Last Bender

5.

Saul King came into the store. I was ready to stretch out a bit and get a cup of coffee and something to eat. I keep some rice cakes under the register, and have an electric kettle and tea bags in the back, as well as a water bubbler, just in case. Imagine dying for lack of water in the middle of New York. But I knew a man who almost did when a seizure of gout left him immobilized in his bed. Were it not for a bottle of seltzer he had squirreled away in the sheets, he would surely have died.

When I first got the bubbler it worried me that if I didn’t drink all of the water quickly, mold and algae would form in the bottle. So I offered cups of water to customers. They thought I was insane. Here was this slightly stooped, hook-nosed man with long brown hair streaked with grey, an unruly beard and eyes straining in the light over a pair of reading glasses, offering a paper cup of water. I always smiled as I did so, and bowed slightly, like a fiend trying to appear affable. Being nice is just not of much use here. Decent, honest, true, yes. That’s expected, and honor is a lot easier if you have money, and the earning of it doesn’t compromise your principles. Otherwise you’re down there sucking on the bottom as the rent eats you up ass first.

Sometimes Saul comes in to hang out, sometimes to work putting titles on line for 10 bucks an hour. He naturally is far more suited to the minutiae of computerism. He is a classic neurasthenic type, long dark hair that just touches his shoulders, delicate skin, tragic eyes. But he isn’t a sack of misery. He has the unwarranted optimism of his generation. Would they still be smiling if they knew what was coming? It frightens me; but I suppose aging men are always afraid.

Of course, I trust him utterly. His sense of honor is true. It is the one indispensable quality of an anarchist; without personal honor their system has no possibility or meaning. And a certain kind of honor is not such a rare thing after all, a basic one at least. One subject to frequent and bitter violation.

 One of my favorite discussions is of books neither of us has read.

“Do you think it’s any good?”

“How could it be?”

So stark for a young man! How could it be? But it could be, you never know.

He came down the steps stumbling slightly, whether out of unconscious habit or practice I have no idea. He always stumbled, even as a boy. I probably stumbled like that too, even though I never took drugs. What others did I did.

When I was a lad I got my books from the psychiatrist. His first gift was an illustrated Treasure Island. H.G. Wells followed, including, especially, his history of the world. The psychiatrist loved world histories, he loved his Toynbee. For me, there were the Tolkien books, and Vonnegut, and Portnoy’s Complaint. He couldn’t resist giving me the Karl May westerns he read growing up. He had pictures of himself dressed like a cowboy, and marching into the mountains with the young pioneers.

My father was living at The Commodore Hotel. He didn’t leave Midtown Manhattan; he just hung around lawyers, journalists and pols, drinking and talking and taking drugs. We weren’t supposed to see him, or so I thought, until they started fighting about it. The psychiatrist would say to my mother, “He needs a father! Someone to take him places and teach him things.”

When I saw my father, he didn’t even look at me, not in the eye. He was like Deadman, all the love in him exhausted. Except for one time I remember at The Oyster Bar in Grand Central, where we always ate. As usual I took the train into town after school and went up to his office in the Pan Am building to look at the traffic shooting north on Park Avenue. He had nothing else to look at in there, no art on the walls, no reception area. It was just a desk in a room with a north-facing window, at the end of a long carpeted corridor. He shuffled papers and made as if to read them when he was nervous. When it was time to leave he packed the papers up in his briefcase, put on a coat as if he were going outside, and we took the elevator down into Grand Central, and a passage that led to the Commodore Hotel, where we took another elevator up to his room. He’d hang up his coat and have a gin and tonic, sitting on the edge of the bed watching people gun each other down in the jungle or the streets, and cities burn. Then we took the elevator back down to the lower level of Grand Central and went to the Oyster Bar for dinner. On this night, shortly before the election, he was unusually engaged and more like his normally voluble self. He kept waving the New York Times around as he spoke and smacked the palm of his hand with it. “Dump the Hump!” he finally said, after ordering an oyster pan roast and eight on the half shell. “You’ve got to try an oyster this time. Look at this willya. People shouting it wherever he goes. Dump the Hump. Dump the fucking Hump.” He swallowed down some gin and tonic, practically sputtering the words out. “Unbelievable. It’s come to that. Idiotic. You call that a political argument? And if they don’t vote, then what? Is McCarthy just going to sit on his ass and watch Humphrey lose? Humphrey’s weak, it’s a shame. It doesn’t help that his balls are in that sonofabitch Johnson’s fist.” My father squeezed his knuckles white and his voice was constricted now with rage. “But still, over Richard Nixon? If that bastard wins then we’re done for. He’ll throw us all in jail and start a nuclear war. You’re not old enough to remember.” He shook his head and drained the drink and rattled the ice around. “We were so fucking close. I’ve never seen anything like it and I never will again, no, you probably won’t either. He couldn’t walk down the street in California, couldn’t drive anywhere that there weren’t people pressing in. They clawed at his hands. The crowds bloodied him, they stole his shoes. I just didn’t think it was possible.”

