Читать книгу Risk Game - Francis J. Greenburger - Страница 11
ОглавлениеMy head was pounding when I walked through the agency’s door. Although the fifties were over, there was still a lot of drinking going on—particularly in the tiny 64th Street apartment I lived in with Hanna. When she wasn’t at her job at a graphic design studio or seeing her shrink, it seemed that we were often having a cocktail. Hanna drank scotch, Chivas to be precise, so I did too. Her other roommate, David’s girlfriend from Austen Riggs, started her day with a breakfast of a water glass, filled half with Coca-Cola, half with gin.
The night before had been particularly brutal when some friends stopped by the apartment with some medical-grade pot. But if my father and Leo took note of my delicate state, they didn’t say anything about it. As usual, they were locked in an overly analytic discussion.
“Laurie is leaving the agency,” my father announced when he saw me.
Laurie Colwin, who had responded to a small ad I had put in the New York Times for a part-time assistant at the agency, had been a major step up from the low-key fellow who preceded her. Fluent in Yiddish (later, she translated for Isaac Bashevis Singer), she had been educated at Bard, the Sorbonne, the New School, and Columbia. Laurie loved chamber music and Jane Austen, but most of all she loved writing. (She went on to have her first short story published in the New Yorker, become a columnist for Gourmet, and publish a number of novels—including one loosely based on my father’s agency.)
Although my mind ached from last night’s excesses, as the realist of the group I instantly went to solving the problem of Laurie’s replacement.
“You know, I met somebody who might be interesting for the office,” I said.
“Please,” Leo mocked. “Is it one of your wealthy friends from Stockbridge? We have enough cuckoos around here already.”
Far from it. I was thinking of a classmate from Washington Irving Evening High School, which I’d been attending at night to earn my diploma. Heide Lange, the daughter of German parents who lived in Queens, was like most of the other people at Washington Irving: incredibly hardworking and admirably resourceful. Surrounded by students learning English or working full-time jobs, for the first time in my life, I actually enjoyed going to school. Everyone there struggled to get an education, which was fully respected by the teachers. They treated us like mature and highly motivated individuals instead of impulsive adolescents in need of homework to keep us in line.
With poor parents, Heide had to work to support herself. She earned $60 a week at her day job as a secretary at an engineering firm where she typed ninety words a minute. Laurie had been getting $40 a week from the agency to peck and hunt part-time. I ignored Leo’s jab—for an extra twenty my father could have a full-time, fluent German-speaking speed typist. I got out the phone book. I didn’t have Heide’s phone number, but I knew her last name. So I started going through all the Langes in Queens, of which there were about fifteen, and asking, “Do you have a daughter named Heide?”
“No.”
“Nein.”
“No.”
“No.”
On the eighth call, I found Heide, who agreed to come in for an interview and, passing my father and Leo’s unusual set of standards, was hired after an appropriate amount of “reflection” by my father.
I was far better at solving my father’s problems than I was my own. While I liked living with Hanna, none of us liked living with three people in a small one-bedroom. With her roommate out in the living room, it was, to say the least, tight. So when Hanna found a studio on West 68th Street, between Central Park West and Columbus, in the building next to the one where she worked, I happily tagged along. In retrospect, I was a lot happier than she was. It wasn’t as if she had agreed that I would live there. Under the nebulous arrangement, I was kind of looking for my own place, or something, but not finding it, whatever it was.
Despite my reluctant roommate, I entrenched myself even further in our new building by asking the landlord if I could rent two unused rooms I’d found on the top floor for an office. He was happy to make some additional money—$15 per room, per month—for rooms that were sitting empty. They didn’t have kitchens or bathrooms but were a perfect—and affordable—office for my growing empire of publishing-related businesses.
In addition to the easy money as a buyer of English-language books for Bertelsmann in Germany, I had started a cookbook mail-order business with Bernie Brown, the owner of a bookstore on 58th and Madison where my father ordered all the books he sent to his foreign clients. I had gotten to know Bernie because I was in and out of his shop all the time. Having learned of my deal with Bertelsmann, he approached me about starting a mail-order cookbook business where we’d buy remainder cookbooks for a buck and sell them by mail order for $12.50.
