My Young Life

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My Young Life Page 23

by Frederic Tuten


  “Go back to bed,” he said.

  I had to walk him back to my door so I could fasten the police lock. I was very weak after we said our good-byes and I slept for an hour. I was feverish when I woke, and I was not sure if Samuel had been there or I had just dreamed him.

  On my third day in bed Jack phoned saying he had passed by the bookstore and was told I was sick.

  “Got anything to eat?”

  “Can you bring me something? Maybe a liverwurst sandwich with mustard?”

  “I’m in the West Forties by the docks. I’ll be right over, man.”

  I got dressed except for my shoes and went back to bed and back to sleep. I woke over an hour and a half later when Jack knocked and came in with a large brown paper bag. He had walked all the way to save the fifteen cents bus fare.

  We sat at the kitchen table, where he poured from his paper bag the tomatoes he had bought from a street cart by the docks. They had kept the cold that always blew in from the Hudson. I managed to bring out some plates and a knife for him to slice the tomatoes into quarters, and we seasoned the whole mound with pepper and salt and drank tap water. “We can live on this,” he said. “Who needs steak or a pork chop?”

  We finished eating and sat by the window on two old chairs that I had found on the sidewalk. You could sit on them, but the seats needed caning. Jack read to me, in the fall afternoon light, some of his new poems, written in thick pencil in a softcover notebook. I thought they were naïve, crude, but I said I liked them. I compared them to Kenneth Patchen, whose poems, with their sentimentality dripping from the page, I had loved when I was fifteen, the very reason I disliked them now.

  “I’m my own poet,” he said, a bit miffed. “I’m not even a Beat, you know? Although Kerouac digs my work.”

  “Of course, Jack, you’re your own poet,” I said, trying to redeem myself.

  “What’s the difference,” he said. “Everything’s OK, right, Fred? As long as we can eat some tomatoes and drink cold water from the tap, right?”

  “More than right, Jack. It’s everything.”

  I was feeling tired and it was obvious, although I tried hard to hide it.

  “Hey! Go crash, man. I’m splitting,” he said. “I’ll call you to see how you’re doing and if you need anything.”

  I was feeling so weak, I couldn’t last another minute. I got into bed and fussed about with getting the blankets and pillows right, fretting whether or not I should get up to pee, and finally, just when I was about ready to go to sleep, a knock at the door stopped me: it was Jack with a shopping bag with four cans of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and a loaf of Wonder Bread, whose wrapper promised to help “build strong bodies 12 ways.”

  “So long,” he said, racing down the stairs.

  There are kindnesses that live in you, live even in your ashes after you’re dead.

  I returned to the Figaro a week or so after my recovery, hoping to see Jack and thank him again for his visit and for cheering me up with his tomatoes and chicken soup. He was not there, but Laurita, the Argentinian waitress Jack had introduced me to what seemed a lifetime ago, was. “I haven’t seen him for over a week,” she said. “But I’ll let him know you came by when he’s in again.”

  “Where could he be?” I said.

  She laughed. “Where could he be? On his mother’s couch in the Bronx, or maybe in Mexico with Kerouac.”

  I sat there by the window and in the light from outside I resumed reading The Magic Mountain. I was with Hans Castorp as he slowly fell in love with the rude, loud Russian, Clavdia Chauchat; I was starting to fall for her, too, and that she made bread pills and flicked them at the others sitting at her breakfast table. I joined the other men crazy for her in the sanitarium, high in the Alps, where she made them forget that their lungs were slowly rotting away with consumption.

  Finally, it was evening, and I wondered where I would go to eat. Maybe Il Tacchino, a few blocks away, where the food was terrible but cheap. There was a bocce-ball alley in the middle of the restaurant where some of the old neighborhood Italians played, seemingly oblivious to the diners being served.

  I was still deciding where to go when Laurita walked over and said, “I’m off work now, and if you like, we can go.” We went to a spaghetti joint off Sheridan Square and finished off a flask of raw chianti and soon we walked to her apartment close by in a prewar art deco building off Sheridan Square. A man in an olive green uniform with baggy pants greeted us with a sleepy nod.

