Great Kisser (3 page)

Bart Stevens never forgave me for that story. Whenever he saw me, he said almost the same words, no matter who was in the room: “That story—Michael—come clean! It's just not credible! Are you trying to tell me that a little guy like you fucked that big black maid? Who do you think you're kidding?”

“She was petite, that's what I wrote, Bart, and I didn't fuck her.”

“I mean, come off it. I wasn't born yesterday. Who do you think you are anyway?”

Mort Zager, the American on the faculty, was a mousy little Jewish guy with a sweet, open face, a gentle way about him, and a meandering teaching style. He always concluded a class by asking his students the same maddening question: “Do you think anything of value occurred here today?” To which the students, emboldened by Mort's insecurity, would reply, “Not really,” or remain silent. I spent long evenings at his house listening to his abstract monologues while his wife stared at him with a furious look on her face. Her frustration had turned to rage.

Totally alone in Vancouver, a city of very few Jews—and most of them lawyers, dentists, accountants and doctors—and thousands of bland blondes, I bonded with Mort—which meant, he talked on and on, I listened. Mort had a solution for every manuscript he received from his students. It was always the same solution, and he didn't spring it on you immediately. He gestated it. And he was never conscious of the sameness of his response. I saw Steve, a Southern boy, product of a military school, who lived in my boarding house, return from a session with Mort dissolved in tears. Steve had been working on a novel for eight months about Southern brutality, racism, bigotry and homophobia in a military school and had a book-length manuscript. When I saw him crying, I knew what had happened, because I'd seen it happen again and again in class: “Mort,” Steve said. “Mort …” He was almost speechless. “He wants me to turn my protagonist into a mouse. An actual mouse. He mapped out an entire structure for the book. He wants me to turn my main character into a mouse!”

All the struggles he'd gone through to get through the military school, to travel to Canada, to reach the university and oppose his family's wishes that he go into the fried chicken business—all the months of writing—and he was a serious boy in his way—had come to this.

“Steve,” I said gently, “this is what Mort always says in the end. Haven't you heard him?” He had, but had thought not with his manuscript, just with those whose manuscripts deserved to have a mouse as the protagonist.

In fact, Mort had not done it to me yet. What he had done was to encourage my work in the classroom but ignore it for the literary magazine, the Canadian yawn he edited for the university. He would continue to ignore it for the two years I spent there, even though he praised it to the skies. And in the end, gently, tentatively, he began one day with me: “Say, Mike! I've got an idea!” I knew what was coming, although I dreaded it. Mort's eyes sparkled, his eyebrows danced upwards at this point, “What if … now get this: your character, Marvin, turned into a mouse …?”

That summer, it was 1973, I returned to a broiling Manhattan. I stayed high on tranquilizers and rum and saw a rerun of
Portnoy's Complaint
with Richard Benjamin as Portnoy, a perfect numbing choice to fit my shellshocked mood. I had returned to Manhattan because my best friend Robert Greenberg was getting married and he asked me to write a poem and read it at his wedding. And I was secretly hoping that Julie would take me back, that she'd fall into my embrace, and that we'd get married on the same day with Robert.

I first met Bob in the New School for Social Research cafeteria in 1967. I was neurotic. I stayed in the Judson Church where, as a Jewish socialist atheist, they let me live in the tower.

Bob had lived in two rooms with a hot plate on 14th street. He had an energy to him. Notes, address books, magazines poured out of the pockets of his jacket and raincoat. He wanted to be a director.

We climbed up the fire escape of the church together to the tower, where I read him my poems and stories. He encouraged me and brought me candles.

Bob had a way of looking at people. If you were suffering, he suspended any movement; he seemed to have put everything aside and was focusing only on you. There was pain in his look. Yet it was hard to catch him at it. For when you paused, stammering, his gaze seemed to shift to an inch over you, or around you, so that you did not become self-conscious. But you knew he was with you. When you were in control, he looked directly at you again.

In winter of 1968 we would stand outside the New School, in the freezing snow and rain, exchanging phone numbers of girls and articles we liked by I. F. Stone, C. Wright Mills and Murray Kempton. One day he mentioned a girl he had met. Linda. I knew who she was: the fabulous blonde in my literature class who kept injecting the word “Revolution!” into literary discussions.

