SOCI13CT

5

THEN ONE NIGHT, Jenny and I went to the Avon, a third-run

movie house on Ninth Street. One of the two movies was

Portrait of Jennie, with Joseph Cotten. I thought he was

great in The Third Man and we laughed about how those

people out in Hollywood couldn’t even spell Jenny. In the

movie, Joseph Cotten was a painter. He lived in the Village

and had an amazing studio, with easels, a fireplace and, of

course, a skylight. One day, he’s in Central Park and meets

Jennifer Jones, who is young and shy and beautiful. She

sings a strange little song:

Where I come from nobody knows,

And where I’m going, everything goes …

Joseph Cotten keeps meeting the girl over the next

month or two, and each time she’s older. He paints her

portrait and tries to learn more about her. But in fact, she’s

dead, killed years before in a storm. At the end of the

movie he meets her on the anniversary of her death. He

gets to kiss her and hug her; the music builds to an

amazing swell; she is swept out to sea to die again.

Jenny was crying at the end. I kept thinking about Joseph

Cotten’s studio. We didn’t stay for the second feature. All

the way to her house on the Fifth Avenue trolley, Jenny was

silent.

That’s the way life is, isn’t it? she said.

Like what? That movie?

Yeah.

Oh, sure. We always fall in love with ghosts we meet in

Central Park.

No, she said. I mean that things always turn out lousy.

Hey, Jenny, it’s a movie.

We reached her house. She asked me not to come in. It

was too late. Her mother would be home soon.

You keep saying you’re an artist, she said. Why don’t you

draw me?

I will.

When?

Tomorrow night?

My mother’s home tomorrow night.

Next Friday.

You swear? she said, smiling.

I swear.

That Friday night, she served me another dinner, this

time of baked ziti. I sipped my beer slowly, cleaned my

plate, and had seconds. After dinner, she stacked the

dishes in the sink, ran water over them, left them to soak,

then washed her hands and primped her hair. She seemed

very nervous.

Maybe you shouldn’t try this, she said. You don’t have to

draw me if you don’t want to.

No, no, I said. Let’s try it.

She sat on the edge of the couch in the muted yellow light

of the table lamp and I sat across from her and started to

draw. In my head I saw Joseph Cotten making his portrait

of Jennifer Jones, and I wished we were in some great

high-ceilinged garret in the Village instead of this basement

in Bay Ridge. But I worked hard, using a number 2 pencil

on a pad of white paper, outlining her head with very light

marks, blocking in the eyes and the nose and the mouth,

loosely indicating the hair, the neck, and the collar of her

white blouse. I was soon lost in the act, erasing, shading,

smudging with a finger, but the picture was not going well.

Jenny’s hair looked fine, and I’d captured those sad eyes;

but there was something wrong with the mouth, and the

nose looked enormous. I erased again, trying to make the

nose smaller, but that wasn’t right either; I couldn’t put

someone else’s nose on Jenny’s face. I paused, sipped my

beer, stared at her, trying to figure out what I was doing

wrong, then tried to outline her nose with absolute

exactitude. This time I thought I had it right. With the nose

recorded properly, the mouth was easier to fix. I hurried to

the end, blocking in the hair with what I thought were bold

strokes, then finishing the neck and blouse. I exhaled, then

took a deep breath and finished my beer.

Can I move? she said.

Yeah, I said. I’m finished.

Can I see it?

Sure.

I handed her the drawing pad. She looked at the picture,

her eyes wide. And then burst into tears. She stood up,

bawling, and threw the pad at me.

I’m ugly, she sobbed. You think I’m ugly!

No, Jenny, I don’t think you’re ugly. I was —

Look at my nose! She turned away and buried her face in the pillows of the

couch. I tried to console her, petting her hair, hugging her.

She stopped crying and then sat up slowly, saw the picture

on the floor before the chair and started crying again.

That’s the way you see me, she said. I’m ugly, ugly, ugly!

No, Jenny, I love you.

You love my — you love what I give you! You love what I

let you do to me!

I stood up and closed the pad, so she wouldn’t see the

hated picture. She wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her

dress and then saw the pencil and it started again. I didn’t

know what to do. I’d tried so hard to make the drawing real,

and she obviously was wounded by it. A gift had become

an instrument of torture. Joseph Cotten didn’t have this

problem. I stayed a little longer and then took my pad and

my pencil and fled.

That was the end of it. Suddenly, shockingly. We saw

each other two days later outside Steven’s. She didn’t want

coffee or a soda. Standing on the sidewalk, she announced

that she was “breaking off” with me. She talked about

needing “freedom” and how she was too young to get

married or settle down and how she was afraid of getting

caught by her mother or ending up pregnant.

You’re only fifteen, she said. It’s not right.

Her eyes looked sadder than ever. She turned her back

on me and hurried down Ninth Street to catch the Fifth

Avenue bus. I felt absolutely alone, engulfed by a delicious

melancholy. Now, I thought, this story has an ending.

So back I went to my friends and the Totem Poles and

drinking beer from cardboard containers. I listened to my

friends talk about the glories of pussy, knowing they were

almost all virgins. I started truly listening to Sinatra. I did

almost no homework, drew no cartoons, attempted no

portraits. The war ground on in Korea, back and forth with

little gain. I saw more young women in grave little knots,

going out together on Saturday nights. I didn’t call Jenny;

she couldn’t call me. Suddenly, Tony Bennett was on all the

radios and crooning from the jukeboxes: “I Won’t Cry

Anymore” and “Cold, Cold Heart.” I would sing with him:

I’ve shed a million tears since we’re apart,

But tears will never mend a broken heart.

One night, I saw Jenny waiting to the side at the Sanders

while the men lined up to buy tickets. She glanced over at

the Totem Poles, but then turned and smiled at her date: a

big dumb guy from Seventh Avenue who could hit a

spaldeen about four blocks. She took his arm and they

went in to see the movie. I never talked to her again.

6

I WAS BORED in St. Agnes and started playing hooky, the

empty spring days spent wandering the city. Sometimes I

sat in movie houses. Other times I worked my way through

the dark caves of Book Row. In May, Willie Mays came up

from the minors to play for the Giants.

They say he’s the greatest thing on two feet, my father

said.

What do you think?

We’ll see, he said. We’ll see if he can hit the curveball.

Suppose he can?

Then the Dodgers are in trouble.

We talked about the Dodgers and about Kid Gavilan

beating Johnny Bratton. But we talked about nothing else.

He went to work and then to Rattigan’s. I went to school and

then to the Totem Poles. In June, I finished at St. Agnes. I

never went back.

Instead, I took an examination to get into the

apprenticeship program at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. My

uncle David worked as a sheetmetal worker in the Yard (as

it was called) and he told my father about the program. One

night over dinner, the kids all there, my father mentioned it

to me.

It’s a goddamn good thing, he said, if you can get into it.

My mother shook her head.

Ach, Billy, she said, let the boy finish high school.

But he went on explaining it to me. The program was

simple: you worked for four weeks, then went to school for a

week, right there in the Yard; when you finished, you got a

high school diploma, and you got paid for the weeks you

went to school; eventually you moved up to become a

journeyman at your trade. I listened carefully; it was the first

thing I’d ever heard my father approve for me. I could

escape from the drudgery of high school. I’d start earning a

living, no matter how small. Hell, he explained, you could

have a job at the Yard for thirty years, and retire with a good

pension. And remember, he said, it’s a federal civil service

job. There’s nothing better than civil service, except federal

civil service.

