Drunken Angel (9781936740062) (18 page)

I nudged Lane, who nodded and grinned.

“Wars rage around the globe, whole peoples exterminated, children massacred, crime and poverty overtaking us, great undiscovered painters and starving writers breaking their hearts to produce ignored masterpieces, orphans molested, mental retardates rotting naked in their own filth in unmonitored state institutions, rockets going into space, new cures for murderous diseases just a rabbit's foot away, and this is the news you choose to bring? Your wallpaper?”

Lane and I choked laughing. MacShane was apoplectic. “Why would I give a damn for your kitchen cabinet, your butcher block cutting board?” and so on until the subject had been scourged of every last drop of preciousness.

If you were here to write for
Ladies' Home Journal
, you were in the wrong class. Here, in MacShane's class, you wrote to change the world.

IN MY SECOND YEAR, UNSURE OF HOW TO PAY FOR a semester's tuition, I read in a
New York Times
obituary for the poet and author Robert Graves that at university he had produced an anthology titled “Oxford Writers of 1921,” which gave me the idea to assemble an anthology of the best student writing to appear from the four programs John Barth had named in his
New York Times
article: Columbia, Stanford, Iowa, and Johns Hopkins.

Ran the idea past MacShane, who was always available to students undeterred by his fearsome temper—close up, he was as gentle and pleasant a person as one could hope to know. He not only thought my antho idea great but offered his agent to represent me and even gave the book its title:
The New Generation
.

With John Lane's unflagging help, I assembled a manuscript that included authors like Ethan Canin, Gish Jen, Tama Janowitz, Susan Minot, Ehud Havazelet, Mona Simpson, Michelle Carter, and Bob Shacochis. Thanks to Lane, half the book comprised poets who one day would fill the top ranks of American letters. Lane even helped
me type out dozens of inquiries to publishers, which went out on departmental stationery provided by the ever-helpful Lini Lehman. Several publishers responded with interest but Doubleday called the department directly, seeking me, to make an offer on the book, sight unseen.

When I met with the interested Doubleday editor, Jennifer Collins, a short, intense young woman, she enthused about the book and then handed me back the part of the manuscript—nearly half—that was poetry.

“We won't be needing that part,” she said and smiled.

This was my first glimpse of the low regard in which trade publishers hold poets. It explained to me, somewhat, the sly unscrupulous personalities so typical of the poets I'd met at school. They behaved like embattled starvelings.

For example, when I contacted Iowa's Jorie Graham, a poet of some considerable repute who enjoyed every sort of professional advantage, and requested that she nominate a grad student to collect the contributions from Iowa writers, she tried, instead, to jockey herself into the post, thinking, perhaps, that it entailed some remuneration, no matter how small, or perhaps some slight prestige that would enlarge her hoard of accolades. Lane and I were amazed and disgusted.

Needing the money, I dropped the poets. Doubleday bought
The New Generation
, my first trade book. I now had enough for tuition and even for a belted London Fog raincoat and a leather satchel—coveted totems, to me, of literary New York.

Armed with these, I imagined myself as some sort of Brat Pack Saul Bellow rushing about campus and Manhattan on errands of earth-shattering importance. This was a time of publishers' lunches, meetings with my agent, Robin Strauss, and working late into the night in a loaned office at Doubleday, high up in a skyscraper's
air-conditioned room in which I sat gazing out over virtually the whole of New York, feeling harshly unreal, but also tragic with distinction.

At one of the business lunches, held in a smart Italian bistro, Collins outlined the agreement for Robin Strauss, who changed, to my advantage, almost every key contract point. When Collins—who before coming to Doubleday had worked as marketer for Colgate toothpaste, or some such thing—asked me who my favorite author was, I promptly replied: “Herman Melville.”

“Oh,” said Collins, with a thoughtful look. “I never read him. Has he put out something new lately?”

Strauss and I shared a wide-eyed look of amazement.

“Uh, no.” I smiled. “Nothing recent.”

News of my anthology aspersed the department. Although many had received permission requests, those who didn't hated my guts. No one as yet knew who was in, who out. I held my cards close, even from Lane, couldn't bear to tell him that poetry had been bumped. I had put up no fight. Wanted the book, the money, the glory, even if it meant betraying one who had helped so much. Told myself, sitting on my West End Bar stool, knocking boilermakers back: I'll learn to live with it. This is what you gotta do to get ahead.

