THEY ARRIVE AT PORT AUTHORITY a little after six in the morning on Tuesday, May 31. They find a motel room on Forty-Ninth Street and Tenth Avenue. The rates are designed for use by the hour, more time than most customers seem to require, from all the coming and going. They sleep in a windowless room that smells like a urinal and bad breath. The bed is narrow and surprisingly clean for what this place is—the sheets bleach white and fresh. They sleep next to each other but do not touch.
When they wake, it’s night. The place has suddenly become very active.
They go out to a nearby diner. We need a plan, he says, and outlines his idea for how to proceed. The day before they left, he withdrew half the family savings—he slides the cashier’s check across the counter to her now. And I have enough cash in my wallet for us to get by for a couple of weeks without making use of this, he says.
Will he start up a practice here in the city?
No, he is through with that life. It’s time for something new. He wants to make something, to use his hands, tools on a large scale—use picks and drills that aren’t all designed to fit in a person’s mouth. He has heard of a man who went into business for himself restoring rundown properties and then reselling them at enormous profit. He can buy a place with the money, and they can live in it while he fixes it up—then they could sell it, which would net them enough for another place and enough left over to live on while they fix the new one up. And so on. It would be a self-sustaining way of life. There is something graceful about its logic—from the micro to the macro—restoring cavities in the face of a block. He’ll learn as he goes. He already knows quite a bit from being a homeowner—it’s surprising what you pick up intuitively about structural engineering from managing your own home repairs. And when the baby is born, he—or she—will have a roof over his head. Cynthia meanwhile can do whatever she wants—sing, dance, act—anything her little heart desires.
See, she says, I knew this is what you would do.
Do what?
You’re making a family. You are not my husband. And you are not going to be a father.
Honey, in seven months I am, like it or not. Fine. So let’s hear your plan.
You do what you want. My plan is simple and hasn’t changed since tenth grade.
Do you even know where this place is? (She doesn’t.)
And what do you imagine will happen once you get there? He waves his fairy magic wand—presto, you’re a superstar! You still don’t have a place to live. (She’ll figure something out.)
You’re still going to need to eat. (She’ll manage.)
They walk along Forty-Second Street, among a rough crowd of transients and prostitutes. They lug their belongings with them because they don’t trust them in the motel. Cynthia insists on stopping every vagrant with a cup of change to ask where she can find Andy Warhol’s factory. She has heard somewhere that Ultra Violet and Candy Darling—and most of the other superstars—were, at the time of their discovery, bohemian eccentrics with no fixed address.
Why don’t you just look it up in a phone book?
Don’t be stupid—he’s not going to put his phone number and address out there for just any person to see. The place is underground, man! (In fact, she has no idea whether or not it would be listed in the phone book. Thinking about it now, she imagines that it probably was.)
One man Cynthia asks leads them to a place several blocks away. The Factory? Sure, I know it, he says. But it turns out to be a jazz club called the Factory. Inside, it reeks of sweat and furniture polish. The three of them slide into a booth and listen—Cynthia enthralled, Doc skeptical—to the man’s life story over the cacophonous quintet of musicians onstage.
When the man gets up to go to the bathroom, Doc says, He’s just milking us for free whiskey.
Cynthia looks at him blankly. So? He’s broke. What else is he going to do?
They stay until the place closes at two and then wander, drunk, back to their motel, which, when they arrive, is being raided by the police. An officer at the entry tells them to move along, and they happily comply.
They book a room at the motel next door, which isn’t being raided. (“A stupid, stupid thing to do,” Doc said. “It was just dumb luck the cops didn’t—when they were done with the one place—move on and raid this place, too. I would have been toast. Cynthia would have gotten what she asked for—cops find a forty-year-old man and a fifteen-year-old girl in a motel room? They would have driven Cynthia back and locked me up and thrown away the key.”)
This place isn’t as well maintained. The carpet is stained; the sheets are not clean; a haze of cigarette smoke hangs in the air from the previous occupant, who seems to have vacated only minutes before their arrival—the cigarette butt stubbed out on the windowsill is still damp with saliva.
They sleep in their clothes, on top of the covers.
The sounds of a violent argument shake the walls. Stomping, screaming (a woman), bellowing (a man), splintering furniture (a bed?), glass shattering (a mirror? an ashtray?), outside the wail of sirens. When he wakes that morning, Cynthia—as well as all the cash in his wallet—is gone.
He waits in the hotel for three whole days, not daring to leave lest she return and not find him there. But she does not return.
He walks the Forty-Second Street corridor, from river to river, but she does not turn up. He begins to recognize the faces of the permanent vagrants, to learn names. Popcorn Jack. The Cardboard Preacher. Josephina Billingham III. Haunted faces, faces worn hard by vices, by insanity. Scars, open sores, hard callous feet.
When he reads a couple of days later that Andy Warhol has been shot by a woman, he thinks, My God, Cynthia—what have you done? He starts at every police siren, sure they are looking for him, sure he will be arrested as her unwitting accomplice. It turns out, though, not to have been Cynthia but rather a radical feminist by the name of Valerie Solanas, who had been in one of his movies. According to the papers, there had been some dispute about a screenplay.
He goes to the Factory, which turns out to be in a building down in Union Square, but he is stopped by a drag queen on his way off the elevator.
Your business?
