The Great Kisser
Stories
To Dini Evanier, Andrew Blauner, and Eric Wilson
Contents
The Tapes
The Man Who Gave Up Women
Sabbath Candles on Brooklyn Bridge
The Great Kisser
Danny and Me
Scraps
The Better Man
Rabbits in the Fields of Strangers
About the Author
The Tapes
“Wasn’t it your Uncle Sidney who said, ‘Acceptance, forgiveness and love?’”
—Broadway Danny Rose
I: My Life
I start with a suicide because I have avoided mentioning it to myself for so many years. A suicide of a man I never met.
In horror films, a drowned victim’s corpse rises to the top of the water, confounding the murderer.
Sometimes I see my wife Karen’s former husband, Victor, in my dreams. His body rises to the water’s surface.
On the tapes I hear myself as I was then—ten, twenty, twenty-five years ago—my old shrink Solomon Butinsky’s gift to me, the record of our therapy sessions. My life.
The tapes. I have just started to listen to them, in 2004. They unearth a hidden city. They tell me all the things I’ve blocked out, distorted or forgotten. What an amazing gift. Karen lying beside me, so changed now. Hearing her as she was then.
Butinsky, dead seven years, his scandal on the front pages in Boston long forgotten. And listening to the forgotten tapes, I measure what is real to me now against what was real to me then.
Now I love my wife Karen as she had wanted me to love her then. But on the 1978 tape, I hear myself say, “I don’t really know what the truth is.” And listening to the tapes, I realize that I don’t know anything.
“It,” says Butinsky, “sounds like MacBeth accusing his wife of plotting the murder.” He’s referring to my disclaiming any responsibility for the suicide of my wife’s husband, Victor.
He took his life because I was fucking his wife and she had left him. And I was fucking his wife because I was lost and lonely in Vancouver. And she was fucking me because the ’60s were over and she’d missed out; she wanted to be with a free spirit, a Jewish intellectual like myself who was actually not free at all, but terrified in exile and just wanting a date on Saturday night more than anything else. And, she fell in love with me.
When I went to Vancouver in 1972, I had left behind in Manhattan my girl Julie in the walkup red brick tenement on Stuyvesant Street in the East Village and the fleas I’d let in with the hooker I picked up on the Bowery. This had happened during my despair when Julie was away that summer in the pure winds of Vermont and I knew I had to give her up that following autumn. The hooker, red wig, red eyes, red platform shoes, left her Coca-Cola can on the stairway where I found it the next morning.
When I went to Vancouver, I had left behind Julie and the Cooper Union clock I could see from our window at night when I wrote and Julie slept, napkin under her head, I never knew why. And I left behind my fragile hold on the literary life and my Jewish radical friends and the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square—with all the holy meshugenas who lived there as I had once done with Julie when I first met her. Huddling together in the warmth of the community kitchen and writing all night at the Figaro. Wandering into Washington Square Park at dawn, the snow glinting on the trees, and thinking, I will remember how I felt this moment.
I had left behind the Italian Village Streets and all the apartments I had lived in with Julie: the tub in the kitchen at 145 Sullivan Street, and the last Italian enclave in East Harlem at 310 Pleasant Avenue—where a guy once kicked me in the balls because I interrupted his phone call in the booth on the street because Julie was sick and I needed to call a doctor—across from Rao’s and near Benjamin Franklin High School, and the apartment on Richmond Terrace in Staten Island that Julie and I took the ferry across to. When I left Julie, I felt no less loss than Hemingway when he left Hadley in Paris in “A Moveable Feast” or Peter Allen felt when he wrote and sang “Once Before I Go:” “It’s so hard to say goodbye when there’s so much that’s left unspoken in your eyes. But unless I spread my wings again, I’m afraid I’ll never soar …” I spread my wings and tumbled to the ground.
And I left Julie because I knew she didn’t want to have babies and I wound up with my wife Karen who had had her fill of babies, or so I thought then. Karen and I met in 1974 when we were both teachers for the first time at a community college in Vancouver. She had a Raphaelite face, and a pure heart. She trembled when I touched her. She actually resembled Jackie Kennedy in her dark beauty.
Karen had a young son and was married to a Dutchman, who had served as a doctor in both Nazi and Communist prison camps. He would smuggle food to the Jews through the barbed wire. This was her second marriage; her first had been to a florist in Oregon who turned out to be gay.
