My Young Life

by Frederic Tuten

  1. First, the kiss. No tongue.

  2. The kiss and a feel of the breasts with all her clothes on.

  3. French kiss, but no slathering of the tongue.

  4. French kiss with hand on breast under the bra.

  5. Bra off; breast kissing and licking nipples.

  6. Rubbing against her thigh with pants on. (Coming in pants acceptable.)

  7. Give her a bracelet with your and her names engraved on a little gold heart and let the world know you are GOING STEADY.

  8. Put penis between her breasts; slide back and forth until you come.

  9. Petting below the waist and beneath the underpants.

  10. Guide her hand to your penis and let her stroke you until you come.

  11. Slide finger into the vagina. Swirl finger about. Last stop before marriage and the real thing.

  After three weeks, I was at rule four when Marsha agreed to pose for me and one day appeared at my door.

  “My mother knows I’m here,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “In case you want to try some funny stuff.”

  “What are you talking about? What funny stuff?”

  “You know very well.”

  “Have I ever gone further than you let me?”

  “No.”

  “So why are you worried?”

  “My mother says I should never be in an apartment alone with a man.”

  “That’s a good rule, generally.”

  She looked about for the first time and said what I’d always dreaded she would say: “How can you live here?”

  “It’s just temporary. We’re going to move.”

  “Really? That’s good. Where to?”

  “I’m going to live in Paris as soon as I finish high school next year.”

  “With your mother?”

  “No, she’s going to live in Tuscany, where we have some property.”

  I heard a dog barking out the open window. “Is that Rudolf?” I asked.

  “I leashed him inside the hedge. He doesn’t like you.”

  “Too bad, I would have painted him sitting on your lap, like in old paintings of aristocrats.”

  “Maybe he’ll get to like you, one day.”

  “OK, let’s start now before it gets dark,” I said. It was only four o’clock in May and did not get dark until at least seven, but I was worried that my mother would return early from work and ruin the intimate atmosphere—what artist’s mother walks into his studio while he’s painting his model?

  I set up a canvas board on my easel and had a few charcoal sticks at the ready for outlining her before I began to paint. I placed her in a chair by the window where we first had chatted and turned her to the light.

  “Do you like what I’m wearing?”

  “Yes, very much.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  Marsha was wearing a powder-green sweater and a green scarf. Her black skirt was tight and her legs bare and ripe.

  “Is that all?”

  “Because you look beautiful.”

  “I want you to make a portrait of me that will last forever. One that will hang in a museum someday.”

  “I will try.”

  “Also, my mother wants to see it.”

  I made an oval for her head, as I had learned in the How to Draw from the Model book that Seymour had finally sold me. Then I drew a larger oval for the chest and abdomen, and two long ovals for the arms.

  Marsha yawned. “How long do I have to stay this way?”

  “It’s not even been three minutes,” I said. “Don’t break my concentration.”

  I did my best with the face, but I knew I was in trouble when the eyes seemed too large and the nose too flat. The chest was another problem: How was I ever going to imply the juicy fullness beneath her sweater? I rubbed out the drawing and started again, and now, with Van Gogh–like abandon, I slashed in the paint with my butter knife.

  “This is enough,” Marsha said. “I’ve got to go walk Rudolf. Do you want to come?”

  “I have to work on the painting.”

  “Can I have a look?”

  “Of course not, I’ve just started.”

  She sighed, immaturely, I thought. I walked her to the door. “Don’t you want to kiss me?” she said with a make-believe pout.

  “All the time.”

  “Do we have to kiss standing up?” she asked, lightly caressing the back of my neck and sending a current through me.

  My cot was too narrow and would not have held us both, so we went to my mother’s room and into her bed. My first time in a bed with a woman, so different from lying down on the grass in the park with the dog ready to snap. I felt an unimagined boldness—I was an artist in bed with his model. I kissed and used my tongue. She slowly twirled hers.

