Michael shook his head.
He looked out at Manhattan, the Public Library, Bryant Park, and the river, and said, “Here you will write many stories about the city.”
In a minute he was gone.
The next day I called him at the hotel. A female answered. I thought he was playing around. He wasn’t. It was Linda, who, instinctively, I never really liked. An icy wind always blew from Linda—in the old days, and now. There had been no change.
I had awakened the baby. “Do you want to speak to her? She’s very cross at you for waking her up.”
A voice said, “You woke me up!” There was a pause. “You woke me up!” Pause. “You woke me up out of a sound sleep!”
I could not believe it was the baby. I thought Linda was putting me on. Two-and-a-half years had gone by since I had seen her and the baby in Santa Monica.
The baby’s voice stayed with me, all that day and the next.
Michael flew back and forth and then it was preview night. Opening night was two days away. We had been invited to the preview. The disturbing meaning of that occupied my time and I swallowed a pint of rum to relax.
I scanned the program and noted that Michael, director of the show, was, among other things, vice president of Imprisoned Creators, Inc. Of course—he’d been especially interested in prisoners for years, working as a volunteer with them in workshops—but still it surprised me now. Michael, who had settled into a Hollywood home, who at this moment was circulating in the lobby with the kissers-and-huggers set. When did he have time for prisoners? I saw his curly hair, the bald spot in the back, his shaggy proletarian jacket with patches of corduroy as he reached to kiss.
I overheard him talking to one of the beautiful people about the swimming pool he was having installed. He had not told me. He caught my surprise—and laughed self-consciously. A bad moment between us.
When the show began, I grasped Michael’s comment over dinner that night, for he had worked part of it in.
Black basketball stars, making their theater debut as black prisoners talking extemporaneously and singing about their experiences. It was hard to make out their words. I frequently heard them say, “You had to be there to experience it” and “Damn the Man.” The audience cried out “Amen!” The set was a back canvas of a prison wall. The music was a piano player. The audience was weeping from the time the curtain opened. At the end of the act, the actors joined hands with the audience. The audience joined hands. Swaying, they all sang “We Shall Overcome.” Tears were streaming down my cheeks. I was confused.
At intermission, they sold souvenir pictures and descriptions of the basketball stars for a dollar. The bar did a booming business. The show would run forever. Michael handed over Linda to talk to us while he circulated. She was guarded and cautious, the way she had always been. She loved L.A. She sounded defensive, as if we’d take it away from her. She was writing for “Kojak” and Cosmopolitan. She said it was all crap, but she didn’t mean it and didn’t expect us to agree. What fed her dislike was my agreement. Still, she had a certain pity and compassion toward me after all these years. I felt like screaming.
Michael walked over to us, left, came back. The strained conversation with Linda went on. We were all standing in the crowded street, lights and smoke. A woman walked out of the theater saying, “You hope someone will say ‘hi’ to you—”
“Hi!” I heard my own voice.
It got a laugh, but I didn’t know what I was doing.
Being a hit, I continued. I said hello to strangers, answered questions directed to people near us. I was babbling away, uncharacteristically convivial.
Michael and Linda weren’t around at curtain. We waited outside the theater. I greeted more strangers.
Michael didn’t appear.
Michael was quoted in the press that week as declaring that the attitude toward blacks in the theater was still racist. “They all said, ‘Don’t bring the play to New York. Blacks won’t pay to go to the theater.’ It was a lie. Blacks will pay!”
I first met Michael in the New School cafeteria in 1965. I was neurotic. In the East Village church where, as a Jewish socialist atheist, they let me live in the tower, I laughed aloud at the news of JFK’s assassination.
Michael lived in two rooms with a hot plate on Fourteenth Street. He had an energy to him. Notes, address books, magazines poured out of the pockets of his jacket and raincoat. He wanted to be a director.
We climbed up the fire escape of the church together to the tower, where I read him my poems and stories. He encouraged me and brought me candles.
In winter we would stand outside the New School, in the freezing snow and rain, exchanging phone numbers of girls and articles we liked. One day he mentioned a girl he had met. Linda. I knew who she was: the fabulous blonde in my literature class who kept injecting the word “Revolution!” into literary discussions.
It was the time of the Beatles; Abbie Hoffman stripping nude at Fillmore East; Paul Krassner’s youth; the Fuck You Bookstore on Avenue A tended by Ed Sanders; Jack Micheline, Ray Bremser, and Allen Ginsberg reading at the 9 Arts Coffee Gallery run by a sailor in a loft above Ninth Avenue and Forty-third Street; Dave Van Ronk and Bob Dylan at the Gaslight on MacDougal. It was a dismal time.
Michael was part of that period—not me. I had nothing to do with it. I attended classes. At midnight I left the tower and walked in the snow along MacDougal Street past the San Remo, where O’Neill had worked (and Bodenheim and Joe Gould had begged), to the Cafe Figaro, where the young bohemians hung out. I sat down with my notebook, a pen, drank a double espresso. I waited. My pen started flying as I really gave it to my father, my mother, and several mean teachers. The waiter came by periodically. I waved him away.
