Boys of Life

by Paul Russell

  “Look.” I was shaking him pretty hard. “Are you just fucking with me or what?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He was sort of giggling, like he thought this was some kind of joke. I could tell he was pretty confused. I think he liked me shaking him awake like that in the middle of the night; he thought it was different and fun.

  But I was really upset, so I asked him again, “Are you just fucking with me?”

  It must’ve gotten to him finally that something was really wrong, because he sat up in bed and grabbed both my arms.

  “You find this kid,” I told him, “and you start fucking with him and you tell him anything so he won’t know what’s what and it’s all so you can have everything right where you want it, right?”

  I was yelling at him with the words coming out and me not even thinking about them. “Who said you could act like that?” I remember saying it over and over, and I didn’t care if Sammy or Netta heard. Of course they must’ve heard, but from the first I’d always sort of pretended they didn’t, even though they must’ve heard us fucking around every night of the week. I guess I just didn’t care, like when I was a kid and had to piss in a restroom. If somebody was standing next to me, I’d get nervous and couldn’t—but if it was some black guy next to me I’d say to myself, He’s just a nigger, and then I could piss fine because it didn’t matter. “You’re just a fucking New York queer out hitting on any kid you can get your pervert hands on,” I yelled, and I think I was punching at him, because he grabbed my wrists and before I knew it he was holding me in a power lock.

  “Listen to me, Tony,” he said. “Listen to what I’m saying.” Because he’d been talking and I wasn’t even listening, I was just yelling at him these words I wasn’t even paying attention to.

  “Are you going to listen?” He was squeezing my wrists together really tight and it hurt, so I nodded.

  I could barely see him with the orange streetlight glow coming in through the heavy plastic over the windows. It was like a fire burning somewhere that was lighting up the room.

  “I could tell you I love you,” Carlos said. It was a terrible thing for him to say. I remember I started shaking my head and trying to break away from him but he held me and I couldn’t get away. “Does that make it any better,” he said, “if I tell you that? Is that what you need?”

  “That’s bullshit,” I said, “that’s what it is. It’s got nothing to do with anything.” Which at the moment I really did believe, and the last thing I wanted Carlos to do was start telling me he loved me.

  “Then what’re you doing here?” Carlos asked me straight out, and when I didn’t say anything—which I couldn’t, I was just too surprised—he said, “There’s got to be an answer to that question, Tony. What is it you want? Somewhere there’s got to be an answer to that.”

  He knew I didn’t have an answer, which was why he asked. He knew I didn’t know what I wanted, even though I was walking around thinking I did, and if you’d asked me before that instant, Did I know what I wanted, I’d have said, Of course. But now when he said it, it was like everything I ever wanted fell into some hole, and all that was left was the hole and nothing to fill it up with. Suddenly that part of me that’d always been jabbering away about everything suddenly forgot what it was talking about and didn’t have anything more to say and I was speechless.

  I started crying like a lunatic—the first time in about five years I’d cried like that. I mean howling, just completely letting go and not caring who heard me. And Carlos did the one perfect thing he could do. I’m sure he knew it was the one perfect thing, even though I’d never have thought of it. He put his arms around me and hugged me and wouldn’t let me go—which is a very simple thing and maybe obvious but it was the perfect thing to do anyway, and what counts is that he did it. He eased me down into bed with him, not saying anything, and just held me. He didn’t kiss me or fuck with me or anything, he just held me there like I’d die if he ever stopped holding me, and he let me cry my heart out about everything I hadn’t cried about: Ted, and my mom, and being this fucked-up kid who was taking it up the ass from a queer—which was bad enough, but wanting to take it up the ass, which meant I was having to say, for the first time, I was a queer like Carlos was a queer, and I wasn’t going to be anybody else than exactly who I was. Which can be a pretty terrible thing to suddenly realize.

