Boys of Life Read online

  It took forever, what with stopping every flight up: but in that building of hers, even that could be interesting. On one floor, this little black kid came tearing toward us down the hall. Then all of a sudden he just fell down. He didn’t make a noise, he just fell down, and when I looked I saw why he fell down—he was wearing two left shoes, both of them about five sizes too big.

  Verbena leaned with her weight against the metal door at the top of the stairs—it gave way into bright sunlight, and there we were on the roof. Somebody else was already up there.

  “T.J.” Verbena called to this tall black guy—really tall, like seven feet. He was standing in front of a tar-papered shed. On the roof of the shed were about a hundred pigeons, all standing there crowded together.

  T.J. was cooing at them and they were cooing back, all of them cocking their heads in his direction while he talked pigeon talk to them.

  “Hey,” he said to us. “Ya’ll just in time to see us slap off.”

  “What?” I said.

  He picked up this bamboo pole with a red flag on the end of it and waved it through the air. It was like this explosion—a hundred pigeons all flying up in the air at the same time.

  It was a slap off all right.

  T.J. jumped up on the roof of the shed where the pigeons had been and started making these sharp cries, not the soft ones he was doing before—and waving his flag around in these 8 shapes. The birds went up and up—it was great—and then they started hooking around in 8s just like T.J. was making with his flag. I never saw anything like it. They went up as far as you could see, almost till they were out of sight. There was a helicopter flying over, and they were up even farther than it. T.J. stopped waving his flag and jumped down off the shed.

  It must’ve been some kind of signal. All those birds came spiraling back down, like water funneling down a drain, like that shed was the drain and they were funneling right to it. In half a minute it was like they’d never been up there in the sky at all—they came in through a trap door and were sitting there peacefully in the shed, cooing away.

  My heart was beating like no tomorrow.

  “That was a fine spay,” T.J. said. “Don’t you think so?”

  “It was a fine one,” Verbena told him.

  “That was great,” I said. “That was the most amazing thing.”

  “That was nothing. You just wait. King Kong’s up today.”

  “King Kong?”

  “This guy who lofts birds about five blocks over. He’s got such a huge flock, I call him King Kong. But I’m ripping away at him. I got six rippers this past month.”

  “I’m totally in the dark,” I said.

  I thought to myself, what am I doing standing here on this roof in the middle of New York with two black people and a hundred pigeons? What would Ted say to that, or anybody back in Owen? Not that I was ashamed to be hanging around with black people—I just couldn’t get used to the thought of it. I told myself these black people weren’t like the ones in Owen. Though maybe they were. I’d never hung around with any of the blacks in Owen.

  Just then T.J. gave a shout, and Verbena did too—I looked to see what it was, but couldn’t see a thing.

  “Over there,” Verbena pointed.

  “What?” I shouted. The two of them were so excited, I didn’t want to miss whatever it was I was supposed to be seeing. With a big whoosh, all T.J.’s pigeons lifted off the roof into the sky. The instant they did that, I saw what it was Verbena was pointing to. From a roof way off in the distance, this other flock of pigeons had taken off. They went rising up in a black cloud, changing shape all the time like a soap bubble does when it floats, sometimes drawing way out and other times shrinking close back into itself.

  “King Kong,” T.J. said. The two flocks of pigeons moved closer together in the air, till they were on top of one another and then they were all swirling together like one big flock. T.J. was busy throwing corn down on the roof. The two pigeon flocks swung in and out of each other, sometimes two flocks, sometimes only one. We watched them like that for a while, making patterns in the sky, changing direction quick as a finger-snap, whipping back and forth—the way you see sheets of rain whip across a lake in a windstorm. Then T.J. started swinging the corn bucket over his head and making pigeon noises like I’d seen him doing earlier.

  The flock that’d been one flock for several minutes all of a sudden was two again, with one of the flocks funneling back down to the roof where we were. They hit the roof of the shed like thunder and then immediately jumped down onto the roof where we were and started pecking away at that corn. All except one bird that stayed on the roof.

  “Shh,” T.J. said when I was opening my mouth to say something. “Just watch.”

