by Lou Cove
The interview continues, and Howie follows up on this idea of falling madly and passionately in love. Does it come easily to him?
“It depends. People know each other over long periods of time. Sometimes you meet people and you realize that your histories go back for centuries. When I met my last girlfriend we had the feeling we knew each other four thousand years ago. There is no word for that kind of feeling, but everybody knows when it’s happening.”
He loves life, and oh, yes, he wouldn’t mind if someone in Hollywood sees this spread and makes him the next Starsky or Hutch.
“OK, if that happens then that would be pissah,” Uli nods.
Below these three shots and the text is the big finale. Howie, spread eagle, all the brown and tan clothes on the floor beside him. His armpit hair looks like it’s been sweating a little, bunched into thick strands, but there’s no other sign of perspiration. He’s just bronze. And a little pink. This time his penis is pushed back against his stomach and it looks like it’s made of plastic.
Did they put makeup on it?
His pubic hair is pushed back too. Did they tell him to adjust himself or did someone get right in there and use a special comb? Or their bare hands?
Side by side, Uli and I continue to browse the spread. My fingers wander to my face. They smell like burnt perfume.
We’re still analyzing when Howie appears at the door to my room. “So? What’s the verdict?” he asks, a new pair of drawstring pants covering the business again.
“It’s cool,” I manage, unable to find the right words.
“Really. You can say it’s weird to look at pictures of my penis, you know?”
“I kind of see it all the time,” I remind him. “But it’s weird that everyone else can now.”
“Touché.”
“How many people were there when they took the pictures?” Uli asks.
“Photographer, makeup and hair girl, art director kind of person. And the centerfold editor.”
“I would have been wicked embarrassed being naked in front of all those people,” I say.
“Hazard of the profession. But I don’t mind being naked in a group. You saw my wedding photos.” He sits down beside us on the bed. “Hey, is this my Hustler?” I nod. “Just give it back when you’re done. It’s a new one. Stick with the back issues, Sticky, OK? But yes, I don’t mind the public nudity. Though it’s a little hard to keep it up when everyone’s staring you down.”
“That really is weird,” Uli says.
“Yup,” Howie concedes.
“So, how did you get so Lou Ferrigno for this?” Uli keeps going.
Howie smiles and flexes a bicep. “I was going more for Paul Newman, actually.” He walks to Bunny Yabba’s crate, leans over and sniffs. “When was the last time you cleaned this fucking thing? It smells disgusting.”
“I don’t really smell it anymore,” I say.
“Trust me. It’s bad. I’ll help you clean it out tomorrow,” he promises, sitting down beside me on the bunk and pointing at the centerfold in my lap. “This is thanks to El Jefe, in a way. Remember the way he kicked my ass in racquetball last time? That was just the latest in a string of humiliating indignities. He’s almost ten years older than I am, but he is one tenacious motherfucker. And one of those times, a couple of years ago, he said ‘This is middle age, boy. Use it or lose it.’ And me, huffing and wheezing on the floor of the court? I realized he was right. El Jefe usually is, for what that’s worth to you. Your old man knows shit.
“So I start working out with a sense of purpose, instead of just going to the gym to play a game. I start treating my body like a science experiment.” He stands up and makes as if to pose in front of a mirror. “Oh! Pecs not big enough? Let’s try to make them harder. You know what kind of a revelation that is for a former fat kid? I can carve my body into whatever shape I want to. Six-pack? Triceps? All possible. I started right away after that game. And breaking concrete with a sledgehammer for work didn’t hurt. Next thing you know, I’m in a hot tub in Berkeley and a pretty lady across from me asks if I’d be willing to pose naked. Fuck yes! I’m beautiful now! But you saw the ugly truth: beauty can’t slay the beast. Your dad still kicks my ass. He’s a killer, that Papa of yours.”
Uli, captain of the Papa fan club, nods vigorously. “But what about Carly?” Uli asks. “She seems super sad. Is she mad about the magazine?” I flash Uli the angry Papa eyes but the question is already out there.
