PART 8: BIG BROTHER

After I graduated from Cornell, I moved back home, which was still at 2 West 67th Street.  It was where Dorothy and Hi Carr lived. We seemed to follow them everywhere; our two families joined at the hip like Siamese twins. I was very pleased to have them so accessible; of all my parents’ friends, Hi and Dorothy were the most approachable and most amusing. Toby had by this time married Bob Rafelson, who worked in television, and moved to the East Side, but Peter, who had his own apartment, tended to gravitate toward his parents’, and we saw a lot of each other. He took me on as a project, appointing himself as my guide while I re-learned the city from the perspective of a young single man.

His tutorials included dress, hairstyle, musical taste, and – at the top of the list, women. These were, indeed, his priorities in life. I was a first-year graduate student, so my priorities were very different, but we had an unspoken agreement that I wouldn’t bore him with scholarly discourse, and he never talked about his own job, which was menial and low-paying. In a way, I had two lives, one north of 116th Street, where people were interested in, say, the Counter-Reformation, and one downtown, where I knew better than to drop terms like that. Peter had left Amherst without graduating several years before, and his taste in reading tended toward Esquire and GQ. He was neither dumb nor a philistine; he forgave me, even admired me for my dedication to an arcane discipline and the career that it led to, but it wasn’t the trajectory he was on. He wasn’t on any trajectory at all.

The Carr family – and particularly Peter and Toby – had always been one of the few constants in my life. We had lived in adjoining buildings on West 79th when my parents first moved to New York from Chicago, and now they had unearthed for us the apartment on 67th Street. And there were all those summers on Fire Island, spent mostly in their house, which they either lent to us or rented to us when they weren’t using it. That seemed to be most of the time. Dorothy and Hi ran a business called the Carr Buying Office (when I was little, I always thought it was an auto dealership) which brokered fashions, most of them foreign, and Dorothy was always traveling to Europe to look at what the designers were up to. Hi had no use for the Fire Island house when she was away; my memories of him are all city-based, he sitting at the dining room table adding up long columns of figures on yellow legal pads.  When my mother and I were in their house on the Island, there was an unspoken understanding that Peter and Toby could come and go as they pleased; Toby came seldom but Peter was always around, often with one or two of his friends. Their sweaty, boisterous presence annoyed my mother – she ended up doing their laundry, and they ate prodigious amounts -- but I loved it. It was like a buddy movie; I became in effect their sidekick, their mascot. I had always wanted an older brother; now I had the next best thing.

Peter was not what you would call a steadying influence on me – that was his appeal. At 25, he was rudderless; he didn’t make plans or provisions. He had a couple of those jobs that sometimes lead to careers for highly-motivated people – first in the mail room of a talent agency and then as a trainee there -- that provided him with enough money every Friday to get through the weekend. But he had no interest in representing entertainers for a living – or in anything else. He was like Alfred E. Neuman, the cartoon cover-boy of Mad Magazine, whose motto was, “What? Me worry?”­ – except that Neuman was geeky looking and Peter had male-model looks that made woman weak in the knees.

Peter at 25

Peter appointed himself as my tutor after I moved back to the city, and I saw more of him than I did of Jeff Davidson or any of my other New York / Fire Island friends. I didn’t want to live a life like his, but I envied him his poise and sophistication. I had a habit of finding analogues in the literature I was studying for his prescriptions, and I came across a perfect description of what Peter had and I lacked: he was the living embodiment of sprezzatura, which meant doing almost everything – riding a horse, improvising a sonnet, speaking a foreign language, seducing a woman -- with a kind of negligent grace that suggests it’s being accomplished spontaneously, without endless hours of practice or study. Thus, wrote Baldassare Castiglione in the early 16th century, it’s always well to leave one little lock of hair out of place, to make a few mistakes when playing the lute, to stumble slightly when speaking with the French ambassador in his own tongue, to miss an occasional shot while demonstrating Federer-like elegance on the tennis court. (Castiglione recommended tennis to courtiers as the sport that best showed off one’s grace and beauty, as opposed to wrestling, which was for peasants.) The true Renaissance man never sweats, is never at a loss, always knows what to do and say. Look at how practiced Romeo’s moves on Juliet are at their first meeting: no fumbling or stumbling, no “So where do you go to school?”, just witty repartee that in only fourteen lines earns him a kiss. “You kiss by the book,” says Juliet, and the book might well have been Castiglione’s.

In the Gospel according to Peter, dress was of paramount importance in the presentation of self. Another analogue: in Hamlet, Polonius tells his son, “Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, / But not expressed in fancy (rich, not gaudy), / For the apparel oft proclaims the man.” The prevailing fashion in the early 60’s was what Brooks Brothers and J. Press were selling – ultraconservative clothes that now. in retrospect, just seem shapeless and baggy. But Peter was always beautifully turned out; the only flaw in his appearance (and it bothered him greatly) was that he was losing his hair, and he tried a variety of remedies, including plugs and different kinds of snake oil, in his losing battle with baldness. There was still enough hair on his head, fine and dark, to cover his scalp, but it was clear that someday there wouldn’t be. Every man in his family was bald. For him it was not only a cosmetic problem but a sign of ageing, and like Peter Pan, he never wanted to grow old. He simply couldn’t imagine a life for himself at 40 or even at 30. In The Great Gatsby, a book he admired, a fatal auto accident occurs on the narrator’s birthday, about which he remarks, " Thirty -- the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair."

