My Young Life

by Frederic Tuten

  Our senior editor, one of the star students in the department, and mature beyond her years, whom we all admired for her political savvy in the academic corridors, said, “We were late to the printers and overlooked showing the play to our advisor.”

  I was not sure this was true, but I was grateful that she got Professor Magalaner off the hook: we loved him and he made us admire Ulysses as he wove through its more elusive and allusive pages.

  “I have read it in the magazine and I think it is a literary work without any hint of pornography or smut,” Professor Magalaner said.

  “I’m very glad to hear that,” Professor Johnson said, “and let’s hope we can soon get this all behind us.”

  We left with many thanks and apologies for the trouble, but not for the play that had caused it. I was stunned and fearful of being thrown out of my beloved college. We rushed to the cafeteria and to our table. The word was out, and we were greeted with applause. We were heroes. I enjoyed my first taste of fame and saw how exciting it is to be known and how one could want that all the time.

  The following day the suspension was reported in the New York Times and some days after in the Soviet newspaper, Pravda, which lamented the lack of freedom in the United States. Now that the tempest had gone beyond the college’s little teacup, we worried that the notoriety would further damage us and have us not just suspended but expelled.

  The cause of the suspension was my one-act play, “Tea Party.” It recounted in dramatic form and with painful sophomoric intensity and impassioned seriousness an event of several months earlier, the night when Lenny and Natasha and myself had ended up at Natasha’s apartment drunk, a night of talk and sex.

  Fame

  Manhattan, The City College of New York, Shepard Hall, 1957

  I phoned John with the news of my suspension and perhaps eventual expulsion. He laughed and put Anita on the phone.

  “My little rebel,” she said. “John and I are proud of you.”

  “Find me a girlfriend like you if you are so proud of me,” I said. I was still lusting for her and reprimanded myself—Stop! She’s like a mother!—but it did me no good.

  Maybe she’d read my thoughts, because she passed the phone back to John.

  “Freddy, don’t be a hero. Just apologize to the dean and be on your most polite and best behavior.”

  “Of course, meek and most humble,” I said.

  “Just be natural. He has all the power and you are a pain in his ass. He has to answer to his superiors and to the community and you want to be reinstated. Make him want to be on your side.”

  I understood better how John was able to work his way out of prison. He had made the warden and the governor and the whole prison administrative network believe that they could gain by releasing him. It brought them public credit for their role in his rehabilitation. An exchange: he goes free, they look good.

  But what could I offer the dean in exchange for my rehabilitation?

  My mother went to church for the first time in years, lit candles, and prayed for me, promising Jesus a novena for my reinstatement. Over dinner she cried, asking, “Can I go with you and tell them what a good son you are?”

  The week passed slowly and miserably. Being banished from classes was terrible, because I missed the lectures, but being banned from the campus cafeteria was worse. Now there was no place to go to meet my friends, to talk, to be excited, to live. If they threw me out completely, I planned to get my seaman’s papers, as John had done as a young man, and sail the world until I died, writing masterpieces of sea literature along the way. The problem was that I easily got seasick and turned green in mid-passage on the Staten Island Ferry, where I had taken some of my dates for glamorous voyages at night—five cents each way.

  We sat in Dean Gotschall’s giant office. He took his time shuffling papers and giving his eyeglasses a good cleaning with a spray and a cloth. But soon he started in with how upset he was that we had tarnished the college’s good name. He pointed to a huge tapestry behind him and addressed me. “This is a Renaissance hunting scene. Look at it closely.” I studied it: men on horses with pikes and lances were spearing a wild boar held at bay by a pack of dogs.

  “Have you noticed anything unusual, Mr. Tuten?”

  “No, sir, but I’m sure I have missed something.”

  “Yes, you have missed something.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What is missing?”

  I was baffled and frightened that I did not have an answer and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but I do not know.”

  “Excrement. Do you see excrement on the hunting grounds?”

  “No, sir.”

  “If this were real life, there would be dog and horse and boar excrement. If this tapestry were copying nature faithfully, it would show the animals’ excrement strewn around the ground.”

