When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,31

count of all the times she’d mentioned her friendship with John Gotti, head of the Gambino crime family. “He’s a very good-looking man,” she’d say. “Pictures don’t do him justice.” After pressing, I learned that by “friend” she meant they had been introduced at a party thirty years earlier and had danced for two minutes before someone cut in. “John is very light on his feet,” she told me. “That’s something most people don’t know about him.”

“Maybe they’ll bring it up at his murder trial,” I said.

Helen fell in the tub and sprained her wrist. “That’s it for the cooking,” she told us. “You’re not getting any more free meals out of me.”

Hugh and I shuffled back across the hall and shut the door behind us. No more “Famous Veal Cutlet”! No more “Famous Sausage Casserole”! No more “Famous Chicken with the Oriental Vegetables”! We could hardly believe our luck.

While Helen was laid up, I went to the store for her. Hugh took down her trash and delivered her mail. Joe, a widower now, offered to help as well. “Anything that needs doing around the house, you just let me know,” he told her. He meant that he’d change lightbulbs or run a mop across her floor, but Helen took it the wrong way and threw him out of her apartment. “He wants to give me a bath,” she told me. “He wants to see my twat.”

It was shocking to hear this word from a seventy-three-year-old woman, and in response I winced.

“What?” she said. “You think I ain’t got one?”

Three months after Hugh joined the scenic union, the membership voted to go on strike. This is the group that paints backdrops for movies and plays. I wanted to be supportive, and so I tried coming up with slogans that might sound good on a picket sign: “Broadway Gives 829 the Brush-off” was my idea, as was “Scenic Painters Find New Contract Unpaletteable.”

On the first morning of the strike, Hugh left the house at 7:00 a.m. A short while later, Helen called. I normally wouldn’t pick up at that hour, but her voice on the machine was slurred and frantic, and so I answered. Since I had known her, Helen had, in her words, “taken” three strokes. They were, she’d admit, little ones, but still it worried me that she might have had another, and so I got dressed and headed across the hall to her apartment. The door jerked open before I could knock, and she stood in the frame, her lower jaw sunken, the lip invisible. It seemed that she had been at her window, surveying the scene below, and when the super in the building across the street threw a lit cigarette into our trash can, she yelled at him with such force that she blew her lower plate right out of her mouth. “Itch in da schwubs,” she said. “Go giddit.”

A minute later I was downstairs searching the planter in front of our building. There I found a beer bottle, a slice of pizza with ants on it, and, finally, the dentures, incredibly unbroken by their five-story fall. It is not unpleasant to hold someone else’s warm teeth in your hand, and before returning upstairs, I paused, studying the damp plastic horseshoe that served as Helen’s gum. What made it all look so fake was its perfection. No single tooth protruded or towered above its neighbor. Even in shape and color, they resembled a row of ceramic tiles.

Back upstairs, I found Helen waiting on the landing. She slid the dentures, unwashed, back into her mouth, and it was like popping the batteries into a particularly foul toy. “Rat bastard motherfucker could have set our whole building on fire.”

In the mornings Helen listened to the radio, an oldies station I referred to as “K-WOP.” All the singers seemed to be Italian, and all were backed by swollen string arrangements. Whenever a favorite song came on, she’d crank up the volume, subjecting us to countless versions of “Volare” and “That’s Amore.”

Radio meant a lot to Helen, but only her station. When I was invited to record a series of commentaries for NPR, she took no interest whatsoever. The morning my first story was broadcast, she pounded on our door. I was in the bedroom with a pillow over my head, so Hugh answered, and gestured to the air around him. “Listen,” he whispered. “David is on the radio.”

“So what?” Helen said. “A lot of people are on the radio.”