City Light Page 2

  “You’ve seen me. Short is good in wrestling, too. When I’m on the mat, I can always tell when my opponent is measuring himself against me, flexing his long arms and legs, and imagining how he’s going to tie this short guy up in knots.”

  “And?”

  “And I go right through those big guys, don’t I? I get under them, go for their hips and lift them off the ground. Then what can they do? Then they’re the bugs spinning around on their backs. Now, what do you say?”

  “Do I have any choice?” She raised her hands. “Okay, okay, short is better, George. Short is much better.”

  I was twelve when I met Julie. I had gone to her house that day with my father. He was there to collect the rent. I was there to be with him. While he went upstairs, I stood outside, looking over the edge of the cliff, down at the river and across to New York City. It was like looking out of the real world into something bright and mysterious.

  We didn’t go over to the city much. “Here, it’s better,” my father said. He didn’t have anything good to say about New York. Here, he said, we knew the streets, we knew our neighbors, we knew the names of all the dogs who came out to greet us. My grandfather had moved here from Brooklyn when my father was a little boy. My grandfather had had a barber shop on Bridge Street. It was a laundromat now.

  My mother had lived in Clifton Heights all her life. And so had I. All my life, I’d looked across to New York City. I suppose if I thought about New York City at all, what I thought was that it was over there and I was over here and that was the way I liked it.

  Standing there that day, I noticed a path and steps leading down the cliff. Had there been steps across the water, I wouldn’t have taken them, but down the face of the cliff was something else. That was interesting.

  I started down. I’d only gone a few steps when something hit me in the back. Ping! I took another step, and I got a stinger in the neck. Another step and I was hit again. Ping! Ping! Something small and white rolled down the steps. I picked it up. A miniature marshmallow. I was hit again.

  “Hey!” I yelled.

  Above me I noticed a thicket of bushes, actually a tree with its top lopped off and boards hammered down to make a platform. I saw a foot; a sneaker; a skinny, bare, scratched-up leg. I sprang for the tree and scrambled up to the edge of the platform.

  “Stop!” a girl said.

  “Hi,” I said. It was Julie.

  She looked down at me. “This is private property. You’re trespassing.”

  “You attacked me.”

  “I did not.” She had a bag of marshmallows in her hand.

  “Where did those come from?”

  She looked down as if she’d never noticed them before. “You’re trespassing,” she said again.

  “You’re the one who’s trespassing,” I said. “I own this place.”

  “You? Who are you?”

  “George Farina. My father owns this land and apartment house.”

  “That means you’re trespassing, too,” she said. “You don’t own it, either.”

  Her logic escaped me. “I’m coming up.” I said and climbed up. “Did you build it?” I asked.

  She nodded. “It won’t hold you.”

  I bounced up and down. “Solid,” I said and sat down. It was a neat place. Sitting there was like being suspended in the air, hanging over the cliff and the river.

  She kept looking at me. I couldn’t tell if she liked me or not. I already knew I liked her.

  When I heard my father calling, I didn’t want to go. I heard him overhead, at the edge of the cliff. I didn’t want him to know about the platform. I put my finger to my lips and smiled at Julie. “I’ll be back,” I said.

  I went back the next day, came over on my bike. Julie was on the platform, reading. “Oh. Hi,” she said.

  “Can I come up?”

  “Okay.”

  We talked for a long time. She said she came there to read or just watch the birds. There were birds everywhere in the thickets and wild grapevines growing down the cliffs. Julie had trained a robin to come to her hand for food. That’s what the marshmallows were for. She told me if I was quiet, the robin would come back. And it did. It landed on her shoulder. It had a dark head and a yellow eye. It hopped down on her open hand and snagged a marshmallow. Julie’s face was glowing.

  I think that was the exact moment I fell in love with Julie. It didn’t matter that I was just a kid. It didn’t matter that I was only twelve years old. I fell in love with her as hard as anybody could fall in love, and I knew right then that I’d never love anybody else the way I loved Julie.

