Thirteen Most

One night in the 1980s, a low period for me, as I slumped on my regular stool at Farrell's, in Brooklyn, staring into my fourth or fifth of their enormous beers, the gentleman to my left struck up a conversation. Like nearly everyone in the bar but me, he was a cop, a retired cop to be exact, and unlike most of them he looked like a churchwarden, lean and grave and puckered, definitely on the farther shore of 80. He had much to say; his proudest accomplishments had gone unrecognized. It seemed he had been the first to put together a numbered list of the most-sought reprobates from justice. He'd gotten the idea sometime in the late '40s, he recalled. He had been listening to Symphony Sid, his favorite radio disk jockey. It was the week that "Twisted" by Wardell Gray moved into the pole position on the chart. The idea of a Top Ten was itself new.

There were some good cases on tap that week, too. Someone had stolen all the sacramental vessels, worth many thousands, from the sacristy at St. Patrick's; someone else had apparently scaled the sheer face of a skyscraper to murder a diplomat in his heavily-guarded 35th-story bedroom; a gang of miscreants in fright masks had walked off with the gate receipts during the seventh inning of a game at the Polo Grounds. My friend deplored these crimes, naturally, but still felt they deserved something more than the usual tabloid-headline form of appreciation. He imagined a Top Ten of crimes--the Most Audacious Felonies. He saw himself announcing the list on the radio, becoming a personality, a sensation. There would be a spin-off comic book with his name and face at upper left, "presenting" the felonies to an eager public. In the meantime he got himself some sheets of oaktag and posted a list in the squad room.

His superiors were not amused. He was informed that as a property clerk his job was to keep track of evidence and exhibits and not go inserting his nose in places where it did not belong, and he was furthermore forcibly reminded why at age 45 he was still nothing more than a property clerk--my new friend did not enlighten me on that particular score. Not a week later, however, a list appeared on every bulletin board of every precinct house in the city. Nicely typed and roneographed, it was headed "The Ten Most Wanted Men." Immediately my friend knew just which ambitious, sniveling lieutenant it was who had stolen his idea, but there was nothing he could do about it. Adding insult to injury, the FBI caught wind of the list and called the plagiarist down to D. C. to advise on the creation of a nationwide Top Ten. By the end of the month the rat was heading up his own Special Squad.

Right away the list entered popular culture. It was just as my friend imagined it, down to the comic book, although J. Edgar Hoover was the personality charged with "presenting" it. The FBI list--the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives--garnered the lion's share of publicity, but the New York City version, which evolved into the Thirteen Most Wanted, more than held its own. My friend, who was not short of contacts on the other side of the law, had any number of stories about crooks vying for a position, gunning for the number-one man in order to take his place, becoming depressed and allowing themselves to be arrested when they were bumped down to number fourteen, and so on. The public, for their part, were intoxicated--the number of wanton misidentifications and groundless accusations of bosses and neighbors and rivals in love more than quintupled, and so correspondingly did the number of false arrests. Even more than during the "public enemy" craze of the 1930s, law enforcement had become a spectacle.


At some point in the late 1950s, my friend made the acquaintance of a boy, a "bohunk" from Pittsburgh, who had come to town to become an artist. He didn't say how they met, but they seem to have become rather close, although he didn't think much of the boy's attempts at art. The boy liked to draw "fruity" things, like women's shoes, and serenely ignored my friend's attempts to steer him toward something more substantial, such as true-crime comics. Still, they had some good times before the boy started becoming a success, designing greeting cards and wallpaper and shopping bags, and began thinking himself "too good" for my friend. As the boy became ever busier attending fancy cocktail parties on Fifth Avenue, their acquaintance languished. My friend was sad, but moved on, and had put the boy well out of his mind by 1962 or so, when like the rest of America he was made aware of a huckster who was making a fortune painting pictures of soup cans. He laughed when he read the story in the Daily News, but the laughter caught in his throat when he saw the picture next to it. It was the boy.

My friend had drifted through a couple of decades as a property clerk and, despite his early dreams of derring-do, had come to rather enjoy it. The job was steady, undemanding, and allowed him plenty of time to do the Jumble. He was a department fixture, almost synonymous with his job. That same year, though, his longtime nemesis, the plagiarist, became chief. And it could only have been his decision, made out of pure malice, to kick my friend down to patrol duty--my friend was nearing retirement, had been a model employee, had fallen arches. Anyway, it so happened that my friend was on the street in uniform on an unseasonably cold autumn evening, guarding a movie premiere, of all stupid things, when he saw the boy again. The boy now looked like an apprentice hoodlum: leather jacket, sunglasses, need of haircut. He was walking with that old movie star--what was her name? The boy spotted my friend, said nothing, but the two locked eyes for a second. Even through the sunglasses, my friend could tell.

