Drunken Angel (9781936740062) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  PART ONE

  BOOK ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  BOOK TWO

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  BOOK THREE

  11

  12

  13

  14

  BOOK FOUR

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  BOOK FIVE

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  PART TWO

  BOOK SIX

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  BOOK SEVEN

  58

  59

  60

  BOOK EIGHT

  61

  62

  63

  BOOK NINE

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  BOOK TEN

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  79

  80

  81

  BOOK ELEVEN

  82

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  It’s very thrilling to see darkness again.

  —Diane Arbus

  PART ONE

  BOOK ONE

  1

  ON A LAMP STAND BY HIS BED MY FATHER KEPT A small stack of True Men’s Adventures and Stag, magazines with illustrated feature stories bearing titles like “Virgin Brides for Himmler’s Nazi Torture Dungeons” and “Hitler’s Secret Blood Cult” or “Death Orgy in the Rat Pits of the Gestapo.”

  I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

  The covers showed buxom, naked young women—Jewish, I presumed—in shredded slips, their panting and perspiring busts crisscrossed with luscious-looking whip welts, hung by wrists from ceilings, about to be boiled, others spread-eagled on torture tables, dripping red cherry cough drop–colored blood as shirtless bald grinning sadists manned obscene instruments.

  Is this what my birth looked like? Had my mother, a French-born Jew, been a virgin torture bride for the pleasures of the medical Gestapo? And is that why she still constantly revisits doctors and goes to the hospital to have surgeries? To my libido, it was logical.

  To her, my hungers were disgraceful. “You’re hungry? You don’t know what hunger is,” she told me, mopping her flushed face with her apron, when I requested more bread.

  I was too fat, she said. “Look at you! You should be ashamed! You have breasts like a woman. In the war I hid in basements and attics, starving, and all around me German soldiers with dogs. I was just a little older than you. Hungry! What do you know? Your waist is bigger than mine!”

  But what about the Gestapo rat pits, I wondered, shutting my eyes, trying to imagine her hung over cauldrons, like the ones bubbling on the stove, or chained to a wall, naked and starving, a thin figure with voluptuous breasts, a moan parting her lips. Shifting uncomfortably in my seat, I grew hard under the dinette table.

  The magazines’ cheap black-and-white newsprint guts contained boner-inspiring photo art, grainy flicks of scantily clad women of ill repute, black bars printed over their eyes. You saw pretty clearly their cleavages, could form a mental movie. I knew that sex was bad things one did and I knew the mags were sinful, but reading was the only thing I seemed to excel in at school; I failed most subjects. I read the mags compulsively, desperately, yet with a curious mentholated sense of remove, the coolness of sin, the way others pray, for fantasy, escape from the circumstances of my life, for I did not yet understand about libraries, that you can be only eight years old but based on honor take home books, since there was no honor in my world where I was a groveling larva trying just not to get crushed.

  My father played cards and bet on horses. He brought home stolen hi-fi consoles and portable TVs, purchased hot, or hung out with his brother, Arnold, and the kids, who were mainly jailbirds and hoods. And if I could, I stole too—you couldn’t trust a kid like me, for now and then I took change from his pockets, filched cupcakes and comics from the candy stores.

  When an actual book fell into my hands, street-found, some yellowish crumbling paperback, Ted Mack’s The Man From O.R.G.Y., or George Orwell’s 1984, I handled these with proprietary reverence, inscribed the title page with “Property of Alan Kaufman” and a little poem plagiarized from Pop, who had it scrawled in the only two books he kept, a Webster’s and this antho of best prose from Nat Fleisher’s Ring Magazine:

  “I pity the river, I pity the brook, I pity the one who steals this book.”

  It seemed like great poetry to me. I wondered if he made it up, was some kind of poet. This, the first poem I ever learned, stolen from my dad, made me want to write others.

  I tried. When I showed my efforts to my teacher, she put across the top: “Excellent! You’re a real writer!” Even my mother encouraged this idea, and kept my poems stashed in her secret drawer of precious things, folded away among silken panties and bras—my very first archive.

  My poems, writing and reading, became erotically tinged, a way to earn love as I couldn’t by other means. Writing seemed to befriend me. I felt less lonely, began to dream, and from the page a voice seemed to speak directly to me and to no one else.

  Be a writer, it told me.