If there’s another Depression, he said, you’ll always work.

My mother said nothing. I was beginning to understand

what the Depression had done to both of them. I took the

test for the Navy Yard and passed.

That summer, I was in another kind of depression. Day

and night, I felt that I’d lost my way. It was as if some long

steady tide were flowing out of me, the waters rising in my

skull and then tumbling me along with that tide I couldn’t

control. It seemed absurd to think anymore about being a

cartoonist. Or a bohemian. Maybe everybody was right,

from my father to Brother Jan: it was arrogant, a sin of

pride, to conceive of a life beyond the certainties, rhythms,

and traditions of the Neighborhood. Sometimes the attitude

was expressed directly, by my friends or the Big Guys or

some of the men from Rattigan’s. More often, it was

implied. But the Neighborhood view of the world had fierce

power. Who did I think I was? Who the fuck did I think I

was? Forget these kid’s dreams, I told myself, give ’em up.

Do what everybody else does: drop out of high school, go

to work, join the army or navy, get married, settle down,

have children. Don’t make waves. Don’t rock the boat.

Every year I’d do my Easter duty, whether I believed in God

or not. I’d drink on the way home from work and spend most

weekends with my friends in the saloons. I’d get old. I’d die

and my friends would see me off in Mike Smith’s funeral

parlor across the street from Holy Name. That was the end

of every story in the Neighborhood. Come on: let’s have a

fucking drink.

7

I DIDN’T KNOW it at the time, but I had entered the drinking

life. Drinking was part of being a man. Drinking was an

integral part of sexuality, easing entrance to its dark and

mysterious treasure chambers. Drinking was the

sacramental binder of friendships. Drinking was the reward

for work, the fuel of celebration, the consolation for death or

defeat. Drinking gave me strength, confidence, ease,

laughter; it made me believe that dreams really could come

true.

Drinking also made me change my feelings about my

father. In the Navy Yard, I worked with men who knew him.

And after a day of labor, buried inside an aircraft carrier

that was being converted for jets, or lugging angle irons on

my shoulders across Shop 17, I would go to the bars on

Sands Street with them and hear tales of young Billy Hamill.

He was a great soccer player, one of them said, a man

named Hugh Delargy. He was fast and he was tough.

Jesus, was he tough. Smart too.

I was there the day he got hurt, said Eddie McManus, a

short, powerful balding welder. It was out at the oval in Bay

Ridge, on a Sunday. We were playing a German team. Our

team was called Belfast Celtic, after the team back home.

And there were teams from the different countries, a

Spanish team, a Jewish team called House of David. We

were playing the German team that day and your father was

at center forward. He was having a great day, bloody great.

And then, Delargy said, that German fucker came at him

. . . .

Kicked him so bloody hard, McManus said, it sounded

like a board breakin’.

Delargy sipped his whiskey and said, He went down and

we all knew he was hurt and everybody ran out on the field.

They wanted to kill the fuckin’ Kraut.

They took Billy over on the side, McManus said, and it

was pitiful, fuckin’ pitiful to see. The leg was broke beneath

the knee and the bone was sticking out through the blood.

And Billy was cryin’ like a baby, My leg, he kept saying, my

leg, my leg, my leg . . . .

DeLargy and McManus told me this in grave voices,

sipping whiskey while I drank my beer. I remember trying

very hard not to cry, then excusing myself and hurrying into

the men’s room. I sat on a bowl in a locked stall and bawled

for my father. And despised myself for the way I’d often

sneered at him. When I went back to the bar, I gulped the

beer and ordered another, engulfed in a sweet bitterness,

knowing that all my life I would see my father on that hard

winter playing field, crying like a baby.

After that talk, and other tales told in the bars near the Navy

Yard, I began to love my father again. Pity allowed me to

see him as a man, instead of a father who could not play

the role that my childish imagination and need had

assigned him. I could see him in Belfast as a boy, running

streets and fields with his twin brother, trying to eat in a

kitchen with a dozen other kids, listening to commands

from his own father. There was a photograph of his long-

dead father in our house now, recently sent from Ireland,

where it had been found by Uncle Frank in an old steamer

trunk. It was cracked with age and very formal, showing a

somber long-faced man whose white beard made him look

like George Bernard Shaw. He looked as capable of

silence as my own father.

What was he like, your father? I asked him one evening.

He was a mason. A stonemason.

No, I mean what kind of man was he?

Billy Hamill shrugged and lit a Camel.

He was stern, he said. He was very stern.

Then I saw my father in flight from the stern white-

bearded man, smoking Woodbines in the Belfast night,

watching British soldiers patrol streets, hearing endless talk

about Catholics and Protestants, playing soccer in frozen

fields, and learning to drink. Was it whiskey or was it beer?

Or did they drink the dark liquid called stout? And was he

drinking when he joined Sinn Fein? Did he and his friends

drink the night the bomb was planted and the British

soldiers were killed and they all took the night boat to

Liverpool and then America? After the bomb, did he shiver

in fear? Was he afraid of being caught and turned into an

informer? Or did they all go somewhere and get drunk and

sing the songs he now sang in Rattigan’s?

In a new way, Billy Hamill came alive to me, a person

cobbled together from sparse facts and my imagination,

and in that summer of my own defeat, I pitied him, with the

glibness of a child, and felt the permanent grieving hurt in all

his black silences.

We still could not talk in any easy way. But in the bars

near the Navy Yard and on long evenings at the Totem

Poles I would speak to him in imagination and he would

speak to me. I have fucked up my life, Dad; I’ve quit high

school and gone to work in the Navy Yard and I don’t want

to be there. Well, he would say, do something about it.

What can I do? Do what you want to do, Son. Make yourself

happy, Son. Live every day of your life, Son. And I’d say,

Love me, Dad. And he’d answer, Let’s have a drink.

But we never had that conversation. And I knew I had to

save my life on my own. I was taking home forty dollars a

week from the Navy Yard and giving my mother ten. But I

couldn’t do at home what I still wanted to do. I couldn’t draw.

I couldn’t read. And I began thinking about a place of my

own. A place where I could leave unfinished drawings on

the table until I got home, with no fear they would be ruined.

A place where I could drink beer and slide girls between

sheets. Maybe I could even go to school at night. Maybe, in

spite of my dreadful failure, I could still try to be an artist.

On the subway one morning I met a guy I knew in Holy

Name. His name was Ronnie Zeilenhofer. He was smart

and decent. His father owned a delicatessen on Prospect

Park Southwest. We talked and joked for a few minutes,

but when I told him I’d dropped out of high school, his face

went oddly slack.

Jeez, I figured you’d be one of the guys that went to

college, he said. I can’t believe it, you dropping out.

I felt suddenly small and diminished. In two years I’d gone

from being the smartest kid in the class to another guy from

the Neighborhood, trudging off to work with his hands and

his back. Another loser from Brooklyn. I started talking

wildly about how I was just starting, I was gonna go to art

school and was looking for a place of my own. Panic and

shame produced something resembling the truth.

