Great Kisser (6 page)

Tapes have long been a part of my life, and not only Butinsky's tapes. In the worst years of alcohol and pills locked in with Karen in the dirty Manhattan apartment in the 1980s, I carried a hidden tape recorder around with me and secretly taped conversations with friends because I was too high to hear them at the time. Later, in the sober night, I took them out and listened to them, enjoying my little ripostes and theirs, chuckling at witticisms and hearing the nuances of conversations I had missed out on, and often catching up on my own words, on entire conversations I had been part of but not heard in the first place.

The tapes were my reconnection with reality, minutes or many hours later. And almost a quarter of a century later, Butinsky's tapes introduce me to myself. And gradually my self-righteousness wears down. I miss it terribly.

It was in 1980 that I gave Karen the ultimatum: send Kevin back to his real father, or give up the marriage. He was growing marijuana plants, setting fires, collecting knives, getting arrested for painting graffiti on subway cars. I wanted him out. I didn't want him, and I felt I was hurting him terribly by not wanting him. And Karen would not send him, but gave him that option, which he took, to her lifelong regret.

The tapes had so many different meanings for me. Using them with friends, taping conversations when I was high. Afterwards, when I was sober, listening to them and finding out what had actually happened. And in a similar way, hearing these old tapes of my shrink Butinsky, I think of how I have gone through life, with such craziness, with such turmoil, and that I've missed so much.

The tapes restore what has been missed. Much of what I am writing about, I had forgotten until now. No doubt about it, I've missed my life. It wasn't the one I wanted. And so I waited for the new one to begin.

VI: The Arrest

Kevin went back to Portland to live with his rich WASP father in 1980, but he always wanted to be with us. When Kevin was 15, he called me from his father's house in Oregon and shouted, “I'm reading Sartre's
Anti-Semite and Jew.”
Stuff like that from Kevin, that darted to my heart. What did he like about me? Images of Kevin before he left:

Enduring my stare of hatred: cornered, his eyes trying to look straight ahead, darting about. His head rigid. Cool and frozen.

Kevin high. Lit up, he shines like a polished apple. Karen is delighted with his good mood, not thinking about the Heinekens he had drunk through the late afternoon, or what he has smoked.

He is a handsome, tall and muscular boy with brown hair. When he squints his eyes in a smile, he looks as if he is crying.

He says to me in his slurred voice, beaming: “I want to be like you: wine, women and song.”

Ghettoization, 1978. Manhattan. Bedroom, kitchen, Kevin's room in the back. Every time he stepped over the line, I banged the wall.

Taboo areas in the tiny apartment: the living room because it adjoined the bedroom, the kitchen because he banged around so much, the bathroom because I spent so much time in there.

Autumn, 1978. Kevin at 13 is falling apart at school. He makes strong resolves that last for a few days. I map out a space for him to study in the cramped apartment. I tell Karen to check his homework every day. I wrench these steps out of myself reluctantly. They take my time, and they are ineffectual anyway. For Kevin is a charming bullshitter. Soon he works his way out of the net: with a hurt look, he tells Karen he thought we respected and trusted him, yet we wanted to check up on him daily—as if he were a child. Karen is moved. She buys it. No more checking: no more homework. I feel rage. He's back to his old schedule—staying out until midnight or all night with his friends, once sleeping on a park bench on Riverside Drive.

We clamp down again. I supervise Kevin's English homework. For a week things go smoothly, although in his book report he confuses Thomas Wolfe with Tom Wolfe. (He writes, “Tom, as he was known to his friends, wrote of his North Carolina childhood in his famous best-seller,
Big Fire at the Vanitys
.”) After he leaves the house one morning, I hear a buzzing in his room. I open the door and trace the sound to his closet. I open it and a light stuns me. I shield my eyes from the blaze. It's poorly connected by a nest of wires hooked up haphazardly and seems set to explode. It's shining down upon a fresh marijuana plant. I unplug it. I pound the wall: zounds! holy moly, sin and putrefaction. I am betrayed.

Kevin's sweeping hungry glances at my bookshelves climbing to the ceiling. His eyes grow large, intent. He takes books out with care. “So many books,” he says. Sometimes he steals them.

