At first, I only thought that good old Super-super goofed, again. After all, the man's command of the "Engleesh as she is spoken" isn't the best to begin with (but you would think that living in the City for umpteen years would make a difference sometimes I'm sure that English is doomed to become the United States' second language), but even he should know the difference between gringa and gringo (at least that's how I think the "Spanish she is spoken" I never did take that course back in Ewerton High) but at the time I decided that it would not do to gripe about it. He does allow me to keep Wolfie and Duke (neither of whom will ever be mistaken for lap dogs) up here in the apartment, which is not the most common practice here in New York City. (And if I'm not a good girl, he'll confiscate his Roach Motels!)
Anyhow, Roach Motels and the boys aside, when Mr. Hernandez said what he did to me, I had just gotten back my proofs for "The Mouth That Would Not Die" from Bloodbath Quarterly. The editor scribbled that the "...That Wouldn't Die" sounded a bit "flip." As in Wilson, I was tempted to scribble back in the margins, but you learn to keep such thoughts to yourself especially when there's a five foot high slush pile generated by writers just dying to get a shot at BQ. (Instead, I told myself I'd change it back when the anthology of my work came out.) As usual, the galleys came back with the standard note, "Running late, get back ASAP," and so on. I had only found three typos, all minor, when Mr. Hernandez knocked, asking for the rent, and for once he didn't make some crack about (pick one or more): my halter top, my shorts, my body, and/or my single female status. (Thank goodness for two mammoth male doggies at a time like that! And I used to think good ole Dead Fred Ferger back home in Wisconsin was bad! Spare me from the Latin lover type!)
Instead of his usual "How's de preety señorita?" line, Mr. H. kept it short, but right before he left, he bent down to itch Wolfie's head and said something about, "You boys protect the young gringo, okay?" but I didn't really think about it until after I took a second look at the proof sheets (noticing the initials of the guy who typeset my story in the upper left hand corner of the first page he was the one that the editor at Gore Magazine wrote to me about; she said that he really liked "that D.B. Winston's stuff" if I remembered her letter correctly), and even then, I figured that Mr. H. made a simple mistake ... but after I went to the drugstore, what Mr. Hernandez said began to niggle at the back of my mind.
Not that the trip to the drugstore and back was eventful but, in a way, that was the problem. All I had picked up was a box of tampons, some cheap typing paper (is there any other kind?) and a few stamps from one of those mini mail-box shaped dispensers (the kind that gobbles your quarters and usually forgets to stick out a tongue of stamps), and even though a few of the toughs from the neighborhood were lounging around the counter and by the door for once they didn't give me a hard time. Once, one of them offered to help me "put in" a feminine product (shades of Dead Fred and his "can I trim your bush?" remarks), but this time they just stood around gassing, playing with the dials on their boom boxes (which I swear grow out of their shoulder blades) and scaring the bejesus out of out-of-towners who happen to find themselves in this part of the city (not your highlight tourist attraction here!). And I actually made it back to the apartment house unaccosted
...and I didn't have the boys along for moral support, either. (When I walk the dogs, no one approaches me if the boys don't scare them off, there's always the option of beaning someone over the head with the pooper scooper!)
But that day, I only figured I'd lucked out. It wasn't until I called the super to come and take a look at my leaking faucet (the roaches were taking sides for swimming teams in my sink) a week later that I realized something was wrong, really off-kilter. For one thing, Mr. H. who usually broke both legs running to come spend time with the gringa made some excuse about not being able to make it until after supper. I figured that perhaps he didn't realize it was me, the "Preety señorita," so I said who was calling, taking pains to pronounce my name very plainly, and after I did, there was this pause on his end of the line, and I could hear this Spanish-language radio or TV station in the background (like something out of "The Possession of Joel Delaney," the part when Shirley MacLame goes slumming in search of help for her brother) and only after I'd shouted "Hello?" into the speaker a few times he came back on the line, muttering that he'd be up right away, but before I hung up I heard him grumble something about the "loco gringo" At the time, I thought to myself, Maybe you should write "I Am Woman" across the front of your tee, since it did seem funny ... then. As it was, Mr. H's visit was uneventful; he growled that he had his food waiting on the hotplate, and hurriedly fixed the faucet, but as he was leaving (and Mr. "Do Not Disturb Night Job Sleeping" Door Sign as if a "Night Job" was an entity that needed sleep! was just leaving his apartment across the hall), Hernandez happened to say to himself, "Goddamn loco gringo sonsabitch," which prompted Mr. "Night Job Sleeping" to chortle "Goo'night, fellah" at me. I almost sicced Wolfie and Duke on him, but figured, why waste the effort? They might have gotten food poisoning from the jerk. I decided to get them to bark at his door some day ... his sign didn't say "No Barking!"
