There Should Have Been Castles Read online

“Maybe.”

  “You have—pardon the expression—money?”

  “A little.”

  “And how much is a little, pray tell.”

  “Five hundred dollars.” I figured I’d better hold onto the other four hundred dollars in case it turned out that Sy’s lucky number wasn’t six.

  “You have five hundred dollars?”

  “Yes.”

  He walked toward the kitchen. “Go home. You’re a mirage.” He turned and walked back. “Blondie, cutie-pie Blondie, you have five hundred George Washingtons?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which you would invest in a cockamamie Kosher-Japanese restaurant?”

  “I might.”

  “What are you—a crazy Vanderbilt?”

  “No, I—”

  “—that you would invest five hundred samoleans for a share of the profits the formula of which we’ll work out later?”

  “Possibly.”

  “And the moolah is not in Deutschmarks?”

  “No.”

  “Iri!” He called. “If you haven’t already killed yourself, come out of the kitchen! If you have—don’t bother, I’ll go it alone!”

  And so I was in the restaurant business, turning $500 in cash over to Sy Fein who yelled at me for not getting a cashier’s check because how could I know that he and Iri were on the up-and-up, was I out of my mind?

  As insane as it may sound, the restaurant worked, becoming a fixture and a meeting place where Christopher Street crossed West Fourth. Crazy Sy Fein, given my five hundred dollars with which to buy food, made the thing work. Iri handled the kitchen, Sy clanged the cash register, and I waited tables but only for as long as it took daylight to come shining in. And when I quit, it took two girls to take my place. Hah!

  On Sunday mornings we’d split up the take. Mine wasn’t much but then, how could it be? They had put up $7500. I had only put up five hundred dollars. Still, it was a Dow-Jones miracle. My money was earning money—more each week. The reputation of Sayonara spread, blanketing the Village and moving uptown like Donovan’s Brain, causing people to trickle in from faraway places—Flatbush, Staten Island, East New York, Nassau. Jackets, ties and reservations were required, especially on Friday and Saturday nights. Iri took on another chef, Lenny Abelson, whose specialty was “lotkes tempura” (potato pancakes in soy sauce). Sy added a maitre d’ out front, Oshiru Matsuoka, an expert on cheap wine as, yes, we got a true liquor license and made a phony wine cellar out of a spare John.

  What it meant for me was emancipation. I didn’t have to work. After getting my five hundred dollars back, my share of the daily take, after expenses, was coming to almost thirty dollars a week, more than enough for me to live on. Sy arranged for me to put my remaining money into a “legitimate bank” with Sy as trustee, because of my age. He was shocked at my age but promised to keep it a secret from the white educationalists. At that time it wasn’t all that unusual for minors and runaways to be floating all over the Village. The trick was to stay out of trouble. Keep your nose clean and the police would turn a deaf ear and a blind eye. Needless to say, I maintained the cleanest nose in town.

  What did I do with all my time? I breathed. I sucked it all in. As a kid I didn’t speak a word until I was five. And there I was again, so anxious to sop it all up that I was willing not to speak—to anyone about anything. I floated up to the UN, skinnying in, telling officials that my uncle was my father: “I’m Congressman Maitland’s daughter.” (He was with the UN at the time but I never contacted him lest I be hustled off to Chicago.) Once inside the UN I would listen to the translation machines, turning the dials on the chairs, putting on the earphones and tuning in to any one of six languages. I learned Russian, a little. And Chinese, a little less. But they were more fun than French or Spanish. Also, if they were indeed coming to get us (the Russians and Chinese), then I sure as hell wanted to know what they were talking about when they registered at the White House.

  Fritz Kreisler. I adored Fritz Kreisler. The cognoscenti dug Jascha Heifetz but I loved Fritz Kreisler. He made the violin sing. Heifetz could make it stand on its ear and do tricks but Kreisler was liquid gravity and musical poetry. When Fritz Kreisler played Carnegie Hall I went to every concert. I hung around outside and followed him down the street. I would sit in the lobby of his hotel, waiting to get a look at him. I got to know the ushers at Carnegie Hall and they’d let me back-stage to watch the rehearsals. I was a Kreisler freak and he must have thought he had two shadows.