The West End Bar had been the first gathering spot for the early Beats. Now here I was, a book man in the flesh. Yet I felt heartsick, poisoned by my victory.

There were others too, fiction writers I wanted to include, believed in, but Collins, for one reason or another, adamantly refused to include. Jeff Goodell, one of the department's most gifted writers, a tall, lanky motorcycle racer from California, had sent in an amazing story about the races. It was perfect for the book, yet Collins said no. When I insisted, she took me to the editor in chief. The pleading look in her boss's eyes as he studied my face was
enough: I complied. It was my first published book. I wasn't going to ruin it. But thereafter I avoided Jeff, too ashamed to face him.

On the other hand, other writers and poets, hearing of the book, drew close. I became popular. Sexual opportunities abounded.

The first was a tall, lanky blonde from Kansas City named Ginger, a girl with the flapper look of a gun moll, with whom I got reeling drunk and, returning to my room, stripped and balled on Bella's bed. The door flew open. There stood Boris, leaning on the doorknob like a cane, squinting half blind at the blurred pink Francis Bacon shapes wrestling on his dead wife's bed. “Vot is?” he called out. “Al? Is you?”

Ginger was tittering hysterically. I clamped a shushing hand over her mouth.

“AL! SOMEVON IS THERE!! WHO IS THAT MIT YOU???”

While the mattress under us slid to the floor, we rolled naked, clinging, over Bella's throw rugs. Ginger shrieked in glee and Boris cried out: “IS A VOMAN! AL!! YOU BRING HERE WHORES!?!? VOS IS DAT SMELL? IN MY HOUSE YOU DRINKING VODKA MIT A WHORE??”

What could I say?

I answered, seated there bare-assed on the ground: “Yes, Boris. I'm here with a woman—not a whore, Boris, a woman—and yes, we are drinking vodka. Not yours. Our own. And will you please get out of my room. I'm a grown man, Boris. You're not my poppa.”

“IN MY HOUSE YOU MAKE HANKY-PANKY!” he howled. “SHAME MIT YOU!!”

I looked at Ginger, incredulous: “Hanky-panky?”

“That's so cute,” she said.

“WHORE!” Boris raged. “PROSTITUTE! GET OUT FROM MINE HOUSE!!!”

Clutching our clothes, we ran out naked into the hall, where we hopped first on one foot, then the other, dressing hurriedly, and left. Adjourned to Ginger's place in a women's residence hotel down the street, where we continued our orgy.

 

Next was Carolyn Shaw. A poetry cowgirl from Montana, married to a former Navy Seal who now taught, weirdly, at a dance school and who, she claimed, tied her to a bed, spread-eagled, blindfolded, and beat her senseless as he raped her with whatever he could stick up in her. I shifted my legs uncomfortably, so that she wouldn't see how much the spread-eagled and blindfolded portion of her admission aroused me. The parallel with him was too close to home. His taste for violence sickened me. But in my darkness, I understood.

Necking nonstop, Carolyn and I took a bus ride to Nyack, New York, during which I committed myself, body and soul, to protect her from the blindfolding and sadistic Navy Seal. This was exactly what she wanted to hear. “I know you can too! You're the only one with balls enough to stand up to him. I'm terrified of the man. I heard you were an Israeli soldier. You won't be afraid.”

“No,” I boasted. “I'll kick his ass if he lays a hand on you.”

Our first full-on sexual encounter was strangely lifeless. She was bone dry. Had a hard little unforgiving body. Without jelly it was like copulating with a hairbrush. Her nude body revealed the numberless beatings endured, the ghosts of old bruises. Her sickly skin and muscles cringed to the touch. Her eyes looked beaten down, puffed and evasive, with that hunted look that battered women get. I hardly knew what to make of it. But felt myself hooked, deeply, despite the complete absence of pleasure or even physical attraction. As though some deep sickness in her had entwined around some deep sickness in me and we were now umbilically bound by a taste for the psychotic.

DOUBLEDAY SENT OUT REVIEW COPIES OF
THE NEW Generation
, including one to Towers, who, impressed, invited me to a private party at his home attended by the novelist Russell Banks and others whose names greatly mattered in the literary game. Towers, quite drunk, approached me with a tall, wobbling glass of bourbon, handed it to me. Nose inflamed, words slurred, a real lush, he said: “Drink up, Alan! I liked your preface to
The New Generation
. This one is on me. Here's to your book!”

