Scenes from Our Imaginary Life

A novel about the goings on in my crazy neighborhood and in my non existent private life with my cat, Violetta.

 

Scenes from Our Imaginary Life

 

1.        The Halloween Party

2.        The Christmas Painting

3.        Holly Brunch

4.        Ping Pong and Cards by the Pool

5.        Film Addict Girlfriend from Texas

6.        Cat Holiday

7.        The Boy next Door

8.        The Gang at the Corner Bodega

9.        Morning Coffee with the Dog People

10.          Shop Till You Drop

11.          A Burrito that Packs a Punch

12.          Criolla, Criolla, Payola, Payola

13.          Where is that Sock?

14.          Trouble in the Night Garden

15.          Notes from the Slammer

16.          A Lady with a Cat

17.          Working for a Dead Visionary

18.          Laughs with a Crackhead-Pimp

19.          Heading for Curtis Pool

20.          Like a Stuffed Monkey

21.          A Quiet Place to Howl

22.          Doing it with Verizon

23.          Roadkill




 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Christmas Painting




    Joanna had tried her best to paint a picture of the Garden that was abstract but showed her joy at seeing flowers and birds in this cold ghetto landscape of car fires and grafitti.  She had bought a brush, quite expensive, at Michael's.  She just never thought about paying much for anything.  In fact, she had hardly gone shopping all her life.  Her best moments shopping had been as a sales girl at Bloomies.  squirrelling away clothes in the back and waiting for double discount sale days.  But those days were long gone, no one would hire her back with the pit on her nose and sores on her face.  She had always been such a beautiful girl; she was still handsome when she walked into the garden seven years ago. 

   She bought the brush.  It was big with natural bristles and had an action to it that easily painted squares.  She took out the brush and squeezed globs of acrylic paint on to a pie pan and began painting the sky with primary blue and white and the garden phthalo green cadmnium red deep, cadmium yellow, and hooker's green.  The colors in the garden blended on her brush and mixed on the canvas to create an earthy brown in spots at the bottom. The colors became brighter as they approached the sky; suggesting patches of daffodils and tulips, branches of lilacs and teaL colored flowers, all in squares reminiscent of Chuck Close or the pointilists, moving from dark, somber earth colors to bursts of color up to the blue and white sky creating the impression of a garden on a beautiful cloud filled day. 

    She had asked Angel at Zanny's if she could put the picture there.  Joanna had gotten to ask after Russell had put his stuff there and it was not his best, so she thought,  hers would be good enough.  She was disappointed at Angel's reaction but the owner, Julia, had approved and so Joanna came out one fall day with the large painting, 39 x 40 inches, holding on to the wooden frame supports at the back.  She could just manage it.  She took a picture with Angel standing in front of it and put it on

Facebook.  It was the most that had happened to her since she was beaten by the police and joined the Garden.  This was when she had met Ed at Zanny's.  Maybe they did not want her there.  But how could that be, they let her hang her painting.  It is almost like a murder mystery, in fact it is, Joanna muses.  Are the polite customers she sometimes chats with and the Mexican help along with the Korean owner her friend or her assaulter? She still looks for  a friend somehow to arrive and goes everyday until it all stops.  The worst thing is the weight problem.  Joanna was a beautiful girl when she had walked into her psychiatrist's office.  Then he closed his office, quit his job with the hospital, and left town for New Zealand.

   She had  put her initials "CMcC" at the bottom of the painting in red and yellow.  Angel just did not want the painting around after awhile and so Joanna painted something for Christmas:  a falling over Christmas tree, an abstract with gold paint and squares except the colors were green, white and for fir and snow and red for Christmas balls.  Russell took a picture and texted a thumbs up to Joanna.  He now had a little gallery uptown.  She thought she might eventually show a painting there.  Harlem, is a little scary, though, and she began dwelling on the basement below the gallery where she said she could put her paintings.   Again, she mulled over in her mind the idea of a murder mystery and when she added the rat poison in the garden she started to cry because there was no one she knew who cared. She was scared that they may be trying to kill her.  She didn't know why.  Sometimes, she feels better when she hears the kids cheering in the playground.  She had heard them when she had finished the Christmas tree and it reminded her of how it might have been if she had a husband and some kids who cheered her when she painted.  But she was a gay vegetarian who loved kids and so most situations just didn't apply to her.  Again, mulling it over, she did not have anyone, just few likes on Facebook.  Joanna felt it was important to know someone.  All of her life, she had tried to know someone but she was always completely alone.  Again, like a murder victim in someone'z mystery novel, her relatives slowly died off and the others dropped away. No one seemed to know her and the people who did were creepy.   Before her Pop had died he had told her that she was being creeped and to stay in her house.  Mulling it over, she decided to go to the happy hour at Amsterdam Cafe to see if there was any hope of a friend or any prospects on the horizon or even just a few moments of relaxation from the immense void by watching TV.  It was as if she was cursed for something she had done but didn't know what it was.  That was why when she had heard about the Stevens Amendment, a law to stop cruel and unusual punishment, she had gotten excited about it.