At 4 A.M. one morning he asked me if I wanted anything else. I looked up wearily, picturing myself doing it. “Can’t you see I’m writing?”
At 5 A.M., he said, “Are you sure you don’t want anything else?”
“Perfectly!” I said.
“Get out,” he said.
“What?”
“Get out.”
“I’ll order something.”
“Get out.”
I grabbed my things and, trembling, weaved my way down MacDougal Street. It was deserted, except for a man in a hallway who screamed again and again, “I don’t hate—nobody. I don’t hate—nobody.” The snow was falling. It crept into my shoes. I felt a weariness and a sense of persecution. I felt good. I walked into Washington Square Park, white with snow coating the leaves of the trees. It was dawn.
I leapt into the air.
I was going to Israel for the summer. Michael and I both chuckled. “Shit, it’s the only country my father will send me to.”
Michael shook his head in commiseration. “A counterrevolutionary arm of American imperialism.”
“Exactly.”
At the memorial, Yad Vashem, outside of Jerusalem, there was an eternal flame for each of the concentration camps.
The dancing on the kibbutz accompanied by flutes moved me. The sight and sound of children—Jewish children—in the breezy garden in Haifa. Normal things.
When I got back to New York in the fall, the New York Times reported the death of Daniel Burros, a member of the American Nazi party, and disclosed that Burros was Jewish. Michael suggested that I write a play about it. He suggested the title: Jew-Nazi!
I tried to get into the head of Burros. I couldn’t even imagine him. I gave him my bar mitzvah, my first girlfriend, my sex fantasies. Michael was crazy about everything I wrote. He ripped the pages from my typewriter as I typed and kept muttering, “Sensational!”
He suggested a childhood scene in which Burros’s authoritarian tendencies are first revealed. Burros is shown insisting on directing a line of children his age at school, ordering them around. Then Michael wrote a song which he intended to have the chorus sing. The lyrics went: “Why do I feel so brutal/When at heart I know I’m a Jew?”
The first rehearsal was held at
Michael’s new loft. I trembled all through it. Jew-Nazi was more of a comedy than I had intended. The potential backers, embarrassed, drifted away.
Michael was hopeful. “It needs work, but it’s already quite wonderful.” My friend Michael. I am sure he meant it.
Michael had rented the large loft for himself and Linda. There was plenty of work space: an act of celebration after Fourteenth Street. Space to make love, to work, to have rehearsals: light and air. Bookshelves everywhere, posters, records, productivity. I had always lived in one room. Michael’s bicycle was in the hallway. He bicycled around the city. A basketball was in the corner. I pointed at it, speechless. I had only played Ping-Pong and potsy.
“I play on my lunch hours,” he explained.
“Huh?” I was trying to absorb it.
“Yeah, you know, these little corners of buildings, vacant lots, with the Puerto Rican kids.”
Normality, fearlessness, health, sunshine, brotherhood in Manhattan. I was deeply impressed. There were sides to him new to me.
Then Michael and Linda were getting married, and I was getting ready to break up with my girl before she broke up with me, and flee to Vancouver. I had sublet a room on Saint Mark’s Place.
One day Michael suddenly said, “Write a poem for our wedding.”
“Just like that?”
Michael smiled and shrugged.
On the day before the wedding, I went back to my girl’s apartment to pick up my books. She had called me insistently, giving me a deadline. It was a steaming hot July day. I stood on the stoop in front of the apartment house on Stuyvesant Street waiting for Michael. He had promised to help me carry the books. I had drunk a pint of rum. I leaned against the brick wall.
Michael was late. I waited. Then I saw him, grinning, waving, walking his bobbing, busified walk; slung over his shoulder was a green canvas bag.
We shook hands and embraced. “How the hell do you think of these things?” I asked, pointing to the bag.
“How else are you going to carry them, dummy?”
We walked up the five flights of stairs.
My girl was at the door. “This is Pepper.” A short man with glazed eyes waved at us and went back to his phone conversation. I stared at him.
“Hey, come on—” Michael called.
I tossed the books into the bag.
On the way down the stairs, I said, “Did you see that guy?”
“Poor passive schmuck,” Michael said. We carried the heavy load of books to the room on Saint Mark’s Place.
I had been working on a story about the girl.
“How’s the story going, Bruce?”
“You haven’t got time now, Mike—”
“Sure I do.”
We put the books down and I read my story to him.
I looked up occasionally as I read. He was smiling. When I finished he made a circle with his finger and thumb. “You’re being very productive, Bruce. It’s wonderful.”
I walked back down with him to Saint Mark’s Place. It was difficult to speak. Crowds pushed against us.
I watched Michael going off down the street, the empty green bag over his shoulder, hurrying to Linda.
I was shivering.
It was early morning of Michael’s wedding day. I lay in bed drinking rum and read the personal ads in the East Village Other. One girl wanted to meet a fellow whose middle initial was J, and no one else. Another said she had trouble talking with people, nothing serious, but would prefer to correspond with someone for the time being. A third was seeking a “combination of Eldridge Cleaver and Holden Caulfield, but Jewish and sincere.”
