Great Kisser

by David Evanier

  “He left you?” I asked in astonishment.

  “Then he came back into my life and said he wanted to marry me. There was really never any consideration of doing anything else. That’s just what one did.”

  “When did you get married?”

  “February 5, 1962.” Horns blasted discordantly outside the restaurant window, marking Rachel’s wedding day.

  “You have four kids?” I said.

  “No. Ron and I adopted four children. They all wanted to know who their real parents were. I always wanted a lot of children. Do you remember, Michael? I saw The Egg and I. I wanted six for a very long time. And then it was clear that I had problems.

  “Two years ago I had a miscarriage. After a lifetime of trying to have children. I was 45 years old. I had surgery to try to make a baby. For many years I didn’t have to worry about birth control, about periods. I never went through puberty. I couldn’t menstruate. And then—I was so happy. But I could not.

  “And you,” Rachel said. “You have children?”

  “My wife has a child from a previous marriage.”

  “So you’re a father.”

  “No, I’m not,” I snapped at her. “It’s not the same.”

  She stared at me.

  She took out pictures of her children. “Lisa is 18. She is learning disabled.” She paused. “I was abusive. I’m very guilty. Very guilty.

  “I’ve been therapized to the hilt,” she said. Only her parents seemed to have survived well, her father carving out a career for himself at Columbia, the two parents settling into a comfortable middle age, enjoying the early bird specials at their favorite restaurants where the portions were ample.

  Rachel showed me pictures of her brothers, Joseph and Sammy. A shiver passed through me. When Sammy had had his Bar Mitzvah, I had mailed him my watch, which I knew he had always loved.

  “I recognize them,” I said. “But Sammy was a little boy when I knew him.”

  “Michael, neither of us was as old as any of my children are now.”

  We walked out into Washington Square Park, where Rachel had sung and played her guitar on Sundays. The kids with their purple hair, blue lips and hatchet haircuts sat on the circular rim of the square. We passed by the Gaslight, the San Remo, the Bottom Line, the chess store and Arturo’s on Thompson Street, emblems of the New York I loved.

  “By 1970 Ron was fucking around royally,” Rachel said. “So I got involved in ecology. Let me do something! I gotta do something! I was hooked. I got into the frog boycott. Some of these people were saints and some the whores of the world. I’m flying back and forth to Washington. I’m speaking beautifully. I felt terrific. I would say, ‘I don’t like that!’“ I became famous for that. I was on the Mike Douglas show twice. When I walked down the street people recognized me and called out, ‘I don’t like that.’

  “Now I’m moving into media relations,” Rachel said. “I’m a business consultant to a very interesting fellow importing swimming pool fittings from Russia. And I’m getting into a new kind of contact lenses.”

  Rachel gazed at me. “You know, you haven’t said a word all afternoon.”

  I looked away. “The truth is, I loved you very dearly. I was very hurt.”

  “Michael, you were 15 and a half. I was 17 and a half. It was as simple as that.”

  She said, “I get the feeling you think you were an intruder in the household.”

  “Yeah, I think I was.”

  “My family is enormously fond of you. You were a very welcome presence.”

  “I’d be, you know, extra spaghetti.”

  “You see, I don’t remember that,” she said.

  “I remember the spaghetti,” I said.

  “Oh, we lived on spaghetti. Always.”

  She took my hand. “The thing I can’t get over about you is that—”

  “I’m grown?”

  “No, that you’re not! That you’re not! That you’re the same!”

  “I’m not the same.”

  “Of course you’re not the same.”

  Later, she said, “I even found the silversmith shop on West Fourth Street where we I had our yin and yang pin made. Do you remember?”

  “Yes, Rachel, I do.”

  The pin had arrived in the mail on my birthday in 1959, with 27 letters from Rachel. “I can tell you truthfully that I love you with all my heart,” she had written.

  “I see deep waters in you, Michael,” she said now. “I see a real guardedness. When I called you, I was so glad to hear you were separated. You’re still my boy friend.”

  She paused. “I have to know how to approach our relationship,” she said. “It’s built on such a long history. It will need a new form. You have to tell me how.”

  I did not answer. Well, you could start by understanding, Rachel, that everything stopped for me when you left me. Everything stopped and never started again. I wanted babies as much as you did, but even the thought of having babies, of being man enough to be a father, started and stopped with you.

