Timebends (63 page)

So there was a certain halo of imminent catastrophe, a supercharged ozone of jeopardy around our hours in the Waldorf, but not only because of my situation. Marilyn was absenting herself from Hollywood in an all but acknowledged strike until her business partner, the photographer Milton Greene, could renegotiate her Twentieth Century Fox contract so she could periodically make independent pictures with her own new company, Marilyn Monroe Productions. Her hopes were immense for this arrangement, which promised both decent roles and personal dignity. Naturally, the then powerful movie columnists were taking shots at Marilyn, the non-actor floozy, for the preposterous chutzpah of making artistic demands on so great and noble a corporation as Twentieth Century Fox.

She was also beginning to sit in on Lee Strasberg's classes at the
Actors Studio, not daring as yet to open her mouth, awed as she was by Strasberg's weighty authority and the entire atmosphere of New York actor talk, which, in contrast to Hollywood preoccupations, probed the slippery concerns of the actor's art rather than the shapes of noses or breasts. I knew little of Strasberg beyond a nod and a handshake and the pervasive tales of his terrible temper in the Group Theatre—he was said once to have thrown an actor off the stage. Actors I respected, including my sister, Joan, revered him, although Monty Clift, a most astute analyst of acting and its problems, thought him a charlatan. Marilyn's dealings with Strasberg were her own business, I felt, especially at this early stage of our relationship, and if she slipped into hushed reverence when uttering his name, I figured she needed that kind of faith after years in the cynical Hollywood jungle. Idealization might lead to disillusionment, but without ideals there is no life. It was not yet clear to me that I, too, was being idealized beyond all human weakness.

She was a whirling light to me then, all paradox and enticing mystery, street-tough one moment, then lifted by a lyrical and poetic sensitivity that few retain past early adolescence. Sometimes she seemed to see all men as boys, children with immediate needs that it was her place in nature to fulfill; meanwhile her adult self stood aside observing the game. Men were their need, imperious and somehow sacred. She might tell about being held down at a party by two of the guests in a rape attempt from which she said she had escaped, but the truth of the account was far less important than its strange remoteness from her personally. And ultimately something nearly godlike would emerge from this depersonalization. She was at this point incapable of condemning or even of judging people who had damaged her, and to be with her was to be accepted, like moving out into a kind of sanctifying light from a life where suspicion was common sense. She had no common sense, but what she did have was something holier, a long-reaching vision of which she herself was only fitfully aware: humans were all need, all wound. What she wanted most was not to judge but to win recognition from a sentimentally cruel profession, and from men blinded to her humanity by her perfect beauty. She was part queen, part waif, sometimes on her knees before her own body and sometimes despairing because of it—“Oh, there's lots of beautiful girls,” she would say to some expression of awed amazement, as though her beauty betrayed her quest for a more enduring acceptance. For myself it was beyond rationalizing; I was in a swift current,
there was no stopping or handhold, she was finally all that was true. What I did not know about her life was easy to guess, and I suppose I felt the pain of her memories even more because I did not have her compensating small pride at having survived such a life.

It was an ironical summer packed with powerful images that I would never forget. Many mornings I spent with Marty and Bloomgarden planning the new production and meeting actors for the remaining parts, or in Boris and Lisa Aronson's Central Park West apartment studying his endlessly revised set designs for the two plays, my soul only half there, but still exhilarated with life and at the same time ridden by guilt, a spinning whirl in my head, a drunkenness with the blasted, limitless beauty of existence. In the late afternoons I would be out in Brooklyn, in the Bay Ridge hotbox where I had attached myself to Vincent Riccio, who was teaching me how to maneuver in an area exploding with some of the worst violence in the city. The summer nights were the best for war, and the mindlessness of it all somehow reflected my own humbled pretensions to an ordered life.

