The Green Grolsch Bottle

It stands alone on the billboard, the flat place on the real one transmogrified into the “o” in “iconic”. The first night I saw a Grolsch bottle I was saying “Oh,” a lot. It was a hot September night in New York and the Grolsch bottle contained not beer, but salad dressing. It was Uno’s, the latest trendy pizza spot, all shiny black and white tiled terrazzo floors, red dishes and glasses, and the accents of the green beer bottles with the custom-made salad dressing as accents, glowing like carved emeralds in the lengthening shadows.

“I prefer Ray’s,” someone behind me was saying. I had been to Ray’s on my first night in New York after a long schlep by bus from the Newark Airport.

My first New York taxi, my first New York pizza, and my first New York fly. My lover said it was probably the reincarnation of Nelson Rockefeller, looking for freebies in the fleshpots of New York.

“Reincarnation doesn’t change anything,” Javon, my lover’s current roommate had shrugged.

Homemade dressing in a recycled beer bottle. Was this how my life was going to be?

In Ray’s that first night, Javon had warned me, “He doesn’t have sheets on his bed. This isn’t gonna be very romantic.”

So I took them to shop in Times Square, pre-Rudy Giuliani’s cleanup, and bought flowered sheets while the two of them sang “Let a Woman in Your Life.”

But in our relationship who was teaching who? What was being learned? 

“Bet they just buy the dressing and funnel it into the bottles,” Arthur said, peering at the menu, too vain to put his glasses on, too poor for contacts.

 I didn’t notice the pessimism or the cynicism. I was too much in love. He was always willing to find something to whine about, although not as badly as his friends Rickie and Donny.

That was something else I didn’t notice: the fact that I was usually the only girl in the crowd. I was Wendy to their group of lost boys, young men from thirty to forty-five who had immersed themselves in comics, science fiction, and fantasy to the point where most girls could no longer connect with them on any level.

“I won’t go out with most women,” Ricky said. “Just after my money, anyway.”

I’m not a pizza person most of the time so I was eating the salad, pouring drops out of the rubber-stoppered beer bottle, letting Arthur click down the metal clamp on the glass each time I used it.

“I’m going to VHS.” They discussed their competing sound systems. It was 1984 and Beta was still in the game against VHS. And there was the new Coke that everyone hated. I slopped down Perrier, club soda and seltzer instead. I dreamed of Ocean Parkway and Coney Island. 

“I just want them to up what I can take out of the trust fund,” Ricky was moaning. He wrote movie reviews and had made mock of my poetry. I found his continual wimping about money a pain.

“Get a job,” suggested Javon, who was a conductor on the subway. His parents had two brownstones up in Harlem and had put him through college. He went home for dinner at least once a week and came home with care packages. “My only trust fund is my ma’s full fridge.”

“Best of both worlds,” said Donny, who was a bond trader and had a trust fund. “I could quit like that.” He snapped his fingers. “In the meantime, I have a great co-op, a fun job, and the best of everything, except for the people I hang around with.” He looked down his surgically repaired nose at the rest of us. Our foreign visitor excepted.”

I ordered dessert that night, and paid for Arthur and me with the Mastercard. He was supposed to be getting a Master’s degree in physics, not a Canadian mistress, so his parents had cut him off. I leaned back and licked the last of the custardy filling and pastry flakes from my lips. Then I noticed that the salad dressing bottle was gone. There was a container on each of the other tables. I said nothing. The waiter was too busy being superior to notice missing condiments. He put the credit card down on the table in front of Arthur with a disdainful sniff. Arthur slid it over to me.

 Javon took off for work and Arthur and I headed back to Crown Heights, while the trust fund babies went to Towers Records to look at the latest Madonna release. 

“Hey, where did that salad dressing bottle go?” I asked on the rumbling subway.

Arthur shrugged. “Oh, Ricky and Donny have this bet. Whoever gets a piece of restaurant property first gets to collect a CD from the one who doesn’t.”

I gasped. 

“Both of those guys could spend a year of my salary in a month and not notice! And if they had been caught, and the police had found I’m just here visiting, I could be deported back to Canada, never allowed into the U.S. and the magic city, perhaps a criminal record!”

“It’s just a game with them, honey,” Arthur said, as if it meant nothing in the world.

Yeah, and I’m not in the mood for an American prison, I wanted to say. Ryker’s Island, here I come.

We never mentioned it again. I hardly remembered that night until I looked out the window and saw the sign tonight. Arthur used me as his personal trust fund for twenty years and then left me for a wealthier woman. Jovan has died of diabetes, his genes and predilection for sweet desserts and liquors having given him a fatal stroke. Donny is melting down with the stock market disaster, telling me what to buy and sell, even though I have nothing left. Ricky calls to tell me how poor he is, along with travel reports from the last place he has visited. He and Donny have continued into their lonely money-oriented bachelorhoods. I stare out at the emerald bottle. I had wanted an emerald engagement ring: it didn’t happen. Tonight, I will go home and have a salad, pouring the cheap dressing from a plastic supermarket bottle, enjoying my escape.