Great Kisser (7 page)

At Times Square, Kevin and I took the uptown train. Sitting side by side, we didn't speak.

Karen was operated on later that week. Looking up at me just before the operation, she had said, “Whatever happens, I will be happy, because I know you love me.”

I wept and walked the streets.

The operation took seven hours. Karen recovered completely.

I waited two weeks to tell Karen about the arrest. I seethed, waiting to tell her. I could hardly wait. This was my ammunition to send Kevin back to his father. I led up to it, and she could see how upset I was. “Something's wrong,” she said. She asked me to lie down on her bed in the hospital room.

“There isn't room for the two of us,” I said.

“I'll sit on the chair,” she said.

“No,” I said.

“It's okay, honey, I feel much better,” she said.

I lay down on the bed.

“I have a headache,” I said.

“I'll get you a cold cloth.”

She laid a cold towel over my forehead and sat down in the chair by the bed, waiting for me to speak.

Looking up at her, I began. Slowly and dramatically, punctuating my account with little outbursts of rage, I told her about Kevin's arrest.

I'm not sure now why I was so outraged, except that it was my opportunity to get rid of Kevin.

Soon after that, I gave Karen the ultimatum: Kevin had to go back to his father in Seattle. She threw herself into my arms. She said, “It's so hard to resist you on anything—even my own child. But even for you, I won't send him away unless that's his choice.” And he went.

Then I lost the job at Jewish Punchers. I was always walking away from jobs; I had Karen to support me, and my father threw in a check every month. “You're lucky,” Karen screamed at me at the bus stop. “You lose all your jobs, so you have your freedom to write. I've been buying you and now if I don't pay full price I can't keep you. It's my probationary period. I'll just keep working until I drop.”

“You think I want you to die?” I said.

“No. I'm worth more alive.” Karen screamed. “I've been your slave for eight years, fed you, clothed you.”

“I hate this,” I shouted. “It's humiliating.” I lurched away from her, then walked back. I always came back. I didn't have a job now; my father's images of the Bowery, men on breadlines, helpless men like me, flared at me.

“Just tell me you're going to leave me and get it over with,” Karen said. “I'm one step ahead of the hangman. Your time is so much more valuable than mine. You can't even stand spending time with me. You regret giving up a few moments.”

We arrived home, but Karen kept screaming. At 5
A.M.
she stood at the door of our apartment with a knapsack, ready to go out into the night. “The only reason you don't want me to go,” she said, “is that the police would hold you responsible. I'll die if you leave me. Nothing means shit. You want a young woman baby slave.” She paused. “You won't even kiss me goodbye. You ration out your kisses to me.” She slammed the door, but I didn't hear her footsteps on the staircase. I opened the door and saw her crying and hovering on the stairs. She moved towards me: “Kiss me if it isn't over. I thought I had to hang on to the job to hold on to you, and felt I couldn't. You think your work and your life is so much more important than mine.”

And I kissed her.

VII: Terror

I measured my terror against Karen's and it came out even.

Karen recently told me of a nightmare in which the earth and green grass in front of her Portland home ripped open, like a huge sheet of sod with no ground under it, like a stage set. And she fell beneath it through dark space crisscrossed with timber understructure, clinging to the building slats and sticks that broke at her touch. She fell into open space, and terror.

It was hers and it was mine. It kept us together.

The two culprits who shaped my terror were my parents. I recently walked down the street and a bedraggled woman turned suddenly, stopped, and screamed at the stranger behind her. Her behavior reminded me of my father, of what he would do with me on the street: brusquely stop, and scream or shout, because of something shocking or inexcusable that, in his view, I was doing. Perhaps tying my shoelace or not listening closely enough to his telling me for the thousandth time of the penny his father would give him every Tuesday.

I have spent too many years writing about my parents, but two other memories of my father pop out of the sack. On my 17th birthday, my father greeted me at the door of his apartment in a smoking jacket, beret, his underpants, and a cigarette holder with an unlit cigarette in it.

“How are you, Dad?”

“Crazy,” he replied.

