Emma Who Saved My Life by Wilton Barnhardt

Author:Wilton Barnhardt
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Picador

1980

IN September I made my TV debut, in a commercial for the Garden State Assurance Trust, a local insurance company. At Emma’s and Janet’s new East Village apartment, we gathered to watch this command performance.

Emma turned on the TV:

It was Ronald Reagan: It’s time to look back for that which made America great, its integrity, its goodness—

AAAAIIII! Janet, Emma, myself and my theater friend Kevin screamed in unison: TURN IT OFF!

“Damn election year,” muttered Emma. “You can’t get either Ron or Jimmy off the TV—there’ve been ads for one or the other every five minutes.”

“Ronnie Ray-gun, the Black Man’s Friend,” said Janet scowling. “And he’s probably gonna get in too.”

“What kind of choice is this election? It’s gotta be the worst ever,” mused Emma.

Nixon or pro-Vietnam Humphrey?

“Yeah, that was bad.”

Pro-Vietnam Johnson or pro-Vietnam Goldwater?

“Forget I said anything,” Emma shrugged. “It’s always bad, isn’t it?”

Janet brought everyone a beer. “The world’s being run by old men, Gil. Brezhnev is a hundred ’n eighty and may or may not be dead, the Ayatollah is in his hundred ’n eighties too, and Reagan is in his hundred ’n seventies. Those old men who keep hangin’ on, the kind who never die.”

Try the TV again, Emma.

Emma turned back to the channel my commercial would be on.

Americans will never cower before a foreign government, will never negotiate with terrorists … America will not be held hostage …

“Of course true to my doctrine,” said Emma, “of voting for entertainment value, I’ll vote for Uncle Ronnie.”

“You may get your way on World War Three,” said Janet.

Emma’s buzzer sounded. We figured it was Jasmine.

Janet and I kept watching Reagan: The Great Society has failed. No one believes anymore that the welfare system of the United States is healthy. Fraud, welfare, swindling is now accepted in the cities of America. In Newark, New Jersey, a welfare queen there took the government for $270,000, masquerading under fifteen different names …

Janet dipped into black-stereotype-speak: “Now Ronnie chile, you talkin’ bout my Aunt Sadie now! We gots us some Ripple on that money and played the horses and got us a Cadillac with a fuzzy pink interyuh…”

“Well,” said Kevin, camping it up. “He’s got a good-looking son, that ballet dancer. Although Ford still had the best-looking presidential kids of all time—Steven Ford, you remember?”

Dream on, Kevin.

“Gil,” he said, hopping out of the chair, “can we talk a moment in the kitchen?”

Sure. Kevin and I went to the kitchen. Kevin worked with me at the Soho Center for Experimental Theater. He was the gay lover of Nicholas who owned the place. Emma always described Kevin as a Muppet. He was twenty-four or so, big bushy blond punked-out hair, he sort of bounced about with floppy gestures, and the expressions on his bright, blond face were exactly what he felt: Kevin ecstatic, Kevin moping, Kevin cross—not an ounce of deviousness or guile in him, apparently.

“Will you ask Slut Doll to do the theater project?” he asked, once we were in the kitchen. “I mean, I’m no good with things like that…”

Yeah okay.

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