Three Balconies

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  You can say that it was a meaningless game and that it certainly wasn’t going to be reported in Sports Illustrated and that I should have been casual about the experience. Nonetheless, it stung.

  I asked Margaret about Beau. She was a psychiatrist I was dating who was much older than me which had its own erotic appeal.

  “He has a character flaw, darling,” she said. “You won’t find it in the textbooks.”

  She doled out such insights sparingly, roughly one each time we met, which fueled our brief affair and may have kept it going. I wondered how many she kept in reserve. Our brief affair ended when she insisted that we see each other three times a week – as if I were a patient. But she had wondered at the time why I kept up my friendship with Beau.

  “It seems so unsatisfying.”

  I had no answer at the time. But I must have known, instinctively, that despite his bravado, the amatory and athletic achievements, both real and imagined, I could always count on Beau – no matter what my state – to be in worse shape than I was. I was not alone on this. Many of us took that strength from him. None of us realized the toll it was to take on him.

  It will come as no surprise that we enjoyed going to the fights together. Beau arranged for our ringside tickets; I paid for them as I did for our dinners and nights on the town. I don’t know if I had more money than he did, but he had the family and after my wife left me I had no interest in money. I spent whatever I earned in theatrical royalties as soon as I received it, almost as if it were an annoyance. We saw Roberto Duran, unknown then and sleek as a panther, defeat the lightweight champion Ken Buchanan and spit on him in the process. We watched Jose Torres literally paralyze Willie Pastrano with a single body blow, the latter never having been knocked down before.

  My father was dying slowly from a blood disease, but he could still get around and on occasion, we took him along. My mother had died some years back and he lived alone in the apartment they had shared for many years in Stanford, Connecticut. I lacked the will and strength to have him come and live with me in one of the flats in Manhattan I rented every few years. Then, too, such an arrangement would have interfered with my rigid schedule of getting my work out of the way and trying to seduce as many women as possible – taking advantage of the glorious license that had been issued to one and all in the ’70s: Carry on to Your Heart’s Content.

  I suppose the Fight Nights and an occasional dinner were a means of atoning for failing to care for my father in his last days. Beau told me that his father was a retired engineer who had spent many years abroad building dams. Mr. LeVyne joined us for one of the Fight Nights at Madison Square Garden. He was a small round-shouldered man who wore a fedora and a tan windbreaker and did not seem to fit the swashbuckling resume supplied by his son. Beau and his sister had been raised in a small flat on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. I kept wondering how Mr. LeVyne had been able to find the resources to send his children to Wellesley and Princeton. The two older men, both soft-spoken and roughly the same age, got along well. The Hispanic fighters were first coming into prominence at the time, and the new fans, from a more demonstrative culture, were more raucous than the usual mild-mannered Garden crowd. When a decision went against a Panamanian favorite, a hail of beer bottles rained down on us from the balcony. Using a bench as an overhead shield, both Beau and I led our respective fathers to safety.

  We saw the first of the memorable Ali-Frazier fights. In the dressing room, Frazier, a man I had written about for a magazine, shook hands with my father and congratulated him on the iron grip, forged in New England textile mills, that this small courtly man was to maintain until he died. Afterward, we joined some boxing regulars at Toots Shors nearby. A promoter asked if I was satisfied with the complimentary tickets he had been giving to me and Beau.

  “They were just fine,” I said.

  The news that the tickets were “comps” and that Beau had kept the money I’d given him to buy them was hardly devastating. I wasn’t exactly out of pocket, since I thought all along I’d been paying for the tickets – but it was unsettling, one of the many little jolts in our friendship that I was to experience at regular intervals.

  I have the uneasy feeling that I’ve been portraying myself as a monument of good behavior. It may be impossible to dig out from this posture, but I like to think that my transgressions – failing to care for a dying parent; suddenly, almost viciously shutting the door on an affair that no longer interested me – had more sweep to them than those of Beau.