  When I learned that even I could join the library and check out books six at a time, my mother said I would run up fines she couldn’t pay, don’t I know how poor we are, but I went anyway, returning home with arms full of new sentries to post around my bed. A kind of literary fortress stood guard over my hopes: Ernest Hemingway, James Jones, Leon Uris, Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, Irwin Shaw, a new bulwark against my mother, who entered my room raging and lashing at me with a belt for my defiance as I cringed in the corner crying and glanced at the books for courage. Could sense Hemingway and Dylan Thomas there in the room, encouraging. Alone, vowed someday to join them. At night, with a flashlight under my blanket tent, I mouthed artful words I barely understood, until, now and then, narratives took form, more real than my reality, and obliterated the grimness of the day and loneliness of my night.

  2

  DEVOURING STAG ZINES FELT DIFFERENT FROM struggling through Shaw’s “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” or Hemingway’s “The Battler.” Books made me feel healthy and like a boy. Books fed my Angel. But the magazines bred a secret world of shame, a growing hint of uncontrolled chaos, a black drunkenness of the senses, and I plundered them with the rapt terror of forbidden realms I intuited a boy my age shouldn’t be privy to.

  This was a worldview of transgressive pornographic global evil I shared with my parents, a dark adult-only newsstand read on life, one with the sickening graininess of a Weegee Daily News photo that I felt myself too young to have, for at nine it crazed me to think that o
ut there in the glass-strewn Bronx streets were devil worshippers, gangsters, Nazis, Commies, rapists, torturers, spree killers—scary men in sweat-drenched tees roaming with razor-buckled garrison belts wrapped around their fists, waiting to pounce on me. Yet knowing this made me feel closer to Mom and Dad, even as it gutted deep runnels in my soul, hidden labyrinthine fear sewers that began to fester and stink.

  The mags were spellbindingly addictive. I could not just read one about statuesque blondes bound to altars for ritualized rape and torture and then put down the mag and go sing along with Howdy Doody. I would need to read until the stories ran out and then, jonesing like a junkie, wait until Pop brought some more home. But even the next hit of Stag was insufficient. Slowly, I descended into the bottomless pit.

  Pop frequently replenished his stock but I was not allowed to read them until he’d been through them first. An illiterate with a fourth-grade education, it could take him days.

  When home, Pop lay abed in his boxer shorts and white T-shirt, asleep and farting noxious fumes until nightfall, when he would rise and go to his job at the main post office on 33rd Street and Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, work a shift from midnight to 8:00 a.m., at which time he emerged, squinting, into the early morn and headed over to Times Square for a breakfast of burger patties and Orange Julius, and then a browse in the mag racks for the latest number of True Men’s Adventures.

  When these arrived I planned my commando raid. Waited for my mother to bustle out with shopping cart, complaining about what a good-for-nothing he was, letting his poor wife go out in the rain; how he couldn’t care less about her kidney stones or high blood pressure.

  “Oh, yeah?” he’d yell back from his throne on the bed, half asleep, face crushed to a pillow. “And what the hell you think I been doing all night? Working to put food in your big goddamned insulting mouth!”

  “Oh, to hell with you!” she called back and slammed out. While Howie lay in bed watching TV, I would gently nudge open my parents bedroom door with fingertips, peer in at my father’s calloused feet, listen for his sleep breathing and crawl in on my belly slowly, noiselessly. Slithered undetected, slid the new mags off the rack, and crawled out, booty in hand.

  Dad’s gonna kill you, Howie would say. He didn’t look at the mags, didn’t dare. Lay on his bed reading comics, watching TV. A good boy.

  We had twin beds, side by side. Lying on mine, I compulsively read them from cover to cover, all the way to the Frederick’s of Hollywood ads. The horrifying stories, stimulating, strange, stirred vague longings, desires that I could not identify but felt increasingly frightened of and sickened by, though I couldn’t stop, aware as I read of the stirring between my legs.

  All this made me feel nightmarishly arrant in the watching invisible eyes of the world and of the writers I admired, as if Hemingway could see me from his throne in the sky library and shook his head in disappointed disgust.

  Yet, I did not know what sex was. My birds and bees were satanic torture rites and Goering’s Pain Slaves.

  I did not even know about coupling. Didn’t exist. The stag mags only alluded indirectly to coitus, draping the act in coded euphemisms.

  When kids made screwing jokes, I hadn’t a clue what they were referring to, just couldn’t guess. Babies came from torture chambers, where now and then my mother lay moaning and bloody on some hospital table, surrounded by Nazi surgeons, an incorrigible torture bride getting her insides scrubbed, stabbed, and stitched. In front of the TV, her eyes grew soft watching movie people kiss. “You should get yourself a nice girl someday,” she’d say, turning to me. “One with a lot of money.”

  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.

  3

  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.”

  4