  Chapter 3

  “Here at last, my prince,” my mother said when I walked into my father’s shop. Mom was behind the reception desk, wearing a gray silk dress with a string of pearls, and her hair short and smooth. She took care of the business end of things, made sure that everyone who worked was in on time, the appointments ran smoothly, and the customers were taken care of. She gave me a kiss. “Daddy’s waiting for you,” she whispered.

  In grade school, I used to get into fights all the time over my father’s business. Chuck Langione or Dick Bielick would come along and say, “Hey, Farina! Your father runs a beauty parlor.”

  “You got it wrong,” I’d say. “It’s an ugly parlor. They got a special on today for guys like you. You want to get your mug fixed?”

  “Hey, Farina! Let me see your hands. You got a manicure?”

  “Not as good as yours, Bielick. Where do you get your nails done? A horse barn?”

  “Hey, Farina! Your father does ladies’ hair!”

  “You want to make an appointment? What do you want done? Shampoo? Set? Facial massage? Pull the hairs out of your ears?”

  “You wouldn’t catch me in a place like that.”

  “Don’t worry, Bielick, you couldn’t get in. They don’t cut apes’ hair.”

  About that time Dick’s eyes would be nearly squinted shut and his hands would be making fists. He was bigger than me, but then so was every boy in the class, except Arthur Stone. Dick started the pushing. I said he had a face that belonged in a sack of potatoes. He shoved me. I shoved him back. It was a short fight. He held me off with one hand and popped me in the nose with the other. A couple of pops and my nose was producing tomato juice.

  “Had enough?” he said.

  “Not till I pull you apart.”

  Another pop in the nose.

  “Quit?”

  I wiped the blood from my nose and smeared it on his shirt.

  “Hey! My shirt! You ruined my shirt.”

  “That’s just a sample of what you’re going to get.” I kicked him in the leg and ran. Then I had to stay out of his way for the rest of the week.

  Leonard was my father’s name and the name of his business. Just Leonard’s. Not Leonard’s Beauty Salon. Not Leonard’s Hair Stylists. Not Leonard’s Sheer Magic. Just the one word. Leonard’s. More class. Leonard’s wasn’t one of those little storefront places you saw strung along every block. There were as many beauty parlors in Clifton Heights as there were grocery stores.

  A long time ago, before my sister, Joanne, was born, my father had a storefront place, too, on Anderson Avenue, but around the time I was four years old, my parents bought an old brick firehouse near Bergen Boulevard and renovated it. They put big windows in front and a spiral staircase going up to the second floor to the Beauty and Relaxation Room. There were paintings on the walls and statues of winged cherubs, hanging plants and intersecting windows, and a waiting room with comfortable chairs and magazines. The coffeepot was always on.

  Outside, a flagpole flew the LEONARD’S banner: yellow letters on a purple background, the royal purple. We shared a parking lot with the Pickwick Club, where they had tennis and squash courts. They get a pretty tony trade there, and my father gets the benefit of it. A lot of men, especially, go in to play tennis and then come over to Leonard’s to have a shampoo or a haircut.

  Near the register, where my mother worked, there wa
s a row of celebrity pictures showing my father shaking hands with the mayor of Clifton Heights or with the police chief. He’s even got one of him shaking hands with the pride of New Jersey, The Boss, Bruce Springsteen. You might think that was the one I liked best, but the picture I got the biggest kick out of showed my father, all five feet four of him, reaching up to shake hands with the Jets’ wide receiver Eli Green, all six feet five of him.

  My father was at work. He had the first chair, behind the half-wall separating the reception area from where the work goes on. My father wore glasses at work. He was round-faced, sort of grim-looking, except when he smiled. Then his whole face broke open. When he smiled, it was like a jailbreak. “Is that my son?” he said.

  “Yeah, Pop, it’s me.”

  “My son is here,” he announced. My father is loud and proud. Everyone in Leonard’s heard him and maybe over at the Pickwick Club, too.

