The Morels

by Christopher Hacker

  The lesbian says he’s crazy. Who’s going to buy a luxury condo in this neighborhood?

  The contractors are young toughs from Brooklyn who spend as much time working as they do trying to catch a glimpse of the lesbian, who tantalizes them all by walking around topless. They take long lunch breaks, openly indulging in marijuana and beer. Sometimes Doc joins them. Other times he finds this irritating and yells at them to get out. I’m not paying you to sit around and get high!

  The place, raw enough before, takes on a bombed-out look now. The lesbian remains very tolerant of the state of affairs—the haze of plaster dust and the perpetual whine of the circular saw biting into a two-by-four—in part because she is no longer paying rent. Also, perhaps, she is beginning to allow herself to be taken in by Doc’s vision of what the place can become.

  They had gone to a party at Vic Tedesco’s place a couple of weeks prior—Vic was a self-proclaimed real estate baron and patron of the arts. He converted a warehouse on Mercer Street and West Broadway. It was immense—restored brickwork and wrought iron. He had built a solarium on the roof—accessed via a sweeping spiral staircase—which enclosed a pool. Vistas of the Midtown skyline, clear up to the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings.

  She stops teasing Doc after that night and in fact encourages him—for the most part staying out of everyone’s way. She even takes to wearing a shirt around the house.

  Occasionally now as Doc works, in that pure, blank mind state that hard work produces, he finds himself thinking about Dolores. He can hear her saying, I am willing to work as hard as I can. And then he can picture her perfectly, standing before him in their kitchen, hands sudsy, hair plastered to her forehead, waiting for him to respond. He has the strongest urge during these daydreams to pick up the phone, just to hear her voice. He hates himself for the urge, for whatever forces in him bring this memory to the surface, but finds himself unable to refrain every once in a while, after he’s had a few drinks, from picking up the phone and dialing his home in Plainfield, a number that he still remembers easily. On all but one occasion, he hangs up before anyone answers.

  On the occasion he doesn’t, it’s a man who picks up.

  Is Dolores there?

  Who is this?

  It’s been only five months since he’s left, less than a year. Is it possible she remarried? Maybe she moved.

  And then, into the pause: Dad?

  Benji?

  Oh, my God, Dad, where are you?

  Doc hangs up, heart thudding, his whole body gone into high alarm.

  This is a mistake he does not repeat. Now, when the image of his wife comes to him, he locks himself in the newly constructed bathroom and lies in the smooth cool dry tub until the wave passes.

  November brings with it another reason that the buildings in this neighborhood are ill suited for residential use: the cold. They are drafty and impossible to heat properly. A modern boiler system needs to be installed, but in the meantime they are making do with space heaters.

  He is on his way out to buy two more to replace the ones that have overheated and died the night before. It’s brisk, but he sees—passing through Washington Square Park on his way to the Woolworth’s on Sixth Avenue—a throng gathered around a dry fountain basin.

  A man in a leotard and bow tie is performing magic tricks. His assistant is a young woman in a peasant dress. It’s clear that she’s very pregnant. It’s also clear, as he comes closer, that it’s Cynthia.

  When the show is over, she goes around with the maestro’s top hat. She passes Doc without noticing him.

  He reaches out and puts a twenty-dollar bill in the hat. When she recognizes him, sees that the bill is his, she becomes angry. She fishes it out and gives it back.

  Not so fast, the man in the leotard says.

  He shakes Doc’s hand and offers him a business card. On it is a graphic of a unicycle and the words The Meticulous Ticulous. No address or phone number.

  Ticulous?

  At your service, Ticulous says, and bows deeply.

  Where are you staying, Doc, asks Cynthia.

  Around.

  The Meticulous Ticulous says, Are you her father?

  Cynthia snorts. Hardly.

  Have you been to see a doctor?

  She gives him a confused look, and he points at her belly.

  My friend, Ticulous says, childbirth is not a medical procedure—it’s the most natural thing in the world!

