LEND-A-HAND
I’m twenty-four or twenty-five. What does it matter? Twentysomething. It’s all just one age, really. I thought there was a difference at the time. I remember graduating college at twenty-two and wanting to join the Peace Corps, but when I found out the commitment was two years, I reacted like it was a block of time I could barely comprehend. “Two years?! But I’ll be twenty-four when it’s over!”
I only really wanted to join because I liked to travel and be around attractive people. The helping others aspect of it was not at the forefront of my mind. It was mostly me, incredibly lean and tan, sipping a drink at some local rooftop bar in an exotic city somewhere like Marrakech or Istanbul surrounded by young, handsome selfless men such as myself. The actual mechanics of the Peace Corps never entered into it. It was more about the going out after work part and the weekend trips to remote beaches with simple chic lodgings for five U.S. dollars a night.
During my imaginary stint in the Peace Corps I would grow my hair out. The climate and water in my new country would do wonders for it, making it more full-bodied and manageable than it ever was in New York. I wouldn’t fuss with it though. I would be too busy helping people dig a well or teaching them something that would no doubt improve their lives. Whenever I would get complimented on it, which would be often, I would tell people it’s only this long for practical reasons. “I can tuck it behind my ears and I won’t have to bother with it.” Even though a perfect lock would flop over an eye every time I bent down to lift another shovelful of dirt, forcing me to exhale exasperatedly to blow it out of my face because I couldn’t possibly be bothered tucking it behind my ear again.
Due to all the physical labor I was performing my body would transform itself into something out of a magazine practically overnight. I would not notice it though. Too consumed with my work in the village to be bothered by such trivial matters. Although it would be hard for me to avoid with the constant attention it would embarrassingly bring me. The girls in the village giggling shyly when I crossed the dirt square that served as the community’s central gathering place with a long stick across my bulging shoulders straining to hold the enormous buckets of water at either end. I would smile at them and call out their names as I passed, pronouncing each unique one perfectly.
I would be beloved in the village. And I would become best friends with the volunteer who worked in the next village over. So close I could walk there at the end of the day so we could enjoy a beer together, bonding over our shared passion for helping those in need. Josh would be blond. And have a deep voice. And we would be exactly one month apart in age. And he would’ve been a champion swimmer in college who was on an Olympic track but had to put his dreams aside when a knee injury forced him to rethink his life. We would talk about this constantly. Me being the reassuring friend. His entire support system. His confidant each night as he breaks down in my arms. “Who am I if I can’t swim?” “It’s okay, Josh, shh, I’m here.”
And then I would get sick. Or Josh would get sick. One of us would get sick. Probably him. And during this time we would profess our love for each other. And one would nurse the other back to health.
And our affair would be lit like a National Geographic special. Yellow sunrises, golden sunsets, clear starlit skies.
It’s about this time that the villagers and any kind of charitable work pretty much disappear from my imaginary time in the Peace Corps.
This part on is mostly beaches and tanning. A photo spread of young love as envisioned by Condé Nast Traveler.
But the thought of being gone for an entire two years is enough to dissuade me from this potential new life. The fact that what I was actually looking for was an extended warm-weather vacation with a fitness model as opposed to the life-altering growth experience that the Peace Corps in reality was never enters into the equation. I decide not to apply. I would be too old by the time I returned. It would be too late to start my career as a novelist, which I have just decided I want to be. I would lose too much time. I would miss too much.
Two years go by in about a second and I accomplish absolutely nothing. Literally thinking on my twenty-fourth birthday, shit, I should’ve joined the Peace Corps I wouldn’t have missed a thing.
Well, I would’ve missed being a cashier, and an office temp and a salesman at Ralph Lauren but that’s it. I still have plans on becoming a novelist even though I have no idea what that entails. Aside from writing. Which I haven’t done yet. Better to get life experience first. I can’t write about nothing.
