My Young Life

by Frederic Tuten

“I think about it, about you, all the time.”

  “Because it’s new and you like the power. But it’s not authentic to you or you would have started this life long ago.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Let’s walk to the waterfall. I always go there when I want to get away from myself.”

  We sat on a large flat stone and held hands. It was not a high fall, and the water cascaded with a gurgle into a torpid stream. Beer cans and broken bottles and condoms flowered along its soggy banks.

  “My parents have rented a little villa in Saint-Tropez for the summer. Up in the hills. Away from the noise.”

  “That’s good.”

  “I’m going to spend some time with them. I owe them.”

  “I’m sure it’s not all obligation.”

  “Look at this. Completely trashed. No, I like it there.”

  “Will I see you?”

  “Sure, I’ll be back and forth a few times.”

  “I suppose there’s no point, then, in my staying in Syracuse for the summer.”

  “Well, of course, if you can get your work done here.”

  “Won’t you miss me?” I wanted to ask? “Won’t you miss what we do and what for me and I believed for you as well was at the center of our lives, all else merely existing at the periphery?” A great wave of self-pity swept over me: she would leave and I would be empty and left to fend for myself in the ordinary day—the empty day, to be filled with tasks like finishing my incompletes. “They would have been done but for you,” I wanted to say, like a wounded child. Of course, it was not her fault that I never finished the essays: we had been living in different dreams. I would have found another excuse for leaving my work unfinished.

  “It will be lonely here without you,” I said, feeling the same burning in my throat I’d felt when my father left, when Elizabeth said good-bye.

  “Oh, Fred, don’t you know yet that things don’t last forever?”

  “Not even the snow,” I said, having no idea what I meant.

  We sped back at the speed of light, trees and clouds blurring by, and the sun blinked on and off until I got home. We kissed good-bye. I felt my heart tighten. She drove off without a toot of her horn.

  I put my winter clothes in the two cheapest cardboard suitcases I could buy and stored them in the landlord’s musty basement—no charge. I left my apartment with the understanding that I could have it back in the fall if he had not found another tenant. My plan was to spend the summer in the Bronx at my mother’s and think of nothing, not even Sandra, and to write my papers and make up the incompletes and return to Syracuse with a clean slate. I packed five of my favorite books and took the Greyhound bus back to New York.

  I slept intermittently. As much as I wanted not to, Sandra came into my dreams. She stepped off the bus with me at the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Thirty-Fourth Street and sat with me on the subway all the way back to the Bronx.

  Gutted Hares and the Library

  Manhattan, Alphabet City, East Eighth Street, Fall 1961

  I was back to where I had started: my fragile mother, my cot in the living room, the subway stop—Pelham Parkway, the Bronx. Two weeks after I settled in, a letter arrived from the English department chair of Syracuse University: my incompletes had turned to grades of F. I was terminated as a student at the university. I had had prior warnings but I had brushed them aside. Still, I was shocked. I later learned that the same thing had happened to a fellow student, who immediately got a lawyer to protest and perhaps sue the university, but I never heard the results. I did not think to protest or beg to be reinstated. Maybe I thought I deserved the expulsion for letting everything slide; maybe, at heart, I had just had enough of Syracuse and was glad that someone else had ended it for me, taken it out of my hands. I was hurt but glad it was over.

  Two years had vanished with nothing to show for my reading, my course work, my pages and pages of notes and the starts of what were to be essays altering the course of conventional literary criticism. Worse, with my stained record, I had forever ruined my chances of getting a PhD anywhere else; that meant that unless I became famous, there would never be a job for me at any university or college of any repute—or any college at all. High school teaching, with its Monday-to-Friday weeks, loomed large on the horizon.

  I applied for a part-time job teaching English at a yeshiva in Brooklyn; it was a two-hour bus and subway ride there, four hours round-trip, for an eight-minute interview with the principal.

  “I like that you went to City College,” the interviewer said. “My father went there, and me, too. I liked you at first sight, but pardon me for asking: Which of your parents is Jewish?”

