The Reenactments: A Memoir Page 3

  THIS past summer, head to head with my three-year-old daughter on the grass, staring into the blue, she asked me where the sky started. It comes out of us when we breathe, I told her. Then we breathe it back inside us. Now, when I lie with her in her bedroom, before she falls into sleep, she opens her eyes wide in the dim light and points to the ceiling: Do you see that? she asks. That baby bear coming out of its cave? Amazing, I say, the ceiling shadowy white above us. Where is the bear going? I ask. She’s going to find her mother, she tells me. O, I say. I’m making that with my eyes, she says. I have magic eyes.

  FOUR

  CONSIDER the cattle, Nietzsche writes, grazing as they pass you by. The animal is seemingly happy, or at least content, to stand in a field all day, tearing at the grass. To understand this, to feel what they feel, we take the longhorn (or the emu, or the Brahmin), empty him out, stuff him with sawdust, and put him in a glass box. And yes (lord help me), if I stand before this corpse, with its black glass eye, if I stand in meditative awareness, I can absorb some of its elusive happiness. But the question remains—wouldn’t I get more out of standing in awe before a living thing? I worry that this is what we are doing by making this film, that we are attempting to contain the world, to hold it, to understand it. Everything so uncertain now (was it ever not?)—oceans rising, ice caps melting, species vanishing. Yet at this moment, miles to the north, a polar bear is standing over a hole in the ice, waiting for a seal to emerge. He covers his black nose with his own paw, seemingly aware (really?) that his nose is the only thing that makes him visible. Nietzsche didn’t know this, he couldn’t have, it hadn’t yet been observed, that even polar bears, like us, can act on some level of self-awareness.

  COLLECTIVE memory is the term used to describe those memories that are shared by groups. Neurobiologists seem more comfortable calling this concept memes (rhymes with genes), a word coined by Richard Dawkins. If your group has all watched a particular film, say, then there will be a collective memory of that film. Walter Benjamin, on the idea of collective memory, offers this:

  It is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the events is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.

  THIS is what I remember: De Niro, at the beginning of The Godfather, Part II, moves catlike across the rooftops of Little Italy as a parade winds its way through the streets below. He is tracking the reigning godfather (Don Fanucci—I had to look up his name), who, in his long white coat and white hat, walks alongside the parade. De Niro enters a building through a rooftop door, takes a gun out from his belt, and wraps his hand in a white towel. The towel, we all know, is to silence the blast. As he waits in the shadows he practices aiming at the empty door. He waits. We hear Fanucci’s footsteps before we see him, we see his white hat rising up from the stairwell, and then he is at his door, looking for the key. De Niro calls out softly, Fanucci turns—is that how it happens, or does Fanucci just sense his presence? The first bullet ignites the towel, it pops into flame, De Niro doesn’t seem to notice at first, focused, as we are, on the shock on Fanucci’s face as he falls back into his apartment. Then, as an afterthought, De Niro shakes his burning hand—the towel unwraps, the flame goes out.

  I always forget what I was going to say. I forgot that De Niro unscrews the lightbulb in the hallway, in order to conceal himself. I forgot that Fanucci, as he stands before his door searching for his key, taps the bulb, and it flickers on, revealing De Niro in the shadows behind him. I forgot that this scene was the echo of another scene in a film by . . . is it Bertolucci (The Conformist?)? How did I forget all this? Damasio again:

  The images in the consciousness narrative flow like shadows along with the images of the object for which they are providing an unwitting, unsolicited comment. To come back to the metaphor of movie-in-the-brain, they are within the movie. There is no external spectator.

  According to Damasio, certain objects get imprinted upon the neural maps that constitute what we call our minds—whatever we took in, early on, in childlike wonder, has now become part of our inner subconscious lives. The act of attention has elevated certain images for each of us, so that now we each carry around inside us our own closed image system (I remember the burning hand, but I forget the lightbulb). Was Don Fanucci wearing a white hat or a black hat, I don’t remember. I remember that after he shoots him, De Niro climbs back up to the roof, breaks the gun into little pieces, and drops the pieces down not one, but several, chimneys.

