Adam Adamsky
stepped off the bus. Jostled by the throng getting off the bus, and
counter-jostled by the throng boarding the bus, he was both annoyed and
benumbed. His hyperconsciousness threw down a flag like an official in a
football game to mark a violation. "Fifteen-yard penalty for the World:
Unnecessary Roughness." The mini-crowds dispersed each its own way like mobile
huddled masses trading off the countries of the bus and sidewalk. They went
their nattering, clattering ways like halves of an amoeba splitting, leaving
Adam Adamsky in the center of his existential vacuum. Then and there he felt so
alone he might easily have screamed. But even in his despair he had some
manners. There was such a thing, after all, as gentlemanly insanity.
Clearly, Adam was
the hero of his own nervous breakdown.
To be such a hero is a
tremendous burden. "For instance," Adam thought, "the flesh clown part of the
syndrome is so hard to bear." For instance, he could not make his calves move
him for a time, and so he was stuck in his grey corduroy suit on the grey
sidewalk in the grey air scanning the grey buildings with frantic sleepless
eyes. A passerby might have taken Adam for a stoned architect. A screen for
quite personal viewing dangled in the space before Adam's eyes. This was a
welcome hallucination and medium for hallucination because it gave him something
to do while he waited for his body to work. He tuned into an old program.
The title of this
episode was "A Victorian Parlor; Upper-Middle Class; A Child's 1954." And the
deepness of the room full of dust and mahogany and dust and Persian carpets and
dust and velvets and dust was stunning and soothing. And secure and as solid as
a dollar. And dollars were the topic, more or less, in the room full of father
and uncles. The five men lolled and sipped amber liquids and smoked great
cigars. The boy Adam was sweetly suffocating in the wonderful smoke. Fumes of
the great men. He watched the room through a goldfish bowl. He filtered the
dialogue through a fine mental cloth woven of the silken threads he spinned by
saying to himself, "This is a dream." And then by asking himself, "Is this a
dream?" The room's dialogue was a basso profundo-to-tenor opera scene about Wall
Street and racing.
"John, those wheat futures
aren't worth a damn," said the eldest brother, basso profundo Uncle
Archie.
"That's not the way my broker sees it. He put a thousand out himself," protested
John, the baritone uncle.
"Yes? And who's your broker?"
asked Adam's tenor father. "And how well has he ever done? In futures? For
himself or his clients?"
"Hang onto the RCA, John,"
sang the other baritone brother, Uncle Bud. "This television thing is only just
beginning."
"Yes!" sang the romantic tenor. The great romantic tenor. The youngest singer.
The uncle in the wheel chair. The hero from the Korean Conflict. The sweet uncle
whom Adam looked most like. The uncle who would commit suicide in a few more
agonized years. "Yes! Hang onto everything in electronics. Television is just
beginning yet. And just the beginning. Look," he said, taking a racing form out
of his dressing robe. "What've you got in the stakes Saturday?"
Just then the doors that led
to the odd and sketchy rest of the world outside of this sure heaven opened, and
in stepped a garden of an aunt. Adam had three aunts and each was a goddess of
some aspect of nature. Uncle John's wife was the sky, dressed as she always was
in solid blue, pearl grey, or white. And she wore solid colored dresses, like
patches of sky or clouds. Uncle Bud's wife was the sea. She was giving to
billowing greens and blues, and ropes of jewels that twinkled like light on
waves. All these women were quintessence of aunt. And this garden aunt who had
just entered Adam's memory, worse flowered prints always, and reeked remarkably
of flowery perfume. She came now to put a platter of cookies in front of Adam,
and then she stroked his curls. Adam thought she was beautiful. She knew she was
at the homely end of plain, but the well-off wife of Archie Adamsky!
As she crossed the
room to open the drapes, her perfume jousted with the cigar aromas. The air was
filled with an olfactory paisley print which confused the boy Adam, sending him
in his blue serge suit to recline securely using his father's lap and torso as
if a chaise lounge. Before she left the room, this aunt smoothed the blanket
over Robert's withered, burned legs and stroked the curls on his head. Uncle
Robert never looked up from the racing form.
When his wife left, Archie
Adamsky stirred his bulky body and he rose to draw the drapes again against the
feeble February sunlight. Uncle John was complaining about the way RCA had been
creeping along of late. But when Archie sat again, he sang in his most profound
bass: "That filly called Rose's Rose was the ugliest goddamned horse I ever saw.
Looked like a rat that had had insomnia for a month. But put her on a track and
she was as fast as hell. Ugly and fast. Ugly and fast as a shooting
star."
The
silence that followed this mythic recitation was rich with the articulate quiet
five brothers can work up, even when they're a talkative bunch. But when Adam
got off his father's lap and crossed the room having succumbed to the urge for
another cookie, the spell was broken and the conversation turned to the gold
standard. And somewhere in crossing the room to the platter of cookies by the
goldfish bowl, the boy Adam had lost the consciousness that pastes memory to the
mind.