Later that year, I was dating one of my near-psychotics, a nursing student named Lois. My father was trailing after us, wanting to be taken in by me as always. We were walking down MacDougal Street in the Village. We hopped down the street. My father, wanting to join in, hopped after us. Bob Dylan was singing at the Gaslight. My father did an amazing “Blowing in the Wind” to woo us. We passed the Fat Black Pussycat Cafe and went in. We sat down at a table by the window and my father stood outside, blowing kisses and meowing at us through the open window.

There was a cider bar on Times Square where I hung out when I was 14 with Cheryl, a dropout and a thief from Scarsdale. A pimp named Wayne with a big white hat enjoyed giving me tips about coping with life, and I heard the hookers talking about their Johns.

There were boarding houses and hotels then where I stayed with my father, the life of desolation and male loneliness he introduced me to, listening to him talk with the other lonely men about shirts, shoes, stocks, linen; and there were the faded women in the hotel I had crushes on—women alone in single rooms smoking and listening to Sinatra and drinking scotch.

Times Square was still there with Hubert's Flea Museum and the Laffmovie and Toffernetti's with the giant strawberry cake in the window. There were dressing rooms, theater alleys, old record and sheet music stores on Sixth Avenue, the Commodore Record Shop, the Colony Record Shop, and soon Alan Freed pounding a phone book to the beat.

My father moved into the Paris Hotel on West 96th Street when he split with my mother in 1953 and the men seated in the lobby with their cigars had records by Don Cornell and Buddy Clark—bachelor singers doing bachelor songs, and I heard tales of Caruso and Buddy Bolden and 52nd Street jazz. They showed me their One Record or One Book that held all their dreams and philosophies: Mezz Mezzrow's
Really the Blues
, Dale Carnegie,
The Prophet
. Nat Holman of CCNY was The Coach for basketball for the Jews; Roosevelt the Politician, Jolson the Singer, Benny Goodman the Band Leader.

And still glowing on the stinking Bowery was Sammy's Bowery Follies, with women singers, belters, in giant hats, waving big handkerchiefs on the podium over the bar.

And reaching back far beyond those years, I remember that as a young boy, I would spit every time I passed a church.

Listening to the tapes now, I understand what a nut I was, and what brought me together with Karen. The spontaneity of women, the looseness of movement and speech, the way they moved, their tart tongues, their freedom to react to me objectively and render autonomous opinions—that was not for me. I wouldn't have a chance with them. For I was aroused and terrified. They promised delicious sex, nights of wanton abandon on windy balconies in my beautiful Manhattan—but I could not get near them. Every free licentious move they made threatened me. If they wiggled their asses or breasts, stroked their hair, made knowing gestures that told me they knew how hot they were and how my prick was responding to them, I went out of my mind.

“Karen puts a lid on your dangerously flying,” said the great and wise Butinsky before he went bonkers. “She keeps you from going into the mean streets. You walk around and around the block and then you go home to safety.” In the Italian restaurant where I was on fire, there was candlelight, warmth, bacchanalia. Red lipsticked mouths, laughter, the heat and dancing shadows toasting their faces. Faces became glowing as I drank and freed up. The heat seemed to turn faces liquid, beads of perspiration, glistening, dark, reddening on their lips. Faces changed by the heat and desire. Their skin was rouged and glowing, tongues, earrings, necklaces, skin soft and hot, lacy black stockings over slim legs, eyes catching mine. The heat created a layer of phosphorescence over their skin, little pearls of sweat glistening in the candlelight; I wanted to lick it off their faces. I wanted to lightly run my fingers over the black hairs of their arms.

I wanted a slow, tactile, smooth fuck. I was ready, too late, late, late. Karen, whose movements were so taut and controlled, who kept her eyes downward, who barely spoke except when she drank, who drowned me in seas of silence, who made me feel utterly alone, her innocence a product of her fear of the world, who was so eager to please, who never disagreed with me except when I tried to leave her, who genuinely loved me as if we were two stowaways on a desert island—Karen was for me.

The tapes: Butinsky and me, 1979:

Michael: Karen says I don't really love her enough, or I don't really appreciate her. That I want to have another woman, that I want to have children—

Butinsky: It's almost like reading your mind. She wants you to reassure her.

Michael: I can't say anything or I lie.

Butinsky: What kind of answer is that for her? It's the answer that makes her want to pull her hair out.