I’m looking for a girl. He describes Cynthia, but it’s clear she isn’t here—clear, too, that this place it not what she had supposed. There are no vagrants here, no Cynthias. Everyone here is, in spite of some costumes, normal, adult. It is a place of commerce—a messenger handing over a package, someone signing for it, a man in a suit and bow tie sorting through artwork on a large table. Business as usual, even though their fearless leader lies recuperating in a hospital from a bullet in the ass.
What’s so special about this place? Nothing, as far as he can tell. Cynthia will be disappointed when she finds it—if she hasn’t found it already—just to be turned away by a man in a pink beehive wig.
He leaves and spends the rest of the day searching the meadows of the city. This seems to be where all the young people congregate when the weather is nice. In Union Square Park, Madison Square Park, Tompkins Square Park. He spends an entire day getting lost along the cloistered footpaths of Central Park. He buys a hot dog from a vending cart, and then another, then an ice-cream sandwich. He sits down in an enormous grassy field, among a ring of young people. Several have musical instruments. He is welcomed in warmly and—after being encouraged several times—joins in the singing, even though he doesn’t know the words or the tune, and eventually finds himself beckoning with the others for passing strangers to join them, making room, expanding the circle.
This was the day Robert Kennedy was killed.
It grew dark, and the circle broke up. He left the park and found his way back to the room he was renting. It was time to move on. Cynthia was gone, subsumed into the great anonymous swirl.
He would occasionally wake, panic-stricken that Dolores had killed herself and still, half dreaming, imagine that Benji was calling to give him the news. He would grope for the phone in the dark and be woken by the sound of the dial tone droning in his ear. He’d hang up and go back to sleep, and by morning the dread would have passed. No news was good news, he figured. They were all getting along fine without him, he was sure. He had certainly left them all enough money to, anyway.
So however impossible it might have been to utter the word no and dissolve his family, it was remarkable just how easy it had been for him to forget about them entirely. That he had left them forever never to see them again was already, in his mind, a fact. In these first weeks of his arrival in the city he thought about one or another of them only in the context of how distant, how unreal, they seemed to be. He could conjure his wife’s face only vaguely and Benji’s not at all. The most vivid was Sarah’s, but sometimes he caught himself confusing her face with Cynthia’s.
He himself hardly remembered who he was anymore. Who had he been all these years? And who was he now?
It was too soon to know.
The death of Robert Kennedy turns out to be an occasion of national teeth gnashing and breast-beating; it’s an event for which he himself has no particular feeling. The only politician he ever liked was Barry Goldwater, but this was only because Goldwater talked sensibly about taxes and government spending. The Kennedys are a phenomenon he doesn’t get. What that family of New England socialites had to do with poor black people in the south he just could not figure out.
He is alone in this, he can see. Everywhere he goes the conversation is about the assassination—how nothing will ever be the same, how they are living in dangerous times now, how this will define the era. And coinciding as it does with an occasion of personal upheaval, Doc begins to hear the disembodied phrases of national mourning uttered by people—at a newsstand, in an elevator, on a bus—as advice. Start from scratch. Do what needs to be done. Move on.
He starts seeing a sculptor who rents an old carriage house on Grand Street. The neighborhood—if it can really be called that—south of Houston Street, had been a major base for manufacturing at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one, but most of the businesses moved away, the rest forced out through the threat of eminent domain. Early in the sixties, many of the buildings had been slated for demolition to clear the way for an eight-lane expressway that would connect the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges with the Holland Tunnel. Apartments could be gotten cheaply, and artists took advantage of these raw spaces—some former printing houses, others former textile factories, grand old buildings with cast-iron façades, expansive views, and enormous windows—expecting that when the city got its act together, they’d all be kicked out.
In fact, this never happened. The expressway plan fell apart due to a change in political winds, and by the time Doc arrives, it has become a thriving creative hub. It’s not zoned to be lived in, but most landlords look the other way. Neither is it a neighborhood convenient for its residents. There are no groceries, few restaurants—the delis keep bankers’ hours. The nearest Laundromat is on Sullivan Street, many blocks away. The buildings are not equipped for tenants—bathrooms are multistall affairs in the hallway, without showers, no kitchens, no bedrooms or closets or proper ventilation. When he stays over—which is most nights—he is reduced to sponge bathing in the large slop sink in her studio.
The woman claims to be a lesbian, but this does not stop them from sleeping together. So far as he can tell, lesbian just means that she enjoys being pleasured orally—fine by him—and occasionally catcalls women on the street. She also claims to be an anarchist. They initially bonded over their mutual indifference to Robert Kennedy’s death. She likes to host parties, which he pays for. The parties last all night and into the next morning, and if one falls on a Friday, it lasts the entire weekend. He is free to sleep with whoever is willing, though he is often at odds with his desire to follow through with this invitation and his desire to get high, which precludes his doing anything sexually productive.
It’s at one of these parties that Doc meets the lesbian’s landlord, a tall man in his fifties who she says used to be an actor. Doc doesn’t recognize him, but the man does use old-fashioned turns of phrase, words enunciated to the verge of British. Doc tells the man that he’s interested in buying the carriage house. A month later, Doc finds himself in possession of the deed to the property and shockingly less money in his new bank account. He buys a sledgehammer and begins knocking down walls.