  I KNOW PEOPLE TALK ABOUT CARLOS CORRUPTING kids that couldn’t know any better. But speaking only for me, all I can say is: whatever was there for him to corrupt would’ve gotten corrupted anyway, and everything I did, I did because I wanted to do it. Maybe I’d have done it in different ways—but I’d still have done it. So you can only pin it on me. People say, Well, he put those ideas in your head. All I say is, if he hadn’t put them there somebody else would have, or they’d’ve put some other ideas there to take their place. Either it’s somebody like Carlos who puts ideas in your head that other people don’t want to be there and so if you want those things it’s bad, or the other people put their ideas in your head and so if you want those things it’s good because that’s what they wanted you to want.

  The only trouble with Carlos I can see is, he wanted things other people didn’t want him to want, and those other people were the ones who were able to say what people are supposed to want and not want—especially what kids like me are supposed to want, whether we really do want it or not. And as far as I can see it, that’s what Carlos’s life was all about. Pointing out the way all that stuff worked.

  So you could say Carlos corrupted me into seeing things the way he did. But then I never knew any adult who wasn’t trying to corrupt you every time they talked to you, even if it was just to say do this because it’s right or don’t do this because it’s wrong.

  Which is all something I’ve been thinking about, and I just had to say it for the record.

  CARLOS MUST’VE HAD EVERYTHING WORKED OUT from the start. Either that, or he knew how to make things look like he’d wanted them to be exactly the way they were. It might’ve been his biggest talent—taking things the way they came, and then fitting everything else around that.

  A couple days after that night I just told you about, he came bursting into the apartment.

  “So, can you read?” he said.

  I was sitting at the kitchen table with an X-Man comic and my Canadian Club and hot tea, and I was really surprised to see him in the middle of the day.

  “What do you mean, can I read?”

  “Well, these days you can never be sure.”

  “Of course I can read,” I told him. Not that I ever did in those days, except for comic books and stuff like that. But I could if I had to.

  “Good,” he said, and he handed me a bunch of papers in a folder.

  “So what’s this?”

  “Read,” he said.

  I’d never seen a movie script before, but even if I had I might not have recognized what Carlos handed me—it wasn’t really a script, it was just this set of suggestions. Later I’d learn that was the only kind of script he ever used—he wanted people to be free to make things up on the spot. It could drive you crazy—the movie was always changing directions out from under you, depending on what other people did. But then nothing about Carlos’s movies ever had much to do with normal movies. He didn’t care if his movies didn’t look like the stuff that came out of Hollywood—in fact he wanted them to look completely different. What his movies always looked like was, somebody went and invented movies from scratch without ever seeing a Hollywood movie.

  Like sync sound. He could do sync sound if he wanted but he never wanted to. We’d do a scene or takes for a scene and usually we’d be just saying anything. Sometimes it was good and we could use it and sometimes it was bad, but it didn’t really matter, because Carlos went back and wrote the dialogue after he’d filmed everything and then dubbed the voices in. Sometimes he’d have the person do their own voice, but sometimes not: sometimes he’d get somebody else to do the voice�
�strange, because here was this one person and then this other person’s voice. But it grew on me, and after a while I sort of started to see how Carlos was looking at things when he made his movies.

  Not at first, though. “So this is the movie I’m supposed to be the star of?” I asked Carlos. Because I couldn’t make a thing out of what I was looking at.

  “You bet.”

  “But I don’t get it. What’m I supposed to do?”

  Because in the so-called script there would just be a number and then something like: 57; Sammy becomes a seagull on the rooftop, or 81: Tony as a principle of unconscious motion. There were about two hundred of these, no lines for us to learn or anything, just Tony this or Sammy that and we didn’t even have names except our own names.

  My heart sort of sank when I realized it was basically just me this and Sammy that through the whole movie. Like what I needed just now was more of Sammy.

  Also, I was afraid there was something in this script I wasn’t getting.

  “Nope, no secret,” Carlos said. “The secret is, you make up the secret as you go along.”

  And that’s exactly what we did. I never would’ve believed it, but we made a whole movie that way—which I guess just proves that Carlos was crazy and a genius like people said he was.

