Prime Green : Remembering the Sixties Read online

  Among the guests at that time was Colonel Rudolph Ivanovich Abel, a highly respected Soviet spy of the period. There he resided for several years and there he was arrested, to the distress of residents like my mother, who missed his central European good manners and military éclat. From the week of my discharge, I rented a very small, extremely clean room in the gargantuan St. George Hotel on Clark Street in Brooklyn. The rent for a single sans bath was fifteen dollars a week, which included use of the huge saltwater swimming pool, steam room, and sauna. I had found a job with a magazine in downtown Brooklyn. Every morning I would have a swim and walk to work at the downtown end of Flatbush Avenue. The magazine that employed me was a civilian-operated maga- zine designed for naval enlisted men, a struggling antique. Its pages were full of ancient sea stories, like the reminiscences of old salts about their years on the China Station. Correspondents inquired about their lost shipmates aboard gunboats that had long since been knackered for razor blades. Did anyone else out there, subscribers wrote to ask, remember the Lucky Pussycat Bar off the Bund in old Shanghai? An ad ran in every issue, unaltered since the twenties, that pro- moted a still popular brand of shoe polish. Its artwork featured the drawing of a good-humored marine, in spats and gleaming boots, kicking a stylized Latino in the behind. On the other side of the page—a sort of “later, that evening” was suggested—the same ma- rine sat at a candlelit table on the plaza, drinking a beer and sur- rounded by the traditional flashing-eyed señoritas. Their quivering lace fans failed to conceal their admiration and lust for the marine. His shoes shone with a spectral radiance, and beside him another stylized Latino (or perhaps the same one across the page?) awaited prime green: remembering the sixties 23

  the jarhead’s pleasure, sombrero in hand, with a toothy, untrustwor- thy smile. The copy was too offensive to bear recalling—even then, unenlightened as I was, it caused me an inward cringe. The best thing about the magazine was its location on one of the highest stories of the Williamsburg Bank Building. The bank’s tower was an art deco dirigible in unchallenged command of the vast spaces of Brooklyn and beyond. In one direction were the tow- ers of Manhattan and the bridges. In another were the vast fields of Brooklyn that only the dead knew, the cemeteries, abandoned Ebbets Field like a crumbling riverboat, and—on a different quarter—the unbridged Narrows, Coney Island, the Steeplechase, the parachute jump. Beyond these was the Lower Bay, and Sandy Hook and the Atlantic’s rollers, a vision “commensurate”—as the great writer said—“to [our] capacity to wonder.” I found it also a great inducement to idleness and daydreaming. Sometimes I thought about Denise. Once I found an item on the Empire Games in Montreal, followed by a small print box with the results of various competitions. Denise was there; she had fenced her way into a place somewhere in the middle of the order. I thought of taking the bus to Montreal, but of course I didn’t. Most weekends I would call up one of the young women I had dated in high school, and we would go on the town. My dates were often Irish American girls from Yorkville. Back during their high school years I had observed that my dates embraced a degree of sen- sual enthusiasm on Friday nights that might not be available to us later in the weekend. On Saturdays they knelt in penitential dark- ness before their confessors, blushing at his discourses on “purity.” The Holy Sacrament of Penance could afflict a New York Saturday evening with spectral flames and hell’s bells. 24 robert stone