  I remember the towel, how it burst into flame.

  I remember the gun.

  I remember how he made it disappear.

  (2011) Before filming began, in those few weeks when it was still possible for the whole project to fall apart (again), if someone asked me how it was going, I’d show her the fifty-seven-second clip of De Niro walking in the snow. I wouldn’t tell her what it was, I’d cue it up and hand her my phone and let her watch it. I did this a few times before I realized it really says nothing—the image is so grainy, so jangled, so out of focus, that it could simply be a stretch of winter sidewalk nearly anywhere. I could be making it all up. Is that De Niro on the bike? a few have asked, and so I’ve taken to pausing it on the one I call De Niro (look, his Taxi Driver face) but, really, it could be anyone. I felt, at times, a little pathetic, a little desperate (really, De Niro is playing my father). The thing is, you can project nearly anything onto these fifty-seven seconds, so I began to tell myself that this pleased me, and that this is the ultimate purpose of why we’re here—to create a scrim that others can project onto, so they can actively participate in trying to make meaning out of this, out of everything. . . .

  FIVE

  (2006) A few months after our initial meeting at Ammo, Paul calls saying he wants to meet me in Boston, to visit both my father and the shelter (Pine Street) that my father stayed in, off and on, the years he was homeless. The same shelter I’d been working in for three years when he came to our door. Paul has started mapping out the book, and he needs to fill in some details. I fly in from Texas, he flies in from Los Angeles, and we meet at a Dunkin’ Donuts around the corner from my father’s apartment, the place he moved into from the streets, set up by someone I’d worked with at Pine Street. It’s bitter cold, neither Paul nor I are adequately dressed—January, in Boston, and both of us are wearing thin jackets. I’ve set up the visit to Pine Street, but it’s iffy that we will actually find my father. He doesn’t have a phone, and he often spends his days wandering the neighborhood. If you saw him, sitting on a bench, talking to himself, a Dunkin’ Donuts cup beside him, you might think he was still homeless. I’ve made this trip to Boston before, come all this way, and failed to track him down. I know most of his haunts, but not all of them.

  We ring my father’s bell, the buzzer sounds, we push the door open—as always, he lets us into the building without checking to see who it is. My father’s apartment is on the edge of one of Boston’s priciest neighborhoods, just across Massachusetts Avenue from Back Bay, in a building of mostly subsidized apartments (paid for by Uncle Sam, my father proudly proclaims). We step off the elevator and knock on his door. Who is it? he barks, from behind his chain. Inside it is as I knew it would be—cramped, dingy, smelling of sweat, a wet animal smell. It’s as if he never really made if off the streets, as if the street followed him inside. I introduce him to Paul. A pleasure to meet you, my father says. He motions for us to sit, gestures toward his (filthy) bed—there is nowhere on it to sit. I push a pile of last year’s newspapers to one side, spread a blanket out over the gray sheet, and we sit. This is the way it always is, this is what I imagine Paul wants to see, though it seems even sadder, even shabbier, with him here. Am I really simply letting my father live out his life like this? Do I have a choice?

/>   Part of this visit, I know, is to make sure I didn’t just make it all up, that my father actually lived on the streets, that he didn’t just have one drink too many one night (like James Frey). Or like that white girl (Margaret Seltzer) who wrote the book about being raised by the Crips, and even hired a black woman to sit in her living room when the New York Times came to visit, to play the part of Big Mom, her (fake) foster mother. Here, in the vodka-sodden flesh, is my father.