  So’s a postpartum hemorrhage, Doc says. Cynthia, it’s freezing out. Your legs are bare. And you’re wearing beach sandals.

  Doc takes out a pen and crosses out what’s printed on the business card Ticuolous has given him and on the other side neatly writes the address and phone number of the carriage house.

  Cynthia refuses to take it, so he drops it in the top hat and walks away.

  Ticulous hollers out, Farewell!

  Doc, in spite of himself, waves.

  When Cynthia met Ticulous, she had been trying, unsuccessfully, for an audience with Andy Warhol.

  After the shooting, the Factory effectively closed its doors to the public. Warhol became much more private—and wary of strangers. She was met by a voice over an intercom and told to leave her contact information and that somebody would get back to her. She gave the number of a public pay phone nearby and had been guarding it ferociously for days.

  There was a mime working the passersby of the block. He was engaged in a routine wherein he would pretend to be hurrying along wearing an invisible hat, carrying an invisible briefcase. He would stumble, and the briefcase would fall open, and invisible papers would fly out that he would scramble through the crowd trying fruitlessly to recover. Then he discovered Cynthia, stubbornly pretending to be on the phone, waiting out a growing line of impatient people.

  I’m on hold, she snarled, reaching into her pocket for a nickel, pretending to insert it in the slot.

  The mime liked this. He got on line and acted out extreme impatience, tapping his foot, looking at his invisible watch—and then, discovering an invisible phone booth next to the one Cynthia was on, he would step into it and make a call and, mirroring exactly Cynthia’s body language, stave off a growing line of invisible people, claiming with a shrug, an eye roll, a pointed finger, that he, too, was on hold.

  During a lull in foot traffic, he asked her, with hand gestures, whom she was waiting for.

  I’m waiting for a call from Andy Warhol, she said.

  That asshole?

  Hey! You’re not allowed to talk.

  Pop is the death of art, the mime said, and that man is the grim reaper.

  He introduced himself, handed her a business card. He explained that he was just one of several street performers in a troupe. This loose collection included former students of half-a-dozen illustrious institutions: Julliard, Oxford, Yale. We are an impressive band of dropouts, he said. Ticulous had been to Lecoq. Their shared ethos was the renunciation of artistic professionalism. Appalled by what they saw as a rise in the commercialization of their chosen callings, and the willing participation of their colleagues and mentors in the greed machine, they opted out and somehow found one another, taking a monastic vow of poverty; the only means of protest available to them in a capitalistic state was with a dollar—or its refusal. They gave the gift of their art freely, accepting donations given only in a similarly free spirit—food, clothing, shelter, or, if it was all you had, money. They prostrated themselves like monks to the generosity and goodwill of the people of New York City. Koko, who had spent three years at Academy of Art in Bonn before coming to New York, drew elaborate and lavish oil-pencil murals on the pavement. Winston, who had been dancing from the age of five and endured two years at Birmingham Royal before calling it quits, made the various platforms of the subway system his stage. They were, all of them, hounded by police. They had all been arrested repeatedly, spent time in jail. Most had been mugged; a couple had been beaten. Many nights were spent freezing—or wet and freezing—on park benches. They wer
e not above fishing through trash for food. The fervor with which he talked drew Cynthia to him—and away from the phone booth. By the end of their conversation, he had made her vow never to return. It’s not like he was ever going to call anyway, she said, so he didn’t think she was too easily persuaded.

  For the rest of the day, she followed Ticulous around as he performed his routines, taking an increasing delight in being his straight man. If they were able to draw a crowd, Cynthia took the bowler from his head and circled for tips. She invited him up to her room—she was renting a sublet on Thompson Street—and they talked until morning. He convinced her that art was not a commodity to be bought or sold but rather like love to be received and given freely. He demonstrated with a kiss.

  I’m pregnant, she said.

  Congratulations, he said, and kissed her again.

  I’m a little sensitive to smell right now, she said, so if you keep kissing me I may vomit in your mouth. You’re kind of ripe, if you don’t mind my saying.

