Timebends (64 page)

Billy died of an overdose, the result either of poor information or of despair, but hardly of protest, I thought; it was an end still so novel that it did indeed seem arbitrary. Its fundamental pointlessness, the unredeemed waste, connected with Cloward's speculation about “lifestyle,” how accurately I could not yet fully understand. At Billy's wake, in the family's small apartment above the bar, his beautiful mother sat with her youngest infant on her lap, staring into space with a fixed dead smile and neither bitterness nor anger in her eyes, for she was beyond those feelings. The sons, all in their best clothes, sat sighing with boredom but protective of their mother, while their father, his performer's instinct fired up as he faced the little crowd of a dozen or so mourners, went around showing off a new tie he had bought for the occasion. He leaned over me, stroking it. “Like the tie, Art?” His ineptitude clouded his sons' faces with hopeless pain. In his open coffin Billy looked his old surprised self, with skin too fair to bury and a face hardly marked by his eighteen years. I would not have been able to believe then that he was only the first victim of a scourge.

After three or four weeks in the streets with the gangs, I became cautiously optimistic about being able to write a film script. For one thing, I loved their mangled English. One burly Italian boy, nicknamed
Mungy, had a sweet nature and masturbated incessantly. He was happy to show his immense penis to anyone who asked, like a valuable gift that some stranger had unaccountably handed him on the subway. That spring, along with some thirty other boys, he had been bussed up to a YMCA camp near Peekskill—their first time out in the country. Here, where they were immeasurably safer than down in the neighborhood, they were frightened of being alone and insisted on sleeping several to a cot. Mungy alone seemed content, as though his penis were company enough, wandering off by himself to peer up at a bird in a tree or lose himself staring at the running brook. There he captured a large painted turtle and tied a string around its neck, waiting patiently for it to move and taking a few steps at a time beside it as if it were a dog on a leash. Looking up at me, he said, “I'm commutin' with nature.”

The YMCA camp was normally closed so early in spring but had been especially opened for the gang's weekend at a time when no other children would be there, the management having been apprised of the boys' reputation. Gang boys in Harlem in the twenties had usually been pretty good athletes, and I expected the same now, but when these boys managed to hit a ball they were breathless by the time they got to first base and had to lie down. In the lake they floundered about, none daring to go out over his head, and they refused to play the outfield except in a mob of half a dozen at a time, afraid of derision should they miss a fly ball. They would protectively conceal whoever missed the catch, even here moving together like a gaggle of geese.

A busload of girls from some middle-class Manhattan school showed up unexpectedly, and the camp manager quickly summoned Riccio to tell him to get the gang on its bus and out as fast as possible. But Riccio guaranteed him peace and tranquility, which I thought was distinctly in danger when the girls suddenly appeared around the swimming pool, bursting out of their skintight swimsuits. Rape was one of the occasional sports the gang indulged in, and I glanced around for signs of trouble. The gang had magically disappeared, and the pool was entirely given over to this female visitation. Imagining a council of war going on, I went off looking for the boys. Only a few yards into the surrounding shrubbery, I found them crouching like a band of frightened aborigines on an uncharted island peering out through the foliage at incredible invading creatures. I had never seen them so serious, so awed, as when a girl made a high arching dive from the board,
followed by others slanting into the water in racing form and speeding up and down the length of the pool. Here were two civilizations, divided between those who could breathe and those who could barely do so, between the fed and trained and the deprived and ashamed.

From life on the streets to Marilyn high in the Waldorf Tower was a cosmic leap, but not such a discontinuity as it would seem. Of course it was strange for me to see boys in the Bay Ridge candy store staring hungrily at some photo of her in today's
News
when I knew that I would be telling her about it in a few hours, but she was no stranger in spirit to what was happening down below. Movie stars' salaries were beginning to take off now, but hers was fixed by an old contract, and she had the resentment of a revolutionary. In her long fight with Fox for the freedom to make her own films, she positioned herself against the studio's exploitation of her popularity, which had been soaring over the past couple of years. What she thirsted for was not so different from what the gang boys so ineffectually plotted and fought to win, a sense of self-respect in a world that called them zeros. She could hardly find a sentence in any piece about her, even those written in praise, that was not condescending at best, and the majority seemed to have been written by slavering imbeciles who liked to pretend that her witty sexuality marked her as little better than a whore, and a dumb one at that.