Zeilenhofer and I weren’t close, so in an odd way I could tell

him what I really felt. Then he said that if I was serious there

was a small place for rent upstairs from his father’s deli.

Eight dollars a week, with a bed and a refrigerator.

That sounds great, I said.

Call me, and I’ll show it to you.

A week later, I moved in. Three months after starting in

the Navy Yard, I was off on my own.

8

THE ROOM was small and bare, with flowered wallpaper

stained by old glue. There was one picture on the walls: a

framed magazine photo of the Rockies. The bed was

narrow, the mattress lumpy. But there was a bureau for my

clothes and I set out my inks and pens and brushes on a

small table and stacked some books on the windowsill and

I was happy.

The room was in the back, overlooking a chilly treeless

yard. On weekends and on cold evenings I would sit at the

table, deep in the luxury of solitude, and draw pictures of

aviators and pirates, of detectives, and villains with scarred

faces. I loved the feeling of standing up and going to the

sink and washing the india ink from the brushes, pushing

them into a bar of soap, rinsing them, then forming a

perfect needlelike tip with my mouth. I bought a small lamp.

I Scotch-taped my drawings to the walls. I learned to carry

dirty clothes to the launderette and feed myself in greasy

spoons.

Downstairs, to the left, was a bar called the Parkview,

and when I came home in the evenings from the Navy Yard I

could see faces staring from the windows. The faces were

almost the same as those in Rattigan’s: pouchy-eyed and

tight-lipped. One evening I ran into Mickey Horan, one of

the crowd from the Totes. He invited me in for a drink. The

bartender served us without asking for draft cards. Soon I

was walking in on my own, and the faces from the windows

acquired names. Like the men at the Navy Yard, they

seemed to accept me. I was sixteen. But I could put my

dollar on the bar with the others. That was enough. They

talked over and over again about Bobby Thomson’s home

run in the play-off game at the Polo Grounds and how it had

destroyed more than the Dodgers, it had wrecked them. They talked about Ray Robinson’s revenge against Randy

Turpin, and how he battered the Englishman into a stupor at

the Polo Grounds. They talked about Rocky Marciano’s

destruction of Joe Louis. They didn’t talk about Korea. As

the year moved toward Christmas, I would come up to the

room, gassy with beer, and the ceiling would move and the

table bob and I would hold a pillow to my chest as if it were

an anchor. Sometimes, for no reason that I understood, I

would weep.

On Saturday mornings, I would go to Seventh Avenue

and climb the stairs to the apartment and give my mother

eight dollars. The Good Boy, of course. She would talk to

me as best she could about going on with my schooling,

maybe at night. But it was hard to sustain such talk; the kids

were running around; tie shopping must be done; she had

to be on the job at the movie house by five. I knew she was

right. But I didn’t know what to do about it. I walked back up

the slope to the Totes. I talked with my friends. I went to the

Parkview and drank beer and listened to the jukebox. The

Four Aces were singing “Tell Me Why.” Tony Bennett was

singing “Cold, Cold Heart.” Rosemary Clooney was singing

“Come On-A-My House.” I didn’t sing with them. After a

while, I went upstairs to the room and napped and woke up

and drew pictures. Sometimes the music would drift up

from the bar. Sinatra. I’m a fool to want you … The newspapers fed me in a different way. And

everything I learned from the newspapers seemed to lead

to something else. In one of them, I saw a story about the

death of a painter named John Sloan. He was 80 years old

and a member of a group called the Ashcan School, the

paper said, and it showed one of his drawings of people

under the Third Avenue El. I went to the library and found

books that showed his paintings and etchings and copied

them into my own sketchbooks. Those pictures had nothing

to do with comics. Instead, they were about a world that I

recognized, even if most of them were made in the 1920s.

The El. The streets of Manhattan. The dark city looming at

twilight. I loved Sloan’s lumpy Irish face too; he could have

stood right at the bar in the Parkview, talking or singing. He

even painted bars, for the books showed several works

about a place in Manhattan called McSorley’s. He caught

the dark snug safety of a bar, the golden warmth it could

give you on a cold night. His bars had no jukeboxes or

shuffleboard machines in them. But I had seen places like

them all over Brooklyn. One Saturday afternoon, I went over

to see McSorley’s, down the street from the Third Avenue

El. The oldest bar in New York, a sign said. I was thrilled; it

was exactly the way Sloan had painted it, dark and

romantic, with old pictures on the wall and a potbelly stove

and lumpy men at the bar and tables. I took a breath and

went in. But the bartender asked me for a draft card and I

left in a mixture of humiliation and panic. Still, John Sloan

had his effect on me: I started sitting in booths at the

Parkview and drawing the men at the bar.

Who the hell is that? a guy would say.

You.

I don’t look like that, come on, kid.

You look worse than that, Jerry, another guy would say.

If I did, I’d fuckin’ kill myself.

The older men seemed amused by me, the kid from

upstairs who worked in the Navy Yard and drew pictures in

the bar.

You oughtta do that for a living, kid, said a bartender

named Brick.

Brick, don’t encourage him. He’ll end up in the fuckin’

Village wit’ the faggots.

Impossible. He’s a fuckin’ Catlick!

They all laughed. I drew their pictures and they asked for

copies and I handed them out as if they were my tickets to

the show. In the Navy Yard, I could drink with men because I

worked with men; in the Park-view, I could drink with men

because I drew their pictures. The world was a grand

confusion. Finally, when I was bleary, when my hand

wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do, I went home. I would lie

alone in the dark, feeling that I was a character in a story

that had lost its plot.

Then one Sunday before Christmas I saw a story in the

Journal-American about Burne Hogarth, the artist who

used to draw Tarzan. He and some other people had

started the Cartoonists and Illustrators School on Twenty-

third Street in Manhattan. There was a picture of Hogarth in

a classroom full of easels, just like the photographs of John

Sloan at the Art Students League. He was teaching in a

real school. Now. Not in the distant past. Not in some

remote place. Here. In New York.

Suddenly, after months without a narrative line for my own

life, I felt the story again. The next day after work, I went to

Twenty-third Street and after twenty minutes of hesitation,

walked into the Cartoonists and Illustrators School. It was

located then on the corner of Second Avenue and Twenty-

third Street (later it became the School of Visual Arts and

moved up the street to grander quarters). I was dressed in

my rough work clothes from the Navy Yard, but that didn’t

seem to matter; almost everybody else was dressed the

same way. There was a wonderful pungent odor in the air

(a mixture, I learned later, of turpentine and linseed oil) and

a busy sense of purpose and direction, people carrying

large manila portfolio envelopes or stretched canvases or

pieces of unfinished plaster sculptures. There were dark-

haired girls with vivacious eyes. There were young men

with paint-stained dungarees. They talked and laughed and

smoked until a bell rang somewhere and they all hurried

away to unseen classrooms. In the office, I was given a

catalog, which I accepted clumsily. Then I turned around

and walked out.

All the way home on the subway, I read the catalog over

and over again. The newspaper story was true: the great

Burne Hogarth was teaching three nights a week. Drawing

and anatomy. The term started in the first week of January.

The tuition was thirty dollars a month. Almost a full week’s

pay. But I could do it. Somehow. If I ate less. If I didn’t spend

money drinking. I could do it. Yes. Do it.

