Drunken Angel (9781936740062)

by Kaufman, Alan

  From then on, I had friends among the clubs. One, a sergeant of arms for the New York chapter of the Angels, drove a Dad’s Root Beer truck to make ends meet and worked the door as a bouncer for the Fillmore East. Every so often he would pull up in the truck, drop off a few cases of root beer, and hand down guest passes for shows.

  One night, I showed up at the concert hall with Kathy and was greeted by a cheerful “What’s going on, Alan!” from the Angel bouncer, who let us in for free. This so impressed Kathy that later, at the club, she almost let me go all the way, but not quite, which swelled my nuts so bad I howled.

  8

  SUMMER ENDED, I MADE FOOTBALL SQUAD AT A sports powerhouse, the biggest all-boys high in NY, a state penitentiary posing as a school, and eventually became offensive tackle and defensive end on a team heading for the city crown.

  One night out with a couple of schoolyard guys in Van Cort-landt Park, passing big gallon jugs of Gallo port back and forth, I felt the universe snap into view. I stumbled, drunk, to the grass and lay with arms and legs akimbo, like an altar sacrifice, smiling at the blazing stars. For the first time in my life, I felt connected, happy, sure that life belonged to me and I to it. And I drank myself unconscious.

  From then on, my life’s game plan became to someday live by myself in a room stocked to the rafters with bottles of Gallo and books by famous writers.

  Once, I met up with a few players from the team at the Killarney Rose, near Fordham Road; guzzled pitchers, and then shots. Completely sloshed, I picked a fight with someone’s face and broke the place up. It was my first drunken brawl. The last thing I recall before passing out was lying with a swollen eye atop an Irish barfly dressed in a brassiere, in her upstairs bedroom, the feel of her stubbly upper lip as I tried to plant a kiss. The next day, sick as a dog, I learned from the others, who’d waited a turn with her, that I’d puked up on her neck as I passed out.

  Finally, when my sexual threshold had grown explosive, I sought relief from a Delancey Street whore named Michelle, who worked for a cathouse on the Lower East Side and charged me ten bucks for a half-and-half—a bang and a blow job. My first real try at sex, I could barely get it up. The old nightmares roared back. “Are you tense? Is this your first time?” she asked. I nodded that it was. “Just relax,” she cooed. But I began to obsess about human sacrifice, blonde virgin brides. The obsession with human sacrifice had nothing to do with the act of being blown; it was what my mind threw on the screen as sex occurred—an old obsessive way to buffer reality with twistedness. Still, the anguish it brought was sharp, real. I focused obsessively on a crumb-encrusted fork jammed into a butt-heaped ashtray on the nightstand, overcome by panic that if she saw me staring at it she would apprehend my sudden urge to thrust it into her chest.

  Now ensued an unspoken game of eyes. If I happened to glimpse the fork as she performed oral sex, she’d snap my eyes away by stopping and asking how it felt.

  I was sure that she had seen my eyes make contact with the utensil; knew, fathomed, my homicidal phobia. It made me so ashamed. I just wanted to crawl away from my skin and die.

  After I came, I skulked out ashamed as Michelle looked on sadly. I felt that I barely deserved to live, so filled with nightmares that I could not even enjoy sex with a beautiful woman.

  My response to this strange fork-stabbing fear in the weeks and months ahead was to drive my fist into another man’s face, a kind of surrogate stabbing, I suppose, the wrestling, the spurting blood, the furious rush. In the Bronx, fights always had a manslaughter element. And football was like that, a kind of stabbing sex. All of me came to play. I slammed my opponent with everything I had, tumbled like a pit bull locked in a grunting death bout. But at the end of day, there was only loneliness, and the sore trek home under seagull-haunted skies, and the weight of an equipment-laden duffel bag, home to a family who hated my guts. I wanted so badly to entangle my legs with a woman’s, cradle my head on her soft shoulder, lips at her breast, listening to her heartbeat, touching her pussy possessively—and reaching wholeness with a bottle of Gallo port.

  9

  LINDA WAS THE FIRST REAL GIRLFRIEND WITH whom I had serious sex. I was seventeen, a high school junior; she, nineteen, a miniskirted, blonde Bronx Community College sophomore with long legs, sweet tits, and blue, defiant eyes.