  Making that movie turned out to be both harder and easier than I thought. Most of it was just standing around waiting to do something, and then you’d do it, and then maybe do it again a couple more times. Then you’d stand around waiting for the next thing to do. It was pretty boring. And also freezing, since it was February and snowing, and when it wasn’t snowing it was even colder than when it was.

  Since Sammy and I were supposed to be these sort of street people, basically the whole thing was outdoors shots. Being so old and frail, Sammy really suffered. He’d stamp his feet and rub his hands together to try to keep warm, but you could tell it didn’t help. In between feeling my ears and nose to see how I couldn’t feel anything in them anymore, I was always trying to find places in the neighborhood where we could go get a cup of coffee and warm up—which on the farther alphabets there weren’t a whole lot of back in 1980.

  Sammy never really complained much about the cold, just about everything else—mainly me, and how I wasn’t doing things right. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t much of a right or a wrong, there was just whatever we happened to be doing at the moment. All bundled up, Sammy was like some rag doll you could pick up and toss around if you wanted, and sometimes I almost did—except then I’d look at him and think about all that stuff he’d told me about Poland and the war. If you thought about it, nothing made any sense—him going through all that and how could he have ever known back then he’d still be alive in 1980 and making this crazy movie in New York City in America with some kid from Kentucky?

  Sometimes he was really enjoying himself with it, though—doing things that if I did them he’d be all over me for ruining the movie, but Carlos thought anything Sammy did was great so sometimes Sammy just cut loose. I remember one morning he showed up with this amp meter, the kind you test circuits with. I don’t know where he got it, but he explained with a straight face how it was his invention to measure animal magnetism.

  “What’s animal magnetism?” I asked him.

  Carlos and Seth were getting it all down on camera. Lots of times it was like that—we’d be making the movie before I even had time to realize we were making it, which completely threw me till I got used to it.

  “For years I have worked on this machine,” Sammy told me. “It is my crowning achievement.” We were walking along Avenue C and it was so cold steam was rising from the manhole covers and when we’d walk through the steam it was warm like stepping into a bathroom where somebody just took a shower. Sammy took the two wires of the amp meter and touched them to a metal stair railing that went up to a brownstone. He shook his head. “No animal magnetism,” he said, like it was the most tragic thing. “Stair railings do not have animal magnetism.”

  He moved along and I followed after him, since what else was I supposed to do? Seth was walking backward ahead of us with the camera, and Carlos was making sure he didn’t back into anything by accident. He tilted a garbage can out of Seth’s way, and when Sammy came to the garbage can he stopped and touched the meter to it.

  “No animal magnetism,’’ he said. “Garbage cans exhibit no animal magnetism.’’

  I was desperately trying to think of something to say to all that, because usually Sammy was the one to think things up and I couldn’t think of a thing, and after a while Carlos would hold up his fingers, which meant I was supposed to say whatever numbers came into my head and he’d figure out something to dub in there later.

  “Four thirteen seventy-two thirty-three,” I said in my most convincing voice.

  “I have raised a brilliant son,” said Sammy.

  Just up ahead there was this guy lying asleep on the sidewalk, with about five wine bottles sitting around him and a cardboard sign propped up against the wall beside him that said NEEDED I MILLION $ FOR VINO-LOGICAL RESEARCH. Before you knew it, there was Sammy bending over him and touching the wires to the wino’s shoulder where he was rolled over on his side.

  “Animal magnetism,” he said, nodding his head and looking very proud of himself. “I have proved animal magnetism.”

  But then a few days later Sammy got sick, being out in the cold every single day like that, and he started this hacking cough that once it started would go on for five minutes till you thought he was going to choke. Carlos didn’t even seem to notice, or if he did it was like he didn’t care—it was just one more thing that was getting in the way of everything else.

  I collared him with it one afternoon when Sammy was shivering and these violent coughs kept racking him. “So how’re you planning on finishing your movie when Sammy up and dies?” I asked him. Partly it was because I was freezing to death too, but also I was worried Sammy really was going to do something like die if we kept this up.

