Great Kisser Read online

  Or visiting me summers in Oak Bluffs, this courtly man in white knee socks and shorts, chasing butterflies with a net. I would walk with him, and he would turn our walks into brief therapy sessions, interspersed with bird-watching. Butinsky alert, as we walked, to human grief, a gobbler of life with his Batman card that he gave as his I.D. at stores. This physically mammoth, personally shy man with hooded eyes, his unmistakable Boston accent, came from the ghetto of Blue Hill Avenue in Dorchester and loved the streets and parks and alleyways of Cambridge and Boston and Brookline. He once told me he considered himself a hedonist. I wondered what he could have meant: that he ate a lot of plums? I had written some of this in a story I’d published about Butinsky in 1986, a story he showed to all of his patients.

  He invited Karen and me to spend weekends. And soon he told us of his wife Beth’s lymphoma. He asked me to sit by her bedside with him as he read her Thurber and took care of her with infinite good humor and patience. For the first time, I realized how important my presence had become to him—that he, my therapist, was disappointed if I could not spend the weekend with him. And so when he began to turn the tables and confide in me, at first I felt so special, so privileged and singled out.

  Two things he said in those days had a significance I would only later grasp. “My patients become my rescuers,” he told me one day out of the blue on the way to the synagogue. I didn’t know what to make of it until a colleague of his confided to me: “He’s known for never letting go of his patients.” Shortly after that, Butinsky told me that an essay by Freud had made a lasting impact on him: “Psychoanalysis: Terminable and Interminable.”

  And about this time, his generosity had become acute. He had begun moving his most helpless patients into his large home, the homeless, the jobless. One day a blind girl knocked at his door. The young woman was looking for a room. She wore dark glasses. She came by at the suggestion of a patient, Bob Starr, who said she was a witch. Before Butinsky could decide whether to let her stay, the doorbell rang again, and a bunch of people came in and trudged upstairs with boxes of her stuff. He said “Wait a minute,” and she said, “You wouldn’t want to be known as a doctor who put a blind girl out on the street.”

  “Now I can’t get rid of her,” he told me. “She’s taking over the house. She has a malign presence, an aura, and a vast network of people who are devoted to her. I told her she had to leave, and a lawyer’s letter arrived several days later. It had the same refrain: ‘You wouldn’t want a news story that says a noted doctor put a blind girl out on the street.’ Even Bob Starr, who used to hate her, comes to see her now. I see him disappearing into her room. He says, ‘She has a way of moving her body.’”

  Butinsky paused, and said, “I’m not sure that girl is blind.”

  His wife was at a loss to stop the invasion. The patients did small chores, changed light bulbs, unclogged sinks, washed clothes. And then there was me. “Michael,” he said, “you will be my Boswell.” Now I conducted hours of interviews with him for a projected biography, not really listening to the technical details of what he said but basking in the role he had assigned me. Then he suggested that I begin to interview his other patients to better know him by getting to know who he was intent on saving.

  And in order to prepare me for these interviews, and to help me better understand his therapeutic skills, he shared tapes with me of his sessions with these patients.

  That was a kick.

  After his wife’s death, he sat with me, wringing his hands: “She slipped through my fingers. My humanity wasn’t great enough. That great wall went up, the severance of connection. I saw her face in the coffin. She’s lying in the coffin in the cold ground. Why did I fail her? What am I going to do with the rest of my life?

  “I think: why isn’t she coughing? The silence, the loneliness. I was there to save her, to get her tea in the morning, to suffer for her. I could be there in the night when she rang for me. I had been resigned to a life of suffering. For many years she was no longer able to do what a wife did. She kept saying to me: ‘I don’t want to live anymore.’ But I breathed life into her. Every breath was painful for her. There was great emptiness and loss for me. My life was so taken up with her needs. I could always anticipate her coming home from the hospital. To go beyond condolence to remembrance—a bouquet of remembrance. There had been breath between us. It suddenly stopped. There’s such silence in the house. I nursed her for twenty-four hours. She would wet herself from coughing and I would be able to help, to clean her. How could she want to leave me alone?

