The Inventors

by Peter Selgin

  Then the elevated ended; the Simca descended into a shady jungle of bumpy cobblestones. Along Canal Street your father parked. Gripping your hand he led you from one industrial surplus shop to another, foraging parts for his inventions. The faces that crowded the sidewalks were like the baubles on a Christmas tree. There were few dogs and fewer children. The city was a place for grown-ups.

  From Canal Street you walked to Chinatown, where you ducked into shops packed with lacquered trays and jade carvings. There the streets smelled of fish. In one of those shops, your father bought you a carved wooden box. (I still have it; it sits on a bookcase next to the desk where I write.) In Chinatown the plethora of street signs held you spellbound, transformed into adornments by virtue of being illegible. They clung there, butterflies caught in a lightless tangle of fire escapes and utility lines.

  In Greenwich Village the boutiques teemed with trinkets, boxes, beads, and reeked of incense. The city was a colossal museum of objects divided into galleries according to periods and styles. Its purpose: to amuse you.

  You returned to the Simca and drove back uptown, stopping for lunch at Schrafft’s, then on to Manganaro’s Italian Import Store to buy your mother some parmesan cheese, the jagged hunk broken off a heavy golden wheel. Then up West End Avenue to Ninety-sixth Street, where your father parked the Simca not far from your hotel. After checking in, you and your father rode the subway back downtown.

  It was mid-September, but the subway platform still hoarded summer heat. The station’s dim lighting gleamed off its innumerable tiles. A man in a dark gray suit leaned against a pillar. Others stooped over the tracks. None said a word. You obeyed the unwritten law by which New Yorkers pretend to ignore each other. A muffled roar heralded the subway train’s arrival. The roar grew so deafening you plugged your ears. Then the train squealed to a stop and its doors slid open.

  Clinging to straps, you and your papa careened underneath the city, the subterranean world a murky blur punctuated by lustrous stations whose waiting faces looked on in envy while you roared by on express tracks. You rode the subway to the Battery, where gulls wheeled over the ferry that you rode to the Statue of Liberty. Then back uptown to Union Square, where you jumped over the set of iron teeth that stretched to fill the platform gap. Then up a maze of latticed stairways into the dimming dusk.

  From there you walked to the colossal pinball machine known as Times Square. In the settling darkness the lurid lights sold everything from Pepsi-Cola to convertible sofas. A giant Phil Silvers as Sergeant Bilko blew smoke rings into the electrified dusk. At an establishment called Nedick’s you ordered two frankfurters with paper cups of papaya juice and watched traffic and pedestrians go by.

  From Times Square you rode a taxi back to the hotel. Of all the city’s features, the Hotel Paris was your favorite, a wedding-cake-shaped building of garnet colored brick topped by a crenelated turret, with a tall flagpole reaching farther up into the sky. The lobby was made of pink marble, with a mirrored dining room adjacent to it and an old-fashioned caged elevator whose diminutive black operator wore her flame-red hair in an immense beehive. She let you man the controls, a courtesy for which you would never forget her. It had to be done just right or the floors wouldn’t align. She placed her brown hand over yours, its warm grip guiding. At every floor, the elevator’s caged doors opened to different hallway carpeting, arabesques of brilliant color whose elaborate intricacies mirrored the teeming chaos outdoors.

  Like all the Paris’s rooms, yours was small and stuffy. It stank of the previous occupant’s cigarettes, which was okay with you. You accepted the smell as part of the city – your father’s city, so it seemed to you, as if he had laid every brick and cobblestone and built every skyscraper. As he unpacked his suitcase you watched, mesmerized. A suit, two pair each of socks and underwear, a can of foot powder, his battered shaving brush, his safety razor, a shoehorn, a necktie.

  The necktie fascinated you most. You had seen it before, many times, hanging in your papa’s closet back home. But in that hotel room it took on an entirely new aspect. With its paisley lemon drops against a maroon background it was no longer just your papa’s tie. It was his New York City tie.

