The Day the Bozarts Died

by Larry Duberstein

  Charles Largent recalls that C.I.T.’s overall commercial portfolio was indeed so strong they could afford to “let the artists run on empty” for as long as the boom continued. “Statewide, worldwide in fact, we were damned close to 100% occupancy,” says Largent. “Which never happens, you understand.”

  The face of #4 had begun to change. Ken Battle was the first of the pioneer group to break ranks, leaving for Tarrytown, New York, on the Hudson, in the fall of 1984. By January of 1986, Sheldon Gross would be in Providence, Catherine Kyle-Ward in Seattle, and Carla Freemantle in Paris.

  All were replaced immediately, but then so were the replacements. Of the first eight artists to occupy those four studios, only one, Missy McKay, would become entrenched. Didier Blaine and Albert Brunson were two of the transients. Blaisdell Street was where they met, and where each abandoned a painting career. They would go on from there to found the influential Brunson-Blaine Gallery, but to the Beaux-Artists they were just two of the “Forgettables.”

  The chaotic transition was brief, partly because the remaining pioneers became recruiters. Ed Bellingham had gone to Rhode Island School of Design with Rich Kenniston. Celia Firestone and Monica Watson were old friends. Still, no one did more to unify the new group than Beryl Baines and Bea Jasperson, who were complete outsiders, with no contacts in the local art scene.

  These two potters may have been among the least well known at Blaisdell Street, but they quickly became the most beloved. Certainly they were the best organized. “They unionized us,” says Cloud, “albeit in the kindest gentlest ways.” They did so by scheduling a “compulsory” coffee break each morning at 10, and instituting a monthly State-of-the-Bozarts buffet dinner. “Free food is what does the trick,” says Baines.

  A steady succession of memorable local events would help tighten the bonds. The first of these involved the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, which killed among others a schoolteacher from nearby New Hampshire. That day and the next, the Blaisdell population sat around a radio to hear the tragedy picked clean by a helpless striving media for a helpless stricken public. They heard from friends, family, fellow teachers, students. They listened on as the circle of pain widened to include educators, shrinks, shuttlephiles and shuttlephobes.

  “One camera-happy politician was even pushing a memorial postage stamp. There was nothing to do but listen, and be glad of this community that listened with you,” says Jasperson.

  “We were tight that whole year,” agrees Rich Kenniston, recalling the next major happening, the fateful World Series a few months later. As New England braced for an end to seven decades of frustration and futility, as “baseball fever” gripped the region, Monk Barrett took charge. He procured a television set from Caldor, “the largest one they sold back then,” and arranged his studio as a micro-stadium. There were padded chairs up front and benches (“the bleachers”) in back. There was an ice chest full of beer.

  Still, according to Baines, the early games drew “only the heterosexual males.” She remembers watching them drift in and out Barrett’s door “like drug customers buying nickel bags. They would go in looking furtive, suspicious as anything, and come out ten minutes later looking just as furtive.”

  By the final two games, however, everyone was in Barrett’s studio, anguishing over each pitch. Bartering and jockeying for the choice seats, passing the pretzels and beer, they were in it together to the end. And when it ended badly (“when the Sox were not merely defeated but shamed somehow”) everyone was shattered.

  Barrett took the television back for a refund. He had always intended this; it was simply his approach to such major cultural events as the political conventions or the Olympics. He would buy a TV with a 30-day return proviso and return it on the 29th day. “Sure it was a loophole,” says Barrett now, “but isn’t that what loopholes are for?”

  This time, however, in genuine outrage, Barrett threatened to sue the store for selling him an appliance that “went on the fritz” just as the famous grounder was rolling through Bill Buckner’s legs. This fabrication earned Barrett a free merchandise certificate which he redeemed for a new radio. He donated the radio to Baines and Jasperson (“To everyone, really”) for their latest program of afternoon teas, during the broadcast of All Things Considered.

