The Morels (26 page)

Penelope looked for a cab but couldn’t find one. A green Dodge Neon passed them, in the driver’s seat the man with the sunburn and yellow windbreaker—he looked at her and shook his head.

They walked the dozen blocks to Port Authority, and she bought them two tickets to DC. By this time, Will had stopped overtly fretting and seemed to be enjoying himself.

They ate at the Au Bon Pain in the terminal. Will wanted a chocolate croissant and a chocolate milk. Penelope didn’t fight it.

They sat in silence. Will used a plastic knife to cut his croissant in half and gave one of the halves to Penelope. This, more than anything else today, made Penelope want to weep.

That’s okay, honey, you save it for later, when you get hungry on the bus.

They went to a newsstand. Will chose
Mad
magazine. She paid for this and a copy of
Us Weekly
and they traveled the escalators down to their gate.

It was 5:45 by the time they shuffled through the line and took their seats. It was 11:05 by the time they arrived in DC. Her father met them at Union Station and drove them out to Annandale, to her childhood home.

Arthur’s postcard led us down into the cobblestone heart of Soho, to an unassuming carriage house that stood between two new clothing boutiques.

Arthur’s mother, Cynthia, greeted us from its open archway, ushering us inside. “Friends of Artie! I knew those postcards would hit their mark one day. Next time you can bring him, too. Doc! Where are you?”

Cynthia had an enormous amount of hair, a weeping willow of hair, and spoke expansively with her whole mouth, each word enunciated so that it might be unmistakable to people seated in a theater balcony. She was dressed in a flamboyant purple scarf, and her bony arms jangled and clacked with bracelets running up
and down, arms that flailed as she spoke. Her teeth were large and perfectly white—perfectly fake, I could only assume.

Doc—Arthur’s father—was lean, pockmarked, and bald. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and a backward Kangol hat. They were both old, but he was much older. If she was fifty, he was seventy, at least. But there was something about his eyes; he had the eyes of a teenager—mischievous, attuned to our smallest gestures. It was Cynthia who did most of the talking that first day. Doc was restless; he got up and disappeared for stretches of time before coming back, settling in, and listening to Cynthia—nodding, grunting assent, or frowning when something she said took a turn he didn’t like. It wasn’t clear that he knew—or cared—why we were here or what our relationship might be to his son.

They lived in squalor. Though their address carried with it New York prestige—neighbors with Robert De Niro and David Bowie—they embodied an older kind of city shabbiness, from a time when you could be a poor artist in New York. They used to have the whole building to themselves, Doc explained, but when property values exploded in the eighties, they were forced to rent out the upper floors to a graphic designer. They lived on the first floor, which opened via a garage door onto the street. At nine every morning, the door came up, and the elder Morels played host to all of downtown Manhattan, as they had done since moving in more than thirty years earlier. This open space was part living room, part artist’s studio; there was a broken-down couch, a lounge chair draped with a dingy sheet, a coffee table, as well as easels, a painter’s taboret, a wood block midsculpt in the corner. The floor was built up with overlapping threadbare rugs, irrevocably paint stained. On the wall hung paintings that varied wildly in style. Seeing me scan the walls, Cynthia said, “This is my trading post. Keith stayed with us for a while after his boyfriend kicked him out—paid for his stay by painting me that.” She pointed to a toilet seat hanging on the far wall that bore the unmistakable jigsaw graffiti of Keith Haring. “And that one?” She pointed to a blurry color photograph of a drag queen pursing her lips. “Let’s
just say that one didn’t nearly cover the damage caused by those assholes Nan brought in with her.”

As we talked, we were interrupted constantly by people walking in off the street. Doc insisted on getting up and greeting each as a potential customer, yet it didn’t appear as though anything was for sale. “Come on in,” he said, “look around!” And we’d resume our conversation with these strangers loitering silently behind us. “Mostly what we get these days is tourists—they come, snap a few pictures. It’s okay. The Japs especially—we’ve been told we’re in a guidebook: ‘hidden gems’ or something like that. The old days was different. We had real guests, all kinds. Neighbors, drifters, politicians, artists. Come to stay an afternoon or a week. Real orgies.”