  Take me back to Elmhurst, Rachel, to the ice cream parlor with its mint green cool smells, and sleigh rides down that vanished hill, and your hurly-burly parents with little food spots and crumbs on their clothes and their Talmudic kindness, and the cold brisk walk in the snow home from Newtown with our schoolbooks, and Eddie Colletti waiting around at all hours for Jane Benson, the girl he had a crush on, pretending to be a detective and flashing his badge. My Bar Mitzvah at the tiny Corona Jewish Center (which Madonna later turned into a condominium): I did Jolson, and a George Burns soft-shoe, told jokes and read a congratulatory telegram from Belle Baker—that was my ace in the hole. I’d opened the telegram and read aloud, “Michael Darling: Let me be the first to call you my good man. Mazel Tov on your Bar Mitzvah. God bless you. Love, Belle Baker.” And forty years later I recite it from memory. And I put the record on the phonograph that my mother wanted me to play: Gertrude Lawrence singing “Getting To Know You” from The King and I. And the first times Rachel and I went shyly backstage at the sacred RKO Palace where the old-timers lit up at the sight of us. And Rachel accepting my kisses on her warm neck, her sweet lips, and my feeling for just a minute—just a second—that I was a man in the world who could make his way.

  Rachel was speaking, and I heard her say, “Will you come back to the hotel with me?”

  “Not tonight. I have a manuscript deadline.”

  “I’ll type it for you.”

  “No. I’ll call you, Rachel.”

  Rachel pulled me toward her, and she kissed me. Suddenly I recognized her chubby, dear lips. Oh, yes.

  I remembered the nights in my mother’s apartment I would lie awake, imagining that the softness of my pillow was really Rachel.

  We could not rescue each other. But I admired Rachel. She had been broken by the world, but at least she had entered the real world. I never got that far.

  I desperately wanted to call my wife.

  I waved as Rachel pulled away in a cab.

  I reconciled with my wife the next morning and went home.

  Chekhov’s story, “The Kiss,” is about a shy, plain, young officer at a party. He wanders into a darkened room. A girl flings her arms around him and kisses him in the dark, thinking he is someone else. He does not see her, but imagines that she is beautiful. Then she realizes her mistake. The young officer becomes obsessed with the kiss that was given him in error, and with the fear, or knowledge, that he will never be kissed that way again. He will always desire, and never be desired by those he desires.

  VI

  The snapshot of Rachel’s parents is part of my scrapbook from those years. I return to it and I see autographed pictures of other girls I adored and never touched. Behind them are always the red brick, the trellises, the steam pipes of my childhood. Sue Greene writes, “To Mike, Best wishes and Good Luck, Sue.” I don’t know how I found the courage to ask her for a picture. I’d walked miles at night to spend ten seconds in front of her house, peering into the win
dow to see if I could catch a glimpse of her. Connie Gitelson is seated on a fence. She wrote, “To Mike, with fondest love.” Shortly afterwards, she got sick of my mooning over her and never making a move. But how could I? Connie, so rich and classy and elegant, and me a little pisser who traveled to Central Park West from Queens.

  “All the best, Michael,” wrote Louis Gossett on the playbill of “Take a Giant Step” beside the picture of my teacher Morton Ballinzweig that his wife sent me after he died, sitting on his porch, she seated behind him on a rocking chair. I have written beside it: NEVER TO BE FORGOTTEN. Adlai Stevenson sends “heartfelt thanks” for my “understanding message” after he loses the election.

  There are pictures of the gang at the Concord and Grossinger’s: Jack Carter, the Barry Sisters, Sid Gould, Harry Belafonte, Jan Murray, Jan Bart, Buster Crabbe (reduced to athletic director at the Concord). There is my high-toned letter in the New York Times captioned a “Young Man’s Tribute:” “As a 14-year old theatregoer, it is a bit sad for me to discover that among my elders are those who refuse to admit the arrival of a salient young actress named Audrey Hepburn in Ondine.”. … I saved all the reviews of Judy Garland restoring two-a-day vaudeville to the Palace (Ward Morehouse in the New York World-Telegram: “Two-a-Day Reborn; Palace Wild; Stampede in Duffy Square.” And Walter Winchell’s poem, “Song for Judy Garland:”

  … Show people’s fondest dream has now

  come true … New York can view the “two-a-day,”

  as in bright years gone by

  When Baker, Bayes and Tucker trod the boards,

  Weber and Fields, Nat Wills, and many a guy

  and gal who’s traveled on to blest rewards;

  … Old troupers’ hearts sing to a glad refrain:

  A Queen is in the Palace once again!

