SOCI14

14

IN THE LATE spring of 1952, as the Dodgers tried in the new

season to recover from the Home Run, and the war in

Korea was grinding on, and the papers said that

Eisenhower was planning to run for president, everything

shifted again. Laura disappeared.

For two nights, I didn’t see her at school, didn’t receive

her Yes or No. On the third night, I asked about her at the

office. The secretary was annoyed because Laura hadn’t

even called. They had to cancel one painting class because

they couldn’t find a substitute.

I was suddenly panicky. In class that night, I imagined her

burning with some fever, alone in the studio without a

telephone. I imagined her careening around the studio,

drunk and falling, the blood running from a gash in her

head. Or she flipped a cigarette in a careless way and it

landed in the files or the turpentine and exploded and she

was burned alive. Or a man climbed in through the air shaft

window, to hold her prisoner, and was even now hurting her.

The lurid scenarios filled my head while I tried to draw a

lithe young brown-nippled Puerto Rican model in class. The

model was exquisite, with sad brown eyes, and a thin trail

of hair from her navel down her stomach to a thick black

vee between her legs. But I couldn’t even focus my lust.

When the bell rang for the first break, I packed my things

and hurried down to Tenth Street.

The door to Laura’s studio was unlocked. I opened it

slowly, remembering all those film noir scenes of the horror

within. The rooms were black, but I knew where the kitchen

light cord was and pulled it on.

Everything was gone except the bed.

The easel was gone. The paintings. The brushes and

paints and tomato cans. The sumptuous art books. The

folders full of reproductions. Laura.

The linoleum floor now looked like an immense abstract

painting. Under the sink, there was a bag of garbage.

Inside it were two empty pint bottles of Canadian Club. I

stood there for a long moment. How could she just go like

this, without a word? I’m fucking you, kid. But I don’t have to love you to fuck you. Why didn’t I see this coming? I

looked everywhere for a note to me, even on the bathroom

mirror where they left notes in the movies. Nothing. She

was gone. I imagined a man coming to the door and the

two of them laughing. She was already packed, the clothes

folded into suitcases, the canvases wrapped and tied

together, the easel broken down for shipment, and he

helped her to the street with her things and shoved them

into his car. A convertible. I was sure of that. The easel

sticking up from the back like a cross. And off they drove,

smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey and laughing,

laughing.

She would never tell him about me, some kid from

Brooklyn, some boy out of art school. She might never tell

anyone about me, might already have forgotten my

existence. I slammed the icebox door with the flat of my

hand, then did it again and again. Then turned around and

saw the bed, stripped of sheets and covers, the striped

mattress as naked as a corpse. I walked over and ran my

fingers along its edge. Then I fell upon its vast emptiness

and heard the distant rumble of the El and wept.

A chill came into me. For weeks, I couldn’t read Henri, or

look at the artists Laura had introduced me to. It was as if

the whole world that she knew had walked out into the night.

My need focused more than ever before on Maureen. We

were now going steady. That was supposed to give me a

sense of structure, and a shared intimacy on the inevitable

path to engagement and marriage. Instead I was full of

uncertainty and one huge silent lie: I couldn’t tell Maureen

how numbed I was by the disappearance of Laura.

The notion of marriage was scary; it made me see an

apartment in the Neighborhood, kids, noise, a job I might

hate. For a while I tried to merge the notion with my vision

of life as an artist. We’d live in the Village and have children

later. Maureen would be my model and we’d spend our

evenings together in the company of painters and poets. I

must have been a hugely egocentric boyfriend. I remember

almost nothing about what she wanted from life, but I’m

certain I spent many hours talking about what I wanted. I do

remember that she didn’t take seriously my grand plans. Or

so I thought at the time. She might have simply been what

most girls then were: a supreme realist.

When the school term ended in June, my life started to

unravel again. Without Laura, I had no outlet for my

sexuality. Maureen was a Good Girl and with her I usually

played the Good Boy. It was only late at night, after I’d

dropped her off, that the Bad Guy came to life. Neither

Boop’s nor the Parkview was any help; there were almost

no available women in the Neighborhood, and those who

were free knew I was going steady with Maureen. One

evening, I called the school office to see if Laura had

returned for summer sessions. No, she wasn’t part of the

modeling pool anymore. What about Gloria, the Puerto

Rican girl? The secretary laughed.

What do you think this is, a dating service?

No, no, I lied. During the summer, some of the guys from

class, we’re planning some life sessions, just to stay in

shape for the fall.

She gave me a number for Gloria Vasquez. I called. A

man answered in Spanish and I hung up.

In the lunchtime bars along Sands Street, some of the

guys from the Navy Yard talked joyfully about the whores

who showed up in the evenings. But I had seen them,

painted, lacquered, with huge piles of hair and alarming

mouths, and they made me afraid. Afraid of disease. Afraid

of their experience: thousands of blow jobs, thousands of

fucks. And besides, I couldn’t pay them.

So I got drunk a lot and into fights, drowning my cock in

rivers of beer. Drunk, I called Gloria Vasquez again one

night, my head full of her brown nipples and thick lustrous

hair, and this time she answered. She was sweet. She was

polite. But she knew I was drunk and soon hung up. I was

too embarrassed ever to call again.

The summer came and we all went back to Bay 22 and

Oceantide. I remember strutting too much under a Saturday

sun, getting bleary with beer, and falling asleep on a

blanket beside Maureen. I woke with a furry tongue but I

wasn’t very ashamed of myself: everybody else from the

Neighborhood was doing the same thing. For all of us, boys

and girls, drinking was natural. It was also woven together

with sex; you drank in order to get sex or you drank if you

didn’t have sex. In those years before the Pill, sex was also

woven together with fear. The girls surely wanted it as much

as we did, but they would pay a tougher price. Instead of

fucking, we got drunk.

On the beach, among all those oiled bodies, with

Maureen beside me but untouchable, I sometimes tried to

distract myself with books and allow a novel to lift me into

some other world. But then someone would come over and

say, Whatta you, studying for a test? And I’d put the book

away and play the role to which the Neighborhood had

assigned me. I went to the bar at Oceantide (where they did check draft cards) and sat on the side at a crowded table

and sipped beer that older guys had bought. I talked much

bullshit. Sometimes I even danced with Maureen.

On my seventeenth birthday, I stopped at 378. I brought

my father some drawings I had made of Duke Snider and

Sugar Ray Robinson and he seemed happy with them but

didn’t know what to do with them. He rolled them up and put

them in a closet. My mother had a cake for me and the kids

all cheered. Then my mother saw something in my face.

You’re unhappy, aren’t you? she said.

I’m all right, I said.

What’s the matter?

I shrugged and didn’t answer.

Maybe you should come home, she said.

Maybe, I said.

But I didn’t want to go home. When I said goodnight,

there were tears in her eyes, but she didn’t cry.

From the pay phone in Sanew’s, I called Maureen. Her

father answered.

Who’s this? he said.

Pete.

She’s already asleep.

Could you tell her I called, Mr. Crowley? He sighed and

hung up.

I was a mess of emotions and I wanted to get drunk. But I

knew that wouldn’t help. I went back to the room, and for the

first time since Laura left, I read The Art Spirit.

Find out what you really like if you can. Find out what is really important to you. Then sing your song. You will have something to sing about and your whole heart will be in the singing. … I was soon asleep.

15

MICKEY HORAN joined the navy in July. A few weeks later,

he was followed by Jack McAlevy. And Joe Griffin.

Suddenly, among the guys in Boop’s, it was our turn.

The radio and the newspapers were still full of the war. In

my room, I was reading Harvey Kurtzman’s Two Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat. Even Ted Williams, the

greatest hitter in baseball, was back in the air force, joining

Steve Canyon. I imagined myself in Korea. Or on ships

plowing through icy northern waters.

You’re the type who is always going away, said Laura,

before she went away herself.

And I thought: Maybe she was right. She was right about

a lot of other things. Maybe I have to go away. It wasn’t just

destiny; there were practical reasons too. The money I

earned at the Navy Yard just wasn’t enough for me. I had to

pay for rent, food, and carfare; I needed money for drinking,

to see friends, to have a little enjoyment; and I was going

steady with Maureen. In the fall, when school started again,

I’d need tuition along with money for paint and canvases,

because I was supposed to move on from the basic

drawing course. But I didn’t even have a bank account. I

couldn’t afford a telephone or a television set. Two days

before payday, I always had to borrow a few dollars, just for

carfare and hot dogs. I knew what I wanted: enough money

to pay for art school, to buy paint and brushes and books.

Without those things, I couldn’t imagine a life, even with

Maureen. I just couldn’t afford the wanting.

In August, I decided to join the navy.

But why? Maureen said.

I can finish high school in the navy, I said. And when I get

out, I’ll get the GI Bill. You know, they pay you to go to

school. They give you loans to buy a house. I can save a lot

of money while I’m in, and we’ll be in great shape when I get

out. It’s for us, Maureen. For us. She knew otherwise. She began to weep. I talked to her,

caressed her, kissed her almost desperately. I hedged,

layering doubt into my words, making it sound as if my mind

wasn’t made up. She cried inconsolably for a while and

then stopped. I walked her home. She ran inside without

another word.

But the idea of the navy had possessed me, and the

possession wasn’t based on the benefits of the GI Bill. That

summer, I couldn’t see myself clearly; it was as if the mirror

was warped. The navy would provide me with a clear

identity, no matter how temporary. Once I could say I was

an Eagle boy and everyone knew what I meant; now I could

say I was a sailor. In the navy, I would earn my space in the

world and in this country; the act would certify that I was

American, not Irish, not simply my father’s son. Joining a

group larger than myself would cause my hobbling ten-cent

miseries to recede and vanish. Above all, the navy offered

escape. I would escape the stunted geography of Brooklyn,

going where nobody knew about my father, my drinking, my

failure at Regis, my limitless uncertainties. I would escape

the grinding pressure to pay my way in the world. Above all,

I would escape the strained demands of choice. I wouldn’t

have to choose between life as a cop or a bohemian, a

plumber or an artist. I wouldn’t have to choose between art

school or an early marriage and the baby carriage in the

hallway.

In addition, there was the truant spirit of romance. I would

be going from the known to the unknown, the safe to the

dangerous. Alone at night, I saw myself on a cruiser,

rocking in deep blue water as the heavy guns fired salvos

at the dark Korean coast. I saw myself moving through

radiant tropical ports with palm trees blowing in the wind

and bars full of dark abundant women like Gloria Vasquez,

with brown nipples and black hair. I thought about visiting all

the ports where my grandfather had gone, drinking in his

bars, and then, dressed in navy whites, tougher and older,

walking into the sunlight and seeing Laura. She would stop

and squint and say, Is that you? And I’d look at her in a

bitter Bogart way and say, Not anymore, and turn to take

Gloria Vasquez by the hand.

And Maureen? I made a different set of pictures,

conjured another shadow-self. Maybe we’d get married.

Not right away. Eventually. When Korea was over or

something. She’d come and live with me in my home port,

in Hawaii or San Diego, some bright gleaming place far

from Brooklyn. Or we’d want until I was discharged. Sure.

Because I was only seventeen, I needed to be signed into

the navy by one of my parents. But when I told them one

evening in 378, my mother was horrified.

They’ll send you to the war, she said.

Everybody’s going to the war, Mom.

Buddy Kelly is dead in this war, she said. Buddy Kiernan

is dead. Every week, more of them are dead.

They were in the army, Mom. I’ll be in the navy.

Can’t you wait a year? Until you’re eighteen? Maybe the

war’ll be over by then.

I don’t want to wait, Mom.

She shook her head in sorrow and frustration. But my

father was looking at me in a different way.

Don’t listen to her, he said. It’ll be the best thing you ever

did. You can learn a trade. It’ll make you a man.

I don’t understand it, my mother said.

