Drunken Angel (9781936740062)

by Kaufman, Alan

UNTIL HOLLYWOOD, HOWIE HAD BEEN A WARM, talkative kid. After the thumbs down, he clammed up. I became his emotional conduit, as if appointed to feel for both. I was Mother’s little genius, earmarked for escalating special treatment.

  Whenever she laid into me in the motel rooms, screeching, he stood by, silently watching, half hidden by the doorway, sucking his thumb, big dark eyes grown wide with terror as I called out: “Howie, help! Make her stop!” But what could he do? Trapped and helpless as we were in the rat pits of her fury?

  Out there, on the road, when my father was nowhere about, she beat me mercilessly. This went on, day after day, in motels with names like The Sandman and The Costa Rica and Holiday Bungalow. Muffled by the happy squealing clamor of families in bathing suits frolicking in the pool, my shrieks for help fell on deaf ears.

  Back in the Bronx, she woke me at late hours when Pop would be gone—and the harder I screamed, the louder she struck. No mercy shown once she was engaged. My only hope to play dead, stifle my cries, though this always proved impossible, as she managed to find that one spot in the elbow or knees which provoked more pain than I could bear.

  She caused me to break, plead, to no avail. With a shrieking sense of injury, at such times I was not a self or a person but a blinding blur kinesthecized by tears. My shadow, on the ground or on a wall, seemed more real than me.

  My mother bought the magazines too. I read them when she was out. A shadow world grew in my thoughts. Desires so forbidden their sheer weight crushed me. Often they took the shape of a beautiful adult woman, trussed and blindfolded, helpless to resist my caresses, endearments, or cruelties. She couldn’t shrug me off or slap me away. She couldn’t hit me with a hanger. She had to let me touch her and kiss her as I liked. She had to let me rub against her, love her as I wanted, for as long as I wished. Such thoughts triggered hard-ons so painful that only repeated ejaculations brought relief.

  Turning ten on the road, moving around from motel to flophouse, I began to fear that I was a serial killer, one of those baby-faced blue-eyed butchers gazing back from the dingy newsprint pages of my parents’ mags.

  I masturbated constantly. Following which I experienced a wave of remorse, sometimes horror. This drew me further into myself.

  Barred from decent human society, I was left only with books and with stray dogs, pigeons, hoboes, parks, endless streets, the cold round sun, hunger, and the black-smudge ink traces on my fingers from the smut mags and paperbacks I browsed in the candy stores.

  If I was in fact a potential killer, I had best stay hidden from sight, away from women especially, who I feared could at any moment unleash their rage on my exposed elbows and turn me into the tortured son of the Nazi torture bride.

  Life had once been a nice place to visit but I didn’t want to live here anymore. I felt everything too intensely, became twisted, writhing, a knot of fierce furtive agony. Around women, I grew subdued, pitilessly shy. At school could barely bring myself to speak. We moved from city to city, state to state, the perennial new kids on the block. When money ran out, we wound up in a San Francisco Mission Street flop, out-of-state indigents. Soon after we arrived in the city, my father traveled there to join us. I suppose my parents missed each other, though I suspect she was in flight from the life he had made, which was no life. Naturally, he arrived penniless. Now there was no money and a fourth mouth to feed.

  To make ends meet, my mother worked as an au pair temp and every night my father went out into the foggy streets to walk her home. They returned with a can of spaghetti and a bottle of orange soda: dinner for four.

  I remember this as a time of lice-crawling despair and sinister strangers. There was not even money for the stags. I recall a couple named Joanne and Bob, young Linkhorn drifter types, descendants of poor Dustbowl refugees who’d thought, same as us, to find Paradise in California, who had befriended my parents and paid frequent visits to our squalid little room to find relief from their own dirty hole on the next floor up.

  Once, to prove how tough she was, Joanne threw me face down on the bed, thrust a knee into my back, and jerked my arm behind, twisted until I howled but still didn’t relent, even when I begged her to stop.

  “You little shit!” she said with a laugh. “Go on! Kick and scream! It won’t help you! Do it!”

  My parents and her husband stood by guffawing. It was as if I was now a stag story. Stretched for sacrifice. I swore then I’d never let that happen again. From there on, I must serve as my own shield and sword.

  5

  WE RETURNED TO THE BRONX, TO STAY FOR GOOD. Fed on fat and starch, morbidly obese, with large femalelike breasts that the teen boys would squeeze until we wept, Howie and I had the hell beat out of us.

