“Come, Workers, sing a rebel song,
A song of love and hate;
Of love unto the lowly and of hatred to the great…”
By now, the wine was beginning to taste very smooth, in fact it had no taste at all, and when O.B. offered me his reefer, I took a deep puff without even coughing. “Wow, it’s like A Night at the Opera in here!” O.B.’s girlfriend laughed, as someone bumped her up against him, and I laughed with her. Then it seemed I couldn’t stop laughing. When the Black Baron wandered in and Harry asked him in a corny Baron Munchausen accent, “Vot you tink, Sharlie, all dis pipple?”, I couldn’t even keep my feet, but fell giggling to my knees. Thérèse, infected by my giddiness, bugged her eyes at me, gapped her mouth, and sang out: “Aw, I once was as pure as a lily, an’ nobody called me no cow…
“Mah booty was sweet as a rosebud,
But lookit the dam’ thing now—!”
And—“Woops!”—she tossed her paper skirts over her head. We were all laughing by then. “Hey! Ain’t dot luffly?” “Hee hee!” I was rolling around, unable to stand, feeling wildly silly but wonderful. “Meyer, you goofy ass,” Jesse laughed, baptizing me with a spray of whiskey, “you oughta git drunk more often!” It was around then, or maybe a little after, it’s all a bit confused, that I danced my kazatzke. And it was some time after this, hours maybe, long after midnight certainly, when most of the people had left, that I found myself sitting on the concrete floor of my barnlike studio with those close friends remaining (I’d spread some dusty old canvas for everybody to sit on, or seemed to have, maybe someone else did this), huddled in our overcoats, listening to Jesse sing old folk songs, new union songs, joining in when we knew the words or thought we did:
“A redheaded woman took me out to dine,
Says “Love me, baby, leave your union behind.”
Get thee behind me, Satan, travel on down the line.
I am a union man, gonna leave you behind.”
Harry knew some old Yiddish songs from Poland and O.B. some country blues — I especially remember one called “The Broke and Hongry Blues”—which he claimed to have learned from some blind guy with a peg leg. I’d found a tattered stocking cap for my head, had stuffed some newspapers — Hoover blankets, we used to call them on the road — inside my shirt, I was feeling very warm and happy. The bottles had been emptied, though I still clutched my wine bottle in one hand, licking at the neck from time to time as though to hold back sweet time. I really didn’t want it to end. In my other hand, I held a little Hasidic dancer, whittled from wood, the first piece of sculpture I ever did — someone had asked to see it earlier in the evening (maybe it was this that had led to the dance, or else followed it), and I hadn’t let go of it after. It was, I suddenly understood, huddled there on the floor, an image of my father, though I have no memory of him, and as far as I know he never danced, nor followed Hasidim.
Past Jesse’s head on the broad south wall, my mask of Maxim Gorky, made of welded bits of scrap metal and nearly ten feet tall (all that my warehouse ceiling permitted and more than the door allows), was taking shape. The wide forehead with its peasant hairline and deep worry lines, the high cheekbones, drooping mustache: these parts, though still incomplete, could be made out now and understood. By coincidence, I’d been reading — and been much moved by—My Universities when Gorky died last year, and I had thrown myself impulsively into the project, thinking: This is worth a lifetime. I’d thought I was ready for it, felt sure I had the skills now, the insight, the right relationship. I hadn’t reckoned, however, with the eyes. Hundreds of sketches were stuck up on the wall around the face, hundreds more had been destroyed, and I hadn’t got the eyes right yet on one of them. Those wise, piercing, compassionate eyes of Maxim Gorky, who cannot see enough of life. The old wounded eyes of Alexei Maximovitch Peshkov who has seen too much. In my imaginings, I could picture the entire face down to its least detail, but could only see deep empty spaces where the eyes should be. But tonight, I thought, tonight, if I weren’t so drunk, I might almost be able—
“Hey, Meyer,” Leo was saying, “let’s fix some coffee and build a fire in your stove.”
He was right. The studio was very cold. You could see your breath. Outside, snow was tumbling past my front shop window, vertical one moment, then suddenly horizontal the next as wind gusts whipped it. We struggled to our feet, the ten or eleven of us still there, and went back to my little room behind the studio, where I ate, slept, washed, and even, especially in the winter, did most of my work. There, on my old iron bed, we found Gloomy Gus screwing Harry’s sister Golda.
Golda stared up at us in terror and confusion — she’s no virgin, Golda, she’s been married once and has lived with a boyfriend or two since, but she is, as they say, a good Jewish girl, and this was not her style at all — but she held on to Gus all the same. Gus hadn’t seemed to notice we’d come in, he just kept thumping away: white-cheeked, very hairy, and professional. His lips moved faintly as though he were timing himself.
“Vos… you sh — vos tut zich—!?” Harry choked, his voice cracking with embarrassment and rage, but too stunned for the moment to leap on Gus and drag him off. I braced myself for the worst, glanced around for things that might break.
“Don’t do anything, Harry!” Golda pleaded throatily, wrapping her big soft thighs all the tighter around Gus’s bucking arse. Her eyes reminded me of some of my rejected sketches for Gorky’s eyes: desperate, aggrieved, soulful, but reflecting something more like irrational panic than wisdom. Over their heads was a quote I’d pinned up from Gorky’s Childhood: “Our life is amazing not only for the vigorous scum of bestiality with which it is overgrown, but also for the bright and wholesome creative forces gleaming beneath.” “I’m in love!” she cried.
Harry’s mouth opened and shut three or four times, gasping for air like a beached fish. Harry in his poems celebrated free love and he never interfered with his sister’s affairs, but he was clearly unprepared for this. He seemed to be trying to say something like “Get off!” or “Give up!” but before he could get it out, Gus suddenly arched his back, slammed powerfully into Golda, and unleashed an orgasm that made her yelp and cross her eyes.
“Hey! Hey — shit shtik!” Harry croaked, finding his wind at last, grabbing Gus roughly by the shoulder. “I’m telling you—!”
Gus turned slowly, imperturbably, to gaze up at Harry from Golda’s flushed and ample bosom where he’d fallen, and after a moment a flicker of recognition crossed his bearded face. He lifted himself with brisk expertise out of Golda, stood with a jerky little hop, pulled on his shorts and trousers, tucked in his shirt, buckled his belt, cleared his throat and, standing there more or less at attention, sang “The Internationale” straight through, not missing a word: “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation! Arise, ye wretched of the earth…!”
We all dropped back in amazement, foolish grins twitching at the corners of our mouths (O.B. was laughing openly, his white teeth gleaming against his black face, and his girl was giggling helplessly, her face ducked against O.B.’s chest; later, I accomplished a wire-and-plaster study for a sculpture of the two of them like that, calling it, and meaning no irony at all, “After Guadalajara”), all except Harry and Golda — Golda lay tearful and naked on my bed like a pinned moth, breaking out all over her body in a pink mottled rash (“How many on our flesh have fattened…?” Gus was singing), while Harry stood rooted to the floor and white with shock. He didn’t even move when Gus finished his recital (“The Internationale shall be the human race!”), raised two clenched fists in a V, smiled as though accepting applause, and strode out. We had to shake poor Harry and smack his cheeks before he snapped out of it. Golda had by then roused herself, grabbed up her clothes and, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling, fled the room, possibly to chase after Gus, maybe just to escape her brother’s wrath. Harry wasn’t angry, though. He just shook his head stupidly like an old man and muttered: “That f’kucken Karl Marx! That f’kucken Karl Marx…”