I also had a stint up on the seventh floor selling trendy new items like antigravity pens and neon dial clocks for a department they named Design Seven, where, wearing a blue frock one afternoon, I had the embarrassment of encountering some of my Brandeis hippie schoolmates, who thought finding me in such a straitlaced job the funniest thing in the world. Then, too, I occasionally worked as a flyer, filling in at different departments — shoes, electronics, furniture — a fun rotation since it broke the monotony and repetitious nature of those days, and most spectacularly so during the holiday season, when whatever low morale plagued the employees vanished in the overwhelmingly magical onslaught of Christmas cheer, as the mostly gay display-window staff went crazy decorating the store. That old-time movie Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street, which is set in Macy’s, inevitably came into all of our heads — you couldn’t avoid it. In the employees’ dining room on the ninth floor, stills from it hung on the walls, and a pianist wearing a Santa Claus cap played carols on an upright set off in the corner, next to a little tree: In such an ambience, I couldn’t help but daydream about meeting Edmund Gwenn’s Kris Kringle in the corridors; also, if you ever wonder where those sidewalk Santas, ringing their bells and going ho-ho-ho for the Salvation Army, come from, in those days at least, you would have only had to look in the Macy’s basement employees’ locker rooms, where some twenty or so of those volunteers gathered to get into costume in the mornings.
Actually, I never really had much to complain about working there and I did a good enough job, being fluent not in Spanish but in numbers. Mr. Trampani thought enough of my performance to actually tell me one afternoon, “I’ve had my eye on you for some time, young man,” as if delivering a line from a movie, and went on to offer me the opportunity to study, at the company’s expense, at their management training school in, of all places, Denver, Colorado. According to him, I would have a wonderful future in retail if I wanted one. But even back then, while I really appreciated the fact that he was looking out for me, I couldn’t see myself committing to anything for long.
At so young an age, I had, despite my tendency to go off the deep end emotionally, endless reserves of energy. After working all day, about three nights a week, I’d take a series of subway trains and end up at the far northwest Bronx, where I took some fill-in courses at Lehman College. My big goal was to matriculate to City College, where, in the event that I did not make it as a musician, I believed, I’d end up studying to become a schoolteacher of some kind. I became one of those fellows you’d see hunched over a history or math textbook on the number 4 train heading uptown, at around seven at night, later making my way off that El and walking the six or so blocks to the school, as if it were nothing at all. (I couldn’t begin to do that now, night after night.) I’m not sure how I managed to stay alert during the unavoidable torpor of those classes — most of the students, many of them older, had full-time jobs and were often low of energy — but we were allowed to drink coffee and to smoke in the classrooms. Some teachers even kept ashtrays handy, but I’d also bring along one of my own (cheap, metallic, the kind sold in a John’s Bargain Store for a dime apiece), and if no transit cops were around later, on my way home, I’d have a smoke on the platform, during those endless waits for the train, inevitably thinking, at some point of the night, about my poor father.
In those years, I had a girlfriend who happened to be into acting, Carol, a lady I met while babysitting my friend Tommy Muller-Thym on one of those nights when he had gotten too high on LSD for his own good. (As when he, a rambunctious soul, would speak of wanting to toss a brick through a police car window.) We were in the Gold Rail bar, where Tommy, in the midst of stunning hallucinations, had attempted to pick up her across-the-hall neighbor, a staunch feminist of a patrician upbringing, as they were sitting by a grubby initialincised table next to us. According to Tommy, her feminist friend needed a good screwing to get rid of her haughty attitude, and told her so. While that remark did not bode well for his amorous chances, I made Carol’s acquaintance, as a sort of equally bemused and neutral party witnessing their verbal parrying.
A brunette, buxom and attractive, she was a very nice woman of some not inconsiderable talents, from a fairly affluent family in Chicago, whose parents, both shrinks, would come to view me, with my street ways of talking and lack of polish (breeding), as something of a Neanderthal whose Cuban roots seemed to surprise them: If I can pick out one incident that would have predicted our eventual demise — and the prevalent attitude toward me on their part — it would be the fact that when I, having hitchhiked to Chicago, first met them, the first thing her father did was to sit me down in their kitchen and administer a Rorschach test, her mother looking attentively on.
(But, hell, what did I know?)
My Macy’s job overlapped our meeting, but once I had matriculated to CCNY full-time as a student enrolled in the SEEK program — that anagram for Search for Elevation Education and Knowledge — and I left that store, disappointing Mr. Trampani, a real gent, it was she who hooked me up with one of the strangest jobs I ever had, one of those crazy gigs actors passed around among one another on the grapevine. The job, which paid phenomenally well — some fifteen dollars an hour — involved the kind of placebo versus real-drug testing, a few afternoons a week, for which I happened to be temperamentally suited: pain research. Turning up at the facility, in one of those vast and forebodingly dark buildings that were part of the Bellevue complex on the East Side — I would be given a cup of water and two white pills to swallow, at which point I would wait in an adjoining room for about an hour or so, while they took (or didn’t) effect, and pass the time reading. Then into the testing room I would go, led inside by a nurse whose long blond hair reached her waist, and for whom, despite her awful acne-ravaged complexion, I seemed to have developed my usual wounded-animal attraction.
One of the tests required that I keep my fingers steeped in a beaker of ice for as long as ten minutes, no easy thing: Checking out a stopwatch and writing figures down on a chart, which had graphs, the nurse would ask me to rate the degrees of pain I happened to be feeling in thirty-second intervals (I think) on a scale of 1 to 6; to impress her with my macho resolve, I’d usually hold out until my fingers had gone numb (which probably threw the tests out of whack, since, while waiting beforehand, I’d often hear other subjects quickly shrieking their lungs out.) A second test was a variation of the above: My fingers in a beaker, an electric current would be passed through wires into the water, which first registered as a tingle, as if one’s hand had slipped into a hornets’ hive; then, as she turned a knob, it widened into a more numbing prickly sensation, until that graduated into an out-and-out metallic — and broadening — burning, at which point even I would give up. But along the way, while uttering those numbers, I’d keep looking at the nurse’s compassionate face, which seemed to grow prettier and less disfigured each time I turned up as a subject.
The most ghastly — and the only test for which I had zero patience — involved what basically came down to the application of a thumbscrew: Each of my thumbs would be fitted with a clamp through which a blunt screw head could be passed; a kind of elongated paper puncher would be pressed, the pressure raised by increments, the nurse twisting a knob, until gradually the screw nub, progressing more and more deeply into the skin and tissue, began intruding on the bone, at which point it produced a kind of deadening pain that made the right side of my head and the top of my eyeballs ache. Despite my Catholic tolerances and everlasting desire to prove to myself that I was no kidney-diseased wimp, I always called out after no more than a few minutes of that medieval torture — it was creepy, even for a medical group testing aspirins and such, and she knew it, which was why, I suppose, she’d look my way apologetically.