Now that I knew her somewhat better, I began to see the world as she did, and the view was new and dangerous. We were still a decade and a half away from the end of the sixties, and America was still a virgin, still denying her illicit dreams, still living up to some standard image of the pure and the real. When a calendar of nude color photos of Marilyn was discovered, the studio went berserk, spinning off one plan after another to squelch it, even frantically pressuring her to deny that it was she who had posed for the pictures. Instead, she calmly confirmed that she had needed the money and that that amazing body was indeed hers, her most precious possession, in fact. Though the hurricane quickly receded and she was even admired for not running for cover, she knew down deep that hypocrisy was the order of the hour and that she had not ceased being its target.

Marilyn lived in the belief that she was precisely what had to be denied and covered up by the conventional world. She did not expect that to change. But when I began to know her she was just starting to attract the public's curiosity and sometimes its affection,
and this made her tentatively imagine that she might somehow create a rooted, respectable life. She relied on the most ordinary layer of the audience, the working people, the guys in the bars, the housewives in the trailers bedeviled by unpaid bills, the high school kids mystified by explanations they could not understand, the ignorant and—as she saw them—tricked and manipulated masses. She wanted them to feel they'd gotten their money's worth when they saw a picture of hers.

“A character is defined,” I once wrote in a notebook, “by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from. And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse.”

But what I had omitted out of inexperience was the overwhelming power of the past to overflow the dam of lifelong restraints so that choice itself floats off in the debris. In the Bay Ridge streets life had burst the last respect for rule in the gang boy's brutal revolt against such specious moral rationalizations as his school and parents had bothered to give him. At the same time I was groping day by day toward a similar romantic vision of a more authentic life, one that would welcome its own evolution rather than trying to deny it. I had become estranged from my own past, which now seemed a parade of impersonations. And I was helplessly aware of moving in parallel to a breakdown around me of old credos and restrictions, all somehow connected to the wild thrashings of the untamable rogue force of paranoia in the political life of the country. The rules had been revoked, the ropes around the ring cut, and the fight had spilled out into the crowd itself. Such was my sense of life then.

One night on an abandoned pier from which the Wall Street skyline could be seen, two gangs assembled for a new kind of battle that Riccio had invented. A war had been brewing between the gangs, insults had been exchanged, satisfaction refused, and Riccio had convinced the leaderships (replicating the knightly jousts of individual horsemen, a tradition he knew nothing about) that each side should elect a champion to represent it and stage a “fair fight.” Weeks of negotiation followed, culminating in this night, when some fifty guys, ages twelve to eighteen, congregated on the splintered pier. There were to be no weapons, only fists and feet. Few could box well; they were street fighters who always handled weapons, chains or knives or sometimes a bag of steel bearings.

There was no moon, and it was hot even beside the river. A few
freighters lay out in the roads, and from one of them a Puerto Rican radio commercial could be heard floating across the water. “This music I heard across the water,” I thought, incorrectly recalling a lovely line so separate from this ugly time. Kenny Costello—a thin boy of sixteen with an uncontrolled temper, already an ex-jailbird, and a fair player of the guitar, an instrument he had taken up after stealing it from a Fulton Street pawnshop—came dancing from among his cohorts in the lights of a police cruiser that obligingly appeared just as he and his opponent, a much heavier, clumsy Italian boy whose name I never got, faced each other with Riccio between them as referee. Costello broke open a bees' nest of short sharp jabs that sent the larger guy falling backwards, and the fight was finished in a minute, no more. The relief was almost wide open on all sides that something had been settled, no one quite knew what. Riccio made a charming speech beginning with “Listen, fellas, I gotta say this—you make me proud,” praising all of them for inventing a world-shattering new way of settling disputes. Calling the leaders together to shake their hands and congratulate them for their wisdom in safeguarding the honor of their troops, he shortcut any smoldering objections of the frustrated young brawlers by promising both gangs nothing less than a city-paid-for mass bus ride to Coney Island the following evening, with a free hotdog and a soda for each guy, and maybe more if there was money left over.

