Boys of Life

by Paul Russell

  What it did most of all was focus. I know some people will say, Tony, everything’s a muddle from here on out—but I didn’t feel that way, and I still don’t. For me it was like looking through the sharpest lens there is.

  The first thing I had to do, before anything else, was find a library. That’s what I mean by focus: the night before, I’d just been reeling, but now it was completely clear to me that I had to find out exactly what happened to Ted, and some newspaper somewhere was going to be able to tell me.

  I’ll spare you the details—only to say that it was the first time I’d been in a library since the one in New York where I used to study those pictures from the ghetto, so I didn’t have any idea how to go about finding what I wanted. But I ended up getting all the help I needed from this nice lady named Miss Kieling who had a big birthmark that covered half of one side of her face, which I guess is maybe why she became a librarian.

  She must’ve figured I was some homeless lunatic from the streets, considering the state of my clothes and mud in my hair and all, but it didn’t seem to faze her any. She’d heard about Boys of Life; she said there’d been a lot in the papers about it a few months back. Once she’d set me up in front of the microfilm machine, with the New York Times for the year 1987, it wasn’t all that hard to find what I needed. I scrolled down through those pages like they were some kind of time-lapse movie about the days passing and passing, and then before I knew it I’d stumbled on the first of a whole series of articles, starting at the beginning of April 1987 and going to the end of May, about Carlos’s trial, which was taking place in Hermillosa, Mexico.

  Here, for the record, is one of those articles—thanks again to Earl, who found it in the microfilm section in some library in Albany, and who, I keep telling him, should get some job as a detective. But he won’t do it—he likes being a prison guard too much. I guess he likes being around people like me.

  BIZARRE CASE IN MEXICO

  H E R M I L L O S A, Mexico, May 18—A Mexican court today acquitted the American film director Carlos Reichart of charges of kidnapping, assault and reckless endangerment in the 1986 death of Theodore Blair, a 23-year-old actor who had worked with Reichart on several films.

  The trial attracted considerable attention both in Mexico and in the United States, due in part to the lingering mystery surrounding the actual events of Blair’s death.

  Blair was admitted to the Hospital Santa Maria de Los Angeles on July 1, suffering from numerous lacerations and contusions which appeared, according to doctors, to have stemmed from some type of ritual mutilation. Also present were massive internal injuries.

  Contradictions

  After Blair’s death, Reichart surrendered himself to Sonoran authorities, claiming that he had held Blair captive for a week in which he repeatedly sodomized and tortured Blair. According to Reichart, Blair managed to escape his captivity when a door was left unlocked.

  Complicating the case, however, was a signed statement by Blair, deposited with Dr. Hermann Perez of the Hospital Santa Maria de Los Angeles shortly before Blair’s death, to the effect that Carlos Reichart was in no way responsible for the events which led to Blair’s death.

  Further confusing the situation is the fact that sources at Santa Maria de Los Angeles indicate Reichart accompanied Blair to the hospital on July I, and was with him frequently during the next several days. Blair died on July 9.

  At first reluctant to pursue the case, Mexican authorities reportedly decided to prosecute when Mr. Reichart’s past became more fully known to them. In I984 Reichart was charged by the state of New York with soliciting minors for the purposes of filming obscene acts. The charges were later dropped. In 1985 allegations surfaced that in 1980 Reichart had held two boys virtual prisoner for several days, and had forced them at gunpoint to perform sexual acts. These acts were allegedly filmed, though a search of Reichart’s Manhattan apartment failed to uncover any evidence of this. No charges were ever filed in connection with the allegations.

  Death by Method Acting?

  Reichart’s insistence on his own guilt was contradicted by testimony from various of his associates, several of whom remarked on Mr. Blair’s self-destructive propensities.