Cut to Spring, 1964. My friend, inches from retirement, had been patrolling the World's Fair. One day he was called to the New York State pavilion. There might be trouble, he was told. As he approached he kept looking up at the piston-shaped towers, imagining a jumper. Only when he got close did he notice the lower building. It was covered with a row of enormous portraits of men. To his astonishment, he recognized them: the Thirteen Most Wanted. He stared at the faces in disbelief. But the instant he recognized the face of Salvatore Vitale, workers began obliterating it with white paint. One by one the faces disappeared. It was his dream--both realized and short-circuited--all over again. Somehow he found out, eventually: it was the boy! He did that! But was it an act of love, or an attempt to kill him?

Horror Vacui

In this picture you see me, fleeing from my home of seven years. It was in fact a farmhouse, although its grounds had long ceased being a farm. It was a nice house, and beautifully situated. The view from the back--meadows tumbling toward a pond with a ridge behind, the valley angled to the right giving an impression of sumptuous depth--made visitors exclaim. An allee of ancient maples guarded the long driveway. The house had been built in 1904 as a folk-art approximation of the Second Empire style. The barn--rescued from collapse at no small cost--had been made in the nineteenth century from parts of even older structures. There was a peach tree, and the remains of an orchard, and a chicken coop, and a shed that was being slowly squeezed to death between two trees. Every spring the farm dump would cough up a few more things--glass pill bottles, pot lids, patterned china fragments--that weather had made to rise from their graves.

I lived there, as I said, for seven years, and before that I lived in another rural setting for halves of five years. But eventually I couldn't go on. Other circumstances played their part, of course, but to some degree I was fleeing country living itself. I've always been a city-dweller. I was born in a city, fled the suburbs for the city as early in life as was feasible, lived in New York City for 28 years. I never had any intentions of living anywhere but a city, but I was lured to the country by promises of interior space--an effective draw after so many decades of constriction. Summers in the country were pleasant, and with the city to go back to when the weather turned rotten, the country was enticing. I was living in a pretty wild area then, and could walk for hours in a straight line and not see anything manmade but stone walls and deer platforms. Or I could drive and try to get myself lost, winding down roads that you could easily pretend had not been visited by the twentieth century.

When circumstances dictated moving to the country full-time, however, that specific country had a suburban aspect--the previous location necessitated a full hour drive to get to a decent supermarket. In this version of country, everything was a memorial to its former identity--former farms, former haylofts, former roadhouses, former depots, all engaged in more self-conscious, college-graduate sorts of activities. I could still have managed, if I had possessed much of a feeling for nature. Because nature hung around, magnificently sometimes: coyotes, bald eagles, owls, foxes, bears, the occasional unverifiable mountain lion. And nature asserted itself as weather on a very regular basis. And that is where I failed, ultimately. Every winter was the end of the world. It was the end of life, everything skeletal and drained of color. Yes, I did know better. That's why I say that I failed it, not the other way around. Now I'm in a town, which is a sort of halfway house, a sort of airlock on the way back to urban life. I've got a tree--two trees, actually--but I'm steps away from neon, and things that are open 24 hours, and people having arguments on the street. I couldn't live in Eden. I'm a citizen of the fallen world.

Body Modification

No, those are not tattoos, and they are neither skinheads nor football hooligans. The subjects are seven dogfaces from World War II. I don't have a date for the picture, so I can't tell if the shaving was done in anticipation or celebration. Here they are again in an informal grouping, looking a bit more greatest-generationish:
Note how Mr. O looks a bit like a member of the Monks (who indeed started out as G.I.s at a base in Germany). Except for Mr. R, who looks as if he were wearing a flower or a rubber glove on his head, the others in their diverse ways are all reminiscent of Travis Bickle.

I've always been curious about people's willingness to turn themselves into signboards. What purpose did those haircuts here serve? Was it limited to the photograph or photographs, or did they perform a routine at a USO-canteen pep rally? How drunk were they when they had the idea? How drunk were they when they carried it out? Did the exercise fill them with a greater sense of mission and achievement, give them a certainty of imminent victory, embolden them for greater challenges? They do look like a serious crowd. I'm sure that cheap laughs figured nowhere in their plans.

