Six days later his father went back to the hospital. His mother spent a lot of time there, and left Alex with the upstairs neighbors, the Diamonds, whose son, Jerry, was an old friend of Alex’s from back when they were three. The Diamonds had an enormous state-of-the-art television. One evening, when the Muhammad Ali–George Foreman fight was about to come on, he received a call from his mother summoning him to the hospital. He wanted to watch the fight. There was a tense discussion. In the end Mr. Diamond took him in a taxi. Nothing much happened when he got there. His father lay asleep, unshaven, tubes in his arms.
His mother had purchased an electric razor for his father, but it sat unopened in its box, and Alex took it out and plugged it in and preoccupied himself with the razor and its three vibrating coils.
There was one last urgent late-night visit, a few days later, during which Alex had been effusive and cheerful.
“Hi, Pop!” he said with real exuberance when he walked in. He had never before called his father “Pop.” But as his father had instituted the Alexander/Alex change, he thought he would go out on a limb and retire “Papa” in favor of “Pop.” His father was groggy and never surfaced from his sleep, though he briefly became restless.
That night he slept over at the Diamonds again. The next day there was a Mets game on, and he and Jerry munched from a big bowl of sour-cream-and-onion potato chips that sat on the coffee table and watched the game. His mother came over towards the end of the game and looked very ashen and asked him to come downstairs, but he wouldn’t come. He refused. Then Rusty Staub struck out and he went home and was told the news at the kitchen table.
“What does ‘passed away’ mean?” he said.
When she explained, he said, “Oh, but I prayed!” and slammed his fist on the table and broke into tears. He and his mother cried together. But the strange thing was that as he cried he wondered if he had just told a lie. Because he hadn’t really prayed. He had thought about praying. But he hadn’t actually done it, or he hadn’t done it wholeheartedly. He had tried to engage God in a discussion as to whether or not He existed. God had not been forthcoming on the matter.
After a while he composed himself, sat up, and looked at his mother. “What’s going to happen to me?” he said.
EVEN AT AGE ten, Alex vigilantly guarded his father’s death from the threat of interpretation. If throwing yourself out a window could escape interpretation, then dying of cancer should be left alone as well. He felt that to hold his father’s death up as a cause and draw a line to some effect diminished the event and missed the point. It was like saying that hairstyles changed drastically after the earth lost its gravitational pull.
He took every stolen pen and hid it carefully in the depths of one of the apartment’s closets. The house was generally stuffed with writing implements left over from his father. You couldn’t open a drawer without finding some. It was as though Alex were hoarding these extras in anticipation of the day they would all run out.
After school Alex smuggled the pencil case onto the bus. Whenever Alex boarded the bus, Stacey gave him a warm but also knowing and somewhat forbidding smile, meant to remind him to behave so that she wouldn’t have to walk to the back of the bus to scold him. Alex cherished these looks, just as he cherished her scoldings, which always seemed to involve Stacey coming very close to him and speaking in precise, clipped tones while her breasts hovered in front of his face. He wondered, in these moments, when her breasts were so close, if she was doing it on purpose, giving him a hint, an invitation. He would stare back at her with wide eyes, as though by the sheer power of his expression he might provoke her to lean forward and whisper, “Yes, visit me.” Now, as he boarded the bus with his stolen goods under his shirt, he had to close himself off, and her eyebrow twitched in recognition of his new demeanor. But nothing was said. He went and sat in the back seat and, with a pounding heart, opened the pencil case to examine his loot.
The bus ride took forty minutes. Every day in the morning Alex would sit with his forehead pressed to the window and stare at the passing scenery which unfurled before him in triptych form. On one end was West End Avenue, that long parade of heavy-lidded buildings from whose lobbies emerged old European ladies and gentleman in elegant clothes, peering up and down the avenue as though they had somewhere to go.
