The Autograph Man Read online

  “Lovelear, I don’t think he’s well.”

  “News flash.”

  “I don’t think you’re well, Brian,” said Alex, bringing himself to put his hand on the poor man’s bumpy forehead. “I think I should probably get you out of here.”

  But Duchamp pulled away from him, suddenly. For a moment he had broken from the shell of his world into Alex’s; now he retreated. All his attention returned to the podium.

  “Lot 182,” said the auctioneer, “which is a preview program signed by the cast of the film 42nd Street, including the popular musical actress Ruby Keeler . . .”

  The auctioneer kept talking, but so did Duchamp. A hum that had started softly was increasing in volume and pitch, becoming harder to ignore. Duchamp stood up. The auctioneer turned himself up: “DO I HEAR TWO HUNDRED . . .”

  “If that’s Ruby, I’m fahkin’ Jolson, mate.”

  “Sir?” queried the auctioneer. “I’m sorry, is there some sort of a problem?”

  “That’s not Ruby that’s not Ruby that’s not Ruby,” Duchamp was shouting. “THAT’S NOT RUBY THAT’S NOT FAHKIN’ RUBY. THAT’S ME! I SIGNED THAT.”

  Security was now finally being called, but Duchamp hadn’t finished being mad yet, and there was something admirable—like a theater crowd indulging a bad King Lear—in the way they were going to let him finish what he had started.

  “I BLOODY WORKED FOR THESE STUDIOS, DINT I? RUBY NEVER SIGNED A THING! I SIGNED ALL OF THIS STUFF!”

  There was method in the madness, as all the Autograph Men present knew. Fresh out of the war, Duchamp had washed up in Hollywood, working in the publicity departments of several studios. He signed thousands of items. In younger, less mad days, Duchamp had been invaluable to collectors who wanted to check on the authenticity of a purchase. He had always maintained that the British market was flooded with forgeries; he had a strong case. Still, Alex could think of better ways to air this issue than exposing oneself to the public, which Duchamp, fumbling furiously with belt buckle, seemed poised to do.

  “RUBY, GRETA, MARLENE, RITA, KITTY, BETTE—THEY COULDN’T CLEAN THEIR OWN ARSES. I DID ALL THEIR DIRTY WORK.”

  For his finale, Duchamp dropped his trousers, revealing a cotton canvas of heartbreaking, variegated stains.

  3.

  How many moves, wondered Alex later, on his way out—that is, if this were a sophisticated game like mah-jongg or chess—how many moves to get from where I am to where Brian Duchamp is? Because the people who buy the brass dogs and the billiard tables, they’re not like this, are they? So why are we like this? What’s wrong with us?

  Who would ever choose this life? Alex stepped out into the center of town. In the curved black glass of a superior clothes store he dropped his shoulders, placed his hands by his sides, itemized himself. No love, no transportation, no ambitions, no faith, no community, no expectation of forgiveness or reward, one bag, one thermos, one acid hangover, one alcohol hangover, one Kitty Alexander, in pristine condition, written in dark ink, centrally placed on a postcard. Look at this. If this is a man. Look at him. Never have I been more perfectly Jewish. I have embraced a perfect contradiction, like Job. I have nothing, and at the same time, everything. And if I am out of my mind, thought Alex-Li Tandem, it’s all right by me.

  Alex believed in that God Chip in the brain, something created to process and trigger wonderment. It allows you to see beauty, to uncover beauty in the world. But it’s not so well designed. It’s a chip that has its problems. Sometimes it confuses a small man with a bad mustache and a uniform for an image of the infinite; sometimes an almond-eyed girl on a big screen for the stained-glass window in a church.

  Maybe it is fatuous to think of steps, stages, moves between me and Duchamp, thought Alex. Maybe I am already there.

  For I am an Autograph Man.

  No choice, then, simply this: a closing down of options. This is a simpler game than chess. Simpler even than snakes and ladders. This is a slow, malicious game (designed by whom? controlled by whom?) of tick-tack-toe.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Hesed

  LOVE • Only he who hath the knowledge shall hath the key • The Happy Fried Chicken • Sex versus death •

  Fats Waller was Jewish • Talking seriously • Movies versus music • God needs us • The oldest joke

  1.

  “Kofi Annan.”

  “Boutros Boutros-Ghali.”