Orgies? Dave and Suriyaarachchi gave each other wide eyes.

Though they’d been here for years, and its furnishings seemed a part of the place for as long as they’d lived here, the arrangement felt temporary, ramshackle: there was a hot plate in the corner on which sat a charred espresso pot. Doc, always moving, unscrewed the pot and filled it with water and a few spoons from a coffee can nearby. A floral bedsheet separated this public living room from the rest of the apartment, which consisted of a kitchen and a sleeping loft perched over a desk space cramped with books and antiquated office equipment, including an old mimeograph, a typewriter, and a spiral-bookbinding machine. Dave helped himself to a peek into the sleeping loft—a rickety construction of unpainted two-by-fours. I think Dave must have realized a step or so too late up the ladder that he was intruding into a stranger’s “bedroom” and came quickly back down. He gave a shake to one of the ladder rungs. “Sturdy,” he said.

“Sturdy enough.” Cynthia gave him a sly smile. I noticed in the course of our conversation that she had a tendency to hold eye contact a few beats more than was comfortable, something I only later connected with Arthur, who had a similar tendency. With Arthur the effect was one of frankness, that he was seeing into you, past what you were saying with your words and into what you meant in your heart; whereas Cynthia’s lingering eye contact suggested
something sexual and gave the words she was saying the quality of innuendo. Disconcerting, being hit on by Arthur’s mother.

Doc, after opening the fridge and walking away, said, “Help yourself to whatever you find that’s edible.” Not much was, as the fridge wasn’t on. It was being used as a pantry. Room-temperature cans of root beer, a net bag of clementines, rolls of toilet paper. The freezer—also warm—stocked batteries of all shapes and sizes.

“Doc worked it out,” Cynthia explained, “that it was cheaper to just let Con Ed go and live on portable power.”

“You know how much those cocksuckers wanted from us? How much was it, Cyn?”

“I don’t remember. Three thousand?”

“At least! Can you imagine?”

“A month?”

“A month? No, that was over how many years? Lost count.”

“You haven’t paid your Con Ed bill for years?”

“Years.”

“And they didn’t cut you off?”

“Eventually they did. Which is the situation we find ourselves in at present.”

“Off the grid.”

As we continued on our tour, I noted just how much of their lives ran on batteries: TVs, fans, radios, clocks, lights—heavy-duty flashlights fitted with shades. The hot plate and the makeshift hot-water heater, which Doc showed me with great pride, ran on butane. Once we got out of the chill of the open-air living room, my senses thawed. It smelled like dirty socks in here and something I couldn’t identify until I saw one: cat. Cynthia claimed there were six, though I saw only one during our time here. She picked it up on our way down to the basement, an explosion of gray fur. “And this is my pussy-pussy!” She brought it to her breast and buried her face in it. The cat indulged this sleepily, limbs drooping down as though it were a stole.

We descended a narrow wooden staircase and found ourselves in an open concrete space that felt like a parking lot. “This is what
we refer to as the Permission Room. Down here you have permission to do anything you want.”

“It was Artie’s idea.”

“What do you want to do?”

As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could make out a solid mass of things, all hugging the wall—broken furniture, tangled clothing, musical instruments, boxes collapsing under their own weight. An accretion of years of neglect.

“You can scream to your heart’s content,” Cynthia said and let out a piercing shriek. The cat who had been in her arms bolted. “Nobody can hear.”

“Or,” Doc said, and lit a flat ceramic pipe that he’d been holding in his hand. We all waited as he held his inhale, eyes squinched, holding our own breath until finally he exhaled a cloud of pot smoke. He held out the pipe. Suriyaarachchi shook his head, but Dave took it with a shrug before having a hit.

Though the suggestion was that this place was for sex and drugs, the Permission Room gave me the serious creeps. There was something of the serial killer’s lair about it, and I was relieved to be escorted back upstairs.

When we finally got around to explaining who we were and what we wanted from them, Cynthia said, “That’s great, look at that. Artie’s got people who want to do a movie of him.”

Doc said hoarsely, “As long as it’s making him happy.”

“That’s the important thing, it’s true,” she said. “Doing what makes you happy. How is Artie? Is he happy?”