  Nor was I was an injured victim. No doubt, I upset my friend Beau as often as he did me. A cruel blow to him must have been my very existence – an unspoken but subtle (and smug?) reminder that as rudderless as my life had become I had at least some career achievement and he had none.

  My circle of heroes shrinks as I get older, but I continue to be in sophomoric awe of outstanding writers and athletes, the latter posing a particular problem for me. What does one say to Pelé? Or Jerry Rice? What conversational opener is appropriate upon meeting Dominguin? Beau had no such inhibitions. On our nightly tours of the city’s clubs and restaurants, he would disappear and then pop up at a table nearby, having an easy, bantering exchange with Reggie Jackson or Earl Monroe or whichever legend happened to be in the city. Somehow he would confer upon himself a status equal to theirs. After all, weren’t he and Jim Brown, at bottom, both jocks, a pair of football greats out on the town? I believe he truly felt that he would have surpassed Brown in the record books were it not for the mysterious injury that cut short his athletic career at Princeton. And somehow, his relaxed style with them brought great heroes down to human proportions. At one of the small parties he gave at his immaculately-kept book-lined house in Brooklyn Heights, I met Kyle Rote who had always seemed Herculean on the football field. It came as a surprise that he was mortal after all, a man no taller than I am.

  Beau read a great deal and for some unfathomable reason was on the mailing lists of publishers who sent him review copies of their latest novels. Whenever a notable first work of fiction appeared, Beau would somehow wind up with the author in tow, squiring the novelist about the city. He was on friendly if not intimate terms with established writers as well. Capote, Jones, Shaw, Algren, Mailer. Such men may have been Gods to me, but not to Beau who saw that they were plagued with indigestion, had to worry about money and divorce, and feared death. He was aware, as I was not, that the writing of Lolita did not encase Vladimir Nabokov permanently in a state of celestial bliss.

  What did they see in him ? That he had charm was undeniable, although my friend Margaret – in one of her carefully parceled out insights – suggested that I examine this trait carefully. Do we really want to be charmed? By a charmer? In the company of distinguished writers he was neither self-consciously brash nor overly solicitous but would simply penetrate their celebrity without fear.

  He didn’t drink very much or smoke and the very smell of marijuana turned him sullen and listless. But there were times when the proximity of these substances got through to him and he would behave badly. One such night, at a restaurant, he challenged Bill Russell to a test of strength. He had to be held by the great NBA star at arms length – kicking in the air – until he calmed down. On another occasion he flexed in front of “Crazy Joe” Gallo, prompting the fabled mobster to get up from his dinner party and ask the restaurant proprietor ominously: “What do you want done with him?”

  It was inevitable that he would match himself against the legendary “Pinhead,” a bearded giant twice Beau’s size, who had knocked out ranking heavyweights in saloons and was acknowledged to be the East Side’s top bar fighter. McMartin stood by, puffing on his pipe, as the two wheeled round and round on a dark side street, Pinhead slamming Beau to the ground, picking him up to congratulate him (“You’ve got a lot of guts, kid”) then flinging him against a tenement wall.

  In his pinstriped suits and corporate ties, he was always fighting someone and he was gracious in defeat. One night he showed up late at Elai
ne’s and cheerfully announced that he had just been knocked cold by the brother of a jewel thief in K.C. Li’s Restaurant in the West Village. He would drop out of sight on occasion, then show up with fresh cuts and swollen cheekbones, alluding to a score he had had to settle in central Harlem.

  One night, at a restaurant on Bleecker Street, a bedraggled poet came in from the street and sat down at our table. He recognized McMartin, had read a piece of his on Baudelaire and wanted to discuss it. When Beau asked him to leave, he refused.

  “Now look,” said Beau, puffing himself up. “Don’t make me repeat myself.”

  The poet ignored him and decided to stay for dinner. The air went out of Beau who picked at his food morosely and said: “If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s someone who’s above fighting.”

  In such situations, when confronted with someone of unprepossessing stature, but strong convictions, he generally backed off.

  I had no reason to doubt his courage, but on reflection I can’t think of a time when he actually came out on top in one of his many brawls. Which leads to the melancholy conclusion that actually winning fights was not on his agenda.

