Mr. Apology and Other Essays

CameosHere comes Hugh in his truck, turning heads. Hugh Cosman in a 1953 Ford F-100, the special deluxe edition pickup, with the rounded fenders, and the clamshell hood stamped from one sheet of steel. The horn button on the steering wheel says 50th anniversary, 19031953. You lose that horn button and good luck finding another one. Other details: the boomerang-shaped ornaments on either side of the hood. Originally they were chrome, but when the truck was built the manufacturer wasn't putting nickel under the chrome, because nickel was a defense-appropriated material. Korean War. The chrome wore thin, so Hugh had his boomerangs sandblasted at a shop out in Roosevelt, Long Island, and then he painted them ivory, to match the tailgate lettering and the bumpers. Hugh works at Treitel-Gratz, in Long Island City. Its card says:CRAFTSMEN IN METAL FABRICATION PRECISION PARTS CUSTOM FURNITURE DESIGN MODELSTreitel-Gratz also makes sculptures for artists such as Isamu Noguchi, Barnett Newman, and Walter De Maria. Hugh is thirty-seven, and he went to Vassar, formerly a women's college, where they (still) don't offer courses in automotive restoration. In the chain of events that delivered the truck into Hugh's hands, it is likely that he occupied the role of guy D. Guy A has the truck parked in his barn or garage or out back on the lawn, and has always meant to do something about it slap some putty here, a little paint there, maybe bang out a dent but never has. Guy B sees it, or sees an ad, or knows somebody who knows about the truck, and he buys it, thinking he'll put a few hours into it and give it a new coat of paint and have a showcase piece of rolling stock. He does some slipshod patching of rust with strips of metal and pop rivets, sees how much more of a commitment is required, and puts the truck back on the market, turning it over to guy C, who thinks he'll devote several evenings and weekends to it, then realizes he's in over his head and throws a tarp over the truck and puts a For Sale sign on it, and in comes guy D. Years may have passed (Hugh's truck was last on the road in 1979, registered in Pennsylvania) and a lot of bad amateur work may have been performed on the truck by the time guy D gets hold of it. Hugh paid nine hundred for the truck, in December 1987. The ad that he answered described a West Coast rust-free truck. He says that the truck that came into his hands was "an East Coast rust-eviscerated vehicle." Hugh began restoring his truck in the yard of his weekend house, in New Jersey. Then he brought it to the city, piece by piece, and worked on it at night in a corner of the shop at Treitel-Gratz. Eventually, every part of the body except the cab had been removed and brought to the city to be sanded or sandblasted or galvanized or painted. The bed he had rebuilt in poplar by a cabinetmaker. Hugh's association with Treitel-Gratz provided him with garage space, specialized tools, and access to Frosty that is, Forrest Myers, an artist, car restorer, and metalworker, whose support, knowledge, and philosophical example gave Hugh the kind of head start that most guys (guys A, B, and C, for example) lack. There is an aspect of friction, though, in Frosty's relationship with Hugh. Frosty's position is that Hugh's truck is a classical showpiece, not a beater. Some months ago, after enough mechanical work had been completed to allow Hugh to register his truck, he ran an errand in it, using the bed of the truck to carry lumber. Frosty's reaction: "He's making a farm truck out of it. He's throwing cinder blocks into the back, and hay bales, and I don't know what else. The last time I looked, there was dirt in the bed." Frosty does, however, approve of the care with which Hugh pursued the restoration. What Hugh really did was not simply restore his truck he remanufactured it, duplicating all kinds of rotten sheet- metal pieces in stainless steel, so they will never rust again. A few weeks ago, Hugh brought the truck to Oscar's Auto Body, on Twenty-First Street in Queens, for painting. Parts of Hugh's truck have spent a lot of time at Oscar's. The fenders alone spent a year. While his truck was at Oscar's, the only contact Hugh had with it took place one night in a dream. Oscar does work for Hugh at a discount, when one of his painters is free. Normally, Oscar handles Jaguars, Bentleys, and Rolls-Royces. He doesn't have much extra time. Whenever Hugh paid a visit to see whether progress was being made on his truck, Oscar would give him a tour of the shop and explain why there were delays. He would point to the Jag that belonged to the orthodontist who drove straight on into a truck with its lift gate down. Or the Bentley with the door that stopped a bicycle messenger. Gradually Hugh's truck was sanded down to the frame and touched up with primer, until it looked like a person shaved and painted and waiting for surgery. Oscar used to cushion Hugh's disappointment at not having his truck finished by saying, "When you get this truck done, it will be one of those few." Of all the new elements of his truck, Hugh takes the greatest satisfaction in his tailgate. In order to turn heads, the hood and the tailgate must be in top condition must be cherry because those are the two parts of the truck that people see first. Besides, everyone knows that the condition of your tailgate says a lot about the kind of person you are. So Hugh took pains with his tailgate. That meant painting the letters spelling ford in ivory, then painting over them in vermillion, the color he painted the rest of the truck, and buffing the letters until the ivory reappeared. The dream that Hugh had about his truck involved the tailgate and the head of the New York Public Library. It took place shortly after he finished buffing out the letters. In the dream, he was standing in the shop at