  My father holds forth awhile—there is really no need to ask him any questions, but I try to steer the conversation. I ask him about his time in prison, and he launches into his story about the book he wrote about it. In my two years behind bars they shuffled me between a dozen prisons, he tells Paul—The Merry-Go-Round of Madman Moose. I am Madman Moose. At some point, I hand him (another) copy of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, the book I wrote about his time on the streets, my days in the shelter, the book the film will be based on—as always, it’s as if he is seeing it for the first time. What a title, he says with a laugh. I remind him (again) that it is something he said, while he was homeless. I was always good with titles, he agrees. I tell him that Paul is a director, that he’s going to make a movie based on the book. It will be about about your life, I tell him. My father, seemingly, is not greatly impressed—he’s always expected a movie to be made of his life, his life is fascinating, he is trying to tell us about it now. What do you think of that, Paul asks, of a movie being made about your life? My father narrows his eyes. Only two people can play me, he says—it’s got to be either Dustin Hoffman or myself. I’ve given it a lot of thought. Dustin or me.

  Interesting choices, Paul tells him.

  It’s nearly dark as we leave. I want Paul to get to the shelter in time for dinner, at five. We take a taxi the few blocks through the now-swanky South End to the shelter—it wasn’t like this when I worked here. Then, I tell Paul, the whole neighborhood had been abandoned, which was why they put the shelter here. Even as I worked there it started to change—first the artists moved in, then it went gay, and now it is solidly back to being high-end. Except for all the homeless guys still making their way to the shelter, who we are now passing in increasing numbers. I tell the cab driver to stop on the street, so we can walk up the alley with them. At the front door we get in line, allow ourselves to be frisked, just like everyone else. Then I ask to speak to Lyndia, a friend I’d worked with on the floor years ago, when my father had first shown up. Now she’s the director—I’d phoned ahead and she’d agreed to show us around.

  Inside, Pine Street is even shabbier than I remembered, sadder (like my father’s apartment), though maybe it was (again) because I was with Paul. Maybe I was seeing it as I imagined he saw it: That was where your father sleeps, this is where he slept? We spend a few hours in the shelter, talking with guests, looking at the showers, the dorms, the clothing room, the cage. We get in line as dinner is being served, sit at a table with everyone else, eat what they eat (creamed chicken over white rice). When I worked here everyone smoked, smoke hung over everyone’s head, stuck to our clothes as we sat in our booth after work at Foley’s.

  My last two years at Pine Street I worked on what we called the Outreach Van—our mandate was to offer services to those homeless folks who, for one reason or another wouldn’t—or couldn’t—go to shelters. I joined the Van, in part, to get away from my father, who had, for a couple years at that point, been sleeping in the shelter. Outside, in the frigid night air, I felt I could breathe again. Within a few months, though, my father got himself barred from the shelter and ended up sleeping on the streets—I was back where I started. I’d spend my nights driving past a bench, where someone who may or may not have been my father slept (It is night & it’s snowing & starlings fill the tree above us . . . )—maybe we’d stop, offer a blanket, a sandwich, maybe it wasn’t him, maybe it was.

  The shift on the Van went from nine at night until five a.m., which I thought was a good idea, because it meant I had less time to get fucked up. I was getting fucked up a lot those days—all the time—mostly on very strong marijuana. Some mornings, after the shift ended, I’d go home with the woman I’d spent the night working alongside—she had her own problems (doesn’t everyone?), my father was simply mine. Some mornings I’d go home alone, get high in my apartment as the sun was coming up, then go back out onto the streets and take photographs of the guys I’d seen a couple hours earlier. Earlier I’d stopped by as a worker—now I came again, with my camera this time. All addicts have radar, all the homeless guys knew I used—they knew I was one of them, it was in my eyes. I was off the clock, I told myself, I could do what I wanted. I sat with them and showed them my camera, asked if they minded—they never minded. I’d go home after I finished a roll or two, sleep for a few hours, wake up around noon, lock myself in the darkroom I’d built in the bathroom, spend a few hours bathing in chemicals and shadows, until my shift began again at nine.

