Drunken Angel (9781936740062)

by Kaufman, Alan

  “We won’t be needing that part,” she said and smiled.

  This was my first glimpse of the low regard in which trade publishers hold poets. It explained to me, somewhat, the sly unscrupulous personalities so typical of the poets I’d met at school. They behaved like embattled starvelings.

  For example, when I contacted Iowa’s Jorie Graham, a poet of some considerable repute who enjoyed every sort of professional advantage, and requested that she nominate a grad student to collect the contributions from Iowa writers, she tried, instead, to jockey herself into the post, thinking, perhaps, that it entailed some remuneration, no matter how small, or perhaps some slight prestige that would enlarge her hoard of accolades. Lane and I were amazed and disgusted.

  Needing the money, I dropped the poets. Doubleday bought The New Generation, my first trade book. I now had enough for tuition and even for a belted London Fog raincoat and a leather satchel—coveted totems, to me, of literary New York.

  Armed with these, I imagined myself as some sort of Brat Pack Saul Bellow rushing about campus and Manhattan on errands of earth-shattering importance. This was a time of publishers’ lunches, meetings with my agent, Robin Strauss, and working late into the night in a loaned office at Doubleday, high up in a skyscraper’s air-conditioned room in which I sat gazing out over virtually the whole of New York, feeling harshly unreal, but also tragic with distinction.

  At one of the business lunches, held in a smart Italian bistro, Collins outlined the agreement for Robin Strauss, who changed, to my advantage, almost every key contract point. When Collins—who before coming to Doubleday had worked as marketer for Colgate toothpaste, or some such thing—asked me who my favorite author was, I promptly replied: “Herman Melville.”

  “Oh,” said Collins, with a thoughtful look. “I never read him. Has he put out something new lately?”

  Strauss and I shared a wide-eyed look of amazement.

  “Uh, no.” I smiled. “Nothing recent.”

  News of my anthology aspersed the department. Although many had received permission requests, those who didn’t hated my guts. No one as yet knew who was in, who out. I held my cards close, even from Lane, couldn’t bear to tell him that poetry had been bumped. I had put up no fight. Wanted the book, the money, the glory, even if it meant betraying one who had helped so much. Told myself, sitting on my West End Bar stool, knocking boilermakers back: I’ll learn to live with it. This is what you gotta do to get ahead.

  The West End Bar had been the first gathering spot for the early Beats. Now here I was, a book man in the flesh. Yet I felt heartsick, poisoned by my victory.

  There were others too, fiction writers I wanted to include, believed in, but Collins, for one reason or another, adamantly refused to include. Jeff Goodell, one of the department’s most gifted writers, a tall, lanky motorcycle racer from California, had sent in an amazing story about the races. It was perfect for the book, yet Collins said no. When I insisted, she took me to the editor in chief. The pleading look in her boss’s eyes as he studied my face was enough: I complied. It was my first published book. I wasn’t going to ruin it. But thereafter I avoided Jeff, too ashamed to face him.

  On the other hand, other writers and poets, hearing of the book, drew close. I became popular. Sexual opportunities abounded.

  The first was a tall, lanky blonde from Kansas City named Ginger, a girl with the flapper look of a gun moll, with whom I got reeling drunk and, returning to my room, stripped and balled on Bella’s bed. The door flew open. There stood Boris, leaning on the doorknob like a cane, squinting half blind at the blurred pink Francis Bacon shapes wrestling on his dead wife’s bed. “Vot is?” he called out. “Al? Is you?”

  Ginger was tittering hysterically. I clamped a shushing hand over her mouth.

  “AL! SOMEVON IS THERE!! WHO IS THAT MIT YOU???”

  While the mattress under us slid to the floor, we rolled naked, clinging, over Bella’s throw rugs. Ginger shrieked in glee and Boris cried out: “IS A VOMAN! AL!! YOU BRING HERE WHORES!?!? VOS IS DAT SMELL? IN MY HOUSE YOU DRINKING VODKA MIT A WHORE??”

  What could I say?

  I answered, seated there bare-assed on the ground: “Yes, Boris. I’m here with a woman—not a whore, Boris, a woman—and yes, we are drinking vodka. Not yours. Our own. And will you please get out of my room. I’m a grown man, Boris. You’re not my poppa.”

