Great Kisser (15 page)

The head of the department, Bart Stone, came in as Montague was licking his fingers. Bart always looked as if he had just come off the golf course, with his white seersucker jacket, white shoes, white hair, ruddy pink complexion and American flag lapel. He sucked on a candy and walked in a jerk-like way. Bart xeroxed every document six times, lest it be lost. “Gaps, there are gaps,” he said, gritting his teeth and sniffing the air ominously.

His fists were clenched. “Montague, you have clipped only one story today. And it's about a bar mitzvah. What about civil rights, politics, anti-Semitism, the Middle East, Congress? Montague, be reasonable.”

Montague tried to stand up. “Those animals on the twenty-fourth floor … sons of bitches … fascists … memo … beast of burden …” He could hardly speak.

Bart was turning beet red. “Montague, what are you talking about?”

“They're like trained dogs. The masses are asses. I hate them … I …” Montague looked around wildly, picked up his chair, and threw it against the wall.

Bart bounded backwards. He held up a hand. He was really a pussycat. “Calm down, Montague. You're upsetting yourself.”

“Kipp can stick those files up his ass, that opportunist.”

“My dear Montague,” said Bart, “You're dwelling in the past. Please calm yourself.”

He closed the door gently.

“That racist,” said Montague. “I wouldn't care if the South African blacks slit the throats of the whites indiscriminately. It would give me great satisfaction. They're all racists here.”

In the afternoon, when Montague returned from having his lemon in the cafeteria, he was in a much better mood. He gazed at the hole his chair had made in the wall. “Oh dear,” he said with a mischievous look.

He reminisced about the Communists in Manhattan in the 1940s: “In those days, they were heavily into folk songs. Women with Slavic blouses, closely cropped hair and earrings would sing on the third floor of not very durable buildings on the Lower East Side. Those songs were very sad, so those who listened to them sat with their faces drooping for hours. And they had tiny folk song hang-outs in the Village, where most of the women were named ‘Manya.' They had poetry readings too.”

“I went to poetry readings later,” I said. “In the 1960s at the Nine Arts Coffee Gallery on Ninth Avenue and Forty-Third—Ray Bremser, Corso, Ginsberg—and on the Gansevoort pier in the Village. There was a terrible poet, Risa Lactate, who always read at these arty things, and seemed to be in charge of them.”

“I knew Risa Lactate,” Montague said.

“You did?” I said, surprised that our lives had intersected.

Holding his bottles of paste and blue in the air, Montague said, “Well you see, Michael, even though you're much younger than I, our paths have crossed. I was never a creative person, but I knew them. Dancers. Poets. Musicians. I was on the periphery. I would sit in the Waldorf Cafeteria off Sheridan Square where Maxwell Bodenheim hung out with his wife. They would throw knives at each other. There was a girl there named Sheila Stern. She was six foot five and had a receding hairline. She wore clothes covering her arms and every part of her body.”

And then I realized that Montague really liked me. And, of course, I liked him. My only fear was that Montague would kill me.

IV

“When my father's coffin went into the ground,” Montague said the next afternoon, “to me it was like Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. I hated him. I didn't like him and he didn't like me. When I was born, he didn't bother to come to the hospital.

“He would watch boxing matches. It was a horror. I was five, and hid under a chair. When I was nine, I had a severe case of scarlet fever and had to stay in bed. My leg muscles stopped functioning. I had no physical activity for three years. When the boys had gym, I sat with the girls in spelling. I took violin, Yiddish and Hebrew lessons. In gym, I was always the last one to be chosen for the team.

“I would stick out my pinkie when I wrote and my father couldn't stand it. He'd crack me over the head. My face swelled up. He'd start drinking at eleven in the morning and be sloshed by 3
P.M.
He went off with an Aryan woman for five years.

“My father,” Montague continued, “liked Jews who looked like goyim. He'd say, ‘Be a Jew in the home and a man on the street.' He was light and had red hair. He went hat in hand to the factories. The WASPs made fun of him. He was at their mercy. It was revolting. He bought golf clubs and had no interest in golf; he joined the Masons.

“I came down with rheumatism at an early age, and had to come home for a while. My father packed up and left the house. He held the purse strings. He thwarted me in every way.

