Little Doors (14 page)

Finished with her yawn, she says, “You don’t remember, do you? Here.” She reaches out and touches his face.

Spirit fingers, driving him.…

4

Harlem

Arthur Fellig dozes one night under newspapers in Bryant Park, behind the library. It’s his favorite midtown spot. Normally, the cops don’t bother anyone flopping here. But tonight is different. Fellig is rousted by a nightstick-wielding bull who sends him and all the other homeless bums out to wander the sidewalks of this gay and heartless burg.

The night before last, he was in the Municipal Lodging House down in the Bowery. Five nickels a night, but he ran out of nickels. On the way out, he noticed for the first time the big sign posted over the desk.

DEPOSIT CASH

AND VALUABLES

WITH THE

CASHIER

BEFORE GOING DOWNSTAIRS

Fellig began to laugh insanely, till tears coursed his stubbled cheeks. “Cash!” he choked. “Valuables!” He imagined a wall-safe full of pocket lint and bottlecaps.

Now, heading uptown, bracing himself against the winter winds, Fellig feels like ratshit. His stomach is gnawing itself, his mouth tastes like sour apple wine, his feet inside shoes whose soles flap with each step are starting to burn. He has no prospects, no skills, no friends.

He’s standing outside a furniture store window. The sight of a bed with white sheets is almost enough to drive him crazy. It looks like the most desirable thing in the world.

Tearing himself away, he strides madly off, bumping solid citizens without concern.

He finds himself at the Hudson. The water looks as inviting as a woman’s spread legs. Fellig pictures himself jumping, the splash—

Just then, a squad car cruises by, inserting its unwelcome presence into his morbid fantasy. The cop hears the splash … he jumps out, takes off his hat, his coat, his shoes, then his pants, which he rolls up in a bundle to hide and also protect his gun … places all of them on the edge of the pier … and jumps into the icy water in his shirt and underwear, cursing. After a rescue the cop always has to take the trip to the hospital along with the would-be suicide to get thawed out … they have equal chances of catching pneumonia.

“Move along, buddy.”

Fellig pushes on, heading north along the West Side.

At 127th Street, he turns east.

He’s in Harlem now.

Fellig’s always gotten along good with coloreds. He’s got no beef against them. Discrimination seems so stupid and ugly to him. They’re all human, ain’t they? They can all laugh, all cry.

He wonders, But can they sleep?

He feels a little more at ease up here. The people around him seem content somehow, despite a grinding poverty almost as bad as his. Fellig’s spirits lift a bit. Might be a chance of a handout somewhere here.…

Fellig passes a church. A huge banner reads:

AFTER DEATH—WHAT?

REVIVAL MEETING

He hits Lenox Avenue, stopped short by a store at the corner.

(ALLEGED)

YOGI AND PROF. NIGER

ALL HINDU COSMETICS, OILS AND INCENSE

6TH AND 7TH BOOKS OF MOSES

LODESTONES—DREAM BOOKS

SPIRITUAL ADVISER—RELIGIOUS ARTICLES

7 KEYS OF POWER

It’s the “alleged” that piques Fellig enough to make him enter, tickles the ragged remnants of his sense of humor.

There’s a rack of colorful pulp-paper dream-interpretation books. Many shelves hold two-quart Mason jars with handwritten labels: Hindu Commanding Incense, Hindu Magnet Incense, Hindu Conqueror Root.… Tinted apothecary bottles are filled with any-colored liquids. A framed portrait of a turbaned swami hangs next to one of Father Divine.

The black man behind the counter sports a crop of white hair beneath his tasseled fez, but his thin mustache is still dark as coal. His large nose supports a pair of pince-nez glasses.

“How may I help you, son?” asks the proprietor in a serious, resonant voice.

Fellig flips a thumb up and back, indicating not the punched-tin ceiling but a spot outside, above the door.

“You the ‘alleged’ Professor Niger?”

The black man lets out a booming laugh. “At your service. And you must be the ‘alleged’ Weegee. I’d know your face anywhere.”

Fellig takes a step backward. The name sounds familiar, but in a way that frightens him. A long-buried memory nudges its way to the surface, floating up from a grave of old newspapers, broken tarmac and wornout tires.

(Small fingers brush his cheek … come out tonight, come out … remember …?)

“My name’s Fellig,” he says sharply.

Niger narrows his eyes and reaches under the counter. For a minute Fellig thinks he may be going for a gun; he tenses, backing off, spreading his hands to show he means no harm.

“Then this isn’t yours?”

The Professor lays a camera on the counter. Fellig stares. Almost remembering. Before the nights of rambling, before the drunken sleepless bouts of twisting on pews in the Bowery Allnight Mission, there was another time. Another name.…

And a camera. This camera. His?

His attention is caught in the burnished aluminum reflector that surrounds the empty socket where the flashbulb will fit. All the meager light in the store suddenly seems concentrated in the polished bowl, with his warped reflection at the center instead of a bulb. Fellig is blinded, as if he had been staring at the sun, as if the nonexistent bulb had just gone off in his face.

When he recovers his eyesight, all is as before.

Except that his hunger and aches are gone.

How had he ever forgotten? How had he spent all this time wandering in a dark city? When had they become separated?

“Got any money on you, son?”

He checks his pockets, wondering if there’s anything else he might have forgotten. But they’re empty. He shakes his head.

“Sheeit. Well, I promised to hold this till you come for it, without no word of no payment, so I’spect you can have it anyhow.”

Professor Niger pushes it toward him, across the counter. He reaches for it, hesitant, wondering how much more he can remember.