  The blizzard of ’88 was a storm which so wildly exceeded all forecasts (three feet fell where three inches had been predicted) that it met with little response. No one rushed home from work that day and no ploughs ventured out, even when the sidewalks and parking lots began disappearing under a billowing white blanket. Then in the hour before dark, several more inches flooded down, freezing winds lashed the area, and the whole city lost power.

  For residents of the Hotel des Beaux-Arts, it was just another bonding occasion. No one had children waiting at home or school. No one had a trapped elderly parent to worry over. The 1988 roster enjoyed substantial freedom that way. Many (including Noseworthy, Barrett, Kenniston, Missy McKay, and Monica Watson) were unattached. Baines and Jasperson each had grown children. Celia Firestone’s teenage daughter was in the care that week of Firestone’s estranged husband, “the oftdissed yet never glimpsed Harry,” as Kenniston describes him.

  They settled in for the night. Pooling food, drink, drugs, and candles, they calculated they could hold out for a week. Candles were arranged on both sides of the central corridor “like those strips of light that guide you from an airplane—when it crashes, I suppose,” says Baines. The heat and the plumbing kept working; no one lacked for comfort.

  In fact, when the sun broke out next morning and they heard the ploughs coming through, there was disappointment. They felt cheated out of their projected week in drydock. Before anyone went anywhere, there would be a protracted snowball war among the drift-sculpted bunkers in the parking lot and a rooftop champagne toast to the snow gods, for the night had been memorable.

  “The one thing we lacked was electricity,” says Arnie Cloud. “Without it, no music. Without music, no dancing. And dancing, as Stanley will be only too happy to tell you, quoting one of his endless supply of playwrights, is the perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire—or words to that effect. So that left sex.”

  There was always sex at #4, of course. Artists will be artists, but also humans will be humans. “Where isn’t there sex?” replied Firestone slyly, when asked about that night. “At least Harry and I were splitsville, so mine was a victimless little transgression.”

  Firestone declines to name her partner in crime (“Not quite so victimless on his side of the fence”) except to insist it was neither Noseworthy nor Cloud. “Those two were in competition for every woman who ever set foot in the building. They would have fought gladiator style in Rome, or jousted in King John’s England. At the Bozarts, they had charisma wars. To which I was immune. I loved that they competed for me that night, to be honest, but what I loved best was knowing I would turn them both down.”

  Cloud denies the charge. By 1988, he was a reformed character, engaged to be married, removed from the hunt “almost entirely.” Even in earlier years, he protests, his priorities differed from Noseworthy’s. Never once did he lose an hour’s work to the distractions of sex, where the “the exact opposite was true for Stanley, who never let his work get in the way of a chance to score.”

  Cloud continues: “Really, I was never half as bad as Stanley. I like to think I cleaved the golden mean between Stanley who is flat out nuts over women and Monk who in all my years of knowing him never showed a flicker of sexual interest in anyone, of any gender or persuasion. But Stanley? Let me tell you a story about Stanley.…”

  * * *

  I was pretty consistently “at home,” as they used to say on the society page. Nina could call me on the pay phone any old time, or she could come tossing pebbles at my window, as she had on a few occasions. I could be summonsed. Moreover, and more easily, Rose Gately was free to rattle my door and ask to borrow a cup of sugar, as neighbors will.

  After the Re
volution in Russia, the Bolsheviks developed a policy of locking children in dark rooms for a few days. (Hey, the Bolsheviks also manufactured a Pushkin Candy Bar. Can you imagine it here, in the land of the philistine? Saul Bellow Jelly Beans, or Mark Twain Toffee?) The idea was to dispel any lingering belief in God. If God existed, surely He would help them. If He didn’t help them, he didn’t exist.

  Now I knew how those kids must have felt. No one called me or tossed pebbles, no one borrowed sugar, no sunshine leaked in for days. God did not throw me down a lifeline. And then (just when I was ready to admit the Russkies had been right) He did, in the form of a power outage.