  He convinced her to be his assistant. He had been teaching himself magic and could use one, and her belly was sure to help loosen people’s grip on their wallets. In exchange, she could share in the profits.

  He introduced her to the collective: Koko, Andrew, Winston, Margarita, Annan, and Brigit. They pooled their resources and—she came to find out after getting to know them and inviting them to stay—their affections.

  Cynthia had somehow, by being spurned from what she thought she was looking for, ended up stumbling into precisely what she’d been looking for all along.

  When Doc happened by, the term on her sublet was expiring. She was forced to spend the better part of a week in a makeshift lean-to over a subway grate. She disliked Doc—he gave her the creeps. He made her feel dirty about her body and her desires. And he was responsible for this beast growing inside her, which was devouring her from the inside out, making her hungry all the time, sleepy all the time, having to pee all the time. She hated him for it and wanted nothing more to do with him. But the cash she had taken from his wallet—which she considered money owed and earned—was gone. She is living on nothing, scraps, reduced to outright panhandling, but people’s hearts have gotten colder with the weather. No bills. The slush of coins at the end of the day is mostly small change. Enough for a meal, not nearly enough for a room.

  She doesn’t bother calling, and when she arrives at the carriage house, the main door is open.

  She says, If you invite me, you’re inviting them as well. Ticulous has come in with her, but the other six are waiting outside.

  Doc welcomes them in. There’s plenty of room, he says.

  He calls the lesbian sculptress out of her studio as Cynthia calls in the rest of the troupe, and they go through a round of introductions. The construction workers come out—Mario has been staying here on a more or less permanent basis since his father kicked him out of the house, and his cousins Michaelo and Cheech often spend weekends here so they won’t have to take the subway back to Bay Ridge after catching a show at the Garden—and introduce themselves.

  Doc makes their stay contingent upon Cynthia seeing a physician about the baby and agreeing to have it delivered in a hospital and not, as she has been threatening, in the pure waters of the Central Park Boat Basin.

  He hands Ticulous and the three other men sledgehammers and crowbars and tells them they are now to answer to his construction crew.

  Their first order of business: knock down the one remaining partition in the house—the sculptress’s studio wall. This is now a house without borders between public and private, between art and life. It’s an experiment, one in which more or less all thirteen members of this motley crew are willing if not enthusiastic participants. They are all, in one way or another—and each for his or her own reasons—hedonists. Each enjoys the roam they’ve be allowed in this arrangement, each happy enough to give up privacy for the sake of the general pleasure to be had, happy to surrender daily life to art. That is the idea, anyway, without anyone having to say it. Pleasure and art. Revelry. Even the bathrooms are communal, a set of doorless stalls, one per floor.

  The Brooklyn Trio, as they come to be called, is able, with the help of the eight others, to outfit the house with modern fiberglass insulation and a proper hot-water heater just on the heels of the first real cold weather of the season. They freely spend all the cash that they’ve been given, and by the time Doc leads a shaky Cynthia back through the front door with her infant son in her arms and a swirl of snow behind her, they are all officially broke.

  They subsist through the winter on communal pots of something called frankfurter stew, a Depression-era recipe handed down from Brigit’s grandmother who, with the pittance given her by her alcoholic gambler of a husband, had to feed an entire brood of siblings and cousins. Ticulous has a connection with a grocer, an admirer of the collective, who sells them dented cans and frozen goods past their expiration date. Often he throws in stuff for free. The loaves they make with the flour occasionally have mealworms, and the canned vegetables need to be cooked extra long in case of botulism, but for the steep discount it is worth it; they eat well.

  Meanwhile, Doc retains a proxy to go back to New Jersey and find a buyer for his practice. The man returns some weeks later with a check along with divorce papers from Dolores. He signs them and gives over half of the money from the sale of his practice. The remaining half will go toward the renovation and living expenses, which, with a baby and a house full of freeloaders, require more money than he has.