To that end I take a new job. It’s for an agency called Lend-A-Hand. Lend-A-Hand matches people looking for someone to do a job for them, any job, with the people who are desperate enough to do them.
This was an awful time in the world, just before the internet, when you actually had to go into places in person to meet with prospective employers. Requiring you to speak with varying assistants and assorted others many steps along the way.
I’m not one of those people who goes on about how much better things used to be before the horrors of social media and modern technology. On the contrary, I wish there were more of it. I wish there were a way to slash at least another 50 percent of all human interaction. Nobody has that much to say when you get right down to it. I prefer a life of texting and scrolling Instagram to one of having to pick up the phone and talk to someone like an animal. No, thank you. You can keep your nostalgia. I wish to God I were a millennial. I’d be so good at it. Better than these shitty ones. I wouldn’t be wasting my time being offended by every little thing or promoting positive body images or getting involved in politics. I’d be avoiding people. I’d be working from home. I’d be watching TV on my laptop. They don’t know the nightmare it was to actually have had to talk to people all the time. And we weren’t allowed to have social anxiety like you are now. Nobody even knew about it. I would have been in heaven if I could have suffered from anxiety.
But here I am, in my twenties, with no technology, having to make an appointment on the phone and I don’t know who I’m going to talk to because I can’t Google anyone and since I don’t even know what that is at the time I don’t miss it but knowing now what it is and thinking back on how different it was then I feel like I came of age in pioneer times and it’s not fair. So, no, I don’t care if everyone is looking at their fucking phone now. They should be. It tells you everything.
Does any of this matter when I’m twenty-four or twenty-five and going into Lend-A-Hand for an interview? It doesn’t. But it annoys me when I think of how much easier everything could’ve been.
The Lend-A-Hand office is small and cluttered and there is one woman who works there. She sits behind a desk with a stack of index cards on them. Each card has an available job on it. They range from cleaning apartments to cater waiter for a private party—the most sought-after job she tells me, often involving large tips and the glamour that’s associated with serving cocktails to people who can afford to hire help.
Getting into a wealthy person’s Upper East Side apartment is the perfect gateway to my career as a successful author I decide. Or even an actor. Who’s to say at this point, and really I shouldn’t limit myself. It’s quite possible that I could find myself serving flutes of champagne to gallery owners and opera patrons when someone approaches me and says “excuse me, have you ever acted?” I’ll look around modestly to make sure they are indeed talking to me. “Me?” “Yes, you.” “A little. In college, but…” Let them know you have done some acting, you’re not a complete rube, but also that you don’t really care tremendously one way or the other. This will make you even that much more appealing. “Here’s my card.” (People had cards then, it was the one delightful touch that I miss.) “Call me. We may have something for you on All My Children.” And just like that I’d be starring on a soap opera. (All My Children is long off the air, but then, in the ’90s, a person would die to be on it. I had a professor in college who taught a class on scene work. He was an adjunct professor, which basically means any idiot off the street, but at the time I didn’t know that. This adjunct professor had the distinction of appearing in a handful of episodes of All My Children as the bartender in Pine Valley’s most elegant restaurant, The Chateau. And I swear it was as if Laurence fucking Olivier were teaching that class. A cast member from All My Children. Here, on Long Island. At Hofstra University. I was really in the thick of it.)
Now starring on a soap opera had never been part of the plan. But if this producer saw something special in me that I didn’t see myself, well then who was I to argue? This is how careers are born. You put yourself in front of the right people and then step aside. Anything could happen.
And besides, all the jobs I did for Lend-A-Hand I could just chalk up as research for my novel, which I was determined to start at some point. When the time was right. So in essence I wouldn’t really be bartending or helping someone move or mopping floors but rather researching what it would be like to be someone who did those things.