You’re not a man, Annie.

And so he signed the papers.

I was told to report three weeks later, on Monday,

September 8, at eight in the morning. The recruiter said I

could “strike” for a yeoman rate, which meant I might be

able to work as an artist or cartoonist on a ship’s

newspaper. There were no guarantees, he said, but since

I’d gone to art school, it was possible. This inflamed me

even more; with any luck, I could become the Bill Mauldin of

the navy!

A week after signing up, I left the Navy Yard, saying

good-bye to the men, who all wished me well. I wrote to

C&I, explaining that I wouldn’t be back until I was out of the

navy. Then I packed all my things, gave up the room next to

the Parkview, and went home to 378. I didn’t show off the

nude drawings; I sealed them with Scotch tape into the big

portfolio envelopes. I got cardboard boxes from the grocery

store and packed my art supplies, comics, and other

books, including The Art Spirit. I stacked them all in the

woodbin in the cellar, explaining to my brother Tommy that

eventually he might send them to me when I was out at sea.

He was now at Brooklyn Tech, a brilliant student, with plans

to be an engineer. He took the assignment as if it were a

sacred duty.

Then I went on a summer binge, ten days of tearful

scenes with Maureen, wild nights at Boop’s, sunburns at

Coney. The art school interlude was behind me; I had been

reclaimed by the rituals of the Neighborhood. Everything

culminated in a going-away party for me and three other

young men in a VFW post down by the Venus theater. I

arrived with Maureen and we clung to each other through

the long evening. Now there was no going back; the papers

were signed; my friends were here to say good-bye. The

hall was packed, the tables stacked with whiskey and set-

ups and pitchers of beer. The jukebox blasted. Maureen

and I danced, her small breasts pushing hard against me,

her hands tense and sweaty. She said very little, but at

some point I made a joke and smiled and she turned away

in tears. Her girlfriends came over and hurried her into the

ladies room. I downed a cold beer and poured another.

Goddammit, Maureen, I’m a man, I thought (incapable of

irony or self-mockery); I have to do this because men do

these things. When Maureen came back, her eyes were

red. I took her hand and we went to dance. Jo Stafford was

singing “You Belong to Me.”

She began to weep again, and I put my arm around her

and waved good-bye to my friends and went into the cool

autumn air. She lived a few blocks away, and we walked

together with my arm around her waist. Suddenly, I didn’t

want to go. I wanted to repeal everything: the decision to

join, the signing of the papers, the surrender of room and

job, the departure from the only school I’d ever loved. And I

wanted to take back everything I’d said to Maureen.

But when we reached her house, huddling on the bottom

step out of view of anyone inside, I couldn’t find the right

words. There was no going back. Staying would be scarier

than going. I kissed her. She cried. So did I.

Maybe I’ve made some terrible mistake, I said.

She didn’t answer. I said I’d write every day. She said

she would too. I said I’d be home at Christmas. She said

she’d see me then. I asked her to wait for me. A light went

on inside her house, and she kissed me one final time on

the cheek and moved quickly up the steps, opened the front

door with a key, and vanished. I stood there for a long

moment, wondering if I should go back to the VFW and get

roaring drunk.

Then I started walking home through the Neighborhood,

along the parkside and the dark brooding forest beyond the

granite walls, past the Totem Poles and the Sanders, down

past the shuttered synagogue and the gated armory to

Seventh Avenue. The lights were out in most of the

apartments. Even at 378. I wondered if any of them were

doing what they wanted to do. I wondered if Maureen was

asleep. I wondered where Laura was.

In the morning, I went off to the navy.

IV

TO THE GATES OF EDEN

The Consul had not uttered a single word. It was all an

illusion, a whirling cerebral chaos, out of which, at last,

at long last, at this very instant, emerged, rounded and

complete, order.

— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

the whole pasture looked like

our meal

we didn’t need speedometers

we could manage cocktails out

of ice and water

— Frank O’Hara,

“Animals”

There are periods and occasions when drinking is in

the air, even seems to be a moral necessity.

— Alfred Kazin, “The Giant Killer”

1

DURING my time in the navy, drinking became more deeply

ingrained in my nature. If I’d served my apprenticeship in

Brooklyn, in the navy I became a journeyman. I learned

much about race, sex, the South, literature, music, and all of

it was absorbed in a delicious heady delirium of drink.

During a one-day liberty from boot camp in Bainbridge,

Maryland, I careened around the flesh joints of East

Baltimore Street, lusted for a stripper named Tempest

Storm, threw up in an alley and laughed about it with my

friends in the morning. I received a Dear John letter from

Maureen, wrote her anguished letters, came home at

Christmas, made a fool of myself over her, joined my father

in a winning us-against-them fistfight in Rattigan’s, and was

moved to beer-soaked tears when he said afterward, This is my son, Peter, in whom I am well proud.

Then I was off to Norman, Oklahoma, to airmen’s school

(there turned out to be no great demand for yeomen who

were high school dropouts). I arrived on the morning of New

Year’s Eve and ended up that night in a tough Indian bar

where I took a whore’s tits out of her bra under her sweater

in a side booth and later followed her upstairs. She was

very fat and we drank hootch from an unlabeled bottle. She

blew me and I fell asleep and woke up at dawn with the

door locked from the outside and my money gone. I had to

move a bureau and climb out through the transom and then

wandered the frozen streets until I found a bus to take me to

the base. Then I was in Jacksonville, Florida, training for a

storekeeper’s rate, learning to type, seeing palm trees for

the first time, and the southern sun. Eisenhower had been

elected, the North Koreans were negotiating, and I would

see no war. In Daytona one weekend, I stood on the beach

with another sailor, named Stamps, and watched the cars

roll by on the hard-packed sand. Two college girls came

along in a convertible and Stamps and I leaped into the

back seat and then we were in their motel room, drinking

beer and fucking them for hours. I was almost eighteen. At

night in the enlisted men’s barracks, I longed for Maureen

— O wounded vanity! — and in my fantasies was once

again in the Tenth Street apartment with Laura tied to an

easel.

From Jacksonville I was sent to Pensacola, to a

helicopter training base at Ellyson Field. In the small base

library I discovered Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the myth of

the Lost Generation. The discovery was set off by a single

sentence by Malcolm Cowley in his 1944 introduction to a

small compact Viking Portable that contained The Sun Also Rises, excerpts from other novels, and a selection of

Hemingway’s short stories.

Going back to Hemingway’s work after several years is like going back to a brook where you had often fished and finding the woods as deep and cool as they used to be. …

I was a city boy; I hadn’t seen a brook since Fox Lair

Camp, had never fished in any serious way, associated

woods with the place where Arnold hid his bottle of wine.

But something about that sentence pulled me in: a vision of

clarity that was liquid and moving and cool.

Part of the appeal came from reading it in the heat of

Florida. But I had never thought of a writer that way, making

words as clear as flowing water. Cowley allowed

Hemingway himself to talk:

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

I knew that was true; the stuff of many books already lived

in my mind as if it had happened to me. I didn’t remember

the bad books.

And if the Hemingway world of Paris and Pamplona, the

slopes of Kilimanjaro and the eddies of the Big Two-

Hearted River had nothing concrete to do with my life,

Cowley described a part of that world that surely did. The

Hemingway heroes had one thing in common.

They drink early and late; they consume enough beer, wine, anis, grappa and Fundador to put them all into alcoholic wards, if they were ordinary mortals; but drinking seems to have the effect on them of a magic potion.

Yes! I had sampled that magic potion myself. And

Cowley then quoted from Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, whose hero, Robert Jordan, finds that a cup of

absinthe

took the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in cafés, of all the chestnut trees that would be in bloom now in this month … of all the things he had enjoyed and forgotten and that came back to him when he tasted that opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea-changing liquid alchemy.

For weeks I tried to find absinthe in the dirt-floored bars

of O Street, and failed. There were other forms of liquid

alchemy, and so the lack of absinthe did not matter. I was

soon in the Hemingway world, carrying his stoic ethic with

me off the base, to sailor bars where drinking was sport,

entertainment, clarification, and pleasure. I went on to

Cowley’s Exile’s Return, about the Lost Generation that

Gertrude Stein had named and Hemingway had made

famous, and learned that drinking could be something more

than mere fuel for a wild night out. It could be a huge fuck

you to Authority.

The writers, artists, and poets of the 1920s, Cowley

explained, were faced with one mammoth idiocy of

Authority: the mistake called Prohibition. Then, as in my

own 1953, right-wingers, bigots, bluenoses, and puritans

ruled America. They used goons to break labor unions.

Like our current political gangster Joe McCarthy, they

sniffed around for people they called subversives, silenced

them, jailed them, deported them. If people like that passed

a law making it a crime to drink, you had only one choice: to

get roaring drunk.

Cowley led me to Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby, to the world of bootleggers and speakeasies, and I

remembered my father’s friends sitting in the kitchen that

time talking about rumrunners. Nothing could have been

more romantic. James Cagney lived in that world, in the old

movies that kept playing in the Minerva and the Sixteenth

Street; so did Bogart and Robinson and Raft. And now

Wolfsheim the gambler was there and Nick Carraway and

Jay Gatsby, along with Fitzgerald himself, and Billy Hamill.

And Billy Hamill’s oldest son too.

All of them staring across the water at the green light on

Daisy’s dock.

2

FROM HEMINGWAY, I stole the guise of the stoic drinker,

mixing it up with Bogart and some old salts who had come

through the war and knew that a helicopter base in the

Florida panhandle was Mickey Mouse duty. These men

carried deep wounded feelings beneath the tough exteriors

(or so I thought), but they taught us that the only unforgivable

sin was self-pity. A girl broke your heart? Fuck her. Get

another one. Break her heart. You lost a fight? Fuck it. Get

up. Wipe off the blood. Have another whiskey and go get

him again.

Most of them knew a lot about life in a concrete way. And

they laughed out loud at the oratory of the politicians. That,

too, fit in with the codes of Hemingway.

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice, and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other

proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it…. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates….

That was from A Farewell to Arms, and in that romantic

novel, I first came across the notion of a separate peace. In

the climax of the drama, Frederic Henry deserts to join his

woman, Catherine Barkley, leaving behind the abstractions

of patriotism, loyalty, and solemn oaths. Living was more

important than dying; loving a woman was more important

than loving a country. And from Cowley’s Exile’s Return, I realized that there was another way to make a separate

peace: departure. Faced with an America dedicated to

sobriety, thrift, puritanism, and commercialism, many

Twenties writers and artists became expatriates. I loved

that word. The expatriate Fitzgerald went to the Riviera, T.

S. Eliot to London, Katherine Anne Porter to Mexico,

Hemingway to Paris. They lived the expatriate life among

civilized people (or so I thought), in countries where food

and shelter and drink were cheap and the women were

beautiful.

In my imagination, searching for absinthe among the

Hank Williams-Webb Pierce jukeboxes, Paris became the

golden city of my imagination. It was so in the 1920s, I

thought; it must be so now. I envisioned café tables on

summer afternoons, smoky dives in the winter, painters on

the slopes of Montparnasse, and there, coming in the door

of the bal musette, striding right out of The Sun Also Rises, was Lady Brett Ashley.

She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey….

Around this time, I first saw Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris, and here was Gene Kelly, living on the

GI Bill after World War II — that is to say, now — telling me

that if you can’t paint in Paris, you might as well marry the

boss’s daughter. He had a studio in the Quarter that was

smaller than Laura’s, with a bed on pulleys that he raised in

the morning to the ceiling, and windows open to the spring

air, the Paris rooftops, the cobblestoned streets, the

bookstalls, and the fresh bread and, of course, the cafés.

Oscar Levant was his best friend, a piano player, and they

met each day in the Café Bel Ami. The girl he loved was

Leslie Caron. His music was by George Gershwin, full of

charm and confidence and bittersweet regret. This wasn’t

the Paris of Jake Barnes and Robert Cohn from The Sun Also Rises. But it was bright and gay and full of painters

and music and beautiful women and I wanted it.

