Life on Sandpaper Read online

  Afterward, things happened. I saw Mané-Katz painting a Rubensesque model and she was white, glowing, fat, and wearing a crucifix on her chest, sitting with her ass on a Torah ark curtain. The little man explained that it had been saved from a burnt synagogue in Lodz. I’m not religious but I hit him. The model yelled. A big black man came over and threw me out. I went to the sculptress Hanna Orlov who lived close to the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and had modeled my head and later cast it in bronze, and I told her about this. She laughed. She showed me a sketch by Modigliani that he’d given her himself with a dedication in Hebrew. The winter was harsh and I passed out because of my war wound. I was told to go to New York because there they were waiting to see their first Hebrew soldier. I had an Ordinary Seaman’s certificate from the time I’d worked on the illegal immigrant ship, the Pan York. I boarded an Italian ship that flew a Panamanian flag carrying German farmers to Alberta in Canada. The work was tough. The sea raged. There were maybe twenty passengers in cabins because it was a cargo ship. The herd of German cows and bulls weltered in the hold. The crew, mainly Italians, stood on the bridge and pissed on the Germans who lay huddled together drunk on the deck, shouting. In the cabin next to mine there was an American girl returning from Paris after some frustrated love story. She licked chocolates and we lay next to the porthole and the waves crashed against the glass and this turned her on. She wasn’t pretty but was also not not-pretty, she had a tattoo on her ass. She was one of those girls it’s good with but are quickly forgotten, and she said she was from Minot, North Dakota. The story of the name Minot, she said, was that there were nine knotholes in the walls of the first log cabin and there were ten pioneers and the Indians were shooting at the cabin and one man shouted where’s my knothole, where’s mi not. I didn’t see her again, but once she read a review of an exhibition of mine in the paper and sent me a photo of her with a man and five kids, and for some reason I wasn’t sure whether it was her family or if she’d hired them. Maybe I’d been cruel to her and I remembered how indispensable she was up against the waves that couldn’t come through the porthole. I reached Newfoundland. I found a job on a fishing boat sailing to New York and we docked at Hoboken, New Jersey.

  Gandy Brodie who I’d met in Paris was waiting for me. In Paris he’d taken me to a jazz club called Chez Inez. The owner, Inez, was a singer and married to a Dane. Gandy used to draw caricatures of people, most of whom claimed they looked nothing like his drawings and so he’d give them their money back, but there were always a few too embarrassed to complain, so he earned a little bit.

