Harvey Keitel. Marshall Fine

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СКАЧАТЬ rebellion extended beyond attempts at blasphemy into his efforts to attain juvenile-delinquency status: the duck’s-ass hairstyle, the leather jacket, the peg pants set off by pointy shoes with metal cleats to announce his arrival from a block away. He wanted to be a tough guy because that’s the way the guys were.

      Not out-and-out gangsters, of course: just wiseguys who caused a little commotion now and then. According to one classmate of Keitel’s at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brighton Beach,

      We were what was called trumbnicks, troublemakers. We were tough but we weren’t bad. By today’s standards, we were angels. We got into fights, local things. We would go to a dance and end up in a brawl. We’d go to the old Manhattan-Brooklyn Jewish Center. We were Ashkenazi Jews and we’d get into fights with the Syrian Jews. We’d talk to their girls or they’d talk to ours and the next thing you know, you’d have fifty guys fighting in the street. But not with guns or knives – just with fists.

      As Keitel recalled it, ‘You had to be tough, otherwise you were considered a fag, a sissy. We used to have rock fights with black people. I had some black friends and we’d kid one another. The divisiveness and the rock fights always seemed absurd to us. I threw rocks at them and they threw rocks at me.’

      Being tough meant doing things that scared you, things you knew could get you in trouble with the police or worse. Being tough meant never copping to that fear, no matter how overpowering it might become. For Keitel, being tough meant hiding his fear along with all the other unwanted, unwelcome emotions swirling around in his adolescent mind:

      I remember being scared to rob pigeon coops, but you couldn’t admit that. There was nothing to be but tough. Now the other kids who were going to school and studying to be something – a doctor, lawyer, an Indian chief – they had a different identity. But the tough guys, their identity was to be tough. It was as if you were living in Africa and you had a tribe. You had to go out and kill animals to survive. Well, in this particular environment, to survive, you had to steal a car, tap a pigeon coop, steal things, wear certain clothing, put on the whole show. Otherwise you would be an outcast.

      Which was already an identity Keitel was dealing with in everyday life. As the son of immigrants who resented his ever-more-Americanized worldview, he dealt every day with being an outsider in his own home; outside the house, on the other hand, he knew he would never be the all-American kid. As a Jew, he had grown up with the idea of anti-Semitism, its specter emanating from Europe during the war against Germany. As a teenager, he coped with the mercurial nature of social standing in the ever-shifting world of high school. And the only place he seemed to fit was with the tough guys.

      Mark Reiner, a high-school friend, said, ‘Harvey was streetwise and tough, but he was never mean. He knew how to handle himself and while he wouldn’t back off from a fight, he never went looking for trouble either. He did some things I wouldn’t, but he never lost his sense of decency.’ And Keitel acknowledged:

      I knew, deep down, that I didn’t belong with that crowd. I was scared and didn’t feel part of it but I couldn’t admit that to myself, much less to them. So I played the game. I was not a real tough guy. The Brighton Beach Sinners were a group of friends of mine. The name was created by the press after a serious incident of vandalism at a neighborhood school. We didn’t consider ourselves great sinners. We were trying to learn what life was about, we were trying to survive life. I saw myself trying to develop the power to live. I didn’t think so much that I could be something as much as I needed to be something.

      There was so much energy and talent among those guys. I wish I could have sat down with them and talked about things I was interested in – about feelings, about life, about personal problems. I wanted to do that but I couldn’t. That wasn’t tough. That was soft.

      Yet he was a popular kid with his classmates, being elected by his peers as leader of the eighth-grade honor society, much to the chagrin of teacher Edna Dinkel, who took one look at the grinning juvenile-delinquent-in-training and said, ‘I do not consider that an appropriate choice.’ She ordered a new election, with different results and, being the teacher, she got what she ordered.

      Meanwhile, Keitel was discovering new paradigms for his notions of toughness – in the movies of Marlon Brando and James Dean. Here, too, were misunderstood young men, at odds with both parents and society, trying simply to find out who they were amid a world of misunderstanding and opposition. The films showed the young Keitel that toughness could be associated with emotional honesty and not simply a readiness to be quick with the fists:

      I related to James Dean because he was in situations that we were in. I never related to his tough guy side. It was always his sensitivity and yet that’s exactly what I couldn’t be. I always buried it.

      My comrades and I didn’t know about being nourished and we didn’t have the courage to love somebody. That wasn’t something we pursued. We weren’t brought up to nourish one another’s thoughts, to discuss our deep conflicts. Who the hell ever walked over to someone back then and said, ‘Uh, listen, I really feel very lonely’, or ‘I feel very scared’ or ‘I’m not sure where I’m at.’ We never spoke like that.

      I began to get a sense that courage was something other than what I thought it was. I saw people such as Dean, Brando and John Cassavetes as being heroic. As growing up has its difficulties, we look for heroes to help us through that shadowy forest. The work these people did represented a struggle to cope with the difficulty of being that stimulated and gave hope to me and my friends.

      They began to take the place of these warrior-like gods who had been my heroes. Somewhere along the line I have the sense that I was pursuing being tough in the wrong fashion. I wasn’t really becoming tough. I was building a stronger facade because now I see tough as being a whole different animal, as being someone who can face problems, who can try to solve them without a baseball bat. All those guys back in the old days I used to call fags were tougher than anybody because they knew how to be scared.

      I began to want to be less of a war hero and more of what those men were. They gave me courage, they gave me hope. The courage to express their feelings, their emotions, their thoughts. That was stunning. Frightening. It took more courage than I ever imagined, much more courage than picking up a gun.

      And part of that courage had to do with facing his own fears, something Keitel was not ready to do: ‘I never thought I could do what [Dean and Brando] did,’ he noted. ‘I was just glad someone was doing it – the “it” being something so personal and so revealing that it gave me some hope of understanding myself at a time when I was lying to myself with such ferocity. They somehow penetrated my defense, stirred things up.’

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      The sense of hope he gained from watching Dean and Brando act – the realization that men could actually reveal their anguish, anxiety and insecurity without compromising their sense of masculinity – was yet another emotion Keitel hid away as he coped with the pressures of family life and high school.

      He entered Abraham Lincoln High School in September 1954, a short, rather young-looking freshman in a school full of lower-middle-class Jewish and Italian kids from the Brighton Beach and Coney Island neighborhoods.

      The school had no metal detectors, no security forces, none of the stripped-down, urban-siege quality it possesses today. In this sunny era, the worst kids smoked cigarettes (with an occasional puff of marijuana by the really bad guys) as they hung out at the sweet shop across the street from Lincoln (long since replaced by the imposing edifices that comprise Trump Village housing development).

      The school was home to the budding СКАЧАТЬ