ham fisted theatrics

I nod, but when the waiter brings them over, there’s no way I’m gonna touch them. He’ll bitch about it but secretly he’ll like it. He’ll like showing me he can spend money on food nobody eats. The waiter goes.

“God, this fuckin’ guy…I didn’t stand in breadlines the Depression so I could have some punkass telling me about how much appetizers I can and cannot order!”

You were in the Depression? I ask.

“No, no. That was me doing my father. I can tell this isn’t gonna work out.”

When he picked me up in his Maserati, Craig told me he was going to be “trying out characters all night. I’m working on this one man show about my life, and I’m gonna just slip in and out of these six characters I’m working on, so don’t be alarmed.”

All actors want to be rockstars. All rockstars want to act. And if Craig Roccavivara is any indication, all paroled supposedly reformed drug kingpins want to have hit one-man Broadway shows.

“No, no,” I say. “That was good. I mean, obviously if it was good if it was so believable. I really believed you were in the Depression. Enough to ask, anyway.”

“Aww, really? You think?” he says, touched. No, I don’t think. Goddammit. You always have to straddle the line between attempting to spare someone’s feelings and making it clear you are too disinterested to sleep with them no matter how many sampler platters they order. I just put a big dumb foot on the wrong side of that line.

“Your sister’s told me all about you,” Craig says.

“All good, I hope,” I say.

And of COURSE it’s all been good. She’s probably been telling him the things she’d tell him about herself if she weren’t married and therefore unable to fuck him. My sister adores Craig. She’s read his memoir “From Shoveling Snow To Breakin’ Rocks In The Hot Sun: The Seasons Of A Druglord” six times since he signed it for her at her job as his parole officer’s secretary. He wrote his number on the inside cover, and she and her husband have since been to six parties at his legendary all-white house.

“He’s lonely,” she told me. “He asked if I knew anybody as nice and pretty as I am, and I think you two would be great together.”

“You think I would be a great sacrifice on the altar of Lindsay’s Exhilarating Friendship With A Drug Dealer, you mean.”

“He’s NOT a drug dealer!” She then lists as evidence the fact that he shows up to his parole officer’s every week, and he takes a drug test, and then continues describing everything in his house that’s white.

“ALL the silverware is white, all his cars are white, with white wheels and rims, all the glass in the house is a special kind that appears white at certain angles, all the flowers in the backyard are white…”




Craig’s shirt is white until a blob of mango chutney lands on it.

The three appetizer platters are here, each consisting of the same three finger foods and three sauces. I wonder why, since they were all for the same table, they couldn’t have just brought us three platters with one thing each on them. I guess they assumed it was for a big table to share, one platter for each end and one for the middle. Instead of how it actually is, Craig with one platter on each side on a stand and one platter in front of him.

“You’re probably wondering how come all the white.”

“Oh yes, I was,” I say, “I just didn’t know if it was rude to ask.”

Dammit. Must stop appearing interested.

“Well, my mother was a neat freak, and I promised to make her proud, even though when we were younger it drove us nuts. Get outta here, you kids! Get outta here!”

I look behind me to see who he’s addressing.

“I was doing my mother. She was telling us to get out of the living room after she’d just cleaned it.”

Neither of his characters sounded at all unlike his normal speaking voice. Not the slightest shift in pitch or accent. Just louder. Several people looked over this time.

“That was great,” I say. “Again, so real.”

He blushes. “Well, y’know, that’s my training.” He proceeds to tell me about a now-unknown breed of brilliant actors and directors that went to jail on trumped-up drug charges in the sixties, and how three of these lost geniuses were in his cellblock. “And Stanislavski, and Meisner, and all these assholes, these guys took all the credit and wrote my guys, the jail guys, the true minds, out of the history books.” The biggest of these jailhouse influences, for Craig, was a guy named Rotgut Mickey. I don’t ask how he got that name.

“You believe me?”

“Yes,” I say, “you really have a knack for believability.”

“Well, that’s all Mickey, that guy could tell a shanking story and I swear you could feel the screwdriver between your ribs.” Craig eats his eighth crab fritter. “You aren’t touchin’ the food!”

“Well, nothing stokes an appetite like a shanking story.”

“Whoa, okay, sorry… a guy tries to open up.” He looks genuinely hurt. Involuntarily I grab his arm.