  At the Forty-sixth Street Theatre I went to see Guys and Dolls over and over. It was an incredible show because neither the cast nor the audience was ever allowed to relax. Two, three, four nights a week I’d go. And each performance I’d watch something else. I’d watch the dancers because I thought I could do that. I’d watch Sam Levene and Vivian Blaine and Isabel Bigley and Stubby Kaye—how they moved, their anticipation, their timing. I watched the conductor pointing in the pit, making different instruments do their individual thing. I watched an oboist for an entire performance. Then the drummer, then the French horn. I gathered it all up, harvested it, threshed it, stored it—the techniques and emotionality of musical theatre. I would know it from a thousand different angles—a million. No one beyond myself would ever know Guys and Dolls as well for no one beyond Damon Runyon and Frank Loesser and Abe Burrows and George S. Kaufman and Jo Swerling could ever muster the time, endure the rigors, and apply the love to really distill what made the magic, how the music, why the laughter, whence the exhilaration.

  And when I finished swallowing Guys and Dolls, I likewise dined on South Pacific, after which I consumed Wish You Were Here. I glutted myself on Broadway musicals, moving from aficionado to addict. I was hooked on them and on New York because New York didn’t just permit it to happen, it insisted on it.

  I began to bathe myself in New York. The air of it and the light of it. I would take it and rub it all over my skin as if it were Revlon and bottled. A few weeks before—six, maybe—I had kept New York at arm’s distance, distrusting it, condemning it. But now I was a part of it. I could see it and feel it, running up alleys and spilling onto sidewalks. At four in the morning I could open my single, ground-level window and look up and out at how the world was doing. Yes, there were derelicts and druggies and crazies, some of them pissing in the street—but, Christ, it was going on, life was going on. So what if the old sot was pissing directly on my window, banking it off my wall and shocking the shit out of my one geranium, I was in the middle of a solar explosion, a musical extravaganza gonna play Broadway, you bet your ass. Box seat, Maggie, wherever the hell you are.

  Boys. Yes, there were boys. In all shapes and sizes. Weird ones, nice ones, cute ones, gay ones—emphasis on the latter—like Glenville. I guess Glenville was about thirty. He had bleached hair and plucked eyebrows and see-through shirts, and he followed me around with his tortoise-shell comb. Whenever he’d see me, he’d zip out his comb and start combing my hair. He’d see me from across a street or out of a doorway and come skipping after me, like a cat or a dog that knew me. And he’d comb my hair all the way to wherever it was I was going. Sometimes I wouldn’t even talk to him just to see if it would stop him. Other times I’d make as though he wasn’t even there, gliding along like a disinterested fish. It never bothered Glenville. He still came after me. Then one day Glenville just upped and disappeared; I never knew what became of him.

  Aldo, the dope addict. Kept his hair slick, like Cab Calloway, and his eyes wide like Jerry Colonna. He was in his early twenties and had to know that I was a lot younger than legal. He was always singing, always flashing teeth so white that, whenever he smiled, his mouth looked like it was rolling dice. Aldo never touched me and I had no idea he ever wanted to until, one night, he said to me, “You’re driving me crazy, so I can’t see you anymore.” And he disappeared.

  It had taken Aldo two months to be driven crazy. Had I known it was going on I might have tried to enjoy it. I mean, hell, that was pretty torrid stuff he was
dishing out. As to why he was called a dope addict, I had no idea. I never saw him do a thing that was the slightest bit strange except, as I said, on the last night I saw him. I should tell you that he was crying when he left. Smiling, rolling his white dice teeth, but crying. I don’t know whatever became of Aldo. I’m not sure he knows either. But he was the first boy to ever say he loved me and that ought to count for something.

  Maxwell Bodenheim bought me coffee. He was at that time the waning poet-laureate of the Village even though he lived in Brooklyn with his bedraggled Medusa of a wife. He was craggy, boney, emaciated, had popping eyes, long slidy hair with things in it (some of them alive), and a hatchet nose that also could have served as an ice-breaker. He would have been perfect casting for Raskolnikov. And he always had with him his ragged leatherette portfolio of aimless rhymes, word things he would read aloud and with feeling to anyone who chanced by his bench in Washington Square Park. He was like a spider, sitting in his web, waiting for some unsuspecting victim, then—wham—a poem came at you from out of nowhere, numbing you, fixing you where you stood. And, if you remained stationary, or if you even slowed, there’d be another poem and another, shot into the back of your neck—whump—until you were dulled to death and spun into a pupa that he would dine on for the rest of the afternoon, after which he would buy you coffee that you had to pay for.