  “Neither,” I said, wanting to add, “But I’ve met with anti-Semitism.”

  “Thank you for coming all this way,” he said, giving me his hand.

  I reasoned that I was lucky. Brooklyn was so huge that if I turned down the wrong street or got off on the wrong subway stop, I’d be forever adrift in its strange vastness. “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn,” the novelist Thomas Wolfe once titled a story. How well I now understood that. Lucky or not, I rode the subway back to the Bronx jobless.

  I applied for a proofreader’s position with Prentice-Hall, a giant publisher of educational books based in New Jersey, starting at a fortune of five dollars per hour, three days a week. I went to their New York office, where a kindly-looking man gave me five pages to proof and return the following day. I rushed home and sat at the same kitchen table where I did—or didn’t do—my homework but this time striving for a high grade. I brought the test back the next day; he read it in less than a minute and asked very sweetly: “Are you sure you went to college?”

  I had missed half of what I should have noticed: punctuation, spelling, and the distinction between such words as “discrete” and “discreet,” “pore” and “pour.” I consoled myself that I would never have been able to work in an office. I would not last two weeks under the fluorescent lights and amid the sterile rows of desks. Had I not known that life when I worked in the Sperry and Hutchinson mailroom? But I was a mere boy then! I would never be able to shower and shave every day before dawn and get dressed—tie and jacket required—and cross over the Hudson on the PATH train to New Jersey and clock in at nine, even if it was only three days a week.

  Of course, being glad at not being hired was a cover for the truth: I had no skill to sell. For all my fancy thoughts of myself, I was unemployable. I was not a good waiter or even a busboy—a dishwasher, maybe. I had written one story in the last two years: a story about a young man who prowled the lowest movies houses on Broadway and went home to masturbate, hoping his mother, sleeping in the next room, did not hear him groan as he came into a hand towel.

  That story, like my graduate school essays, was left unfinished. I still felt everything had to be perfect, stunningly original, publishable in the best literary journals, and so brilliant that a major university would seek me out and offer me a professorship—better yet, a distinguished writer-in-residence position, maybe at Princeton or Harvard or Oxford or even the Sorbonne, where I’d magically lecture in exquisite French. Did any of the great literary critics of the day have a PhD? Did R. P. Blackmur, Irving Howe, William Empson, Alfred Kazin, John Berryman, or Howard Nemerov have one? Kenneth Burke did not even have an undergraduate degree, and he wrote like a god—a smart one who went to the core of poetry and fiction by mining the work’s key images and bringing to the surface its occult meaning.

  I had left my short story unfinished for fear of what it revealed me to be: not the artist with Plato as his friend but a lonely boy with low thoughts, with filthy thoughts, with no thoughts at all.

  I left the interview and wandered about the streets until I walked into a paperback bookstore opposite the New York Public Library on Fifth and Forty-Second Street. I was wondering if I could afford to buy a book, when I heard: “Freddy, is that you?”

  I didn’t recognize the man behind the cash register. He lau
ghed. “It’s me, Richie!” He came into focus: he was one of the kids from my Bronx neighborhood, a few years older than the rest of us but always ready to build a fort in the park or take a side in a snowball fight. He quickly filled me in on the years we had not seen each other. He owned a small chain of paperback bookstores called Book Masters and was married and had a child. Richie was all grown up.

  “And whataya doing, Freddy?” he asked.

  “I’m taking a break from graduate school. I’m looking for a job,” I said, as if having a job was a vacation.

  “I need someone to work here, but I don’t suppose that would be a job for you?”

  Of course it was, and I started the following day. Book Masters sold bestselling hardcovers but mostly dealt with paperbacks. I shelved the new arrivals, tried to keep track of what we needed to reorder, and took charge of the register when Richie was off to his other store on Broadway and Forty-Fourth. I worked six days a week from eight to six, with a half hour for lunch. The minimum wage then was a dollar and fifteen cents an hour, and I made sixty-nine dollars a week before taxes. For now, I was saved.

