This is one of my favorite chapters of the book. Not because I think it's the funniest story, and not because I think my writing is so good that Mark Twain would have shit himself being impressed. No, this is one of my favorite chapters because I remember that for the one year I lived in New York, I had this thought at least ten times a day:
Every. Damn. Day.
A big thank you to everyone who's made a contribution to the book so far. And if you haven't yet, I can only presume it's because you're trapped under something heavy. Or you have no soul. (I'm
Chapter Sixteen
New York (First Interlude)
If you can make it there... then you, too, can piss in the street.
In 1999 when Wishbone was officially over and done
with, I was trying to figure out what to do. I was getting offers for
representation from some very respectable agencies in Los Angeles, and also in
New York. The thing was, though, they would only represent me if I lived there. I’d been to Los Angeles and
New York City several times in support of Wishbone,
and they were essentially different planets. In different solar systems. In
separate galaxies.
I love southern California. I
love the sunshine, the ocean, the music vibe. It’s all good. The only thing I
never liked about Los Angeles was the fact that I could never have a
conversation there that wasn’t about “the business.” I’m from Texas, y’all, and
what you do for a living – and what industry you do it in – makes up only a
very tiny amount of my interest in you as a person. I want to know your story,
and only a small part of your story is your job. My experience in Los Angeles
was such that, every time I asked a question that wasn’t directly related to
the film and television industry, people’s eyes would glass over. There would
follow some uncomfortable (for them) confusion, as if I had just broken a rule
of the Social Contract, like letting my dog shit on their lawn without cleaning
it up.
I quickly discovered that the
easiest way to derail a conversation in L.A. was to ask something like, “So, what do you like to talk about that has
absolutely nothing to do with film or television?” Because it seemed like everybody I ever
met in Hollywood only wanted to talk about Hollywood, and what was going on in
Hollywood, and who was doing what in Hollywood, and what they were getting up to in Hollywood, and who with. And I mean
everybody. I ate in a lot of restaurants in Los Angeles while on press junkets
for Wishbone, and I almost always ran
into a server or a hostess who couldn’t wait to tell me about the screenplay
they had written, or the fact that CAA or some other big agency was seriously considering representing them.
I realize how cliché that sounds; people have written movies about that shit.
But it was true. And it was exhausting.
From a geographical and
meteorological standpoint, I didn’t like New York City nearly as much as Los
Angeles. I’ve always liked visiting the East Coast, but the plain truth is
there’s too many fucking people. I don’t like sardines, and in New York City
you are the sardine. Also, I don’t
like the cold. And I especially don’t like when Wet and Cold get together –
like they do an awful lot of the time in New York. What the city did have going for it, in my opinion,
was its attitude toward “the business.” Namely, being an actor was just another
fucking job. It didn’t define who you were as a person. New Yorkers were way
more fascinated that I was from Texas than they ever were about my occupation. “You’re an actor, huh? Cool. Does everybody
carry guns in Texas, or just the cowboys?”
Ultimately the decision was to move to New York. Much like my first
foray into television, I had no fucking idea what I was getting into. We moved
into the borough of Queens, where, as a diehard Texas Rangers fan, I was
relatively safe, as Queens belonged firmly to the National League Mets, and not
the Yankees. We got an apartment in Forest Hills, which I later learned was one
of the safest neighborhoods in the borough, as several mid-level mobsters lived
in the attached houses behind me on Austin Street. There were no muggings or
stick-ups, ever. Because one never knew if a potential mugging victim might be
related to someone who could put you in a trunk in New Jersey.
This is a true story about a
mob guy I befriended during our brief stay in Queens. I’ll call him Marty,
though that wasn’t the name he gave me, and probably the name he gave me wasn’t
his real name, either. Pulling my wife Tracy out of her beloved suburbs and
into the City was extremely traumatic for her, and so in an effort to make her
feel more comfortable I wanted to establish some routine right away. I thought
walking our dog down the shaded lanes of Forest Hills would be a good start.
And so, our very first weekend living in New York, we leashed up our
dog, Grady, walked out the apartment building and headed off. Forest Hills is a
beautiful neighborhood. Lots of trees, old and well-kept attached townhomes,
and plenty of mom & pop shops on Austin Street. What it doesn’t have – at
all – is parking lots. So everybody who owns a car parks it on the street. The
residential streets are narrow to begin with, originally built for nothing
wider than a horse and buggy. And, because space is at such a premium, folks
park on both sides of the street, making these lanes all but impassable to
anything larger than an obese man on a Rascal Scooter.