  There was a guy named Billy the Barrel, an adult, who would waylay me en route to the schoolyard, force me into doorways to fondle his testicles. He pressed up against me, panting hard, a hand on my throat, grunted: “Hold them harder. Hold them fuggin’ balls.”

  There were others, strangers, men who chased me down, pinned me against hot metal fin-tailed Buicks and Chevys as indifferent passersby walked on. They whimpered excitedly, squeezed until my breath strangled, grinding their groins against me, their thick cold tongues squirming in my ear.

  Struggle was futile. In their arms I went limp, let them do what they wanted until it was done, and once escaped, hurried off to try to return to my body, which I’d left when their hands trapped me, flown off while still in the predatory embrace, to hover over it all in a kind of disembodied aerial astonishment.

  Fled, I sat in the cool shadows of some alley, hid among trash cans where no one would think to look, and amid the refuse and stink searched for signs of something lost, a sense of me as good, to retrieve if I could even as I knew that I couldn’t, that what had just occurred had happened too often. That with my big breasts and my helplessness I must have been some sort of girl who was supposed to be a boy, or why else would they touch me that way? And then grew amazed, sickened, cursing myself for my passivity. And fantasized about what I should have done. Stab them with a big knife like Jim Bowie, with a sword like Zorro, run them through! Or shoot them dead like the Lone Ranger. Saw myself shouting and punching, wanting to be a hero, but felt only a coward. And slowly, the numbing helplessness and shame filtered through until it was all over me, every part, an invisible infection about which I could not speak to anyone, for what would they think? My father? If he knew? What would he say? Forget about it! And my mother? How would she look at me as I told her about the men touching me in that way?

  Forget about it.

  BOOK TWO

  6

  BY AGE FIFTEEN, AFTER YEARS OF SCHOOLYARD training in gutter violence and sports, my body shot up, gained muscle, lost fat. I became a skilled, ruthless fighter who laughed at pain, relished blood, savored mayhem.

  Known around the hood as “Moony,” I prided myself on bruises and scabs. I grew my hair and sideburns long. My curled lip sneered and my eyes grew sharp.

  Billy the Barrel still came around, thinking I’d forgotten his enforced ball-holding. Saw me once and called out: “Hey, there’s fugging Moony. Look who got big. You still a punk! Get the fug outta here!”

  At stickball, with a bat wagging in his fists, cigarette dangling from his lips, he shot off his mouth at some scared kid whom he’d coerced into a game of pitching in. “C’mon, ya moron!” he screeched at the kid. “Throw me something I can hit! C’MON!”

  When he spotted my approach, his face grew grave, he turned away from the pitch, and the ball bounced off his arm as he tossed the cigarette aside to aim his bat at my forehead.

  “C’mere,” I said, smiling. He swung. The bat broke against my arm with a loud crack. I laughed. To this day I can feel my hand clamped on his hair, slamming his head into cement studded with glass shards. Had a broken bottle neck going for his eye when hands from behind pulled me off as others hauled him to his feet and hurried him away, bawling, blood gushing through his fingers. Never saw him again.
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br />   Other times, I broke teeth. One guy’s face exploded against my fist. Another with a knife out, who’d picked on my brother, got beat to a pulp outside a pizza joint, against a car. Once, this huge baboon named Fat Joe put out word on the street that he was gunning for me. I put word back that we should meet in a dead end off the Concourse at such and such a time. He brought an entourage, who stood silent witness as I turned his ape face into a swollen mask of blood.

  On a family visit to Uncle Arnold’s place in the Castle Hill Projects, we brought big bags of White Castle hamburgers, quarts of Coca-Cola. Cousin Dennis had just returned from serving a stretch. At the time he and his brother Harvey were engaged in heroin dealing, car theft, robberies, and other felony crimes. Ivy, another brother—in all there were nine—had a serious monkey on his back. Entering their home felt like crossing over the threshold of a demonic haunt where crazed devils lived. The edginess of that household was amazing.

  While my Aunt Ray sat in the dining room screeching that Arnie should drop dead, Arnie and my father—in full sight of Ray and her circle of sympathetic girlfriends—enjoyed the living room, oblivious to her rants. Arnie wore boxer shorts, wifebeater tee, and house shoes, while my father looked real sharp in an Italian knit, sharkskin slacks, and Florsheim gator loafers.