  There were things besides sex that Catholic girls went to hell for, but I can’t seem to remember what they were. Nearly every young woman with the benefit of a Catholic education must have acquired, along with her knee socks and vaunted penmanship, some of the fioretti of Christian modesty, pious tales designed to harness their hearts and minds to chastity. In one of them, a young person of hith- erto spotless virtue—call her Mary Margaret—finds herself parking in the front seat of a non-Catholic sex pervert’s customized and wired hot rod. Beside her, this heedless, heartless slimeball pants in amorous entreaty, breathing sin itself into her well-scrubbed ear. And then—oh horrible! We see his dirty fingers at her bra snaps, a low maneuver he’s picked up somewhere. Her pants, of a rayon whiter than Ben Bulben’s snowy slope, are put aside. A terrible pen- etration! And in the same moment—God’s appalling justice! A lightning bolt! A freight train—because the slimeball, lust-crazed, has parked aslant eternity—the hell-bound tracks of the Babylon Express! And are Paolo and Francesca thrust by an oncoming loco- motive into the infernal regions with their so briefly savored weight of mortal sin? You bet. By the time I was home from the sea, the same girls, if not married to firemen or actuarial trainees, were in college or nursing school, and less oppressed by perdition. Sometimes I could use the serviceman’s discount cards I had hoarded during my enlistment to get us tickets to Broadway shows. Usually we went for music, sometimes for jazz at the Central Plaza on lower Second Avenue. The Central Plaza had beer by the pitcher and wonderful Dixieland jazz, although the sets were sometimes vi- tiated by endless requests for “When the Saints Go Marching In.” But jazz greats like Red Allen and Conrad Janis were regular per- formers. The post-speakeasy mobbed-up cafés on Fifty-second Street prime green: remembering the sixties 25

  were still in place. On the other side of things there were Brubeck or Modern Jazz Quartet concerts at Carnegie Hall, and there was Bird- land, the Five Spot, or the Village Vanguard. The sound of the street was different in those days, and so was the sound of New York speech—poils and ersters and so on. Toity-toid Street. I remember my mother correcting me, as an urchin, for em- ploying the pronoun yez of which the singular was youse. My mother was often told that she sounded like Mrs. Roosevelt, a diction she had picked up going to St. Bartholomew’s Sewing School before the New York Central tracks were paved over to create modern Park Av- enue. It was the old-time dese and dose that informed the carny patter of those mean, sour little men who talked the suckers into Times Square clip joints. They crooned a welcome to the passing parade, and they could likewise tell you good-bye. They all had the same wizened features; they weighed a hundred and ten pounds each in- cluding their saps and knuckle dusters, but they could eighty-six tanked football players so they actually bounced. On one occasion I left my money behind and had to leave my date as security against the check. Thank God she was there when I got back; I had half ex- pected to find the place hurriedly repainted, with Patricia on her way to some far-off island. She was really a good sport about it. I loved my room at the St. George. The bed was made up every day, the bath was down the hall. Brooklyn Heights was quiet and beautiful and in a way I was a returned native, having been born in Brooklyn, although I had never much lived there. I took advantage of being in Brooklyn to look myself up at Borough Hall; sure enough, I had been born at Good Samaritan Hospital on President Street in 1937. However, my mother’s name as registered there was not the name I knew her by. For years I had been coming across identity documents, apparently referring to her, but representing 26 robert stone

  the bearer under a variety of names. Passports, visas, bar bills in Tokyo, even the deed to two cemetery plots in two different ceme- teries. The documents were signed in her handwriting affirming two different names. She never got to either of them. My mother was a puzzle to me. It was not that I never raised the subject of these confusions. But Mom seemed so confronted, so pained by my discoveries, that I couldn’t bear to embarrass her. Finally I got her drunk and coaxed a few explanations from her, although I’m not sure which versions to believe. She was disappointed, too, that I had turned out to be nothing but a sailor. Regardless of what the sobby voice-overs proclaim to banners and God-shots on the tube, experts recognize military ser- vice as one sign of social dysfunction. My mother actually explained this to me, although not in so many words. I might have countered that not knowing your mother’s real name surely indicates a degree of social pathology. Not knowing your father’s real name was com- mon enough where I came from. But could not a mother’s conceal- ing her identity from her only son (I think) be not uncharitably inter
preted as rejection? In fact, she was very affectionate, and neither rejected me nor slapped me around. When crossed, my mother invoked two fan- tasies for me to consider, which I did at various times throughout my childhood and later. One was that I would wake up one morning and find her gone—gone, vanished into thin air, never to be found. The other, which bothered me less, was that some dismal morning would find me with my head severed from my body; some mothers were capable of such things, and I might do well to imagine that she might be one of them. Gladys Grant was how I knew her, the daughter of a tugboat’s chief of Scots descent. She remembered passing under the newly prime green: remembering the sixties 27