  Her father, Fred, like mine, worked night shifts in the PO, different branch. Her mom, Raz, was a cripple laid up with MS.

  I would go to her house when Fred had left for work, slide into her bed, spend the night. My first time with her I got so excited I couldn’t get it up; delirious, pardoned myself, went to the bathroom, sat on the toilet, jerked off. When I emerged, she saw a spot of sperm on my thigh and said with a witchy laugh: “What’s that?”

  “Snot,” I said. “I blew my nose.”

  “That’s not snot. That’s sperm.” She grinned and, leaning over, kissed me.

  After that, I had no problem with sex, though once in a while I wrestled with stabbing nightmares.

  Sometimes, leaving Linda’s house, hunkered in my black varsity letter football jacket under bright blue autumn skies, I sat next to scarved old ladies gabbing on the projects benches, and smiled at how nice the world seemed.

  I thought about her all the time, the way she looked, how she loved Laura Nyro, how devoted she was to her mother. I got a job working nights at Krum’s, a big confectioners on Fordham Road, to save for a going-steady ankle bracelet engraved with our names.

  When I presented it, she was so happy she cried.

  It felt damned wonderful, so I bought her tickets to see Laura Nyro and she couldn’t believe it. Also got her a beautiful sweater, Leonard Cohen albums, took her to a fancy-dress dinner restaurant with a foreign-sounding name.

  Our parents got to know each other. My parents liked Linda. Everyone felt sure that someday we’d marry.

  Then, one night, while she was attending to Raz, I happened across a telephone bill lying open on her white dresser and noted a long string of collect calls from Fort Lee, New Jersey, charges reversed.

  When she slipped back into bed, I asked: “Who’s in Fort Lee?”

  “What?”

  “All the collect calls from Fort Lee. Who’s that?”

  She froze. “A friend.”

  “Oh, yeah? Which?”

  His name was Eddie, a former boyfriend now in the National Guard, who was lonely, had no dad, and had a lush for a mom. Linda felt sorry for him, accepted the charges when he called because of how broke he was.

  “He calls a lot. There’s like fifteen calls for this month.”

  “He’s having a hard time. His mom’s dying. Please don’t be upset. It’s nothing, really. I love you.”

  “Okay. I’m cool,” I lied.

  Then, over a period of several weekends—our usual hang-out times—she became ever less available, due, she said, to end-term exams; kept canceling, last minute.

  And then one day, on a park bench, she said, “Things have an order. Romance can’t be number one!”

  I thought, She has to study: no sweat. “You do what you gotta do, baby,” I told her. “I’ll get the hell out of your hair for a while.”

  She smiled, nodding somberly, in this very adult way, asserting, as never before, her emotional leverage over me, as if I were some delinquent little crud grounded until I’d learned some pointless lesson.

  Pride stung, I left without goodbye, no embrace, hands jammed in pockets—shuffled out of there, dismissed, bewildered, ashamed, sauntering through the Pepto Bismol–pink brick housing complex, feeling a faint draft of the old unbearable loneliness.

  10

  I DIDN’T DRINK. AND TURNED DOWN OFFERS OF smack from friends as the drug spread like wildfire through the Bronx. When my parents were out, Puerto Rican friends locked themselves in the bedroom, cooked, tied up, and booted. Others sat around the kitchen, drinking wine, huffing glue. When some of the players fixed up in the locker room I looked the other way, played football, wrote poems, s
tudied. I tried to avoid trouble. But my doubts about Linda had infected me.

  One Saturday night, when she called to say that she couldn’t see me—she and Shelly cramming for some important exam, the usual story—I sweetened my voice, told her no problem, you’re my girl, do what you gotta. I’m here for you. Lotsa luck with the tests!

  Off the phone, I dressed for combat—an old football jersey, jeans, black Cons, river rat hat, a bandana wrapped around my wrist, a short blackjack in my hip pocket, night’s leaden weight in my soul. Palming my K-55, I headed out.

  I rode the uptown IRT in a mood of grim resolve, like an animal with a bullet in its side, bleeding out, hiding in the bush, waiting to charge.

