Ken Shorr is in town and dropped by this morning. We went for a coffee on Sullivan Street and were sitting at an outdoor table when an elderly man approached and asked if we could help him lower a plant into a hole he’d just dug. It was a strange and unexpected request, so we said yes and allowed him to lead us up the street and into a building I must have passed five hundred times. It had an elevator, and he pushed the button for the basement, explaining that this was his son-in-law’s apartment. “He’s Chinese,” he added, “and is composing an opera. I hoped the maid could help me with the plant, but unfortunately she’s not strong enough.”
In the basement, we walked down a dark narrow hallway and into a clean-smelling apartment. It opened onto a small backyard, where the man gestured to a good-size tree, its roots contained in a sizable burlap ball. It must have weighed three hundred pounds, and he needed it carried up four steps and then dragged to a hole six feet away.
Ken and I tried to lift it, but it took all we had and within seconds it was back on the ground with us over it, panting. “I can’t believe…your maid couldn’t…handle this on her own,” Ken said, gasping for air. “Mine could carry two…trees and still manage to…breast-feed…the children.”
The man blinked.
On the second try, we got it up a single stair. Then another and another. On nearing the hole, we realized that it was way too shallow. Someone needed to make it deeper, but it wasn’t going to be either of us. The man was so frail that it might have taken him hours, so we said nothing and lowered the tree into the too-shallow hole, where it looked pathetic.
March 28, 1998
New York
Hugh and I went to visit Helen in the hospital and throughout our half-hour stay I wondered if we didn’t have the wrong room. She’s been literally defanged, and without her teeth, it was difficult to understand what she was saying. “How are you?” Hugh asked.
She pointed at the wall and told him to open the refrigerator.
Her hair has grown out since I last saw her. The copper-colored henna is gone, and she looks a good twenty years older. She later told her daughter, Ann, that two men had stopped by. She didn’t recall our names and had no idea why we’d come.
March 30, 1998
New York
Because I was in a bind with my BBC story, I devoted most of my day to defrosting the freezer. In the afternoon I called the delivery service to order some pot, and an hour later a guy named Stogie came to the door. After counting my money, he looked at the papers on my table and said, “Hey, are you David Sedaris? My wife really likes you.” He asked if he could have my autograph and I was so flattered. I mean, here he was, a big-time pot dealer, and he wanted my autograph? It was sweet of him to ask, and his attention made it much easier to finish the BBC story.
April 10, 1998
Hanover, New Hampshire
I was met this morning by a woman named Georgia who took me across the river to do a radio interview in Vermont. Afterward we went to a restaurant where she seemed to know everyone. On leaving after our lunch, she introduced me to an eighty-year-old Japanese American woman named Bea who said, “We just got back from our annual Good Friday March for Peace!”
Bea, I learned, lives part-time in a local Quaker retirement community. “The rest of the year we live on the farm.”
“You farm?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, have for decades. My husband and I are tied to the land.”
I asked what she farmed and was slightly disappointed when she said, “Christmas trees.” Because, come on, that’s really not the sort of thing that forces you out of bed at five a.m. I could be wrong, but don’t Christmas trees pretty much take care of themselves?
April 15, 1998
New York
I passed the Black Israelites on 7th Ave and 50th Street this afternoon. These are the people who wear outlandish robes and talk about how much Jesus hated white people. I was walking along, minding my own business, when the guy with the microphone called me a cracker faggot.
April 17, 1998
New York
Rakoff was on As the World Turns today, playing a talent scout for the Visage Modeling Agency. His lines included “Are you kidding, I’d never miss a Rebecca Drake fashion show. I’m simply mad for her work.” I’d never seen this particular soap opera before but will watch as long as he’s on it. On Monday he’ll appear again and say, “Excuse me, miss, but do you think I might look through your portfolio?”
April 20, 1998
New York
On my way home tonight I passed a fistfight taking place in front of the pizzeria on the corner of Spring and Thompson. I’m not sure who started it, but the kickboxer won, literally hands down.
April 27, 1998
New York
I’m reading a book Amy suggested by Maria Flook. It’s about her sister, who took off at the age of fourteen with a fifty-year-old man she met at a bowling alley. He led her to Norfolk, Virginia, where she started working as a prostitute. At one point, the two of them go off to steal a fur coat. They’re in the store and he tells her to wait by the door while he stands beside “the Jewish piano.” That’s what he calls the cash register, the Jewish piano. It’s such a good book.
May 7, 1998
La Bagotière
On my way to Ségrie-Fontaine I passed three teenage girls lying on their backs in the middle of the road. It was a dumb place to relax, as they were surrounded on both sides by winding curves. I walked by, and then two of them stood and asked if I had a cigarette for their friend. I indicated that mine were menthols and they said that was fine.
Teenagers in Normandy always seem so innocent—even when they’re hanging out in a village square, they always smile and say hello.
Hugh passed the girls an hour later on his bike and they stopped him to ask if he was English.
“American,” he told them.
When they learned that he lives in New York, they asked if he’d ever seen Leonardo DiCaprio. “Well, yes,” he said. “As a matter of fact…”
I was there, too, and remember it clearly. DiCaprio was with a beautiful young woman, stepping out of a cab in front of the Museum of Natural History. He tried to pay with a $50, and when the driver said that the bill was too big, the movie star stood in line at the hot-dog cart and got change there. That’s what being famous gets you in New York: change.
The girls asked Hugh what other famous people he’d seen and he said something unsatisfying like “Oh, you know.”
I keep a list of the stars I see, but even without it I’d have made things up, just to get a reaction out of them. I would have given them the New York they imagine, the one where you can’t leave your house without seeing Madonna and Michael Jackson breast-feeding their babies. If you were going to give these girls one star, though, Leonardo DiCaprio was definitely the one. Hugh got back on his bike and as he took off, the girls resumed their position on the road, so small-town, it must hurt.
May 12, 1998
New York
Helen died the other night at six o’clock, five days after being transferred to a Staten Island nursing home. At the funeral parlor on Bleecker Street, I met her sister, Minnie, who had a voice as deep as a man’s. “We used to call Helen ‘Baby Hippo’ because she was always so fat in the hips and rear,” she said.
Hugh told her that we thanked Helen in all our play programs. “She’s the one who gave us the sewing machine we used to make curtains.”
“That was my machine,” Minnie said. “You should have been thanking me, not her.”
The sisterly resemblance was striking.