Boys of Life

by Paul Russell

  Lying in that bed with my hand jerking my dick raw, I see how I am. I’m this guy kneeling in the bushes, looking in through the window—and it’s me I’m seeing, it’s me I’m jerking off to. Me when I was sixteen years old and nobody’d ever fucked me in my life before. Suddenly I’ve got to get it all exactly right, every little detail that’s coming back to me, and I’m jerking harder and harder, till my hand cramps and my dick aches, and I’ve got the middle finger of my other hand stuck as far up my asshole as I can get it—but everything just gets worse and worse, the harder I go at it, and when finally I get myself to come I’m feeling so miserable it’s agony I’m groaning with.

  Afterward I fell asleep in a second, which I never do. I guess I was so depressed my whole body just sank right down into sleep, like all it wanted to do for a while was not know it was alive anymore.

  Now this morning I’m remembering other things, better things. I still feel sad, but it’s clearing—and just a minute ago I was thinking about this one time when, I don’t know why, I was looking through Carlos’s wallet and I found his driver’s license. On the back was this place to sign so you could donate your organs if you got killed in some car crash, what they called an “anatomical gift.” There were these two boxes you could check; one said you’d donate all your organs but the other box said “only the following body parts.” Carlos had checked that one, and then in the space where you were supposed to list what body parts he wrote, “penis, gizzard and testicles,” and signed it. Then he got two people whose names I never heard of to sign as witnesses. When I asked him about it, he didn’t know what I was talking about, so I made him take out his driver’s license from his wallet and I showed him on the back where it was written. He just looked at it and shook his head, and all he said was, “I must’ve been really really drunk for that one.”

  Maybe things like that aren’t interesting to you, but they’re what I carry around with me, and I think somehow they have to matter. If they don’t matter, then nothing does. And if I’m going to talk about any of this, then I have to talk about all of it.

  For example, this dream I had last night that I’m just remembering now. It’s something I don’t understand—how writing all this down must be setting off these depth charges in me somewhere, and so all this stuff floats up to the top. It’s some other secret story that goes along with the story I think I’m telling.

  They always take place in Owen, my dreams. I never dream about New York, or Sammy or Verbena or Seth or Netta. I never dream about Carlos. In last night’s dream I’m walking down in the woods behind the trailer, and it’s wintertime. I notice somebody’s set a brushfire, though it’s burned itself out and all that’s left is a charred circle about twenty feet wide. In the circle there’s a big old stump, some tree somebody cut down years ago. When I look closer I see the brushfire has burned away the side of the stump, and it’s hollow inside. The hollow of the stump’s filled with skulls and other bones—people’s skulls, which at first I think are old Indian skulls, but then I know they’re not. Where the hole in the side of the stump is, skulls are spilling onto the ground, and beside one of the skulls that’s spilled out there’s a charred piece of paper, a driver’s license. When I pick it up and read it, it says “Mattie Parr” on it—not a name I ever heard of in real life, but in the dream I know who Mattie Parr is, and I look down at the skull and I somehow recognize that it’s Mattie Parr’s skull.

  In the dream I know people have been looking for her—she’s somebody who’s disappeared, and in fact lots of people have been disappearing and nobody knows where they went to. But now suddenly I know who it is who’s been making all these people disappear—it’s these three farmers who live down the road. In the dream I know them, I know what they look like. They’re these three old black men who wear overalls and they all three live in this farmhouse together. They’re killing people and hiding their skulls in the hollow stump.

  I know I should call the police and tell them about this, but I’m afraid to because the farmers’ll know it’s me that found the stump—though I think maybe in the dream I do call the police, or maybe I stick the driver’s license in an envelope and mail it to the police telling them where they can find Mattie Parr. It gets sort of hazy—but I think in the dream somebody says the police have found eighty-five bodies in that tree stump, though by that time I’m living somewhere else, on a sea coast. I’m eating ice cream with Ted—he’s wearing sunglasses so nobody’ll know him. We’re way up on a cliff, sitting in lawn chairs on a kind of terrace with pots of red flowers and the ocean way down below us.

