Page 37 of Go Now
And one day, on a Friday so hot that David had actually seen the asphalt on the road bubbling like soup, three big, sweating cops came and dragged the man away.As they were shoving him into the cop car, one of them, the biggest, sweatiest cop with pink skin like raw sausage, punched the skinny man right in the belly and the man was sick on the sidewalk.After that, he wasn’t shouting anymore; he just let them stuff him into the car like he was something that wouldn’t fit in a suitcase.
‘Youze dit’n see nut’n,’ the cop growled at David, and there was a scary blank nothing behind the man’s mirror-shades; David only saw his own, frightened face. But that was the summer David learned to see everything.
A week after the skinny man went away, another crazy man robbed the bodega with a gun.He shot Mr and Mrs Hernandez dead with that gun, and then he barricaded himself in there. He said he wanted a car, and five thousand dollars, and morphine.Everyone came to watch – David's Mom, his aunts, even the aunts and the cousins from Coney Island, plus all the kids from the block, and the priest, and the TV news with a big van, and a helicopter in the sky.The cops kept shouting at everyone to go inside, but the people just kept popping up again like groundhogs.David found a spot where no one saw him, sandwiched between the trash cans and a couch someone had dumped right there on the sidewalk.He had a great view of the bodega across the street; the cops crouched behind cars with their guns drawn, a big, tall, in-charge guy with a megaphone, Father Tedeschi getting in everyone's way, sweating in his surplice.
A man came and sat on the couch next to David.He had a sand-colored vest on with many pockets, a big shoulder bag, a camera with lots of wheels, buttons, and dials.It was the kind of thing David, instinctively, wanted to reach out and touch and turn and press.
‘Hey,’ the guy said to him.
‘Hey,’ David said back.
‘What you looking at, kid?You want a cigarette?’
‘I’m ten,’ said David.
The guy laughed, displaying a gold tooth, like a pirate.‘Ten,’ he repeated, as if it was funny to be ten.‘What you doing, kid?’
David shrugged.‘Watching.’
‘You picked a goddam perfect spot for it.You got the eye,’ the man said, touching his left eye with his thumb.David didn’t know what he meant, so he didn’t reply.
‘You like watching,’ the man went on.‘Watching’s what I do.’
He gave David a card. David kept it forever.It said Paul E.Swiss, Photographer.
‘You mind sharing with me?’he asked, patting the dirty gold cushion of the couch.
David shrugged.‘Sure,’ he said.Nobody ever asked him questions like that.
But slowly, things started to make sense.And something in David Sterling leapt into the light.This guy on the couch, with his cigarettes and his cameras and lenses.Snapping away at the siege, throughout the stifling heat of the night, until the cops shot the man with the gun and brought him out in a long black sack that went on a low trolley with wheels.All the time, Paul E.Swiss, Photographer was telling David what he was doing, showing David the view through the viewfinder, explaining how to load the film and wind it on, how to compose the perfect image.Using strange new terms:depth of field, perspective, balance.They sounded like special, almost holy things, like part of the Mass, but better.Not one single time calling him ‘weirdo’ or sayingfuck off and play like a normal kid would youor uttering any of the other cries that normally followed David around like gulls at the beach.The man said he would sell the pictures he’d taken to a newspaper or a magazine, and make a hundred dollars, maybe more. David, who had twelve dollars and sixty cents in a cigar tin under his bed, liked that idea a lot.
There were so few men in David’s life that Paul E.Swiss, Photographer might as well have been an emissary from another planet.But it was more than that.On that one thick, hot, electrically-charged evening, he’d planted a seed.And David never forgot it. Every time he had an exhibition or a new book out, he said a silent thank-you to the man who’d started it all.
‘Watching’s what I do’, he said, as he switched the red light on and stepped inside the basement dark room. That, too, was part of his ritual, recited each time he developed a roll of film.Not for superstitious reasons, just in solemn remembrance of how it had all begun.His journey to here.And it had been a blessed journey.Straight out of high school onto theNewark Star, then theTimes, freelance in Europe, China, Australia; his first exhibition at 27.
He loved it in the basement.It was supposed to be a communal space, but he paid the other people in the building so that it could be his alone.His sanctuary. Down here, he felt his life had come full circle; he could see how everything had led to him being here, in this special underground chamber, practising his own kind of alchemy with developing fluid, timer, and plastic tongs.Long before he knew about developing, before he owned his first camera, even before the night of the bodega siege, David had loved being on his own in tiny, secret spaces.In the block where he'd grown up, there'd been a cupboard under the communal stairs where he used to hide with a flashlight; his proto-darkroom.Everything pointing to here.