Don’t I get a say, his lesbian asks.
If you don’t like it, talk to your landlord!
He tries hiring an architect to build a kitchen and proper bathrooms, but he is told it’s against zoning law—so he goes out on his own. He finds a plumber and a general contractor. He pays them in cash.
The lesbian says he’s crazy. Who’s going to buy a luxury condo in this neighborhood?
The contractors are young toughs from Brooklyn who spend as much time working as they do trying to catch a glimpse of the lesbian, who tantalizes them all by walking around topless. They take long lunch breaks, openly indulging in marijuana and beer. Sometimes Doc joins them. Other times he finds this irritating and yells at them to get out. I’m not paying you to sit around and get high!
The place, raw enough before, takes on a bombed-out look now. The lesbian remains very tolerant of the state of affairs—the haze of plaster dust and the perpetual whine of the circular saw biting into a two-by-four—in part because she is no longer paying rent. Also, perhaps, she is beginning to allow herself to be taken in by Doc’s vision of what the place can become.
They had gone to a party at Vic Tedesco’s place a couple of weeks prior—Vic was a self-proclaimed real estate baron and patron of the arts. He converted a warehouse on Mercer Street and West Broadway. It was immense—restored brickwork and wrought iron. He had built a solarium on the roof—accessed via a sweeping spiral staircase—which enclosed a pool. Vistas of the Midtown skyline, clear up to the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings.
She stops teasing Doc after that night and in fact encourages him—for the most part staying out of everyone’s way. She even takes to wearing a shirt around the house.
Occasionally now as Doc works, in that pure, blank mind state that hard work produces, he finds himself thinking about Dolores. He can hear her saying, I am willing to work as hard as I can. And then he can picture her perfectly, standing before him in their kitchen, hands sudsy, hair plastered to her forehead, waiting for him to respond. He has the strongest urge during these daydreams to pick up the phone, just to hear her voice. He hates himself for the urge, for whatever forces in him bring this memory to the surface, but finds himself unable to refrain every once in a while, after he’s had a few drinks, from picking up the phone and dialing his home in Plainfield, a number that he still remembers easily. On all but one occasion, he hangs up before anyone answers.
On the occasion he doesn’t, it’s a man who picks up.
Is Dolores there?
It’s been only five months since he’s left, less than a year. Is it possible she remarried? Maybe she moved.
And then, into the pause: Dad?
Benji?
Oh, my God, Dad, where are you?
Doc hangs up, heart thudding, his whole body gone into high alarm.
This is a mistake he does not repeat. Now, when the image of his wife comes to him, he locks himself in the newly constructed bathroom and lies in the smooth cool dry tub until the wave passes.
November brings with it another reason that the buildings in this neighborhood are ill suited for residential use: the cold. They are drafty and impossible to heat properly. A modern boiler system needs to be installed, but in the meantime they are making do with space heaters.
He is on his way out to buy two more to replace the ones that have overheated and died the night before. It’s brisk, but he sees—passing through Washington Square Park on his way to the Woolworth’s on Sixth Avenue—a throng gathered around a dry fountain basin.
A man in a leotard and bow tie is performing magic tricks. His assistant is a young woman in a peasant dress. It’s clear that she’s very pregnant. It’s also clear, as he comes closer, that it’s Cynthia.
When the show is over, she goes around with the maestro’s top hat. She passes Doc without noticing him.
He reaches out and puts a twenty-dollar bill in the hat. When she recognizes him, sees that the bill is his, she becomes angry. She fishes it out and gives it back.
Not so fast, the man in the leotard says.
He shakes Doc’s hand and offers him a business card. On it is a graphic of a unicycle and the words The Meticulous Ticulous. No address or phone number.
Ticulous?
At your service, Ticulous says, and bows deeply.
Where are you staying, Doc, asks Cynthia.
Around.
The Meticulous Ticulous says, Are you her father?
Cynthia snorts. Hardly.
Have you been to see a doctor?
She gives him a confused look, and he points at her belly.
My friend, Ticulous says, childbirth is not a medical procedure—it’s the most natural thing in the world!
So’s a postpartum hemorrhage, Doc says. Cynthia, it’s freezing out. Your legs are bare. And you’re wearing beach sandals.
Doc takes out a pen and crosses out what’s printed on the business card Ticuolous has given him and on the other side neatly writes the address and phone number of the carriage house.
Cynthia refuses to take it, so he drops it in the top hat and walks away.
Ticulous hollers out, Farewell!
Doc, in spite of himself, waves.
When Cynthia met Ticulous, she had been trying, unsuccessfully, for an audience with Andy Warhol.
After the shooting, the Factory effectively closed its doors to the public. Warhol became much more private—and wary of strangers. She was met by a voice over an intercom and told to leave her contact information and that somebody would get back to her. She gave the number of a public pay phone nearby and had been guarding it ferociously for days.
There was a mime working the passersby of the block. He was engaged in a routine wherein he would pretend to be hurrying along wearing an invisible hat, carrying an invisible briefcase. He would stumble, and the briefcase would fall open, and invisible papers would fly out that he would scramble through the crowd trying fruitlessly to recover. Then he discovered Cynthia, stubbornly pretending to be on the phone, waiting out a growing line of impatient people.
I’m on hold, she snarled, reaching into her pocket for a nickel, pretending to insert it in the slot.
