My Young Life

by Frederic Tuten

  The hospital looked more like a luxury hotel where she had her own sunny room filled with bowls of flowers, the notes still attached. She was sickly white and had a tube or two in her arm. Her blond hair was matted. She was worn-out, looked ten years older, but she was cheerful, and asked me to draw the single chair close to her.

  “I had a botched abortion and almost bled to death. I think the doctor who did it was drunk, but he was very good-looking.” Her voice was full of sunshine and pain.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, then realizing how lame that sounded, I added, “I wanted to say good-bye before I left. I’m going to miss you so much, Diana.” I could feel my tears starting to come.

  “It was fun, you little red.”

  I took her hand and kissed it. I kissed her face. I started to embrace her but she said, “It hurts me down there, so don’t hug me too close.”

  I kissed her eyes and took her hand again, holding it for a long time, as if not to lose her like a balloon on a string. I started to feel that I loved her but then wasn’t sure that it was really love that I felt, but the sorrow of my leaving her.

  “It will be OK,” she said. “Send me a postcard sometimes.”

  “I will,” I said. “One every day.”

  Isn’t it true, I thought in the taxi back to my apartment, that with every good-bye we die a little? And with someone you love, you die a lot. How much life in us is left at the end, when there have been so many good-byes?

  On the Road

  From Texas to the Bronx, Fall 1956

  The Mexico we had left behind was ripe, red, warm. Its road to America was bordered by lush, dark green hills, and yellow and blue wildflowers spread themselves everywhere along the mountain passes. Children waved to us, smiling, as we drove by, and I saw men and women splashing water on each other, laughing as they bathed naked in a pool fed by a gentle waterfall. I loved even the crisp, blue, cloudless sky that had covered Mexico, the sexy Eden I had left behind.

  But now our car sped us over the endless dry, hot flatness of Texas. Strange huge black bugs zinged up to the windows, so we had to keep them closed and ourselves steaming within.

  We flashed by pasty people dozing on suburban porches fronting scorched lawns: my fellow Americans in their arid, colorless world. The little I saw from the car window assured me that America was, as Henry Miller had written, an air-conditioned nightmare. I was sick at heart not to be in Mexico, and I was shrunken by the vastness of Texas, a country in itself. Humbled, too, by how little I knew of my own land, having always lived in the Bronx and never having seen a steer or a horse or a sky the size of the world.

  Larry, a young American I had met at the university and whose Ford we were in, drove in a maddening stop-and-start way that made me seasick. He was ill, feverish, even some days after we had stopped in Ti Belinda to get him a shot of penicillin; his penis had been burning, and it was in flames when he pissed. He wondered why. He had spent his last month in Mexico going to a brothel twice a week but made no connection between that and his malady. His sickness worked in my favor because we often had to get off the highways and stop in diners for him to piss away his infection, and I had time to write postcards to Diana from Brownsville, Laredo, Austin, New Orleans, and some swampy, forbidding towns in Louisiana; time to send passionate greetings from wherever I could along the way. The cards grew more cheerful the farther north we went, and by the time we got to New Jersey, I was pure optimism.

  But no sooner had I returned to City College than I went back to my indolent ways of life as a student. I enjoyed the few excitements that came from sitting again in the cafeteria and talking politics and art—could a fascist be a great artist?—and staying glued to the tables after all my classes were done, and I would linger there into the early evening, staying through the comings and goings of friends headed to their classes or on their way back home. Maybe one of them was a girl I was interested in, or maybe I would go with her and friends out for a drink at the Emerald, one of the last Irish bars left in Harlem. Or maybe I would just dally in the cafeteria as long as there was a hint of company. I never wanted to go home to that tiny apartment with my abandoned, husbandless mother and her grief.

  Beautiful Mexico was behind me. I was in New York, a student again, riding the subway to the nowhere Bronx where the local bars provided free TV and bowls of free pretzels and peanuts, and where no one but an occasional weepy drunk sang. Had they, in the 1956 Bronx of Seagram’s 7-and-7 and boilermakers, ever sat in a bar drinking tequila or mescal with a fat worm soaking in it, and heard strolling bands of mariachi singers who made your heart pound with joy?

