Monkey Boy

by Francisco Goldman

  Marianne was half one thing and half another, like me. She was half-Irish and half-Portuguese. She had pale matte skin, slightly nutmeg hued, and ebony hair worn in a careless bob falling partly over one eye, and that she kept tucking behind the opposite ear. Neither tall nor short, she was skinny but so well proportioned that her skinniness, snugly adhered to by her jeans, was also ample, her floppy emerald-green sweater far from new, her breasts like emergent islets underneath. Dark brown eyes, elongated and a little slanted, flashing vivacity and humor, and from her upper lip’s crest a thin scar, faint as a vein of milk, slanted toward a nostril, from when her cat had scratched her when she was a little girl. Lana was extroverted too, but Marianne was in a different way—chirpily sarcastic and sultry. Words poured out of Marianne in streaks of cheerful distress, and she had a robust laugh often directed at herself because she was her own favorite hapless comical character. She could talk on the phone for hours with me barely getting a word in, but I loved that more than anything. I grew much closer to her voice than I ever did to her physically. I didn’t have much choice.

  Marianne and Lana were both junior varsity cheerleaders, and I was on the sophomore football team. In middle school, I’d never risen above third string. For years, though, I’d been playing yard football, those long afternoon three-against-one muddy backyard battles, often in the rain or snow or after darkness fell, when I’d carry the football on every play against Mark Milbauer, Matt Blum, and Leo Seltzer, Jewish kids from the Wooded Hollow Road neighborhood, relentlessly ramming my body into theirs for hours like some blind demented animal. At home, in the new house, I’d stomp up and down the stairs of our split-level, pumping my knees, or hopping up them one leg at a time, over and over, in a sweaty trance. During one of our first sophomore team practices, I made a perfect tackle on Joe Botto, though he seemed twice as big as me, thrusting my helmet into his solar plexus, driving forward with my legs. Joe got up wobbly and looking queasy, fixing me with a glance of perplexed resentment, and Coach Gomes shouted: That Frankie Goldberg, he’s a tiger! There’s a future Harvard University cornerback! Coach Gomes was under the impression that I got good grades, a studious Jewish boy who loved the violence of football. Goldberg’s a ferocious little tiger, our coach repeated in that laconic rumble that we were always imitating. It changed my life a little, that one tackle in front of all those kids who heard Coach Gomes. I knew I’d get to play in our games. Our team went 0–8, but a few were close losses. In one game that we lost 14–8, I ran the ball across the goal line on a two-point conversion. Maybe I’d never been happier.

  The JV cheerleading squad, including Marianne and Lana, cheered at our games, which were played on Thursday afternoons. Probably that had something to do with why I was walking with them across the football field that Saturday. But also, I remember now, Lana was in a couple of my classes, including English, taught by Mr. Brainerd, whose best friend in college had been one of John Steinbeck’s sons. Mr. Brainerd had even stayed at John Steinbeck’s house. When we read Of Mice and Men, Mr. Brainerd told us personal stories about the man who’d written it and what he’d heard John Steinbeck say, not all of it nice, about some of the other authors we read in our class, like J. D. Salinger, Ernest Hemingway, and Truman Capote. One thing I especially remember is when Mr. Brainerd told us that in high school Hemingway had been a D student, because my overall grade average was a D too. Some weeks, though, Mr. Brainerd had us write short stories for homework, the only assignments I always handed in, and he always gave my stories an A, with comments like: “Putting a grade on this is ridiculous. But why can’t you write with margins and indented paragraphs like I always ask you to?”

  Not everyone was as encouraging as Mr. Brainerd. The next year in a creative writing class taught by Mr. Gripper, I wrote a fifty-page story about a lumberjack during the French and Indian War and the magical powers of his axe. Mr. Gripper gave the story back to me with a grade of F and the written comment “Write what you know!” An F for a fifty-page story! That seemed unfair, and anyway I did know about the French and Indian War. But it was my strictest policy never to contest a grade.

  Will you goddamned look at that, our future Hemingway gets a D in writing class! bellowed my father after I’d resignedly handed him my subsequent report card. HaHaHa, the boy genius writer, he cawed without laughing. I ran down the stairs to the front door to escape his horrible mockery, and he shouted down after me: Hey Hemingway, I’ve got news for you. You don’t have the guts, you don’t have the goddamned character to be a writer!