  “I liked you from time we meets,” she said in the elevator. There was not a scratch on the wood paneling.

  “I liked you, too, Laurita, but I never thought you would like me.”

  “I like you OK,” she said. “But I like you more when Jack said you are a great writer.”

  She saw me stare at the paintings in an otherwise bare living room. I went up close to one, a green river with a yellow barge and red sky. It was signed “Derain.”

  “Yes, yes. It’s for real,” she said.

  “Is it yours?”

  “Of course, Federico. Well, my father’s, I should say.”

  I was about to let out an unsophisticated “Wow” but saved myself in time, and said, “Very beautiful.”

  I went to look at the others. A Vlaminck, a Picabia, two by Juan Gris, and a small pastel study of greenish-red apples on a blue plate by Gauguin.

  “Did you come to see paintings?”

  Her bed was strewn with skirts and jeans and paperbacks that she swept off before undressing. She was skinny with clothes on, but bones and honeyed flesh without them. I was afraid I would crush her with a hug or splinter her skeleton once I was on top of her. She saw but mistook my apprehension.

  “Do you dislike thin women?”

  “The opposite,” I said, which was not too true, but I was no longer thinking about her body, because I was struck with the paintings in the other room and wondering why a woman with a rich father and rich apartment and immaculate elevator was a waitress. But what did I know about life? What did I know about anything?

  I left her apartment before the crosstown bus had started its normal morning schedule. I never considered paying all that money for a cab, so I walked across town and got home in time to shower and change. I was so happy; I thought I did not need to even change or shower. I only needed to stay awake forever.

  A few weeks later, with a giant grin, Jack appeared in the bookstore. He took me aside, pretending he needed my help so that my boss wouldn’t think he’d come to socialize while I was on the clock. “Man, you left a big impression on Laurita. She said you were muy hombre and she’d leave her boyfriend for you if he wasn’t in jail.”

  “Jail?”

  “Yeah, he’s a boom-boom man: knocks you on the head with a blackjack and lifts your wallet. I think he does it just for fun, because she gives him all the money he ever wants.”

  I was ready to run to Mexico before Boom-Boom was released and cracked my head open.

  “That’s really great,” I said.

  “There’s nothing to worry about. Laurita’s not gonna leave him while he’s still in jail. It’s a point of honor. She feels guilty that she slept with you. So she’s fixing you up with a belly dancer friend who saw you at the Figaro and digs you, too.”

  “Jack, is she the one with long black hair and flared nostrils?”

  “And big tits,” Jack added. “Susan, she’s the one.”

  “Wow! I’ve seen her at the Figaro a lot and was dying to meet her.”

  “You should never make a move with a woman. They’ll come to you if they like you. Haven’t you ever noticed that? And it’s always better for you when it works that way.”

  A belly dancer, like the one in Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky or in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, the burning, most famous books of the day that I had read every night in bed, volume after volume, until I went blind and forced myself to turn off the light.

  A belly dancer, like the one I would sometimes go to se
e on Friday nights at a Greek dive on Thirty-Eighth and Ninth, near the General Post Office. For days after, I would dream of her and her slow work up from a hip shimmy to a full-body frenzy and her smile and quick exit at the end. Faria, the Turkish Delight, the goddess was called on the poster, and the night-shift post office guys on their break packed the bar, where I nursed a tall, watery drink and waited for her eleven o’clock set.

  Susan, aka Jasmine, danced at a club off Sheridan Square in the West Village. She was as good as Faria, and she had all her teeth. She reserved a table up front for me. After her first set, she came over, ordered drinks, smiled, and said, “Jack says you’re a great writer.”

