“I said I would do them.”
“Now. Now.” I stare at him wildly and stomp into the kitchen. I pound my fist against the wall. Then I take my briefcase and leave.
I take the subway to my writing studio in Times Square. I walk up Forty-second Street and watch the sights. The Jewish Feminists have set up a booth on the Holocaust and hold up signs to advertise a rally “IN MEMORY OF THE THREE MILLION.” Their newspaper has a picture of Joseph Papp on the front page nursing a leg: the headline proclaims with approval that Papp has shot himself in the right foot in self-criticism for making a chauvinistic remark.
When I arrive at the building, I take the elevator to the twenty-sixth floor and then walk up a narrow, winding, orange staircase to the top. My studio is in the tower. It has twenty-two little windows. It isn’t very safe. Big chunks of plaster keep shooting down from the ceiling and narrowly miss me. One night the chunk was five feet wide. I had to close off some areas entirely, and I keep moving my desk, a card table. I drink two cups of black coffee and begin writing about my childhood and my father. Tonight I wrote about the day he came home in the middle of the day to the boarding house and found me dressed up in a suit and tie. He exploded at me, claiming he wanted me to be out playing with the boys. This scene has stayed with me over the years and this time I’m going to get it right. I do.
By 3 A.M. I wind it up. I have a shot of bourbon to steady my nerves for what is to come: the trip home. First I take the same route down to the first floor. I have to ring the bell for a long time to wake up the guard, a black man named Harper. He has the front door key. He needs to talk. He is very lonely, in the building by himself. Tonight he talks about his family. I learn that his son was shot in the head and killed on the first day of his first job, before “he’d had a chance to scuffle up the ladder.” I am exhausted, but I listen carefully to Harper. I am stunned by what he tells me, and I have decided I can use him as a character in my novel. And I like him. And he holds the keys. I don’t know what to do: to just walk out seems now like the most insensitive thing I could do. So I put my briefcase down and we talk for almost an hour. Finally he lets me out. “How’s your young fella?” Harper asks. I start at this. Then I say, “Fine, fine.” We shake hands in the doorway. It is a very dangerous neighborhood, so he stands there watching me run down the block, making sure nobody gets me. But when I am out of his sight, I jump into a doorway and write down in my notebook everything of interest that Harper has said.
Then I begin the most difficult part of the night: getting safely into the subway. I have to get down the Forty-second Street block past the muggers, the pimps and hookers and the killers. I am vulnerable, with my beret, my books and notebooks and briefcase, walking in the neon lights past the porn shops. But I have certain advantages too: I look weird, I’m drunk from the shot of bourbon, and I deliberately talk to myself and act paranoid. I fit in a little better that way—even though the things I am saying aloud are really perfectly rational: stuff about making progress in my writing and avoiding summarization and cerebral content.
As I get closer to the subway entrance, it is really dangerous, so I run again instead of walk. The biggest challenge is when I reach the subway entrance. That’s where they wait with their knives and guns. But I’ve worked out a strategy that works pretty well. I run up to the entrance and then, to everybody’s surprise, I throw myself down the steps, landing at the bottom, where the token booth and the cops are. This is painful, but it works. Of course, I pad my knees with foam rubber. I am never mugged. Then, when I get on the subway, I look so ragged and wild, nobody messes with me.
XI
Some horrors are ridiculous: little thirty-year-old Jewish boy horrors. In 1968 I traveled to the frontier: to Vancouver to get a masters in creative writing. Alone and poor again at twenty-eight: no girls, no car or friends: dinner—peanut butter crackers, a sausage stick. If the head rabbi of Vancouver had known about me, I would have been a prime subject: a guest at people’s homes on Friday nights, dentists and lawyers offering me philosophy. At bar mitzvahs they would have stuffed my pockets with kishke for a rainy night.
It rained in Vancouver endlessly, day, night, weekend, pouring down on my body and will.