  I put my hand under her sweater and left it there. She did not take it away. I put my hand under her bra and felt the huge, soft swell of her naked breast. She touched me below and I burst into a warm, steady flow of excitement and embarrassment.

  “Can I look now?” she asked.

  “When it’s done,” I said, trying to keep in focus in my role as the artist and not as the boy who had exploded in his mother’s bed.

  First Review. Picasso Unmasked

  The Bronx, Pelham Parkway North, 1951

  A few days later, Marsha and I met at Louie’s and held hands over the orangey-red Formica-top table littered with the remains of a Lime Rickey, a watery Coke, french fries, and the edges of two hamburger rolls.

  “You know,” she said, “I’ve been thinking that I won’t model for you again until I see what you’ve done.”

  “But this is a process that takes time,” I said.

  “You just want to get me into bed. Which is OK, because we are going steady.”

  “We are?”

  “Of course! After what I let you do!”

  I hoped that no one had heard her, and if they had, what filthy things did they imagine I had done to her? But now that we were going steady, I wondered what more she would let me do.

  “Let’s go over to my place right now.”

  “What made you wait so long to ask?”

  I paid, took her hand, and walked just short of running across the streets to my house. We rushed to the bed and after few minutes of necking I said, “Take off your sweater.”

  I was amazed that she did, and without a fuss. We kissed until my lips hurt and my teeth hurt, too.

  Then, in a madness of desire, I heard myself say: “Take off your bra.”

  I thought she would be angry and walk out. But in a tone used to soothe a cranky baby, she said, “Here now,” and I drowned myself in her breasts.

  “Now can I see the picture?” she asked, putting on her bra and sweater.

  “Yes,” I said, in a warm haze of satisfaction.

  She pointed out that her nose looked like a wedge of yellow cheese; her ears, twin orange slices.

  “But it looks nothing like me,” she said, summing up the strange concoction on the canvas.

  “It’s your essence,” I explained.

  I dared not admit that I had no idea of how to represent faithfully the human face or body—or the form of a dog or a cat or of any animal thing.

  “How can I ever show this to my mother? She hates Picasso.”

  “This was only your first sitting,” I said. “I’m sure I can make it more realistic if you want. But then, I might as well take a photograph.”

  “I want to go home now,” she said, her disappointment trailing her all the way to the door and out into the street, where my good-bye wave was not returned.

  The Seduction of a Green Cover

  Manhattan and the Bronx, circa 1946

  ANOTHER BACKWARD GLANCE

  When I was ten my grandmother and I went to the city—that’s what we called Manhattan—to pick up a cake from De Robertis Pasticceria, between Tenth and Eleventh on First Avenue. My mother had ordered the cake for my aunt Sadie’s birthday. Th
ere were many Italian pastry shops on Arthur Avenue, a swift twenty-minute bus ride from where we lived, but none, in my family’s judgment, was as good as DeRobertis, where they would stop for baba au rhum or a cannoli when they lived on East Twelfth.

  We got off at Union Square, as usual, but instead of walking across Fourteenth Street as always, we took a turn and found ourselves on Fourth Avenue, where we had never been. It took us along Book Row, the area between Eighth and Fourteenth Streets, packed with used-book stores with their outdoor stalls. I knew right away that I would go back when I was old enough to travel alone.

  I seldom left my neighborhood or traveled to Manhattan, but after I turned thirteen I started taking the subway down to Book Row. The ride from Pelham Parkway to Union Square Fourteenth Street was direct, no changes or transfers, so I was not too afraid of getting lost. On early Saturday afternoons it was easy to find an empty seat and be left quietly to read a book during the hour-long ride. The subway cost a dime each way, and for another dollar or even less I could find wonderful books to haul back to the Bronx. My mother complained, “Where are we going to keep all these books?” My one bookcase made of boards held up on bricks was already overpacked and verging on collapse.