  Cynthia dislikes Doc as much as ever, but Ticulous seems to admire the man. He thinks of him as their patron and leader. When Cynthia bestows on Ticulous the honor of naming her child, he chooses the name Arthur, much to her dismay, in honor of Doc. Doc, however, still thinks Ticulous is a buffoon and takes every opportunity to rile him, which Ticulous, for his part, takes in stride. On any matter on which they disagree, Doc Morel would say, Did they teach you that in clown school?

  To which Ticulous would insist, Lecoq! Lecoq! The man is the greatest living performer in the world, and L’École—

  Tell it to your pal Bozo. I’m not interested.

  And Ticulous would laugh. He thought Doc was kidding and that he enjoyed Ticulous’s company more than he let on.

  Baby Arthur is doted on by two-dozen hands. Never was an infant more handled than Baby Arthur. There is no crib, nor is there a need for one: he is never put down; he is always in somebody’s arms. Cynthia breastfeeding him, Doc burping him, Ticulous sweeping him around the room, Koko cradling him while he naps, or any of the others caressing or changing or cooing or cuddling.

  He sleeps on the top floor, with Cynthia, Ticulous, and Winston. It is the warmest place in the house. On the rare occasions he is left undisturbed to sleep, it is in an old typesetter’s bath, padded down with blankets. When, after months, he outgrows the makeshift manger in the corner, he begins sleeping in his mother’s bed. One day Annan comes in with a crib he’s found on the street and lugged all the way from Midtown, pleased with his contribution to Baby Arthur’s care and well-being, but Cynthia refuses to even consider it. I’m not putting my son behind bars!

  It is, most of the time, unbearably hot on the top floor where they sleep, Arthur curled against his mother’s belly as though he were remembering how he used to sleep. Even in the winter they sleep with the portable fans going—the windows on the top level do not open, and so the fans merely produce a swirl of hot air. They sleep naked, mother and son, under a thin sheet, as do Winston and Ticulous, who have taken up together on a separate mattress.

  The coupling and decoupling in ever-rotating pairs was a fact of life in those first years at the carriage house. And however free most felt to share and share alike, there remained something quaint about these fleeting unions, for they were always pairs that were formed—the groups came later—always discreetly consummated, on a mattress at night. There was a time to be a couple, a time for sex, and that time was night. These boundaries were unde
rstood. There were the usual jealousies and hurt feelings that came with arrangements like this—but they were feelings quickly healed through new pairings. Those that did not heal left, to be replaced by a new face, a new possible permutation in this evolving community. When a couple was engaged in sex, they were given the benefit of privacy, however illusory. For the fact remained, there were no walls. Most had gotten used to life without them. The lesbian, who came to be known as Emily (though this was not her name), insisted on keeping her area private with a series of sheets draped over clotheslines and took to the toilet and shower in the early morning while her floor mates slept, but by that point she was already halfway out the door.

  And however tactful, however much people in the house deferred to a couple’s privacy, sex must have been some of Baby Arthur’s first, vivid facts of consciousness, lying curled against his mother’s breasts to the sounds of two people grunting through their shared pleasures. And as Baby Arthur began to wobble and race, something he did at all hours, as Cynthia shunned the notion of a “schedule” for her son, guided by his own internal clock when to sleep and when to wake up, he would often happen upon two members of the house having sex, for Baby Arthur gave no such deference to his housemates’ privacy. He would be greeted happily by the out-of-breath couple and then free to watch as they continued with their business or to bobble off to some other corner of the house.

  With the convenience of a fixed location, the performers begin using the carriage house as a creative venue. Ticulous throws open the great arched doorway through which horse-drawn carriages many years ago used to enter and leave and, setting up a cluster of chairs along the sidewalk and acting the part of an old-fashioned barker, calls out to passersby to stop, take a load off, and behold: Brigit on point or Koko painting herself gold and wrapping herself in white bed linen or Ticulous himself hopping down off his barker stool and tumbling into a handstand.