  Finding the video shop closed, Alex-Li stepped to the right and rang the doorbell for the upper flat. After the usual lengthy pause, Adam appeared in the doorway, his face a perfect onyx sun framed by short, skinny dreadlocks fanned out like rays, beaming on his friend. And now they are in the middle of their ritual.

  “Kofi, Kofi Annan,” says Alex, bowing deeply from the hip. The pose is stately, the accent Nigerian. “Kofi Annan,” he says, “Annan, Annan.”

  Adam bows lower: “Boutros. Boutros, Boutrous-Boutros, Boutros-Ghali.”

  Alex brings his palms together in prayer: “Oh, Kofi, Kofi, Kofi Annan.”

  “Welcome.”

  Adam straightens, grins.

  “Welcome to my humble yard. You best come in. Don’t worry, Esther’s not here.”

  Alex inclines his head, resting it on the door frame.

  “Ads. Mate. It’s like I’m in some sort of Bermuda Triangle of goyishness today. Honest to God. Tell me something.”

  “Speak it.”

  “Am I an Autograph Man? I mean, do I look like one to you?”

  “Again?”

  “Forget it. To be continued upstairs. Lead the way.”

  IT IS NO PALACE, Adam’s place. This first front door opens onto a communal concrete space, like a corner of an underground car park, windowless, bulbless, and therefore always dark. On the left wall, a grim miniature morgue of steel pull-out drawers spill useless mail (catalogues addressed to ex-tenants, electoral forms sent to Flat D’s anarchists, electricity bills for the dead); farther along, the iron railings of the staircase suspend three crucified bikes bound by chains and rope, in an attempt to counter the pervasive local belief that Adam’s hallway is a hundred-percent-credit free-for-all mountain bike superstore.

  On these stairs, Adam becomes morose.

  “So. I take it you can smell it?”

  Alex sniffs.

  “Oh. Well, yeah. Different, though. Spicy.”

  “Yes. I noticed that. New recipe. More sugar, more chilies. So, you can smell it—?” Adam stops where he is. “Like here? Before you’re in? I swear I can’t tell anymore. I’m too close to the situation. Rubinfine said he couldn’t smell it, but I think he was humoring me. He was three days late with a video, so, you know, it was in his interest.”

  “Ads, to be honest . . .”

  How to put it? Alex places his hands on his best friend’s shoulders and delivers a quick consolatory squeeze. “Sorry, but if anything, mate, it’s stronger.”

  “Well, there’s a good reason for that. . . .”

  Solemnly, Adam ushers Alex through the door and on to the long outdoor walkway. Here he lets his arms fall to his sides, palms open. International Gesture of the vanquished.

  “Behold the Monster.”

  “Oh. My. God.”

  “Yes. Blasphemy aside, that was sort of my feeling.”

  There is a new addition to the view. Not really part of the view, as such. Too close to be effectively viewed. More like something that you’re almost in. Two more steps to the left, and its great mouth could swallow your head and still be hungry for more.

  “Huge bloody pipe.”

  “Yes. The Monster.”

  “Adam. Huge bloody submarine-style periscope pumping smell of fried chicken into your flat. That’s no good.”

  “No, I know that.”

  “Then what are you doing about it?”

  “Well, it’s done now, isn’t it?”

  Agitated, Alex takes off his dirty glasses and begins to besmear them further with the corner of his shirt. “No, Ads, no—this isn’
t a Zen issue. I mean, this is not an issue to which Zen should be applied. This is a private property issue. This is an eye for an eye, tooth et cetera issue. This is a time for the application of Judaic law. You’ve got rights. You were here before them.”

  Pacing down the walkway to get the plant pot, Adam lets his lips vibrate with a sad exhale of air.

  “Well, was I? That’s up for debate. . . . I don’t know, anymore. . . . Everyone’s claiming, you know, something different. . . .” Bending over the low wall, he empties the pot of its rainwater and drowned leaves, pouring the lot onto the lower roof of his adversaries.

  “I mean, people who come for videos buy chicken from them and vice versa, so. I don’t know, mate. It’s like, I went to talk to them a while ago . . .”

  He moves the pot in front of the door. Alex kneels to hold it steady for him on the slippy asphalt. Adam climbs up.

  “. . . and I’ve got sympathy for their situation, you know? They’re just trying to run a business, like me, and they’ve been there a long time, and the owner guy keeps giving it all this about do I want to ruin him and do I want his children to starve. . . .”

