My Young Life

by Frederic Tuten

  “I have no idea, but I would be sure to take my portable typewriter with me.”

  “What for? You can always find another when you get to safety. I mean, what thing would you take so you can live? ¿Entiendes?”

  “I give up, Professor. I guess I would just have to kill myself.”

  “Many have done the same, so that’s not too funny.”

  “That was dumb of me. I’m sorry, Professor.”

  “Stamps,” he said. “Some are worth a small fortune, and you can slip them into your wallet.”

  “That’s amazing!”

  “By the way, The Magic Mountain, even in translation, is for you.”

  I had heard of it often and had tried reading it, but I could not get beyond the snooze-worthy opening thirty pages.13

  We were suddenly at Fourteenth Street. “Thank you for your time, young man.”

  “It is me who thanks you, Professor,” I said, after fumbling for words.

  “You are a good boy,” he said. “Don’t waste time.”

  How did he know that I killed time, assassinated days and weeks of it dreaming and sitting in the cafeteria and, like the lonely drunk at the bar, talking to anyone at hand? The professor’s parting words frightened me. I was a time waster, a daydreamer, a failure at twenty! And without a penny to buy a rare stamp to see me safely across the border.

  * * *

  13THE SPELL OF THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

  I did not know then that one day Thomas Mann’s book would change my life and become the foundation for my novel Tintin in the New World (1993), where the fabled young reporter and his sidekick, Captain Haddock, and the dog, Snowy, meet the characters from The Magic Mountain on the heights of Machu Picchu.

  The novel opened me to the vast encyclopedic, philosophical world, which the protagonists refer to and debate. But, on a more personal level, its theme of unrequited love spoke to me, not as a literary trope but as a theme central to my life and, eventually, to my writing.

  Lord Byron and Smoke Rings over Broadway

  Manhattan: Museum of Modern Art; Times Square, Fall 1956

  I got to MoMA two hours before closing. In those innocent days, before art had become a mass audience spectacle, it had a spiritual quiet and stillness. The garden with its Matisse and Maillol and Picasso sculptures was all mine. This was my oasis of beauty, my refuge from the Bronx, which I wished to escape from permanently. I sat under Rodin’s huge sculpture of Balzac and opened Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky.

  Soon I was with Port, dying of typhus in a little dark mud-brick hovel of a far-flung hospital in the Sahara Desert. What had started for him as a touristic adventure was ending in misery and death. But he had been dying spiritually before he and his wife, Kit, first set foot in North Africa in search of something to refresh their fruitless lives. Port was sexually estranged from his wife, but he was also estranged from everyone and everything, and, like the desert surrounding him, his soul was arid. I found it beautiful, noble, to slide into eternity among the dunes and the camels and the little colonial French fort in the oasis where Port had made his final way.

  Compared to Bowles’ North African world, my earlier dreams of living in Paris seemed so tame and ordinary, so civilized. I imagined myself like Port, wandering through silent villages of sunbaked mud, and falling in love, as he had, with a blind dancer and waiting to die, not old in a boring, bright, noisy hospital but in a hovel with a narrow window open to the night stars and to God, who was not there.

  “Fred!”

  It was Lenny, a premed student with Dumbo ears whom the girls hated and loved. He hung out with us at the bohemian table when he was not at the lab dissecting a baby shark. He copied sonnets from an anthology of love poems and slipped them into the books of girls he was trying to seduce. He had cultivated a great tragic façade—the poor man’s Lord Byron of the Bronx, Natasha called him to his face—and an exquisite set of manners that opened all doors. I had been with him once when we walked over to a table of four young women neither of us knew and he said, “Ladies, excuse me, may I engage you in conversation?”

  No one said “Please go away” or “Don’t bother us.”

  “Sit down with us,” the most beautiful at the table said, “and your friend, too.”

  Lenny had more girls than he could handle, and he was always looking for even more. The men, we hated him. He told me one day that he always came to our bohemian table because arty girls put out. “Fred,” he advised, “just take the arty ones to a folk concert or to an art movie house for a date, and then you’re in.”

