Boys of Life

by Paul Russell

  Some of the other people Carlos picked up for the movie weren’t as great as Rafe and Nicky, and I told him that. We’d just done a shot over in Tompkins Square Park, where I was supposed to be warming my hands over a trash-barrel fire with a couple of bums. One of them starts handling me while I’m standing there. I mean, he reaches down and grabs my ass and smiles this gross smile with no teeth in it.

  “What’d you want?’’ Carlos asked. “Hire a stuntman?”

  “Sometimes I get this feeling you’re just joking with me,” I told him. “I mean, all the time. Getting your kicks that way.”

  He looked at me and asked, “Aren’t we all?” like nothing else ever occurred to him.

  Sammy was sitting in his stupid little cardboard tollbooth, watching us out the window.

  “What do you mean, aren’t we all?”

  I remember thinking, I bet Carlos is feeling sorry right now he can’t get this on film too, like everything else—but he wasn’t supposed to be in the movie and Seth couldn’t shoot me without shooting Carlos so for once we were safe. I wasn’t changing the plot for the hundredth time by opening my mouth or doing something I never planned to do. Anyway, Carlos was terrified of anybody ever taking a picture of him, let alone with a movie camera—which I always thought was strange from somebody who spent their life making movies.

  “Aren’t we all just getting our kicks?” Carlos asked. He seemed really surprised by it all.

  “Getting felt up by some wino’s not my idea of kicks,” I said, with the wino standing right there where he could hear everything since we’d raised our voices and with this completely sad look on his face. I felt sorry for him, since it was Carlos who asked him to feel me up in the first place, and if he got his kicks out of it, it wasn’t his fault.

  “Maybe feeling you up’s his kind of kicks. Maybe being in a movie’s your kind of kicks. How about that?”

  Of course it was a point, the way Carlos always made points.

  “Anyway,” Carlos went on, “anything for art. Right?”

  “I thought it was anything for a drink,” I told him.

  “I always forget,” he said. “You’re the future and I’m just the past.” Which meant things sort of ended there, with us doing a retake and that wino’s hand on my butt one more time and Carlos getting his way completely. That was how things always ended up and I guess you could say how Next Year in Gomorrah got made. That being the name of the movie starring Tony Blair and Sammy Finkelsztajn, him as the old Jew from the ghetto in Poland, like he was in real life, and me his son and a Jew too, which of course I’m not in real life but like I told Carlos, I’d become a Jew on purpose if they ever started doing the concentration camp thing again.

  I guess it was only a long time after we finished making that movie and it was all history that I started to see how much Carlos was fooling around with me. I’m not sure how to explain it. How he was fiddling with my brain in all sorts of ways I didn’t have any hope of understanding at the time—just to see what he could get out of me for the movie. And by the time I started to realize all that, it was too far in the past to worry about. It was just the way things were—and by then I pretty much knew how things were anyway.

  IT’S BEEN FIVE YEARS SINCE THE LAST TIME I SAW Sammy, and three years since he died, which is something I’ll tell you about later. But now that I’m thinking about him again, I remember all these things I thought I’d forgotten. Stupid stuff—these beat card games he used to try to teach me, which I never could get the hang of, or this one song they used to sing in the ghetto in that yammering Yiddish of his. He used to sing it to me all the time: about the young girls in spring, he used to say, and for some reason he wanted me to remember it.

  But I can’t remember it. Right now I just sang some of it out loud, but it wasn’t right—wrong tune, and I forget the words. But other things I remember—Sammy’s tomatoes: how he’d go over to the markets on Second Avenue and come back with a paper bag and three tomatoes, which he paid for I’m sure with that same ten-dollar bill he always used. He’d hum his song about the young girls in spring and sit at the kitchen table and dump those tomatoes out of the bag. With his salt shaker, he’d sprinkle a little salt on the tomato, and then bite in, this big juicy bite like it was some sloppy apple he was eating—and then another shake of salt and another bite, juice running all down his chin and his fingers and him with his eyes closed, slurping away. The first time I heard that sound, it was so scrumptious and noisy I thought somebody in the apartment was having sex, the juiciest blow job of their life.

  Of course, I found out it was just Sammy eating his tomatoes. But every time after that, when I heard that sound, I still liked it, and I wondered if Sammy lay in bed at night listening to Carlos and me and if it sounded just the same. I was sure, even if his ears were just an old man’s ears, he still could hear us through those curtains that were the only walls in the apartment. I wondered if somehow the sound of us slurping away at each other was as comforting to him as the sound of him eating his tomatoes was to me.

  It never seemed to bother Sammy too much, what me and Carlos were doing. I remember sometimes our room could get to looking pretty rough after we’d been at it for a night. Carlos would always be gone by the time I woke up, and I’d lie around in bed till noon or so—I never knew what time it was in those days. I liked the sweaty body smell of the sheets. We used to go for weeks without changing the sheets, maybe because the laundromat was ten blocks away and as you probably already know I hated laundromats, I’d do anything to stay away from them, but maybe because we both liked lying in there with our smell all over the place. Just to remind us.