After dinner he walked me up to track 28 where we waited till the train got in. He hugged me stiffly and said to tell Roy next time he better be there and then he went up to the Commodore Bar, where he sat every night till closing. We never went on the street at all. We just traveled underground between elevators, trains and buildings. That was his day.

He would go weeks without calling. Rarely he’d come to see me. He’d show up a day late, unshaved, jittery. The light hurt his eyes and he looked like the wind was pinching his skin. Sometimes I could hear the constant ringing in his ears.

“Vhere is the father?” the psychiatrist would demand. “Vhat kind of a man doesn’t care for his sons?”

Justice was a religion, a mania with him. So not seeing my father for weeks or months was not unusual. Even when he lived with us he was a weekend father at best. He left only the barest trace on our day-to-day lives, yet within myself I was consumed by him. Why was he as he was, why? The phantom man was hateful to me. Hatred became the habit of our lives. My mother hated him. Roy hated him. The psychiatrist, my father’s sisters…. Or so it seemed to me then. Sometimes I even pitied him; he was so alone, and so totally incapable of expressing what it was he was going through. He could only mull it over, the political situation. The catastrophe. He would turn the moves the operatives made around and around like a Rubik’s Cube, trying to make the unalignable align. Even an ancient cubiston could not express the shape of what was. I was ten but I could see that he had been mauled, and that it wasn’t just him, it was in the walrus eyes of his closest friends. Their boss, their Clan Chieftain, was dead. With the loss they lost their casus belli and there spread among them self-pity, paranoia, solipsism, boorishness, narcolepsy, hallucinations, blackouts. And sometimes he just looked like an emaciated hawk seated behind the steering wheel, dropping off his Oldsmobile for a lube job while he took me out for roast beef sandwiches at The Larchmont Tavern. Two birds, one stone, as he liked to say. We walked aimlessly around parks and drove ellipsoids through the streets.  

After about a year of this the psychiatrist decided to step up. If my father was unable give me what I needed, he would. He arranged to meet me on weekends in the city, where he worked at a walk-in psychiatric clinic he had started. I would take the train into town and meet him at Astor Place and we’d hit the Fourth Avenue bookstores.

Some years before the psychiatrist died he went back to Austria for the funeral of an old friend. In attendance were two men who had been Nazi thugs. In school they had tormented him because he was a Jew. Afterwards, some of the guests met for dinner and drinks in a famous old Viennese restaurant located in a grotto inhabited since Roman times. He went into the bathroom and there encountered one of the men. They were both seventy years old. They were both still strong. The psychiatrist ran ten miles a day, had a black belt in Karate, skied. The other man was a bricklayer, still working. He said when he saw the man in the bathroom, with nobody about, he exploded and yelled, “It was you who slugged Schmidt!” The man looked at him and the psychiatrist realized he didn’t know who he was. “Szep. Bela Szep. Do you remember now?” Then he slugged him three times! “Alex, I punched him. I vish I could have killed him. Those fucking Nazis! That’s vhat they unleash in you. The poison. They stir it up. And ve Germans, ve Austrians are full of wiolence and envy.”