  I was astonished to see him appear in the museum garden.

  “What’ya doing here?” he asked.

  “What are you doing here?” I replied, not too brilliantly.

  “Thought I’d stop by to check the talent. You can’t imagine how many chicks I’ve picked up here. They can’t get over seeing a guy alone looking at paintings. I had one follow me from the Impressionist gallery down here to the garden wanting to know if I was an artist.”

  “Which you said you were?”

  “Of course not. Why be caught in a lie so soon? I told her I was a poet, the truth. And she asked me if I ever read Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne. I love Rilke and I love Cézanne but I had not read that book, I said, and she told me all about it on the way downtown to Café Figaro on Macdougal Street, and even mentioned it in bed the next morning.”

  “That’s great,” I said, “but I’m reading right now.”

  “Oh, sure. Don’t let me stop you.” He drew up a chair beside me and went into a deep, meditative pose. I could no longer concentrate on Port, his fever, and his dying under an indifferent sky.

  “What’ya reading?”

  I showed him the book. He recorded the title and the author in his pad. “I know there’s a whole bunch of books they like, and it’s always good to drop them in a conversation.”

  “I can give you a list one day and you don’t even have to read them.”

  “You think so?”

  “Well, maybe just read the jacket copy.”

  “What about The Idiot? Natasha is always swooning over it.”

  “Actually, it’s called The Moron in the English translation.”

  “Very cute,” he said. “It’s a good thing I can take a joke.”

  I felt guilty for teasing him, for my envy of his looseness and daring, guilty that I was turning into a small-time literary snob or maybe just a plain snob.

  “I’m just kidding.”

  “That’s OK. Hey, you still have a job after school?”

  “I’m off today.”

  “Oh. Because I may have something for you where I work.”

  He had a job we all envied. He sat behind the Camel cigarettes billboard of a man blowing smoke rings. The smoke puffed out twenty-four hours a day. They were nationally famous, those smoke rings over Times Square; even parents from the outer boroughs would make the trip to show their kids that wonder. Lenny worked one of the eight-hour shifts behind the billboard and was paid to do little more than make sure the steam machine that sent out the huge smoke rings through the hole that was the man’s mouth kept working, so he had a huge amount of time to study or nap or do whatever he wanted. For all his goofing and chasing women, Lenny was a straight-A student, necessary for anyone who hoped to get into medical school.

  “Are they looking for someone?”

  “Sometimes, and I could put in a good word for you.”

  “Thanks. Please keep me in mind,” I said, already grateful and more guilty than before for being such a snot to him.

  He flashed me a big smile. “Hey, if you’re free, why don’t you come down with me now and I’ll show you around?” Port would have to hang on awhile longer and wait for my return before he slid into eternity.

  I was rarely in the Broadway area, except when I got off the subway and sped directly to the sleazy soft-porn movie houses, hoping not to be seen by anyone who might know me. So this was a new place for me: the towering
billboards, the knots of awed tourists and their guides, the flow of people from all over America whom I otherwise, in my Bronx and City College enclaves, would never see. We went up into the Hotel Claridge and took the stairs up to the billboard’s behind-the-scene mystery. Lenny was excited to show me a peephole that looked onto the streets below.

  “I’m like God being up here,” he said.

  Lenny was right. I felt Godlike, up above the world, surveying the movement and sway of human traffic. Below me were people without names or voices, bodies without history, without joy or tears. But then I came down a bit, and I realized although I was perched up high, I belonged in the street. I was one of the flow beneath me, and God was regarding me in the same way, indifferent to whether I was ill or in love. I thought of Port, just another dead ember; there were mountains of them, of us, just waiting. I was reveling in the bittersweetness of this profound reverie and deep thinking but was interrupted at its climax.

  “Cool, huh?”

  “Very,” I said. “I see why you like working here.”

  “I’m going to get a pair of great binoculars and scope out the talent in-depth.”