  He was shaggy, smelled bad, was ninety percent nuts; and the dog-eared poetry that gushed from his folder was, to state it mercifully, incomprehensible. And yet, maybe because I was young and searching for some evidence that there once was an Atlantis, I listened to the fossil, pretending that the relic was a god and that the ravings were clues to the universe.

  Maxwell Bodenheim read some thirty to forty poems to me over some ten cups of coffee, and people began to notice me if only because I was sitting with him. I liked that. Maybe I didn’t understand his poetry, but after a while I began to understand him. He was trying not to die. They were burying him, smacking him topside with their shovels, but he was still dodging the blows when I met him. One foot in the grave, the other in his mouth, the poor, brave, cast-aside poet was trying not to die—an admirable goal and one that sustained him, I’m sure, right up until they found him, murdered in a basement, beneath a cellar, under Brooklyn. Who would murder Maxwell Bodenheim? Any information leading to the apprehension and conviction of that individual would be a little fucking late, don’t you think?

  Another incident of passing interest was the night there came a knock on my door, somewhere around midnight. Prepared to tell whoever it was that Mona the Chicken Lady was just one door down the hall, I opened my door, only to find that there was no one there—at least not at eye-level. But, allowing my gaze to drop, I was soon confronted with the bare ass of a man. It was looking up at me like something from a Breughel, winking. And just below it, peeking up and out from between two hairy thighs, was the upside-down head of the ass’s owner. “Hello,” said the head pleasantly, its hands holding its trousers and its underwear at about its knees.

  “Hello,” I said, struggling for poise while wondering how I’d gone through the looking glass without ever knowing it.

  The inverted head, quick to see that it had parked at the wrong address, said, “Oh, excuse me.” After which its owner righted himself, pulled up his clothing, and turned and smiled at me like Marlon Brando because, bless all elves and woodfolk, that’s who the hell it was.

  Never having seen a star before, I said, “But, aren’t you—?”

  “No,” he said, clicking, his belt into its buckle and swaggering down the hallway. “I’m Fred MacMurray.”

  So much for my meeting up with Marlon MacMurray, an important event in itself but all the more important in that it triggered something rather disquieting in my head. The man’s behavior was typical of a kind I had never experienced until coming to the Village but was experiencing more and more every day; i.e., people were going to great lengths to not say “hello, can you help me?” It was very “in.” Very “cool.” Saying hello from under your ass was evidently a very funny and hip thing to do. I guess I could have shut the door and forgotten the whole thing except that Marlon Brando was my genius, my Stanley Kowalski. And if he could reduce himself to an asshole aimed up at whoever answered a door, what was going to become of me?

  I took the question back inside with me and it raised other questions, like what motivates people? Why the strange, aberrant kidding around? Saying to a person “Jesus, you’re a sonofabitch”—is that supposed to mean “I love you”? Because it doesn’t. It means, “Jesus, you’re a sonofabitch.” Will I get to a point where I do it—and like it? When will love reveal itself to me and what do I do about it? Aha—love. That was the word all the time, wasn’t it? Finally pushing through.

  Never having tasted of love I began to think that, since it could easily be around any corner or in any pair of pants, I’d better get ready for it. I’m talking physical love, okay? The other kind? I had seen enough of that to know to pretty much leave it alone. I was beginning to ponder the issue rather clinically. For on more than one occasion had I awakened in the middle of the night unable to get back to sleep without first introducing my finger to the task of “eight hours peace through sexual release.” It didn’t upset me. I had masturbated before, but that was merely to see if my body really worked, if I could really press the button and get a charge. But now my body was saying to me “Hey, big shot, you’re sixteen and you’re ready. It’s going to happen soon, so why not, before you get raped in an alley, pick a fella of your own choosing and get the deed done?”

