Putting Daddy
On
PARKER WANTS ME TO GO
DOWN TO THE LOWER EAST SIDE and help him retrieve his son from the
hemp-smoking flipniks. He believes all newspaper reporters know
their way around in the lower depths. “Come on down and ride
shotgun for me,” he says. Parker has a funny way of speaking, using
a lot of ironic metonymy and metaphor. He picked it up at Yale
twenty-five years ago and has nurtured it through many lunches in
the East 50’s. On the other hand, he doesn’t want to appear to be
too uneasy. “I just want you to size it up for me,” he says. “The
whole thing is ridiculous, except that it is just as pathetic as
hell. I feel like I’m on my back with all four feet up in the air.”
Parker says his son, Ben, suddenly left Columbia in his junior
year, without saying anything, and moved to the Lower East Side.
Parker speaks of the Lower East Side as the caravansary for
flipniks. Flipniks is his word for beatniks. As Parker pictures it,
his son, Ben, now lies around on the floor in lofts and four-story
walkups on the Lower East Side, eaten by lice and aphids, smoking
pot and having visions of the Oneness of the hip life.
I think Parker is a casualty of the
Information Crisis. The world has had a good seventy-five years of
Freud, Darwin, Pavlov, Max Weber, Sir James Frazer, Dr. Spock,
Vance Packard and Rose Franzblau, and everything they have had to
say about human motivation has filtered through Parker and all of
Parker’s friends in college, at parties, at lunch, in the magazines
and novels they read and the conversations they have at home with
wives who share the same esoterica. As a result, Parker understands
everybody’s motives, including his own, which he has a tendency to
talk about and revile.
He understands, for example, that he is
now forty-six years old and close to becoming a vice-president of
the agency and that at this particular age and status he now
actually feels the need to go to the kind of barbershop where one
makes an appointment and has the same barber each time and the
jowls are anointed with tropical oils. It is as if Parker were
looking through a microscope at a convulsive amoeba, himself,
Parker. “I can’t go into any other kind of barbershop,” he says.
“It has gotten so I have an actual,
physical need to have my hair cut in that
kind of barbershop.” He can go on like this about the clothes he
buys, about the clubs he joins, the music he listens to, the way he
feels about Negroes, anything.
He understands why pot-smoking is sort
of a religion. He understands Oneness, lofts, visions, the Lower
East Side. He understands why Ben has given up everything. He
understands why his wife, Regina, says he is a ---- ---- ---- and
has to do something. Her flannel mouth is supposed to goad him into
action. He understands everything, the whole thing, and he is in a
hopeless funk.
So here are Parker and I walking along
Avenue B on the Lower East Side. Parker is wearing a brown
Chesterfield and a Madison Avenue crash helmet. Madison Avenue
crash helmet is another of Parker’s terms. It refers to the kind of
felt hat that is worn with a crease down the center and no dents in
the sides, a sort of homburg without a flanged brim. He calls it a
Madison Avenue crash helmet and then wears one. Inevitably, Parker
is looking over his own shoulder, following his own progress down
Avenue B. Here is Parker with his uptown clothes and his anointed
jowls, walking past the old Avenue B Cinema, a great rotting
building with lions’ heads and shattered lepers’ windows. Here is
Parker walking past corner stores with posters for Kassel, Kaplan,
Aldrich and the others, plastered, torn, one on top of the other,
like scales. Here is Parker walking along narrow streets with
buildings all overhung with fire escapes on both sides. Here is
this ripening, forty-six-year-old agency executive walking along
amid the melted storefronts. There are whole streets on the Lower
East Side where it looks as if the place had been under intense
heat and started melting and then was suddenly frozen in amber.
Half the storefronts are empty and there is a gray film inside the
windows. Pipes, bins, shafts of wood and paper are all sort of
sliding down the walls. The ceilings are always covered with
squares of sheet metal with quaint moldings on them to make an
all-over design, and they are all buckling. The signs have all
flaked down to metal the color of weathered creosote, even the ones
that say Bodega y Carnicería. Everything is
collapsing under New York moss, which is a combination of lint and
soot. In a print shop window, under the soot and lint, is a sample
of a wedding announcement. Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Arnschmidt
announce the marriage of their daughter, Lillian, to Mr. Aaron
Kornilov, on October 20, 1951. This seems to deepen Parker’s funk.
