My Young Life

by Frederic Tuten

  “Writers need a great deal of time. Good-bye,” he said, offering his hand for me to shake.

  Time. I was back to working six days a week, now that I had paid off the key money. I got to the store at seven thirty a.m. and opened it to the public at eight. Sometimes Richie asked me to stay until eight or nine at night. I did, especially on Saturdays when there was much business from tourists wanting guidebooks and city maps. By the time I was finished talking to customers, stacking new arrivals, and working the register, I was half-dead, the other half comatose. Rather than go home and try to write, I would run down to Café Figaro, have a sandwich, flirt with the waitresses, and melt into the scene with a book until it was too late to do anything but take the crosstown bus and hope I didn’t get mugged on the two-block walk home.

  Every other Sunday I brought my laundry to Kim, the portly, old Chinese man whose shop lay across from my building. He worked all day until late and slept in the curtained rear, where he lived illegally. I saw through his window a faint light at midnight, meaning he had stopped working and was listening to the radio and reading his Chinese dream interpretation books and manuals on what days to engage with the world.

  I had given him my birth date and he checked my sign in his book. Sometimes he waved me into the shop to caution me when to stay home and when not to answer the phone. If the forecast was bad, he was not shy about saying, “No go work.” Of course, I went anyway, although I was looking over my shoulder all the time and was doubly cautious getting on and off the bus. I took the steps up to my apartment like a fearful snail without a shell and paused on the landings to listen in case anyone was coming up behind me. Not that that would have done me much good if someone pulled a knife or a pistol or a blackjack to splinter my head.

  Kim liked me because I had brought him food after he was robbed and beaten in his shop—beaten so badly that he could not walk for more than two weeks. The two kids that did it kept shouting at him, “Where’s the gold? You Chinks always have gold.” He laughed as he told me this, saying, “Maybe they no see this,” pointing to the two gold teeth in his mouth.

  He had been left weak from the beating, and was fearful of slipping on the ice that always seemed to be glazing our streets well into spring.

  I went behind the counter and took his snow shovel and a box of raw salt that he kept under the bathroom sink. I tried not to look too closely at his room, but I saw he slept on a mattress with a wooden block for his pillow. There was no shower or bath. For a stove, he had two hot plates: one for his teakettle and one for cooking rice. There was only one chair, where he was sitting, hand on his bandaged head. I shoveled away the snow and sprinkled the pavement with the salt. “Thank you,” he said, taking out his wallet.

  “Don’t be silly, Kim,” I said. The next time he did my laundry, he refused to take payment.

  He promised to take me to a restaurant in Chinatown where, he said, Chinese were served delicacies that the tourists—meaning anyone who was not Chinese—never saw. He had to consult his books to find the propitious day.

  • • •

  A day in spring came when all the stars and planets agreed that it was favorable to travel. Kim told me to meet him the coming Sunday at the bus stop on Avenue B and Ninth Street at twelve thirty. I offered to come collect him. He said, “No, bus stop.” I suspected that he did not want to be seen walking with me for fear that his other clients would be jealous. He was already at the bus stop when I arrived, but I hardly recognized him. He was in a beige tropical suit and beige shoes with woven straw uppers. He was wearing an understated green tie with a pearl stickpin. And his hat, which he had rakishly cocked to the side, looked like the finest panama. He also carried a cane, which I had never seen him use even when he hobbled around the shop. He greeted me and remained silent until the bus arrived packed with people.

  In Chinatown he brought me into a restaurant filled with Caucasian families eating heaping bowls of food that looked brown and mushy and all the same. I saw a free table and moved toward it. Kim shook his head and gently took me by my sleeve, leading me down a staircase into a room with Chinese at every table. Some looked up at us; some nodded to him and continued eating. He and I sat alone at a corner table. He ordered in Chinese, and I had no idea what was to come.