The mime liked this. He got on line and acted out extreme impatience, tapping his foot, looking at his invisible watch—and then, discovering an invisible phone booth next to the one Cynthia was on, he would step into it and make a call and, mirroring exactly Cynthia’s body language, stave off a growing line of invisible people, claiming with a shrug, an eye roll, a pointed finger, that he, too, was on hold.
During a lull in foot traffic, he asked her, with hand gestures, whom she was waiting for.
I’m waiting for a call from Andy Warhol, she said.
That asshole?
Hey! You’re not allowed to talk.
Pop is the death of art, the mime said, and that man is the grim reaper.
He introduced himself, handed her a business card. He explained that he was just one of several street performers in a troupe. This loose collection included former students of half-a-dozen illustrious institutions: Julliard, Oxford, Yale. We are an impressive band of dropouts, he said. Ticulous had been to Lecoq. Their shared ethos was the renunciation of artistic professionalism. Appalled by what they saw as a rise in the commercialization of their chosen callings, and the willing participation of their colleagues and mentors in the greed machine, they opted out and somehow found one another, taking a monastic vow of poverty; the only means of protest available to them in a capitalistic state was with a dollar—or its refusal. They gave the gift of their art freely, accepting donations given only in a similarly free spirit—food, clothing, shelter, or, if it was all you had, money. They prostrated themselves like monks to the generosity and goodwill of the people of New York City. Koko, who had spent three years at Academy of Art in Bonn before coming to New York, drew elaborate and lavish oil-pencil murals on the pavement. Winston, who had been dancing from the age of five and endured two years at Birmingham Royal before calling it quits, made the various platforms of the subway system his stage. They were, all of them, hounded by police. They had all been arrested repeatedly, spent time in jail. Most had been mugged; a couple had been beaten. Many nights were spent freezing—or wet and freezing—on park benches. They were not above fishing through trash for food. The fervor with which he talked drew Cynthia to him—and away from the phone booth. By the end of their conversation, he had made her vow never to return. It’s not like he was ever going to call anyway, she said, so he didn’t think she was too easily persuaded.
For the rest of the day, she followed Ticulous around as he performed his routines, taking an increasing delight in being his straight man. If they were able to draw a crowd, Cynthia took the bowler from his head and circled for tips. She invited him up to her room—she was renting a sublet on Thompson Street—and they talked until morning. He convinced her that art was not a commodity to be bought or sold but rather like love to be received and given freely. He demonstrated with a kiss.
I’m pregnant, she said.
Congratulations, he said, and kissed her again.
I’m a little sensitive to smell right now, she said, so if you keep kissing me I may vomit in your mouth. You’re kind of ripe, if you don’t mind my saying.
He convinced her to be his assistant. He had been teaching himself magic and could use one, and her belly was sure to help loosen people’s grip on their wallets. In exchange, she could share in the profits.
He introduced her to the collective: Koko, Andrew, Winston, Margarita, Annan, and Brigit. They pooled their resources and—she came to find out after getting to know them and inviting them to stay—their affections.
Cynthia had somehow, by being spurned from what she thought she was looking for, ended up stumbling into precisely what she’d been looking for all along.
When Doc happened by, the term on her sublet was expiring. She was forced to spend the better part of a week in a makeshift lean-to over a subway grate. She disliked Doc—he gave her the creeps. He made her feel dirty about her body and her desires. And he was responsible for this beast growing inside her, which was devouring her from the inside out, making her hungry all the time, sleepy all the time, having to pee all the time. She hated him for it and wanted nothing more to do with him. But the cash she had taken from his wallet—which she considered money owed and earned—was gone. She is living on nothing, scraps, reduced to outright panhandling, but people’s hearts have gotten colder with the weather. No bills. The slush of coins at the end of the day is mostly small change. Enough for a meal, not nearly enough for a room.
She doesn’t bother calling, and when she arrives at the carriage house, the main door is open.
She says, If you invite me, you’re inviting them as well. Ticulous has come in with her, but the other six are waiting outside.
Doc welcomes them in. There’s plenty of room, he says.
He calls the lesbian sculptress out of her studio as Cynthia calls in the rest of the troupe, and they go through a round of introductions. The construction workers come out—Mario has been staying here on a more or less permanent basis since his father kicked him out of the house, and his cousins Michaelo and Cheech often spend weekends here so they won’t have to take the subway back to Bay Ridge after catching a show at the Garden—and introduce themselves.
Doc makes their stay contingent upon Cynthia seeing a physician about the baby and agreeing to have it delivered in a hospital and not, as she has been threatening, in the pure waters of the Central Park Boat Basin.
He hands Ticulous and the three other men sledgehammers and crowbars and tells them they are now to answer to his construction crew.
Their first order of business: knock down the one remaining partition in the house—the sculptress’s studio wall. This is now a house without borders between public and private, between art and life. It’s an experiment, one in which more or less all thirteen members of this motley crew are willing if not enthusiastic participants. They are all, in one way or another—and each for his or her own reasons—hedonists. Each enjoys the roam they’ve be allowed in this arrangement, each happy enough to give up privacy for the sake of the general pleasure to be had, happy to surrender daily life to art. That is the idea, anyway, without anyone having to say it. Pleasure and art. Revelry. Even the bathrooms are communal, a set of doorless stalls, one per floor.