And began to think I might even get it. When I finished

with the navy, I too was entitled to the GI Bill, just like Gene

Kelly. I could go to Paris and see all the great paintings in

the Louvre and read all the writers whose names were

scattered through Cowley’s book: Joyce and Pound, Proust

and Valéry, Verlaine and Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Why

not? I’d find the Café Bel Ami and sit at a table and order

Fundador and read little magazines too. And study at the

Académie Julien or the Sorbonne. And paint in the street.

All night long, I’d discuss with my fellow theologians the

canon law of the religion of art. And sample other

pleasures.

The only things that matter, said Gene Kelly, are women and wine.

And absinthe. Of course.

3

BUT I DIDN’T GO to Paris. The Korean War ended in a grim

stalemate, and a year later the navy ended for me too, and I

went back to New York. I found a job as a messenger and

then proofreader in the production department of an

advertising agency that specialized in industrial accounts.

Everybody in the Neighborhood thought I was crazy.

You got a good job in the Navy Yard, Duke Baluta said.

They gotta count your navy time toward your pension too.

I want to try something else, I said.

You could be there for life.

That’s what I’m afraid of.

Back home, I didn’t go very far. I found a new room, this

one next to a synagogue on Ninth Street in Brooklyn, a half

block from the library. I was soon going steady with another

girl from the Neighborhood, this one named Catherine. I

didn’t go back to C&I; there was some problem about the

GI Bill. I enrolled instead in evening classes at Pratt

Institute, where an English teacher named Tom McMahon

looked at my compositions and encouraged me to write.

McMahon was a fine teacher with a probing theatrical style.

He was an expert on Hemingway, an admirer of Nathanael

West and Horace McCoy, a cigarette smoker and wearer

of trench coats, and at one point he urged me to try to get

into Columbia University, where I could study literature or art. I went up to Morningside Heights and saw the registrar,

a bald polished man. He looked at my academic record,

such as it was, and suggested in a condescending voice

that I consider going to a vocational school.

I hear there is a big need for dental technicians, he said.

Fuck you, I said, gathered my papers and walked out the

door.

All the way back to Brooklyn from Morningside Heights I

kept saying, Fuck you, I’ll do it some other way. Fuck you, I’ll

do it anyway.

I was reading newspapers again, the comics behind me,

but enthralled by Jimmy Cannon in the Post’s sports section

and by Murray Kempton’s column on the editorial page.

After Pensacola, the seven New York newspapers were a

gorgeous feast. I no longer wanted to be a cartoonist. But

the dream of painting in Paris also began to fade under the

gray pressure of earning a living and a feeling of rejection. I

wrote to the Sorbonne in Paris. I wrote to the Académie

Julien. I never received answers. Fuck you, I said to Paris.

Fuck you too.

Now everyone in the Neighborhood had a television set

— even my father — and on summer nights the streets

were emptier, as each apartment lit up with a pale blue

glow. I still listened to Symphony Sid and got drunk when

Charlie Parker died and sneered at the arrival of rock and

roll.

In Brooklyn I felt stalled again. Most of my friends were

still in the service; they’d gone in after me and stayed later.

My best friend was Tim Lee, a brilliant guy who had boxed

in the amateurs at Thomas Aquinas and came home on

weekends from his army base in Maryland. In Boop’s or

Rattigan’s or the Caton Inn, we talked a lot about going to

college, doing something with our lives. Everything seemed

possible over a beer. But in 1955, such talk was always

interrupted by other matters. In Boop’s, we cheered in

September when Archie Moore knocked down Rocky

Marciano before getting knocked out himself. We were

thrilled when Sugar Ray Robinson ended his amazing

comeback in December by knocking out Bobo Olson in two

rounds. At the bar there was a lot of talk now about heroin,

which was claiming its first victims in the Neighborhood.

Who brought this shit around anyway? I asked one night

in Boop’s.

The guineas, who else? said Vito Pinto.

Hey, Vito, Duke Baluta said, you’re a guinea!

You know who I mean, Vito said.

Everybody knew, all right. The racket guys from South

Brooklyn had started slowly peddling heroin, and now it was

coming in a flood. The streets that once had the most

drunks — Twelfth Street, Seventh Avenue, Seventeenth

Street — now housed the most junkies. The South Brooklyn

wise guys did to the Tigers with heroin what they couldn’t

do with fists, bats, or guns: wasted them and robbed them

of their pride. Seeing that, I was never tempted by hard

drugs. But now drinking acquired another quality: it was the

normal, healthy, even moral alternative to smack.

That year, I also started hanging around with a tough

funny ironworker named Jack Daugherty. He loved

sentimental Irish songs, practical jokes, and fighting. He

was the hardest-punching street fighter I ever knew. And

soon, in bars and coffee shops all over Brooklyn, we were

in fights every night. We fought strangers over change (I had t’ree quarters here when I went to take my piss) or

looks (The fuck you lookin’ at, prickface?) or women

(Whatta you, own this broad?). Sometimes Tim Lee was

there; usually it was Jack and me. I broke my right hand

twice and had a stabilizing pin inserted through my

knuckles, forcing me for a few weeks to draw with my left.

There were wild fights in Bickford’s cafeteria on Ninth

Street and wilder ones on the sidewalks outside Nathan’s

on Coney Island. I was drinking every day but seldom got

drunk and never had hangovers; it was a matter of deep

pride in the Neighborhood to be able to hold your drink.

One night in the Caton Inn, a dark joint on Coney Island

Avenue with a huge horseshoe bar, a booming jukebox,

and a dance floor, I was drinking with my girl, Catherine. My

broken right hand was in a cast. Then a guy grabbed

Catherine’s ass on his way to the men’s room and I spun

him around and hit him between the eyes with the cast. His

head bounced off another guy’s foot, breaking his toe. It

became known as The Night Pete Hamill Broke Frank

Christie’s Toe with One Punch.

Catherine was sweet, funny, a drinker, with dark hair cut

in a bob, long legs, and smooth skin. All around us, people

were getting married, as the men came back from Korea. It

was assumed that we would be married too. My father

knew her father; she lived two blocks from 378; I was told in

a dozen different ways by several dozen grown-ups that

there was nothing better than a good neighborhood girl.

That year, Catherine went to a lot of baby showers. We

went together to some weddings. She didn’t mind my

drinking or fighting; that was what men did. She gushed

about the drawings I took home from Pratt, giggled at the

naked women, but looked blank when I tried to talk about a

life as a painter. She didn’t dismiss the subject the way

Maureen had; it just didn’t register with her. I could have

been discussing the rings of Saturn. We ordered beers.

We danced. She laughed at my jokes. We groped each

other in the kitchen of her parents’ flat. I went home. Or

stopped for a nightcap in a bar.

One day in the Daily News there was a story about the

ongoing demolition of the Third Avenue El. The work crews

were moving uptown from the Bowery and were about to

reach Fourteenth Street. I felt a pang; a piece of the world I

knew was going to disappear. But there was more to it than

that. After work, I went down to Tenth Street and Third

Avenue, secretly hoping that Laura had seen the same

news item and would feel the same pang. A half block from

the El, we had pleasured each other on winter nights. I told

myself that I wasn’t in love with her; I didn’t even want to

take her to bed; I just wanted to see her again and hear

from her what had happened. From the Astor Place subway

station, I walked slowly east along Tenth Street. At her

building, I went into the vestibule and looked at the

mailboxes, but someone else was living in the old studio.

Then I walked to the corner. Third Avenue felt empty and

hollow without the great dark iron structures of the El and

the steel growl of the trains. I went into a bar and sat there

for a long time, sipping beers, watching the street. But I

never saw Laura again. I never saw her name in the art

magazines. She wasn’t listed in the directories of American

artists. She was gone forever.

4

BY EARLY 1956, I began to feel that I was vanishing too. The

production manager at the agency had quickly decided I

wasn’t what he needed; he was about to fire me. The art

director, Ernie Waivada, saved me, out of an excess of

Christian pity, and from him I started to acquire some minor

skills. I could draw a straight line with a steel T square, for

example. I could do simple pasteups and mechanicals. I

could “spec” type and do some primitive lettering (taming

my cartoony instincts). I knew about repro proofs and

photostats and Photo Lettering. I was trusted to black out

cut lines on negative photostats, to cut mats, to “gang”

various small pieces of art for photostats. I managed to

keep the job and was even given a small raise.

But at night in the dark, alone with myself, graphic design

seemed a chilly discipline. It was basically a function of the

intellect, and I was still in the sweaty grip of romance, full of

Hemingway, reading the poems of García Lorca, soaking

up James M. Cain, discovering the drawings of Heinrich

Kley, copying George Grosz and Orozco. I still loved

drawing human bodies, hair and teeth and flesh. I had much

less interest in squares, circles, triangles, or the delicacies

of Caslon Bold.

In the small studio, upstairs from a rug importer on Fifth

Avenue and Forty-seventh Street, there was another man

who came to work three or four days a week. His name

was Dave Hills. He was in his sixties, with age freckles on

his hands, his back hunched from years bent over drawing

boards. He had been the first art director of the agency but

now worked as a part-time freelancer on some of the minor

work, such as employee newsletters. He had a few peculiar

specialities, one of which was lettering that looked like

rope. But he never talked about the glories of design. His

fundamental medium was the Job. He had started out long

ago and come through the Depression and the war; he was

happy to be there at all. Then one day he announced that he

was going to retire. He was packing up and moving to

Mexico.

Why Mexico, Dave? I asked.

Oh, I don’t know, he said. I like the people. I like the

country. I like the booze. And besides, it’s cheap.

At almost the same time, I received a letter from a navy

friend who also wanted to be a painter. He enclosed a

catalog for a school called Mexico City College, approved

for study on the GI Bill, with an art department offering a

bachelor of fine arts degree. The language of instruction

was English, but there were extensive courses in the

Spanish language. Maybe this is our Paris, my friend

wrote. And besides, it’s cheap, said Dave Hills.

Suddenly Mexico cast a voluptuous spell. If a sixty-five-

year-old man could pack up and go to Mexico, why couldn’t

I? I sent the catalog to my friend Tim Lee, who was still in

the army. Maybe, I wrote him, we could go there together.

So what if nobody in the Neighborhood ever went to

college; why shouldn’t we be the first? And in Mexico! The

notion would not go away. In the agency, I was trying to

letter a line of copy in Clarendon Bold and suddenly Orozco

tore across my mind. I sat at the bar in the Caton Inn with

Catherine and imagined hard brown mountains, cactus,

distant volcanoes; bandidos out of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; pyramids and lost cities; cantinas full of

music and tequila and brownskinned women.

Are you okay? Catherine said.

Yeah, yeah.

You’re not drunk?

No, I’m not drunk.

I hope you’re not thinking about some other girl.

No.

Or one of those naked women from school.

No. No women. I swear. …

In February, Tim got out of the army. And we ended up

one night at the bar in Boop’s.

What do you think? I said.

About what?

About going to Mexico.

He laughed out loud.

You’re nuts, he said.

I know, I said. But I’m serious.

He downed a beer, his brow furrowing, and said: Hey,

why not? Why fucking not?

In May, we sent the application forms to Mexico, just to

see what would happen. Weeks passed. The Mexico fever

ebbed as I assumed that I faced still another rejection.

Then, on a Friday, a plump letter trimmed with orange and

green arrived in my mailbox. The stamps were from

Mexico. I tore it open and discovered that I was accepted.