Karen had a free-floating innocence about her and supreme inhibition. When angry or upset, she would clear her throat once, even twice—but usually not speak. If she was furious, she might say “Oh crumb” or “Yuck.” She was entirely silent until she drank. As she sipped wine all day and night, she talked of her Oregon childhood. Her mother tried to make her curtsey to the teacher before her piano lessons.
“We would have these pajama parties through high school,” she told me. “Our favorite song was ‘Mister Sandman.’ Those lines: ‘My lonely nights are over,’ we found incredibly sexy. ‘Oooh!’ we said. ‘Oooh!’
“What meant a great deal to me as a child was a picture in my Girl Scout book of a foot in a field that stops just in time to avoid stepping on a caterpillar.”
Karen had a haunted, remote look that turned people off. She was deeply intelligent and empathic, but taut and painfully self-conscious. She did not look at people, hoping they wouldn’t look at her.
Long after I left Julie, ten years later and back in Manhattan and married to Karen—this was 1982 and I’d been living in Manhattan again for four years—I took the subway down to one of those fringe areas of Manhattan on the edge of Chinatown where I smelled the sea and looked at the lit lanterns and thought of the Rosenbergs because they had lived in Knickerbocker Village, a housing project nearby, before their arrest. I had tracked down Julie’s most recent known address. She had always liked these marginal, vivid areas near the waterfront—these noirish areas—where the wind seemed to be always blowing. When I first saw her, in 1966, hanging out outside the Judson church, she was wearing a tight leather skirt that blew me away and I walked into a pole. The stepdaughter of a Baptist minister, she lived with her cat and her masculine black musician lovers or willowy little pale white slaves on West Broadway near Broome on a warehouse street before the area had turned into Soho. And then we lived together in the Judson Church student house before we moved all over the city.
I found the address. An old white wooden house stood shuttered; yes, this was her kind of place. I walked up the creaky front steps and peered in through the blocked windows and tried to taste Julie. A middle-aged woman came by and peered at me. She asked me, “Looking for a long lost love?”
And yet, after I left Julie to go to Vancouver, I soon felt that she had left me, and in revenge, wrote of her “frozen face” in a story and mailed it to her preacher stepfather. That face that I loved dearly.
Karen and I were married in Vancouver in 1976 and we returned to live in New York in 1978. Those first years with Karen in New York were years when, after Karen had gone to sleep, I still combed the Manhattan phone book, sipping scotch, stopping at names of women or men I remembered from my past—a history teacher with two middle initials: “H” and “Q” (there he was, probably in his eighties) and I would sit silently with fleeting recollections that left me longing over lost chances for love, or sex, or friendship, or nothing at all except a touch. Sometimes the impulse was just testing memory. The memory sometimes lasted only as long as I fixed on the name, and then lost its place to another recollection as another name came into view. Frances Steloff’s name conjured up a scene I’d long shunted out of my mind: when I was 16, lost as I ever was, wandering into the Gotham Book Mart on West 47th Street, that literary sanctuary permeated with the strivings of Hemingway, O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Wolfe and every hungry writer in New York. Frances Steloff, oh how she spotted me, and said, her eyes appraising, but casual, not wishing to frighten me, “Are you a writer?” Startled, I said, “I am.” She said, “Do you want to work here?” I was silent for a moment. “Yes,” I said. “You can start tomorrow morning.”
I could function in the world as a writer, working in this one shop where I would not have to hide myself, where I could survive without being scorned and ridiculed for not keeping pace with the drumbeat of commerce.
And, my heart beating, I never called her, didn’t allow myself to think about it, never went near the shop for years, never gazed in the window lest she see me, so afraid of failing those who loved me, of their turning on me when they realized what a fraud I was. And I ran.
I remember that day in the Gotham Book Mart now, the dark pall of it, the tomb I fell into, fearing so much that which I loved with all my heart.
And the names in the phonebook evoked the dividing signposts: the period of high school and college before I went to Vancouver; everything that followed upon my return to Manhattan. Or I would look for forgotten movie stars, or writers, or blacklisted actors, or old-time Communist celebrities. I frequently found them in the phone book and wondered what they did now. Losers and has-beens were so easy to approach. I was so much more comfortable with them.