The Brooklyn Trio, as they come to be called, is able, with the help of the eight others, to outfit the house with modern fiberglass insulation and a proper hot-water heater just on the heels of the first real cold weather of the season. They freely spend all the cash that they’ve been given, and by the time Doc leads a shaky Cynthia back through the front door with her infant son in her arms and a swirl of snow behind her, they are all officially broke.
They subsist through the winter on communal pots of something called frankfurter stew, a Depression-era recipe handed down from Brigit’s grandmother who, with the pittance given her by her alcoholic gambler of a husband, had to feed an entire brood of siblings and cousins. Ticulous has a connection with a grocer, an admirer of the collective, who sells them dented cans and frozen goods past their expiration date. Often he throws in stuff for free. The loaves they make with the flour occasionally have mealworms, and the canned vegetables need to be cooked extra long in case of botulism, but for the steep discount it is worth it; they eat well.
Meanwhile, Doc retains a proxy to go back to New Jersey and find a buyer for his practice. The man returns some weeks later with a check along with divorce papers from Dolores. He signs them and gives over half of the money from the sale of his practice. The remaining half will go toward the renovation and living expenses, which, with a baby and a house full of freeloaders, require more money than he has.
Cynthia dislikes Doc as much as ever, but Ticulous seems to admire the man. He thinks of him as their patron and leader. When Cynthia bestows on Ticulous the honor of naming her child, he chooses the name Arthur, much to her dismay, in honor of Doc. Doc, however, still thinks Ticulous is a buffoon and takes every opportunity to rile him, which Ticulous, for his part, takes in stride. On any matter on which they disagree, Doc Morel would say, Did they teach you that in clown school?
To which Ticulous would insist, Lecoq! Lecoq! The man is the greatest living performer in the world, and L’École—
Tell it to your pal Bozo. I’m not interested.
And Ticulous would laugh. He thought Doc was kidding and that he enjoyed Ticulous’s company more than he let on.
Baby Arthur is doted on by two-dozen hands. Never was an infant more handled than Baby Arthur. There is no crib, nor is there a need for one: he is never put down; he is always in somebody’s arms. Cynthia breastfeeding him, Doc burping him, Ticulous sweeping him around the room, Koko cradling him while he naps, or any of the others caressing or changing or cooing or cuddling.
He sleeps on the top floor, with Cynthia, Ticulous, and Winston. It is the warmest place in the house. On the rare occasions he is left undisturbed to sleep, it is in an old typesetter’s bath, padded down with blankets. When, after months, he outgrows the makeshift manger in the corner, he begins sleeping in his mother’s bed. One day Annan comes in with a crib he’s found on the street and lugged all the way from Midtown, pleased with his contribution to Baby Arthur’s care and well-being, but Cynthia refuses to even consider it. I’m not putting my son behind bars!
It is, most of the time, unbearably hot on the top floor where they sleep, Arthur curled against his mother’s belly as though he were remembering how he used to sleep. Even in the winter they sleep with the portable fans going—the windows on the top level do not open, and so the fans merely produce a swirl of hot air. They sleep naked, mother and son, under a thin sheet, as do Winston and Ticulous, who have taken up together on a separate mattress.
The coupling and decoupling in ever-rotating pairs was a fact of life in those first years at the carriage house. And however free most felt to share and share alike, there remained something quaint about these fleeting unions, for they were always pairs that were formed—the groups came later—always discreetly consummated, on a mattress at night. There was a time to be a couple, a time for sex, and that time was night. These boundaries were understood. There were the usual jealousies and hurt feelings that came with arrangements like this—but they were feelings quickly healed through new pairings. Those that did not heal left, to be replaced by a new face, a new possible permutation in this evolving community. When a couple was engaged in sex, they were given the benefit of privacy, however illusory. For the fact remained, there were no walls. Most had gotten used to life without them. The lesbian, who came to be known as Emily (though this was not her name), insisted on keeping her area private with a series of sheets draped over clotheslines and took to the toilet and shower in the early morning while her floor mates slept, but by that point she was already halfway out the door.
And however tactful, however much people in the house deferred to a couple’s privacy, sex must have been some of Baby Arthur’s first, vivid facts of consciousness, lying curled against his mother’s breasts to the sounds of two people grunting through their shared pleasures. And as Baby Arthur began to wobble and race, something he did at all hours, as Cynthia shunned the notion of a “schedule” for her son, guided by his own internal clock when to sleep and when to wake up, he would often happen upon two members of the house having sex, for Baby Arthur gave no such deference to his housemates’ privacy. He would be greeted happily by the out-of-breath couple and then free to watch as they continued with their business or to bobble off to some other corner of the house.
With the convenience of a fixed location, the performers begin using the carriage house as a creative venue. Ticulous throws open the great arched doorway through which horse-drawn carriages many years ago used to enter and leave and, setting up a cluster of chairs along the sidewalk and acting the part of an old-fashioned barker, calls out to passersby to stop, take a load off, and behold: Brigit on point or Koko painting herself gold and wrapping herself in white bed linen or Ticulous himself hopping down off his barker stool and tumbling into a handstand.
