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I remember looking at
James Dean one
day when he and I had been hanging around in New York - he was standing in the
rain with his head tipped back and water running down his face. He reminded me
of the famous circus clown, Emmett Kelly. Dean's eyes had the same look as the
clown's: not funny or cheerful, more a sort of distant craziness, a controlled
kind of craziness that kept you from knowing what he was thinking.
The first time I saw Dean he looked
like a small scarecrow. I was at the counter in a drugstore at 47th and
Broadway when he shambled in behind a guy I knew from Hollywood. Dean lurched into the place as though he'd tripped on the door
sill and was struggling for balance. With that shock of hair standing out like
straw, his hands jammed into the pockets of baggy trousers, and a checkered
jacket that hung on him big and had leather patches sewn around the cuffs,
Dean seemed like a burlesque character. He was all hunched down into himself,
squinting through his brown-framed glasses.
The other guy, Ray Curry, introduced
us, but Jimmy hung too far back for a handshake, so I nodded. He said nothing,
just stood there staring suspiciously and bending slightly forward as though
from a stomach ache. I was also wearing glasses, and he asked if I was
near-sighted or far-sighted. I told him I was far-sighted. "You're
lucky," he said, sitting on a stool. He glanced at what I'd ordered and
asked the waitress to bring him the same: orange juice, coffee, an English
muffin. Curry told her he'd have that also, then went to make phone calls with
a big safety pin. You could stick the point into a mouthpiece, touch the clasp
to the nickel or dime slot, and presto - a dial tone. Not every pay phone fooled
so easily, but the drugstore and a booth in the Museum of Modern Art never
failed to plug through free of charge.
While waiting for the juice, Jimmy
twirled the stool between us, wanting to say something important. "Eyes
can be a drag," he said. He'd been in a Broadway play, lost his glasses
and had trouble seeing the other actors if they "got out of reach."
He had seen them "only as shapes" and couldn't see how they were
looking at him.
I asked him how he had managed to
play it, and he said he had related to the scene in his mind, as opposed to
"what the hams were doing on the stage. "I asked him what the play
was, and he said it was "a shit-fucker with Arthur Kennedy." He
didn't say anything else about it, which I figured meant it had been a rotten
experience.
Leaning closer, he eyed the book I
had open on the counter, Barnaby Conrad's Matador. "Why are you reading a
book about bullfighting?" he asked. I told him I liked it. Had I read
Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon? he wanted to know. "Now that's a
fucking book about bullfighting," he said. Of course I'd read it, I told
him. In fact, I had a copy at my apartment. He asked where I lived and I said,
"Around the corner on 48th off Eighth."
"What've you got," he
asked, "a room? You got to come here to eat?"
I said, "No, there's a
kitchen - part of one main room, and a bedroom."
"What about a bathroom?" he
asked. "You got one in the hall?"
"It's in the apartment," I
said. "A shower - no tub, you know."
"It's
better to take a shower," he said, laughing, "or you start playing
with your dick . . . So, no shit," he continued, "What's it
cost?" I told him what I paid on a weekly basis, and he asked, "You
live there by yourself?"
"Right now," I said and
Jimmy nodded, logging in the information. When he asked to take a look at the
Conrad book, I said, "It's a novel," and he said he knew it was
fiction. He knew the book. I slid it down the counter and he picked it up. He
held the book open in one hand. He hunched over the pages, touching the paper
like someone reading Braille. His lips moved quickly, and he'd glance off as
if remembering something or mouthing lines.
That was how the friendship began:
without wanting to know if I'd finished reading the book, he asked to borrow
it. I remember the way he was holding it and looking at me with his mouth
slightly moving with whatever thoughts were spinning in his head.
There would come a time when we'd
talk about other books - Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell and Garcia Lorca's
plays. I loaned Jimmy my copy of The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations,
and when we tried discussing the book, I could tell he hadn't read it. I
tricked him on it; he didn't say anything at first, but later told me he
hadn't had time, finally confessing that he read "slow." He said,
"It takes me a while to get the gist of the whole thing." It was
because he thought in "circles," he said, grinning.
I'd soon find out about his reading
disability. Eager to talk about books, he'd absorb what was said, taking it in
and quite consciously making it his own. An amazing trick, his sponging
whatever you knew about a subject, kind of shaking it around with what he'd
learned elsewhere and piecing together a rather original, persuasive
presentation.
It took him a long time to actually
read pages. He thought in pictures, not in words. Reading was an excruciating
chore, and though he'd profess to be an avid reader -a "cosmolite,"
as he once put it - he rarely cracked a book. And yet he could evolve a
spontaneous performance from what he'd heard and made his own.
GO
TO PART TWO
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