  It was there that I made my acquaintance with jazz. Gandy played me a Billie Holiday record and said that her voice was like dried-up water. I didn’t know what that meant, but I liked it. He’d sent me a letter in Paris and on the envelope wrote: To Yoram Kaniuk, An Israeli Citizen in Paris. Said I should come. When I arrived he asked me how much money I had. Eight dollars and forty cents, I replied. He seemed disappointed because although he was a Jew he was one of the ones who think that every Jew, apart from him, is wealthy. We took a bus to Manhattan and from there, somewhere around 100 and Something Street, we walked. The sun was shining. It was a beautiful fall day. A pleasant aroma of roasting coffee and flowers and in every store and restaurant the jukeboxes played two songs, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” or “Stormy Weather,” and I felt I’d come home. I fell in love—unrequited love—with the city I’d live in for ten years. Gandy wore a colored scarf around his neck. He was a young, handsome man with straggly hair, gestures that were heavy but at the same time lankily elegant. Solomon Gabriel Brodie was born in the Bronx at a time when his father would take a belt, chew on it, and give it to his family to chew on and then, said Gandy, the good times ended and the Depression began. He was wild. Daring. He knew every haunt in New York, especially places where you could eat cheaply. He had affairs with old women who helped him out because he was an artist, and he also had some kind of mysterious relationship whose nature I never fathomed with a Japanese man, with whom he’d hide out for a few days every now and then. His best friends were jazz musicians. Before we met in Paris they’d have parties for him where they passed the hat for him to go to Paris, which he wanted to reach so badly. But after the parties he’d squander the money and put off his trip until the next party. And one day he did go. He reached Paris wearing overalls and the moment he disembarked he wanted to go home. That’s when I met him. He said that after New York, Paris was like summer camp. He was called Gandy because he did a gandy dance, like the Chinese immigrants working themselves to death laying the American railroad tracks, who according to one explanation I heard learned it from a traveling Indian with a dancing monkey. Nobody in New York could do that dance like he did. Like a Chasid crossbred with a Greek country bumpkin. For a while he’d danced with Martha Graham but she said he should give it up because he was too heavy. Since then he painted. He didn’t know how to paint but his paintings were like his dance, like his enthralling personality, filled with difficulties, desire. He’d knead the paints into some soft chaos, but with a sure hand, and daubed sand on his paintings and painted layer upon layer. Gandy was open, but at the same time he kept secrets about his past and he wouldn’t talk much about it. Rumor said that he’d been in a fight once, that somebody had tried to kill him. People said he was a panhandler and liked to invite people to have a coffee or whiskey with him. We grew close and liked one another. He was my guide to the human and economic sewers of New York, every hidden corner, to the Mafiosi of Little Italy who liked to watch him dance and would throw money at him. Once he decided that he had to meet Charlie Chaplin. He took a Greyhound bus to Los Angeles, walked down Sunset Boulevard and found Chaplin’s home. He knocked at the door and said, I’m Gandy Brodie from New York, and the butler slammed the door in his face. He turned around and went into the yard, feeling dirty from his long walk in the sun, and gave himself a shower with a garden hose he found there, and when he started brushing his teeth he was found by the police who’d been called by a neighbor because on Sunset you don’t walk on foot or brush your teeth in backyards. Gandy was arrested and he said he was surprised by his arrest because he’d been brushing his teeth and had wanted to tell Chaplin something and that he was Gandy Brodie from New York. He returned to New York happy. Walking down the street with him was like going into a bar in a hick town with a population of two hundred. Everybody knew him. Someone would say, Hi Gandy, and he’d ask, Have you got five bucks for me, I’m pretty deep in the hole, and sometimes they’d give it to him. He didn’t believe in work and so except for once a month, for a single day, he never worked in his life. He lived off things I didn’t understand, he knew how to demand things from people because he was an artist. Gandy took me to Greenwich Village and sat me down on a bench in Washington Square and said he had to go and he’d be back later today or tomorrow. I sat there alone with the sack with my stuff I’d brought from Paris and waited. I didn’t know a living soul and evening fell. Apparently I wasn’t concerned.

  A small yelping poodle rubbed against my legs. I stroked it. A young woman, I don’t remember whether she was good-looking or not, was tied to the dog and I think her name was Gloria. At first she regarded me with contempt because I looked like a vagrant. I didn’t have a cent to my name. I said something, then she said something, then I said to her, “Taketh me to thy pad,” because at Chez Inez in Paris I’d learned what was then known as bop talk and which later became widely used American slang, but at the time was the secret language of jazz musicians. I’d studied Julius Caesar in high school and now I joined the two lingos together. My sentence turned Gloria on and she asked what a pad was and I explained that it’s an apartment, she hadn’t heard the term before and seemed amused. We talked for a while, I petted the dog again. She took me to her apartment near the park on Fifth Avenue, building number one, twentieth floor. She fed me. I told her stories, that I was from the desert and my mother was a shepherdess and that I rode camels, because camels, or so I’d b
een given to understand by Gandy back in Paris, work wonders in New York. I told her about a girl I’d loved in Israel who’d dumped me. I told her that my family were farmers in the Jordan Valley and they’d known the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob personally. We got into bed and did what you do in bed and she said, You could pull a knife now and kill me, and I agreed that objectively speaking that was true. She said, You don’t know me subjectively, and I said neither did she. She got up and walked backward with her eyes closed and didn’t bump into anything in the bedroom filled with all kinds of clothes, tennis balls, chairs, and her intimidating little dog, and there were lots of shoes spread all over the beautiful wooden floor. There was an iron there too. The telephone was on the floor. Again she walked backward with her eyes closed and kept saying, Look how marvelous I am! She fell asleep but I still couldn’t drop off myself and so I looked at her. She slept like a soldier at roll call, disciplined and obedient, her arms at her sides. But on her face I saw an expression of hopeless anguish. It hurt me. I had enough of my own. I almost left, but this was a new type of loneliness on the twentieth or thirtieth or fifteenth floor of a fancy building, loneliness I hadn’t yet encountered. And then the phone rang, she jumped up, answered, her eyes flashed with hatred, she pushed twenty dollars into my hand and threw me out. There was a drugstore by her house on the corner of Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue. I went in and had breakfast and went back to the park and sat down on the same bench. Gandy came and didn’t apologize. He said he knew I’d be there.

