Little Caesar

by Tommy Wieringa

  ‘I admire it, I really admire it,’ I told Sarah later that day.

  ‘But?’

  ‘No buts. You guys, you have something you consider greater than yourselves. To do that, you have to have something I don’t have. The ability to cast yourself off, like a sannyasi.’

  ‘Don’t act like we’re a bunch of freaks, some sect of idiots. Isn’t there anything you believe in? Isn’t there anything sacred to you? Not even love, Ludwig? Giving yourself away for another person?’

  I knew that my answer would be important to everything that came afterwards. I plumbed my inner depths, and said truthfully, ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’

  The day my mother left Loews, I played in the hotel for the first time. The celebrities in the room manifested themselves as coagulations in the crowd, humanity clotted around a core. It was some kind of charity thing, sometimes someone would ask me to stop playing for a minute while a man shouted numbers enthusiastically into a microphone: so many dollars for this, so many for that. The celebrities auctioned themselves off, you could pay to have your picture taken with them. Berny Suess had come into the room twice and drummed his fingers on the piano as he looked around at the proceedings. Afterwards I went past his office.

  ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘I doubt they heard much, but it was better than nothing.’

  I thought that was funny, better than nothing. I could pick up my money on Monday, the safe was locked for the weekend. It had to be in cash because I didn’t have a work permit.

  Sarah was with the Indians – she had followed the caravan to San Francisco and would be back on Sunday night.

  I walked out into the gentle evening. On the map I located Washington Way, on the border between Santa Monica and Venice, where my mother had found her rental. She had taken my suitcase along with her.

  I found the house in the shade of low trees. Whispers of lonesomeness in the branches. Our possessions were stored in a barn in Suffolk, I hadn’t given them a thought since the journey started, weeks ago – there was nothing I wanted more than to have them around me and to say the word home.

  I knocked. Then again. A little window in the door opened, like in some fairy tale.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  She was wearing a bathrobe from Loews. Did I fancy a cup of tea? We sat down at the table, a couple of candles, shadows. I looked around at the little house with its spare furnishings. Bars at the windows, gleaming pans on the kitchen wall.

  ‘Sugar in your tea?’ she asked.

  I looked at her.

  ‘Sugar, yes. And a dash of milk, please.’

  ‘All that sugar is bad for you.’

  ‘You use it too.’

  ‘Only a tiny bit. Mostly sweeteners, really.’

  There was something about her I couldn’t quite place. I looked at her more closely. She seemed older. Perhaps it was the candlelight, but there were lines around her mouth, her eyes, the place where life resides in a face. Sleep had lowered her defenses and removed the mask of eternal youth.

  ‘I played tonight,’ I said, ‘at Loews. I can pick up my money on Monday. The first dollars I’ve ever earned.’

  ‘On to stardom,’ she said.

  ‘It went pretty well. They said Tom Cruise was there.’

  ‘Were you all by yourself ?’

  ‘Tom Cruise was there too, I just told you that.’

  ‘Was Sarah with you?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Well, where is she?’

  ‘Demonstrating with Indians.’

  ‘So now you have time for me again.’

  ‘In San Francisco. She’s coming back tomorrow.’

  ‘I enjoyed meeting her.’

  She thought about it for a moment. Then, ‘She’s not particularly pretty or anything. Is she Jewish?’

  I looked at her, thrown off balance. Why would she say something like that? Why dispel the timid spirit of peace flitting over the table?

  ‘I think she’s pretty,’ I said. ‘What you think . . . well, you know, forget it.’

  She sighed.

  ‘You always think the worst, Ludwig. I thought she was nice, I said that, she seems very special.’

  ‘Is there any food in the house? I haven’t eaten yet.’

  ‘At this hour? Eating so late isn’t good for you.’

  ‘Not that either.’

  She came back with crackers and a tube of cheese spread.

  ‘Fruit,’ she said. ‘Would you like some fruit?’