The other end of the triptych began with the Stella D’oro cookie factory in the Bronx, in whose vicinity there was always a sticky sweet smell. This was followed by the slightly dilapidated area of the Bronx over which loomed the subway tracks, which in turn gave way to the opulence and cleanliness and order of Wave Hill, where the Wave Hill School was located.
In the center of the triptych was Harlem. In the morning it was a quiet, shuttered place, with few people on the sidewalks, a place where the burned-out buildings mingled with buildings that had that same heavy-lidded dignity of the ones on West End, with various grandeur-inducing embellishments illuminated by the bright morning sun. The stores were all shuttered and gated and covered with illegible graffiti, except for the ones with murals advertising the store and providing a faintly uplifting message in the process. Mango Records had a mural featuring a disc jockey with a funny hat and an unbuttoned shirt holding a gleaming vinyl record over a turntable and smiling a toothy grin and giving them a thumbs-up; the name “Chico” was proudly written out in the corner. The store was a landmark of sorts that Alex passed every morning and enjoyed a great deal, as he seemed to be getting a personal vote of confidence from the Mango Records disc jockey. This same Chico had also done a mural on the grocery store, which featured a series of break-dancing vegetables with happy faces: mushroom, broccoli, carrot, and one other vegetable that Alex, in his morning-addled state, could never identify (maybe it was a turnip, but he didn’t really know what a turnip was), whose mystery slowly came to obsess him on his morning ride, a tiny tremor of frustration presaging the earthquakes of the day ahead.
The afternoon was altogether different. Alex was awake, buzzing from a hit of after-school candy, and Harlem was awake, too. It was alive and full of people, all of whom, to a uniform degree that never ceased to amaze him, were black. The bus moved fast enough so that few individual faces had a chance to take hold. It was a montage of faces and strange clothes, and cars, some dilapidated and others well-looked-after. A few were so dismantled that they resembled the carcass of a huge, long-dead animal, and others, extravagantly ornamented in chrome and with shiny tires and strange fuzzy dice hanging down from the mirror, were attended to by one or even two or three people carefully polishing it with wax.
Now he peered out the windows at the effusion of life and activity, viewed at high speed, riding through Harlem in the silver bus. At times like this it seemed as though Harlem were another of Mr. Gold’s glass boxes. And at still other times he felt as if the bus itself were the box, and he a specimen.
The bus stopped at a red light, and Alex found himself staring at a group of young boys not that much older than himself. Something about the bus caught their attention. Alex, forehead pressed to the window, stared with interest as their body language changed and all their attention became focused on the bus. If he had been in a different state of mind he might have noticed that their attention was not just focused on the bus, it was focused on him, but he wasn’t thinking of himself as a distinct entity. He could not have pictured himself. He was just a perceiver. And so he watched without so much as a twitch as one of the boys reached down to pick something off the street and started running towards him. The bus had started to move again, and his ears were filled the roar of the engine as it struggled to thrust the vehicle into motion. The boy ran towards him, his face contorted with anger or, to look at it another way, possessed of the pitcher’s concentrated glare as he is about to release the ball towards home plate. Alex watched as the boy reached back from a distance of about five feet and threw something. He didn’t see what it was. He just saw the contortion of pain and spite on the boy’s face as he released it, and felt a calm im
passive wonder at what it could be, and what was going to happen next.
The sound was shockingly loud—a popping, shattering sound, followed by shrieks from all the passengers, who, being between the ages of seven and seventeen, were not generally reluctant to scream for whatever reason. The rock hit the window with a huge crash, somewhere a little below where his chin was. The window cracked but did not shatter. The bus roared forward.
Alex had moved his forehead an inch off the glass just before impact, and after the sudden blink that the impact provoked, he kept staring at that face that he had been staring at a moment before, which was strangely, almost miraculously, transformed—anger had become laughter. Stacey came quickly down the aisle to see what had happened, and Alex kept staring at this suddenly happy black kid as he turned towards his friends.