  That tie became the city for you, as did the stale smell of that hotel room, and the gaudy hallway carpeting, and the black elevator operator, and the passenger ships snug in their berths, and the GAS HEATS BEST slogan on the side of a fuel storage tank that could have been the imperative of an almighty God. It was all part of the city that belonged to him, to your inventor papa, who’d invented it for you, his son.

  * * *

  AFTER HIGH SCHOOL YOU WEREN’T SURE WHAT YOU wanted to do. While George and your mutual friends went off to college, you took a job with a furniture company, delivering dry sinks, dining hutches, grandfather clocks, and sleeper sofas to homes in the tri-state area. As driver’s helper you weren’t supposed to drive, but Al, the official driver, let you. Sitting behind the wheel of a forty-five-foot truck in your green Ethan Allen uniform made you feel manly, a compensation of more value to you than your salary. You’d take your sketchpad to work and sketch Al and the rest of the warehouse crew to mixed responses.

  You did that job for a year, after which you made up your mind to study art in the city that you loved. At the art school in Brooklyn, you took courses in drawing, painting, illustration, graphic design, theater, and film. And though your interest in each of these subjects was sincere, you still really had no idea what you wanted to do. All you knew was that you wanted to be an artist of some kind – a famous one, preferably, someone recognized and admired for his bold, unique style.

  In a word, you wanted to be special. By then that need was so deeply ingrained in you it felt like an imperative, something you could no more escape than you could escape growing old and dying. It was your destiny.

  The need to be special set you apart from others if not at odds with them. The alternative would have been fitting in, and fitting in meant, among other things, admitting to yourself that you were no better than the people around you, meaning they were no less special than you. In judging them, you would have to apply the same standards you applied to yourself. You would have to compete with them on the same grounds, to play by the same rules. You’d have to be treated equally, as you and your twin brother had once been treated as equals – a prospect that, consciously or otherwise, you found as inviting as that of sharing your mother’s womb again.

  THE FRIENDS YOU made while in art school tended to be other alienated souls unwilling or unable to run with the crowd. There was the handsome Puerto Rican painting and theater major. He did a three-dimensional painting once of a dead bird in a coffin. He used an actual dead bird that he’d found and sprayed with Krylon varnish, and that – in spite of this – gave off a faint nasty odor whenever you raised the coffin lid.

  There was the Vietnam veteran turned assemblage artist and filmmaker. One of his collages featured a hundred Marlboro cigarette packs arranged in a grid and splattered, a lá Jackson Pollock, with blood-red enamel paint. With him you made short films about drug addicts, psychopaths, and lobotomy patients in which you would star, and went on to do storyboards, wrangle props, build and dress sets, and design posters for other people’s movies (including people of low, if not criminal, repute).

  Nor did you lack for relationships with the opposite sex, though these tended to be catch-as-catch-can. At a loft party – or was it a gallery opening? – in Soho – or was it Chinatown? – you met a woman named Gretta – or was it Gertrude? You hailed a taxi and rode it to her basement dwelling on the Lower East Side, or was it Alphabet City? The dwelling’s windows were barred. It featured a caged sulfur-crested cockatoo that squawked, “I’m so pretty! I’m so pretty!” while its owner and you made love.

  You drew, painted, wrote, auditioned for parts. One day you auditioned for a singing waiter job at a Third Avenue restaurant. The accompanist refused to transpose “On the Street Where You Live” to your key. They hired you to work
in the kitchen instead, manning a huge stainless steel console with steaming tureens holding different-colored sauces. As singing waiters hurried in and out of the kitchen, you handed them the plates of fish, beef, or chicken over which you’d ladled the different sauces. Halfway through your first shift, in your exhaustion and confusion, you began putting the red sauce on the fish and the tan sauce on the beef and the brown sauce on the chicken. They fired you.

