Drunken Angel (9781936740062) (2 page)

There were the magazine women in bras and corsets idling
bored on chairs, with black-barred eyes, and the citizens of weird disintegrated streets like the ones around Times Square—denizens of a neon zone I knew well, for my brother and I had been enrolled in singing lessons at a Broadway talent school since my mother's loss at term of a nameless baby girl who would never live to be our sister. We were five at the time of our first class. Year after year we went. This was also about the time my mother began to beat me, at first intermittently and then, as I grew more able to protest, incessantly, with a rolling pin, clothing hanger, or belt. She would then collapse in the bathroom behind a locked door, crying hysterically as she lay on the tiles. I would stand behind the door, ear pressed to the wood, tugging on the doorknob, pleading with her to please open up, Oh, Mommy, let me in, always at about one o clock in the morning, well after my father had gone to work.

She would groan, “Let me die here!”

“Mommy, please!!”

And sometimes the door opened and stumbling out she'd rush to a window, throw it open, threatening to jump. I would beg, weep, until I reasoned so persuasively that little by little I coaxed her back. It may have been such incidents that convinced her of my theatrical ability, because twice a week my mother dressed us in matching blue suits, white shirts, and red bow ties, all things between us being equal, shined our shoes to a high gloss, and marched us, the American flag twins, from the subway to the talent school. The school was located in Times Square next door to a shooting gallery, around which hovered the hookers who looked just like the stag-mag ladies, though sans black bars of identity concealment—hard-edged, angry, feral women, unwashed, with fumey, bloodshot eyes, smoking and talking loudly, calling out to passing men. I sensed that they might have something to do with the sexual menace.

Upstairs, in a classroom with several other children, my brother
and I listened to a man named Donald ramble on about the glories of the footlights. Donald played scratchy records on a phonograph and we all stood at our desks warbling up and down the scales. I was riveted by the Camel Cigarette billboard across the street of a man with a hole-mouth from which big gray wobbling puffs of ring-shaped smoke dissolved over Broadway. Then, lesson done, my mother hauled us into a penny arcade, which had a voice-recording booth and where for a dollar she cut a plastic single of Howie and me trilling “Tea for Two.” Sometimes she took us into Hubert's Freak Museum to see photos of Sealo the Seal Boy or Alberto Alberta, the half-man, half-woman, or Congo the Jungle Creep. Then, back to the Bronx, where as reward she let us stay up late and sprawl on her bed while she snored in the armchair and my brother lay on his back, reading comics.

With my father's mags out, I had myself a real smut fest.

Snarling black panthers wearing collars adorned with swastikas bared fangs at the near-naked breasts of a spread-eagled and manacled “Reich Sex Prisoner” as flesh-gobbling tattooed and feathered cannibals gleefully hog-tied a stripped redhead in prep to become a “Living Sacrifice for the Amazon Snake God”—an immense boa-sized cobra that slithered toward its bug-eyed and screaming victim across a cave floor strewn with skulls.

IN THE STAGS THERE WERE CRIME STORIES. Real-life photos of cold-eyed sex slayers, killers captured after their latest interstate spree. The young men always seemed to have buzz haircuts, deadpan remorseless faces defying the mug-shot photographer to find even a smidgeon of pulpit decency in their soulless lonesome eyes.

They had raped and mutilated scores of young women with beehive dos, flaring nerdy horn-rim glasses, and sleeveless blouses that always buttoned to the neck, the affronts and outrages detailed in graphic terms, except for the rapes, which were described in police blotter officialese: “Lab tests showed that the victims had been repeatedly penetrated.”

As yet I had no idea that a penis entered a vagina, or that a breast might be suckled for reasons other than milk. In such accounts, the stabbings became the sex: eroticized knifings, orgasmic woundings.

I only learned about sexual congress at age nine, when my
mother decided to decamp with my brother and me on a cross-country exodus to Los Angeles to enlist a talent scout whose ad had appeared in the back of one of my father's stag mags.

After a four-day transcontinental Greyhound haul we arrived exhausted at the home of a drunken failed actor and director who pretended to audition us, knocked Howie from the box, declared me star material, and offered to help enroll me in Warner Brothers Talent School in exchange for a small fee of ten thousand dollars.