  We all moved away, behind a roof divider. They were watching the one single bird that was on the roof of the shed. “It’s King Kong’s all right,” T.J. was telling Verbena.

  “How can you tell?” I whispered.

  “Got a red band on his foot there. See my birds? They got yellow bands. Oh, he’s a beauty, isn’t he? What I call a blue splash—see all that blue color in his neck.” As far as I could see, it was just a pigeon.

  “There’re kinds of pigeons?” I asked.

  “Lots,” he said. “You can tell by the colors. There’s blue splashes, dun nuns, beardeds, lots of kinds.”

  The pigeons on the ground had filled up on corn, and now they were going one by one through the trap door into their cage. Once T.J.’d said that about the colors, I could see how each one was different. Their necks were all shimmering in the sun—if they hadn’t been pigeons they’d have been gorgeous.

  I’d never thought to look at pigeons before.

  All the birds were inside but the one on the roof. It was looking around but it wouldn’t come down.

  “Shy bird,” Verbena said. “Maybe it’s thirsty.”

  T.J. went over and got the water pan and stuck it right inside the trap door. All the time he was talking pigeon talk to that bird, trying to coax it, but the bird wouldn’t talk back. It just kept eyeing him, like it was the smart one and T.J. the odd bird here.

  For ten minutes T.J. kept up his bird talk. Finally the bird hopped down. Looking around all the time, he waddled over to where the water was. He looked around, one last time, and stuck his head in to get the water—the instant he did that, wham, T.J. had the trap door shut and the new bird was inside.

  “You got him,” I said.

  Meanwhile T.J. had let himself into the coop and was looking around at his birds. “King Kong’s done ripped three of mine,” he said. “Damn, that nigger’s too good.”

  I understood that the game had been to steal each other’s birds away.

  “Oh well,” T.J. was saying. “This time last year I couldn’t rip a single one of his birds.”

  “You’ll be T.J. Ripper,” Verbena told him, “before you know it.”

  T.J. mucked around with his birds some more, separating them out into cages that were inside the coop. When he was done, we went back downstairs to Verbena’s apartment.

  “How do you stand it in here, girl?” he asked. The instant we walked in he took off his shirt, and I did the same. After the cold air of the roof, it was stifling.

  She opened a bottle of Colt .45 for each of us—those big bottles we used to call nigger bottles back in Owen.

  “I was raised in Alabama,” Verbena said. “I’m used to heat. Got it in my bones. It’s these winters that kill me. Shy girl, you want to roll some of that weed, you go on ahead.”

  “I don’t smoke,” I told her, “but thanks.”

  “That’s good,” T.J. said. “Smoking that stuff’ll kill you. There’s so much shit you can put inside your body.” He shook his head.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Verbena told me. “He’s a old dope hog talking.”

  “Used to be,” T.J. said. “Used to be. But I quit. I quit putting any of that stuff inside me.”

  “Quit shooting dope and took up flying pigeon
s,” Verbena said. She was walking around the room with her bottle of Colt .45 in one hand and a plant mister in the other. She was giving those pot plants a good dousing.

  “Tony here,” she said to T.J., “has gone and made a movie with Carlos.”

  “That so?” T.J. studied me. “Carlos ain’t too much in my book.”

  “Well, he is in mine,” I said.

  T.J. kept studying me. He nodded his head. “Yeah,” he said, “I bet he is. Keep your eyes open is all I can say.” And he squinted at me, like he had trouble seeing who I was.

  “I could tell you something about Carlos,” I said, “that’d totally change your mind.”

  “So go on ahead, mystery man,” said Verbena. “Tell us something about Carlos that’ll change our mind.” I could see she thought it was going to be amusing to hear something about Carlos she’d never heard before. She took a swig and went on misting the plants.

  For a second I was blank—it’d seemed so totally clear, what I had to say about Carlos. How it had to do with everything—the pigeons on the roof, and T.J. and Verbena. Everything that’d gone on in the last hour. It was like I’d seen it out of the corner of my eye for a second, and now it was gone.

  But then I saw it again, and I launched in. “I had this friend Wallace,” I said, “back in Kentucky. He’d come round, we’d spend time together. Down the road from where I lived there was this old black man. He lived in a total shack. Heaps of garbage out in front of it—he used to pay people to dump their trash in his yard and then he’d go through it, find what he could use or sell. It always pissed Wallace off when we drove by, to see all that trash out there.”