“Yeah, well…” Howie starts. “I had a little fling with El Jefe’s secretary. Remember the one at the desk?” he says to me and I nod, angry eyes morphing to saucers of surprise. “So I had to tell Carly that I wanted to. That it was going to happen. We made a promise to always tell each other whenever … whenever that kind of thing comes up. And she sets it up, you know? So there are never any surprises. I tell her who I want to be with and then she makes it happen, so that I’m not just out there sneaking around. Lies are what kill relationships.”
“Seems like Carly wasn’t that happy about it, though,” Uli says. “I mean, if it’s part of the agreement and everything.”
“Point taken,” Howie replies softly. “Sometimes love just hurts like a motherfucker.”
*
Our Thanksgiving guests all have questions of their own:
“Do your parents know?”
“How much did they pay you?”
“What’s the point?”
The questions are fast and relentless.
The magazine, it turned out, wanted a man with an erection. (Uncle Rick: “I couldn’t do that if you put a gun to my head.” Enid Freedman: “I thought that was … against the law. Being upright, I mean.”)
“My dad wasn’t too thrilled. He wasn’t running down to tell the rabbi, you know? But my mother had a different take. She told my dad, ‘Burt Reynolds did it! And look at his career!’”
Grandma Wini, never one to abide a gloomy moment, breaks in: “Well, this grandmother thinks it’s very brave and very wonderful. I can’t wait to show the ladies at mah jong. This is the perfect distraction from that dreadful game.”
“Dayenu,” Howie sighs, getting up to kiss her. “You are one of a kind, Grandma Wini.”
“Hey, I don’t care about the Pittsburgh perspective,” Uncle Rick breaks in. “I just wanna know how they got you up! Let’s get to the good part.”
“OK, listen, before we get into the arousal part, can we have the kids go upstairs?” Enid beseeches.
“Lou,” Papa calls. “Upstairs. Take all the kids. And your brother, too.”
“I want to know that part, too, you know.”
Uli nods feverishly beside me.
“Not on your life,” Mama says, pointing to the stairs.
I stand reluctantly, appeal with my eyes to my father but he just shoots me an unambiguous expression of finality, then resumes his role as maestro of the table. “Steve! A little more wine? And Glovey, what can I get you? Cigar?”
As he doles out bitter servings of brandied apricots and crème fraîche, I have to reconsider Papa all over again. “Your old man knows shit,” Howie had said. The man I so admire, admiring the man who made me. Papa’s not Lou Ferrigno. He’s a skinny, short Jewish guy with a perm. Handsome, yes, but not a physical specimen. It’s not physical prowess. It’s tenacity. Discipline. Maybe even ferocity. He isn’t in it to lose. He is going to win. At work. At play. As a father and a son and a brother-in-law. Even as the new Jew on Chestnut Street, living under the watchful eyes of Glovey Butler and the reproachful Salem royals, the backward townies and the sea captain wannabes.
Howie may be number one with a boner in a national nudie magazine, but Papa is El Jefe.
The Kicker
Yahweh must know what I’ve been thinking. Obsessing about Penny and Barbi Benton. Bailing on the bar mitzvah studies. Having fun.
So he decides it’s time for me to get whacked.
I have seven days to adjust to the new reality that the man sleeping down the hallway from me isn’t sim
ply a free spirit, an unusual intrusion of cool—but a bona fide star. Only just enough time to imagine the kind of car he’s going to drive when he becomes the next Starsky. And now …
“Time out, hombre. Gotta go home,” Mr. November says when I find him stuffing his rainbow wardrobe into a duffel.
“What? Why?” Electric panic jolts me, top to bottom.
“My mom. She fell and broke her leg. Her ankle. I don’t know. I’m not sure. But she can’t walk.” Steam wafts from the bathroom where Carly is showering. It’s seven in the morning. I’ve never seen either of them up this early.
“How did she break it?” I ask.
“Strolling in the cemetery. Annual visit to see the relatives. Put a stone on a grave. Say ‘I’ve come here.’ I guess there was a pothole between Great-Uncle Mortie and Great-Auntie Flooz. There always was. And my mom is pretty heavy. Top-heavy, little bitty bones.”
“What about your dad? Can’t he take care of her?” I demand.
“My father couldn’t cook a pot of pasta if you told him Jack Benny was coming for dinner. Plus my Uncle Izzy lives with them.”