  She put an apple down in front of me. Unless I was mistaken, I had seen this same apple a while back on the windowsill at the hotel. I squeezed a gleaming worm of cheese along the length of the cracker and smeared it out with the opening of the tube. I kept my eyes fixed on this chore all the while as I asked, ‘So what are you up to, during the day I mean? Globally speaking.’

  ‘Globally?’

  ‘No details.’

  ‘I don’t really feel like talking to you about that right now. Some other time, okay?’

  ‘When’s the next Lilith film coming out? You can talk about that, can’t you?’

  ‘In October, I believe. I’ll wait and see. The shooting for the new one starts in December, in Vienna. Then I’ll be leaving here as well.’

  ‘Don’t you miss your things, your personal belongings? Don’t you ever think about them? Don’t you want to have a house again? A real house? Not . . . this.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Material things, Ludwig, I don’t become attached to them. I’ve never missed them for a second. There’s nothing to own, not yesterday, not tomorrow, right now is all there is – and you don’t own that either. Even our house . . . it was terrible for me, a catastrophe, but do I miss it? No. We had a few wonderful years in Alburgh, apparently it was time for something new.’

  Her feet shuffled across the tiles. She stood up.

  ‘Do you want to sleep here?’

  I shook my head. She said, ‘Because I’m going back to bed.’

  I had wanted to say that I did miss Kings Ness, and sometimes realized with a start that the house was gone, gone for good, that we had fallen out of our lives and that there was no going back anymore. I’d also wanted to tell her about the Bodo Schultz exhibition, about his abyss – that at this moment he was somewhere in this hemisphere, scratching at his insect bites in a pitch-black jungle. But I would save that for later, she would feign disinterest but absorb every word, then say, ‘He certainly makes life difficult for himself, the poor man.’

  But that’s for later. First I’ll go to her house, sleep in the bed that smells of Sarah and me. Tomorrow she’s coming back. Today, in fact, it’s already way past twelve.

  In July and August there were fires around the city. Cigarette butts, the sparks from a grinder, everything set the hills aflame.

  Sarah gives me a silver ring to wear on my pinkie, so thin it bends all the time. She says, ‘If someone were to ask about the two of us, not that anyone does, but imagine they did, how should I describe it?’

  She’s energetic and cheerful, when we argue it’s because of the tiny space we share, and the differences in temperament. She can be volatile. She starts arguing, and only asks questions afterwards.

  Her body is a constant source of surprise to me. She has short, explosive orgasms, she has serial orgasms, a chain of little releases that seem without end, she has orgasms of which she says, ‘I don’t know, it started off real heavy but suddenly it was over.’

  Rugby has given me a body that is fit for hard confrontations, only in love do I get to know and control it as an instrument of pleasure.

  I lay there, my eyes open, sated, the world might be there or it might not – we had drifted off on a floe that had broken free of the earth. I look at myself from above, a boy on his back, no one wondering where he was, he knew no one and no one knew him; anonymity to the limits of nonexistence.

  When I got up in the morning, later than she did, I would find the notes.

&nb
sp; I’m missing you, at the moment you read this. Now and now and now again

  Or

  My heart stays behind somewhere with you (look in the bed)

  While we were making love I sometimes thought about the fetus above our heads and was afraid she would get pregnant again, new life against the black death that had come out of her. I dreamed she was sitting on me, riding me; when I wanted her to get off I discovered that we had fused, our bodies had become a single organism, as though we had been grafted together – the sense of horror followed me long after waking.

  I read a little book I had found among the esoteric volumes on her bookshelf. About a fourteen-year-old boy who boards a ship at Naples, he watches Vesuvius until it fades from sight, he is alone now for the first time in his life. The ship is headed for America. His brother, Ricardo, is already there, he has a job in Pennsylvania. Sabato Rodilla is following in his brother’s footsteps, in the new country he uses the name Dick Sullivan in order to get work more easily with the Irish foremen. His brother is killed in a mine explosion. Sabato, who now calls himself Sam, Sam Rodia, travels on to Seattle. In 1902 he marries Lucia Ucci. They have two children. Rodia is a problem drinker, in 1912 his wife divorces him. In the transcript of the interviews with him, his heavy Italian accent is preserved. I was one of the bad men of the United States. I was drunken. All the time drinking. But then suddenly he goes on the wagon. I quit the drinking in 1919. I don’t drink wine, beer, if you give me a hundred dollars. No touch it.

