Susan Smahl

A small but not insignificant retiree’s reward for a lifetime of rushing, rushing to school, rushing to work, rushing home, rushing somewhere, anywhere, is that, in addition to the pension, the travel, the midweek matinees, the  aimless walks through the park, is  the possibility of drinking coffee in bed. No more Styrofoam or those iconic blue and white pattered Greek diner cups, impossibly stained metal thermos’, bitter Starbucks, lukewarm Dunkin’ Donuts, despicable office blend from a grungy pot, but an oversize coffee bowl of steaming brew, precipitously perched on a pillow as I read the morning paper. Open the blinds, watch the river, enter a little piece of heaven (for at least an hour or so).

If I wake too early, I might try to sleep some more but eventually give up, a little tired but cheerful because I have just been awarded some extra coffee time. 

It’s not that I’m an addict.  Yes, I do get a headache if I miss my daily dose of caffeine.  Yes, I do get cranky.  But there is also something so cozy and  comforting about being under a big fluff of down with a deliciously hot cup of aromatic Jamaican Blue Mountain.

My barista skills are limited.  My daughter bought me a Chemex (the nice one with a handle) and I broke it and two replacements. Then she bought  a Le Creuset French Press and I broke that one too (don’t ask). She has forgiven me but I listened to those liars at Wirecutter and bought their number one pick in drip machines, its stainless steel carafe, practically indestructible.  The coffee is never hot enough,  but the machine is still standing.

This coffee habit means that I’m constantly running out of coffee.  After several emergency trips to Zabars, I decided to treat myself to a coffee subscription. First, it was Peet’s, but like any good junkie I am always looking for a better fix.  Now, it’s Atlas, rated best single origin roaster by some very “Wired”  Cutter reporters.   Every month, I get two bags of coffee from a different exotic country.  I don’t know if it’s really the best coffee, but the bags sure are beautiful.  

It’s that time again, I think, as I stare out of the bedroom window towards a red blinking light across the Hudson. The blinker is my focal point, my end of day meditation.  I stare, reminded of Gatsby’s blinking light, a promise of hope,  but then my mind wanders and I remember the temporary “NO PARKING THURSDAY’  flyers tacked up along Riverside Drive. It is almost September 11. I make a mental note to move my car.  Soon, hundreds, maybe thousands of firemen will converge upon my neighborhood in dress blues for their solemn reunion at the Firemen’s Monument at West 100th Street.

My gaze continues across the river from my 14th floor apartment past the silhouettes of water towers and scaffolding, roof terraces and windows, eyes still drawn to the blinking light.  A barge floats motionless, waiting until morning to head north.  I hear but can’t see the buzz of a helicopter hovering nearby and the rumble of traffic on the West Side Highway.  A peaceful  end to an inconsequential day.

I had good luck finding this humble, cozy apartment several years ago with views of the Hudson River from every window. The first September 11th I lived there, I didn’t know the routine and while sleeping, my window open for the late summer breeze, I was gently roused by the mournful, dreamy sound of bagpipes. Then silence, commands and finally the gun salutes.

Now, a neighborhood veteran, I’m up earlier and sometimes wander downstairs to pay my respects. The firemen look beautiful in their fancy uniforms and hard brimmed caps. They never notice me or anyone but their own.  They socialize,  solemnly. It is their day.

As I look at the blue gray water of the Hudson,  I realize with a chill that the plane that hit the North Tower must have flown right above where I am now.  Low. Loud. Right above where I am staring towards the red blinking light, right above the barge and the roofs and the water towers, that infamous, deadly plane.  The rumble must have been deafening.  A quarter of a century ago. I close the shade.

Grandpa Izzy Brodsky loved “the fights,” otherwise known as professional wrestling.  That’s the only thing that I ever saw him watch on television, when back in the 1960s  we lived in a two family house with my grandparents, who were tasked with watching me and my sisters after school while our parents were at work.  After homework time, was TV time.