  “Under my cot, Mom.” Where I had stashed the books my shelves could not hold.

  One afternoon, drawn by the title, I bought George Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man from a bookstall for a dime. It had a worn, leathery green cover and distinguished gold title impressed on the spine. I read the opening pages out there in the street, and in moments I knew the book was addressed to me. It was about a young man (like me) who wanted to be an artist (like me) and yearned (like me) to find his way to become one.

  On the subway back to the Bronx, I continued reading, and as we ascended from the underground to the elevated tracks after 149th Street, passing the littered streets below and the brown rows of sullen apartment buildings, I felt I had met myself in a past life. Not only because young Moore had wanted to be an artist, but because he wanted to live the life of one. His Confessions teemed with names of famous Impressionist painters, of mysterious narrow streets and smoke-filled cafés, under a Paris sky thick with artistic aspiration.

  I promised myself that one day I would follow him to Paris, where art and beauty counted for everything, and where extraordinary women—as I found in a book of artists photographed in their studios and on their picnics and in sexy cafés—also came with the freedom of bohemian life.

  My friend Arthur, the expert who had explained to me the mysteries of sex, came over to me in the school cafeteria and said, “This is the book for you.” Arthur was the one who had passed around his copy of Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury, dog-eared to the famous scene of a woman walking into the hero’s room and slowly unbuttoning her blouse—the scene that had inflamed a generation of Bronx youth. Arthur’s parents drove around in a Cadillac and parked it in a garage at night and they never seemed to have to go to work. They had recently returned from Paris and had sneaked through customs Henry Miller’s banned book Tropic of Cancer. Arthur filched it from their bedroom bureau and turned it over to me. “This will make you cream all night,” he said. “But you got to give it back before they find it missing.” I was thrilled to have this mysterious, forbidden book.

  The edges of the pages were folded at the supposedly hot passages. The rest of the book seemed untouched. I read the whole book from first sentence to last, and a day after I finished I started over again. It was a key to the cell I lived in and offered a view of the exciting world outside the prison of ordinary life. The book sang the joy of living unshackled by social norms, conventions, the everyday lies; it was a manifesto for my liberty. Nowhere did I find the supposed sexy filth for which it was banned. There was plenty of sex, but none of it pornographic, and even if it had been, so what? What was all the fuss about? Wasn’t sex the stuff of life we lived in and lived for?

  Tropic of Cancer tells the story of Henry, the author himself, who, at thirty-five and with just a few dollars to his name, sailed from New York to Paris, knowing no one there, speaking not a phrase of French. In Paris he scrounged money from fellow Americans, went hungry, and yet none of that mattered, because he walked the city like a man crazy in love. A single day wandering in Paris was a day richer, deeper, than his whole previous life in New York working at shitty jobs and starved for a woman’s caress that did not require a marriage license. Could I not one day soon do the same as Henry—and young George Moore—and live in Paris a free man?

  But first I had to escape from prison. I was bored with my high school classes, with the well-meaning teachers, the students with passion for nothing—except for sex, the only passion we shared. There was nothing in school that opened me to greater poetry or fiction than I had already been reading. I was then in the world of Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, with its spiritually lost expatriates wandering through Morocco and its desert outposts.

  I thought it was wonderful to be spiritually lost, especially in Bowles’s world, so far away from school, from the butcher shop and even Louie’s Luncheonette, from my crumbling apartment and my sad mother. But better than Bowles’s soulless desert was the glamorous writer’s life in Paris that I had discovered in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Like its protagonist, Jake Barnes, I, too, would sit with other artists and writer friends—and worldly women—in a café where I could linger for hours drawing and reading at a table sur la terrasse, which sounded more heroic than just a table on the sidewalk.

  I reread Moore’s Confessions, searching this time for practical information on how young George was able to pay his way to the city of art and light. I soon discovered the answer. He wrote: “Then my father died, and I suddenly found myself heir to considerable property. . . . I was free to enjoy life as I pleased. Eighteen, with life and France before me.”