  After work, I went directly to Café Figaro, the old haunt of my City College days. In the two years I had been away, there were few changes; the new crew of younger waitresses was as beautiful and cosmopolitan and cool as ever. One, Silvi, the only American, took me under her wing, making certain that I understood she had a serious boyfriend so that I did not mistake her smiles and friendship for an invitation to further developments. Another, Luce, was so beautiful that I had to avoid looking at her. She was from Rome, maybe twenty-two, and married to an American artist. I imagined her as Audrey Hepburn in the film Roman Holiday, smiling, riding a Vespa on café-lined streets under an open blue sky.

  Luce liked that I spoke to her in an Italian larded with Sicilian words that threw her off. “What is a jadrool?” she asked. I was surprised, thinking every Italian knew the word for a shabby, poor devil of a loser. She forgave my grammatical mistakes and comical pronunciation, correcting them sweetly.

  “Luce, do you have a girlfriend for me?”

  “In Rome,” she said. “But improve your Italian first.”

  “I will start tomorrow,” I said, imagining myself on a Vespa, riding behind a beautiful woman with long hair and a laugh to make me always happy.

  I would sit alone in the café, and after I finally left, then move on to a basement-level bar on Houston Street where I heard girls came to meet men, before I took, not having met or spoken to anyone, the long subway ride back to the Bronx. The world—for others—was made of friends and lovers.

  All my City College friends were gone. One had moved all the way to San Francisco with a Mexican woman he had fallen in love with at a brothel in Mexico; one saved enough driving a cab to put a down payment on a taxi medallion, then spent his days and nights driving to pay off the balance. Others disappeared into conventional careers of school teaching and marriages, and moved to Westchester or New Jersey, which to me were just other versions of Siberia or Syracuse or Brooklyn. I had lost contact with those friends anyway.

  One evening when I was lounging at the Figaro, Luce asked if I knew anyone looking for an apartment; she and her husband were moving back to Rome.

  “Me,” I said. “If it’s affordable.” I needed to add that. The rent was fine, twenty-eight dollars a month, but I had to pay them three hundred dollars key money for the apartment—money they wanted right away, as they were leaving right away. And another one hundred dollars for the bed and chairs and kitchen table and lamps. The apartment was rent-controlled and the key money was Luce’s fee for introducing me to the building agent and for having him put my name on the new lease. This was the way it was always done. I asked Richie for the money and offered to work on Sundays until the loan was paid off. Without a word, he peeled off thirty tens fresh from the bank. I scrounged up the other hundred from who knows where.

  My first apartment in New York was on the top of a six-floor tenement at 394 East Eighth Street between Avenues C and D, with a bathtub in the kitchen but with a separate toilet and shower in the small back room. There was plenty of heat and hot water, and sunlight from the two windows that faced north, uptown, where the men wore jackets and ties and the women lipstick and high heels, and everyone took taxis—the adult world to which I could not belong, and perhaps, for that reason, had never wished to.

  From those two windows I could see, by stretching myself out on the sill, a slice of the East River and the freighters and tugs plying it. I loved the soft, melancholy hooting of the tugs at night as I was falling to sleep. It comforted me to feel a part of the river’s strong flow, carrying me out into the Narrows and out to the far edge of night. I did not see but imagined Tompkins Square Park to my west with its little monument to those who, in 1904, on a beautiful June day trip, had drowned in the burning of the steamship General Slocum. A thousand people, mostly women and their children from the Lower East Side, drowned in the very river where the tugs I loved to hear now did their watery work. Sometimes I imagined the hoots of the tugs were mourning wails for those who had drowned. The river, the park, the drowning were forever packaged into my new life.

  I was close to everything I loved. The park on the East River, filled every Sunday with families from the whole of the Lower East Side, and where Jamaicans in their impeccable whites came to play soccer. The library on Tenth between A and B, with its solid oak tables, was filled with luxurious silence, except for readers turning pages.