  For an embarrassing number of years, and no doubt to the detriment of the magisterial plays I had planned to write, I was completely preoccupied with sex – hot, immediate, relentless, boundary-breaking, personal and anonymous, long-and-shortterm, rough and gentle. I don’t recall this being in a spirit of conquest, but I can’t prove that it wasn’t. More likely, it was designed to make up for some long period of deprivation in this area. I know it was a journey of some kind, through exquisite and for me unexplored terrain. Nor did I experience the hollow feeling that many insist must accompany such activity. It worked out nicely, and I got out, so to speak, when I was ahead.

  Despite his unsettling last words – “There’s nothing you can do for me” – my father left me some money, enough to buy but not furnish a small apartment in a midtown high-rise, which became a base for me. My territory, as it were, was a three-block area contiguous to my building. I focused on women who worked in the bank and the optometrist’s shop on the ground floor – and in an upscale boutique I could see from my bedroom window. The advantages I had were that I was available and totally committed to the enterprise. Striving to avoid the mistake of my marriage, I generally chose situations in which I felt I had a slight advantage. Women who were attractive but not overly so. Women from the boroughs who had just discovered books and theatre. Others who were new arrivals from foreign countries. It’s fair to say that I preyed on women, but also to point out that often as not I discovered that I was being preyed upon. This was particularly true of a disastrous affair I had with a woman from Ecuador. I thought I had ingeniously picked her up at a delicatessen – only to learn that she had researched my work at the library, was familiar with my brief entry in Who’s Who – and had been sitting at the same table for several weeks in the hope that I would drop by.

  Beau seemed to enjoy women, but was less relentless in his pursuit of them. His affairs had a rueful caste to them. When I think of him in this context he is sitting in the gloom of the Oak Bar of the Plaza Hotel at some defeated hour of the day, seeking comfort from a sturdy co-worker in tweeds. But there were more spirited times for him and I envied him several of the women he knew – a furiously attractive slip of an actress with an underbite and straw-colored hair who followed him about the city, trailing furs and money – and a dark-haired fashion model with a pornographic face who disappeared with him on a motorcycle one night and was never seen again.

  He showed up at my door one afternoon with a huge Swedish woman in tow who spoke no English; with a finger to his lips, he cautioned me to be quiet, as if I were about to shout out something disruptive. Unnecessarily, she did cartwheels to be enticing, then undressed and lay back on the bed to receive us. We threw off our clothes swiftly and comedically. Unused to sharing women, I had trouble getting an erection. Beau, too, had his difficulties, the woman was unhelpful, and the two of us labored fruitlessly throughout the afternoon. At one point, in a tangle of flesh, he whispered: “Put it in my mouth.” Lapsing idiotically into an English accent, I said: “I don’t think so, old boy.” It’s important here to catch accurately the spirit of his offer, which was that of a soldier on a battlefield, offering to help out a wounded comrade. Or so I felt at the time. Glumly, we proceeded on our barren path . . . and then later, as we dressed forlornly in the darkness, Beau rescued the occasion with a single statement: “That woman can never claim she didn’t get her pussy sucked.”

  There were the two houses, the cars, the school tuition, and for many years and through some sleight of hand, Beau managed to keep this precarious vessel afloat. He lasted an average of two years at his jobs; from the moment he was hired, it was as if he would set about to have himself fired – by slipping off to Morocco or Spain on trips that were only vaguely related to his work. In one case, while he was working at a supposedly full-time job, he signed on for a role as a pimp in a daytime soap opera. When the patience of his employer ran out, he would, within a short period, find work elsewhere. His abilities were not unique, however; attractive young men came along who could do very little with just as much facility. He ran through jobs in music, publishing, advertising. I’d always thought it surprising that he didn’t drift off to Hollywood, where men whose talents were even more amorphous had been known to flourish.