He is no doubt asking himself what sort of hopeless amber fix
Lillian Arnschmidt and Aaron Kornilov are frozen in
today.
Parker sticks his head inside a
doorway. Then he walks in. Then he turns around and says, “Are you
sure?”
“You said 488,” I tell him, “this is
488.”
“Nifty,” Parker says.
Here is Parker in the entryway of a
slum tenement. Slum tenements are worse than they sound. The
hallway is painted with a paint that looks exactly the color,
thickness and lumpiness of real mud. Parker and I walk in, and
there are three big cans of garbage by the stairway. Behind them
are two doors, one to the basement apartment, one to the
first-floor apartment, out of which two or three children have
overflowed when the mother rises in the doorway like a moon
reflecting a 25-watt light and yells something in Spanish. The
children squeeze back, leaving us with the garbage and the
interesting mud tableau. At some point they painted the mud color
over everything, even over the doorbell-buzzer box. They didn’t
bother to pull the wiring out. They just cut the wires and painted
over the stubs. And there they have it, the color called Landlord’s
Brown, immune to time, flood, tropic heat, arctic chill, punk
rumbles, slops, blood, leprotic bugs, cockroaches the size of mice,
mice the size of rats, rats the size of Airedales, and lumpenprole
tenants.
On the way up there are so many turns
amid the muddy gloom, I can’t tell what floor we stop at. But
Parker finds the door up there and knocks.
For a while we don’t hear anything, but
there is a light through the door. Then somebody inside says, “Who
is it?”
“Ben!” says Parker. “It’s
me.”
There is another long pause, and then
the door opens. There in the doorway, lit up from behind by an
ochre light, is a boy with a very thick head of hair and a kind of
Rasputin beard. It is a strange combination, the hair and the
beard. The hair is golden, a little red, but mostly golden and very
thick, thatchy, matted down over his ears and his forehead. But the
beard is one of those beards that come out a different color. It is
red and stiff like a nylon brush.
“Ah,” says Parker, “the whole
scene.”
Ben says nothing. He just stands there
in a pair of white ducks and rubber zori sandals. He has no shirt
on. He looks as robust as a rice pudding.
“The whole scene,” Parker says again
and motions toward Ben’s Rasputin beard.
Ben is obviously pained to hear his old
man using hip talk. He gives a peeved twist to his mouth. He is
rather startling to look at, a little chunk of rice pudding with
all this ferocious hair. Parker, the understanding, understands,
but he is embarrassed, which is his problem.
“When did all this happen?” says
Parker. “The beaver. When did you grow the beaver?”
Ben still just stands there. Then he
narrows his eyes and clamps his upper teeth over his lower lip in
the Italian tough guy manner, after the fashion of Jack Palance in
Panic in the Streets.
“Beaver is a very old expression,” says
Parker. “Before you were born. About 1803. I was using a very old
expression, from my childhood. Did you ever hear a song that goes
‘Alpha, beta, delta handa poker?’ That was a very hip
song.”
Then he says, “I didn’t mean that, Ben.
I just want to talk to you a minute.”
“All right,” says Ben, and he opens the
door wider and we walk in.
We walk into a sort of kitchen. There
is a stove with all four gas burners turned up, apparently for
heat. The apartment is all one room, of the sort that might be
termed extremely crummy. The walls actually have big slags of
plaster missing and the lathing showing, as in a caricature of an
extremely crummy place. The floor is impacted with dirt and looks
as if it has been chewed up by something. And off to one side is
more of the day’s gathering gaffe: two more kids.
They are both up against the wall as if
they have been squashed there. One of them is slouched up against
the wall in an upright position. He is a chubby boy with receding
blond hair and a walrus mustache. The other, a thin, Latin-looking
boy with miles of black hair, is right next to him, only he is
sitting down on the floor, with his back propped against the wall.
They are both looking at us like the Tar-Baby or a couple of those
hard-cheese mestizos on the road to Acapulco. There is a sweet
smell in the room. The understanding Parker isn’t going to start in
on that, however. Parker looks a little as if he has just been
pole-axed and the sympathetic nervous system is trying to decide
whether to twitch or fold up. Here is Parker in the net of the
flipniks, in the caravansary.