The business didn’t do very well, but that didn’t keep me from going into business with Bernie again after he got a tip from a salesman that the primary wholesaler of boating books, which supplied all the marinas in the country, was going out of business. With nobody else in the market, publishers of this niche market needed somebody to sell into it. Again, we didn’t do great, but now I had three book businesses—plus I was the New York representative of an Italian literary agency started by a friend. This hodgepodge fully justified my hiring a secretary. A beautiful redheaded one.
Theodosia, a friend of Laurie Colwin’s, was of Italian descent but looked more English with her thick red hair, glowing white skin, and round, John Lennon–style glasses. She had the inexplicably unfeminine nickname Peter, but somehow it suited her. An engaging and open person, she was hired to do whatever I needed her to, which turned out to be not very much.
Although Peter was very friendly and nice, my girlfriend didn’t care too much for her. There were a lot of obvious reasons for the animosity, but Hanna insisted that the main problem was Peter using our bathroom. The “office” didn’t have a bathroom, and heading to Columbus Avenue every time she had to pee was out of the question. The purely residential Central Park West was okay, but Columbus was, to put it mildly, a slum. When Hanna forbade her from using our bathroom, Peter had to walk the streets dotted with flophouses, catcalling drug dealers, and stumbling junkies to find a dicey store where she could go.
The untenable situation finally came to a breaking point one spring evening. I don’t know if it was the fact that Peter was just a little too attractive, or that after five months I still hadn’t found an apartment, but Hanna completely lost it. Our arrangement had theoretically been temporary, but I wasn’t eager to go anywhere. She, on the other hand, was extremely anxious for me to move on. She was afraid that if her parents found me in the apartment, they would stop paying for her psychiatrist, far and away the most important man in her life. It would have been pretty hypocritical of her parents, wealthy Catholics from Boston, to cut her off for shacking up with a guy, considering her father was the real-life version of The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker. (For years, according to what Hanna told me, her dad had been absent for half the week, ostensibly on business trips. In reality, though, he was visiting his other family. He went back and forth between two wives with three or four children each without them knowing a thing until they figured it out.) It seemed the least he could do was pay for Hanna’s treatment. Anyway, our fight that night came down to her psychiatrist or me—and her shrink won hands down.
“You’re out of here,” she screamed.
Then she began to throw all my stuff out the window.
My elegant Hanna, with her refined features, quiet demeanor, and conservative little dresses, was tossing my things from the third floor as I had seen women do in Italian movies. It was clearly time to go. I ran down to the street and started picking my stuff up (before other people had a chance to) while my junkie and drug dealer neighbors offered knowing glances of support.
The next day, I gathered all my stuff (as a sixteen-year-old, there wasn’t too much of it) and went to look for a cheap apartment, which I found on 58th Street between Madison and Park. It was a fifth-floor walk-up, but the location was considerably less colorful than the Upper West Side and convenient to my dad’s office on 57th and Madison. I hired moving guys to bring my limited possessions to the apartment, but having planned to spend the weekend with my parents in the country, I called Peter and asked her to deal with the move.
When I returned to the new apartment Sunday night I found Peter still there, and the draw of an interoffice romance was too strong to resist. She spent the night, then the next night, then the next. Basically, she never left, and so there we were living together just as unintentionally as I had moved in with Hanna.
I quickly found a vastly different life with Peter than the one I’d had with Hanna. Having grown up in the small town of Rhinebeck, New York, in a big Italian family that included an Italian grandmother and three aunts all within spitting distance of each other, Peter was a natural cook. When I returned home from a day at the agency and night school, I was greeted by the homey smells of a big pot of red sauce simmering on the stove or a roast in the oven. With Hanna, I don’t even remember eating.
When my ex-girlfriend Marie came to stay with us for a few days that August, she enjoyed Peter’s domesticity almost as much as I, and the two girls got along like sisters. Although I hadn’t seen Marie since we were caught naked and guilty by her mother, who had shipped her off to a French lycée after deciding that Georgia was not far enough away, we continued to exchange letters, and when Marie returned to New York City it was straight back into my apartment (except this time, only as friends).
