"Young Caller from Sheepshead Bay" by Martyna Starosta
Two things happened when I was twenty-five: I failed my first art crit and a girl named Beverly knocked Stino Martino off the air.
In early February of 2011, at the beginning of my fourth semester, I came up with a belated New Year’s resolution: I’d start a simple artistic routine and put in two hours every morning. No more prayers for erratic bursts of inspiration, no more squirrel hair paint brushes that busted my budget, no more ruminations about whether my art would land me a spot in the Guggenheim or the soup kitchen.
Instead, I bought: Diamond match sticks (green heads hatted with white tips, not unlike frozen sugar droplets; 32 per box), composition notebooks (graph-ruled), Faber-Castell graphite pencils (medium-hard), Elmer’s multi-purpose glue (4oz bottles). I brought from home: one shoebox, one ceramic bowl, one sharpener.
First I arranged the raw ingredients into a tidy assembly line on my desk. Then I emptied the matchsticks into the shoe box. The soft clattering bounced off the church-high ceilings of our north-facing studio (strictly reserved for Professor Waters’s cohort). When it came to the matchboxes, only the coarse striking surfaces mattered to me. So I cut off the two sides, dotted with tiny brown diamonds, and glued them into my notebook. (The pages curled up, but I’d bought everything in bulk and couldn’t afford to start over.) It took one whole morning session to prepare the first notebook:
Twelve rows of horizontal rectangles on each page, each column neatly aligned to the left.
The next day, I lit the first match by striking it against the phosphor-coated surface at the top of the page, and let the flame trickle down the slow-burning, white Aspen wood, before putting it off with a quick jiggle. I threw the charred stick into the ceramic bowl and marked the event with a pencil stroke in my notebook, to the right of the used rectangle. Then I repeated the whole thing with as little variation as possible. Four vertical graphite strokes, the fifth diagonal. Picture a prison tally, it was as simple as this.
At that time, I worshipped my Polish compatriot, Roman Opałka, who saw himself as the father of conceptual art with a numerical focus. In 1965, he began painting numbers from one to infinity. Starting at the top left of the canvas, he inscribed minuscule digits with a fine brush (No. 0) and acrylic paint in horizontal rows that ended at the bottom right corner. Critics called his endeavor “quixotic” because he vowed to pursue this tedious meditation on mortality until the very day he died. I didn’t think I had the stamina to follow through with my mimicry past May, but told myself to shut up: I had to start somewhere. In Polish, we call a match “zapałka,” which rhymes with “Opałka”—not a coincidence if you asked me. Opałka named his canvases “Details”; I titled my notebooks “Morning Pages.”
Still, I had a hard time tricking the killjoy part of my brain into taking my work seriously. That’s why I tallied my match-strikes while dressed up in a red zipper jumpsuit—the universal costume of the working class. (Flame resistant, with bottomless pockets, this uniform could house a Swiss army knife, keys, idea books, tampons, rainbow chalk, anti-anxiety medication, a magnifying glass, bobby pins, a sand timer, a glow-in-the-dark compass, chocolate, and pepper spray.)
Thankfully, the smoke detectors in room 84 turned out to be dormant. You might expect other students to complain about a forest’s worth of matches burning in toxic succession, but in the universe of art school, I was considered an early riser. Most of my peer geniuses materialized just before lunchtime, some after their siesta, and others only showed their faces sporadically like migratory birds on their way to the Venice Biennale. Between 8 and 10 a.m., the studio, big enough for Halloween parties with two hundred people, was mine alone. During these peaceful hours of peak artistic output, the base-level aroma of turpentine and stale popcorn was overpowered by the pungency of sulfur dioxide. Here I sat, every weekday morning, working like a monk, listening religiously to Stino Martino.
I’d come across his show by accident and was hooked trying to figure out his accent. Like my Brazilian roommate Maurício, he often placed the emphasis on the wrong syllable. I learned that Stino was born in Milan but had lived in Tel Aviv, Port-au-Prince, Montevideo, and Antwerp. Two decades ago he washed ashore on the East Coast and quickly got his hands on a green card (I was still working on that one). How he’d gotten on NPR without conforming to Standard American English was beyond me. Some haters kvetched (“You can’t understand a single word”) but the rest of us shrugged gleefully (“Fuck off. This is New York City”).