Treitel-Gratz, showing the tailgate to an acquaintance, who was a sculptor. The man studied the work. He rubbed his hand over the letters to feel how the enamel had been buffed to a texture that was almost like glass. He admired the richness of the color. He was silent for a moment, and then he turned to Hugh and said, "That's great. You did yours the same way Vartan Gregorian did his." (1989)The young man responsible for the slightly perceptible knot in pedestrian traffic at the northeast corner of Bleecker Street and Seventh Avenue is Jean- Pierre Fenyo, The Free Advice Man. He has a sign: J.P."S FREE OBJECTIVE AND REALISTIC ADVICE ON ALMOST ANY SUBJECT. It also says, "Make no assumptions, please; not a religion, not a mystic," and "Not qualified to give medical or legal advice." Occasionally, to attract benefactors or patrons (he never calls them clients or customers), he has lain down in the middle of the sidewalk. Typically, though, he sits on a folding chair outside the Geetanjali Restaurant and waits for people to come to him. Now and then he will lean forward and say, "Good evening. I've got a problem, do you?" Or "Good evening. Financial, personal, marital, career try me with one big problem." Patrons and benefactors used to sit beside him on a second folding chair. At night, The Free Advice Man would lock the heavier of the chairs to the No Parking sign on the corner and take the other chair home. A few weeks ago the heavier chair was stolen. Now he sets up his chair beside a concrete box concealing a pump outside the laundromat next door to the restaurant, and patrons and benefactors sit on the box. It is not as private or intimate. The Free Advice Man has dark hair, dark eyes, and dark skin. Recently he lived for two years in the Sudan. His face is heart-shaped, his chin is pointed, and he has an almost flawlessly sculptured nose. He is frail. If you ask him how old he is, he says, "I have been around the sun twenty- three times." Mr. Fenyo has a flyer that reads, "New York's one and only "Free Advice" guy may have the answer to your problem(s)." It also says that he has received media attention from places as far away as Ireland and the Philippines, and that his advice is based on "infinite realism," and that interviews and photo sessions are best scheduled for Wednesdays. Altogether, he has given advice to about six thousand people, only four of whom were dissatisfied. What happened is they failed to follow his advice. Despite his success, he says, "I do use disclaimers." Mr. Fenyo would like to have a column in a newspaper. "Anything," he says, "to be known internationally as The Free Advice Man." He wears a whistle on a cord around his neck, for security reasons. He also carries a map of the city. "I don't like to spend too much time giving directions," he says, "but because there's such a demand, I do give them. Sometimes. I don't really consider it advice. It's directions. I like to make the distinction." He also says: "I'm accessible." "My main tool is simplicity." "I was born in Washington, D.C., and I lived there three years. With my parents, I moved every two or three years, all over Europe and Africa and the U.S. I've visited sixty countries and lived in seven, and I speak six languages. My mother is a retired professor of archeology, and my father is a professor of history. She dug up the past, and he just talks about it." "I don't take anything for granted, except nothingness, and that's not much." A characteristic exchange with a benefactor: Young Man: "I just got out of school, and I'm staying in Poughkeepsie for the summer, and I have to go home in the fall. What do I do? I don't want to work. I never liked any job I ever had." The Free Advice Man: "You don't have to have a job. You can have a career." Or this: T.F.A.M., to young woman standing before him reading his sign, "Hi, what do you do for a living?" Young Woman: "Not much." T.F.A.M.: "But what?" Y.W.: "Acting." T.F.A.M.: "Not doing too well?" Y.W.: "I don't want advice about that. I already get too much." T.F.A.M.: "Let me ask you a question. Are you invested in any stocks and bonds?" Y.W.: "No." T.F.A.M: "Good. Stay out of that. Got any land?" Y.W.: "No." T.F.A.M.: "Too bad. Get that." When people tell him that they don't think they have any problems, he tells them that he thinks they do. He recommends that they go recline and reconsider. Something will come up. The other evening, The Free Advice Man was sitting in his chair outside the restaurant. He held his sign in front of his chest. People passed in and out of his view on both sides. Some of them stopped and read his sign, but no one sat down, and if he spoke the people moved on. A black woman paused in front of him. The Free Advice Man said, "Good evening. I've got a problem, do you?" The woman said, "I'm my own analytical analyst," and walked away. A man came by on a motorcycle that was elaborately decorated with twisted metal and looked like a piece of abstract sculpture on wheels. The man parked the motorcycle on the far side of Bleecker Street. The Free Advice Man picked up his chair and moved it across the street, next to the motorcycle. "This is fantasy, I'm reality," he said to someone admiring the motorcycle. He stood in the middle of the sidewalk, forcing people to walk around him. He held his sign slightly above his head, and waved it slowly, as if it were being moved by the breeze. In a moment, a woman walked by with tears streaming down her face. Unfortunately, The Free Advice Man was looking in the other direction. (1987)Embassy Pictures gave a party at the Tavern-on-the-Green following the screening of a movie that features the Rolling Stones in concert. Ahmet Ertegun was there, Bill Graham was there, Mary McFadden was there, and so was a man who told a nervous woman, "You call me about business. I will call you to see if you are all