Bitter Bronx (15 page)

Many years later, she saw that bewildering look in her father's eyes. It was the spring of '63, and Daddy lay dying of lung cancer. He had his own room at Mount Sinai. He was wearing silk pajamas, but he had the same sunken cheeks and wild patches of hair as the deranged old men at the nursing home in the Bronx. The silk pajamas couldn't save him. He went through some elaborate pantomime of pretending to write with a pen. He must have imagined he was still president of Russeks Fifth Avenue. She'd brought her paraphernalia to the hospital, had her cameras lashed to her neck. And she click-clicked the way she had done as a child in the Bronx, with the shutters of her own green eyes . . .

And now she was back in the Bronx, visiting with Eddie Carmel, a Jewish giant who was eight feet tall. Eddie longed to join a carnival, but he was much too ill. He suffered from scoliosis, and the Jewish giant had begun to shrink. He couldn't walk without a cane. And Dee was compelled by the sadness in his eyes. Dee was Eddie's accomplice. As a child she too had dreamt of running away to a circus or a carnival. She had felt like a freak on Central Park West, in that cave filled with furniture and cigarette smoke.

Even if he hadn't been ill, Eddie was much too smart to spend his days rotting in a carnival. He'd studied business administration at Baruch. Whenever Dee offered him a hint of one or two words, Eddie would construct a poem in his head.

“Deeyann,” he'd say, “I dare ya.”

And Dee would tempt him with some brain teaser. “No, I dare you, Mr. Eddie Carmel. I demand a poem on the spot with a cement mixer and a flowerpot.”

He'd laugh with that deep-throated laugh of his and recite in a voice that could have boomed back and forth between Manhattan and the Bronx.

Happy the flower, happy the pot

That can avoid all the mad fury

Of that fiend, the mixer of cement.

Eddie Carmel was born in Tel Aviv in 1936. He came from a family of rabbis.

His parents arrived in America when he was a little kid and settled in the Bronx. He wasn't much taller than any of his friends and classmates until he was a sophomore at Taft High School. He'd developed acromegaly, that curse of giants. But no one should have been surprised. His maternal grandfather had once been billed as the tallest rabbi in the world. By the time Ed was a senior, he couldn't sit in a classroom without occupying two chairs. At Baruch he took over the entire front of the class, and his instructors were trapped behind their desks. He couldn't even fit into his custom-made clothes. He grew all the time, like a merciless tree. And when he arrived at eight feet, he began to sprout in other directions; his jaw and forehead widened, his knuckles and his knees were like strange carbuncles.

She'd first met him around '58, when Eddie still dreamt of a normal life. He was selling mutual funds at an office close to Times Square. Normal life for Eddie included a desk that looked as long as an ocean liner; and he had to keep his great, lumbering shoes on a little table, because they couldn't fit behind the desk. Times Square had already become the mecca of freaks and misfits, with its penny arcades, its all-night movie houses, and Hubert's Dime Museum—that's where Dee had expected to stumble upon Ed, among sword swallowers and bearded ladies. But he wore a necktie behind his mammoth desk, a pitchman for mutual funds.

She crept all around him with her camera, while he sang to her like some local bard. He was the Jewish giant who protected kids in a neighborhood that could no longer protect itself. Gangs from the South Bronx would seize upon this tiny middle-class oasis, and there was Eddie, loping up and down the hills in his lumbering shoes, both David and Goliath.

But no matter how many times she clicked, she couldn't bring Ed out from under his mask of normalcy. He saw himself as some new-fangled squire. But he wasn't a squire. Customers came to him because of his outsize, not the advice he could give. And they stopped coming once his novelty began to wear off.

That's when she discovered him at the dime museum. Eddie Carmel had begun to moonlight as the World's Biggest Cowboy. He donned a Stetson and sat on some discarded king's throne. But she couldn't provoke Eddie with her camera, couldn't take him through the looking glass into some wonderland of his own. She caught nothing but his boredom and his big knuckles, even when she filmed him in the Bronx with his parents, who didn't seem to know what to make of their son.

