Walkers in the City

SOME LITTLE NOTES ABOUT VALI

2012-01-27T15:07:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I read Clayton Patterson’s article in The Villager, in which he wrote about how Vali Myers used to come to New York every so often from her valley in Positano with a portfolio full of drawings to sell to ensure her livelihood for another year. Vali loved New York, and New York loved her, and whenever she came she always stayed at the Chelsea Hotel.

One of my very dear friends is Carole Ramer, whom Vali befriended back in the ‘60s while staying at the Chelsea. Carole was Abbie Hoffman’s right hand, Vali said, and she told me that when they first met, Carole looked like a gorgeous young black fox with her beautiful cascading black hair. Vali loved her as much for her charm as for her great loyalty to Abbie, and she never tired of listening to Carole’s accent, one of those old-fashioned New York badges of honor we don’t hear enough of anymore.

Vali introduced us and after I got to know her, Carole described meeting Vali for the first time in a little room at the Chelsea with Abbie. Vali was a beautiful, half-animal, half-woman creature who lifted her skirts and peed in the sink with complete grace, and Carole was dazzled.

Both Carole and I visited Vali in Positano in the 1990s, and after reading Clayton’s article I went looking in the notebooks I kept during some of those visits. These particular jottings are from December 1994, when Vali let me cram into her bed up the ladder in her tiny house, and just outside was Gianni Menichetti in his little tin-roofed palazzo full of cats, Gianni who first came to live in the valley in 1971 and still lives there today. I thought I’d post these for Carole in particular, but also for anyone else who might like them.

Vali climbing up the ladder to the bed saying, “Shit Piss and Corruption” and “Fuck a duck!”

She told me that at the beginning of this century there were bandits all over this coast. They probably slept right here in this valley, and the road down below was just a donkey path.

In the morning she said she had a dream in which she got sucked out of an airplane and was kind of zooming along in front of it hoping the pilot would see her.

Vali is annoyed because there is nowhere to put anything where the cats can’t get it. The butter and cheese must be hung from a hook or the black one especially will get it. She’s making coffee and saying, “I wish those bloody birds were laying, no such luck and I was dreaming of fresh eggs.” One of her bright ruffled skirts is drying on the line.

She told me about an Aboriginal girl in Australia called Donna who paints things, all kinds of things, like old chairs, and there’s someone who takes them to a gallery up in Sydney and people go nuts for them and buy them and then Donna buys all kinds of things for her mother.

Vali up on the bed saying that Sheba’s making stink all over the place and that Melville can really write when he gets going. She says James Joyce’s letters to Nora could put you off screwing forever.

She showed me the little courtesan drawing she’s working on; she put in the little house and the path out to Murat’s cave, and she showed me the place where she’ll draw in Fanny the donkey. And up above the path and the cliffs she drew in the Bay of Naples and sketched-out some doggies up near the volcano, and told me, “Some are sleeping and some are looking kind of like, ‘Look out, Mate, it’s going to blow!’”

Here she comes, through the gate with an armload of ferns for the pig like a gigantic salad. The late sunlight makes her hair blaze like a fire. This place is so beautiful, she’s saying, “You practically drop dead looking at it.”

It is almost black out. The radio is coming in clearly from Tunisia, and Gianni is cutting up potatoes. Here come Vali’s bare feet down the ladder as a muezzin calls out of the radio. Vali says she likes the long pauses. The radio from North Africa comes in so mysteriously, only at night. Arabic cat food ads. A sort of disco song is playing now and Gianni said it sounds like some kind of mechanical horse galloping. Vali’s telling Gianni not to cut the onions too fine or they come out tasting like petrol. She looked at a packet of sponges sitting there and read aloud, “SPUGNA ABRASIVA,” which she found hilariously funny.

The three of us sitting around the bowl of potatoes on a newspaper and afterwards I said, “Does anyone want a tangerine?” And Gianni sitting under the gas lamp, said, “But is it right to have fruit before the coffee?” To which Vali replied, “What do you think this is, Victorian England?”

She says koala bears sleep nineteen hours a day and that when they sleep they are probably thinking of gum leaves.

Outside Vali built a bower out of sticks and broom branches for Queenie the chicken and her little peeper. The roosters and chickens all crowded into the Elder branches. Today must be very close to the shortest day. The little dog Sardo has come creeping in to the house, as if we might chase him out, to sit next to the fireplace.

“Do you remember when you used to rub my bottom with butter?” Vali’s asking Gianni, and he’s saying,” Of course, and you would go off to sleep like an angel.”

The fire is down to embers, and Myers is climbing up the ladder to write in her book.