I had, and have, thank God, plenty of hair. But sprezzatura was, and is, a quality I conspicuously lack. I’m a grind, and always have been – earnest, goal-directed, proud of my accomplishments and embarrassed by my failures. Peter wasn’t interested in accomplishing anything except, in the short term, sleeping with the best-looking woman in whatever room he happened to be occupying. They, and hence he, could often be found at Malachy’s, a saloon on the East Side owned by Malachy McCourt, brother of the writer Frank and a wonderful story teller himself. It was one of the first singles bars in the city, the earliest manifestation of the hookup culture that was Peter’s element.

I didn’t share in these successes. I was only 21 when I moved back to New York from Ithaca, and I looked even younger. My ears stuck out, my Adam’s apple was prominent, and I had the pink cheeks of an adolescent who has just started shaving. I remember attending a friend’s black-tie wedding (in a rented tux), and after fumbling with the studs and cuff links and bow tie, surveying myself in a full-length mirror, hoping I looked like Cary Grant or David Niven, but Bob’s friend Buck Henry was probably right when he told me, “Maybe closer to the lead in a high school production of Abe Lincoln in Illinois.” Opportunity often knocked during this period without my answering. Once, during this period while I was transitioning to something recognizable as manhood, Peter’s girlfriend Dany invited me over to her parents’ apartment, just to keep her company. When I pressed the buzzer, I heard giggling before the door swung open, and there stood Dany and her best friend Susan, whom I knew slightly. “We chickened out,” explained Dany, with a smirk. “We were going to take off our clothes and open the door naked, just to see your face.” And what would have happened if they had? My fantasies notwithstanding, probably nothing; they were a year older than I, sophisticated and sexually active, but they were also nice Jewish girls at heart. But I chickened out too, by not pressing the issue.

But things began to change, and quite suddenly, too. By the end of that year, I had begun to fill out, my ears were covered by the long hair that the 60s were making fashionable even before the Beatles arrived, and girls started looking at me differently. Peter was changing too, and not for the better. He was slipping away from us – from Toby, from his parents, from his old friends. He had new friends now, and I didn’t like them. It was obvious from their banter that their lives included – centered on – drugs. He shared an apartment somewhere uptown with a serpentine, insinuating young guy (I’ll call him Tony) who made me cringe. Women found Tony glamorous and dangerous (they were right about the dangerous part), and were always fawning over him. I remember listening to him at a party describe to a rapt female audience what else you did with cocaine besides snorting it. “You rub it on all the pink parts of your body,” he was saying. “Your lips, your nipples. . . .” And they were nodding in absorption. I knew that Peter had succumbed to his aura; he had lost weight, and had an abstracted air about him. What hair he had left was messy, and he sometimes came home from work with two-days of stubble, before that was a style. He looked much older than 25.

One morning, while I was still asleep, alone in the apartment – no idea where my mother was; we didn’t keep tabs on each other – one of the elevator men (not Brian) rang my doorbell. “Well,” he said to me, dolefully, “Ye won’t be seeing yer friend Peter no more.” I couldn’t speak. I knew he was telling me that Peter was dead. He was struggling to break the news gently, but I felt as though I’d been clubbed over the head. He put out his hand, and I shook it and thanked him. Then I showered and shaved, got dressed, and went downstairs to find Dorothy and Hi, Toby and Bob in the kitchen. She was shaking, and her cheeks were stained with tears. Toby took me into another room and told me what had happened the night before. She and Bobby and Peter and Dany and Susan had gone to a dance club, where Peter had been drinking so heavily that Toby became alarmed. Every time Peter and Susan got up to dance, she said, she would take his martini to the ladies’ room and pour it down the sink. Much later, after everybody had gone home, Tony had called Bobby in a panic: Peter was unconscious. Bobby told Tony to call 911 and hustled out the door, leaving Toby still asleep; by the time he arrived at the apartment, the EMT personnel were there and had pronounced Peter dead. Bobby went home, woke Toby with the awful news, and at first light they went over to 67th Street. When Toby told Hi what had happened, he trudged wordlessly into his bedroom, where, Toby told me later, she could hear him pacing, muttering something that sounded to her like, “What’s the point? What’s the point?”

Bobby hadn’t told Toby that there were drug paraphernalia scattered around the bathroom floor of the apartment, and she assumed for a long time that her brother had died of alcohol poisoning. And maybe that was true; it’s what the coroner’s report eventually said. I assumed that he’d died of an overdose of heroin, to which he’d been introduced by Tony, and I still think so.

Losing Peter was more shocking to me than losing my father had been. After all, I hadn’t been accustomed to my father’s continual proximity for years, but Peter was a constant presence in my life. I spoke at his funeral, and talked about my memories of him in his teens, on the beach, in his red lifeguard trunks, surrounded by admirers – the picture of a young man who had everything going for him. My recollection moved a few people to tears: I wasn’t the only one who loved him. Shortly afterward, my mother and I moved away from the building on 67th Street, and Toby and Bob went to California, where he became a film director and producer. My mother and Dorothy remained close; after Hi died some years later and they were both widows, they had lunch and went to museums and movies until Dorothy herself died, in her 80s. I spoke at her funeral, too; it wouldn’t have been right if she had been buried without some formal acknowledgment of the connection between our two families. I talked about my fascination with her life in the 1920s, when she was a flapper, and how I questioned her endlessly about the speakeasy culture. “What did people eat in those places,” I remember asking, and she answered, “Club sandwiches. That’s all they had. I got so sick of club sandwiches I haven’t had one in thirty years.” Toby inherited the apartment, but never lived in it except when she visited New York and Fire Island every year for a few weeks.

Two other events preserved the continuity of Peter’s life and his death for me. Toby, when her brother died, was pregnant, and she named her son Peter. And years later, with grim satisfaction, I learned that Peter's friend Tony had also died of a drug overdose.