  After that I stayed for two or three days in a room somewhere around there, went to the Mount Sinai Hospital and told them something or other and gave them a letter I’d been given in Paris in order to get a resident’s permit for America that wasn’t easy. I was treated at the hospital. Doctors came to see the wonder: an Israeli soldier who’d established a state in the face of seven Arab armies. They gave me a private room, my own nurse, a transistor radio. In the door there was an oval window through which the doctors peeped at the first Zionist soldier they’d ever seen. They operated on me until my leg and eye got better. Gandy came and stole a few bouquets from different rooms and the radio too, which he later sold and then bought me a coat, because the one from Yolanda’s mother had been stolen, but the hospital brought in a new radio right away. Gandy got a nurse into a closet with him and the closet door locked and the nurse yelled and they had to call the maintenance man to get them out. After two weeks they discharged me. They passed the hat in the dining room and the whole medical team collected four hundred dollars for what they called minor expenses, and four hundred dollars was a lot of money back then. Gandy took half and I was supposed to begin the rest of my life with the other half. I found a room on Eleventh Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenue. The women’s prison was next door. The women would stroll on the fenced-off roof of the sixth floor while their pimps down below shouted filthy endearments up at them. Somebody brought me an easel. With the money I was given at the hospital I bought canvases and I left a little for food and rent, which came to five dollars a week. I bought paints and brushes and started painting. That evening there was a knock at the door. The landlady came in and sat down. She was fat and younger than I am today but pity is timeless and never looks in the mirror. She had the face of a bulldog. She laid out everything I needed to know. Girls were forbidden, but on the other hand she didn’t really check and every so often she raised the rent by a dollar but sometimes she didn’t and that all depended. On what? You should know! I wasn’t allowed to make any noise but she was half deaf. If I didn’t pay on Monday of every week, I’d be thrown out. Keep the room clean. The bathroom and a public telephone are in the hallway and are shared by everyone on the floor. She left, and in came six young guys who it turned out also lived in the building and they brought me blankets, sweaters, shoes that they told me to try on, and I did, a scarf, a suitcase for my travels in case I had to escape the landlady, a typewritten page documenting the landlady’s daily movements, how she got up at eight A.M., how she couldn’t hear, how she always opened a window at nine A.M., how she peeked out whenever she heard the toilet flush, how at ten A.M. she went from room to room after the lodgers had gone out and rifled through their belongings, how at night she tried to stay awake until nine and always fell asleep in her chair, how at one A.M. she always had to go to the bathroom and then put on her nightgown because the heating would have switched off and how she would then just lay in bed. So if I had to clear out, well, now I had a suitcase and it would be best if my clothes and other belongings were always ready to be packed up quickly, and also I should keep her daily schedule handy so I would know when it was the best time to leave. We drank wine and talked. I was surprised by this warm welcome. Next morning Gandy took me to a drugstore and explained a few basic facts of life. First, to make a phone call all I needed was a dime. If I called from a public phone, dialed zero, and said, Sorry, wrong number, I’d get my dime back in the coin-return slot and could dial again for free. Gandy taught me how to eat for free at bars and weddings. He took me to a bar on Fourteenth Street. Spread out on the counter there were plates of sardines, tiny sandwiches, tomatoes, pretzels. I tasted them all. The place was packed all the time. Hordes of anxious people who needed a drink. A tired, sullen, and impatient bartender hurried over and Gandy couldn’t decide whether he wanted Beefeater with mocha or a whiskey sour but with Canadian whiskey, and all the while he was wolfing down huge amounts of sardines and hardboiled eggs and putting whatever other food he could lay hands on into a paper bag and saying I’m sorry, and the bartender finally lost his patience and went to serve somebody else and came back and Gandy still couldn’t make up his mind if he wanted Bacardi on the rocks and then remembered that he actually was late for something and had to leave and the bartender lost his temper but there were more than forty guys sitting there shouting at him and he forgot. A few years later Gandy accused me of teaching some Israeli friends the trick with the dime and the wrong number because the phone company, instead of returning dimes, started to return nine one-cent stamps that came out of the coin return slot, but who wrote letters back then?