I soon came to believe that I couldn’t do my project without listening to Stino. There was something addictive and mind-altering about boosting the heat of my flames with the warmth of his full-bodied voice. I’d come as far as sacrificing my buttered everything bagel and coffee for him. The women’s restroom was one floor up and I didn’t want to miss a single moment of his show, which was full of surprises.
This is how it worked: The first caller would share a problem. Stino would react to it and then open the floor for suggestions from other listeners. He never rushed. Sixty minutes per problem. Two problems per show.
I was halfway through my second notebook when Golda from Crown Heights called to report: “I live on the fifth floor of a five-floor walk-up. The light in the staircase has been broken since Christmas, and my landlady stopped picking up my calls.”
“Oh man, I’d be worried too about going down that staircase,” Stino confessed. “I don’t even turn the lamp on my nightstand off when I go to sleep.” And then he retreated, as he always did, into his famous Stino Martino Pause. You could barely hear him breathe. Once I counted nine and a half seconds of silence. And whoever was on the other line would inevitably tap right into it.
Golda was no exception. “You know my mother fell down the stairs in her house. She got up by herself, didn’t break any bones, but the truth is she was never quite the same after that. Of course, we don’t know if it was the fall that caused her dementia or the other way around, but soon she started forgetting her words. Every time I have to cling blindly to that stupid banister, I think of my mom who’d call me ‘baby’ when she couldn’t recall my name. I don’t think I have told anyone about this.”
Had the caller just made a lucid link between the bleak state of tenants’ rights, the lingering loss of her mother, and the precariousness of language? And if so, how exactly had Stino helped trigger that epiphany? It was hard to tell. His listeners dispensed a cacophony of advice that ranged from common sense (“Just go to Home Depot and get a headlamp for twenty bucks!”) to self-important (“I’m an attorney on 5th Ave. and West 63rd. Call Cindy, my assistant, and she’ll set you up for a pro bono session”) to the transgressive (“Where does this landlady live? I’ll send the mob”).
Stino waved silence like a magic wand—to make space, to heal, to bring us closer together. His well-timed radio silence was so unlike the silent treatment my parents had regaled me with when I was a child.
Khalid called to talk about an upcoming move from his two-story house in Sunnyside, Queens, to a hospice room that barely fit a twin bed on the Lower East Side. He’d made peace with the transition but agonized about the number of books he wanted to bring along.
“Khalid, are you someone who likes to reread a beloved book or who craves novelty in novels?”
“You alone know your jewels,” said Marie-Louise from the Upper West Side. “Trust your gut. They’ll never move me out of my place without my Agatha Christie collection—over my dead body!”
Jamal from East Flatbush chimed in. “Hey brother, as soon as you hang up, call the hospice and ask for the super. He’ll tell you the exact measures of their bookcases and you can go from there.”
It was not rare for people to dial into Stino’s show from the parking lot of a hospital right after a cancer diagnosis, a miscarriage, a nervous breakdown. Each time, Stino would just say “Go ahead,” his firm voice massaging the patient’s state of mind like a psychic. And when those misfortunes were dis- closed piecemeal, drowned out by sobs and emergency sirens, he’d remind the caller to “focus on the exhale, the inhale will take care of itself.” Eventually, he’d throw the ball back to his audience. “It sounds like you’re really trying to figure out what to do next. Would you mind hearing what has worked for us?”
“I know it seems kooky, but it was my houseplant that got me through my darkest hour,” shared Rosalind from Cypress Hills. “I’d been a paralegal since I got out of college but after my son’s overdose, I never went back to the office. I didn’t look at any of the condolence cards. I didn’t answer the phone. And when my daughter-in-law banged at my door, I didn’t open. I just deep-cleaned my apartment until I got a rash from all that Lysol. But a couple of months later, I remember it was the last day of April, a week before Kevin’s twenty-ninth birthday, I was rinsing out one of these empty yogurt containers and instead of throwing it into the recycling bin, I took it to Highland Park and filled it with soil. Back home, I stuck three lima beans into the cup and watered them—just like they’d taught us at P.S. 213. Believe it or not, things got better from there. That’s all I got to say. And don’t forget to cut holes in the bottom of the pot for drainage. The way you kill a plant is by overwatering!”
A New Yorker profile professed that Stino’d hijacked this thing called “the radio” and made it into a complex tin-can system, a living organism, to remind us testy New Yorkers that today was a beautiful day to be neighbors. (At least Monday to Friday—people joked about the Stino Martino Withdrawal on weekends.)