The street-side theater, as it were, evolves. Those main doors frame a natural proscenium arch. It is perfect. Day by day, with each performance, they develop a repertoire, invite local performers to use the space, to collaborate. Ticulous directs a series of movement pieces: mime productions of The Canterbury Tales. Annan conducts a series of chamber ballets set to his own music. The Brooklyn Trio builds a stand of bleachers, which the police eventually make them move inside, to be set up permanently against the three walls on the ground floor. For a while, it is the Carriage House Theater, doors kept open so people can walk in off the street and take a seat and watch the show, already in progress.
This is young Arthur’s living room. He eats his meals in the stands, watching his aunts and uncles rehearse. Most objects he touches in the house are used onstage as props; even the plates and utensils he eats with while watching a play might be taken from him and washed and used in the next scene. When a child is required, he is offered up—dressed and set before an audience with a few words to deliver on cue.
He is tested out, like a new instrument, by each member of the Carriage House Theater, for quality, for truing—to see where his talents and inclinations might lie. Koko thinks he has a certain raw potential with the plastic arts; Brigit declares that he will never be a dancer. Just look at his feet, they will always be in his way. Ticulous agrees but thinks his rhythm is quite good. Annan pronounces his natural aptitude in music to be extraordinary. A quarter-sized violin, among a crate of props, is strung and tuned and given to the boy. He is taught to read music, and Annan comes up with a series of fingering exercises for the boy to practice.
You’re not going to force my son to learn a bunch of pointless lessons, Cynthia says, but Annan pushes back.
Come off it, Cynthia. This isn’t about freedom. Arthur is happy to spend the entire day sawing away on that violin, and you know it. You just can’t stand the noise.
It’s true that Arthur isn’t very good yet; the particular high-pitched squeaking sets Cynthia’s teeth on edge and carries through the house, following her wherever she goes.
He’s not to spend a minute on that thing he doesn’t want to, she says.
Annan devises more difficult exercises and starts training the boy’s ear. They work together at the old saloon upright under the bleachers. Cynthia asks the boy if he is enjoying these lessons, and Arthur says, Sure.
Doc jokes that his son skipped the age of two. “He never learned to say no. It was always ‘sure’ or ‘okay,’ whatever it was. He’d eat anything you put in front of him. Benji and Sarah, when they were little? If it wasn’t spaghetti, they weren’t interested. But Arthur, you could put anything in front of him—steamed broccoli, raw tofu, pickled beef tongue—and you ask him if he wanted to try it he’d say, ‘Sure.’ If he didn’t like it, he wouldn’t have seconds. Benji, he didn’t like something, it was the biggest production, the faces he’d make, the yelling, the fits. You’d think we were trying to poison him. But with Arthur it was always ‘sure.’ ”
Arthur becomes a regular attraction at the Carriage House Theater. Annan composes pieces for Arthur to perform as incidental music between set changes. By the time he is eight, Arthur has been playing for three years, and Cynthia no longer complains about her son being enslaved by pointless rote memorization. She is enjoying, along with the rest of the audience, the weekly recital programs he comes to perform. Arthur’s virtuosic feats are paired with Ticulous’s magic; these, Ticulous feels, are acts well suited for each other, as the child prodigy is a kind of magic, not unlike the talking horse or the dancing bear. One is moved to a similar awe and pity for the creature.
Ticulous in tails and top hat, Arthur in a black suit and clip-on bow tie, they are a nested set. Ticulous would creak around on the black-painted boards of the stage, barefoot, pulling live pigeons out of his hat, making various audience-supplied items disappear and levitate while Arthur, walking the perimeter would play glissandi and arpeggios—an incidental sound track meant to mirror the illusions. During longer setups, Arthur would give the cue to Annan at the upright offstage, and they’d strike up a duet, Arthur up front now, bow hopping lightly to a Mozart sonatina.
These concerts are held on Sundays for neighborhood parents and children who in the late seventies are few and far between—and as such that much more enthusiastic to find an oasis of free child-friendly entertainment within walking distance.
Annan invites his mentor, Cornelius Diamond, to hear Arthur play. Diamond brokered Annan’s journey to this country from his native Afghanistan ten years earlier—arranged for schooling, scholarships, visa—and Arthur is a kind of offering, a willing and capable apprentice, new blood for the old man.
Diamond usually handles older students, but for Arthur he makes an exception. Annan’s assessment of the boy is confirmed: Arthur is good. They start small, lessons once a week—a list of pieces to learn.
Doc is shocked at the cost. I don’t care how great this guy is, there’s just no way. But Annan pitches it as an investment in their son’s future. Doc won’t budge, but Cynthia is swayed by the idea.
I thought you were against this whole thing, Doc says to her.
This is my Artie. I don’t ever want him to say we held him back from doing anything he wanted or becoming anything he needed to become.
For such a free-spirited household, Arthur leads a very sheltered life. Although Cynthia consents to the lessons, she won’t hear of Arthur having lessons at “some old perv’s apartment.” So for the first year of his apprenticeship, Diamond comes to Arthur. Diamond is temperamental and explosive. When he hears something he doesn’t like, he claps his hands, a sound like a gunshot in that big open space, and shouts. For God’s sake, stop! Stop! He storms over to Arthur and grabs the little violin and bow out of the boy’s hand and, hip checking him out of the way of the music stand, says, softly, Just listen. And then Diamond plays the passage, his large hands seeming all the more enormous on Arthur’s half-sized violin. Arthur is good, but when Diamond plays, it’s music. No question who is the student, who the master. Arthur stands at attention, waiting for Diamond to hand back his instrument.