I hope reading these might inspire some memories for Carole too. And I wonder if like me, she found the little house in the valley not unlike Vali’s wonderful room in the Chelsea.

27 January 2012

Photos of Vali and Sheba up the ladder on the bed from that chilly December.

THE DANGERS OF THREAD

2012-01-20T12:21:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends, I am putting up an old one today, at the suggestion of my friend Jeremiah Moss. I'm very sorry for how negligent I've been lately about posting new ones. I'm going to be much more diligent about it in the months to come. Meanwhile, this one was originally posted in 2007, but the perils of thread are no less perilous out there today. Sincerely, Romy

I was on the Crosstown bus reading the New York Post when an old geezer sat down next to me and said, “That’s my name,” pointing his finger at the front page. BOY WONDER, it said, with a picture of a skinny looking New York Yankee pitcher. I said, “Whaddaya know?” The old geezer said, “NOT whaddaya know! They called me the Boy Wonder!” He looked to be about 80 years old and he stank of cigarettes. He rooted around in a blue tote bag. “I met Einstein once,” he said. “Did he tell you anything worth knowing?” I asked him. “No, he didn’t,” he said. “But I know everything there is ta know.” He pulled several sheets of paper out of his bag. They were all covered in drawings of people’s faces, done in blue and red ballpoint pen. “Ya ever seen anything that good before? Ya ever seen anything in a museum that looked like this?" He showed me one all covered in geometric blue and red circles, each with a little face in the center. “I most certainly haven’t,” I said. He said to himself: “OK, next stop,” then he turned to me and said, “Ya know Marion Davies, the one that used to be William Randolph Hearst’s girlfriend? Well, I did all kinds of work for her when she lived in the apartment on 40th Street.”

“What kind of work?” I asked him, and he shrugged his shoulders as if he just couldn’t believe what a dingbat he’d saddled himself with. “Well, ART! I made all the art in her apartment! And look at this!” He pointed his finger down at one of his sneakers where there was a hole on the top. “I can see your little toe sticking out,” I told him. The bus swerved over to the curb and stopped. “I can’t AFFORD new shoes,” he said. “What artist can?” I said back, and he smiled at me before he descended the steps to the street. After he got off the bus, I wondered if he really had done work for Marion Davies and if she’d had an apartment on 40th Street. Maybe he had done all the art, or maybe the art was the colored paint on the walls of her dining room. I was inclined to believe that Boy Wonder had met Einstein and Marion Davies. Why not? Why make that up and not something else? I remembered meeting a man at a seder once who had been the greatest, most sought after wallpaper hanger in New York. He had hung wallpaper for some of the most fabulous people in the city. I think he even said he hung wallpaper for Barbra Streisand. It wasn’t something that just anyone could do. I got off the bus in front of the library on 23rd Street and went in to return a depressing video I had borrowed called Saraband. I knew it would be depressing when I checked it out because Ingmar Bergman made it, but I checked it out anyway. I wondered while I watched it if Liv Tyler was named after Liv Ullman.

Walking home, I saw a pigeon sitting on the edge of the curb on 7th Avenue and 22nd Street and I stopped to look. Another lady was looking at him too. The pigeon looked sad but alert, not at all like some of the old sick birds you see huddled in a doorway waiting to die. He didn’t look sick, but something was keeping him sitting there. I wondered if one of his wings was broken. The problem is that you won’t find a veterinarian in most neighborhoods who will help out a street pigeon or a rat. The lady took a little baggie of walnuts out of her bag and started dropping them in front of the bird, and he perked up. He leaped up and gobbled up the walnuts, and the lady put another little handful down in front of him. That’s when I saw that the bird’s two feet were shackled together with what looked like a piece of white thread. He could hop a little with his feet like that, and the more walnuts he swallowed, the more he hopped. But he couldn’t stand or walk normally, and after he ate up the nuts, he sank back onto the pavement.

Then a little man appeared. “Is it thread on his foot?” he asked in a thick Spanish accent. He had gray curly hair and was very effeminate. “Wait,” he said. “I catch.” He squatted down and carefully reached for the bird, but the bird flew in an arc and landed a few feet away. “I use coat,” the man said, taking off his jacket. From his pocket he drew a little pair of scissors and a pair of tweezers. “I cut thread,” he said. “Always I carry this for birds.” He said that the worst thing for pigeons is thread and hair extensions. He said that beauty salons throw out hair and the threads used for eyebrow threading. The birds get all caught up in them and their feet get bound together. He’d cut lots of birds loose from those threads. The lady had emptied out her walnut bag and the bird was fortified. He had no intention of being caught in the man’s jacket, and flew up to the roof of my building with the little thread between his feet. In all my years of looking at pigeons, I had never considered the dangers of thread and hair.