I caught a glimpse of the two cops in the cruiser as it turned and majestically moved away into the darkness. They were not amused by Riccio's display of an authority that had always been exclusively theirs. They had been accustomed to prowling the neighborhood and, on finding a clot of boys on a corner, getting out and batting them, around for a few sporting minutes to “disperse an unruly crowd.”

It was about then that strange men began appearing on those same corners, unmolested by the police, men who would take a curious boy into an alleyway and make him a present of some powder he might want to try. What was in those glassine bags would make this time of the gangs seem like high good health, the last period of dignity that many such neighborhoods would ever know.

They were boys nobody wanted, that much was as clear to them as to any observer. They were excess, and in the bars after they got out of jail they would pridefully unfold their newspaper clippings, accounts of their arrests and trials, which they carried around carefully
folded in an envelope, like actors with their notices. Everything was publicity; if your name was in the paper you existed, and your photo on top of that was immortality—you had made it out of this throttling anonymity, this nothing.

Since I was married and Marilyn could hardly peek out of her hotel room door without being photographed, we spent much time alone together, drawn into far lengthier talks than if we had been able to move freely amid the usual distractions. The bond of shared silences, as mysterious as sexuality and as hard to break, also began to form. Looking out over the sparkling city at night, we were each, I think, finding the presence of the other difficult to tear away from dream. Our connection seemed about to vanish, it was obviously a wrong fit, as though we had come out of two climates that could not correspond. But beneath the clash of dissimilarities there seemed a dark carpet of wordless being on which we could walk at our ease together. In each stood an image that could not yet be turned and seen full face but only obscurely, from an angle that drew us on, at first with curiosity, and gradually with the hope of being transformed by our opposite, as light longs for dark and dark for light. Many years later in the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the relief sculptures of full-bodied crowned goddesses, with their stone stares and their faint but confident world-containing smiles, would bring back to me the silent tumult of those evenings, when the nowness of life seemed alive around us and there was no future and no past.

After one of those silences I said, “You're the saddest girl I've ever met.”

She first thought this a defeat; men, she had said once, only wanted happy girls. But then a smile touched her lips as she discovered the compliment I had intended. “You're the only one who ever said that to me.”

We were confirming new roles for each other as people do in love, renewing the world as we saw each thing freshly, like people reborn. From those windows the whole city below seemed recently constructed from someone's dream. In the streets I had come to feel a strange new tenderness toward others, reminding me of the births of my own children, when I had brought them home from the hospital driving the car with anxious care in traffic that suddenly seemed dangerously heedless.

My mind kept discarding her and then rushing to bring her
back—fleeing the brutalized woman I now knew was in her and returning again to the child.

They were often inseparably mixed. “I never intended to make all that much about being an orphan. It's just that Ben Hecht was hired to write this story about me, and he said, Okay, sit down and try to think up something interesting about yourself.' Well, I was boring, and I thought maybe I'd tell him about them putting me in the orphanage, and he said that was great and wrote it, and that became the main thing suddenly.”

Of course she had not been an orphan, not really, not with a mother and maybe even a father somewhere, like lots of other kids who were never called orphans. But they had parked her in an orphanage when her mother was institutionalized and there was no other place she could stay. Gradually her orphanhood had taken hold as a fact that Hecht confirmed in his story. Actually, the real shock had come when on approaching the orphanage she realized what it was and dug in her heels and yelled, “But I'm not an orphan! I'm not an orphan!”—the terror of being denied by her own mother and given to strangers. As the years passed and I saw her continuing need for unstable older women, whose exploitation of her found some perverse pleasure center deep inside, it seemed one more inevitable stone in the wall of her monument. But that was not yet.