9

AND SO I DID.

The classroom was a large studio on the top floor.

Easels were scattered everywhere, facing a wooden

model’s platform, while one easel faced us. There was an

empty stool on the platform. The floors were scabbed with

dried paint, a thousand drips and spatters of color. Most of

the students were young men, all of them older than I was;

there were three young women. They seemed to know each

other and laughed and joked in an easy way. I found an

empty easel and watched them set up their newsprint pads

and take out their black chalks. I did the same. I was very

nervous.

A few minutes before seven a gray-haired woman

walked in, dressed in a blue-gray smock. She sat on the

edge of the platform, smoking a cigarette and reading a

book. She was wearing slippers. Her hair was pulled back

tightly and tied into a pigtail. She was about forty. Nobody

seemed to notice her. Three guys near me were looking at

some yellowing pages of Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant. I looked at the woman’s face, her long nose and dark

eyebrows, and wondered how Foster would draw her.

Then, at seven o’clock sharp, a compact mustached man

arrived. His hair was a shiny black, combed straight back.

He wore a button-down shirt, dark tie, sharply creased

slacks, and polished loafers. The room hushed as the man

placed his own large newsprint pad on the easel beside the

stand. He looked more confident than anyone I’d ever seen.

This was Burne Hogarth.

All right, folks, he said, let’s get started.

I realized that my hands were already black from a

mixture of sweat and compressed charcoal. I saw the guy

next to me tear the cover sheet off his pad and I did the

same. The woman put out her cigarette in a small ashtray,

then took off her robe, stepped out of her slippers, and went

to the center of the platform. I gazed at her body, her small

hard breasts, the thick ridges of pale flesh around her

stomach and thighs. Jenny’s flesh was smoother and

darker. The woman looked cold under the blue fluorescent

lights. I could see veins in her legs. Her pubic hair was gray.

We’ll do some one-minute poses to loosen up, Hogarth

said. All yours, model.

Suddenly everybody was drawing furiously, as the

woman assumed one pose after another, bending, twisting,

stretching, firing invisible arrows from invisible bows. My

drawing was cramped and tight, as I started at the top of

her head and worked my way down. I was used to small

drawings, penciled first, then laboriously inked. Every time I

moved down from the head, she changed the pose again. I

heard the others tearing pages off their pads. I saw that one

student was as stiff as I was; another was bold and swift. I

felt clumsy. Suddenly Hogarth was beside me.

Forget the eyebrows, he said. Just get the gesture, the

big shape. Scribble it, but make the big shape fit on the

page. No details.

He moved away. I tore off the page, then scribbled in a

big bold shape.

Use the side of the chalk, not the point, Hogarth was

telling another student. Big and blocky, nice and bold.

Now I could hear chalk on paper all over the room. I didn’t

look at anything except the model, locking in, me and her

and the chalk on paper. Now I saw that she had a long

beautiful neck, and I wondered how she had come to this

room.

Hogarth said, Okay, now look at her and remember what

you see, then close your eyes and draw what you

remember.

I tried what he asked and drew the memory of the woman

bending one knee and extending the other. When I opened

my eyes, I was amazed. There was a big brutal form on my

page, bold and strong. Then Hogarth said, All right, the

quick poses are over, let’s do a twenty-minute pose.

The model sat on the stool and posed with one foot on

the second rung, the other stretched out behind her on the

floor. There was no expression on her face.

I started drawing but I cramped up again, starting at the

top in a linear contoured way. When I stopped to look at it,

everything was out of proportion. Her neck was too short,

her shoulders too broad, her stomach too thick. Worse, she

didn’t seem to be sitting on the stool; she looked pasted to

it. Then Hogarth was beside me again.

You didn’t think this out, he said. The big forms have to

come first. Look.

He took my chalk and made a few bold strokes over my

labored drawing, showing me that the way I was going, the

model’s feet would be off the page. He made them fit. And

he showed me where the big forms were.

You lay it out in big quick forms, he said. Even if the

forms are light, make them the basis. Later you can get into

the details. Just don’t start with the details or you’ll get lost

in them. It’s the old business about not seeing the forest for

the trees. Or the trees for the leaves.

He was talking to me and talking to the full class. But he

didn’t seem to be trying to make me feel small; there was

no Brother Jan in him. He said his few words, in a sharp

precise voice, and then moved on to another student.

Everybody listened; we all learned.

When the twenty-minute pose ended, Hogarth called a

break. The model slipped on her robe and slippers and

took out a pack of Chester fields. She glanced at some of

the drawings but not mine. I watched her go. She must have

felt my eyes on her, because at the door she smiled in a

polite way and walked into the hall. I wandered out to the

hall too. I didn’t smoke then, but everybody else did. They

were all talking and laughing and smoking. I wandered

around the hall, looking at notices for art shows and foreign

movies, glancing into classrooms where other students

worked on oil paintings. I didn’t see the model anywhere.

The break ended, and now Hogarth was in front of his

own newsprint pad, giving us an anatomy lesson. He

explained the basic shape of the torso, how it was

essentially several wedges, one large, one small; or, in a

shorthand, more fluid way, a kind of peanut shape. He

showed us how, if we established the peanut, there was a

logic to the way you added shoulders, arms, and legs.

The head is the basic measure, Hogarth said. The ideal

figure is seven heads high, although fashion illustrators —

or our friend El Greco — make it nine heads high. Forget

about them for now. Forget about short people or infants

too. For our classes, seven heads should be the measure.

And remember, your task isn’t to copy what’s in front of you.

Any camera can do that. It’s to understand what the figure is

doing and why it can do it. You learn anatomy to understand

what’s beneath the skin. And you don’t express the figure

by what it is, but by what it does. It is what it does. I was awed by the man because it wasn’t just talk; he

also put on a show, starting with the peanut, the shoulders

roughed in as a kind of barbell, the hands beginning as

mittens, then acquiring startling power. It is what it does, he

said, making his own drawings look both easy and

impossible, the chalk obeying his commands, providing

shape, volume, and power to the figures. He luxuriated in

foreshortening, in making the figure seem to leap off his

pages. Sometimes he made forms simpler; at other times,

he made them more complex, showing unseen muscles,

bones, structures, beneath the sheath of skin. Those figures

didn’t look like our models; a Hogarth drawing resembled

nothing on the earth. But he seemed to be saying that it

didn’t matter. The model was where you began, nothing

more; the drawing was the result. The model was a

collection of facts; the drawing was the truth.

When that first evening was over, my mind was a roar of

words, bodies, drawings. I remember Hogarth saying to the

model, Goodnight, Laura, and thank you. She pulled on the

smock and fumbled for her cigarettes and left. I went home

in a blur of exhaustion and excitement, thinking: My life has

changed. Here. Tonight. This morning I was just another

fuckup, a high school dropout from Brooklyn. Tonight I

became an art student.

And hey, maybe I was going to be good at it. On the

breaks I walked among the other easels. Some drawings

were beautiful. Some were pretty good. Some were

dreadful. Mine were at least okay. I was the youngest

student in the class, but I was better than a lot of them. I

thought: I can do this.