Realizing that she'd been duped, my poor mother marched us out of there and launched on a tearful, zigzagging suicidal meander from state to state, motel to motel—lying whole days in dark rooms, crying, while Howie and I wandered hand in hand, gnawed by hunger, through whatever city or town we happened to land in, and in one of these—Miami—I learned from a dark-skinned Cuban boy named Juan, who spoke near-perfect English, that my father stuck his penis, which Juan called “dick,” into my mother's vagina, which Juan called “cunt.”

He was slender, good-looking, older than me—maybe ten or eleven—and we had settled into a game of trapping scorpions as they wandered in the grass lawn of the motel. We threw matches onto their backs, or jabbed them with sharp sticks, or crushed them into goo with rocks. The scorpions certainly deserved painful deaths, we reckoned, seeing how poisonous they were.

Juan asked, gaping lewdly: “You seen your father fuck your momma?”

Heart pounding at the sound of the F word, I gaped back. “I dunno.”

“I saw my poppa screw my momma other night. You ever see them do it?”

“Do what?”

“You know, man! IT!” Into a circle made with one hand he
jabbed a finger of the other, hard, fast, in and out. “Screwing! Your daddy put his dick in your mommy's cunt!”

Instantly, I saw what he meant and began to cry.

“It's not true!” I protested. “My dad don't do that to my mom.” But it sounded hollow. Juan jabbed his stick thoughtfully up and down on a scorpion's back as it writhed in its own leaking fluids. Then he stood up, smiled wickedly, and implanted in my consciousness a nightmare that would lead to my eventual ruin. “Why I lie to you, man? Everybody do it! When you grow up, so will you.”

UNTIL HOLLYWOOD, HOWIE HAD BEEN A WARM, talkative kid. After the thumbs down, he clammed up. I became his emotional conduit, as if appointed to feel for both. I was Mother's little genius, earmarked for escalating special treatment.

Whenever she laid into me in the motel rooms, screeching, he stood by, silently watching, half hidden by the doorway, sucking his thumb, big dark eyes grown wide with terror as I called out: “Howie, help! Make her stop!” But what could he do? Trapped and helpless as we were in the rat pits of her fury?

Out there, on the road, when my father was nowhere about, she beat me mercilessly. This went on, day after day, in motels with names like The Sandman and The Costa Rica and Holiday Bungalow. Muffled by the happy squealing clamor of families in bathing suits frolicking in the pool, my shrieks for help fell on deaf ears.

Back in the Bronx, she woke me at late hours when Pop would be gone—and the harder I screamed, the louder she struck. No mercy shown once she was engaged. My only hope to play dead, stifle my
cries, though this always proved impossible, as she managed to find that one spot in the elbow or knees which provoked more pain than I could bear.

She caused me to break, plead, to no avail. With a shrieking sense of injury, at such times I was not a self or a person but a blinding blur kinesthecized by tears. My shadow, on the ground or on a wall, seemed more real than me.

My mother bought the magazines too. I read them when she was out. A shadow world grew in my thoughts. Desires so forbidden their sheer weight crushed me. Often they took the shape of a beautiful adult woman, trussed and blindfolded, helpless to resist my caresses, endearments, or cruelties. She couldn't shrug me off or slap me away. She couldn't hit me with a hanger. She had to let me touch her and kiss her as I liked. She had to let me rub against her, love her as I wanted, for as long as I wished. Such thoughts triggered hard-ons so painful that only repeated ejaculations brought relief.

Turning ten on the road, moving around from motel to flophouse, I began to fear that I was a serial killer, one of those baby-faced blue-eyed butchers gazing back from the dingy newsprint pages of my parents' mags.

I masturbated constantly. Following which I experienced a wave of remorse, sometimes horror. This drew me further into myself.

Barred from decent human society, I was left only with books and with stray dogs, pigeons, hoboes, parks, endless streets, the cold round sun, hunger, and the black-smudge ink traces on my fingers from the smut mags and paperbacks I browsed in the candy stores.