  We began showing our paintings on Greenwich Avenue. Gandy would dance in front of the paintings to attract attention. I stood to one side. We sold a few sketches and we sometimes painted the young girls whose resolves were weakened by the anguish that Gandy expressed so picturesquely by rolling his eyes and raising his long lashes all the way up to his eyebrows. But that wasn’t enough to make a living. I started using enamel paints because they were cheaper. I painted on the backs of used canvases. Before Christmas we painted greeting cards that we unsuccessfully displayed in Rosetta Reitz’s legendary store on Greenwich Avenue. At Jewish weddings I learned how effective it was to say just a few words of Hebrew, which attracted warmhearted attention and when anybody asked me if I was from the bride’s side I had to say I was from the groom’s side, drink fast and eat fast and leave. I learned where to get cheap meatball-and-spaghetti meals in various, almost secret locations. New York was wonderful to me and to improve my English I read detective novels by Ellery Queen, Dashiell Hammett, and Rex Stout. I’d sit with a dictionary, try to make sense of the English, learn the words, practice. Gandy and I argued about painting.

  Together with the painter Larry Rivers we were chosen to be the protégés of the critic Meyer Schapiro. Following numerous arguments I had with Rivers about abstract expressionism and for reasons of his own he stopped painting abstracts and began doing nude portraits of his ex-wife’s mother. But Gandy didn’t side with Rembrandt, Grünewald, and Hooper, Gandy favored Mondrian, Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock. He took me to Hans Hoffman’s school because it was only from that point that I’d be able to scale the lofty mountain of art. I hated that stuff. I said that Hoffman was a false guru. People made pilgrimages to see him. Hundreds of artists did what was known as action painting in his studio. Anybody who didn’t paint that way was condemned. Even Larry Rivers who years later would become one of the t
ruly great American artists. I brought some paintings I’d done in Paris. It was 1951. I entered the big room that was Hoffman’s temple. There were hundreds of artists outside painting the exact same painting. They all seemed pretty agitated and daubed their canvases with controlled anger, rounding on and assaulting their canvases with passionate expressions on their faces, stamping on them, slashing them, spraying paint, they looked like a tribe of savages, and I was ushered into the temple. Hans Hoffman was sitting in a tall chair like a rabbi. He wore a huge turban. Spoke with a German accent. He looked at me aggressively, with some contempt, even pity. Gandy was trembling and began fiddling with his scarf and Hoffman looked at my paintings for a while and handed down his verdict: He’s either too much of a painter or not a painter at all. I didn’t really understand this but on our way out Gandy explained that it was a compliment, that what he meant to say and didn’t was that I was a painter but in the wrong way.

  Days passed. I painted. Gandy came and went. An Israeli woman came by and brought me money from her aunt who’d heard about me from one of her friends. I sat in the drugstore on the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue and next to me was a stern-faced man with deep-set eyes beneath beetling brows. He was drunk and looked at me and suddenly laughed. I asked what was funny and he said, America is drowning and you’ve come here to die with it, my name’s James Agee, a writer! I didn’t know who he was and the man went on for hours about America being a terrible, insidious civilization whose end was near. He tried to sing me a song, but was really just reciting it, about two airplanes in the sky that meet and the American pilot says I’ve destroyed the Eastern hemisphere and the Russian pilot says I’ve destroyed the Western hemisphere, and they chorus together: What will happen when the fuel runs out? I liked his loneliness. He was the most serious film critic in the United States. During the Depression he wrote a book about poverty in the South that was banned for a long time. He gave me a rare copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men with photographs by Walker Evans. Agee also wrote one of the most beautiful American novels, A Death in the Family, and from time to time we met on his regular corner after a night of drinking. There was a concentrated, melancholic seriousness to him and he would say things that weren’t always connected to each other and then would laugh at what he’d said, get up and hop around the drugstore on one leg, describing America as Rome in its decline. He refused to look at paintings by someone like me, a colonialist from Palestine, he didn’t remember my name but was happy when I showed up. I saw a firm but generous Calvinist sincerity in him. He was filled with enthusiasm but wasn’t excited by his own enthusiasms. He spoke of his heroes, Mother Jones and Eugene V. Debs who organized the railroad workers. His words tasted of faraway torments. We used to walk the streets late at night and he would be awake and asleep at the same time. Behind all the bombastic rhetoric with which I was already familiar from my time in the youth movement he had a talent for awkward but precise storytelling and knew how to describe doorknobs, the features of policemen, the smashed face of a black child, and talked a lot about Africa, which he’d never visited and which in his view was the future of humankind, because humankind had begun there in the Garden of Eden until the white man destroyed it and trampled over the continent, and maybe that’s why he later wrote the screenplay for The African Queen.