Many of my outings with Miguel were punctuated with a visit to Mamoun’s, the falafel joint on MacDougal Street that has become a Greenwich Village institution. We’d stand in line arm-in-arm, pressing against each other, laughing and talking as we waited our turn to squeeze into the hole in the wall for our delicious falafels drenched in tahini sauce. The few sticky tables were usually taken, so once we’d ordered and paid, we would sit on the bench out front, stuffing our faces and wiping tahini from the corners of each other’s mouths. Once, Miguel noticed the cook who had served us leaning against the building smoking a cigarette. Disgusted that a smoker had touched his food, Miguel threw what remained of his falafel in the trash. I loved that Miguel kept his body pure (and I made a note to continue hiding my nicotine habit from him!). We had a beautiful, loving relationship, but we fought a lot, mostly because Miguel wanted to marry me.
I couldn’t marry him or anyone else. I had already taken a husband—New York City itself. We were the perfect couple. I’ve always been dramatic, and New York matched my “extra-ness.” The city was extreme, and so was I. Everything about New York seemed over the top like me. Y’all know I’m loud. The entire city seemed to vibrate at my frequency, propelling me to reach for more, more, more! This was the relationship I wanted—though I loved Miguel deeply, his proposal didn’t stand a chance.
Through the decades, New York City has remained a magical, fascinating adventure for me. The people, the conversations! For instance, nearly thirty years after I first arrived in New York, I was sitting in the lobby of the Public Theater, studying my ass off for my role playing opposite Meryl Streep in Mother Courage and Her Children. A young black man, who I think was a summer intern, approached me in the lobby. Without saying so much as “Excuse me,” he sat down next to me in a huff and growled, “Why do black women get so mad when they see us walking down the street with a white girl?”
I slowly turned toward this handsome, ebony boy and said, “Do you really want to know the answer to that question?”
He said, “Yeah, I really want to know. I get sick of that shit.”
I said, “Well, it might have something to do with this. For decades, black men were lynched, often for allegedly looking at a white woman. Our mothers’ mothers cut the black bodies of their sons and husbands down from the trees. But we black women did something we didn’t have to do before we buried them. First, we washed their bodies.” I let my words sink in and continued.
“So, little boy, when you see a black woman walking down the street, you tilt your hat and acknowledge her existence. If only for the fact that first, we washed you. And next time you sit down next to me, you say, ‘Excuse me, Miss Lewis.’ Now get the fuck on where you’re going. I’m studying Brecht, little boy.”
About two years later, I was again living in the city temporarily, this time during my run as “Motormouth Maybelle,” the black mother character in Hairspray. I was provided a nice one-bedroom apartment with a great view on the twenty-eighth floor of a high-rise that had a pool on the lower level. It was all very movie star on Broadway, if you know what I mean.
Every day of that sweltering hot summer seemed to serve up at least one quintessential New York experience. I’ll never forget the day I rode the Circle Line tour boat past an astounding public art exhibit where they had erected a waterfall underneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Another memory of that New York summer is the reaction of the passengers when I rode the N Train between shows in my Motormouth makeup, which of course was shocking up close in that garish light. And, I will definitely never forget the time I decided to do my own laundry and inadvertently found new meaning in the phrase “separate the whites.”
Although any sane person who was singing and dancing in eight shows a week would have someone else handle her wash, I’m a clean freak and find it highly disturbing to stare at a load of dirty clothes. So, I decided to truck on down to the third-floor laundry room and do it myself. I separated the whites into a basket and used pillowcases for darks and light colors.
I stood in my sweats and house shoes at a bank of four elevators, waiting in the middle. When an elevator door opened to the far left, I scooped up the basket, ran over, and plopped it in the door’s path to keep it open. I asked the older couple in the elevator to wait a second while I grabbed the other two bags. I ran to get them, but as I turned back, I heard the woman say loudly: “We’re not waiting for you.” With that, she kicked my laundry basket out of the elevator, its contents spilling out onto the floor.
I began to rumble like the Northridge earthquake of 1994. Truth be told, I was overdue for a phone session with my therapist, Rachel, and was carrying a lot of pent-up anxiety. When I saw the basket fly out of the elevators, I launched my body between the elevator doors in one rage-fueled leap to stop them from closing. Then, while keeping my eyes on the couple’s eyes, I knelt down, and ever so slowly placed my whites, one by one, back into the basket. White sock by white sock. White towel by white towel. White crotch-less panty by white crotch-less panty. When finished, I straightened up, stepped into the elevator, and let the door close. I pushed “3,” turned to face the white couple, and in a normal, even tone of voice, said, “Well, that was rude.” The woman snapped back. “Look, we’re in a hur . . .” Before she got the entire statement out of her mouth, I was about a half-inch from her nose. Drawing on vocal cords that had been reaching the back row of the theater, I roared, “Shut the fuck up. You lost the right to speak when you kicked my shit.”
The old man stepped toward me as if to reach out and protect the woman. But if there was a first blow to deliver, it wasn’t coming from me. I never strike first. I had sense enough to remember that there are cameras on elevators. The man stepped toward me. I turned my head and with eyes blazing, and through clenched teeth, I said, “Don’t you move.” He went rigid. I continued in a low, level tone. “You lost your right to do anything when you let her kick my shit.”
Ooooh baby, that was just the introduction to my diatribe!
“What are you people made of?” I shouted, my voice amplified in the small cabin. “After the Holocaust, after 9/11, after the Middle Passage . . .” I realized they didn’t know what the Middle Passage even was. That made me madder, so I really went in. “Have you no souls? Have you not heard of the Brotherhood of Mankind?!” I berated them for the duration of the twenty-five-floor descent, probably for close to a minute. I’m sure it felt like hours for the couple, who stood stiffly, their eyes wide. At one point the elevator stopped and the doors opened. A young, executive-type Asian woman stepped forward, but sensing the tension, quickly retreated, whispering, “I’ll wait for the next one.”
As we reached the third floor, I yelled, “And, another thing!” The doors opened right on time as I gathered my laundry and cheerfully exited the elevator with, “Now, y’all have a nice day.”
Later I learned that the couple reported me to the concierge, describing me as a “crazy maid.” But the joke was on them. The staff knew and loved me and figured out for themselves what had taken place. They told me that particular couple treated everyone disrespectfully as a matter of course.