Timebends (38 page)

From the beginning, the idea of writing a play was entwined with my very conception of myself. Play writing was an act of self-discovery from the start and would always be; it was a kind of license to say the unspeakable, and I would never write anything good that did not somehow make me blush. From the beginning, writing meant freedom, a spreading of wings, and once I got the first inkling that others were reached by what I wrote, an assumption arose that some kind of public business was happening inside me, that what perplexed or moved me must move others. It was a sort of blessing I invented for myself. Of course the time would come, as it had to, when the blessing seemed to have been withdrawn from me, but that was far down the road.

Working day and night with a few hours of exhausted sleep sprinkled through the week, I finished the play in five days and gave it to Jim to read. I was close to despair that he might make nothing of it, but I had never known such exhilaration—it was as though I had levitated and left the world below. Like my father in times of unresolvable stress, having handed over the manuscript, I fell sound asleep. I was awakened by laughter. It was coming from Jim's room. My stomach went hard with terror and hope.

Jim Doll was about six feet eight inches tall, as were his mother and father and brother, a family of giants bending over to pass through the doorways of their tiny nineteenth-century Midwest house. I was drawn to Jim, who was the first practical theatre man I had ever met. When he talked about them, the published plays I was reading lost some of their monumental inevitability and he led me to see their flaws and stumbles. He was also the first homosexual I had known, and his suffering—at that time and in the Middle West besides—created a kind of kinship of misfits. He had
a vast acquaintance with the European playwrights and pointed me toward their works, especially Chekhov, whom he worshiped.

Finally his door opened, and he came across the corridor into my room and handed me the manuscript. Aesthetic pleasure makes people vulnerable, and Jim's long, bony face was like a child's now, despite a smile made crooked by his forcing down the left side of his upper lip to cover missing incisors, a not uncommon condition in those hard times. “It's a play, all right. It really is!” He laughed with a naiveté I had not seen in him before. “What's surprising is how the action flows and draws everything into it instead of chasing after its meanings. I think it's the best student play I've ever read.” Something like love shone in his face, something, incredibly enough, like gratitude.

Outside, Ann Arbor was empty, still in the spell of spring vacation. I wanted to walk in the night, but it was impossible to keep from trotting. My thighs were as hard and strong as iron bars. I ran uphill to the deserted center of town, across the Law Quadrangle and down North University, my head in the stars. I had made Jim laugh and look at me as he never had before. The magical force of making marks on a piece of paper and reaching into another human being, making him see what I had seen and feel my feelings—I had made a new shadow on the earth.

And if I should win a Hopwood, imagine! Two hundred and fifty dollars for one week's work! I was still accustomed to thinking like a laborer: it had taken me two years to save up the five hundred dollars to come to Michigan, two years on the subway morning and night, living through the summer heat and the freezing cold in that auto parts warehouse.

The Chadick-Delamater warehouse, on Sixty-third Street and Tenth Avenue, where the Metropolitan Opera House now stands, was my entry into the big world beyond home and school. It was the largest wholesale auto parts warehouse east of the Mississippi, an old firm that sold to retail parts stores and garages all over the Eastern seaboard. Stashed away in its five floors of bins and shelves were parts for all the latest models, as well as some, their records long vanished, that fit cars and trucks built by forgotten manufacturers long before the First War.

Joe Shapse, a schoolmate at Lincoln High, was the son of a parts retailer whose shop, just at the end of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge in Long Island City, repaired the gas company's trucks, among
others, and was a good customer of Chadick-Delamater. I had driven Sam Shapse's delivery truck for a few months after graduation, making many pickups of parts from Chadick, and had come to understand something about the business, although I managed to get myself lost in Long Island City several times a day and was not in general Sam's greatest find as a truck driver. The summer of 1932 was probably the lowest point of the Depression, and Sam's business had almost come to a complete halt. It was all very simple, nobody had any money. What would be the last Republican administration for twenty years was at its gasping end, without ideas, and for us at the bottom, without even the rhetoric of hope. My memories of that year especially, as I moved the truck through the streets, back and forth across the bridges, up into the Bronx and out to Brooklyn, were of a city under a spell, being slowly covered with dust, block after block sprouting new For Rent signs on the dirty windows of long-established and now abandoned stores. That was the year of the breadlines, too, of able-bodied men standing six and eight abreast along some warehouse wall waiting to be handed a bowl of soup or a piece of bread by one or another improvised city agency, the Salvation Army, or a church.