So there we were, walking
along an idyllic stretch of old New York neighborhood. I could feel Tracy
finally starting to relax a little. And that was when we saw the black SUV coming
down the street ahead of us; a behemoth of a car that had no business on these
tiny streets. Even though it was moving at a crawl, it still knocked two
rear-view mirrors off of two different parked cars as it approached us. Never
even stopped. As it got closer I could feel Tracy tense up to the point of
simply fleeing, leaving Grady and I to fend for ourselves. I gently squeezed
her hand in what I hoped was a reassuring, I’ll-take-the-bullet kind of way –
all the time hoping the big bad black SUV would roll right past us. I willed it to keep going. So, naturally,
when it came abreast of us, it stopped.
The driver’s side window
powered down, unleashing a wave of Cuban cigar smoke. (All cigars are Cuban to
me. It sounds cooler.) The guy behind the wheel was right out of a Sopranos casting call: late
forties/early fifties, black hair (colored and permed!), shirt open to his shoes, with several gold chains tangled
in a mass of chest hair that looked like it was growing up his neck to stake a
claim on his face. Sitting beside him was a bleach-blonde, enormously-racked
girl who was young enough to be his daughter (she wasn’t). He took his time
eyeing me up and down, and Tracy squeezed my hand so hard that I heard a couple
of the minor bones snap. He took the cigar out of his maw, and said, “Yo.”
So I said, “Yo.”
“What kinda dog is that?”
Not what I had expected. I had expected, “You didn’t get my permission to walk in this neighborhood,” or, “How much for the woman?” I had not
expected a query into the breed of my dog.
“He’s an Irish Setter.”
Pause, with some grimacing. “A
what?”
“Irish Setter.”
Longer pause. This was the kind of tension that always happens in
the movies right before a lot of bad shit goes down. What happened next was
even stranger. This guy – who could not have been more mobbed up if he was in The Sopranos, broke out in this huge grin, and exclaimed, “THAT is a beee-autiful fuckin’ dog!”
I managed to keep from soiling myself and said, “Thanks.”
“Hey Carmen, look over here. Is that not a beautiful fuckin’ dog or
what?”
Carmen: “Yeah. It’s nice.”
“Nice? Are you shittin’ me? Look at that coat! Look at those eyes! I
never seen a Mick Setter before. Fuck me, that’s a beautiful dog! Say, what’s
your name? You new around here? Where you from?”
These were the questions I had been dreading. But, since he seemed
to be enamored with Grady, I decided to keep it friendly and honest. “I’m Larry, this is my wife, Tracy. And this
(pointing to my dog) is Grady. We
just moved here from Texas.”
“Hooolee shit, are you shittin’ me? Texas? Dat what the ‘T’ on your cap
stands for?”
It was only at that moment I realized I was wearing my Rangers cap.
“Yep (in a slight drawl). That’s exactly what it stands for.”
“Well fuck me. Two Texans and a Mick dog. What a day!” He stuck his
hand out the window, and I had an awkward second of prying my wife’s hand off
of me in order to shake with him. “I’m
Marty. Everybody in dis neighborhood knows me. Hey, you need anything, I’m da
guy. Ok, Texas? And that was what he called me always after that day.
I wasn’t sure agreeing with
what he asked was akin to climbing in bed with the mob, but neither was I sure
that disagreeing with him was a wise choice. So, putting the drawl on a little
thicker, I said, Sure thang, Marty. Sure
thang.”
Marty responded with a toothy grin and a pretty decent impression of
me. “Shore thang!” He chortled at
himself, and as he and Carmen drove away, I could hear him saying, “Two Texans and a Mick dog. Fuck me.”
As we stood there, just the three of us, I heard Tracy start to
breathe again. When she could speak, she merely asked, “Was that a…?”
“Pretty certain of it, yeah.”
Tracy: (pause) “Fuck me.”
A couple of days after that
encounter, I decided to try out the neighborhood pizza shop. I have developed a
taste for authentic New York pizza that borders on the suicidal. I walked in
and ordered my standard: pepperoni. You judge all New York-style pizza shops by how well they do on this simplest
of pies. After the pizza was baked and boxed, I was standing near the cash
register doing what I usually do when I meet new people: asking a lot of
questions. The proprietor and his family were all immigrants from Argentina,
and they all worked in the shop. He asked if I was new in the neighborhood, so
I told him where I was from, and then I told a little white lie that I came to
instantly regret. You see, I immediately liked this gentleman, and I wanted him
to believe that other folks in the neighborhood had recommended me to his shop.
So I said, “Marty says you make the best
pizza in Queens.”
The smile on his face during
our entire transaction vanished. He pushed the box over to my side of the
counter. I said, “How much?”
“No charge.”
“Aww, I can’t do that. What do I owe you for the pie?”
“No charge. Have a nice day.”
It took me a full minute to realize what I’d done. “Listen, Sir. Marty is not my friend. He’s
just a guy I met that told me you made good pizza. Okay?” The elder
gentleman searched my face, and seemed assured. “So, how much do I owe you for the pizza?”
We completed our transaction on friendly terms, and I visited that
pizza shop every Friday without fail for our entire stay in New York. And I
never – ever – mentioned Marty’s name again, anywhere.
