Ansil recalls this stunt as one of the dumbest things he ever tried. My brother was so cocksure about handling sharks that Ansil strayed from his sense of caution. But, more, Bill had the ability to elevate outrageous ideas, to make them seem glorious. For another segment of the ABC show, they decided to harpoon a man-eating tiger shark from the fourteen-foot skiff while the cameraman caught the action. After searching for a couple of hours they found a big tiger on a white sand bottom in six feet of water behind South Bimini. The sun was high overhead. The cònditions were perfect for filming. Ansil asked the cameraman if he was ready to go and then slowly approached with the skiff. When he was close Bill threw the harpoon, but it only grazed the shark. While my brother retrieved the line attached to the harpoon for another try, the twelve-foot tiger turned sharply and attacked the side of the skiff, throwing everyone off balance. After a few seconds it let go and disappeared from view. While Bill and Ansil tried to locate the shark, it came up astern and charged the skiff again. This time it swam with its head high, planing the water like the white shark years later in the movie Jaws. It seized the flimsy transom with a broad mouth of teeth and shook its head, all but ripping the stern from the boat. My brother jabbed the harpoon into its flapping gill to try to get the shark to let go and Ansil shouted to the ABC cameraman to get this on film. But one more attack like the last and the skiff would sink and the three of them would be in the water with the enraged beast. They were lucky. On its third attack the shark grabbed the lower unit of the engine and began to shake its heavy head. Ansil started the engine and gunned the propeller. Teeth and blood splattered into the boat. When the water began to clear, the tiger shark was floating belly up. The scene was more than The American Sportsman could have hoped for, but when Bill and Ansil finally turned their attention to the cameraman, he was cowering facedown on the deck. From the tiger shark’s first attack he had been so frightened that he’d never turned on the camera.
To save money Bill shared his room in the hotel with a boy named John, who was several years older and another friend of Ansil’s. John had come to the island to do some bonefishing with Ansil before entering Harvard as a freshman. He was petrified of sharks, which Bill found amusing. But John’s literary name-dropping and snotty attitude toward Rogue Shark wore on my brother’s nerves. Whenever Bill was annoyed at someone it quickly showed in Black Jack’s demeanor. The German shepherd began snarling and making exploratory lunges at John, putting him on edge. Perhaps Bill saw similarities in this boy to his bookish brother. One night when Bill was entirely fed up with John’s pretentiousness, Black Jack came at him with teeth bared and drove John off the Bimini Hotel’s little dock, which was a notoriously good place for shark fishing. While John struggled against the current in the blackness, Bill began shrieking at the top of his lungs, “Get out of the water, hammerhead, hammerhead, swim for your life! Hammerhead!”
When Bill called Mother from Florida to say he was coming home, she wasn’t sure if she felt joy or anger. She had been desperate about him when he left, but now after a year she thought less about Bill. Stella was living on West 9th Street in the Village, right around the corner from the Cedar Tavern, and had replaced motherhood with extra hours working on her sculpture and teaching. When she hung up the phone with her younger son, her heart was palpitating. She walked to May’s Department Store on 14th Street, where two years earlier, when the building was just under construction, she had buried one of her large polyester eggs. May’s was one of her favorite stores. She went inside to the appliance department and carefully selected a midsized radio with a wooden cabinet. She put it underneath her coat and walked past a uniformed guard at the door. This was the largest item Mother had ever filched. Stella claimed that shoplifting gave her a rush and distracted her from problems. But I believe she went through this phase of petty stealing mainly to climb in the same boat with Tony.
When Bill arrived in New York he discovered Mom was living with a boyfriend, Tony Fruscella. My brother would have viewed any new man in Mom’s life as a rival, but Tony brought qualities that cut to the bone.
Tony Fruscella was a genius jazz musician. He grew up in an orphanage in New Jersey listening to church music until the age of fourteen, when he first heard jazz and began studying trumpet. Following his release from the army he played with the Lester Young band, Gerry Mulligan and Stan Getz and occasionally with Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker. Jazz lovers of the fifties were touched by his emotional trumpet voice, his husky whisper lingering on melody and improvising close to it instead of racing into abstraction, like many of his contemporaries. Tony was often compared to the young Miles Davis. But today listening to his haunting solos I think of Chet Baker.