  “Thank you. I guess I should let you get to work.”

  “Gotta study, Fred.”

  I started to leave, when, drawing a bottle from under a stack of newspapers, he said, “Let’s seal it.”

  “Seal what?”

  “Our friendship, dummy.”

  He half filled two paper cups with Seagram’s 7, a blended whiskey I disliked and usually chased with beer. He knocked it down in a flash; I sipped it like sherry. He gave me a sympathetic look: “Whataya, some kind of fairy?”

  “I don’t usually drink rye in the afternoon.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Anyway, I got to get cracking with the books. The next time I’ll fix you a dry martini.”

  I forced a laugh. I was at the door when he came from behind his desk to stand inches away from me. He wore his tragic poet expression. “You could do me a big favor. Put in a good word for me with that Russian with the big tits. I got a thing for her, but she treats me like small-time potatoes.”

  All the guilt I had earlier felt for being a snob and a snot to him vanished.

  “Maybe when you get me the job,” I said, as coolly as I could.

  I was halfway downstairs before he shouted: “Tell her we’re great friends.”

  Vodka, Bread, and Pickles

  Manhattan, Amsterdam Avenue, Spring 1957

  One cold, winterish early April afternoon, Lenny and Natasha and I found ourselves alone at the bohemian table when everyone else had left for home.

  Natasha pointedly addressed me: “Let’s go for a drink.”

  Lenny, who for the past half hour had been silent and meek and ostentatiously reading The Idiot, chimed in: “May I come along?”

  Natasha: “You may say ‘can,’ as you always do.”

  Lenny: “Can I come along?”

  “Don’t you have to go to work?” I asked, hoping he would get the point and bow out.

  “I was having such an interesting time that I called in sick an hour ago, and they didn’t mind because they have five subs itching to go at any minute.”

  “So, what did you find so interesting, Mr. Poet?” Natasha asked.

  He took his time, made his tragic face more suffering than ever: “I’m crazy for your big tits and I’ve been wondering what color your nipples are.”

  I expected her to smack him, but she said, “Ask Fred. I’m sure he remembers.”

  He gave me a look of surprise and high regard.

  “I’d rather learn in person.”

  We rose to leave and Natasha said, “You may come, but only if you buy us all the drinks.”

  “I’m loaded,” he said, showing us a wallet stuffed with bills.

  The mute TV over the Emerald’s bar flashed static waves and broken wavy images. It was the first time I had ever seen it on.

  Mike yawned as we walked in.

  “Closing soon,” he said, “unless you’re an Irishman.” He smiled. I had never heard him speak so much, but then I realized he was flirting with Natasha.

  “We are all Irish here,” Lenny said.

  “The lass, too?”

  “I’m Irish as long as you keep the bar open,” she said.

  “All night, then.”

  “I see that a beautiful woman can melt the stoniest heart,” I wanted to say to Mike, but I thought it best to keep this piece of wisdom to myself, considering that now he and I were on intimate terms.

  It was six thirty when Lenny ordered the second round of gin martinis with extra olives. When Mike finally brought them, he said, “I’m clean out of olives, except for the lady.”

  Lenny said, “OK, just keep ’em coming,” laying a five-dollar tip on the now-empty tray. Mike yawned, held the bill up to the light as if pretending to see if it were a counterfeit, and slipped it into his apron pocket without a thank-you.

  “Big shot,” Natasha said to Lenny. “Etot mujik nichego krome deneg. In Russian we say about a certain kind of man that he has nothing to show but his money.”

  “That’s a great expression and true to life,” I remarked, further convinced of the wisdom of the Russian soul, as I had recently discovered it in Dostoyevsky and Gogol.

  “Thank you.”

  “You know, Natasha, I think you just made that up,” Lenny said.

  “So you’re not such an idiot after all,” she answered, giving him an approving smile that I did not like.

  By eight we were sinking. We ate liverwurst sandwiches with wilted onion on stale rye to keep us from sinking more deeply.