“I’m sorry, Craig, that was rude of me. Here, I’ll try a shrimp puff.” Dammit.

“Yea, you’d better stay away from the crab puffs…you’re already CRABBY enough as it is!” He roars at his own joke. More people are staring. I fake a smile, then get mad at myself for allowing even that tiny gesture. His laugh winds down. He wipes tears from his eyes. “Crabby. Oh, man…That’s…I gotta remember that one…that one’s goin’ in the show.” He pulls a tiny white notebook from his breast pocket, and an all-white fountain pen. He starts writing.

He’s still writing when the waiter comes over.

“Are you folks ready to—“

“Just a second, Kyle, okay? Artist at work.” He looks up. “Jesus! This fuckin’ guy!” He puts his notebook back in his pocket. Kyle is taken aback.

“Oh, I didn’t mean you, Kyle. That was my Uncle Denny talking about how the ice delivery guy used to be late on Saturdays.”

I wonder if the ice guy’s name was Kyle and if Uncle Denny considered himself a “genius at work.” Then we order.




A little while later, the manager comes over to inform us that it would be easier to bring the first two lobsters out, and then, when we finished with them, two by two, they could bring out the other six. Craig agrees. The manager goes.

“I really don’t think we need eight lobsters,” I say.

“Baaaah,” says Craig. “This way, you don’t feel like, oh, I gotta eat this part, I gotta suck the meat outta that part, don’t want any go to waste, you just eat the parts you like then the next one comes. Think of it like Best Of Lobsters Volumes One Through Eight.”

I ask Craig why he didn’t want to write that one down.

“That ain’t my joke. It’s Billyclub Taylor’s. He was this other guy in the joint, he invented standup comedy as we know it. He was the silent partner in founding the first comedy club in New York City, and Lenny Bruce won all Billyclub’s jokes in a poker game. Got famous and Billyclub got nothin’.”

“Did Billyclub also go in on trumped-up drug charges?” I ask, again breaking my new disinterest rule.

“Nah, he shot a guy in the face.”

The first two lobsters arrive.

“Mmm mm, look at this, look at this. So what do you do, Ellen?”

It’s Helen but it’s the first time he’s said my name all evening and correcting him now would show I care that he gets it right. Besides, I want him to say to my sister “I had a good time with Ellen…” and have HIM have to correct her. I want pain and embarrassment for them both.

I answer him while being distracted by a lobster claw that just won’t fucking crack. “I, uh, I run the website for a store in Brooklyn that sells exotic tea and tea accessories. And a couple of other little freelance things—“

“Boring,” he says.

I shatter the claw.

“Excuse me?”

“Shit, oh, Jesus, that was what my cousin Tony woulda said if he were here. That knucklehead huffed anything you could spray inna bag for three counties, but he wants to tell ME what I do—what I DID—is wrong. Real burnout. That’s what he woulda said, and I woulda said—“

I lean in close: “All of your voices sound exactly the same. All of your characters sound just like you.”

He drops his fork. “Aw, well, jeez…I guess I’m not doin’ Rotgut Mickey very proud…you’re right, rotten, I’m lousy...” His eyes go four-year-old.

“I’m sorry, Craig, I didn’t—“

“No, no, you’re right, jeez, you and your sister, you both, only you girls will tell me the truth and you’re right, it’s lousy, it’s a dumb dream…I should stick to…”

“No, Craig…”

“This is dumb, all this food, this is dumb…” Now he’s legitimately crying, and not I-just-made-a-priceless-crustacean-pun crying, but crying. All the same people are staring.

“No, I’m sorry, Craig, I’m the one that’s dumb, you’ve taken me out for a lovely meal and you’ve been so nice to my sister and I don’t even have the decency to…look, it was just the same thing. The only reason I said that is because it was obviously so believable my mind couldn’t handle how amazing it was, and the only way could rationalize it…” I’m wiping tears off his face with a fancy lobster bib. The sobbing has subsided. “The only way my mind could make sense of it was by making it sound like your voice to my ears, like you know a frequency only dogs can hear? I just can’t hear brilliant acting. To anyone normal I’m sure they’ve all sounded great. I’m just a dog, Craig. I’m just a mean old dog.”

“Really?” he says.

“Yea,” I say. I kiss him on the forehead and sit back down.

He tucks his bib back in.

“So…we’re gonna fuck?”