  Some weeks later you were cast as an extra in a movie whose famous comic director wore plaid shirts and horn-rimmed glasses. Along with the others who had been selected from a three-city-block-long cattle call, you were ushered into a cavernous room and told to sit against one of two walls. It would take you many years, until you finally saw the movie, to grasp the purpose of this bifurcation. In a famous scene in the movie the main character (played by the comedian director) sits glumly in the car of a passenger train filled with grim, miserable-looking people. As he sits there another train pulls up alongside his, this one filled with happy, smiling, attractive people throwing a party. As he watches from his stalled sad train the happy train leaves the station.

  And though apparently you had been cast in the “happy train,” you were never in the movie, having attended the costume fitting and two days of rehearsal only to miss the day of the actual shoot thanks to a faulty alarm clock. (The comic director is known, incidentally, for having said, “Half of success is showing up.”)

  Through these and other experiences you felt the hand of fate casting its shadow over you, waiting to pluck you from obscurity and deliver you to your true destiny, to either some form of artistic fame and fortune, or to Castalia, the community of intelligent, like-minded, idealistic souls that the teacher planned to create.

  While waiting, you carried a sketchbook with you everywhere. At cafe tables, on street corners, at gatherings with friends, you’d fill its pages with sketches and writing. Over the next ten years you filled more than a dozen sketchbooks. You stored them on shelves in the different apartments where you lived. Pressed for space, you mailed them to your mother, who stored them for you in the basement of the house where you grew up.

  THE INNOCENT CITY, the one you so loved when your father took you there with him as a child, the city of Christmas tree skyscrapers and bright-funneled ocean liners no longer existed. A darker city had taken its place: a greedy, lusty, brutish, grueling city. A fire-breathing dragon that consumed innocence and exhaled ambition and alienation.

  Unlike the New York City of your childhood and adolescence, this New York confused you. Confronted by its maze of doors and passageways, any one of which might lead you to your destiny, you were paralyzed with indecision, knowing that in choosing one path you’d cut off all the others. So you didn’t – couldn’t – choose.

  Now and then on a busy street corner you would be so gripped by paralysis you’d be unable to decide which way to cross. You’d stand there, frozen as the other pedestrians jostled you, cursing under their breaths but loudly enough for you to hear. You had learned your way around the city only to find yourself directionless there.

  This lack of impetus begot awkward situations, like the time you ran into that English fellow on the corner of Eighth Street and Astor Place. He said he was an actor with the Old Vic, in town to do a production Macbeth. Since he looked like Richard Basehart you believed him. You had no hair. You’d shaved it down to peach fuzz. For some reason, this provoked and inspired gay men. Macbeth wondered where “a bloke from out of town” could get “a bloody drink.” It was the winter of your second year of art school. You were still living in Brooklyn, renting a room in the brownstone of a retired church choir conductor. You weren’t knowledgeable with respect to Manhattan bars and said so. This didn’t dissuade Macbeth. You ended up having bloody marys at Chumley’s, and from there went to Macbeth’s place, the borrowed “flat” of some other actor. Having mixed each of you a screwdriver, Richard Basehart lay on his back on the parquet floor and fondled himself while reciting explicit passages from Henry Miller. He didn’t notice or seem to care when you stepped over him and out the door.

  Another time, during a snowstorm that blew on your twenty-first birthday, a former Presbyterian minister who had taken you out to dinner invited you to spend the night at his loft, which you did, gladly, having come to detest those two a.m. subway trips back to Brooklyn. As the former clergyman fellated you, you pretended to be somewhere else enjoying the ministrations of a different set of tongue and lips. The next morning, your host was beside himself. You told him to forget about it. Honestly, you said, I couldn’t care less. You meant it, too. What did you care if some former clergyman sucked you off? It’s not like it hurt or anything. (Implicit in this denial was the distinction between sex and emotions, a dichotomy of which you would be largely oblivious but that would inform your romantic relationships for years to come, for much of your adult life.)

