I'm sitting by the good window in the livingroom, staring out the window blurred without glasses. I fumble with the mug of coffee, cigarettes and ashtray set on the deep sill. Outside the light's bright, another unbearably unbendingly cheerful day under way. Nice day to go to the parks if you have a breath of freshness left in you. I decided to call up Granny. Not that she's anything more than a dusty old husk herself, nor I today anything but a bottle of flat stale beer, dried foam at my mouth. Outside is all abloom, hurting my eyes; my apartment is a gloomy dank mushroom cellar. I can't decide. Given the given of the gloomiest place to be in all New York City, I needn't decide. I trap the phone with my foot and try to drag it across the floor towards me. The receiver tumbles off, I manage to get it within reach. I pull the body along and some recorded woman is telling me to hang up.

I say, "Shut up!" hang up, pick back up and dial my grandmother.

It's no surprise when she picks up and starts telling me she's not at home right now and . . . I can tell it's her recorded persona. Sometimes she gets the phone and pretends to be her answering machine. "Come on Grandma, I know that's really you," but she always plays silence to the end, clucks a few times to signify the end of the message time; then she either repeats the whole spiel or hangs up, depending how feisty she's getting to feeling.

I intone, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

We reach the sound of the tone, and I scream, "Hey Granny wanna go to the Met today and look at all those paintings of people old enough to be my mother's mother?! . . . Now, I know you're listening, so if you don't call me back by five minutes I'll be so grievously insulted I won't ring you up for a month. And I'll have my number changed, unlisted. Hope you don't fall and break a hip hobbling to the phone."

It's not my fault I have to treat her like that. I'm certain she loves every second of it. It's her way of flirting with me, we're a pair of grade school crushes. When I pull her pigtail it means I like her.

She keeps her damn machine turned all the way up loud. Hops me out of my skin whenever I'm around to hear it. I'll mutter when I've recovered, "Why don't you turn the damn thing down, you bitch." Invariably she responds, "What? what? I'm sorry, I missed what you just said. Hope you don't mind I got that telephone so loud. These days I've gotten to be so deaf I can barely hear it ringing as is. Remember, that's why you got it, so I wouldn't miss any important phone calls even if I was here."

I turn my back and walk to the window, breathe down the front of my shirt, "You're as deaf as a fruit bat."

She fairly danced with glee, "See see, you agree, you just agreed! Hah, caught you on that one."

"This shriveled old lady sits in her apartment all day every day just waiting for phone calls so she can stay seated and listen to the shouted testimonials from her legions of admirers. The bulk of which are her grandson when he has absolutely nothing better to do."

Usually she denies it.

She's pretty much pissed off and pissed away most of her old cronies. Back in the days when she either had to answer the phone or suffer through the crowish fifteen to twenty rings. Her standard greeting then was, "Oh, it's you. I thought you were dead. Didn't your old ticker kick out about seven months ago? And here I was all along thinking Good Riddance."

One old shrew had called about twenty times in the course of one week, presumably with some hot new gall bladder gossip. Twenty calls returned by less than one.

I remain the almost anonymous grandson, so the biddy called the police, enlisted the concierge. They were a peremptory knock away from busting down the door. Granny answered peeved at having to have done so. I can only pretend to guess at the tirade launched thenceforce.

"'Oh, that old box, I never use it, why I don't even know how to make it work. My grandson brought it over one day--wasted my entire afternoon wiring it all up--then made me say something I guess in there as a message somewhere though I don't know how, but personally I've had nothing further to do with it since that day.' That's what I told them. You should have seen their mouths drop: their tongues were hanging on the floor. I turned to her and said, 'It's not that I don't really no want to talk to you, or see you, but next time you decide to pay a visit you really should call beforehand. Basic Etiquette I believe it's called. I'd certainly be appreciative of that. And I'd be equally appreciative if you'd ask my grandson to reconsider, to disconnect this troublemaker.'"

Grandma had all the gall she needed herself to tell me that story to my face, across the table at the Russian Tearoom. Knowing the locale was eating my next week's groceries, I half stood up from my seat and shouted back, "How many times, Grandma? how many times! You know goddamn well the first time I ever laid eyes on that vanity aid was that afternoon I came over with my key and caught you dancing around the livingroom, swirling and dipping as you were replaying your messages like they were some sort of fucking Alzheimer's Hit Parade."