During her visit, she went to dinner with Peter, me, and an editor I knew named Claus Kimbel, a recent Yale grad (magna cum laude) and a very angry person. At a certain point that evening, Peter and I grew tired of Claus’s tirades and decided to head home. Marie, however, accepted Claus’s invitation for a nightcap and would return to the apartment later. But Marie never came home that night. Returning from work the next evening, I found a note from her: “Sorry I missed you. Headed back to Georgia.”
That was all I heard from Marie until the following November when she sent a note that she was getting married . . . to Claus Kimbel. She wanted to know if Peter would be her bridesmaid at a small ceremony at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The whole thing was so completely bizarre—Marie hardly knew Peter, or Claus for that matter—that it warranted a long-distance phone call.
“Boy, what a surprise,” I said to her. “When did all this happen?”
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
“Are you sure you want to get married? You don’t even know Claus,” I said. “Have you thought about an abortion?”
Abortion, still illegal, was complicated but not impossible, especially if you had money. Marie, who was barely nineteen, had considered it, but Claus was adamant. He was Catholic, so they were getting married. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. Plus, her mother had said she wouldn’t let her get an abortion.
“Your mother won’t let you? You’re the one who’s pregnant,” I said. “If you need help, I will do whatever I can.”
“No, I’m going through with the marriage,” she said. “Will Peter stand up for me?”
Peter did stand up for Marie, who married Claus in a side chapel at St. Patrick’s with a small group, including her mother, looking on. But two days after the wedding, while they were on their honeymoon in Mt. Snow, Vermont, Peter and I were visiting my parents at their country house when Marie called. Marie, a real intellect, was friendly with my father and had become close to my mother, who picked up the phone. Whatever Marie said to her was enough for my mother and father to jump in the car and make the half-hour drive to Mt. Snow to rescue her.
They brought Marie back to my parents’ house, crying and in complete distress. I didn’t get the details, but it was clear she couldn’t stand being married to Claus. At some point during the long night of hugs and tears, it was decided that Marie would stay with my parents until the baby was born. My mother was always protecting people in need. Happy to leave the problem for her to sort out, Peter and I returned to the city.
Ten days later, our peaceful existence was shattered by violent banging on our front door at two o’clock in the morning. Peter and I jumped out of bed, but whoever was trying to break the door down was too close for me to see through the viewfinder. Fortunately, I had a Fox Police Lock (I’d been robbed a couple of times already), because the bar that came down from the door was the only thing holding it up and keeping this lunatic outside. This had to be one of Monti Rock’s jilted lovers, I thought. Who else would act so crazy?
Our neighbor and TV personality Monti Rock III was a very strange guy. Raised as Joseph Moses Montanez, Jr., in the Bronx by Puerto Rican Pentecostal evangelists, Monti was a classic tale of American reinvention. In the 1950s, he quit school after the ninth grade and became Mr. Monti, a well-known hairdresser at Saks Fifth Avenue, where he charged the small fortune of $50 for his celebrated blunt and asymmetrical cuts. At nights, when he wasn’t cutting hair, he performed an act that had some singing and dancing but was mostly just him regaling audiences with stories about sex and drugs.
During his next phase, he put a “sir” before his name, Roman numerals after, grew out his hair, and wore white jumpsuits, makeup, and a lot of jewelry. His talent was still unclear, but he became a celebrity nonetheless, appearing on many talk shows, including The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson eighty-four times. And he happened to live right below our apartment.
Just as one might imagine with a guy who kept highbred poodles and donned a lot of gold lamé, his world was one endless party (several years later, he hosted a suicide party with a coffin and organ music for 600 people, where he downed a lethal combo of alcohol, Quaaludes, and amphetamines, although he didn’t die). There would always be people, in the morning, afternoon, or middle of the night, pounding on his door and shouting, “Monti! Monti! Let me in! Let me in!” Sometimes they were women; sometimes they were men. But in our little building, there was a constant cry for Monti.
“Monti lives downstairs,” I shouted through the door. “Wrong floor!”
“I’m looking for you,” the man said.
It was Claus Kimbel.
Shit.
“What do you want? It’s two o’clock in the morning.”
“I’m going to kill you. I have a gun.”
