Boys of Life

by Paul Russell

  Part of the reason must’ve been that Carlos’s brain was just always working. You couldn’t tear yourself away from that. I remember lots of nights sitting around with him and Seth and Sammy and Verbena, where we’d spent all day working on a movie and everybody was exhausted. But Carlos wouldn’t be content to relax; he’d be going on about all the other movies he wanted to make in the future, talking nonstop for hours with everybody else mostly wowed into just listening.

  Lots of his movie ideas came from driving around the country in that van of his—which at a certain time in his life was one of his favorite things to do, though now he was too busy ever to leave New York with the one notable exception of that trip that took him through Owen, Kentucky—I always figured, no wonder he didn’t travel much after that. Just too risky.

  I always tried to imagine the Carlos back then, but I didn’t meet with too much success. I only had the stories he told.

  “There’s this house in Nebraska,’’ he told us, “near the Platte River—ordinary old farmhouse, but there’s a secret. You go down into the cellar, only it’s not a cellar, it’s a cave—the house is built over a cave. You go down these steps that are carved into the side of the rock, maybe two hundred feet down you go, and then the steps disappear into water. Just at the water line, though, there’s a cave room—they call it the blue room, because when you turn off the lantern or flashlight or whatever light you’ve taken down there with you, the room gives off this faint blue glow.

  “The water level’s always steady, though it must’ve been lower when the house was built, because if you look down in the water you can see the steps continuing down out of sight. And once, in the nineteen thirties, according to the old woman who lives in the house, the water started to rise. For no reason. It flooded the blue room and came all the way up the stairs—it just kept coming, rising about five feet a day, till they thought it was going to come right up to the cellar door. But it stopped just below it, and stayed there for a couple of days, and then receded again. No explanation.

  “I want to make a movie about that old woman living alone in that house with that cellar that goes down who knows how deep.

  “Then there’s a man I met once, in Wyoming—it must’ve been nineteen sixty-seven. He claimed he had a petrified woman in his possession. I didn’t believe it, but he took me there: I saw it, I touched it. It was a stone woman all right. He found it in the nineteen twenties up in the mountains. An Indian woman, hundreds of years old, calcified into solid stone. He wanted to sell it to me for five hundred dollars but who has five hundred dollars? I wonder—is he still alive? I can’t even remember where he lives—it was this little tin shack up a steep dirt road. I remember, he had the petrified woman laid out on a long low table. There’s a movie there—he’s in love with the woman: living out there alone has put the zap on him. He tends to her, he starts to believe all sorts of crazy things.”

  I think he must’ve had a million movies all going at once inside him, and he was always incredibly frustrated because actually to make just a single one took so much time and energy that it meant a hundred other movies were never going to happen. So if you look at it one way, most of his best films never got made. They were all up there spinning around in his brain, and maybe he got to see them but the rest of us never did. We only heard him tell us what they looked like to him.

  Actually shooting the movie was always the fastest part of the process for Carlos—he shot movies the way some hungry person’ll gulp down a meal. It was getting the money together for the movie and then after it was shot editing it down that drove him crazy, because by the time he was editing he already had the whole thing in his head and so he was completely impatient to go on to the next movie. I guess if he could’ve had his way he’d’ve had the camera going twenty-four hours a day his whole life and somehow the money would be there and the editing would just happen and he could make movies as fast as he thought them up.

  IN WARM WEATHER, CARLOS AND I’D CLIMB UP ONTO the roof of our building. It was all tarry in most places, but there was one place where somebody’d piled some tarps, so we’d sit up there and drink cocktails and watch these sunsets that were like some movie in technicolor—a really slow plot but one you could watch from beginning to end. Carlos said the color was because of pollution. “It’s beautiful and it’s killing us,” he said. “What do you say to that?” Which I guess is more or less what he thought about everything. He’d rigged up a shower out on the fire escape in back, and we used to take showers out there in full view of the other buildings. Since most of them were abandoned or burned out, it didn’t matter. But it was great taking showers outside, the water falling through the metal grate under your feet and splashing down three stories to the ground. The only creepy thing was that there were these two guys who used to sit out on their fire escape about a hundred yards over from ours across this lot with broken bottles and piles of bricks and these weedy trees growing up everywhere, and they’d drink beer and watch us.

  The first time Carlos kneeled down in front of me under the spray from the shower head to blow me, I told him no way, those guys were watching and you could tell they were all excited by what was going on. But Carlos said they were too far away to see who we were, which was true, and anyway they were enjoying it, and why shouldn’t they? Which was also true, I guess, and I have to admit I sort of got into it, letting Carlos blow me while I was standing there with my hair hanging down in my face and water running all over me and looking over at those guys drinking beers and watching us. I thought, looking down at my dick sliding in and out of Carlos’s mouth, This is totally crazy, this is the craziest thing I’ve done yet. But then when I came, I remembered I was so into the feeling of it that I let out this Tarzan yell you could hear half a mile away. When those guys heard that, they started yelling, “Bravo,” and applauding like we were some kind of show, which I guess we were, and yelling “Encore, encore.” Then one of them yelled to Carlos, “Fuck him, fuck him!” and the other one did too, like a chant with their hands clapping, and before I knew it Carlos had me bent over and was fucking me like they told him to.

