The Handyman cleared his throat. I’d forgotten about him.
“You know Mario,” I said.
“Mario, the handyman,” Zak said, suspiciously. I could see the memory of the exploding toilet flashing before his eyes. “Why are you here?”
“Mario the cowboy,” the Handyman corrected. “I’m taking your girl to dinner, amigo.”
Zak looked as though he was going to choke on suppressed laughter.
“My girl?” he said. “I’m just going inside.”
“I’m just going out,” I said, only partially believing what I was saying.
CARMELA WALKED TEN FEET in front of us, pretending, no doubt, that she was a princess being attended by a couple of servants far below her station. She didn’t even look back to see if we were behind her. The Handyman seemed to know everyone on every street corner. He greeted women ranging from seventeen-year-old Polish girls to their gray-haired grandmothers. He donated a buck to the yellow-eyed Kielbasa Dude, a career drunk who perpetually hung out on Greenpoint Avenue clutching a booze-filled brown paper sack and a sausage. He waved at the proprietors of the bodegas. He nodded at the waitresses in the Thai Café, which, despite its unlikely location deep in Polish Brooklyn, made the best green papaya salad in the city. It was as though we were traversing a Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood arranged specifically for the Handyman.
I walked next to him, and wondered how I’d managed to live in Greenpoint for as many months as I had without getting to know anyone. I recognized the cast of characters, of course, but the Handyman knew them by name. I’d been pretending I didn’t really live in my neighborhood. Most of my time, by necessity, was spent in Manhattan anyway. Greenpoint was where I slept. When I slept. The neighborhood had, in my opinion, very little to recommend it. Greenpoint, obviously named early in an optimistic century, had nothing green to boast of, unless you counted the complexions of its residents, upon catching a whiff of the famous Greenpoint Sewage Treatment Plant. Or, perhaps, the neighborhood’s moniker referred to Newton Creek, which divided the northernmost tip of our neighborhood from Queens, and which was euphemistically classified as “precluded for aquatic life” due to the massive Exxon oil leak that had, for years, been drooling into the creek’s already sewage-contaminated waters. This did not keep certain neighborhood eccentrics and teenagers from cannonballing off the disintegrating India Street pier, and dog-paddling in the slurry. The Handyman seemed to thrive in this neighborhood. For the first time, I thought that maybe I could, too. I’d been rejecting my new home. If I was giving up on no, it was time to give up on that, too.
In between yelling hellos at hipsters, bums, and babies, the Handyman conducted a running monologue of his history.
“So, mamita, it used to be heroin for me, but I got clean of the devil, and now I’m here. Montana was where I came straight from Colombia, three wives ago. Her mamá, we never got married, ‘cause I got smart.”
I was alone amongst my friends in thinking that dating recovering addicts was actually not the worst thing in the world. They always told you their story, right up front. It was a refreshing change from persons addicted to other things: emotional warfare, codependence, Harold Pinter plays. At this point in my life, it seemed worth dealing with the addict’s night sweats, sievelike memory, and “bad liver and broken heart,” as Tom Waits put it, in order to get to his stories. Where else could I hear tales of piano bars and mystery scars, ballads of long-dead cronies named Mac, stories of jonesing for a hit of something or other and somehow ending up married to a waitress, and buried alive in a diner Dumpster by fried egg sandwiches? Stories like the Handyman’s.
Carmela dropped back to listen.
“Daddy also had a big mess with cocaine,” she told me.
“I was getting to that, baby,” the Handyman called after her, but she had resumed her place in front of us.
“Montana?” I asked. I was feeling pleased with myself for remaining unfazed in the face of the Handyman’s story. He was twirling his hammer with the panache of a marching band vixen. The zippers on his motorcycle jacket flashed in the sun. His spurs, yes, spurs, jingled. His teeth were white, and his skin was tanned, and it seemed that, even though he was a walking contradiction, a motorcycle-riding Colombian cowboy, nothing bad had ever happened to him.
“Dude ranch. The Flying Bull. We called it the Flying Bullshit, mamita, but it was not a bad place to be. First I was the dishwasher, then I was the cook. And Montana! Baby, you gotta get your sweet ass to Montana!”
Carmela led us to a restaurant called the Manhattan Triple Decker. It was neither in Manhattan, nor three stories high. One story and a lot of eggs. She greeted the aged Polish man behind the counter, and then graciously accepted his lift onto a bar stool. Without being asked, he brought her a strawberry milkshake. Clearly, she was a regular.
“I was bringing the powder to the cowboys, baby, and they were out there, on their horses, high, high, high, and all because of me, their dishwasher. Man. Those days are dead and gone now, dead and gone.”
The Handyman ordered a hamburger. I got a grilled cheese.
“Couple of the guys, they were the real thing, and the rest were the guests from everywhere, everybody who wanted to ride horses and pretend they were in a Western movie. Everybody liked the coke, though; man, mi amigo in the kitchen got me hooked up and before you knew it, we were selling the shit to the whole town. I could ride, back then, mamita, as good as the guys who were out there year-round. I had a horse I liked, and I used to ride all over the ranch, high out of my mind! And shit, baby! Did I tell you I could lasso? I lassoed whatever I felt like. One time, I put a loop around this chica in jeans and cowboy boots, and damn, damn, damn, mami!”
He paused for a moment, lost in the memory of a girl I pictured as a lot like the big-haired Rodeo Queens of my high school. There’d been one who’d been famous for the constantly visible outline of a Trojan in the back pocket of her skin-tight Wranglers.
“So, what happened? How’d you end up here?”
“He got busted,” said Carmela, turning to give me the first smile I’d seen from her. A bewitching, missing-toothed grin. She slurped her milkshake. “And then he got my mommy.”
“I met her in jail,” said the Handyman. “I was in for only five months. They busted me, but they busted me on the wrong day. I didn’t have shit. They wanted to put me away forever, but instead, they had to put me away for no time at all. She was my cellmate Victor’s wife. Fool wouldn’t see her, got pissed over some small shit, thought she was fucking his brother, so I went out and there she was.”
“The most beautiful woman my daddy had ever seen,” said Carmela, happily.
“Her name was Maria,” said the Handyman.
I was enchanted. I’d started writing a tragic motherless-child-and-widower story in my head. Death in childbirth. Grieving widower, scarred by a criminal past, trying to hack out a living through fix-it gigs, little daughter raising herself on mustard-and-marshmallow sandwiches. Horrible as it was, it appealed to my drama-saturated nature. I was already considering how I’d adapt it into a hybrid of Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and Sam Shepard. I was envisioning my Pulitzer. My Tony. My Oscar! The trifecta, balanced on the bookshelves I’d finally be able to afford.
“What happened to her?” I asked softly, ready to comfort him. He started laughing. Laughing hard. Slapping his knee at my apparent stupidity. Carmela drew some milkshake up in her straw. She shot it, with perfect accuracy, at the Handyman’s cheek.
“Damn, mamita, whadda you think?” The Handyman wiped his face, still laughing.
I protested that I didn’t know. How could they laugh about something as tragic as this? What kind of people were they? Had they no compassion?
“She ran off on the back of a motorcycle with some fucker she met in the 7-Eleven. Left me with this one, still a baby.