Obviously she isn’t safe anymore. She’d slipped down from that fire escape, unknit herself from the limbs of her brothers and sisters, and found her way to him in the darkness, in the tunnel, where everything found him eventually, each with its fresh burden of unwelcome thoughts, its chain of unsavory associations.…
She’s only a girl, but she reminds him of a woman—reminds him of all sorts of things he can never really have, thanks to the camera.
When was the last time I had a woman, one I didn’t have to buy like a dancehall hostess? Weegee asks himself. Can’t get close to one with this damned camera always in front of my face, hanging at my hip, keeping me up all night without sleep.…
Weegee shakes himself out of his self-pity. Aloud—he’s a talker, Weegee, loves to talk to anyone, high or low, young or old, and in a pinch his own forlorn forty-five-year-old self will do—Weegee says, “Oh, shut up, you rummy old bastard. If you wanna cry, go buy yourself one of those heartbreak pillows at Lewis and Conger’s, fer chrissakes.”
He looks reproachfully at his warped reflection in the windshield. The cigar ember flares orange in the corner of his distorted mouth. Out of the corner of his right eye, he sees the girl coolly watching him, saying nothing.
As he drives from the gas-fumed tunnel and out under streetlamps again, both car speakers kick in at full volume, a loony Rossini overture tinkling from one while the other crackles with the police dispatcher’s voice. (It’s illegal for the average citizen to have one of these rigs in his jalopy. But Weegee has special dispensation from the police, who always welcome the ’38 Chevy coupe with license plates 5728Y, its trunk stuffed full with cigars, film, flashbulbs, flashlights, a pair of fireman’s hipboots, disguises, even a typewriter and a ream of paper, for quick captioning of photos, notation of who, what, and where, of disaster, death, and—too rarely—laughter.)
The dashboard clock says one minute past midnight, but for Weegee the night is just beginning.
Neon light from a hundred signs-HORSEFLESH SOLD HERE; ROOMS 35 CENTS & UP; TROMMER’S WHITE LABEL—slides liquidly up the maroon hood of the big car. A salami rolls across the seat as he takes a corner. He wolfs down an oily slice of meat he’s slightly surprised to find in the fingers of his free hand. He can’t remember cutting it. Can’t, in fact, remember where he was headed before the tunnel. Consciousness is fragmentary, a sign of exhaustion. When was the last time he slept? He tells everyone—himself included—that he sleeps in the day, but when was it ever day?
Weegee wipes his greasy fingers on a wad of teletype notes that poke from his jacket pocket like a stiff handkerchief. Idly, pointedly ignoring the girl, he uncrinkles the sheets, holds them up at eye-level, so he can still scan the street.
They’re blank, except for salami grease.
“What’s this, Mister?”
The girl’s voice startles him. It’s the voice that had said, “Tonight’s the night.”
Weegee looks to where she’s pointing. It’s the camera resting on the seat between them. Always between him and everyone else.
2
Camera Tips
The camera is a 4 x 5 Speed Graphic with a Kodak Ektar lens in a Supermatic shutter, all American made. The film inside is Super Pancro Press Type B. A flashbulb is always used, since most pictures are taken at night. But even when shots are made by daylight, the flash is still used. A Graflex flash synchronizer is employed. Exposure is always the same: 1/200 of a second, stop f/16. That is, at a distance of ten feet. At six feet, it may be stepped down to f/32. Focusing is always at either ten or six feet.
There is no time for anything else on a story.
3
The Curious Ones
The girl releases her cat’s neck, her hands still arched around its belly, ready to grab. The animal inches forward to sniff the camera.
Ignoring her question, which lingers in the air like a prostitute’s recriminatory perfume, Weegee continues to drive down Forty-second Street, past crowds outside theaters and bars, idlers and gawkers, lovers and fighters, musicians and sailors, the people of a sleepless New York poised on the precipice of another Sunday morning hangover. He’s wondering just how seriously he’ll have to take this phantom.