So was Tim. After the cold rejection by Columbia, and the

silence of Paris, I was giddy with jubilation and went off to

Boop’s to celebrate. They did not have tequila at the bar so

I got wrecked on vodka. On Monday, I gave my notice at the

agency, telling Ernie Waivada that I would leave in late

August. I gave no notice to Catherine. I just couldn’t tell her

anything that was not a lie, so I said nothing. To save

money for the trip, I took a second job, as a page at NBC,

starting at six in the evening and working until one in the

morning. That summer, every hour seemed packed with

excitement and discovery, as I learned about the world of

television while dreaming of Mexico. There was an added

benefit: the long hours kept me from facing Catherine.

Meanwhile, Tim and I applied for U.S. passports and

Mexican student visas. The summer raced by. Until the

week before we left, none of it seemed real. We didn’t learn

any Spanish, except the words for bread (pan), water

(agua), and beer (cerveza). Three days before we left, I

finally told Catherine. There were tears and scenes. I

behaved badly.

On the last weekend of August, Tim and I went to the

Greyhound station and waited for the bus that would take us

to Mexico City. I had eighty dollars in my pocket and a bag

of sandwiches.

Pan, I said to myself. Agua. Cerveza.

5

THE BUS from Transportes del Norte was climbing slowly,

breaching one final ridge as it drove into a gigantic scarlet

dawn. Suddenly we could go no higher. And there in the

distance, spread out before us in the great valley of

Anáhuac, was Mexico City.

I remember the tumult of the bus station, the air drowned

with vowels, and the taxi driver staring at the written

address and then driving wildly to the house where we

would stay, with a family arranged by the school. The

address was Melchor Ocampo 288, an apartment house

on the corner of Río Tiber. At the door on the fourth floor, an

old woman smiled and nodded, speaking no English; her

two homely daughters examined us discreetly and led us to

the clean, bright rooms. We unpacked, had soup and rolls,

trying to be polite. Pan, I said, agua, adding por favor, and

ending with gracias. We bowed. We nodded. We smiled

too much. Then we went out in search of cerveza. We found a bar three blocks away, where the Mexicans

stood on the rail and so did we. Later we learned that they

first thought we were making fun of them; they used the rail

because the bar was high and they were short. There was a

great pot of shrimp soup in the place, and our fellow

drinkers laughed as they explained mezcal and the worm at

the bottom of the bottle and tried to describe what pulque

does to the human brain. That first night, a soldier came in

with his girlfriend and placed himself in the doorway leading

to the john, which was an open trench with a steel bar upon

which you hoisted yourself if you had more to do than

urinate. His girlfriend went in to hoist herself on the steel bar

and the soldier held his rifle at the ready, glaring at all of us.

Nobody said a word. A rifle is a useful guarantor of good

manners. Then the woman was through and the soldier

nodded gravely and said Buenas noches and they went

into the night.

The bottles of Carta Blanca beer were cold, bien fría, señor, very cold, sir. And from the great jukebox I first heard

José Alfredo Jiménez growling his cantina poems and

Cuco Sánchez with the harp and the bass guitar singing

“La Cama de Piedra”:

De piedra ha de ser la cama, De piedra la cabecera …

And everyone joining in the mournful line Ay, ay: corazón porque no amas. My heart is broken. Because you don’t

love me.

Dos más, por favor.

I had grown up in New York and visited Baltimore and

Miami and New Orleans. But Mexico City was the most

beautiful city I’d ever seen, as we walked in the cool nights

along the hard-packed earth of the great wide Paseo de la

Reforma. Ash trees climbed high above us. One-peso cabs

hugged the curbs. Thick-bodied pigtailed maids met their

boyfriends in the shadows and sat on stone benches to

listen to the music drifting from the fancy supper clubs.

There were elegant office buildings and great Victorian

mansions from the days of Porfirio Díaz; cafés on the

sidewalks of the Zona Rosa and tiny restaurants where they

served octopus in its own ink and shrimp flown in from the

Pacific ports. Freshly arrived from the countryside,

campesinos in straw hats and white pajamas stared at the

great light-bathed statue of the Angel of Independence in

the center of the circular glorieta where Río Tiber

intersected with the Reforma.

In the crisp mornings, the air thin and clear at 7500 feet

above sea level, we walked seven blocks to the school bus,

passing shopkeepers washing their sidewalks, and

schoolgirls in uniforms hurrying to class. We bought the

sports papers, Esto and Ovaciones, and read about how

Floyd Patterson, from Tim’s high school in Brooklyn, had

knocked out Archie Moore in five rounds to become at

twenty-one the youngest heavyweight champion in history.

We were the same age as Floyd; wasn’t everything now

possible for us too? We also read about the great Mexican

fighters, the bantamweight Ratón Macias, who could box

and punch and sell a hundred thousand tickets, or the

featherweight Pajarito Moreno, who could punch out a

Volkswagen with a right hand and was even the hero of his

own comic book, or Toluco López, great macho, wonderful

fighter, king of the cantinas.

The orange school bus moved up past the monument

honoring the 1938 nationalization of the petroleum industry

into Las Lomas de Chapultepec, where the rich people had

their great mansions behind stone walls topped with broken

glass. That year in Mexico City, there were only three

million citizens and the air was clear. On those crisp

mornings we could see the snow-topped volcanoes

Popocatéptl and Ixtac-cíhuatl, the first male, the second a

sleeping woman, or so we were told, and so we believed.

We came out of the Lomas and turned onto the two-lane

Toluca highway, still climbing, with deep gorges falling

away on either side, and a vast stone quarry way off to the

left; until at the sixteenth kilometer we reached the school.

Mexico City College was a converted country club with

the name lettered in deco style over the main archway. I

thought, as I stood there on the first day: I’m here, in Mexico. I did it. I walked on the irregularly patterned stone

path into the campus and found the administration office in

a cluster of plain red sandstone buildings. Tim and I

completed our forms for the Veterans Administration, then

he went off to the general studies office and I went in search

of the art department. The studios were on the top floor of

an ivy-covered concrete structure that also housed the

theater and the cafeteria, and as I climbed the stairs I

picked up the fragrance of oil and terps. For a moment, I

flashed on Laura. Maybe she was here. Painting. Teaching.

She wasn’t, of course, but a pretty Mexican woman took

my papers, checked them against her own list, and told me

that all I needed for my first classes was charcoal and

newsprint paper. My first class was in the morning. I was in.

With any luck, I would stay for three years, learn the

painter’s craft, become the first in my family to earn a

degree. Here. In Mexico.

6

IN THOSE FIRST GLORIOUS MONTHS, I gazed in awe at the work

of the Mexican muralists. I looked at the dark, brooding

drawings and paintings of the new Mexican artists, led by

José Luis Cuevas, who were the enemies of the painted

oratory of the muralists. I studied Spanish. Money was

always short, the checks from the Veterans Administration

slow in arriving. But Carta Blanca was one peso a bottle,

the equivalent of eight cents in that time when the peso was

a solid 12.50 against the dollar. Bohemia and the dark

fermented-looking Dos Equis cost more, but another brand,

Don Quijote, was only fifty centavos a bottle, or eighty cents

for a case of twenty.

There was drinking everywhere, and Tim and I were part

of it. We went drinking in the small hut across the highway

from the school, in the cantinas near where we lived, at

weekend student parties all over the city. Those parties

bound us together. In some ways, it was like the navy.

Everyone was far from home, far from Ohio and Illinois,

from states with age limits on drinking, far from inspection

by friends or family, all using drink to deal with strangeness

and shyness and a variety of fears. At MCC, there were two

American men for every American woman, and the sense

of male contest gave the parties a tension that occasionally

resembled hysteria. The rule was BYOB, bring your own

bottle, and in the doors came cases of beer, bottles of

tequila, mezcal, pulque, rum. These were 1950s parties,

young men and women packing the chosen apartment,

dancing, as we said, teeth to teeth, to the music of Benny

More and Los Panchos, drinking with little care about food,

faces swirling, ashtrays overflowing with butts, hot eyes

falling upon asses and tits, tits and asses, until the midnight

hour had long passed, and finally the last of the women

were gone, and the remnants of the bleary male squadron

kept drinking on until the beer ran out and you could see the

worm in the bottom of the mezcal bottle and it was time to

face the gray dawn.

I was happier than I’d ever been.

One Saturday night in December, on the eve of the Feast of

the Virgin of Guadalupe, there was a big party in an

apartment shared by four MCC students. It was more

formal than usual, because some Mexican girls had been

invited from a commercial school downtown and we’d been

told to try to make a good impression. I wore my only suit,

dark blue with a thin pinstripe, a shirt and tie. The beer was

flowing. As the Orquesta Aragón played a charanga, I watched the dancing Mexican women, in their formal

dresses, their tapered legs, rustling crinolines, high heels;

the American women seemed more formal than usual, even

awkward, and the men worked too hard at being cool. I

danced a mambo with a girl named Yolanda. Another guy

cut in and I moved aside and drank beer. I danced slowly

with a girl named Maria to “Sin Ti.” She thanked me and

hurried away and I drank beer. In the kitchen, I opened

another bottle of Bohemia and laughed when some of the

louder gringos made bad jokes about La Virgen. Tim Lee

was there with me but left early with one of the young

Mexican women. I danced a cha-cha with a woman named

Lourdes. She left early with two other women. Around

midnight, there were about fifteen men still drinking and two

American women, neither of whom was free. I was drinking

with a Mexican-American friend named Manny when he

suggested that we go out on the town.

There’s gotta be some women someplace, he said. Let’s

take a look.

¿Porqué no? We ended up down on San Juan de Letran, the wide

neon main boulevard of la vida nocturna, where the dance

halls and strip joints and burlesque houses called to the

working class and the slumming ricos. Down here, you

could go in pursuit of the women of la vida galante. On this

chilly midnight, our goal was as clear as the vision was

blurry.

We moved off San Juan de Letran into dark side streets

lined with one-story houses, their walls painted, doors and

shutters locked against the night, iron grills over the

windows. Then we crossed a small cobble-stoned plaza

and a dry fountain and then up ahead there was a street full

of light and noise and people and music. I remember

hearing the song of Agustín Lara:

Solamente una vez Amé en la vida, Solamente una vez — Y nada mas …

(I loved only one time in this life, only one time, and

nothing more.) I was singing the song — or those lines, for I

knew no others — as we walked into the Calle de la

Esperanza, the Street of Hope, lined on both sides with

bordellos. These were the ten-peso whorehouses, the

cheapest in the city, and had been here since before the

1910 Revolution. Each had a tall locked door with a window

opening into a parlor. Dozens of customers, all of them

Mexican, strolled along the street, gazing at the women

through those windows, making comparisons, whispering

offers or compliments before moving on or choosing

admission. I kept humming, Solamente una vez, and

thinking, in a thrilled, tingling way: Orozco must have come

here, and Cuevas, to look at these whores who were old

and listless or young and frightened, to see these altars to

La Virgen made of cigarette tinfoil and fat candles, to

remember the pale harsh light from the ceiling bulbs and

the worn furniture and the drinks served on beer trays. From

one parlor, glimpsed through the window, a young girl

smiled at a visiting gringo, her wide mouth full of gold;

another looked up and turned back to a comic book; a third

stared at the patterns on the rug as if she would never

again have enough sleep.

And then in one of the parlors I saw a frail young woman

with cinnamon skin and liquid eyes. She was sitting alone

on a flowered chair with worn arms, a Dos Equis calendar

of a bare-breasted Indian princess above her on the wall.

From a radio, Los Panchos were singing, and I went by,

wishing I had a sketchbook, imagining myself sitting in that

parlor and drawing that girl, the way Pascin or Toulouse-

Lautrec sketched the whores of Paris; imagined then taking

her away, to live with me in some other place, where I could

draw her and fuck her and sleep with her and then draw her

again. She wasn’t a beaten hulk, like the whores in Orozco,

or a grotesque out of Cuevas. She was beautiful. I was

certain of that. In all the other parlors, the women repelled

me, and as I moved on down the street, I had a sudden

moment of panic; someone else would see her, go in, take

her into the back and I would lose her.