right on an emotional basis, but I will never, ever call you about business." Sam Holdsworth, the editor of the magazine Musician, was there, and Keith Richards, looking strange and unearthly, the way he always does, was there with his father and his son Marlon, and so was a woman who looked at Keith with his son and said, "Keith is so devoted to Marlon. Until a few years ago, he used to dress up as Santa Claus for him." Mick Jagger was there, looking ideal. He wore a white shirt with a wing collar, a black jacket, and a pastel striped four-in-hand, and he worked the room like a politician at a fund-raiser in his hometown district, bending now to this ear, now to that, smiling across the room, and huddling at one table, then another. Some people told him they admired his performance in the film; others asked for and received autographs; still others found themselves completely unable to frame the simplest kind of sentence. A tall black woman too handsome to be a model, wearing a blue shirt and dark pants and carrying a clipboard, was there attempting to keep order among a throng of photographers lurking in a small chamber outside the banquet room. The photographers had been promised a "photo opportunity" with the four members of the Rolling Stones attending the party. (As well as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ron Wood were there.) The photo opportunity was chaotic and brief, with as many pictures taken of the Rolling Stones in, say, three minutes as are taken of the average person to document his entire life. During the photo opportunity, the tall black woman strode back and forth making remarks that were largely ignored: "Everybody take a step back. . . . Please, you're too close. . . . Gentlemen, if you can't behave we'll have to stop it. . . . Everybody, five steps. . . . Gentlemen, go somewhere else to resolve your disputes. I mean it. . . . I'll get security. . . . Gentlemen, you're too close, please! . . . Get off the table. . . . Ralph, would you get security." Guests people associated in one way or another with the business of popular music ate Chateaubriand, veal piemontese, pasta carnevale, assorted cold poultry, fresh vegetables, salad, cheese, and fresh fruits dipped in chocolate. The Rolling Stones stayed just so long. Then bodyguards carrying coats appeared and escorted them swiftly to their car. A young man trailed after them saying, "Keith! Keith! We're friends?" (1983)In anticipation of crossing the Bering Strait in his taxi, Ioan Oprisiu intends to take a look at the strait this summer, while driving his cab to the Arctic Ocean. Oprisiu, who is Romanian, plans to visit a fare in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. He picked up the man last fall in Manhattan and, after they talked for a while, the man, who works in the oil industry and has lived in Prudhoe Bay for twenty-five years, gave Oprisiu his card and invited him and his wife and two boys to visit. Driving to the Arctic Ocean will be the longest trip of the sixteen that Oprisiu has made in his taxi. He arrived by himself in New York nine years ago his wife and two sons came four years later and worked for a while in a restaurant, then got a hot dog vendor's cart, and then, as he says, "decided to go for a cab." To learn more about America, he began making trips of a week or so in his cab, each longer than the last, until he had reached the Pacific. "Unfortunately, a lot of people don't know what a great country this is," he says. "They fly. Everyone should have to make one trip across the country. The problem is, once you make one, you have to make two, and after that you can't stop yourself." The first trip Oprisiu made was a circle that included Boston, Albany, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Pittsburgh. On the way to Boston, a man flagged him down on the Cross Bronx Expressway. As it happened, the man wanted to go to Boston, where Oprisiu dropped him off, but only charged him twenty dollars. Oprisiu is forty-two. He has black hair and a black mustache, and a round face. He generally wears cowboy boots, jeans, a Western shirt, a bolo tie, and a cowboy hat. "When I was thirteen, we had a carnival in my school, and my costume was a cowboy suit," he said. "Even my nickname for my father was the Sheriff. So Western passion probably came from there." Oprisiu is not the first member of his family to come to America. He had a great-great-grandfather who emigrated to Cleveland in 1905. When Oprisiu drove through Cleveland, he visited his ancestor's grave and bought him a headstone. "He never had one," he says. Oprisiu has driven his taxi throughout the South and the Southwest, and up and down the West Coast. If you happen to occupy his cab and fall into conversation with him, you are likely to end up looking through his scrapbook, which he keeps beside him on the front seat and which features his cab parked in front of various landmarks. Oprisiu will say: "That's the Continental Divide and my son. The Grand Canyon, my wife. This is the desert, that's Hoover Dam, that's Santa Monica. This is Mexico look at the machine guns the cops have, and that's just the regular ones. This is Oklahoma, the bombing place. This is Arizona just to the left here is the Biosphere and this is Arizona also, the biggest meteor crater, and this is Amarillo. They have a great steakhouse. Seventy-two ounces. If you order it, they put you up on a stage. You have one hour, and if you eat the whole thing you get it free." Oprisiu has not yet decided how he will cross the Bering Strait. "Driving across the ice, I think, is not what I need to do," he says. "About seven years ago, there was a truck company in Italy that had a round-the-world trip for their trucks, so I know it can be done. They used a boat, I think, so, if it's possible for a truck, I guess a yellow cab can make it." Oprisiu's