  Now that I think of it, probably it was through Lana, who sat next to me in Mr. Brainerd’s class, that I met Marianne.

  Fred Tarrell said, Francesco, the reason I asked to meet with you today is that in her fax to us Lana Gatto alleges that you are not a Hispanic, err, or a Latino. She says that in high school your name was Frank and that you’re Jewish. According to Ms. Gatto you had a nickname that everybody knew you by, and he glanced down at a notepad he’d pulled from the pocket of his raincoat, folded open to the page he wanted, and said, Gols. He pronounced it goals and looked at me as if silently willing himself: Show no facial expression.

  I answered, Yes, Mr. Tarrell, I admit it. I am Jewish, and all these years I’ve been hiding my true identity behind the last name Goldberg.

  It would have been great if Fred Tarrell had published our exchange in his newspaper, but he ended up not writing any story. Probably wanting to recover some dignity, which is sometimes impossible to do for a person who, after all, has just lost it, Fred Tarrell said, As you might know, recently there’ve been other cases of authors turning out not to be what and who they claim, so we do need to follow up when something like this crosses our desks.

  He must have been referring to the case of the novel about a Chicano that turned out to have been written by a Jewish guy using the surname Suarez or Sanchez. Book and publicity-spurning author from the barrio were a sensation until he was outed, then book and author were nuked. That’s what Fred Tarrell thought he was going to get to do to me, thanks to his Deep Throat source, Lana Gatto. But my answer landed like a clean punch to his puffy dwarf face.

  You got me, man. My name’s Goldberg, I reiterated with a shrug.

  And Francesco? Fred Tarrell asked tensely, a mean little curl to his lip. Lana Gatto says that nobody called you by that name.

  Francisco, I think you mean. You know, like in San Fran, the California city? Nope, they sure didn’t, Mr. Tarrell. Growing up I always went by Frank, but I was named for my mother’s father. Come on, man, you know what people are like around here. You think I was going to run around my high school waving a Guatemalan flag and insisting kids call me Francisco? At home I was called Frankie, not Panchito. See that ship, the Boston Tea Party ship? I worked as a tour guide on that ship. That’s how American I was as a kid. Am.

  Lana Gatto also wrote in her fax, said Fred Tarrell, speaking through visibly gritted teeth, that she was in your Spanish class and that you failed.

  That’s not true, I said. I got a C minus. Do you want me to say something to you in Spanish?

  That’s alright, said Fred Tarrell, slumping a little. Look, I’m sorry to have brought you out here only for this. He put his hands into his overcoat pockets and looked like he only wanted to go and get a drink.

  It’s damp and cold here on the bridge and getting windier. My bad knee is starting to ache. I might as well go check into my hotel. It’s a pretty long walk, but it will do me good after the long sit of the train. I head back toward South Station, passing pedestrians in dark winter coats, confetti-colored parkas, scarves and hats. Bent into frigid harbor gusts or pushed forward by them, almost everybody resembles a clenched fist inside a mitten. Nevertheless, I keep an eye out for anyone who went to my high school, though probably not many can afford to live in our town anymore, not since the strip of suburbs outside Boston along Route 128 turned into Silicon Valley East. Lexi handled the selling of our ho
use after my father died. I only know the house was sold to an MIT robotics engineer for about twenty times what Bert paid. Walking through this Boston gray winter gloom always brings back memories of coming into the city as a little boy with my mother to go shopping in downtown’s cold cavern of department stores and bargain basements, and with Feli on her day off, once to see Lady and the Tramp at the Paramount and afterward to eat pizza in the North End, my first-ever pizza, the unforgettable surprise of tomato-soaked elastic strings of hot mozzarella.

  I need to remember to buy a tin of butter cookies, Mamita’s favorite, before I head there tomorrow, butter cookies from France, with a picture of the Eiffel Tower or some other Parisian scene on the tin. There should be a gourmet shop near the hotel.