My grandfather would sit with us while my grandmother fixed dinner.  Sometimes, if she was making chopped liver, a Jewish staple, she would direct Grandpa to a folding chair set up in front of the TV.  Grandma would hand him an ancient wooden chopping bowl, nicked and carved with the scratches of a thousand meals and heaped full of cooked chicken livers and onions.  Grandpa would obediently chop the mixture with an equally ancient red-handled blade.  Chuckling gleefully while watching the professional wrestlers contort on the black-and-white screen, he would shout my Grandma’s name, “Rae, Rae,” whenever he saw a dangerous looking maneuver.  With each thundering slap on the wrestling mats, my grandpa would chop harder and faster.  As the fight escalated, so did the chopping. Grandma Rae couldn’t care less, she was oblivious.

To us kids, it looked disgusting; the chicken livers, greenish, slimy, the smelly onions and the wrestlers, with their bloody noses and buckets of spit, black bulging briefs, gross mouth guards and ominous sounding names.  We watched my grandfather watching, and were slightly terrified and totally entertained.  This was full-circle evisceration!

Short and stout with a heavy Yiddish accent, Grandpa Izzy seemed perpetually happy.  To me, he looked like a Jewish Louis Armstrong, bald shiny head, round face and the widest of smiles.  He radiated joy, so I was naturally confused as to why he would watch a seemingly violent activity on television and laugh hysterically. His only other entertainment was reading The Jewish Daily Forward, gambling a little on the ponies, and weekly Saturday synagogue always followed by a shot of Slivovitz with the other old men. Watching professional wrestling was a highlight.

As the eldest child, I recognized some turbulent days in our family and the world, conflict at home and constant talk on the 6 o’clock news of the Cold War.  Duck and cover, life was more than a little scary. But, each day when Izzy would pick us up from school in his Dodge Dart, stopping to honk at every intersection in our Brooklyn neighborhood to warn the other drivers that he was carrying precious cargo, we felt safe and loved, even if it took forever to get home.

The television wrestlers were a spectacle.  They were pretending that professional wrestling was a true sport.  We kids didn’t know.  But Izzy knew, and he loved it anyway. There’s even a word for it in wrestling.    KAYFABE, That’s – “K A Y F A B E.”  The suspension of disbelief. Pretending something is real when it’s not. Izzy, once a 17-year-old immigrant from a little village in Ukraine had fought a war, lost family members, built a business, lost a business, found a wife, lost a child. Why remember the sad things in life when you could decide to remember to forget.  That’s Kayfabe!

Maybe we were ahead of the times. When we watched Gorilla Monsoon wrestling on TV in the 1960s, who knew he would be the one to fight in the legendary match against Andre the Giant in 1977?  Or that superstar Billy Graham’s style would be an inspiration for the now infamous Hulk Hogan.   I don’t remember ever feeling moved by a professional baseball or football game (except maybe those first Mets and Yankees games after 9/11).  But, the memory of my grandfather chopping chicken livers in an old wooden bowl while watching the antics of professional wrestlers on Channel 5, brings a little mist to my eyes.  Or maybe it’s the onions.

* Kayfabe – (noun) – the agreement between professional wrestlers and their fans to pretend that overtly staged wrestling events are genuine.

The summer of 1974 is forever etched into my memory as a result of two events—the ridiculously dramatic, televised resignation of President Richard Nixon and the very excellent dinner I had at Rao’s, a legendary New York City restaurant, so exclusive that I will probably never get a chance to eat there again.

My summer fling, let’s call him B,  picked me at my apartment on Riverside Drive in a black muscle car.  We were going to his “uncle’s” restaurant, Rao’s, unfamiliar to me then, but  soon regularly appearing on Page Six as a celebrity hangout.  B took the Batman route across Manhattan and after a brake-squealing, dual-exhaust roaring ride, we arrived at the tiny restaurant on the corner of East 114th Street and Pleasant Avenue.