“So? Why can’t he take care of them?”
“Because he’s an extremely large fifty-year-old child,” Carly says, walking out of the bathroom and kissing me on the cheek. Damp lilac-scented hair. Tea and honey and something else.
“What does that mean?” I say, intoxicated and angry at the same time.
“Uncle Izzy’s retarded,” Howie says. “He can’t take care of shit. Carly and I need to go there and take care of all of them. It’s going to interrupt our living with you for a while and that’s a drag.”
I start with solutions but quickly segue to pleas. “We need you here, you know.”
“Hey, I like being with you, too. This is fun. And Pittsburgh ain’t no picnic. It’s going to be a production just to smoke a little dope. But listen, I want to leave you with something. Something to keep you company while we’re gone.” Howie hands me a small package wrapped in the Sunday Globe funnies. Inside is a black, hardbound sketchbook—a miniature version of the journals he keeps—its pages completely blank, except for the first, which bears the following dedication:
This book is joyfully given to Louis Cove from Howie and Carly and is dedicated to the million little voices in people’s heads that like to have what they are saying be written down.
An old writing teacher I once had told me that a person learns to write by writing. So, Lou, here’s a whole book to write anything you want in it—even pictures.
The nicest thing about being a writer is that it doesn’t stop you from being anything else you want to be. You could be a plumber and a writer, too.
So, here’s your book, now,
hope you like it,
Howie + Carly
“You can use my colored pencils while I’m gone,” he adds. “I’ll leave a bunch in my room.”
“So that means you’re coming back?”
“Is Lenny Bruce’s real name Leonard Schneider?”
“How should I know?” I almost cry.
“Hell yes.” He hugs me, hard. I want to let go as soon as possible—of him and of this unfair feeling of loss. But I can’t.
“Do you know how much I love you?” Carly asks, eyes searching mine. I shrug. “You can’t possibly know. Now give me one of those hugs, too.” And I do, holding on hard and wondering if the towel might just slip when I step away.
Later, outside, we are all crying as the powder-blue minibus disappears down Chestnut Street. Usually, when people go away, it’s just one of us kids crying while the others comfort. Today, the family weeps as one, so there’s no one left to tell us it’s going to be OK.
“Now. Let’s go get dressed,” Mama says eventually, “it’s still a school day.”
I stop in Howie’s room on the way, find the pencils, and retreat to my bunk bed to heed his counsel and write sad things. Bunny Yabba scratches anxiously from inside his crate but when I don’t attend to him he settles down. Atjeh scrambles up the stairs and claw-skids her way along the hall to my room where she leaps up beside me, making my cheek sloppy.
“Quit it,” I say, forcing her head down. “Lie down. Down.”
She watches me as I stare at the white page, unable to conjure any words. Eventually I decide to draw instead: an eye, brown like mine, bloodshot, with a tear dripping from the corner. It’s not very good, so I add a sword poking up through the bottom of the eye, color the teardrops red, and add a little spray of blood flying off and away from the pointy tip. Then I slide the journal under the mattress of the bottom bunk to the hiding space below and get ready for school.
*
“Do you think Laurie Cabot can read your mind?”
“Duh. She’s a witch,” Uli says as we cross the street on the way home. “Why? Are you afraid she’ll read your dirty mind and make you stop hanging around with Penny?”
“I can’t help it,” I confess, a centerfold of Penny seared in my mind.
He laughs, punches my shoulder. “You better be careful. Or you get the curse!” He considers this for a minute. “That would be so freakin’ basil, though. If you could read someone’s mind?”
“Basil…?”
“So basil.”
“No, I mean, what does that mean? It would be … basil?”
“Oh. You know how some people say ‘boss.’ Like, ‘it’s wicked boss?’ Which means it’s really good. And some people say ‘bitchin’.’ Which is also good. But I wanted to make up my own word for something that is so totally boss and bitchin’, so I called it basil.”
“But, basil is a vegetable.”
“It’s an herb,” Uli corrects.
I shrug, sniffing the last whiffs of Athens Bakery’s bread still lingering in the unusually warm December air. Uli’s different, which is why I like him. He’s got weird ideas, all the energy I lack, and he’s ready to try anything. But he’s not Howie, and his not-Howieness is pronounced during the long Pittsburgh defection. In a lifetime of unwanted separations, I’ve learned to stuff the bad feelings away, but this one doesn’t want to be stuffed.
