Saturday reprise: Flame

The Le Creuset pot I’ve owned for 53 years

I could hear her in the kitchen.  She had dropped something large and metallic on the floor and it woke me up.  I opened my eyes.  I could see her bent over the table.  I could smell the onion she was slicing from the bedroom, which was open to the kitchen in the railroad flat on Perry Street.  She turned and saw me watching her.

“You’re awake!  I’m making bagels.  You want some coffee?”

“Sure,” I said, easing myself upright. 

“Did you see that guy who came into the bar last night in the long black raincoat, almost to the floor?  He was standing over by the cigarette machine.”

“Yeah. He had a girl with him, a blonde, looked about 18. Shifty wouldn’t serve her.” 

“Ha! She’s not all he had with him.”

I pulled on my socks and jeans and shoved my feet into my boots and walked into the kitchen.  Four steps.  I counted.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve seen him in the Roadhouse.  I don’t like him.  Wes ought to 86 him.”

“Why?”

“He sells guns.  He operates out of a bar over on Hudson Street.  He’s connected.”

“The fucking guy in the raincoat?”

“Yeah. His name is Johnny Machine.  Your coffee’s on the table.  Sit down.”

I sat in one of the two chairs at the small table by the window.  She finished up and sat across from me and pushed a plate with a sliced bagel and cream cheese and tomato and onion across the table.  I didn’t have to check my watch to see it was midday.  There was sunlight in the tops of the Ginkgoes out the window.  It was at least one o’clock.  She worked until two last night and then we went out dancing on St. Marks Place. We were on bar time.

She poured me more coffee from one of those Chemex carafes you used with a cone-shaped paper filter. She bought French roast coffee at Porto Rico Coffee Importers on Bleecker Street. It was strong and good.  I was already on my second half of bagel.

“You want another bagel?  I’ve got more of everything.”

“If it’s not too much trouble.”

She sliced another bagel and spread both sides with cream cheese.  “I’ll split it with you,” she said as she layered on the tomato and onion and handed me my half. 

She had her shit together.  Her place was small, but she had everything.  Pots and pans hung from an iron rack over the stove.  The fridge was one of those under the counter jobs, but it was big enough for her.  Her bed was three-quarter size so it fit in the little space off the kitchen with enough room to walk past to the toilet, which was through a narrow door at the end of the bedroom.  She had a hanging rod along the wall for her clothes.  She had made a space for my typewriter under the bed.  I kept it at her place for nights when I had to file the next morning and didn’t have time to make it all the way back to the barge where I lived across the Hudson in West New York, New Jersey.  “It’s like we’re moving in together,” she said with a laugh the day I lugged it up the stairs from a second hand shop on 10th Street where I picked it up for ten bucks.

“So tell me about the asshole in the raincoat,” I said, pouring myself another cup of coffee from the Chemex.

“I heard he lives in Hell’s Kitchen,” she said. “Somebody said he’s one of the Westies.”

“What’s he doing in the Village?  I would think the Demartinos would run him out of here.  It’s not Westie turf.”

“The gay bar he operates out of is a Demartino place.  Maybe it’s their operation, or they take a cut.  I don’t understand how it works with those guys.  I don’t want to know.”

“My friend Howard at the Voice is working on a story about guns in the West Village.  There are lots of them on the street.  I’ll tell him about the place on Hudson Street.”

“You didn’t hear it from me,” she said, raising both hands as if in surrender.

“Of course not.”

“One of the bartenders at the Roadhouse knows him.  He grew up in Hell’s Kitchen.  Your friend should talk to him.  Brian.  You met him that night at the afterhours place on Thompson.”

“I remember him.  Tall guy in a hat.”

“That’s him.”

“I’ll tell Howard.”

“Tell him not to say anything to Brian about how he got Johnny Machine’s name. He’ll know it came from me if your friend mentions you.”

“Don’t worry.  I’ll warn Howard.”

“He’s messing around with some bad people, writing about guns.  That guy who ran that club Salvation on Sheridan Square was shot last year.”

“I remember.  I wrote a story about it.  They arrested a guy called Frankie Gio for it, but they could never prove it.”

“Fucking mob is everywhere.  They’ve been trying to shake down Wes, get him to put in a jukebox.  Wes told me he’s going to end up caving into them.  They’re messing with his liquor deliveries.  They’ve got their fingers in everything.  The mob is a real pain in the ass in the bar business.”

I picked up the plates and put them in the sink and ran some water and started washing up.  Behind me, I heard her laugh.  She had a deep, gravelly laugh that came from down low in her chest.  It was a great laugh.  “Guys don’t wash dishes.  What’s up with you always washing up?”