When Salomé from North Riverdale called in distress about Sidney, her feline runaway, a nearby librarian named Chris unleashed a search squad before she’d hung up the phone.
They said there were no screeners on the show. Whoever got through first got Stino’s full attention. I’m not sure how that worked with hundreds of people calling in simultaneously. Maybe it was just one of those urban legends, and yet I liked the idea that luck was your entry ticket.
I also liked that Stino never made the show about himself. Despite spending six hundred minutes a week of in-the-ear-nearness with him, we really didn’t know much about his life. Every now and then we could hear him clunk his hand against the microphone, and pictured him in a studio too small to contain his spark. They said he followed a chromatic diet. They said he recited Icelandic poetry before going on the show. They said he never took time off in August, because—since most therapists were on vacation—people were already on edge. But none of this was certain and that too was a gift. The less we knew about Stino, the more we could make him be anyone we wanted.
One May morning I reached the last page of my twenty-fifth notebook and decided to give myself a break. When I paged through my work, it occurred to me that this was the closest I’d ever come to journaling. Maybe I was on to something. I piled the notebooks into a tower stacked against the wall and stepped on it (barefoot) to assess my recent growth spurt. Later, I took Maurício and my friend Gretchen out for cheesecake at Junior’s. I slept the rest of the day and snuck back at night to try my hand at a video documentation. With the lights off, I was able to strike a dramatic rhythm between bright flames and black pauses, between crackling and quiet. I was feeling good about the upcoming crit.
After finding a hidden storage hole under a trap door, I pointed the projector downward to beam the video into the ground. With the speakers placed close to the image, the committee would only have to follow the sound to discover my installation. I spread my notebooks out on five folding tables that lined the wall of the studio, and opened each of them to the first page — an invitation to peruse.
You might wonder how anybody could judge something as hazy as student art, but there was certainly a science to it. Just like a Supreme Court case, it all hinged upon the makeup of the bench. I wish the professors had been actually seated, but instead they’d float into your studio and circle around you like sharks. My professor Jacob Waters enjoyed a longstanding feud with Professor Caspar Bishop. Professor Waters would fail Professor Bishop’s students and vice versa. You really wanted both of them in the room so they’d cancel each other out.
Professor Waters was known to be either hot or cold with his students. Each year he’d take two or three fledglings under his wing, gaze at their art in rapt silence and then whisper—for all to hear—“Please call my gallerist.” At the bottom of the food chain were the disciples whose scribbles he refused to review at all. Without making eye contact, he’d say: “You know some people are born painters and some are not. If I were you, I’d look into graphic design or teaching high school.” When Crystal implored him to review her portfolio, he just said, “I saw your drawings last year. I don’t need to see them again.” He couldn’t care less that she’d taken classes in Paris with professor-so-and-so, that the new drawings had nothing to do with the old.
To me Professor Waters was reasonably supportive even if he wasn’t always awake. He had dozed off during the screening of my trilogy “Portraits of My Father.” I couldn’t blame him. Each video was thirty minutes long and consisted of one static shot that featured my dad doing his thing: vacuuming the house, reading the paper, watching sports. (The audio track included no dialogue, just ambient noise.)
And yet Professor Waters got the gist of my “Morning Pages” immediately: “I like that it’s not about an idea, ideas are cheap, it’s about duration and endurance, about how long you’ll keep at it.” But then he got off on a tangent about his own encounter with Opałka. (They’d met at the Documenta, Roman was much funnier than expected, they ended up mixing vodka with red wine.)
The day of my crit arrived but Professor Waters did not. He’d been replaced by the adjunct professor running the photo lab whose bangs almost covered his eyes. The other people on the panel were the dean, who rarely looked up from her phone, and Professor Bishop. The trio was escorted by assistants, other students (including the twins in Waldo outfits whose explicit watercolor paintings had found their way into a group show on Staten Island), as well as a pear-shaped man with a horseshoe mustache who looked vaguely familiar (our model for drawing class! Fully clothed he seemed out of place). Two dozen spectators spread out, anticipating my examination with morbid curiosity. One of the admins butchered my last name.
“Wanda Trzeszczkowska—that’s me,” I said, helping her out.
Professor Bishop walked right up into my face. He was a couple of inches shorter than me and I couldn’t help but notice a little piece of green (seaweed?) trapped between his incisor and canine tooth.
