He unsmiled. “Give these to her when she comes out,” he said.
We waited in a greasy alley. Dusk sneaked in and it was cold. Gordo turned up the collars of both our coats. He stamped and blew steam like an impatient horse. Then the star of the family arrived in a miasma of cold cream, and the two of them launched into a furious argument over Carla.
“Christ almighty!” She was still reaching for those EXIT lights. “You call Rita’s right now and get her down here in a cab.”
A dramatic rescue; an on-her-own ride through Central Park as night fell. Carla, however, didn’t appear glad to see any of us, even when fussed over (her dress had been through Rita’s washer and dryer) and given the bouquet.
“That’s all right,” said the star of the family. “There’s another show tonight and you’ll have a seat in the front row.”
Then she led the way to a restaurant with peppermint-stripe decor and an electric train that circuited the counter delivering orders. Carla and I threw petals at each other while the grownups sulked.
“Mom danced with a lady,” I reported, taking my pizza-burger from a little B & O flatcar.
“Liar.” Carla kicked me softly.
“You’ll see.”
“I don’t know about this acting.” Carla addressed herself to no one in particular. “We get sent to bed for it.”
Note: Phoned main library in the city for data search. The play was called Three on a Mattress. It ran seventeen performances.
7
I WAS A SMALL, dutiful boy who was never asked to clean up his room. My grades were steady, my deportment good. “Evasive” was a word I heard often. My mother, concerned that I was old before my time, sent me to a psychologist, who fed me sour-balls and asked repeatedly how I felt about Negroes. A homeroom teacher, one Ted Buttonweiser, wrote my parents, speculating if my lack of extracurricular participation might not mask some deeper problem.
What must, from the outside, have seemed like timidity was inside the caution that proceeds from mistrust. To put a not very fine point on it, I had my doubts about close contact with other people. Still do.
I arrived at my sophomore year of high school with the single flamboyance of hair combed in a downward swoop over the brows à la Merseybeat stars Gerry and the Pacemakers. By now I was worried too. Without metamorphosis, and soon, I might be doomed to a life in which I bored even myself. But, of course, nothing is ever as hard as we make it. It took only one chance afternoon of quaint illegality, cruising the empty streets of a housing development with an unlicensed driver and a Baggie of airplane glue, to show me how little was required and how superfluous my caution had been. It was very much a case of instant possession. When I woke up and smelled the coffee, I moved to Brazil.
In pursuit of the dissolute, we had energy as never before. We were a cadre with secret codes and unbreachable unity; we were shaking things into a new arrangement, like glass bits in a kaleidoscope. I passed my sixteenth birthday at a gallop, wanting to leave myself behind. I saw the most pampered minds of my generation wild-eyed in the wake of petty vandalisms and inert upon leather furniture, their ennui as transparent as gelatin capsules yet to be filled.
All in all, it was pretty routine.
My mother, who took no interest in details, encouraged my new moves.
“Go on, explore,” she’d say, slipping me a twenty.
Explore. Expand. See the world.
Carla, who had been sent to Puerto Rico in April for an abortion, gathered us after dinner one night to view her slides: pretty nurses smiling under coconut palms that flanked the clinic entrance, piles of fruit in the mercado central, a porpoise washed up on the hotel beach.
“When did you have time to take pictures?” asked Gordo with ominous calm.
“Was I going to miss an opportunity like that? I just loaded up on Kotex and hit the streets.”
My mother welcomed it all. Prevented now, by herself, from achieving the safety of the stage, she relied on us for dramatic settings. And, obliging her, we expected her indulgence in return.
The day I was expelled from school for a supposed role in the pollution of the faculty lounge coffee urn with tranquilizers, my mother came to fetch me, wearing gumboots and a silver fox jacket. What fine technique as we drove home, such delicate shadings in tone. So skillfully did she modulate between fury and self-reproach that I began to suspect her of rehearsing on the way over. It was a nerve-jangling performance. Makeup striped with tears as we reached the driveway, my mother pressed her forehead to the steering wheel and whispered, “Can you get any more of those pills?”
Gordo, with no appreciation of the exploratory spirit, threatened me with a military school in Maine, which he’d found advertised at the rear of the Sunday Times Magazine. But my mother prevailed on him to relent, saying she couldn’t bear my being so far from home. Eventually, he contacted a friend on the board of supervisors and got me reinstated. I wrote an essay on mutual trust for the school paper.
My girlfriend Sabra wrote me a ballad in which she compared her heart to a hydroelectric dam. She fluttered her kohl-rimmed eyes and blocked my approach with her guitar. Sabra was equivocal.
“I’ve been in real trouble ever since I got the idea that my father scratching my back had something to do with sex,” she’d once told me in her lovely contralto.
Her father was a tall, recessive man who did reconstructive surgery. He did not like me and I don’t think he liked his daughters much, either. Their house always seemed half empty, like they were getting ready to move.
In Sabra I could recognize that same caution which I, for the time, had turned upside down. But instead of drawing me to her in recognition and empathy, this irritated me.
“Are you sleeping with her?” my mother asked.
I told the truth.
“That’s all right,” she said gently. “You don’t have to.”
A good friend of mine whose career plan filled several notebooks was stabbed during a concert at the Nassau Coliseum. My mother, citing the necessity of renewal, went to live with an old college friend in the city, came home again, moved to a hotel, was hospitalized for exhaustion. My sister, who’d become involved with a Senegalese exchange student, was beaten and gassed at a demonstration in front of the UN.
Spring came on like waltz music at the scene of an accident, and Sabra and I stopped seeing each other. I considered alternatives: a life of crime, never coming out of my room.
“If I had it to do over again,” my father said in an unusual reflective moment, “I’d be the finest goddamn fishing guide in Nova Scotia.”
I looked hard for omens, but nothing seemed helpful. Then, for reasons never to be clear, Sabra’s older sister took an interest in me. In just a few short months I learned all sorts of things. Like how intimidating it can be to get what you want.
And the necessity for caution.
8
I IMPROVISED A TOUR for a delegation from the Uruguayan embassy. I spoke for over an hour to a woman whose son was the pilot of a hijacked airliner. I smoked hashish in Walter Cronkite’s chair.
When it became clear that my unanimous rejection from college was due in no small part to incendiary statements I had put down on the applications, my parents were furious. But after a few smoldering months, during which I was effectively quarantined, they were prepared to accept, if not forgive, this act of sabotage.