  “My knees are getting wet. Please, you’re not going to ruin him—he’s probably got eight more all over town.”

  “No—wait—where is it? It’s here somewhere. It slips along the gutter when it’s been rainy—Ah!” Adam retrieves the Hooky Thing (made out of two coat hangers, many elastic bands, the head and tines of a fork) from its hiding place in the lip of the gutter.

  “Remind me again why you—”

  “Look, mate, if you lost your key as often as I do, you’d do the same. Plant pot back, please?”

  Alex sploshes down the walkway hugging heavy clay. Comes back with a wet leaf pressed like a leech against his throat. Adam puts the Hooky Thing through his own letter box and begins the process of blind-feeling for his house key, marooned somewhere in the doormat.

  Bored, Alex peers over the wall and down into the dismal cement backyard of Happy Fried Chicken. During the last summer, a brief détente in a six-year conflict, fun was had down there, Adam and Alex cautiously accepting an informal invitation (yelled up from below on a steaming day: Play? Yes, yes—you want try?) to take part in that mad game (is it Indian?) where everyone runs one way and then everyone runs another, and there’s chalk lines everywhere but no ball. They got quite good at it. Lost weight too, also got tanned, until Alex was almost as brown and whippet-shaped as the bare-chested boys who worked there. Fun, yes. But no more. Now two of them stand against the huge black bins, drinking Cokes, clasping fags, looking back at Alex, returning insolence for insolence. Impulsively, Alex gives them the finger and hurriedly backs away from the wall, as the cans come flying.

  “Ads, they’re laughing at you. You do know anyone else would have sued them by now? Blown them up. Reported them to the bloody health inspector, that’d be a start. You should get on to Joseph about it.”

  Adam’s sweet face contorts as a dark thought passes over it.

  “You know,” he says into the letterbox, “the only thing that really got to me, that was really properly out of order”—his arm is very steady; carefully, and with great concentration, he draws the key through to his side of the door—“is that they made sure the installation blokes turned up on Yom Kippur—knowing I wouldn’t be here. Knowing. I just thought that was blatantly— Ah! Got it!” Key found, door opened. “Enough about that, anyway. Too depressing. Open sesame. Tea?”

  Everything in Adam’s flat comes off the one narrow hallway. One box living room, one box bedroom, one box kitchen and one box loo (actually a real box, this last one. If you were giving a loo for a present, and you wanted a box to put it in, you would put it in this). No shower. No bath. No sink (except in the kitchen). If you were fortunate enough to spend an afternoon with Adam—you and he, two lazy, stoned flâneurs admiring the city—you would be treated, naturally, to the usual pyrotechnics of Adam’s huge intellect (his incredible knowledge of pop music trivia, and then its strange bedfellow, the various sublime Judaic insights). You would also be given a tour of public utilities across town in which Adam showers and bathes. Swimming pools, gyms, homeless shelters, gay saunas, nunneries (“That’s not true.” “Alex, all nuns do all day is dream that some smelly young man, preferably Jewish, will turn up on their doorstep begging to be cleaned”), retirement homes, schools.

  2.

  The saving grace of Adam’s flat is the living room. This is two boxes stuck together with a long window, the type you get on a London bus, stretching the length of one wall. The room has two modes: light for studying, dark for smoking. Just now, the curtain is drawn and it is dark. Finding his sight not sufficiently accommodated, Alex lights two more candles on the coffee table (plank of wood, supported by bricks). And there it all is, fabulous as ever. The Path of Spheres. The Path of Letters. The world is broken.

  On the remaining wall, there many shelves of books, mostly in Hebrew. Above them, a huge cross-shaped poster of the popular musician Isaac Hayes dressed in a dashiki and sunglasses, calling himself Black Moses. Some photos of the popular musician Stevie Wonder. A badly framed print of the painter Klee’s Angelus Novus. The director Steven Spielberg, the popular singer Michael Jackson and the Styrofoam alien E.T. sitting on each other’s laps. The martial artist Bruce Lee with nunchucks. The wise guy Walter Benjamin in need of a comb, a better tailor, a way out of France. A pin board of notes and reminders, aphorisms (“All names and attributes are metaphoric with us but not with Him”) and scraps of prayers. Most pleasing to Alex is a far corner of this wall, up near the cornice of the ceiling. Nine black-and-white photos in Kabbalah formation. The postcards are of famous faces. They go with the autographs Adam sheepishly requests every now and then. They look so pretty up there that Alex has almost forgiven him his philistine mutilations (Adam pays good money for them, cuts the names out of the documents, buys a postcard of the person in question, and then sticks the name with Blu-tack over the postcard, thus rendering them worthless to anyone but him. He did this with Kafka. Kafka).