Let’s go back to that place up the block, I said.

You see one you like?

Yeah.

She was still there. I went up to the door, bent down, and

leaned in through the window.

Perdóname, señorita. She looked at me and smiled.

Uh ¿cómo se llamas? What’s your name?

She didn’t answer. Suddenly, an older woman stepped

over and heaved a pan of water at me, drenching me,

shouting in Spanish. I didn’t know why (and never found

out). But I reacted. I lunged forward, like a fullback hitting

the line, driving my body half into the window. The door

came off its hinges and went straight down, with the older

woman under it, screaming. In the same wild action, I

stepped on the door, squashing her, and then the young

woman, my model, the woman I would take to a more

gallant life, attacked, swinging a pocketbook at my head.

Other whores came out of the back, belting me with more

pocketbooks and ashtrays and a tray of tacos, all shouting

and cursing in Spanish, and then Manny grabbed my arm.

Let’s get the fuck out of here, man.

We ran out of the Calle de la Esperanza, laughing and

still a little drunk. In the cobblestoned plaza, a beat-up

rented car pulled over. Inside were three gringos, looking

for directions to the whorehouses. They were in their

twenties, tourists from Texas, beefy, drinking from a rum

bottle. We blurted out what had happened and they opened

the back doors and offered to drive us away. We were all

laughing now. Broke down the door of a fuckin’ whorehouse! In Mexico! Gab-damn!

We were laughing right up to the moment a taxi cut us off.

Out came the two whores followed by two policemen in blue

uniforms. The young whore, mi vida, mi corazón, amor de mis amores, was enraged, her body coiled, her nostrils

wide, her eyes glazed in fury, with her arm straight out and

one painted fingernail pointing at me.

¡Eso es! she screamed. ¡Este cabrón, eso es! That’s

him! That son of a bitch, that’s him!

And then the cops were aiming guns at us. They ordered

us out of the car. The three Texans were jittery. I kept my

eyes on the guns while the whores shouted curses. Manny

was talking very quickly in Spanish, his manner conciliatory,

now smiling, now worried. The policemen were small and

mustached, with brown complexions and worn uniforms.

They did not look convinced of our good intentions. They

ordered us all back into the car, and one of them barked

orders at the two women, who hurled a few final curses,

entered the taxicab, and were driven away. In our car,

Manny sat in the front, between the nervous Texan who was

driving and one of the cops. I sat in the back, the other

Texans beside me and the second cop planted on my lap.

The cop in the front was giving orders to the driver.

Izquierda aquí. As commanded, the driver took a left. A la derecha . . . . The Texan dutifully turned right, down empty

streets with blind windows.

I was suddenly very sober, struggling to believe that this

was happening. Clearly, we were under arrest. All of us. I

was the guilty party, but they were taking us all to a police

station. Over a broken door! But, hey (I told myself), I didn’t

do anything so terrible, did I? I asked a whore for her name

and another whore threw water on me and then … Shit.

What a pain in the ass. Still, it wasn’t murder. It wasn’t

some great armed robbery. We’d go to a police station and

pay for the broken door and that would be that. And I

remembered that I had almost no money. About sixty

pesos. Less than five dollars. Maybe Manny had money.

Maybe the Texans could loan us whatever we needed and

we’d pay them back when we got home. A few bucks. Just

for now. Solamente una vez. But then, as the cop ordered an izquierda, the driver took

a derecha. The cop on my lap cursed at him, this pinche gringo cabrón. The fucking gringo son of a bitch kept going

into the wrong street. And then the Texan beside me

changed everything. He threw a punch at the cop in the front

seat, hitting him on the side of the jaw. The driver panicked,

slammed the brakes, the car skidded, everyone was

shouting, and we spun to a halt. The cop on my lap had his

gun out. I pushed down on the door handle and he and I

rolled out in a tangled heap. I got up and started to run. And

then heard shots.

Pap, pap. Pap-pap-pap. I heard at least three bullets whiz past my head.

I ran. Thinking: They’re trying to kill me.

And then, up ahead, I saw a blue wall of police. They

were piling out of a police station, alerted by the shots, and

I was running right at them. I stopped and one came at me

swinging a long club. I bent down and threw a punch and

knocked him down. Then all the others were on me,

swinging clubs, punching, kicking, screaming pinche cabrón add chingado gringo, until I was on the ground,

pulling myself into a tight ball as they stomped me some

more.

They shoved me into the delegación, and I saw Manny at

the far end of a high-ceilinged greenish room, surrounded

by cops. The Texans were nowhere in sight. Obviously, they

had chosen a better street, and we never saw them again.

But in flight, they’d also taken one of the policemen’s

pistols. So I found myself charged by a fat lieutenant with

lesiones (causing cuts with punches), destruction of private

property (the whorehouse door), assault, resisting arrest,

and robo, for stealing the pistol. I didn’t have enough

Spanish to explain myself. My back and ribs and legs hurt.

My nose ached, and when I touched the bridge, blood

came off on my fingers. Worse, my teeth felt cracked and

sharp to my tongue; one small piece broke off, and when I

picked it out with my fingers, one of the cops smiled.

I was in a mess. I asked for el teléfono but the lieutenant

shook his head and grimaced. No hay, he said; there is

none. No hay teléfono público. I looked out through the

dirty window at a car passing on the street and wished I

was in it, heading home. The sound of the shots and the

whirring of the bullets now seemed louder. And I realized

that I could be dead. One bullet in the head and I’d have

ended on the sidewalk with my life over before it really

started.

The cops shoved me through a door and down a corridor

and then opened a blank steel door that led to a cell block.

In some ways, the long night was just beginning.

They put me into a large dark communal cell at the end of

the block. One high barred window opened to the night. As

the cop locked the cell door behind me, I gazed around.

There were about fifteen men in the cell, a few in modified

zoots, most in rough clothes; I was the only one in a suit and

tie, and I was certainly the only gringo. There were no beds,

but some men were sleeping, huddled on the filthy floor

against the scabrous walls. The air was a compost of stale

beer and rum, sweat and entrapment and shit. The only

toilet was an open hole in the floor in the far corner. The

men gazed at me. I nodded, shrugged, said buenas noches, and smiled. A bone-thin mustached man came

over and asked me for a cigarette. I patted my pockets and

said, No fumo, which was true. He stared at me in a chilly

way, his face impassive, his eyes searching for some sign

of weakness. I stared back, tense, ready to fight. But he

turned and walked away. I felt exhausted and drained and

hurting, but I knew that I could not risk sleeping.

I squatted against the bars of the cell, wondering where

Manny was, and as my eyes adjusted to the murky light I

realized that there were three men in the cell directly across

the corridor. There was also a pile of bricks. Some kind of

construction must have been interrupted by the holiday

weekend. Now more men were being brought into the

cellblock, the gatherings of the holiday, and I could hear

shouts of recognition from other cells and banging on the

steel bars and much drunken laughter. I called Manny’s

name, yelling in English, Are you there, Manny? But there

was no answer. I wondered how I could get word to Tim, to

arrange for bail, to get a lawyer, maybe notify the American

Embassy. But there was nobody to ask. The guards came

in with prisoners, threw them into cells, ignored all pleas or

shouts, and disappeared beyond the steel door.

Then they started bringing in the women. Two of them

were thrown into the cell across the way, where there were

now about eight men. One of them was a worn-out woman,

her hair gray and wild. But the other was young. She was

wearing a yellow blouse. I could see her white teeth against

dark skin. The men in my cell moved toward the bars to

examine this new arrival. Suddenly the mood shifted; sexual

excitement seemed to thicken the air. Across the way, two

men were easing around the young woman. She was

terrified, backing away from each of them, screaming in a

thin voice, Ayúdeme, por favor, ayúdeme … Help me, please, help me.

Nobody came to her aid. One of the men, short,

compact, muscular, reached out swiftly and tore open the

front of the blouse. She made a yipping birdlike sound, her

voice weak and trembling, and then he grabbed the center

of her black bra and ripped down, exposing her heavy dark

breasts, and now all the men in my cell were shouting

encouragement. ¡Vaya, macho! ¡Ándale! The old woman

cringed against a wall, but the rape was delayed. The

second man intervened and shoved the short, muscular

man, who threw a punch and grabbed at him, the two of

them closing violently, throwing punches to do damage, the

short man’s shirt coming off, the girl retreating in wide-eyed

fear, covering her breasts, screaming. And then the

combatants found the bricks. Their eyes were wide, faces

gleaming with lust and violence, as they circled each other

like boxers, each armed with a brick, the men in my cell

roaring now as if at a prizefight in the Arena Coliseo, urging

them to use the left or throw the right. Every time one of

them landed with a brick there was a loud thwacking sound

as if something had broken. Sweat glistened on the body of

the shirtless man. Blood ran from a gash in the other’s

cheekbone, and their shoulders and arms were welted and

raw.

Finally the young woman was shouting something to

them, something about death, and offering her breasts,

then placing a hand up under her skirt, as if saying that she

didn’t want them to kill each other for her. I couldn’t make

out the pleading words over the roar of the men in my cell.

But she seemed to be saying, Stop! Go ahead and rape

me if you must, but stop.

They paused.

My cell went silent.

And then the short man lunged at the other, prepared to

kill or die, and the roar was immense, the codes of men

triumphing over the mercy of women.

Finally, the steel door opened and guards rushed in,

hurrying down the corridor. One drew a gun, shouting into

the cell. The men stopped, then sullenly dropped the bricks.

The girl looked forlorn. The guards opened the cell door,

first called out the old woman, then the younger one, while

one guard shouted at another about his stupidity. The

fighters were locked in with their inexhaustible supply of

bricks. The men in my cell were still roaring, calling out to

the girl, Muñeca, eres mi reina, Hey, doll, you are my

queen, and offering to never fight again if only she would

take them forever to her bed. But she stared at the floor of

the corridor, walking sadly on one high-heeled shoe, the

other in her hand, covering her lovely breasts with the

shredded blouse. The two women went out through the

steel door. I didn’t know what had brought her to that cell; I

supposed she was a prostitute, perhaps a thief; but I felt

certain that she would carry that hour of horror with her for

all the years of her life. I knew I would too.

7

IN THE MORNING, they started moving me around. The first

stop was another jail, where I was put in solitary

confinement. The room was like a closet, no windows, no

toilet, no bed, with a thin line of light at the base of an iron

door. I ran my fingers over the wall and found letters gouged

in the surface. My eyes slowly adjusted. The letters said:

Viva Stalin, el Rey de los Rojos. Long live Stalin, the King

of the Reds. And I thought that maybe Siqueiros had been

here, or the leader of the railroad workers, or some

amazing guerrilla fighter brought down alive from the

Sierras. I wondered too if I was a political prisoner of some

crazy kind; maybe they’d separated me because they were

afraid the Mexicans would kill me, a gringo, one of the

people who stole Texas and California and New Mexico

and Arizona and Oklahoma and Utah, one of the people

who called them greasers, spics, beaners, and wetbacks

on the cold scary other side of the border. Maybe the cop I

hit had died. Maybe I fit the description of some other killer.

Some fugitive who killed eight people in Nebraska and

made it across the border.

And how did I get here? In the black closet, as I gazed at

that sliver of light, the night played out in my mind. If I hadn’t

gone to the party, or if nobody had cut in when I danced with

Yolanda, or if I’d said no to Manny, said, Manny, I don’t want

to go anywhere, if I’d gone home and read a book or made

some pictures; if I hadn’t seen the young girl in the crib on

the Street of Hope, hadn’t gone back to see her again; if I’d

had some money to bribe the cops; if I’d run down the

street behind the Texans; if. If, I said. If. I wondered what

time it was too. What day. Where Tim was. Wondered what

my mother would think if she heard I was spending my life in

a Mexican prison. Wondered if I’d ever read a book again

or paint a picture. And fell asleep, wedged against the wall,

under the name of Stalin.