  I had dreams of becoming a writer and had hoped Linda would share this life, and escape, with me, the blue-collar lack of options grinding down our parents’ lives. I went to Shelly’s. Pounded on the door. Heard hushed voices. Kool & The Gang on the stereo. Mazor, Shelly’s boyfriend, dressed only in briefs, cracked the door a notch. “She’s not here,” he said and started to shut it on me. Behind him, I glimpsed Shelly in panties and bra. I blasted the door open. Shelly screamed as I bounded up the steps to the next landing, scanned the corridor, figuring that if Mazor had to ball her in the downstairs then someone must be in the upstairs. I kicked in Shelly’s bedroom door.

  She was naked on her back with him, I guessed it was Eddie, above her, between her legs, white ass muscles clenched, sliding his red horse-sized dick up and down inside her. She screamed. He jumped off comically, dick wagging. I reached for my K-55. Could have lopped it off. Stabbed her to death too.

  But amazed, ashamed, embarrassed, I turned and left. I don’t know if they called the police.

  I found a liquor store. An old Irish guy stood outside. “Look,” I said. “Here’s two fins. Go in there, get me a jug of Gallo, keep the change.”

  Moments later he emerged with the medicine. I took the big green bottle with the blue-black contents up to the parkway lawn overlooking the columns of headlights barreling north. Unscrewed the cap, tilted the big jug, and took a long shuddering pull. Then another. Felt so hurt inside I thought it would kill me. Wanted to howl. The firm cold grass pricked my neck. I turned my head to drink more fortified wine, and I saw her, wrapped around his waist, her manicured red fingernails pulling him down by the shoulders into herself, to take him deeper, and on her leg, the ankle bracelet. She had not even had the decency to remove it before giving herself to him.

  I thought: Fug it. The wine’s sharp grape smelled pleasantly feverish, like a fatal wound. I shuddered and drank more.

  BOOK THREE

  11

  THAT SUMMER, I FLEW TO EUROPE WITH THREE rock-and-roll heroin addicts named Barry, Jimmy, and Danny, who weighed a hundred pounds each and wore their hair in giant Jewfros. Their faces oozed with smack pimples. They all smoked Newport menthol cigarettes and were obsessed with the thought of either scoring methadone in Piccadilly—the Brits handed it out to addicts gratis—or else obtaining some large quantity of pure H in Marseille, a drug trade crossroads made famous by the film The French Connection.

  Because they dealt smack, they lent me enough money for the summer, and then some. I purchased my ticket on a Freddie Laker flight for a ridiculously low sum, proud that they had let me come along.

  In London, we headed over to Hyde Park and fell in with a band of hippies who offered us giant rolled cigars of cheap tobacco sprinkled with stingy pinches of pot. It didn’t work well and we all began to jones. Barry and Jimmy went off, and in no time returned with bags of H, passed them around. I snorted too. Then we crashed with a hippie couple. Jackie Mod, with bangs and go-go boots, worked in a Chelsea boutique. Royal Richard drew amateur cartoons. He hadn’t much patience, and after fiddling with pen and ink he’d sigh, slap his thighs, rise, and say: “It’s all bollocks! Off to the pub!” We’d get hammered on pints of piss-warm bitters. Jackie Mod, coming home and finding us regularly smashed, grew understandably upset and left, she said, to go bang his best friend, Corey. Outraged, Royal Richard stalked off after her. Soon, my friends also melted away into the ulcerated underbelly of London, cruising for meth. They always found it and stumbled back to Royal Richard’s and Jackie Mod’s to boot up and nod.

  I drank pints of bitters in a local pub and went to see my first play by Samuel Beckett, Endgame, at the Young Vic. It affected me profoundly because his characters inhabited the same lonely madness that I felt.

  Often, I dropped in on Granny Takes a Trip, His Majesty’s clothiers to the Who and the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart and the James Gang. The Gang happened to drop by one day. There we were, sitting side by side on little Shanghai stools, as long-legged SoHo girls in hot pants and teensy sweaters helped us try on patchwork leather kicks and snakeskin shoes, velvet two-toned jackets and embroidered silk shirts. What are you doing tonight around two? the James Gang asked me. Nothing. Here’s a pass to our after-hours club. They were some of the most ferocious rock-and-roll guitar gunfighters of all time, wielded their Gibsons like Colt .45s. Even the fearsome Winter Brothers, Johnny and Edgar, wouldn’t draw on them. Two days later, eardrums stunned, I crawled out of that club on hand and knees, converted.