“Even in the hospital when he was sick, he didn't want the Yiddish newspaper on top of the file. He said, ‘Don't you know the nurses are Polish?' He had tubes in his mouth; he was choking and gasping for breath. He said to the nurse, ‘You dirty whore, can't you see I'm dying?'”

Chaim, the thirty-five year old Chasid and head xeroxer, with his huge stomach rivaling Montague's, stuck his head through the door. “How's your mother, Montague?”

“Very well, thank you, Chaim,” Montague purred, folding his arms and smiling. When the door shut, he muttered, “Stick your Talmud up your ass. I can't stand him. He's a manipulative little worm. I don't like the Jewish religion. It's all a crock of shit. I hate ‘hat-wearers.' I'm very intolerant, you know.

“Chaim had an operation last year for his impotence. He asked us to pray for him. His wife would call up and say, ‘After ten years, I'm still a virgin.' She beat him up.”

Montague stripped a banana, looked at it and smiled, and took a bite. He and I glanced up as we heard Chaim cheering a baseball score outside the door. “Savage,” Montague said. “I'd rather kill a child than have him play baseball.”

On the way out that night, I saw Chaim, alone, in the office. He had plunged his face down against a table holding a hand mirror, and was snipping his hair with scissors and listening to wolf calls on his cassette.

V

Montague called Leo Starch “The Head Fascist.” Leo had a stern, sour and very critical look and a bald head, he held himself very straight, and he compiled dossiers on left-wing and right-wing groups whose innocent sounding names (“Pigeons for Democracy,” “Angels of World Unity”) endeared them to Montague. Leo was a former Socialist Party activist who had once been photographed by the
New York Times
being carried out by police when he staged a sit-down during a civil rights demonstration. He was one of the few at Jewish Punchers of intellectual weight, who had wound up there because their credentials were too spotty for establishment organizations. Jewish Punchers took almost anybody.

When Leo drank too much, he subjected Montague to interrogations, the point of which were how little Montague was supposed to know about the subject at hand.

Leo was eloquent in his awkwardness. At staff meetings, he would rise to make a point. Stumbling and stammering, even stuttering in his passion, blood rushing to his face, he looked like he would explode in a torrent of incoherence. Three-quarters of the way to the end, he would suddenly marshal his argument and his words came tumbling out in a froth, painful, trembling, sparkling, an effort of will, witty and funny and coherent. He gave birth each time. I began to root for him, that he would make it to the point when he began to sing, and I found his struggle a little thrilling.

Leo was one of the many lonely womanless men at Jewish Punchers. He invited me over to his bachelor pad and shared with me his nightly pre-dinner ritual: the sip of vodka from the freezer, the cold herring from the fridge: ah! he downed it. Once, at a staff weekend in the Catskills, I watched him dancing with a pretty woman. Leo was courtly and smiling and agile.

He had emphysema, and it was taking over his life. Each breath was a struggle and he carried the inhaler with him. He coughed and spat into a handkerchief, he gasped for breath, and struggled to keep going.

I had a dream about him. In the dream, Leo wasn't sick or dying. He was living in a brownstone on Washington Square Park and the lights were twin kling there at sunset as the young lovers sat in the square. Leo was having a salon of the bright and beautiful at his home (or were they old Socialists with baseball caps and canes?) to discuss the social and political ideas and issues he loved.

VI

Montague spoke Hebrew, Yiddish, Greek, Italian and Russian in that soft, syrupy, mellifluous voice of his that was almost a whisper. After World War Two, I was astonished to learn, he had served in the Haganah, the Jewish underground, in Rome in 1946. He had navigated ships.

On his first trip to Israel by boat, Montague said, “If you can imagine a boatload of passengers crying … Haifa was all white. I couldn't eat. People just stared and cried. There was pandemonium when we got off the boat. When we reached our kibbutz, I didn't want anyone to speak to me. I just wanted to look. My old friends who'd come before me greeted me. We sat by the fire and sang. I stayed up all night.”

Now Montague was a member of the Harry Reems Defense Committee, helping out on weekends at the porn star's office on Charles Street. Montague hated Israel now and loved all Palestinians. In all of New York, Montague seemed to encounter kindness and sweetness mainly among the Palestinian grocers and restaurant owners he patronized. “I hand them knives,” he told me, “and tell them: ‘Please. Please cut me. I deserve it, for all that the Jews have done to you.' And do you know—” Montague asked this question in wonderment—“They hand me back the knives without a word?”