Only at the last moment did he realize that he was clutching the pens and pencils in his hand. When Stacey leaned her fragrant body over him, and asked what had happened in a concerned, almost angry voice, and then asked if he was all right in a softer voice when she realized he hadn’t done anything wrong, the image that stuck in his mind was that transformation from anger to happiness on the boy’s face, and also the transition from the clear transparent veil of glass to something fractured and blurred. And he couldn’t help noticing, as he frantically tried to stuff the bouquet of pens and pencils into his pocket, that it was the clear pane of glass that had delivered the anger, and the shattered one that transmitted the happiness.
“HOW WAS SCHOOL?” his mother said when he got home.
“It was good. Everyone signed everyone’s yearbooks and someone threw a rock at me,” he said.
“What?”
“I mean at the bus. It was no big deal.”
“I see. Tomorrow I’ll pick you up after school and we’ll go make our visit.”
Alex looked down glumly. The grave, he remembered, was on top of a steep hill with a majestic view of trees and rolling hills and far off in the distance something that resembled a castle. The whole cemetery was built on a hill, and at the top was a patch of unused land. Theirs was the first grave up there. Everywhere on that hill there was a neat carpeting of green grass, exquisitely ripe and soft, except for the raw unruly spot where they had dug a hole. Alex had been embarrassed by that hole. People threw flowers into it after the coffin was lowered, stepping with their black shoes on the reddish soil at the hole’s edge, and Alex felt the flowers were some kind of apology to the earth for having so violently interrupted its surface. He couldn’t imagine a picnic next to that gash in the earth.
After the flower-throwing and some general snuffling and outright weeping from people he had never seen before, everybody began to move down the steep hill, leaving his mother alone up near the hole. He had wanted to go and get her, but there was some kind of respectful distance being kept, and his mother was kneeling next to the hole and had her hand pressed against her forehead. From behind, even at a distance, he could see her back move with her breathing. Or was it crying? She seemed to be pressing her hand very hard against her forehead. She had high heels, and after a couple of minutes one of his father’s friends went up and got her and helped her down the hill, and Alex wondered if the high heels were digging into the soft grass and giving her extra traction.
“I’ve brought you something nice,” she said now, and went to refrigerator, returning with a plate of three small delicate-looking pastries she had brought home from Eclair, on Seventy-second Street, where she always went for occasions she considered special. But what was the special occasion? It was just another day at school. One of the pastries was a small pink tower with a cherry on top. If someone made a chess set out of pastries, this would be the castle. It was his favorite sweet. He felt a pang of exasperation with her, an enormous wave of anger at her incomprehension of the facts of life as he was experiencing them. She had no idea about pencil cases and cubbies; she didn’t know about the way he ran his fingers over Arnold’s back; she had never seen the jittery steps of a kid freeze under a net of descending cold water. She didn’t know about Stacey and his planned midnight visits. She didn’t understand about the pleasures of rock throwing. And here she was putting out treats the day before they were supposed to go to a cemetery and have a nice picnic. Yet he also felt a strange kind of gratitude.
His anger lasted all the way until dinner. That night she made Wiener schnitzel. Halfway through he balled up his napkin and threw it at her.
“Alexander!” she said, and looked at him with surprised, wide eyes.
He took another bite as if nothing had happened. He waited for a few minutes and then gave up hope, at which point from across the table came flying a balled-up napkin that hit him on the head.
Great Jews in Sports
IT WAS FRIDAY NIGHT AND ALEX LAY ON HIS MOTHER’S BED, watching television with glassy eyes while his mother sat in the kitchen reading, or talking on the phone, or doing whatever it was she did in the kitchen while he watched television. He secretly suspected that what she was doing was giving him the privacy to watch television alone, which made the use he put this privacy to even more unsettling. As eleven-thirty approached, his pulse began to quicken. When it arrived he turned down the volume and changed the channel.
It was at the age of thirteen, when cable television was installed in his home and Bar Mitzvah season commenced, that Alex was hit by the twin lightning bolts of sex and religion, two previously unrelated subjects that came crashing into his life simultaneously, as though holding hands.