  Expecting no estates to be left to me, I was bitter at my bad luck and chastised myself for being such a dreamy fool. I would have to discover my own way to Paris.

  Dancing Daffodils

  The Bronx, Christopher Columbus High School, circa 1951

  I did not do well in math, and I was rejected for the elite high schools like Stuyvesant and the Bronx High School of Science; so after junior high I went into the general population of Christopher Columbus, which, although not renowned, had some excellent teachers all the same. My favorite was Mr. Francis Anderson.

  Mr. Anderson’s back was turned to the class; he was dreaming at the blackboard again. The blue suit he wore every day was exhausted and seemed never to have a restful night in the closet or undergo rehabilitation at a dry cleaner’s. Tony Gavanti, the class clown and bully, shouted, “Let’s chip in and buy Mr. Anderson some new weeds.”

  Tony was a pimply giant with a slick duck’s-ass hairstyle who wore green pegged pants and pointy blue suede roach-killer shoes.

  Mr. Anderson wheeled about and said, “Tony, I’m not deaf. But thanks for the thought.”

  “Don’t sweat it.” The class tittered. Tony stood and took a bow.

  “Where were we, Elizabeth?” Mr. Anderson asked.

  Elizabeth Bloom shouted, “ ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ Mr. Anderson!”

  “Of course, I was just testing you.” Chuckles from the class.

  Marvin Moyers spoke without raising his hand. “Mr. Anderson, we’ve been talking about this poem for two weeks. Will it be on the test?”

  “As the Boy Scouts say, Marvin, ‘Be prepared.’ ”

  Marvin made a sour face and closed his book.

  Mr. Anderson, looking about the room, asked, “Why does the ancient mariner have an albatross hanging on his neck?”

  Elizabeth and five other girls raised their hands.

  “Elizabeth, you know all the answers. Give someone else a chance. How about you, Leslie?”

  Leslie took a deep breath: “The mariner wears the albatross because he shot it with his crossbow and his punishment for killing it is to have to have it hang about his neck
so that everyone will know that he sinned against nature.”

  “Very good, Leslie. I see you’ve been doing your homework.” Leslie beamed.

  I hated the poem, the lilting seasick rhyming, the corny moral; the whole thing without life, a cardboard boat in a cardboard sea.

  We had studied Romeo and Juliet, about which Mr. Anderson said, “This is a play about teenagers like yourselves, with problems I’m sure you will understand, because all great literature, no matter when it was written, reaches out to all of us at every age.”

  “But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?” Romeo wanted to know. What teenager in all of history had ever spoken like that? I disliked the play because we were told we would love it. I disliked everything official, approved, fixed with the seal of the eternal. If school liked it, it had to be nothing because it was meant to dull us into conformity and not to excite us, disturb us, tell us the truth about life.

  “I thought we were going to talk about Wordsworth today,” Elizabeth said. Some of the boys called her “brown nose” and “teacher’s pet.” Tony Gavanti, one day passing her in the hallway, said, “You ass-kissing cunt.”

  “Yes, Elizabeth, we shall. In fact, among the poems of  Wordsworth’s we were assigned to read, which one or ones do you like most? Class, I ask all of you the same.”

  Tony, to everyone’s surprise, raised his hand. “Mr. Anderson, can I have the pass? I have to go bad.”

  “May I have the pass?”

  “Yes, you may,” Tony said.

  The roars hit the windows. Tony had done the same routine in math and chemistry and speech.

  “Very funny, Tony,” Mr. Anderson said. “I hope your great wit helps you land a good job, should you ever graduate.”

  “Thank you,” Tony said. “I hope it shall.”

  “Class, turn to the Wordsworth poems. Elizabeth, which one have you chosen?”

  “ ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ is my favorite.”

  “Will you read it aloud, please?”