  “IN MY HOUSE YOU MAKE HANKY-PANKY!” he howled. “SHAME MIT YOU!!”

  I looked at Ginger, incredulous: “Hanky-panky?”

  “That’s so cute,” she said.

  “WHORE!” Boris raged. “PROSTITUTE! GET OUT FROM MINE HOUSE!!!”

  Clutching our clothes, we ran out naked into the hall, where we hopped first on one foot, then the other, dressing hurriedly, and left. Adjourned to Ginger’s place in a women’s residence hotel down the street, where we continued our orgy.

  Next was Carolyn Shaw. A poetry cowgirl from Montana, married to a former Navy Seal who now taught, weirdly, at a dance school and who, she claimed, tied her to a bed, spread-eagled, blindfolded, and beat her senseless as he raped her with whatever he could stick up in her. I shifted my legs uncomfortably, so that she wouldn’t see how much the spread-eagled and blindfolded portion of her admission aroused me. The parallel with him was too close to home. His taste for violence sickened me. But in my darkness, I understood.

  Necking nonstop, Carolyn and I took a bus ride to Nyack, New York, during which I committed myself, body and soul, to protect her from the blindfolding and sadistic Navy Seal. This was exactly what she wanted to hear. “I know you can too! You’re the only one with balls enough to stand up to him. I’m terrified of the man. I heard you were an Israeli soldier. You won’t be afraid.”

  “No,” I boasted. “I’ll kick his ass if he lays a hand on you.”

  Our first full-on sexual encounter was strangely lifeless. She was bone dry. Had a hard little unforgiving body. Without jelly it was like copulating with a hairbrush. Her nude body revealed the numberless beatings endured, the ghosts of old bruises. Her sickly skin and muscles cringed to the touch. Her eyes looked beaten down, puffed and evasive, with that hunted look that battered women get. I hardly knew what to make of it. But felt myself hooked, deeply, despite the complete absence of pleasure or even physical attraction. As though some deep sickness in her had entwined around some deep sickness in me and we were now umbilically bound by a taste for the psychotic.

  40

  DOUBLEDAY SENT OUT REVIEW COPIES OF THE NEW Generation, including one to Towers, who, impressed, invited me to a private party at his home attended by the novelist Russell Banks and others whose names greatly mattered in the literary game. Towers, quite drunk, approached me with a tall, wobbling glass of bourbon, handed it to me. Nose inflamed, words slurred, a real lush, he said: “Drink up, Alan! I liked your preface to The New Generation. This one is on me. Here’s to your book!”

  I easily drank it down. Towers studied me, amazed. “Well,” he slurred. “That’s…you can hold yours, can’t you. Yes. Well.”

  When I excused myself to the bathroom to piss, he staggered right behind and as I urinated observed in his courtly Southern drawl, “Ernest Hemingway himself once peed in that very bowl!” Which so excited me to learn that I splashed my signature all over the seat, howling: “And now, by God, so has Alan Kaufman!”

  As pub date approached, I found myself making manic late-night calls on Boris’s phone to friends and relations from Israel to Minnesota, all on the old man’s dime. Drank constantly and saw as much of Carolyn as possible. She had decided to leave her husband for me. Thrilled, saw us as an ideal literary couple, she stretched blindfolded and spread-eagled on a bed, mouth gagged, as I read to her from the New Yorker.

  At Towers’s invitation, Bernard Malamud, whose novels and short stories I had admired since youth, even tried to emulate, came to Columbia to conduct a two-day seminar in fiction.

  Slender, bald, with a sensible mustache and dressed in a conservativ
e suit and tie, Malamud looked more like a CPA than a writer. Spoke at length of his association with the Italian existential sculptor Alberto Giacometti, from whom he’d learned formal techniques that he’d translated into prose and applied to his own literary art. He then announced importantly that he would read to us from a new work in progress, a novel whose central conceit was that Chief Joseph was really, secretly a Jew.

  The room stirred.

  When he finished, he asked for feedback.

  I raised my hand.

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Malamud, Alan Kaufman here, and first want to say what a great admirer I am. I’ve readjust about all your books. So it’s with a sense of dismay that I must tell you that the Indians portrayed in your excerpt are not Malamudian.”

