Great Kisser Read online

  Kevin’s sweeping hungry glances at my bookshelves climbing to the ceiling. His eyes grow large, intent. He takes books out with care. “So many books,” he says. Sometimes he steals them.

  A rare moment when I write at home instead of at the peaceful library. He comes upon me at the typewriter, my fingers flying. He makes a typing motion with his outstretched fingers, smiling and approving, and says, “Keep making that beautiful music.”

  How does he know I’m a writer? When I’m home, I’m drunk, or raging, or listening to Sinatra.

  On another evening, Karen and I are at the Ensemble Studio Theater in Hell’s Kitchen. Here, on a tiny stage, are small miracles. Mistakes cohere into art. Poor and small and confined. Small, hard-backed chairs, no air. The atmosphere is electric and tight. We wait. I read the drama program. The theater is forming an acting school.

  Wow. This is my chance. What I’ve been waiting for.

  Fuck. I don’t want to be an actor anyway. I haven’t wanted to be in show business for many years. I flash back to the Palace, to Al Jolson, to seeing my first Broadway play: John Garfield in a revival of Golden Boy, and going backstage to get his autograph; to the days when all of Broadway was like a delicious hot crackling potato latke, with Winchell and Runyon, and Jack Dempsey sitting in the window of his restaurant, and the stage shows at the Paramount, the Roxy, the Capitol, Loew’s State and the Strand. How I wanted to be an actor then, when things seemed sunny and bright. They darkened soon enough. It’s too late, too late, far too late, incredibly late.

  Karen is shifting beside me. I know what she will say.

  “Michael, look at this announcement—”

  “I saw it,” I say. “What about it?”

  “Maybe Kevin could—”

  “Could? Could what? What are you talking about?” Have what I couldn’t have?

  I can’t breathe. My head is spinning. “I have to get out of here. I feel faint.”

  I keel over onto the floor.

  The tapes tell me about the fall of 1979, and here I am really surprised. I tell Kevin, “What really matters is zeroing in on what you care about and learning to do it well. Not scattering and dispersing yourself. I think you want to be in the theater.”

  He nods his head silently, and then says “Yes.”

  “If you could get to work with a small drama company, would you like to do it?”

  “Sure.” He looks directly at me with feeling. “I’d really like that. I’d love it, in fact.”

  Later in the week I call the Equity Library Theater and ask them if they can use an apprentice: my son.

  “Does he have any experience?” they ask. “Yes,” I say, “in lighting.”

  They want to meet him. He races to the interview.

  Kevin is taken on. He’s placed in charge of lighting for The Crucible.

  He works every morning, evening and weekend.

  Karen and I go to see the production. We wait for Kevin outside the theater afterwards as snow falls lightly upon us. When he sees us, he throws himself into our arms. We kiss and hug him.

  “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me in my life. Thank you,” he says to Karen, and “thank you,” he says to me.

  We all walk arm in arm up 103rd street, from Riverside to West End, the old brownstones covered with snow and shimmering with Christmas lights: the old West Side, scene of my early struggles in the ‘60s in a Communist lady’s boarding house, the prim lady spinning around with her flyswatter to crush cockroaches climbing up the refrigerator. Oh what outrage. One wintry night a telegram appeared under my door: Kay Boyle praising and criticizing a story I had written for her New School class. May Kay Boyle live forever in my heart for that gesture, which I needed more than food.

  These highs and lows that I cannot explain. Spring, 1980. Kevin is expelled from school. I go to plead for him with the principal. He will not relent, but will allow Kevin to take his final exams. If he passes, he will get credit for the term.

  The final summer that Kevin lived with us. Kevin lies around in his room after the expulsion. When he comes out of the room, wearing only his underpants, he has a stricken, pained look. His face is blazing red from the sun—his body red and peeling like an onion. He looks as if the top layer of his skin has been stripped away.

  He exercises with his barbells, reads High Times, and goes downstairs to buy joints.

  One day a butcher knife lies beside the bed.

  Knives are stuck in the wall of his room; another knife juts out of the desk. On the wall: Laurel and Hardy, Groucho, W. C. Fields, rock groups.