  It was easier, when high, to take photographs than to write—photography requires focused attention, and I could focus when high, my world in fact was nothing but focused, reduced to a pinpoint, to a chunk of hash impaled on a pin. But writing requires both clarity and a willingness to step into the unknown, and there was nothing clear about my days, not then. Getting fucked up every day is about maintaining the status quo—it has nothing to do with change, or the unknown. Yet I felt this need to make something, anything, and so I made photographs—click click—then locked myself in the darkroom for the rest of the day. The photographs themselves meant little to me, not then—what I imagined was that one day I’d be able to look through them and they might help me to make sense of who I’d been. They were like the push-ups one does in prison—meant not so much for today, but more for the day of release. Then I read Sontag’s On Photography. In it she argues that the proliferation of photographic images has begun to establish within people a “chronic voyeuristic relation” to the world around them, that one of the consequences of photography is that the meaning of all events is leveled, made equal. This sounded a lot like what happened inside me when I got high, it sounded like what I was looking for—numb and unaffected, I felt like I’d found a level space where nothing could surprise me, ever again. The medium itself, Sontag warned, fosters an attitude of anti-intervention, that the individual who seeks to record cannot intervene, and that the person who intervenes cannot then faithfully record, for the two aims contradict each other. This troubled me, for though getting high had become a daily routine, as familiar as a photograph of a famine on the front page, some part of me wanted desperately to intervene, in something, to change the way things were. Why else was I working at a shelter? Years later Sontag would (seemingly) soften her position—No sophisticated sense of what photography is or can be will ever weaken the satisfactions of an unexpected event seized in mid-action by an alert photographer—but there was no way those words could have saved me, not then. Sontag hadn’t written them yet.

  At nine everyone who has a bed at the shelter is in bed. Paul and I move outside, help load the Van. Vinnie is now in charge of the Van—he’ll be driving tonight. Vinnie is Native American—a Micmac. When I was working the Van in the 1980s he was living on the streets—always a decent guy, but a hardcore drunk. Not hopeless, but nearly so. Now he’s clear-eyed, soft-spoken, smiles easily. He knows every hole in the city one could crawl into. The van is nicer than the one we used to drive—I remember spraying starter fluid into the carburetor some frozen nights, flames shooting up from the engine when the key was turned. We load up blankets and sandwiches and coffee, just like we always did. Our thin jackets are not going to help us tonight, and so before we take off I bring Paul into the clothing room—we each borrow a donated coat, which we will return at the end of the night, or hand off to someone else. Then Vinnie drives.

  A call has already come in—it’s five degrees above zero, a concerned citizen has seen a man facedown on the sidewalk by the library. Paul wonders, sensibly, if the police shouldn’t be cal
led. Vinnie steers us down Boylston, and we scan the sidewalk for the guy. Paul and I jump out to look around, and Vinnie gets another call, for a guy in a doorway on Newbury, around the corner. I tell him we want to look around, ask if he can swing by again in a few minutes—there’s a chapter in Suck City that unfolds here, the first night my father sleeps on the streets, it would be good for Paul and I to retrace his steps. In Suck City my father spends the last of his money on some soup and a beer at a favorite haunt, and then makes his way to the library, to write a letter to Ted Kennedy. The poor and the homeless are our constituents, we both care deeply about the poor and the homeless. When the library closes he makes his way across the street to the Dunkin’ Donuts, where he nurses a coffee until eleven, closing time. I show Paul the library, the Dunkin’ Donuts, the bench my father sat on—only so many options. I wasn’t with him the first night he slept out, but for years afterward I’d find him, drinking coffee, or writing letters, or sitting at this bus stop, those years it seemed he’d never make it back inside. Paul needs to see the blowers behind the library, where my father ends up sleeping on his first night out (or so I imagined), and so I lead him there. As we approach we see three or four homeless guys, sleeping where they fell, all these years later. When we make it back to the corner where Vinnie left us there is no sign of him or the Van. Paul and I share a moment of slight panic—everything is now closed, and even in our donated coats we are bone-cold. If you drove past, we would really look no different than any other homeless guys, shivering on a corner, waiting for someone to pull up, offer coffee, a blanket, a ride.