  They blew smoke rings on fat White Owl cigars, remonstrated about lost bets, and argued back and forth about the Yankees. Sometimes their voices dropped and they talked about things I wasn’t meant to hear. Bored, I tried wandering down the hall to my cousins’ room but Pop’s voice cracked like a whip above my head: “Hey, dummy! Where you think you’re going?”

  “I’m bored. I wanna go see my cousins.”

  “Get your ass over here NOW!”

  “Let ’im go see them pieces of shit,” said Uncle Arnold. “It’ll be a good warning to him.”

  “YOU’RE THE PIECE OF SHIT, NOT YOUR SONS!” Ray shrieked. Her bottle brunette big-hair girlfriends, in pantsuits, nodded in accord.

  “Awright,” my father said. “But if they try to give you any dope, you let me know. I’ll go in there and knock them dumbheads off. You morons in there hear me?”

  From my cousins’ room came laughter.

  “Keep your nose clean!” my father warned me.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said insolently and knocked on the door. Heard Dennis call: “Who’s that?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Hey, Cousin Alan! C’mon in, man!”

  I entered, found them in their Skivvies, stretched on cots, smoking Camels, having themselves a little chitchat, or plotting heists.

  “Cousin Alan!” said Dennis. “How’s it goin’, man? Have a seat, relax.”

  Down one side of his mouth ran a scar I hadn’t seen before.

  “It goes,” I said.

  “How old’re you now? said Harvey. “Fifteen, goin’ on fifty?”

  They both snickered.

  Dennis waved me into a folding chair. “Don’t listen to that dummy, Cousin Alan.”

  I sat there. And tried hard not to stare. But gawked anyway at the tattoos covering Dennis’s arms, chest, shoulders. They hadn’t been there before he got sent up and they were a little like the hand-drawn numbers that my mother’s friend Ruth—who’d been in Auschwitz—had on her arm. But the tats on Dennis were even more jagged looking, crudely drawn.

  Dennis, noticing my stare said, pleased: “You checking these out? I got ’em in the joint.”

  “Them’s tattoos,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “But I thought Jews don’t get those. My mom says Jews don’t get buried Jewish if they get those.”

  “Yeah,” said Dennis, glancing over at Harvey with a mischievous grin. “Well, I guess I’ll worry about that when I’m dead.” They both guffawed.

  “Lemme see?” I said.

  “Help yourself, Cuz.”

  “You got all those doing time?”

  “And a couple on the outside.”

  Soon after, Dennis got into trouble again and tried to kill the DA’s main witness during a trial for a jewelry heist and was sent upstate to Sing Sing. While Harvey, who kept up his end of the heroin trade, slipped a bag of smack to his brother Ivy, who OD’d and died in his mother’s bathtub.

  For Ivy’s funeral, two police bulls brought Dennis down cuffed and dressed in a prison-issue brown suit to say goodbyes. They led him into the chapel by the elbows, a defiant sneer on his face as he peered into his brother’s coffin, and then led him out, no chance to speak to anyone.

  My Aunt Ray cried and screamed, and my Uncle Arnold looked lost, but out behind the chapel, Harvey, who’d slipped the hot shot to his brother, lounged with his crew, leaned up against a big two-toned, fin-tailed Chevy, and was passing a joint around, the smell of which wafted inside. My father said to me, “C’mon,” and out back we went. Pop walked right up to Harvey and backhanded the joint from his mouth. None of Harvey’s crew dared move against Pop. They kept their traps shut and I noted as I scanned their hate-filled gazes (my own hand on the K-55 knife in the side pocket of my jacket) that a lot of them had tats on their hands and arms. This was the late Sixties and ink was already common among gangs.

  “C’mon, let’s get the hell outta here,” my father said in a tone of utter disdain, and we returned to the chapel.

  At the burial, Arnie got the idea that the Kaufman men should take over from the gravediggers, bury our own, even though our own had killed our own. We each took hold of the balancing straps and, on Arnie’s cue, eased the coffin down into the hole. Someone lowered too fast, the coffin dropped, my cousin, wrapped in his white burial shroud, spilled out.

  Around the grave Aunt Ray, my mother, and other female relatives swooned, screaming, hands to foreheads. My Uncle Arnold ripped open his new silk shirt and howled like an animal. My father stood there, shaking his head, muttering, “Goddamned hopeless, all of ’em.”

