In recollection, the shiny, self-pitying grandeur of Pink Floyd is among the uneasiest tokens of my teenage tastes. A year or two later I’d give myself to their paranoiac epic
The Wall
, memorizing and debating lyrics in the company of friends my own age. With my pals Joel and Donna I made a pilgrimage to the Nassau Coliseum to see Pink Floyd play the entire double album live from behind a fake wall, which was destroyed by a fake airplane at the show’s peak. Then we slumbered in a stoned fever as we rode home, heads lolled on one another’s shoulders in seats on the Long Island Rail Road. Yet Pink Floyd was at odds with the musical tastes I’d cultivated otherwise, those more along punk lines, and requiring Talking Heads– or Elvis Costello–style ironies to deflate the sort of hippie pieties which thrived unmistakably beneath Pink Floyd’s wounded rage.
Such self-conscious posturing (my own, I mean, not Elvis Costello’s) doesn’t stand a chance against the kind of helpless love I still feel if I play “Shine on You Crazy Diamond, Part I–V,” especially on headphones. My pleasure in the song is in more than the regression cued by my memory of Bob’s gentleness with a too-high child. I love the song for what it meant to me after I studied it too—after I learned the story of Pink Floyd’s fallen compatriot, Syd Barrett. They were a group that had lost their genius, their spiritual center, and had had to carry on. And, paradoxically, their masterpiece (for that was what I felt “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” to be) was achieved without his help, but in his honor. Syd Barrett wasn’t dead, but “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” was memorial art. It suggested that my own wish for a large life—my attempts, even, at greatness—might be compatible with the loss of my mother. I didn’t have to fall into ruin to exemplify the cost of losing someone as enormous as Judith Lethem, since Pink Floyd had flourished in Barrett’s wake. My surviving her death would be in no way Judith’s dishonor. I’d only owe her a great song.
Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980, momdead)
My father’s sometime-girlfriend Hannah and I went out to see the new Godard movie,
Sauve qui peut (la vie)
, or
Every Man for Himself
, at the Quad Theater on Thirteenth Street in Manhattan, on an evening when my father was out with another woman. The film had been widely reviewed as a return to form for Godard, who had for most of the seventies renounced the poetry of his sixties style in favor of Marxist agitprop (or anyway that was the received opinion). I’d been watching his sixties films at repertory houses, and loved the ones I (partly) understood:
Breathless
,
My Life to Live
,
A Woman Is a Woman
,
Band of Outsiders
,
Weekend
. This would be the first time I’d seen a new Godard film at the moment of its release. Hannah was a young painter, sharp and funny, as near my age as my father’s. I treasured my friendship with her, even at a time when my anger at my father for surviving my mother was at its very worst, and my treatment of him consisted largely of sullen avoidance.
I didn’t understand
Sauve qui peut (la vie)
. I’ve also never seen it again, so I can’t characterize it for you here. I only recall an undertone of political and sexual disappointment that was beyond me. No major shame in that, as Godard can mystify plenty of adults. I did sense the film’s beauty, the beauty of a pure cinematic voice that even in its pensiveness evoked grand, unnameable emotions. These days, I see that as Godard’s gift, sufficient unto itself: an eroticism of the intellectual life, against which not only the viewer’s suppositions but Godard’s own ideologies are finally helpless. At fifteen, though, I wasn’t at a point where I could trust art which baffled and enraptured me. I needed to feel I’d encompassed it. Perhaps if I’d gone to the movie alone I’d have kidded myself, but in Hannah’s company the incompleteness of my response was exposed to me.
We returned to my family’s home, an odd move given the situation. There we smoked pot together at my family’s kitchen table, a provocation (by both of us) to my absent father, but also an invocation (by me) of my dead mother. It dawned on me that I was being used, a little. Hannah was staking out my dad, seeing if he came home alone, or at all. But that was okay, because I was using Hannah to taunt my father, whether he knew it or not. I wanted to feel I was out on a date with Hannah. The flaw in my game was clear soon enough. As I tired, Hannah grew angry, and my insufficiency as a surrogate became annoying to us both. I wasn’t interested enough in this drama because it wasn’t about me, so I went to bed.