  Karen had a lump on her breast and went into the hospital for a biopsy. She lay on the bed and said, “I remember when I first had breasts. Like something that surfaces from under a wave in the ocean—unevenly—one an apricot and the other a pea. Something I welcomed then—I was thrilled—and which I fear now.”

  I felt her breast in her lace nightie. “You feel good in it,” I said.

  “Let’s wait,” Karen said. “If it means having only one breast, we’ll skip it.”

  “No,” I said. “Not even then.”

  “But they are nice,” she said.

  The biopsy was negative.

  Then Karen was in the hospital again. A hard lump had suddenly appeared in her neck. The oral surgeon made an incision in it. The lump got bigger. A dental problem, the doctor said. The oral surgeon agreed and made an incision in her neck. But this was no dental problem, I thought. This was due to what Karen had done to herself. The lump got even bigger. She lay wide awake in bed at night, the pain cutting through her, touching the lump. I would awaken every few hours and know she was up, staring into the dark. A neck surgeon looked at it and placed her in the hospital within two hours.

  Now I was alone with Kevin and two cats and Karen dangerously sick in the hospital and a full time job at Jewish Punchers. I ran between the job, the hospital and the apartment, where I cooked or handed Kevin money for food, fed the cats, shopped and drank.

  Just a month before Karen was hospitalized, we had been walking in Hell’s Kitchen. We passed Polyclinic Hospital, where I was born. I told Karen of this, and she said, “Shalom,” the only Jewish word she knew. I kissed her that moment, and held her.

  I got home from visiting Karen in the hospital, and had a second martini. I sat down at the typewriter. I decided I would write a letter to Charles Bukowski, who was just starting to finally make it after quitting the post office since the freaks decided he was okay, that he was a drunk and liked to kick ass and hassle landladies.

  Bukowski had written nastily of Sinatra. “I have long waited to tell you this, Buk,” I wrote, “but you are wrong about Frank. I’ve had a few drinks and now I’ll finally tell you. Frank and you have a lot in common. You’re both bastards, and you both have great talent. So listen to his voice, Buk, get to know one another, and let there be peace between you at last. Doobie doobie doo.”

  Then the phone rang. The policeman said, “This is Officer O’Malley of the 23rd precinct. Is this the father of Kevin Bradford?”

  “No it is not.”

  “Is not the aforementioned Kevin Bradford your son?”

  “I have no son.”

  “He says you’re his father.”

  “Look, Officer, my wife is in the hospital. I’ve just left her there. She’s very ill. Kevin is her son. I’m very disturbed. I’ve had no dinner. I’m exhausted.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that, sir. But your son has been arrested on a serious charge. He’s been painting graffiti on subway cars.”

  “Of course he has. My wife encourages him to do that. She thinks it’s a healthy form of self-expression.” This was true. Karen had never disciplined Kevin in his life. She reasoned it would estrange him from her.

  “You’ll have to come down and pick up your son.”

  I paused, bit the telephone chord, and pounded the bed with my fist.

  “Look, Officer. I’ve just left my wife in the hospital.”

>   “I understand, Mr. Bradford. But if you don’t come to pick up your boy, at dawn he will have to be remanded to reform school. I will give you traveling instructions by subway to Queens.”

  “How far is it?”

  “It’s quite far, sir. On the tip.”

  The policeman gave me the instructions. I had found a paper bag on the floor beside the garbage and ripped off a piece of it. I slid to the floor and scribbled furiously, cursing. I jammed the paper into my pocket and threw the phone against the wall.

  “How did this happen to me?” I screamed. “How the fuck did I get into this mess?”

  I ran around the room hitting the walls. “And I can’t even tell his mother about it. He figured it out perfectly.”

  I had a final drink, stumbled out into the street, and ran into the Kentucky Fried Chicken store. I actually felt less nervous that night than usual with the street people around me—after all, if they touched me now, I would kill them.

  I paid for the chicken, took the box, and went down into the subway station. I ate the chicken and tossed the bones out onto the tracks. “This is not happening to me,” I said to myself.