“Take it, alleged Weegee.”

“My name’s Fellig,” he mumbles, voicing his last doubts; but as soon as he touches the camera he knows that’s not true anymore. All doubt is gone.

He’s Weegee now.

Carrying his moments of split-second light forever through the city of never-ending night.

5

Psychic Photography

The camera takes the pictures.

The camera makes the pictures.

Weegee is convinced of this.

Whatever it is, wherever it came from, whether crafted by hands angelic or satanic, the Speed Graphic is more than just metal and glass. It, not he, is the doer, the actor, the Prime Mover. Weegee is only the instrument, the vessel, the driver and hustler who delivers the camera to its chosen sites; his hands cradle but cannot really even be said to point the thing.

Without the camera’s presence, the incidents he “photographs” might never happen, or would happen differently.

It is a heavy burden, especially when he considers all the death he has photographed.

Death. He is known for death, yet death is only part of what he knows. Can’t the camera see there’s more to life than its climax, must be more!

The shots of lovers on the beach, the children sleeping peacefully on the tenement fire escapes, the happy barflies and lushes, the hot jazzmen, the Village artists and their free-spirited babes, the nurse pushing a carriage, the baker delivering bagels—

Weegee weighs all these shots against the others, the charred corpses, the burning buildings, the gutshot crooks, the suicides with brains blown out, the hit-and-run victims, the drowned secretaries, the murdered bocce ball player, the crushed stampede victims—

Which way does the balance tip? He’s afraid he knows.

If Weegee has any training in photography, he can’t remember it. And it would be irrelevant. The camera knows what it needs. He suspects that even his primitive alteration of the aperture makes no difference.

Yet he continues to put his eye to the viewfinder, as if it might take him somewhere, show him a way out of the darkness.

And it’s always dark in there, always a vagueness and a seethe of unstoppable motion and form, until suddenly he senses the flash quivering, the lens lusting. At this point, Weegee becomes one with the camera. He has teamed to estimate the forms of darkness, a kind of divination prior to the fulfillment of the flash. A struggle of forms, a tangle of shadows. He moves toward the heart of it, waiting until the sounds and movements reach such a peak that he knows he’s at the center of the blackest moment. And then, his one (perhaps needless) contribution, he thrusts the camera into the formless sprawl and tries to press the already self-descending button. Too late. There it is, the unchangeable result of his photography, limned in the unforgiving light, a revelation to him as much as anyone. The most fleeting possible light, yet the subject’s fate has been fixed forever.

Often he doesn’t know what he’s seen until later, after development. And then he feels the guilt—or, more rarely, the joy—attendant on aiding the scene’s real creator. For he is at best a collaborator, along with darkness, light, and above all else the camera. His flash has created the moment by isolating it—a moment that might have gone another way, been forever lost in the rush of time and in the dark, its syrupy edges blending in with the rest of the night, as if it had no special value save that which he gave it.

Even the seemingly neutral shots—a stack of newspapers on the sidewalk; a car covered in snow, its lines resembling a woman’s haunches; his favorite skyscraper, Sixty Wall Street Tower, hanging at the lingering edge of a dawn that never comes—press down on his conscience, as if by putting them on film he has ineluctably tampered with their true selves.

Once he set the Speed Graphic down on the bar at Sammy’s, needing both hands to pick up an overstuffed ham on rye from the free dinner platter. He turned to find Sammy joshingly aiming the camera at him.

Sammy, bearing no grudge, poured drinks for the next month with a splinted forefinger.

6

Sudden Death

The girl eyes Weegee with a look he’s seen before. It’s the look a high-society dame lays on her diamonds, the one a gal at Coney Island gives the boyfriend who just managed to win her a stuffed owl; it’s the look a Death Row hood turns on the electric chair at Sing Sing. A look of total possession and absorption, subject and object merging into one, fatalistic but underpinned with dread.

Dread of the inevitable loss time brings: loss of the boodle, the boyfriend—specifically, of life.

“You remember now?” says the girl. Ribs of light and shadow slide across her face like the bars of a portable prison.

“Yeah, I remember.”

The girl pets her cat thoughtfully, no longer regarding him. Weegee takes the opportunity to ask, “So—what’s your story?”

“It’s part of yours.”

He expects a mischievous smile, but she looks serious, even grim.

“I mean, what’s your name?”

“Tara.”

“Like
Gone with the Wind
, huh?”

“No.”

Before Weegee can question Tara further, the police radio dispatcher, speaking plainly for the moment, broadcasts the code for the discovery of a fresh stiff (Weegee knows all the codes), along with an address down in the Bowery.

Luckily, Times Square lies just ahead, bright as the shine on a salesman’s shoes. Weegee whips the big Chevy onto Broadway in a screech of tires and roars off downtown.

The lights and traffic are all with him. The other cars seem to give way around him, letting him pass, knowing he has pressing business, as if he were a cop car with siren wailing. He’s never had a run quite like this, and he’s had doozies. His car melts away hindrances like Sinatra mows down teenagers.

It seems like only seconds before he’s nudging the curb with his wheels, nosing in behind two cop cars. He bolts out of the Chevy, camera in hand.

The corpse lies on the granite sidewalk, in a pool of congealing gutter-bound blood. A cane he’ll never need again waits patiently by his limp hand. The corpse is conveniently situated in front of a meat store. The fire escape above the store is draped with an NRA banner:

TIME IS SHORT

EVERY MINUTE COUNTS

There’s a crowd of spectators—there’s always a crowd of spectators—held back by cops. Weegee recognizes several flatfoots.