He grew sick of moonlighting at dime museums and decided to conquer show business. He formed his own rock 'n' roll band, Frankenstein and the Brain Surgeons, even did a single, “The Happy Monster's Song,” and then he had a few bit parts in films. But he couldn't keep playing Frankenstein with a clubfoot and enormous, clopping shoes. He sank into a circus. He was in the sideshow at Ringling Bros., but you couldn't find him on the circus' main floor, among the lions, the clowns, and the trapeze artists; Eddie's home at Madison Square Garden was underground. You had to breathe sawdust and sweat in that fetid basement. And it had the same sting of urine as the Hospital and Home of the Daughters of Jacob. That's why Dee was drawn to this damp, dark world. But the home never had such a vast sea of faces. She clicked and clicked, with bolts of light that hurt people's eyes. Dee didn't really care. She was no longer a spy who hid from her own subjects. She was like a soldier on the attack. She relied more and more on her Mamiyaflex with an electronic flash that startled her subjects and would give them a haunted look. She was searching for shadows and ghosts, and for the shadow of herself.

But when she saw the Jewish giant on his platform, in a cartoonish cape, she couldn't bear to look into the deep sockets of his eyes. He was billed as the Tallest Man in America, but his back had already begun to curl. And he seemed about to totter. Children taunted the Jewish giant and stuck pins into his legs. And so Dee turned her electronic flash on them and attacked. The children scattered. But she didn't have the heart to seduce this battered Samson, to suck him into the whirlpool of her camera. She couldn't play Delilah with Eddie Carmel.

“Deeyann,” he said, “if I stay here I'm gonna die.”

Yet he did stay; the Jewish giant had nowhere else to go. He rarely traveled with Ringling Bros. He stood on his platform in the basement whenever the circus was in town. But he still lived at home with his parents in the Bronx. Eddie had learned to drive a Volkswagen by ripping out the front seat and sitting in the back. It was like his toy car. But his joints had grown too stiff for him to drive; he had to give up the Volkswagen. He loved the penny arcades, and sometimes he would wander with Dee through Times Square in his cowboy hat. And then he began inviting her home again. Dee felt like she was going on a date with the Jewish giant.

His parents were puzzled by this tiny woman who looked like Peter Pan in her cropped hair. They hadn't seen her in seven years. Her eyes were almost sunk as deep as her son's. Dee never felt comfortable in that cramped apartment. The tiny living room was cluttered with cloth; each chair had a cloth cover; the couch had a cloth of its own. The lampshades had plastic covers; there were sconces in the wall that seemed to sprout light bulbs like sinister flowers. The windows were covered with drapes; the carpet on the floor reminded Dee of dead grass. The ceiling had veins in it that could have been the mark of some invisible leak.

Eddie's parents would leave them milk and cookies and retire to another room. The mother's name was Miriam. She wore a housecoat on Dee's visits. There was nothing in her face that revealed the simplest clue of Eddie's fate, even though it was her father who had been the tallest rabbi in the world. She seemed bewildered around him. Dee preferred Eddie's dad, who wore a mustache and was quite dapper in his velvet coat. But no matter how long Dee remained with Ed, moving like a pint-sized panther as he collapsed onto the couch, she couldn't capture the Jewish giant within her viewfinder; she was the haunted ghost, and Eddie was outside whatever a ghost could govern.

She had session after session with him in the Bronx; he was the same man-mountain, spectacular and absent, removed from her own mountain range. She was drawn to him, but Eddie Carmel had been her one great failure. She'd gone across the country in a Greyhound, had won her second Guggenheim, had her picture in
Time
, and had been dubbed the photographer of freaks. She went around in black leather skirts and white sweaters. She was in love with a married man. Marvin was her muse and her mentor—he made her giggle like a girl. She missed having her periods. She was forty-six years old. She had other lovers; sometimes they beat her up. Both of Dee's daughters were away. She lived alone. She'd visited hermaphrodites in Harlem, could feel her ghost mingle with theirs. Whenever she had to photograph some rich couple for
Harper's Bazaar
, she'd make them pose for six hours, until she broke through their boredom and unmasked the horror in their eyes.

And then she moved to Westbeth, an artists' complex in the West Village, near the Hudson River docks. It was a labyrinth of buildings that had once belonged to Bell Laboratories; Westbeth reminded Dee of a paupers' prison. Most of the artists who lived there were practically paupers. But Dee had a duplex with a heartbreaking view of the Hudson. Other artists and writers would have killed to live where she lived. Her own neighbors at Westbeth were jealous of her view. But there were parties all the time. Marriages broke up at Westbeth. Children cruised the dark, endless halls in tricycles and nearly ran her down. The elevators stank of cat piss. Westbeth began to feel like a penal colony, even with its theaters and dance troupes.

