War. The
chrome wore thin, so Hugh had his boomerangs sandblasted at a shop out in
Roosevelt, Long Island, and then he painted them ivory, to match the tailgate
lettering and the bumpers.
Hugh works at Treitel-Gratz, in Long Island City. Its card says:
CRAFTSMEN IN METAL FABRICATION
PRECISION PARTS
CUSTOM FURNITURE
DESIGN MODELS
Treitel-Gratz also makes sculptures for artists such as Isamu Noguchi,
Barnett Newman, and Walter De Maria. Hugh is thirty-seven, and he went to
Vassar, formerly a women's college, where they (still) don't offer courses in
automotive restoration. In the chain of events that delivered the truck into
Hugh's hands, it is likely that he occupied the role of guy D. Guy A has the
truck parked in his barn or garage or out back on the lawn, and has always
meant to do something about it — slap some putty here, a little paint there,
maybe bang out a dent — but never has. Guy B sees it, or sees an ad, or
knows somebody who knows about the truck, and he buys it, thinking he'll
put a few hours into it and give it a new coat of paint and have a showcase
piece of rolling stock. He does some slipshod patching of rust with strips of
metal and pop rivets, sees how much more of a commitment is required, and
puts the truck back on the market, turning it over to guy C, who thinks he'll
devote several evenings and weekends to it, then realizes he's in over his
head and throws a tarp over the truck and puts a For Sale sign on it, and in
comes guy D. Years may have passed (Hugh's truck was last on the road in
1979, registered in Pennsylvania) and a lot of bad amateur work may have
been performed on the truck by the time guy D gets hold of it. Hugh paid nine
hundred for the truck, in December 1987. The ad that he answered described
a West Coast rust-free truck. He says that the truck that came into his
hands was "an East Coast rust-eviscerated vehicle."
Hugh began restoring his truck in the yard of his weekend house,
in New Jersey. Then he brought it to the city, piece by piece, and worked on
it at night in a corner of the shop at Treitel-Gratz. Eventually, every part of the
body except the cab had been removed and brought to the city to be sanded
or sandblasted or galvanized or painted. The bed he had rebuilt in poplar by a
cabinetmaker.
Hugh's association with Treitel-Gratz provided him with garage
space, specialized tools, and access to Frosty — that is, Forrest Myers, an
artist, car restorer, and metalworker, whose support, knowledge, and
philosophical example gave Hugh the kind of head start that most guys (guys
A, B, and C, for example) lack. There is an aspect of friction, though, in
Frosty's relationship with Hugh. Frosty's position is that Hugh's truck is a
classical showpiece, not a beater. Some months ago, after enough
mechanical work had been completed to allow Hugh to register his truck, he
ran an errand in it, using the bed of the truck to carry lumber. Frosty's
reaction: "He's making a farm truck out of it. He's throwing cinder blocks into
the back, and hay bales, and I don't know what else. The last time I looked,
there was dirt in the bed." Frosty does, however, approve of the care with
which Hugh pursued the restoration. What Hugh really did was not simply
restore his truck — he remanufactured it, duplicating all kinds of rotten sheet-
metal pieces in stainless steel, so they will never rust again.
A few weeks ago, Hugh brought the truck to Oscar's Auto Body,
on Twenty-First Street in Queens, for painting. Parts of Hugh's truck have
spent a lot of time at Oscar's. The fenders alone spent a year. While his
truck was at Oscar's, the only contact Hugh had with it took place one night
in a dream. Oscar does work for Hugh at a discount, when one of his painters
is free. Normally, Oscar handles Jaguars, Bentleys, and Rolls-Royces. He
doesn't have much extra time. Whenever Hugh paid a visit to see whether
progress was being made on his truck, Oscar would give him a tour of the
shop and explain why there were delays. He would point to the Jag that
belonged to the orthodontist who drove straight on into a truck with its lift
gate down. Or the Bentley with the door that stopped a bicycle messenger.
Gradually Hugh's truck was sanded down to the frame and touched up with
primer, until it looked like a person shaved and painted and waiting for
surgery. Oscar used to cushion Hugh's disappointment at not having his
truck finished by saying, "When you get this truck done, it will be one of
those few."
Of all the new elements of his truck, Hugh takes the greatest
satisfaction in his tailgate. In order to turn heads, the hood and the tailgate
must be in top condition — must be cherry — because those are the two
parts of the truck that people see first. Besides, everyone knows that the
condition of your tailgate says a lot about the kind of person you are. So
Hugh took pains with his tailgate. That meant painting the letters spelling ford
in ivory, then painting over them in vermillion, the color he painted the rest of
the truck, and buffing the letters until the ivory reappeared. The dream that
Hugh had about his truck involved the tailgate and the head of the New York
Public Library. It took place shortly after he finished buffing out the letters. In
the dream, he was standing in the shop at Treitel-Gratz, showing the tailgate
to an acquaintance, who was a sculptor. The man studied the work. He
rubbed his hand over the letters to feel how the enamel had been buffed to a
texture that was almost like glass. He admired the richness of the color. He
was silent for a moment, and then he turned to Hugh and said, "That's great.