Five hours to the wedding. I dialed an ad: Club Mogen David. A voice told me they had someone very special for me to meet: Martha Goldberg. Martha was twenty-four, and would soon make aliyah to Jerusalem.
In a flat, gravel voice, Martha spoke to me over the phone: “I am tender, affectionate, sincere.” I quickly walked to Twenty-third Street and Ninth Avenue. Now I wouldn’t be alone at the wedding. I would bring along this affectionate Jewish girl and casually mention to Michael and Linda that we were emigrating to Israel. Michael would be so happy for me.
Martha answered the door. She was heavy but not fat. She wore a blouse, skirt, and sneakers. She did not smile. I heard growls.
Four huge dogs headed for me, gnashing their teeth. “Down!” Martha commanded them. She pointed her fist at the floor. “Down! You will obey me.” The dogs moved toward her. She settled herself on the bed, the dogs around her. She stroked them, and they licked at her partially opened blouse. When I opened my mouth, they growled. She leaned back and stretched, thrusting her breasts outward. The dogs licked her. She dangled her thick legs.
She spoke only when I did and after a pause. Yes, she was headed for Israel. There was a growing horse and dog market there. She would raise them.
I told her I had been to Israel.
“Good,” she said after a long pause.
“I have a wedding today, where I’m going to read a poem to my best friend and his bride.” I explained that Michael was directing his own wedding at a theater.
“I’m not much on weddings,” she said.
“Oh. You don’t want to come?”
“Not particularly.”
“Why.”
“It sounds mod and phony to me. Why hold a wedding in a theater?”
“He’s a director—”
“I’m not interested in the theater.”
I stood up. The dogs stood up and surrounded me. “Down!” she shouted, stamping her sneaker.
I said good-bye and staggered down the stairs.
At the wedding, Michael’s father stood on the stage and told the story of Michael as a schoolchild ordering around a line of children at school, as an early sign of his son’s directing ability.
It was very quiet then. I moved into the lights, to the center of the stage. I took the paper from my pocket and held it. My voice trembled as I read:
TO MICHAEL AND LINDA.
One.
“But the real issue is revolution!”
Said Linda to the instructor in the New
School class
And shortly after I met Michael in the school
cafeteria
Carrying his armload of books,
The Nation, National Guardian, notes
numbers, appointments.
One day he said, “I’ve met this girl …
How does friendship grow in the city?
How does love?
Two
Some of us submerge those we love.
But Michael and Linda shouted, fought, planned
revolution, marched on picket lines.
Shaped each other. Michael: director.
Linda: lyricist. Beside Michael, she wrote and
sang, “I sleep so still.”
Three
Our friendship: common struggles …
Jobs, New York in winter, therapy, the draft,
reading my work to them.
Common joys: Michael’s first plays,
And I at the Tribune,
publishing.
The passage of time.
Four
Michael and Linda in the two closet
rooms on Fourteenth Street
Corie and I on the fifth floor,
17 Stuyvesant Street
George Burns said of his late
wife Gracie Allen:
“Then, in 1928, I got my big break.
And I married her.
And we were together a long, long time.”
Then Rabbi Rick Levi spoke. He had recently been fired as chaplain at Yale for his revolutionary politics. He talked about his experience for a long time. The audience shouted “Right on!” but after a while they became restless. They began to talk among themselves.
The rabbi finally finished.
When it was over, I walked out into the hot sunlight, and down the Bowery.
The next week I left for Vancouver.
> Michael had gotten a job with a theater company in Los Angeles. Michael and Linda settled in Santa Monica.
He wrote me often over the years, encouraging me, his letters frantic, surging, the letters half-typed in his impatience, filled with half-words I learned to decipher.
He had a perfect job, his own theater, a lunchtime program for local workers, a prison program of theater workshops with kids from the reform school.
In 1972, he wrote: “The movie people are brutal and demanding … like the garment industry … Am planning next season’s work and reading, refurbishing my soul and thinking of parenthood—very strange.”
We exchanged happy letters. I was married, and publishing.
In December, my wife and I left the rains of Vancouver for the holidays and arrived in Santa Monica, where it was warm, bright, and sunny, to stay with Michael and Linda for a week.
We slept in the baby’s room, surrounded by a crib and toys for the coming baby. The house was filled with books and play-scripts. Michael’s sun-dappled workroom was lined with posters for children’s, Vietnamese, mental patients’ and prisoners’ liberation, as well as theater posters of plays he had directed. He had a complete file of our correspondence and my writing.
There was a book on Michael’s desk, Forming Your Own Corporation, lying alongside a pamphlet on combating American imperialism in Asia and Latin America.
Linda showed us a closet of lavish suede clothes—jackets and suits—she had bought for Michael, which she saved for him, but which he defiantly refused to wear. He wore the clothes of the people—as did everyone in the theater and movie colony in Los Angeles.
The One-Star Jew: Stories Page 8
