Читать книгу Harvey Keitel - Marshall Fine - Страница 9

The sense of hope he gained from watching Dean and Brando act – the realization that men could actually reveal their anguish, anxiety and insecurity without compromising their sense of masculinity – was yet another emotion Keitel hid away as he coped with the pressures of family life and high school.

He entered Abraham Lincoln High School in September 1954, a short, rather young-looking freshman in a school full of lower-middle-class Jewish and Italian kids from the Brighton Beach and Coney Island neighborhoods.

The school had no metal detectors, no security forces, none of the stripped-down, urban-siege quality it possesses today. In this sunny era, the worst kids smoked cigarettes (with an occasional puff of marijuana by the really bad guys) as they hung out at the sweet shop across the street from Lincoln (long since replaced by the imposing edifices that comprise Trump Village housing development).

The school was home to the budding musical talents of Neil Diamond and Neil Sedaka, who both sang in the choir during Keitel’s years there. The Tokens, who would have a hit with ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight,’ also walked Lincoln’s halls.

Gangs were not a problem; the biggest concern of principal Abraham Lass were the intramural scuffles between members of rival cellar clubs, local dance haunts. Keitel and his friends frequented a club called the Raleighs; they wore sharp red-and-black jackets with an image of Sir Walter Raleigh on the back. So Lass finally banned the wearing of club jackets to school to stem the spate of scuffles they seemed to invite.

For most teenagers at Lincoln, the biggest concerns were social: having dances and meeting girls; hanging out at the beach and Coney Island. None of which did much for the confused existence of Harvey Keitel, as he explained:

Growing up, success for us was what? Money. Very simply: Money. Whoever had the most money at the end of the day was the most successful person. We grew up believing that, because that was the message given to us – and to our parents, and through our parents to us – and directly to us from the movies we saw and the television we watched.

There was a huge concern over material things. Having a car, a new car. Buying a girl a diamond engagement ring. A friend of mine would buy a new car and I would immediately spit on it. I would say, ‘Why are you so caught up in this? It’s only a piece of machinery.’ The same thing I thought about buying a diamond engagement ring. Guys were like humiliated that they couldn’t afford a carat ring or a carat-and-a-half diamond ring for an engagement. And something about that struck me as wrong, that people were being judged by the amount of money they had, as opposed to who they were.

Keitel, who had good enough grades to be a member of the honor society in middle school, suddenly found himself struggling in the face of high school’s educational demands. He wouldn’t pay attention even to the work in front of him. Outside of school, he was rebelling against his family’s demands for better performance, running with his friends to the poolroom rather than keeping up with his homework.

‘I didn’t like anything except hanging out with my friends,’ Keitel remembered. ‘I didn’t want to read. I didn’t want to study. I didn’t have the concentration, I didn’t have the focus. I was just upset, upset with those familiar things that perhaps any young person would have been upset about. And being upset doesn’t afford one the patience necessary to learn anything. I failed everything but I thought I was a great student.’

He hid that emotional turbulence behind bravado, behind the tough-guy, wiseguy persona. Yet there was also something straightforward and ingenuous about the bantam Keitel, as Principal Lass found out on his first day at Lincoln, in the fall of 1955. Patrolling the halls, looking for stragglers after the first bell, Lass ran across a diminutive sophomore, peg pants stopping just short of his pointy, shiny black shoes, metal taps scraping restlessly on the floor. And, when asked, the underclassman couldn’t produce a hall pass.

‘What are you doing here, young man?’ Lass asked, giving Keitel a baleful look.

‘I’m waiting to see what our new principal looks like,’ came the reply.

Lass fixed Keitel with a no-nonsense look. ‘I’m your new principal.’

‘How do you do?’ the young man said, extending his hand seriously. ‘I’m Harvey Keitel. I’m your new student.’

He lost interest in the classroom, falling further and further behind, barely scraping by. Outgoing and funny with his friends, he became withdrawn and unresponsive in class. Thirty years later, visited by a high-school classmate backstage during the Broadway run of David Rabe’s Hurlyburly, Keitel found himself confronted by a woman who asked him, ‘Harvey, what happened to you? You were so quiet.’

‘Who’s really quiet?’ he replied.

None of the things that would prove to be his salvation later in life – literature, the arts – seemed available to Keitel and his friends. Movies? Sure, they went to westerns, horror films, gangster movies. The theater? Reading a book? Fuhgeddaboutit: ‘There was no involvement in the arts at all. Zero,’ Keitel said. ‘We were taught we could not be something different. They’d say, “How could I be anything but what my father was?” In Brighton Beach, I mainly tried to look tough and having a book under one’s arm doesn’t make you look tough.’

Nor was there anyone to take the young Keitel in hand and say, ‘I see potential in you. Let me help you.’ A young man desperately searching for a mentor, Keitel couldn’t look to his father for advice:

The important things to a man like my father were having food to eat and a roof over your head – with good cause, because he had mouths to feed for twenty years. I had trouble in high school. I was disoriented and I didn’t know who I was. I needed guidance and I didn’t get it. Here I was, so choked with internal conflict that I had a serious stuttering problem and there was nobody I could talk to. I had potential; my marks showed that. But there was nobody to say, ‘Hey, it’s alright to have these feelings and thoughts.’

What were my fears? Fear. Fear of us talking, fear of what’s going to happen later, fear of tomorrow, fear of death, fear of not succeeding.

In desperation, after his sophomore year he changed schools, moving from Lincoln in Brighton Beach to Alexander Hamilton High School in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant area. He did it, he said, ‘seeking another road. I wasn’t doing well at Lincoln and I thought maybe if I changed my physical circumstances, I would do better. I wanted to do better. So I went to vocational school.’

As a vocational school, Hamilton was hardly an academic hotbed. Keitel wasn’t interested in being channeled into a manual vocation that offered him the same life of tedium and stress he’d seen in his own father. He found the curriculum dull and unchallenging.

When he tried to re-enroll at Lincoln, however, officials there found a technicality to deny him admittance: ‘I was seventeen,’ Keitel said, ‘and the irresponsible idiot of a dean said I was too old.’ Rather than return to Hamilton, he chose the poolroom over the schoolroom. His chronic absenteeism eventually caught up with him near the end of his junior year:

I had a very good average but I was absent too many days. I just lost the desire to do anything. They called me down and told me they were going to throw me out. This history teacher went to bat for me. But he couldn’t do a thing about it. There was some law about truancy, and they put me out. The dean at the time was a jerk, because he didn’t pay attention to what was going on with his students’ lives – one student being me. To this day, it’s something that irks me.