You did yours the same way Vartan Gregorian did his."
(1989)
The young man responsible for the slightly perceptible knot in pedestrian
traffic at the northeast corner of Bleecker Street and Seventh Avenue is Jean-
Pierre Fenyo, The Free Advice Man. He has a sign: J.P.'S FREE
OBJECTIVE AND REALISTIC ADVICE ON ALMOST ANY SUBJECT. It also
says, "Make no assumptions, please; not a religion, not a mystic," and "Not
qualified to give medical or legal advice." Occasionally, to attract benefactors
or patrons (he never calls them clients or customers), he has lain down in the
middle of the sidewalk. Typically, though, he sits on a folding chair outside
the Geetanjali Restaurant and waits for people to come to him. Now and then
he will lean forward and say, "Good evening. I've got a problem, do you?"
Or "Good evening. Financial, personal, marital, career — try me with one big
problem." Patrons and benefactors used to sit beside him on a second
folding chair. At night, The Free Advice Man would lock the heavier of the
chairs to the No Parking sign on the corner and take the other chair home. A
few weeks ago the heavier chair was stolen. Now he sets up his chair beside
a concrete box concealing a pump outside the laundromat next door to the
restaurant, and patrons and benefactors sit on the box. It is not as private or
intimate. The Free Advice Man has dark hair, dark eyes, and dark skin.
Recently he lived for two years in the Sudan. His face is heart-shaped, his
chin is pointed, and he has an almost flawlessly sculptured nose. He is frail.
If you ask him how old he is, he says, "I have been around the sun twenty-
three times."
Mr. Fenyo has a flyer that reads, "New York's one and only 'Free
Advice' guy may have the answer to your problem(s)." It also says that he
has received media attention from places as far away as Ireland and the
Philippines, and that his advice is based on "infinite realism," and that
interviews and photo sessions are best scheduled for Wednesdays.
Altogether, he has given advice to about six thousand people, only four of
whom were dissatisfied. What happened is they failed to follow his advice.
Despite his success, he says, "I do use disclaimers."
Mr. Fenyo would like to have a column in a
newspaper. "Anything," he says, "to be known internationally as The Free
Advice Man." He wears a whistle on a cord around his neck, for security
reasons. He also carries a map of the city. "I don't like to spend too much
time giving directions," he says, "but because there's such a demand, I do
give them. Sometimes. I don't really consider it advice. It's directions. I like to
make the distinction."
He also says: "I'm accessible."
"My main tool is simplicity."
"I was born in Washington, D.C., and I lived there three years.
With my parents, I moved every two or three years, all over Europe and Africa
and the U.S. I've visited sixty countries and lived in seven, and I speak six
languages. My mother is a retired professor of archeology, and my father is a
professor of history. She dug up the past, and he just talks about it."
"I don't take anything for granted, except nothingness, and that's
not much."
A characteristic exchange with a benefactor:
Young Man: "I just got out of school, and I'm staying in
Poughkeepsie for the summer, and I have to go home in the fall. What do I
do? I don't want to work. I never liked any job I ever had."
The Free Advice Man: "You don't have to have a job. You can have
a career."
Or this:
T.F.A.M., to young woman standing before him reading his
sign, "Hi, what do you do for a living?"
Young Woman: "Not much."
T.F.A.M.: "But what?"
Y.W.: "Acting."
T.F.A.M.: "Not doing too well?"
Y.W.: "I don't want advice about that. I already get too much."
T.F.A.M.: "Let me ask you a question. Are you invested in any
stocks and bonds?"
Y.W.: "No."
T.F.A.M: "Good. Stay out of that. Got any land?"
Y.W.: "No."
T.F.A.M.: "Too bad. Get that."
When people tell him that they don't think they have any
problems, he tells them that he thinks they do. He recommends that they go
recline and reconsider. Something will come up.
The other evening, The Free Advice Man was sitting in his chair
outside the restaurant. He held his sign in front of his chest. People passed
in and out of his view on both sides. Some of them stopped and read his
sign, but no one sat down, and if he spoke the people moved on. A black
woman paused in front of him.
The Free Advice Man said, "Good evening. I've got a problem, do
you?"
The woman said, "I'm my own analytical analyst," and walked
away.
A man came by on a motorcycle that was elaborately decorated
with twisted metal and looked like a piece of abstract sculpture on wheels.
The man parked the motorcycle on the far side of Bleecker Street. The Free
Advice Man picked up his chair and moved it across the street, next to the
motorcycle. "This is fantasy, I'm reality," he said to someone admiring the
motorcycle. He stood in the middle of the sidewalk, forcing people to walk
around him. He held his sign slightly above his head, and waved it slowly, as
if it were being moved by the breeze. In a moment, a woman walked by with
tears streaming down her face. Unfortunately, The Free Advice Man was
looking in the other direction.
