Saturday morning, I was up again on only a few hours’ sleep in a maelstrom of brothers and sisters who needed rides to friends, to art or music lessons.
After my parents moved to Long Island from Boston I'd flunked out of school and become a city kid lost in the suburbs. I had to beg for a lift to my part-time job as a stock boy in a shopping center. With that and the dark looks at me for my late hours and my short answers, I was just a bothersome child who couldn't grow up.
Sunday morning after I'd had to go to church and sit through family dinner, I hitchhiked over to Bill's place in Massapequa. Even when I had a car I traveled that way. He liked the idea that I wasn't old enough to have a driver's license and was saving money to enter college next year.
When I'd met Bill on the Fire Island ferry the summer before last, I'd told him a story about a strict father and the military school where I'd been sent. When I said I was a sophomore he assumed that meant high school and I hadn't contradicted him. Sometimes looking young bothered me. But mostly I played to it.
His house was in a development kind of like the one I lived in. Bill was maybe forty and seemed safe. His camera was all set up on a tripod. He liked to take pictures. A photo of me on the ferry in short pants and a striped jersey was up on the wall. Certain guys noticed when I wore clothes my mother bought me.
"Get everything off,” Bill said, and helped me do that. “Take these,” he handed me hi-top sneakers and a basketball. Not your average high school gym outfit but then most of my moves took place on the couch. As soon as I got the money I needed for Doctor Lovell and a bit more besides, it was as if this had never happened.
That next Friday Doctor Lovell asked, “What is your earliest memory of violent assault? I don't mean sexual necessarily."
The question surprised me. I thought about it and an image came to me of an August evening with the light going away.
"That summer I told you about, the summer at the theater, was the first time I remember. A kid hit me with a rock.
"I was with some kids my age playing and one pointed up and said, ‘Look!’ I looked, and coming slowly down the slope from the yard behind was this boy who had been sneaking up on us."
Doctor Lovell asked, “Who was he?"
"A kid, who, I guess, was a year older than me, a big deal when you're four. His father was the local district attorney. Our parents wanted us to be friends. Until that summer I'd never been let out to play with other kids. My playmates were all my parents’ friends—actors, grad students. None of them had children. They'd sing, act out stories, do funny voices, listen enraptured when I talked.
"To me this boy was sinister and I shied away from him. Kids, like all animals, sense fear in others, and he came walking down the slope from the next yard, very slowly, smiling this big scary smile. I think he had the rock in his hand already. The twilight was behind him. I stood, rooted. Maybe he expected me to run and when I didn't, he stopped a distance away. Still uphill from me, he let fly. The rock hit me on the top of the head."
I rubbed the spot. “It still feels like there's a scar."
Doctor Lovell got up and came around the desk. She was a tiny person and made me lower my head to look and touch. “The fontanel, your skull bones, would have closed by that age,” she said. “This seems like a normal skull contour. There is, though, on the spot you touched, a small patch of almost white hair. What happened next?"
"I ran inside crying. I was awake that night and it felt like the inside of my mouth was swollen. Once I must have dozed and saw my father at the end of a long hall with a cartoon whirl of cats and dogs fighting like a wreath all around him."
She leaned back against her desk directly in front of me. “Before I left Europe I was a pediatrician. Were you taken to a doctor?"
"Yes. I remember the waiting room and feeling like everything, the toys and kids and mothers, was spinning. I behaved badly, crying and not wanting to be touched. He shot something into my butt, I remember, and said I had a concussion."
"Childhood concussion is hard to diagnosis. But that is what I would have said.” She sat behind her desk again. “And later you saw the Witch Girls."
I thought for a moment. “All that happened after I saw the Witch Girls, not before."
"And did you see them again that summer?"
"No. Not once that play had ended its run.” Then I told her about the recent dream in which they'd had no faces.
"Those Witch Girls could be what we call your Anima,” she said, “your vision of your female unconscious, in a way your soul. I'm sorry you don't see their faces."