  That was the summer of 1980, and though I didn’t know it then, I guess it was a pretty wild summer for everybody; and nobody knew it at the time, but it was one of the last wild summers there was.

  If you ask me, Did it bother me to get fucked with those two guys watching me and jerking off on that other fire escape? The answer’s no. In fact, I could get pretty excited thinking about somebody wanting to jerk off while they were watching me. It made me feel like I did under those power lines that very first time, when I felt hooked into a million volts of power. And that was exactly what Carlos said when we finished and he was drying me off with a towel. “Powerful, powerful,” he kept saying, like he’d felt the exact same thing.

  I wondered why that could be—why fucking in full view of a couple of strangers, instead of making me feel clammy and squirmy, made me feel powerful instead.

  I guess we must’ve had sex out there, with those two guys watching, about fifteen times that summer, and though they’d call out for us to come over to their apartment so we could all get stoned and get down, we never did.

  In the afternoons, lots of times, we’d go up to Central Park and play soccer on this great big open meadow with these tall buildings rising up where Carlos said only people who were incredibly rich lived. I’d never been much on soccer or anything else really, but that summer I got to really like it. I got to really like running around and sweating and being out of breath. It didn’t feel so great when you were doing it, but afterward you felt peaceful and sort of bright inside, and that was great. Carlos, it turned out, was really big on soccer—he played when he was a kid, and in fact all his life, and he was very good at it.

  There was always this bunch of guys playing and you could just sort of join in with them—lots of Puerto Ricans especially. I’d never been with Puerto Ricans before. Carlos was friendly with them; it seemed like he knew a lot
of them and they were always slapping him on the back or catching his arm to talk to him in between plays or while we were resting.

  I used to imagine those rich people standing on their balconies and looking down at us playing soccer in that meadow in Central Park, and wishing they were down there with us instead of up there on their balconies, and I’d look up there and try to imagine how they were living their lives and stuff up there but I couldn’t really. It was like they were living in some totally different city than we were. Which was fine—we probably both liked it better that way.

  “So I didn’t know you were such a soccer freak,’’ I told Carlos one night after we’d been going up to the park for a few days. We were sitting up on the roof of the apartment watching the sunset.

  He sort of laughed. “There’s lots you don’t know about me.”

  Which was definitely true—sometimes it made me dizzy to think about all the things I didn’t know about him.

  “So maybe it’s time to change that,” I said.

  He just looked at me.

  “It was a suggestion,” I said.

  “No, you’re right,” he told me. “I may be a criminal, but I got nothing to hide.” Sometimes he went into this fake country drawl, which maybe was to imitate the way I talked or maybe not.

  “Come on, you’re not a criminal.”

  “You never know,” he said.

  “You wish,” I told him.

  “Yeah, I wish.”

  “So come on, give me the dope,” I insisted.

  “The dope?” He smiled, the way you smile when you think about things you haven’t thought about in a long time. “Maybe I’m not so different from you,” he said. “Did you ever think about that?”

  I hadn’t, because with a name like Carlos Reichart I figured there was no telling what his story was. I mean, where he came from and grew up and everything.

  “Would you believe Ann Arbor, Michigan?” he said when I asked where.

  I’d never heard of Ann Arbor, Michigan, but I told him, “I’ll believe anything. You know that. Go ahead, make up something interesting. You know I’m just some teenage kid who gets bored.”

  “As far as I can tell,” Carlos told me seriously, “you’ve got this very great capacity not to be bored.”

  It was one of those things he’d say every once in a while, like he wanted to throw me off-guard. And it always felt like that first swig of whisky, the way it lights you up from the inside out.

  “But I really was born in Ann Arbor,” he went on. “My father worked at the university. You could say he was a part-time janitor and a full-time alcoholic. It was terrible—back in the thirties he was a labor organizer, a real socialist with causes and ideals, but then after the war he just lost it. He got completely disillusioned with Russia and communism, and at the same time he was disgusted with things in this country, how everything seemed to be shutting down around him.” We had this bottle of scotch we were drinking from, and I handed it to him to take a swig. I guess he was in some kind of mood that night, because after he took a swig he started to talk some more.

