The Morels (32 page)

The street-side theater, as it were, evolves. Those main doors frame a natural proscenium arch. It is perfect. Day by day, with each performance, they develop a repertoire, invite local performers to use the space, to collaborate. Ticulous directs a series of movement pieces: mime productions of
The Canterbury Tales
. Annan conducts a series of chamber ballets set to his own music. The Brooklyn Trio builds a stand of bleachers, which the police eventually make them move inside, to be set up permanently against the three walls on the ground floor. For a while, it is the Carriage House Theater, doors kept open so people can walk in off the street and take a seat and watch the show, already in progress.

This is young Arthur’s living room. He eats his meals in the stands, watching his aunts and uncles rehearse. Most objects he touches in the house are used onstage as props; even the plates and utensils he eats with while watching a play might be taken from him and washed and used in the next scene. When a child is required, he is offered up—dressed and set before an audience with a few words to deliver on cue.

He is tested out, like a new instrument, by each member of the Carriage House Theater, for quality, for truing—to see where his talents and inclinations might lie. Koko thinks he has a certain raw potential with the plastic arts; Brigit declares that he will never be a dancer. Just look at his feet, they will always be in his way. Ticulous agrees but thinks his rhythm is quite good. Annan pronounces his natural aptitude in music to be extraordinary. A quarter-sized violin, among a crate of props, is strung and tuned and given to the boy. He is taught to read music, and Annan comes up with a series of fingering exercises for the boy to practice.

You’re not going to force my son to learn a bunch of pointless lessons, Cynthia says, but Annan pushes back.

Come off it, Cynthia. This isn’t about freedom. Arthur is happy to spend the entire day sawing away on that violin, and you know it. You just can’t stand the noise.

It’s true that Arthur isn’t very good yet; the particular high-pitched squeaking sets Cynthia’s teeth on edge and carries through the house, following her wherever she goes.

He’s not to spend a minute on that thing he doesn’t want to, she says.

Annan devises more difficult exercises and starts training the boy’s ear. They work together at the old saloon upright under the bleachers. Cynthia asks the boy if he is enjoying these lessons, and Arthur says, Sure.

Doc jokes that his son skipped the age of two. “He never learned to say no. It was always ‘sure’ or ‘okay,’ whatever it was. He’d eat anything you put in front of him. Benji and Sarah, when they were little? If it wasn’t spaghetti, they weren’t interested. But Arthur, you could put anything in front of him—steamed broccoli, raw tofu, pickled beef tongue—and you ask him if he wanted to try it he’d say, ‘Sure.’ If he didn’t like it, he wouldn’t have seconds. Benji, he didn’t like something, it was the biggest production, the faces he’d make, the yelling, the fits. You’d think we were trying to poison him. But with Arthur it was always ‘sure.’ ”

Arthur becomes a regular attraction at the Carriage House Theater. Annan composes pieces for Arthur to perform as incidental music between set changes. By the time he is eight, Arthur has been playing for three years, and Cynthia no longer complains about her son being enslaved by pointless rote memorization. She is enjoying, along with the rest of the audience, the weekly recital programs he comes to perform. Arthur’s virtuosic feats are paired with Ticulous’s magic; these, Ticulous feels, are acts well suited for each other, as the child prodigy is a kind of magic, not unlike the talking horse or the dancing bear. One is moved to a similar awe and pity for the creature.

Ticulous in tails and top hat, Arthur in a black suit and clip-on bow tie, they are a nested set. Ticulous would creak around on the black-painted boards of the stage, barefoot, pulling live pigeons out of his hat, making various audience-supplied items disappear and levitate while Arthur, walking the perimeter would play glissandi and arpeggios—an incidental sound track meant to mirror the illusions. During longer setups, Arthur would give the cue to Annan at the upright offstage, and they’d strike up a duet, Arthur up front now, bow hopping lightly to a Mozart sonatina.

These concerts are held on Sundays for neighborhood parents and children who in the late seventies are few and far between—and as such that much more enthusiastic to find an oasis of free child-friendly entertainment within walking distance.