ambition is not simply to cross the Bering Strait. He intends to drive from the strait to London and take a picture of his cab in front of Buckingham Palace. What he needs, he believes, is a sponsor. "Such a trip," he says, "it's not an easy one. Probably it's not going to demonstrate anything, but it will give me an idea of the many pleasures along the road." Oprisiu is now on his third taxi, which has a hundred and five thousand miles on it. He keeps his cab in excellent repair. He uses only original parts, and he doesn't let anyone else drive it. "In Romania, we have a saying," he says. "My car, my pen, my wife, I don't lend." (2000)Joel Hirschhorn, a fifteen-year-old senior at Stuyvesant High School, in Manhattan, talking about his paper "On the Distribution of Twin Primes," to which the attractive equationE (n) = n/(log2 n - log n * log log n)is somehow essential, and for which he was recently chosen as one of forty finalists in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, a national competition among high school seniors: "Two years ago, I was talking to a friend in the computer room at Stuyvesant, and he told me what twin primes were, and I started thinking about them. Primes are any numbers that can be divided by themselves and 1 but by no others, without a remainder, and twin primes are primes that are two apart 3-5, 5-7, 11-13, and so on. I wasn't exactly sure I would do it for the contest, though. I was thinking about a few other things, too. For instance, I still haven't found anyone who knows if mice are colorblind. I asked around, but all anybody could come up with was an inconclusive study done in the early nineteen-hundreds which is surprising, I think. I just read in Scientific American that they have discovered color vision in fish, and fish seem a lot more difficult to work with than mice, but I found out that for the competition you're not allowed to remove vertebrates from their environment, so I gave that idea up. I also thought about doing something on the Lyon Hypothesis, which has to do with genetics. That came up because a couple of years ago on a biology test the teacher asked for a reason for a particular thing to have happened, and I came up with an explanation that I later learned was the Lyon Hypothesis. My father is a research physician, and I asked him about it, and as he explained it I got interested, but I later discarded it because it would have been very complicated and so difficult to get results for that I might have put in all that time and not necessarily had anything to show for it which is almost what happened anyway. I had a couple of other ideas, too, but I forget them now. Whatever they were, I guess I didn't think about them very long. "I began in the spring of 1980, by counting twin primes. I didn't have a computer just a programmable calculator, and that didn't have a printout, so I just had to sit there and watch it and wait and write down the answer when it arrived. Right away, it started to take about five minutes to come up with the next twin prime, and it got even slower as it went on, because of the nature of the problem. I didn't get past 150 before I decided it was useless, considering I was working up to eighty billion. So I gave it up for the moment. That summer, when I was fourteen, I went to a math program at Hampshire College, and one of the courses I took was about prime numbers, and that helped; and I also learned a little bit about computers. I began the project for real, then, last winter. I figured I'd better get an early start, so I wouldn't be frantic at the end, and it was lucky I did. I had some trouble. I got a computer, but I didn't write a really good program for a while, and I was getting the wrong data. The computer seemed to be adding wrong which is impossible, I think, for a computer. I wanted the right data, so I checked back, and found the error, and revised the program, but I had lost some time a lot of time, actually and I didn't have all that much to begin with. Monday afternoons, I teach computers at the Village Community School; Tuesdays, I have a bassoon lesson; Wednesdays, the math team I'm on it has meets with other schools in the city; Saturday mornings are All-City High School Orchestra rehearsal, and after that I have my piano lesson. I study with Erna Jonas, on Ninety-sixth Street, and, along with other piano students, I play a concert once or twice a year at Carnegie Recital Hall or the Donnell Library. So Saturday is almost like a school day except it's not, too. So, anyway, I've used up the spring, and now I'm into the summer. "Then I had real trouble. This gets a little technical for a moment. It's not as important to understand what was happening with the mathematics as it is to know it went horribly wrong. As it is now, the first half of my project shows that there is a constant for predicting twin primes, and the second half shows how that constant works with my formula to predict the actual numbers. But from mid-August to the middle of November I was on a different tack I was expecting the constant for twin primes to match the square of the constant for primes. It would have made a neat package. I was also trying to prove that the constant for twin primes approached 1, as the constant for single primes does. What's important to know, however, is that I was counting on it, I put all my hopes on it, and it turned out to be totally a red herring. And I spent three months trying to figure out what was wrong with my data that they didn't show what I wanted them to I wasn't sure I had enough data. There was no one I could ask about it except the great mathematicians, so I went to the library at NYU and found a small reference to a source that was an article in a journal, and it suggested that the constant definitely doesn't go to 1, and I went, "Oh, no." That was supposed to be kind