I confess that even temporary and transient forms of body modification make me queasy. Tattooing has a certain criminal allure even now, but the idea of wearing something you can't easily take off seems so burdensome I'm still at pains to understand it as the mass phenomenon it has become. Painting your face blue and yellow to cheer on the Fighting Coalheavers, on the other hand, may only last six hours, but those are six hours you spend as, essentially, an inanimate object, no matter how much screaming and jumping you do. You have converted yourself into a part--a grommet or a nozzle or a flange.

But maybe that's the whole idea. People--young people especially--find it burdensome to be themselves, and long for temporary escape into the world of thinghood. You are barely distinguishable from the other things all around you. You can make a spectacle of yourself with impunity, regress as violently as you wish, throw up all over the lobby and not be easily identifiable as the culprit. That wasn't what those G.I.s were after, of course, but their haircuts were still for them a way to shed their selves and merge into a unit, a human lexeme coextensive with the idea of victory itself. If you changed their circumstances just a trifle, they would be ideal candidates for roles as suicide bombers.

Unpacking My Library

Yes, we're back. Sorry that postings have been so erratic of late, but I just went through an overwhelming week of cleaning the Augean stables, followed by moving. (Faithful readers will note that I moved only a month ago. Let's just say the task came in two parts, of which this was the larger by far.) As a consequence, I have my entire library together in one place again. This is no small matter.

I have a very large library by most normal standards, have seemingly arranged my life in order to acquire as many books as possible--I worked for three years right out of college in a large secondhand bookstore, then for a literary review where I raided the mailbag on a daily basis, and spent much of my free time in book barns and flea markets. Meanwhile I've moved around, often; only once did I live in a single place for as long as ten years (and it was possibly the rattiest of all my residences). I lived in New York City in that bygone era when as soon as you got a $20 raise you'd move to a slightly bigger apartment. My older friends probably still suffer joint aches from helping carry my hundred boxes up to sixth-floor walk-ups.

But after living in smallish apartments for decades I just spent seven years in a house with a full-size attic, and everything went to hell. Books entered my house under cover of night, from the four winds, smuggled in by woodland creatures, and then they never left. Now that I have moved again--into a house that's not necessarily smaller but that I am determined to keep from being choked with books like kudzu--I have just weeded out no fewer than twenty-five (25) boxes worth: books I won't read and don't need, duplicates, pointless souvenirs. I discovered that I owned no fewer than five copies of André Breton's Nadja, not even all in different editions. I owned two copies of St. Clair McKelway's True Tales from the Annals of Crime & Rascality, identical down to the mylar around the dust jacket. I had books in three languages I don't actually read. Etcetera. It was time to end the madness.

I still possess a great many books. But I'm not a book collector. Over the years I've gotten used to the inevitable questions. No, I haven't read all of them, nor do I intend to--in some cases that's not the point. No, I'm not a lawyer (a question usually asked by couriers, back in the days of couriers). I do have a few hundred books that I reread or refer to fairly regularly, and I have a lot of books pertaining to whatever current or future projects I have on the fire. I have a lot of books that I need for reference, especially now that I live forty minutes away from the nearest really solid library. Primarily, though, books function as a kind of external hard drive for my mind--my brain isn't big enough to do all the things it wants or needs to do without help.

Optically scanning the shelves wakes up dormant nodes in my memory. Picking up a copy of Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller or George Ade's Fables in Slang or Chester Himes's Blind Man With a Pistol and leafing through it for five minutes helps restore my writing style when it has gone stale. Seeing that the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant is fortuitously shelved right above The Ego and Its Own by Max Stirner might get something going in my subconscious (or it might not). Many books are screwy, a great many are dull, some are irredeemable, and there are way too many of them, probably, in the world. I hate all the fetishistic twaddle about books promoted by the chain stores and the book clubs. But I need the stupid things.

My True Story

Someday I will write the true story of my youth, but the details are so hair-curlingly bizarre that I may have to call it a novel. If I told how I was raised by capuchin monkeys in a remote canyon, and emerged at the age of six to be conscripted into labor at a blacking factory, before being recognized as a living Buddha by a breakway sect of hashishin, then made a career of winning spelling bees in languages I did not previously know, at the last of which I encountered the glamorous movie star who was my true mother, but who could not acknowledge me because of her secret and unwilling ties to the North Korean nuclear program, the codes of which remain on a chip implanted in my left armpit, which throbs exactly a week in advance of an earthquake... But no, none of these matters can be fact-checked. The media would have my hide. A tearful confession on a popular talk show is no sweat, of course, but by now they've amped up the amends. I would have to return the advance. Including the film options.