  For a few hundred dollars he buys a triangular plot of ground in Watts, a suburb on the south side of Los Angeles. Using simple tools, a hammer, trowel, pliers, he begins work on a series of towers, open constructions of steel rods, chicken wire and mortar. He decorates the wet mortar with colorful shards and shells he finds on the beach, with the bottoms of glass bottles, broken cups, the handles of pitchers, everything he scavenges from the side of the road and drops in the bag he always carries with him.

  The pictures in the book showed the angular structures lit by the sun – I wanted to go there right away.

  Rodia started building his towers as a middle-aged man, he was forty-two at the time, and only stopped at the age of seventy-five. Crisis, war, recovery, through it all he sits in the tops of his towers, singing and talking to himself. I work in the night, midnight, sleep five hours a night. Work two hours in the morning, Sunday, Christmas Day.

  I read that the entire complex formed the abstract representation of a ship, the walls surrounding the triangular lot were the hull, the three towers inside were the masts. The book didn’t say towards which point of the compass the bow was pointed.

  The banal but essential question was why Rodia had spent thirty-three years working on the towers. He said: Why I built it, I can’t tell you. Why-a man make the pants? Why-a man make the shoes? The beauty of it, it seemed, was enough for him, that and people’s attention. I built the tower the people like . . . everybody come.

  When Rodia turned seventy-five he gave the ground and the towers to a neighbor and moved to Martinez, where he lived with his sister. A gesture simply and poignantly dramatic. The artistic and his – torical value of his work was recognized during his lifetime. When someone once showed him a photograph of Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia, Rodia asked (and I couldn’t help laughing when I read this): Did he have helpers?

  They replied: Of course he had helpers.

  Rodia: I had no helpers.

  I asked Sarah to take me to see the towers. She had been there once, she said.

  ‘After that we’ll drive out into the Mojave. When you’re there, you suddenly realize that we live in a desert here.’

  Watts. I had never seen a more cheerless landscape. Low houses, all built of the cheapest of materials. Only blacks and Latinos, we were the only white people.

  ‘To be here after the sun goes down,’ Sarah said. ‘Brr . . .’

  There were lots of churches, simple wood-and-brick buildings with signs out front saying that Jesus had died for our sins and that He was the only hope of salvation. We asked for directions twice, were sent to the tracks, which we had to cross. And suddenly there we were, without warning, the Watts Towers were standing there – smaller than I had imagined, less colorful too. Sarah parked the car, I climbed out and crossed the street. First the curb, then the wall lining Rodia’s lot – I looked up past the circling structure of the middlemost tower, which had much more color to it when seen from close by. It was too much to take in at a glance, I stepped back. Something so vital in such illusionless surroundings, so much concretized creative urge – it touched something inside me, something I had never known was there.

  ‘The sun again, sweetheart?’

  Sarah patted my back. I nodded and wiped the tears from my face.

  ‘Come on,’ she said.

  I kept my eyes hidden behind the sunglasses when we bought our tickets at the neighboring arts center. A woman led us to the gate and unlocked it.

  It was no large plot of land on which those towers had arisen. But as soon as your eyes homed in on the details, the space doubled and a world of playful shapes emerged. This was the terrain par excellence of ‘ornamental man’, who works without examples, without predecessors, who bows only to a mighty urge to make something huge and irreproducible.

  There were many spots where he had added his initials, I saw surfaces on which he had left behind the imprint of his tools, as a kind of signature: with this I, Sam Rodia, built these towers. With this hammer, this pick, this rasp, these nails and these pliers did I perform this miracle.