In the same day, I had met a man who made me realize how little I really know, and another one who told me that he knew everything there was to know. “Well, I do nothing this time,” the man said. He put his scissors and tweezers away. “I’m really not a bird person,” said the lady. “But I couldn’t just let him sit there.” Then we all went our separate ways without saying goodbye.

OLD CHELSEA STATION

2011-11-17T12:03:00.000-08:00

In the post office last week I heard a lady talking to a man on the line behind me. They both looked to be in their seventies, and the lady was lamenting the fact that the post office had done away with the two big stamp machines that used to stand against the wall. “It’s very annoying to have to wait on such a long line just to buy one 44-cent stamp,” she said. The man told her that he had gotten a letter saying that this post office, Old Chelsea Station, would soon be closing, and the lady gasped. “I didn’t get that letter and I have a post office box here!” she said. “And this post office is on the National Register of Historic Places!” The man said he had read in the newspaper that a lot of post offices are closing all over the country. “People don’t use the post office like they used to,” he said. “And then there’s the lousy economy.” The lady said she didn’t think they could do away with the post office entirely because it is promised in the United States Constitution, and the man replied, “Well, that don’t mean much.”

I thought of the letter I got a couple of months ago telling me that a post office somewhere up near the Port Authority would be closing. I had wondered why I got the letter, since I have never been in that post office. A woman I know from the neighborhood told me recently that she got a letter saying Old Chelsea Station was closing, but without giving any details. I looked around for a sign saying something about it and didn’t see one, but I noticed the bears in their panel of wilderness over the doors facing 8^th Avenue in the foyer. And like every time I’ve noticed them from the stamp line, I felt myself transported to some mountainous, misty place far away from the post office on West 18^th Street.

Above the opposite entrance is another panel with three deer in it. I’ve always liked them and wondered about them, these handsome scenes that look to be made of metal. They’re almost colorless, and that, along with how high up they are, makes them very easy to miss. I stopped to look at them on my way out and noticed a signature at the bottom of each. I tried with and without my glasses, but could not read the name. So I came home and got my binoculars. When I looked at each of the panels through those, I could see all of their marvelous detail, just how hand-made they look, and I could read the signature, which is “P. Fiene.”

I went home to see what I could find out, and on the web site of the National Postal Museum I found this:

“Throughout the United States—on post office walls large and small—are scenes reflecting America's history and way of life. Post offices built in the 1930s during Roosevelt's New Deal were decorated with enduring images of the ‘American scene.’ In the 1930s, as America continued to struggle with the effects of the depression, the federal government searched for solutions to provide work for all Americans, including artists. During this time government-created agencies supported the arts in unprecedented ways. As Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's relief administrator said in response to criticism of federal support for the arts, ‘(artists) have got to eat just like other people.’”

I read that the work for decorating post offices in the 1930s was not commissioned through the WPA, but through an office of the Treasury Department called the Section of Painting and Sculpture, and Paul Fiene was a sculptor who received one of the commissions. He had his studio upstate in Woodstock, New York, and the two panels, called “Deer” and “Bear,” are bas-relief cast stone covered in silver leaf, made in 1938 for Old Chelsea Station, which was built in 1935. I read that Paul Fiene had studied at the Beaux Arts Institute to Design here in New York, and that he won first prize in a life class in 1917. Then he won the Prix de Rome, which he had to decline because he didn’t have enough money to get to Rome to accept the prize, and I imagine that he must have been very disappointed. But he must have been very happy to get the commission to create two works of art to decorate this Manhattan post office. Imagining a post office built during the depression and decorated with money set aside for just that purpose having to close for lack of funds made me feel very sad.

Then I read that the Canal Street station, also on the National Register of Historic Places and built in 1937, has a beautiful relief of its own, by an artist named Wheeler Williams, called “Indian Bowman.” In reading about it, I saw that this Wheeler Williams made lots of beautiful things. He was once president of the Fine Arts Federation of New York and founder of the American Artist Professional League. He was also a supporter of the House Un-American Activities Committee and their search for communists. I don’t know why learning that surprised me, but it did.

Years ago I used to see Johnny Ramone in Old Chelsea Station all the time, in his holey jeans and leather jacket, opening up his P.O. box. Back then the notion of any post office closing would have been as hard for me to imagine as imagining Johnny Ramone as a conservative Republican, which, I just recently learned, he was.

The day before yesterday I went to the post office and asked a clerk if there was any truth to what was in the mysterious letters people were getting. “Well,” he said, “that depends.” I asked him what it would depend on, and he said, just as mysteriously as the letters: “It depends on what the post master decides to say.”