The chairman of the creative writing department suggested I turn the protagonist of my novel into a mouse. He suggested at one point or another with conviction that every writer in the department use a mouse as a protagonist. He always explained his reasons at length and with compassion.
During my first year in Vancouver, I put an ad in the newspaper and a teacher answered it. It said: “Graduate student seeks friendship with serious girl.” When she called me, we discussed the import of the word “serious” and agreed it was what made the ad unusual. She came to my apartment, with its bridge table, typewriter, TV set and cot.
Two days later, after I kissed her, she called me to tell me her old “beau” wanted her back. I felt weak in the knees at this news and had to sit down on my cot.
1970. The masters degree, a teaching job, meeting another faculty member: Susan. Marriage, and Danny.
XII
Spring, 1979. Danny will visit us in July for the summer.
Susan and I are at the Ensemble Studio Theater in Hell’s Kitchen. Here, on a tiny stage, are small miracles. Mistakes cohere into art. Poor and small and confined. Small, hard-backed chairs, no air. The atmosphere is electric and tight. We wait. I read the program. They are forming an acting school.
Wow. This is my chance. What I’ve been waiting for.
Fuck. I don’t want to be an actor anyway. I haven’t wanted to be in show business in fifteen years. It’s too late, too late, far too late, incredibly late.
Susan is shifting beside me. I know what she will say.
“Bruce, look at this—”
“I saw it. What about it?”
“Maybe Danny could—”
“Could? Could what? He doesn’t live with us anymore.”
I can’t breathe. My head is spinning. “I have to get out of here. I feel faint.”
I keel over onto the floor.
XIII
I call Eichner, Danny’s psychiatrist when he was here, tell him what has happened, and ask to see him.
I sit in the child psychiatry clinic—the only adult—smug and pleased as punch. I am snagging Danny’s shrink. I knew he preferred me all along. I pop two Valiums. I will not be droopy during this first interview.
But I don’t like being the only adult here. The other patients are drooling, reading comic books, sucking on candy. Even the other shrinks look like kids—swinging singles in their twenties, from Grossinger’s, with tiny moustaches. Entering the waiting room, they stop in their tracks when they spot me and seem to buzz together about it.
Eichner is a string-bean German, thirty-five, legs twisted around each other with delight, pasty complexion, glasses with a dangling pearl string. He takes wild stabs.
I tell him about fainting in the theater. “Danny is coming and I have to move out of that room of his—the only space I have to work when I’m at home—”
“So. You are furious! And for very good reason. His arrival means a suspension of your being.”
“Well no—”
“Oh yes! But why do you seem to think he has to stay in your apartment with you and his mother?”
I pause. “What do you mean?”
“So. Aren’t there hotels in this vast metropolis?”
“But he’s a child. You mean he should stay on his own?”
“Why not? If he can play with knives and drugs, if he can steal, why can’t he stay on his own at a hotel?”
“He’s only seventeen years old. And what about Susan? She only gets to see him once a year now. And it would make him feel unwanted.”
“Why would it do that?”
“The problem is … I’m frightened of him.”
“Of course. You should be frightened! Herr Daniel had knives of many sizes, he was into drugs, and his animosity was di
rected at you. His fist almost shattered the plate glass table top in this office.” Eichner stood up and made clawing motions with his hands. “Knives! He had knives!”
XIV
1953. Showtime at Grossinger’s. I worship the MC, Harry Spear, for his style and his showmanship. Tonight before the main act (young singer Harry Belafonte) he allows me and my buddy Mike Lobell to do a comedy skit. I must do this; shadows are failing on my life and a comic has to feel funny.
The lights are on us. I hear my beating heart, but our act is so funny that it breaks us up as we do it. But there is no laughter out front. One thousand people are silent. We walk down the stage steps into the blackness of the aisle to our seats. I hear Harry’s apology to the audience. Mike and I were both short and we didn’t reach the microphones.
I approach my seat.