And here are Karen, Butinsky and me in 1985 on the tapes:

Karen (to me): The only time that I seriously thought of suicide was during the period between when Victor killed himself and when you finally decided you wanted to marry me after all. Remember, we were engaged while I was still married to Victor. And you talked me urgently into moving out on him.

Michael: But then I changed my mind.

Karen: Yeah, then you changed your mind.

Michael (to Butinsky): When I said I wanted out, she said nothing she'd done had been justified, that her life wasn't worth living, that she didn't know what she was going to do. I felt she was either going to commit suicide or kill me, and I was terrified for that reason. I felt I'd gotten into depths way beyond what I was able to deal with.

In 1986 I talk on the tapes of trying to repair my relationship with Kevin who is far away in Portland. And Karen says (I seem to be hearing this for the first time): “It's like you knock someone down when they're nine years old and cripple their spine forever. And then when they're 20 years old you start wheeling them occasionally in a wheelchair to the grocery store.”

VIII: I'd Rather Be a Lamppost

My terror was the reason I loved, really loved, old people, and especially old Communists, who threatened me not in the least, whose words and actions I could predict in advance, and for whom my pure essence, my youth, was perfection itself.

September 11th set off thoughts of the nutcases I've known who wanted to burn up the world or use up the world for their pleasures. Sometimes they were leaders, like the Communist Herbert Strugin, or Butinsky; sometimes they were followers and acolytes, who needed someone strong to tell them where to go and how to stand up straight. After September 11th came the story of the rabbi who emotionally seduced a Jewish loser into murdering the rabbi's wife. The hitman, his heavy sad needy Jewish face, actually looked like Butinsky, but the rabbi didn't look like Butinsky.

I had been like that at 13, before I met Julie, before I met Butinsky. I was boiling with rage and self-contempt. Prof. Herbert Strugin had been my Osama Bin Laden in 1958, beseeching me to go forth and burn and bomb. He talked of the decadent West as villainous, garbage, a “nest of vermin,” “scum,” “human animals,” “lice,” “bedbugs,” “faggot honeybuns,” and “trash,” with the minds of “goats and gorillas.”

Said with gusto and spit, but with an overlay of scholarly decorum too. I had loved that language at the Jefferson School, loved Strugin, his wild boiling red eyes, red face, red beard, standing with his back to the class (droolers, fat boys in shorts, white socks and sneakers, FBI agents, Communist singles), Strugin looking out the window and filled with righteous rage. It was glorious to watch. A man of delicious extremes. On the blackboard in large letters he had written quotations from Stalin. Slogans from the master like: Ferret Out, Eliminate, Destroy. True blue Strugin. Weaklings might be deserting the master, but not Strugin. He was a rock. He had scientific reasons. He was keeping up the entire crumbling edifice of Stalinism on his shoulders.

Strugin was pure, upright, incontrovertible, brilliant, almost overcome by internal rage. He had a furious smile. Khrushchev had given his speech about Stalin's murderous dementia. Things were falling apart and people were leaving the Communist Party in droves. But there was Strugin at the Party school, intense, insanely intelligent, speaking with measured fury to his classes. A pleasure to watch; I was never sure he wouldn't murder a questioner. His favorite word was “indubitably.”

Strugin took me under his wing, asked me, a kid, to evaluate his manuscripts. I was prematurely bald and I couldn't walk down the street without my hair turning into string. It drove me crazy. It made me want to kill. Strugin promised to send me to the Soviet Union soon, where, he said, natural hair grew back “as a matter of course.”

There came the day when Strugin sent me up to Party headquarters to join. I would meet the great Ben Davis, the legendary black Communist Party leader, comrade of Paul Robeson, just out of prison. Harvard Law School graduate, lawyer for the Scottsboro boys. Ben and Robeson, two giants. Physically imposing men too, tall and proud. But it was Ben who had the human touch. I had seen him in Harlem on the day he was released, lifted off the soapbox, lifted up and carried on the shoulders of his people, they cheered, they loved him so much. But there was something wrong with this scene. Harlem didn't really believe what Ben believed; they just loved him as a man. Ben, like Strugin, didn't believe that reactionary shit about Stalin. He was a true believer, he screamed, “I'd rather be a lamppost in Moscow than President of the United States.” Really? Well, I didn't know about that. That was weird even for me. I did know about the camps. But I liked it because it was weird. I just didn't believe it.