If I was in fact a potential killer, I had best stay hidden from sight, away from women especially, who I feared could at any moment unleash their rage on my exposed elbows and turn me into the tortured son of the Nazi torture bride.

Life had once been a nice place to visit but I didn't want to
live here anymore. I felt everything too intensely, became twisted, writhing, a knot of fierce furtive agony. Around women, I grew subdued, pitilessly shy. At school could barely bring myself to speak. We moved from city to city, state to state, the perennial new kids on the block. When money ran out, we wound up in a San Francisco Mission Street flop, out-of-state indigents. Soon after we arrived in the city, my father traveled there to join us. I suppose my parents missed each other, though I suspect she was in flight from the life he had made, which was no life. Naturally, he arrived penniless. Now there was no money and a fourth mouth to feed.

To make ends meet, my mother worked as an au pair temp and every night my father went out into the foggy streets to walk her home. They returned with a can of spaghetti and a bottle of orange soda: dinner for four.

I remember this as a time of lice-crawling despair and sinister strangers. There was not even money for the stags. I recall a couple named Joanne and Bob, young Linkhorn drifter types, descendants of poor Dustbowl refugees who'd thought, same as us, to find Paradise in California, who had befriended my parents and paid frequent visits to our squalid little room to find relief from their own dirty hole on the next floor up.

Once, to prove how tough she was, Joanne threw me face down on the bed, thrust a knee into my back, and jerked my arm behind, twisted until I howled but still didn't relent, even when I begged her to stop.

“You little shit!” she said with a laugh. “Go on! Kick and scream! It won't help you! Do it!”

My parents and her husband stood by guffawing. It was as if I was now a stag story. Stretched for sacrifice. I swore then I'd never let that happen again. From there on, I must serve as my own shield and sword.

WE RETURNED TO THE BRONX, TO STAY FOR GOOD. Fed on fat and starch, morbidly obese, with large femalelike breasts that the teen boys would squeeze until we wept, Howie and I had the hell beat out of us.

There was a guy named Billy the Barrel, an adult, who would waylay me en route to the schoolyard, force me into doorways to fondle his testicles. He pressed up against me, panting hard, a hand on my throat, grunted: “Hold them harder. Hold them fuggin' balls.”

There were others, strangers, men who chased me down, pinned me against hot metal fin-tailed Buicks and Chevys as indifferent passersby walked on. They whimpered excitedly, squeezed until my breath strangled, grinding their groins against me, their thick cold tongues squirming in my ear.

Struggle was futile. In their arms I went limp, let them do what they wanted until it was done, and once escaped, hurried off to try to return to my body, which I'd left when their hands trapped me,
flown off while still in the predatory embrace, to hover over it all in a kind of disembodied aerial astonishment.

Fled, I sat in the cool shadows of some alley, hid among trash cans where no one would think to look, and amid the refuse and stink searched for signs of something lost, a sense of me as good, to retrieve if I could even as I knew that I couldn't, that what had just occurred had happened too often. That with my big breasts and my helplessness I must have been some sort of girl who was supposed to be a boy, or why else would they touch me that way? And then grew amazed, sickened, cursing myself for my passivity. And fantasized about what I should have done. Stab them with a big knife like Jim Bowie, with a sword like Zorro, run them through! Or shoot them dead like the Lone Ranger. Saw myself shouting and punching, wanting to be a hero, but felt only a coward. And slowly, the numbing helplessness and shame filtered through until it was all over me, every part, an invisible infection about which I could not speak to anyone, for what would they think? My father? If he knew? What would he say? Forget about it! And my mother? How would she look at me as I told her about the men touching me in that way?

Forget about it.

BY AGE FIFTEEN, AFTER YEARS OF SCHOOLYARD training in gutter violence and sports, my body shot up, gained muscle, lost fat. I became a skilled, ruthless fighter who laughed at pain, relished blood, savored mayhem.

Known around the hood as “Moony,” I prided myself on bruises and scabs. I grew my hair and sideburns long. My curled lip sneered and my eyes grew sharp.

Billy the Barrel still came around, thinking I'd forgotten his enforced ball-holding. Saw me once and called out: “Hey, there's fugging Moony. Look who got big. You still a punk! Get the fug outta here!”