  I went to see her every Tuesday and Wednesday night for a month, and I became a fixture: the bartenders called out a friendly hello and the tubby manager smiled when I appeared and even walked me to my reserved table. The weekends were out, because the place was packed to the ceiling then and they needed my table, even if I paid for my drinks. Sometimes on Saturday nights, drink in hand, I hugged the bar with the other guys who were wild for her. I felt sorry for them and superior to them as well, in the most primitive way. The poor saps could just fantasize about her, jerk off at home dreaming of her, as I would have done. But at the end of the night, when she was done dancing, she’d come over to the bar where I was waiting and plant a few kisses on me. “Let’s go home,” she said. The guys sank with envy.

  I was so glad that I had not married Eva or anyone else. I couldn’t endure the monotony of monogamy and cohabitation: the morning, noon, and night closeness that would eventually turn into a bad smell.

  Susan loved Blake and Whitman and Pablo Neruda. She read to me first in English and then in Spanish from his Twenty Love Poems.

  “You should write poetry,” she said. “You’re more romantic than Neruda.”

  “I will write a poem for you,” I said. I did and read it one night in bed.

  “That’s very sweet, Fred. You should get into yoga.”

  She made hissing sounds when we made love, and it frightened me that she would turn into a snake just as we were coming. I liked the fear; it made me come harder.

  She brewed coffee for me before I left for the bookstore in the morning, and I kissed and fondled her and tucked her into bed, where she would stay until late afternoon. We never said “I love you.” We never said “I’m in love with you.” Sometimes it is better that way; the moments are richer and less filled with disappointment.

  With Susan, I was not an hourly-wage bookstore clerk or a failed graduate student or a poor boy from the Bronx: I was an intense young writer—soon to write something astounding—living a glamorous writer’s life with a belly dancer for a girlfriend.

  One early evening I went to the Figaro and fell into a reverie. Susan: the naked curve of her hip; her full, beautiful breasts; her small, tight ass; her flared nostrils and long black hair; the inverted isosceles triangle of her pubic hair. I thought: There are women more beautiful than Susan—Sandra, for example—but when Susan danced, she made me and the world dizzy. As I was engaged in this profound meditation, Jack walked in.

  “Susan told me to tell you she liked you very much, Fred. Don’t be hurt—she even loved you a little—but she’s gone to Mexico to become a vegetarian.” Jack sniffled. “She was far out, man, wasn’t she?”18

  * * *

  18JACK AND HIS HIPPIE GIRLS

  Jack Micheline (1929–1998)

  I did not see Jack again for five years, not until maybe 1967, this time in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. He was tossing a Frisbee with four young girls with flowers in their hair and laughing like a goat. He ran over to give me a giant hug.

  “Come meet the ladies,” he said, bringing me into their circle, but I was too shy to dance and stayed stiffly behind watching, needing, as always, to be drawn into life by others.

  Thirty years later I saw that dancing circle again, in a painting by Poussin, A Dance to the Music of Time: the sybaritic man playing the lyre is Jack, and he is whirling the beautiful young women and himself to a joy in time never ending. I later learned Jack had died of a heart attack on the BART in 1998 in San Francisco.

  I wonder to this day why I never thought of trying to find him or find out where he had gone. He just seemed to vanish, and I seemed to let him. To think I had all those years before he died to be his friend. I don’t ever believe that people die, imagining instead that they just go away for a while, and that one day or another I will run into them again.

  Rebecca

  Manhattan, Alphabet City, East Eighth Street, circa 1961

  Rebecca called one rainy fall evening. “Can we meet?”

  “Of course.”

  “I mean soon, like tonight.”

  “Tonight?” I repeated, taken aback. “Where?”

  Meeting her anywhere seemed too far, now that it was nine and I had settled in after a day’s work and a sandwich at Stanley’s bar.

  “I could come to you,” she said.

  “Where are you?”

  “Home, where else?”

  She was on the Upper West Side in the Eighties. It would be at least an hour before she arrived: I figured the A train to West Fourth Street, then the crosstown bus that ran every so often, then the walk from Tenth and D—dangerous, especially for a woman alone. I could wait for her at the bus stop so we could be mugged together.