  Five or six dishes were brought to us at the same time. Fish pieces? Chicken shreds? Tasty, but too delicate for me. I started for the soy sauce and chili peppers, but there were none at the table. Kim ate with chopsticks, and seeing what a mess I was making with mine, he barked at the waiter, who went up the stairs and grudgingly returned with a fork and spoon.

  All through the meal we drank scalding tea. I calculated Kim had downed about a gallon, and he broke into a sweat, which he patted away with a very fine white handkerchief. I realized we had not spoken fifteen words between us, but I also realized I didn’t know what to talk about with him. To rescue me, he produced a photograph from his jacket pocket, a picture of a two- or three-year-old in black pajamas whose fly was open, exposing the genitals. Kim said, “Grandson. A boy.”

  I said, “Oh, Kim, I’m so happy for you. A grandson.”

  He smiled. “Thank you. My country strong now.”

  I didn’t know if Kim was aware or cared that his country was now being ruled by one of the most ruthless dictators, Mao, and that his homeland was a man-made catastrophe of mass starvation and deaths and countless imprisonments. If so, it didn’t seem to matter to him, because what was important was that China was being restored to international prominence. I said nothing, but he gave me a bigger smile and added, “Very strong now.”

  He motioned to the waiter, who brought the check. I offered to pay, but he refused. “My day,” he said. We went back into the streets. I stood on a corner with him, and three or four Chinese men on the opposite corner called out. He answered quickly and turned to me, saying, “Time you go home now.” He seemed embarrassed to be in my company and could see that I felt slighted. Then he added, “My friends ask if you policeman.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Aren’t you coming back with me?”

  “No,” he said, and then very shyly added, “Time to play fan-tan.”

  He crossed the street and joined his friends, who kept looking over at me. I didn’t wave or shout my good-bye. I walked all the way back home, wishing I could have joined Kim and his suspicious friends and feeling that I was part of nothing and no one. I wondered if I should get a cat and some plants to look after and to greet me when I stepped through my door.

  A few years later I moved not too far away, to an apartment on Tompkins Square Park. I continued to visit Kim periodically and brought him cartons of Camels, which he chain-smoked. One day I found the shop closed, and I could see through the window that it was empty except for a snow shovel leaning against the bare wall.

  Around that time, I also went to Sam’s door and heard no voice or radio. I knocked, but there was no answer. Taped to the door was an index card. T. Simpson, it said, with a flourish. I asked one of the old neighbors if he knew where Sam was.

  “Gone,” he said.

  “Gone where?”

  “To the cemetery. Where else?”

  Rodin and Vagabonds

  Manhattan, Tompkins Square Park, 1961–1962

  Sometimes on my free Sundays I tried to write, but when the weather was good I longed to be outside, having spent most of the entire week in the bookstore. I strolled through Tompkins Square Park like an explorer without a mission. There was a hobo meeting ground on the benches on the Avenue B side of the park off Eighth Street; wayfarers and loners from everywhere in America traded stories and smokes and info on good soup kitchens and the best place in the Bowery to crash for a quarter.

  Sometimes I brought over a pint of rye from Winarski’s liquor store on First between Eighth and Ninth and passed it around the hobo benches, taking the first swig before it vanished among all the thirsty men. I was always politely thanked and maybe asked for a cigarette, but that ended their interest in
me. Once I asked why they always came to this end of the park, and a man in his seventies said, “It’s where we birds come every year. No one knows why, but it’s always been that way.”

  “I see,” I said. “It’s like a tradition.”

  He laughed. “If that’s what you want to call it. You got a cigarette, sonny?”

  Later, I saw a whole band of hobos enter Saint Brigid’s Church on Eighth and B. It featured a soup kitchen, always a magnet.

  Old Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews, and the few Italians still living on First Avenue from Ninth to Thirteenth Street took up the benches on the north side of park. They turned to the sun while talking, taking in every last minute of it before returning to the tenements where we all lived. They would all be dead in a few years, but for now they had their languages and memories to share. Some of the old Jews lived with their children and grandchildren in the suburbs but came back to visit friends while their daughters or sons shopped for creamed herring or pickles soaking in barrels on Avenue C. Some of the grown children waited in cars parked along Avenue B to bring their nostalgic parents back to Riverdale or to some tidy house with clean windows in Westchester.