Money was an ongoing problem. The theater, in line with the monastic ethos of its members, accepted as a fee only what its goers were willing to part with, which was—judging from the jumbo mayonnaise jar at the entrance—very little. By 1978 Doc had run out of money, which would have spelled an end to the Carriage House Theater, to young Arthur’s education, and the collective in general had not his insolvency coincided with the acquisition and restoration of an offset printing press.
One was liable in those days to come across pretty much anything on the sidewalk. The printing press was just one of the many objects hauled in off the street. It would have lain dormant under the bleachers to this day had Mario not been taking a correspondence course in the maintenance and repair of industrial office machines. He fixed the thing just to practice his skills.
Doc took to using his old prescription pad for the occasional antibiotic or painkiller. But after a while he began to see its usefulness as a recreational tool as well—codeine for a mellow party, say, or Benzedrine for a more lively one. Word got around about his access to drugs and, lo and behold, there was a market waiting for him. The profits he could pull in through the sale of pills divvied out five or six at a time was well worth the outlay for a generic refill and whatever risk was involved in attempting to fly a bogus prescription. And so he began selling to make ends meet, which developed, like most activities Doc engaged in, slowly, with no particular plan beyond the necessity of the moment.
Soon enough, however, his one and only prescription pad was depleted. He kept the last one around and tried copying it—but his options were limited in those days. He sought all the readily available technologies, but photostats felt fake and mimeographs smelled fake. Which was where the offset press was of use. Not only could he make a perfect replica, he could also change his name, as well as his degree—there was only so much as a dentist he could get away with prescribing. With a minor alteration of title letters, he could have at his disposal the entire range of opioids, of amphetamines and barbiturates and benzodiazepines. The sky was the limit.
“Nowadays,” Doc said, “you have tamper-resistant pads, watermarks, nationwide electronic databases—pharmacies proceed from a starting point of skepticism. You’ve got to be pretty ambitious to practice that kind of fraud. In those days, though, it was different. Because there was no such thing as a copy shop, to forge a thing like a prescription was more difficult, which in turn meant people weren’t on the lookout for fakes—or signs of the genuine. Pharmacists were, by comparison, rather guileless; they didn’t question what you handed them—or rather they questioned different things. They would call the number on the prescription, which was the only tricky bit. We had a second phone line put in. ‘Hello, doctor’s office.’ It was written in big marker letters across the phone’s handset. Anyone who answered that phone had to say it. It’s amazing we got away with it as long as we did.”
I said, “But those first prescriptions would have had your New Jersey office number, right?”
Amazingly, Doc explained, the dentist who took over the practice kept the number. “I guess he figured he’d save his patients the headache of learning a new one—most of them he poached from me. So when the pharmacy called, they got him. I don’t know how or why he okayed those prescriptions. He could have gotten into serious trouble for that. He was young, and I guess I was able to strong-arm him a bit.”
It had been mutually agreed upon that Arthur’s brain would not be poisoned by the institutions of knowledge and that each member of the collective would share in the responsibilities of schooling him in whatever he wanted to learn. Doc taught him science; Koko taught him history; Brigit taught him math. Books were procured from the public library on Canal Street, and Arthur spent weekdays, when he should have been in school, at his studies. Here, too, Arthur proved himself to be serious and determined. Cynthia was amazed.
“If it weren’t for the eighteen hours of labor,” she said, “I wouldn’t have believed that was my kid at those books. He was a gift. I don’t know what I would have done had he been a bad seed. He could have easily brought down this place of ours. So easily. I think back and can’t believe our good luck.”
Diamond told Cynthia that Arthur wasn’t getting as rounded a musical education as he should be at this stage in his development. Arthur had long outgrown the basic theory and ear-training primers they worked out of. At the conservatory where he taught there was a weekend session for the younger students. A scholarship might be available, depending on how his audition went.
Cynthia objected. School? Out of the question.
But Arthur, who thus far had rarely expressed his wants, was very clear about wanting this, and so, from the age of nine, he began his weekly Saturday excursions to Morningside Heights. For those first few years, Annan would escort him. Arthur would return from these adventures flushed and full of stories.
Doc saw this and began expressing reservations about the boy’s weekday “schooling.” He should be with kids his own age, he said. Keeping him cooped up like this couldn’t be good for the boy.
It’s too late, Cynthia said. There was no telling what might happen if they walked him into a real school at this stage. Aren’t there laws about keeping kids out of school? It’s been four years. They’ll end up taking him away from us for neglect.
Although it was meant to preserve and sustain it, the pill business brings the excess and decline of the theater and the collective as a whole. Brigit leaves, Koko leaves, Winston leaves—and several characters with little connection to art take their place. The only original members left now are Annan and Ticulous, and they are only here out of concern for Arthur.
On his last day, Ticulous tells Arthur, Follow your art. It will always lead you in the right direction. He is standing at the main archway with Annan and Cynthia. He buttons his peacoat, picks up his army duffel. He pulls Annan into an embrace with his free arm and tries kissing Cynthia, but she turns away.
You don’t get to leave here on friendly terms, she says. This is desertion, plain and simple.