“Why?”
“I know Marie’s in there. I need to talk to her.”
“She’s not here,” I said. “Just cool down, and I’ll open the door.”
Even with the police lock, the door was barely holding. He’d almost broken the hinges, and I didn’t want him to break down the whole door. Thinking I could talk him down, I let him in.
“You sit down over there!” he shouted at Peter and me. “Where’s Marie?”
“She’s with my parents.”
“Get your mother on the phone.”
I didn’t see a gun but did just as he asked.
After my mother picked up, he started screaming into the phone, “You goddamn interfering bitch!”
If he thought that was going to scare my mother, he was wrong. She had experienced a lot worse than an enraged, drunken editor. I imagined her replying in her coolly authoritative German accent, “Marie vill stay here as long as she vants.”
I hadn’t been wrong about my mother. His wild emotions were no match for her steely will. Eventually he put the phone down, and then he started to cry. He was a mess.
“I’m sorry about your problems,” I said, “but you know you’re going to have to pay for the door.”
“Hello?”
The voice on the phone was thin and crackling, as if it had traveled from the past. My father had never come close to the booming presence of, say, a Shumlin, but in the last year he had grown so physically weak that even his words were frail.
“Dad, I wanted to find out what time the movers should come tomorrow to the office to move your stuff.”
“About that,” he said. “I’ve changed my mind.”
“You’ve what?”
“I’ve changed my mind,” he repeated.
“The night before you’re supposed to move, you change your mind?” I said in total disbelief. “We discussed this at great length. You agreed that the new office will be much easier to get to from your apartment. I already made a deal on the entire brownstone. And I bought all new stuff.”
“I just won’t be comfortable moving. I’m not going.”
Despite my incredulity, and disappointment, I knew it was pointless to argue. I’d need to summon Aristotle, Spinoza, and Lincoln to have a fighting chance in this debate, and frankly I didn’t have the energy; I had to move my entire office the following day to its new location in a town house on Lexington between 30th and 31st Streets. As I had gone over ad nauseam with my father, I rented the whole town house with the idea that the top two floors would be apartments, including my own, the beautiful parlor floor my father’s office, and the ground-level floor my office. While taking on a whole town house was quite a risk for a nineteen-year-old, I was ready for the challenge.
My first real estate deal, which happened purely by chance, was a complete success. Back when Hanna and I first split up, I found a new office on 118 East 59th Street. I had been on the fence about the place because it had two rooms and I only needed one. “So, find somebody else to sublet it to,” the landlord said to me. That afternoon I went over to Bernie’s bookstore to deal with our boating book business, and there in the back was Robert Parker, a distant heir to the Parker Pen fortune, who just so happened to be looking for an office. I paid $50 a month for each room, and rented one to him for $100 so he was essentially paying for my office and his. This is good, I thought. And easy.
So for the next couple of years, I went between my father’s office and mine, spending three or four hours in the morning at the agency and then dealing with my publishing interests at my office in the afternoon.
During that time, I continued to do the agency’s books, but I also started to function as a literary agent after I found my first client from the slush pile I had been reading on a regular basis. One day I came across a play as strange as its title, Stock Up on Pepper Because Turkey’s Going to War, which was written by some guy named Frank Zajac. It revolved around two bums, McKoater and McKeating, locked in a debate over the merits of the practical versus artistic sides of life. Very much in the vein of the Theater of the Absurd, it wasn’t at all obvious, but still I liked it.
I didn’t know anything about the author other than that he’d given a P.O. box on the Bowery as a return address. So that was where I sent a letter stating I’d like to try to sell Stock Up. Frank, who turned out to be a beer alcoholic in his thirties, carrying the plays he wrote on anything from napkins to newspaper in a brown paper bag from flophouse to flophouse, was thrilled.
Despite the fact that he was a Bowery bum, I went big with my first client and sent Stock Up directly to Joseph Papp. A theater dynamo, Papp had made a name for himself in the fifties by bringing Shakespeare to common folks through free shows at the Emmanuel Presbyterian Church on the Lower East Side and then at the 2,000-seat East River Park Amphitheater in the same neighborhood. He rarely directed modern plays and had never produced a completely new one before, but he had just taken over the old Astor Library on Lafayette Street for a new six-theater complex called the Public Theater, so I figured he’d need more material than Macbeth.