But it was really the women who mesmerized me, who carried me away, who I was afraid to look at. For whom I burned. When they had caught me in their coils, especially if they were smart, and alive, they blocked out everything else, made me leave the ground and fly, forget where I was, out of control, desperate for life. Just beyond my grasp. They fell for the cool, the uninvolved, and how they turned away from awkward passion. An upright prick was a walking wound. What do you do with it? The guys who got laid didn’t seem to care about it. And it wasn’t that I was after, I was too afraid: but breasts, dimples, wide eyes, long black hair, a warm, live hand, a particular voice, a particular laugh—they were enough to make me cross to the other side of the street when someone I wanted was approaching, as my father had done before me. This was true in my adolescence, in my 20s, 30s, and 40s.
When Karen and I returned to Manhattan, we were eating at an Italian restaurant and I was staring at a beautiful dark Indian woman at the next table. I looked up to see my table on fire. My napkin had been ignited by the lit candle and the waiter rushed over to damp it down.
In 1965, when I was 21, I received my first fellowship to a writers’ colony in Maine. I had spoken two or three times to a painter, Linda Williams, who was perhaps 32 at the time, over dinner. One evening she said that she was engaged and wondered if she should go through with it. She suddenly paused and said, “Why don’t you marry me instead?” She’d been kind to me and I decided this was the one. At breakfast the next morning I stumbled into the dining room an hour late, pretending artistic exhaustion, telling her I’d been up all night writing. I hoped this would impress her and give her some idea of what a profound catch I was. Then, as we walked in the garden, I told her yes, I would marry her. She tried to explain that she hadn’t been serious. I had thought that if we married, I could jump over all the steps of courtship I could not navigate—the period of overwhelming need and dependency when I had a crush on a girl and wanted desperately to kiss her and regressed to the feelings of a child—feelings of helplessness and black depression, feelings that went back so far I knew I was in the grip of some distant but familiar part of myself that I could not remember but somehow recognized instantly. I became a trembling leaf, although my body was rigid. It was a damp and wet moistness—a neediness that drove women away always, neediness that was somehow deeply feminine and embarrassing both to them and to me. Wanting to hurdle those feelings that I could not control, which overwhelmed the woman and made her invariably touch my shoulder or my hand and say to me, almost the same fucking exact words every time: “I’m so sorry. I can’t handle this …” with a look of such pity and sorrow in her eyes that I wanted to cut my throat.
Seated quietly with the phone book and a scotch in 1980, I knew how it would hurt my wife if she knew I was doing this, and I never told her.
I did it until I had drunk enough, and fell asleep.
From the time I married her in 1976, Karen gave me a secure perch from which to yearn. I could do it knowing I was lucky, remembering my father’s images of poverty and failure and loneliness everywhere. Images he pointed out to me, and which stayed with me always. (“I look at those cripples, and I feel great,” he would say. “Look at that retard.”) I would have died without her. What if the bough broke? My sweet lovely Corie on the kibbutz in Israel when I was 20 (yeah, I didn’t fuck her either) sang to me as she poured cherries into my basket, “The last leaf clings to the bough.”
And when I left Julie in New York in 1972, I fell like that last leaf.
Peter Allen died of AIDS. He was like a shooting star those early days at the Bitter End when I came back to New York with Karen and her son Kevin (eight people in the audience and Peter Allen said, “You’re so small but so nice”) and at Reno Sweeney, singing songs he’d written of his grandfather, a saddler in Tenterfield, and of Central Park at 6:30 on a Sunday morning. Without mentioning her by name, he wrote—so simply—of his former wife, Liza Minelli: “I married a girl with an interesting face.” I remember his look of terror when he walked through the audience to the stage and his look of triumph when he introduced a new song and the audience rose to its feet; he hopped onto the piano stool, and when they kept applauding, he hopped up onto the piano. There was a sexual subtext, but I never gave a fuck about that. I never met him. I loved him, as I had loved the old vaudevillians at the Palace. Now Peter Allen is in the ground; that farewell song is on my CD player, and there is no way to forget what is lost.