of the knockout punch of my paper. Instead, I had to suddenly cross out everything that had to do with 1 and the relationship to single primes. So it's mid-November, the paper's due in mid-December, and I'm suddenly back to mid-August. And not only that I've suddenly gone from a whole paper to half a paper. The main problem was that once I found out that the constant wasn't 1, there either wasn't a constant, and then I had no paper at all, or there was one, but I might not find it in time, in which case I still had no paper. I was dismayed. So for no reason except curiosity, I guess I just thought I'd try my formula on the numbers starting at 80 109, which is eighty billion, and then down in intervals of ten billion to 70 109, 60 109, and so on. I ran them all at once, and as I read down the column a moment later on the printout I suddenly realized there was a constant. It wasn't 1, it was 1.255. It just hit me over the head: 1.255; 1.255; 1.255. All in a row. And then, just like that, I was back from half a paper to a whole paper again." (1982)Flipping is done in the South Bronx, in a vacant lot that flippers call the Garden, at 163rd Street and Prospect Avenue. It involves the performance of aerial maneuvers flips and twists and spirals above a pile of mattress springs. Kevin Jones and Terrence Ford are renowned flippers. Terrence is fourteen, and his ambition to flip was born in him about ten years ago, when his father used to pick him up and toss him into the air. After that, he jumped mainly on his bed until his mother enrolled him in a gymnastics class, and then he learned the maneuvers that are fundamental to flipping style. Kevin, who is fifteen, learned by watching other flippers. "Every day is flip," Kevin says. "Jump and flip. Flip is like a drug to me, like a habit. I can't go a day without flipping." Kevin is slight and rangy and soft-spoken. He has almond-shaped eyes and a round face. Terrence is smaller. He smiles quickly, but is reserved in his manner. Occasionally, Kevin and Terrence compete with each other they call this battling but Kevin always walks away the winner, because he can perform a double backflip and Terrence can't. At the moment, flippers are flipping in reduced circumstances. They launch themselves from six mattress springs piled on top of a box spring near the 163rd Street end of the Garden. The flipper performs his trick and lands on the crash pad an intact mattress resting on a stack of four mattress springs. The mattress prevents the feet of the flippers from getting caught in the wires. In terms of equipment, the most favorable moment in the history of flipping occurred a year ago, when the flippers had three lines of mattresses and springs running nearly the length of a block. At the head of two of the lines were refrigerators. The flippers would launch themselves from the refrigerators and twist and flip and twirl like Slinkys down the rows of mattresses and springs until they arrived at the other end of the block. This golden period ended when a traveling revivalist set up his tent in the Garden and the Sanitation Department carried off the mattresses to clean up the area. Flippers collect their springs from factories that restore mattresses especially from Peters Mattress, at 165th Street. Terrence's father, a small, slender man with thick glasses, employs himself by scouting the neighborhood for discarded mattresses and selling them to the factory. Sometimes the factory discards the springs you can rebuild a mattress only so many times and these springs become flipping equipment. Kevin and Terrence and their friends drag them to the Garden. A set of springs lasts about six weeks, then begins to get lumps and depressions, which throw the flippers" trajectory out of kilter, and may sometimes make them land clear of the crash pad. Beside the Garden is a row of ailanthus trees, and next to that is a red brick apartment building. One day, as Kevin is standing beside the crash pad, a window on the fourth floor opens and a young man's voice calls out, "Yo, Kevin, do a show for me!" Kevin says, "That's my friend Jigga. His real name's Jamal. He's been working in a barbershop. He's someone who really started me flipping. He's old now, but he can still do it." Kevin bounces several times on the launching pad, forces his arms hard to his side, and turns a somersault in the air. In the little slot of the window, two children stand between two women. One of the women holds back a curtain. All of them cheer. Terrence is carpentering with his grandfather in a building that overlooks the other side of the Garden. He hears the noise and appears in a window. Kevin yells, "Yo, Terrence, come flip." In the meantime, Jigga arrives. He is twenty-three, small and lithe, and he wears a gold earring that spells his nickname. The women in the apartment window, it turns out, are his wife and her sister, and the children are Jigga's son and a friend. "They want me to flip," Jigga says. Kevin smiles. Jigga says bashfully, "I don't flip no more." He takes some cassette tapes out of his pockets, though, and a comb, hands them to Terrence, who has just arrived, and steps onto the launching pad. He bounces several times, gathering height, and does a creaky version of a backflip. "Hey, Jigga!" one of the women shouts. "You can do better than that!" Jigga smiles shyly. "Do a twirl!" she shouts. "No twirl," says Jigga, bouncing on the launching pad. "I'm scared to hit the floor." "Jigga!" yell the children. Jigga performs another flip, this one more self-assured, but not stylish. Kevin steps onto the launching pad and does a double. "He beat you, Jigga!" Jigga flips once more. Quarters fly from his pockets. Terrence collects them. Jigga tries a double flip and misses the crash pad completely. "Boo, Jigga!" Terrence hands Jigga his tapes, his comb, and his quarters. Kevin steps