I easily drank it down. Towers studied me, amazed. “Well,” he slurred. “That's…you can hold yours, can't you. Yes. Well.”

When I excused myself to the bathroom to piss, he staggered right behind and as I urinated observed in his courtly Southern drawl, “Ernest Hemingway himself once peed in that very bowl!” Which so excited me to learn that I splashed my signature all over the seat, howling: “And now, by God, so has Alan Kaufman!”

As pub date approached, I found myself making manic late-night calls on Boris's phone to friends and relations from Israel to
Minnesota, all on the old man's dime. Drank constantly and saw as much of Carolyn as possible. She had decided to leave her husband for me. Thrilled, saw us as an ideal literary couple, she stretched blindfolded and spread-eagled on a bed, mouth gagged, as I read to her from the
New Yorker
.

At Towers's invitation, Bernard Malamud, whose novels and short stories I had admired since youth, even tried to emulate, came to Columbia to conduct a two-day seminar in fiction.

Slender, bald, with a sensible mustache and dressed in a conservative suit and tie, Malamud looked more like a CPA than a writer. Spoke at length of his association with the Italian existential sculptor Alberto Giacometti, from whom he'd learned formal techniques that he'd translated into prose and applied to his own literary art. He then announced importantly that he would read to us from a new work in progress, a novel whose central conceit was that Chief Joseph was really, secretly a Jew.

The room stirred.

When he finished, he asked for feedback.

I raised my hand.

“Yes.”

“Mr. Malamud, Alan Kaufman here, and first want to say what a great admirer I am. I've readjust about all your books. So it's with a sense of dismay that I must tell you that the Indians portrayed in your excerpt are not Malamudian.”

He smiled coldly. “Malamudian. Well. What genus of Indian then do you assign to them?”

“TV Indians. Stereotypes.”

Malamud's face shut down. Towers, his old colleague and close friend, looked furious. Hurriedly, the seminar was brought to a close.

The next day, I encountered Towers rushing down the hall, distressed.

“Hi, Bob!” I smiled. “Great seminar.”

He stopped and spit in an accusing voice: “Malamud is dead!”

Said in such a way that seemed to suggest in no uncertain terms that I was directly responsible.

It was known that he had a weak heart, and the advisability of exerting himself in a seminar with a bunch of brash grad students was questionable at best. Apparently, he had felt unwell in the evening, died. Did my criticism of his Indians trigger stress resulting in heart failure? Evidently, Towers thought so.

Astonished, went to the men's room, leaned on the sink, peered into the mirror, and grinned in an evil Dorian Gray sort of way. “Kaufman,” I informed my reflection, “you have just killed Bernard Malamud!”

My reflection seemed pleased.

But thereafter, my drinking accelerated to levels that in other times had driven me to the brink of nervous collapse. Sometimes I really did think that I had killed Malamud. Woke from horrified sleep, shaking my head in disbelief—no, it couldn't be. I loved the man's books! I'm just a dumb kid from the Bronx. Don't tell me I killed Bernard Malamud! And then Carolyn, with whom I was insanely obsessed, even though screwing her felt like getting a callus scraped, announced to me that she couldn't leave the old Navy Seal after all. Rambo needed her, poor thing. Strangely, she needed him too.

“The fact that he drove jeeps into your house and raised egg-sized knots on your forehead is beside the point,” I said. “Those were just the things you shared. Yeah, most definitely, you deserve each other.”

Insulted, she walked off.

This sudden abandonment reduced me to a squalling agonized knot. To kill the pain I drank scotch, in the course of which I
decided that suicide was the best solution. Knew what was coming, the dehumanizing tsunami of pain, and couldn't bear the thought of living through that, past the limit of what anyone should have to endure.

Went to the bathroom, found one of Boris's razors, returned to Bella's study, seated myself at her desk, and stared at the thin blade pinched between thumb and forefinger. In a way, had always wanted this. All the army gun barrels in my mouth. Death had always been a wish. Considered the thick veins running under the white skin of my wrist. All you need to do is draw the blade down hard now, first across one wrist, slice, then the other, slice. Then drink some more. And wait. There. And there.