Back in the room beside the Parkview, I looked at the

drawings I’d made, tearing up the truly dreadful ones,

seeing a progression, an improvement. Lying in bed later in

the dark, hearing the trolley move down Prospect Park

Southwest for Coney Island, I thought about the model.

What did Hogarth call her? Laura. Like the Stan Kenton

record. Laura, on the train that is passing through . . . . I

wondered if she had a husband or boyfriend or children and

what they would think of her sitting naked every night in a

roomful of strangers. I wondered what she thought as she

held herself still for this group inspection and the only sound

was chalk on paper. I wished she would come here to this

place in Brooklyn and let me draw her. Slowly and lovingly.

Until I got it right. I was tracing the outlines of her body in my

mind, her small hard breasts and thickening hips, when I fell

asleep.

So I worked in the Navy Yard days and went to C&I nights.

On the weekends, there was drinking, openly in the

Parkview or clandestinely in my own room, joined by some

of my friends from the Totes. There was one difference. In

the fall, I had drunk out of a sour sense of waste and failure.

Now I was drinking exuberantly, certain I had earned that

right. I felt that I was on my way.

Hogarth was a great teacher. He had a critical

intelligence that could be sardonic but not devastating; I

never saw him destroy anybody’s ego or try to establish his

own worth by humiliating a kid. At the same time, he set up

high standards of excellence and let us know when we

weren’t pushing ourselves hard enough. Most of us failed,

most of the time. But he encouraged us to try again, and

although most of the students wanted to be cartoonists, he

always reminded us that there were other options.

You might become a painter, he said. You might become

a sculptor. You might make murals. Just work at the top of

your talent and keep pushing past it. And remember: The

figure is the key to everything.

I bought a small composition book and started writing

down some of what he said, his phrases, the names of the

artists he mentioned. During the week, there was no time to

go to museums or galleries; on weekends, the rhythm of the

Neighborhood seemed to eat my time — taking my clothes

to the laundry, cleaning the apartment, visiting 378, drinking

on the Totes or in the Parkview. But I did find time to go to

the main library at Grand Army Plaza. In the reference

room, where they kept the art books, I looked at pictures by

Michelangelo and Rubens, Rembrandt and Caravaggio,

Leonardo and Velázquez, Picasso and Matisse. I realized

I’d seen many of the paintings and drawings before, in

magazines, or in religion books in grammar school, even in

advertising; but now they were works made by men,

calculated, planned, made by hand, in the same way that

Steve Canyon was made by Milton Caniff.

They call them masters, Hogarth said. But they all started

with the figure, with drawing. Among other things, they all

understood the principle of contraposition. They understood

that all forms become dynamic by moving in opposition to

each other. The shoulder moves up, the biceps and triceps

move to the front and the back . . .

I didn’t get everything that Hogarth was saying, but it

thrilled me. Drawing wasn’t just God-given, like a voice; it

was something that could be learned, it had rules, axioms,

formulas. As crude and unfinished as I was, I would get

better. All it took was work.

At night, when I came out of the subway beside the

Totes, or stopped for food in the back booths at Lewnes’,

my drawings became a hit. Naked broads! Duke Baluta

shouted, taking the drawings from my portfolio envelope.

The other guys grinned lewdly.

You mean to tell me, Baluta said, that you sit there

looking at this broad, naked, tits out and all — and you

don’t get a hard-on? Duke, I said, it’s like, I don’t know, you’re so involved in

getting the drawing right that —

That you don’t want to fuck her?

Uh, I, well —

See, Duke said, he does want to fuck her!

No, it’s like it could be apples or pears or something, I

told him, my head filling with half-baked Hogarthisms.

You’re trying to get the contrapos — the basic form. You

want to get to the core of the shape.

You mean you want to get to the core of her pussy. Usually, they all guffawed and I laughed with them.

Sometimes, they called over a few of the girls and showed

them the drawings and the girls giggled or blushed or got

huffy. Some of the girls thought I was weird. Living alone at

sixteen. Drawing naked women. In that neighborhood, it

was too strange, too dangerous.

10

AT SCHOOL, the models changed every week, sometimes

from night to night. Laura was gone after a few nights and I

didn’t see her around. Then one chilly night, I went out on

the break and saw her down the hall, wearing her smock

and sandals, smoking her cigarette. I walked toward her,

glancing into a painting classroom, and nodded at her. She

smiled back.

You must be cold out here, I said.

It’s colder in there, she said. Here, I get to wear this.

Your name is Laura, right?

Right, she said. She seemed surprised. Cigarette?

Thanks, I don’t smoke. Would you like a coffee or

something?

She smiled, in an amused way; it was the first time I’d

seen her smile and it made her seem younger.

Sure. After the last bell?

Okay.

That wasn’t what I’d meant; I meant that I could go

downstairs and get coffee from the machine. Now,

somehow, I had a date. Tonight. Dressed in my Navy Yard

clothes. Back in class, my heart was thumping. We were

drawing from a black male model, but I kept thinking about

that last bell. And Laura. Who was she? How old was she?

If she asks, how old am I? An artist and a model! Jesus.

But what if she’s just playing a game on me? Calm down.

She probably won’t show up. She’ll think it over and just

come and shake my hand and tell me something came up,

she had an appointment she forgot, maybe next week or

next term.

But there she was at the end of the last class, waiting for

me in the lobby. She was wearing a navy pea jacket,

dungarees, a wool cap pulled over her hair, and sneakers.

She looked much younger.

There’s a coffee shop over on Lexington, she said.

It had begun to snow. Big white flakes fell into Twenty-

third Street, turning briefly black against the streetlamps,

before melting on the roofs of cars.

Oh, great! she shouted, in an almost girlish voice. I love snow!

We sat in a window booth, facing each other and

watching the snow falling steadily. She ordered an English

muffin and black coffee; so did I (as in so many other

things, I followed the lead of those who seemed to know

what they were doing). Laura told me that she’d come to

New York to be a dancer (and I wondered, When? Before

the war?). But dancing hadn’t worked out. She married a

photographer who took pictures of radios and refrigerators

for catalogs; that didn’t work out either. But before it ended,

the photographer introduced her to some painters, and

after a while she started painting too.

The trouble is, there’s maybe twenty thousand painters in

New York now, she said. Maybe more. That GI Bill, that

made everybody think they could be painters. So it’s hard

to make a living. That’s why I model. To make ends meet.

She smiled in a matter-of-fact way and sipped her coffee

and lit another cigarette. I could see her nipples in my mind

and her pubic hair and the thickness of her hips.

How do you feel, I said, with everyone looking at you up

there?

Most of the time, I don’t feel anything. I think about the

painting I’m working on. Or the book I’m reading. Or the

landlord. Or the laundry.

She took a deep drag and then smiled, glancing at the

snow.

But to tell the truth, Laura said, sometimes I get hot. I can

feel all those eyes on me and I know some of the men must

want to fuck me. Maybe some of the women too. And what

happens is, I start thinking like them, some kind of

transference, I am them, I’m them fucking me, kissing me,

pressing against me, licking me; and I get hot. And then I’m

afraid I’ll turn a certain way and you’ll see that I’m wet. Do

you have a hard-on now?

Yeah.

Let’s go to my place.