One more story about Marty. It
happened that Tracy had to be out of town for a weekend, so it was just Grady
and I at the apartment. I had rented a couple of movies from Blockbuster (a
very outdated thing to say), and when Sunday afternoon rolled around, I
remembered that I had to take them back. When I walked out of my building the
sky was gray and overcast, threatening rain. But I grew up in Texas, where
threats of rain are treated with the contempt they deserve. So I walked down to
the Kew Gardens station and hopped the train up two stops to drop off the
videos. Upon my return, I came up out of the same station to find that rain
threats in New York should never be treated with contempt. It was what MeeMaw
would have called a “frog strangler.”
As I had no umbrella or
raincoat, I decided all I could do was run back to the apartment. Fortunately
it was a short run on a wide sidewalk fronted with shops, most of which were
closed on Sunday - except the pub. The pub was always open. It’s called
Cobblestone’s now, but I’m not sure that’s what it was called when I lived
there. But they still have the big green awning out front. Anyway, I was
trotting past the pub, when I caught movement out of my peripheral vision.
Toward me. I turned my head in time to duck under a punch that some big, drunk
asshole swung at me. I’d vaguely noticed him holding up the wall outside of the
pub, and now all of a sudden he was launching a haymaker at my head.
He was shit-face drunk, and
I’ve been holding off on mentioning my experience in martial arts because I am
no kind of a badass. The truth is my dad started me in martial arts because I
sucked so bad at every other sport, and he was desperate for me to do something
athletic. Turns out I was actually really good at that, and I’ve been
practicing one form or another for years. Ironically, the pub where this idiot
swung on me is two doors down from the ju-jitsu club I was training in when I
lived in Queens.
So I pretty easily dodged his
swing, ducked under his arm and gave him a little push, which combined with his
forward momentum, sent his big steroid-infused ass to the concrete. He rolled
around like an upended turtle for a minute, struggled to his feet, said something
completely unintelligible and squared off for another run at me. Just then his
buddy (I assume it was his buddy) came bounding out of the pub, grabbed the
drunken asshole, and said to me, “It’s
cool man. No harm. He’s just drunk.” I didn’t have a witty riposte, jacked
on adrenaline as I was, so I simply resumed my trot back to my building, taking
care that neither of them saw me go home.
Now, I can sense your
disappointment. You thought you were about to read about the time I got into a
genuine street fight in New York. No. Trust me, the truth is way scarier (at
least to me). Two days later the skies cleared, and I was down on Austin Street
doing the daily grocery shopping. (You shop for groceries daily in New York.
Not because everything is fresh daily, but because most apartments don’t have
pantries.) I was headed over to the local green grocer, when from across the
street I hear, “Hey, Texas!” It was
Marty. I waved.
“C’mover here!”
I crossed the street with my little red grocery basket on wheels;
something I felt made me a true New Yorker. Marty was looking
uncharacteristically agitated.
“Hey, you have some trouble out front of that pub on Queens last
Sunday?”
“Sunday?”
“Yeah. Heard maybe somebody gave you some trouble out front of that
pub.”
“Oh. You’re talking about the drunk guy? That was nothing. He was just
wasted. No big deal.”
“This was a big guy, right? All muscles and shit? Roid freak in a tight
t-shirt with a ball cap on backwards like a douchebag?”
The description was dead on. I’d told no one about that incident,
not even Tracy, and she’d been back two days. Somebody in the bar had made a
phone call.
“Like I said, Marty. He was just a drunk asshole. Probably would have
swung at anybody who crossed in front of him. No harm.”
Marty would not be appeased. “Yeah,
well don’t worry about it. He ain’t gonna make trouble for you no more.” And
then he walked off. Just like that.
Now, I’m not going to
speculate. Speculation is bad for relationships, it’s bad for the economy, and
it’s bad for America. I’m just going to stick to facts. And the fact of the
matter is, I never saw the drunk asshole after that. Not once. The bar on Queens
Blvd is a local bar. Tourists don’t come to Queens, and if they did this is not
a place they’d visit. And experience has taught me that a guy who hangs out in
a bar on a Sunday usually hangs out in that bar every Sunday. So, the very next Sunday after my encounter with
Marty, I walked into the bar, at about the same time in the afternoon as my
little altercation the week before. No drunk asshole. Nor was he there the next
Sunday. Or the next. I decided not to inquire as to the drunk asshole’s
identity or possible whereabouts, because I didn’t want to put anybody else on
the spot the way I unwittingly had my new friend at the pizza shop. I saw Marty
a few more times after that, before our stay in New York ended and we packed
back off for Texas. He was always friendly, always gregarious, always fond of
calling me Texas.
And we never – ever – talked
about the drunk asshole.
Next Week, Chapter Seventeen: New York (Second Interlude)
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