  T.J. was still studying me, and Verbena’d stopped misting the plants and was just standing there. But all the water drops on the leaves were catching the light—they were glistening.

  “I have to tell this story,” I said. “If I don’t tell it, then I can’t be here. I mean, right here in this room. Up on your roof. Whatever. So let me tell it, okay?”

  They were both looking very serious.

  “That old black man had this mangy hunting dog he used to keep tied up in the yard. Thin—you could see its ribs sticking out. Well, one day Wallace and me were doing some serious drinking—we’d gone out hunting, but we didn’t bag anything. It was drizzling all morning, and we’d been drinking to keep warm out in the woods.

  “Wallace was this kind of crazy guy, but I liked him. We were driving by that old man’s shack, and the dog was out front where he usually was. I don’t know why, but Wallace stopped the pickup there in the front yard, and the dog started barking like it always did when anybody came around. The dog started barking and Wallace started yelling Shut up! at the dog. It was very funny. The two of them going at it, Wallace yelling Shut up! over and over, and the dog keeping up with its bark. I don’t know why—it made Wallace madder and madder, the more he yelled and the more the dog barked. I was laughing, I thought it was so funny. Then Wallace said, I’m gonna get that damn dog. He took one of the rifles off the rack, yelling Nigger dog, nigger dog, while he was aiming out the truck cab. I thought it was this great joke, and I was laughing and laughing till all at once he pulled the trigger.

  “That dog was in the middle of a bark—it was like you just sliced through its bark with a knife. But it wasn’t dead. It was lying on the ground making this whine that was terrible to hear. Nigger dog, Wallace kept yelling, but now he was the one who was laughing, this crazy scared laugh that was like hiccups. I think he was totally freaked at what he’d gone and done.

  “He threw the truck in gear and we drove forward, right over that dog. You could feel the truck go over its body, like hitting a speed bump.”

  T.J. and Verbena were looking at me. They didn’t say anything.

  “I had to tell you that story,” I told them. Sweat was pouring off me, these cold drops on my ribs. It was seeing those birds on the roof—how they broke loose into the air like they did. How they came funneling back home to T.J.

  “You were going to tell us some story about Carlos,” Verbena reminded me.

  “I know,” I said. “I just did. Carlos lifted me out of all that.”

  I WANT TO TALK MORE ABOUT SETH, HOW HE AND Carlos would sit up for hours arguing about movies and other directors and politics and the best way to shoot a particular scene. They never seemed to agree about anything, which was maybe why they worked so well together. At the collective where they edited the movies, they’d both be hard at work, concentrating on their little bits of film and talking nonstop at each other, arguing with Seth yelling all the time at whatever Carlos would have to say—and neither one of them ever looking up from their work. They’d just yell at each other and keep on concentrating on sewing their little pieces of film together.

  I think Seth’s secret was that he was angry all the time—this scary powerful anger that kept him going, and that would’ve ripped him apart, if it hadn’t been for the dope that kept it just barely under control. For anger to rise to the surface over all the dope he smoked to keep it down—that was some anger that had to come from deep down and be incredibly powerful. I always thought of Seth as having this grizzly bear locked inside his body. Sometimes I’d think how that big angry bear was trying to bust out of Seth’s human skin to get at the world with its teeth and claws. And if you looked at him the right way when he was angry about something, you could swear you saw that bear coming right on through.

  Lots of things made him angry—more things than I even knew were going on out there. Things in foreign countries like El Salvador and Nicaragua I’d never thought about before, fundamentalist preachers, the mayor of New York, fishermen from Japan and Iceland who were killing whales, a bunch of people called the Kurds who lived in Turkey and were getting ripped to shreds by the army.

  When he got going, Seth could be as talkative about what was going on in the world in 1980 as Sammy was about the ghetto in Lodz and everything that happened back then. The only difference was, Sammy’d come to terms with a lot of terrible stuff a long time ago, and that freed him up in some way. But Seth was caught right in the middle of it. He hadn’t seen his way clear of anything yet, and it all hurt him a lot. Every day, it hurt him, and he was angry about it.

