Great Kisser Read online

  Julie was at the door. “This is Pepper.” A short young black man with glazed eyes waved at us and went back to his phone conversation. I stared at him. Julie said nothing else. So it was really over.

  “Hey, come on—” Bob called.

  I tossed the books into the bag.

  On the way down the stairs, I said, “Did you see that guy?”

  “Poor passive schmuck,” Bob said. We carried the heavy load of books to the room on Saint Mark’s Place.

  I had been working on a story about the breakup.

  “How’s the story going, Michael?”

  “You haven’t got time now, Bob—”

  “Sure I do.”

  We put the books down and I read my story to him.

  I looked up occasionally as I read. He was smiling. When I finished he made a circle with his finger and thumb. “Sensational! You’re being very productive, Michael.”

  My friend Robert. My only friend of those Washington Square years.

  I walked back down with him to Saint Mark’s Place. It was difficult to speak. Crowds pushed against us.

  I watched Bob going off down the street, the empty green bag over his shoulder, hurrying to Linda.

  It was early morning of Bob’s wedding day. I lay in bed drinking rum and read the personal ads in the East Village Other. Five hours to the wedding. I dialed an ad: Club Mogen David for Singles. A voice told me they had someone very special for me to meet: Martha Goldberg. She was soon moving to Jerusalem.

  In a flat, gravel voice, Martha spoke to me over the phone. “I am tender, affectionate, sincere.” I quickly walked to 23rd Street and Ninth Avenue. Now I wouldn’t be alone at the wedding. I would bring along this affectionate Jewish girl and casually mention to Bob and Linda that we were emigrating to Israel. They would be so happy for me.

  Martha answered the door. She was heavy but not fat. She wore a blouse, skirt and sneakers. She did not smile. I heard growls.

  Four huge dogs headed for me, gnashing their teeth. “Down!” Martha commanded them. She pointed her fist at the floor. “Down! You will obey me!” The dogs moved toward her. She settled herself on the bed, the dogs around her. She stroked them, and they licked at her partially opened blouse. When I opened my mouth, they growled. She leaned back and stretched, thrusting her breasts outward. The dogs licked her. She dangled her thick legs.

  She had a sawdust personality; she was like chalk scraping against a blackboard. She spoke only when I did and after a pause. Yes, she was headed for Israel. There was a growing horse and dog market there. She would raise them.

  I told her I had been to Israel.

  After a long pause, she said, “Good.”

  “I have a wedding today, where I’m going to read a poem to my best friend and his bride.” I explained that Bob was directing his own wedding at a theater.

  “I’m not much on weddings,” she said.

  “Oh. You don’t want to come?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Why?”

  “It sounds mod and phony to me. Why hold a wedding in a theater?”

  “He’s a director—”

  “I’m not interested in the theater.”

  I stood up. The dogs stood up and surrounded me. “Down!” she shouted, stamping her sneaker.

  I said goodbye and staggered down the stairs.

  At the wedding, Bob’s father stood on the stage and told the story of Bob as a schoolchild ordering around a line of children at school, as an early sign of his son’s directing ability.

  It was very quiet then. I moved into the lights, to the center of the stage. I took the paper from my pocket and held it. My voice trembled as I read the poem to Bob and Linda.

  After I finished reading, I was too high to notice the reaction. I remember, while I was reading and afterwards, being careful not to sway. But Bob and Linda embraced me, and that was enough.

  When it was over, I walked out into the hot sunlight, and down the Bowery, cracking and crumbling from loneliness and despair. I walked into Tompkins Square Park, and I saw Julie. She was smoking pot and cuddling Pepper. She suddenly looked up and saw me. She said, “You can’t change a girl by pouring a glass of water over her head.”

  The next week I left for my second year in Vancouver. I met Karen soon after, in the fall of 1974.

  Reading the lines of the poem I wrote for Bob’s wedding 30 years later, I am struck by my having written, “Some of us submerge those we love.” I remember now that I was writing of how I felt about my relationship with Julie, and that I left her to give her her freedom. And what a misguided sacrifice that might have been.