  This represents the total of Adam’s autograph collection, purchased at the rate of about one a year. The collection seems to Alex one of the most perfect he has ever known (and not solely because of his own inclusion in it): small, selfless, almost entirely arbitrary (his own inclusion, he presumes, is a joke)—and with so much time passing between one acquisition and the next!

  If it is, indeed, a tree, then it is bonsai. Miniature, artificial, slowly tended. But with one branch missing. Adam insists there should be ten names—a crown for the tree, a head for the body—and yet for almost a year now Alex has been unable to tempt him with star or sportsman, scientist or celebrated suicide, assassin or assassinated, president or prole. No writers (though he wavered for weeks about Philip K. Dick), no wrestlers. Neither Jews nor goys. (“But who do you think you’re waiting for?” “I don’t know. I can’t say. When I see it, I’ll know, won’t I?”)

  Eye level with Alex’s seat, on a low shelf, rests a stunning photograph of Esther. She is sitting on the edge of the kitchen sink. It was taken the day after her grandfather’s funeral, three years ago. Alex took that picture. Her eyes are sad but her mouth is teasing, a certain smile Alex knows to be sexual for he was inside her a few minutes after the image impressed itself on the acetate. He remembers relieving her of her blouse in a rush, pressing his fingers to her left breast and then, below that, grasping at the solid box of her pacemaker. They did it standing up, against the kitchen door, while shivah went on in the lounge. Important not to get the wrong idea about this: Esther was closer to Isaac Jacobs than anyone. She lived in the hospital those last few months, reading Torah to him until they both fell asleep. Reaching across him to the plywood cupboard, retrieving the things he wanted to see, smell, read. But sex is the opposite of death—so Esther had claimed as she pushed Alex up against the wall. Sex is the reply to death. They had replied.

  ADAM POPS HIS head round the door.


  “Fruit or normal?”

  “Normal.”

  “Milk? Sugar?”

  “Both. Lots.”

  “You’ll get fat.”

  Alex lifts his shirt and aims an exploratory poke into the fold of flesh where once he had a navel.

  “Already happening.”

  “Omphalos obfuscated.”

  “By obesity in the offing. Yeah, yeah.”

  Adam laughs and disappears and Alex looks after him, at the space where Adam has been. He feels a deep love. Also a kind of awe, something like: now, wait an ugging minute, how did that happen? Handsome, bright, enlightened, thin—what happened to that fat weird freak Black Jew kid? Who lurched from one ill-fitting “identity” to another every summer, going through hippiedom, grunge, gangsta lite, various roots-isms (Ebonics, Repatriation, Rastafarianism), Anglophilia, Americanization, afros, straightened, corn-rowed, shaved, baggy jeans, tight jeans, white girls, black girls, Jew girls, goy girls, conservatism, Conservatism, socialism, anarchism, partying, drugging, hermiting, schizing, rehabbing—how did he get from there to this? How did he get so happy?

  Adam will say God, of course. Except he won’t say His name, and if you ask him to write it down he will write YHWH, or, if he has a nice pen, . Yes, Adam will say God. Alex, on the other hand, is more inclined to say Weed. Alex favors the argument Marijuana. Maybe, in truth, it is a split between the two, something like 60/40.

  ALEX RECLINES INTO the sofa, remembers something and brings his bag up on to his lap. Drawing a folded piece of paper out from between a book, he opens it and begins to yell in the direction of the kitchen: “LAST WEEK, BEFORE THE MESS. I FOUND SOME GOOD STUFF. IT’S STILL HERE IN MY BAG. LIST OF.”

  “WHAT?”

  “BLACK JEWS.”

  “OH, YEAH?”

  “I MEAN, PEOPLE WHO ARE. AUTOGRAPHS I COULD GET. TO COMPLETE YOUR COLLECTION MAYBE?”

  “RIGHT. ANYONE GOOD?”

  “SLASH.”

  “YEAH, NO . . . I KNEW THAT. THAT’S LAME.”