That Saturday night was the final performance of Dark of the Moon. The party afterward was at a bungalow on the water in Long Beach. Rents were cheap in the off-season and lots of the theater kids lived there.
Dietrich and Lenya sang on the record player, the bathroom was thick with marijuana smoke, only same-sex couples were allowed to dance. Mags had Marty off in a corner. His ears were bright red. He cast several looks my way.
Mags then talked to another woman and took me aside. “Janette says she and Claudia are going away tomorrow and we three can have their place in the afternoon."
"I'm busy,” I told her.
"She was really mad,” Marty said later, trying to be cool. I kissed him and he almost steered off the road.
* * * *
Sunday it was still drizzling and cold. I flicked the rain off the top of my hair as I walked up to Bill's house. His car was in the driveway. A car I didn't recognize was parked out front, which made me wary.
One rule of the street I'd learned early was that it was dangerous to be alone with more than one guy.
Bill greeted me at the door, wanted to take the wet raincoat and everything else off me. But that would mean I couldn't leave. I stood in the doorway. “Someone else is here,” I said. “Who is it?"
The door to the kitchen opened and a big guy in a sweat suit, smoking a Marlboro, stood there looking at me like I was a lamb chop. Pictures of me holding the basketball were on the coffee table. I heard him say, “Bill tells me you're a bad boy.” His laugh sounded like an old car engine trying to start. He moved my way.
But I still had the door open behind me. I shoved Bill aside and got out. “Come back here, little boy!” the guy yelled.
Walking home in the rain, I was angry that they thought I was that stupid and angrier still that I probably was. A nice old lady driving a 1950 Nash Rambler, the kind that looked like an upside-down bathtub, drove me all the way to my parents’ door. She warned me never to go out without an umbrella and rubbers.
* * * *
That Friday I had enough cash for one more session with Doctor Lovell. She asked me why as a kid I never told my parents or anyone else what had been done to me. The answer that came blurting out was, “I didn't trust them to love me if they knew."
"A compartmentalized life is one of the penalties that come with keeping so many secrets,” she told me.
"I have a girlfriend now,” I said. “There's a guy I really like. I think I'm going to be okay.” I didn't tell her how I lost the source that paid for the visits.
She looked at me. “You almost epitomize the molested child. Some aspects of life you know very well. In others you are young and immensely naive. We will stay in touch. I will give you a letter when you need it for the army. We will meet here again before long."
* * * *
A couple of months later on the Saturday night after the end of the semester, the family was asleep and I was out in the backyard dressed in just shorts, looking up at the stars.
Mags had graduated and was apprenticing at a regional theater in Minnesota. We'd had sex often enough for me to think maybe I was human after all. I liked her and she loved me. Marty hadn't joined us which was okay. Suggesting it had made me feel kind of like the Subway Man.
My parents were delighted that I'd gotten on the Dean's List and helped me buy a little blue Plymouth Valiant. I was starting a job at the World's Fair.
The night
was mild and to someone raised in New England the air had a taste of the tropics. I went out the back door and walked barefoot on the grass. It seemed like a moment for the Witch Girls. But they never came when I expected them.
* * * *
In January I showed a letter from Doctor Lovell to the college psychiatrist who was very nice and the commandant of the campus ROTC who was not. But the gym and ROTC requirements got waived and I graduated.
My family was moving back to New England and the draft hung over me. But I landed a job as an apprentice fashion copywriter in the Garment District, sold my car, and moved into Anise's Place, a rambling crash pad/commune on East Tenth Street. I'd managed to outrun the letters from my draft board.
My job meant that five days a week I dragged my ass out of the smoke and madness of Anise's Place and up to Seventh Avenue.
In the Garment District insanity was organized. Old copyeditors smelling of cigarettes and gin snarled at me, “Cut fifteen characters out of the body, shmuck!” Buyers shouted, “Double stitching is not as big a selling point as the sleek mod look, understand?"