  His cubicle was a little bigger than anyone else’s, but that was the only sign he was the boss. He didn’t swing his weight around. The closest he got to that was when he lectured the new stylists. “Hairdressing is an art.” (I knew his spiel by heart. I’d heard it often enough.) “Barbers cut grass. Chop, chop. The grass gets long, they run a machine over it. Chop, chop. That’s not what we do here. Hair expresses something about a person. Look at the whole person, not just the hair. The personality, that’s the art of it.”

  He was combing out Mrs. Ellison, a regular customer. I watched him work for a few minutes. “How’d you like to have a head of hair like that,” he said, pulling me over. “Isn’t that a beautiful head of hair?”

  Lucy went by and pulled my ear. She was wearing a pink smock, her glasses around her neck on a chain. “You’re late,” she said. Lucy’s been with my father for years.

  I went downstairs into the storeroom and began cleaning up, stacking supplies, sweeping, throwing out empty boxes. I had the radio on. Lucy came halfway down the stairs to tell me to bring up several bottles of shampoo.

  Back downstairs again, I was arranging bottles on a shelf, when my father came in. He lit a cigarette and sat down on a box. “My feet hurt.”

  “You’re carrying too much weight, Pop. You need to get in shape.”

  His hand went to his belly. “Short and fat, that’s your father. What’s wrong with being short and fat?” He exhaled a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “Short, fat, and I like cigarettes, too. Don’t tell me what they’re going to do to me. It seems that the older I get the less I’m allowed to do. All my pleasures turn into poisons.”

  “Doesn’t have to be that way.”

  “You’re right, but I don’t think I’m going to change now.… George, what are you going to do when your father can’t?”

  “Can’t what, Pop?”

  “Can’t. Just can’t. Can’t snip, can’t cut hair, can’t lift a pair of scissors. I’m out of shape, cigarette-poisoned. You listening, son? What then? What are you going to do with your life?”

  “With my life?” I hated that expression. It always made me uneasy. My life was fine. I didn’t want to do anything with it. I liked it the way it was. I was with Julie. I had my friends. Someday, probably, I’d go to work with my father the way he had with his father. But I didn’t want to say it, because I didn’t want to do it now. Maybe I wanted to try some other things first. The one thing I was totally sure about was Julie. I’d once made the mistake of telling that to my parents.

  “Okay, you’re certain about her and we’ll assume she’s certain about you,” my mother had said, “at least for the present moment.” And here she gave me a look that said, You’re a nice boy, but you’ve still got a lot to learn. “And what are you offering Julie?” she’d said.

  “Me,” I’d said. Another indulgent look from my mother.

  My father looked at me like I had a leak in my head. “George, George, you’re going to have to do better than that. You’re going to have to earn, you’re going to have to provide.”

  I can’t remember who said what. It was a chorus. They took turns. “George, you’re going to be a man, you have to have a steady income. Where’s it going to come from?”

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” I told them. “I’m thinking about things.” Not true, but it was my only defense. And now I said, “You don’t have to worry, Pop. I won’t let you go to the poorhouse on foot.”

  “No, you’ll drive me there in your Cadillac.”

  “Understood.” It was an old joke between us.

  “Now you know you can always come in here in the business. Don’t look like I just gave you a bellyache. I started with my father, didn’t I? I didn’t do so bad. You’ve got a feeling for it, too. You’ve got the eye. You just need a little training. There’s a lot worse things that you could do.”

  “Right, Dad, I could be a pick-and-shovel man.” I’d heard the lots-worse-things speech before, too. In the back of my mind, I agreed with my father. The business was there and it made me feel safe, though I’d never admit it. One of these days I’d step in, but right now I didn’t want to think about it.

  “All my customers know you already. When your mother and I are ready to retire, they’ll just keep right on with you. They’ll come for you, too. They’ll bring their friends and their kids here. They all like you. George, they say, he’s such a nice boy. And I say, right, not like his father. I tease them, but they really mean it. They like you, son. You’ve got the personality. This business is about two things. One is knowing your job, how to make the most of hair, whatever it is you’re doing, cutting or styling or coloring, and the other is customers. That’s the bottom line, George. If you have a loyal clientele and you treat them right, you’ll live a comfortable life.”