“Good morning, Wanda. So what exactly are you doing here?”
“I’m examining the passage of time,” I said with prey-like confidence.
“I can see that,” he said, peering at me through rimless glasses. Nobody approached my notebooks. The match strikes coming from the speakers also failed to do the trick—nobody made a single step toward the hole in front of them. They all froze in formation behind Professor Bishop, like the family of King Carlos IV in Goya’s life-sized group portrait.
“You are examining the passage of time,” Professor Bishop repeated. “Well, you are wasting your time. You are wasting everybody’s time. And unfortunately, you are wasting my time.”
With that, he turned around and exited room 84.
Left alone, I crawled into the hole to disconnect the speakers and stayed there long after the admin returned with the verdict. I dialed Stino’s number which I’d memorized should I ever suffer a devastating injury. I wasn’t look- ing for advice. I just wanted to cry on the air, report to the people of New York that I’d been wronged. But then I realized that it was already past 10 a.m. The show was over. I called Gretchen, but only got her voicemail. Maurício didn’t pick up either. It occurred to me that it was 4.11 p.m. in Warsaw, not a bad time to call my mom.
“Hey, what’s up?” my dad asked. “Didn’t I just call Mom’s number?”
“She keeps forgetting her phone. She keeps forgetting her keys, her wallet—it drives me crazy. Now she’s at the hairdresser again.”
I could hear TV cheering in the background. “Soccer? Who’s playing?”
“You wouldn’t know how to tell them apart.”
“I failed.”
“Failed what?”
“I just failed my crit.”
I could hear my dad turning the TV volume down by two notches. Couldn’t he just mute it all the way? “Well, it was your idea,” he said.
“The Opałka project?”
“Art school, New York, the red jumpsuit—that was your idea.”
“I wasted months on this project. And they didn’t even look at it.”
“What can I tell you? You’re not Opałka. That man dedicated his whole life to his art, not just a couple of months.”
“When he started painting Details he was nine years older than I am now.”
The background volume shot back up. The commentator screamed, “Overtime!”
“In any case, I’ll have to retake the crit this fall. So I’m going to stay here and keep working.”
“You won’t visit this year?”
“It’s not my fault that they failed me.”
“Your mom won’t be happy—”
I hung up and dug out some melted Hershey’s Kisses from my pockets.
They were impossible to unwrap.
That summer I deleted my Facebook account. I was tired of seeing friends post selfies from residencies in Ushuaia, protests in Cairo, weddings in Mumbai, while I was stuck in that empty studio where I carried on stub- bornly with my grand, unmatched project. My hours hadn’t changed. Neither had my radio habits.
“Hello, this is Beverly from Sheepshead Bay! I’m almost eleven. I’ll be eleven on Thanksgiving.”
You didn’t often hear kids calling into Stino’s show, presumably because they were trapped in school during the hours of the live broadcast. But come July, fifth graders were apparently free to roam the airwaves.
This one was a chatterbox. “I want to talk about the horses. On the last day of school we took a trip to Central Park, it was so hot, and Miss Pfaffenburger said, ‘Look at these poor horses, they shouldn’t have to work so hard.’ Why do they have to torture them like that? It ain’t fair.”
Normally Stino would repeat the caller’s name but that day he did not say, “Good morning, Beverly!” He did not say, “How can we help our young animal rights activist?” Instead he let the kid patter on about the carriage horses.
“It ain’t fair, it ain’t fair. Why do they have to drag all these tourists uptown and downtown? What if we all take the train to Columbus Circle and let the horses run free? It’s a big park. They work so hard, they’re tired, one of them fell asleep while standing on the street. I live between Avenue X and Avenue Y. Miss Pfaffenburger put my best horse drawing up in the teacher’s lounge. It was really hard to get the ears to look like real horse ears. What happened to Mommy’s monthly payments?”
That’s when I forgot to jiggle my hand and let the match burn for a second too long. Had I missed something? How had the Sheepshead Bay girl leaped from horses to monthly payments? Did she need pocket money for her horse liberation project?
I made sure to turn up the volume before rinsing my hand under cold water. “C’mon, we all know what you’ve been up to, DAD-DY! You gotta make your monthly payments to Mommy. Don’t be a jackass full of piss.”
You could hear the high-pitched laugh of a woman in the background of wherever Beverly was calling from.