  Prime Green : Remembering the Sixties

  constructed Brooklyn Bridge from her father’s boat. She lived on Park Avenue next to the railroad tracks and went to St. Bartholo- mew’s Sewing School. She spoke with a cultivated New York accent, and for the first few minutes she could seem more than presentable. As far as the outside world went, appearances were against us. Twice, when I was eleven, we got reported to the Society for the Pre- vention of Cruelty to Children, whose officers demanded that we present ourselves for their okay, cruelty-wise. This organization, as I remember, ran some kind of kiddie jail up in the New York barrio. I got a glimpse of it on the way up to their office, about the time I no- ticed my mother was wearing mismatching shoes. It looked like hard time in there. When we left, I thought some kind of uncruelty dogcatcher would be coming by our place with the wagon. I guess my mother thought so too because we disappeared to Chicago until the school term, when we moved to a different furnished room, and I returned to the daily custody of the Marist Brothers, from whose discipline the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty et cetera offered no recourse. When the summer of 1958 was over, I managed to swing a job at the New York Daily News I had been angling for since my discharge. At the same time I started classes at NYU. Before many weeks were out I knew that college had not been a particularly good idea. One payday afternoon I was lounging around the St. George Ho- tel pool preparatory to my evening on the town when the pool life- guard greeted me by name. I recognized the guard as a high school acquaintance—a big good-looking kid who had been a basketball star, a youth possessed of considerable physical grace and extrovert charm. We both had done our military time and were finding our way through the real world. He was studying acting at the Uta Hagen–Herbert Berghof studios and suggested that I try out myself. 28 robert stone

  Today, as I try to recall the state of my ambitions at that time, I draw something of a blank. During my time in the Navy I had amassed a small collection of magazine rejection slips, so I know I had some dreams of turning myself into a writer. One of the rejec- tion slips was my proudest possession at that time. It was the form demurrer sent out to disappointed contributors to The New Yorker, as elegantly worded as anything the magazine published at that time. What made that familiar totem of obscurity an artifact of such sweet promise to me was the fact that some unknown hand had inscribed a three-word message in one corner of the standard slip: “Try us again.” That brief extra message would serve me as an anthem for many years to come. So the sum of my trophies after a couple of months as a reenfran- chised civilian consisted of one treasured rejection slip—something to show my mother, anyway—and a portfolio of writing samples. Beyond this, I incubated a few other half-formulated hopes and dreams and one of them, not surprisingly for a young man of literary aspirations who had grown up around the streets where Lincoln Center would one day rise, had to do with the theater. It seemed to me then that the New York theater—on or off Broadway—was about the most exciting and magical entity in the culture. I had actually thought a little about acting, and after the conver- sation with my old classmate I began to imagine a providence at work. Compared to the rocks, the shoals, the silent storms I knew were out there in the endless progression of empty rooms that were the writer’s inheritance, a life of performance seemed very attractive. I was impatient, too, anxious to make something happen. My shuttle between NYU and the Daily News had the rhythm of a tread- mill. And I reasoned that the study of acting might provide me some insights useful to a dramatist, an ambition that was one aspect prime green: remembering the sixties 29

  of my writerly impulse and one that, even now, I have still not com- pletely despaired of. I did go around to the Hagen-Berghof studios a few times. A number of the students I saw there had brilliant futures before them—Sandy Dennis, if I’m not mistaken, worked at HB around the time I went by. The urge toward performance, an urge to risk winning the love of an audience or face its scorn then and there, had much to recom- mend it, compared to the solitary struggle to believe in the power of what I could summon from my own silence. Somewhat later it would bring me to what, for a few tormented hours, looked like an- other fork in the road. 30 robert stone

