English: Westchester County, NY map from 1839. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
LOUIS
From when I was about 8 years old until I was in my early 20s I had a close friend named Louis (pronounced in the French manner Louie), Louis Maiello. Both he and I lived in Tuckahoe N. Y. at the time. Tuckahoe was a small village nestled between the toney Westchester County suburbs of Bronxville, Eastchester, Scarsdale, and Pelham. Most of the people who lived in Tuckahoe were Italians or Afro-Americans who for the most part were dependent on the wealthier suburbs for their sustenance. A few Jews and wealthier Italians lived within the village closest to its borders because most of those upscale addresses had restrictions at the time, prohibiting Jews, Italians, and blacks from living within their jurisdictions. So, living just across the town boundaries was as close as they got to their idea of suburban heaven.
Where Winnie (Winston Churchill who appeared in “Papa Joes Tales” a few weeks back) was destined for success based on name, ancestry, looks, capability, wealth and a host of other things, Louis definitely was not. It was not just the name and family background that separated them.
Where Winnie was tall, athletic, manly looking and white, Louis was small, smaller than I was, skinny and pretty, almost effeminate looking with long eyelashes and coal-black eyes. He also definitely was not blessed with that chalky pink tinged alabaster complexion and throbbing blue veins that marked one as a member of the “white” race at that time. (The white race then usually being limited to Anglo-Germanic-Nordic ancestry. Celts had been recently admitted to the club and Slavs confused things. Jews were not really white, they were after all Jews. They along with Southern Europeans, Turks, Arabs, and others had just begun knocking at the door clamoring for membership.) Louie was that deep dark dusky color with a flash of gold buried deep beneath the dirt that ranked us at the bottom of the racial hierarchy, along with blacks, Puerto Ricans and Sephardim (Mexicans were not an obsession at the time where I lived on the East coast).
As an aside: As a child the white pink, blue-veined people who lived in up scale suburbs of Westchester County, NY frightened me. Those blue veins throbbing beneath that dead looking white skin always made me think of zombies or vampires. I wonder if those nordic masters of the universe had or have now any idea of how ugly they appeared to many of us. Ironically the worst and most frightening of them was an Italian. He ran the Italian operation of one of the American clients I represented when I lived in Rome. He was a Colonna; a member of the Colonna family who along with the even older Orsini family had run Rome and the Papacy for 1200 years. My client was the first person from either family in those 1200 years to take a job. “Just like one of those upstart Colonnas,” an Orsini was rumored to have sniffed. Anyway, I guess as a side effect of a millennium of inbreeding, all color had left his face leaving only a deathly pasty white pallor. Those ghastly throbbing blue veins remained. He resembled a cadaver more than something living. He was also one of the most despicable human beings I have ever met. That also has something to do with breeding, I guess.
Anyway, Louis was not pre-destined for success. At 8 he was thrown out of his house by his sadistic father and forced to live on the streets or on the largess of relatives and friends. For some reason, many of the adults I knew would warn me to stay away from him because he was a bad influence. I did not understand that. He wasn’t mean or violent, in fact just the opposite. Not that he was a do-gooder or anything like that. He preferred leaving people alone, just as he preferred for them to leave him alone.
Nevertheless, many of the bigger boys would bully him mercilessly. He would not often fight back against the bullies, preferring the strategy of avoid and escape to confrontation. I on the other hand always fought back, but usually lost.
Perhaps that is why we became friends. Louie was sort of a kindred spirit; befriending him probably filled my need for acceptance. Not that I was ostracized and shunned like him, but I seemed to inhabit the fringes of my childhood social sets and pushing my way into their center required a greater commitment than I thought the rewards warranted.
He was not a thief either. Oh if you left something lying around he might take it, but I saw that as now more than the occasional incidental stealing we all do; sort of like taking pencils from the office where we work.
Although he was pretty looking, he was not effeminate and was of all of us the one who had the earliest and most prolific sexual experiences. He was very successful at it and with that, as he grew older, his reputation among the other neighborhood boys climbed a bit. It was said of him, that Louie could get laid in a nunnery. I, on the other hand, much to my chagrin, was truly a late bloomer.
Anyway, in our late teens, I went off to college and law school and Louie, as a lot of the dispossessed people from the East Coast at that time did decamped for California. He wanted to become an actor.
He returned a year or so later and moved into a basement flat in Greenwich Village; one of those flats common in NY City then; one room below street level, fully exposed toilet sitting in the kitchen area, no hot water, bathtub with a piece of plywood covering it that served as the dining table and all the rats and cockroaches one could desire.
He was living with a woman who had returned with him from California and who appeared stoned all the time. Actually, I did not know what being stoned all the time ment or looked like since it was still a few years before the rise of hippiedom when we learned all about it. At that time, she seemed to me, seductive. That sort of dreamy look and half-smile that flitted across her face in response to anything I said and the uninhibited movements of her body I interpreted as erotic rather than drug-induced lethargy. I spent one night at the apartment. Louie had gone to sleep. I thought for sure I would lose my virginity that night and out of nervousness I talked… and talked until she fell asleep and I had to wait another year or so for that highly anti-climatic event we, fortunately, experience only once in our lives.
Louie had succeeded in becoming a movie actor of sorts in Hollywood and had appeared in a movie. He told me about what he and other actors had to do to get a part in a movie in Hollywood; how he had to give blow jobs and more to the producers to get the part. While he was telling me this, I noticed that it was the only time I had ever seen Louie angry or ashamed. His eyes filmed over in fear, embarrassment or self-disgust I could not tell. Perhaps he was stoned also.
Nevertheless, I envied him. I had already given up my dreams for a life in the theater, unwilling and perhaps frightened that I would be unable to do the things and suffer the humiliations required to even get a chance to perform.
The movie he appeared in was a biker flick that was Jack Nicholson’s first starring role. Louie played a skinny sex-crazed hanger-on. A role he was well suited for.
Anyway, after that, I sadly lost touch with Louie. He had taken the stage name of James Oliver. I would periodically search the internet for some information about him but without luck. I assumed that he must have died of AIDs or some other form of STD.
Last week while obsessing again about why so few people respond to my Facebook posts I decided that I needed to find more friends. Previously I had assumed that my posts were simply boring, so I started sharing posts that others had sent me. I believed that if they received a lot of comments on their posts, by sharing them with my other “friends” I would get a similar response. Alas, no. I thought there were only two reasons for this. The first I refused to contemplate and the second was that I had too few friends. So, I went searching for more friends. I decided to click on the village where I grew up, Tuckahoe, to see if I could find a few members of my old gang who I could, for old times sake, con into reading one or two of my posts.
I was both pleased and surprised to find, James Oliver alive and well living as a 70-year-old artist in Taos New Mexico. According to a news report accompanying his profile, he had continued his “Hollywood” lifestyle becoming one of John Lennon’s favorite carousing pals and had actually made it into one or two of Lennon’s biographies. Tiring of the bright lights and the big city he had moved to Taos to live life as an artist of local renown.
Read Full Post »
Papa Joe's Tales, Fables and Parables 