Even the church had been a part of that journey.Most of what Father Tedeschi said made no sense.It made no sense when that fat, irritable priest talked about Christ’s love, about ‘suffer the little children’, not when he’d pinch your cheek in confirmation class, pinch it so hard that the tears came.But the Mass always made sense.The precise order of things, the bell, the lamp, theHanc Igiturjust before the blessing of the bread and the wine.It reminded David of how he’d put all his bears and soldiers in a row before he went to sleep.How he’d had to do it, or hecouldn’tsleep.A peace descending on the world after that, a soft, silent kind of click, once everything was in order, in its correct and proper place.And God saw that it was good.Everlasting peace.Peace on earth.
Developing a film was just the extension of that, a mystery performed in the dark, a Godless Mass with chemicals instead of wine.He assembled everything in strict order: the developer, the gloves, the measuring jug, the baths, the agitator… He had a place for everything in the darkroom.He didn’t really need the red light, he could do the whole thing in total darkness.
All That Is Holy. That had been one of their suggestions for the exhibition title.God, how they’d argued over it.Him, his agent, the kid from the gallery.He didn’t want to come across as an arrogant prick.He was too long in the tooth to be anenfant terrible.And he was astute enough to know that the success of David Sterling, Photographer, had always depended on the goodwill and faith and simple generosity of a lot of other people.Too many artists, particularly photographers, seemed to forget that. Seemed to believe their own write-ups; start thinking they were the centre of the universe.
Why was it especially photographers?He wondered that, as he measured out the different, precise quantities of developing solution and water into separate jugs.Well, it wasn’t hard to see why.A painter needed brushes and a sculptor needed chisels, but nobody doubted that the skill, the innate creative spirit, was supplied by the human being.A decent painter could still knock out a decent portrait with a lump of coal and the inside of a Cheerios box, because the skill resided in them, not in their tools and instruments. But every photographer knew deep down that it was different for them, that they were, at best, a mere fifty percent of the team that made a good photograph.And hence the arrogance, hence the hubris, hence the elevated quantities of ‘Don’t you know who I am?’
And David Sterling was determined not to be one of those photographers.But even so.Christ.Some of the suggestions that the gallery and even Mieke, his agent, had put forward for this exhibition were… They made him want to groan.To shit right there on the gallery’s polished floor.They were justbad. ‘Black Mass’?A political hot potato, not to mention misleading.‘Sins Of The Fathers’?Great, for a book about pederastic priests.It was as if neither of them really understood what this exhibition was about.
With the solutions mixed, David started to load the film into the reel.He knew each image so well, he could tell from the shadow-shapes on the negatives. ‘The Choir’ was first on the strip: he’d taken hundreds of shots to catch the boys as they sang a high note.Their mouths open, their eyes wide, they looked like they were transfixed in horror, not singing the Angelus.
He heard the doorbell.He had the sign on his door, so he knew no-one would disturb him. There was only Roy in the building at present; the girl at the top was teaching in Jakarta for a year.And Roy himself was going away for a few weeks, so he'd have the whole place to himself.Through the building, he heard Roy coming out of his apartment on the first floor, heavy-footed.A bit of a klutz.
Next was ‘The Sermon’: a take on those Renaissance paintings where something classical or biblical is going on centre-stage, but the real action’s everywhere else: some dude getting his purse pinched, some chick getting her ass pinched, a monk losing big-time at the card-table.He’d picked Easter Sunday in East Harlem, the church packed out like a baseball game.Up in the pulpit, that handsome, angry Latino priest had his fist clenched, berating a congregation who were otherwise occupied.A woman was picking lottery numbers, her husband was chewing a bit of skin on his index finger.And their little boy was facing the complete opposite way, staring at the little girl in the pew behind him.He reminded David of himself. People used to get so mad with him for looking. They said he looked for too long. His second wife – maybe it was the third – had said he was ‘somewhere on the spectrum’, that he should ‘go and do the tests’.He’d said she should go and get screwed.
He heard Roy's slightly nasal, Canadian accent at the main door.Words he couldn't make out. Roy's were surprised, apologetic. He heard him jogging back inside, down the hall, and up the stairs; he heard keys and coins in Roy's pocket.He remembered being a kid and running up and down the stairs with two pennies in his pants pocket.So he'd sound like a man.
The same little boy featured again in 'Suffer The Children': there was a life-sized Christ on the cross, one of the grislier, Southern European kind, with genuine agony on the messiah's face and blood dripping from the crown of thorns into his sweaty hair. The kid was playing with a yo-yo, utter indifference on his chubby face.As if Christ was saying, 'Look, kid, I'm doing this for you,' and the kid was just saying, 'Yeah.And?Do that walking-on-the-water trick again.'
Another slam at the top, more jogging down, Roy coming back down the stairs.Maybe he’d ordered a pizza and was short of change.That made sense.At the door, again, more surprised noises from Roy, nothing from the caller. ‘Hello?’Roy called out. Then more distantly, as if he’d gone into the street, ‘Where did you go?’