It’s a slow night, though still early. Weegee is jumpy, anxious for distraction, despite the fact that something always happens, and he always turns up just in time to capture it. It’s the girl making him nervous, isn’t it? He reaches forward and twiddles the Rossini to soften it slightly, then turns up the police radio, alert to any news that might concern him. The radio gives out a soft babble, like the voice of a crowd, teasing him with the sense of speech but no actual words. But he rarely needs the police; he gets his instructions from somewhere else.
The car slides over the streets like the planchette on a grimy Ouija board, spelling out clues he’s too close to read, rolling over letters in ripped-up broadsides, smashing the labels on bottles and cans; ghost fingers move him this way and that, from “Hello” to “Goodbye.” Sometimes he thinks that if he takes his hands off the wheel, the car will keep driving, taking him to another crime’s aftermath, another dark scene that is his alone to illuminate. Something is coming, something developing in this Darkroom the size of Manhattan. He’s at the mercy of forces that make him feel small and alone. Ghost fingers tickle the back of his neck.
But it’s the kitten’s whiskers. The creature comes crawling over the back of the seat, hunting for the salami. Instinctively he reaches for the camera, pulling it toward him, as if the cat had any interest in it.
“Where did you get it?”
Against his better judgment, Weegee answers her question with another.
“Get what?”
“The camera.”
The question makes no sense. He’s always had the camera. There was never a time without it, this appendage vital as his hand, foot, or balls. So baffled is Weegee that all he can do is repeat her last words.
“The camera?”
The girl unselfconsciously lifts one arm and scratches her downy pit. The breast on that side flattens, the pink nipple rising slightly up her ribcage.
The kid yawns, and Weegee thinks, Kinda late for her to be up. Kids need their sleep.…
Finished with her yawn, she says, “You don’t remember, do you? Here.” She reaches out and touches his face.
Spirit fingers, driving him.…
4
Harlem
Arthur Fellig dozes one night under newspapers in Bryant Park, behind the library. It’s his favorite midtown spot. Normally, the cops don’t bother anyone flopping here. But tonight is different. Fellig is rousted by a nightstick-wielding bull who sends him and all the other homeless bums out to wander the sidewalks of this gay and heartless burg.
The night before last, he was in the Municipal Lodging House down in the Bowery. Five nickels a night, but he ran out of nickels. On the way out, he noticed for the first time the big sign posted over the desk.
DEPOSIT CASH
AND VALUABLES
WITH THE
CASHIER
BEFORE GOING DOWNSTAIRS
Fellig began to laugh insanely, till tears coursed his stubbled cheeks. “Cash!” he choked. “Valuables!” He imagined a wall-safe full of pocket lint and bottlecaps.
Now, heading uptown, bracing himself against the winter winds, Fellig feels like ratshit. His stomach is gnawing itself, his mouth tastes like sour apple wine, his feet inside shoes whose soles flap with each step are starting to burn. He has no prospects, no skills, no friends.
He’s standing outside a furniture store window. The sight of a bed with white sheets is almost enough to drive him crazy. It looks like the most desirable thing in the world.
Tearing himself away, he strides madly off, bumping solid citizens without concern.
He finds himself at the Hudson. The water looks as inviting as a woman’s spread legs. Fellig pictures himself jumping, the splash—
Just then, a squad car cruises by, inserting
its unwelcome presence into his morbid fantasy. The cop hears the splash … he jumps out, takes off his hat, his coat, his shoes, then his pants, which he rolls up in a bundle to hide and also protect his gun … places all of them on the edge of the pier … and jumps into the icy water in his shirt and underwear, cursing. After a rescue the cop always has to take the trip to the hospital along with the would-be suicide to get thawed out … they have equal chances of catching pneumonia.
“Move along, buddy.”
Fellig pushes on, heading north along the West Side.
At 127th Street, he turns east.
He’s in Harlem now.
Fellig’s always gotten along good with coloreds. He’s got no beef against them. Discrimination seems so stupid and ugly to him. They’re all human, ain’t they? They can all laugh, all cry.