There were so many other old folks in the room, I had to empty my wallet onto the table and run. Might have gotten caned and walkered to death. I bet Granny felt twenty years younger, and about sixty dollars richer.

But she herself has admitted that it gives her more of a charge than anything else in life. She told me once, when I got her to tipple a little sherry before during and after her birthday dinner. She'd whined and pouted for the two months prior, until I promised her I'd find myself sacrificing a paycheck for her dream birthday dinner at the Four Seasons. So many, she sniffled, had promised her that throughout her life, and now with her life all but over, she has yet to have stepped foot and all that and how she may only have a month of life left in her. I tell her softly, "You only had a month of life left in you about twenty years ago. You've been stealing time ever since."

Oftentimes I just jest her, "I'm going to call the Grim Reaper person-to-person and personally report you."

That night she turned god-knows-what, she broke on the subject, broached her habit herself. Well into the after-dinner sherries she told me that often she's pitched to such a frenzy of ecstasy that she becomes certain that she is the Pope, standing out on her Vatican balcony, literally her fire escape out the window, addressing the adoring devoted throng below. Telling them she simply doesn't have the time to bother wasting upon all of them, any of them. I waste no time, I don't begin to wonder if that's just a fantasy or something she actually does on occasion. Because right not, in real life, not to mention in the middle of the Four Seasons, she's doing a damned vocal enough re-enactment.

+ + +

She knows I mean every word of what I say. I'm a man of a few concise properly placed words. If she dumps me, what other man will remain to have her? I time the ornery old bitch. Four whole minutes and forty-three seconds, my phone rings. I answer, "Seventeen seconds to go, Grandma you're slipping. Want me to reserve you a slot in a nursing home or graveyard?"

"Young man! You'll have to talk louder! I can't hardly hear you. Oh sonny, pity the old ladies gone deaf."

"I vote, Pity the old ladies gone nuts."

"Nuts? Why yes, I just happen to have a bowl of fresh pistachios in the livingroom in case you can find a few spare minutes to soothe an old woman's loneliness."

"I hate pistachios."

"You don't have to tell me how great they are, dearie; I'm you granmerd, I know how much you love pistachios."

"I won't even come over unless you run out right now and buy a can of beer nuts for me."

"I know how dear nuts are to you . . . "

"I'm not even going to come over unless you promise to reimburse me for the cabfare down, and spring for the tab-plus-tip to the museum."

I take the subway on down and walk the three blocks to her building, arriving in about a third the time of a taxi. I wait to ring her buzzer for the sight of a cab turning onto her sidestreet. I run up the stairs, waltz her into her front room, panning my hand in front of the window, the cab passing away down the street.

"That's twenty dollars. Honest. Right now. In case you renege on our deal, I instructed the driver to swing around the block, pick me up if I'm back out front." I move to the door to move her to her pocketbook. She knows that random cab is twenty blocks uptown by now.

+ + +

At the Metropolitan, leaving for the Metropolitan, she insists on bringing along a pair of her walkin' canes. She has no use for them other than stomping them on the ground when she's the least bit irritated. As usual, she refuses the Senior Citizen designation and forces me to pay the two full-price donations. As usual she rattles us through the endless galleries of ancient old fucks.

"Grandma, all this old shit sucks."

She cups a hand to her ear, shrugs, shrugs me off.

"We could go look at all that pretty colorful impressionistic type stuff, granted the collection is a bit paltry . . . "

"Why, why would I want to have a gander at any of that? I've got some wallpapering in my bathroom nicer that any of that modern stuff."

"Probably true, but this is just old gas so old it lacks even the virtue of a smell."

I think I offended her. I think of ways to cheer her up. I ignore them. I reply to her silence, "Most these Old Masters are nothing more than glorified ancestors of television stills."

She snaps, "You forget you're talking about vintage t.v. T.v. when t.v. was still t.v. the way t.v. used to be t.v."

"But they're not even as funny as Green Acres or The Beverly Hillbillies. They don't even have that high a level of consciousness."

"Consciousness schmonsciousness, now you're talking about the era of t.v. that was Pop Art, Pop-up Art. Cartoons," she sneered.

"Okay, they're not even as edifying as Your Show of Shows. Your show of shows the way shows were shows when shows were shows."

"Abstraction," she spat.

"You're talking about the era of t.v. that was radios and picture shows, only your brain these days is too soupy to remember the difference."

"And I imagine you'd expect any of it to matter."