  “I’ll take a cab,” she said, as if understanding my apprehension. I was a bit shocked. A cab? It was about seven dollars from where she lived; no one in my world took a cab, unless, I supposed, it was to a hospital.

  “I don’t have much of a place,” I said. But then I thought: So what? My pad in Syracuse was much worse, and she had seen that.

  Rebecca arrived in a half hour, calling out from the street below, as I had told her to. I bundled up the outer door key in an old sock and sailed it down to her, then I ran down the stairs to be sure that no one mugged her on the climb up: sometimes muggers found their way into the building and waited.

  “When I told the driver where I was going, he almost didn’t take me,” she said. “I had to promise him a five-dollar tip above the meter.”

  She was more beautiful, more soulful than ever, but all I could think about was how she would get back from this neighborhood, where taxis feared to travel.

  I made tea. For the past several weeks I had tried not to drink alcohol, marking off forty dry days on a calendar from the DeRobertis pastry shop on First Avenue between Tenth and Eleventh, my second home after Café Figaro. We sat in the kitchen and were cheerful for the first few minutes—saying how glad we were to be back in New York, how glad we were to see each other—but soon the cheer was gone, and Rebecca broke into tears.

  “Have you and your husband split?”

  “Yes, but that’s not why I’m crying. My father was shot a week ago.”

  I had met her father on his visit to Syracuse: a thin, nervous man who spoke very little. He had taken us to dinner in a steak-and-chops place with a red plastic tablecloth and a twelve-page plastic menu. He left a twenty as a tip.

  “He owed some people money. He didn’t pay. He couldn’t pay. And finally, when he was alone on a Saturday catching up on his paperwork, someone came into his office and shot him.”

  I blurted the first thing that came to my mind: “He was doing paperwork?”

  Rebecca gave me a cold stare. “He was the best father he knew how to be,” she said.

  That left me stumped. That may have been true of my own father, if I chose to picture it that way. She stopped crying and eyed the bathtub.

  “I have it there for convenience,” I said. “Also, it’s a conversation piece.”

  “Do you have much company?”

  “Like a girlfriend, you mean?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  She rose and stood over me, her hair longer than before, now straight down to her buttocks. I stood and felt the tension that could convert a friend into a lover. But I was not yet sure. Not s
ure if she was sure. We wavered in a kind of electrified silence. And in silence we undressed and went to bed.

  The shoulders of a woman who is your friend are not the shoulders of a woman who has become your lover. Nor is her face or hair or any part of her. Her beauty may be the same, but an alchemy has taken place, and she becomes another being, another person, the one whose eyes you kiss and whose shoulders you kiss, the one whose hair you stroke, the one whose thighs open to you.

  “Your breasts are beautiful,” I said, outlining the curves with my finger.

  She caressed my face. “Why did we wait so long, Fred?”

  Kim’s Laundry

  Manhattan, Alphabet City, East Eighth Street, 1961–1962

  Every Tuesday morning at half past eight sharp, a middle-aged man came into the bookstore, bought a book, and left with a simple nod. He chose gems: a recent translation of Plato or the collected plays of Georg Büchner or a new edition of Yeats’s poems. He was spry and lean, with steel-gray hair, and he always carried with him a black satchel, like a doctor’s bag for house calls. He had an accent I couldn’t place. One day, after he paid for Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he said, “The best books go begging on the shelves.”

  “I’ve noticed that,” I said.

  He nodded, left, returning a moment later.

  “Thank you.”

  Each week he added more words, until one morning he asked, “What are you doing here?”

  I was taken aback. “What do you mean, what am I doing here? I work here.”

  “Of course, but I feel you are very intelligent, and you should be doing something else. May I ask what that something else might be?”

  “I want to be a writer.” I disliked myself for saying that: it was so lame, so clichéd, and so self-defensively boastful at the same time. Like a galley slave, chained to his oar, who says that he’s just rowing part-time but aims to be a navigator.

 

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