II: Butinsky: Decline and Fall
1990: Dr. Butinsky, my shrink, sat beside me on the sofa and handed me nude photos of a female patient of his. I didn’t know what to say. He was a handsome man in his seventies—curly hair, a large, ingratiating, dark and perspiring face, a square, broad body-builder’s frame, his Delphic beard and mournful, piercing eyes. Mountainous shoulders like clubs. He had a huge and curiously graceful shape, which had always made me feel protected. And he was a kind and wise man.
But his wife had died six months before after a six-year battle with cancer. And he was cracking up.
The decline had started some time before, but he had been so immense—in his intelligence, his understanding—that it took time for me to recognize what was happening. When he began to fall asleep during a session, which he did increasingly, honest to God, I thought: he has such awesome power, he doesn’t even need to stay awake; he can analyze me while asleep. A remarkable gift. But then, of course, came along the sneaky second thought: or can he?
For twenty-five years he was the shrink one dreamt of having. I met him in Boston in 1965 when I was attending college and dodging the draft. I was living with the secret that I had laughed at JFK’S assassination, that was my state of mind, the hate within me. Butinsky didn’t even charge me for sessions, making it possible, after graduation, for me to travel to Boston to see him. He was always accessible, day or night.
I left him for two months for that summer in Israel. One day, as I was picking berries high in a tree in the Galilee, he walked towards me, beaming, with his family. He had come to visit me in Israel without telling me. It was like a benediction. I kept seeing him, traveling to Boston by train on weekends, until 1972, when I went to Vancouver to get my graduate degree.
I resumed seeing him in 1978, when I returned from Vancouver, and I kept seeing him, on and off, for another 12 years, with Karen the last 6 years.
To settle in Israel is to make “aliyah,” which means to ascend to something higher. For me, traveling to Boston to see Butinsky was my aliyah. Coming to Boston meant for me walking in the Boston Garden and by the Charles, climbing the winding streets of Beacon Hill and walking along Commonwealth Avenue listening to music wafting from windows, and reading and studying in the Copley Square Library and at Harvard. And then, on Sunday mornings, waiting to see him before my appointment, I would sit in the field (traces of remaining forest and old trolley lines between gnarled branches of trees) near Butinsky’s baronial house, smelling the burning leaves in late fall, or sit on benches in winter as the snow fell, or watch the children playing in spring and summer, music spilling from the open windows of the beautiful houses all around me. As the hour came closer, I had a brownie and coffee in the candy store nearby, the sweetness of the brownie a prelude, and then walking over to Powell Street to see the man I loved more than anyone on earth.
But this was 1990, and I was paying the price. He had saved me. But now I needed to save myself from him.
The reversal of roles had begun four years before, when he ushered me and Karen through his massive office door into the actual living room, the magic carpet of his home. He introduced me to his wife and daughter. Teacups, honey cake, the Talmud. What a feeling. A patient’s fantasy come to life. For years, I had listened to the happy sounds of his household while sitting in his office, his wife playing the piano or the Boston Symphony playing on his turntable, peals of laughter coming from his daughter. Butinsky would lift his head to the sounds. I had devoured every detail about him from afar, seeing him around Boston, playing basketball with his daughter, bicycling with his wife, cocking his arm for his wife to put her hand through as they entered a theater. That combination of gentleness and strength that would endure as a model for me of how one should live—even if I couldn’t do it myself.
Or visiting me summers in Oak Bluffs, this courtly man in white knee socks and shorts, chasing butterflies with a net. I would walk with him, and he would turn our walks into brief therapy sessions, interspersed with bird-watching. Butinsky alert, as we walked, to human grief, a gobbler of life with his Batman card that he gave as his I.D. at stores. This physically mammoth, personally shy man with hooded eyes, his unmistakable Boston accent, came from the ghetto of Blue Hill Avenue in Dorchester and loved the streets and parks and alleyways of Cambridge and Boston and Brookline. He once told me he considered himself a hedonist. I wondered what he could have meant: that he ate a lot of plums? I had written some of this in a story I’d published about Butinsky in 1986, a story he showed to all of his patients.
He invited Karen and me to spend weekends. And soon he told us of his wife Beth’s lymphoma. He asked me to sit by her bedside with him as he read her Thurber and took care of her with infinite good humor and patience. For the first time, I realized how important my presence had become to him—that he, my therapist, was disappointed if I could not spend the weekend with him. And so when he began to turn the tables and confide in me, at first I felt so special, so privileged and singled out.