Laura had a two-room apartment on Tenth Street, three

buildings away from the Third Avenue El. The shades were

drawn but I could hear the train rumble through the snowy

night. One room was a kitchen with a table and two chairs

beside a window that opened into an air shaft. The other

room was studio and bedroom, cramped and messy. There

were books packed on shelves, lying on the paint-spattered

linoleum floor, used to hold open a door. There was a

record player, a radio, stacks of records; a toolbox full of

brushes and tubes of paint; a huge wooden easel; a long

table covered with tomato cans full of paint, linseed oil,

turpentine, and other cans holding big fat brushes; and

dozens of canvases covered with shimmering abstract

paintings, most of them in great splashy variations of a

single color: blue.

My Billie Holiday paintings, she said. Want a drink?

Sure.

She poured an inch of Canadian Club into each of two

water glasses. I felt unreal, as if I’d walked into a novel.

Okay, Laura said, now it’s my turn.

For what?

She sipped her drink and said, Take off your clothes.

I laughed.

You’ve been drawing me, she said. Now I draw you.

I’m sure I must have blushed. I took a sip of the whiskey,

which burned into my stomach, and then put the glass on a

table. I took off my shirt and undershirt, then my boots and

socks and trousers. The paint-spattered floor felt pebbly.

So did my skin in the chilly room.

Everything, she said.

So I slipped off my shorts and tossed them onto a chair,

trying to look casual. In the chill, I was sure my cock had

shrunk to its tiniest size. I was afraid to look. She was

placing a newsprint pad on the easel, an amused look on

her face.

Now what? I said.

Just like Hogarth’s class, she said. Quick poses.

I tried to remember what she did, bending, twisting,

holding the pose. All I could hear was the chalk moving on

paper, sheets being torn off the pad, ice clunking in her

glass. Then she asked me to hold a longer pose, seated on

a chair, right leg extended, left leg curled along the side of

the chair. She brought me my drink; I sipped it and she took

it away and put Billie Holiday on the record player. The

recording was a worn version of “Strange Fruit.” I worked at

holding the pose, knowing she was looking straight at me,

sensing her presence but not seeing her. Then I

remembered what she’d said in the coffee shop, how she’d

imagine us thinking about fucking her. I tried to see myself

on this chair, tried to be her, looking at my body, at my

shoulders and belly and legs and cock, and then I could feel

my cock getting hard. I tried to stop it then, shifting my

imaginings, trying to will it away; but I only got harder.

And then Laura was there, on her knees, gripping my

cock in a chalk-blackened hand. Then she took it in her

mouth, gripping it more tightly, her hand moving slowly, as I

held to the edge of the chair, looking at the slow movement

of her head. She looked up at me, her eyes wide, her

mouth stuffed with my cock, and I started to come. Violently.

My whole body erupting as my pelvis thrust up off the chair.

Laura held on as an involuntary roar rose from my throat

and I went back again and over the chair to the floor.

Silence.

And then Laura began to laugh in a crazy way.

Jesus Christ, she squealed. Jesus H. Christ, that was

amazing! I got up slowly, my back aching. Laura sat there, sitting

on her ankles, still fully clothed.

How old are you anyway? she said.

Almost seventeen, I said.

Jesus H. Christ.

I stood up, trying to look casual, and she went to the

bathroom. I looked at her drawings. They were scribbled

and loose, made up of hundreds of small lines that built up

form and volume; later, I’d see a similar style in the

drawings of Giacometti. I was shivering and sipped my

drink and was warm again. Then Laura was back, wearing

a thin robe, carrying a hot washcloth that gave off steam.

First things first, young man, she said, and began to

wash the charcoal off my cock. She dropped the cloth on a

table, switched off a lamp, then another, and then she came

to me from behind and rubbed her hand on my stomach

and began kissing and sucking on my neck.

Okay, she whispered. Now we can fuck.

11

THAT SPRING, I felt as if some enormous ice jam had

broken. I was alive again after a long dead time. The

feelings of failure, impotence, loneliness, ruin: all were

washed away. Art school made me feel that I could do

something that was valuable, special, part of me. Laura

made my body tremble with sensuality, and that went into

my drawings. Through the long days at the Navy Yard, I

could handle any drudgery, full of the luxuries of the evening.

Then at a Saturday-night birthday party in the

Neighborhood, I met a girl named Maureen Crowley. She

was tall, thin, dark-haired, with a slouching walk and bright

dark eyes. For a long time, I was in love with her in that

diffuse, ambiguous, and obsessive way that can never be

explained to strangers. Laura was from the world outside

the Neighborhood; Maureen was part of it. I knew that

Laura wasn’t part of some limitless future; I wanted to

believe that Maureen was. She was the middle daughter in

a respectable family that lived in a private home near where

I had my room. Her father owned a grocery store and later

ran a bar. It was clear from the beginning that he didn’t want

his daughter to be going out with the likes of me: a high

school dropout from Seventh Avenue, and perhaps worse,

a son of Billy Hamill.

Much of this disapproval was surely about class. The Irish

from Seventh Avenue were “shanty”: low, common, often

violent and alcoholic. The Crowleys were “lace curtain”; the

father worked for himself, wore a necktie to his job, had

moved at least one step past the immigrant generation.

When I first came calling at the house, I wore my best

clothes. Or the clothes then considered the style on Seventh

Avenue. The clothes of the hoodlum: pegged pants, shirts

with wide Mr. B collars, wraparound jackets. I couldn’t

afford a suit, or a tweed jacket; most of my spare money

was going to tuition and art supplies. Gradually I adopted

the chinos and plaid shirts favored by the Big Guys, but it

was too late. With Maureen’s parents, first impressions

were everything. To them, even art school was a negative;

what sort of foolish dreamer went to art school?

But the very obstacles charged this new love story with

an aching romanticism. I wanted to prove my worthiness;

that meant I had to live a lie. I never told Maureen about

Laura. I saw Maureen on Wednesday nights, when there

were no classes at C&I, and on weekends. On the other

weekday nights, I almost ran to Laura’s place.

Laura was amused by me, I suppose; I was a kind of

earnest, untrained pet. I never found out whether she had

other lovers; I knew almost nothing about the way she lived

outside school and the studio on Tenth Street. At school,

she seldom talked to me in the hallway; she would see me

in the hallway and nod Yes or shake her head No and that

would tell me all I needed to know for the night. If it was No,

I’d be stabbed by jealousy; I’d try to see if she left alone or if

she was sitting in the coffee shop with another student.

Once, I waited in the shadows near her house, to see if she

came home with someone else. That night, she never came

home at all.

But if she nodded Yes, Laura always had something new

for me. She’d tie me to the bed with cord or pieces of

clothesline and lick my body until, as I did one memorable

midnight, I ejaculated without being touched by anything but

her tongue. She’d paint my cock with watercolors or have

me apply lipstick to the lips of her vagina. She had me fuck

her on tables and the floor and against the kitchen sink,

sometimes while I wore only my work boots. Once she

asked me to tie her to the easel and fuck her from behind.

On several nights, she took me into a hot soapy bath, the

walls perspiring, and sat on my cock until she came.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t get much beyond Maureen’s breasts.

And then one night, while I was frantically fucking Laura, she

whispered to me:

What’s her name?

What’s whose name?

The girl you’re thinking about while you’re fucking me.