Something was quietly wrecked. Hannah generously treated me as an equal, so it wasn’t her fault that the evening had stripped away part of my disguise, both in terms of Godard and my father. From now on I’d have to go farther from home for my companions, that was the lesson. And
Sauve qui peut (la vie)
became a farewell to Jean-Luc Godard as one of my primary tokens of identification. He’d betrayed me by belonging more to the adults in the full auditorium at the Quad than he had to me as a teenager sitting in mostly empty repertory houses, alone. I quit trying to see all his movies. The sole exception was
Alphaville
, which, with its dystopian noir science-fiction plot, was precisely in my ballpark of satirical paranoia.
Alphaville
was unbudgeable, with Rod Serling’s
Twilight Zone
, the Talking Heads album
Fear of Music
, and Kafka, from my deep pantheon. The rest, though, was French to me. In fact, I wouldn’t again see a film of Godard’s at the moment of its release until I saw
Éloge de l’amour
at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, with Godard himself in the audience. We gave him a standing ovation. He looked as tired as someone who’d borne the freight of so many expectations for so many years probably ought to look.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1978–1986, mom dead)
In the years following my mother’s death, when I was fourteen, then fifteen, then sixteen, I forged a series of friendships with grown men, all of them teachers or artists or bohemians or seekers of one kind or another. There was the bon vivant Michael, whose bookshop I haunted until he imported me into his remarkable circle of friends. There was Paul, a Quaker/hippie/army-dropout, whose book of poetry I illustrated. There was Ian, my math teacher in high school, with whom I’d stalk the streets of Greenwich Village after school, engaged in deep talk of existentialist resistance to bourgeois life. More briefly, there was Rolando, a gay black painter and ballet dancer, who gave me a glimpse of New York’s homosexual demimonde while leaving me untouched; Mr. Newman, a refined young painter frustrated at being trapped teaching English in a high school for aspiring painters; Mr. Greenberg, my sensitive, bearish sculpture teacher, for whose pleasure I momentarily became a prodigy at marble carving; Steve, a British hippie and world traveler by bicycle, who for a time had been a boyfriend of my mother’s, with whom I would stay up all night inflamed by mystical, Gurdjieffian dialogues.
There may even have been others, but it would be a mistake to class any others with these principal three: Michael, Paul, and Ian—call them
the beards
. Each wore a beard, like my father. And it was their beards that made it unmistakable (to my eye) that my friendships were with adults and so that I must therefore be an adult myself, just as it was their beards and my lack of one that must have made it unmistakable (to other eyes) that a kid was hanging out with a grown-up.
My relationships with each of these three, Michael, Paul, and Ian, might have seemed similar to a witness, had there been one. With each of the three I talked about books and movies of the “outsider” variety, smoked pot, complained about the dullness of school and the limited perspective of my peers, and escaped the role of teenager in a house wracked by my mother’s death. To each of them, I suppose, I delivered the flattery of my reverence, nicely hidden inside the outlines of genuine friendship. For they were my real friends. No one of these three (nor any of the others) ever hinted at anything paternal in their feeling for me. I would have rejected it irritably, and anyway, they weren’t the type. Only in their twenties, Michael, Paul, and Ian were more like older brothers, but we’d never have invoked even that mild analogy. That pretense of equivalence was precious to me, as was the escape from anything to do with family.
For these outward similarities, the flavor of a day in the company of each of these three was violently dissimilar. Michael cultivated a misanthropic air, but drew people to him more compulsively than anyone I’ve yet known. Trained as an actor, he was an instinctive mimic and scene stealer. In the puppet shows that shared the space of his bookstore, Michael played the “human” character to the puppets: the giant in
Jack
and the Beanstalk
, the genie in
Aladdin
, the sorcerer in
The Sorcerer’s
Apprentice
. His extemporaneous asides in these roles were in the nature of the “adult” part of an entertainment for children, meant to keep parents from growing restive. Yet in rooms full of six- and seven-year-olds and no parents, they seemed aimed solely at me. When the sorcerer turned the apprentice invisible, the spell he spoke aloud would attenuate into lines from Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”: “You’re invisible now, you’ve got no secrets to conceal, you’re a complete unknown, so how does it feel to be on your own?” Michael taught me to delight in the erratic nature of human interaction from within a pose of exasperated worldliness. That he adored people as much as books helped keep me from making too firm a choice between the two, even as he became my idol as a reader and collector.