  That was one way of looking at it. Another way was to ’fess up that the idea of sex, with or without emotional involvement, scared the bejeezus out of me because I had yet to find one person, beyond poets and liars, who was ever made anything but miserable by the inserting of a penis into a vagina—or, in the case of Mary Ann, a mouth, or an ear, or wherever she was taking it at the time.

  Okay, then, I said to myself, calling a spade a spade, sex is scary but can no longer be ignored by burying it in the removable crotchpiece of nylon pantyhose. And since it takes two to tango—are there any volunteers?

  There being no one in my room at the time, no dashing volunteer stepped forward, and I knew it would be up to me to make the selection. I also knew, if it was to work, that it would have to be a man who had nothing to gain and nothing to lose by making love to me. I made my selection: Alan Braden, thirtyish and groovy in an unhandsome yet attractive way. I called him on the phone, not to tell him the good news (how head-on could one be?) but to ask him if he’d be at Madame Getrude’s dance class that afternoon. For Alan, like many actors, took dance class so that his body might be as supple as his mind, so that, on stage, he could trust his body and move it and ask of it things it might never be called upon to do offstage.

  At any rate, yes, he would be at Madame Getrude’s for three-o’clock class and, yes, he’d love to meet with me afterwards for a Coke and a walk and a seminar on theatre. On other occasions, Alan and I had behaved like Hansel and Gretel, holding hands and running through Times Square, knocking on doors and yelling “Flood!,” subwaying to Coney Island for hot dogs at Nathan’s, and generally encouraging each other to be eight years old. Having first met at Madame Getrude’s, we had known each other for about a month and we liked each other. I was pretty sure he was married, unhappily, and that he had a couple of kids but all the better, I thought, a man of experience.

  I should tell you that I never missed dance class. Not once. And on days when Madame Getrude’s was closed, I’d take class with Mae O’Donnell, or Frank Wagner, or Pladova, or with the immortal Luigi, perhaps the greatest of them all. He had studied with Jack Cole and taught jazz dancing in a studio that always had live music, piano and drums, something. Ask any New York dancer. Luigi was “it.”

  I loved dancing. I could do it quickly. I could pick it up immediately, faster even than those who were at it longer and more easily than those who were more ac
complished. I could dance without thinking, it never gave me a headache, and it forever provided me with substitute orgasms. Because, if you danced well and full out, you didn’t need sex (at least that’s what they told me).

  Anyway, Alan Braden and I regularly took class at Madame Getrude’s, which was fast becoming the most “in” studio in town. Madame Getrude, a little Jewish sparrow of a thing with vision so bad that she’d often miss her own studio by two blocks, never insisted on being paid. Evidently she was of a moneyed background and was not using her studio to derive income. That in itself guaranteed attendance in her class to run from “full” to “Look out, we’re capsizing.” But recently she was into “Island Dancing”—Caribbean dancing, a style first introduced by Catherine Dunham in the forties. It was being dusted off and reintroduced at Madame Getrude’s by a former Dunham dancer, Annice Chatterton, a black giantess, six feet of slink, and utterly brilliant. As you might imagine, beyond the usual crowd there were then a lot of black dancers coming to class, not all of them professional but, wow, all of them born to those Afro-Haitian, bongo-birdcall rhythms.

  We all plugged into the music of Martinique and Jamaica, and we watched, fascinated, as a barefoot Annice, costumed in ruffles and rivulets of white skirt, crowned with a wild turban and dripping with glass beads, stepped around as though she owned the whole Caribbean. The music came out of the phonograph hot and voodoo and absolutely shameless in its sensuality. Each of us was asked to try it and Alan was a hoot, looking as though he were trying to put out a lit cigarette with bare feet. The blacks did it best, of course, but that didn’t bother me. For when my turn came I jumped up and did it like I had six hips and three belly buttons. I didn’t know if I was good but man, I was into it, on top of it. I was living it. And that’s all I remember—beyond receiving a lot of applause. That kind of dancing is so raw, so steaming with natural power and jungle grace that, to this day, whenever I hear that music, I’m not to be held responsible if I bite a chicken’s head off and dive into a live volcano.