The part of Bay Ridge where Riccio was based was a white slum made up of Irish, Italians, and some families of German and Norwegian background, and the houses did not look bad from the street. The vast black ghetto of Bedford-Stuyvesant was not far away, but race conflicts were not the problem. Occasionally, in fact, black boys would take long subway rides to join in a white rumble, just to see some action when things got too quiet back home. Of course, all-black gangs were warring with each other no less than the whites were, and for no better reasons. The strife was so bewildering partly because it seemed utterly profitless; a tall, good-looking black eighteen-year-old, a physician's son from the Bronx, who had traveled all the way to Bay Ridge to join a fight, simply shrugged when I asked him why and gave me an opaque look edged with contempt for my powerlessness to penetrate his mind. They drew a certain perverse sense of dignity from the very purposelessness of their wars, a gallant kicking over of society's tables of loss and gain. The spirit's logic was the mind's irrationality.

With Riccio my guide, it was not hard to map what from the outside seemed a sealed-off jungle. Fairly soon it was obvious that tribal organizations with boys instead of adults at their head were being substituted for weak or absent fathers. These youths had reverted to an age of chivalry whose misread pennants fluttered in their confused heads. But they were not without pathos. The gang
had its president, treasurer, secretary of war—a government in miniature, but one based on respect, especially for their leaders, rather than on any material motive. In America they believed in nothing, in the gang they doubted nothing. Guys might suddenly decide to go over to Fulton Street to rob some passerby on the street, but they went as individuals, not as gang members, and did not look for gang support in these forays. As gang members they were a shadow military who saw themselves fighting for something like honor and the sublime spoils of victory. The problem, it soon seemed to me, was that in trying to suppress these gangs society had assumed that gain was the only real motive for human action, while the gang, albeit in a distorted and desperate way, considered itself useful to the community. The gang members longed for pride; money was something each would try to get on his own time. Like all idealisms, theirs made it difficult to figure out what they really wanted and what would satisfy that want.

A former slum kid himself, the youngest of twenty-one brothers and sisters brought up in respectable poverty, Riccio understood this. In his mid-twenties, he was a graduate of St. John's, a subway university, had no advanced degrees or prospect of earning any, and at least in his own mind was in a demeaning conflict with the more intellectually sophisticated leadership of Mobilization for Youth, which was administering this infiltration program. He had boxed as a lightweight in the navy—“where I won my dentures,” as he put it—and his handy combination punches more than anything else had won him respect among the boys. His approach was theoretically simple: “They've got no fathers, so I'm the role model, so they keep testing me for the soft spot where I cave in to their threats or join in some gang bang. They'd like me to turn phony on them, and at the same time they secretly hope I don't; it's like you'd like to be good without you have to stop being bad.” And so there was a keen tension between their incipient cynicism toward him and a touching hope for their own salvation through his example and help.

Riccio had a very fine line to walk between his roles as society's representative and the boys' trusted ally. The police had never really accepted Mobilization's demand that its street workers not be required to divulge knowledge of a crime, although there had been an agreement on that touchy point. In effect, the police wanted the street workers to act as informers, something that clearly would crush the boys' confidence in them. Some individual cops understood and respected this confidentiality, but most resented
it; it gradually eroded, and for this among other reasons the program was eventually undermined.

A tide was turning in 1955, and one felt it even then: for one thing, it was the first time narcotics were noticed in the neighborhoods, though I thought this only symptomatic of a wider but impossible-to-define disorientation that far transcended the gangs. One evening at dinner with Jim McCarthy and Mobilization's chief theoretician, Richard Cloward of the Columbia University School of Social Work, the question arose as to how this generation of youth differed from our own of the thirties. We were sitting in a spaghetti joint on the Lower East Side next to a housing project where a particularly destructive outbreak was taking place. Fires were being set in hallways, elevators sabotaged, windows smashed, feces strewn on stairways. But relatively few attacks were directed at people. The police were overwhelmed and had asked McCarthy to come in and make suggestions, since he by now had had some publicity as Mayor Wagner's troubleshooter on youth problems.

