24 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
came across as participating in the pun
ishment,” he said. “Our line was: If you
smoke weed, and keep doing it, we’re
going to discharge you. I’m not going
to expel someone for smoking mari
juana. I’ve never met anyone who O.D.’d
on marijuana.” (Page said that Fortune
would never force a client out just for
smoking marijuana.)
Rivera returned to an image that
haunted him. “I was driving by a play
ground once, near where I grew up. And
I was with one of my mentors, watch
ing these great little kids playing in this
playground. And he said, flatly, ‘Sixty
per cent of those kids are going to prison.’
We’re still not fixing the problem or even
addressing it. What we’re doing now
with policing, it’s as if we deliberately
set buildings on fire, and then installed
a fire station across the street. The thing
is not to let the fires get started.”
David Rothenberg, who knew Rivera
best, wondered if the coping mechanisms
that had enabled Rivera to remake his
life had been disabling to him in mo
ments of professional friction. “Sam has
gotten so adept at avoiding conflict that
he avoids conflict when he needs to en
gage in it,” he said. “I keep telling him
that—you just have to accept that, wher
ever you go, there will be friction be
tween you and the people you work with,
and you have to work through it. It re
minds me of when I was in group ther
apy, years ago, and I strongly disliked an
other member of the group. ‘That’s the
one who will do you the most good!’ the
therapist said. And he was right.”
I
n early July, Rivera paid the Castle
and its residents a final visit. “I want
to say goodbye,” he said. He and Roth
enberg drove together from Rothen
berg’s apartment in the Village up to
140th Street.
“So, one night Miss Peggy Lee called
me at midnight and said, ‘I want to
do a show of Frank Loesser’s music,’”
Rothenberg was saying in the car. “‘A n d
you’re calling me at midnight about this
because?’ I said. ‘Because I need the
sheet music,’ she said. So I called the
Loesser estate. God, she was good!”
He got no response. “You know who
Peggy Lee is?” he asked.
Rivera furrowed his brow, as one who,
knowing exactly who Peggy Lee was, was
disinclined to admit it at just that moment.
As the car pulled up to the Castle, a
group of residents, all masked, were wait
ing on the steps. But, where in the movie
version the returning local hero would
be surrounded by a crowd, Rivera quickly
sought out oneonone encounters. Hil
ton Webb was there, and, with the sto
icism that betokens great pride in ac
complishment, he narrated to Sam the
sequence of certificates he was pursuing.
Instead of congratulating him, Ri
vera exclaimed, “You gotta accept that
getting one degree is enough.” He re
minded Webb that the point of the Cas
tle was to get out of the Castle, and that
the choice of when to leave would not
always be left to the resident. “One of
the issues for you is that you’re a bril
liant motherfucker—no, no, you are!—
but you have to be more than that. I
never in my life thought that I’d think
that ignorance is bliss. And now I to
tally respect it, because there are ele
ments in my life right now that I wish
I didn’t understand. There are Puerto
Ricans in my life who are proTrump—I
wish I didn’t understand them.” Webb
was laughing. “So what I’m saying to
you,” he added, more softly, “is that your
intellect’s your intellect—you’ll always
have it—but you only need one degree.
And then you need to move and live.”
Later, sitting with Rothenberg for
lunch outdoors at Trufa, Rivera said, “Any
thing can be an addiction, or a crutch.
You can get addicted to education. You
can even get addicted to recovery.”
A man careered down the street, ob
viously high. Rivera discreetly pointed
him out to Rothenberg. “Remember
him? He used to come to Fortune.”
“He looks bad,” Rothenberg said.
Recently, controversy had arisen about
the release of longterm prisoners guilty
of notoriously violent crimes, and Ri
vera and Rothenberg began discussing
the difficulties of reconciling the work
at Fortune with their sense of moral
order. At the Castle, you never ask any
one about the reason for his imprison
ment. But no one, as Rothenberg says,
goes away for thirty years for jumping
a turnstile, and many people at the Cas
tle have been away for thirty years.
“It’s hard, I get it,” Rothenberg said.
“There was this wonderful arts editor
at the Times, who was always kind to
me, helped me understand what worked
and what didn’t. He was killed by a
drunk driver on New Year’s Eve. Years
later, I’m at Fortune, and someone in
troduces me to a woman. She had just
come home after doing years for a D.U.I.
‘I think she killed some editor from the
Times,’ they said.” He swallowed hard
and said, “That was the moral test for
me. Could I work with her? And, of
course, I did.”
Rivera mentioned a friend of his
who had seemed in good shape, and
then suddenly committed a violent act
against a former girlfriend and her new
lover. “We hadn’t addressed his trauma
adequately,” he said. “We’re all transi
tioning. You keep coming home. It’s
like—you know, I’ve been thinking a
lot lately about diets. Everyone has a
diet. Monday’s O.K., you eat your soup
and salad. Then Tuesday goes better
than you hope, but then Wednesday is
really hard—you’re hungry. Then on
Thursday you go over to Mom’s and
she makes fried chicken, and how can
you say no? It’s Mom. So then you al
ways say, ‘Well, I blew it, so I’ll start
again on Monday.’ And you spend the
weekend enjoying yourself. That’s the
trick. You have to start again on Friday.
That’s all it is. Everyone backslides or
has a bad day. The key is going back
on the diet on Friday, after you screw
up on Thursday, and not to wait till
Monday to start again.” He paused and
waited for his food to arrive.
“Did I ever tell you about the time
Edward Albee came to the Castle on a
Thursday?” Rothenberg said, brightening
the silence. “And one arrogant woman
running for office who was there watch
ing came up to me and said, ‘What was
that old con in for?’ I said, ‘I don’t know,
I guess for winning three Pulitzer Prizes?’ ”
He smiled. “I told her, ‘Never assume.’
That’s a line from the Katharine Hepburn
and Spencer Tracy movie ‘Desk Set.’”
Rothenberg paused. “People say Hep
burn and Tracy. Actually, Shirley Booth
did the play on Broadway.”
Later that day, Hilton Webb texted
Rivera, saying that he would begin to
think less about education and more
about independence. “I think I may have
been delaying things because it’s been
almost fifty years since I last lived by
myself,” Webb explained. “Scary.” Ri
vera forwarded the text to a friend and
added a comment: “This is why I do
what I do.”