A few stories in my college magazine, a chaotic draft of a novel about a young kid who talked like Rimbaud and wrecked the life of an academic poet got me an agent. She wasn't much older than I was and mainly wanted someone to go with her to parties.
All her plans for my writing career involved prominent writers who were looking for boyfriends. At a book party at the old Scribner's store/publishing house on Fifth Avenue, she introduced me to James Baldwin. The bubble eyes that looked so strange in his photos were riveting in real life. He was charming and we kissed but left separately.
Then my Selective Service notices caught up with me and on a bleak morning I found myself shivering in my jockey shorts along with several hundred other potential draftees at the Induction Center on Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan.
The halls stank of tension and fear. For hours we got poked and prodded, gave up blood and urine, stood in lines. I felt like I was in a car sliding endlessly out of control. I had letters from Doctor Lovell. If they didn't work I was going to be shipped to Fort Dix that night. My clothes would be sent to my parents in Massachusetts and the process of erasing me would begin.
Then I stood before a psychiatrist who sat behind a desk and read about the Subway Man and me, about how I had suffered an incidence of traumatic head injury as a child, was a conflicted homosexual, a compulsive alcoholic and drug abuser—the story went on.
Doctor Lovell had described the contents to me, “To save you the trouble of opening the envelope and discovering you can't understand the jargon."
The shrink sneered as he wrote the permanent deferment and I wondered how much he got off on having an endless succession of scared, nearly naked young guys come through his door.
Afterward in the locker room, my hands shook so much I had trouble getting dressed. A legend of the draft physical was the guy who flipped out to fool the army doctors and ended up permanently crazed.
Outside it was evening rush hour. I was too dazed to find the subway and wandered through unfamiliar streets. Then I saw figures with long, loose hair and diaphanous gowns paused on a corner. The dark Witch Girl turned slightly but not enough for me to see her face.
They crossed the street and I followed them past the Fulton Fish Market, through the Lower East Side and Little Italy. Neither of them glanced back again and though I tried I could never catch up.
In the middle of a block a panhandler looked up with crazed eyes and it seemed I knew him. When I looked for them again, the Witch Girls were gone and I was outside Anise's Place.
The people in residence cheered my return, listened to my saga, turned me on to ultra fine hash. Next morning, in jacket, tie, and shined shoes, I was at my desk writing catalog copy. But the feeling that I was in a car sliding on ice stayed with me.
"Your description of me in that letter was awful,” I told Doctor Lovell.
"Understand that I put your problems in the worst possible light for the army. Now that that bad episode is behind us, we will begin work to make you better. What do you have to show me?"
I took out the creased notebook that was my journal and read. “Last night I had a dream I've had before. In it I came into the tiny cubbyhole that's my room and discovered a door I'd never noticed. I pushed it open and discovered this whole other large room with a view of a big backyard with trees."
Lovell waved her hand and smiled. “Darling, everyone in New York has dreams like that. It means only that you want a bigger place to live. With your new freedom you must get out of that drug commune."
She wanted me to cut down on my drinking, to stop doing drugs, and find someone to love. Half-Witch, half-grandmother, was how I described her when people asked.
At a party in the Chelsea Hotel on a Friday night when I'd started drinking at lunch the day before, my agent introduced me to Arthur C. Clarke. He was very British and was about to write the screenplay for a Kubrick movie. He'd already found a young boyfriend who was Asian and relatively sober.
The next thing I remember was being awakened at Anise's late Monday morning by an angry call from work asking where I was.
Doctor Lovell's office was on the ground floor of a big East Seventies co-op where she and her husband had an apartment upstairs. One Saturday morning after staying up the night before for a nine a.m. appointment, I arrived in the tiny waiting room.
It seemed there was a patient ahead of me. I heard a man in the office say, “It's utterly idiotic that I should be held accountable for every mistake some stupid sales clerk made. I signed the bill, thinking I was being charged the correct amount."