  I guess I’d also have to say, lots of times he was angry with me too. I could never do things right for him—I was this snot-nosed kid Carlos had picked up somewhere, and everybody in The Company knew they were going to have to put up with me until Carlos came to his senses and dumped me. On good days, I think Seth thought about me about as much as he’d have thought about some lamppost Carlos had told him to train his camera on.

  But then every once in a while this other thing happened between us. Some kind of tenderness, I guess is what it was—the kind only somebody who gets really angry can give you. The kind Carlos knew about too, in a different way. It never lasted very long, a few seconds or a minute, and after it happened I was never completely sure it’d happened—but it happened enough that, looking back on it now, I remember it, and I remember how it was important to me at the time.

  The first real talk I ever had with Seth was one day in the collective. Carlos had gone out to do some errand, and the lady who was doing the movie about the deaf children singing wasn’t there—she got depressed for weeks on end and couldn’t work—so it was just the two of us. Seth was handling a strip of film, and he put it in the viewer.

  “Here,” he said. “Look at this.”

  I looked through the viewfinder and there I was, pretending I was dancing with this old floor lamp—I’d found it in a pile of junk somebody’d set out on the sidewalk, and I was just spoofing around. We were in between scenes. I never knew Seth had caught me with that. I’d been doing it just for myself.

  “Recognize it?” he asked.

  “I didn’t know you were filming me. You sneak.”

  “What do you think of it?”

  I shrugged. “Well, if you can’t get a date,” I said.

  “Look at it
again,” he told me, so I played it back through.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Well,” I said.

  “Don’t you see, it’s fabulous?”

  “It is?”

  He took the film out of the viewer and held it up. “It’s terrific. And you know what? It’s only you and me who’s seen it. Carlos hasn’t seen it. He’d give anything for a scene like this. It’s exactly what he needs—and he has it and doesn’t even know it yet.”

  There was white dandruff all down the front of the black turtleneck sweater he was wearing—if you ask me, I think he wore black as some kind of defiance.

  “We could burn this,” he said. “There’s no record. Nobody’ll ever know you made poetry by dancing with a floor lamp on Avenue C one winter morning in nineteen eighty. That could all just disappear. What do you say?”

  “What’re you getting at?” I didn’t exactly follow Seth a lot of the time.

  It was funny—I hadn’t even remembered that little dance. If he hadn’t got it on film, it would already be gone.

  “Keep it,” I said.

  “Oh—definitely keep it,” said Seth. “Definitely. And even you didn’t know what you were doing, did you?”

  “I never do,” I told him.

  “Let me tell you a secret,” he said. “Nobody ever does. But the camera knows. That’s the real secret—the camera always knows. That’s why we invented the camera—so it would know exactly what we were up to, even if we didn’t. Not just the main moments, the big picture—but the in-betweens. All that little stuff. Don’t ever forget that, especially when you’re around me.”

  It was one of those times when Seth would launch into something, and before I knew it he’d be sounding angry, and I didn’t know why. I was just baffled.

  I think Seth kept wanting to have completely dropped out of the world—he wanted not to care about anything except making movies, but the trouble was, he couldn’t. He’d been through too many things, done too much stuff—civil rights stuff and antiwar stuff all through the sixties—and he kept getting angry about all those things. I think he smoked all his dope to keep things from making him angry but it didn’t work. Before you knew it something else would come along and he’d start to care about that too—he’d get angry about all the ways it got fucked up. And I guess that caring somehow, now and then, included me. I think Seth made up his mind at some point—it was some way of staying alive with all his anger—that the one thing he had to do with his life was be Carlos’s eyes. Why he ever decided that I don’t know, but then why did any of us ever decide to do whatever it was we decided to do with Carlos? I don’t have any answer. I’ve spent an awful lot of time thinking about it, and I just don’t have any answer. I mean—why Seth or Sammy or Netta or Verbena didn’t get the hell out any number of times before they actually did, I just don’t know. I guess it’s what made Carlos some kind of genius: keeping all those people together, and keeping them together through the kind of weird stuff they were doing, especially toward the end, when anybody else would’ve lost them in a week.