The recorded oeuvre of Fruscella’s music is pitifully meager, although several records from the early and middle fifties attest to his soulful virtuosity and the sadness of his life. By the late fifties Tony was broke and frustrated by lack of recognition. He was doing junk and playing only intermittently. For a time he didn’t have a horn and some musicians chipped in and bought him one at a pawnshop. Friends said that he played a great session with Sonny Rollins during the period when Rollins had withdrawn from the public spotlight and was mainly playing by himself on the Brooklyn Bridge. Someone taped it, but the session seems to have been lost.
Mother fell in love with Tony for his music, although by the time she met him, his career was over. At only thirty-eight Fruscella was ruined by drink and drugs, living on rooftops or park benches, and occasionally the couches of friends until he was thrown out.
Wafting through Mother’s subterranean 9th Street apartment were the sounds of Tony’s solos recorded years earlier with Stan Getz and Phil Woods, lyrical refrains, relaxing and dreamy. Sometimes the music on the hi-fi was Bach and Vivaldi, Tony’s favorites, which made Bill impatient because he favored the Supremes and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. Mixing with the music was the aroma of Mom’s chicken soup and gribbenes to heal her wounded men; and the factory smells that came from Mom’s kiln, which was cooking in the hall fifteen hours a day. Often it was the odor of hot glass. At the time Mother was melting bottles like caved-in souls. But sometimes it was the acrid smell of melting metal, silver and gold. To maintain his drug habit, Tony was breaking into stores, apartments, going on secret missions was how he put it, grabbing jewelry, small appliances, whatever, bringing loot to Mom’s for hiding, melting down precious metals in the kiln before meeting the fence. Mother was mostly oblivious to his capers, or treated them as an aspect of his art.
Tony’s immediacy, his wildness and decadence fascinated her. If she took him for a sandwich, Tony would grab the tip when she turned to walk out the door. Mother laughed at his outrages as if they were living in a Warhol movie. Before his introduction to Sadie, Stella’s mother, Tony ran around a corner and stole flowers from someone’s fenced-in garden.
For Stella, rather than in museums, art was alive in street happenings and improvisational movies and also in abandoned refuse and crippled souls. Tony’s fall and beatness were art. One afternoon they were wandering through a flea market on Seventh Avenue. Fruscella picked up an old horn from a table and began to play taps. His sound was so ethereal and captivating people stopped what they were doing and gathered around. Mother was moved by the absurdity and pathos of vegetable vendors and housewives pausing for taps on Seventh Avenue. Afterward Tony said to her, Stella, when I go, I’m gonna leave you my body.
To make a buck Fruscella occasionally worked in a fish market. When he came to 9th Street stinking from the market, with fillets, probably stolen, she told Bill, Tony’s into fishing like you. My brother simmered.
One afternoon Bill was walking home from school and noticed the traffic on 9th Street was backed up. Standing in front of the building Tony was brandishing a Japanese sword he’d stolen someplace, dueling cars to a stop like a matador. Despite his rage Bill found this amusing. Tony was not impeded by inhibitions or rules. That’s why he’s a great artist, said Mother with a
glow that irritated my brother.
A couple of months after Bill’s return, Tony broke into a boat docked at the 79th Street yacht basin. Escaping over the barbed-wire fence with a big stash, he cut himself up. Tony trailed blood down 9th Street to Mother’s basement door. He was a mess and he began bellowing, Stella, Stella, let me in, Stella. Mother wasn’t home and Bill was furious and wouldn’t open the door. He told Tony to go away, she was in Coney Island, eating at Nathan’s. Fruscella hauled his sacks down the block but came back minutes later moaning pitifully, Stella, Stella, please Stella. By now neighbors were looking out windows. When no one answered, Tony piled newspaper and wood against her door and set it on fire.
Bill was in a rage. He called the cops and they arrested Tony with the loot. Fruscella was locked up for three months.