  I wrote to Diana several times over the next months but received no answer; finally, my letters were returned marked “Addressee Unknown.” I gave my phone an experience it had never known before: I placed a long-distance call and had the operator connect me to Diana’s private number. The line had been disconnected. I had no idea how to find her, and I feared that she had now vanished from my life. And then I waxed philosophical, cosmological: “We all vanish,” I said aloud, and the pronouncement elevated me, as if in making it I was, for the moment, as tall as Death.12

  * * *

  12DIANA UNTO DEATH

  Diana Harris (1930–1960)

  In 1960 my former roommate told me that some newspapers had reported that Diana died of a morphine overdose in her apartment in Houston, Texas. She had been famous, known as Lady Diana Harrington, the Golden Girl. She was a star in a call girl ring in New York’s café society of the 1950s and was one of the highest-paid prostitutes of her time, supposedly making as much as five hundred dollars a night. She had been arrested as a material witness against the pimp ringleader, Mickey Jelke, heir to an oleomargarine fortune.

  In exchange for her evidence, she was set free and told to leave the country. She went to Mexico. She became increasingly addicted to morphine and went to live in Texas, where drugs were allegedly supplied by a doctor who was also her lover. She deteriorated to such an extent that by the time she died, her rates had gone down to fifty a throw. She was twenty-six when I met her; she died at thirty.

  She lived an intense burst of life, where most of us string along, eking out a pleasure here and there. Most people I met were not as warm, as generous, as honest, or as fun as Diana. Stuffed shirts and hypocritical moralists and misogynist politicians, pimps for the wealthy and for giant corporations, don’t have an ounce of her integrity and spirit. She injured no one but herself and gave others much pleasure.

  Before the Bar with Dignity

  Manhattan, The City College of New York, Fall 1956

  Mexico filled my thoughts, even months after my return to the city. My friends at the college were interested in my stories at first, but they’d had enough after several retellings of my adventures. I told them of the knife fight at the Barba Azul, about the artists I had met and the great public murals, which I compared to those decorating the Sistine Chapel, in Italy, where I had never been. I never mentioned Diana. Who would have believed me? But then my roommate told them about her. This seemed less interesting to the men than to the women, who asked me such questions as: What kind of perfume did she wear? Did she paint her nails? What color? And her toes, too?

  Natasha, the red-haired intellectual queen of our table, asked, “Is sex different with her than with regular women?”

  This was dangerous territory, mostly because I didn’t yet have that much sexual experience to know, but also because I sensed a trick.

  “All women are regular women,” I said.

  “Do you know any regular women in the whole college who wear perfume or paint their nails?”

  My roommate’s description of Diana as a glamorous being had elevated me by association and made me interesting, even desirable—so much so that the worldly Natasha, who had spent two summer months on a scholarship in Paris, took me aside one late afternoon and said, “Let’s have a drink later.” And we did, at the Emerald, the seedy Irish bar on Amsterdam Avenue.

/>   The Emerald was always empty; its clientele had long ago moved away or were dead. Mike, the hatchet-faced barman, was sullen and unwelcoming and as mute as the TV high above the bar. All the same, I loved it there: I loved the liverwurst on rye, made to order and just forty cents with a draft beer; I loved the bowls of hard-boiled eggs on the long wooden counter, worn, I glamorized, by fifty years of hard working-class Irish elbows.

  Natasha and I drank: she had vodka—“American-made swill,” she said—on the rocks and I had a proletarian rye with a beer chaser. We rushed into books—The Idiot, our favorite. She had read it in Russian, which her mother, who had fled the Bolsheviks a few years after the 1917 revolution, spoke at home.

  “Dostoyevsky is much greater than you can imagine from reading him in the English translation,” she said, adding that the American novel was immature—like Americans. “You know nothing of life, you simple-minded, cheerful Americans.”