  I got off the subway stop in Queens and walked toward the police station in the distance, blazing in the dark night. A policeman named Chaim said to me, “Generally kids committing crimes like this—and I’m not assuming anything—are from broken homes with emotionally disturbing factors. The kids are trying to get attention—love—”

  Then I saw Kevin standing there, not particularly upset but solicitous, concerned. His concern always seemed more directed at other people than for himself. Besides, he must have thought, what’s the big deal?

  At Times Square, Kevin and I took the uptown train. Sitting side by side, we didn’t speak.

  Karen was operated on later that week. Looking up at me just before the operation, she had said, “Whatever happens, I will be happy, because I know you love me.”

  I wept and walked the streets.

  The operation took seven hours. Karen recovered completely.

  I waited two weeks to tell Karen about the arrest. I seethed, waiting to tell her. I could hardly wait. This was my ammunition to send Kevin back to his father. I led up to it, and she could see how upset I was. “Something’s wrong,” she said. She asked me to lie down on her bed in the hospital room.

  “There isn’t room for the two of us,” I said.

  “I’ll sit on the chair,” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s okay, honey, I feel much better,” she said.

  I lay down on the bed.

  “I have a headache,” I said.

  “I’ll get you a cold cloth.”

  She laid a cold towel over my forehead and sat down in the chair by the bed, waiting for me to speak.

  Looking up at her, I began. Slowly and dramatically, punctuating my account with little outbursts of rage, I told her about Kevin’s arrest.

  I’m not sure now why I was so outraged, except that it was my opportunity to get rid of Kevin.

  Soon after that, I gave Karen the ultimatum: Kevin had to go back to his father in Seattle. She threw herself into my arms. She said, “It’s so hard to resist you on anything—even my own child. But even for you, I won’t send him away unless that’s his choice.” And he went.

  Then I lost the job at Jewish Punchers. I was always walking away from jobs; I had Karen to support me, and my father threw in a check every month. “You’re lucky,” Karen screamed at me at the bus stop. “You lose all your jobs, so you have your freedom to write. I’ve been buying you and now if I don’t pay full price I can’t keep you. It’s my probationary period. I’ll just keep working until I drop.”

  “You think I want you to die?” I said.

  “No. I’m worth more alive.” Karen screamed. “I’ve been your slave for eight years, fed you, clothed you.”

  “I hate this,” I shouted. “It’s humiliating.” I lurched away from her, then walked back. I always came back. I didn’t have a job now; my father’s images of the Bowery, men on breadlines, helpless men like me, flared at me.

  “Just tell me you’re going to leave me and get it over with,” Karen said. “I’m one step ahead of the hangman. Your time is so much more valuable than mine. You can’t even stand spending time with me. You regret giving up a few moments.”

  We arrived home, but Karen kept screaming. At 5 A.M. she stood at the door of our apartment with a knapsack, ready to go out into the night. “The only reason you don’t want me to go,” she said, “is that the police would hold you responsible. I’ll die if you leave me. Nothing means shit. You want a young woman baby slave.” She paused. “You won’t even kiss me goodbye. You ration out your kisses to me.” She slammed the door, but I didn’t hear her footsteps on the staircase. I opened the door and saw her crying and hovering on the stairs. She moved towards me: “Kiss me if it isn’t over. I thought I had to hang on to the job to hold on to you, and felt I couldn’t. You think your work and your life is so much more important than mine.”

  And I kissed her.

  VII: Terror

  I measured my terror against Karen’s and it came out even.

  Karen recently told me of a nightmare in which the earth and green grass in front of her Portland home ripped open, like a huge sheet of sod with no ground under it, like a stage set. And she fell beneath it through dark space crisscrossed with timber understructure, clinging to the building slats and sticks that broke at her touch. She fell into open space, and terror.

  It was hers and it was mine. It kept us together.

  The two culprits who shaped my terror were my parents. I recently walked down the street and a bedraggled woman turned suddenly, stopped, and screamed at the stranger behind her. Her behavior reminded me of my father, of what he would do with me on the street: brusquely stop, and scream or shout, because of something shocking or inexcusable that, in his view, I was doing. Perhaps tying my shoelace or not listening closely enough to his telling me for the thousandth time of the penny his father would give him every Tuesday.