onto the launching pad and begins to gather height. The mattresses creak. Terrence says, "You all watch what he's about to do." In the air above the Garden, Kevin turns his back to the apartment building, claps his hands to his knees, and revolves twice against the sky. A car stops. By the time Kevin lands, the driver is applauding. (1992)Ry Cooder, the virtuoso guitarist, who lives in Los Angeles, so dislikes performing that he is almost never seen onstage, but he was in New York last week to appear with the seventeen members of the Buena Vista Social Club, the band that he and the producer Nick Gold assembled three years ago in Havana from a collection of mostly elderly men and one woman. The record they made in 1996 Buena Vista Social Club has sold millions of copies around the world and has been certified gold in America; it won a Grammy in 1997. The band's principal singer, Ibrahim Ferrer, who is seventy- two, has a new record, and he and the pianist, Ruben Gonzalez, who is eighty, are playing concerts in America and Canada, with the band behind them. A week ago last Thursday all of them attended a party in their honor at a restaurant in the Village; Friday night they played at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan; on Saturday they left for performances in Boston; and on Monday morning they came back to New York to appear on Late Night with David Letterman. At the party on Thursday the bartender made drinks from lime and rum and mint. On the tables were candles, and trays filled with water on which gardenias floated. A number of the band's members sat shoulder to shoulder at a banquette along one of the walls. They wore coats and sweaters against the cold, and looked like men waiting for a bus, or their turn to bowl. At a table in the corner several of them played hands of dominoes. Ibrahim Ferrer made some remarks in Spanish and so did Ruben Gonzalez. A translator said, "The two of them express that they don't have words to express how they feel, but they say that, because they are Cuban, they had to speak for five minutes." The rehearsal for Letterman began shortly after four and ended around five. The show began taping at five-thirty. In the meantime Ruben Gonzalez sat on a chair in a hallway outside the band's dressing room in the basement of the Ed Sullivan Theater, where the show is taped, and Ferrer sat on a chair in a small dressing room on the theater's sixth floor. Gonzalez is thin to the point of being frail. He is a bit stooped and sometimes limps a little. He has small hands and feet, and his handshake is delicate. He often wears suits and looks like a figure of romance, a plantation owner perhaps. Ferrer is taller and lithe and likes to dance, which he does as if the movement cost him no effort at all. His face is small and round and easily conveys pleasure. He usually wears a felt cap with a brim, the kind of felt cap that men who owned English sports cars in the forties and fifties often wore. He is a tenor, and his voice is a little gritty and warm and expresses emotion succinctly and without being sentimental. Cooder and Gold were three days into making their record when Cooder felt that the combination of voices wasn't exactly right. "Isn't there anybody who can sing the bolero?" he asked. "Doesn't anybody have that romantic style?" In assembling musicians, Cooder and Gold had the help of a man named Juan de Marcos Gonzlez. Gonzlez said, "There's one guy, I have to find him." "So Marcos went to where he knew Ibrahim was," Cooder says. "And he found him walking in the street he had nothing else to do and Ibrahim said, "I'm not interested. I don't sing anymore." He'd had a lot of disappointments and about five years before, he'd just given up singing, retired, he's making his living shining shoes. Marcos is a forceful guy, though. He says, "This is interesting, you want to do this, we need you," and Ibrahim says, "I can't now, I've been shining shoes, I need to go home and take a bath," and Marcos said, "You don't have time for that." When he arrived in the studio, you could see he was heavy, you just didn't know at what. This music really rests with the singing. It's required that someone can sing these songs so the music is illuminated, and Ibrahim is entirely unique. You wait years for someone like him to appear." In his dressing room, Ferrer said that his new life as a celebrated singer arrived so abruptly and is so strange and surprising that it feels a little like a dream. "I feel exactly as if two lives had been joined together," he said. "My old one and my new one, and this new one is a good one." The only disadvantage he could think of, he said, is that now that he is a notable person everyone in his neighborhood in Havana comes over to his apartment, which is small, and wants to spend the day with him. When the first royalties were paid for the record, Nick Gold went to Cuba with cash to distribute among the musicians. He arrived at Gonzlez's house to give him his share while Gonzlez was playing the piano. Gold had the cash in a satchel. Gonzlez asked to look at it. Gold held the satchel open and Gonzlez peered in at the dollar bills, then waved his hand. "Take it away," he said. In the theater basement someone asked him if he had actually made such a gesture. He smiled broadly. "I did do that," he said, "but it was a joke." (1999)My new best friend is Cash Money. Cash and I have become friends only recently. I don't know since when, exactly, but lately. A lot of people know Cash more intimately than I do and are going to feel that I have no business talking about him. But that doesn't bother me. What do we do together? Visit cafs, where the waiters make a quiet fuss over him, where he places one hand on the table, his nails curved so perfectly into arcs that it is as if a mathematician and not a manicurist had worked on them. Within Cash's