Nobody is saying a word. Finally Ben
nods toward the chubby boy and says, “This is Jaywak.” Then he nods
toward the boy on the floor and says, “This is Aywak.”
Jaywak stares at Parker a little longer
with the Tar-Baby look, and then he fans his lips out very slowly,
very archly, into a smile. After what seems about eight or ten
seconds, he holds out his hand. Parker shakes his hand, and as soon
as he starts to do that, the boy on the floor, Aywak, sticks his
hand straight up in the air. He doesn’t get up or even look at
Parker. He just sticks his hand straight up in the air and waits
for Parker. Parker is so flustered he shakes it. Then Parker
introduces me. All this time Ben never introduces Parker. He never
says this is my father. One’s old man does not show up in a brown
Chesterfield with ratchety pleas in his poor old voice, such as he
wants to talk to you.
“Well, take off your coat,” says Ben.
But when he says something to Parker, he looks at Jaywak and
Aywak.
Parker keeps his coat wrapped around
him like a flag and a shield. Parker can’t take his eyes off the
place. Between the kitchen and the other part of the apartment is a
low divider, like a half-wall, with two funny pillars between it
and the ceiling. God knows what the room was for originally. In the
back part there is another big craggy space on the wall, apparently
where a mantelpiece has been ripped off. Some kind of ratty cloth
is over the windows. It is not the decor that gets you. It is this
kind of special flipnik litter. Practically every Lower East Side
pad has it. Little objects are littered all over the floor, a sock,
a zori sandal, a T shirt, a leaflet from the Gospel Teachers, some
kind of wool stuffing, a rubber door wedge, a toothbrush, cigarette
butts, an old pair of blue wool bathing trunks with a white belt, a
used Band-Aid, all littered around the chewed-up floor. There is
almost no furniture, just a mattress in the corner with a very
lumpy-looking blanket over it. There is also a table top, with no
legs, propped up on some boxes. Parker keeps gawking.
“Very colorful,” he says.
“It’s not very colorful,” Ben says.
“It’s a place.”
Ben’s voice tends to groan with
pretentious simplicity.
Suddenly Aywak, the Tar-Baby on the
floor, speaks up.
“It has a lot of potential,” he says.
“It really has a lot of potential. Doesn’t it? Or doesn’t
it?”
He looks straight at Parker with his
eyes rolled up sadly.
“We’re helping Bewak,” he says. “We’re
helping Bewak put down the tiles. Bewak’s going to do a lot with
this place because it has a lot of potential. We talked it over.
We’re going to put all these tiles over he-e-e-ere, and then, over
he-e-e-ere, on this wall, all these bricks. White bricks. We’re
going to paint them white. I kind of like the idea, all these white
bricks and the tiles. I mean, it’s not much.
I’m not saying it’s a lot. But the important
thing is to know what you’ve got to do and then do something about
it and improve on it, you
know?”
“Cool it,” says Ben.
This is all very bad for Parker.
Suddenly Parker turns to Jaywak and says, “He’s an interior
decorator. What do you do?”
“I’m not an interior decorator,” says
Aywak, “I’ve got a trade.”
“I’m a social worker,” says Jaywak.
Jaywak spreads his face out into the smile again.
“Who do you social work for?” says
Parker.
“Well, it’s sort of like the Big
Brothers,” says Jaywak. “You know the Big Brothers?”
Jaywak says this very seriously,
looking at Parker with a very open look on his face, so that Parker
has to nod.
“Yes,” Parker says.
“Well, it’s like them,” says Jaywak,
“only … only …”—his voice becomes very distant and he looks off to
where the mantelpiece used to be—“only it’s different. We work with
older people. I can’t tell you how different it is.”
“I’m not an interior decorator,” says
Aywak. “I don’t want you to think I’m an interior decorator. We’re
not going to do miracles in here. This is not the greatest building in the world. I mean, that’s
probably pretty obvious. But I mean, like I was going on about
it—but that just happens to be the way I feel about it.”
“What are you if you’re not an interior
decorator?” says Jaywak.
“You mean, what do I do?” says Aywak.
“I mean, what do you do,” says Jaywak.
“That’s a very important question,”
says Aywak, “and I think he’s right about it.”
“What do you do?’”
“Yes.”
“Someone ask Aywak what he does,”
Jaywak says.