Her answer was too low for me to hear.
"And it infuriates me that you're taking their side,” he said. The door to the inner office flew open and a beautifully dressed middle-aged man with gray hair swept back like a symphonic conductor's emerged. He carried a little dog under his arm.
Apparently unbothered that I might have overheard his conversation, he gave me one disdainful look and was gone. I recognized Maria Lovell's husband, the composer Reynolds Strand, and felt pretty sure his anger had been an act.
"Come in,” she said and smiled when I did. “You see, my dear, that all relationships have problems from time to time."
At that session I told her, “The night before last I had the soldier dream again. It was pretty much like always. I know in the dream that he's a soldier and carries a rifle but he dresses like a college kid. He's in this neighborhood of old houses with big lawns that looks like the town where my family moved. But there's no one around, no enemy, nobody. He's on patrol and I know he's alone on patrol all the time."
I paused. She said nothing so I added, “I understand that he's me.” She nodded slightly. “The thing is, yesterday, on my way to work, I went through Astor Place. There are people lined up along the wall of the Cooper Union, panhandling. And I saw this bum I've seen before. He was in rags and with a half-grown beard and crazed eyes. And I realized he's the kid in the dream except older."
"You mean you dreamed this? Or that you had seen this street person before and that he then appeared as the soldier in your dream?"
I shrugged to indicate I didn't see what difference it made.
"An inability to distinguish between dreams and reality is called delusion. It can be fueled by psychotropic drugs and amphetamine. You must stop taking them or there is nothing that I can do for you!” Her voice rose. She looked angry.
"If the soldier in the dream, that lost kid in a deserted world, is me now,” I said, “the guy on the street is me if I had been drafted."
"Yes,” Doctor Lovell said quietly. Then she remembered she was angry. “You must stop doing drugs and drinking or that will be you in any case. What abuse did was to drive a wedge between you and your emotions. I am trying to help you reconnect them, and you are fighting me."
I agreed and looked contrite because I wasn't entirely sure what I'd seen and what I'd dreamed.
The thing that I didn't say to Doctor Maria Lovell was that I'd been told her story and thought of her as a bit magical and somewhat out of a dream. She was a French doctor who fled to England in 1939 just ahead of the Nazis’ conquest of France. She wanted to get to the U.S. and couldn't until she heard that the actor Peter Lorre who was in London needed someone to accompany him back to the U.S. He was a drug addict and the Queen Mary on which he was to sail insisted there be a medical person along to administer his morphine. She signed on for that and got to New York. Once here she married the electronic composer Reynolds Strand, fourteen years her junior and a bit famous.
If I could accept her as something out of an Ingrid Bergman movie, I didn't see why she had so much trouble with my dreams spilling over into my waking life.
I didn't stop doing drugs or drinking. I lost a fine copywriting job and managed to land one for much less money.
Anise didn't want me in her crash pad anymore.
Then on Avenue B on a perfectly clear afternoon, someone said, “Hello, Witch Boy!” Mags McConnell, the blonde Witch, had just moved back to New York and we fell into each other's arms.
In her apartment near Avenue A in the East Village I was introduced to Geoff, her roommate, cute, twenty years old, a bit willowy, very funny, and officially bisexual. We all knew it was perfect as soon as we got together: I loved Geoff, he loved Mags, and she loved me.
When Doctor Lovell asked how I was able to pay her fees, I told her about an older guy, an art director, who I saw once or twice a week.
She shook her head. “In order to deal with what happened as a child you manage to believe that money is a prophylactic. Because you then use it to pay me, nothing that I say really touches you."
One midnight Geoff, Mags, and I, along with half a dozen other people, went up to Max's Kansas City to hear the Velvet Underground play.
We came in ripped and got nicely plowed. Then I saw Frankie the Bug Boy who dealt the meth of death. It struck me that this would be a nice way to top off the evening. As I approached him I recognized the one Frankie was talking to.
FSF, July-August 2010 Page 18