Bill assumed a reasonable tone with his mother, as though he were the sage and forgiving parent. He explained that Tony wasn’t a respectable choice. She and Fruscella wouldn’t be able to make appearances together at 57th Street gallery openings, not to mention the Museum of Modern Art. With Tony the family would never be accepted back in Great Neck. Mother appeared to agree. She always tried to appease Bill. Then it’s all settled, was Bill’s manner.
My brother phoned a fishing captain he knew from the Montauk days, Swede Swenson was his name. Swede was rawboned and six foot six. He drove a forty-two-foot Wheeler without the help of a crew. Swede was tough and resourceful and became famous in big game circles for wrestling large game fish aboard without a mate. A few weeks before Tony got out of jail, Bill arranged a date for Mom with Swede Swenson. To please Bill, Stella was pleasant to Swenson when he came by for a cup of coffee. She thought it was comical when this huge man explained how he brought aboard big tunas and broadbills by himself using flying gaffs and meat hooks.
Bill painted his large bedroom dark blue like the Gulf Stream, hung his fish mounts on the wall beside lacquered shark jaws and his prized jars of small sharks in formaldehyde. But he could not re-create Bimini’s expansiveness. Bill was hemmed in by big buildings and the banality of school. He’d lost interest in Rogue Shark and the daydream of fishing on the beach with Ansil went lifeless. Bill turned on the afternoon soaps or flipped through the channels for Godzilla movies. He drank Jack Daniel’s and planned expeditions to South America and the South Pacific. He felt dead without mystery and bold adventure. My brother had his first epileptic seizures during this period. He regarded this illness as humiliating and managed to keep it secret for years.
When Tony got out of jail he was right back to the apartment, needing wine, needing Stella, phoning his ex-wife, jazz vocalist Morgana King (she played the role of Don Corleone’s wife opposite Marlon Brando in The Godfather), who always hung up at the sound of his pleading, plastered voice. Playing against his inebriation, vomiting, manic thievery, bags and boxes of unwanted loot passed on to Mom with frantic sweaty love, there was “Tony’s Blues” or “Night in Tunisia” or “Lover Man” carrying from the hi-fi down the long, narrow hall. Mom was painting in the little outdoor garden tapping her foot or nodding to his sweet music touched with sadness. Musicians said Tony was as good as Chet Baker. For Mother art eclipsed all sins.
One day Mom said to Tony, I could really love a man who would help me find old mattress springs. Mother felt limited by the size of her kiln. She believed if she could develop her melted-bottle sculptures on a larger scale, she might get a show, begin to make a reputation. In her view, an old metal mattress frame would make a kind of canvas. Tony searched abandoned tenements and back alleys for rusting, burnt-out and battered bedsprings and collected about a dozen. Then he helped her load them into her station wagon along with boxes of empty cheap wine and liquor bottles, most of which he had drained himself in Mother’s East 14th Street painting studio, where he slept. Mother drove off with the junk to Hazleton, Pennsylvania.
The Globe plant in Pennsylvania was only about one-third the size of the one in Maspeth, but it was brand-new, with concrete floors unsullied by oil and grease, and many windows, which made it look bigger than it was. The machinery was top-notch. The automated oven for melting glass lenses and drying lacquer on fixtures was a hundred feet long, at least the size of the one in Maspeth that had baked a million of Dad’s eight- and ten-footers.
Maybe Mom’s beautiful sister Thelma wasn’t such a great salesman, but she brought glamour to the new factory and Grandpa liked that. Once or twice a week she breezed in from New York in her fancy convertible, unless she was in France or Italy collecting glass samples for Grandpa’s lenses. Thelma turned heads walking through the plant in a designer dress carrying spiral notebooks filled with upbeat color combinations for the new line.
But Globe’s problems persisted. There wasn’t enough business and labor costs were too high. Grandpa had hoped that the Hazleton community would greet him with open arms, but the local unions weren’t offering any breaks. Grandpa suspected that his New York enemies were exercising long-distance muscle, Abe was still pulling strings. Probably the truth was that Grandpa had grown too old and weary from loss to pull the company ahead.