  How the story of that dream connects with the other story I’m trying to tell, I still don’t know.

  IT TURNED OUT CARLOS WAS RIGHT WHEN HE TOLD me he lived in a slum. That apartment on Avenue C was about the seediest place you can imagine—not even really an apartment, just this one huge cold empty room on the third floor of an old brick building. There wasn’t any bathroom—only this toilet head in one corner of the room, and curtains somebody’d hung around it to give a little privacy. The same person—I never knew who it was—had hung some around another mattress in another part of the room, and that was the bedroom where Netta and Sammy stayed, and that was it for rooms. There was also this filthy old stove and a refrigerator that couldn’t even make ice it was so broken down.

  There were windows along the front of the apartment, facing the avenue, but somebody’d tacked heavy sheets of plastic over them, I guess to keep the cold out—but it also meant you couldn’t see out. Every day looked the same in that apartment—this cold, cloudy light that didn’t have anything to do with whatever real weather was happening outside.

  Carlos wasn’t around most of the time. He’d go over to Brooklyn during the day to edit Ur with Seth and Verbena, who were both living over there. The first couple weeks I stayed around the apartment a lot in the day, reading X-Man comic books and then when afternoon came hitting the Canadian Club Carlos kept me supplied with and trying not to jerk off while waiting for him to get back at night.

  As for Netta and Sammy, who stayed in the apartment’s other room—if you can call curtains around a mattress any kind of room—they were always there too, especially Netta, who never left the apartment a single time, as far as I could tell, till she moved out for good sometime in the middle of that winter. They’d yammer away at each other in that foreign language they always spoke with each other. It always sounded like they were arguing, but I guess they weren’t because they spent hours in there together. Sometimes Netta would get in these moods and play tapes of opera singers on a little cassette player she had—she’d play each song over and over like she was trying to figure out something about it before passing on to the next one.

  When that’d happen, Sammy would always move out into the other room where I was. At first it made me nervous. We hadn’t exactly hit it off with each other that first day back in Kentucky. But for some reason, maybe because he was as bored around that apartment as I was, he seemed to take some kind of liking to me. At least he’d talk to me, which was more than Netta usually did. Ever since we’d dug weeds together in that field, she’d pretty much acted like she couldn’t be bothered with me.

  Sammy’s real name was Szlama Finkelsztajn, and he was born in the year 1900, which in Jewish years was the year 5661, something I thought made sense: the world was older for them than it was for us. He told me about how he used to live in Poland, and what happened in 1939, or 5700, depending on how you wanted to call it.

  “Everywhere,” Sammy said, “there were the signs.” He never looked at me when he talked. He was going over this stuff again and again in his head, and I could’ve been anybody there to listen. We were both sitting at this rickety kitchen table, and I had a tea cup with some Canadian Club in the bottom of it. “But we would not believe the signs,” he said. “No one would believe. How could you go on living and believe those signs? But this one day there is no longer any doubt. I am walking and it is hot, it is summer. Beca
use I have not eaten I am very weak. And I pass a church, a Christian church. The Church of the Virgin Mary it is called, and from the very first that they closed the ghetto this church was closed up also. No one is allowed in it. But today I see it is open. The doors are open, and there are women, Jewish women walking in and out of the open doors of the Church of the Virgin Mary. What is this, I ask, that you are going in and out of the Christian church? And a woman tells me, it is the Institute of Feather Cleaning. And she points to a sign beside the door and it is true, it says Institute of Feather Cleaning. So I go inside, and what I see is, everywhere white feathers piled up on the floor and floating in the air. When I take a step white feathers float up into the air of the church. Every breeze that comes through the door, white feathers float up and sink back down. All over the carved altar and the great organ and the statues of saints white feathers are floating. And everywhere Jewish women are at work.”