  But there was a nether side of this urban pastoral: muggings and break-ins galore. That was one of the reasons not to live in the neighborhood. But the low rent was more than compensation, and thus the neighborhood was a draw for artists and writers from everywhere. My building, aside from a few leftover old Polish and Jewish tenants, was filled with them. I was in love with the whole area: the tiny shops that sold pickles floating in huge wooden barrels on the sidewalk and the fish markets with their window displays of porgies and ling sleeping on beds of crushed ice. I was fascinated and repulsed by the gutted hares suspended on hooks in the butcher shop windows.

  I even liked the cold. It was a familiar Lower East Side cold, one that had clung to my grandmother and mother not far from where I was now living, a cold that had frozen them in the tenements, in the streets—frozen them everywhere but in church on Sunday. They never defrosted, not even later in the warmth of the Bronx.

  No one in my building had escaped a burglary. A neighbor on a lower floor pinned a note on her door: You have taken everything. I had to illegally double-gate the fire escape window. A neighbor down the hall, Samuel, a carpenter in his late eighties from Kraców, built me a new reinforced door with a police lock after the first time the apartment was broken into. For some reason my radio was taken but not my sweet red Olivetti. Some books had disappeared, too, but only the few hardcovers. The second time around, I came home to find the door almost broken from its frame, but it had held, thanks to Samuel’s Old World skill. He accepted no money for his work but asked me to take in his gray cat when he infrequently visited his daughter for a weekend in Westchester. Samuel said, “Gustav is happy with you. Will you take him when I die?”

  “Of course,” I said. I loved this man, who wished never to leave our building, our streets, never to live with his children, who promised him comfort in the suburbs. “Who wants to die up there with all that grass?” Samuel said. I loved Gustav, or the gray pelt of whatever there was left of him dragging himself from room to room behind me.

  Sometimes I saw Samuel walking with his carpenter’s toolbox on his way to repair another old-timer’s broken chair or table leg. He was hatless on the coldest days, and his black overcoat had holes in the elbows and was missing two buttons. But he walked erectly and strongly, like a man of twenty going to see his love. Every morning before I left for work, I made a point of stopping at his apartment down the hall and listening at the door just to be sure he was still alive. I was relieved when I heard him talking
to his cat in Polish or his radio playing, or if I could smell that he was frying sausage from the butcher on First Avenue and boiling up a pot of mushroom soup.

  I had girlfriends, but none who stayed in my heart. I sometimes went to Stanley’s, a bar on Twelfth and B, the East Side mecca for artists and other wannabes like myself. I had no friends there, either, but once a young woman my age took me to her apartment close by and we listened to Puccini’s Turandot on LPs, playing over and over the “Nessun dorma” aria. “Vincerò! Vincerò” (“I will win! I will win!”), the singer cried, risking death for the chance of love. I heard it for the first time, and it buoyed me up with the feeling that I, too, could win in life and not grow old and die a loveless old man stacking books in a small bookstore. The eyes of the woman I was with were teary; mine, too. Maybe she was thinking the same about her life. She took my hand: “It will all be OK, right, Fred?” she said with forced brightness.

  We sat drinking wine and playing the aria until dawn, when I left to open the store at eight and she went off to teach in a high school in Queens. I did not see her in Stanley’s in the following days and weeks. I asked Stanley about her; he had no idea who I meant, and I had no memory of the building she had taken me to. I never saw her again, but she lives in me.

  Sliced Tomatoes and High Fever

  Manhattan, Greenwich Village, 1961

  I was happy to run into Jack Micheline at the Café Figaro. He wanted to meet me again soon and read me his poems. I had a phone, finally, and gave him my number. He, as always, had no permanent address and no phone, but there were plenty of phone booths in the streets and drugstores, and it was easy to call someone if you had the right change.

  I got sick one week and had to stay home from work. I had a high fever and was too weak to leave my bed and go up and down the six long flights to the grocery on the corner. Samuel brought me a pot of his homemade mushroom soup and a loaf of thick black bread from a shop on First Avenue that sold day-old loaves, leftovers from the restaurants. The loaves tasted just baked from the oven. Samuel wouldn’t take a penny for the food. I offered him a glass of vodka, which he swiftly downed in one swallow and went to rinse the glass.