A Savage Life

by Michael Savage

  Now, Benny’s beautiful paranoia was a reflection of his image of the world, which was based largely on his many years working among the cream of society of the Lower East Side of New York. Take the way he entered his stand in the market. He backed into it. I didn’t know from backing in, walking in forwards, whether to go it sideways. There was a little corridor entering his booth, and then in front was the merchandise. He’d always warn me, “You’ll always walk in backwards. Never take your eyes off them. You take your eyes off them for a second, they’ll hit ya like a hawk.” He’d say, “They’ll look ya right in the eye, they’ll talk to ya, and they’d wait for ya to blink, and the minute ya blink or ya sneeze, boom! Ya lost somethin’ and you’d never know it.” So, as you would guess, he figured out in the oxygen tent that someone clipped an Austrian ski sweater from me because I failed to back into the stand; that is, I didn’t walk in backwards at work. At college you had to do that a great deal, walk backwards into your seat. Can you imagine that? It’s pretty crazy. What a reality. I mean, how was I supposed to have known to walk in backwards? But in his mind, he probably thought professors backed slowly into their rooms, never taking their eyes off the students for fear that some philosophical wizard would steal a thought, you know what I mean?

  Another guy pops to mind. This was the freak, the one-titted man. His name was Harry the Freak. Harry started out as a freak in Coney Island. Just a regular barnyard freak. And his big attraction was that he had one tit. Big deal. He billed himself as “Half Man–Half Woman.” As years went on, he became fairly well off. He became a capitalist freak, and he opened up his own sideshow in Coney Island. He employed and exploited his freak brothers and sisters, the microcephalics, the macrocephalics, the midgets, you know, the standard dwarf that would say a little thing with his voice and scare the kids, “blah, blah, blah,” you know. And the bearded lady, too. But Harry’s game was running the freak show, and he made a lot of money—and where would he spend it? This distorted, twisted man would buy beautiful antiques; that was his counterbalance. And he’d spend virtually all his money on such merchandise. He lived in Long Beach, in a little Godfather-like house. It was strange. From the outside it was a regular house in Long Beach. You’d knock on the door—I remember I went a few times with my father to make deliveries of, oh, a bronze figure of something, or a grandfather clock—and the door would open, but never all the way, only just a crack through which you would come in sideways, schlepping the thing in with you. And there it was: from floor to wall to ceiling and back again, with no apparent order, merely a storage house of antiques. No order, no rhyme, no reason to the display; as he got them, he dragged them in, found a place for them, and stuck them there on the floor, maybe moving a few things around. And this was the world he lived in. He treated his antiques just as if they were mere objects of art. So in a sense he had a purer vision of what these things were. He didn’t worship them, give them a pedestal or a special place; he merely liked associating with them, and treated them as such, as mere objects. SO you might say that Harry the Freak was really an antiques chauvinist.

  In the beginning, the 1940s, the men at the market earned their living primarily by buying merchandise that had been left in the subways, unclaimed merchandise, unclaimed steamer trunks and the like. I was told that in those days, if a trunk was unclaimed it was sealed at the wharf and then put up at auction, unopened. Which means in the good old days of the thirties and forties, you used to bid on the trunk according to what the trunk looked like in value on the outside. If it was an expensive leather with brass fittings, you bid accordingly. You could never tell what was going to be inside. But the men liked playing the game. It was interesting to them because it was taking a chance. They’d bid maybe seven dollars for a good trunk; four or five dollars for a poor-looking one. And they’d buy six, seven, eight trunks at auction, take a little truck, and haul them into the market, usually late at night. As they proceeded to open the trunks up, everyone who went to the auction, they’d have a kind of free-for-all, comparing who did better in the game of chance.

  One trunk story in particular sticks in my mind. One trunk had belonged to a nun. They could tell it was a nun’s trunk because of the photographs inside. They had also found her habits in there—a few old nun’s habits and articles indicating she was also a nurse.

  As they were rummaging through, looking for a few valuable candlesticks or whatnot to put up for sale and get back their seven bucks profit, they found a strange object at the bottom wrapped up in muslin. Being inquisitive sorts, they proceeded to unfurl the muslin package. What would be at the heart of this onion-like skin but an embryo. A human embryo, all wrapped up neatly in a nun’s trunk.

  Twelve

  Hegira from New York

  MY FIRST HEGIRA FROM NEW YORK WAS A BUS RIDE TO Miami.

  The dining highlights I recall were the chicken bones in a greasy bag, thrown under the seat by an old lady going to her retirement; and chicken again, this time the “Southern Fried” variety at a bus rest-stop in the middle of an Atlanta winter night. I always loved fried chicken as a boy, and this was really going to be a treat. To gorge on greasy chicken thighs and breasts in the heart of Dixie, where I had heard they had first perfected the recipe.