  “We should have pickles,” I said. “They keep the alcohol from absorbing too quickly.” We had a debate about this.

  “Eat bread,” Natasha said.

  “Eat your mother,” Lenny said.

  “Is disgusting,” Natasha slurred.

  “Just drink. Who wants to slow down anything anyway?” Lenny said.

  I had lead shoes tied with lead shoelaces. Lead head, lead hair, lead voice.

  The lights switched on and off until Lenny paid and we filed out, Mike’s voice behind us: “Come again, lassie.”

  We staggered to an empty Chinese restaurant on West 125th Street and ordered so much food that the waiter said, “Too much for three persons.” Lenny laughed and ordered even more. The waiter hated us. When he returned with the first tray piled with steaming dishes, Lenny put a five in his palm. This did not buy him a smile.

  “Big shot,” Natasha said.

  Halfway through the meal, Natasha rushed to the bathroom. A minute later we heard her throwing up. So did the waiter, smiling for the first time.

  “The Romans knew how to banquet,” she said, stumbling into her chair.

  Lenny was stuffing himself with General Tso’s spicy chicken and spare ribs and gulping tea. “What’ya want to do later?”

  “I’m going home,” Natasha said.

  “I’ll go with you, Natasha.”

  “Dream on.”

  “I’ll take Fred with me,” Lenny said.

  I didn’t want to go back to the Bronx. I wasn’t even sure if I could make it all the way—the subway, the bus, the walk home, my mother. But I was pissed off by the way Lenny made me his second fiddle. “Go blow yourself up,” I said, embarrassed that I had come up with such a childish line.

  “Maybe,” Natasha said, inching her face to his, like a challenge to a fight, “but you have to spring for a bottle of vodka because I have nothing in the fridge.”

  He did not need more encouragement and paid the bill, leaving a giant ten-dollar tip on the dish-packed table. The waiter pocketed it and turned his back on us.

  “The Chinks are weird,” Lenny said as we got into a gypsy cab with a busted headlight. We stopped at a liquor store on 116th Street with tall plastic shields housing the cashier and the cash register. Lenny bought two quart bottles of vodka that looked like the ones I remembered having in Mexico, made in Amer
ica but with Russian-looking labels of bulb-topped buildings in a snowy night; it was the Cold War and we did not import vodka from the Soviets or their satellites. Lenny handed me two giant bags of pretzels and three smaller packets of potato chips.

  “In case you get hungry again,” he said, “and you can take them home.”

  “Fuck you,” I managed to say through a mouth packed with wool.

  We climbed up to Natasha’s apartment and the three of us squeezed into her narrow bed, Natasha in the middle. I fell off twice but climbed back on and we all continued drinking from the bottle until I fell off again and passed out. I woke on the floor, which was layered with broken pretzels, with Lenny and Natasha on the bed spooned, naked.

  Banishment

  Manhattan, The City College of New York, Spring 1958

  In the spring of 1958, I was standing at the entrance to Army Hall on the south campus with another student distributing the latest issue of Promethean. I was now an editor and sat more easily at the bohemian table. Two men in blue suits and crew cuts rushed up and said, “We are confiscating the magazines, and you are expelled. Go to the chairman’s office.” They scooped up the magazines and vanished.

  Professor Edgar Johnson, the English department chairman, was a renowned Dickens biographer and a sweet, crisp man who looked like his bearded subject. The other editors and I and our faculty advisor for the magazine, Professor Marvin Magalaner, a young Joyce scholar, sat in the chair’s office, worried.

  “A mother called and complained that she does not want her daughter to go to a college that lets such filth be published. The dean has suspended you until further determination,” Professor Johnson said.

  He was not stern or admonishing, which was a relief. There was to be a hearing in the dean’s office the following week, and until then we were not to attend classes or to show our faces on the campus. Our advisor was steadfast and supportive and gently raised the matter of academic freedom and censorship. The chairman asked, “Professor Magalaner, had you read the play before it went to press?”