“I have a trade,” says Aywak., “I’m a
cooper. I make barrels. Barrels and barrels and barrels. You
probably think I’m kidding.”
So Parker turns on Ben. He speaks
severely his only time. “Just what do you
do?” he says to Ben. “I’d really like to know!”
“What do you
do?” says Ben. “What are you doing right now?”
“Look,” says Parker, “I don’t care what
you want to look like in front of these—”
Ben reaches into an old tin of tea and
pulls out a string of dried figs. This is one of the Lower East
Side’s arty foods, along with Ukrainian sausages. Ben turns
completely away from Parker and says to me, “Do you want a
fig?”
I shake my head no, but even that much
seems stupid.
“Are you going to listen?” says
Parker.
“They’re very good for you,” says
Aywak, “only they’re filling. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” Jaywak says to me, “sometimes
you want to be hungry. You know? Suppose you
want to be hungry, only you aren’t hungry. Then you want to
get hungry, you know? You’re just waiting to
get hungry again. You think about it. You want it. You want to get
hungry again, but the time won’t pass.”
“A dried fig ruins it,” says
Aywak.
“Yeah!” says Jaywak.
I have the eerie feeling they’re
starting in on me.
“Are you going to listen?” Parker is
saying to Ben.
“Sure,” says Ben. “Let’s have a talk.
What’s new? Is something new?”
Parker seems to be deflating inside his
Chesterfield. Here is Parker amid the flipniks, adrift amid the
litter while the gas jets burn.
Parker turns to me. “I’m sorry,” he
says. Then he turns to Ben. “O.K., we’re going.”
“O.K.,” says Ben.
“Only one thing,” says Parker. “What do
you want me to …”
He doesn’t finish. He turns around and
walks toward the door. Then he wheels around again.
“What do you want me to tell your
mother?”
“What do you mean?” Ben
says.
“Do you have a message for
her?”
“Such as what?”
“Well, she’s been praying for you
again.”
“Are you being funny?”
“No, it’s true,” says Parker. “She has
been praying for you again. I hear her in the bedroom. She has her
eyes shut tight, like this, and she is on her knees. She says
things like, ‘O dear Lord, guide and protect my Ben wherever he may
be tonight. Do you remember, O Lord, how my sweet Ben stood before
me in the morning so that I might kiss him upon his forehead in the
early brightness? Do you remember, O Lord, the golden promise of
this child, my Ben?’ Well, you know, Bewak, things like that. I
don’t want to embarrass you.”
“That was extremely witty,” Ben
says.
“What do you want me to tell her?” says
Parker.
“Why don’t you just go?” Ben
says.
“Well, we’re all going to be on our
knees praying tonight, Bewak,” says Parker. “So long,
Bewak.”
Down in the hallway, in the muddy
tableau, Parker begins chuckling.
“I know what I’m going to tell Regina,”
he says. “I’m going to tell her Ben has become a raving religious
fanatic and was down on his knees in a catatonic trance when we got
there.”
“What is all this about kneeling in
prayer?”
“I don’t know,” Parker says. “I just
want everybody who is japping me to get down on their knees, locked
in a battle of harmless zeal. I discovered something up
there.”
“Which was?”
“He’s repulsive,” says Parker. “The
whole thing was repulsive. After a while I didn’t see it from the
inside. It wasn’t me looking at my own son. I saw it from the
outside. It repelled me, that was all. It repelled
me.”
At the corner of Avenue B and 2d Street
Parker sticks out his hand and bygod there is a cab. It is amazing.
There are no cabs cruising the Lower East Side. Parker looks all
around before he gets in the cab. Up the street, up Avenue B, you
can see the hulk of the Avenue B Cinema and the edge of the
park.
“That is a good augury,” he tells me.
“If you can walk right out on the street and get a cab—any time,
any place, just stick out your hand and a cab stops—if you can do
that, that is the sign that you are on top of it in New
York.”
Parker doesn’t say anything more until
we’re riding up Fourth Avenue, or Park Avenue South, as it now is,
up around 23d Street, by the Metropolitan Life Insurance
Building.
“You tell me,” he says. “What could I
say to him? I couldn’t say anything to him. 1 threw out everything
I had. I couldn’t make anything skip across the pond. None of them.
Not one.”