Paul was more problematic, in that he called to a side of me that remains underdeveloped to this day: the mystical. We even first met one another through my family’s involvement in Quakerism. This drab vestige of family connection—our parents had known each other—we strove to leave behind. Our sole use, those days, for our Quaker heritage, was the mysterious Quaker Cemetery in Prospect Park, a private plot grandfathered into the public land, the high gates to which only the Quakers had access. Paul and I got hold of the keys so that we could creep around and take drugs inside the cemetery, where we were fascinated by the chicken heads thrown in by local practitioners of Santeria or voodoo (we weren’t sure which). I also wanted to search for Montgomery Clift’s grave—Clift’s eccentric Quaker mother had had him buried there—but Paul wasn’t as interested as I was. He was bored by pop forms. For instance, he knew Philip K. Dick’s work, but found it uninteresting except for one novel,
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
. In that book Dick had, it seemed to Paul, almost accidentally rattled the doors of perception. Paul’s taste was for exoticism, secret knowledge, and he treated not only literature but both sex and drugs as paths to higher realms.
I savored Paul’s frank talk of experiences he’d had and I hadn’t, and tuned out what stumped me. His book of poetry and memoir, the pages of which I spent six months illustrating, typesetting, and laying-out with an X-acto knife, was similar to our conversation, a collision of things I could and couldn’t use. I liked that Paul was a “real” writer. His language was resplendent, but veered into the sort of muzziness that back then always had me guiltily skipping pages in John Fowles or Frank Herbert. I was more literal than Paul. When I brought the finished product of Paul’s book into Michael’s shop, to insist we display it on a front table, Michael complied, grudgingly. When he glanced inside its pages he spared just a raised eyebrow and slight smile for comment. Michael knew he could devastate his rival wordlessly, not by criticizing the book but by revealing his X-ray capacity to see in my eyes the diffidence I thought I’d hidden.
Ian called to something more atavistic. He earned his misanthropic posture by wholehearted fury and genuine isolation, ornamented brilliantly with provocations, conspiracy theories, and rococo sarcasm. His wild-man math classes were a legend in our high school—he’d drop the lesson and glower, or inform us we were fools to think doing well in math class meant anything in the larger scheme—but I was the kid who followed him home. We’d eat shark’s-fin soup at a Chinese-Cuban restaurant on Eighth Avenue, then visit a pool hall or sit on the stoop of a horse-betting hustler pal of his named Bobby.
Talented at whatever he touched, Ian’s enthusiasms fell on him like illnesses. He’d spend a month or two writing sonnets or carving stone or mastering the newest theories in particle physics, disdaining as futile what he accomplished—it looked to me—effortlessly. I couldn’t keep up, but found my place as a sounding board for both fevers of inspiration and rages of rejection. Fools were everywhere, games were rigged, and striving was pathetic. My challenge was to not point out how our friendship, or Ian’s encouragement of my artistic ambitions, or, for that matter, the laughter we shared watching Godard’s
Alphaville
at the Bleecker Street Cinema, expressed possibilities of connection that our daily orgy of nihilism denied. Batman might make room for a sidekick, but could Raskolnikov? (Two or three years later, when I dropped out of college, I dragged Ian along with me and another friend on a rambling drive to Boulder, Colorado. His wide-eyed awe at the sight of Kansas cornfields was poignant. He hadn’t been out of New York for more than five years.)
Why should a kid who’s lost his mother seem to be in search of a replacement father instead? Well, Michael, Paul, and Ian weren’t offering me sympathy, at least not a brand of it that cast me as the bereft child I partly was, but didn’t wish in any way to be. A grown woman might threaten to do that. A few of my father’s girlfriends had, in fact (not Hannah, but others). My sudden need at fourteen was to have evolved out of the primitive contexts of childhood and family, into some sophisticated version of adulthood that disdained bourgeois values. If Michael, Paul, and Ian had one thing in common it was their apparent disinterest in home or hearth. Their values reinforced my notions of a happy bohemian solitude, in which entanglements with women were a siren song of distraction.