Great Kisser (10 page)

“What was that?” I asked him.

“I'm not sure,” Julius said. “I guess they must have been large rats. We had salesmen in those days who sold bedsheets on the never-never plan: they gave them to you and you paid them later.

“Anyway,” Julius said, rising from the bench, “It's been lovely, my
kind
. But now I have a meeting with Barney Lovelace, the producer, in thirty minutes. I think this is gonna do it. I'm going to present him with a script idea that can be made for only one million.”

“What's it about?” I asked.

Julius bristled at me. “What difference does that make? I don't know yet.” He dug his cane into the sand and moved on.

At least Julius didn't clasp his hands together in a prayerful motion and bow his head when saying goodbye to me like some of the younger producers did.

And then Julius was retiring to live with his son in San Diego. I saw him two more times on the Santa Monica promenade. I was with a friend, and did not stop. Julius did not see me. The first time I saw him, he was walking across the street from me toward a building entrance. He stopped, whirled around in a circle, raised his fists and shook them at the sky. He seemed to be shouting something, but I only saw the violent thrust of his fists.

The second time was one of those sunny Sundays when the promenade is ringing with the laughter and music of hundreds of young lovers, children, musicians, and characters like the man in the bowler hat and roller skates who dances to music in behalf of the Christian Children's Crusade. It was the kind of day so ineffably beautiful it induced a sadness about how to embrace it before it was gone.

I recognized his familiar stance out of the corner of my eye before I saw his face. Julius was standing in the doorway of Woolworth's and he was almost invisible in the hot sun. He was a shrivelled old man with a baseball cap, his arms folded in front of him. His head jutted forward. He was hungrily watching the spectacle through his one good eye, especially two babies in a carriage. I knew how much he loved children.

I kept walking. Julius: watching with bitterness, love, sorrow, loneliness and indomitable strength the carnival of life. Julius had been part of the carnival for a long time, unlike my father, unlike myself.

I remember the few days with Julius when, again and again, I was surprised by beauty.

Dean Martin died on Christmas night, 1998. Of emphysema. They thought it was drink, but he couldn't go on stage in Las Vegas anymore and cough up phelgm every two minutes.

He'd become a ghost around L.A., drinking by himself at Dan Tana's, eating at Hamburger Hamlet or La Famiglia, putting his false teeth on the table. The tabloids ran a picture of him stumbling at the curb, rescued by a neanderthal bodyguard. I always knew that he had stopped wanting to live and be funny when his son died in the plane accident.

I sat alone before the TV at the empty graduate center in Vancouver watching Dean every Thursday night, including Christmas Eve when he and Frank clowned around together. A shining TV light in the cold darkness. When I wanted to shoot my head off. This was before I met Karen.

Dean, gliding through life, so effortless, so much fun, so warm, the handsomest, funniest man in the world and not mean like Frank. I watched him with the women, Judy Garland, Ann-Margaret, how they cuddled up to him and how he protected them. Dean, take me by the hand and show me how to get laid. How to glide. How not to fall apart when my shoes pinch or a waiter ignores me. Or a pretty woman looks at me with contempt.

I had wanted to walk up to him in L.A. to thank him for keeping me going, or maybe just sit with him and keep him company. I was afraid he would stare blankly at me.

The Italian emigrant shoemaker to the stars, Pasquale diFabrizio, had a special feeling for him. “When I came to this country,” he told me, “Dean had me make him fifteen pairs of velvet slippers. I knew he didn't need so many. He did it to help me out.”

Dean was buried a couple of blocks from my house in L.A. beside his parents, Guy and Angela Crocetti, in an alcove called the Sanctuary of Peace. I went there and talked to him, and I wept and kissed his gravestone. This was the moment when a woman's breasts, her hair down to her waist, became more important to me than the book I was reading. And I told him how much I wanted to kiss now, to give. I was not the lonely little fuck I had been, but it was so late and I had so little time.

I walked to Robert Greenberg's house in Venice on a sunlit day in 2001, expecting to find a beachfront condo. But it wasn't. It was a plain apartment house, a little raggedy. I even expected to see him lounging on the patio in shades reading
Variety
or
The Nation
, a blonde on his lap, laughing that cackling laugh. I found his name on the mailbox, and another unknown name: Stein, and I quickly walked away, afraid he might see me.

This is fifteen years we're talking about, since I last saw him. Afraid Bob would look at me with that soulful gaze that shot through me, size up the situation in a second: same hang-ups, same old shit.