  In Vancouver in 1972, there was no way I could connect with a woman. Just Morty and his mice. When women wanted me, I didn’t see it, or I ran away. When I wanted them, which was most of the time, I froze with the fear of rejection.

  I lived in the boarding house with Steve. There were three girls smoking pot and listening to the Mamas and the Papas. The third, Jane, was fat and into Eastern religion. Very ethereal with her pinky held aloft as she dived into a pizza. She called me, “My friend.” That’s how she began her sentences. One day she came to my room and accused me of stealing her pot. “I don’t smoke pot,” I said. When she discovered her cat had hidden it in a corner, she came back and apologized. She seemed to think her apology bonded us and made us a couple. When I didn’t respond, she had her revenge.

  Jane and the two other girls introduced me to a beautiful Jewish girl named Eva. I was a little shy in my stovepipe boots with their vomit color. I’d bought them for a dollar in a thrift store; they were all I could afford and it was snowing and raining constantly. The dirty snow and ice melted over them, merging with their brown color, and they really looked as if they’d been vomited on. But one day the three girls took me over to Eva’s. She told me she danced in a cage in a strip club, which I found sad and a real turn-on. I liked doomed sexy women. Plus she was talking about Jewish identity, Jewish this, Jewish that, and it seemed important to her that I shared this with her in this goyishe city. The other girls left, and Eva was all over me. We drank, and I couldn’t quite get at her, but I always liked a tease and figured this was only the beginning. She talked of marriage and children, and we drank and drank. What a quick connection. I floated home. When I called her again, she didn’t answer. She never answered me again. One day I was walking back to the house in the dark rain in my filthy boots and I heard peals of laughter. I looked up and the three girls from the house and Eva were laughing.

  When I studied at the university, I met a burly, brawling writer who drove a garbage truck. Bill T. O’Brien. He was writing a novel that was later published, Summer of the Black Sun, about a mental institution he’d been in. He wrote, “In the distance between the trees walked a woman. We were like children at a pastry window. ‘Ooo. Aaaa. Mmmm!’

  “We had forgotten women. Now we remembered.”

  I was always forgetting, and always remembering.

  O’Brien published the book, and he died. Like most writers I knew, he didn’t know how to get through life, he didn’t have a clue. And neither did I.

  After graduating from the university in 1974, and before I got my teaching job, I was suddenly propelled for a few seconds into a glittering life. A choreographer and dancer named Jim Toscano was forming a weekly show business newspaper, the Canadian version of Variety. He needed an editor, and my creative writing department recommended me. After all, I’d been a copyboy at the Times, and that was hot stuff in Vancouver.

  Jim had saved $100,000 and was going to spend it on the newspaper. He was also gay and planned to go straight. He formed a staff and moved his future wife and all of us to Toronto, much more an urban town than Vancouver. I was suddenly Somebody, with a great apartment. I shopped for red silk shirts with accordion sleeves, purple blazers, boots and bell-bottomed trousers at Big Steel, and Marmalade sang “Reflections of my Life” on loudspeakers. The song was about changing, and suddenly my life was transformed.
I longed and lusted for Jim’s secretary, Maureen, but she became pregnant by someone else. And I, of course, never got laid.

  Jim was one of the many generous and bountiful Italians I would know in my life, kind and giving, and our editorial conferences took place in Italian restaurants with Bolla wines and Sinatra, Darin, Roselli, Dino, Louie Prima and Tony Bennett on the jukebox and we all got drunk, as did his father and mother, who had traveled to Toronto to offer him their loving support. Jim could barely read or write anyway, but for seven weeks we held press conferences, met deadlines, staff members married each other, and our oldest staffer, a Hollywood veteran in his sixties, got arrested for stalking an actress. Jim, of course, bailed him out.

  And then suddenly it was over. The money had run out. Jim said he had a farewell present for me, and gave me his record, which was called “Tap Dancing Class.” The record had a small orchestra playing and you heard the sound of his tapping. You kept waiting, but that was it.

