Punk
by Francis Levy
I started drinking Beefeaters, by myself, grabbing the bottle from the burnished wood foldup bar in the den. My face was hot from the gin which I swigged down as fast as I could, taking one last swallow right from the bottle.
My mother was led to the table, by her Finnish nurse, Irma. Mom’s face was an expressionless Parkinsonian mask. My father, sitting at the far end was sullen and unreachable.
“Hi Dad.”
The silence was his weapon. I always mistakenly thought I could say something which would make him wake up. Once when I was a kid, I kept going after him about not answering me. It was the only time I remember him paying attention long enough to get angry.
Irma could not be dissuaded from the delusion there were people outside the kitchen window waiting for her.
Pretending I had to take a piss, I ducked back in the den and took one final hit before we left for the Kol Nidre service.
My father and I walked down Park Avenue past the canopies whose rims I’d jumped to touch on my way home from Hebrew School.
I had never understood prayer. I didn’t care about God, even if he existed.
You stood up. You sat down. I wasn’t sorry about anything. I didn’t have to ask anyone’s forgiveness.
I studied the names on the stained-glass memorial panes. Cohen, Kaufmann, Stein.
Maida Seaman was a girl in my second-grade class. I almost broke out into laughter, in the middle of the rabbi’s sermon, when I realized it sounded like “made of semen.” Why had I not thought of that before?
The rabbi with his frock and empimedium sempervirens was the stern Bergman minister of Winter Light.
“I’m tired of hearing about your periods,” was the quote that always stuck with me.
After the service, while my father was making the rounds of the lawyers, accountants and other assimilated professionals in their un-Jewish looking Brooks Brothers suits and rep ties, I slinked away. You showed up once a year to be seen, to recite the Al chet, “for the sin,” ten times during services.
What Dad and I had in common was the fact we killed two birds since neither of us believed in God or any sin that required forgiveness.
Perhaps he’d leave and walk home by himself without realizing I was gone.
It was the 70s. The city was wide open.
I took a cab down to the brothel on the second floor of a taxpayer opposite Bloomingdale’s.
Flesh was cheap.
Crack whores, crank, scag.
“Vacancy” signs.
I’d taken the small square handout, the size of one of those stick ‘ems, crumpling it in my pocket.
$15, no tipping.
All over Times Square the handouts littered the sidewalk. Shils, whispering “girls,” constantly thrust them into your hands.
I’d been looking for a job in publishing. My heart rate had increased as I walked towards one of the addresses before my interview with Bill Loverd at Knopf. Loverd was from New Jersey, and wore preppy looking blazers. He told me he’d carried the ball, but never called back.
There were names like Jim Silberman and Ashbel Green, Tony Schulte and Jason Epstein. I’d managed to interview with Roger Straus and Bob Giroux. Don Fine, stubby and imperious looking, didn’t live up to his name. He kept me waiting so long, I walked out.
I got interviewed and blown or blown then interviewed.
Walking in the cold, the anxiety drove me towards these no-frills brothels, cubicles with cots. I’d been to one on Sixth Avenue on the third floor of a skyscraper, where a demolition was underway.
My heart pumped as I walked up a staircase in the diamond district or that sub-street level space below the old Salvation Army headquarters off Broadway where there were Dominican girls with long fingernails who wore lots of mascara— or simply into that peep show on the side street opposite the newly finished Citibank Building on Lexington.
The anticipation of what I would find created its own anxiety. I’d made a sociological observation (I looked at my sallies into varying redlight districts as “research”) that there was always one girl on a pay phone, talking for an inordinately long period of time.
I walked and walked. I couldn’t stop. There was no end. What I was looking for? Was it a body part? A breast? An ass? It was always raining and one afternoon, feeling a wetness in my sock, I realized I had a hole in my sole.
I paid my $15 to the madam who looked like a librarian with her glasses dangling studiously from her neck. Would she be the enforcer of the “no tipping” admonition.
She never looked up.
Prostitutes didn’t celebrate the High Holidays. So why was there only one girl on the threadbare sofa? She had the distended belly of a woman who’d recently been pregnant and was wearing a turquoise bathing suit whose fabric was frayed. Her pumps were worn. I could see the leather at the bottom of the heel, tearing along the edges. Her face was lightly pockmarked.
I handed her my chit and she led me to a cubicle in the back.
She was insolent and plainly didn’t want to have anything to with me after we were finished. We didn’t say a word to each other.
Had I done something wrong or crossed a line?
Should I have asked forgiveness for my sins? Did I need to make an on-the-spot whorehouse “al chet?” I felt guilty about her having to split the meager proceeds?
If she were taking in 50%, she was earning $7.50 a fuck.