A rare moment when I write at home instead of at the peaceful library. He comes upon me at the typewriter, my fingers flying. He makes a typing motion with his outstretched fingers, smiling and approving, and says, “Keep making that beautiful music.”

How does he know I'm a writer? When I'm home, I'm drunk, or raging, or listening to Sinatra.

On another evening, Karen and I are at the Ensemble Studio Theater in Hell's Kitchen. Here, on a tiny stage, are small miracles. Mistakes cohere into art. Poor and small and confined. Small, hard-backed chairs, no air. The atmosphere is electric and tight. We wait. I read the drama program. The theater is forming an acting school.

Wow. This is my chance. What I've been waiting for.

Fuck. I don't want to be an actor anyway. I haven't wanted to be in show business for many years. I flash back to the Palace, to Al Jolson, to seeing my first Broadway play: John Garfield in a revival of
Golden Boy
, and going backstage to get his autograph; to the days when all of Broadway was like a delicious hot crackling potato latke, with Winchell and Runyon, and Jack Dempsey sitting in the window of his restaurant, and the stage shows at the Paramount, the Roxy, the Capitol, Loew's State and the Strand. How I wanted to be an actor then, when things seemed sunny and bright. They darkened soon enough. It's too late, too late, far too late, incredibly late.

Karen is shifting beside me. I know what she will say.

“Michael, look at this announcement—”

“I saw it,” I say. “What about it?”

“Maybe Kevin could—”

“Could? Could what? What are you talking about?” Have what I couldn't have?

I can't breathe. My head is spinning. “I have to get out of here. I feel faint.”

I keel over onto the floor.

The tapes tell me about the fall of 1979, and here I am really surprised. I tell Kevin, “What really matters is zeroing in on what you care about and learning to do it well. Not scattering and dispersing yourself. I think you want to be in the theater.”

He nods his head silently, and then says “Yes.”

“If you could get to work with a small drama company, would you like to do it?”

“Sure.” He looks directly at me with feeling. “I'd really like that. I'd love it, in fact.”

Later in the week I call the Equity Library Theater and ask them if they can use an apprentice: my son.

“Does he have any experience?” they ask. “Yes,” I say, “in lighting.”

They want to meet him. He races to the interview.

Kevin is taken on. He's placed in charge of lighting for
The Crucible
.

He works every morning, evening and weekend.

Karen and I go to see the production. We wait for Kevin outside the theater afterwards as snow falls lightly upon us. When he sees us, he throws himself into our arms. We kiss and hug him.

“This is the best thing that's ever happened to me in my life. Thank you,” he says to Karen, and “thank you,” he says to me.

We all walk arm in arm up 103rd street, from Riverside to West End, the old brownstones covered with snow and shimmering with Christmas lights: the old West Side, scene of my early struggles in the ‘60s in a Communist lady's boarding house, the prim lady spinning around with her flyswatter to crush cockroaches climbing up the refrigerator. Oh what outrage. One wintry night a telegram appeared under my door: Kay Boyle praising and criticizing a story I had written for her New School class. May Kay Boyle live forever in my heart for that gesture, which I needed more than food.

These highs and lows that I cannot explain. Spring, 1980. Kevin is expelled from school. I go to plead for him with the principal. He will not relent, but will allow Kevin to take his final exams. If he passes, he will get credit for the term.

The final summer that Kevin lived with us. Kevin lies around in his room after the expulsion. When he comes out of the room, wearing only his underpants, he has a stricken, pained look. His face is blazing red from the sun—his body red and peeling like an onion. He looks as if the top layer of his skin has been stripped away.

He exercises with his barbells, reads
High Times
, and goes downstairs to buy joints.

One day a butcher knife lies beside the bed.

Knives are stuck in the wall of his room; another knife juts out of the desk. On the wall: Laurel and Hardy, Groucho, W. C. Fields, rock groups.

Karen had a lump on her breast and went into the hospital for a biopsy. She lay on the bed and said, “I remember when I first had breasts. Like something that surfaces from under a wave in the ocean—unevenly—one an apricot and the other a pea. Something I welcomed then—I was thrilled—and which I fear now.”