That evening, they took me out of solitary, with no

explanation, and put me in another large cell with a dozen

guys. I was starving now, aching with thirst, my tongue furry

with hangover. The mood here was brighter, kinder, the

men speaking slowly so that I could understand their

Spanish. I quickly learned that nobody was fed in these

jails. Food was delivered by wives and girlfriends, and

when the other prisoners discovered I had neither, they

shared their food with me. They told jokes. They laughed.

They explained why they were there. A busdriver was

arguing with his girlfriend and ran his bus into a limousine

whose owner — a politician — had him arrested. Another

man had beaten up his father-in-law at a family party, for

coming on to some woman in the kitchen. A third had stolen

some shirts from a market and tried to sell them to buy a

dress for his mujer. When I told my story about the

whorehouse, they laughed and slapped each other and

handed me some water. I was one of them: another crazy

bastard fucked up by women.

They told more stories. They made jokes. They talked

about Ratón Macias and Toluco López. They sang mournful

ballads. They slept. In the morning, I was moved one final

time, outside to have my picture taken on the steps of the

jail (it appeared in El Universal, where an “I” was dropped

off my name and I was described as being of Arabic

descent) and then into a van with grilled windows. With four

other men I was taken through side streets and across wide

gray avenues into the city’s penitentiary at Lecumberri, a

looming pile called El Palacio Negro. The Black Palace.

I was let out of the van in a courtyard, then taken to a

second yard. Dark stone walls climbed above me, topped

by barbed wire and guards strolling casually with rifles at

the ready. No way out. I remember passing cells that were

elaborately decorated with pictures of women and boxers

and soccer players; men cooking at stoves; radios playing;

and the endless noise of steel upon steel. There seemed to

be thousands of men here, some walking independently

down aisles, others sleeping, dozens milling around. I knew

about this place from our Mexican history classes; Pancho

Villa was once a prisoner here; Francisco Madero was

murdered beside these walls. But this wasn’t a tour; I was a

prisoner.

They put me in a single cell and locked me in. There was

a scab on my nose now and my ribs hurt and my teeth were

a mess. But the fear had gone out of me; I stopped thinking

about what had happened and what might happen and

focused on what was happening. And for the moment I was

safe. Even death had lost its scary power. I knew now that if

a bullet had slammed into my skull and killed me, I’d have

felt nothing. But I was alive. The pain I felt was the proof.

Four days later, when they finally came to take me out, Tim

Lee was waiting in an outer office of the prison with a young

Mexican lawyer. They’d been trying for days to find me in

the labyrinth of the prison system. Tim saw my picture in El Universal, flanked by cops on the stepe of the delegación as I was being moved to the Black Palace. He got the

name of a lawyer from one of the teachers and used his

own money for bail. A functionary in the prison office told

me to report to the Black Palace once a week to sign in

while the judicial process ran its course. The lawyer

explained to the official that he was representing me,

signed some papers, gave me his card, and left. Then I

took a deep breath and walked out into the sunshine. There

were groups of shawled women waiting beside the walls to

deliver food to their men. They had helped feed me too.

I’m sorry, I said.

Forget it, Tim said. I just wish we’d found you sooner.

I’m glad you found me at all.

We hailed a cab.

Where to?

I laughed.

A bath, I said.

Nothing else? Not even a meal?

No, I said, not even a beer.

I went to bed in a darkened room and tried to pray to the

Virgin of Guadalupe. The words would not come. I tossed in

the dark for a long time, seeing sweaty men hammering at

each other with bricks. Then I turned on the light and slept

for eighteen hours.

8

WITH MY FRIENDS, even with Tim, I affected a casual, blasé

attitude about what had happened in the night on the Calle

de la Esperanza. But for weeks, I woke up sweating, my

dreams instantly wiped away, leaving only an ashy residue

of dread. The memory of the whistling bullets, the fight with

the bricks and the whimpering young woman, the sense of

being lost in a system of steel rooms in which strangers

spoke a language I did not know: all were woven into me.

I didn’t blame the drunken party that had preceded the

trip to Calle de la Esperanza; by then, drinking was so

natural it would have been like placing blame on the act of

breathing. I continued going to the student parties, still got

drunk. I didn’t blame Mexico either. Too many Mexicans

had been kind to me. But something had happened. I was

trying to discover some deeper principle, some rule of adult

life that accounted for accident and choice and human

ugliness. Not some divine commandment. Not some vague

or blurry generalization. Something that I had learned from

experience. After all, an artist should know how to do that;

an artist shouldn’t just learn what other artists have learned;

he should know what his life has taught him. But when I

made drawings of the events of that evening they all came

out looking like comic strips. They were simpleminded and

crude, mere diagrams of place and action and

consequences. They seemed glimpsed from the outside,

instead of felt from the inside.

Because of that failure, and my dissatisfaction, I started

to write. I filled pages with accounts of what had happened,

telling the story, layering it with dread and fear, trying for

what Hemingway called the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact that made the emotion. I might get fact

into a drawing or painting, but how could I get motion? I

could get both in writing. And as I wrote more, my passion

for painting faded.

There was another reason for this shift: money. Or the

lack of it. Drinking at some Saturday-night party, or hanging

out between classes at MCC, I could swagger in front of

other students about what happened in jail, as proof of a

macho ability to survive. I couldn’t swagger about money.

Like all the other veterans, I was receiving $110 a month.

From that I had to pay for tuition, room, board, and

expenses. After Christmas, Tim and I moved with two other

students into a large apartment off the Avenida Ejército

Nacional; that cut the rent to $25 each. But I was also

paying back Tim for the money he’d laid out for bail, and I

had to make monthly payments to the Mexican lawyer as

the case dragged on in legal hearings. I couldn’t write home

for money. In 1955 my mother had given birth to my brother

Joe, and with six kids in the house in Brooklyn, there was

no money to spare. Besides, I was a man now (or so I

thought), and a man didn’t borrow money from his mother. I

could borrow books from the Benjamin Franklin Library. I

couldn’t borrow brushes, paint, or canvas. In the second

quarter, I decided not to take an oil painting class and

enrolled in a writing class instead.

I did have enough money for a trip to Acapulco, sharing

the expenses with four other students to ride down through

the wild mountains of Guerrero, where bandits still

practiced their craft. After miles of twisting roads through

gorges and tropical valleys, we came around a bend and

the great curving bay of Acapulco lay before us. Mountains

dove sharply to the sea, with tiny white buildings set along

their ridges among palms and thick green foliage. The

beach looked like a white scythe, touched by the great

expanse of cobalt blue water that moved off to touch the

darker blue line of the sky. The light was as bright and clear

as Matisse.

One of the guys in the car had been there before, and he

explained about the morning beach and the afternoon

beach, the Caleta and the Caletilla, how one was sunny

until noon and then was abruptly plunged into shadow when

the sun moved behind the mountains. The white mansion

on the edge of the cliff: that was John Wayne’s house. He

had a Mexican wife and lived here between pictures. And

that lavender palace, out beyond the Duke’s, out there on

the Quebrada, past where the divers plunged into the

advancing tides: that belonged to Dolores del Rio.

A beer popped. We were sitting under a straw-roofed

palapa on the morning beach, the car parked on a

cobblestoned street, hawkers selling rum drinks in coconut

shells, and an argument briefly raged about which of

Mexico’s two greatest female stars was more beautiful,

Maria Felix or Dolores del Rio. I said there was no contest

about pure beauty. Dolores del Rio’s perfect oval face, her

high cheekbones, the slope of her brow: she was like a

Renaissance painting, man. That’s the problem, somebody

said. She’s too beautiful. You’d spend your time just

looking at her; you wouldn’t want to fuck her. And someone

else said, But you never get to fuck Maria Felix, either; she

fucks you. We had no money for the tourist hotels, of course, but we

found a place on the beach south of the city where we could

rent hammocks tied to palm trees for one peso a night.

That beach is gone now, devoured long ago by the Pierre

Marqués Hotel, but no place in my memory remains more

beautiful. In the evenings, we sat on driftwood and drank

beer and laughed and told lies and listened to the

fishermen play guitars around an open fire. The Mexicans

were friendly, amazed at the crazy gringos who were down

there with them on la playa. The Mexicans were humble,

illiterate, generous, decent; they shared food with us and

beer and taught us the words of songs and talked about las mujeres, about women gone off and women arriving, about

women full of betrayal and women full of trust. I remember

gently rocking into sleep under the stars, more stars than I’d

seen since Fox Lair Camp, stars forming clouds and

clusters, shapes and patterns, dwarfing us all. And then

waking in the dawn to the quiet lapping of surf and the

arrival of the orange ball of the sun while fishermen

dragged dead sharks onto the sand.

On the last day, drinking in the afternoon, I went Walking

north upon the beach, out beyond the point of the Playa

Caletilla. At the foot of a cliff, I lay down on the empty sand

and fell asleep. When I woke up, the sky was darkening into

dusk. And off to the right a young woman in a one-piece

yellow bathing suit was sitting on a towel staring out to sea

toward the Isla la Roqueta. Her tightly braided pigtail hung

down her back, pointing at the towel. I sat there for a while,

brushing the sand off my back, looking at her smooth dark

skin. My own skin was reddening from the sun. My mouth

felt sour from drinking. She and I were the only people in

sight. I stood up and walked slowly toward the surf, angling

toward her. She turned to look at me. She was about

eighteen, with a long nose and an upper lip dark with down.

I saw that she’d been crying.

Are you all right? I said.

She turned away, wiping at her eyes with her forearm.

¿ Está bien? I said.

I squatted beside her and touched her hand. She pulled

away and then started talking very quickly in sobbing

Spanish, something about the novio — her boyfriend —

and her father, who was so cruel, and how her life was over.

I didn’t understand the details, but she was full of anger and

despair and heartbroken tears. And then she fell against

me, her body wracking with sobs, and I put my arm around

her and held her tight and whispered to her in English,

Don’t worry, don’t worry, murmured, It’ll be all right,

murmured, Go ahead and cry, just cry, baby, just cry. Until

the sobs ended, and my chest was wet with her tears, and

she was still, the warmth of her body entering mine as the

sun went down.

We held each other for a long time, whispering,

exchanging names, Pedro, Yolanda, the surf growling and

pulling and growling, buoys dinging in the dark. I kissed her.

She kissed me back. I lifted the pigtail and kissed the nape

of her neck. She touched my chest and stomach and

discovered my erection. I played with her breasts through

the wired bra of the bathing suit and then moved her zipper

down and took a lush pliant breast in my hand and a hard

nipple in my mouth in the Pacific night, as her hand moved

inside my bathing suit. Yolanda. At the foot of the cliff where

Dolores del Rio gazed at mirrors. Yolanda, excited and

writhing and then suddenly weeping again, withdrawing her

hand, pulling away, as I heard what she heard: distant

feminine voices calling on the dark beach.

Yo-laaaanda. ¿Dónde estás? Yolandaaaa. And she was up, panicky, tucking breasts inside the

bathing suit, zippering it up in back.

Mañana, I said. Aquí en la playa. Exactamente aquí.

Sí, sí, she whispered. Mañana, en la tarde. Aquí en la playa. . . . Tomorrow afternoon, here on the beach.

She hurried off in the dark toward the town and the

faceless disembodied voices of her keepers, her sisters or

aunts or mother. I plunged into the surf. The next day I went

back to the spot but she was not there. And that night we all

piled into the car to return to Mexico City.

