LUCY LOVES ME
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Milton Ayala is a shy stutterer with a penchant for violent fantasies, a lonely Puerto Rican transvestite and devoted fan of Lucille Ball; nightly he bathes in blood from a dead rooster, soliloquizing on how his tub offers him safety and how the blood in the water somehow cleanses him of his sins. Lucy Rodriguez is the 25-year-old, self-effacing pizza deliverer whom Milton meets by a fluke. Though a rape victim, she’s less afraid of life than Milton is; resignedly she says, “I don’t belong to myself–I belong to the world and the world can do anything it wants with me.” Worse, Lucy sees herself as a homely “pizza face” and her function in life as protecting people by bringing them food so they won’t need to endanger themselves by going out. Touched, Milton gives Lucy a love token, a cookie mold he made from the lips of a girlfriend (not too surprisingly, she didn’t cherish the gift). The final entry in this weird and accidental get-together is Lucy’s mother Cookie, a scrappy harridan who clings to the memory of having once been “Miss Manhattan”; nowadays, daubing war paint on her contorted puss, she nightly exhibits herself from her apartment window while waving a small American flag.
Milton is in the habit of making anonymous phone calls, between applications of lipstick, to women named Lucy, and ends up meeting Cookie after he phones to ask her daughter for a very blind date. He doesn’t know that Cookie is the mother of the pizza deliverer he likes, which sets up a hilariously competitive date–on Lucy’s birthday–in which Lucy and Cookie vie for Milton’s elusive attention. They end up trekking to New Jersey to perform in the amateur variety show of the Miss Oyster Festival–Lucy bleating away on a clarinet, her mother telling groaner jokes and wailing her lungs out in a Kate Smith imitation, and Milton softly speaking one of the “Lucy” poems by Wordsworth. When they get home, the mother and daughter explode with old angers: “You’re bad milk–spoiled!” Cookie screams. “Why do you take everything away from me?” demands Lucy. Cookie: “Why do you let me?”
Frankie Davila offers a cleverly understated study in seasoned craziness; you sense that Milton settled into strangeness so long ago that he hardly sees or fears it anymore, yet he’s desperate to find someone to share it with. Davila could open up Milton more, however, if he would stop lapsing into Method mumbling.