  The Mexican court ruled today that the evidence in Mr. Blair’s case indicated death by misadventure rather than any demonstrable criminal misconduct on Reichart’s part. The judge admonished Reichart, however, that “grave misjudgments of conduct” had been made by Reichart and his associates, and that many of his actions, while not necessarily illegal per se, nonetheless carry with them “a volatile moral taint that provokes disgust and outrage.”

  At 23, Theodore Blair had attracted considerable critical attention in three films by Carlos Reichart, Zouf!, An American Purgative, and Theo-Porn-Kolossal. His striking physical beauty combined with an air of romantic dissolution was compared to such figures as Nijinski, Sal Mineo and Antonin Artaud. Some critics considered him the most brilliant member of The Company, that extraordinary ensemble of actors Reichart assembled beginning in the late 1960s, which provided him with a seemingly endless pool of talent. The Company also included in its ranks such celebrated performers as Netta Abramowitz, the transvestite Verbena Gray, and the late Samuel Finckelsztajn.

  Extreme physical hardships, orchestrated mental duress and other techniques imposed on his actors served to create what Reichart called “a theater of reality”—a heightened method of improvisational acting.

  Controversial Career

  Reichart, 49, self-proclaimed “anarchist, theologian and pornographer,” is the director of a number of critically acclaimed films including Mother Chicago, Ur, The Only Bitterness of Anna, and Creeping Bent. These lively, hallucinatory films have often shocked even sophisticated audiences, especially Reichart’s more recent work. His 1987 film, Theo-Porn-Kolossal, was named by the New York Film Critics Circle as “perhaps the most important independent film of the last decade.” The film’s explicit homoerotic and sadomasochistic content, however, caused protest at screenings in several American cities.

  In 1984 Reichart was awarded a special medal for lifetime achievement at the Barcelona Film Festival in Spain.

  It’s funny how you can get used to something. Maybe it was because I was still totally exhausted and in some kind of shock from the night before, but reading those articles I felt calm, like I was reading something that took place a long time ago. You probably want me to say I was howling—but I wasn’t. I guess somewhere in the night this door just shut on Ted, and I knew he was gone. I wasn’t any more upset about him being dead than I’d be about Abraham Lincoln, or Tom Lee for that matter—anybody who’d been dead a hundred or a thousand years. It was just this fact, like a river’s a fact, or a mountain.

  When I got back to the house, it was about noon. Monica’s car wasn’t there—and it was only then, not seeing her car in the driveway where I expected it to be, that I realized I hadn’t thought of her once since everything started to come down. On the kitchen table there was this note saying she was at her parents, please call. It said she was worried sick.

  I know I should’ve called—because as it turns out, in the year since then I’ve only talked with her through her lawyer, and I understand why she feels that way. But that morning—what was I going to say? That the Tony she thought she knew was just this thing pasted over some other Tony, and now it’s come unglued? That this other Tony had things he needed to do that didn’t have anything to do with anything she could know about? Nothing I could say to her would even begin to make any sense.

  So instead I took this long hot shower. It felt really good, and I just stood there in that water luxuriating for a while, getting the soreness out of my body from the night before. That same electric focus still had me in its grip. I put on some clean jeans, and a black T-shirt, and I reached way back in the back of the closet and pulled out those snakeskin boots Carlos got for me once, back in some other life.

  ONE THING I KEPT THINKING ABOUT, ALL THE WAY to New Yor
k: one little detail that was in that newspaper article I read, the part where it talked about the famous members of The Company over the years, and the words “the transvestite Verbena Gray” lost in there amidst everything else.

  You know how you focus on one single thing to keep from thinking about everything else? I kept turning that one thing over and over in my head, saying to myself, How could I not have known that? After all those years, all those afternoons I spent hanging out with her in her apartment, and eating her black bean soup and listening to her talk about conjure and star charts—how could I not have known? And if I missed something so obvious as that, then what else had I gone and missed along the way?

  Maybe it wasn’t true, what the article said. And if that wasn’t true, then the rest of what it said about other things wasn’t true either—but I knew that wasn’t the case, and that all of it must be true. And I knew that there must’ve been lots that went on right under my nose, all along, and I never knew about it. Most of the things I thought I’d known about those people, I probably was wrong about in one way or another. I should just tell you that, for the record.