  Anyway, some mornings I’d be lying in bed and I don’t know what would get into Sammy, but he’d bring me a cup of tea on a tray and sit on the edge of the bed while I sipped at it. It was like some kind ofjoke to me, but I went along with it. I used to imagine we were in some movie where I was this Russian prince and Sammy was my faithful servant, and I could almost make it work too, especially on cloudy days when the light was this pale light coming in through those white curtains that were the walls of the bedroom, and Netta’s opera music was playing on her cassette player in the so-called other room.

  While I’d drink my tea Sammy would flip through the porn magazines that were always lying around, because Carlos loved porn magazines. I don’t know where he got them, but he was always bringing them home. I think Sammy just thought they were really peculiar things, not good or bad but just interesting. He’d flip through them and just shake his head. “So adventurous, these boys,” he’d say. “See what they do here?” He’d show me some picture of a kid with a dildo stuck in his ass. “Why do they want to be doing that, I wonder?”

  Why did they? Sammy’d lived through that ghetto. I guess nothing surprised him anymore, which was why he was with The Company—but nothing other people who hadn’t been in the ghetto did made much sense to him. I think he always felt sad about the way people were living their lives. I think he was always thinking about those people he knew who never got a chance to be living their lives one way or the other.

  “I guess it makes them feel good,” I told him. But it occurred to me—I really didn’t know why somebody’d want to do stuff like that when there was this camera watching them. Somehow I’d never thought about there having to be other people around—guys working the cameras, and lights, and everything like that. Suddenly it made whatever those two boys were doing on a bed seem different. It was a job, like they were actors, and they could be good or bad but it was still a job. It was something they were out there doing for the rest of us—so we could watch, whatever the reasons were that we wanted to watch them. And I thought—why not? Why not do it in front of a camera if that was what you needed to go and do. Because I guess I was happy they did. Not that I spent much time jerking off to those magazines, I was never much for looking at porn, though like I said before Carlos could never get enough of it.

  “It just breaks my heart,” Ca
rlos told me once. He was holding up some magazine called, I don’t know, Hotter Than Hot, or something like that—they all had stupid titles. What he was showing me wasn’t any different from any of the other pictures, but he said, in that excited voice he sometimes got, “Look at it, look at it—the expression on that kid’s face.” He thumped the pages. “Right when the blond guy’s putting it in him. See how they caught it just like that, that instant when the kid thinks, I’m gonna die. It’s too big. I’m not gonna live through this. But he loves it. He loves that feeling of I’m gonna die. See—his eyes’re kind of crossed, his mouth’s hanging open, you can just hear that ouff! he’s moaning when it sinks into him. And they’ve got it there, just some guy with a camera and he’s catching this kind of death that’s happening for this kid—this one single instant that turns him clear as some pane of glass. You’re looking all the way down into him, to where he’s giving away something he didn’t even know he had.”

  Carlos could get inspired—he’d talk himself into these excited states. It was true, the kid did look kind of shocked, not bored like they usually did in Carlos’s magazines. But still, it was just some guy getting fucked. Carlos was always seeing things I never could, even in some stupid porn magazine.

  “My God,” Carlos went on, like it was something he was trying out for the first time, like it’d been lying there under his nose all along and he never noticed it. “Do you realize what we could learn from all that? I mean, for really getting the truth about somebody. That instant when some cock’s going into them and they just give everything away. A single look. That’s what’s real—not all this posing around, but that one real second when you think you’re going to die. That’s a true self, that second there. It’s too scary even to look at. You could go to jail for the right kind of picture like that, and everybody knows it. It’s why everybody’s so scared and no good.”

  I lay there on the bed and just looked at him. He knew I thought he was peculiar.

  “It’s an idea,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

  “You have all these ideas,” I told him. It was why he sometimes wore that black headband, I thought—to keep all those ideas from exploding.

  “Yeah, I do,” he said. “And for what? Who cares about any of this?” He let go of the magazine that just a minute ago he’d been holding like it was the greatest thing, and it fell on the floor. “Why make movies,” he said, “or porn magazines, or anything?” He sounded sad. I just sat there, my eyes locked on his. I knew he didn’t want me to answer his question. With his hand he reached down under the covers and closed around my dick that was hard for him.

  “It’s because this won’t last,” he said. He pushed the covers aside and leaned forward and put my dick into his mouth. Then there he was, slurping away, like the noise Sammy made with his tomatoes.

  If his question was going to have any kind of answer, I guess that was it. I guess there’s some reason why I started out talking about Sammy and ended up talking about Carlos. Sammy would sit there on the side of the bed while I sipped the tea he’d brought me. He’d turn those porn magazines this way and that way, like he was trying to figure out something, and every once in a while he’d say something like, “Tony, I count three boys on this bed, and three heads and three impolite things and six legs and seven arms. Now can you tell me why is that, Tony? Does that ever happen to you?”

  WE SHOT NEXT YEAR IN GOMORRAH DURING THE whole month of February, and Carlos and Seth spent most of the spring editing it down. I’d sometimes go out to Brooklyn to the film collective where they did the editing—not that there was anything I could do to help. Besides, Carlos didn’t want my help. Like Sammy and Nicky and Rafe, I’d already done whatever it was I was supposed to do—Seth was the only person Carlos wanted now. Which I guess made sense, seeing how the instant he turned that camera of his on, Seth was Carlos’s eyes.