9

MY CASE dragged on, month after month. I would go to a

hearing, answer questions, be given another date, then pay

the lawyer what I could. I kept taking drawing classes but

couldn’t afford the painting workshops; I started writing

short stories and poetry. In the last week of each month, the

VA money virtually all gone, I was eating sandwiches made

of hard rolls and slices of raw onion. For the first time, I

started smoking cigarettes, dark-papered Negritos, four

cents a pack, to help me across the hunger; I became an

instant addict. There was one more drunken party and a

fight with a young Mexican student. I was in the kitchen

when it started, and I hit him hard and he went down in a

pile of broken glasses and there was blood everywhere. I

thought he was dead. He wasn’t, but I hid for a few days,

afraid the police would come and get me. And then in May,

the school term was over and I knew I had to leave.

I decided to jump bail and try to make it back to New

York. Tim stayed behind, to work for a degree, while I

shared a ride with a guy from Buffalo who was heading

home. As we approached the border, I was certain that my

name must be on some list. I would show my visa to the

Mexican border guards and they’d see my name and start

to arrest me. I rehearsed escapes: sprinting across the

bridge, leaping into the shallow waters of the Rio Grande. In

my mind, I heard the cracking of shots. I heard bullets

whistling. I saw men fighting with bricks to possess the

body of a frightened woman.

When we reached the bridge, my heart was pounding,

my hands were wet. But there was no list. The guard took

my visa and waved us across. The dream of Mexico-as-

Paris was over. In Brownsville, we stopped for gas and I

had a cold bottle of Lone Star. I looked back at Mexico,

relieved and free, but overwhelmed with an almost

intolerable sadness.

10

HOME AGAIN in New York, after nine months away, I quickly

fell into the earnest rhythms of the 1950s. Necessity was

the goad; I needed to eat and get on with my life. I again

worked for Ernie Waivada in the advertising agency. I spent

a year at Pratt, studying design. I took a small flat on the

Lower East Side. After work or school, I went drinking. I

wrote a little and painted less.

On one level, the track was clear. Learn a trade and you’ll never go hungry, my father said. Graphic design was

a trade, like plumbing or carpentry. If I mastered it, I would

never go hungry. But in truth I was hesitant about moving

down the track. In magazines like Graphis, I saw the cold

elegant layouts of Swiss designers and studied the bolder

work of the Americans. Some of them offered more than

the example of craft; they promised a vision based on

order, the reduction of chaos to a small neat space. But in

the art galleries, I finally saw the actual work of Kline and

Pollock, de Kooning and Motherwell, stood close to their

ferociously confident canvases. There was nothing cold

about their disorderly art and nothing small. They had the

size and boldness of the Mexican muralists but were free of

their preaching. I was drawn to the physicality of their

paintings, the almost athletic swagger of the brushwork. But

at the same time, their work seemed beyond me, their

vision too heroic. After this, where could painting go?

Where could I go?

Writing remained only a perhaps. In my flat off Second

Avenue, or in small dark bars, I filled notebooks with

questions about art, politics, my own chaotic ambitions.

Sometimes, late at night in the flat, I typed these notes on

an old upright Royal I’d bought in a secondhand store and

put them in file folders. I tried short stories in the

Hemingway manner, more variations on what had

happened to me in Mexico, even poems, transcribed from

fragments scribbled in bars. But it seemed an arrogant

ambition to be a writer, in a world where Hemingway and

Faulkner still lived. Who do you think you are? some

collective voice from the Neighborhood called to me. Who the hell do you think you are? Besides, in bars at night, or

at Pratt, or at my part-time drawing table at the agency, I

could still show off with a drawing. And if there was even

small applause, I felt that I never could completely abandon

the dream of art; the prospect filled me with dread. For a

long time, I’d based my identity on the hope of being an

artist; to give up now might cast me into the shapeless fog

that had engulfed me after the failure at Regis.

I carried these confusions with me through a New York

terrain now permanently changed by the tubular Ben Shahn

forests of television antennas and highways leading to the

faceless Levittowns of Long Island. The Neighborhood, its

streets already emptied at night by television, began to reel

from departures to the new suburbs and the arrival of the

plague of heroin. When I visited 378, my mother talked for

the first time about danger. Standing with my father at the

bar in Rattigan’s, a full member now of the fraternity, I heard

about muggings and overdoses. A few men died of

cirrhosis from drinking, but compared to a needle in the

arm, that was an honorable death. In tenements where once

there was nothing much worth stealing, people now started

locking their doors.

The Eisenhower era bragged of the good life for all, a

time of abundance and prosperity, but it didn’t touch the

Neighborhood. The prosperous were gone to the suburbs;

among those who stayed, money was still short.

Everywhere in the city, factories were closing. Globe

Lighting, where my father worked, moved from the

Neighborhood to Flushing and then, later, to Georgia. In the

daytime, there were more men in the bars, drinking in

silence and defeat. The city was changing: gradually,

almost imperceptibly in some ways, drastically in others.

The world wasn’t as solid as it seemed when I was twelve;

and that was a confusion. You spent twenty years learning

how to live in the world and then it changed on you. I’d wake

up some mornings and buy the newspapers and think:

What the fuck is going on?

Even in bars, some things were not discussed. McCarthy

was gone, but the Great Fear had left its mark. At the

agency, I was on the fringe of the world of organization

men, men in gray flannel suits, men who talked about the

new cult of motivation research, of inner-directed and outer-

directed human beings, of lonely crowds and hidden

persuaders. They shrugged when you mentioned politics

(although Ernie Waivada, from Massachusetts, was a huge

fan of Senator Jack Kennedy). Politics was trouble. Get the

money. Or get the women. Luscious secretaries from

Lynbrook. Sweet fearful file clerks from the Bronx. Noble

defenders of the holy hymen. But willing to please at the

midnight hour. I knew I couldn’t exist for long in that world.

Painter or writer, I needed to be free.

In the fall of 1957, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was

published by Viking Press, with a glowing review by Gilbert

Milstein in the New York Times. I went out and bought a

copy, that first hardcover edition with the famous

photograph of Kerouac in rough lumberjack shirt and silver

crucifix, his eyes brooding, his square fullback’s face

unshaven. I read the first sentence on the subway to

Brooklyn — I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up — and was carried away. I read in the Village Voice (then three years old and full of surprises) that

Kerouac was due in town for a Friday-night jazz-poetry

reading at the Village Vanguard. I paid the admission, went

downstairs, ordered vodka at the bar, and for almost two

hours listened to Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and some other

poets. I was thrilled with the flow of words and the

counterpoint of jazz, and gazed through the cigarette

smoke at the remote women, who all seemed dressed in

black, cool as ice sculpture. Kerouac was older than I

expected (he was then thirty-five) and punched out with his

hands to punctuate his lines. At the end, the audience

cheered. I wanted to talk to him, about Mexico and

Pensacola and jail and women; but I couldn’t get close to

him when it was over; he was engulfed by reporters and

photographers and the cool dark women. That year, Jack

Kerouac was a star.

I went back upstairs into Seventh Avenue and wandered

east to University Place and eased into the packed bar of

the Cedar Street Tavern, where the painters did their

drinking. For an hour, I drank beer alone at the bar and

listened to an argument over centerfielders. Suddenly

Kerouac and his friends came in, shouldering through the

door, then merging with the other drinkers, three deep at

the bar. Kerouac edged in beside me. He was drunk. He

threw some crumpled bills on the bar. I said hello. He

looked at me in a suspicious, bleary way and nodded. The

others were crowding in, yelling, Jack, Jack, and he was

passing beers and whiskeys to them, and Jack, Jack, he

bought more, always polite, but his eyes scared, a twitch in

his face and a sour smell coming off him in the packed bar

that reminded me of the morning odor of my father in the

bed at 378. Soon he was ranting about Jesus and nirvana

and Moloch and bennies, then lapsing into what sounded

like Shakespeare but probably wasn’t, because his friends

all laughed. Under the combination of Kerouac and beer,

my brain was scrambling. The painters gave him a who-the-

fuck-is-this-guy? look. College girls were coming over. A

bearded painter bumped him on the way to the bathroom

and Corso let out a wail of protest at the ceiling and the

bartender looked nervous and soon I was drunk too.

When I woke up the next day I wrote a poem in Beat

cadences, mixing up the Village Vanguard and Brooklyn

College and some bad Kenneth Rexroth, and a few days

later submitted it (and another) to the Pratt literary

magazine. I was astonished when both were accepted.

They were my first published writings.

The confusions deepened. After Mexico, I wanted to have

enough money to forget about money and chose graphic

design as the way to make a living. But the life of a

designer demanded steadiness and clarity, qualities in

complete opposition to my image of the wild, free-living,

hard-drinking bohemian. Design also required submission

to the whole buttoned-down gray-flanneled organization-

man strictures of the Fifties. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t

want to accept those tame codes. But in an important way, I

used them as a license. Drinking became the medium of

my revolt against the era of Eisenhower. Drinking was a

refusal to play the conformist game, a denial of the stupid

rules of a bloodless national ethos.

I expressed that revolt at huge weekend parties, crowded

with students, where cases of beer were jammed into ice-

packed bathtubs, and big strapping young women from the

Midwest slipped into dark back rooms with various guys,

including me. The music pounded, Little Richard meeting

Miles Davis, Elvis contending with Coltrane, while the half-

digested words of painter-guru Hans Hofmann collided with

the lyrics of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. There were wild nights in

Manhattan too, stops at The Cedars or the Five Spot, with

complete strangers saying, Let’s go, man, big party right up

the street. And they were right: hard loud whiskey drinking

beer-swilling parties were part of every New York weekend.

I remember being at two big parties at The Club on Eighth

Street, where I first saw Helen Frankenthaler, beautiful in a

camel’s-hair coat, de Kooning and Kline cracking wise to

each other, women grabbing men by the balls while

dancing, men dancing with men and women kissing

women. I was at another party in the packed sweaty

railroad flat that belonged to the poet LeRoi Jones, who

had started publishing a little magazine called Yugen and

talked to me in a smoky hallway about Krazy Kat. I spent

one glorious night drinking at The Cedars with Franz Kline,

talking about women and cartoonists and London art

schools. He took three of us to his studio at four in the

morning, where he showed us his big new paintings, which

were in color. He looked sad and fatalistic when he told us

that the dealers hated them. They wanted him to keep

doing “Franz Klines,” in his trademarked black and white. I

thought: Just like executives at some big company dictating

to a man from the advertising agency.

That night, I backed up a few feet from the bohemian

ideal. Kline, Pollock, de Kooning all had starved for twenty

years before selling any paintings. And here was Kline, at

the peak of his fame, worried that the galleries would stop

taking the pictures he wanted to make. What if I spent

twenty years and nobody ever bought a painting? I thought

of Laura’s bitterness, posing nude to pay rent, then

vanishing into obscurity. I knew from Brooklyn that poverty

wasn’t noble; it was a humiliation. If I chose the freedom of

the painter’s life, who would pay the bills? I suddenly

understood that I wasn’t painting because I was afraid to

discover that I had no talent. If I had no talent, I would starve.

That was the late 1950s for me. Torn between the desire

for personal freedom and the need for a proud security, I

postponed the choice. I drank a lot. I got laid a lot. In most

of the minor ways, I had a very good time.

11

MUCH OF MY MEMORY of those years is blurred, because

drinking was now slicing holes in my consciousness. I never

thought of myself as a drunk; I was, I thought, like many

others — a drinker. I certainly didn’t think I was an alcoholic.

But I was already having trouble on the morning after

remembering the details of the night before. It didn’t seem

to matter; everybody else was doing the same thing. We

made little jokes about having a great time last night — I

think. And we’d begun to reach for the hair of the dog.