  The Grossinger Tatler states that “14-year old Michael Goldberg, a walking encyclopedia on the entertainment industry, is determined to make his mark in show business one of these days,” while “Mrs. Ben Plotkin is quietly absorbed in a book in the lobby this ayem.”

  There’s a clip of Einstein dead at 76, and Joe Laurie, Jr. at 62. He asked that his ashes be put in the rosin box in the wings of the Palace. Hoofers used those wing boxes for rubbing rosin on their shoes to keep from slipping. But the Palace announced that the old rosin box had disappeared, and that dancers now provided their own rosin boxes. There is a picture of me on Rachel’s fire escape. There are many pictures of Grossinger’s master of ceremonies, Harry Spear, who was my idol. Dapper, debonair, vaudevillian par excellence, he sang “Ramona” and he tap-danced. When he was fired, I hunted him down at a rundown hotel off Times Square, and when he ran out on the hotel bill, I went to see the manager and arranged to pay it in installments, week after week, to save Harry’s honor. And there is me and future movie director Mike Lobell introduced by Harry and hamming it up on the Grossinger stage, trying out our comedy act. I cannot recognize the self that is up there.

  And most uncannily, there is the news story I wrote for the West Side News and an accompanying picture: “Drive to Help Flood Victims Brings in $1,600.” The totally bogus article was about my Central Park West pal David Peel, “president of the Junior Division, West Side Chamber of Commerce” and how he and I directed 25 “active West Side teenagers” who “combed the area in a valiant effort to aid flood victims.” What flood victims? We didn’t care. There was the picture of David and me and three girls, all who were crazy about David. David had two total scams, the Chamber of Commerce and the Young Democrats, to get his name around, find girls, and get to be a guest on Murray the K, Barry Gray, and Big Joe’s Happiness Exchange radio shows and he’d had stationery printed up with his name embossed to prove these groups existed. But David’s only serious goal was finding the right cufflinks to wear.

  I stare at the article and realize that even as late as 14, I was a normal rogue. Shortly after, I met Rachel. I touched her and kissed her and held her.

  And after that, it was all over.

  The Better Man

  I

  Hymie Stolowitz was president of Literary Knockouts, a New York and Los Angeles production company and foundation. He owned scores of valuable literary properties. Linda, my manager, said that he had never read any of them, “except the scummy, porno parts.’” She added, “He’s hurt people.” She said this with high passion and obvious envy. “I’ve had a crush on him for fifteen years.”

  “What do you mean, he’s never read them?” I said, not getting into the “hurting” business.

  “He knows the value of the manuscripts,” she said, “but he doesn’t know why. He knows they give him power and financial gain, and he just knows people like you and me will drool over them.” She paused, and said, “I think Hymie hunted down Eichmann and Mengele. That was his passion. Then he went into the jungle and came back with pictures of Che Guevera’s corpse.”

  I had come to Hollywood from the Jewish literary world of the Upper West Side of Manhattan at 47 to make a living as a screenwriter. I was tossed to and fro like a herring in a barrel. Like so many other writers before me, in Hollywood I came to covet what I despised. Yet I wasn’t given the chance to sell out. I wasn’t important enough. And besides, although everyone talked endlessly about it, I couldn’t find the fucking arc of a story.

  Hymie was a huge man in his seventies with a cauliflower face, pudgy cheeks and a W. C. Fields nose. He was extraordinarily ugly. His hands were double the size of human hands, and they were encased in brass knuckles. His voice was like a smoking cauldron, menacing and cavernous, roaring, growling and bellicose, or slurred and ominously slow and deliberate. Tufts of reddish hair shot out of his bald head, and he always wore battle fatigues and dark glasses and had a cigar sticking out of his mouth. He stood with his fists clenched and his legs spread apart, and he walked with a strut. He was a hunger of game with a bow and arrow. He didn’t drink, but he seemed drunk with power and lust.

  When I first met him in his office in Los Feliz, he tantalizingly held away from me the precious, yellowed original manuscript of Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten. He sniffed my reaction. Before I could see the manuscript, Hymie grinned and said, “This will make you come in your pants.” Then he said, “You’ll write my life story for the screen. It’s got a terrific arc. How about this, kid?” He paused for dramatic effect. “Rags to riches.”