  THREE When I remember the New York Daily News as it was when I went to work there, the first images that come to me are comic strips that ran in color with the Sunday paper. Dick Tracy was one. I should hope we all remember Dick with his right-angled jaw, yellow fedora, and two-way wrist radio, the senior detec- tive of a strange city where the cops wore puttees well into the nineteen fifties. The colorful police force stood locked in dubi- ous battle with bands of grotesque criminal mutants. Detective Tracy was hard but fair. Perhaps the tragedy of his own brutally

  geometric features gave him some insight into the desperate rebel- lion of deformed local outlaws. God knows, life must have been martyrdom for Flattop (named for the contour of his head, not his choice of hairstyles) or for Poet, who suffered from a neurological compulsion to sum up his situa- tion in rhyming doggerel (“Such is Life when you meet jerks / He put a bullet through my works!”). Sadder still was the lot of Poet’s boss Flyface, whose face, to put it bluntly, drew flies. Today, cops and robbers are not usually portrayed in comic strips. Amid the prevailing post-irony, melodrama is passé. In the nineteen fifties the funnies had a lot of crime and punishment. The triumph of justice and the comeuppance of the villains usually came in the full-page color Sunday supplements. Little Orphan Annie was another feature that served the spirit of America’s Most Popular Newspaper. Orphan Annie appealed to me for a number of reasons. Its heroine was a sardonic, rather asexual, but identifiably female adolescent. Her expressionist appearance, her orange Afro and picaresque adven- tures, and especially the cast of characters with whom she matched wits, belonged not to the fifties but to the feverishly imaginative, inappropriately grotesque, comix dreamworld of the twenties. She was an orphan, an institutional child like me, in flight from the control of a pigeon-breasted, demonic orphanage keeper who wanted her back in custody for reasons that were ever unclear. Mrs. Bleedingheart was her name, and I think she represented New Deal collectivism at its most rapacious. Annie’s allies were among the most sinister right-wing activists this side of a Colombian militia. They included Daddy Warbucks, who wore a diamond stickpin and a homburg and seemed to be a mad avuncular pro bono weapons magnate. Daddy employed two deadly murderers as his sinister for- 32 robert stone

  eign assistants. One was Punjab, who seemed to be a turbaned Sikh about eight and a half feet tall. The other was a vaguely East Asian, silent man in servant’s livery, the Asp. As Annie’s chief ally, Daddy Warbucks would dispatch Punjab and the Asp to eliminate Annie’s enemies, feeding them to giant catfish for example while they (enemies) grinned in terror and clasped their hands in vain prayer. At age eleven I would have been glad to ask Punjab and the Asp to visit with the Society for the Pre- vention of Cruelty to Children, which I imagined to be presided over by Mrs. Bleedingheart. Little Orphan Annie killed off as many malefactors as Dick Tracy. It always seemed to me that the attitude that informed these sav- agely retributive comic strips reflected an attitude at the heart of the parent newspaper. Its headlines rejoiced in patriotic gore, hero cops delivering babies, death in the hotseat. MARINES MASH CONG IN MUD declared one headline, typed one imagines with clawed fingers and clenched teeth. It succeeded in l
inking guerrillas with gorillas, pop monsters resisting the Ameri- can Century, the vision of a slavering ape brought to bay in the jun- gle swamps of Asia by John Wayne & Co. The spirit of editorial at the nineteen fifties Daily News was that of The Front Page and of all the lesser newspaper B movies of the pe- riod. These newspaper movies, for all their stock characters, had more zip than many film noirs, newspapers being after all something many movie writers knew a little about. The editorial department at the News was based on its city room. Rewrite men sat at their typewriters at desks arranged in rows of six. Under the system of that time, newspaper stories were a two-person operation. The reporters, whose names came first in the bylines, prime green: remembering the sixties 33