After Ticulous leaves, Arthur weeps and storms up to his room. The atmosphere of the place changes. One could feel it come off its axis. With Annan and Arthur upstairs—the piano had been installed on the top floor so that Arthur could work undisturbed for longer stretches of time—what else was there to do? There had been order, rhythm; rehearsals, a chore board. Without a chore board, there were no more chores. Without rehearsals, there were no more shows. And without Ticulous’s magic, Arthur’s Sunday performances failed to draw more than a few passersby—and so these, too, were abandoned.
The new members of the collective brought “instruments”—congas and bongos, harmonicas and ukuleles—so that when they were high they could “jam.” Doc and Cynthia—the only two members of the household not trained in the arts, who until now had always abstained from art making, preferring their role as patrons—became active and enthusiastic participants in these jam circles. There was singing and dancing, which oftentimes devolved into stripteases, which devolved further into free-form group sex.
Annan is the sole holdout and protests this artless noisemaking. It’s disgusting, he says, and besides, Arthur is trying to study! How is he supposed to learn with all these distractions?
Arthur suggests a compromise: Why don’t they use the basement? Down there could be a free zone, to do whatever people wanted.
Doc and Cynthia like the compromise, and so the Permission Room is born.
One day—or evening, it becomes hard to tell after a while—Doc comes up from the basement to discover the bleachers gone.
Cynthia says, It’s time for some real change around here. Out with the old-fashioned, in with the fun! She is naked, the main door wide open.
What combination is she on, Doc wonders, and would she give him the recipe?
If those first years at the house were a celebration directed outward, out into the street, a giving away, now is a time to turn inward again, for each to seek out his or her own pleasure—the time has come to take back. And whereas the ethos of life had been toward excellence and beauty, now it’s the opposite. It’s all revel, without the art, without the life. The drugs do away with any inhibitions, as well as the notion of coupling. It is every man for himself now. There are no more experts. It’s an unwinding of sorts. The only thing to do is fuck.
“That was a crazy time,” Cynthia said wistfully. “Crazy.”
I asked, “What about Arthur?”
Doc said, “What about him? He was a big boy by then. If he lived in India, he would have been married off. If he were a Jew, he would have already been a man. Thirteen, fourteen. Almost the same age as Cyn when I first banged her.”
Cynthia said, “Anyway, he kept to himself mostly. He was in his room practicing or out at the library or at a lesson or up at that music school.”
I tried pressing here; what activities had Arthur seen, exactly? What might he have participated in, in the Permission Room, and with whom? At what age? But their answers were elusive. Later, I could see that this was a mistake, pressing the issue. It pretty much put an end to the interview. Cynthia excused herself to “piddle,” and Doc, taking out the flat marble pipe from his pants pocket along with a Bic lighter, sparked up a waft of pot smoke that he kept in his chest along with anything else he might have been willing to say that day.
The Morels talked for six straight hours. Dave had to make a run up to Tower Records to pick up more DV cassettes after a frantic bit of whispering with Suriyaarachchi; we hadn’t planned for this kind of outpouring. And, despite my failure at the end, Cynthia had come back into the main room as we were packing up and invited us to stay and continue filming—she was planning to design some more jewelry and thought we might be interested in filming her make it. Maybe stay for dinner.
We departed the carriage house after promising to return on Sunday, and, when safely around the corner, we were free to hug one another, to giggle at our good fortune. The Morels had proved to be a gold mine. Suriyaarachchi carried the cassettes in a special bag that he clutched now with both hands to his chest.
“So they’re not married,” Suriyaarachchi said.
“They don’t sleep together. Did you see the other bed?”
“I thought that was for guests.”
“It’s where he sleeps. She’s up in the bunk.”
“Your man Arthur,” Dave said, “had one strange kind of childhood.”
We passed an Indian restaurant on Broome Street that met the description of the one that Doc had recommended earlier. The place was empty. Several waiters were gathered around a table in the back, wiping down menus. We sat down by the window and ordered samosas and three servings of palak paneer.
After hearing about the last days of the carriage house, I had to wonder at Arthur’s sexual inexperience. From what he’d shared with me, and what I gleaned from his book, there had only been that one early encounter with another boy his own age. How was that possible? From the way Cynthia told it, he would have been tripping over writhing orgies on his way to the bathroom every morning. I pictured myself at the age of fifteen, with a perpetual erection, living in that household, with my pick of willing participants and no prohibition whatsoever from my parents. It would have been nonstop fucking, I would have gone insane from fucking. And, I would have thought, growing up in a household like that, Arthur would have been less shy, more at ease with himself in social settings. Another thing that didn’t add up.
“Sunday will be about pickup shots,” Suriyaarachchi said. “And cutaways. We need lots of cutaways. See if we can’t get our hands on old photos or artwork. Signs, anything we can do that Ken Burns slow pan-zoom with. And we’ll need all sorts of footage of that basement.”
“We’re going to need light. The gain in the shadows will be bad.”
“If you bring light down there, it’s not going to look like a creepy basement anymore.”
“As long as we get the ratio right, we can do what we want.”
The two of them argued for a while about this until our food came, and then we lost ourselves to our appetites, piling our plates high with pea-studded steaming rice and torn flaps of naan, ladling the stew from the round copper bowls. There was plenty to go around, and by the end I felt stuffed and a little guilty at my indulgence.