  His office resembled a catacomb. It was like walking into film noir: the ghosts of Runyon, Winchell, Jimmy Cannon, Al Capone, the guys and dolls at Lindy’s, Jack Dempsey, Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom, and the Dead End Kids seemed to flutter around me. Nothing was organized. Hymie claimed he knew where everything was. The room was stuffed with stacks of books with hundreds of Post-its sticking out of them, movie stills, paper boxes, yellow, crumbling folders, with crap and incredibly valuable manuscripts; Hymie didn’t know the difference. A 1948 Modern Screen was curled up on the floor against a Thorton Wilder diary in his own handwriting.

  From floor to ceiling there were categorized and catalogued books. A dark brown wooden church pew sat on the side, a round turquoise hand mirror for Hymie’s toilette, shaving kits, briefcases, fifteen RoleTx knockoffs, plastic baggies, 45 rpm records, bunches of manuscripts, the Burns Mantle play index, the International Motion Picture Almanac, books (Mickey’s Adventures), and videotapes (Mickey McGuire’s Gang, 1930, with Mickey Rooney), pictures of the Jewish Syndicate, Dutch Goldberg, Al Capone, Sam Giancana, Babe Ruth, ten copies of Hymie’s favorite book, a 28-page tome called The Sacred Sanctuary of Frank Sinatra by Jimmy Tarantino, who wrote it in prison—it was about Sinatra being one of the gentlest, sweetest men ever born—Dick Tracy books, ads for Old Gold cigarettes, pinups, knee-high piles of paper on the floor—all in a heap. Half-eaten pastrami sandwiches and pieces of pickle. They were all over his desk, spilling out of paper bags. And right beside Hymie on a little table was a lunch pail, Hymie’s sentimental touch. Hymie kept it there to remember the Depression days when he’d been down an
d out. In Hymie’s jacket was a gun in a holster and in his shoe a hunting knife. “They say about a gun, my lad, that it makes a little man big, and a big man bigger,” Hymie explained.

  He began to tell me about his life, and like most characters I met, no matter how much he hated everybody else, he looked upon his own story with loving tenderness. And although he regarded me as a spot on the wall, he tried to love me a little, even flatter me, just to keep me from walking out. After all, I would burnish his legend.

  Hymie was an East Coast Jew who had become a born-again Christian. His conversation was sprinkled with Yiddishisms. On Yom Kippur he atoned for his sins at a monastery atop a mountain—“at the tippity-top,” he told me. “I started going up there when I was twelve,” Hymie said. “I used to hike up that mountain. I had a World War Two German compass. Some of the monks did’ n’t talk at all. It was quiet as a church mouse. There was a tremendous rock there. I said to a priest, ‘The profile on the rock looks like Jesus Christ.’ So he says to me, ‘You are blessed, my child. I said why. He said, ‘Those who see what you see are blessed. The average person does not see it at all.’

  “So I been going up there all these years. It was very inspiring, the solitude, perfect for Yom Kippur. It’s a Franciscan order of atonement. They’re into that. Then I became a born-again Christian. My friend Billy the Pistol, who was up on a murder rap for that which he did not do, asked me to join. I thought what the hell: Jesus was a Hebrew to begin with. And he died a Hebrew. It’s the same thread. I see absolutely no difference.”

  He grew up on a dairy farm in Buffalo. As a boy he was always shadow boxing. He would tie little one-pound weights to his combat boots and run backwards up and down a hill. “Then I put on sneakers,” he said. “I felt like I was flying through the air.” He rode bareback in local rodeos at 15 and hitched around the country during the Depression. He’d been a middleweight boxer, a fruit picker, a cantor in a synagogue, a bouncer in a whore house, an airplane riveter, a bareback rider, a worker in a slaughterhouse. He had worked on the cattle kill and the pig kill. He couldn’t handle that, because the pigs squealed like hell and he had to wear ear plugs. “They use everything but the squeal on a pig. We made the frankfurters. In the inedible department they took all the crap, put it in these big vats, some guy standing there with five or ten pounds of beef in his hands, throwing it in there to cover the rest of it. And the stuff would come out like white paste. Then they’d go on a rack, a belt through a chimney and come out red. I didn’t eat a hot dog for twenty years after that.