The details of how my dad met Reed were vague. By family lore, they were two Southern transplants living in New York City who bonded over a mutual love of Dr. Pepper, which was not yet a national brand; Reed was importing it from Texas by the case. There might’ve also been some theatrical connections as my father, like Reed, was a failed actor. Before siring me, he’d worked off-off Broadway designing and building sets for outfits like the Living Theater. Maybe John Tebelack, the man behind Godspell and another one of my dad’s customers, had recommended him to Reed. Or maybe Reed recommended my dad to Tebelack. Regardless, there we were, Rex offering me a soda while I stared at what I saw lying on the living room floor: a baby zebra rug. I was transfixed. Was that a real zebra? Yes it was. But what truly held my eyes was the void of the zebra’s own: two big, oval holes where its eyes would have been were it still alive. It was one of the eeriest things I’d ever seen.
Though I never saw Reed in person again, he remained a tangential figure in our lives. He was famous enough to pop up on TV from time to time. I remember seeing him as one of the judges on The Gong Show, praising and canning various acts of marginal talent on the campy talent program. He had a cameo in Superman (1978) and occasional guest spots on fare such as The Love Boat and Fantasy Island.
Then one December, when my younger sister and I were about 4 and 10 years old, Reed mailed us a Christmas gift: a five gallon bucket of popcorn.
It was a kid’s dream. Three flavors of popcorn: salted, caramel, and chocolate. And more of it than the two of us could go through in a holiday season, even accounting for our father occasionally walking by and pulling a man-sized scoop.
No one had ever given us anything so cool.
But one evening, when my sister and I were running around, playing some kid’s game, she tripped and fell, hitting her mouth on the rounded edge of the large metal bucket.
This was before everything was made out of shitty, cheap, lightweight plastic.
She came up bleeding and crying, and our mom freaked out. The beloved bucket was dangerous and it had to go. The source of my sister’s tears shifted midstream from physical pain to horrified desperation, and I stopped worrying that I might be in trouble they way older siblings are apt to be when younger siblings cry . We immediately joined forces, begging our mother to let us keep the big bin of corn. Our father offered measured support for our panicked pleas . We would be more careful, we swore. But our mother would brook no compromise. The offending pail had bloodied her little girl; it had to go. Our father quietly walked our most prized possession down to the garbage chute at the end of the hallway on the 11th floor of our apartment building as the two of us tried to absorb the shock of our sudden loss.
Some years later, I was a 17 year old HS graduate. I’d been working for my father in earnest during summers and winter breaks since I was 13. Most jobs were in the Bronx, in the middle class neighborhood where we lived or in the houses of Fieldston, the wealthy neighborhood across Henry Hudson Parkway. But a small number of jobs were down in Manhattan. That summer we spent about two weeks at The Dakota. Ten years on, my dad was back to paint Reed’s apartment again while that esteemed critic, low to mid-level celebrity, banger of gongs, and lover of Dr. Pepper was out of town
During the 1970s and ‘80s, my father moved workers and supplies in this or that half-broken down van or station wagon. None of them ever had commercial plates because commercial vehicles were (are) banned from Henry Hudson Parkway, the highway we lived next to and which leads to Manhattan where it eventually becomes the West Side Highway. Not being allowed on the Henry Hudson would not only have complicated the occasional commute, but also been impractical as my father’s jalopies also doubled as the family car. This meant that when my father did work in Manhattan, he could not take advantage of the parking spots reserved for commercial vehicles, which would have been dreamy. Instead, we’d pull up to the job site, park illegally, and, like a well coordinated gang pulling a heist, quickly hustle all of the materials and equipment, from ladders to hammers, out of the car and onto the sidewalk. My father would then go hunting for a parking spot that would likely require pumping a parking meter, while another worker or two and myself would bring everything into the building and up the elevator, if there was one. The Dakota had eight of them.
Built in the early 1880s, The Dakota is the oldest luxury apartment building still standing in New York City. The apartments are not vertically identical, as is the case with most buildings to facilitate plumbing and streamline design and costs. Instead they were customized for the original tenants. Half of the elevators are service elevators, and there were two different ones you could take to Reed’s apartment. The hallway was a twisting, winding thing that made you consider dropping breadcrumbs behind you. During those two weeks I had a recurring nightmare that I was lost in the Dakota’s maze of hallways, unable to get to Reed’s apartment or to find my way out. In the morning I’d awake, panting, put on my work clothes, jump in the wagon where my father played the radio and adamantly refused to let me nap, and head down to the upper west side.