People then had a way of looking movingly at one another on the streets, there always seemed to be a kind of question in their eyes—“Are you making it? What are you doing that I could do? Are you in? How can I get in? When does this end?” Only in that sense were people more unguarded with each other, especially in working-class neighborhoods like Long Island City, for there was ferocity, too. We were all on a ship that had run aground and were walking around on the deck staring out at a horizon that every morning was exactly the same. And that was when Sam had to let me go. He was a small man with an easygoing temperament, a Hoover supporter and lifelong Republican who had given up trying to justify his president. Like a lot of other people in 1932, he simply stopped talking about politics—it was all too baffling, an epidemic of rolling catastrophes that no one could stop.

So I was back hanging around the house again, despairingly scanning the few help-wanted ads in the
Times
each morning. In those days it was routine for an ad to specify “White” or “Gentile” or sometimes “Chr.” And the eye soon trained itself to zip down a column and to stop only at the ads with no such warning—for that is what it was to me, a warning to stay away. It was a time when to be a Jew was to be a little bit black too; the two groups still understood one another. There were even ads specifying “Protestant”
and, very rarely, “Cath. firm,” as though the city consisted of clans terrified of each other's impurities. My disdain for such clannishness probably helped move me later to marry a gentile girl.

One morning I was excited to see an ad with no warning symbols calling for a stock clerk at fifteen dollars a week in an auto parts warehouse in Manhattan. The phone number and address seemed familiar. It was Chadick-Delamater. I instantly called Sam Shapse to ask permission to use him as a reference, and he of course agreed. “But I want you to be sure to let me know what they tell you when you apply.” I had no idea what lay behind his instruction.

I recognized Wesley Moulter, the manager, from my frequent pickups there in the past. I sat beside his desk all scrubbed and wearing my one tie, feet flat on the floor to conceal the hole in my shoe sole, and told him about my experience working for Shapse. Moulter at thirty was in charge of the whole place, at a salary of thirty-six dollars a week. As a sign of his executive status he wore a striped tie, had his collar buttoned, and rolled his sleeves neatly up two turns to mid-forearm; the ordinary help rolled their sleeves up above the elbow. A serious fellow but not cheerless, he had dense, tightly curled reddish hair and a square flat face and a thick neck. His desk was set beside a window overlooking the street, a few feet from where the bookkeepers, three women and one man, bent to their tasks. The walls of this white-collar area were bare cement block, and my eye as I talked with Moulter detected some daylight in the mortar joints. He gave me five minutes, nodded once or twice, took my phone number, and said he would let me know.

I did nothing all next day but hang around near the phone in our dining room, which, like anything one stares at long enough, began to become animate, the living spirit of a mockingly obdurate silence. My desire for the job spread over me like an itch that I was trying to forget. The fifteen-dollar salary was not only three more than the going rate for a “boy” but proof of how high-class a firm Chadick was. And indeed from my vantage point as a truck driver it had always had a certain panache, handling the best brands—Bear ignitions, Timken roller bearings, Detroit axles, Brown and Lipe transmissions, Packard-Lackard ignition wires, Prestone antifreeze, Gates gaskets and radiator hoses, Perfect Circle piston rings and wrist pins—these were heavy names that bespoke grave and established firms solid as rock. On entering Chadick, one walked on a concrete floor unlike the splintery floors in other auto warehouses. The place was always swept and had a banklike decorum,
as in the offices of Brooklyn Union Gas, where we would go to pay our monthly bills. Obviously they were offering fifteen dollars instead of twelve because they expected more from whomever they hired, and I, standing at the starting line, was crouched and ready to go in this, the beginning of my eighteenth year, but the phone did not ring.