Two things he said in those days had a significance I would only later grasp. “My patients become my rescuers,” he told me one day out of the blue on the way to the synagogue. I didn’t know what to make of it until a colleague of his confided to me: “He’s known for never letting go of his patients.” Shortly after that, Butinsky told me that an essay by Freud had made a lasting impact on him: “Psychoanalysis: Terminable and Interminable.”
And about this time, his generosity had become acute. He had begun moving his most helpless patients into his large home, the homeless, the jobless. One day a blind girl knocked at his door. The young woman was looking for a room. She wore dark glasses. She came by at the suggestion of a patient, Bob Starr, who said she was a witch. Before Butinsky could decide whether to let her stay, the doorbell rang again, and a bunch of people came in and trudged upstairs with boxes of her stuff. He said “Wait a minute,” and she said, “You wouldn’t want to be known as a doctor who put a blind girl out on the street.”
“Now I can’t get rid of her,” he told me. “She’s taking over the house. She has a malign presence, an aura, and a vast network of people who are devoted to her. I told her she had to leave, and a lawyer’s letter arrived several days later. It had the same refrain: ‘You wouldn’t want a news story that says a noted doctor put a blind girl out on the street.’ Even Bob Starr, who used to hate her, comes to see her now. I see him disappearing into her room. He says, ‘She has a way of moving her body.’”
Butinsky paused, and said, “I’m not sure that girl is blind.”
His wife was at a loss to stop the invasion. The patients did small chores, changed light bulbs, unclogged sinks, washed clothes. And then there was me. “Michael,” he said, “you will be my Boswell.” Now I conducted hours of interviews with him for a projected biography, not really listening to the technical details of what he said but basking in the role he had assigned me. Then he suggested that I begin to interview his other patients to better know him by getting to know who he was intent on saving.
And in order to prepare me for these interviews, and to help me better understand his therapeutic skills, he shared tapes with me of his sessions with these patients.
That was a kick.
After his wife’s death, he sat with me, wringing his hands: “She slipped through my fingers. My humanity wasn’t great enough. That great wall went up, the severance of connection. I saw her face in the coffin. She’s lying in the coffin in the cold ground. Why did I fail her? What am I going to do with the rest of my life?
“I think: why isn’t she coughing? The silence, the loneliness. I was there to save her, to get her tea in the morning, to suffer for her. I could be there in the night when she rang for me. I had been resigned to a life of suffering. For many years she was no longer able to do what a wife did. She kept saying to me: ‘I don’t want to live anymore.’ But I breathed life into her. Every breath was painful for her. There was great emptiness and loss for me. My life was so taken up with her needs. I could always anticipate her coming home from the hospital. To go beyond condolence to remembrance—a bouquet of remembrance. There had been breath between us. It suddenly stopped. There’s such silence in the house. I nursed her for twenty-four hours. She would wet herself from coughing and I would be able to help, to clean her. How could she want to leave me alone?
“She was my patient.
“I don’t want to live.”
A year later, Butinsky showed me the naked pictures of his patient/girlfriend: “She wants to be a human skeleton,” he said. “She seeks her greatest bliss. Eats only tofu and vegetarian food. I specialize in borderline cases. Janice is a challenge to me. If I end the relationship, she’ll crack up. If I can get her to mature, there’s a chance for us.”
“In the long run, you’ll get sick of her,” I said.
“Also in the short run,” Butinsky said. “This is the last fling of the rescue fantasy.”
Karen and I sat with Butinsky in front of the TV set hour after hour watching public broadcasting. He was getting frail, he had diabetes and a bad heart, and he didn’t want to do much else.
But when I write now that Butinsky has a stroke, or a bad heart, or diabetes, it is not true that I was aware of these things then. Yes, he told me. But I barely noticed. I didn’t have space for it. It’s only the tapes I listen to now—fourteen years later—really listen to now—and learn what Butinsky was going through. At the time I only knew that I was no longer the center of attention. It really pissed me off.
When I began to bring up recent crises, Butinsky sighed. “You promised me.”
“What?”
“You promised you wouldn’t talk about your problems anymore,” Butinsky said.
“I’m thinking of going into psychoanalysis,” I told him.