  THE NEIGHBORHOOD WAS CHANGED. FIVE YEARS had passed since I was in the alphabets last, and it wasn’t so rundown anymore. There were these fancy-looking restaurants stuck in between the slums, and lots of the people walking on the streets were the kinds of people who, you can just tell by looking, know they’re hot stuff. The kinds of people I always hated about New York.

  It was sad to see, especially because being away so long I could look at those people and see what they couldn’t—that they were all going around putting on an attitude because they were scared to death of AIDS, and some of them even had it in their bodies though they didn’t know that yet. But they were carrying it around, it was eating away at them and all the time these big posters on the walls of buildings telling them SILENCE = DEATH, and they couldn’t hear it. I knew Carlos must’ve gone wild when he first saw those posters, since that was his whole life, SILENCE = DEATH.

  Carlos’s building was about the only one on his whole block that looked exactly the same—like everything that’d happened had happened around it but couldn’t touch that building. The instant I caught sight of it I knew Carlos had to still be living there. It was like some force of his personality was protecting that building from change. I wondered if he was still showering out on the fire escape in the summers—only now it was probably in full view of the people eating at some new restaurant garden. But he still wouldn’t care. I had this sudden picture in my head of Carlos standing on the roof of the building pissing down on them while they ate their fancy meals and yelling, “Eat the rich!”

  When I got to the top of the stairs—still piss-smelling after all these years—I waited there at the door, which, if Carlos was still living there, I knew would be unlocked. There’d never been any doorhandle on it, and still wasn’t. When I’d caught my breath, I just pushed and the door swung open like it always used to.

  Carlos was standing at the front windows with his back to me.

  “It’s funny,” he said, almost like he was talking to himself. He didn’t turn around, but I knew he was talking to me. “I saw you coming. I saw you walking up the street. I don’t know why I walked to the window just then, but I did. And I saw you coming.”

  He turned around.

  “So how’re you doing, Tony?”

  It took me totally off-guard, his saying that. Maybe he did see me, and maybe he didn’t. With Carlos you just never knew. But already, like always, he had all the advantage.

  I noticed somebody’d taken the plastic down off those windows, and it was true—you could see out them like you never could all the time I lived there. They were open wide and a breeze was coming through.

  I didn’t say anything—I just stood there looking at him, which must’ve made him nervous. He grinned that grin of his that flashed and then went sad, and held his hands out, palms up—like he was showing me he didn’t have anything to offer.

  “I had to come,” I finally said.

  “I knew you would,” he told me, “sooner or later. I’m glad you did.”

  What came next just burst out of him. “Tony, Tony, Tony,” he said. “Oh, it’s good to see you.” I think it was the most sincere I ever heard Carlos in all my years. And I completely believed him—not that it was going to make any difference. But I still believe he was happier to see me right then than he’d ever been to see anybody in his whole life.

  And I was happy to see him too. I had this insane idea that now that I was with him again, everything was going to be okay—somehow Ted would have to be still safe and alive and living back in Owen, Kentucky, where nobody had ever heard of Carlos Reichart. And as for me, Carlos and I were going to pick up right where we left off years ago like nothing had ever happened to make things go wrong.

  “Can’t we get out of this apartment?” he asked, like it was suddenly this idea he had. “The heat’s killing me.”

  “Okay,” I told him. “We should walk.” I’d always hated that apartment, and to be there again brought back all those winter days I used to sit there feeling trapped—by the city outside the windows, and by Sammy, and all that whisky I used to drink every day. The streets were where I’d always escaped to. Out there, I felt in some kind of control again—and I think Carlos knew that.