  “Am I simple-minded, Natasha?”

  “Yes.” She gave me a big smile.

  This was an exciting, new Natasha, not the studious one who punctually did all her work and got only As and never seemed to date. Or, as she had said once, “I have no time for boys, and all American men are boys.” Even her hair was exciting, a vibrant red, like the inside of a pomegranate.

  It got uninvitingly dark outside; through the dirt-streaked window, the lamppost on Amsterdam Avenue sprang to life with a dull eggshell-white glow. I hated the idea of leaving the bar, of leaving Natasha, but how long could we stay before I slid under the table? And this time there would be no Diana to transport me to her bed. It was late enough to suggest that we go to dinner, but this—the issue of whether she would expect me to pay for her share aside—was above the level of my daring. The law was that you had to ask a woman for a date—a movie and pizza—at least a week in advance; for pride’s sake she would not accept if you called later than that, even if she was free.

  I imagined my walk to the subway on 125th Street and the ride all the way to Fordham Road in the Bronx, then the lumbering bus to Pelham Parkway. An hour and a half if I was lucky. I wished I could fall asleep under the table and be done with it. She said, in a thick, throaty way I had never heard before, “Come with me.”

  We grabbed a gypsy cab right off and drove down to a dark street in the Nineties. The garbage pails were overflowing; the underlit hallway stank of urine. Up, up, to the top floor and into a railroad flat—an apartment with a long corridor and rooms off the hall—until we reached a room with a sagging bed.

  I needed a bed. I needed to sleep. But Natasha had other ideas. And we tried to implement them. Natasha was naked, stunning in her white, white skin and full, beautiful, delicately freckled breasts. She had been concealing this ravishing body under goody-goody peasant skirts and billowy blouses, but her unshaven legs, like a colony of crawling red ants, made me queasy. But I was in luck: Natasha passed out and was soon snoring. I read her body for long minutes, focusing on her torso, her heavy breasts. And then I was in dreamland, dreaming of Diana, pale in the hospital, saying her tender good-byes.

  I woke at nine and Natasha was still sleeping. But she opened her eyes and said, “Don’t tell anybody.” I splashed water on my face and rinsed my teeth with a stinging spearmint toothpaste and then I was down on the street walking back toward the college. I stopped on the way at the Emerald for a shot of rye, a beer chaser, and two hard-boiled eggs.

  Mike said, “Go for another round, sonny, on me.” This was the first time he had ever spoken to me in a full sentence or offered me a drink. I felt in luck: first Natasha, and now recognition by Mike, casting me among the elect.

  “Thank you,” I said, and, hoping it wouldn’t be too familiar and break the thread of our progressing relationship, cautiously added, “Mike.”

  I downed the rye and started to feel like a grown man. “Good-bye, Mike,” I said, but Mike was deep into his Daily News and simply nodded. The nod was enough to make me feel special.

  I was halfway up the block when on impulse—for the glamour of the thing—I doubled back to the bar and downed another beer and rye. I was woozy, but I felt powerful. I looked at myself in the tired, weak mirror and, paraphrasing Hemingway, said, “There is nothing left but to stand before the bar with dignity.” I was thinking of having another drink to accord myself the full measure of dignity befitting a young writer standing at the bar in the morning having woken in bed with a beautiful woman.

  I said good-bye to Mike again; this time he pulled the newspaper to his face and said, “You said that already, sonny.”

  The Intellectual at Large

  Manhattan, The City College of New York, Fall 1956

  I got to the school just in time to make Professor Hans Kohn’s ten o’clock class, The History of Ideas. The little amphitheater was packed, and I had to sit high up in the crowded stairway. Professor Kohn seemed never to have had a childhood: he was born venerable, was nursed in a venerable library, and had worn a venerable pin-striped suit in his crib.

  He sat at his desk with a few books piled up by his side and started slowly, quietly, and, with a Germanic accent that spelled intellectual wisdom and scholarship, he swelled passionately to his theme.