One person in the audience is laughing, and it is my father. It is a silent laughter, filled with satisfaction and joy. I do not feel like a funny fellow.
XV
Fall, 1977. Danny is falling apart at school. He makes strong resolves which last for a few days. I map out a space for him to study in the cramped Lefrock Block apartment. I tell Susan to check his homework every day. I wrench these steps out of myself, reluctantly. They take my time, and they are ineffectual anyway. For Danny is a charming bullshitter. Soon he works his way out of the net: with a damaged look, he tells Susan he thought we respected and trusted him, yet we wanted to check up on him daily—as if he were a child. Susan is moved. No more checking: no more homework. I feel rage. He is back to his old schedule—staying out until midnight or all night with his friends. This partly pleases me—the part that wants him to fail. One night he sleeps on a park bench in Riverside Drive and his wallet is stolen.
We clamp down again. I supervise Danny’s English homework. For a week things go smoothly. He is friendly and communicative. After he leaves the house one morning, I hear a buzzing in his room. I open the door and trace the sound to his closet. I open it and a grow light stuns me. I shield my eyes from the blaze. It is poorly connected by a nest of wires hooked up haphazardly and seems set to explode. It is shining down upon a fresh marijuana plant. I unplug it. I pound the wall: sin and putrefaction. I am betrayed.
XVI
Danny’s sweeping, hungry glances at my bookshelves climbing to the ceiling. His eyes grow large, intent. He takes books out with care. “So many books,” he says.
I feel a surge of jealousy.
A rare moment when I write at home. He comes upon me at the typewriter, my fingers flying. He makes a typing motion with his outstretched fingers, smiling and approving, and says, “Keep making that beautiful music.”
How does he know I am really a writer? When I am home, I am drunk, or raging, or listening to Sinatra.
XVII
Fall, 1978. “School is bullshit,” I tell Danny. “What really matters is zeroing in on what you care about and learning to do it well. Not scattering and dispersing yourself.”
He shakes his head, which is bowed.
“I think you want to be in the theater.”
He nods his head silently.
“Yes.”
“If you could get to work with a small drama company, would you do it?”
“Sure.” He looks directly at me. “I’d really like that.”
Later in the week I call the Equity Library Theater and ask them if they can use an apprentice: my son.
“Does he have any experience,” they ask. “Yes, in lighting.”
They say they want to meet him. He races into Manhattan for the interview.
Danny is taken on. He is placed in charge of lighting for The Crucible.
He works every afternoon, evening, and weekend. He is very happy.
Susan and I go to see the production. We wait for Danny outside the theater afterwards as snow falls lightly upon us. When he sees us, he throws himself into our arms. We kiss and hug him.
“This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me in my life. Thank you,” he says to Susan, and “thank you,” he says to me. We all walk arm in arm up 103rd Street, from Riverside to West End, the old brownstones covered with snow and shimmering with Christmas lights: the old West Side, scene of my early struggles in a Communist lady’s boarding house, the prim lady spinning around with her flyswatter to crush cockroaches climbing up the refrigerator. Oh what outrage. One wintry night a telegram appeared under my door: Kay Boyle praising and criticizing a story I had written for her New School class. May Kay Boyle live forever for that gesture, which I needed more than food.
XVIII
Girls. No one failed with them the way I did. How they fell for the cool, the uninvolved, and how they turned away from awkward passion. An upright prick is a walking wound. What do you do with it? The guys who got cunt didn’t seem to want it. And it wasn’t even cunt I was after: breasts, dimples, wide eyes, long black hair, a warm, live hand, a shoulder to hold, a particular voice, a particular laugh—and they were enough to make me cross to the other side of the street when someone I wanted was approaching, as my father had done before me.
XIX
Winter, 1977. Danny is on his back, in his room, drunk and miserable. He should not be there, for the girl he has confided in us about, the first girl he has been able to approach this year, a new girl in his class, whom he asked out before the other boys got to her, striding toward her, introducing himself, challenging the odds—this girl is waiting for him for their first date. His friend John has gotten him drunk—John, who, I told Danny when he came home, wants him to be a loser Like himself.