As I sobered up, the inevitable reason for that silence was plain, but it did not particularly dishearten me, I think; such exclusion was not yet given the name of discrimination and was merely the natural order of things. It simply meant that I would have to probe for another way into the American world.

That evening Sam Shapse phoned to ask if I had been hired, and when I told him I hadn't, he said, “You are going to have that job. You know more about the business than any boy they're likely to find. It's because you're Jewish. But most of their customers are Jews, and I am going to call them first thing in the morning. You get ready to go down there, you hear?”

Moulter called in the middle of the next morning and gave me the good news, and I was on the trolley rocketing down Gravesend Avenue to the subway stop at Church and then up to Times Square and a change to the local train to Sixty-sixth Street, then a short trot over to Sixty-third and up the steel stairs into that quiet, cool establishment. Except for Moulter and one other, they were all Irish, all of them to a man and woman, and as I began to move among them I practically had to stand still to be sniffed, for there had never been one of my kind in this pen before.

The three women bookkeepers were the first to relent; one of them, Dora, found me working behind a pile of axles. A spinster (as thin and with the same nearly transparent wrists as the Baroness Blixen, with whom, a quarter-century on, I would spend an afternoon), Dora whispered through her buck teeth and what I got to know as the perpetual cold in her nose that I would like it here, that it was an awfully nice place to work. I was grateful to her for that, but I realized that my job of locating parts in five stories of bins to fill the orders impaled on a spike on the desk of the sixty-five-year-old packing boss, Gus—he had the same mustache as Kaiser Wilhelm and fierce white eyebrows and a belly that looked as solid as a medicine ball—the job would only be easy once I knew where the stock was. Such welcome as I had been given soon wore thin as the other workers grew tired of being asked where I should look for various items. So at quarter past five, when everyone had left, I started at the end of one aisle of storage bins, climbed the
rolling ladder, and peered into each one to see what lay inside. Soon I heard heel taps on the concrete floor and, looking down, saw Wesley Moulter making his way around the foot of my ladder toward the bathroom, a linen towel over his wrist. I nodded a greeting to him, about to explain my no doubt praiseworthy purpose in staying late, but before I could speak he grinned up at me with a cool, untroubled gaze and said, “Figuring on owning the place?” and continued on down the aisle to the toilet.

The coldness in my belly did not warm up until I was halfway back to Brooklyn. Maybe I shouldn't try to buck the dislike I now realized must be the general feeling for me there. Dora's little visit, it occurred to me, had been meant to show me that she was not like the others, but what a frail ally! I said nothing to the family at dinner; there was no point spoiling their relief at my landing a job. Kermit, always romantic about business, thought I had taken a fabulous step forward in being employed by such a fine company. Of course we all knew that without Sam Shapse's intervention I would not have been hired, but the psychological principle of reality denial was already doing its work. I desperately wanted the Chadick job and feared that a season of idleness would weaken me, as it was doing to so many guys in the neighborhood who had no money to continue in school, and the objective need created the necessary attitude—I denied that Wesley Moulter, my boss, hated my presence, and when I came in to work next morning I cheerfully nodded to anyone who looked like a candidate for a friendly hello, and went around the place energetically filling orders. In the quiet periods, when there were no orders to fill and men stood around the packing table in the back of the loft, I quickly learned how to stand on the sidelines, looking and listening and uncharacteristically keeping my young mouth shut rather than seeming to ask for their friendship or even toleration.

But in a few weeks I was trading inanities just like the rest of them. They had caught on that I was really no smarter than they were, dumber in some ways, in fact; for the fear of the Jew is first of all the fear of his intelligence, which is mysterious and devilish and can embarrass and ensnare the unwary. It is the fear, too, of people who appear not to live by one's own rules, a mirror image of the Jew's estimate of the gentile. I would learn at Chadick's how to hold the hand of a man whose wife had almost lost her newborn baby's life in their unheated Weehawken flat the night before; he was so distressed—hours afterward, when he had time to realize what had nearly happened—that he suddenly began to shake, his
face looking split as if by a stroke. This was Huey, a large blond lisping stock clerk of twenty-eight who even normally was in a suppressed state of desperation from trying to feed his four children on eighteen dollars a week.