  I jumped in, followed by my cousin Larry. Brushed the grave dirt from Ivy’s eyes and scooped it from his mouth with two fingers. He felt like cold butchered meat. Then we rolled him into the box, sealed it, and I yelled up: “Goddamit! Bury ’im!” The gravediggers tossed in dirt fast and drumming on his coffin. But though I had stuck my very hand into the corpse mouth of a dead drug addict I did not think of it as a warning.

  7

  AROUND THIS TIME I FOUND WORK AS A FLOOR sweep and general grease monkey in the Bronx Motorcycle Repair shop on Soundview Avenue. It was the main custom shop for the Angels’ chapters of the Northeast, from NYC to Massachusetts, and was run by this guy named Eddie, a gearhead genius who turned cherry full-dress Harleys into chopped hogs with extended forks and with flaming death’s heads painted on the peanut gas tanks.

  He paid me under the table and fed me take-out shrimp-salad heroes and quarts of chocolate milk. I think he kept me out of pity, because I wasn’t much with a wrench, couldn’t tell a lug nut from a washer.

  The gig was a get-around boon for a tenement-poor sewer rat like me—gave me the bucks to take out my first girlfriend, Kathy, a short, seventeen-year-old mixed Puerto Rican and Greek girl with long black hair down to her waist. Kathy wore stilettos, miniskirts, and tight sweaters with uplift bras that turned her breasts into milk bottle torpedoes.

  I belonged, with my brother, to a dead-end crew that had its own storefront clubhouse bankrolled by a nutjob bodybuilder named Paul, where we drank wine, smoked joints, planned trouble, listened to the Four Tops. When I had Kathy in back, on the cot, she’d moan, “Keeese me, Alan! Keeese me, my baby!” I loved rolling and sweating, grinding and upthrusting those breasts into my face. But she wouldn’t let me get further than a copped feel, which gave me blue balls so bad I limped.

  One day at the motorcycle shop I heard a ground-rumbling roar that sounded like a tank charge by Patton’s Third Army and watched as the endless ranks of the Angels rolled up in waves of chrome and fire.

  They dismounted, and Eddie, dressed in his usual ragged greasy jeans, black boots, and rip
ped T-shirt, stepped out to greet them, mopping his face with a sweat-soaked bandana. He led them into the cavernous shop, introduced me to everyone.

  “This here kid’s Alan,” he said. “He’s Jewish, right? So, his mother was hunted by Nazis in the war. And she survived. Ain’t that right, Alan?”

  “That’s right.” I nodded shyly, avoiding eyes, hands jammed in pockets, shoulders slouched: a big proud strong kid planning to go out for varsity football that fall.

  The bikers, fearsome, wild, studied me with interest. Then they parted ranks and up stepped an Angel with long black stringy hair, a grizzled face, and a certain familiar look of intense and torturous intelligence.

  He pointed at the armada of hogs parked in neat rows outside. “My name is Jewish Bob,” he said. “That’s my bike. You see the sissy bar?” I followed his pointing arm to an iron Star of David welded atop the sissy seat of the baddest chopped Roadster I’d ever seen. It had giant monkey handlebars and chrome everything; sat so low that cockroaches had to detour around it.

  He pulled up the sleeve of his striped jersey and showed me a Star of David tattoo. “You been circumcised, kid?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “No, you ain’t. You see this knife?” He slipped one from an ivory scabbard slung on a black garrison belt with a grinning skull buckle. “Look at it. Genuine SS battle blade. My own father took it off a Nazi in World War Two after he shoved a bayonet up his ass. See that swastika on the handle?”

  I saw it.

  Balancing the knife in one hand, he took hold of the loose hanging tongue of my belt, sliced it off with a lightning stroke, and held it up for all to see.

  “Check out this fuggin’ foreskin!” he shouted, and the bikers laughed and cheered. “Today he’s just got a circumcision, Angel style! Now he’s really a man!” And he shouted the Hebrew toast to life: “L’chaim!”

  All the grinning bikers pounded me on the back and jostled and made me feel like I belonged. I’d never seen a Jew like Jewish Bob. He seemed like the toughest, craziest Angel. As the day wore on he stripped off his shirt and colors and walked around bare-chested. He danced drunk, dropped some acid, and careened laughing into doors. Back and front he was a roped muscle wall of black tattoos, including what I recognized as the Hebrew word for God, YHWH.