  You know how murderers claim they don’t remember anything? Well, I remember everything. I remember every word we said that night, the whole time we were walking up Broadway toward Central Park, and then when we were in the park, and everything else. You might expect me to say I wish I didn’t remember it—but I don’t say that. It’s important to me to be able to remember it. Not because it makes me feel any better, or any worse either, but just because I think you have to look at life whatever it looks like, and you can’t ever look away from it because when you start to do that, you start to die. Carlos knew that—it was the one terrible lesson he taught—and I learned it from him. Whatever you might think about that, it’s something nobody that ever learned it can go and unlearn. And so I remember everything.

  Neither of us even knew where to start. I’d rehearsed all this in my head about a thousand times on the drive up from Tennessee, but of course all that just disappeared once I was back in Carlos’s presence. He was older, I could tell—he’d always seemed younger than somebody in his forties, more like somebody who was thirty, but now that he was fifty his age had sort of caught up with him all at once. Plus he’d lost weight, not that he ever had that much extra to lose. But it made his face look older.

  It took a while for us to figure out what to say. He was the one that finally got it started, of course.

  “Sammy passed away from us,” he said. It was as good a starting place as any.

  “I know,” I said. “But tell me about it anyway.”

  “Well, it was a couple of years ago. He and Seth went up to Poughkeepsie to visit this friend. They took the train, and when they got to the station in Poughkeepsie Sammy said he was very tired and could he sit down and rest? So he sat down on a bench in the waiting room, and Seth went out to get a taxicab, and when he came back Sammy was lying down on the bench. Seth tried to wake him up but he couldn’t.”

  I knew that train station—I’d been in and out of it a lot when we were filming Creeping Bent up on the Hudson, back in the fall of 1982. I could see the benches where Sammy would’ve laid down, and the high ceiling and grimy red brick—it was this big empty depressing room. So that was the last thing he saw, after everything else he’d seen in his life. I felt sorry for Sammy, but I also felt—I don’t know why—glad for him that he was finally gone off this planet. Even though he loved being alive, I think he was probably glad too—not to have to go through being alive anymore.

  We’d turned onto Broadway and were walking uptown. It was a warm night, lots of people were out, and it was great to be back in the city after all those years.

  “He said he wrote you,” Carlos said. At first
I thought he was still talking about Sammy.

  “After he got your card he wrote you a letter.” Neither of us broke our stride even for an instant. We just kept on walking up Broadway. “But you never answered back,” Carlos said.

  “I never got any letters,” I told him. I remembered how I waited for Ted to write me back after I sent him that postcard all those years ago, but he never did, and I finally gave up waiting and decided the card never got to him. I also remembered how happy I’d been to write Ted and tell him I was in this movie, and how I was going to be famous. I remember actually believing that—that I was going to be famous because I’d been in that movie.

  Carlos shrugged. “Nobody ever delivers any mail to that apartment,” he said. “It’s why the rent’s so cheap. Even the postman’s on drugs. He probably threw those letters in the trash can. But it’s better now. You noticed, didn’t you—how it’s all better now? Gentrified. I could make a fortune going co-op on that dump.” He grinned his Carlos grin, and neither of us knew it but that was the last time he’d ever grin like that.

  “I’d like to think I’ve been truthful,” he said abruptly.

  “You were always truthful with me,” I told him, and I meant it.

  “Even when I was being a monster,” he said, “I was a truthful monster.”

  “Maybe,” I told him. I thought about it. “Definitely,” I had to say. “Even when you were being a monster—which a lot of the time you were. But you know that.”

  Three fire trucks went by us, one after the other, and then an ambulance. Somewhere people were burning up but here we were walking up Broadway toward Central Park and the night was muggy even though it was the end of September, tail-end of the hottest summer in years.

  “Of course I know it,” Carlos said. “I’ve always known it. Anybody who tries to be truthful in this country gets turned into some kind of monster. That’s why I let you go. I didn’t want to just shoo you away, because then you’d come back. I wanted you to go for good, which meant I wanted you to learn that you wanted to go away. Which I think you did learn, because you went.”