capacious and complex personality are all the virtues I have ever sought in any companion. He's exceptionally attractive, especially when he's had a night's rest, but even in that run-down condition he sometimes shows up in, his jacket torn and his lapels astray and covered with stains whose origins are uncertain, with a name or a small drawing somewhere on his front in blue ballpoint ink, like a tattoo, and him slightly withered as if he had been bossed by some friends into extending a party to celebrate the sale of, say, a fabulous painting, a Monet, a van Gogh, in which he had obscurely and deftly figured, even perhaps made possible, although he would never claim such a thing, he's more worldly than that. His company (I find) is soothing and quietly reinforcing of one's sense of well-being. He's as seductive as a beautiful dark-haired woman in her thirties whose manner conveys intelligence and sexual accomplishment. He's protective of confidences and willing to arrange the acquisition of any pleasure no matter how singular, showy, or demeaning. Even when you go slightly mad in the pursuit, he stays by your side, at least as far as your claim on his attention allows. Most people are unreliable anyway. You can know them too well. You can arrive at a period where you're privy to their secrets, you can hear their words in your head before they speak them, they bore you. With Cash, any failure of his to entertain you is really a failure of your own imagination. Sometimes, true, it's hard to get him on the phone. He's elusive. No argument there. He can seem unable to remember your name. All true. Sometimes he's aloof, but so is God. Before I knew Cash I never cared about the Moneys. I met Cash in Jackson Hole in 1972 at the summer ranch of the family of some friends from Bennington. The rest of the year the family lived in Princeton. Cash would show up for breakfast at the long table in the ranch mess and drink coffee and eat bacon and eggs and pancakes without ever somehow being seen to actually put anything into his mouth, which would have been vulgar, while everyone talked about Bluebell or Charger or whatever horse they were going to ride that morning and gave instructions to the staff about what they wanted placed into their picnic hampers and where the car was to meet them with the hampers and so on. I discovered that everyone knew Cash to be the only rider sufficiently accomplished to manage Thunderbolt, so he never took part in the talk, and the horse was always saddled for him, a four-legged piece of distemper and misanthropy, waiting by the corral. Everyone seemed extremely fond of Cash even the hard-bitten cowboys liked him and invited him to the bunkhouse to play poker; they called him Tin and Scratch, which amused him endlessly, and he always let them win. The ranch had been in the family for generations, and Cash had the best cabin, with a view of the Tetons, and over the doorway, like a waspy joke, the cow skull that Georgia O'Keeffe had found in a pasture. He wore beautiful tweed jackets that fit like an embrace and were a little frayed at the cuffs. His place was always set at the table with the ranch china and crystal and a tin cup for coffee, and the waiters served him first, although he waved them off cheerfully and sent them toward my friend's grandmother, and he always remembered the names of their children and had a little something for them, candy, I don't know what, something he took from his pockets. In years after that I saw him various places. Once fifteen years ago on the beach at Sagaponack in front of a house that looked like the old TWA terminal at Kennedy, glass and steel with cables holding the whole sorry structure together and the cables looking as if they were about to snap. He was with a couple of guys in their thirties who were smoking cigars and slapping each other on the back and had those big phones that resembled the ones that guys in war movies used to have, and he looked desperately ill at ease. I hardly recognized him. I'm pretty sure I saw him another time on the deck of a yawl that dropped anchor late one evening in the bay off La Samanna at least I thought I made out his high forehead, wide shoulders, and long form but the light was failing, and no one came ashore, and the next morning the sailboat was gone and the horizon was as empty as a slate that had been wiped clean. We had for several years a tentative friendship. The idea that women more easily become intimate with each other than men are able to is partly a feminist rant, but it is also partly true. I was a little uncertain of myself with Cash his sporadic and solicitous attention I felt was partly a favor to my parents and I was never sure what sort of conversation might interest him. On the other hand, I was also innocent, and protected myself by means of the invention that I was the only person on the face of the earth, a young man's defense. I got married my parents added Cash to the guest list but he was abroad; he sent a cut-glass bowl I keep on a table beside my bed and fill with change. My wife and I moved to Manhattan, to a small cold- water flat, a walkup on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. Cracked plaster walls, windows looking out on a churchyard, and the smell of garbage rising from the sidewalk in the summer. Across the street was a storefront clubhouse belonging to some gangsters. On the occasions when Cash came slumming downtown, he'd bring an old bottle of Chteau Lynch Bages and sit in our small living room before taking up the pattern of his evening and say such things as, "No elevator, five floors, really you're a hero, kiddo." What surprised me was that he was fond of the gangsters. They'd invite him for an espresso or a grappa, whatever it is they drank together, and grin and slap him on the back and give him those little European hugs