  Young people embracing and smooching had no set territory and sat or walked at all points of the park, indifferent to the junkies and the junkie muggers and fences who sold shoes and sports jackets and hair dryers and typewriters laid out on blankets, all hot goods. You might have found your own stolen radio there and then bought it back, no questions asked. It was like a tax for living there, so there was no use for hard feelings, no point in running to the police. They would do nothing in any case, their problems much larger than a few stolen items on a blanket.

  I was not on the benches with the old or the hobos or the junkies or the thieves; I was not there strolling among the coupled young. I was a species alone, wishing I were not, wishing that by some magic I would be walking through the park with a woman I loved and buying her an ice cream cone from the Good Humor truck stationed on Avenue A since the beginning of time.

  “What will you do when you really have trouble, Fred?” asked a sparrow perched on a bench.

  Rebecca came downtown to see me, but Tompkins Square Park, or even the folksinging farther west in Washington Square Park, was not for her. The whole of lower Manhattan was not for her. I had no hope, at least in the near future, of ever leaving my pad on Eighth Street, and I actually never wanted to leave unless it was for a larger, more sunny place in the neighborhood, on Tompkins Square Park itself, say, facing south.

  “I’m never going to greatly improve my financial circumstances,” I said to Rebecca one night in Lanza’s, the neighborhood Italian restaurant with frescoes of old Sicilian villas and their lush gardens.

  “Or your creative circumstances,” she said. “I’m not chiding you, but with the way you’re working at the bookstore, you’re not going to get any serious writing done. Or any writing at all.”

  She was right, but for the moment my thoughts were on the restaurant’s frescoes. A green garden baking in the Sicilian sun, two tall palm trees standing guard by a fountain as dry as the scorched blue day. I saw my grandmother walking there, dreaming of her escape to America. The frescoes were fading, along with the once-Italian neighborhood, where my grandmother and her family had lived when they first arrived—off the boat and into a cold-water flat with a bathtub in the kitchen and a toilet down the hall. Now I was walking the same streets and, except for having an in-house toilet, living in the same kind of walk-up flat, inhaling their immigrant shadow.

  “Can’t you work fewer hours and give the time to writing?” Rebecca asked.

  “You don’t understand about money,” I said. “People who have it never understand people who don’t.”

  I was mean to her because I was upset by what she had said, wondering if, in fact, by working all those hours at the bookstore I was giving myself an excuse for not writing. At least Ehrlich had written one novel before he went into pained silence.

  Sometimes on Sundays Rebecca and I would go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where we often made a stop at Cézanne’s painting of a table with apples. “How can he have done that?” Rebecca said, her voice thick with awe. I loved this painting, but her lavish appreciation made me wonder whether my love for it was honestly felt or filtered through my reading Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne and finding there, in the old painter’s devotion to his art despite critical indifference or scorn, a message of courage for me. Did I love Cézanne’s work, or did I love him? My doubt made me wonder about Rebecca, too, and whether she believed in her love for Cézanne, for anything not officially sanctioned and housed in the pantheon of art.

  In good weather we’d walk from the Met on Eighty-Second Street all the way down to Fifty-Third and Fifth Avenue to drink coffee in the sculpture garden at MoMA, with Rodin’s statue of Balzac as our bronze chaperone. It elevated us to be there, in the noble world of Art. In this quiet garden, the buses and subways, the spilled-over garbage pails and the noisy trucks that came to empty them, the monthly rent and unlit staircases with bandits waiting on the landings, the murder of her father, were no longer concerns—or, better, had never existed.