 

The Halloween Party




    They have been having them for about eight years now.  Every year, Margaret starts in about June after Lady Bug Release Day.  She takes out her paints and vats of glue and starts make papier mache figures.  Little babies with missing teeth, posters of skulls with flowers, and then streamers and banners.  This year, Virginia's last season with us, because she is moving on to a part-time teaching position job in Florida, she made dragon's head and an angel that looked like the daughter of one of the members, Alison.  It was so lovely, her little finger's outstreched and beautiful white, glittering wings.

    There is always some suspense around the event because 1) things are always getting stolen or rained on or ruined or 2)  Margaret gets really angry and everyone is afraid to go near or even participate.  This year was not so bad but two thing that I started were missing from the shed.   I started to make a blue imaginary animal and it was missing from the shed after a while.  Margarethe and her mother liked it.  S I thought, "Gee, no worries now."  Instead when I couldn't find it in the shed and had asked around, I had to start all over again.  So, I spent the last week before Halloween, making flowers.   I only manage to make two.  The theme was anything blue; but for some reason I couldn't get anything to be more than blue green.   Starting with a wire, I made the center of a flower with network of stamens and pollen,  It took two days and, in the end, it just looked O.K., something between a shamrock and dogwood.   The second flower turned out better.  I had started to make magnolia but it only turned out to be a lotus with blue green glitter on the petals.  Margaret's Mom, Judith, liked it very much and moved it to the top of a bean pole.  I have them in the house now decorating the kitchen.

   The garden is really quite smile and built from the ground up, literally.  A building fell and they cleared way the rubble and the city came by and duped some dirt.  The gals got together and planted the garden making beds out pieces of wood.  There are community beds and individual beds and there is quite a competition and warlike animosity that goes on in there that I hardly do anything with my bed.  Also, because because you have to water everything from a barrel and you have to fill those up from the hydrant which no one wants to do.  So, I keep my bed mostly filled with mint which doesn't need water and I plan to add campion which is a beautiful little flower with semisucculent leaves like the herb sage which also needs little water.

     I ordered them from Amazon because I couldn't find them anywhere and they were stolen out of my mail.   I went downstairs to pick  them up the top of the mailboxes but the letter was ripped open.  I'll order them again in Spring and I hope to have a beautiful bed of daisy's and campion, mint and peonies.

   On the day of the Halloween party, actually on Halloween this year, we all came out to work on the Garden peacably because in previous years there has been shouting arguments.  Mostly Margaret seems to need to scream at me and when Brian was there, they tried to yell at him but he fought back so they left him alone.  I think that they yell because they don't want people of color in the garden and also because, frankly, Brian is bad and I did not say thing when they asked him to leave but he still comes around and this year he brought a slew of beautiful little black children dressed to party.  And, you know, since he is a former crackhead, drunk and active pimp, they must have all been somehow in his care and swamped the place in a warm, beautiful rush as David, Margaret's irate, stinking of gin husband passed out candy with a smile on his face at the front of the garden.  Judy was sitting inside and asked me to sit with her, perhaps, because I was casting a pall on the proceedings with my unmade up face and man's hat that I bought from the Mexican shoe store which was also too small.  Judy invited me to sit with her by letting candy drop in her crotch and letting me take it out.  It was a Snicker's bar.

   That's the funny Frey's.  On her way out that evening she said to me,

"We came because this is crappy."

    Judy meant my poor neighborhood, I guess, and I know she is right but I will miss every cripple and miscreant child when all  the developers finally bulldoze the place until we have no place to live.

   Oh, there is one more little anecdote.  At one point, the garden wasn't crowded and there were only white kids there.  I was sitting by the cake that I ahd ordered from the fancy bakery on Broadway hoping the cake wouldn't be stale.  Alison came by to chat and I was saddened to hear her cough.  She was as beautiful an angel in real life as she was in Papier mache.  After that I walked away and went home to shower and put some nicer dudes on.  I was feeling overworked schlepping the cakes and papier mache hoping not to be yelled at.  When I came back, the cakes were all gone, eaten, and the white kids had disappeared.  Then Brian and his kids began to rush and cheered me up/  In the crazy whirlagig one kid parted from the wave of kids and he showed me all the candy he ahd.  A look of peace and serenity replaced the uneasy, waiting to be berated feeling I knew so well and experienced in the garden.