(1987)
Embassy Pictures gave a party at the Tavern-on-the-Green following the
screening of a movie that features the Rolling Stones in concert. Ahmet
Ertegun was there, Bill Graham was there, Mary McFadden was there, and
so was a man who told a nervous woman, "You call me about business. I will
call you to see if you are all right on an emotional basis, but I will never, ever
call you about business." Sam Holdsworth, the editor of the magazine
Musician, was there, and Keith Richards, looking strange and unearthly, the
way he always does, was there with his father and his son Marlon, and so
was a woman who looked at Keith with his son and said, "Keith is so devoted
to Marlon. Until a few years ago, he used to dress up as Santa Claus for him."
Mick Jagger was there, looking ideal. He wore a white shirt with a
wing collar, a black jacket, and a pastel striped four-in-hand, and he worked
the room like a politician at a fund-raiser in his hometown district, bending
now to this ear, now to that, smiling across the room, and huddling at one
table, then another. Some people told him they admired his performance in
the film; others asked for and received autographs; still others found
themselves completely unable to frame the simplest kind of sentence.
A tall black woman too handsome to be a model, wearing a blue
shirt and dark pants and carrying a clipboard, was there attempting to keep
order among a throng of photographers lurking in a small chamber outside
the banquet room. The photographers had been promised a "photo
opportunity" with the four members of the Rolling Stones attending the party.
(As well as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ron Wood
were there.) The photo opportunity was chaotic and brief, with as many
pictures taken of the Rolling Stones in, say, three minutes as are taken of
the average person to document his entire life.
During the photo opportunity, the tall black woman strode back
and forth making remarks that were largely ignored: "Everybody take a step
back. . . . Please, you're too close. . . . Gentlemen, if you can't behave we'll
have to stop it. . . . Everybody, five steps. . . . Gentlemen, go somewhere
else to resolve your disputes. I mean it. . . . I'll get security. . . . Gentlemen,
you're too close, please! . . . Get off the table. . . . Ralph, would you get
security."
Guests — people associated in one way or another with the
business of popular music — ate Chateaubriand, veal piemontese, pasta
carnevale, assorted cold poultry, fresh vegetables, salad, cheese, and fresh
fruits dipped in chocolate. The Rolling Stones stayed just so long. Then
bodyguards carrying coats appeared and escorted them swiftly to their car. A
young man trailed after them saying, "Keith! Keith! We're friends?"
(1983)
In anticipation of crossing the Bering Strait in his taxi, Ioan Oprisiu intends to
take a look at the strait this summer, while driving his cab to the Arctic
Ocean. Oprisiu, who is Romanian, plans to visit a fare in Prudhoe Bay,
Alaska. He picked up the man last fall in Manhattan and, after they talked for
a while, the man, who works in the oil industry and has lived in Prudhoe Bay
for twenty-five years, gave Oprisiu his card and invited him and his wife and
two boys to visit. Driving to the Arctic Ocean will be the longest trip of the
sixteen that Oprisiu has made in his taxi. He arrived by himself in New York
nine years ago — his wife and two sons came four years later — and worked
for a while in a restaurant, then got a hot dog vendor's cart, and then, as he
says, "decided to go for a cab." To learn more about America, he began
making trips of a week or so in his cab, each longer than the last, until he
had reached the Pacific. "Unfortunately, a lot of people don't know what a
great country this is," he says. "They fly. Everyone should have to make one
trip across the country. The problem is, once you make one, you have to
make two, and after that you can't stop yourself." The first trip Oprisiu made
was a circle that included Boston, Albany, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago,
Indianapolis, and Pittsburgh. On the way to Boston, a man flagged him down
on the Cross Bronx Expressway. As it happened, the man wanted to go to
Boston, where Oprisiu dropped him off, but only charged him twenty dollars.
Oprisiu is forty-two. He has black hair and a black mustache, and
a round face. He generally wears cowboy boots, jeans, a Western shirt, a
bolo tie, and a cowboy hat. "When I was thirteen, we had a carnival in my
school, and my costume was a cowboy suit," he said. "Even my nickname
for my father was the Sheriff. So Western passion probably came from there."
Oprisiu is not the first member of his family to come to America. He had a
great-great-grandfather who emigrated to Cleveland in 1905. When Oprisiu
drove through Cleveland, he visited his ancestor's grave and bought him a
headstone. "He never had one," he says.
Oprisiu has driven his taxi throughout the South and the
Southwest, and up and down the West Coast. If you happen to occupy his
cab and fall into conversation with him, you are likely to end up looking
through his scrapbook, which he keeps beside him on the front seat and
which features his cab parked in front of various landmarks. Oprisiu will
say: "That's the Continental Divide and my son. The Grand Canyon, my wife.
This is the desert, that's Hoover Dam, that's Santa Monica. This is Mexico —
look at the machine guns the cops have, and that's just the regular ones.
This is Oklahoma, the bombing place. This is Arizona — just to the left here
is the Biosphere — and this is Arizona also, the biggest meteor crater, and
this is Amarillo. They have a great steakhouse. Seventy-two ounces. If you
order it, they put you up on a stage. You have one hour, and if you eat the
whole thing you get it free."