Sometimes we’d duck out for pastrami and corned beef at the Second Avenue Deli, or pizza at John’s. The shops were stuffed with books and boxes of pamphlets and grocery sacks of still more books sitting on the floor, stacked to the ceiling, dusty piles of books on the desks that served as counters, and rolled up prints and maps, and everything sandwiched between old newspapers and Life Magazines. Seated at one of these desks was a guy with a cash box and a notebook in which he laboriously recorded each sale. I have kept one myself. I have known the tyranny of the book. The grubby, thumbed over book, the record of all the chaos and bombast that spills in and out of your nexus, the clot of your eddy in the economy. The little man at his blotter soaked in the acid rain of piss and tears.

The psychiatrist knew the invariably obstreperous owners. When he first arrived in the city in 1939, he lived down the block at the Hebrew Resettlement House where The Public is today on Lafayette. They would chat about books like crocodiles on an idyll. Stuffed owls with eyes of yellow glass gazed on them as if they were village rubes seated on barrels guffawing about the weather. I wonder if they called him Mr. Clean behind his back, or was it Kojack. They would have made fun of him. I would. I do. We’re businessmen, not sentimentalists. Who cares about Fourth Avenue bookstores? It doesn’t matter where they go bust. Book people sell books one way or another.

Saul and I exchanged hellos. Then he asked, “What were the orders?”

He always asks me this and on that day I was excited to tell him. “Someone bought the Ubik.”

“No!” He looked visibly shaken.

“But you have a copy.”

“I just love the first cover art.”

“Well, next time you have a thousand bucks lying around–”

“The spray can, Alex. How many times did you stop to look at it when it was in the window?”

I thought this over a moment and made a bitter face. “Every time I looked at that damn book I thought of how I had paid two hundred bucks for it and couldn’t get a thousand. Every jackass in the neighborhood looked at it. It was worth $1,000.00 when it went on display and six weeks later, I sell it for $800.00. Condition issues.”

“Well, then why–”

“What?”

“Why put it in the window?”

“It brings people in. I made a lot more than two hundred bucks off of sales to people who came in just to look at it.”

He gave me a hard, disapproving look. “You’re like the boss in his books.”

“He loved petty salesmen.” I had a change of heart, watching the lower halves of people trudge by and the shadow encroaching on the other side of the street. I stretched in my chair and said, “Can you go and get me a cup of coffee and something to eat please?”

“What, you don’t want to leave?” Saul sputtered along at a low speed.

“Not at the moment. Get yourself something too. What will it be, pizza?”

He tipped his chin up! “I already did that today.”

“Dumplings?”

He shook his head. “No way, not Chinese. I’ll just get something at Starbucks.”

“Is it necessary to tell me that in advance?”

“It’s the closest good place.”

“Alas, an umbilicus, like the gidouille inscribed on Ubu’s belly, his umbonal belly.” I handed him a twenty. “Is that enough? Bring back just a short Americano. And a nosh to imbibe. Is there any sort of fried dough or pastry, a bonne bun?”

He rolled his eyes and said, “I’m sure they have brioche,” in such a way as to tell me that he knew I knew what they had already.

I hesitated and said, “Are principles obsolete? Why do you go there?”

“It’s for you. I wouldn’t go for me.”

“But surely I’m encouraging you not to go.”

He looked surprised. “And if I bring back the wrong coffee, you won’t drink it. The Starbucks you’ll drink.”

“I don’t see why it should matter what I will or will not drink. I often immoderately refuse to budge. You don’t think I’d compromise a principle just to comfort you?”

He laughed. “Sure you would. You sat through an evening of Flarf!”

“Oh but I hated it. It violated every aesthetic principle I hold dear.”

“Boo hoo. You stayed. You could have gone upstairs.”

“It would have been rude. Another principle. Now we have a case of conflicting principles. Now we have drama. Guilt. Do you know how bonobos control one another?”

He sighed and said, “Perhaps a pizza from Two Boots.”

“Mutual masturbation. And they’re lesbic. I’ll drink their coffee, if it’s fresh. Ask them to make a fresh pot, if you feel you can. You can take the rest back to Brooklyn with you.”

“Flat box. I can carry it under my arm when I bike home.”

“Don’t be obtuse. I’ll heat it up in the microwave for you tomorrow.”

“What do you want on that?”

I mulled it over, stumped. “The sauce is very spicy. Some ham.”

“Ham?”

“And painapple.”