  He finished his cigarette and got up. “My appointment is waiting. Think about what I said.”

  “Okay.”

  “The time is coming when you have to make a decision.”

  “I know, Pop.”

  “You’re going to think about it?”

  I nodded, but what I was thinking about was calling Julie. We hadn’t made our plans for tonight yet.

  “You want to help me with Fitzy today?”

  “Mrs. Fitzgerald? Her again?”

  “She’s not so bad.”

  “She’s never satisfied. If you do her today, she’ll be in tomorrow to complain.”

  “She never goes anywhere else. She’s a good customer.”

  “If you say so, Pop.”

  When I was done in the supply room, I went out to see what else anyone wanted me to do.

  “I’m set,” Paul said. He was doing a coloring job, rolling in the Saran Wrap. His client was really beautiful. I wondered why she wanted to change her hair color. Maybe she just wanted Paul to work on it. Paul’s got dozens of women crazy over him. He’s handsome, dresses like a prep, looks like he’s straight out of Princeton. He’s worked at Leonard’s for about five years.

  “Sweep me up, lover,” Inez said. She’s tall, every week has a different hairstyle, every month a different color. This month she was a redhead. She had a new perm.

  “Looks good,” I said, sweeping up the hair.

  “You like it? I’m not so sure.” She was cutting a customer I didn’t recognize. Inez had long, clever fingers that fascinated me. Watching her cut hair was like watching Troy at the piano. Their fingers had a life of their own. “George, did you hear about the superjock who got straight A’s but still wasn’t happy?”

  “Is this serious?” her customer asked. He had a small head; his hair was thin on top and long in back.

  Inez put her hand on his shoulder. “If you laugh, it’s a joke.” She went back to cutting his hair, lifting it strand by strand. “So, this guy, I’m telling you he was a superjock, he was a basketball player, he was great on the court, plus he made straight A’s.”

  “So what was his problem?” I said. I always played straight man for Inez. “Why was he so unhappy?”

  “’Cause his B’s were still a little bit c
rooked.”

  I groaned, and the guy in the chair turned to look up at Inez. She handed him a mirror and whirled the chair around so he could see the back of his head. “You don’t think that’s funny?” she asked. “Dumb jock joke. Better than those dumb Polack jokes you hear. I’m Polish. I don’t like those jokes.”

  “Nice haircut,” he said.

  She took off the smock and brushed his shoulders. He was wearing a vest. He gave her a fifty-cent tip and left.

  “Twenty-two bucks for the haircut,” Inez said, “and he can’t afford a dollar tip.” She pocketed the coin. “What are you doing today, George?”

  “I’m going to see Julie.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, what else is new? Oh, I gotta have a smoke before my next customer.” She took off for the bathroom.

  When I had a moment, I called Julie’s house. Beth, her older sister, answered the phone. “Hello, Beth,” I said. “This is George. Is Julie there?”

  “George?” she said. “George who?”

  A simple telephone call with Beth was like a sparring match. “George,” I said, “as in Julie and George.”

  “George Crispin?”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Okay, Beth, this is George Farina.”

  “Spell that, will you?”

  “Sure, Beth. You’ve only known me for six years, I don’t expect you to remember my name. Are you ready? This is space G-E-O-R-G-E space F-A-R-I-N-A. Can I space T-A-L-K space to space J-U-L-I-E?”

  “Oh, George! My friend, George Farina! Why didn’t you say so?”

  “Love your sense of humor, Beth.”

  “It’s not bad,” she said modestly. “Wait a minute, George Farina.” When she came back, she said, “Uh, George? Uh … Julie doesn’t want to talk to you right now.”

  “What’s she doing?”

  “Who knows with Julie? She’s got her head in a book.”

  “Did you tell her it was me?”

  “I think so.”

  “Tell her again.”

  “Sure, George, anything for you.… Julie … Julie! George is on the phone.…” A moment later, she was back to me. “George? She said she didn’t feel like talking right now. But Mom says for you to come over for supper.”