   The next Saturday it was time to clean up an I didn't know because my landline and internet were out so I wasn't following Margaret's angry messages and the patient comic obfuscation of the other gardener's trying to keep her off me.  I was sitting enjoying a morning latte and she came in and screamed,

     "Get in the Garden and clean up.  Haven't you read the MFC garden notes?"

    "No, my internet is out."

   So I immediately went to the Garden and everyone was there, busying themselves as angry Margaret carefully took down her beautiful papier mache dolls and took them back to the house.  I looked in the shed and took up the long brush and started by doing the dirtiest job in the garden  in effort to keep Margaret quiet so everyone didn't leave.  In fact some of the gardener's had left and two new girls were digging out their gardens to line them with chicken wire to protect them from the Malthusian rat problem that had developed since a baker moved in next door and piped the smell of croissant daily into the garden.  Nobody could take it anymore and everyone had left except Margaret and me.  Only that crackhead/pimp wanted back in mostly to bother us with political conversation.  Though his kids were beautiful and funny.  That night listening to the radio, I had heard that a careening car had mowed down some trick o treaters in another neighborhood in Brooklyn.

   Thankfully the two new girls looked kind and sane.  One was Chinese, so there might be some safety and security in that place.  In any case, the rat problem was going to be there for a while.  I had walked by several days later after the cleanup.  The leaves and dog poop surrounding the garden, caught in the fence were all gone and everything was well groomed.  Two cheeky little rat wholes had appeared in David's old bed.  I laughed.  I couldn't help it.

   Then a few days later there was a sign.  They had called Green Thumb professional poisoners to get rid of the rat problem.  There was an official not taped to the shed with masking tape.

   "God help us," I thought.




Holly Brunch




   Aida called a can and said a prayer.  Since she had met that crackhead at Zanny's, she had become desperate.  She had put some speed on to get back to the club and took the risk of the taking the scary old cab company to get back there to see her Aunt Ma, mother and her girlfriend, Natalie over the holidays.  They were all to meet for the Holly Brunch.

   The phone rang and Aida picked it up.

  "I'll be right down," she said and put on her coat, grabbed her gloves and bag, set the alarm and locked the door.  She stepped down the four flights and was out the front door and in the black cab waiting outside.

   "91 Old Town Road, Staten Island.  The Richmond County Country Club."

    "O.K." said the cabbie, a middle aged Indian looking man, neat and quiet with a steady hand on the wheel.  He turned on the GPS and drove straight through to West End because he had the lights and took a left.  At 96th street he waited and then turned and took a right to the highway.  It was a gorgeous sunny day and she could see the white caps on the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge in the distance.  Then they were headed downtown to the business district and piers where large billboard signs dotted the highway.  She looked over to the park by the water. 

    The winter cold had stopped most people from walking there.  A big wind sweeps the Hudson and West Side most of the time.  There were still some stalwart souls sight seeing the old destroyers parked at 39th St. Big and grey with old jets on top, they looked anachronistic as you gazed down to the Wall Street Area with all of the state of the art skyscrapers and money that passed through them to and from all parts of the earth.  Her father had been a captain there but somehow the financial district had out paced them and he and my grandfather had died with only a government social security check.  Aida too had only government check and the inheritance from her mother when she died.  Then she would be all alone.  God help her. 

   So, she was on a desperate run back to the club to see if her aunt or anyone cared, because although her father and grandfather and cousins played in the financial district for moth than a century, she knew no one there or anyone in town, in fact, except for people in the Community Garden and Zanny's.  Mostly all she knew was that horrible funny crackhead she had treated to lunch and dinner.  She even gave him a parka coat.  Now, he was bothering her all the time had she thought he wanted money.

   She san along with the radio in the car to comfort herself as she looked out the window at the wide expansive view of downtown, Aida thought of the days when her Uncle was alive.  Johnny was one of his favorite artists along with Elvis.  His untimely death in his early thirties; he swam out into the  sea and drown himself during a liberty from the  mental ward, passed through her mind.  She was still in mourning and disbelief because he was one of the sweetest men in the world.  Her father had blamed South Beach where Uncle Billy had lived and then drank himself to death after reuniting with her mother 20 years after an acrimonious divorce.  Back then, divorce was a new thing and it is still trendy after all these years.  Aida had never married because of the trauma of her parent's divorce and her father's tragic death had never really left her.   The precious moments she had with her father played over and over in her head and she longed for the days when he was in her life, always doing something fun like sailing, gardening or making hors d'ouevres , though specter of alcoholism hung over them and marred those days and their memory. 

    "Have yourself a merry little Christmas..." Johnny Mathis sang as the new shiny black car whizzed into the tunnel and was enveloped in darkness and silence.