  The collective was this run-down building that a bunch of movie people used, though that spring there was only one other person in there regularly, this woman named Jean who’d made a documentary movie about some banker who turned into a drug addict and then got better, and now he was teaching deaf children how to sing in some school in Harlem. It was a pretty okay movie—she let me watch parts of it—only the kids couldn’t sing worth shit, being deaf and everything. She got a little huffy on that score and said it was beside the point what they sounded like. It was doing it that counted. Still, I thought that was pretty neat. Carlos said she’d been making that movie for ten years, and he didn’t think she was ever going to finish it. I think Carlos liked her a lot—he was always very nice to her at the collective and all—but he thought she was pretty hopeless. All Seth ever said about her was, she’d picked the perfect subject.

  I sort of liked watching the little bits of film Carlos had finished editing. They’d be hanging in long strips from a clothesline. I’d take them down and spool them through the viewfinder for ten or twenty seconds of movie action till it ran out.

  It was something to see myself there—me and Sammy carrying on, riffing with each other out on the streets and so cold the breath coming out of our mouths was like talk-bubbles in a comic strip. What it made me remember was something I hadn’t thought about in years. When I was a kid—I think I might’ve mentioned this—we didn’t have a TV set. So what I’d do instead was, I’d go through the funny papers on Sunday, the color ones, and cut out the ones I liked—Dick Tracy, Snuffy Smith, Li’l Abner. I’d paste them onto a long strip of paper so you could watch them like a movie. I even made a little box, with two wooden sewing spools you could thread the strip of paper onto, and a window cut in the box that was like a screen. When you rolled the spools, each frame of the comic strip moved by the window. You could stop at each one and look at it, and then go on to the next.

  I must’ve been ten when I made that, and I was pretty proud of it. I made a show of watching my movies, and how interesting it was, but I never could get anybody else to pay attention. I’d set up special showings, march around the house announcing to everybody, come see Dick Tracy at the movies, three o’clock. And I’d set everything up on the kitchen table ready to go, but when three o’clock came, nobody was there. Not even Ted. Maybe my mom and dad weren’t crazy about me pointing out how we didn’t have a TV. But Ted should’ve liked it. It was for him as much as for me.

  It was odd to think back on all that, and now here I was making real movies. I’d sit on a stool and watch Seth and Carlos putting the different clips together—which, to tell the truth, was about as interesting as watching somebody sew. Carlos knew that. “Go on,” he’d say. “Get outta here. You’re driving me crazy.”

  “I’m just watching,” I told him.

  “You are radiating boredom so intensely, if there were plants in here they’d fall over and wilt,” he said. “Now scram. Go bother Verbena.”

  Verbena lived in this apartment about five blocks from the collective.

  “What’m I supposed to do with Verbena?” I asked.

  “I don’t care,” Carlos told me. “Anything. Just don’t let her sit on top of you.”

  “You’re disgusting,” I said. And with that, and a laugh, he swatted me out the door. Actually I was glad to go. I loved being in that room with Carlos, watching him do his work, seeing how careful he was when so much of the time it could seem like he was the most careless person you ever met. It was one more of those things that filled in the blanks for me. At the same time, I could only sit there and watch him edit for so long—after that, I was happy to know there was work going on, and one day there’d be a movie out of it.

  Verbena’s apartment was this dingy place filled with pot plants—some scheme she had going with Seth to grow plants indoors and sell them. She had the windows blacked out, and tin foil and mirrors all over the walls, and bright lights set up to shine on the plants. Carlos said she’d figured out some way to steal electricity from Con Ed—they had no idea her apartment was even hooked up to them. There must’ve been twenty-five p
lants in there, so many they filled up almost the whole room. Actually it was sort of great-looking, like being in some jungle. And very warm and humid.

  Verbena was sitting at a table listening to the radio, some preacher raving on about the rapture—how when it came, those that were saved would just disappear. A man driving a bus, or a pilot flying a plane. The preacher was laughing this big belly laugh to think of all the plane crashes and bus crashes the rapture was going to cause.

  “How can you listen to shit like that?” I asked her.

  “I like the melody,’’ she said. She held this painted fan and was fanning herself and sweating all over. She had on these huge gray sweatpants and a bra—her breasts looked the size of New Jersey at least.

  I hadn’t been to visit her in about a month. Whenever I saw her, she always pretended not to remember my name. At least I thought it was pretend.

  “Tony,” I told her.

  “Shy girl,” she said, “I seen so many white boys in my time—they all look alike. But I’m happy to see you. I was itching to get out of here.”

  “Where’re we going?” I asked her. The idea of being seen around Brooklyn with Verbena wasn’t totally my thing.

  “To the roof,” she said. “If we can make it that far. The elevator’s broke. But we can rest on the landings.”

  “What’s on the roof?”

  She smiled, that big gap-toothed smile of hers that was the ugliest thing, you had to love it. She wrapped herself in this flowery robe and we were ready to go.