The Perfume Burned His Eyes. Michael Imperioli
stayed home as much as I could without going batshit myself. She didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything so I made us sandwiches for lunch every afternoon and more sandwiches for dinner every evening. I am not much of cook. The lunch sandwich would be her breakfast because she slept till two in the afternoon every day. Just in time to turn on the TV and catch her soap operas. The TV would remain on till she passed out in the wee hours. If I woke up during the night I’d turn it off, but very often it stayed on until I rose the next morning.
It was heavy and oppressive being alone with her every day. It was also hot as all fuck. The air conditioner was broken and she was way too out of it to care. She was sliding down a nasty slope of addiction and depression and there was nothing I could do about it.
At least once a day she would be sitting in front of the TV watching General Hospital or some shit and tears would just roll down her face. Big watery tears that left trails of dirt and makeup as they made their way south. The weird thing was that she didn’t really look sad. She was blank, no expression, nothing in her face giving away any grief or pain. This unnerved me more than if she were overcome by a loud jag of sobs and crying. I wished she would moan and wail like a normal human being instead of the empty zombified shell she’d become. I was not equipped to deal with her and she’d stopped letting anyone at all, family or friend, into the house.
And then one day around the middle of August I woke up to the sound of our vacuum cleaner. It had been silent for months. My mother had gotten up early and was giving the house a thorough cleaning. She looked different that day, she was smiling at me but not in a dopey narcotic way. It was a lucid and peaceful smile. Her hair was combed and her clothes weren’t wrinkled. She kissed me good morning and cooked me breakfast in a clean kitchen.
It seemed like she had picked herself up by the bootstraps, snapped out of despair, and made a decision not to let it all go down the drain. That afternoon she started packing things into suitcases and boxes. I didn’t ask why. When we sat down to lunch (she made chili with Minute rice—my favorite) she told me that we were going to move into the city.
She may as well have said that we were moving to North Dakota. If you lived in Jackson Heights, Manhattan was that far away. Maybe we would go once or twice a year to see the Christmas tree or the circus. Or if my cousins came up from Florida we would go to the Empire State Building. But not much more than that. And living there . . . well, that was uncharted waters. The city was for rich people or poor people and we didn’t fall into either category.
five
My grandfather had a lot more money than I’d imagined. He took numbers in his shop and made loans to his customers for decades. There were piles and piles of cash in a safe he kept in the basement of his house. The lion’s share of this booty went to my mother. I think she got even more than my grandma did, but it may have been that Grandma Betty felt sorry for her and wanted to give her a chance to start a new life.
Right before Labor Day, my mother and I took a taxi to East 52nd Street in Manhattan. The block dead-ended to a high ridge with the East River and the FDR Drive flowing below. It was a very ritzy block, even I could see that and I knew jack shit about the city. There was a Rolls Royce idling near the corner on First Avenue. A chauffeur wearing a hat was sitting behind the wheel which was on the wrong side, the British side. It was the first Rolls I had ever seen in my life.
We walked up to a big brick building. A friendly doorman let us in and handed my mother an envelope that bore her name scrawled in black ink. The smiling doorman said his name was Kenny. He had a string-beany Dick Van Dyke type of frame and a very young face. His uniform was too big for his body and he looked like a kid wearing his old man’s clothes.
Kenny showed us to the elevator and rambled on about the heat and the impending rain. He seemed like a good guy even if he was a bit of a blabbermouth. He left us alone at the elevator and my mother pressed 6. Inside the envelope was a key that let us into apartment 6K at the end of a long hallway.
The living room was empty and had shiny wood floors. The windows looked out onto 52nd Street. We could see part of the river and the Queens shoreline. My mother showed me the bedroom that was going to be mine.
She went to the bathroom and I stood alone in the center of the room. There were two windows that faced the back of the very wide building just south of ours. All I could see were windows, maybe a hundred of them. A big wall of eyes or one big fly eye that was trained right at me. I could see people behind some of the eyes. I could watch them go about their daily lives. It was a strange sensation and I felt like it was wrong to be watching them. But apparently they didn’t care. If they wanted privacy they could pull down the shades.
I waited for my mom in the kitchen. She was in the bathroom for a long time and I started to worry. I killed time looking through the drawers and cupboards but all I found were some chopsticks. She finally came out of the bathroom and asked me what I thought of the place.
The idea of moving scared me. The rooms were big, the building in a fancy part of town; it was all too foreign. And my mother hadn’t told me anything about what our life here would be like. There were too many unknowns: Where would I go to school? Was she getting a job? Was it a temporary move and we’d go back to Queens in a few months? Or did my mother meet a new guy at some point and he was the one renting the apartment for us and now she was going to open one of the closet doors and Jerry or Jim or whoever the fuck would appear and introduce himself as my new father? I was scared of all the questions and even more scared of the answers.
I opened the refrigerator, expecting it to smell bad. It didn’t. I took that as an okay sign. There was nothing inside except an open can of Coke. I emptied it into the sink.
My mother asked me the same question again: “What do you think, Mitt?” She was the only person who called me that.
“It’s nice” was all I could manage to say.
She sat down Indian style in the middle of the living room and asked me to sit across from her. I did and then I noticed that she was still on the pills.
“I think we owe it to ourselves. No?”
She waited for me to reply but I didn’t.
“We had a rough year and I think a new beginning would do us both a world of good.”
Still no answer from me.
She stared at me and smiled. She did have a lovely smile. And if a drug was responsible for it, well . . . so be it. Pills or no pills, I think she was genuinely happy that day.
As for me, I can’t really say I was unhappy. Yes, I was afraid, but I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t going to miss anybody from my neighborhood. Maybe Willie a little bit. Maybe not. I wasn’t so attached to anyone except my Grandma Betty and my mother assured me we would be seeing her at least once a week. I mean, we were only fifteen minutes away from Jackson Heights by taxi or train. But psychologically it was another story. For me, the East River may as well have been the Atlantic Ocean.
“When do we move in?” It was my first real question about our new life. It would also be the only one I asked that day.
“The movers are coming Friday morning. We have a lot of work to do, Mitty.”
Friday. Wow. She was wasting no time.
We took the elevator back down to the lobby. A different doorman was on duty. He smiled at us as we walked toward him but his attention was immediately drawn to the entrance. A short, skinny guy dressed in all black with big dark sunglasses and very short bleached-blond hair stumbled his way inside. He had on a black leather jacket even though it was ninety degrees.
He smelled bad. Like cigarettes, booze, BO, cheap perfume, and something like kerosene or the gas from a stove with its pilot light out. I was sure the doorman was going to throw him right out. He looked like the junkies I would see hanging out by the Roosevelt Avenue subway station hustling change for a token or a shot.
But I was wrong.
The doorman motioned to my mother and me to wait a second as he graciously greeted the man in