  He smiled coldly. “Malamudian. Well. What genus of Indian then do you assign to them?”

  “TV Indians. Stereotypes.”

  Malamud’s face shut down. Towers, his old colleague and close friend, looked furious. Hurriedly, the seminar was brought to a close.

  The next day, I encountered Towers rushing down the hall, distressed.

  “Hi, Bob!” I smiled. “Great seminar.”

  He stopped and spit in an accusing voice: “Malamud is dead!”

  Said in such a way that seemed to suggest in no uncertain terms that I was directly responsible.

  It was known that he had a weak heart, and the advisability of exerting himself in a seminar with a bunch of brash grad students was questionable at best. Apparently, he had felt unwell in the evening, died. Did my criticism of his Indians trigger stress resulting in heart failure? Evidently, Towers thought so.

  Astonished, went to the men’s room, leaned on the sink, peered into the mirror, and grinned in an evil Dorian Gray sort of way. “Kaufman,” I informed my reflection, “you have just killed Bernard Malamud!”

  My reflection seemed pleased.

  But thereafter, my drinking accelerated to levels that in other times had driven me to the brink of nervous collapse. Sometimes I really did think that I had killed Malamud. Woke from horrified sleep, shaking my head in disbelief—no, it couldn’t be. I loved the man’s books! I’m just a dumb kid from the Bronx. Don’t tell me I killed Bernard Malamud! And then Carolyn, with whom I was insanely obsessed, even though screwing her felt like getting a callus scraped, announced to me that she couldn’t leave the old Navy Seal after all. Rambo needed her, poor thing. Strangely, she needed him too.

  “The fact that he drove jeeps into your house and raised egg-sized knots on your forehead is beside the point,” I said. “Those were just the things you shared. Yeah, most definitely, you deserve each other.”

  Insulted, she walked off.

  This sudden abandonment reduced me to a squalling agonized knot. To kill the pain I drank scotch, in the course of which I decided that suicide was the best solution. Knew what was coming, the dehumanizing tsunami of pain, and couldn’t bear the thought of living through that, past the limit of what anyone should have to endure.

  Went to the bathroom, found one of Boris’s razors, returned to Bella’s study, seated myself at her desk, and stared at the thin blade pinched between thumb and forefinger. In a way, had always wanted this. All the army gun barrels in my mouth. Death had always been a wish. Considered the thick veins running under the white skin of my wrist. All you need to do is draw the blade down hard now, first across one wrist, slice, then the other, slice. Then drink some more. And wait. There. And there.

  For a time, sat watching blood pour out with a sense of disbelief. Was that from me? Looked around. Was I really to die? What had I done? Blood everywhere. Unsteadily rising to my feet, wrists pressed tight against my shirt, I staggered to the bathroom, wrapped white towels around the bloody wounds, and with a sense of exhilaration, called 911.

  41

  POLICE ARRIVED, TWO PATROLMEN, ONE BURLY, one thin, sharp-edged. Boris was snoozing in his room. They looked around. The thin cop eyeballed my wrists as I explained to his partner that I had just cut them with a razor, intending to end my life.

  “I tried to kill myself,” I said with tingling joy.

  “Uh-huh,” said the burly cop, as if I’d just explained that I wasn’t really a human being but an aardvark awakened somehow in a human body and trying to get back to aardvark world.

  “It was,” I said, “ a suicide attempt.”

  When I said this, the thin cop winced and the burly cop seemed lost in calculations of some sort. Neither appeared to relish having to take me to the hospital.

  “Are you going to call for an ambulance? I’m bleeding pretty bad.”

  “Well.” Burly sighed. “I guess.” Looked at his partner. “You want?”

  Thin looked at me. “We’ll take him in the squad car. But, uh, look, pal, don’t get blood on the backseat, okay?”

  “I won’t.”

  In the squad car, I had a view of the backs of Thin and Burly’s thinning wet-look razor cuts. Relaxed, heaved a relieved sigh: nothing more for me to decide. The authorities in charge now, me free to be as sick as I am and no excuse about it. I’d get help now. Proudly, sat up straight, held my towel-wrapped wrists flat against my abdomen, already the good patient, keeping my blood away from the black vinyl seat, bleeding all over myself.

  “Officers. Which hospital are you taking me to?”