  Not long after, we shot up north to Gloucester, to this commune I heard of, and there were sheep and foul communal stews and everything looked Dark Ages gray.

  One night, I escaped to a pub with a single motorcycle parked outside. Inside was a gang sporting patches on cutoff denims. I sat down at their table and introduced myself as a visitor from the Bronx. Impressed, they asked me what it was like. I told them about working at Eddie’s motorcycle shop. “So you met the Angels?!” They fell over themselves to stand me drinks. “Where are your bikes?” I asked. “I saw the BSA outside. What about the rest?” They laughed. There were no others. Too poor. One bike between the whole club is all they had. That night, I went back to their clubhouse, a welfare flat on a crooked street in a dingy slum. We drank cider, dropped mescaline, listened to the Rolling Stones. We tripped, and told each other jokes that made us vomit out our guts with mirth. Come morning, I joined a biker named Flash as he followed a horse-drawn milk wagon, filching the bottles from doorsteps and bringing them back for the club’s breakfast. The rest of the day was spent groaning in the crapper.

  Back in London, reunited with my original group, we bought a broken-down tiny green-and-white station wagon, which we registered using the Cornwall YMCA as our home residence, and headed to France, where we drove around Paris tripping on acid. Slept in an abandoned lot next to a Turkish camper overrun with rats, and next morning, horrified, drove hell-bent for leather to Marseille, a city of Africans with scarred cheeks, sunglassed Moroccans with bronzed chests, and police officers in white kepis out of Casablanca. But there was no one willing to peddle us smack. And no one could really blame the Marseille dealers if the sight of three American furry freak brothers with a long-haired brute Bronx bodyguard in tow made them doubt our true intentions.

  12

  TIRED, BROKE, WE RETURNED STATESIDE. I WAS now almost nineteen and went to a podunk college in Michigan on a promise of a possible football scholarship. Long-haired, earringed, brain corrupted by LSD, my chin ringed by a Mormon’s beard, twenty pounds under my playing weight, unwashed, pasty-faced, stoned, I stood insolently in front of the coaches with beer breath and bloodshot eyes, and I got benched, and then dropped.

  Began to cruise around with Goldie and Moondog, two local Ann Arbor heads who hipped me to the White Panthers, a political pot party formed to free rock activist John Sinclair (sentenced to ten years for a single joint). I spent a month in their safe house, crashed on a fold-out couch that contained a duffel bag packed with weed, which I smoked the way others chew mints. One day, in walked the Panthers’ house band, the MC5. Their underground hit “Kick Out the Jams, Motherfucker” became the prototype of punk. I recall being backstage at one of their famous Ann Arbor gigs too, and it may be that Beat legend Allen Ginsberg—whom someday I’d perform w
ith—was there. Hard to say, though. The memory is fuzzy because I was so zonked.

  Done with sports for good, I was admitted as an undergraduate in American lit with a minor in Jewish studies at the City College of New York, still known, at the time, as the Harvard of the Proletariat.

  I studied with Yitz Greenberg, a Jewish studies pioneer, in a course on Israel and the Superpowers, and enrolled in a seminar with Elie Wiesel, the dean of Holocaust literature.

  Elie, as we called him, frail, refined, wore an air of somber courtesy. But underneath lay an invincible sadness that was like a reproach. Virtually everything he said accused the world and confirmed what my mother had tried to teach in her own crude way.

  Another Holocaust was certain to come. Governments of any kind cannot be trusted. The world is and always will be against the Jews. The Holocaust was a civilizational crime, but in a very real sense, no one, yet, had truly paid for it. In fact, those most culpable were now prospering.

  Once, Elie stood at the blackboard, elbow cradled in his hand, eyes wistful, and pronounced in that slow, sad, thoughtful way of his: “The Holocaust is not the end point. No. It is a new kind of beginning. For mankind, a singular sort of precedent. History has shown that once something unprecedented appears in this world,”—he scanned our transfixed eyes—“rather than go away, it sets the stage for future reenactments of the same, more genocides, but on an even larger and more criminal scale.”