Eleven-thirty on Friday night was when a program called Ugly George aired for half an hour on Channel J. Ugly George was a television show about the adventures of a man named Ugly George. The plot was very simple and yet never lost its suspense from one show to the next. The opening scene would invariably be a shot of a busy street somewhere in the city. The camera was mounted on Ugly George’s shoulder as he strolled along, pointing his camera this way and that while he described the scene for his viewers in the singsong voice one might use to read a bedtime story. This introductory segment was equivalent to a magician’s showing the audience that the top hat was empty, before reaching in and producing a rabbit. Ugly George was showing his viewers that this was the real world, the same sort of crowded street they might have walked down the other day, looking at faces, making tiny judgments about people, having fleeting moments of lust, and proceeding on without anything eventful happening. Ugly George, on the other hand, possessed the ability to make things happen.
Alex did not. He had experimented with petty forms of vandalism and theft, as well as belligerent wisecracks at school that left him stunned and amazed at his own audacity moments after he made them, as though he had been momentarily possessed by some strange demon. Yet everyday circumstances continued to sweep him along, diverting his plans and wishes, impervious to his efforts to change his own life. He had been planning to do something about his crush on Tania Vincent, for example, and yet had hardly been able to meet her eyes. He felt like a captain who drew up elaborate navigational plans for his ship, only to discover anew that the wind and waves would dictate his path, and nothing else.
For Ugly George, the sailing was not smooth, but the direction was clear. If a young woman walked by, Ugly George would point his camera at her and begin talking. He was cordial and polite, but he got to the point fairly quickly. The point was: would the woman care to duck into an alley, or a rest room, or some nook and cranny of the city which Ugly George was always able to find, and show him, and his camera, and a large portion of the subscribers to Manhattan Cable, her breasts.
Ugly George was an anthology of rejection. The styles were as varied as the women. But every now and then a woman said yes. The amateurism of the footage and the awkwardness with which the whole thing progressed added to its intensity and its immediacy. There was no airbrushing here, no poses and props as in dirty magazines, just this strange voluntary gesture of a woman exposing herself to a man with a camera, usually after considerabl
e coaxing.
Alex watched Ugly George in a state of extreme excitement and agitation, because all this visual delight had to be experienced with his mother sitting in the kitchen at the end of the hallway, in her slippers and robe. His Friday-night bedtime was midnight. The floor of the hallway was carpeted. And though Alex had developed a hypersensitive device in his ear to detect his mother’s footsteps in the hall, all the erotic stimulation of Ugly George had to coexist with an intense vigilance for her arrival.
He watched now crouched in the small space between the television and the foot of her bed, arm outstretched, with his hand on the cable-box dial, ready to spin to another channel at the first sound of her steps. This was the position he maintained for the entire half-hour duration of the show.
Ugly George had gone to the auto show to see what he could find. He found the latest cars from Detroit and Japan, as well as hot rods, and drag racers, and men demonstrating incredibly sharp kitchen knives that would stay sharp no matter what you did to them. Scantily clad women stood on platforms next to the cars like gigantic live hood ornaments. Ugly George approached one after the other.
“Excuse me!” he called out pathetically. “Excuse me, ma’am, can I talk to you a moment?” He was ignored. Or he was told, “I’m busy.” Or “Go away.” Men in suits approached him. Representatives of Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors told Ugly George to get lost. There had never been an entirely fruitless Ugly George program, but it was now eleven-fifty, ten minutes until his bedtime, and things were looking bleak. Then an attractive woman standing next to a car with a lot of chrome started paying attention to what Ugly George had to say. She listened to him with a serious expression.
“I’ll talk to you on my break,” she said.
Suddenly she was standing on a dark staircase and talking about her modeling career. The bright light on top of the camera gave her face a pale washed-out quality. Ugly George told her that many women had had their careers launched on his show. While she spoke, a hand appeared in the lower corner of the screen and tugged gently at her spandex top. “Could you pull this down a little?” he asked.
The Sleep-Over Artist Page 3