It was the time of the Beatles; Abbie Hoffman stripping nude at Fillmore East; Paul Krassner's youth; the Fuck You Bookstore on Avenue A tended by Ed Sanders; Jack Micheline, Ray Bremser, and Allen Ginsberg reading at the 9 Arts Coffee Gallery run by a sailor in a loft above ninth avenue and Forty-third street; Dave Van Ronk and Bob Dylan at the Gaslight on MacDougal.

Bob was a part of that period—not me. I was too afraid. Bob loved it; in fact he never got over it. To this day a Tuli Kupferberg print is Bob's Picasso. The drugs, all that fucking, all that wasted time—not that I wasn't dying for sex. At midnight I left the tower and walked in the snow along MacDougal Street past the San Remo, where O'Neill had worked [and Bodenheim and Joe Gould had begged], to the Cafe Figaro, where the young bohemians hung out. I would sit down with my notebook, a pen, drink a double espresso. I waited. My pen started flying as I really gave it to my father, my mother, and several mean teachers. The waiter came by periodically. I waved him away. I pictured myself, the driven, melancholy, brooding poet with a tragic, inspired look, far above such paltry things as food and drink.

At 4
A.M.
one morning the waiter asked me if I wanted anything else. I looked up wearily, seeing myself doing it. “Can't you see I'm working?” I said.

At 5
A.M.
he said, “Are you sure you don't want anything else?”

“Perfectly!”—I don't remember if I added, “You fool,” or not.

“Get out,” he said.

“What?”

“Get out.”

“I'll order something. How's your prune danish?”

“Get out.”

I grabbed my things and, trembling a little, weaved my way down MacDougal Street. It was deserted, except for a man in a hallway who screamed again and again, “I don't hate—nobody. I don't hate—nobody.” The snow was falling. It seeped into my shoes. I felt a weariness and a sense of persecution. I felt good, and so very special. I walked into Washington Square Park, the snow falling. It was dawn.

I leapt into the air.

Then, in 1970, Bob rented a loft for himself and Linda. There was plenty of work space: an act of celebration after 14th Street. Space to make love, to work, to have rehearsals: light and air. Bookshelves everywhere, posters, records, productivity. I had always lived in one room. Bob's bicycle was in the hallway. He bicycled around the city. A basketball was in the corner. I pointed at it, speechless. I had only played ping-pong and potsy.

“I play on my lunch hours,” he explained.

I tried to absorb it. “You what?”

“Yeah, you know, these little corners of buildings, vacant lots, with the Puerto Rican kids.”

And me, afraid to enter a gym, afraid to walk the streets.

Normality, fearlessness, health, sunshine, brotherhood in Manhattan. I was deeply impressed.

I met Julie in 1966, a year before I met Bob, and for a while we were all together. I got a job as a copyboy at the
New York Times
. Putting the pieces together. One day as I sat at the receptionist's desk reading Allen Ginsberg's “Kaddish,” Ginsberg called on the phone and I picked up for the editor who was out to lunch. I told him I was reading “Kaddish.” “I wrote that a couple of years ago already,” he said. “Doesn't anyone read anything else of mine?” But he would never write that well again.

Now it was 1973 and Bob and Linda were getting married. Bob had found a room for me to sublet for the summer at an apartment on Saint Mark's Place, a few blocks away from Julie.

And one day Bob suddenly said, “Write a poem for our wedding.”

“Just like that?”

Bob smiled and shrugged.

On the day before the wedding, I went back to Julie's apartment—the apartment where I'd lived with her, the apartment we'd found together on Stuyvesant Street, waiting for the landlord to arrive at his office at 7
A.M.
—to pick up my books. She had called me insistently, giving me a deadline. She was still furious about the fleas, but I somehow felt she would melt when she saw me and fall into my arms. And we'd rush over to get married with Bob and Linda.

It was a steaming hot July day. I stood on the stoop in front of the apartment house waiting for Bob. He had promised to help me carry the books. I had drunk a pint of rum and taken a tranquilizer. I leaned against the brick wall, the sun beating down hurting my eyes and my throbbing head.