  We crossed the decorated cement floors, peered up and became entangled in the endlessly spiraling structures, countless rings moving up. The towers were connected by arches, graced as well with sun-bleached shells. Rodio decorated in the same way nature overruns the earth when left to its own devices. This was a place that called for loud rejoicing. This was how one entered a faith, with the shock of a revelation.

  Sarah pointed out a little group of miniature stone animals on an archway. I nodded and moved away from her a bit. This was also a place to be alone, without anyone else in your field of vision, a place you should have to yourself for twenty-four hours in order to see it as he had seen it, at sunup, in the afternoon, in the evening, murmuring come, let us build us a city, and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered upon the face of the whole earth.

  And you realize that he had seen it only briefly in its current more or less finished state. Had that saddened him, the fact that all completion also constitutes an end? Or did he view with satisfaction the empire of towers he had built with his own hands? What did he shout when the hammer struck his thumb? You wished you could have been there to see him at work, hanging from a battlement. There were pictures of it, I had seen them in the book, a weathered man at the top of the little tower, wearing a hat, a pair of torn overalls over his street clothes.

  His workshop had been at the back of the complex, but it was gone now, burned down after fireworks landed on the roof. In a kiln there he had melted his glass and iron, from the walls of the complex grew melted bottles of 7 Up and Canada Dry. Ceramic handles stuck out of the walls, the ceiling of the front gate was a mosaic of broken mirrors. Beneath my feet the ornamental urge rolled on, the wet concrete was etched with endlessly repetitive geometrical patterns of flowers and hearts. In the walls I deciphered shards of plates, oven dishes, pots, pitchers. A sign said he had used eleven thousand pieces of pottery, ten thousand shells, six thousand pieces of colored glass and fifteen thousand tiles; in total, more than one hundred thousand decorative elements. I let the details burn into my memory, the birdbaths, the fountains, the words I had in my mind I’m gonna do something, something big, and I did.

  Slowly I came out from under the spell, signals from outside were making their way through, the silly, repetitive clanging of an ice-cream truck, very loud, very lonely, as though it were your own death knell being rung.

  We left t
he city. I looked at the worn-down mountains, lightless, arid, with here and there a few clumps of sinewy scrub.

  ‘That people live here . . .’ Sarah said.

  Stretching out at the foot of the mountains was a ribbon of tens of thousands of more or less identical houses, in camouflage, covered with dust and the shadows from the ridges. People here did their shopping and sought enjoyment in shopping centers on both sides of the highway.

  ‘What’s up?’ Sarah asked at last. ‘You haven’t said a word for a long time.’

  Schultz’s abyss and Rodia’s towers, they were tumbling through my mind, all jumbled together. By talking I could probably have imposed structure on the whole thing, by giving a name to the shiver of the sublime I might have been able to draw a line between the sacred and the sacrilegious, between the one who built a Jacob’s ladder and the other who thrashed the gods out of their heavens, but I didn’t dare. Instead I said, ‘Is this the Mojave already?’

  We had wound our way lazily out of the mountains, a void had opened before us. Looking at the dashboard I saw that the temperature had suddenly dropped. Little groups of clouds hurried along above the flats, the monotony broken here and there by a lone, blunt mountaintop. Plastic refuse was washed up against low shrubs. Clouds were piling up in the east.

  ‘We’re going to Europe,’ I said, ‘my mother and I. Maybe next month already. Or else in December.’

  She didn’t look over, kept her eyes on the road. I thought about my mother’s words. Maybe she wasn’t as pretty as I thought.

  ‘For how long?’ she asked. ‘Are we talking about weeks or months?’

  ‘It depends on where she has to work, and how long it takes.’

  ‘And you’re going along with her.’

  ‘I have to.’

  ‘Says she?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Says me.’

  ‘But why? Can you tell me why?’

  From between the clouds, islands of sunlight fell on the earth. In the distance were mobile homes, tossed down at random around the desert as though by a tornado. A couple of answers were battling for primacy, but one of them seemed to stand in clearer light than the other. I said, ‘She’s the only one I have.’