After a pause, Montague said, “What hurt me was that my father tried to be an American. I brought him the Yiddish
Forward
and he hid it in the
New York Times
. A Jew is always a special individual. We lived through a Holocaust and one out of three of us was killed. I believe the New Testament and the Koran are responsible for
Mein Kampf.”

The phone rang. Montague whispered into it at his daintiest: “I want you to sit on my right hand. Is that the kind of thing you kiss me? A little sick kiss?”

The next morning, Montague looked at me and said, “My grandmother was a soothsayer. She was known as the witch. She told fortunes, and was a midwife. She delivered many children. She kept a sharp carrot in holy water for the Christians. And I'm the product of incest. My parents were first cousins. That's why I'm a little weird.

“I wore knickers and high argyle stockings as a boy. I was the only one with stockings. I felt so ashamed. I gave most away to the other boys. My mother saw they were gone and she pinched me. A few days later, on my eighth birthday, I wandered into a Father Divine church. There were tambourines and I started dancing. I forgot about my birthday. I put on a button that said, ‘Father Divine is God.' My mother found me and made me give back the button. I thought it was chic.”

Chaim came in with some papers for Montague. “You're very kind to think of me, Chaim,” Montague said. When Chaim left, Montague said, “Animal. Filthy fascist dog. He pisses and shits with God. I wish he would choke himself on his tallus.”

I placed my hands against the side of the desk to keep from falling over the precipice, pushed over the precipice of Montague's rage. When would that rage turn on me?

Montague's fury at the new file baskets mounted each day. He threatened to urinate on them.

He went to the movies almost every day. “
Matador
is my current favorite,” he said. “It's about a young man in Spain who's very religious. He wears a metal brace against his penis to keep it down. He goes crazy over the pretty girl next door. He can't stand it; he follows her down the street. He throws her against a car, takes out his penis and fucks her. There's a trial. The girl testifies, ‘He didn't fuck me. He came between my legs.'” Montague's face was dark red with laughter; his chins were shaking. “Her mother got upset.” Now Montague was hysterical, heaving; he struggled to get the words out, his face was a beet. “The mother says, ‘You shouldn't say ‘come.' You should say ‘ejaculate.'”

On Friday morning, there was a knock at the door. “It's only me,” Montague said as usual, entering. He put his overcoat on the rack and sat down.

Leo Starch walked in and smiled. Suddenly, inexplicably, he and Montague were friends. They seemed to like each other's hostility. They were exchanging stories. “When I was a kid in Brownsville, which we pronounced Brunsville,” Leo began, addressing Montague, “my brother Steve had eczema. My mother had taken him to several clinics. No one could help us. But one afternoon the seltzer man came. He'd bring a case of six bottles, like the milkman. Once a week. You'd keep the bottles on the fire escape to keep them cold. He came and saw my brother with the eczema and said, ‘I have a cure for that.' My mother said, ‘So what's the cure?' The seltzer man said, ‘I'll bring you a bottle of stuff'—that's the word he used, ‘stuff'—‘the next time I come. It'll cost you a dollar.' So my mother took a chance. He came, he brought a bottle of some kind of stuff, liquid stuff. It worked like a charm.”

Montague smiled. “He didn't say what it was, where he got it?”

“No, it was a secret. Secret formula.”

Montague felt this was a sufficient answer. “Arnold Wolin is the most masculine person in this office,” he said suddenly. Arnold was twenty-eight, paper thin, a stooped cutter and paster with a thin beard and an intelligence deficit. He shuffled around the office in his slippers. “He won't live long,” Montague said. “He had a colostomy. I admire him. A lot of people I know in that position would give up. Before he goes to the toilet he has to loosen his shoes. I don't know why.

“By 3
P.M.
Arnold finishes cutting and pasting, and gives me the articles to categorize. He can't think. He has no curiosity. He doesn't know where countries are. He stands on the subway all the way back to Brooklyn. He lives near me. He paints. He writes music. He plays instruments. He's still paying off his wedding from three years ago. He's sexy; he and his wife talk on the phone and it's very romantic. He's very appreciative of women.