  The only factor limiting my enthusiasm was the time. I was asleep like Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman’s grizzled drifter in Midnight Cowboy) on his death ride, sweaty and in a fit of sorts, when the jouncing Greyhound abruptly stopped. The lights were flashed on. “Rest Stop, everybody out,” shouted the bus driver, and he came down the aisle prodding each and every one of us, even the old chicken-bone lady, reminding me of the cartoon cop of the past who cracks his billy across the soles of the sleeping park bum.

  Maybe he got a kickback from the rest-stop owner, I really don’t know, but everyone on that bus was hounded into that eatery, the doors to our carriage locked; there was no escaping it. I would have Southern fried chicken, even though I was slightly nauseous beneath that three A.M. Georgian night sky with stars as sharp as fractured mollusks in a barrel.

  It was OK, that’s all. Too crusty, too greasy. Of course, today I know it was probably cooked in lard, and that the saturated fat would account for my early death had I kept on with my dietary ignorance. But the slight case of indigestion I nursed all the way to Jacksonville gave me that slight something to think about, which oh so softly pushed me into the arms of Morpheus.

  MIAMI

  IN THOSE DAYS (C. 1958), YOU COULD GET A FULL BREAKFAST for thirty-nine cents. Two sunny-side-up eggs, fried in butter, one slice of grease-ridden ham, two slices of white toast suffocated in butter, coffee, and juice.

  I loved every bite, but have never again eaten anything like that. Now it’s one healthful (and bland) dirge after another. But I’m still alive, which is an achievement in this world. Balancing your wants against your needs without becoming homicidal or suicidal is success, though I will admit to approaching both states several times along the road.

  Kerouac’s On the Road had just surfaced at Queens College. Harold, the older, fat boy in the crowd, smilingly fished it from his tentlike trench coat one rainy autumn day in Flushing. He told us younger guys, milling around between classes, that the book portrayed a wild car ride across America. Free sex, saxophones, and drugs on every page.

  As they say today, it was a real “page-turner.” My first, really—unless you count that book I read when I was about eight about some guy who flew a seaplane into Arctic lakes, saving Eskimos and trappers.

  Kerouac’s odyssey was not about saving others; he was on his own road of salvation, seeking drama through thrills, not yet knowing that peace within came only when the trips were over and you could sit on a balmy pier watching the gulls while thinking about where you had been and what you thought you were doing there.

  Now, it is true that Tolstoy died in his eighties, covered with snow on a train station bench after setting off on one more journey. And that there is something defeatist about saying you’
re through traveling while still young and healthy.

  This attitude is true sacrilege in a nation obsessed with motion. But, like Kerouac, America too will learn her limits and I hope it’s before we burn out in an old armchair in front of a television, drunk and drugged, watching another one of our endless foreign “peace” missions.

  But Harold’s book was just the kick I needed to unchain myself (so I thought!) from clan and caste. So during midsemester break, it was my first bus trip to Miami, followed in later seasons by a wild nonstop car ride, eight of us packed into a fast hemi-Dodge, and later still, an army surplus DC-3 that taxied on a tail-wheel from Newark. Tilted at 45 degrees, you felt like Buck Rogers about to take off on a space adventure. Until the stewardess, not yet a “flight attendant,” distributed those box lunches that smelled of cardboard.

  Other than being robbed in a fleabag hotel by a midget bellhop, who pulled some kind of trick on me by making my bankroll of eighty dollars disappear from the hotel’s safety box, nothing much exciting happened down there.

  It is true I got my money back by causing a bad scene, provoking seedy Orson Welles types to slowly close in on me in a circle, only being saved at the last minute by the Dade County blue boys. They came, mind you, because the midget had called them in an attempt to intimidate this Yankee into backing off on his crazy demands. But when the six cops arrived, as I say, I was surrounded by an assortment of perfectly fine carnival geeks, and the midget suddenly discovered that my money was somehow still in that steel box.

  Must have fallen down in back somewhere, that’s all.

  Charged with pulling victory from what would have been fiscal disaster on my first solo flight from the nest, I took my friends to dinner.

  And I don’t remember the meal, and that’s all I’ve got to say about eating in Miami.

  Thirteen

  An American Gangster in Spain

  MAJORCA

  THE FIRST RESPECTABLE MIDDLE CLASS “BUM” I MET WAS A soon to be high school principal from Brooklyn who smoked “dope,” danced the mambo like a Cuban, “had” lots of women, and walked with a minstrel smile at all times. Very dark-skinned for a Caucasian, and with thick lips and curly hair, he was the Hebraic male version of Abraham’s wife, Sarah, said to be comely and black.

  Anyway, Donny had just come back from a very faraway place, where the wine, women, and danzóns were said to flow as freely as in Impressionist Paris days. I, right then, decided to go there. That summer, or as soon as I could afford it, I’d go to Spain and get over to Majorca.