She was recovering from hepatitis; her skin looked gray. She could no longer eat processed food. She survived on raw honey and steamed vegetables. Marvin, her comrade and married lover, was away while she moved into Westbeth, and Dee was all alone. She couldn't prowl the halls like some vampire. So she prowled the streets with her cameras and her little kits. She'd once used a paper bag as a purse, but she had no need of purses now. She'd occupy some street corner, remain there for half the night, search every face, click with that crazy camera inside her head. Then she'd ride the Fifth Avenue bus down to the Village, hover near her fellow passengers, beleaguer them with her cameras, blind them for an instant with her flash, and sometimes the driver would toss her out of the bus and leave her stranded. But Dee didn't mind. She was the waif with cropped hair who lived in a paupers' castle.

And that's when Eddie Carmel called. She hadn't photographed him in two or three years. Dee couldn't become his own magic mirror and break into him with her camera. Ed was like a figure out of some fairy tale, and he lived within its walls with that trauma of his, the deep disgrace of his outlandish size. Ed was the aristocrat, not Dee. She'd been born a princess; Daddy had left her a disappearing treasure of mink coats and a dead department store. And now she was the princess of nothing at all.

Eddie had been forced to leave the circus in 1969. He could no longer mount the platform in the basement of Madison Square Garden. He wasn't even much of a giant; he'd shrunk below seven feet. And how could the Jewish Goliath protect his streets from marauders? He couldn't run after the Jesters and the Fat Cats of Clay Avenue.

“Be cautious, Deeyann, on your ride to the Bronx. If you run into some bad people, tell them you know Eddie Carmel.”

But she ran into no one, into nothing but dust on the subway. She rode uptown on the D train, ceiling fans creaking over her head. She was always lost in the Bronx, no matter what line she took, no matter where she exited. She happened to be on a hill beside Daddy's hospital and home. She hadn't visited those demented women and men at the Daughters of Jacob in forty years. And it was remarkable how the walls of that dull red world reminded her of Westbeth. The corridors hadn't been so dark at the hospital and home, and the main traffic consisted of wheelchairs rather than tricycles. Dee remembered the baked apples on the radiator in some old couple's room, how she and Daddy had shared a baked apple the couple had offered them, how Daddy broke into the apple's flesh with a silver spoon he'd brought up to the Bronx. She grew dizzy from all that sweetness, as the apple bubbled on the radiator and filled half the hall with an intoxicating perfume. Daddy had been so kind to that couple. His own parents had come from Kiev, had eloped and run away to America. He seldom invited them to the San Remo, but perhaps he must have seen his father and mother in this old couple . . .

Dee began to cry. Was she mourning her father, or was it something else? She felt like Alice in a wonderland that was both familiar and remote. She marched deeper into the Bronx, strode across the Grand Concourse with her cameras and her bags. There was a little armada of beauty shops on the ground floors of apartment houses that could have belonged to some doll's version of Central Park West. She walked down a hill, crept under the shadows of the Jerome Avenue El, and climbed another hill. She landed on a little island called Kingsland Lane. And she could have walked out of a dream. There was the giant's house at the very edge of the island.

She climbed the stairs, which were like another hill. She was agitated when Eddie opened the door. He had stubble on his face. His hair seemed much curlier than it had ever been. His back had a noticeable bump on it. He was very frail and now had two canes. But he seemed concerned about Dee's condition, not his own.

“Deeyann,” he said, with a quiver in that deep echo chamber of his. “What happened to you? You're a bundle of bones.”

He was kind enough not to talk about her gray complexion. Dee's skin looked liked the paste she had used in kindergarten. Eddie's mother welcomed her with milk and cookies. And Dee was startled by the mother's own complexion. As Eddie unraveled, he resembled Miriam more and more. They had the same curly hair, the same big nose, the same freckles. Dee carried her own apple in a camera bag, but she drank the milk and munched on Miriam's cookie. Nothing had changed much in the flat. The furniture and the lamps were still sheathed in plastic and cloth. The veins had spread across the ceiling like some perverse hieroglyphic. The carpet was a little dirtier but still looked like dead grass.