A couple days ago I went over to 10th Avenue to the bookshop there to see if they’d kept their promise of ordering Ira Cohen’s new (posthumous) book, A Certain Kind of Wizard, and they had! There he was on a shelf, his eyes looking straight into mine from the wonderful cover photo taken by his friend Ira Landgarten (who took many good photos of him over many years). This book is a kind of magnum opus, and the second by Ira that I’ve had the privilege to edit. The first one was a selection of his poems and photos called Poems from the Akashic Record, published almost 25 years ago, and I remember how much fun we had working on it together.
I have a memory of running into Ira downtown on Bleecker Street near Father Demo Square on a bright cold day like today, and his telling me he had some poems in his bag he wanted to give me for the book. I remember him opening his bag atop one of the big blue post boxes on the corner, with his cape billowing out around him and his beard doing the same. I wish he’d lived to see his later manuscript turned into a book—I missed him while working on it without him—but I think he’d be happy to see it in such a nice bookshop. I also think he’d complain that they hadn’t ordered enough copies.
I remembered him sitting in the Chelsea Hotel one day and listing off a few of his old friends who were on his “dead list,” without his fully believing they could be dead because they just weren’t the types to die. One was the writer Alfred Chester, who he said was so vibrant and alive in his mind that he’d not fully realized until telling me this that Alfred had been dead for many years.
Outside in the freeze walking home from the bookstore, I thought of a night years ago when I went together with Everett Quinton to some kind of performance (that I’ve blanked out now) and then riding the bus downtown or across town afterwards and how much fun the bus ride was because of Everett. In my own experience in this town, nothing and nobody was ever more entertaining for me than Everett Quinton, whether he was on a stage, or on TV, or sitting on the bus. Everett will always be my favorite actor. It was sleeting when we got off the bus, and we waded through the slush into the donut shop on 14th and 7th. We sat at the counter and got coffee and sweets, and then the door opened and a very unkempt magician blew in on a blast of cold air. He stood next to us at the curve of the counter, and I remember Everett saying afterwards that he looked like a used car salesman. He had a Long Island accent and a toupee, and he said to us: “Okay, I’m gonna show ya some tricks.” He asked me if Everett was a prince or a frog, and while I was thinking about it, Everett said, “Old queen!” I don’t remember anything else about that evening, and now Everett is in heaven. The donut shop is still here, but it’s very hard to believe that Everett isn’t, at least not in a way that we can see him. I remember some of the walks we took as if they were last week—walks over to the river with Raindrop, his daughter dog, and how much fun it was to watch her have fits over FEDEX trucks rumbling by on Hudson Street, the way she would recognize the letters FEDEX and bark her head off at them.
Once Everett sent me a tiny little story he’d written, which I saved in a note book, a story called:
A RAINY DAY IN NEW YORK TOWN!!!!
Bright Light and
Little Mary were walking on The River That Flows Both Ways!
The rain was pouring down!
And Little Mary wore a frown!
"Why so sad Little Mary?" asked Bright Light.
"The World, The World, The World!"
"Oh, that!" said Bright Light. "Well, let's keep walking. And
maybe stand on your head."
"Stand on my head?" smiled Little Mary.
"Made you smile!!"
And Bright Light and Little Mary kept walking on The River!
Everett was always very superstitious about lots of things; about which pennies to pick up off the sidewalk and which not to pick up, about the possible consequences of putting one’s hat on the bed or sofa, so that I had to be careful if wore a hat to his place and wanted to take it off. While we were recording what would become his issue of Housedeer in 2013, he gave me a little Infant of Prague from his book room and told me to put it facing the door to the apartment for prosperity. And he gave me a penny to put beneath it. Right now that little Infant of Prague is just where I put him on the shelf in the kitchen when I came home that day, facing the door, and any good luck I have with money getting is no doubt thanks to him being there because of Everett.
When Ira first knew Charles Ludlam, long before Everett became part of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, he let Charles and the company rehearse in his loft downtown. And while they were doing that, he took many wonderful photos of them, some of which I remember seeing framed on the wall behind his sofa at his place on Duke Ellington Boulevard. Ira must have seen Charles dying as Camille—he would not have wanted to miss that—and I was lucky to see Everett dying as Camille after Charles was already in heaven with Greta Garbo. And over on 10th Avenue from his place on the shelf, Ira’s eyes were definitely following me all around the bookshop.
Copyright 2024 Romy Ashby
A Rainy Day in New York Town!!!! story copyright Everett Quinton
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