where you kiss the guy on both cheeks. Over the years I fell out of touch with him. He didn't call and I was embarrassed to call him. I was trying to be a painter and no one seemed interested in my work, and I was getting a little old to pretend that I preferred living in a slum. I fell into feeling wounded and thinking of him as a fair- weather friend. Then he would invite me to lunch at the Gloucester House or the Racquet Club, buy me two martinis and a swordfish steak from Block Island and tell stories and ask if I was getting enough to eat and send me home in a taxi, and I would look out the window at the fabulous people of Midtown and think, what more really could one ask of a friend than that he devote himself, intensely, for a few hours to your well-being. I know. I grew up. I no longer considered raffishness such a laudable trait. As I said, I always viewed Cash as a member of another generation, the kind of figure you occasionally see in the corner of a photograph depicting a lawn like a pelt leading to a big white elephant of a house in Greenwich, and it really surprised me, when I got over my shyness and diffidence, that he has a kind of ageless and almost permanently youthful quality that makes chronology seem irrelevant, and his own dif.cult to pin down anyway. He apprehends all there is to understand about history. Knows every card game coon cane, peter pot, arcane versions of poker and when to bet up the odds and when only a fool or a daredevil would. Never says where he's been, who he's been talking to. Everything's mysterious. The mark, I think, of a truly cultured person someone with acquaintances all over the map, who's welcome anywhere and knows how to behave at a cockfight as well as at a dinner with three wineglasses and seventeen utensils. Someone who knows how to put you at your ease. Who supports your own best impression of yourself. When he's distracted or tired he seems disengaged and a little forbidding. Other times he's radiant. Where this new infatuation is going, I can't say. I hardly see him frequently enough to be certain. Sometimes I'll sit there talking to someone across the table and think, Why can't you be Cash? I want to be just like him. When we're together, I study how he holds himself, his gestures and rhythms of speech, his manner of dressing, and the absence in it of any of the fussy preoccupation with clothes that seems so much in vogue. I think I was a moron for the time that I held him at some remove. I look for him everywhere, crossing streets, in the backseats of limousines, reflected in the windows of stores. It's an obsession, I know, a May to September thing, I suppose, ruthless and thrilling, but I'm not at all sure that I don't really like it. (2001)Think about Call Reluctance, a modern affliction. According to the cover story in the October issue of the magazine Selling, "Call Reluctance strikes men and women, rookies and veterans, and people in every selling field. It's as common as the common cold but a lot more deadly it can kill a sales career." Call Reluctance involves an aversion to using the phone to make sales calls, or to set up appointments for meetings. One man who had it said, "I had an actual fear of the telephone." Salesmen and saleswomen often catch Call Reluctance from one another. "Certain forms of Call Reluctance are highly contagious," the magazine says. A woman who had Call Reluctance says that an attack brought on "big purple hives" all over her face and that to conceal them she wore blouses with high collars and let her hair grow. A person might think of Call Reluctance as a salesman kneeling in the dark, narrow lobby of a building with one elevator. It is late in the afternoon. The salesman has a sample case. He is leafing through a collection of business cards, trying to think if there is anyone in the neighborhood who will see him on the spur of the moment, since he couldn't call ahead. He used to call ahead, but one day he couldn't anymore. He would sit in his office at Rake's Progress Sales, the blinds drawn, eyeballing the phone, cracking his knuckles, exhaling deeply, then picking up the receiver. He would ask the woman who answered if she had time to see him and his new line. His wife has become frightened by this charade. When he says, "I think you'll be very excited with our new products. How about I bring them by tomorrow?" she says, "Harry, what's the matter with you?" The answer used to be nothing, until, through some kind of casual contact a handshake, one of the paper cups at the water fountain, the toilet seat, for Christ's sake, who the hell knows he contracted Call Reluctance. When he tries to use the phone, he breaks out into a fine sweat that bathes his body, making his face shiny in bright light. He feels like he runs out of breath before he reaches the end of what he has to say. He thinks, "If I can get through the door, I know I can sell them. I just can't make the call." In the dreary lobby now, he rises and drops a coin into the slot on the phone. The sound of the dial tone fills him with dread. The air feels heavy. He imagines humiliations, conspiracies at the other end of the line. His palms are damp and his fingers leave little smudges on the card he has been gripping so tightly that it is crumpled. He closes his sample bag and decides to get a drink and take an early train home. He'll make new calls tomorrow. Everyone will be gone by now anyway. (1994)Copyright 2003 by Alec Wilkinson. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

Excerpted from Mr. Apology: And Other Essays by Alec Wilkinson
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Mr. Apology and Other Essays

9780618123117

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Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials

Excerpts

Rewards Program

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