ANYTHING NEW YORK has that we lack in our own Tri-Cities? Not so much, since TV gives us all the sports and media in the world and the Internet provides all else. I admit the multitude of museums on Manhattan is fine, dandy, impressive, et cetera. Being able to walk into, say, an ancient temple from Dendur or a hall full of assembled dinosaur bones makes for a great excursion, even when you have to share it with schoolkids from all over the state and tourists from all over the world. I had a whole day of museums when the women booked facials, massages, and pedicures—a.k.a. hangover cures. I saw paintings I will never understand, an “Installation” that was nothing more than a room filled with torn-up carpet samples, and a sculpture that looked like a huge, rusted, dented refrigerator. Ars Gratia Artis (Art for Art’s Sake), moaned the MGM lion.
MY FINAL MUSEUM was the place for Modern art, where I saw a movie that was nothing more than time passing—really, a lot of clocks ticking and people looking at their watches. I gave it ten minutes. Upstairs, there was a blank canvas with a knife slice down its middle. Another canvas was colored a light blue at the bottom that became a dark blue at the top. In the stairwell, an actual helicopter was hanging from the ceiling, a whirlybird frozen in flight. Up the steps a pair of Italian typewriters, large and small versions of the same model, were kept behind glass as if they were studded with valuable gems but they weren’t! Nor were the machines more than fifty years old. I couldn’t help but think the Tri-Cities could put together a collection of used typewriters and charge admission. The now vacant Baxter’s Ham Factory on Wyatt Boulevard is available. Anyone civic-minded enough to get cracking on that?
Who’s Who?
On a Monday morning in early November of 1978, as she had been every day for the past six weeks, Sue Gliebe was up and out of the apartment before her roommates were awake. Rebecca was asleep, eight feet off the floor in the loft bed in the living room, and Shelley, probably, was still conked out behind the locked door of the apartment’s single bedroom.
Sue had showered quickly and quietly in the half tub with the rubber hose running up from the faucet, the dribbling water a weak stream that was alternately tepid and then as hot as the surface of the planet Mercury. Since she had come to New York, she had yet to feel truly clean and her scalp had begun to itch. She dressed in the fog of the tiny bathroom, slipped on her shoes from under the living room sofa, where she slept, strapped her big leather purse crossways from shoulder to opposite hip, then grabbed the umbrella she had bought on Friday. Another storm was due, the news said, and Sue was prepared; she had already paid five of her dollars to one of the many men who appeared with boxes of umbrellas the moment the clouds grew thick with rain. As quietly as possible, Sue exited through the front door, making sure the lock clicked behind her. She had once failed to confirm that click and Shelley had angrily lectured her on the dangers of an unlocked apartment door in New York City in 1978. No click was a major no-no.
Her roommates had come to view her as an unexorcised poltergeist, one that had to be negotiated around. Then again, they were not really her roommates but her hosts, making Sue feel as welcome as an abdominal parasite. Rebecca had been so friendly the last summer when she was working costumes for the Arizona Civic Light Opera, and Sue, a local hire, was playing three featured roles. They were gal pals, then. On days when her duties were slack, Rebecca swam in the pool at the Gliebe family home and partied with the company on the Gliebe patio. She had offered Sue her couch for “a while” whenever—if ever—she came to New York City. When Sue showed up with three suitcases, eight hundred dollars in savings, and a dream, Rebecca’s actual roommate, Shelley, nodded her assent to the deal with a “yeah, okay.” But that was seven weeks ago and Sue was still spending every night on the couch in the small living room. The vibes in the one-bedroom apartment just off Upper Broadway had gone from benign acceptance to Arctic-level iciness. Rebecca wanted Sue out; Shelley wanted her dead. Sue hoped to purchase extra sofa time and goodwill with contributions of fifty dollars to the rent as well as providing milk, Tropicana orange juice, and, once, a thing called blackout cake that Shelley ate for breakfast. Such gestures were not so much appreciated as expected.
What could Sue do? Where could Sue go? She was hunting for her own New York City apartment every single day, but the agencies named Apartment Finders and Westside Spaces had “listings” that were in dark, urine-stained tenements where no one answered the buzzer, or were no longer available, or never existed in the first place. Shelley told her to post a Need a Roommate notice on the board at Actors’ Equity, but Sue confessed that she had yet to join the union—she couldn’t until she had an acting job. Shelley gave her a half-lidded look of supreme disappointment and another “yeah, okay,” then added, “Next time you go to ShopRite, get a big can of Chock Full O’Nuts, please.” In this eighth week—the start of her third month on the isle of Manhattan—the bundle of Arizona talent who had played Maria in West Side Story (just last season at the ACLO) was prone to weeping at night, silently, in her bedroll on the couch, in the diamond-shaped silhouettes made by the window’s security gates (were such things actually burglarproof?). On the subway, which cost her fifty cents a ride, she often fought back tears, worried that someone would see a pretty young girl undone by her struggles and, well, rob her or worse. For Sue, moving to New York was an act of faith, faith in herself, in her talent, and in the promise of the city that never slept. It was supposed to be an adventure, like something out of the movies, where she would come out of a stage door after a performance and kiss a handsome sailor on shore leave, or a TV show like That Girl, where she’d have an apartment with a big kitchen and louvered shutters and a boyfriend who worked for Newsview magazine. But New York was not cooperating. How could things be going so sadly for Sue Gliebe, who was the very definition of a triple threat; she could sing, dance, and act! Her parents had recognized her raw talent when she was a little girl! She had starred in all the high school plays! She had been selected from the chorus at the Civic Light Opera to become their lead actress for three seasons running! She had done High Button Shoes with Monty Hall, the host of TV’s Let’s Make a Deal! She had had a going away party with a big banner reading ON TO BROADWAY!
So why was New York, New York, making her cry? Her first night in the city, when Rebecca took her via the bus to see Lincoln Center, Sue had looked at all the locals along upper Broadway and actually asked, “Where is everyone going?” She now knew that everyone was going everywhere. This morning, she was going to the bank, the Manufacturers Hanover branch where she had opened an account five weeks before. From behind a Plexiglas (bulletproof) wall, a disinterested female teller slid a ten-dollar bill, a fiver, and five ones through a slot, leaving it to Sue to note that her savings were now down to exactly $564. She had spent more than $200 in New York City and had nothing to show for it but a five-buck umbrella, a blue one with a telescoping handle.
From the bank, Sue went to a donut shop for one plain cake—which was the least expensive—and a coffee with sugar and half-and-half. That was breakfast. She ate standing at a counter sticky from bits of sugar glaze and spilled java. Barely fortified, she walked to the office of Apartment Finders on Columbus Avenue, which was up a wide flight of stairs and above a Hunan Chinese restaurant. The posted listings on the wall had not changed since Saturday, but Sue searched the bulletin board anyway, for a diamond chipped off a ring, for an overlooked gem, for a place with her name on it. Apartment Finders had cost her fifty dollars a month, money she might as well have used to light candles. She would come back later in the day, when, supposedly, new listings were posted, but she already knew her hopes were sure to be dashed again.