  “St. Luke’s,” said Thin.

  “That’s a very good one,” I said.

  Burly and Thin glanced at each other. Then Burly, who drove, motioned to Thin with an up-and-down motion of his head and said: “Hey, uh…whatsit? Alan.”

  “Yes, officer.”

  “Listen, Alan. When you get there, um, they’re gonna ask, like, in the intake, you know, how in the world, uh, you know—what happened? Where’d you get them cuts?”

  “Yeah, they’re gonna ask,” Thin concurred, as though this was the worst possible development.

  “When they ask,” Burly continued, “If you tell them suicide—” Thin spun around in his seat with a loud creaking of jacket leather and his eyes bored into mine: “You know what’s gonna happen?”

  “Tell ’im,” said Burly. “Tell ’im what’ll happen.”

  “It’s gonna be a mess, okay? A mess. They’re gonna have us and you there all night. They’re gonna keep you for observation.”

  “All night we’ll be there,” said Burly. “Tell him why.”

  “I hate to say this, but legally, what you done is considered a sort of crime. Possibly a misdemeanor. No one’ll call it that. But I heard of judges out there who want it brought to trial! Can you believe that?”

  “Fuggin’ psycho judges,” confirmed Burly.

  “But the likelihood is slim to none,” said Thin.

  “Slim to none,” said Burly.

  “But us there filling out the paperwork all night and having to hang out with you, that is real. That will happen.”

  “As real as it gets,” confirmed Burly. “All night with the forms, and tell him what then.”

  “Book you, baby. Fingerprints. Mug shot. The whole shebang. You wanna be like John Dillinger?”

  “Not just John Dillinger. Like a psycho John Dillinger. You tell’em you tried to kill yourself, you got a record, forget about getting hired, forget about renting apartments, forget about meeting a nice girl and getting married. You’re an official nutcase criminal for the rest of your life. Shit follows you around everywhere. They’ll put you under locked observation. They’ll use it against you in divorce court. You’re an official bridge jumper, state certified. Watch how much alimony you end up paying. Child support?”

  “HA!” laughed Thin.

  “Fuggin’ forget it!” said Burly. “And the paperwork. Whatsit? Alex?”

  “Alan.”

  “The whole night.”

  “All night is right,” confirmed Thin.

  After a long pause in which I felt a hand tug murderously at the small frail hope that had taken root inside me, I asked: “So, what’ll I do?”
/>   They didn’t answer right off. Pretended to consider. But I sensed that it was an answer they gave to every attempted suicide who was ambulatory. “Call it an accident,” said Thin.

  Both pretended to be excited by this, as though it were a sudden inspired revelation.

  “Hell, yeah!” Burly enthused. “Tell ’em you had an accident!”

  “There ya go!” said Thin with pleasure. “And you know what the beauty of it is? Nothing they can do about it. They gotta stitch you up and out you go. Home free! Long as no one uses the S word in that place, it never occurred.”

  “Never happened,” Burly concurred.

  “We don’t even use the S word around the intake nurse. Or the go-get-’em intern that’s gonna practice his stitches on you. We don’t use that effin’ S word nohow, no ways. Under any circumstance. And the beauty of it is—”

  “Tell ’im! This is beautiful!” crowed Burly.

  “We go our way, you go yours.”

  “And we’ll all meet on the Great Highway,” sang Burly.

  “So whaddaya say?” said Thin.

  Thin and Burly’s little snapshot seminar on the protocols of municipal response to attempted suicide left me thirsting desperately for a drink. A drink that surely could not be had under psychiatric observation.

  “Okay,” I said.

  At which Thin shifted, turned around, and faced the windshield. “Tell ’em you cut yourself by accident.”

  “Freak accident,” said Burly.

  “Capeesh?” said Thin.

  “Capeesh,” I said.

  And neither said a word more until we pulled into the ambulance bay with the squad car lights spinning and Burly helped me out; leaning over, whispered: “No S word!”

  I nodded that I understood.

  As Thin and Burly stood by with encouraging winks, the intake nurse, a no-nonsense black woman in a winged white cap, inspected my wrists and asked: “What happened?”

  I looked over at Thin and Burly.

  “Go ahead. Tell her about it. Craziest thing,” said Thin.