To save money, I began sharing my seventy-five-dollar-a-

month apartment with Jake Conaboy and Bill Powers,

friends from the Neighborhood. Jake talked about

becoming an actor, Billy also wanted to be a painter, and

was studying at Pratt. At some point, Richie Kelly came

over too, took a flat next door, enrolled at the School of

Visual Arts, and began training as an illustrator. Drinking

cases of beer, we talked passionately about art, movies,

women; we read Pound, Eliot, Camus. We took our own

paths through the city but always ended up at the flat on

Ninth Street and Second Avenue, in the heart of the

Ukrainian blocks of the Lower East Side. And we threw our

own parties, mixing together people from the

Neighborhood, Pratt, and our jobs. They were noisy,

sweating, roaring affairs, full of music, dancing, and booze.

In the mornings after, we had to call people to find out what

we’d done. For a while, I was going out with a beautiful

slender Dominican girl who was saddened in equal

proportions by an early divorce and the smallness of her

breasts. Jake started going with her sister. We laughed so

hard on some nights that my body ached; today I can’t

remember a single line that was said.

At some point after Tim Lee returned from Mexico, with a

degree in philosophy, Billy found his own apartment and

Tim took his place in the third bedroom. A few weeks later,

Tom McMahon, my English teacher from Pratt, came home

from England, where he’d taken a degree at Oxford. He

soon had us organized into a weekly study group. Under

McMahon’s direction, we went through Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms; a number of stories in Understanding Fiction, an anthology-textbook edited by Cleanth Brooks

and Robert Penn Warren, parts of Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading; George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English

Language.” We spent weeks reading and analyzing

Aristotle’s Ethics. All of us joined in, making jokes, sipping

beers, smoking too many cigarettes. McMahon had a

tough, unsatisfied intelligence; he was brilliant in seeing the

stylistic surface of a piece of writing but he also challenged

every sentimentality, every glib remark, and insisted that we

dig and dig until we’d discovered the moral core of the

work. Every session left a permanent mark on my own later

writing. McMahon truly taught me how to read. No small

thing.

Reading drew me deeper into writing, but I showed

almost nobody my own Hemingwayesque short stories,

Orwellian essays, Kerouackian poems. Surely they couldn’t

survive the scrutiny we were applying to Hemingway or

Orwell, and McMahon made clear his contempt for the

rambling formless style of the Beats. So I practiced writing

as a secret vice and kept working as an apprentice

designer. I had money now for oil and canvas, but I did no

painting at all.

A droll, balding artist’s agent named Tom Fortune used

to come around to the agency, trying to sell the work of his

illustrators. One day he asked me if I did any freelancing.

No, I said, but I could use the money. Did I think I could

handle the layout and pasteups for a magazine?

What kind of magazine? I asked.

Well, Fortune said, it’s a little unusual.

What do you mean, unusual?

It’s in Greek.

Within a few weeks I had my first freelance client, a

Greek magazine called Atlantis. The office was on Twenty-

third Street off Tenth Avenue. The editor was an

enthusiastic young guy named Jimmy Vlasto, whose father,

Solon G. Vlasto, was publisher of the magazine and a daily

newspaper of the same name. Obviously, I couldn’t read

Greek, but neither could Jimmy. We had a great time

together, laying out stories about Melina Mercouri or

holidays on Mykonos, hoping that the leftover text jumped

into the correct place in the back of the book. Sometimes it

did. Often it didn’t. And at some point I suggested to Jimmy

that maybe we should start running some articles in

English.

At least we can have something to read in the magazine,

I said. At least the fucking jumps will be in the right place.

Why not? Jimmy said. The old man’ll go nuts but what the

hell.

I had been following the career of a sensational young

middleweight named Jose Torres. He’d won a silver medal

in the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, had won a number of

Golden Gloves, AAU, and All-Army championships, and

after seven victories in seven pro fights, he was the new

hero of the city’s growing Puerto Rican population. He was

managed by Cus D’Amato and trained in the Gramercy

Gym, five blocks from where I lived on Ninth Street. At a bar

near the magazine, I said to Jimmy Vlasto that I’d love to

write about Torres. Jimmy was also a fight fan. Go ahead,

he said.

A few days later, I found Torres at the gym. Almost

immediately, we became friends. He was not only a great

boxer but one of the smartest people I’d ever met. I hung

around with him, did some interviews, then went home and

wrote the article. I needed three days to get it right, and with

anxious heart I delivered it the following week to Jimmy

Vlasto. I sat in a tattered easy chair while Jimmy read the

piece. When he was finished, he smiled.

I love this, he said, his voice surprised. Fuck! Let’s run it!

Great.

But listen, he said, I can only pay you twenty-five bucks.

I’ll take it, I said.

That was it. I was a professional writer. Billy Powers took

some photographs, I laid out the pages, and ten days later

my first journalism was in print. I was runny with excitement.

But when I went to Twenty-third Street to pick up copies of

the issue, a glum Jimmy told me that his father wanted to

see both of us in his office. We went upstairs to the wood-

paneled room with its muted lamps and photographs of

Solon G. Vlasto in the company of presidents and

archbishops. The old man stared at the two of us from

behind his immense desk.

Let me ask you something, he said, in his thick Greek

accent.

Silence. Then his eyes flashed.

How come, he said, in a Grik magazine, is a story about

a Puerto Rican boxer, written by an Irish guy, in English? A pause.

And then Jimmy burst out with an immortal line: The young Greeks love him!

Mr. Vlasto looked at us in a deadpan way, thought about

this, looked suddenly as if he understood that the world was

passing him by, and then sighed.

Next time, he said, find a Grik boxer.

Then, dismissing us, he leaned forward to examine a

sheet covered with the logic of numbers.

12

THROUGH ALL OF this time, I was devouring newspapers.

There were still seven of them in New York then, and I read

them all, like a predator. My favorite was the Post. Convinced by my work for Atlantis that I had some talent as

a writer, I wrote a few letters to the editor, and two of them

were printed. One of them took up the entire letters section,

a long screed about “my generation,” and for a week there

were letters of reaction. This got me on some obscure

radio show, which led to an invitation to appear on the

“Long John Nebel Show,” then the biggest thing on all-night

radio. Nebel liked me and kept inviting me back to his

freeform discussion of Martians, politics, extraterrestrials,

comics, and the Beats. I kept writing letters to the editor of

the Post. Meanwhile, I was earning more money. I left the agency

to open a studio with a partner across the street from the

Art Brown art supply store on West Forty-sixth Street. I

thought this would give me freedom, the sense of being my

own man. But the harder I worked, the more letterheads I

designed, the more business cards and employee

publications I pasted up, the more I felt trapped. I had an

obligation to my partner to pay my share of the studio

expenses. My work was getting better, which brought me

more work, and longer hours. The office building was

deserted and forbidding at night, so I pitched a drawing

table in the kitchen of the flat on Ninth Street and often

worked until dawn, pasting up catalogs and listening to

Symphony Sid on the radio, with the volume turned down so

the other guys could sleep. On some nights, Coltrane

sounded like an accusation: Why are you doing that work

when you could be as free as I am?

Those long grinding hours entitled me to a reward. Of

course. On weekends, or on nights when I was not making

mechanicals for a doll catalog or designing an ad for a

machine operator, I went drinking. Sometimes I was with

my Dominican flaquita. Sometimes with Tim, Jake, and

Billy. Sometimes alone. I had money in my pocket, cash I’d

earned with hard hours. In the downtown bars, in joints like

Birdland, I could afford any drink in the house.

We were in the roaring midst of a New Year’s Eve party on

Ninth Street when someone arrived with great news.

It’s over! Castro wins! Batista left Havana.

You’re shitting me, Jake said.

No, man, it’s on the radio.

We turned on the radio and the news was true. The

bearded young revolutionary had triumphed over the cruel

dictator. His army was moving down from the Sierra

Maestra in triumph. All night long, we played charangas by

Orquesta Aragón and listened to bulletins and drank beer

and talked bad Spanish and cheered for Fidel. Nobody

knew that he was a communist. He was young, from our time. He hadn’t just talked about change, he’d done something. Faced with grinding oppression and a lack of

freedom, Fidel had picked up a rifle and gone to the

mountains. We cheered because we thought the good guys

had won. After a while, I took my Dominican girl next door

to a friend’s small apartment and fucked her wildly, the two

of us yelling together in the revolutionary solidarity of

Spanish. Then we went back to the party and danced some

more, full of exultation, beer, and joy. Later, when the party

was over, Jake went off with one woman and Tim with

another. I was alone with La Dominicana again. We made

love then in my own bed. The morning arrived, as gray as

hangover. I wished we could wake up in Havana.

More than ever, as Jack Kennedy made his great run for

the presidency, I was reading the political columns in the

newspapers, particularly in the Post. Since it had published

several of my letters, I thought of the Post as my newspaper. In the late spring of 1960, Jimmy Wechsler, the

paper’s editor, published a book called Reflections of an Angry Middle Aged Editor. The book was a kind of

situation report on American society after the fall of

McCarthy; it was sometimes despairing, about race and

class, but otherwise full of hope. I read it through in one

night and then typed a long letter to Wechsler, agreeing

with most of what he’d written, arguing with some of his

remarks, singling out a chapter on journalism for my

hardest criticism, implying that newspapers had no room

for people like me. Working-class people. People who

didn’t go to Ivy League schools, young men rejected by

places like Columbia. Such people, I said, might not have

great formal educations but they knew about New York, the

world, life. I worked hard on the letter, making three drafts. I

didn’t think of it as a job application. That’s what it turned

out to be.

A week later, a brief note arrived from Wechsler. He said

he’d enjoyed my letter and agreed with about 90 percent of

what I’d said. Why didn’t I give him a call sometime and

come down to the paper for a chat?

His secretary set up an appointment for a few days later

at the Post. I told Tim and Jake and tried to be casual about

it, but for the next few nights I had trouble sleeping. My mind

was full of images from newspaper movies, all those tough

fast-talking men in tumultuous city rooms, causing trouble,

being brave: Bogart pressing the button to start the presses

at the end of Deadline U.S.A., Robert Mitchum moving

through fog in a trench coat, Gregory Peck in a glorious

apartment in Rome, riding with Eddie Albert to an

assignment. Hemingway was there too, of course. He’d

started as reporter in Kansas City, without ever going to

college. He’d put a reporter named Jake Barnes into The Sun Also Rises, his best novel. I couldn’t imagine him

writing a novel about a graphic designer.

Finally, on a late afternoon in the last week of May, I took

the IRT down to the old Post building at 75 West Street,

went in through the Washington Street entrance, and rode

the elevator to the second floor. I followed a gloomy

marbelized corridor around to the back and then, for the

first time, stepped into the city room.

Looking for someone? a tall, bespectacled man said.

Yes. Jimmy Wechsler.

All the way in the back.

The room was more exciting to me than any movie: an

organized chaos of editors shouting from desks, copyboys

dashing through doors into the composing room, men and

women typing at big manual typewriters, telephones

ringing, the wire service tickers clattering, everyone

smoking and putting butts out on the floor. I remembered

the day I saw Dan Parker walking out of the Daily Mirror building and the newspapermen hurrying to the bars of

Third Avenue. They’d all come from a place like this. But

this wasn’t a rag like the Mirror; this was the Post, the

smartest, bravest tabloid in New York, my paper. All these

men and women were doing work that was honorable, I

thought, work that added to the ideals and intelligence of

the world. I wanted desperately to be one of them.

Wechsler was a small man with a large head and

thoughtful eyes. He was wearing a bowtie and suspenders.

His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows. He took me

into his inner office and I sat beside a desk littered with

newspaper clippings, magazines, letters from readers,

copies of his book. While we talked, he smoked cigarettes

and sipped coffee. Near the end of our chat, he leaned

back in his chair and put his hands behind his head.

Have you ever thought about becoming a

newspaperman? he said.

I mumbled something in reply, but I don’t remember what.

It must have been something like, Only all my life.

Well, Wechsler said, call me in a couple of days. Maybe I

can get you a tryout around here.

At 1 A.M., on June 1, 1960, I was back in the city room,

clumsily disguised as a reporter, and my life changed

forever.