Boys of Life by Paul Russell

never felt like I wanted to know. I can't believe all the things I never asked him, but they just never occurred to me. But now I wonder sometimes. I wonder where he'd been, all those years before he met me, that made him so crazy for this sixteen-year-old kid the way he was. Crazy to the point where he didn't want anything from me except me, and nothing else.
    After Carlos died, there were lots of newspaper articles—junk, mostly, which was pretty easy to shrug off. But one of them that Earl showed me from his scrapbook got under my skin like some wood splinter and stayed there. It was this famous movie critic writing in The New York Times, and I'm putting what he said in here just so you can see how totally different the Carlos I knew was from the one everybody else thought they knew.
    The singfe time I was in the presence oj ( arlos Reichart, at a film festival here in Sen York, he was so closely sheltered K members of his famous troupe, The Company, that there seemed to be a conspiracy afoot to keep him m some kind oj protective custody from the world iit large, He radiated what I can only describe as a remarkable aura oj depravity, as if having come straight from unspeakable debaut hes, I le teemed < uriously disoriented a master actoi who suddenly and inexplicably finds himselj onstage in the wrong play And I suddenly began to reati& something terrible about this man, on rathei about my sense oj him that then
    whose films m, ike one long, intensely, to knou the man behind the film But with ( 'arlos Reichart, one must finally that, howevei much one migjht admire his films, one had no knou the man himself
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    B O Y S O F L I F E □
    I guess I feel sorry tor the guy who wrote th.a. I picture him going home from that day, and being really happy to Bee his wife, and the dog, and washing his hands with soap tor a long time, and suddenly realizing that's what he's doing. I picture him telling his wife how much he loves her, which is something he hasn't done m a long time, but seeing me and Carlos that afternoon seared him in some ways he doesn't want to think about. Because he's not dumb— he's seen Carlos's movies, he knows they're better than anything anybody else is doing these days. And he also knows it he's going to go on watching them, it he's going to understand what they're really about, then he can't go on living the way he does. Which is too much tor anybody to ask. He looks at his face in the mirror. What's wrong with iik.' he wonders, and so he washes his hands again. He can't get Carlos and me out of his head, that picture he has of Carlos walking into that room.
    It's Earl all over again—getting nervous about something he sees and he's not sure what to do with it. Maybe I'm being defensive.

    B O Y S O F L I F E D
    and the cans of black beans and guava juice with rust spots on them on the shelves, it felt like maybe you were in Cuba. At least it's how I always imagine Cuba: this cheesy music on the radio, everybody smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. They drank these extra tall cans of Budweiser, even the women.
    Whenever Carlos walked in, the three little kids who were always in the store, usually sitting on the floor playing some game with bottle-caps I could never figure out, would jump up and just surt shrieking, they were so happy to see Carlos. I don't know what tor, exactly, since he never gave them anything that I saw—but there was just something about him that made those kids go wild. Like it was a holiday. And the women and old men would talk to him—he knew some Spanish, I don't know where from—and they'd babble away, gesturing with their hands and laughing these big laughs that were like gunshots g<
    Carlos was in some ways a really shy person, and he always seemed embarrassed a little by all their attention. But he also loved it. He knew they thought he was special, even though he'd never have told you that. But it brought him out of himself—the way certain things, some pretty kid