  I was back in Vancouver. Soon Franklin College hired me, and I met Karen.

  Franklin College was a hotbed of experimentation. Murray Hodge, the manic-depressive principal, who spoke in a breathless flurry of slurred words that encompassed every educational theory of the late 20th century, was a wild man with bobbing eyes. He was the most unlikely authority figure, and I never understood a word of what he said, but I actually had a kind of respect and love for him. He had a doomed integrity. He always dressed in purple and was having an affair with his secretary that was the talk of the college.

  The first college faculty weekend was held in a log cabin camp in the hills. Smoke and alcohol and pot; somersaults and lectures on lotus positions and linguistics. Murray chasing the secretary through the bushes. His mother Clara was one of my students, and told me, “I told Murray never again. He can get laid without all that hoopla, for goodness sake.”

  I had winged the teaching on tranquilizers, on rum, on the courage of having no choice but to do it in those first teaching classes. Clara and another old lady were seated in the back of my creative writing class. One of them was a church type, eyes darting about as she whispered to the other, her mouth stretching to one side as if she were pantomiming or didn’t want to be seen doing it. This was Bea Rankin. The other was a frail bird of a woman, wrinkled skin, chain-smoking, wearing a jazzy hat that almost dwarfed her. This turned out to be Clara, Murray’s mother.

  I was adopted by the two of them. They came up to me in class and Bea said, “I just want to say there are good vibes here, young man; I think we can really get it together if we tell it like it is. Mind you, no foul language or anything like that; but you’d be surprised how much can be said without it. It could blow your mind.” So I had an in with Murray now.

  We were a bunch of hippies and radicals and cokeheads along with the traditional types, and everybody was fucking and smoking pot. It was heady stuff for Karen, who’d grown up in an upper-middle class home in Portland.

  There were certain women with whom I felt a deep familiarity, as if I’d known them my entire life. they sat on the edges of rooms, they were constantly afraid. Tremblers. They made me feel as if I was in control. I could do no wrong with them. I understood their every move. I was all-important; indispensable, they wanted to be held, to be protected. I spoke their language.

  I was Karen’s Jewish, New York messiah who was going to give her all she’d missed out on. I had materialized in this frenzied college that Karen found incredibly sexy.

  Rebounding from her uptight Oregon upbringing and unfaithful gay husband, Karen had wound up in the arms of the authoritarian Dutchman, Victor van Sant, who loved her but was 20 years older and settled in his ways. The ’60s had passed her by, but now, miraculously, thanks to Victor’s support and encouragement, she’d completed her master’s degree and was a full-fledged teacher in this funky college with its fumes of sex and youth and pot and coke and experiment. And she found me, her Jewish, New York, intellectual messiah, with my stacks of The Nation schlepped from Manhattan, my Strindberg collection, who she saw as her very own Allen Ginsberg, her last angry man, who was going to give her all she had missed out on. I couldn’t miss with Karen. She was overwhelmed at the sight of me.

  “After I left my first husband,” she told me, “I had Kevin with me in Oregon and I was living on two thousand dollars a year, going to graduate school on my bicycle. The Beatles were singing and the hippies were swinging, living this totally free life and I’d done nothing but fulfill this social role all my life. I stood by this ravine, and thought I could just push the car into it—even leave some blood—and take off to Europe and be free. I thought it out to the last detail.”

  Karen would claw the edges of books and magazines with her fingernails, leaving them mangled. I would hear this crackling sound and it drove me nuts and the sight of the clawed edges of books I loved made me want to scream and run. Her hermetic mother, who lived with Karen’s father in the big house overlooking the water in Portland, had long fingernails and in fact, resembled a claw herself. She was a dark woman with a studied beauty and black hair; the house was filled with brown and black wood and sculpture. She detested what the world had come to. Over martinis Mrs. Epson grieved the loss of a time when “a faggot was a little piece of wood” and “gay” meant “gloriously happy.” She said to me that Karen was a “steel hand in a velvet glove.” She told us that she’d voted for Jimmy Carter because Betty Ford had danced with a Puerto Rican. “Intermarriage is like marrying a person to an ape,” she said. By her third martini, Mrs. Epson advocated capital punishment for all blacks (could Jews be far behind?). She spent her days reading about the lives of serial killers. If Karen responded to anything her mother said with a hesitant quibble like “I don’t know,” Mrs. Epson would storm out of the room screaming that Karen didn’t love her and lock herself in the bathroom. Karen, terrified that her mother would kill herself, pleaded with her for hours until Mrs. Epson unlocked the door.