“Watch your tongue, Beverly,” Stino said before drifting into a pause that had nothing to do with controlling the conversation.
“Fuck your shitty radio face,” the girl responded with a giggle. “If you don’t cut us a check TO-DAY, I can’t go to tap class, and to my Girl Scouts trip to Camp Kaufman, and to Disneyland, and to Macy’s. And guess what—I-NEED-A-REAL-BRA! And all of that stuff costs MO-NEY and all we got is BILLS! BILLS! BILLS!”
I imagined the girl stomping around in her basement apartment, pointing at unopened envelopes that crept through door cracks, spilled out of kitchen drawers, and hid between defunct Barbie house components.
Stino tried to rush her offstage. “I think freeing the horses is a lovely idea. Why don’t you write a nice story about it and draw some pictures too? You can make a little book. I’m sure there’s a market for it, lots of horse girls in this city.”
Nice try Stino, but Beverly didn’t seem any less incensed.
“Horseradish up your ass! The trooper lady told us to bring fifteen bucks on Monday. Aaaaand what day is today, MISTER MOTHERFUCKER MARTINO?”
“Wednesday.” Stino’s voice was beat.
“I said, ‘C’mon lady, give me twenty-four hours, you know that my dad is making lots of cash on the radio,’ but then the other girls started screaming ‘Pants on fire!’—”
Cut.
I sprinted from the sink to the radio and switched it on and off a couple of times to make sure it was still getting power. 9:21 a.m. There were still thirty-nine minutes left of the show. Finally someone covered the dead air with a dusty jazz tune.
The next day, the New York Times metro desk served a blitz exposé which referenced some court documents. Stino Martino allegedly owed child sup- port to a woman who lived in the shelter system. According to the article, it wasn’t like he never made his payments, but it wasn’t like he made them every month in a timely fashion either.
People were upset, of course. At first, they were mad at Stino. But it only took a couple of days for his followers to recalibrate our expectations: Okay, Stino was no saint—so what? He was still a mensch—our mensch. And anyway, who were we to judge without any context?
The Daily News wrote that a paternity test had been inconclusive. The New York Post claimed that Stino had contacted the police a couple of weeks prior to Beverly’s call. By all accounts, he’d been receiving a string of anonymous drawings in the mail. The blackmail had kicked off with a glitter-covered foal, but swiftly escalated to beheaded stick figures vomiting blood. No forensic expert could say for sure if the drawings were sketched by a child or by a grown-up pretending to be a child, not just a make-believe daughter, even if her story rang somewhat true, even if her mother had really once slept with a famous guy, why did she have to play dirty? Why did she have to plant her daughter as a Trojan horse on live radio to extort money from Stino of all people? After everything he’d done for our city! After everything he’d done for us!
And yet it was Beverly who stayed on my mind during that lonely summer. It was Beverly with whom I played out imaginary dialogues whenever I wandered through the deserted hallways of art school. How come Stino never automated his monthly bank transfers so his daughter didn’t have to shoplift her first bra? How come Professor Waters didn’t bother to show up for my crit to shield me from his nemesis? And I still hadn’t gotten over that last call with my dad. How come he didn’t say, “Fuck your professors. I’m rooting for you?” Wouldn’t have cost him anything. We’d expected so little of these men, and yet they let us down. And so it was Beverly who I wanted to track down and high five. Why not demand what’s yours? Nothing wrong with that.
The local NPR station announced that Stino needed to take time off to deal with a health issue. He resurfaced a couple of months later, but at that point I’d moved on to audio books.
By the end of August, it was time to retake the crit. Gretchen coached me to show as many works as possible: “They need to see that you busted your ass. Frame all of your notebooks. Hang them. Add some mirrors for visual quantity. And beam one video projection on each of the walls at full volume. Oh, and what about a live performance? Have you ever tried to eat fire?
Instead, I presented: One large mason jar (32oz) filled with ashes—the remains of my “Morning Pages.” The lid was screwed on tightly. A white label featured my best penmanship: “RIP Father Figures.”
—
Martyna Starosta is a Polish-German writer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College and is currently at work on a collection of short stories. Martyna’s films have been screened at AFI DOCS, Rooftop Films, and One World Film Festival, among others. Her latest film, “Elevator Pitch,” was released by Time Magazine and Field of Vision, and was nominated for a Critics Choice Documentary Award for Best Short Documentary. This is her first fiction publication.