Returning to Rex Reed’s apartment during the summer of 1985 may have been my first experience of déjà vu. I was somewhere I had been before, but not in a long time, and not since I was quite young. It largely conformed to my childhood memories. For starters, that baby zebra, a martyr to style, was still splayed across the living room floor, just as I remembered it. But overall, my memories were fragmentary, and so what I did remember, while sharp and familiar, was combined with so much more I never knew.
You get to know a home when you move all the furniture to the middle of rooms and cover it with canvas drop cloths, then scrape, plaster, and sand the walls and ceilings before painting them with brushes and rollers, finally putting everything back in its place as the last coat dries. You get to know it even better when you spend part of your lunchtime perusing. And when you get to know a home in depth, you develop an intimate knowledge of the homeowner, even if you met them only once when you were seven years old. This intimacy is extremely limited, of course, but it is real in its own way. And the apartment was an insight into not only Reed, but to gay New York as well.
Homophobia in mid-80s America, even in New York City outside of Greenwich Village, was de rigueur. Very few gay people were really out. Yet gay culture, particularly a kitschy or campy version of it, was well established in American popular culture, flaunting itself in plain sight to a rather oblivious middle America. Reed was a B-level celebrity in that mold. More famous not-out-but-obviously-gay celebrities I’d grown up with on TV and the radio included Disco superstars the Village People, Hollywood Squares center square Paul Lynde, and undersized fitness guru Richard Simmons, to name just a few. In real life, there were some gay friends on the outer rings of my parents’ social circles whom I’d met over the years. But getting to really know Rex Reed’s apartment was the first time I got to know a gay person through their home.
Murdered baby zebra notwithstanding, Reed’s home was fabulous. The long wall along the living room had shelves of records, ceiling-to-floor. There must have been well over a thousand. Many of them, my father explained, were sent unsolicited to Reed by record companies hoping he’d pen a review. It was the first time I realized famous and/or rich people get things for free. The living room furniture looked stylish in ways that resonated with me even if I didn’t understand why. Some of it was incredibly heavy to move. The bedroom contained treasures. Reed had an entire closet, running much of the wall opposite the bed, of just shirts. That blew my mind. And one day when I turned on the bedroom TV during a lunch break, I realized he had something I’d only heard about: cable. Instead of flipping channels directly on the TV, the channel dial was on a brown box attached to the TV. Some of the channels were incomprehensible. One seemed to be live coverage of the United Nations. In retrospect, perhaps it was C-Span. Either way, nothing was happening, just a camera feed of an empty political chamber in real time. It was all too much. I picked up the phone on the night stand and called my friend Ward. You’ll never guess where I am, I said. What the fuck, Ward asked, how’d that happen?
If Rex Reed’s apartment was a wonderland to me, there was only one small spot that my father was drawn to: a shelf just above eye-level along a short wall facing the living room. On it was a collection of small liquor bottles. At the end of the job, as we were getting ready to leave the apartment for the last time, he pilfered some of the little bottles. It’s not that I was aghast at theft in and of itself, but this seemed like a serious breach of trust, stealing anything from a beloved customer’s home. I asked my dad about it. Oh, these are nothing, he said, they give them out for free on airplanes. Rex wouldn’t even notice. That made no sense to me. This didn’t seem like one of the thousand-plus records many of which he didn’t even know he had. There weren’t that many little bottles, maybe a dozen at most. Surely, I thought, if Reed had taken the trouble to put them on display on a little shelf in his home, he would notice that several of them were gone. But my dad was an alcoholic. Such temptations were perpetually his for the seizing, and he was fluent in rationalizations.
My father’s health began failing not long after, and his small business was defunct before Reed’s next decennial paint job came around. Or perhaps it was moot. Maybe Reed noticed the missing bottles of booze, put two-and-two together, and was done with my dad. He wouldn’t have been the first customer during the 1980s to cut my dad loose because of his drinking. And anyway, by then I was 27 and moving to Nebraska to pursue a Ph.D.; the only homes I’d ever paint again were my own, or friends if they fed me. So it was that I never returned to Rex Reed’s apartment and my father never painted it again.
Rex Reed died last week at the age of 87. He was less than a year younger than my father, who passed away eight years ago, just shy of age 80, a fair bit older than anyone thought a man who drank and smoked the way he did had any right to be. Reed is gone, my father is gone, and I am a late middle aged man living in Baltimore.
Where now goes the baby zebra?
This essay first appeared at 3 Quarks Daily.