  The opportunities petered out eventually – he had developed a reputation – and I began to feel some pressure from him to do something about it, almost as if he were my responsibility. I loaned – or gave – him money, which was annoying but easy enough. And I manufactured some work by paying him to translate French plays, which he did with some skill. But obviously, I was not one of the rich and powerful men to whom he had always been able to attach himself. This not only disappointed but irritated him. It was a relief to me when Sergei Volkov came into his life.

  He was a huge man in both size and vision who had built a fortune in real estate in the Far West. He had also written an opera that was performed in Seattle and a sprawling novel of the Ukraine that had more merit than the criticisms let on. Feeling hemmed in, socially and artistically, he had moved to Manhattan to establish himself as a figure in East Coast culture. With his unfailing antennae, Beau had managed to meet him and to get us invited to a party Volkov was giving in celebration of his acquisition of a major art gallery in Soho.

  It wasn’t that we did much once we were there, but I have a picture of us not so much entering as sweeping into Volkov’s lavish downtown penthouse, and of our flamboyant arrival catching the eye of the industrialist. Halfway along in the festivities, in a swirl of vodka and caviar, Volkov made a slighting comment about a play I had written. (“It has no center. . . .”) When I took offense, a cry went up from his stunning wife who produced a pair of Tsarist sabres, handing one to each of us and encouraging us to use them. When a circle of guests formed around us, the host and I began to lunge at one another with the priceless weapons. The mood was playful – we both had a sense of theatre – but there was the chance of a dangerous escalation. Wondering how to disengage myself gracefully, I looked at Beau for some help – he knew Volkov, I didn’t – but characteristically, his eyes were elsewhere. I eventually managed to withdraw and to leave the party alone and without apparent injury. When I last saw Beau, he was chatting with the Volkovs. As I prepared for bed, I noticed a perfect ring of bite marks on my shoulders. Thinking back, I recalled that Volkov had sunk his teeth into me at the door in what I thought of at the time as a show of Slavic camaraderie. To be on the safe side, I had myself treated with a tetanus shot at the emergency room of Lenox Hill Hospital, which was inconveniencing. But there was comfort in knowing that the weight of responsibility I felt for Beau had passed to another.

  With Beau more or less accounted for, I continued along on a pleasant and purposeless path, contriving to have Hollywood pick up the bills for my wastrel life. Somewhere along the line,
the notion took root in this country that Hollywood corrupts writers. My career is living proof that the reverse is true. I found more gentlemen in Hollywood than I did in theatre and publishing, and the West Coast variety of scoundrel had at least some size and panache. It’s unlikely that I would have written Anna Karenina if I had stayed away from Warner Brothers.

  My slender responsibilities as a film person enabled me to continue living in Manhattan. A rough goal was to stumble into a commercial success or two, dissolve and show up as an aging roué, entertaining the local shopgirls on the patio of a villa in the South of France. David Niven, had the poor man lived, would have been perfect for the role. And then one Sunday night, a time I generally reserve for sober introspection, I attended a worthy but numbingly boring documentary on the disadvantaged of Guatemala and met Helen. Warm green eyes, a wink and a chuckle and there, with no sense of loss whatever, went the South of France. She gave up her apartment, moved into mine and we divided our time between the city and a cottage we bought together on Morris Island. Part of her enormous appeal was that she was not writing a screenplay.

  I saw Beau from time to time, clearing people out of Volkov’s path at various restaurants and functions. He waved at me once as if he were a national politician and I was someone he vaguely recalled as having supported him at the grass roots level. Volkov had given him an office, several secretaries and a handsome budget to develop books and films related to Beau’s favorite themes. I sensed trouble ahead when he called to tell me the ones he had chosen. I had once worked for a shrewd publisher who kept a list posted on his office wall of editorial subjects that were never to be presented to him since he considered them to be commercially ruinous. Beau had selected three of them. Months later, handsomely embossed but unsold volumes dealing with bullfighting and the I.R.A began to pile up in Volkov’s warehouse. Not too long afterward, McMartin told me he had attended the screening of a Volkov/ LeVyne film that dealt with log-rolling in the State of Washington. (“It did not go well.”)