Bob was late. I waited. Then I saw him, grinning, waving, walking his bobbing, busified walk; slung over his shoulder was a green canvas bag.

We shook hands and embraced. “How the hell do you think of these things?” I asked, pointing to the bag.

“How else are you going to carry them, dummy?”

I will remember that bag for the rest of my life.

We walked up the five flights of stairs.

Julie was at the door. “This is Pepper.” A short young black man with glazed eyes waved at us and went back to his phone conversation. I stared at him. Julie said nothing else. So it was really over.

“Hey, come on—” Bob called.

I tossed the books into the bag.

On the way down the stairs, I said, “Did you see that guy?”

“Poor passive schmuck,” Bob said. We carried the heavy load of books to the room on Saint Mark's Place.

I had been working on a story about the breakup.

“How's the story going, Michael?”

“You haven't got time now, Bob—”

“Sure I do.”

We put the books down and I read my story to him.

I looked up occasionally as I read. He was smiling. When I finished he made a circle with his finger and thumb. “Sensational! You're being very productive, Michael.”

My friend Robert. My only friend of those Washington Square years.

I walked back down with him to Saint Mark's Place. It was difficult to speak. Crowds pushed against us.

I watched Bob going off down the street, the empty green bag over his shoulder, hurrying to Linda.

It was early morning of Bob's wedding day. I lay in bed drinking rum and read the personal ads in the
East Village Other
. Five hours to the wedding. I dialed an ad: Club Mogen David for Singles. A voice told me they had someone very special for me to meet: Martha Goldberg. She was soon moving to Jerusalem.

In a flat, gravel voice, Martha spoke to me over the phone. “I am tender, affectionate, sincere.” I quickly walked to 23rd Street and Ninth Avenue. Now I wouldn't be alone at the wedding. I would bring along this affectionate Jewish girl and casually mention to Bob and Linda that we were emigrating to Israel. They would be so happy for me.

Martha answered the door. She was heavy but not fat. She wore a blouse, skirt and sneakers. She did not smile. I heard growls.

Four huge dogs headed for me, gnashing their teeth. “Down!” Martha commanded them. She pointed her fist at the floor. “Down! You will obey me!” The dogs moved toward her. She settled herself on the bed, the dogs around her. She stroked them, and they licked at her partially opened blouse. When I opened my mouth, they growled. She leaned back and stretched, thrusting her breasts outward. The dogs licked her. She dangled her thick legs.

She had a sawdust personality; she was like chalk scraping against a blackboard. She spoke only when I did and after a pause. Yes, she was headed for Israel. There was a growing horse and dog market there. She would raise them.

I told her I had been to Israel.

After a long pause, she said, “Good.”

“I have a wedding today, where I'm going to read a poem to my best friend and his bride.” I explained that Bob was directing his own wedding at a theater.

“I'm not much on weddings,” she said.

“Oh. You don't want to come?”

“Not particularly.”

“Why?”

“It sounds mod and phony to me. Why hold a wedding in a theater?”

“He's a director—”

“I'm not interested in the theater.”

I stood up. The dogs stood up and surrounded me. “Down!” she shouted, stamping her sneaker.

I said goodbye and staggered down the stairs.

At the wedding, Bob's father stood on the stage and told the story of Bob as a schoolchild ordering around a line of children at school, as an early sign of his son's directing ability.

It was very quiet then. I moved into the lights, to the center of the stage. I took the paper from my pocket and held it. My voice trembled as I read the poem to Bob and Linda.

After I finished reading, I was too high to notice the reaction. I remember, while I was reading and afterwards, being careful not to sway. But Bob and Linda embraced me, and that was enough.

When it was over, I walked out into the hot sunlight, and down the Bowery, cracking and crumbling from loneliness and despair. I walked into Tompkins Square Park, and I saw Julie. She was smoking pot and cuddling Pepper. She suddenly looked up and saw me. She said, “You can't change a girl by pouring a glass of water over her head.”

The next week I left for my second year in Vancouver. I met Karen soon after, in the fall of 1974.