“I hope you survive it.” Butinsky kept talking. “I was always shy as a young man. My father would say that suffering is the law of life.” Spotting Reagan on the tube, he said, “All therapy is pointless until we get rid of him.”
I cannot forgive him. I cannot be his Boswell. I have to get away. He calls me in New York. “She’s pressing charges. She’s very bitter. She could wipe me out.” He asks me to call Janice and plead with her to leave him alone. I cannot do it. He keeps seeing patients for some months, but he gets steadily weaker. Then he has another stroke. He tells his daughter, “I think I’m dying,” and he does.
I remember his voice and the gentle way it imparted reason and high expectations for me. In 1965, in 1985, and almost up to the end.
There was a time when for me he was all the radiance of the world. A patient searches for clues about his shrink. For me, in the early days they were the plaque on his wall with a quote from Maimonides: “Here I am preparing myself to engage in this craft. Help me O Lord in this work so that I may be successful.” And the map of Jerusalem on his office wall and his bookshelves lined with the work of Thomas Mann—the writer who embodied the nobility of reason for a generation. When Butinsky lost his mind, I couldn’t stand it. Sure, he saved my life, but did he have to go crazy on me? And I lost my love for him for a long time.
III: Vancouver
1970: I remember Vancouver as a dark place. The rain constantly fell. I was a graduate student in creative writing at the university on a fellowship. I lived in a boarding house. The ex-hooker in the room above me told me she heard the clink of my glass as I poured whiskey.
I had fallen off the face of the earth.
The chairman of my department, Bart Stevens, became obsessed with a story I’d written: a very lonely story about New York and a black maid, Willie Mae, who cleaned my room, confided in me, and tried to seduce me. It went back to my earliest college days, before Julie. The story was an early instance of my constant pattern of deflecting all fucks—all opportunities for fucking through sabotage, denial, or flight. At the same time I thought of women 24 hours a day. My cock became huge when thinking of women or even coming near them, and shrivelled to the size of a pea at the thought of intercourse.
Bart Stevens never forgave me for that story. Whenever he saw me, he said almost the same words, no matter who was in the room: “That story—Michael—come clean! It’s just not credible! Are you trying to tell me that a little guy like you fucked that big black maid? Who do you think you’re kidding?”
“She was petite, that’s what I wrote, Bart, and I didn’t fuck her.”
“I mean, come off it. I wasn’t born yesterday. Who do you think you are anyway?”
Mort Zager, the American on the faculty, was a mousy little Jewish guy with a sweet, open face, a gentle way about him, and a meandering teaching style. He always concluded a class by asking his students the same maddening question: “Do you think anything of value occurred here today?” To which the students, emboldened by Mort’s insecurity, would reply, “Not really,” or remain silent. I spent long evenings at his house listening to his abstract monologues while his wife stared at him with a furious look on her face. Her frustration had turned to rage.
Totally alone in Vancouver, a city of very few Jews—and most of them lawyers, dentists, accountants and doctors—and thousands of bland blondes, I bonded with Mort—which meant, he talked on and on, I listened. Mort had a solution for every manuscript he received from his students. It was always the same solution, and he didn’t spring it on you immediately. He gestated it. And he was never conscious of the sameness of his response. I saw Steve, a Southern boy, product of a military school, who lived in my boarding house, return from a session with Mort dissolved in tears. Steve had been working on a novel for eight months about Southern brutality, racism, bigotry and homophobia in a military school and had a book-length manuscript. When I saw him crying, I knew what had happened, because I’d seen it happen again and again in class: “Mort,” Steve said. “Mort …” He was almost speechless. “He wants me to turn my protagonist into a mouse. An actual mouse. He mapped out an entire structure for the book. He wants me to turn my main character into a mouse!”
All the struggles he’d gone through to get through the military school, to travel to Canada, to reach the university and oppose his family’s wishes that he go into the fried chicken business—all the months of writing—and he was a serious boy in his way—had come to this.
“Steve,” I said gently, “this is what Mort always says in the end. Haven’t you heard him?” He had, but had thought not with his manuscript, just with those whose manuscripts deserved to have a mouse as the protagonist.