She had me. My erection started dying. I must have

smiled in some dumb way, because she looked at me, her

eyes squinting. I rolled over on my side, feeling as if I’d

been unfaithful to Laura.

Hey, young man, she said. Hey, don’t feel bad.

Everybody does it.

She began playing with my cock, and when it was hard

again she whispered: Call me by her name.

I turned to her, seeing the outline of her face in the light

from the street. I ran my fingers on her nipples and drew

close to her.

Maureen, I whispered.

Yes, Laura murmured.

Maureen, Maureen.

Say my name. Come in me, baby.

Maureen, Maureen, Maureen.

She started twisting and heaving in a ferocious orgasm,

pulling my hair, biting my neck and shoulders, jamming her

heels into my thighs, digging her fingers into my ass.

My name! Laura, Maureen, Laura, Maureen, Laura, Laura, Laura …

Then I exploded into her.

We lay there, very still, for a long while. The El rumbled

by. She lit a cigarette and sipped from a drink.

You’d better go home now, she said.

I want to stay here tonight.

That would be a mistake, she said.

Please, I said. I want to sleep with you. I want to wake up

with you.

You do that once, she whispered, and you’ll never come

back.

Why?

She got up and switched on a small lamp. She pulled on

a robe and started fixing me a whiskey and soda.

Why? You’ll see me in the cold light of day, that’s why.

You’ll see I’m old enough to be your mother. You’ll want your

nice little virgin from Brooklyn. That’s why.

I see you in Hogarth’s class, I said. With all those

goddamned fluorescent lights!

That’s different, she said. I could be three lemons in a

bowl.

Come on, Laura. I love you.

She turned on me, snarling.

For Chrissakes, don’t say that! Don’t ever say that to me

again!

It’s true.

You don’t even know what the word means! You’ll find

out, one of these days, and you won’t say it so easy. Love

gets everything all screwed up. It’s one of those lies that

ruin the world.

I thought, in a thrilled way: Jesus, that’s like a line from a movie.

I said: Then what do you feel about me?

I’m fucking you, kid, she said bitterly. But I don’t have to

love you to fuck you.

That was not a movie line. She drained her glass, then

poured another, staring at the floor. Her face was clenched.

I started getting dressed. I noticed a new canvas against

the far wall, leaning against the windowsill. She had

sketched in a naked young man. His heart was outside the

skin of his chest. Everything was blue, even the heart.

For a few weeks, she signaled me No. Twice, she modeled

in Hogarth’s class, and I pulsed with jealousy. I stayed at an

easel to the side, but was jealous of those who could see

between her legs. I had been in there. I didn’t want her to be

imagining them imagining entering her. On the second

night, at the end of the second week, I tried to loathe her.

Her gray pubic hair. The small breasts. The ridged white

flesh around her hips.

But I couldn’t make the loathing work. I kept drawing her

the way I knew her, remembered her, wanted her to be: in

writhing Hogarthian movements. Hogarth himself took

notice.

Pretty sexy, fella, he said. Now try it the other way. Not a

pinup. Make her ugly. Make her a hundred years old.

I don’t know if I can, I said.

Invent it, he said, walking away. Use your imagination.

I didn’t know if Laura heard him, but I tried. I made her a

wrinkled crone. I made her toothless. I made her immensely

fat. Nothing worked. I still wanted her. My last drawing was

made up of hundreds of small scribbles, like one of her own

drawings. When the bell rang, she walked past my easel

and glanced at the drawing. I started to say something but

she kept moving.

I waited for her outside the school. An icy wind was

blowing off the East River. The streets looked dark and

shiny, as if they’d been glazed. Then she came out.

Laura, I —

Come on, she said, and took my arm.

We went to Tenth Street and drank and fucked and

fucked and drank. I stayed until morning.

She woke me with scrambled eggs on a plate and

buttered rye toast. I suddenly panicked. It was Friday and

the kitchen clock said it was eight thirty-five. I was due at

the Navy Yard at eight.

The hell with it, she said. So you miss a day, so what?

Yeah. So what.

I looked at her more closely now as she made coffee.

She was dressed in a loose flowered dress and sandals.

Her hair was wild, but her face was clean and shining. The

winter light threw cold shadows on the walls. I pulled a

blanket over my shoulders and began eating greedily. She

brought me a steaming cup of coffee and then sat at the

end of the bed and looked at me in a forlorn way.

You’ll be going away, she said.

No, I said. I’ll stay here. Maybe we can go to a museum

or a movie or something.

I have to work today. Besides, I wasn’t talking about

today.

She got up and poured herself the first whiskey of the

morning.

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

Come on, I said. You know better. You gave me the brush

for two weeks and here I am.

Temporary insanity, she said, and smiled. She stared

into the glass.

I think you want me to go.

No, she said. Not yet.

12

THE ROOM in Brooklyn became my center, and from that

center I tried to sort out all the different strands of my story:

art school, the Navy Yard, the Neighborhood, my father, my

brothers and sister, my friends, drinking, Maureen and

Laura. I couldn’t do it, and there was little time left for

anything else. McCarthyism was gathering its dark force

but I wasn’t thinking much about it; I had no time anymore

for reading seven newspapers a day, for clipping the

comics and filing them into envelopes. The comics

themselves seemed small and cramped now, and I kept

wanting to draw the way Hogarth did, with great sweeping

movements, my body involved in the act. I had no money for

paint and canvases. And the room was too small for truly

gigantic canvases. All of that was up ahead somewhere.

But while I wanted a future, I also wanted my identity in

the Neighborhood. The drawings gave me part of it. So did

the room. And that winter of 1951–52 I found a place where

the guys from the Totes could meet on frigid nights.

Boop’s was on the corner of Seventeenth Street and

Tenth Avenue. Tommy Conroy and Mickey Horan took me

there for my first visit, entering through a side door on the

Tenth Avenue side. There were booths and an unused

kitchen. We moved through a dark passageway, past the

restrooms, and into the saloon itself. It was dark and

golden, like a John Sloan painting, with a long bar, a TV set

near the windows, a shuffleboard machine, a lone table,

and a jukebox. Behind the bar, the bottles glistened. On the

same shelf, the cash register was in the center, with a

toaster for making hot dogs at one end and signs for the

Miss Rheingold contest at the other. That first night, the bar

was packed and warm and smoky from cigarettes. The

windows were opaque with steam.

Boop himself was a heavy-set mild-mannered Italian guy

who years later was head of security at Madison Square

Garden. That first night, Conroy ordered three beers and

Boop pulled them without asking for draft cards. He was

too busy. I still remember the feeling, standing at a bar with

my friends, paying my own way. In the Parkview I was the

kid from upstairs. This was to be my own bar, a place to

drink or sing, my first club. That night I got very drunk. In the

morning, I woke up happy.

Soon, my routine got more elaborate. If I wasn’t with

Laura, I usually stopped off in Boop’s on my way home from

C&I. Part of this must have been a need for approval. I

wanted them to marvel at my drawing skills, to recognize

that I was different, that I wasn’t just another high school

dropout. But I also wanted to be part of the widening

fraternity of drinkers. On weekday nights, I didn’t get drunk; I

didn’t have enough money and I had to be up early to go to

the Navy Yard. Laura drank more than I did. But on

weekend nights, I usually went out with Maureen, early in the

evening, to see a movie at Loew’s Met or the Sanders or

Prospect. I would take her for a soda, or coffee, at Lewnes’

and then walk her home. She was in before midnight. Then

I’d walk up Prospect Avenue to Boop’s and all the other

young men would be gathering. They’d almost all had

Saturday nights like mine. They hadn’t gotten laid either. So

with the jukebox blasting and the beers flowing, we’d all get

roaring drunk.