“You’re asking me to order a Hawaiian pizza for you? It’s too embarrassing. I can’t do it.”

“So, you’d scruple that but not the other? I might have to accuse you of snobbery. J’accuse!”

“What kind of pizza do you want?”

“Anchovy and onion.”

“All right. Maybe I’ll have one slice.”

“What’s the scat on po-biz?”

He shook his head casually and sort of flipped the hair out of his eyes. “New Brutalist Retrospective.”

“I can’t wait for the Post-New Brutalist Revival.”

He looked at me and made efforts to suppress a smile. “You’d like them. They attempt to write with genuine feeling.”

“Unlike the bloody Flarf. That man with the ears of an ass–”

“Those were bunny ears. They were pink for god’s sake.”

“Eared buttocks–”

“Yeah yeah yeah, but Burt is all right.”

“Burt struck me as a baboon. All he can say is Ha Ha.”

“He’s translating Ubu Roi into phonetic English, like Zukofsky’s Catullus. We’re going to perform it here, if you’ll agree.”

“Agreegious. The bloody homonyms. Ten minutes is enough. Ubusque ad Homonym. Don’t think that I haven’t seen such things before. Nothing ever fucking changes. Nothing bad anyway. Did you ever hear of good chemicals persisting in the environment? The good ones are evanescent, in need of constant renewal. But the crap? The crap subsists forever! And do you want to know why? Because one is the consequence of the other.”

“Why do you attend then? If it violates some quaint aesthetic principle of yours–”

“Quaint? As in, your quaint honor? Or that I honor her Queynt? I queynt coit understonde it.”

“No, come on. Admit it. It would violate your principles not to attend.”

“No. The purpose of attending is to have my principles violated. It’s what they intend, and it’s what happens. Isn’t that why we are all there? What gets me is that the meme of aesthetic boredom should be so persistent. Every ten years somebody reanimates it. I mean, to say the words. And it is not the same as repetition in music. There is hypnotic action in narrative and the minimal is a noble branch of the work. But boredom? It violates every principle of entertainment.”

“Hey, that stuff’s meant to be bad.”

“Radical.”

He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. I was annoying him. But he wasn’t rising to the bait. “I’m gonna go get the pizza.” He turned with a sly smile and stumbled up the steps and out into the light. The kid lacks structure, but I enjoy his company. He keeps a little wind in my sails.

Joseph used to serve that purpose. He was an enthusiastic proponent of postmodern theory, a sort of pop version of Sally, the careful and shrewd adumbrator, and the source of much of his misinformation. Which put me at the decided disadvantage of seeing the same material twice, meaning I was having a postmodern experience, against my will, which preferred of course a pre-modern one. He lacked her focus and ambition. For him, theories were like Beatles songs; he was a theory fan, a teenybopper of French theory. He could, in the course of a single conversation, cite Deleuze and Guttari, Bachelard, Lacan, and Blanchot, never having read a complete book by any of them. Oh, but he was a reader. A chaotic, reiterative, obsessive reader, but I think his eyes wandered over pages in no particular order. Books lay scattered in his brain like albums. An eclectic slew of contradictory matter. He had a way with a cigarette and a hat and nervously flicked ashes into an ashtray on the floor by the couch, or slouched over a book, vulpine, drunk, in the 5am light.

Joseph spent his time forming oddball loft bands with his friends. At the moment they were headquartered in the anarchist building on 1st Street, where a group of NYU students, former and current, some going back to Dalton, others to Stuyvesant, had formed a performance collective in the basement. Of course Joseph at the time did not live in this building; he lived with us and played at night with his busking anarchist friends.

The building was a squat. Power came in off the pole. It had been owned at one time by a Russian Jewish Communist, the nephew of the original owner, who left it to him as an act of revenge: forcing the Communist to be a landlord. The dissonance was lost on the nephew, who ran the building for the party. And then, in the fifties, disenchanted and unhinged, he gave the building over to a succession of increasingly bohemian radicals. By the time he was an old man an anarchist collective had taken root. They walked about naked and openly rutted. He drank vodka on the rocks and watched. When he died in 1973 his weary and scandalized New Jersey heirs stopped paying taxes and abandoned the building.