Oprisiu has not yet decided how he will cross the Bering
Strait. "Driving across the ice, I think, is not what I need to do," he
says. "About seven years ago, there was a truck company in Italy that had a
round-the-world trip for their trucks, so I know it can be done. They used a
boat, I think, so, if it's possible for a truck, I guess a yellow cab can make it."
Oprisiu's ambition is not simply to cross the Bering Strait. He
intends to drive from the strait to London and take a picture of his cab in front
of Buckingham Palace. What he needs, he believes, is a sponsor. "Such a
trip," he says, "it's not an easy one. Probably it's not going to demonstrate
anything, but it will give me an idea of the many pleasures along the road."
Oprisiu is now on his third taxi, which has a hundred and five thousand miles
on it. He keeps his cab in excellent repair. He uses only original parts, and
he doesn't let anyone else drive it. "In Romania, we have a saying," he
says. "My car, my pen, my wife, I don't lend."
(2000)
Joel Hirschhorn, a fifteen-year-old senior at Stuyvesant High School, in
Manhattan, talking about his paper "On the Distribution of Twin Primes," to
which the attractive equation
E (n) = n/(log2 n - log n * log log n)
is somehow essential, and for which he was recently chosen as one of forty
finalists in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, a national competition
among high school seniors:
"Two years ago, I was talking to a friend in the computer room at
Stuyvesant, and he told me what twin primes were, and I started thinking
about them. Primes are any numbers that can be divided by themselves and
1 but by no others, without a remainder, and twin primes are primes that are
two apart — 3-5, 5-7, 11-13, and so on. I wasn't exactly sure I would do it for
the contest, though. I was thinking about a few other things, too. For
instance, I still haven't found anyone who knows if mice are colorblind. I
asked around, but all anybody could come up with was an inconclusive study
done in the early nineteen-hundreds — which is surprising, I think. I just read
in Scientific American that they have discovered color vision in fish, and fish
seem a lot more difficult to work with than mice, but I found out that for the
competition you're not allowed to remove vertebrates from their environment,
so I gave that idea up. I also thought about doing something on the Lyon
Hypothesis, which has to do with genetics. That came up because a couple
of years ago on a biology test the teacher asked for a reason for a particular
thing to have happened, and I came up with an explanation that I later learned
was the Lyon Hypothesis. My father is a research physician, and I asked him
about it, and as he explained it I got interested, but I later discarded it
because it would have been very complicated and so difficult to get results for
that I might have put in all that time and not necessarily had anything to
show for it — which is almost what happened anyway. I had a couple of other
ideas, too, but I forget them now. Whatever they were, I guess I didn't think
about them very long.
"I began in the spring of 1980, by counting twin primes. I didn't
have a computer — just a programmable calculator, and that didn't have a
printout, so I just had to sit there and watch it and wait and write down the
answer when it arrived. Right away, it started to take about five minutes to
come up with the next twin prime, and it got even slower as it went on,
because of the nature of the problem. I didn't get past 150 before I decided it
was useless, considering I was working up to eighty billion. So I gave it up for
the moment. That summer, when I was fourteen, I went to a math program at
Hampshire College, and one of the courses I took was about prime numbers,
and that helped; and I also learned a little bit about computers. I began the
project for real, then, last winter. I figured I'd better get an early start, so I
wouldn't be frantic at the end, and it was lucky I did. I had some trouble. I got
a computer, but I didn't write a really good program for a while, and I was
getting the wrong data. The computer seemed to be adding wrong — which is
impossible, I think, for a computer. I wanted the right data, so I checked
back, and found the error, and revised the program, but I had lost some
time — a lot of time, actually — and I didn't have all that much to begin with.
Monday afternoons, I teach computers at the Village Community School;
Tuesdays, I have a bassoon lesson; Wednesdays, the math team — I'm on
it — has meets with other schools in the city; Saturday mornings are All-City
High School Orchestra rehearsal, and after that I have my piano lesson. I
study with Erna Jonas, on Ninety-sixth Street, and, along with other piano
students, I play a concert once or twice a year at Carnegie Recital Hall or the
Donnell Library. So Saturday is almost like a school day — except it's not,
too. So, anyway, I've used up the spring, and now I'm into the summer.
"Then I had real trouble. This gets a little technical for a moment.