Danny is lying on his bed, and we tiptoe around the apartment. At ten o’clock I knock on his door.
“Danny,” I say, “You know, Nicole doesn’t know why you didn’t show up. The way you described her, she sounds like the kind of girl who would understand if you called her and explained.”
He opens the door. “I’ve been thinking of that.”
“I don’t want to tell you what to do. But as it is now, you’re just a bastard to her. You’ve hurt her, you know?”
Danny nods. “Sure.”
“But maybe if you tell her all about it, you could just start over again.”
Danny strokes his chin. “I’d really like to do that. I didn’t want to hurt her.”
“Okay, Danny.”
I close the door. We listen for creaks and noises. After an hour, there is the dialing of a telephone.
A knock at our door. “I’m seeing her tomorrow night.” He comes into our arms.
XX
What surprises me are his deepest affinities: the Columbia area of the upper West Side, the lower East Side, blacks and Jews, Durante, pushcarts, Coney Island, James T. Farrell, Mike Gold, Richard Wright, a threnody of the lost and dispossessed, the old alliances of my youth that I have lost. Plucked from the West Coast, how did he get this way? He is recreating my dreams; he is walking the ghetto streets my father found as a child, reading the books my father, hovering in the Bridgeport library from the cold, once read.
XXI
Summer, 1978. Danny, Susan, Eichner and I in a circle at the clinic.
“His real father wouldn’t put up with this shit—” I say.
“He wouldn’t deal with it this way,” Danny says.
“What would he do?” I ask.
“He would talk it out, and try to understand—”
“Then why don’t you go back to him in Seattle?”
“Because—” Danny rises and covers his face. Looking away, he lunges blindly for the door.
“Danny!” Eichner calls.
He slams the door and we hear him run down the hallway. Then we hear a crash. Eichner runs out after him.
We pace the room.
After a long wait, Danny returns with Eichner.
We sit in a circle again.
“Bruce feels you want to hurt him physically, Danny.”
“I did that minute. I wanted to hit him hard. I mean it.”
“He means
beyond that. That you generally want to.”
Danny looks up. “Oh no,” he says.
Later, I say, “I’ve been awful to Danny, and I don’t know why. I understand his rage. Everything he does infuriates me. My criticism of him is worthless. After all, if he was perfect it wouldn’t make any difference. I would still resent his presence. And I’ve caused him to act this way. Every movement of his in the house has enraged me …”
“I really admire your honesty in saying all that,” comments Danny. “That takes courage.”
Eichner tells us later that the way things are, there would be danger. Danny is to go to Seattle to be with his father.
Summer, 1979. I am glad to see Danny when he returns for the summer. He has had a good year: catching up in school in Seattle, playing basketball, hiking and swimming and finding some new girl friends. He has made his own movie in English class. He has gone to AA meetings.
The first day we go jogging together around the Central Park reservoir. He contrasts the “natural highs” of exercise, nature, and friendship with drugs and alcohol.
The second day we go to the Thalia to see two Rossellini films, Shoe Shine and The Bicycle Thief, and at a bookstore haunt in the old Columbia neighborhood, I purchase Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy for him. It is very easy to give Danny things he will enjoy: all I have to do is think of those things that have meant the most to me. And he remembers every single gift I have ever given him—he ticks them off unconsciously whenever he wants to boast to a friend of what “his father” has given him. I would think the reference to “his father” would be confusing for him, but he manages nicely.
He sees his buddy Joey a lot of the time this summer and dates a girl named Shelley. When he finally makes his move with her, she says: “What took you so long?” He calls us excitedly—he has gotten a job. After a day it is over. I ask him what it was: “Giving out handbills for a fortune teller.”
The One-Star Jew: Stories Page 21
