and restless, having exhausted the ship’s supply of magazines and other forms of recreation, Keitel turned as a means of last resort to something he had studiously avoided for much of his life:
He picked up a book and started to read.
‘I read a book for the first time. I wasn’t exposed to literature as a young boy. I’m not well-educated. I left school when I was seventeen. I went into the Marine Corps and I hadn’t read a book in my life. I was slow to come to it. It took me many years before I became something of a reader.’
It is fitting that the book Keitel wound up with in his hand was about mythology, in which the stories provide moral lessons about the most basic sins: hubris, greed, jealousy, treachery, betrayal. Keitel seems to have built his entire career around telling stories – creating modern myths – dealing in the same issues that have attracted story-tellers from the most primal mythology to the most sophisticated: man’s quest to discern right from wrong, to resist evil even when doing good involves deep sacrifice, to learn the penalty – both internal and external – of embracing the dark path.
I was aboard ship and somehow I picked up a book of Greek mythology and began reading. I had a desire to understand this chaos that I was experiencing in my body. And books were a guide. I don’t find that my reading has given me something I didn’t know so much as it’s made me more aware of what I do know but hadn’t permitted to enter my consciousness. Sometimes reading makes something clear to me. I’m reading Dostoyevsky, say, and I read a thought, and I say, ‘I know that thought; that thought is already in me and he just uncovered it.’
I can think of no more important endeavor than reading. To be a little dramatic, it’s saved my life in many ways.
Keitel returned to Brooklyn from the Marines in 1959, facing an uncertain future. He had no discernible job skills but now was equipped with a high-school equivalency diploma and an honorable discharge.
For a while, he tried living at home. Pressured by his parents, he began working for them at an Atlantic Beach concession stand they now ran. But, after the relative freedom of the Marines, after being on his own for three years, the confines of the old apartment and the close quarters of working at the concession stand quickly began to chafe.
He hooked up with an old friend from the neighborhood, Mark Reiner, and the two of them found an apartment in Brooklyn. After a brief employment search, Keitel took a job on 34th Street in Manhattan, selling shoes. But he didn’t like the work; given his shyness, he found it excruciating to put on the phony salesman’s smile and try to sell people shoes. The monotony and mundanity rapidly drove him wild. ‘I thought I did not want to be what I was,’ he recalled.
Yet what else was there for him to do? He had no training in anything other than carrying a rifle and, now, measuring and trying shoes on people.
Then someone from the neighborhood suggested court reporting. It was well-paid, steady work that offered variety on a daily basis, but without the need to interact with anyone. All you had to do was listen and transcribe to the stenotype machine. Keitel saved money from being a shoe dog and enrolled on a course to learn to be a court stenographer. ‘To learn it is easy,’ he said. ‘To get your speed up is difficult. I was good.’
He landed a job in Manhattan Criminal Court, an imposingly tomblike building at 100 Center Street, near City Hall. It suddenly offered him a chance to be invisible.
To Keitel, a young man still unsure of how and where he should fit into the life that swirled around him, the job promised a particularly clever way to elude the world while seemingly being a part of it. Working as a court reporter meant being present without ever being called upon to participate, except in the most passive way possible: listening and transcribing.
‘It’s solitary,’ Keitel said. ‘Something about the aloneness of it attracted me. You’re silent all day. It seemed to appeal to me because I didn’t have to talk. I was just looking to be left alone, really. I could just be quiet and type. Even now, I have this fantasy when I pass office buildings at night or banks and see a solitary worker in there. I feel it’s a job I might like to have.’
Sometimes, the job provided unexpected reunions with faces from the past. One day, during a massive arraignment of drug defendants (mostly for heroin), Keitel looked up from the flow of transcribing and recognized one of those charged with a crime. He knew the young black man from Marine basic training. They’d been friends, part of a group of friends. It had been Keitel’s introduction to the state of American racial relations, hanging out with a black Marine in the South Carolina of the mid 1950s. They would travel around off-base together, where Keitel saw, for the first time, public facilities marked “WHITE ONLY”. He was incredulous when, accompanying his friend into a “BLACK ONLY” coffee shop, he was told that he wasn’t allowed in. As he put it, ‘We laughed, because we were from Brooklyn and we didn’t know what the hell all of this was.’
And now his fellow Leatherneck and he connected again under these circumstances: ‘Here’s this guy, years later, busted on a drug rap. We just looked at each other and he smiled and shook his head, as if to say, “Wow, this is what you’re doing.” I couldn’t talk to him because I was up there working. Then they took him to the holding pen. On the break, I went back to see him but he was gone. Gone.’
The job held its satisfaction for a while – until about year three, out of what would prove to be an eight-year career.
After the confusion of adolescence and the strictly organized Marine lifestyle, he’d thrown himself into a job in which he sat as a silent spectator to other people’s misfortunes, whether the crime was committed by them or against them. He could never comment on the misery and venality he saw, never offer an interpretation or connect it to the larger picture. As he’d continued to read and work, he could feel a need to express the increasingly powerful feelings he had no place to sublimate or exorcise. Hiding in his job no longer offered the kind of solitary satisfaction it once did, a feeling that lasted ‘only a short time, a couple of years, before I felt the need to speak.’
Even though he had attained civil-service tenure as a court stenographer – giving him, essentially, lifetime job security – Keitel grew so unhappy at how bad things were that he found himself standing in front of a local Marine recruiting center, poised to re-enlist.
Here was the answer to his dilemma. It wouldn’t be like he was quitting a new job but returning to an old one, one he already knew and was comfortable with.
Suddenly he also remembered clearly the tedium of drilling and working at the base all day, when there was nothing else to do but clean and reclean every inch of a barracks, of the rank and the routine and the rigidity.
And he turned round and walked away.
Then, one day in 1962, one of his colleagues in the court-reporter pool – of all unlikely sources – offered Keitel an invitation he didn’t know he’d been waiting for.
A co-worker asked if he wanted to take acting classes, just as a kick, as something to do in their spare time. The idea, though it had occurred to Keitel, had been squashed and banished, like all the other inappropriate ideas he’d managed to squeeze away into his subconscious. In fact, the friend had to talk him into it.
Keitel didn’t believe he fit the picture of an actor. He was self-conscious about his lack of a college education and worried that he might not be smart enough, that he lacked the polish to make himself believable as an actor: ‘I had it drilled into my head that a guy like me couldn’t be an actor. Someone who came from a lower-middle-class family, who wasn’t well-educated, well, this wasn’t something they could do.’
He finally agreed to attend the class, though he was nervous that his friends in Brooklyn might find out he was taking it. They might surmise that he harbored secret dreams of being