It's not as important to understand what was happening with the
mathematics as it is to know it went horribly wrong. As it is now, the first half
of my project shows that there is a constant for predicting twin primes, and
the second half shows how that constant works with my formula to predict
the actual numbers. But from mid-August to the middle of November I was on
a different tack — I was expecting the constant for twin primes to match the
square of the constant for primes. It would have made a neat package. I was
also trying to prove that the constant for twin primes approached 1, as the
constant for single primes does. What's important to know, however, is that I
was counting on it, I put all my hopes on it, and it turned out to be totally a
red herring. And I spent three months trying to figure out what was wrong with
my data that they didn't show what I wanted them to — I wasn't sure I had
enough data. There was no one I could ask about it except the great
mathematicians, so I went to the library at NYU and found a small reference
to a source that was an article in a journal, and it suggested that the
constant definitely doesn't go to 1, and I went, 'Oh, no.' That was supposed
to be kind of the knockout punch of my paper. Instead, I had to suddenly
cross out everything that had to do with 1 and the relationship to single
primes. So it's mid-November, the paper's due in mid-December, and I'm
suddenly back to mid-August. And not only that — I've suddenly gone from a
whole paper to half a paper. The main problem was that once I found out that
the constant wasn't 1, there either wasn't a constant, and then I had no
paper at all, or there was one, but I might not find it in time, in which case I
still had no paper. I was dismayed. So — for no reason except curiosity, I
guess — I just thought I'd try my formula on the numbers starting at 80 ×
109, which is eighty billion, and then down in intervals of ten billion to 70 ×
109, 60 × 109, and so on. I ran them all at once, and as I read down the
column a moment later on the printout I suddenly realized there was a
constant. It wasn't 1, it was 1.255. It just hit me over the head: 1.255; 1.255;
1.255. All in a row. And then, just like that, I was back from half a paper to a
whole paper again."
(1982)
Flipping is done in the South Bronx, in a vacant lot that flippers call the
Garden, at 163rd Street and Prospect Avenue. It involves the performance of
aerial maneuvers — flips and twists and spirals — above a pile of mattress
springs. Kevin Jones and Terrence Ford are renowned flippers. Terrence is
fourteen, and his ambition to flip was born in him about ten years ago, when
his father used to pick him up and toss him into the air. After that, he jumped
mainly on his bed until his mother enrolled him in a gymnastics class, and
then he learned the maneuvers that are fundamental to flipping style. Kevin,
who is fifteen, learned by watching other flippers.
"Every day is flip," Kevin says. "Jump and flip. Flip is like a drug to
me, like a habit. I can't go a day without flipping." Kevin is slight and rangy
and soft-spoken. He has almond-shaped eyes and a round face. Terrence is
smaller. He smiles quickly, but is reserved in his manner. Occasionally,
Kevin and Terrence compete with each other — they call this battling — but
Kevin always walks away the winner, because he can perform a double
backflip and Terrence can't.
At the moment, flippers are flipping in reduced circumstances.
They launch themselves from six mattress springs piled on top of a box
spring near the 163rd Street end of the Garden. The flipper performs his trick
and lands on the crash pad — an intact mattress resting on a stack of four
mattress springs. The mattress prevents the feet of the flippers from getting
caught in the wires. In terms of equipment, the most favorable moment in the
history of flipping occurred a year ago, when the flippers had three lines of
mattresses and springs running nearly the length of a block. At the head of
two of the lines were refrigerators. The flippers would launch themselves from
the refrigerators and twist and flip and twirl like Slinkys down the rows of
mattresses and springs until they arrived at the other end of the block. This
golden period ended when a traveling revivalist set up his tent in the Garden
and the Sanitation Department carried off the mattresses to clean up the area.
Flippers collect their springs from factories that restore
mattresses — especially from Peters Mattress, at 165th Street. Terrence's
father, a small, slender man with thick glasses, employs himself by scouting
the neighborhood for discarded mattresses and selling them to the factory.
Sometimes the factory discards the springs — you can rebuild a mattress
only so many times — and these springs become flipping equipment. Kevin
and Terrence and their friends drag them to the Garden. A set of springs
lasts about six weeks, then begins to get lumps and depressions, which
throw the flippers' trajectory out of kilter, and may sometimes make them
land clear of the crash pad.
Beside the Garden is a row of ailanthus trees, and next to that is
a red brick apartment building. One day, as Kevin is standing beside the
crash pad, a window on the fourth floor opens and a young man's voice calls
out, "Yo, Kevin, do a show for me!"
Kevin says, "That's my friend Jigga. His real name's Jamal. He's
been working in a barbershop. He's someone who really started me flipping.
He's old now, but he can still do it."
Kevin bounces several times on the launching pad, forces his
arms hard to his side, and turns a somersault in the air. In the little slot of the
window, two children stand between two women. One of the women holds
back a curtain. All of them cheer.
Terrence is carpentering with his grandfather in a building that
overlooks the other side of the Garden. He hears the noise and appears in a
window. Kevin yells, "Yo, Terrence, come flip." In the meantime, Jigga arrives.
He is twenty-three, small and lithe, and he wears a gold earring that spells
his nickname. The women in the apartment window, it turns out, are his wife
and her sister, and the children are Jigga's son and a friend.
"They want me to flip," Jigga says. Kevin smiles. Jigga says
bashfully, "I don't flip no more." He takes some cassette tapes out of his
pockets, though, and a comb, hands them to Terrence, who has just arrived,
and steps onto the launching pad. He bounces several times, gathering
height, and does a creaky version of a backflip.
"Hey, Jigga!" one of the women shouts. "You can do better than
that!" Jigga smiles shyly. "Do a twirl!" she shouts.
"No twirl," says Jigga, bouncing on the launching pad. "I'm scared
to hit the floor."