  “She was my patient.

  “I don’t want to live.”

  A year later, Butinsky showed me the naked pictures of his patient/girlfriend: “She wants to be a human skeleton,” he said. “She seeks her greatest bliss. Eats only tofu and vegetarian food. I specialize in borderline cases. Janice is a challenge to me. If I end the relationship, she’ll crack up. If I can get her to mature, there’s a chance for us.”

  “In the long run, you’ll get sick of her,” I said.

  “Also in the short run,” Butinsky said. “This is the last fling of the rescue fantasy.”

  Karen and I sat with Butinsky in front of the TV set hour after hour watching public broadcasting. He was getting frail, he had diabetes and a bad heart, and he didn’t want to do much else.

  But when I write now that Butinsky has a stroke, or a bad heart, or diabetes, it is not true that I was aware of these things then. Yes, he told me. But I barely noticed. I didn’t have space for it. It’s only the tapes I listen to now—fourteen years later—really listen to now—and learn what Butinsky was going through. At the time I only knew that I was no longer the center of attention. It really pissed me off.

  When I began to bring up recent crises, Butinsky sighed. “You promised me.”

  “What?”

  “You promised you wouldn’t talk about your problems anymore,” Butinsky said.

  “I’m thinking of going into psychoanalysis,” I told him.

  “I hope you survive it.” Butinsky kept talking. “I was always shy as a young man. My father would say that suffering is the law of life.” Spotting Reagan on the tube, he said, “All therapy is pointless until we get rid of him.”

  I cannot forgive him. I cannot be his Boswell. I have to get away. He calls me in New York. “She’s pressing charges. She’s very bitter. She could wipe me out.” He asks me to call Janice and plead with her to leave him alone. I cannot do it. He keeps seeing patients for some months, but he gets steadily weaker. Then he has another stroke. He tells his daughter, “I think I’m dying,” and he does.

  I remember his voice and the gentle way it imparted reason and high expectations for me. In 1965, in 1985, and almost up to the end.

  There was a time when for me he was all the radiance of the world. A patient searches for clues about his shrink. For me, in the early days they were the plaque on his wall with a quote from Maimonides: “Here I am preparing myself to engage in this craft. Help me O Lord in this work so that I may be successful.” And the map of Jerusalem on his office wall and his bookshelves lined with the work of Thomas Mann—the writer who embodied the nobility of reason for a generation. When Butinsky lost his mind, I couldn’t stand it. Sure, he saved my life, but did he have to go crazy on me? And I lost my love for him for a long time.

  III: Vancouver

  1970: I remember Vancouver as a dark place. The rain constantly fell. I was a graduate student in creative writing at the university on a fellowship. I lived in a boarding house. The ex-hooker in the room above me told me she heard the clink of my glass as I poured whiskey.

  I had fallen off the face of the earth.

  The chairman of my department, Bart Stevens, became obsessed with a story I’d written: a very lonely story about New York and a black maid, Willie Mae, who cleaned my room, confided in me, and tried to seduce me. It went back to my earliest college days, before Julie. The story was an early instance of my constant pattern of deflecting all
fucks—all opportunities for fucking through sabotage, denial, or flight. At the same time I thought of women 24 hours a day. My cock became huge when thinking of women or even coming near them, and shrivelled to the size of a pea at the thought of intercourse.

  Bart Stevens never forgave me for that story. Whenever he saw me, he said almost the same words, no matter who was in the room: “That story—Michael—come clean! It’s just not credible! Are you trying to tell me that a little guy like you fucked that big black maid? Who do you think you’re kidding?”

  “She was petite, that’s what I wrote, Bart, and I didn’t fuck her.”

  “I mean, come off it. I wasn’t born yesterday. Who do you think you are anyway?”

  Mort Zager, the American on the faculty, was a mousy little Jewish guy with a sweet, open face, a gentle way about him, and a meandering teaching style. He always concluded a class by asking his students the same maddening question: “Do you think anything of value occurred here today?” To which the students, emboldened by Mort’s insecurity, would reply, “Not really,” or remain silent. I spent long evenings at his house listening to his abstract monologues while his wife stared at him with a furious look on her face. Her frustration had turned to rage.