In fact, Mort had not done it to me yet. What he had done was to encourage my work in the classroom but ignore it for the literary magazine, the Canadian yawn he edited for the university. He would continue to ignore it for the two years I spent there, even though he praised it to the skies. And in the end, gently, tentatively, he began one day with me: “Say, Mike! I’ve got an idea!” I knew what was coming, although I dreaded it. Mort’s eyes sparkled, his eyebrows danced upwards at this point, “What if … now get this: your character, Marvin, turned into a mouse …?”
That summer, it was 1973, I returned to a broiling Manhattan. I stayed high on tranquilizers and rum and saw a rerun of Portnoy’s Complaint with Richard Benjamin as Portnoy, a perfect numbing choice to fit my shellshocked mood. I had returned to Manhattan because my best friend Robert Greenberg was getting married and he asked me to write a poem and read it at his wedding. And I was secretly hoping that Julie would take me back, that she’d fall into my embrace, and that we’d get married on the same day with Robert.
I first met Bob in the New School for Social Research cafeteria in 1967. I was neurotic. I stayed in the Judson Church where, as a Jewish socialist atheist, they let me live in the tower.
Bob had lived in two rooms with a hot plate on 14th street. He had an energy to him. Notes, address books, magazines poured out of the pockets of his jacket and raincoat. He wanted to be a director.
We climbed up the fire escape of the church together to the tower, where I read him my poems and stories. He encouraged me and brought me candles.
Bob had a way of looking at people. If you were suffering, he suspended any movement; he seemed to have put everything aside and was focusing only on you. There was pain in his look. Yet it was hard to catch him at it. For when you paused, stammering, his gaze seemed to shift to an inch over you, or around you, so that you did not become self-conscious. But you knew he was with you. When you were in control, he looked directly at you again.
In winter of 1968 we would stand outside the New School, in the freezing snow and rain, exchanging phone numbers of girls and articles we liked by I. F. Stone, C. Wright Mills and Murray Kempton. One day he mentioned a girl he had met. Linda. I knew who she was: the fabulous blonde in my literature class who kept injecting the word “Revolution!” into literary discussions.
It was the time of the Beatles; Abbie Hoffman stripping nude at Fillmore East; Paul Krassner’s youth; the Fuck You Bookstore on Avenue A tended by Ed Sanders; Jack Micheline, Ray Bremser, and Allen Ginsberg reading at the 9 Arts Coffee Gallery run by a sailor in a loft above ninth avenue and Forty-third street; Dave Van Ronk and Bob Dylan at the Gaslight on MacDougal.
Bob was a part of that period—not me. I was too afraid. Bob loved it; in fact he never got over it. To this day a Tuli Kupferberg print is Bob’s Picasso. The drugs, all that fucking, all that wasted time—not that I wasn’t dying for sex. At midnight I left the tower and walked in the snow along MacDougal Street past the San Remo, where O’Neill had worked [and Bodenheim and Joe Gould had begged], to the Cafe Figaro, where the young bohemians hung out. I would sit down with my notebook, a pen, drink a double espresso. I waited. My pen started flying as I really gave it to my father, my mother, and several mean teachers. The waiter came by periodically. I waved him away. I pictured myself, the driven, melancholy, brooding poet with a tragic, inspired look, far above such paltry things as food and drink.
At 4 A.M. one morning the waiter asked me if I wanted anything else. I looked up wearily, seeing myself doing it. “Can’t you see I’m working?” I said.
At 5 A.M. he said, “Are you sure you don’t want anything else?”
“Perfectly!”—I don’t remember if I added, “You fool,” or not.
“Get out,” he said.
“What?”
“Get out.”
“I’ll order something. How’s your prune danish?”
“Get out.”
I grabbed my things and, trembling a little, weaved my way down MacDougal Street. It was deserted, except for a man in a hallway who screamed again and again, “I don’t hate—nobody. I don’t hate—nobody.” The snow was falling. It seeped into my shoes. I felt a weariness and a sense of persecution. I felt good, and so very special. I walked into Washington Square Park, the snow falling. It was dawn.
I leapt into the air.
Then, in 1970, Bob rented a loft for himself and Linda. There was plenty of work space: an act of celebration after 14th Street. Space to make love, to work, to have rehearsals: light and air. Bookshelves everywhere, posters, records, productivity. I had always lived in one room. Bob’s bicycle was in the hallway. He bicycled around the city. A basketball was in the corner. I pointed at it, speechless. I had only played ping-pong and potsy.