  It was a converted troop ship, the MV Waterman, that carried my friend Marty and me on our pilgrimage to Donny’s paradise island. Two years it took me to save up for that trip. When we first escaped our moorings with deep foghorn vibrations not matched by today’s jet whine, all of my past seemed to slip beneath my feet.

  This was going somewhere!

  The last person in my family to ride a ship was my father on his immigrant journey to America. Turning around on the stern, drunk with Marty and a couple of hundred other budget-minded travelers, and feeling New York’s West Side recede as in a dream, I knew I’d cut the umbilical cord for good.

  Out to sea and seated for my first meal, I knew the next ten days would be bad news for food. Cheap German food served by surly waiters not older than you are does not make for an appetizing prospect.

  So I took to sneaking into the first-class lounge each night and heaping the tasty little sandwiches into my raincoat. Those ham and other cold cut sandwiches beat the sauerkraut and potato soups served in our class, but also served to make me impotent just when I met my first international beauty.

  She was coveted by all the boys. Tall and pale, rarely smiling, Karen was the daughter of some World Bank executive. Brought up in Swiss and English boarding schools, she was the dream of every working-class, would-be poet on that tub.

  The first guy to win her attention was Andrew, a tall ugly screwball who imitated the French existentialists by throwing potato salad at ship lecturers.

  After five days of this brilliant joker, we took up together. Slowly at first, she telling me she liked me because of the way I walked. Something about my feet hitting the ground in a positive, assertive way, she told me in a Paris hotel room weeks later.

  It was all innocent hugging and kissing on the Waterman for us. I pretended to “respect” her too much to proceed, but in reality I couldn’t get excited in the right part of my body.

  My heart would pound, my thoughts would swirl, my weight-lifted arms would nearly crush her breathless, but the right thing was not being transmitted below my waist.

  Years later, I would learn this bout of “impotence” was directly related to the ham sandwiches I was filching from the first-class lounge! Not as a result of guilt for my transgressions, but due to the sodium nitrates and nitrites the ham was laced with. While these preservatives killed off would-be bacterial colonizers, they also killed a man’s ability where desire was not lacking.

  In sufficient amounts, the nitrates are used to quiet libido. It is rumored that in the military they gave this stuff, in the potassium form, to the boys—called it “saltpeter.”

  Now, who would have guessed that a good old ham sandwich, or other preserved meats—bologna, sausage, hot dogs—will ruin whatever good fortune may bring your way during your travels. But should you be eating some of these preserved meats three times a day, while also lacking phospholipids necessary for sperm production, a simple dietary adjustment could render years of psychoanalysis into the redundant torture that it is.*

  You’ve got to be careful when traveling. To know what to eat and what to avoid must not become a full-time obsession, but you don’t want to end up in a garret with the bells of Notre Dame cathedral tolling, white high heels askew on the floor next to a hastily opened lady’s suitcase, lying there in a sweat trying to explain away your failure.

  Karen was understanding. And she did come all the way from London to be with me, after all. But not knowing about the nitrate family and their vicious habits once inside the human, we began to blame ourselves for this unignitable passion.

  As the days went by and my diet of good French food drove away the German ham and white bread, I returned to that state of vigor common to twenty-year-olds. The romance, once inflamed, burned on for a week or two in a magical Paris I’ve never, ever since known.

  Then, the long-legged pale beauty went north, I went south, not to meet again except by chance in the mouth of a London Underground tube years later.

  About to descend the steps with my wife of two weeks, Karen was ascending, arguing with a decadent-looking longhair. Our faces met. We were startled to bump into each other so unexpectedly. I looked healthier than I had during those days in Paris, fuller of myself, stronger in my step, while she was emaciated, almost pimply.

  We said a few words, quickly parted, and never saw each other again.

  But on that first “big trip to Europe,” I did get to Donny’s fabled Majorca.

  The food was so unlike New York, the land and the people somehow so much more alive, that I stayed on, missing the next semester to sample all that the poets had promised.

  PALMA, 1966

  CHRISTMAS DAY IN SHATZY’S BAR. I’D BEEN THERE SINCE the summer. I was a regular among the expatriates, mainly English retirees living on pensions, playing at art.

  The eggy taste of Advocaat, a creamy yellow alcoholic slammer, was fashionable in the Mediterranean port bar. One thing I liked about those English writers, they just drank, without a wink, devoid of “cute” American names for their addiction.

  (In Alabama, I once learned the craziest name for a drink: “Slow Screw Against the Wall”—vodka and 7Up. These were glowingly taught to me by a group of very sweet Alabamian college girls, welcoming me to the Huntsville airport for a lecture I was giving the next day.)

  So, again, another season of too much alcohol (and of the wrong kind), and tasty but suicidal food. Years would pass before I learned
that diet was somehow related to my mood and performance, and which to prescribe and proscribe for myself and others.

  Shatzy, wiry and friendly, took a liking to me. One rainy and windy afternoon, after I had motor-scootered in the 7 kilos from Arenal, a beach town where I had an apartment, he told me to get off the island.