The collective remained, mutating when Joseph and his friends drifted in, in 1980. He wrote and performed the music for the productions, and hung out getting drunk and playing music. They had been improvising but had recently been reading The Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll…. and so they joined The Institute for Advanced ‘Pataphysical Studies, and dedicated themselves to bringing the non-dramatic and unperformable works of Alfred Jarry to the stage. Or that was the plan anyway. First they were going to take a stab Ubu Roi.

The premier performance was the first time my family met the Babels. In attendance were Sally and I (she to make her theatrical debut), her parents, Raphael and Cynthia, my mother and her third husband, Herb Czischz, the chiropractor, the guy who drives a Chevrelet. With him was his 19 year-old daughter Ursule, a pretty typical Five Towns girl, heavy drinker, big Quaalude taker, lots of sex and acid, frosted hair, pink fingernails and lip gloss, peanut butter tan, chewing gum. 

I knew Sally’s parents. Sometimes they stayed at the loft. Raph and Cynthia had only been living year round at their summerhouse for a short while. They missed Manhattan. They would show up spontaneously, stay a few days and take us all out to dinner. Joseph fled immediately after these meals (where the family romance was unfolding before me), to pursue his interests in more congenial company, leaving Sally and me to sit at home watching PBS with them.

We had also dined with my mother a number of times, but without the chiropractor. Brooklyn Heights was his limit. Little beyond a steak could lure him into Manhattan, and even that he preferred to get at Peter Luger’s. And my mother absolutely refused to live in his house in Valley Stream. He distrusted us. He was convinced there was some mystery about our family that would explain why we upset him so. “Those sons of yours, what’s wrong with them?” he used to ask. To which my mother would laugh and ask him how Ursule was doing.

Why Ursule was showing up to an anarchist theatre performance of Ubu Roi was and remains a far greater mystery to me than my family’s unsettling effect on some people. I can only speculate now as then that it had something to do with drugs.

Also arriving were Simon and Tammy, arm in arm, that bastard Sylvio Argento, in a suit, Lou, dressed quite normally, in a black T shirt and jeans, and his much abused girlfriend, Deb, all the remaining Lacan study group people, decked out correctly and assorted others, including Joseph’s recent ex, Jayda. Roy was supposed to be there too, but he had missed drinks at Christopher’s first and had yet to show.

It was a beautiful June evening, and still bright out when we showed up at Christopher’s. He passed around gin and tonics in tall glasses with lime. We stood in front of the windows, which opened onto a fire escape into a sunless alley where all the walls are topped with barbed wire. It was festive with the tingle of an impending performance. Christopher, whom I expected to be a nervous wreck (since that was what he apparently always was, beneath the rigid exterior), was quite relaxed and jocular, not at all disturbed by the entrance impending in less than two hours. There is something about the appropriate glassware and situation that is gratifying and puts you at ease, if you are a certain kind of host.

Sally on the other hand was pale and silent. She trembled. Despite the fact that she had stanzas and stanzas of poetry by heart she had no confidence in her ability to memorize lines. The mere mention of Mere Ubu caused her to slump in her chair and start to mutter angry obscene phrases, sometimes from the play, sometimes not. The past three weeks we had done little besides work and recite Ubu Roi. We debarked for the theatre an hour before curtain time. The air was hot and had the still-welcome smell of summer. We drifted en masse in gaggles, at diagonals, around the corner and up the street.

The entrance was down some steps from the sidewalk into a dank stairwell and through a door into a space that was quite a bit deeper than it was wide, and painted all black: walls, floors, and ceiling. There were some little black cocktail tables with cherry veneer folding chairs from the thirties around them, and a random collection of chairs set up facing the stage. Everything in there they had scavenged from the street. The stage was curtained off, and an easel, covered with a black cloth, was set up in front of the curtain, illuminated by one of the few theatrical lights in the house. A lone Fresnel was focused on an empty chair, set up behind several keyboards, a drum machine, an accordion and an electric guitar. There was a list of instruments taped to the front of the synthesizer:

Hautboi  Chalumeaux         Cervelas      Grande       Basse Petit   Basson        Gran Basson          Triple BassonPetits Cornet noir         Cornets blancs aigus      Sacquebutes          Trombones  Oliphans verts       Galoubets   Cornemeuses        Bombardes  Timbales          Bour  Grosse caisse        Grandes      Orgues.