And
Adam on the sidewalk, grown and dressed in grey corduroy, lost the
hallucination. And a grey brace of frantic pigeons flew across his line of
vision, waking Adam from his sidewalk sleep to the extent that he began to walk
and interpret. "My aura of intellectual intensity burns me pure until I'm white
like the thinking clowns," Adam remarked in himself, taking up the subject of
his clownhood. "But inside I'm flesh and gaudy red like the clownish clowns. The
red clowns. The Bozos. The ones that bump and murder ridiculously. And they are
flatulent. Flesh. Flesh. But really, in the schematic of me, the grey middle
ground between the clown that thinks and the clown that is silly fleshy stuff is
like my suit, the natural abandoned, random, shopworn state. Mostly I'm the dust
and garbage on the ground after the circus has left town. Shut up! Shut up!
Brain, brain. Clown hero. Clown hero. Circus nervous breakdown. Circus nervous.
Nervous circus. Shut up! Shut!" And in this way Adam made his way the several
blocks from the bus stop to the Paradise Theatre.
The Paradise Theatre was
quite old. Ancient by American standards. Abandoned for a decade and a half, it
had the look of a century's decay. The children in the neighborhood had broken
every light bulb in the marquee. Some children had stood solitary in marvelous
concentration and thrown rock after rock as the bits of glass would sprinkle and
titter onto the sidewalk. Other times a gang of kids with whoops of delight and
whoops of smothered urban anger would bombard the marquee, showing off and
competing. The most entertainment from this enterprise was derived by night when
the cascading glass bits would catch the colors from the neon glows that exuded
from the several bars, the penny arcade, the jewelry store, the Army recruiting
station, and the real estate office that neighbored the Paradise Theatre.
In former times the
Paradise Theatre had been noted for the Italian tile work at its doorstep. A
German slave-rum-and-tobacco magnate had brought the tiles from Verona in the
late eighteenth century. He had meant to use them on his dozen fireplaces,
German style, in his new American town mansion. But he'd forgotten them in a
cellar in all the cornucopial excitement of his new American wealth. And when
the German's grandson had drunk and gambled away his grandfather's fortune, the
second owner of the Paradise Theatre, a Russian-American, half-gypsy and
half-aristocrat, bought the tiles in a blind lot at an auction. The tiles were
laid in a six-sided shape that coincided with the perimeter of the marquee as it
jutted into the world, and met the three walls of the front of the lobby which
was cut back into the world of the theater. This quilt of tiles had been the
most beautiful sidewalk in the city. There had been tiles with blue and purple
peacocks strutting beneath the glaze. There had been pink and beige cockles
shells. Irises. Naked cupids. Ships with Greek striped sails. And many another
manner of flora and mild decadence. The tiles, if it were known, had been
antiques several times over when the German had bought them from a syphilitic
Italian baron in 1795. But the tiles were gone and the sidewalk in front of the
Paradise was a gritty plane. The tiles had been randomly dispersed, most now
residing in the hundreds of apartments in the neighborhood. Some of the tiles
had been dug out by hippie husbands in the early 1970's. They took them home to
their hippie wives who invariably used them under candles. And there was an
Italian restaurant two blocks away from the theater that owned an even two
dozen. There the tiles were used for coasters.
But still, despite the ill
repair of the facade, anyone endowed with the slightest imagination or smallest
bit of knowledge would guess that the Paradise had had its day. In fact, had had
many a great day and many a great evening. In the 1800's, the theater was
employed for brave productions of Shakespeare. The Victorian Hamlets and
Othellos and Calibans strode the stage, thrilling the immigrants and their
children and grandchildren.
Adam's great-grandfather had
been an actor in the house company. He'd been the slightly chagrinning glory to
the Jewish community. ("Why doesn't he at least act in the Yiddish Theater!")
Most of the Jewish families had come from Germany, Poland and Russian, had
escaped pogroms and had seen and lived through hideousness. But Adam's Jewish
ancestry had come to America before that, were almost founding fathers. (In
fact, on Adam's mother's side, Adam was descended from a protestant founding
father or two. He was a Boston Adams on her side.) The separation from the
European Jewry was part of the sheaf of slurs that was slung at Adam's
great-grandfather when he reluctantly, but bravely and with every vestige of
professionalism, took on that role in that play--The Merchant
of Venice, of course.
But by the time his son,
Adam's grandfather, played the same role at the Paradise in the first decade of
the twentieth century, there was no personally focused political flap. There was
more humor. There were a few mutterings, but none of these had Adam's
grandfather as their subject. Just generally what an anti-Semite that Bard
was.