  One school night during that same autumn of tenth grade, Marianne and I were outside on her porch when she said, My mother says Jews are sexually perverted. Portnoy’s Complaint, its notoriety as a dirty book, had something to do with her mother’s opinion. My mom’s a little worried because we’ve been hanging around so much, she said. In that same baggy green sweater, Marianne was hugging herself against the chill, her beautiful lips twisted into a teasing pucker. How I wanted to reach out my hand to stroke her silky black hair, a yearning so vivid it was like I could feel the winged soul of my hand weightlessly lifting toward her while my corporeal hand hung at my side at the end of a meat hook.

  Marianne is the oldest of four sisters and one little brother. Her father seemed to be some kind of recluse though apparently there was nothing wrong with him physically. But it was Mrs. Lucas who especially watched over her children, and in these times, when any fifteen-year-old girl could so easily fall into miscreancy, she had to be extra hawkeyed with Marianne, who had no older sister to guide her. Mrs. Lucas, blue eyes soft with worry that could turn to stone, worked as a secretary for a medical technology business in the part of our town built over filled-in Charles River wetlands, now known as the Industrial Zone. I’d only glimpsed Mr. Lucas once, while standing at their front door one Saturday afternoon waiting for Marianne to come down their staircase after she’d run back up to her bedroom to get something. Looking down the hallway into the kitchen I saw a slender, angular man in a sweatshirt with sleeves rolled up over thin forearms, holding a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette, jutting chin and longish nose, I remember thinking he looked Egyptian, though I knew his ancestry was Portuguese. When I waved and called a greeting, he slightly lifted a hand and stepped out of view. Lana Gatto had told me that Mr. Lucas was a veterinarian who’d lost his license to practice, she said she’d kill me if I let Marianne know that I knew. Did Mr. Lucas put down the wrong dog or cat? They lived in an old three-story house with a porch out front on McIntosh Avenue, which ran behind the high school. Out on the porch that evening I could hear one of the younger sisters practicing her clarinet upstairs.

  Maybe I’m mistaken, and Marianne didn’t actually say that her mother was worried about us hanging out so much, maybe my memory is tricking me with a fictionalizing finger on the scale. But I can hardly ask Marianne tonight, at our first reunion in over thirty years: Remember when your mother said that Jews are sexual perverts? Do you think the reason she said that was because she was worried that soon we were going to be fucking? What if she answered: But my mother knew I was never interested in fucking you, Frank.

  Of course, I want it to be true that Marianne’s mother did say that because she was worried about her daughter falling in love with me, not to express a literary opinion about Portnoy’s Complaint. It must have been obvious to her that I was in love with Marianne. Whatever lay behind Mrs. Lucas’s words, they told me that Marianne and her mother spoke about me, and that night out on her porch, that made me happy. Had I taken that thought a step further, I would have realized they only spoke about me because Mrs. Lucas was opposed to Marianne becoming my girlfriend no matter what. I hadn’t realized yet that Marianne wasn’t the type to defy her mother, at least not to go out with me, as she would a few months later with Ian Brown.

  Autumn leaves were piled in the corners of the Lucas’s porch and lay over the small front lawn. A classic autumn in New England night, cold, smoky smell in the air, glowing bursts of yellow and orange leaves in the streetlights, every tree a giant Gustav Klimt dress hung from a line running the length of the avenue, a zesty, gleaming night imprinting itself on memory even as it was happening, you’ll never forget this conversation out on Marianne’s porch, Frankie Gee, or these feelings, so weird, beautiful, and crippled. Does Marianne still remember?

  There must be something I could have said that night, bold or funny, to turn things my way. Why couldn’t I have at least joked: Hey, I’m only half a sex pervert, Marianne, and half of that pastrami sandwich is yours if you want it!

  Toward the end of that walk from the Congress Street Bridge to the hotel, it feels like the temperature has dropped every block. Three hours, nearly, until I have to be at the radio station. I go into the bar off the hotel lobby and order a bowl of chili and a glass of red wine before even bringing my carry-on suitcase, knapsack, and the tin of French butter cookies up to my room. Gisela always had a thing for those cotton hotel room slippers you can take home, and whenever Gisela had a thing for anything, it was obsessive, so that now I always notice those slippers as if she’s been here just before me and left them behind.