Unfortunately in order to get the good Lend-A-Hand assignments you had to prove yourself by taking any available ones offered to you. This is what I am told by the woman in charge of handing out jobs. I, of course, say I would be willing to take on any job, which is how I find myself less than twenty-four hours later cleaning the bathroom of an NYU linguistics professor as his family sits in the living room pretending I’m not there. Later, while I’m on my knees scrubbing this family’s disgusting toilet (who by the way all look perfectly capable of scrubbing their own fucking toilet) I think, “I have a degree I have potential I have dreams, how did I end up someone who cleans apartments?” Then I remind myself I’m not someone who cleans apartments, I’m only researching what it’s like to be someone who cleans apartments, and feel much better.
When I try to decline the next cleaning assignment offered to me and hold out instead for one of the plummier catering gigs I’m told by the woman on the phone (today this would all thank God be done with an app) that if I don’t take this job she can’t promise I’ll ever rise to the ranks of Upper East Side cater waiter. Seeing as this is the one stumbling block to my contract role on All My Children I accept the offer to clean the apartment of a disabled, gay octogenarian on Gramercy Park.
And I can already see how it’s going to play out. I’ll show up and he’ll immediately be so enamored of my good looks (and how unware of them I seem to be—only making me that much more attractive) and my charming conversational skills that in no time at all we’ll be flipping through old Playbills from shows starring Ethel Merman and Mary Martin, sipping cognac (or whatever it is eighty-year-old, disabled, gay men drink) and talking about our love of musical theater. When I finally say something like “Well, I should get started…,” he stops me, “Please, you’re not cleaning anything. You should be in a magazine not cleaning apartments.” Then I look down with great humility and say something like “Hey, a job’s a job,” and before I can utter another word he presses two crisp hundred-dollar bills into my palm and shows me to the door. “Thank you for bringing life back into my home. Tomorrow? Same time?” “I’d like that,” I say in the kind of tone that implies I may have gotten more out of the afternoon than he did. And before you know it I’m in the will and that Gramercy Park apartment is mine. Stranger things have happened. And I’d be a fool not to explore every opportunity open to me. Besides, what a great chapter in my novel this will make!
When I arrive at the address, however, and the old gay wheels himself down the hallway shouting orders at me it becomes all too quickly clear that I’m actually going to have to clean this fucking pigsty. My cute outfit now seems impractical considering I hadn’t dressed to do anything other than leaf through Broadway memorabilia and look angelic. As he points me to the trash bags and disinfectant I’ll need for defrosting his refrigerator and freezer I have to admit to myself that the odds of inheriting this place are not looking good.
After hours of being barked at with a laundry list of increasingly labor-intensive, anally compulsive chores I begin to wonder if this guy is even gay. I’ve deliberately dusted all the highest shelves first in order to afford him a glimpse of my midriff, but not even a glance. At this point I’d be willing to take a shower in front of him if it meant I didn’t have to clean it. Instead he yells at me from the kitchen because I didn’t arrange all the canned goods according to size and color. It’s actually offensive. We’re sixty years apart in age for fuck’s sake I should be driving him insane, this should be Death in Venice not Oliver Twist! I’ve just about reached the end of my rope when I notice something peeking out from an overstuffed drawer. A Playbill from Gypsy starring Ethel Merman. And I throw it out.
The ride home on the subway is crowded. And I pretend Josh is there, leaning up against me, so close, his breath on my face. We carry bags of groceries and plan to stay in and cook that night, like we do most nights. Later, as I lay in his arms, I tell him “I’m scared.”
PATTI LUPONE
I grow up in Queens in the ’70s. During this period there are tons of commercials for Broadway shows. I become obsessed, studying each one with the concentrated focus of a brain surgeon. But the commercial I was most fixated on was for Evita starring Patti LuPone. Every time it came on it was like a jolt of cocaine coursed through my twelve-year-old body. “What’s new, Buenos Aires?” she sang. What was new, Buenos Aires? I was desperate to find out. And then of course “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” her arms open wide. Mandy Patinkin is in it, too, but he’s clearly no match for Patti. When I die I hope this commercial is the last thing that flashes through my mind. I’d never heard of Patti before Evita, but it was like she had always existed.