Even more absurd than the plot of Stock Up was the fact that Papp not only decided to produce Frank’s play but also chose it as the premier performance at his new theater. My very first literary sale was an avant-garde play written by a wino to one of the country’s most important theatrical producers! This was a cause for celebration. I called Frank and told him I was taking him out for dinner and drinks. “Meet me at Daly’s Dandelion,” I said, feeling pretty big.
Located in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge on 61st and Third, Daly’s was a fancy drink-joint frequented by the beautiful people, including a lot of celebrities, thanks to its owner, Skitch Henderson, the bandleader who’d followed Toscanini as NBC’s music director before becoming the original conductor of the orchestras for The Tonight Show and The Today Show. Sitting at the bar, I thought Frank would appreciate my taking him to such a chic place.
Instead, he obsessed about the prices.
“I can’t fuckin’ believe how much this costs,” he said, going over the menu again and again while we drank several beers.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m paying for it,” I said, growing increasingly irritated. “You want to get some dinner?”
“Look. I’m just not comfortable. This is not my kind of thing. Can we go to a regular bar? Is there any place near here?”
There happened to be a Blarney Stone a block or two away, so we went to the cheapo bar where you could get beers for a quarter instead of the two dollars they were charging over at Daly’s.
Much happier now, Frank dove into our newest round of beers. At some point, not long after we’d settled in, a very flamboyant gay man walked in holding a fancy poodle done to the nines, and took the stool right next to Frank. It might have been a Blarney Stone, but it was smack in the middle of the interior designer district. We were just sitting there when, suddenly, I heard Frank say to the man, “You know what I would like?”
“No. What would you like?” the man asked.
“I’d like to have a big, fat dick in my mouth.”
I spit my beer all over the place and hardly had the chance to recover before Frank and the man began negotiating how much it would cost for Frank to go back to his place.
“Two hundred,” Frank said.
“Twenty bucks,” the man with the poodle countered.
They were very far apart in their valuation of the deal, so for the next half an hour they went back and forth.
“It’s worth it. I promise you won’t regret it.”
“I’m not going to pay that much.”
They haggled for what seemed like forever until finally the man with the poodle left. It was past midnight now, we still hadn’t eaten a thing, and I was extremely drunk. But just then, a couple of girls came in and Frank said, “Oh, let’s buy them a drink.”
It was his night. We sat down with the girls for a while before taking them back to my office, where Frank read his play out loud while they giggled. I was drunk in a way that I rarely got, and I’m not quite sure how, but I ended up going home with one of them. I had no idea what happened to the other girl—or Frank.
When I woke in the morning, my head reeling, the girl asked me, “What time is it?”
I looked down at my watch and said, “About eight o’clock.”
“Oh, I’ve got to go,” she said.
That sounded like a good idea, but in my perverse state, I asked, “What’s the rush?”
“My old man’s getting out of jail today.”
That was just perfect. She got up, dressed, and was headed for the door when, unable to help myself, I asked, “What was he in for?”
“Murder.”
“Well, then, you don’t want to be late!”
Construction delays at the Public meant that Stock Up wound up premiering at La Mama in 1967, and Frank’s career never went anywhere. Still, my father read it as a sign that I would take over his business—when he was gone.
“You should come and work here full-time. You’ll learn everything and then one day take over the business . . .”
“I’m not sure that I want to just be a literary agent,” I said. “I have other things I’m interested in.”
I liked the tradition of the agency, but I didn’t necessarily feel it was my calling. My wholesale boating books and remainder businesses were going well, and my latest success subletting half my office space made real estate an intriguing area of steady and easy profits that I wanted to explore. It would have been nice to be a part of the agency, only not all the time.
“But I think I could build up the agency,” I added. “I could bring in other people to work here so that you could find more clients and possibly—”
“You can’t bring in other people,” my father interrupted, waving me off like I was a bothersome kid. “A literary agency is a personal service business. You could do it because you’re my son. But other people? No. That will never work. It’s just not possible.”