"Jigga!" yell the children.
Jigga performs another flip, this one more self-assured, but not
stylish. Kevin steps onto the launching pad and does a double.
"He beat you, Jigga!"
Jigga flips once more. Quarters fly from his pockets. Terrence
collects them. Jigga tries a double flip and misses the crash pad completely.
"Boo, Jigga!"
Terrence hands Jigga his tapes, his comb, and his quarters. Kevin
steps onto the launching pad and begins to gather height. The mattresses
creak. Terrence says, "You all watch what he's about to do." In the air above
the Garden, Kevin turns his back to the apartment building, claps his hands
to his knees, and revolves twice against the sky. A car stops. By the time
Kevin lands, the driver is applauding.
(1992)
Ry Cooder, the virtuoso guitarist, who lives in Los Angeles, so dislikes
performing that he is almost never seen onstage, but he was in New York
last week to appear with the seventeen members of the Buena Vista Social
Club, the band that he and the producer Nick Gold assembled three years
ago in Havana from a collection of mostly elderly men and one woman. The
record they made in 1996 — Buena Vista Social Club — has sold millions of
copies around the world and has been certified gold in America; it won a
Grammy in 1997. The band's principal singer, Ibrahim Ferrer, who is seventy-
two, has a new record, and he and the pianist, Ruben Gonzalez, who is
eighty, are playing concerts in America and Canada, with the band behind
them. A week ago last Thursday all of them attended a party in their honor at
a restaurant in the Village; Friday night they played at the Beacon Theater in
Manhattan; on Saturday they left for performances in Boston; and on Monday
morning they came back to New York to appear on Late Night with David
Letterman.
At the party on Thursday the bartender made drinks from lime and
rum and mint. On the tables were candles, and trays filled with water on
which gardenias floated. A number of the band's members sat shoulder to
shoulder at a banquette along one of the walls. They wore coats and
sweaters against the cold, and looked like men waiting for a bus, or their turn
to bowl. At a table in the corner several of them played hands of dominoes.
Ibrahim Ferrer made some remarks in Spanish and so did Ruben Gonzalez.
A translator said, "The two of them express that they don't have words to
express how they feel, but they say that, because they are Cuban, they had
to speak for five minutes."
The rehearsal for Letterman began shortly after four and ended
around five. The show began taping at five-thirty. In the meantime Ruben
Gonzalez sat on a chair in a hallway outside the band's dressing room in the
basement of the Ed Sullivan Theater, where the show is taped, and Ferrer sat
on a chair in a small dressing room on the theater's sixth floor. Gonzalez is
thin to the point of being frail. He is a bit stooped and sometimes limps a
little. He has small hands and feet, and his handshake is delicate. He often
wears suits and looks like a figure of romance, a plantation owner perhaps.
Ferrer is taller and lithe and likes to dance, which he does as if
the movement cost him no effort at all. His face is small and round and easily
conveys pleasure. He usually wears a felt cap with a brim, the kind of felt cap
that men who owned English sports cars in the forties and fifties often wore.
He is a tenor, and his voice is a little gritty and warm and expresses emotion
succinctly and without being sentimental.
Cooder and Gold were three days into making their record when
Cooder felt that the combination of voices wasn't exactly right. "Isn't there
anybody who can sing the bolero?" he asked. "Doesn't anybody have that
romantic style?" In assembling musicians, Cooder and Gold had the help of a
man named Juan de Marcos González. González said, "There's one guy, I
have to find him."
"So Marcos went to where he knew Ibrahim was," Cooder
says. "And he found him walking in the street — he had nothing else to do —
and Ibrahim said, 'I'm not interested. I don't sing anymore.' He'd had a lot of
disappointments and about five years before, he'd just given up singing,
retired, he's making his living shining shoes. Marcos is a forceful guy,
though. He says, 'This is interesting, you want to do this, we need you,' and
Ibrahim says, 'I can't now, I've been shining shoes, I need to go home and
take a bath,' and Marcos said, 'You don't have time for that.' When he arrived
in the studio, you could see he was heavy, you just didn't know at what. This
music really rests with the singing. It's required that someone can sing these
songs so the music is illuminated, and Ibrahim is entirely unique. You wait
years for someone like him to appear."
In his dressing room, Ferrer said that his new life as a celebrated
singer arrived so abruptly and is so strange and surprising that it feels a little
like a dream. "I feel exactly as if two lives had been joined together," he
said. "My old one and my new one, and this new one is a good one." The
only disadvantage he could think of, he said, is that now that he is a notable
person everyone in his neighborhood in Havana comes over to his apartment,
which is small, and wants to spend the day with him.
When the first royalties were paid for the record, Nick Gold went
to Cuba with cash to distribute among the musicians. He arrived at
González's house to give him his share while González was playing the
piano. Gold had the cash in a satchel. González asked to look at it. Gold
held the satchel open and González peered in at the dollar bills, then waved
his hand. "Take it away," he said. In the theater basement someone asked
him if he had actually made such a gesture. He smiled broadly. "I did do
that," he said, "but it was a joke."