He wonders, But can they sleep?
He feels a little more at ease up here. The people around him seem content somehow, despite a grinding poverty almost as bad as his. Fellig’s spirits lift a bit. Might be a chance of a handout somewhere here.…
Fellig passes a church. A huge banner reads:
AFTER DEATH—WHAT?
REVIVAL MEETING
He hits Lenox Avenue, stopped short by a store at the corner.
(ALLEGED)
YOGI AND PROF. NIGER
ALL HINDU COSMETICS, OILS AND INCENSE
6TH AND 7TH BOOKS OF MOSES
LODESTONES—DREAM BOOKS
SPIRITUAL ADVISER—RELIGIOUS ARTICLES
7 KEYS OF POWER
It’s the “alleged” that piques Fellig enough to make him enter, tickles the ragged remnants of his sense of humor.
There’s a rack of colorful pulp-paper dream-interpretation books. Many shelves hold two-quart Mason jars with handwritten labels: Hindu Commanding Incense, Hindu Magnet Incense, Hindu Conqueror Root.… Tinted apothecary bottles are filled with any-colored liquids. A framed portrait of a turbaned swami hangs next to one of Father Divine.
The black man behind the counter sports a crop of white hair beneath his tasseled fez, but his thin mustache is still dark as coal. His large nose supports a pair of pince-nez glasses.
“How may I help you, son?” asks the proprietor in a serious, resonant voice.
Fellig flips a thumb up and back, indicating not the punched-tin ceiling but a spot outside, above the door.
“You the ‘alleged’ Professor Niger?”
The black man lets out a booming laugh. “At your service. And you must be the ‘alleged’ Weegee. I’d know your face anywhere.”
Fellig takes a step backward. The name sounds familiar, but in a way that frightens him. A long-buried memory nudges its way to the surface, floating up from a grave of old newspapers, broken tarmac and wornout tires.
(Small fingers brush his cheek … come out tonight, come out … remember …?)
“My name’s Fellig,” he says sharply.
Niger narrows his eyes and reaches under the counter. For a minute Fellig thinks he may be going for a gun; he tenses, backing off, spreading his hands to show he means no harm.
“Then this isn’t yours?”
The Professor lays a camera on the counter. Fellig stares. Almost remembering. Before the nights of rambling, before the drunken sleepless bouts of twisting on pews in the Bowery Allnight Mission, there was another time. Another name.…
And a camera. This camera. His?
His attention is caught in the burnished aluminum reflector that surrounds the empty socket where the flashbulb will fit. All the meager light in the store suddenly seems concentrated in the polished bowl, with his warped reflection at the center instead of a bulb. Fellig is blinded, as if he had been staring at the sun, as if the nonexistent bulb had just gone off in his face.
When he recovers his eyesight, all is as before.
Except that his hunger and aches are gone.
How had he ever forgotten? How had he spent all this time wandering in a dark city? When had they become separated?
“Got any money on you, son?”
He checks his pockets, wondering if there’s anything else he might have forgotten. But they’re empty. He shakes his head.
“Sheeit. Well, I promised to hold this till you come for it, without no word of no payment, so I’spect you can have it anyhow.”
Professor Niger pushes it toward him, across the counter. He reaches for it, hesitant, wondering how much more he can remember.
“Take it, alleged Weegee.”
“My name’s Fellig,” he mumbles, voicing his last doubts; but as soon as he touches the camera he knows that’s not true anymore. All doubt is gone.
He’s Weegee now.
Carrying his moments of split-second light forever through the city of never-ending night.
5
Psychic Photography
The camera takes the pictures.
The camera makes the pictures.
Weegee is convinced of this.
Whatever it is, wherever it came from, whether crafted by hands angelic or satanic, the Speed Graphic is more than just metal and glass. It, not he, is the doer, the actor, the Prime Mover. Weegee is only the instrument, the vessel, the driver and hustler who delivers the camera to its chosen sites; his hands cradle but cannot really even be said to point the thing.