  We had not lost power here in ages, not since a blizzard that we turned into a no-holds-barred party. That was the night we figure Ed and Liz finally got it on, though officially they deny it. Monica Watson was also in denial the next day, but believe me, she was Monica Wattage in the midnight hour. Who could have conjectured such abandon lay behind the long expressionless face, the placid withdrawn demeanor? Who would have guessed at the fleshly treasures concealed within her unvarying baggy overalls and size 48 flannel work-shirts? Monica was right back to placid in the morning, dressed in more of her Haystacks Calhoun hand-me-downs and cleaving to the cool Dylan lyric, “Just act like you never have touched.” We were never unfriendly or even distant in the long strange aftermath. It was more amnesiac than that, it was an erasure, like the 18-and-a-half minute gap in the Watergate tape.

  This time it wasn’t even dark, it was daytime, but where was the festivity? Where were the humans? It was as though a neutron bomb had accompanied the power failure, silently wiping out the Bozarts roster. Forget Sodom and Gomorrah, this was so far from being a party I almost missed the cacaphony of Clapper’s raucous art.

  He had been cut off in mid-rawk, on the last leg of a real ear-ripper when the juice stopped flowing. Clapper had been in the process, man, and was in serious distress over his lost momentum when I found him down cellar with Joe the Janitor and Ed Bellingham, who apparently had lost more than just time or momentum. The cybergods giveth and they taketh away, as everyone knows, and today they had taken away Eddie’s six-color London Bridge.

  I left them puzzling over the service box and rushed upstairs to perform the vital public service of informing Citizen Gately—a dirty job but someone had to do it. She must have been expecting that someone to be her bosom buddy Arnold, for she was actually smiling when her door swung ajar. Teeth? So far as my experience went (and lacking access to her dental charts) I might have concluded the girl had none.

  “It wasn’t me,” she said, the teeth not entirely rescinded. “I didn’t even have the radio on.”

  Whoa now. Certainly it was quiet in there (so quiet that the thunk-tick-thunk-tick of a moonfaced quartz clock sounded like faint spare African drumming) but that line about the radio? Could our recalcitrant Rose be making a provocative cultural reference? For a version of her line had long ago provided the young Marilyn Monroe her springboard to fame. Caught with her pants down (literally, having posed for a pinup calendar), MM had kittenishly giggleblushed to an innocent Eisenhower America that she had “nothing but the radio on.”

  “But then how did you know the power was out.”

  “Are you serious?” said Rose, and this, by Jove and Johanna, was nothing less than a joke. Between the two of us! Because, of course, how she knew was that Clapper’s infernal machinery had fallen silent. The process had stopped. So either he had died of a heart attack or the circuits were blown.

  Bright abstractions loomed behind her, woven triangles of earth and orange, defined by hard wavery lines. “Interesting stuff,” I said, peering in. “You know, I’ve never really seen your work.”

  “You’re in luck, then. Next month at the SAGA.”

  “A one-woman show?”

  “Hardly. There are eight of us. ‘Emerging Talent,’” she tacked on with appropriate irony, making the diacrits with her fingers. “Check it out, though. I’ll put a card up on the bulletin board.”

  “How about a sneak preview right now?” I said.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, smiling girlishly as she closed the door.

  I didn’t think so either, but there was no harm in trying. Not when we were enjoying our friendliest conversation. It was over, alas, but it did light a fuse in me. I may have been relegated right back to my godless room without so much as a Pushkin Candy Bar to munch on, but I was inspired, virtually catapulted back to work on my Cubans. Done waiting for phone calls and pebbles, I was ready to get back on that bus as it slammed through Matanzas in the rain.

  Or was I? For the lights came on, the day trickled away, and then the week. The month trickled away, gallons of strong coffee were consumed as fuel, and still the bus wouldn’t run. No spark plugs, no springs. Every scene was D.O.A. Exchanges refused to flow, conflicts refused to become richly ambiguous or even mildly interesting. I was not on the Matanzas bus, after all.

  Where was I? Well, some of the time I was meandering down to the coffee room, just in case Rose’s door happened to swing open. Some of the time I was securing the perimeter, in case Rose was sneaking out to lunch. Much of the time I was distracted by images of Rose, by her playfulness, the surprise of her smile, and as always the terrible anomaly of her being a paper airplane ride away. But my thoughts, so-called, were as gone as Eddie’s London Bridge.