(1999)
My new best friend is Cash Money. Cash and I have become friends only
recently. I don't know since when, exactly, but lately. A lot of people know
Cash more intimately than I do and are going to feel that I have no business
talking about him. But that doesn't bother me. What do we do together? Visit
cafés, where the waiters make a quiet fuss over him, where he places one
hand on the table, his nails curved so perfectly into arcs that it is as if a
mathematician and not a manicurist had worked on them.
Within Cash's capacious and complex personality are all the
virtues I have ever sought in any companion. He's exceptionally attractive,
especially when he's had a night's rest, but even in that run-down condition
he sometimes shows up in, his jacket torn and his lapels astray and covered
with stains whose origins are uncertain, with a name or a small drawing
somewhere on his front in blue ballpoint ink, like a tattoo, and him slightly
withered as if he had been bossed by some friends into extending a party to
celebrate the sale of, say, a fabulous painting, a Monet, a van Gogh, in which
he had obscurely and deftly figured, even perhaps made possible, although
he would never claim such a thing, he's more worldly than that. His company
(I find) is soothing and quietly reinforcing of one's sense of well-being. He's
as seductive as a beautiful dark-haired woman in her thirties whose manner
conveys intelligence and sexual accomplishment. He's protective of
confidences and willing to arrange the acquisition of any pleasure no matter
how singular, showy, or demeaning. Even when you go slightly mad in the
pursuit, he stays by your side, at least as far as your claim on his attention
allows. Most people are unreliable anyway. You can know them too well. You
can arrive at a period where you're privy to their secrets, you can hear their
words in your head before they speak them, they bore you. With Cash, any
failure of his to entertain you is really a failure of your own imagination.
Sometimes, true, it's hard to get him on the phone. He's elusive. No
argument there. He can seem unable to remember your name. All true.
Sometimes he's aloof, but so is God.
Before I knew Cash I never cared about the Moneys. I met Cash in
Jackson Hole in 1972 at the summer ranch of the family of some friends from
Bennington. The rest of the year the family lived in Princeton. Cash would
show up for breakfast at the long table in the ranch mess and drink coffee
and eat bacon and eggs and pancakes without ever somehow being seen to
actually put anything into his mouth, which would have been vulgar, while
everyone talked about Bluebell or Charger or whatever horse they were going
to ride that morning and gave instructions to the staff about what they wanted
placed into their picnic hampers and where the car was to meet them with
the hampers and so on. I discovered that everyone knew Cash to be the only
rider sufficiently accomplished to manage Thunderbolt, so he never took part
in the talk, and the horse was always saddled for him, a four-legged piece of
distemper and misanthropy, waiting by the corral. Everyone seemed
extremely fond of Cash — even the hard-bitten cowboys liked him and invited
him to the bunkhouse to play poker; they called him Tin and Scratch, which
amused him endlessly, and he always let them win. The ranch had been in
the family for generations, and Cash had the best cabin, with a view of the
Tetons, and over the doorway, like a waspy joke, the cow skull that Georgia
O'Keeffe had found in a pasture. He wore beautiful tweed jackets that fit like
an embrace and were a little frayed at the cuffs. His place was always set at
the table with the ranch china and crystal and a tin cup for coffee, and the
waiters served him first, although he waved them off cheerfully and sent them
toward my friend's grandmother, and he always remembered the names of
their children and had a little something for them, candy, I don't know what,
something he took from his pockets.
In years after that I saw him various places. Once fifteen years
ago on the beach at Sagaponack in front of a house that looked like the old
TWA terminal at Kennedy, glass and steel with cables holding the whole
sorry structure together and the cables looking as if they were about to snap.
He was with a couple of guys in their thirties who were smoking cigars and
slapping each other on the back and had those big phones that resembled
the ones that guys in war movies used to have, and he looked desperately ill
at ease. I hardly recognized him. I'm pretty sure I saw him another time on
the deck of a yawl that dropped anchor late one evening in the bay off La
Samanna — at least I thought I made out his high forehead, wide shoulders,
and long form — but the light was failing, and no one came ashore, and the
next morning the sailboat was gone and the horizon was as empty as a slate
that had been wiped clean.
We had for several years a tentative friendship. The idea that
women more easily become intimate with each other than men are able to is
partly a feminist rant, but it is also partly true. I was a little uncertain of
myself with Cash — his sporadic and solicitous attention I felt was partly a
favor to my parents — and I was never sure what sort of conversation might
interest him. On the other hand, I was also innocent, and protected myself by
means of the invention that I was the only person on the face of the earth, a
young man's defense. I got married — my parents added Cash to the guest
list but he was abroad; he sent a cut-glass bowl I keep on a table beside my
bed and fill with change. My wife and I moved to Manhattan, to a small cold-
water flat, a walkup on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. Cracked plaster walls,
windows looking out on a churchyard, and the smell of garbage rising from
the sidewalk in the summer. Across the street was a storefront clubhouse
belonging to some gangsters. On the occasions when Cash came slumming
downtown, he'd bring an old bottle of Château Lynch Bages and sit in our
small living room before taking up the pattern of his evening and say such
things as, "No elevator, five floors, really you're a hero, kiddo." What
surprised me was that he was fond of the gangsters. They'd invite him for an
espresso or a grappa, whatever it is they drank together, and grin and slap
him on the back and give him those little European hugs where you kiss the
guy on both cheeks.