Tall, overweight, and cheerful, now and then wearing a baseball cap when he approached the gangs, McCarthy was quick to laugh, but his rather innocent Irish eyes never lost their seriousness; during a conversation, he would keep nodding and saying, “Right, right.” He thought there was some connection between the vandalism and events of the past few months in the project. A tenants' union had been organized, with committees that were put in charge of keeping order on each floor, the members visiting families whose kids were troublemakers and generally acting as adjudicators of disputes between one apartment and another. It had been working very well until the district's state assemblyman launched an investigation of the union as a Red front and within a short time managed to disband it, scaring off the membership. The political organization of the buildings, Jim theorized, had lifted the morale and sense of responsibility of the tenants, many of them menial workers and some periodically unemployed. Of course it was understood among us at the table that Mobilization, a city agency, could hardly come to the defense of the tenants' union, which indeed might be a left-led organization, even if in this instance it had done socially useful work. What, we wondered, could substitute for it? The Democratic and Republican parties were hardly about to organize tenants' committees in housing projects; it wasn't their style. In a word, this particular outbreak, and perhaps some others, could be traced to the frustration of self-expression.

The depoliticalization of the project led to the broader question of what social ideals would be moving people in the immediate future, for the fifties were baffling, a time, at least so far, without a dominant accent or form. The three of us had grown up during the Depression, when it had been all but impossible to think of one's individual fate apart from that of society. The rise of this obscure tenants' union seemed like a throwback to a perfectly normal and ordinary reaction, thirties-style, of a community of people caught in a common problem—namely, to deal with it by mutual action and responsibility. It might well be that Communists were behind this union, but if collective action itself was to be forbidden, then collective responsibility would obviously have no community support, and things would inevitably end with every man for himself and desperate phone calls to the overwhelmed or indifferent police.

We sensed that we were at the edge of a gulf that would have to be crossed. “If common action of this kind is out, how are people going to visualize their evolution?” I asked Cloward in particular, since he was more the theoretician than McCarthy or I.

“The question is going to be lifestyle,” he replied.

I had never heard the expression before. “What's that mean?”

“There will be competing styles of life, symbolic and essentially meaningless differences in clothing, speech patterns, tastes in food, cars, and so forth. The class struggle is over for now, and maybe even the conception of rank-and-file organizing. People are less and less interested in common action, which even now is getting to seem strange and kind of pointless. Identification will be more and more in terms of style—the self-image will be politically neutralized that way. It's going to be style-conscious, not class-conscious.”

It seemed an empty idea to me, but it returned to mind early one evening in July when I saw Billy, a boy I knew, slumped in a Bay Ridge doorway, unconscious. He was one of six children of a longshoreman, Tommy Flaherty, a small man who lived with his family above a bar and who loved to stand out on the sidewalk and challenge anyone who showed up to a footrace around the block. He never lost, even against young guys. His fast feet were his pride. More than once I saw Billy and his older brothers forcing their father upstairs against his will because his childishness was an embarrassment to them, and for the sake of their mother, a startlingly lovely and dignified woman now nursing her sixth infant. They were a handsome family, blue-eyed and flaxen-haired, the boys tall
and straight, and Margaret, the mother, a proud woman still in her early forties. Billy was the apple of her eye, the one who had never stolen and never been arrested and seemed destined, with his delicate hands and fine features, for something like his uncle Raymond's career as a successful stockbroker on Wall Street, whose clean towers across the bay could be seen beyond the end of the street.

To me, as to his friends, Billy's behavior during the past weeks had begun to seem weird; he had become furtive, with an absent look, and no one could understand his sudden transformation. Then he began disappearing when the gang went to war, and it was finally realized that drugs—once they had learned he was on a drug—made a guy useless to them. Beer was something else, it unshackled you sometimes, but heroin encased a man within himself. Of course it wasn't a question of their disapproving of narcotics but a matter of the practical loss of a good fighter. Narcotics menaced even their subculture with its ultimate privatism, and they consciously understood the threat quite soon. My memory of this in the sixties made it seem untrue and absurd when the new revolutionaries began touting drugs as a challenge to society and a pathway toward liberation.