  After the museum excursions, Rebecca came back to my place, but we no longer shared the hope-filled mood of a new romance. As for sex, we were still in the fresh beginning. While not exciting, it was comforting—except for the afterward and the staying overnight in a small bed and the leaving with me in the early morning and getting packed in the bus, crushed in the subway. All that dampened our romance, and we were not old enough or wise enough to be grateful that we had each other for the night or for a whole Sunday. I didn’t want to end with her, because there was really nothing to end, since we had hardly begun, and because we each had exactly no one else.

  Expensive Watches and Martin Eden

  Manhattan, Around Forty-Second Street, Spring 1962

  One Tuesday morning at eight fifteen sharp, the man with the doctor’s bag appeared. He did not come to buy a book. “I want to show you something,” he said. I came from behind the register and faced him. He removed his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeve to reveal blue numbers tattooed on his arm.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  “Yes.” I had seen such tattooed numbers before on the arm of Solomon, a counterman at the Second Avenue Deli, New York City’s mecca for Eastern European Jewish food. Solomon had been in Auschwitz as a teenager. He had survived, but his eyes seemed always fixed on the crematoriums where his mother and father had been turned from flesh into ashes.

  “Then you understand that there is nothing more precious than freedom. Nothing.” Had John Resko not said the same thing to my friend, the Francophile Elizabeth Charon, before she left her husband and two sons to live with a man in Paris?

  “I believe you.”

  “You don’t, or you would not still be here.”

  I was dazed by his directness, by his blunt fist at my heart.

  Like a child, I said, “What should I do?”

  “Find a way to make a living that gives you the most time possible. Learn a skill that pays well for little work.”

  I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but what he had said was obvious, useless. What such skill could I learn?

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Work you can do at home. A proofreader, for example.”

  “I have already tried that.”

  “A diamond cutter! You can work anywhere in the world.”

  “I have butterfingers. And it takes years to learn.”

  “A poor excuse. Have you read Walden?”

  “Of course,” I said, becoming defensive.

  “Then you remember how Thoreau made his living?”

  “He was a surveyor.”

  “Yes, and he had to work only a few days a week, then he was free to write or stroll in the woods.”

  “That was then,” I said, annoyed. For all his good intentions, I didn’t like being hectored like an errant schoolboy
. I also didn’t like the truth he had implied about my lack of courage, my taking the cowardly way out of struggle. I asked, rather sharply, “What’s your profession?”

  “I repair very expensive watches. I work at home, not more than two days a week. I bring in the fixed watches and pick up the broken ones. I’m going to the jeweler now, right up here on Fifth Avenue.”

  “That’s great for you,” I said.

  He stayed silent and gave me a sympathetic look. He extended his hand. I felt stupid for being so stupid.

  “Thank you. You’ve given me golden advice, I know it.”

  At the door he called out, “Don’t look back with regrets.”

  It had never occurred to me to ask what he did with his free time, and I made a mental note to ask when I saw him again.

  But he did not show up the next week or any week after. Had he died? Was he bringing his watches elsewhere? Or had he had enough of advising me, with my stubborn ignorance and fragile pride?

  All the same, his words spurred me to model myself after the protagonist in Jack London’s Martin Eden, an aspiring young writer who rose in the black hours before dawn and wrote stories before he left for work boiling shirts at the laundry. His situation was worse than mine but he willed himself to stream words onto a page—and by hand. And this without one friend to phone when lonely, no woman to wake beside him from time to time and say that she loved him.

  I followed Martin’s example: no Café Figaro, no chasing girls, no lingering over beer at Stanley’s bar. I went to bed at nine and woke at five. No breakfast, only a roll and coffee and then to my kitchen table and my waiting Olivetti, bright red and cheerful like a kid’s first fire engine. I started my adventure with hope and excitement.

  It was easy at first, and there was something glamorous about being at my table so early in the morning. I saw myself as a hero in my struggle to be a writer. But after my fifth day I woke later, and then later still, until, by the tenth day, I turned off the alarm and returned to sleep until my usual hour. The chilly darkness had depressed me, the blank pages had taunted me. I had sat and stared at the blankness and known I was lost.