Without the camera’s presence, the incidents he “photographs” might never happen, or would happen differently.
It is a heavy burden, especially when he considers all the death he has photographed.
Death. He is known for death, yet death is only part of what he knows. Can’t the camera see there’s more to life than its climax, must be more!
The shots of lovers on the beach, the children sleeping peacefully on the tenement fire escapes, the happy barflies and lushes, the hot jazzmen, the Village artists and their free-spirited babes, the nurse pushing a carriage, the baker delivering bagels—
Weegee weighs all these shots against the others, the charred corpses, the burning buildings, the gutshot crooks, the suicides with brains blown out, the hit-and-run victims, the drowned secretaries, the murdered bocce ball player, the crushed stampede victims—
Which way does the balance tip? He’s afraid he knows.
If Weegee has any training in photography, he can’t remember it. And it would be irrelevant. The camera knows what it needs. He suspects that even his primitive alteration of the aperture makes no difference.
Yet he continues to put his eye to the viewfinder, as if it might take him somewhere, show him a way out of the darkness.
And it’s always dark in there, always a vagueness and a seethe of unstoppable motion and form, until suddenly he senses the flash quivering, the lens lusting. At this point, Weegee becomes one with the camera. He has teamed to estimate the forms of darkness, a kind of divination prior to the fulfillment of the flash. A struggle of forms, a tangle of shadows. He moves toward the heart of it, waiting until the sounds and movements reach such a peak that he knows he’s at the center of the blackest moment. And then, his one (perhaps needless) contribution, he thrusts the camera into the formless sprawl and tries to press the already self-descending button. Too late. There it is, the unchangeable result of his photography, limned in the unforgiving light, a revelation to him as much as anyone. The most fleeting possible light, yet the subject’s fate has been fixed forever.
Often he doesn’t know what he’s seen until later, after development. And then he feels the guilt—or, more rarely, the joy—attendant on aiding the scene’s real creator. For he is at best a collaborator, along with darkness, light, and above all else the camera. His flash has created the moment by isolating it—a moment that might have gone another way, been forever lost in the rush of time and in the dark, its syrupy edges blending in with the rest of the night, as if it had no special value save that which he gave it.
Even the seemingly neutral shots—a stack of newspapers on the sidewalk; a car covered in snow, its lines resembling a woman’s haunches; h
is favorite skyscraper, Sixty Wall Street Tower, hanging at the lingering edge of a dawn that never comes—press down on his conscience, as if by putting them on film he has ineluctably tampered with their true selves.
Once he set the Speed Graphic down on the bar at Sammy’s, needing both hands to pick up an overstuffed ham on rye from the free dinner platter. He turned to find Sammy joshingly aiming the camera at him.
Sammy, bearing no grudge, poured drinks for the next month with a splinted forefinger.
6
Sudden Death
The girl eyes Weegee with a look he’s seen before. It’s the look a high-society dame lays on her diamonds, the one a gal at Coney Island gives the boyfriend who just managed to win her a stuffed owl; it’s the look a Death Row hood turns on the electric chair at Sing Sing. A look of total possession and absorption, subject and object merging into one, fatalistic but underpinned with dread.
Dread of the inevitable loss time brings: loss of the boodle, the boyfriend—specifically, of life.
“You remember now?” says the girl. Ribs of light and shadow slide across her face like the bars of a portable prison.
“Yeah, I remember.”
The girl pets her cat thoughtfully, no longer regarding him. Weegee takes the opportunity to ask, “So—what’s your story?”
“It’s part of yours.”
He expects a mischievous smile, but she looks serious, even grim.
“I mean, what’s your name?”
“Tara.”
“Like Gone with the Wind, huh?”
“No.”
Before Weegee can question Tara further, the police radio dispatcher, speaking plainly for the moment, broadcasts the code for the discovery of a fresh stiff (Weegee knows all the codes), along with an address down in the Bowery.
Little Doors Page 10