There are permanent holes in my memory about most of

those nights. I remember lurching home. I remember the

streets rising and falling and lampposts swaying. Or lying in

bed while the ceiling moved like the sea. Most of all, I

remember the great heady closed feeling in the bar,

pushing quarters around in the wetness, the confirmed feeling when the bartender bought me a free round after I’d

paid for three. Beers were a dime and a tune on the

jukebox cost a nickle (or six for a quarter). You could get

drunk for a dollar and a half. Through the night I was filled

with talk about fighters and ballplayers and the war, guys

we knew who’d been hurt, and others who’d been arrested,

and a few who’d just gone off somewhere. And the music of

the jukebox drove into me. I sang along with Sinatra on “I’m

a Fool to Want You” and joined everybody in the bar on

Johnnie Ray’s “Cry.”

Nobody talked politics, except to make occasional

remarks about politicians in general. And none of the

others talked much about the future. The war in Korea got in

the way. They would mention taking the tests for the cops or

the firemen; someday, later. But first they had to decide

what to do about the war. The draft waited for all of us. For

some of the older guys, it was only months away. So they

discussed the relative merits of the army or the navy, the

Marine Corps or the air force. They didn’t question the

reasons for Korea. It never occurred to them to protest it.

There was a war on. When it was your turn, you went too.

Most of the time, I listened. These were my friends and I

didn’t want to argue with them. But in certain ways I was

already separated from them. I couldn’t tell them about

Laura, because they wouldn’t believe me, and if they heard

I was having sex with an old woman (she was forty-one!),

they’d probably laugh. On the nights when I wasn’t at

Boop’s, or on Saturday or Sunday mornings, I started

making drawings for myself again, filling newsprint pads

instead of making cartoons. I made great violent drawings

of prizefighters, starting with photographs from newspapers

or Ring Magazine, then abstracting them, then drawing

them from memory, repeating alone the exercises from

school. I took stiff classroom drawings of Laura and thinned

her out and added Maureen’s face, smudging the features

with my fingers to protect her from the judgments of my

visiting friends. I began imagining Maureen’s body in detail,

seeing her on the model stand instead of Laura, her pale

skin blushing, her pubic hair dark and shiny. In those

drawings she seemed more real than she did when she sat

beside me in the Sanders.

Somehow, making those drawings, I knew that I could

lose the Navy Yard, lose Laura, even lose Maureen, but I

couldn’t afford to lose art school. That would be losing my

life.

13

BY APRIL, even Laura thought I was getting better.

You’ve got talent, she said one night, but you don’t know

anything yet.

What do you mean?

I mean you’re intelligent, you learn fast, but you’re

amazingly ignorant. You’re too much in love with being a

mug from Brooklyn.

The words wounded me. She was right, and I knew it.

What should I learn? I asked her.

Laura smiled and said, Every fucking thing you can.

She would never go out anywhere with me, obviously (I

thought) because she didn’t want her friends to laugh at her

with a young man. But she began to show me drawings in

art books and from folders of reproductions she’d torn from

magazines. None of them looked like Burne Hogarth’s work

or Milton Caniff’s or Jack Kirby’s. But I began to sense what

Picasso was doing, and Matisse; I saw George Grosz for

the first time and Otto Dix and a wonderful draftsman, now

unjustly forgotten, named Rico Lebrun. Seeing my boxing

pictures, she showed me Stag at Sharkey’s by George

Bellows. She showed me pictures by Ben Shahn and

Yasuo Kuniyoshi. And then she pulled out some drawings

by a man who was doing what I wished I could be doing:

José Clemente Orozco. He was a Mexican and drew

figures with thick black lines and great bold power.

You’re a draftsman, she said. So study the great

draftsmen. You can get to color later. Most artists use color

to hide things they don’t understand. Photographers do it all

the time.

She smoked her cigarettes and sipped her Canadian

Club and rummaged through these files, which she kept in

folders in a Campbell’s soup box, and there was always a

running commentary.

Jesus H. Christ, I have saved an amazing amount of

crap. I oughtta just throw it all out.

Where’d you get it all?

She held up a copy of Art News. Magazines like this, she said. But do yourself a favor,

don’t read these rags. Just tear out the pictures. The writing

is usually the most amazing bullshit.

Then she gave me a copy of a book called The Art Spirit by Robert Henri, and I devoured it. I felt connected to Henri

because he was a friend of John Sloan. His book was a

collection of notes about the study of art, written down by

students in his classes at the Art Students League, and first

published in 1923. As I read, I heard Henri speaking in

Hogarth’s voice, and he seemed to be speaking directly to

me.

The work of the art student is no light matter. Few have the courage and stamina to see it through. You have to make up your mind to be alone in many ways. We like sympathy and we like to be in company. It is easier than going it alone. But alone one gets acquainted with himself, grows up and on, not stopping with the crowd. It costs to do this. If you succeed you may have to pay for it as well as enjoy it all your life. …

This struck me as absolutely true; I knew, for example,

that when I was alone I made drawings that went beyond

the work I did in class. And I hoped I had the courage and

stamina to see it through. I would sometimes remember

these words while drinking in Boop’s — receiving what I

thought Henri meant by sympathy, a kind of generalized

human warmth; being, as he said, in company — and know

that I should be home at work. Henri’s words became a

kind of sweet curse. In my mind, the desire to be an artist

had been a desire for freedom: from the routines of life,

from the Navy Yards of the world. Until I read Henri, it had

never occurred to me that there could be a cost, that an

artist must pay a price in loneliness. That idea gave me a

romantic thrill.

An art student must be a master from the beginning; that is, he must be master of such as he has. By being now master of such as he has there is promise that he will be master in the future. …

Was I a master of what I had? That is, had I pushed as

hard as I could against my crudities, my clumsiness, my

lack of skill? I knew I hadn’t. But nobody else at Boop’s had

either. Most of them seemed content to go along, get a job,

join the army. Who did I think I was anyway? Who was I to

think I could go beyond myself?

You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a specific thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you. … I mean it. There is reason for you to give this statement some of your best thought. You may find that this is just what is the matter with most of the people in the world; that few are really wanting what they think they want, and that most people go through their lives without ever doing one whole thing they really want to do. …

In the Navy Yard, I met men who were doing hard work

because they had to do it; to support wives, children, pay

rent. In Boop’s, the guys who were working weren’t doing

what they wanted to do. Most of them didn’t even know what

they wanted to do. And what about my father? What did he

want to do when he was my age, and how had it turned out?

What could he have become if he hadn’t left Ireland or if he

hadn’t lost his leg? What about my mother? I knew almost

nothing about her, except that she was there, she worked,

she was smart, she encouraged me to do anything I wanted

to do. As Henri did.

An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity. That is what I call self- development, self-education. No matter how fine a school you are in, you have to educate yourself. Yes.