And the
bills at the Paradise Theatre gave over to Ibsen and Chekov about that time, and
by and by went to vaudeville. Adam's father was a great vaudeville comedian,
with the Paradise his first stage and his home stage. He'd done a few pictures
in Hollywood, but his magic didn't take on film. Actually, he could have been a
great classical pianist. But he had verbal compulsions he needed to be relieved
of. And he was funny as hell on the live stage. "The King of Giggles," he was
called. By the time Adam was born in 1949, vaudeville was dead, the King was
forty-five and semi-retired except for an annual tour on the Borscht Circuit and
a radio program now and again.
In 1970, when Adam's first
play, Roses and Horses opened at the Paradise, The King of Giggles had to
leave his seat three times to go to the men's room and throw up. He was sure he
and his family were disgraced by this piece of drek his son had authored. And
Adam's father left the theater before the final curtain. He went and accosted
Adam in the stateroom on the Queen Elizabeth where the son was awaiting
departure for England and escape from the strain of preparing the play, the
strain of the reviews to come. The old vaudevillian harangued his son and wept,
wept and harangued. The King of Giggles, first with horrible fires in his eyes
and then sickening puddles in his eyes, berated his son for writing such a lousy
play and ruining the family name. "Those lights!" Giggles exclaimed. "For three
generations before you, for over a hundred years, those lights have spelled out
the name Adamsky! Now what have you done? How can I look your mother in the eye?
My brothers?--Who's left of them, God rest your Uncles Robert and Archie." The
old man reeled back against the desk in the stateroom to cry a bit, and the
first whistle blasted, warning visitors to leave.
"It isn't quite true about
the lights," Adam had thought, while watching his father's unprecedented scene
in amazement. "There's only been an electric marquee at the Paradise since
1909." Before that, gaslights had lighted wooden words.
"And how," the King spat, off
the ropes and swinging again, "could you presume so upon my connections? You've
gotten this monstrous little play produced on the merits of my good name.
My name. I thought you had written some nice little play like that
Hair, or something. Better naked bodies than your family stripped bare
and bleeding on the stage. Why did you have to try for a masterpiece? Always
aiming too high. Hurting everybody in the process. Now writing lousy theater to
boot." The second warning sounded. But finally, still yelling, the King of
Giggles had to be ejected from the vessel--in a first class manner, of course.
And the son went on his old-fashioned playwright's trip.
In truth, Adam had made his
own connections; or, rather, the connections had made him. That is, he and his
plays had been discovered by chance, and produced and promoted on their own
merits. And, in fact, as it turned out, the play was a critical success. And a
box office success. And in the next two years alone, the word genius was used no
less than forty-seven times to describe Adam, and that count was from the city
papers alone.
When Adam landed in America
again two months later, it was not his father who was his problem. From the
moment he embraced him on the quay, until Giggles died seven years later, he was
a kind and thoughtful father. They never spoke about the evening of the opening.
Giggles never apologized, though contrition lay at the edges of some of his
expressions both facial and verbal. He was just good and loving and tried to
serve his son and his son's talent. But to serve talent is difficult. Talent is
an abstract. And writing is the most amorphous and nebulous of the talents. And,
because Adam reached his majority, became a success, and landed in the
upheavaling eight decade of the twentieth century all at once, helping Adam was
impossible anyway. Even a mother and father born and bred famous as Adam's were
couldn't guide or protect such a son in such a decade as the 'seventies.
No. Adam's problem
wasn't his father. Adam's problem was the universal one: Self. Himself. And his
times, and all of history, and the future, and mankind, and womankind, and
thought and flesh.
And as Adam stood in front of
the Paradise Theatre, at age thirty-five, standing in his grey suit on a grey
early spring day, a great, grey shiver went through him. It was a cosmic shiver,
an earthly shiver of burdensome responsibilities. Burdensome in the main because
Adam hadn't a clue as to what his responsibilities were. Along the little bits
of twigs that a spinal column is, the shock of dutifulness with no identity
translated like a snake with epilepsy. "Frisson metaphysique,"
Adam said.
"Excuse me?" asked the woman who was standing a few yards from him.
Adam had to blink
before he could recall that the woman had stepped out of the theater some time
during the minutes he'd been autobiographically lost under the marquee. Her
emergence from the theater had been barely recorded on the periphery of his
consciousness. "Frisson metaphysique," he said.
"Awe of the universe?" she
asked.
He
nodded. Then they stood, the man facing the theater, the woman facing the
street, as the March wind and a few poor souls and a baleful couple or two
passed them. And the broken burned out lights of the marquee above them were
jagged. And the decade of poster shreds hanging on the white washed glass walls
of the theater lobby were jagged. But Adam's mind and insides were more jagged
still. And his grasp upon the moment was more ragged than the poor souls'
raiments. But Adam could see that the woman was lovely, possibly even wonderful.
He looked away from her. She glanced at Adam then, and thought, "Hmph. Like an
angel."