  “I see, sir.”

  “Yes, but this is art. Art selects and edits life and does not shower us with its filth and excrement. Do you get my point?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A sparrow circled outside the large naked window, then landed on the sill and puttered about. For a moment I was not thinking of the dean, of his lecture on art, of my suspension, but about my grandmother who, when I was a boy, used to put on our window ledge little bits of stale bread she had sprinkled with marsala to feed and revive the freezing sparrows in the winter. “Povere creatura—poor creatures,” she would say. “They are so hungry and cold.” Was I not myself hungry and cold? I wanted to ask her. Yes, but then again, so was she.

  “Do you have anything more to say, Mr. Tuten?”

  I had prepared myself for such a question, and I had rehearsed my speech.

  “I’m very sorry that my thoughtlessness has caused so much trouble, and I promise to be more responsible in the future. I hope you will reinstate us because we all here love this college and wish to honor it and not disgrace it.”

  I had meant every word of my labored apology. And, strangely enough, I thought he was right about art and animal functions. All the writers I had loved did not need to shit on the page to have it smell like life.

  He held us waiting for his verdict. Then, with great deliberation, he said, “The reports about all of you from your professors are good, and they recommend your reinstatement. So I will allow you to return to your classes and take your final exams.”

  I was suddenly seized with the crazy idea of asking, “What about the cafeteria: Can we go back there, too?”

  We thanked him, declaring our gratitude to the point where abjectness and gratitude bordered on satire. Dean Gotschall did not crack a smile and did not rise from his cluttered desk or offer to shake hands. He gave our advisor, who was clearly in the academic doghouse because of us, a nod, the signal that we should all disappear, maybe even vanish permanently.

  We rushed to the cafeteria to celebrate our victory. The word had already arrived, and once again we were met with applause. We were stars. I, the chief troublemaker, shone the brightest, but the brilliance did not last more than a week, and I was soon on the slide to the commonplace once again. Fame is power, and before long I was once again without both.

  Jack

  Manhattan, Café Figaro, Macdougal Street, 1957

  A week or two after my life had returned to lackluster normality at the college—that is to say, when I was once again a mere student and not a hero of revolt—I ran into Jack Micheline, a downtown poet friend of the Beats, whom I had met at a poetry reading a year earlier. He was a wild, fearless man just five or six years older than me but who lived to write and had managed to survive without any visible employment. Women were crazy for him, and he never went hungry or needed a place to crash.

  Jack, a self-proclaimed anarchist, was a big, thick guy with a voice that announced a Brooklyn trucker or an old-time New York cabdriver from central casting. In fact he was from the Bronx, like me, but his accent was Yiddish-tinted, whereas mine was Sicilian-flavored. All the same, we spoke Bronx.

 
He was born Harold Silver in 1929, but was changed to Harvey Silver, and then to Jack Micheline. He was fun like no one I had known or would ever come to know. He loved life to his pores, and he loved, above all, being a poet, which was his life. Like so many exceptional people, he was an autodidact.

  I found him once in the Strand bookstore reading at a stall. I did not want to interrupt him and started to turn away, but he saw me and called me over, excited: “Man, can you dig these old Greeks?” He showed me the Handbook of Greek Mythology he had been reading. “You go to college. I suppose you already know all this stuff.”

  “Not at all, Jack, I just know what everyone picks up along the way.” He was so endearing and earnest that I wanted to hug him.

  “Well, then, you should have this book,” he said, offering it to me as if it were his. In the end, I bought it for him—thirty cents—with his proviso that he would lend it to me whenever I wanted.

  He said, “I just spoke to the people at Evergreen Review and they want to see your play. Send it right away.”

  It went to the editor with a note saying that Jack Micheline had suggested I send it. I wrote his name in capitals. I went to the post office to be sure I had the proper postage and to see that the envelope actually slid down the chute by my own hand.