  Carlos made a face, like that was something he really didn’t want to hear right then. “Well, I guess we could always do a death scene,” he said.

  “Fuck you,” I told him.

  “It’s not up to me to do anything,” he said. Then he did what he never did—he turned his back on me and walked away to where Seth and a guy that helped Seth were setting up some lights for the next shot we were supposed to do. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t even like Sammy all that much. He was supposed to be Carlos’s friend, and Seth’s and Netta’s, but none of them seemed even worried he might be dying of pneumonia.

  During my little argument with Carlos, Sammy’d gone over and sat down on this pile of bricks in an empty lot next to where we were filming. He hunched over in another of his coughing fits, this old man alone out there in all that rubble, and suddenly I thought—it’s the way animals in the forest go off in a corner somewhere to die. The wind was really sharp that day, these stinging gusts that cut right through you. Suddenly I had this idea. Over in the corner of that lot, chucked next to the side of a building, was one of those big cardboard packing boxes, the kind refrigerators come in. I dragged the box over to where Sammy was, and without saying anything to anybody I took out my pocketknife and cut a sort of door in it, and a window in the door so he could see out. Ted and I used to make these forts out of sawhorses and old packing boxes when we were kids, and putting this shelter together for Sammy made me remember Ted, and when I was a kid, and I guess I was really getting into fixing that shelter up because I didn’t even realize Seth was getting the whole thing on film. Carlos was loving it. When I’d finished that box and helped Sammy into it and out of the wind, he threw his arms around me in this great bear hug and whispered in my ear, “I always had faith, Tony—always.” And maybe it was just a gust of wind blowing something in my eye, but I teared up right when he said that to me.

  So that’s the story of that scene in the movies where I build a cardboard shelter for Sammy to die in. Like
I said before, that was the way Carlos always worked; you could hate him for it, but somehow it always worked.

  Another thing I remember is how one day these two guys about my age, maybe a little older, were standing on the corner watching us and every once in a while calling out, “Yo, faggots,” trying to get our attention or show off or whatever. People were always stopping to watch what we were doing. I guess, even though it was New York, it wasn’t every day you saw somebody out on the streets making movies. Anyway, after about ten minutes of those two guys yelling, Carlos walked right over to them and I thought he was going to tell them to fuck off, but instead he asked did they want to be in a movie? They looked at each other like that was the last thing they expected—you could see they were sort of daring each other to say yes. Finally one of them said, Sure, they’d be in the movie—but that didn’t mean they were any kind of faggot actors or anything. They didn’t have to worry, Carlos told them. Nobody would think they were a bunch of faggot actors just for being in one film like that.

  So that’s how Rafe and Nicky got in the movie. And again, up to that point I wasn’t supposed to have these two friends in the movie—it was just basically me and Sammy—but then Carlos wrote them in right on the spot and by the time it came time to dub the movie he’d already lost track of them so he got two other guys to do the voices. The line about “I’m a walking death warrant’’—my favorite thing in the whole movie—Nicky never said that in real life at all; Carlos only added that later when he was dubbing the voice. But you’d never be able to tell it just watching the movie.

  I really sort of liked Rafe and Nicky, only they had so many tattoos they made me a little nervous. Especially Rafe, who had about five running down the length of both his arms—eagles and roses and a skull wearing a top hat and this big green dragon all coiled up in itself. He was always wearing a black sleeveless T-shirt under this beat-up old leather jacket, and anytime you got him indoors he’d take off his jacket so he could show off his arms. I used to sit in this bar where we’d go after shoots (the bartender didn’t care what age you were) and I’d just look at his skinny arms with those tattoos up and down them. It made me shiver. What those tattoos said was, he was completely lost and he was going to die pretty soon. I don’t know why they made me think that, but they did, and I liked him for that reason. Plus he had a motorbike he’d let me ride sometimes at night, up and down Avenue C where there’s not much traffic.