  “The Romantics believed that the city—civilization—corrupted, and that people who lived closer to nature have higher moral values and live in communal harmony. This is the fiction Rousseau created and that was bought by the upper classes and the aristocrats in the French court before the Revolution decapitated them.

  “But the truth is that the natural man is fraught with taboos and injunctions greater than any codified laws, and he lives in fear of nature and its countless threats. The natural man does not wander about in hills and dales rhapsodizing on daffodils.”

  The show-offs among us gave a polite laugh—we had all read Wordsworth, it signaled.

  “The natural man and the civilized man murder all the time, but with different tools.”

  He saved time for questions at the end. Few asked. We were entranced by Kohn’s wisdom, which came not just from books. We all knew his history: born in Prague, a POW in a Russian camp for four years during World War I, moved to Palestine in 1925, and came to live in America in the early thirties. He started teaching at City College in 1949. His was a class I never wished to miss and whose syllabus I followed to the letter. I was a little drunk and felt bold and maybe wanted to show off to the class, maybe also let him know that I took all this seriously, that I was serious, and that he should notice me.

  “In Marx,” I said, “the idea is that when we shed ourselves of capitalist competition, of the exploitation of labor, we will have rid ourselves of wars and crime and the like, and we will all live in harmony.” I had impressed myself.

  “Maybe,” he said, “and maybe someday fish will sing opera.”

  Laughter all around. Even from me.

  “Freud says, in a footnote to his prophetic book Civilization and Its Discontents, that even under communism, men will find a place and a way to use their aggressive nature.”

  I was humbled and tried to recover: “Professor Kohn, that supposes we are aggressive by nature, born that way. Isn’t that just an a priori, unverifiable assumption in the same way the Calvinists believe we are born rotten with original sin?”

  He studied me while the class went chillingly silent, waiting for him to go in and kill the big shot, then he answered, “That’s a very good point, and I would once have argued the same as you against unproven claims that we are born this way or that. I do not like unreason and hope that nothing I have ever said in class may lead you to think so. But in this case, in life, I think that it is wiser and safer to assume that we are all murderers and that without the restraints put on us we all will murder, torture, and kill our neighbors. Freud quotes Plautus, who says, ‘Man is a wolf to man.’ ”

  “Thank you, Professor Kohn,” I said, grateful he had not made a fool of me. There was some faint applause in the class, but for whom or what, no one was su
re.

  Later that week, I was in the subway going from school to the Museum of Modern Art. I opened the novel I had brought to read in the museum’s garden, when I saw Professor Kohn sitting opposite me. From shyness, I pretended not to see him but he called out, “Young man! Hello, young man. Aren’t you that student in my class?”

  Before I answered, he added, “Come sit here if you like,” indicating a vacant seat beside him.

  It was strange to see Professor Kohn not behind his desk, which had seemed attached to him, and I felt bashful and uncomfortable sitting so close beside him. I wondered—as always—what to say that was not banal or stupid or both. No need to have worried because he took the lead and asked: “If you had to flee your country, what valuable thing would you take with you across the frontier?”

  “As much money as I could.”

  “You would be robbed by the border guards. Do you mind my asking what you wish to be your profession?”

  “I want to be a writer.”

  “You want or you write?”

  “Both.”

  “And whom do you read with conviction?”

  “Hemingway.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  I didn’t know how to take that. Was he making fun of me for my obvious taste?

  “Well, I read a lot of other things, too.”

  “That’s very good,” he said. “And how many languages do you know?”

  “A little Spanish. I’m studying it now.”

  “Learn a few more so you can translate for a living and write anywhere.”

  We had long left 125th Street and were approaching Fifty-Ninth, where I was to get off, but I did not want to leave him.

  “How many languages do you know, Professor?”

  He laughed. “Oh, I have had to do a lot of traveling and been stuck in places, so I picked up a few languages. So, did you think about what you would take across the border?”