I hurriedly put my pants on and skipped down the stairs to the street.
She had no right to take her anger out on me. Her life wasn’t my fault.
The denizens referred to the Chez Madison, the dissolute bar across the street from my house as “the Chez.”
Tony who had a toupee was the Hungarian bartender.
The jukebox continuously played “Cherchez La Femme” and “Dancing Queen.”
You can dance you can jive having the time of your life.
Blanche Winger, who occupied the penthouse, was sitting at the bar. When I’d moved into the building three years before, she was still a beautiful Southern belle. The first time I saw her, she was collecting money for The City of Hope.
Now she wore dark glasses. Her hair was wrapped in a leopard patterned scarf. She was staring out at nothingness or just the bottles, as she sipped her martini. She didn’t notice when I sat down next to her.
After knocking back two Seagram’s Seven’s and gagging as I always did before the bile settled back in my stomach, I turned to her and said, “I’ve always wanted to fuck you.”
I’d never been in her apartment. The next thing I knew I was lying in her bed. I must have blacked out.
“Look at that thing,” Blanche said, spreading her legs her legs proudly.
I’d been emboldened by the booze and the opportunity, but I was stymied by my refractory period.
“That’s too bad,” she said when I told her, I’d just fucked someone else.
The elevator opened right into her apartment, the only one on that top floor.
She’d locked us in.
She was now passed out on the bed, nude from the waist down.
I gently shook her, but she didn’t respond.
“Wake up!” I softly said, as if we were lovers who’d had some sort of relationship. “Wake up! I gotta go.”
I was stuck.
When I turned the corner of 60th passing the Grolier Club whose glass display announced an exhibit of Virginia Woolf’s letters, I saw my mother. I slowed down, calling out “Ma,” and expecting her to stop.
She walked by me as if she either didn’t recognize or want to know me.
“I can’t stop,” she said. She was like Cinderella, returned to the tatters of immobility, once her Sinemet wore off.
One of the symptoms of Parkinson’s is a sibilance in which words become stuck between the lips, finally dribbling out when they’re too late to be understood.
She disappeared into a cloud of steam, coming out of a manhole.
I was meeting a distant cousin of my father’s. He considered himself cultivated and took an interest in young men like me who’d graduated from Ivy League colleges. The first suspicion he had about me was when he detected my lack of enthusiasm for Victor Borge, the one night I was invited to dinner.
He met all his proteges at Hyo Ton Nippon, between Park and the entrance to the downtown Lexington Avenue subway opposite Bloomingdale’s.
I got it in my mind that I was going to attend one of the cunnilingus parties, the so-called “Mardi Gras” at the old Harmony at 47th and Broadway, where guys lined up to put their faces between the legs of porn stars.
Stalwart culture vulture that he was, my father’s distant cousin would soon be circling other prey, never having guessed where this protégé had escaped to or why.
It was easy. Downtown 6 to Grand Central, crosstown on the S to Times Square.
I liked Peep-a-Live where the naked girls spun on a turntable. It was next to the donut shop that sold mouthwatering apple muffin tops.
However, when I got out of the subway, I headed for the XXX LIVE NUDE Les Gals which was nearer and where I could enjoy the solitude of my own private booth.
There was a girl at the top of the stairs I called “my confessor,” since I could tell her anything.
It was November and already dark as I returned home. A homeless woman, skin reddened and tough from windburn, camped out in the vestibule of the building. When I was coming down in the elevator, I always knew she was there by her rank odor. She walked around with a shopping cart filled with her possessions. She wore all of her coats at once, in layers.
I had gotten tired of seeing her there. I told her she would be better off in a shelter where they gave you food. I felt a nervousness in my stomach as I came home at night, hoping that for once she wouldn’t be there, but she was resolute in making our doorway her home.
I tried to rationalize her presence. After all, it was a trade-off. In exchange for lodgings which included warm radiator on which she sat, she acted as a kind of door keeper. Not like the uniformed Irish doormen on Park Avenue, but what more could you expect in a rent-controlled building?
Blanche had an ornery boyfriend. He was tall with a large nose and one of those people who wear their wounds, in this case a knife slice across the side of his face, as a way of threatening people away.
He wore a Navy pea jacket. Once when I hesitated to go up in the elevator with him, he looked like he was going to demand an explanation. What was I looking at. Was I being a wise guy? Was I getting wise?
If only the homeless woman had been there that night, she would have protected me.
The Italian translation of Francis Levy’s Erotomania will be released in October. His novel The Wormhole Society will be released then too, along with a graphic novel version illustrated by Joseph Silver. His short story collection, The Kafka Studies Department (with illustrations by Hallie Cohen) was published in 2023.