  I have spent too many years writing about my parents, but two other memories of my father pop out of the sack. On my 17th birthday, my father greeted me at the door of his apartment in a smoking jacket, beret, his underpants, and a cigarette holder with an unlit cigarette in it.

  “How are you, Dad?”

  “Crazy,” he replied.

  Later that year, I was dating one of my near-psychotics, a nursing student named Lois. My father was trailing after us, wanting to be taken in by me as always. We were walking down MacDougal Street in the Village. We hopped down the street. My father, wanting to join in, hopped after us. Bob Dylan was singing at the Gaslight. My father did an amazing “Blowing in the Wind” to woo us. We passed the Fat Black Pussycat Cafe and went in. We sat down at a table by the window and my father stood outside, blowing kisses and meowing at us through the open window.

  There was a cider bar on Times Square where I hung out when I was 14 with Cheryl, a dropout and a thief from Scarsdale. A pimp named Wayne with a big white hat enjoyed giving me tips about coping with life, and I heard the hookers talking about their Johns.

  There were boarding houses and hotels then where I stayed with my father, the life of desolation and male loneliness he introduced me to, listening to him talk with the other lonely men about shirts, shoes, stocks, linen; and there were the faded women in the hotel I had crushes on—women alone in single rooms smoking and listening to Sinatra and drinking scotch.

  Times Square was still there with Hubert’s Flea Museum and the Laffmovie and Toffernetti’s with the giant strawberry cake in the window. There were dressing rooms, theater alleys, old record and sheet music stores on Sixth Avenue, the Commodore Record Shop, the Colony Record Shop, and soon Alan Freed pounding a phone book to the beat.

  My father moved into the Paris Hotel on West 96th Street when he split with my mother in 1953 and the men seated in the lobby with their cigars had reco
rds by Don Cornell and Buddy Clark—bachelor singers doing bachelor songs, and I heard tales of Caruso and Buddy Bolden and 52nd Street jazz. They showed me their One Record or One Book that held all their dreams and philosophies: Mezz Mezzrow’s Really the Blues, Dale Carnegie, The Prophet. Nat Holman of CCNY was The Coach for basketball for the Jews; Roosevelt the Politician, Jolson the Singer, Benny Goodman the Band Leader.

  And still glowing on the stinking Bowery was Sammy’s Bowery Follies, with women singers, belters, in giant hats, waving big handkerchiefs on the podium over the bar.

  And reaching back far beyond those years, I remember that as a young boy, I would spit every time I passed a church.

  Listening to the tapes now, I understand what a nut I was, and what brought me together with Karen. The spontaneity of women, the looseness of movement and speech, the way they moved, their tart tongues, their freedom to react to me objectively and render autonomous opinions—that was not for me. I wouldn’t have a chance with them. For I was aroused and terrified. They promised delicious sex, nights of wanton abandon on windy balconies in my beautiful Manhattan—but I could not get near them. Every free licentious move they made threatened me. If they wiggled their asses or breasts, stroked their hair, made knowing gestures that told me they knew how hot they were and how my prick was responding to them, I went out of my mind.

  “Karen puts a lid on your dangerously flying,” said the great and wise Butinsky before he went bonkers. “She keeps you from going into the mean streets. You walk around and around the block and then you go home to safety.” In the Italian restaurant where I was on fire, there was candlelight, warmth, bacchanalia. Red lipsticked mouths, laughter, the heat and dancing shadows toasting their faces. Faces became glowing as I drank and freed up. The heat seemed to turn faces liquid, beads of perspiration, glistening, dark, reddening on their lips. Faces changed by the heat and desire. Their skin was rouged and glowing, tongues, earrings, necklaces, skin soft and hot, lacy black stockings over slim legs, eyes catching mine. The heat created a layer of phosphorescence over their skin, little pearls of sweat glistening in the candlelight; I wanted to lick it off their faces. I wanted to lightly run my fingers over the black hairs of their arms.