Annan invites his mentor, Cornelius Diamond, to hear Arthur play. Diamond brokered Annan’s journey to this country from his native Afghanistan ten years earlier—arranged for schooling, scholarships, visa—and Arthur is a kind of offering, a willing and capable apprentice, new blood for the old man.

Diamond usually handles older students, but for Arthur he makes an exception. Annan’s assessment of the boy is confirmed: Arthur is good. They start small, lessons once a week—a list of pieces to learn.

Doc is shocked at the cost. I don’t care how great this guy is, there’s just no way. But Annan pitches it as an investment in their son’s future. Doc won’t budge, but Cynthia is swayed by the idea.

I thought you were against this whole thing, Doc says to her.

This is my Artie. I don’t ever want him to say we held him back from doing anything he wanted or becoming anything he needed to become.

For such a free-spirited household, Arthur leads a very sheltered life. Although Cynthia consents to the lessons, she won’t hear of Arthur having lessons at “some old perv’s apartment.” So for the first year of his apprenticeship, Diamond comes to Arthur. Diamond is temperamental and explosive. When he hears something
he doesn’t like, he claps his hands, a sound like a gunshot in that big open space, and shouts.
For God’s sake, stop! Stop!
He storms over to Arthur and grabs the little violin and bow out of the boy’s hand and, hip checking him out of the way of the music stand, says, softly, Just listen. And then Diamond plays the passage, his large hands seeming all the more enormous on Arthur’s half-sized violin. Arthur is good, but when Diamond plays, it’s music. No question who is the student, who the master. Arthur stands at attention, waiting for Diamond to hand back his instrument.

Money was an ongoing problem. The theater, in line with the monastic ethos of its members, accepted as a fee only what its goers were willing to part with, which was—judging from the jumbo mayonnaise jar at the entrance—very little. By 1978 Doc had run out of money, which would have spelled an end to the Carriage House Theater, to young Arthur’s education, and the collective in general had not his insolvency coincided with the acquisition and restoration of an offset printing press.

One was liable in those days to come across pretty much anything on the sidewalk. The printing press was just one of the many objects hauled in off the street. It would have lain dormant under the bleachers to this day had Mario not been taking a correspondence course in the maintenance and repair of industrial office machines. He fixed the thing just to practice his skills.

Doc took to using his old prescription pad for the occasional antibiotic or painkiller. But after a while he began to see its usefulness as a recreational tool as well—codeine for a mellow party, say, or Benzedrine for a more lively one. Word got around about his access to drugs and, lo and behold, there was a market waiting for him. The profits he could pull in through the sale of pills divvied out five or six at a time was well worth the outlay for a generic refill and whatever risk was involved in attempting to fly a bogus prescription. And so he began selling to make ends meet, which developed, like most activities Doc engaged in, slowly, with no particular plan beyond the necessity of the moment.

Soon enough, however, his one and only prescription pad was depleted. He kept the last one around and tried copying it—but his options were limited in those days. He sought all the readily available technologies, but photostats felt fake and mimeographs smelled fake. Which was where the offset press was of use. Not only could he make a perfect replica, he could also change his name, as well as his degree—there was only so much as a dentist he could get away with prescribing. With a minor alteration of title letters, he could have at his disposal the entire range of opioids, of amphetamines and barbiturates and benzodiazepines. The sky was the limit.

“Nowadays,” Doc said, “you have tamper-resistant pads, watermarks, nationwide electronic databases—pharmacies proceed from a starting point of skepticism. You’ve got to be pretty ambitious to practice that kind of fraud. In those days, though, it was different. Because there was no such thing as a copy shop, to forge a thing like a prescription was more difficult, which in turn meant people weren’t on the lookout for fakes—or signs of the genuine. Pharmacists were, by comparison, rather guileless; they didn’t question what you handed them—or rather they questioned different things. They would call the number on the prescription, which was the only tricky bit. We had a second phone line put in. ‘Hello, doctor’s office.’ It was written in big marker letters across the phone’s handset. Anyone who answered that phone had to say it. It’s amazing we got away with it as long as we did.”

I said, “But those first prescriptions would have had your New Jersey office number, right?”

