Thy Neighbor's Wife (28 page)

But when he was not in bed with her, she seemed indifferent to him, even more so after she began attending classes at night, and gradually during the fall of 1960 their relationship ended. Soon he found another girl, not quite so sophisticated but more attentive; and he cared for her less.

Having learned all he could from his after-school job as a photographer’s apprentice with the Hearst organization, Goldstein during the Christmas holidays accepted an assignment from a photo agency to fly to Cuba, where the rising tension between the new Castro regime and the American government would soon lead to the termination of diplomatic relations, an inevitable event perhaps hastened a bit by the disruptive presence in Havana of Al Goldstein. Within an hour of his arrival he began taking pictures with a telephoto lens from his hotel window of the female militia marching across the street, and later that afternoon he wandered around the city photographing armed installations and anti-American slogans that appeared on billboards. During the evening, with four cameras strapped around his neck, he attended a news conference presided over by the Cuban leader’s brother, Raoul Castro, and after taking more than thirty pictures of the speaker and the other principals on the stage, he discovered that he was being edged out of the room by armed guards who demanded that he turn over his film.

Expressing outrage at being interrupted from his work, Goldstein refused; and as he flamboyantly and futilely waved his press credentials, he was shoved into a vehicle and driven to a military prison and arrested on charges of espionage. He would spend four days and nights in jail before the American Embassy could convince the Cubans that he was not a spy but merely an exuberant student photographer on holiday; whereupon he was released and flown off the island on the next plane to Miami.

While the publicity from his Cuban experience added to his stature as a big man on the campus, it also intensified his desire to leave it, especially since he was about to flunk freshman math for the third successive year and he was bored and restless with student life in general. And so in the spring of 1961, during his junior year, he quit college to become a full-time freelance news photographer in search of a profession and high adventure. But he would be extremely disappointed. His most important assignment during the next two years would be a relatively uneventful trip on a government press plane to Pakistan to photograph the arrival of the First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy; and his most daring voyage would be his elopement to Great Neck, Long Island, in January 1963 with a young woman he did not love.

He had first met her during her student days at Pace not long before he left the campus; and while he had not been attracted to her—she was overweight and aggressive, the indulged daughter of socially ambitious Jewish parents—he was impressed with the fact that she was impressed with him, and she was the first person who had ever seriously suggested that he would one day become a success. If her parents had not so vehemently objected to the few dates she had with him, the relationship would have become at best a passive, friendly acquaintanceship; but their insistence that he was unworthy of her, and that she should stop seeing him, induced her rebelliousness and infuriated Al Goldstein well beyond the point of pacification. He
had
to marry their daughter. And he did. And he was sorry.

Shortly after the couple had settled into the new apartment on West Fifty-fourth Street, their irreconcilable incompatability was evident to both of them; and although they remained married for two and a half years, they argued constantly and rarely made love. Rather than have sex with her, Goldstein would often masturbate in the bathroom late at night to the nude photographs of Diane Webber, Bettie Page, or Candy Barr, the pretty Texas stripper who starred in the famous 1953 blue movie
Smart Aleck
or to the lingerie models in the
New York Times
Sunday magazine; or to the
Life
magazine photos of Marilyn Monroe climbing out of a swimming pool; or to the news pictures of Jacqueline Kennedy in sleek low-cut gowns that he mentally removed.

He also sought erotic stimulation by going to pornographic films off Broadway, where he spent dark afternoons in the company of other lonely men who, with wishful thoughts and private stirrings, sat separated by empty seats and avoided eye contact with one another when the house lights went on between shows. On nights when Goldstein had an excuse to be out alone, he would often visit one of the many brothels he knew in Harlem, which was not yet completely off-limits to prowling white men, although the Black Power movement and racial fear would soon discourage the sex traffic and result in black hookers being brought downtown in big cars and deposited along Lexington Avenue and the Times Square district.

In one sense Goldstein’s married years did fulfill the prophecy expressed by his wife during their courtship: He did become a success, though not as a photographer. He excelled at selling insurance. Eager to earn more money than he thought he ever could earn as a photographer, he answered a help-wanted ad in the
Times
placed by the Mutual of New York insurance company, and within a year of being hired his sales record established him as No. 14 among Mutual’s seven thousand agents. Ambitious and energetic, he traveled swiftly around town on a motor scooter, and he benefited from his verbal skill and his capacity to convince large numbers of people that dire events loomed ahead.

But after two years with the firm, and the dispiriting effect of his wearisome homelife, his sales declined and he suddenly confronted the gloom that he had foreseen for other people. One night when he returned home he found his apartment ransacked, the furniture gone, and his clothing tossed around the room and cut into pieces. His expensive cigars had been broken in half, his stereo was missing, and the bathroom floor was covered with broken glass and smelled of his after-shaving lotion. His wife was no
where in sight, and she had left behind none of her own personal possessions.

Enraged as he was, he felt completely helpless. He knew that he could never prove that this had been his wife’s way of avenging his rejection of her, and if he sued her he also knew that her father, a lawyer, would be a formidable opponent in court. Leaving the apartment as he found it, Goldstein spent the next several nights at his parents’ home in Queens, an uninsured insurance man too stunned to speak; and during the ensuing days in New York he was consoled mainly by the friends to whom he had sold policies.

Soon he decided to quit the business, convinced that selling insurance was only reinforcing his depression; and when one of his friends—a man who presided over the Belgian Village at the New York World’s Fair—offered him a job managing a dime-pitching concession, Goldstein immediately accepted. Six nights a week Goldstein stood in colorful clothes, ballyhooing behind a microphone, trying to entice people to toss dimes and land them within the small red circles that were etched on wooden blocks, thereby winning a television set. The game was not rigged, and during the summer of 1965 he gave away thirty sets, while earning $250 a week and losing himself in the carnival atmosphere.