  During those first years in the city you kept having a recurrent dream, a nightmare, one that parachuted you down into the city’s combat zone, amid its vaporous lights and alleyways. In the dream you’d always end up at a movie theater, one of those sordid theaters near Times Square, attached to an un-deployed army of men wearing London Fog coats and hunched in their seats. You faced a screen on which the images were tantalizingly out of focus, looking more like Cézanne’s peaches than human bodies engaged in carnal acts. But the soundtrack was clear: a moan is a moan is a moan. In the dream, as if by your own tumescence, you would levitate out of your folding seat toward a neon sign pulsing over the door to a lavatory behind which ultimate depravities lay in wait for you, tinged with ultraviolet light, perfumed by stale urine.

  Debased by your own dreams.

  This was the New York City to which you had returned.

  * * *

  ONE WINTRY AFTERNOON IN LATE DECEMBER 1976, IN the same rusty Karmann Ghia (incongruous in the snowy streets of Brooklyn) that you’d gone to Huntington Park together in, the teacher arrived. You helped him find a parking space, then rode the subway into Manhattan, where you toured the museums: the Metropolitan, the Cooper-Hewitt, the Frick. At the Guggenheim, you balked at the price of admission: three bucks to penetrate a colossal Carvel ice-cream cone! Screw it!

  You walked farther uptown. In Harlem the streets were in every sense browner, its buildings slung low to accommodate a sky brought to its knees by brawny gray clouds. A sudden whirlwind whipped grit into your eyes. It started to rain. Hunkered into it, you walked faster, the gusts flapping the lapels of your winter coats, past a building shaped like the parabolas you learned about in Mr. Proli’s algebra class.

  From Harlem you doubled back through Central Park, past Rockefeller Center and Radio City to Times Square, where, as a light snow fell, you passed under a succession of marquees featuring porno movies and 25¢ peep shows, a Coney Island of sex. From a shadowy threshold two heavily made-up women emerged to offer you a good time.

  Thanks but no thanks, said the teacher.

  We’re having a good time already, you informed them.

  From there you went to the Village, where you toured the same boutiques that you and your papa had toured fourteen years previously. At the corner of Thompson and West Third Street you stopped to admire the window display of a chess store, with its armies of chess pieces in rosewood, jade, ebony, alabaster, and malachite. While looking at them the teacher told you about the Café de la Régence in Paris.

  Diderot set Rameau’s Nephew, his masterpiece, there, he said.

  Huh.

  From Greenwich Village you crossed through ice and slush to the East Side, where you dined at a Ukrainian restaurant. The waiters were old men in ochre waist-cut jackets who scowled while taking your orders for varenyky and stuffed cabbage.

  By the time you stepped back out of the subway station in Brooklyn it was dark and snowing heavily. Two black children, one wielding a bicycle pump, chased each other through the snow down a dark side street. On another street a woman chipped away at the ice on her sto
op with the bent lip of a snow shovel, which caught the glimmer of a streetlamp. You had started toward the teacher’s Karmann Ghia when he asked you if he might spend the night at your place.

  If it’s all the same with you, he said, I’d rather not have to drive in this weather.

  You’re welcome to stay, you told him.

  Are you sure?

  Absolutely. No problem.

  Only as you approached the apartment building where you rented a room from a retired church choir conductor did it dawn on you that you had only one bed and no sofa, and that bed a mattress you’d dragged in off the street and shoved into a corner on the floor, near a bookshelf packed with paint in jars and tubes and coffee cans bristling with brushes. Nearby were more cans of inexpensive house paint that you used when you couldn’t afford oils or acrylics. Leaning against the room’s walls were rolls of canvas and wooden stretcher bars tied into bundles with twine. In a corner stood a flimsy easel holding a large, half-finished canvas. Subject: a fishmonger slicing the head off a fish. Next to the fishmonger, sharing the same plane with it, an oil-drum fire blazed. In the background more fishmongers stood silhouetted by the flames of other, smaller oil-drum fires.

  That painting was the first thing the teacher saw when he entered your room.

  Your latest? he asked.

  Yeah. But I’m gonna paint it over.

  Why?

  I’m not happy with it.

  Why not?

  You shook your head. The drawing’s off, for one thing.