I said, “When was the last time you saw him?”

“Oh, Doc, how long’s it been?”

“What is it now, thirteen years?”

“At least.”

After we had done a full circuit of the house, we stood outside the open garage door’s threshold on the sidewalk. It was cold, and I wondered how these two survived the winter on battery power, one of their four living room walls essentially flung open to the wind and rain. Neither wore outerwear. Cynthia was in sandals,
Doc in socks. Neither did they seem fazed by the wind that had me digging my hands in my coat pockets. Doc was pointing to the windows on the second floor. Suriyaarachchi and Dave looked up, making visors of their hands. “It was nice having the whole place to ourselves, but the taxes? Forget it! With Con Ed, the worst thing they’ll do is leave you in the dark. The tax man will put you in jail. This guy’s done wonders up there, all glass and bare hardwood. Brand-new computers, top of the line. Nice guy. I check in on him most days, we chat. One of the new breed. Been here several years now, but still I don’t think he’s figured out what to make of me.”

They happily agreed to be filmed and seemed eager for us to return with our equipment. The idea of being in the spotlight activated something in Cynthia. She became fluttery in the eyelids, hands going up to her hair and down to her clothes, adjusting the fit here and there. “I don’t know what I’ll wear,” she said.

“Something that shows off your rack. She’s got quite a pair, even at her age.”

We rented production-quality gear on Dave’s credit card—the not-so-secret industry secret was to rent for two days beginning Friday; as the rental houses were closed on Sunday, you got the third day for free.

When we returned the following Friday, Cynthia was outside at a folding table with her jewelry. Similar to the piece on the postcard, the earrings and bracelets and necklaces and pendants were all made from teeth strung through bent paper clips. Creepy, but also kind of beautiful.

“I found a box of Doc’s old stuff and just went from there,” she said.

The four of us chatted while she fiddled with the arrangements. People stopped and looked, but Cynthia ignored them.

“Let’s go inside,” she said.

“Don’t you need somebody to mind this stuff?”

“It’s fine. People like looking at it, but no one actually wants it.”

It seemed they’d straightened up for the occasion, which for
some reason I found touching, and set two armchairs next to each other facing the sidewalk, so that after we unpacked our equipment and the Morels took their seats, it appeared that, in answering our questions, they were addressing not only us and the camera but all of New York City’s passersby.

It was agreed that Dave would handle the sound, Suriyaarachchi would handle the camera, and I would conduct the interview. As this was our first real break in the project and the first footage we would get, we spent a great deal of time planning in the days leading up to it. We watched
Grey Gardens
several times and all of Errol Morris’s films. We brainstormed a list of questions that we hoped would bring out their craziness. We wanted to hear about the wild seventies, their theory of parenting, the Permission Room, and what Cynthia fed her six cats.

But, in the end, they insisted on answering their own questions and, in so doing, related to me, to us, to the city at large, the peculiar story of their lives.

I
T BEGINS IN NEW JERSEY,
early fifties. Doc is a husband. The wife is not Cynthia but rather someone named Dolores. They have married young, Doc and Dolores, when he is just out of dental school. Happy years, these first living in Trenton, an apartment near Cadwalader Park. Dolores bears him a daughter. The birth of their second coincides with a move out to the new suburbs of Plainfield. This occasion also marks for Doc an end to that happy period in their lives. This second child, a boy, brings with him a deep and lasting depression for Dolores. Doc comes home to find four-year-old Sarah racing around the house naked, infant Benji in his crib, screaming. His wife can be found in bed with a pillow over her head, weeping. When they leave the children with her parents for the evening and go out to a nice restaurant, she ends up staring mutely into her salad, weeping. When they invite their friends over for drinks, Dolores ends up locked in the bathroom, weeping. When they drive to her parents’ for the holidays, Dolores won’t get out of the car because she doesn’t want her parents to see her weeping. Benji is weeping; little Sarah is weeping; the whole goddamned car is weeping! Dolores is not unhappy with Doc; in fact, as she tells him again and again, he is the only thing keeping her sane. If she didn’t have him, she just didn’t know what she might do.