I walked on the boardwalk alongside the beach. “Michael!” Bob whizzed up to me on his bicycle, a little boy perched on his back seat. I acted surprised.

He held out his hand. I looked at him, moved forward and embraced him.

Hello, my brother.

“Do you live here?” I said.

“Yeah. This is Adam,” he said, and I touched the cheek of his child.

He was the same, his beard whiter but his shoulders broader. He was still short but still looked tall.

“I've been remarried seven and a half years. Did you ever meet Judy Stein?” Ah.

“No,” I said. “You look great. Been working out.”

“Gotta stay alive.”

A young man in a clown outfit with a red bulbous nose walked up to Bob and Adam, and without a word, blew up a balloon, handed it to Adam and walked away.

No comment from Bob. This was the Venice Beach, the sun was bright, there was laughter everywhere, the psychics sat in their booths, and everyone ate ice cream.

“Are you living here?” he said.

“Yeah. I just got here. Eight months ago,” I lied. “Actually a year.” It was six years. Even my Jazz Bakery T-shirt said 1996. Schmucko. “Breaking into the industry,” I said. “How you doing?”

“Okay,” he said. “I've got a mini-series lined up.”

We exchanged cards, waved. I watch my old friend bike away, and thought: I'm still lying to him after all these years.

And he still forgives me.

I fucked him good, although I did not realize it at the time. After he left for Santa Monica, I'd published a story in 1985 about how he sold out, the leftie who gazed soulfully at bank buildings in the Santa Monica moonlight. I wrote about how we had struggled in the Village, about the canvas bag, how he encouraged my writing, and about his wedding. And how Bob, his teeth rotting, and Linda thumbed their way to L.A.

So when he began to make it in L.A. as a director, I let him have it. He was a good person, I wrote, but not good enough. He liked money. He was in too much of a hurry and didn't learn his craft (he had volunteered this insight into himself; I just stole it). And I wrote about visiting him in Santa Monica and of the sounds I heard in the next room of Bob and Linda doing birth exercises, laughing, kissing, laughing, kissing.

And how I silently wept.

I felt rage against him for being all that I wanted to be: a loving person, a father, husband and lover. A man.

And years after I got back to New York I wrote the story. In some ways Bob comes off looking much better than you as a person, a literary critic told me then. Well yes. Of course. I balanced it. I kept an objective voice. That way I sliced him up better.

XII: Home

On one of my last days in L.A., a producer I was speaking to on the phone was having difficulty reeling out a coherent sentence to me. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I had a 90-minute massage yesterday. Since then I've been unable to think clearly or speak.”

I had gone to L.A. to live, and spent all my years there missing New York. If a movie was based in New York, I would skip the plot and peek behind the actors to gaze at Central Park, at the streets, the restaurants, the shops, the skyline. It was time to go home. To Manhattan. To the Brooklyn Bridge, St. Marks in the Bouwerie, Arturo's, Forlini's, Central Park, the New York Public Library, The Writers Room, Cooper Union, Rao's, the Ensemble Studio Theater, New Dramatists, Judson Memorial Church, Gino's, the New York Society Library, the Amato Opera on the Bowery, the Strand Bookstore, the Cherry Lane Theater, Gotham Book Mart, Zabar's, the Corner Bistro, Arthur's on Barrow Street, the Pink Teacup, Village Cigars on Sheridan Square, the Hungarian pastry shop on 113th Street and Amsterdam, to every street that had associations for me of a world I would never cease to love. The Peacock Cafe on Greenwich Avenue, the Blue Mill Tavern on Commerce, the Orchidia Restaurant, the Negro Ensemble Theater on Second Avenue and the decaying Automats were gone, but there were new oases of beauty and sanity too: poetry reading at the Cornelia Street Cafe, The Housing Works Book Store, the reborn Thalia, the subway murals at every subway station painted by children and adults, the revivified Grand Central Station. New York, more beautiful than I had ever known it. The city as I had dreamed about it since I was a kid.

I still wandered in the footsteps of those who were great, the streets of Brooklyn, under the bridge where Carson McCullers and Thomas Wolfe and Harvey Shapiro and Capote and Louis Sheaffer lived. I stood outside the brownstone on Montague Terrace where Thomas Wolfe wrote his magnificently misconceived
Of Time
and
The River
—as imperfect as
Look Homeward, Angel
was perfect—and Louis Sheaffer wrote of O'Neill, and the brownstone where Auden wrote “August, 1939.” And the smells of the bakeries on Court Street and the walk across the bridge, looking down into the harbor and the National Cold Storage Company. I was mesmerized by what was beautiful; the Butler Library at Columbia, the reading room of the New York Public Library, the brownstone on Sugar Hill in Harlem where Langston Hughes had lived. I had annoyed Ralph Ellison with endless letters and kissed the copies of
Invisible Man
and
Call It Sleep
and
In Our Time
and
The Williamsburg Trilogy
and
Death of a Salesman
. I was still my own worst enemy and best friend.