  “I don’t get it,” I told him. Lots of times I got the feeling Sammy thought I knew things I didn’t really know. It always made me want to dive into the Canadian Club a little deeper than I already was.

  “There in the Church of the Virgin Mary,” he went on, “Jewish women were ripping open the pillows and featherbeds of the Jews who had been murdered, and cleaning the feathers, and sorting them, and shipping them to Germany, to German merchants who sold them. And from that day on I knew. I knew what was happening without any doubt, and I said to myself God have mercy on us.”

  “I’d have gotten a gun,” I told him. “I’d have fought back. I’d hide in the woods and eat roots and they wouldn’t take me alive. I wouldn’t just let something like that happen to me.”

  Sammy picked up my tea cup and sniffed at the Canadian Club, and then put it back down on the table.

  “Every day people were jumping out of buildings,” he said. “Or they would walk to the barbed wire where the sentries were, right up to the wire without any fear, and the Germans would shoot them. And all this time there were concerts, and even with no food the cafes were open, and people got married and there was crime, like in any city.”

  “Sounds like New York,” I said. At night I could hear gunshots out in the streets, and sirens, and in the day it wasn’t too much better. I wanted to get out and around, but the neighborhood scared me a little. I’d never been anywhere in my life like Avenue C before.

  “There was a bread we used to make,” Sammy went on like he hadn’t heard me. “From potato peels and brick dust. That was what we ate when we were hungry.”

  “Potato peels,” I said. “And so you kept yourself alive, and now you’re here, now you’re making these crazy movies with Carlos. I don’t get it.”

  Sammy looked at me for a long time. “I will tell you this,” he said. “When you are old, maybe you will remember. There was this one man, a photographer, a young man, very shy. He worked, I think, for the bureau of statistics that gathered information. How much the food ration was today. What was the weather. How many people died or were born, and for what causes. And this photographer, Mendel was his name, before the war he had wanted to be an artist, he had wanted people to admire the beautiful pictures he took of flowers and girls.”

  This is hopeless, I thought. But what was I going to do? I was raised to have respect for older people.

  “But now,” Sammy went on, “he was not interested in beauty anymore, this Mendel. Now he was taking pictures of everything. Everything that was happening, he took pictures. And it was forbidden in the ghetto to take pictures. He would be shot if they caught him taking those forbidden pictures. But every day he was walking the streets, or climbing on rooftops or hiding behind a window to take pictures.”

  “Fine,” I said. You can only have so much patience. “What does this have to do with anything?”

  The whole time we were talking, Netta’s tape recorder was blaring out opera music in the next room, those big busty voices heaving away at the top of their lungs. As soon as the song was over, she’d rewind and play it through again.

  “He was not in good health,” Sammy said. I was thinking maybe he couldn’t hear me for the opera music. I was thinking maybe this whole conversation was pretty pointless, and I should just leave, only I didn’t want to leave. I wanted Sammy to leave. “His heart,” Sammy said. “So many times I would go with him, I would carry his satchel for him. And we would go around. His camera he kept under his coat, because it was forbidden. And his hands he kept in his pockets. You see, he had cut his pockets open on the inside so he could work the camera through his coat. And when he would see something, he would turn his body to aim the camera, and he would open his coat just a little—it was very dangerous—and click, there would be the picture. Everywhere we would go, and he would take those pictures. And all those pictures, do you know where they are now?”

  I wanted to take a sip of Canadian Club—a good swig is more like it—but the way he was looking at me, I couldn’t do it. It was the first time in the whole conversation he looked at me.

  “Vanished,” he said. “Gone into thin air.”

  I was never sure how much to believe. I mean, I knew a little from school and TV, but I never really thought about it.

