The Big Pitch
Liddy
My father, Jimmy, was dying and everyone knew it except for him.
It was New Year’s Day and the whole city was hungover. I was curled up on my boyfriend Sam’s sofa, pretending to be alive. He was already showered, dressed and wrapping a scarf around his neck. He had zipped his jacket and it was a race to get out of the overheated apartment alive. He shouted down the short hallway to me, “Hey, I called Tommie’s for you.” He knew that I wouldn’t leave the sofa until I drank a full cup of Tommie’s coffee. Sam didn’t own a coffee machine. He had every meal delivered, not because he was lazy or loaded, it was just his routine.
The bubbles I drank last night were no longer my friend. They were pulsing around my head from ear to ear and behind one eye, reminding me that I didn’t drink enough water and enjoyed toasting neighbors too much. The bartender topped me off so many times I lost count of how many glasses I drank.
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I felt guilty for falling for a holiday for amateurs. Sam had a meeting downtown. He seemed more reliable on a day like today. He didn’t need an excuse to celebrate, like Halloween, New Year’s Eve and St. Patrick’s. He was a professional partier who never had a headache the next day. I had convinced him to meet at his local bar known as Birdies to watch people teeter down the sidewalk, dressed-up for a fancy party or a club with a cover.
As Sam gently slammed the metal apartment door on his way out, I was relieved to be alone to wallow in my cloudy head. I found myself far from my family, who once lived in a nondescript Southern town and now occupied our summer cottage on Mint Island off the coast of Maine. My recently retired parents had packed up their house in a warmer climate to live on Mint Island, only accessible by boat. I was located closer to the island than ever in my adult life, yet I felt further away from home than ever. I was living on the most inhabited island in the world, Manhattan. I had my own apartment uptown, but I felt comfortable at Sam’s apartment, it was a cocoon. The building was slightly tilted and I found that charming, with its cracks in the ceiling that ran down to the floor because the building had a century to settle into its place. There was very little natural daylight because all the windows faced the back of an alley, and an occasional mouse ran from the hallway into the kitchen, and strange centipede bugs crawled up through the drain, but Sam’s apartment felt almost like home. Sam was my first real boyfriend, someone who loved me. He made me fall out of my first love; the guy who walked on water, who carved our initials in a pine tree behind the brick house where I always asked for fried chicken to be my dinner. Jimmy was my first love and Sam was close enough.
I called my father “Daddy” until I was 30 and that was three years ago. I also called Daddy by his first name, Jimmy,
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from a very young age because growing up we called all the adults in our neighborhood by their first name. When I was old enough to learn etiquette, I started calling adults by their first name along with a Mister or Misses. I’d throw in a “Doctor” in front of the men in the neighborhood, because most of them were some kind of physician and they bristled when I mistakenly called them “Mister.” I was a mature little girl who borrowed old silk dresses from my mother, filled an evening bag with lipstick and a checkbook, and tossed a fox stole around my neck and played outside in the woods with my best friend. We opened businesses using old checks of my mother’s and discovered forgotten cities where they were building new houses and threw wild parties all before sun-down.
My mother Hazel worked, and so Jimmy was around when I was a kid. I had a deeper bond with my father Jimmy than most daughters; because he was a constant, he was a part of my life enough to become my first love, my favorite storyteller, and the one person in the world who taught me about love. Jimmy was my gold standard. He was damaged long before becoming my father, but he was my gold that I had discovered and I compared Jimmy’s strengths and weaknesses to all men who fell short until I met Sam.
I was working for a federal agency in Washington, DC, when I met Sam, a producer who worked and lived in New York City. I edited massive scientific documents in a quiet cubicle. I wrote poetry in the margins and daydreamed about writing children’s books. I was ill-suited for the DC environ-ment. Sam offered me the NYC dream – a job, an apartment, and a steady boyfriend. The producer turned my beige, bureaucratic world into neon lights. He introduced me to friends in public relations who paid writers to travel the globe for a medical equipment company. We listened to experts, doctors, hospitalists and researchers rather than the infirmed
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people who depended upon the devices that we made. Sam produced rock-n-roll concerts for well-known bands who performed under the bright lights of the city. I had enough money to pay for a studio apartment I called my ‘locker room’. It was filled with freshly dry-cleaned blazers and a rack of dresses ranging from cotton to special occasion silk and a pile of workout clothes. Most New Yorkers below 14th Street where Sam lived wore dirty blue jeans and black t-shirts, so I knew that I stood out. Too clean and pressed like a lady from another time. I didn’t care about blending in. Everyone had a look in this city and I was going to be the grand dame.