On my first week back in New York, Karen and I sat two seats away from an elderly woman in the Angelika Cinema. We were about to watch
Sidewalks of New York
.

Before the movie started, the woman turned to me and said, “Would you tap me if I fall asleep?” I said I would.

During the course of the movie, I must have glanced her way at least twenty times (perhaps five times at Karen), and felt a twinge of resentment that this stranger was taking my attention away from the film. Her sideways, slanting posture made it difficult to determine, in the darkness, if she were awake or not. To tap or not to tap? But I did tap her once. At the end of the film I said goodnight and she thanked me and gave me a great smile.

Such a confession of vulnerability, the genuine eccentricity of it, an elderly person not afraid to reach out to be touched, and being touched: not likely at the Sunset 5 next to Crunch. Nine years older now, I know we are all in this together.

A few days later I saw the girls on the subway. There were eight of them, beautiful Latina girls of 18 or 19, in bloom. They cascaded into the subway car like trilling birds. They were celebrating one of the girls' birthdays, and they rapped together and sang out in unison: “Girls! Girls! Girls! Girls!” But mostly I could not understand a word of what they said or sang, they were so noisy and they were laughing and chattering at once. Their smiles, their joy and energy was so infectious, they were so devoid of malice, that I grinned at them. They spotted a tired, wasted black man of thirty in the corner of the car and they called to him, “What shall we sing to you?” He looked at them; they seemed to have woken him up or he had wandered into a dream. He was shaking his head and grinning. “What do you like? We'll sing whatever you request. We like you.” And they sang, “I think I want you baby, I think I want you too, I think I love you baby, I think I love you too.” And he bobbed his head, smiling, not quite believing it. Then he got into it.

When I got to my stop, I got up to leave. They called out to me, “You like us! We like you.” I waved.

I remembered the start of my life, when blacks and Latinos bowed their heads on the subway. I thought of Lucy, the black maid who came to clean our apartment once a week. Lucy spoke in the slurred, whining singsong cadence, the forced Aunt Jemima merriment, of the Negro in those days, the half-voice that said, “I am of no consequence whatsoever.” I remember Lucy entering the apartment and saying, “Tha's old Lucy, that's me right heah … hee hee.” My mother kept a separate dish to feed her, so that our food would be kept pure. Lucy sat in a corner eating. Sometimes, during the week, my mother would forget which dish it was, and have a fit. She gave Lucy our castoff clothes.

All those first days of my return to Manhattan were freezing after sunny California, with snow and piercing wind and cold rain. Each day I walked across the shining necklace of the Brooklyn Bridge, the icy winds lashing against my face, wondering why I did not feel the cold. I was filled with an inner warmth that seemed to lift me, as if I was in a carriage in a bitter storm.

Like that woman in the theater, I was home.

XIII: Family

I once asked a therapist why Italians had been so kind and supportive to me through my life. “Why shouldn't they be?” he sighed. “You love them so much.”

On New Year's Eve 2002, after a year back in Manhattan, I the lonely Jew sat with Karen at Vinnie's, an Italian bistro in the Village that I had adopted as family, as close to family as I was going to get. I had come to love this place. Karen and I had gotten to know Vinnie himself, who was elderly and frail, in his brown leather vest. He frequently sat with us. Gradually he had come to realize how much I loved his place, and then, when I wrote about the restaurant, he realized I was a writer. “I thought you were the guy who delivered the pizza,” he said. He had begun to paint, and showed us his latest painting. It was like primitive art, a drawing of Vinnie's itself. It was shaped like a pizza, with pepperoni, onions, black olives, anchovies and peppers on the edges. Vinnie had painted the deep-red-awninged entrance of the restaurant, the windows with plants, the armless Mona Lisa sculpture, and fancifully lodged inside the large entrance was a smaller version of the restaurant: a little Vinnie's within the bigger Vinnie's. A moon hovered overhead. The restaurant was selling it for a hundred dollars, and Donna, Vinnie's daughter, whispered to us she had secretly bought several of them to make her father feel his painting was popular.