  I ran into Jack a week later at Café Figaro on Macdougal; the café was the closest thing to what I had imagined it was like being in Paris. I went as often as I could for the worldly European flavor: some of the patrons were leisurely reading books and foreign newspapers at their table, and some of the waitresses were actually French! Jack plunked himself down at my table. A waitress came over smiling the instant she saw him sit down.

  “Laurita, this is Fred. He was busted for writing a great play. He’s an outlaw, this guy.”

  She smiled. “Good, we need outlaws,” she said.

  I had seen Laurita before but I had been too shy to talk to her other than to order coffee. Also, she never smiled at me, although I saw she smiled at others.

  “Laurita’s from Argentina,” Jack said. “She’s teaching me about Spanish poetry.”

  “Jack thinks that the bedroom is the best place to study the poetry. Not me. So we do not have many lessons.”

  “Look,” Jack said, “this is a great play, Fred, and you’re going to get it published. I’ve got to take off. But I’ll let you know about Evergreen as soon as I get any news.”

  “Great. Can you call me?”

  “He has no phone,” Laurita said. “Maybe he has a wife who does, huh, Jack?”

  “I got a hundred wives, Laurita, but you’re the only woman I’m loco about.”

  The café owner gave us sharp looks, and Laurita said, “I have to go back to work, boys.”

  “Me, too, I got to split. You can always leave me a message here at the café, Fred.”

  He gave me his meaty vise of a hand to shake and left me paying for his coffee.

  I was ablaze with hope. To be in Evergreen Review, the avant-garde magazine that had published Beckett and Genet, meant everything. I dreamed of instant fame, a book contract, and the waitresses at the Figaro noticing me. Two weeks passed and nothing from the magazine. I imagined they were having heated discussions over my play, and that was why I had not yet heard. Then I went to the Figaro hoping there was a word from Jack. Laurita was there and waved the moment I walked in.

  “Jack left me a note for you,” she said.

  I took a table by the window and waited for my coffee to arrive before unfolding the note, written with a thick pencil.

  “They liked it, but it was not for them. They’re all commies in publishing. Don’t worry, Fred, you’re a great writer.”

  Love in the Mountains

  New York, the Catskills, 1958

  I first noticed her sitting by the window with a morning light on her face. I was smitten. One day I planted myself, as if by chance, at the doorway before class began and, as she was walking in, I tried the intellectual approach. “Have you made any sense of Eliot’s essay on Hamlet?” I asked.

  She looked me over. “In what way do you mean?”

  “I mean, why does he call it a failure?”

  “Why don’t you ask that in class?”

  “Because I’m shy.”

  “Sure.” She laughed, and I did, too.

  “I know who you are,” she said. “You’re the one who got suspended for that play.”

  I was thrilled that my fame had cracked open the door to her. “That’s me.”

  “I have a boyfriend,” she said, not too aggressively.

  “I have a girlfriend,” I lied.

  “Great, now we’re even.”

  I was in a summer class in Literary Criticism; I had taken it because I had to make up a semester of credits for the time I had lost from my freshman academic suspension. I was glad that Eva was also there, but I sank a little on the few days that she did not show up. I was also pleased to be there, because I liked reading Matthew Arnold, T. E. Hulme, Eliot, and the New Critics—all of whom took literature as the marrow of life and not merely its entertaining decoration. I liked the professor, Nat Berall, the most gentle man I had ever met and the most exacting. He read Eliot’s Hamlet essay to us line by line, pausing to comment, to question, to point out the equivocation in the poet’s frequent use of the word “perhaps.”

  “Eliot’s ‘perhaps’ is a weaselly loophole,” Berall said. “You stand by the sentence or you don’t.”

  He, like Leonard Ehrlich, believed in the power and rigor of words, held them sacrosanct, and considered their misuse a slovenly, immoral violation. Together, they had led me to believe that the literary world was guided by such principled thinking.

  One morning I was walking beside Eva after class, and invited her to go to lunch in the glamorous campus cafeteria. There, after I took her tray to the trash bin, I hinted that we might see each other sometime off campus.

  “I’d like that,” she said. “As friends.”