  This play simply could not be a dud. It was a complete natural, almost capable of writing itself. I was the dud. I was so distracted that for the first time ever I forgot to call my mom on her birthday. Distracted, and also afraid to hit her with the news about me and Nina. Anyway, the sacred day passed and Mom was so hurt she didn’t even call to complain. The hell with me.

  Eventually I came into clear view of the vanishing point when I typed the word “he” at noon one day and then (still sitting there at six o’clock, me and the Matanzas bus both stalled out) glanced down utterly clueless as to whom the pronoun might refer. Who “he”?

  Rose Gately was not the only distraction. Had she been in Walla Walla, instead of on the paper airplane tarmac, I might have worked around her. In truth, I might have gone to see how Nina was doing, Nina might have said why don’t you stay for dinner, I might have stayed … Because among the other distractions was the growing prospect of abject poverty. I needed to work around that one pretty soon.

  Even with Nina’s coat-tails to ride, I had been needing some sort of an income for a while. Without her, I was pretty much pawnshop broke, down to the crumbs in my cupboard. Once or twice already, I had wondered what Joe the Janitor did with Monk’s supply of Dinty Moore. (Hey, those cans were good through June of 2027.)

  With a thin trickle of royalties and a child-size savings account, I barely registered as a participant in the cash economy. Mostly I bought on credit, maxing out a deck of cards that gave new and ironic meaning to the term “fat wallet.” Time was, I would disdain the ubiquitous credit card offers. None of your undisciplined spendthrift lifestyle for pay-as-you-go Noseworthy. But those cards and letters just kept on coming and I adjusted. I learned to dial the activation number, rip off the strip, and sign on. The cards became my chief source of income.

  Part of me, naturally, had been waiting for the Genius Grant to arrive. A pile of gold ingots, with no strings attached, as a reward for your talent. You cannot apply for it, though. Either they show up with a pile of gold ingots or they don’t. You just have to be a Genius.

  Say this much for Michael Anthony, the dude was democratic. (Or his boss was: the unseen philanthropist John Bairsford Tipton.) Each week on that old TV show, some ordinary citizen (who was never a Genius, but who was always saddled with a financial crisis, frequently a sickly wife or child) would open his front door and find Michael Anthony standing there with “a cashier’s check for one million dollars.”

  And this was in the days before they even invented CEO’s, much less paid them 15 million bucks a year to do absolutely fucking nothing. Back then a million dollars w
as all the money in the world, and yet the cashier’s check would inevitably foment more misery than it managed to take away. That was the hook: the windfall would try the soul of man in a nice variety of well-scripted ways.

  Absent such philanthropy, you probably know that work has been the classic response to poverty. There is crime, but I was not about to start boosting cars or bludgeoning yuppies at their ATM machines. Realistically, or morally if you will, I would be limited to mild victimless crimes like selling term papers to lazy college students. In fact, that was the only one I could think of, and authoring The Importance of Coin Symbolism in Medieval Verse would not be a victimless crime: the victim would be me.

  I did try checking in with Nina. I had a few ideas, things we might do together, and they were not cynical or insincere on my part. Each one (a movie at the Coolidge Corner, a day trip to Onset, where we began, for clams and seaside air) struck me as serious fun. Each one brought back to me the reality of Nina Spiller, her face, form, and voice.

  But she was screening her calls. I was wavering on the appropriateness of dropping by when, one day, the FedEx guy came upstairs. I see him daily, delivering to the movers and shakers downstairs; this time he had a package for me. Or a punch in the gut. Nina sent a few things that had surfaced, books and tee-shirts, along with a cold cold note: “Stop leaving me messages. Stop calling.”

  So I needed a job. And without skills or training (not to say in “today’s economy” where there are no actual jobs) I was fortunate to get one, for six bucks an hour at Furniture in the Raw. Straightaway I grasped that I would not be traveling to Tortola this coming February, as I had the previous three, with my true love Nina.