“I play on my lunch hours,” he explained.
I tried to absorb it. “You what?”
“Yeah, you know, these little corners of buildings, vacant lots, with the Puerto Rican kids.”
And me, afraid to enter a gym, afraid to walk the streets.
Normality, fearlessness, health, sunshine, brotherhood in Manhattan. I was deeply impressed.
I met Julie in 1966, a year before I met Bob, and for a while we were all together. I got a job as a copyboy at the New York Times. Putting the pieces together. One day as I sat at the receptionist’s desk reading Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish,” Ginsberg called on the phone and I picked up for the editor who was out to lunch. I told him I was reading “Kaddish.” “I wrote that a couple of years ago already,” he said. “Doesn’t anyone read anything else of mine?” But he would never write that well again.
Now it was 1973 and Bob and Linda were getting married. Bob had found a room for me to sublet for the summer at an apartment on Saint Mark’s Place, a few blocks away from Julie.
And one day Bob suddenly said, “Write a poem for our wedding.”
“Just like that?”
Bob smiled and shrugged.
On the day before the wedding, I went back to Julie’s apartment—the apartment where I’d lived with her, the apartment we’d found together on Stuyvesant Street, waiting for the landlord to arrive at his office at 7 A.M.—to pick up my books. She had called me insistently, giving me a deadline. She was still furious about the fleas, but I somehow felt she would melt when she saw me and fall into my arms. And we’d rush over to get married with Bob and Linda.
It was a steaming hot July day. I stood on the stoop in front of the apartment house waiting for Bob. He had promised to help me carry the books. I had drunk a pint of rum and taken a tranquilizer. I leaned against the brick wall, the sun beating down hurting my eyes and my throbbing head.
Bob was late. I waited. Then I saw him, grinning, waving, walking his bobbing, busified walk; slung over his shoulder was a green canvas bag.
We shook hands and embraced. “How the hell do you think of these things?” I asked, pointing to the bag.
“How else are you going to carry them, dummy?”
I will remember that bag for the rest of my life.
We walked up the five flights of stairs.
Julie was at the door. “This is Pepper.” A short young black man with glazed eyes waved at us and went back to his phone conversation. I stared at him. Julie said nothing else. So it was really over.
“Hey, come on—” Bob called.
I tossed the books into the bag.
On the way down the stairs, I said, “Did you see that guy?”
“Poor passive schmuck,” Bob said. We carried the heavy load of books to the room on Saint Mark’s Place.
I had been working on a story about the breakup.
“How’s the story going, Michael?”
“You haven’t got time now, Bob—”
“Sure I do.”
We put the books down and I read my story to him.
I looked up occasionally as I read. He was smiling. When I finished he made a circle with his finger and thumb. “Sensational! You’re being very productive, Michael.”
My friend Robert. My only friend of those Washington Square years.
I walked back down with him to Saint Mark’s Place. It was difficult to speak. Crowds pushed against us.
I watched Bob going off down the street, the empty green bag over his shoulder, hurrying to Linda.
It was early morning of Bob’s wedding day. I lay in bed drinking rum and read the personal ads in the East Village Other. Five hours to the wedding. I dialed an ad: Club Mogen David for Singles. A voice told me they had someone very special for me to meet: Martha Goldberg. She was soon moving to Jerusalem.
In a flat, gravel voice, Martha spoke to me over the phone. “I am tender, affectionate, sincere.” I quickly walked to 23rd Street and Ninth Avenue. Now I wouldn’t be alone at the wedding. I would bring along this affectionate Jewish girl and casually mention to Bob and Linda that we were emigrating to Israel. They would be so happy for me.
Martha answered the door. She was heavy but not fat. She wore a blouse, skirt and sneakers. She did not smile. I heard growls.
Four huge dogs headed for me, gnashing their teeth. “Down!” Martha commanded them. She pointed her fist at the floor. “Down! You will obey me!” The dogs moved toward her. She settled herself on the bed, the dogs around her. She stroked them, and they licked at her partially opened blouse. When I opened my mouth, they growled. She leaned back and stretched, thrusting her breasts outward. The dogs licked her. She dangled her thick legs.