  “Of course,” I said, wondering how long I could play this game before she saw that I had a crush on her and would like more than a peck on the cheek for our good-byes. She never spoke about her boyfriend, and I made a point of never asking: that would have cemented the idea that we were just friends. But one day she turned to me just as we were about to enter the subway station at 125th Street, each on our way home, and she said, “Sim’s almost a Republican. Can you believe it?”

  “He must be the only Republican at City College,” I said.

  I went home feeling the door had cracked a bit further, and that I had to be patient and wait for it to swing wide open.

  We took long, companionable walks through the West Village, where she lived, and we talked about Kafka and his reactionary despair and agreed that Eliot was a crypto-fascist. We talked all the way from Washington Square to the Hudson River, where our little bohemian world ended and America began. By the end of June 1958, we were friends on the verge of being lovers.

  “I like you,” she said, “but I won’t sleep with you until I break up with Sim.”

  I liked her even more for being loyal. “I can wait,” I said.

  “Maybe it won’t be that long.”

  One afternoon, after our final class, at the iron gate entrance to the City College on Convent Avenue, Eva said, “You don’t have to wait anymore.”

  Eva’s mother, Magda, owned a small hotel, Apple Lodge, in the Catskills, and Eva took me there to work with her starting on the long July Fourth weekend. She had been a waitress at the hotel every summer since she was fifteen, and she knew the ropes. I did not know one end of the rope from the other and had never been to a hotel anywhere, let alone one with a large dining room packed with tables. Eva’s mother was welcoming but not too pleased about my working there.

  “Have you ever waited tables?” she asked. I did not lie. “Ever been a busboy?”

  Eva jumped in. “I’ll teach him, Mom, don’t worry.”

  “You’ll catch on,” Eva said, giving me a g
reat kiss. “Just think, we’ll have the whole summer together.”

  I took to it right away. I bused her station of four tables, with eight chairs each. I set up the dishes and silverware and folded the napkins for each meal and cleared the dishes during and after each meal; I served the coffee and tea and the hot water with a side of quartered lemon for the older regulars, “So they should be regular,” Eva quipped. I dressed the grapefruits, laid out individual pats of butter, sliced the two kinds of bread—rye and challah—by hand, arranged the slices in a basket, swept the dining room floor, and washed the silverware in two big tubs of hot water, one with soap and one to rinse, after each meal. We worked seven days a week for two dollars a day and tips. We had a Sunday off once a month. We made love in between bouts of exhaustion.

  Me on a break from serving dinner, summer 1958. I was the worst waiter in the Catskills and often demoted to busboy.

  Sometimes, when a waiter quit abruptly or was fired, I was given his station. I was the worst waiter in the Catskills and maybe in the cosmos. I could not remember the orders, especially in the morning rush, when all four tables filled simultaneously with starved breakfasters crazy to eat and to start their day of tennis or swimming, or their painting class, or whatever it was they did to squeeze out the most from their vacation.

  Each table believed they had arrived first and grumbled when another table was served before theirs. We were not allowed to write down the orders. I suspected that the hotel did not want to be mistaken for a diner. I forgot an order as soon as I was given it, bewildered by choruses of “Soft-boiled eggs with bacon” or “Where’s my coffee?” or tea, or hot water with lemon, or “Where are my prunes? The other waiter always brings me my prunes!”—not realizing that the other waiter and I were the same person.

  “You are adorable, but you’re a mess,” Eva said. “Also, it wouldn’t hurt to smile when you take the orders. A lot is forgiven for a smile.”

  Sometimes I made up the orders in the kitchen because I had to shout them out to the breakfast chef quickly; if I hesitated or stumbled, he sent me to the back of the line behind the other desperate waiters. I was always late bringing the food and everyone was livid from having to wait. The other three tables, whose orders I had not even started to take, clinked their glasses with their spoons, and some even pounded on the table, as they did in prison movies, so that Eva’s mother ran over and tried to calm everyone. As soon as they could find a real waiter, I was demoted to the busboy I was born to be.