I buy the original cast recording and listen to it for hours. I learn every word. I am Eva, I am Che, I am Juan Perón, I am even the mistress who gets thrown out into the street (whose one song, “Another Suitcase in Another Hall,” Madonna steals for herself in the movie, telling you pretty much everything you need to know about Madonna).
Several times a year, once we’ve saved enough money, my parents let my sister Maria and me go into the city to see a Broadway matinee. We take the express bus into Manhattan for a 2:00 P.M. Wednesday performance of Evita. I don’t have a child but I can’t imagine the excitement on the day of its birth could come anything near to what I feel that afternoon. The soundtrack buzzing through me like a drug. I haven’t eaten in days, my stomach too unsettled with anticipation. “I’m coming, Patti.” I downplay all of this to my sister, of course. We’re both very excited, don’t get me wrong. But she is excited in the way in which a sane person would be, saying things like “I can’t wait.” Meanwhile I’m thinking, “Can’t wait?? That doesn’t even begin to cut it!” I’m undone, every nerve ending vibrating, I haven’t been able to concentrate on another thought since we got the tickets over a month ago—if my heart were beating any faster I’d have a stroke!
“I can’t wait either,” I say.
We go to Bun and Brew for lunch. Dark and filled with theatergoers and business people, it’s all too impossibly sophisticated. Of course this is actually a shithole but I don’t know that because I’m twelve. The burger goes down like a fistful of sand, so anxious am I about the show you’d think I was starring in it. “I’m almost there, Patti.”
We arrive at the theater thirty minutes early. Panicked at the thought of having to go to the bathroom during the show I force myself to pee so many times it looks like I’m cruising the men’s room. We are shown by the usher to our seats in the orchestra and handed our programs. Off to the side but not bad. The musicians filing into the pit, the remaining theatergoers being seated, so pumped am I with adrenaline right now that I could lift a car. In the minutes before the show starts I quickly open my Playbill to read Patti’s bio when a small slip of paper falls out onto my lap:
Today’s matinee will be performed by Nancy Opel.
What?! I shove the paper in my sister’s face. “Did you fucking see this?!” Maria says something like, “I’m sure she’s just as good.” “JUST AS GOOD AS PATTI?? THAT’S NOT POSSIBLE!!” I have never felt such rage in my life before and all of it is directed at Nancy Opel. I hate Nancy Opel. The orchestra begins to play. This can’t be happening. I sit with my arms crossed. Every fiber of my being devoted to letting Nancy Opel know just how much I loathe and despise her. (Today you would go online and you would know exactly which performances someone was or wasn’t in or they would announce it on Twitter or Instagram and something as horrific as this would have been avoided. I couldn’t afford to see Evita again nor would the thought ever have even occurred to me—this was it. Evita starring Nancy Opel not Patti LuPone. What cruel joke of the universe was this?)
From the second the show began it was apparent this was not going to sound like the original cast album that was playing in my head. Let me make one thing clear right now, Nancy Opel is not Patti LuPone. (Years later I see Nancy Opel in another show where she is brilliant but I can’t help myself from thinking “you’re still not Patti.”) She didn’t look like her, she didn’t sound like her, and I was having none of it. Sitting there with my arms crossed, completely unimpressed. “What’s new, Buenos Aires?” she sang. I didn’t give a fuck. At the end of each number I would listlessly clap. Yawning every time she opened her mouth to sing just to let her know that I was on to her. At intermission I became the jaded theatergoer. Yes, I was enjoying the show. The sets, the costumes, all marvelous. Yes, Mandy Patinkin is splendid. But don’t you think the girl playing Evita is a little too, well, not Patti? At the start of act two when it was time for her to sing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” it was all I could do to keep from jumping onto my seat screaming “IMPOSTER!”
Copyright © 2019 by Gary Janetti