To the left, near the curtain, was a table with some paper cups, ice and vodka and a sign written with magic marker suggesting a donation of a dollar a cup.

The production had consumed the lives of all living in the loft at that point: Joseph, who had moved back in when he broke up with Jayda (the woman with the beard); Lydia, who back in March had moved in when she got evicted from an illegal sublet; and Sally and me. Because she would not, could not live at the apartment anymore and I could not stand to be without her.

What began as a spat developed rapidly into rancor and abuse. If in the morning upon turning on the kitchen light more than a few, say, six, roaches scattered it served as a winch to her nerves, tightening them on a notched wheel that moved but in one direction. The only counter force capable of topping this was lust, and our lust was unabated. Sally angry in her underwear and bra was hard not to love, if I could but disengage for a moment, and this moment came when the light caught her hair and forehead and she was biting her lip. Her presumption of my strength was axiomatic, my handicap and her condition for being there. But I had never presumed for myself any strength at all, other than for hanging on, the last leaf blown from the tree. I’ve known my share of trouble, but strength was something she had imagined for me.

“It’s so, small,” she said, one morning in March. It had rained, it was raining and the wind was fierce. As she ran the shower into the tub I heard her exclaim, ew! a number times. She came out all hot and pink and I asked, “What was ew?” She gripped the robe tighter and said, “If the door shut properly you wouldn’t have heard it.”

“But I did.”

“What were you, listening?”

“No, I wasn’t listening. But you can just hear–” I pointed at the wall and the door not five feet away from us. I had adjusted my scale, my sense of proportion to that space and the lack of privacy was something I had filtered out, perhaps because I felt as home with her there, as when I lived alone.

“Exactly. There’s absolutely no privacy in this place. At least at the loft–”

“We’re stuffed into a closet there, literally. I feel like a foot in a sock.”

“What about the toilet? What about that? I don’t think they put toilets in linen closets. Nor do their feet sleep there. It’s obviously a small room. In Tokyo people sleep in spent torpedo tubes and in Paris they rent out crawl spaces. But at least the bathroom door closes all the way, and the master bathroom is pretty damn nice.”

The facilities were more opulent at the loft I had to admit. Her parent’s bathroom (it always seemed to be their bathroom, I never fully possessed it), had a grand claw foot tub, and a stall shower where the water came out so broad and hard I felt obliterated by it, vaporized against the tile wall. “It’s very nice. But I’m used to this. I don’t have more privacy there than you have here.”

“Leaving that aside, the bathroom is just nasty. The walls are like diseased skin. I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, there are paint bubbles hanging down from the ceiling. I watched a roach crawl across a pubic hair encrusted piece of soap sitting in a puddle by the drain. It’s like overload.”

“Should we have a schedule for cleaning then? At the loft I have to wade through garbage and beer cans and Joseph’s equipment.”

“He lives at Jayda’s.”

“And comes home every afternoon to snooze on the couch and play bandoneon, until all of his friends arrive to drink beer and watch TV.”

“Accordion, not bandoneon. What’s wrong with watching TV with your friends before you go out? You don’t even have a TV.”

“I don’t like to watch it anymore. But of course there’s nothing wrong with that, I’m just saying that he lives with us even if he doesn’t sleep there. He is omnipresent. It is your home, it is his home, but it is not my home, this is.”

“Old people who shuffle around in the halls! It smells like lymphoma here. I feel afflicted walking up those stairs.”

“You didn’t feel that way when you stayed here with Christopher.”

“Oh, but that was different. He was very, orderly. And there’s something about these upper floors, as if the higher you go the more demented things become. Pathologies that are rare below thrive up here. It’s an inverse world that gets darker the higher you ascend.”

“Yeah, and this world too. Anyway, maybe climbing the stairs makes you live longer!”

“I just can’t stay here anymore, not as much as I have been.”

“Then go on. I’ll come over most nights I suppose.”

“You don’t even know if I want you to. All you know is what you want.”

“I don’t think there’s anything I want that you don’t want.”

So I moved back to the loft and soon the production was underway.