However, I didn't get a chance to mull over the day's events; since the BQ editor called; would I consider some last-minute editing on "The Mouth That..."? Nothing major, just a few changes near the end? After scrambling around for a copy of the MS (not much of a scramble, considering the size of my Roach-Motel room) I dictated the changes over the phone, and at that point things really began to get weird, for between lines, he kept asking "Got a cold, D.B.?" "Can you speak up?" "Bad connection," and I wouldn't have paid any undue attention to that if I'd still been living in Ewerton, where bad connections were the norm but he was calling from an office only a couple of miles away at the most! After he hung up I told myself I'd have to get Super-super to come and look at it (since Ma Bell was slaughtered, calling the phone people is a fool's errand!) when he got himself some glasses, or after I made up my "I Am Woman" shirt.
And that was when things were still fairly normal.
Two weeks later I got my check for "The Mouth That..." and I went to the bank to try and cash it. I hadn't been in for about a month, but that isn't an eternity ... yet the teller, a woman who I thought would recognize me (I'd been to her a few times before, during other visits) acted like I'd caught the first ship from Mars and landed on the roof of the building five minutes before, and jumped down to the lobby through the ceiling. Now I'm not a naive person, even though I was born and raised in a small town. I'm aware of the fact that New Yorkers simply don't have the time to be slavishly polite to every Tom, Dick, and Henrietta who walks through the door (unless they work at Bloomies and are busy trying to get you to submit to a cosmetic makeover then they act like they'll sell you the city for a string of beads and some feathers!) but I was expecting a teller at my bank to treat me like a human being.
The woman gave me a strange look when I submitted my check and passbook (for deposit of part of the check; I'm not crazy enough to spend the whole thing at a pop), looking from the book to me and back again, like something wasn't computing for her. She began to act as if I'd just handed her a scribbed note topped with the words "This is a Stickup!" and stammered something about needing some "recent identification," and I reached over, took my things, and said for her to forget it, and left, while she stared at me as if I was Al Pacino carrying a long flower box under one arm. While I walked to the subway station, I began to think about the past few days and decided that the Big Apple (as the folks back home love to call it when I phone them in the background I can hear Mom yell "Arlin, c'mere, it's our girl calling from the Big Apple!") had gone wormy for me. I mean, Ewerton was bad it was deeply entrenched in that old system of "Oh, you're Arlin Winston's girl," or "Her? She's old Palmer Winston's grandchild," or worse, "Devorah? That's old man Winston's son's little girlie." When I got my driver's license, I had almost expected it to say "Devorah Bambi Wins!on, daughter of Arlin, son of Palmer, grandson of Porter," or something semi-Biblical like that. It was so frustrating; if I had stayed back home I wouldn't have ever had a chance to be me, but I would have either been dubbed "So and so's child," or "the such-and-such girl," or if I had married one of the local-yokel Ewerton males, eventually I would have become "Joe Blow's wife," or "the mother of Dick and Jane" and so on to infinity. Part of the reason why I cleared out of there was the fact that I had had no hope of carving out an identity for myself; in a small town a person is never a person, period, but either the offspring of someone or the parent of another ... at least in New York, I figured that a person would be known only as his or her self without a centipede-like trail of relatives hanging behind them. All I wanted to be was me, D. B. Winston, writer, but after all this gringo and "better identification" stuff, I was beginning to wonder if I should go and have my gender and vital statistics tattooed across my forehead!
Crawling out of my pool of self-pity long enough to look up for my station number, I noticed that I was sitting in a subway car full of boom-box babes, all big, all poorly dressed ... and all leaving me alone. And there wasn't a Guardian Angel in sight.
When I reached my stop, I hurried off, hoping to leave before my traveling companions came to their senses. During the walk home, I toyed with the idea of working this all into a story. It had worked for me in the past ... as evidenced by my still uncashed check.
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