But in the fall of 1965 the fair closed, and, owing credit companies more than four thousand dollars in bills incurred by his wife and himself, Goldstein worked at various times during the next year as a rug salesman, an encyclopedia salesman, a taxi driver, and he also sold his blood regularly to a Times Square blood bank. Personally discouraged, and equally disenchanted with the world around him, he became, at the age of thirty, a part-time drifter and full-time fantasizer.

Though his marital experience made him wary of becoming deeply involved with women, he still craved female company and preferred to think that each night in New York there were many attractive women who were as lonely as he was, and were availa
ble for the asking, if he only knew where to ask. But while he could have gone to bars and discotheques, he did not like the drinking or the noise or the inevitable competition with other men for the choice pickups, and he also felt too old and fat for the collegiate singles scene. There were of course always B-girls and street hustlers at his disposal—and for the first time in his life he understood the absolute necessity for such women in society—but on his limited budget he could not in this manner afford his sexual habit. He did subscribe to a computer dating service, which turned out to be fraudulent, and each week he bought
The East Village Other
and scanned the personal advertising columns where women often expressed a desire for male companionship, listing a postal box address. But for every ten ads that he replied to, nine went unanswered, and the tenth was usually a prostitute.

He also became a member of lonely hearts clubs and corresponded with pen-pal organizations and periodicals that offered social introductions through the mail—such as Wally Beach’s “Select” service in New York; Sharon’s “Exotic” service in Toronto; the Renaissance Club of Index, Washington; the Happi-Press of Whittier, California—and he eventually composed his own advertisement and circulated it in the lonely hearts press throughout the land. He wrote:

He listed his address and telephone number, and waited for weeks. But no one replied.

It was while in this rejected condition, and also between jobs, that he met on the street one day a young male acquaintance from Pace College, who said that he had just heard of a potentially lucrative part-time position that might interest Goldstein; it was with a large company and it paid $200 a week and offered a $10,000 bonus if the work was satisfactorily completed. Goldstein was given the telephone number of a certain labor lawyer in New York who would arrange for an appointment. After Goldstein had called the number and been interviewed in person by the lawyer and another man, he was given the job. Goldstein was now an industrial spy for a subsidiary of the Bendix Corporation.

The subsidiary—the P&D Manufacturing Company of Long Island City, which produced ignition systems and other automotive parts for Detroit—was a profitable firm whose executives feared that the factory workers were planning to defect from their traditional union, which was now management-controlled, and affiliate themselves with the independent and powerful United Auto Workers’ union, which would surely demand higher wages and greater workers’ benefits. The UAW had already used sound trucks outside the factory gates urging the P&D employees to vote for UAW representation at the next labor meeting, and now the company’s executives were interested in knowing approximately how many of its four hundred workers would vote to quit the home union.

Goldstein’s assignment was to ingratiate himself with the other workers, to perceive their intentions regarding the UAW, and then to secretly report back to the front office. Goldstein worked as a stock-room clerk and deliverer of auto parts around the factory, allowing him to move freely within all the departments and partake in much socializing and eavesdropping. In less than a month he deduced that the majority of workers favored the UAW; and after consulting with management, he participated in a campaign to spread the rumor that if the UAW was voted in, the company would close down the Long Island plant and move
South, meaning that nearly everyone would lose their jobs. Since this had recently happened at another factory in Long Island after a UAW takeover, the rumors were credible; and when the workers voted, the UAW issue was defeated 203 to 198.

Though he initially took a perverted pleasure in the triumph, Goldstein later began to feel somewhat guilty and loathsome. However foolish or improper he had been during his erratic life, he had always sympathized and identified with the underprivileged and subordinate, and now he was disgusted with his role as a management spy; and while he remained on the job for several weeks and was expected to continue his covert activities, he sensed that even his employers were becoming contemptuous of his position, which was an embarrassing reminder of their own duplicity.

Finally, and without warning, Goldstein left the company one evening and did not return on the following morning, or any morning thereafter. He did not know precisely what determined his decision; he just woke up one day with an irrepressible urge to sever his connection with the company, and the inevitable forfeiture of the $10,000 bonus did not deter him. He stayed home for several days, refusing to answer the constantly ringing telephone, and at night he wandered aimlessly around the city, browsing through bookstores in Times Square and going to all-night movies. He became increasingly dependent on his radio during this time, listening regularly at home to the talk shows of Barry Gray, Long John Nebel, and Jean Shepherd, as well as to the antiestablishment commentators employed by station WBAI, and several other shows that provided compatible company for his misery.

In the summer of 1966, after he had resumed working as a taxi driver, he listened in his cab to his favorite programs on a new German portable radio that cost him most of his savings; it was a $500 Nordmende shortwave model that also allowed him to tune in at any hour of the day or night to words and music from around the world. This radio, which he carried with him everywhere, represented through most of 1966 his main contact with
contemporary life, and Goldstein would no doubt have remained remote from human involvement for an even longer period were it not for a fortuitous meeting one day with an insurance agent he had known at Mutual of New York. The agent was very cordial and seemed concerned with Goldstein’s welfare, and in the course of their conversation he told Goldstein that he occasionally dated an airline stewardess who had a roommate, also a stewardess, and he suggested that Goldstein call her and ask her out. She lived on East Ninety-first Street and flew with Pan American; her name was Mary Phillips, and she was a pretty blue-eyed ashen blonde from South Carolina.