  It was me who wrecked our relationship, but I don’t think too many mortals, in love with Gisela, could have avoided committing a mistake even less reprehensible than mine that she wouldn’t have forgiven anyway. If there were a perfect man for her, I used to wonder, what would he be like?

  We had so much in common, and maybe it was one of my mistakes to believe it was good to have those particular things in common. She also had an extremely fucked-up relationship with her father. When Lazaro Palacios, up-from-the-bottom, high-priced Mexico City criminal defense lawyer, found out from a spying older daughter that his fourteen-year-old youngest daughter was apparently having sex with her boyfriend, the drummer in a Nezahualcóyotl punk band, he took her out to their garage, stripped her naked, and flailed at her with a bullwhip while she huddled on the cement floor determined not to cry. Ever since, she’d refused to acknowledge him as her father or to refer to him by any name other than Señor Palacios. Gisela’s primly pretty mother, the daughter of Spanish Civil War refugees, seemed to fretfully long to be a close and supportive mom to her turbulent daughter but was constantly thwarted.

  I met Gisela at a party within days of having moved to Mexico City. A love-at-first-sight thing, like I’d been torn open, gutted, and refilled with pure yearning I could hardly bear. Her Picasso harlequin girl expressiveness, the straight line between her lips that when bent downwards at the corners and pulling her face down with it could make her look so tragic and so childishly gleeful when stretched out, deepening her dimples. Her jittery overcaffeinated Audrey Hepburn lissomness and poise. Her rich-girl-gone-wrong haughty moodiness. Her aloof air of cool, of pertaining to a world I’d envied from afar while claiming to disdain it. I must have had a class fixation, one like a secret devotion, because my last two relationships (Pénèlope, Camila) had been with rich girls who came from other kinds of exclusive worlds, both, in different ways, essentially rebels against their upbringings. Gisela, my friend told me, was twenty-eight, a talented photographer, her work published in some of the Mexican art magazines, displayed in group shows. I didn’t get to talk to her much that night. She left early with the young man my friend predicted she’d soon be breaking up with, and she did. Within a week she was dropping by my apartment nearly every afternoon. She used to tell me stories about her life in her funny breathless way, skipping over what seemed like the important and even crucial parts as if it bored her to have to slow down to describe them, so I always had to listen extra carefully, cast backward to fill in blanks, use my imagination a little, which I liked. Conversations like the scenes in a movie where the beautiful damaged ingénue discover
s that she’s found someone who truly listens to her instead of only lusting after her. Somehow I managed to be patient, didn’t panic that I was being trapped into a “just friends” relationship. We were on my bed watching one of those Golden Age Mexican movies she adored the first time we kissed and within moments were having sex in what was like a secret language I hadn’t even known I could speak and had been waiting to use all my life; it had a smaller vocabulary than Pénèlope’s but struck deeper, the punctuation marks having a subtly startling poetry of their own, maybe love, the true experience of being deeply seized by love was what that was.

  Gisela was extreme, hermetic, even strange in her individuality in a way that riveted me. She’d warned me: Soy una a niña perversa. One morning she threw me out of her apartment because she didn’t like the way I’d hung up a towel in her bathroom, an obsessive-compulsive control freak to boot. Photography, the stillness it imposed, was one way she calmed her nerves and frenzies, as was any form of intricate beauty that drew her into its circuitry and patterns, absorbing and sustaining her attention: a fascination with Arab calligraphy, ceramics, and the hand tattoos of Berber women; with Mexican prison tattoos; with any unique object, the more eccentric the better, that she considered beautifully made. She fantasized about owning a shop that would consist of only one window in a narrow wall where she’d display and sell one object at a time, mostly lost and degraded treasures she’d buy in the Lagunilla flea market and carefully restore. She had a stray-cat knowledge of Mexico City, knew how to converse with all kinds of people, especially those others might callously overlook or be frightened by. Gisela was a master shoplifter too. She had tales of mind-boggling shoplifting feats, she’d been at it since she was about twelve and had never been caught. To this day the best kitchen knife I own is a Wüsthof that she stole for my birthday from the Palacio de Hierro on Avenida Durango, where the expensive kitchen knives are displayed in locked glass cabinets; whenever I move, I take it with me.