“I enjoy doing the dishes.  I spend all day every day inside my head, figuring stuff out.  Washing dishes is physical, something you do with your hands. There’s a beginning and a middle and an end, and when you’re done, you feel good, like you’ve accomplished something.”

“I never heard that one before.”

“I’m weird.”

She laughed, deeper and longer this time.  “You are the least weird guy I’ve ever met,” she said.  

I dried the dishes and put them on the shelf.  “You’ve got a place for everything here,” I said. 

“You have to, living in an apartment this small.”  She ran her fingers through her hair.  It was long, and dark brown, and thick and gorgeous.  I heard a girl one night tell her friend, “I would kill for that hair,” nodding at her as she filled a drink order at the waitress station at the end of the bar.

“I don’t have to work until six.  Do you have to go to the Voice today?” she asked.

“No, I turned my piece in yesterday. It’s Saturday.”

“Already?”  She laughed, another dark rumble.  “So what do you want to do today?”

“I want to go to Bloomingdales.  I saw an ad in the paper yesterday.  There’s a sale on a pot I want to get.”

“A pot” she said, incredulous.

“It’s Le Creuset.  It’s half price.”

“Le Creuset!  Aren’t we fancy!” she said, hands on her hips teasingly.

“It’s cast iron, enameled.  They last forever.  I saw one last week at a party on the Upper East Side.”

“Enameled pots from the Upper East Side.  I swear, I’ve got to see this.”

We held hands on the street walking over to the Subway on 14th Street.  It was early May, the temperature in the 50’s.  She had her jacket collar turned up. Her boots made a higher tap-tap-tap sound than mine on the sidewalk.  She told me about a friend of hers from Brooklyn who was married to a labor organizer working the mills in North Carolina.  He started carrying a pistol after a mill owner sent some guys to his motel and beat him up.  I told her about hanging around with Jackie Curtis at The Factory for a piece I was writing for Esquire. 

“Andy Warhol’s an asshole,” she said flatly.  “I know somebody he stole some photographic images from and then they turned up as backgrounds in his silk screens at a show.”

We got a seat together on the subway.  It was one of the old cars with wicker seats. The subway rumbled and screeched and rocked from side to side.  We got off at 53rd Street and walked up to 59th and entered on the Lexington Avenue side. 

The store guide on the wall said housewares was on the 6th floor.  We took the escalator.  The floors went by, spring dresses and and high heeled shoes and men’s suits and rack after rack after rack of colorful silk ties. Bloomingdales was like another, idealized world, where everyone was pretty and handsome and walked through the lush spaces like they belonged.

I felt her hand grip mine tighter when we got off the escalator on the 6th floor.  There were groupings of furniture all around, sample living rooms and dining rooms and bedrooms, chrome and glass over here, polished mahogany and Persian carpets over there, all of it so far beyond our meager incomes, it was like walking through a museum.  We stopped and looked at a bed.  It had about 20 pillows piled against the headboard. 

“I wonder what you do with those things when you go to sleep,” she said.  “Put them on the floor?”

“They probably have a special pillow closet,” I said.  She laughed her deep laugh and her eyes sparkled.  We were having fun.

We found the kitchen section in a corner.  There were a couple of model kitchens back to back showing off stainless steel sinks and dishwashers and huge refrigerators with separate freezers.  Laid out on one table along the wall were the sale items.  We walked over and found the Le Creuset pots.  They were bright orange and blue and yellow, not colors I saw in the kitchen when I was growing up.

The label on a blue pot said “Indigo Enamel.”  She picked up an orange one with a ribbed lid.  She took it off.  The inside was enameled too, a cream, off-white color.  “Look at this one,” she said.  “They call the color ‘Flame.’ It looks like it belongs on a stove.  I like it.”

The price was $40.00, exactly half of my weekly pay at the Voice.  She handed it to me, and we walked over to the cash register.  “I’ll take it,” I said, pulling out my wallet.  The sales lady wrapped the pot and the lid in white paper and put it in a big brown doubled-up Bloomingdale’s shopping bag.  We spied a bank of elevators nearby and got on. 

At every floor, people got on carrying garment bags or shopping bags.  You could tell they were all New Yorkers, not tourists.  Nobody was smiling.  Shopping was like another job for them.

We walked down Lexington Avenue holding hands, carrying our Bloomingdale’s shopping bag, heading for the downtown subway.  I owned a Le Creuset pot.  We were imagining ourselves into our lives, trying everything on for size.  “Flame” fit us perfectly.