  Karen would have nightmares of her mother making her psychotic, of prohibiting her from making any contact with the world except herself. And that was exactly what Mrs. Epson had tried to do to Karen, as my father had tried to do to me. That was my bond with Karen.

  Karen and I clung to each other in the early days of the college. We were planning our courses. I was actually teaching Karen about the literature she would be teaching, and her adoration of me gave me the support I needed to enter a classroom, bolstered as I was by rum and tranquilizers.

  I invited Karen to my apartment to “study.” In fact, we were more like two freshmen college students, cramming like crazy to prepare for the students we would be teaching. I gave Karen assignments of novels to read, and unlike in graduate school when she used Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, she read everything I assigned her, thoroughly confident that if these were books that I liked, she would like them too. Soon we were fucking and the faculty all knew about it.

  We got “engaged” while she was still living with her husband. I bought her a gold ring with a carved jade stone; she wore it when she visited me and left it in my apartment when she left. Soon, I insisted she move out of Victor’s house.

  Two weeks later, I parked the car in the college parking lot, and staggered out into the sun. One of my students, David Browning, headband, ponytail, in his thirties with a wife, kids and hash on a farm, waved. He was my favorite (at night in the pub after class, he said, “Man, in the long run the headband just doesn’t make that much difference, you know?”) Since he was close enough in age to be almost a rival, we usually circled around each other. Now I walked toward him, at the back of his beat-up truck.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “No.”

  I paused.

  “Karen’s husband committed suicide last night.”

  He tilted his flask toward me. I drank. He took a swig.

  His tortured eyes seemed right now. We stood together. I drank once more, and he said, “Anything I can do …” I walked towards the campus. />
  Two weeks after Victor’s suicide, a furious member of the faculty, an old-line physics teacher—curiously, a Dutchman too—spotted Karen shopping for me at a men’s store and, his face red hot, his eyes bulging, his anger boiling, stared at her and said, “You’re buying his socks now too?”

  Three months before the wedding, eight months after Victor had killed himself, I told Karen that I had changed my mind and didn’t want to marry her. We stood on the balcony of my apartment.

  She threatened to jump. “You deserve the electric chair for this,” she screamed, her voice bouncing off the building. “You’re killing me, you’ve killed me.” She was so convincing, I almost believed it myself, and I was sure the neighbors did. And I wondered if this wasn’t clever of her; she knew I knew if she jumped, the neighbors would remember what she had accused me of and could blame me. After all, first came the scandal of Victor’s death.

  Then she had an asphyxiation fit (the first of many over the years) and the ambulance arrived with red flashing lights.

  After she had betrayed Victor, after his death, the thought that she had gone through all that for nothing was enraging to her. Not only did we have to get married; we had to have a glorious marriage, a marriage that would justify in her mind what she had done.

  We were married on schedule. I went through the ceremony on tranquilizers and vodka, and couldn’t remember much about it. Karen’s son, Kevin, 11, must have been there.

  After the marriage, a doctor in Vancouver prescribed another pill for my despair: Librium. It was really remarkable. Librium was my friend. It put you in the state of mind where if someone approached you and said, “I’m going to chop your arm off,” you said, even before he finished his sentence, “Sure, that’s okay, go ahead.”

  And you thought: “Sure, that’s okay; I only need one arm anyway.”

  A year later, Kevin dropped a lit match in a barrel of gasoline. His eyebrows were singed from the explosion.

  I wanted to scream, but to whom?

  Robert Greenberg had gotten a job with a theater company in Los Angeles. Bob and Linda settled in Santa Monica.