Link Your Arms in the Cold
The night I knew I‘d never forget Mark Sufrin was the night he told me Norman Mailer hit like a pussy. We were drinking at the White Horse Tavern. He just kept going. “Mailer was the kind of a man who’d make a beeline for your girl the second you went to the bathroom, while your seat was still warm,” he said. “He was that kind of a guy.”
Mark taught a writing class at the New School that I audited after work let out on Mondays. I didn’t know who he was, I just took the class because I had some extra time and I figured it’d keep me writing.
He was short and mostly bald; what hair he had left he dyed and slicked back. I remember that he always wore a thin sweater underneath his blazer. He loved women, loved them all in the way many men of his generation seemed to: as though he were cataloging the regrets on every underside of his years.
I think about him often. That he called me on the telephone, that every conversation had four or five false finishes. “Listen,” he’d say, “that reminds me of something.” And then another thing. I was twenty-three, twenty-four years old and he had things he had to tell me. To pass on.
I think about his stories. All of the writers he knew. All of their great works. And him, in the middle of history with a clatter and a typewriter. He wrote a documentary called On the Bowery and then later in life, a few historical biographies for young adults and some contract projects. Pulp stuff. I guess he did some TV work too but he never talked about that.
But then we walked out into the cold, our faces red with drink and laughter. He grabbed my arm, locked our elbows together and said “that was a good night.”