Amazingly, Doc explained, the dentist who took over the practice kept the number. “I guess he figured he’d save his patients the headache of learning a new one—most of them he poached from me. So when the pharmacy called, they got him. I don’t know how or why he okayed those prescriptions. He could have gotten into serious trouble for that. He was young, and I guess I was able to strong-arm him a bit.”

It had been mutually agreed upon that Arthur’s brain would
not be poisoned by the institutions of knowledge and that each member of the collective would share in the responsibilities of schooling him in whatever he wanted to learn. Doc taught him science; Koko taught him history; Brigit taught him math. Books were procured from the public library on Canal Street, and Arthur spent weekdays, when he should have been in school, at his studies. Here, too, Arthur proved himself to be serious and determined. Cynthia was amazed.

“If it weren’t for the eighteen hours of labor,” she said, “I wouldn’t have believed that was my kid at those books. He was a gift. I don’t know what I would have done had he been a bad seed. He could have easily brought down this place of ours. So easily. I think back and can’t believe our good luck.”

Diamond told Cynthia that Arthur wasn’t getting as rounded a musical education as he should be at this stage in his development. Arthur had long outgrown the basic theory and ear-training primers they worked out of. At the conservatory where he taught there was a weekend session for the younger students. A scholarship might be available, depending on how his audition went.

Cynthia objected. School? Out of the question.

But Arthur, who thus far had rarely expressed his wants, was very clear about wanting this, and so, from the age of nine, he began his weekly Saturday excursions to Morningside Heights. For those first few years, Annan would escort him. Arthur would return from these adventures flushed and full of stories.

Doc saw this and began expressing reservations about the boy’s weekday “schooling.” He should be with kids his own age, he said. Keeping him cooped up like this couldn’t be good for the boy.

It’s too late, Cynthia said. There was no telling what might happen if they walked him into a real school at this stage. Aren’t there laws about keeping kids out of school? It’s been four years. They’ll end up taking him away from us for neglect.

Although it was meant to preserve and sustain it, the pill business brings the excess and decline of the theater and the collective as
a whole. Brigit leaves, Koko leaves, Winston leaves—and several characters with little connection to art take their place. The only original members left now are Annan and Ticulous, and they are only here out of concern for Arthur.

On his last day, Ticulous tells Arthur,
Follow your art. It will always lead you in the right direction
. He is standing at the main archway with Annan and Cynthia. He buttons his peacoat, picks up his army duffel. He pulls Annan into an embrace with his free arm and tries kissing Cynthia, but she turns away.

You don’t get to leave here on friendly terms, she says. This is desertion, plain and simple.

After Ticulous leaves, Arthur weeps and storms up to his room. The atmosphere of the place changes. One could feel it come off its axis. With Annan and Arthur upstairs—the piano had been installed on the top floor so that Arthur could work undisturbed for longer stretches of time—what else was there to do? There had been order, rhythm; rehearsals, a chore board. Without a chore board, there were no more chores. Without rehearsals, there were no more shows. And without Ticulous’s magic, Arthur’s Sunday performances failed to draw more than a few passersby—and so these, too, were abandoned.

The new members of the collective brought “instruments”—congas and bongos, harmonicas and ukuleles—so that when they were high they could “jam.” Doc and Cynthia—the only two members of the household not trained in the arts, who until now had always abstained from art making, preferring their role as patrons—became active and enthusiastic participants in these jam circles. There was singing and dancing, which oftentimes devolved into stripteases, which devolved further into free-form group sex.

Annan is the sole holdout and protests this artless noisemaking. It’s disgusting, he says, and besides, Arthur is trying to study! How is he supposed to learn with all these distractions?

Arthur suggests a compromise: Why don’t they use the basement? Down there could be a free zone, to do whatever people wanted.

Doc and Cynthia like the compromise, and so the Permission Room is born.

One day—or evening, it becomes hard to tell after a while—Doc comes up from the basement to discover the bleachers gone.

Cynthia says, It’s time for some real change around here. Out with the old-fashioned, in with the fun! She is naked, the main door wide open.