  “Not every single photograph,” Sammy said, not looking at me anymore. “But most.” All of a sudden I felt squirmy inside, like I didn’t want to hear any more of this. But I couldn’t leave, because where was there to go? Sammy smiled. Not at me. Not even a happy smile, not even a smile I realized, though for a minute it’d looked like one.

  I saw he needed a shave in an old man kind of way.

  “One day,” he said, “we were in the street. Mendel and I were in the street and a whole family passed us by. They were hauling shit. It was good money in the ghetto, to haul shit away from people’s houses. It gave you money for food. But nobody lasted long because of the disease, so only the most desperate people would haul shit for money. And here was this family. Mother and father, son and daughter. The parents in front of the cart pulling. The children on the sides pushing. And Mendel was about to take a picture of this, the way he took a picture of everything that was happening, but then he stopped. And I knew what he was thinking. How can I do this? he was thinking. How can I take a picture of these people in such shameful degradation? And he was not going to take the picture. But the father saw him, and he knew Mendel, everybody in the ghetto knew Mendel and knew he was taking pictures because he would give people pictures to keep. He thought if he gave enough pictures to people some would have to survive the ghetto. And the father who knew Mendel asked him please to go ahead and take the picture. Let them know, he told Mendel. Let others know how we were humiliated here.”

  “Kill the bastards,” I told him. But he only looked at me. I felt ashamed for saying that, like it was completely the wrong thing to say. But I didn’t know what was the right thing to say. I was sure Sammy didn’t think I could ever understand any of this, and he wasn’t even telling it to me—he was just speaking it out loud where I could hear it if I wanted to.

  A couple days after that he took me to the public library. I went because Carlos never took me anywhere, and I thought, What the hell? Plus Netta was in her opera mood, which I think was driving Sammy as crazy as it was me. The afternoon was one of those cold New York afternoons when the wind blows right through you and trash is every where in the air. He took me through this room where people were busy reading and back into the shelves of books till he found exactly the shelf he wanted. It was like he’d memorized where it was. He reached up on his tiptoes and pulled down a book, and standing there in the aisle between the shelves where the light was dim he opened it up and showed me. It was a book of pictures, mostly out of focus like somebody snapped them in a hurry. But there they were, about fifty of them by Mendel the photographer whose satchel Sammy used to carry. I flipped through those pages, picture after picture, a little freaked out to actually see them, since I only sort of half believed what Sammy’d been telling me. But now he didn’t say a wo
rd. He just stood there and looked at me looking at the pictures.

  I never knew exactly how to behave around Sammy. I always felt a little bit off-guard, so mostly I just didn’t behave at all. Which is what I did that day. I looked at the pictures and handed the book back to him, and I guess I said something like, “That’s pretty amazing.” He didn’t say anything. He didn’t seem pleased or disappointed or anything—he just took the book and reached up on tiptoe again and slid it back in the space on the shelf where it’d been. And that was that.

  Except what I never told Sammy was—I used to go back to that library from time to time to look at that book. I didn’t think I could find it again but I did—I went right to it. At the time it seemed like a good sign of something, but of course you never know. I’d take it to a table where other people were reading, and turn the pages looking at those pictures. There was this one picture that completely got to me—a kid about my age feeding a little girl some soup from a sort of canteen. I used to study that picture for a long time. I’d find myself wondering how he died, because he must’ve died. Did he have to become one of the shit carriers Sammy told me about? Did they take him out in the woods and make him dig a grave for himself, and then shoot him? I couldn’t get enough of looking at him, and wondering—till one day I did know. It came to me like it was something I’d known all along, how one morning he just walked up to the barbed wire and let the guards shoot him. He scooped his little sister up in his arms and they both walked right into the bullets.

  I’d sit there and look at him and wonder what it must have felt like when he finally decided to do it—how he must’ve been incredibly scared, so scared I couldn’t even imagine being that scared. But I also wanted him to be completely calm. I wanted him to be watching all this from some distance that didn’t have anything to do with him. I wanted him to be indifferent to it.