My locker room had a better bathroom than Sam’s toilet-tub-combo in his once-tenement building. He shaved and brushed his teeth in the kitchen sink because there was no sink in the tiny bathroom that was once a closet. All of Sam’s former girlfriends moved in with dreams of changing him, but moved out without a proposal. Keeping my own place was a strategy to prove my independence and as Rose my 97-year-old grandmother said, “Keep your studio as long as you can. You won’t have your own space after you get married.” And my parents were more old-fashioned than Rose. They didn’t care about personal space, or the cost of renting a place that I rarely used, they thought living together before marriage was wrong. A sin, like dancing in Footloose. I spent most of my time at Sam’s where I kept a box of pajamas under his bed along with a crate of toiletries, but I knew Sam liked to live alone, too. We spent our evenings seeing one of Sam’s bands where we wore wrist bands and could walk around backstage. In the mornings, I ran along the FDR Drive to my studio where I showered, dressed, and walked to an untitled building. I took notes for the hungry marketing team. They hired me to write press releases, but I never wrote a sentence before they rewrote it eleven times. I learned I was living in a creative town, but surrounded by conventional minds who taught me AS MUCH
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that every word matters. I returned to writing poetry in the margins of my notebooks.
Before work, I took my medication, two small pink pills. They didn’t give me energy or a buzz or make me think clearer, it was a maintenance drug that I kept from everyone, especially at work. It was a secret. I carefully counted my beers, never to exceed more than three at happy hour. I was the most sober person at any bar in the city. I pretended to drink wine at work events and never swallowed tequila. New Yorkers had a million reasons to drink. I held steady to how alcohol nearly destroyed Jimmy and my family.
Drinking any amount of alcohol made me feel sick, not always in the form of a hangover the next morning, but in the form of guilt while I sat on a barstool. I would drink a few and was the first to leave before the night was over, but I felt uneasy for wasting time in a place that I didn’t enjoy. I wondered, what would Jimmy think? Unless there was a live band performing in the back of a bar, I never relaxed. But drinking was a requirement to survive in the city. I identified Prosecco as my life saver. The bubbles went down easy, and then I learned to drink light beer if there was no sparkling wine around. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t develop a habit because I was equipped with a switch, a mechanism, a shutoff valve that Jimmy never found. I lived in the shadows of my reformed drinking father, Jimmy. I hid my moderate drinking from my parents, who believed any amount of drinking would ruin anyone. I also knew that drinking was bad for my mood swings. I shared an affliction with Jimmy. It was a seed deeply planted in my mind, or it could be my heart or an unknown place, where it’s impossible to measure when I am about to break. I knew that alcohol made me more fragile and my mind might unravel.
Snow had started falling outside of Sam’s dirty apartment window. It was ‘snow globe snow’ where it drifted like bird E.B. HOWELL
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feathers from the low-hanging clouds.
I needed coffee. I wondered if I should call Tommie’s, the deli, to check if they hadn’t lost the order Sam placed. Their coffee tastes more like the paper cup, but the warmth of the tan liquid will bring me back to life and then I’ll walk uptown to my locker room and shake off this headache. Before I could benefit from Tommie’s elixir, my silenced phone buzzed and flashed, and I hoped it was Tommie or one of his brothers standing outside of the building as sometimes the buzzer got stuck in the cold.
I fumbled with the phone to say, “Hello.” I answered the phone just like he’d taught me. Jimmy, my father, a born salesman, said a long time ago in our kitchen in Magellan, Georgia, “Never let it go to the second ring. Identify yourself. Show them that you’re ready,” he had instructed me and my brother. I’d watch my father make phone calls from dawn to dusk. I didn’t understand what “ready” meant. I wondered, “Ready for—what?”
I shouldn’t have picked-up the phone call. It was too early to absorb Jimmy’s energy on the other end. I expected to hear “Happy New Year.” But he was mid-sentence, as if I knew what he was talking about. I needed him to slow down. He had returned from a trip to Pakistan to assist after a massive earthquake about two weeks ago, and I knew he was back home and fine. Jimmy had dedicated his life to international disaster relief when he retired, and as far as I knew he was back living in our summer cottage.
I muted the television and sat against the worn edge of the sofa. Jimmy called for my full attention. Jimmy screamed into his phone as I calmly stared out of a dirty window at another brick building. I had a good view into the apartment across the way. A woman held her phone in her palm. It looked like she was waiting for an incoming text. I imagined she was waiting to hear from someone she met last night. AS MUCH AS I CARE TO FORGET
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I started wishing for yesterday’s problems because I knew that Jimmy was going to tell me something big, something that I didn’t want to hear. I knew my life would change in a few minutes. I could feel something was wrong with Jimmy. He didn’t want distractions, he needed the stage for himself and he needed an audience. Something big must be coming. My mind wandered to my parents splitting up or a terrible acci-dent on the island where they lived. I could imagine a tragedy in seconds.
He blurted out, “I have cancer.”
Jimmy was thrilled with his perfect delivery of this difficult news. This was his ultimate sales pitch. He paused for a moment. More than enough time for those three words to sink in and for me to buy it. He had learned that tactic in some business class years ago: “Give them space.”