So I will have to call it a novel. But then no one will care. Because, you know, the imagination--bah, everybody has one of those! It is contemptibly common, the imagination. If literature were concerned with the imagination, everyone would waste their time reading books filled with lies. The point of literature is to let people step forward and tell their story, the true, unvarnished tale of their struggle to become fully human in the face of overwhelming odds. It is the one source of true beauty, this struggle. As the great captains of literature--the Defoes and the Dickenses and the Samuel Clemenses--have shown, it is only by purification in the white flame of suffering that literature is made whole. Were it not for this purification, then literature would be morally ungrounded, a freak show of no lasting purpose and with no lesson to impart. Sadly, though I have been seared by suffering as few mortals have, I will have to deprive the world of the moral refreshment only I can provide. My beautiful story will remain my tawdry secret, and the media will continue their caviling, soul-destroying ways. Alas!

Apology

Because M. Marcel Duchamp is currently in America, I am unable to meet today's deadline. Because M. Duchamp is currently indisposed, I am unable to give the matter my complete attention. Because I am indisposed, M. Duchamp will be the one handling your account. Because M. Duchamp has been promoted sideways, I will not be able to answer my emails. Because I am indisposed, your request did not cross my desk. Because M. Dominguez has taken over my email account, I cannot hear you. I'm very sorry. Please call back after the dust settles.

My Mom

I never got around to asking my mother about the circumstances under which this extraordinary object was produced, so I can only conjecture. Had I found it in a pile at a flea market I would have assumed such a confection of airbrush and hand-tinting to be a generic romance image, such as the postcards you can still find in places like Greece or Mexico that feature a young woman looking misty, with or without a sentiment printed in cursive. Judging from the hairstyle I'd guess the picture was taken within a couple of years after the end of the war. This print measures roughly 9 1/2" by 7" and I also have a postcard version--on which the lips have been retinted bright red--so I think it might have been a package deal offered by a photographer: one large print and from three to five cards for one low price.

My mother is in her early twenties here, still living with her parents and employed by them as maid-of-all-work as well as holding down a secretarial position with a governmental family-welfare agency. She may not yet have met my father, for all that he sometimes lives with his parents directly across the narrow street from her. Marriage and family are her only prospects, aside from the nunnery the only ones even conceivable to a young woman of her time and her class. She has little education, has principally been schooled in sewing and penmanship. She has been through war, fear, hunger, cold, flight to the south of France in 1940 accomplished in part on foot, strafings by Stukas on the road, bombs falling within yards of her family's apartment, nighttime encounters with Wehrmacht foot patrols--yet none of this has managed to dent her innocence.

To me she is entirely enscribed in this picture: her hazily romantic dreams, her naiveté so profound it might be willed, her deeply buried intelligence, her sufferings at the hands of her family, her enclosing wall of fear, her cruel and only intermittently comforting piety, her constant depression that only fluctuated in its depth, her rigid mask of good behavior. I see a lot of myself in that face: eyebrows, mouth, maybe nose, shape of eyes. We shared many of our worst qualities. We were very close once, and then we weren't. My failings wounded her, and my successes meant nothing to her because they occurred in a world she couldn't or wouldn't understand. She screamed at me and then hung up on me the last time we talked before her death. Her account in my ledger will always remain troublingly open.

My Dad

This is my father as I never knew him, in jive-hepcat mode, sporting a Lester Young porkpie, Eisenhower jacket, skinny tie, sweater tucked in, high-water pants and white socks, and looking like he's about to launch into a dance routine. (He always did identify with Gene Kelly.) The picture was taken not long after the Liberation, in 1944 or '45, when he had successfully joined the Belgian army (in 1940 he had chased it all the way to Dunkirk to sign up, only to watch from the beach as the whole force sailed off to England). You can see that the truck belonged to his outfit, the 35th Fusiliers. They wore American uniforms and employed American ordnance, because none of their own had survived the war.