Over the years I fell out of touch with him. He didn't call and I was
embarrassed to call him. I was trying to be a painter and no one seemed
interested in my work, and I was getting a little old to pretend that I preferred
living in a slum. I fell into feeling wounded and thinking of him as a fair-
weather friend. Then he would invite me to lunch at the Gloucester House or
the Racquet Club, buy me two martinis and a swordfish steak from Block
Island and tell stories and ask if I was getting enough to eat and send me
home in a taxi, and I would look out the window at the fabulous people of
Midtown and think, what more really could one ask of a friend than that he
devote himself, intensely, for a few hours to your well-being.
I know. I grew up. I no longer considered raffishness such a
laudable trait. As I said, I always viewed Cash as a member of another
generation, the kind of figure you occasionally see in the corner of a
photograph depicting a lawn like a pelt leading to a big white elephant of a
house in Greenwich, and it really surprised me, when I got over my shyness
and diffidence, that he has a kind of ageless and almost permanently youthful
quality that makes chronology seem irrelevant, and his own dif.cult to pin
down anyway. He apprehends all there is to understand about history. Knows
every card game — coon cane, peter pot, arcane versions of poker — and
when to bet up the odds and when only a fool or a daredevil would. Never
says where he's been, who he's been talking to. Everything's mysterious.
The mark, I think, of a truly cultured person — someone with acquaintances
all over the map, who's welcome anywhere and knows how to behave at a
cockfight as well as at a dinner with three wineglasses and seventeen
utensils. Someone who knows how to put you at your ease. Who supports
your own best impression of yourself. When he's distracted or tired he
seems disengaged and a little forbidding. Other times he's radiant.
Where this new infatuation is going, I can't say. I hardly see him
frequently enough to be certain. Sometimes I'll sit there talking to someone
across the table and think, Why can't you be Cash? I want to be just like
him. When we're together, I study how he holds himself, his gestures and
rhythms of speech, his manner of dressing, and the absence in it of any of
the fussy preoccupation with clothes that seems so much in vogue. I think I
was a moron for the time that I held him at some remove. I look for him
everywhere, crossing streets, in the backseats of limousines, reflected in the
windows of stores. It's an obsession, I know, a May to September thing, I
suppose, ruthless and thrilling, but I'm not at all sure that I don't really like it.
(2001)
Think about Call Reluctance, a modern affliction. According to the cover story
in the October issue of the magazine Selling, "Call Reluctance strikes men
and women, rookies and veterans, and people in every selling field. It's as
common as the common cold but a lot more deadly — it can kill a sales
career."
Call Reluctance involves an aversion to using the phone to make
sales calls, or to set up appointments for meetings. One man who had it
said, "I had an actual fear of the telephone." Salesmen and saleswomen often
catch Call Reluctance from one another. "Certain forms of Call Reluctance
are highly contagious," the magazine says. A woman who had Call
Reluctance says that an attack brought on "big purple hives" all over her face
and that to conceal them she wore blouses with high collars and let her hair
grow.
A person might think of Call Reluctance as a salesman kneeling
in the dark, narrow lobby of a building with one elevator. It is late in the
afternoon. The salesman has a sample case. He is leafing through a
collection of business cards, trying to think if there is anyone in the
neighborhood who will see him on the spur of the moment, since he couldn't
call ahead. He used to call ahead, but one day he couldn't anymore. He
would sit in his office at Rake's Progress Sales, the blinds drawn, eyeballing
the phone, cracking his knuckles, exhaling deeply, then picking up the
receiver. He would ask the woman who answered if she had time to see him
and his new line. His wife has become frightened by this charade. When he
says, "I think you'll be very excited with our new products. How about I bring
them by tomorrow?" she says, "Harry, what's the matter with you?"
The answer used to be nothing, until, through some kind of casual
contact — a handshake, one of the paper cups at the water fountain, the
toilet seat, for Christ's sake, who the hell knows — he contracted Call
Reluctance.
When he tries to use the phone, he breaks out into a fine sweat
that bathes his body, making his face shiny in bright light. He feels like he
runs out of breath before he reaches the end of what he has to say. He
thinks, "If I can get through the door, I know I can sell them. I just can't make
the call."
In the dreary lobby now, he rises and drops a coin into the slot on
the phone. The sound of the dial tone fills him with dread. The air feels heavy.
He imagines humiliations, conspiracies at the other end of the line. His
palms are damp and his fingers leave little smudges on the card he has been
gripping so tightly that it is crumpled. He closes his sample bag and decides
to get a drink and take an early train home. He'll make new calls tomorrow.
Everyone will be gone by now anyway.
(1994)
Copyright © 2003 by Alec Wilkinson. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.