  “My father drank himself to death,” Carlos said. “I remember coming home from school in the afternoons and he’d be sitting on the front porch with a half-gallon bottle of the cheapest gin you could buy. He’d get up in the morning and drink till he passed out, which was usually around three in the afternoon. On really bad days he’d be sitting there with a shotgun across his lap and the bottle at his feet, because on those days he’d get up in the morning and announce very calmly to my mother and my brother and me at the breakfast table, I’m going to kill myself today. Then my brother, Adrian, and I’d go off to school, and we wouldn’t know whether when we came home he’d have shot himself or our mother or both.

  “So we were always worried, and I remember one day, I must’ve been in the fourth or fifth grade, there was this thunderstorm in the spring, tornado weather, and I suddenly got so nervous, because I had this incredibly vivid feeling my father was going to shoot my mother and then himself and we were going to come home after the storm and find them there. I couldn’t keep still—I kept jumping up from my desk and pacing around the room. I’d walk over to the windows and watch the rain and how the wind was driving the rain down the street in sheets, and the teacher kept telling me to sit down and I would, but only for a minute, then I’d get this uncontrollable anxiety and I’d jump up again.

  “But he didn’t shoot himself that day. In fact, he never ended up shooting anybody—he died of drink. He had what the doctors called a weeping liver, from all the gin. One day his whole system just collapsed.

  “My mother found him dead in that chair on the front porch. It’s odd—for some reason he didn’t have his shotgun with him that day. I guess that morning he was feeling hopeful.

  “It was very difficult for my mother, because she’d been afraid of him but she also loved him—though she’d spent ten years wishing he’d go on and die if that’s what he wanted, because he made life so impossible for her. She cleaned houses to support us—the houses of her friends who felt sorry for her and gave her money. These were the friends she had back when she first got married and my father was sober and held a regular job and they were just like everybody else on the block.

  “They broke my father,” Carlos said. “They.” He laughed. “Something broke him. The world we live in, I guess. What do the Irish say? The world’ll break your heart. My mother was Irish. Is Irish, I should say. Hey, did I ever tell you how I got my name? Carlos.”

  “No, you never did,” I said

  Carlos was getting drunk. There was also this amazing sunset going on, though by now it was pretty much over—but earlier there were these big rays of sun shooting out from behind the clouds, only it wasn’t so much rays of sun as these sort of blue-gray shadow rays, and if you were in the right mood that sunset was just plain scary it was so out of control.

  “Not exactly what you’d expect some socialist Jew to name his kid, right? Carlos.” He said it the way I guess the Spanish say it, rolling it around in his mouth and then spitting it out like he was gargling. “But it was the Spanish Civil War,” he went on, “and my father was following it in the papers, magazines, any way he could—I think if he wasn’t married he’d have been in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in an instant. But he couldn’t be, though he had some friends from Detroit and New York who were, and they all got killed.”

  He stopped and it seemed like he was thinking of something. About everybody getting killed, maybe.

  “You were telling me who you got named for,” I reminded him.

  “Oh, right,” he said. “Carlos Huesca was a communist organizer in Barcelona, my father had met him once when he was in America attending some international labor meeting, and when Franco’s men killed him in ’36, it made a great impression on my father. So when I came along a couple weeks later he named me Carlos. I’m proud of my name. All my movies are made for Carlos Huesca, if you want to know the truth. That’s not completely true of course, but it’s partly true. See, I’m carrying around certain obligations on this planet.”

  The sunset was pretty much completely gone now—it was in tatters like it ripped itself apart, it couldn’t stand being so gorgeous. If we’d packed our scotch back downstairs and gone to bed right then, I’d have woken up next morning amazed at how much I’d gotten out of Carlos. But it turned out he wasn’t through, he was only revving up. He chugged some scotch and wiped his mouth and sort of leaned back so his head was resting in my lap—I was sitting crosslegged on a beach towel we kept on the roof since it was tarry and sort of gross up there.

  “I never told you about Adrian either, did I?” He had his eyes closed, and I looked down at his face, which from all the whisky looked peaceful.

  “That was your brother,” I said. I’d stopped drinking a while ago—a sip every now and then, but it was basically Carlos who was doing all the drinking.

  “Did I tell you about Adrian?” He opened his eyes and looked
at me.

  “You mentioned he was your brother,” I said. “That’s all.”

  “When did I mention that?” He closed his eyes again, and I noticed how he had a sort of mole or freckle of some kind in the corner of his left eyelid I never noticed before, which you’d’ve thought I would’ve.

  “Earlier,” I told him.

  “Mmm,” he said, which I couldn’t tell what that meant. He took a deep breath and said, “Adrian was two years older than me. When I was a kid I thought Adrian was the greatest.”

  “Where’s he now?”

  Carlos’s eyes were still closed.

  “He’s dead,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything because I didn’t think there was anything to say. This was my favorite part of sunset, after it was gone and the breeze from the river picked up a little and started to cool off the city. Carlos’s brother was dead, but I was happy right there at that moment. Happy and content.