It was early, probably about 5 p.m. and the restaurant was quiet.  Warmly greeted by B’s “uncle”, the juke box playing Dean Martin, we were seated at an ancient wooden booth, its table grooved and pitted by decades of former diners.  Late afternoon sun leaked through the slats of the blinds. Immediately, a small glass of red wine in a plain glass was placed before me.  The only red wine I had ever drunk before was sweet and cloying Manischewitz. This wine was tart, fruity but not sweet. It took several sips to get used to the drier, tangy taste. An immediate warmth spread through my body.   “Chianti,” I was told.

We were offered no menu, however, a plate appeared with seafood salad, calamari, mussels, clams, all unfamiliar, in a delicious garlicky brine, green with parsley. Lots of chopped garlic. New flavors for my unsophisticated palate.

Another glass of Chianti to wash it down with. Red with seafood? Still good! Next, a platter of lemony veal piccata, pounded paper thin, buttery, delicious and more garlic and oil dripping from crispy bread.  A little spaghetti on the side? Downing a third or maybe fourth glass of wine, (after all, they were so tiny), I brazenly tried a new vegetable, escarole, more garlic and oil. I ignored the slight burning developing in my chest.

Feeling a little woozy from the wine— the Chianti no longer tasted strange, but was now an old friend, a lifelong buddy. 

Finally, it was time for dessert.  Whole fruit was placed in the center of the table, an apple, a pear, a small paring knife.  B expertly sliced the pear and handed me a piece. A small espresso pot and tiny cups followed.  A restaurant where you sliced your own fruit and poured your own coffee!   I watched as B took a small piece of lemon rind and rubbed it expertly on the rim of his cup. I did the same.   A half empty bottle of clear liquor, slightly sticky, was placed on the table—Anisette.  B poured generous shots into our cups.  The burning in my chest increased.

Did I have room for a cannoli?  A bite, maybe, crunchy, exquisite.

Driving home westward, into the setting sun, B took the pot holes more gently,  as if he knew one extra bump would push me over the edge.  It was warm in the car and the many glasses of Chianti made me sleepy. I closed my eyes as we drove through Central Park.

Sleeping fitfully that night, tossing and turning— the burning in my chest was relentless. I learned in the morning that there is a word, a special word in Italian to describe this feeling—agita, (heartburn).  “I will never eat garlic or drink red wine again,” I vowed.   This resolution has consistently failed.  But, adding agita to my vocabulary—as well as Chianti, calamari, piccata, Anisette and cannoli— has forever memorialized my one and only excellent dinner at Rao’s on a hot summer night so many years ago.  

Bob Dylan probably didn’t win any extra love from the masses when he received his Nobel Prize (those who love him love him and those who don’t, well, you know); Patti Smith surely did, win extra love that is, in that plush auditorium; dignified and other worldly, filled with crowns and satin gowns

It begins with a lone guitar, a beat up old Martin.  Must be a perfect guitar, I think, to be chosen for such an auspicious occasion. Certainly the camera man agrees as he provides numerous close-ups of the scratches, the tiny cracks in the guitar’s weathered body.  Weathered like the singer, like the prize winner, the Nobel Laureate.  A distant steel guitar chimes, a lonely prairie dog, then Patti’s first stumble.  I could tell it was coming: it was the meter, something was off; one word left out and you can’t get it back. How do we remember songs anyway?  We need the beat, our inner metronome. A common mass inhale as everyone, every crown and gown hopes for recovery.   Patti simply stops, humble, apologetic, then continues.  Not a titter nor a sneer among all those tuxes and gowns.   Each musician on stage is expressionless, faces flat, waiting for their next cue; even the guitarist who has followed the stumble so precisely.

An omniscient camera,  a silent, hovering eye finds a woman wiping a tear.  Surely, she knows the song.  A perfect folk song, an oral history, a traditional, written by a skinny kid from Minnesota, listened to by thousands, maybe millions of other skinny kids, then sung, over half a century later to queens and kings, sung beautifully, imperfectly, by a friend he once told a joke to.

Susan Smahl imagined she might be a writer someday, in the future. She’s finally working on that goal with short pieces about her life and thoughts about this crazy world.