We cross Broad Street, pass the houses at the tail end of Summer, and crawl through a hole in the wrought-iron fence and into the cemetery behind Oliver School. Having a creepy graveyard behind your school was just one of the many reasons I was glad to leave it behind. But it’s a good place to hang out.
There are broken branches strewn everywhere among the headstones. IN MEMORY OF MRS. ELIZABETH. IN MEMORY OF STEPHEN COOK. IN MEMORY, MRS. MARY PUTNAM. HERE LIES MOLLY BRITTON, DAUGHTER OF EDWD. AND POLLY BRITTON. AT 15. WHILE YOUTH DOTH CHEER, DEATH MAY BE NEAR. And Pickering after Pickering after Pickering. Ruth. John. Eunice. Timothy. Mary. And then Mrs. Lucy Glover, wife of Capt. John H. Glover, who died October 22, 1830, aged forty-nine years. SHE LIVED RESPECTED AND DIED LAMENTED. Is this the mother of Glovey Butler? The grandmother? I try to do the math as we move. She’s probably her great-great-grandmother I conclude. And she lived respected, just as Glovey does. But did she live feared?
I lay out an assortment of comic books, Wacky Packs, and Pixy Stix as we settle in a spot shielded by thick bushes and December-shriveled poison ivy. It’s our regular spot, right by the Clifton crypt. I’ve used knives, elbows, anything to pry or pound open the doors to these crypts. I never really think about what we might encounter if we actually got in. Scapulas and clavicles, coccyx, femurs, and phalanges—the stench of rotten old Salem, composting behind those steel doors, built into the bright green knolls of this cemetery of which I don’t even know the name.
On West End Avenue all that was under our feet was subway breath screeching and blowing through the teeth of the grates. Better to be down there, rocketing through the tunnels of Manhattan to a new and exciting place, surrounded by living people … dancing, shuffling, hacking, ignoring, giggling, groping, sleeping, reading, yelling, rushing people. Every one of them alive. I don’t even know where they put the dead people in New York.
Bu
t in Salem, the kids know where the dead are. We play alongside them, over their heads, mostly ignoring them but always knowing that they are there with us.
“Did you ever get into one of these?” I ask Uli, banging lightly on Clifton’s final front door with my toe.
“Naw,” Uli lays back and pulls a book of matches out of his pocket.
“I still want to see. I mean, I don’t. But I do.”
“Inside, you mean?”
“Yeah. Are they really still in there? Is it coffins or, like, bodies on little stone beds? Like a Dracula movie or something.”
“We could check…” Uli offers, flicking a lighted match at his outstretched feet.
“Do you have more?” He hands me another book of matches, and we start flicking our little flaming projectiles toward Clifton’s crypt.
“You ever hear DEVO?”
“What’s a DEVO?”
“A band. Are we not men?” he starts singing in a robot voice. “We are DEVO…”
“No. Did you ever hear Eric Carmen?”
“What’s he do?”
“That song, All by myself … don’t wanna be…”
“Ugh! How can you like that? That’s so bogus. SO bogus.”
I shrug.
“You’re a cool kid. You should listen to New Wave.”
“I like rock.”
“Well Eric Carmen is not rock. He’s cock.” He busts out laughing. “He’s cock! Cock ’n’ roll!”
“Hey! Trash mouth!” a loud voice shouts out.
We jerk up simultaneously and whip around. Two girls, one as small as the other is large, have appeared in front of us, arms crossed. They must be from another school because I don’t recognize either of them. But Uli does.
“What’s up, Charlene?” he asks the big one, sitting up in the dirt.
“You desecratin’ somebody’s grave?” she asks, sounding and towering like The Thing.
“No. Just lighting matches. It’s not going to hurt anything.” I look curiously at Uli, who seems far too conciliatory.
“It’s a holy place, fahkwahd.”
“Yeah,” the little one repeats in her Minnie Mouse voice. “Holy. Fahkwahd.” Her smile fans an unexpected spark of fury in me.