  Totally alone in Vancouver, a city of very few Jews—and most of them lawyers, dentists, accountants and doctors—and thousands of bland blondes, I bonded with Mort—which meant, he talked on and on, I listened. Mort had a solution for every manuscript he received from his students. It was always the same solution, and he didn’t spring it on you immediately. He gestated it. And he was never conscious of the sameness of his response. I saw Steve, a Southern boy, product of a military school, who lived in my boarding house, return from a session with Mort dissolved in tears. Steve had been working on a novel for eight months about Southern brutality, racism, bigotry and homophobia in a military school and had a book-length manuscript. When I saw him crying, I knew what had happened, because I’d seen it happen again and again in class: “Mort,” Steve said. “Mort …” He was almost speechless. “He wants me to turn my protagonist into a mouse. An actual mouse. He mapped out an entire structure for the book. He wants me to turn my main character into a mouse!”

  All the struggles he’d gone through to get through the military school, to travel to Canada, to reach the university and oppose his family’s wishes that he go into the fried chicken business—all the months of writing—and he was a serious boy in his way—had come to this.

  “Steve,” I said gently, “this is what Mort always says in the end. Haven’t you heard him?” He had, but had thought not with his manuscript, just with those whose manuscripts deserved to have a mouse as the protagonist.

  In fact, Mort had not done it to me yet. What he had done was to encourage my work in the classroom but ignore it for the literary magazine, the Canadian yawn he edited for the university. He would continue to ignore it for the two years I spent there, even though he praised it to the skies. And in the end, gently, tentatively, he began one day with me: “Say, Mike! I’ve got an idea!” I knew what was coming, although I dreaded it. Mort’s eyes sparkled, his eyebrows danced upwards at this point, “What if … now get this: your character, Marvin, turned into a mouse …?”

  That summer, it was 1973, I returned to a broiling Manhattan. I stayed high on tranquilizers and rum and saw a rerun of Portnoy’s Complaint with Richard Benjamin as Portnoy, a perfect numbing choice to fit my shellshocked mood. I had returned to Manhattan because my best friend Robert Greenberg was getting married and he asked me to write a poem and read it at his wedding. And I was secretly hoping that Julie would take me back, that she’d fall into my embrace, and that we’d get married on the same day with Robert.

  I first met Bob in the New School for Social Research cafeteria in 1967. I was neurotic. I stayed in the Judson Church where, as a Jewish socialist atheist, they let me live in the tower.

  Bob had lived in two rooms with a hot plate on 14th street. He had an energy to him. Notes, address books, magazines poured out of the pockets of his jacket and raincoat. He wanted to be a director.

  We climbed up the fire escape of the church together to the tower, where I read him my poems and stories. He encouraged me and brought me candles.

  Bob had a way of looking at people. If you were suffering, he suspended any movement; he seemed to have put everything aside and was focusing only on you. There was pain in his look. Yet it was hard to catch him at it. For when you paused, stammering, his gaze seemed to shift to an inch over you, or around you, so that you did not become self-conscious. But you knew he was with you. When you were in control, he looked directly at you again.

  In winter of 1968 we would stand outside the New School, in the freezing snow and rain, exchanging phone numbers of girls and articles we liked by I. F. Stone, C. Wright Mills and Murray Kempton. One day he mentioned a girl he had met. Linda. I knew who she was: the fabulous blonde in my literature class who kept injecting the word “Revolution!” into literary discussions.

  It was the time of the Beatles; Abbie Hoffman stripping nude at Fillmore East; Paul Krassner’s youth; the Fuck You Bookstore on Avenue A tended by Ed Sanders; Jack Micheline, Ray Bremser, and Allen Ginsberg reading at the 9 Arts Coffee Gallery run by a sailor in a loft above ninth avenue and Forty-third street; Dave Van Ronk and Bob Dylan at the Gaslight on MacDougal.