I found the picture just recently, among an overlooked trove of photos he kept in a tobacco tin painted with an alpine scene by one of the German POWs he was assigned to guard in a camp outside Mons. Most of the pictures date back to those postwar days, which might have been the happiest period of his life. In them he is always the shortest (he was 5' 2") and the most antic, always front and center, grinning wildly. I was born ten years later, and while I always knew my father as a wit, I never knew him as a kat; I saw him hold forth but never saw him cut up. He was beaten pretty badly by life--specifically by factory labor, financial insecurity, emigration and consequent alienation. In the last forty years of his life (he died in 2001), he essentially had no friends.

The gaps between generations in my family are wide. At least two and as many as six of my great-great-grandparents (that's just two greats) were born in the eighteenth century. My grandfather was born in 1879, my father in 1921. I was born in 1954 and my son in 1999. My father in many ways remains a mystery to me. I intuited all kinds of stories in his past that he didn't want to tell me, presumably out of deference to my pious mother. I spent half my life hoping for some climactic old-age or possibly deathbed truth-telling, but instead he fell to Parkinson's and dementia and didn't speak at all in his last two or three years. At least I have photographs like this one, forensic evidence establishing the fact that my father had a youth. From me, in turn, my son will inherit mostly a pile of words.

St. Sylvester's Day

Let's keep our fingers crossed, y'all. And I promise I'll go back to actually talking about pictures very soon.

Prints While-U-Wait

Let me start out by taking questions from the audience.

Yes, it's been hand-tinted, which is to say painted, with water colors in this case. Because while color photographs existed and were highly desirable, they were new then and rather expensive. I'm guessing late 1940s, maybe early '50s. Very odd, as if she were visiting a colorized alternate reality and had bought a hat there. No, that's a radio. Yes, radios looked like that in the 1930s and '40s--as late as the early '60s in some parts of the world. You're right, it does look a bit like a switchboard, but that's just the telephone wire dangling down over the radio; the wire isn't actually plugged into it. A telephone and her handbag. Yes, she's resting her hands on her bag. Looks like a cigarette to me, but I can't be certain. Two Indian blankets--maybe I should put air quotes around the word "Indian"--framing a painted backdrop. Yes, that's actually painted in--it's the "open window" effect you sometimes see in photographers' backdrops of the past. Search me; my guess is that maybe the backdrop was so old it was beginning to fray on the left edge and the blanket was put in to conceal the damage, then another at right for symmetry. I'm sure that originally you could see the entire window frame. No, that's an extra piece of cloth stuck in to camouflage the wall down there. Originally there would probably have been a piece of furniture or some vegetation below the bottom of the backdrop.

That's right, a photographer's studio. Like a photobooth, only bigger. Yes, there were studios for every budget. I don't know, probably bought his props secondhand. I'm guessing that this was just a very small space--in an apartment, maybe, or the back room of a candy store or a beauty parlor. Very cheap, I can only surmise--as much as a dollar? Maybe not even that. Fifty cents? Less? No, definitely not a passport shot or even a driver's license picture. Well, because most people didn't have cameras then--poor people, that is. Nobody in my own family owned a camera at the time. Oh, about a decade later, say. By the early '60s the most basic Kodak Brownies had become so inexpensive that everybody owned one, or was close to someone who did. Probably to send to her sweetheart. Maybe her family, but while I could be wrong, the hand-coloring says "romance" to me.

To do something with her hands. Most people who aren't models don't know what to do with their hands. Yes, those are the straps of her handbag around her wrist, and you're right, what I had initially taken for a cigarette probably isn't one. A scrap of paper, bearing name of sweetheart? Possibly, but... Lipstick tube? Doesn't seem like the right shape, but you never know. Waist-level, I guess. Beats the tar offa me--because the photographer had a morbid fear of cutting off his subjects' feet? Of course he could have, but maybe she was unusually tall and he didn't recalibrate. That's right, exactly what I was thinking. It's the effect of her being jammed up into the top of the composition that gives the picture its extra poignancy.

She's naturally glamorous, when she's walking down the street, say, but here she's a bit hesitant. Not nervous exactly, but as if she's not quite ready and maybe never will be ready. She's not used to being photographed, and doesn't know how to employ the space or adjust her face to the particulars of the lens. So it does seem intrusive, even though she's a fully consenting partner in the enterprise. That's right, it does possess a quality that's not unlike a mugshot. But are we really judging her? More like we're judging the photographer, I'd say. Well, what do you think: after you're dead, would you rather that images of you be trashed, cease to exist? Or that they survive to be looked at by strangers who will invent a life story for you, one that stands at a 180-degree angle from the real but irretrievable one?