When Mom arrived in Hazleton with bedsprings, it was a very slow time and Grandpa was operating with a skeleton crew. More than half the shears, presses and lathes were standing by and the great oven was stone-cold. Mother viewed this as an opportunity. On long tables designed for mounting ballasts and starters into metal housings, she laid out her beat-up mattress supports. Then she began placing liquor bottles on the springs, moving away from these works to gain perspective, while a few sheet metal workers watched and scratched their heads at Thelma’s sister with uncombed hair and torn, loose clothing. She arranged bottles with heavy textures leaning against open spaces. Warped and sprung struts were brushstrokes. Stella was allowing figurative images into her work, which added enigma and dark humor. This would rankle Hans Hofmann, the great painting teacher. Was ist das? he would say to her when traces of realism intruded into her abstractions. But Mother always considered impulses and radical departures more important than dogma.
When she was ready she directed Globe workers to place her pieces on the conveyor belt at the mouth of the great oven, which was now hot and ready. Soon the small crew in the factory assembled to watch the emerging red-hot springs smeared with Tony’s liquor bottles, which Mother referred to as her “Beds of Pain.” Stella found it appealing to make art from junk in her father’s temple.
When the sculptures cooled, they were placed in front of windows, and with the white winter sun behind them Mom’s bare-boned beds came alive with shimmering light.
From the beginning of her painting life Mother considered white the color of death. “There is finality in white ... it is pure in the way a bone is pure and clean once freed from the flesh and blood around it,” she wrote in a paper for the critic and teacher Meyer Schapiro. During this period, death was a specter in her life. Tony was living right on the edge and he reminded her, like a refrain in his music, Stella, I want you to remember the good times. But in her father’s factory, with whiteness pouring through bottles like stillborn souls, one might have taken this work for a new direction in lighting. At least she did. Mother wanted to mass-produce these objects.
Only problem was, the temperature in the Globe oven was too hot or cold or the glass was the wrong type for mattress springs. As she drove back to New York most of the bottles popped off the springs and shattered against the mattress frames. Only a few sculptures from this series survived intact.
Mom tried to keep Tony away from Bill by banishing him to her painting studio on East 14th Street, but Tony missed her and was always coming over to 9th Street. When Bill was home she wouldn’t open the door and pretended she no longer cared for Tony. Fruscella would stand on the street calling pitifully, Stella, Stella, let me in. Eventually he would walk back to her studio or head for the Bowery. Some nights Mother would come to 14th Street and other times she would meet him at jazz clubs. One night at the Five Spot, Charlie Mingus invited To
ny to sit in with his group. But Tony was boozed up and got on stage with a big cigar, ruined the set with his sorrowful antics. Afterward Mingus came after Tony with a knife while Mother pleaded with the great bass player.
There were nights when Stella didn’t come to 14th Street and each time Tony called her apartment Bill picked up the phone and hung up. When he didn’t have money for a bottle and was desperate and lonely, Fruscella started fires in the hall outside her door where they kept the trash. He knew that Taylor Mead or another 14th Street neighbor would call Mother to say the building was burning down. She would come out to meet him, whatever the hour, calm Tony down, feed him, make love to him. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t always be with her. There were a dozen fires, maybe more.
Bill recognized in Tony an adversary he could not defeat. Tony was already beaten to a pulp. And yet for Mother his groveling need and sadness were a pure note, a kind of grace. Tony’s battered trumpet was usually in the pawnshop on Third Avenue unless Mom tracked it down and retrieved it for him. Then he’d hold the trumpet in his hand and say in his gruff dockworker voice, Stella, I can’t remember how it goes. Help me out. C’mon, Stella. Mother would smile and begin to sing, ‘“The night is cold and I’m so all alone. I’d give my soul just to call you my own.’” She had a rich emotional voice and Tony loved her so much when she sang “Lover Man.” “‘I go to bed with the prayer that you’ll make love to me. Strange as it seems.’” When Mother finished, Tony would lift the horn and begin to curl around the melody, lingering on low notes until the music ached. He had played it many times for Billie Holiday, but now he no longer had his lip and “Lover Man” had misses and scrapes of pain like Billie’s voice during her last year. Always Tony claimed he couldn’t remember how the standards went and coaxed Stella to sing before he played the horn.
The Last Marlin Page 14