I felt her breast in her lace nightie. “You feel good in it,” I said.

“Let's wait,” Karen said. “If it means having only one breast, we'll skip it.”

“No,” I said. “Not even then.”

“But they are nice,” she said.

The biopsy was negative.

Then Karen was in the hospital again. A hard lump had suddenly appeared in her neck. The oral surgeon made an incision in it. The lump got bigger. A dental problem, the doctor said. The oral surgeon agreed and made an incision in her neck. But this was no dental problem, I thought. This was due to what Karen had done to herself. The lump got even bigger. She lay wide awake in bed at night, the pain cutting through her, touching the lump. I would awaken every few hours and know she was up, staring into the dark. A neck surgeon looked at it and placed her in the hospital within two hours.

Now I was alone with Kevin and two cats and Karen dangerously sick in the hospital and a full time job at Jewish Punchers. I ran between the job, the hospital and the apartment, where I cooked or handed Kevin money for food, fed the cats, shopped and drank.

Just a month before Karen was hospitalized, we had been walking in Hell's Kitchen. We passed Polyclinic Hospital, where I was born. I told Karen of this, and she said, “Shalom,” the only Jewish word she knew. I kissed her that moment, and held her.

I got home from visiting Karen in the hospital, and had a second martini. I sat down at the typewriter. I decided I would write a letter to Charles Bukowski, who was just starting to finally make it after quitting the post office since the freaks decided he was okay, that he was a drunk and liked to kick ass and hassle landladies.

Bukowski had written nastily of Sinatra. “I have long waited to tell you this, Buk,” I wrote, “but you are wrong about Frank. I've had a few drinks and now I'll finally tell you. Frank and you have a lot in common. You're both bastards, and you both have great talent. So listen to his voice, Buk, get to know one another, and let there be peace between you at last. Doobie doobie doo.”

Then the phone rang. The policeman said, “This is Officer O'Malley of the 23rd precinct. Is this the father of Kevin Bradford?”

“No it is not.”

“Is not the aforementioned Kevin Bradford your son?”

“I have no son.”

“He says you're his father.”

“Look, Officer, my wife is in the hospital. I've just left her there. She's very ill. Kevin is her son. I'm very disturbed. I've had no dinner. I'm exhausted.”

“I'm very sorry to hear that, sir. But your son has been arrested on a serious charge. He's been painting graffiti on subway cars.”

“Of course he has. My wife encourages him to do that. She thinks it's a healthy form of self-expression.” This was true. Karen had never disciplined Kevin in his life. She reasoned it would estrange him from her.

“You'll have to come down and pick up your son.”

I paused, bit the telephone chord, and pounded the bed with my fist.

“Look, Officer. I've just left my wife in the hospital.”

“I understand, Mr. Bradford. But if you don't come to pick up your boy, at dawn he will have to be remanded to reform school. I will give you traveling instructions by subway to Queens.”

“How far is it?”

“It's quite far, sir. On the tip.”

The policeman gave me the instructions. I had found a paper bag on the floor beside the garbage and ripped off a piece of it. I slid to the floor and scribbled furiously, cursing. I jammed the paper into my pocket and threw the phone against the wall.

“How did this happen to me?” I screamed. “How the fuck did I get into this mess?”

I ran around the room hitting the walls. “And I can't even tell his mother about it. He figured it out perfectly.”

I had a final drink, stumbled out into the street, and ran into the Kentucky Fried Chicken store. I actually felt less nervous that night than usual with the street people around me—after all, if they touched me now, I would kill them.

I paid for the chicken, took the box, and went down into the subway station. I ate the chicken and tossed the bones out onto the tracks. “This is not happening to me,” I said to myself.

I got off the subway stop in Queens and walked toward the police station in the distance, blazing in the dark night. A policeman named Chaim said to me, “Generally kids committing crimes like this—and I'm not assuming anything—are from broken homes with emotionally disturbing factors. The kids are trying to get attention—love—”

Then I saw Kevin standing there, not particularly upset but solicitous, concerned. His concern always seemed more directed at other people than for himself. Besides, he must have thought, what's the big deal?