“I have a business offer,” Zippo said.
“I’m not in the market for photos,” Carney said.
He frowned. “I don’t do that anymore. I’m a director now. Movies.”
Zippo watched the man cook up distasteful scenarios. “Not that kind,” Zippo said. “Hollywood movies.” He cranked up his work smile. “I’m going to put you in pictures.”
* * *
***
Nine years ago the Harlem Gazette ran the best pics from Zippo’s Miss Laura–Wilfred Duke series, with prominent play on the cover and in the spread inside, credited to “Anonymous.” What was the point of getting his work out there if no one knew it was his? Usually people called pics like that blackmail stuff, “compromising photographs,” but Zippo considered them just the opposite: uncompromising. They didn’t flinch from the primitive mechanics of desire, the hardwired yearnings. The black bars across his subjects’ faces turned them into vessels for the viewer’s erotic truth. When the cheap newspaper ink smudged on your fingers you understood you were implicated. Yes: A precise and uncompromising art.
Zippo restrained himself from badgering the newsstand guy: “I did this.” He thrilled to see his work in the world, in the hands of a faceless but approving public. Out in the open—unlike his boudoir work, stashed under the mattress or hidden in the sock drawer and occasionally pulled out for dreamy appreciations or masturbation fuel. He owed Carney for this realization, for hiring him in his scheme to ruin the banker Wilfred Duke.
After the Duke job, Zippo continued the boudoir work, posing shy wives and compliant girlfriends and budding exhibitionists, and laid off—more or less—check kiting and other illicit activities. He added pet portraits to his services. The pet sideline was lucrative and generated strong word of mouth, as opposed to the risqué stuff. In a few months he’d gone legit.
It took Uncle Heshie’s death for him to make a change. Zippo had always been the old man’s favorite. “You see things cockeyed, like me,” he told the boy as he shared his latest tinkerings, the sketches and doohickeys that populated his workshop. Herschel Lefkowitz was an inventor, a father of patents. He was born in Odessa and settled on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side in 1906; his family’s house had been burned down the previous October. Pogroms, massacres. America was in the massacre racket, too, Heshie observed, but they concentrated on Negroes and Indians for the most part. He figured they’d come for him once they ran out, but that might take years.
According to Heshie, there were two types of inventors: those who identified deficiencies and provided remedies and improvements; and those who could see the invisible, discover what was lacking, and will it into existence—“fill the hole in the world.” Uncle Heshie belonged to that latter tribe. “I’m an artist, the way I look at it. I have it in my head and then I bring it into being.” Of all his inventions, among the reversible zippers and spring-loaded can openers, the most lucrative and enduring was the ceramic toothbrush mount, that sensation found above bathroom sinks the world over. When his niece Dorothy married Henry Flood, a Negro schoolteacher from Harlem, he hosted the ceremony in the garden of his Riverdale mansion. Toothbrush money, the whole shebang.
Heshie was the only member of the Lefkowitz family in attendance that day. They’d made the trip over within months of one another, a staggered heap of battered briefcases and bad teeth, but had since diverged. Where his relatives saw in Henry a colored brute, book learning or no book learning, Heshie recognized a fellow refugee. He’d fled Europe’s genocidal rehearsals and Henry the murderous designs of Alabama. Now they were New Yorkers.
When Zippo was seven, his father had a heart attack on the A train. They were returning home from the Children’s Zoo in Central Park. As his father slumped at his feet, the other riders noted the boy’s detached affect, as if the tragedy was happening to someone else. As if he were a passenger on another train altogether and rushing through a separate darkness. Zippo’s balloons bumped against the ceiling of the car and made a sound like a distant heartbeat. Heshie looked after the boy from then on, paying for his summer camp and underwriting his hospitalizations when “the fire thing” manifested itself.
Everybody called him Zippo after the fire thing, even his mother. Not Uncle Heshie. “No one got hurt,” he said. “Except some buildings.”
Heshie left Zippo a monstrous sum in his will, contingent on his nephew finishing his education; after high school Zippo had pursued an autodidact curriculum of photography and petty larceny. Zippo’s next incarnation was Heshie Lefkowitz’s final invention: He enrolled in art school, Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and stepped into himself.
A fire will catch on its own, given the proper conditions; an accelerant multiplies its power, velocity, and hunger. Pratt was kerosene and the changing culture a bellows. Zippo made his mark on campus with his first group show. He was a couple of years older than his fellow students; his experience on the crooked side enriched his work. Blue Movies reframed twelve photographs from his boudoir days, with a row of six close-ups of faces over another row of six clients’ bodies. Frames in a film strip. None of the faces—expressions in a spectrum of coy, downcast, aggressive—belonged to the fragmented bodies. Feather boa, strap of a nightie. Elbow crevices and somehow maudlin nipples.
“I chose the ones with the maximum erotic charge,” Zippo told the class.
“A brittle sensuality,” answered the professor. Zippo’s photography professor lacked black acquaintances and it had never occurred to him to consider black people as sexual beings. He gave Zippo an A.
Like many artists Zippo had been starved of attention in his younger days, and like many artists he channeled a modicum of praise into a contempt-of-audience phase: Invincible! He took to dressing like a Negro Salvador Dalí and penciled in a handlebar mustache. Shambling in velour, he pushed a watermelon in a baby carriage down DeKalb Avenue and harassed strangers, demanding to know if they “liked his baby chile.” Everybody assumed he was high most of the time. He wasn’t.
The jazz loft scene was taking off downtown. Greene Street was holy, Mercer Street was almost holy, Wooster Street was on the way to holy but the train was delayed—Manhattan in pockets was a refuge of sacred hip. Two dollars got you keg beer and discordant reveries that harassed the bones. One night Zippo and Ornette Coleman stood before the open windows of a second-story loft owned by some music-industry guru. Gulping the night air. He asked Ornette Coleman how much his own loft cost, a few blocks away.
“What?” Zippo said. The music was loud.
Ornette repeated the sum.
Zippo could swing that. Toothbrush money. He bought a two-thousand-square-foot loft on Greene Street for twelve grand. A Pratt buddy studying architecture made sketches; he got an A when he turned them in for his final. The Greene Street space, aka the Grotto, was outfitted with a projection room whose six seats had been rescued from the Pussy-Cat Playhouse after it was closed down by the Health Department. Another room was referred to as the Lot. Zippo painted it to resemble a lunar surface—deep-space black over deathless gray—and spent a week making papier-m?ché boulders. It was the backdrop for dozens of shorts over the years, wherein a succession of acting students performed the world’s great monologues on the moon while Zippo prowled with his 16mm Bolex. “It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had died long ago.” There was even a room for his mannequins, cooled by a window unit.