  Bob was a part of that period—not me. I was too afraid. Bob loved it; in fact he never got over it. To this day a Tuli Kupferberg print is Bob’s Picasso. The drugs, all that fucking, all that wasted time—not that I wasn’t dying for sex. At midnight I left the tower and walked in the snow along MacDougal Street past the San Remo, where O’Neill had worked [and Bodenheim and Joe Gould had begged], to the Cafe Figaro, where the young bohemians hung out. I would sit down with my notebook, a pen, drink a double espresso. I waited. My pen started flying as I really gave it to my father, my mother, and several mean teachers. The waiter came by periodically. I waved him away. I pictured myself, the driven, melancholy, brooding poet with a tragic, inspired look, far above such paltry things as food and drink.

  At 4 A.M. one morning the waiter asked me if I wanted anything else. I looked up wearily, seeing myself doing it. “Can’t you see I’m working?” I said.

  At 5 A.M. he said, “Are you sure you don’t want anything else?”

  “Perfectly!”—I don’t remember if I added, “You fool,” or not.

  “Get out,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Get out.”

  “I’ll order something. How’s your prune danish?”

  “Get out.”

  I grabbed my things and, trembling a little, weaved my way down MacDougal Street. It was deserted, except for a man in a hallway who screamed again and again, “I don’t hate—nobody. I don’t hate—nobody.” The snow was falling. It seeped into my shoes. I felt a weariness and a sense of persecution. I felt good, and so very special. I walked into Washington Square Park, the snow falling. It was dawn.

  I leapt into the air.

  Then, in 1970, Bob rented a loft for himself and Linda. There was plenty of work space: an act of celebration after 14th Street. Space to make love, to work, to have rehearsals: light and air. Bookshelves everywhere, posters, records, productivity. I had always lived in one room. Bob’s bicycle was in the hallway. He bicycled around the city. A basketball was in the corner. I pointed at it, speechless. I had only played ping-pong and potsy.

  “I play on my lunch hours,” he explained.

  I tried to absorb it. “You what?”

  “Yeah, you know, these little corners of buildings, vacant lots, with the Puerto Rican kids.”

  And me, afraid to enter a gym, afraid to walk the streets.

  Normality, fearlessness, health, sunshine, brotherhood in Manhattan. I was deeply impressed.

  I met Julie in 1966, a year before I met Bob, and for a while we were all together. I got a job as a copyboy at the New York Times. Putting the pieces together. O
ne day as I sat at the receptionist’s desk reading Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish,” Ginsberg called on the phone and I picked up for the editor who was out to lunch. I told him I was reading “Kaddish.” “I wrote that a couple of years ago already,” he said. “Doesn’t anyone read anything else of mine?” But he would never write that well again.

  Now it was 1973 and Bob and Linda were getting married. Bob had found a room for me to sublet for the summer at an apartment on Saint Mark’s Place, a few blocks away from Julie.

  And one day Bob suddenly said, “Write a poem for our wedding.”

  “Just like that?”

  Bob smiled and shrugged.

  On the day before the wedding, I went back to Julie’s apartment—the apartment where I’d lived with her, the apartment we’d found together on Stuyvesant Street, waiting for the landlord to arrive at his office at 7 A.M.—to pick up my books. She had called me insistently, giving me a deadline. She was still furious about the fleas, but I somehow felt she would melt when she saw me and fall into my arms. And we’d rush over to get married with Bob and Linda.

  It was a steaming hot July day. I stood on the stoop in front of the apartment house waiting for Bob. He had promised to help me carry the books. I had drunk a pint of rum and taken a tranquilizer. I leaned against the brick wall, the sun beating down hurting my eyes and my throbbing head.

  Bob was late. I waited. Then I saw him, grinning, waving, walking his bobbing, busified walk; slung over his shoulder was a green canvas bag.

  We shook hands and embraced. “How the hell do you think of these things?” I asked, pointing to the bag.

  “How else are you going to carry them, dummy?”

  I will remember that bag for the rest of my life.

  We walked up the five flights of stairs.