November 17, 2011

A PAGEANT OF OLD SCANDINAVIA

2011-11-09T16:55:00.000-08:00

Today I pulled a book from the shelf to take with me in case there was a line at the post office. I chose A Pageant of Old Scandinavia, which once belonged to Vali Myers, in which she had written: ‘Vali, Chelsea Hotel, April 1’ on the title page.

Before I ever went to visit when she lived there, I remember hearing stories about the debauched scene going on in her room at the Chelsea every night with the crew of wild young Irish boys she had crammed in there with her. There was a story about a particular night when someone brought a pretty-looking young cop up from 23^rd Street, got him drunk and then apparently they all played Russian Roulette with his service revolver and fired a bullet into the ceiling.

My friend Liza had introduced me to Vali, and during a quiet time while Vali was recovering from a brain seizure she’d had after one especially crazy night, Liza pestered me to go over and visit her by myself. She said I’d be glad I had later, and as usual, she was right. I finally forced myself to go over to the Chelsea and call Vali from the brown house phone in the lobby, and I will always remember hearing her warm and lovely voice say, “Come on up, Love.”

On the door to her room was a brass knocker in the shape of a fox’s head, and I used it to tap on the door. Her foxyknocker, she called it, and for some reason hearing Vali say ‘foxyknocker’ always struck me as funny. Her room felt like the inside of a gypsy wagon, so brightly painted it was in checkers the colors of an El Pico coffee can. One of the Irish boys was there, with long curly hair pulled back and tied with a rope. He stood at the stove making tea, and Vali patted a pillow beside her for me to come sit on. She said, “Hello, Love. This is Sheba,” and I petted her pretty dog. Vali’s eyes were blazing blue and when she smiled, her tongue came out and curled up at the end in a way that made it impossible for me not to laugh. And she laughed too. “Hello, Love,” she said again.

I gave her the little bouquet of flowers I had brought and she said, “Thank you, Love.” She said to the Irish boy, “Have we got a jar, Love?” A little TV was on next to Vali with the sound off, and she said, “I’ve been doing nothing but looking at the bloody TV.” A commercial came on for a cleaning product that showed a lady in a suburban-looking kitchen.” Vali said, “Wouldn’t you just die if you had to live in a place like that, Love?” I said I would, which was true, and she laughed and said, “Hello, Love.”

It was calm in Vali’s room. She opened a portfolio and showed me some of her drawings, the most beautiful, delicate, fine works of art I had ever seen. I can still picture so vividly her hands, tattooed like lace, as she turned over each one of the drawings, and all her pretty rings.

I went to visit a lot after that first time, in the late afternoons or early evenings, every few days, for the rest of the time she lived at the Chelsea. Often I had her all to myself, shared only with Sheba and the little pile of books she was currently reading, full of stars in their margins. She showed me her diaries, into which she pasted photographs and made drawings and wrote descriptions of everything she liked in the world. She copied her favorite poems into the diaries, and wrote lines such as, “It’s not a mustache, it’s a whisker.” One day she read me a story from A Pageant of Old Scandinavia called ‘Wolves or Seagulls?’ And she told me about a Dutch girl she had known once who looked like a seagull and wore dark glasses to bed.

When Vali eventually left the Chelsea to go back to Italy, Stanley Bard gave her a break on the back rent for a drawing, and Vali took Sheba the dog and went back to her wild mountain garden. I remember that on the day she left she was blue because someone had stolen her brass foxyknocker right off the door during the night. She gave me a few keepsakes, including A Pageant of Old Scandinavia, and invited me to come visit her in her wild valley, where she said every night was a starlight hotel.

When I opened the book in the Old Chelsea Station today, a letter fell out from Vali, written in her garden full of animals on the 26^th of September 1997. While I waited on the line to buy stamps, I read part of it:

“It’s early morning here and I’ve just taken dear Fanny the Donkey outside of the garden so she can graze—the roosters are crowing and it’s still cool and fresh and I’ve just had my first coffee. Back here, it’s been a luxury to take care of the creatures again and make things beautiful around the place—the Pavilion and all I’ve painted Bombay Pink, I’ve cleaned out behind the house, so as one can see the waterfall again, and have managed to complete a new small painting called “Lamia” inspired by the beautiful little water snakes living by the stream and some lines from a poem of John Keats—

‘so rainbow-sided, touch’d with miseries,

she seem’d, at once, some penanced lady elf,

some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self.’

It’s not easy, Love, that world out there.”

And then I heard the clerk calling, “Step down!” and it was my turn to buy stamps. I felt very lucky to get the friendly lady instead of the one who always seems so put upon whenever she has to open the stamp drawer.

9 November 2011

I would like to dedicate this to one of the most wonderful of all New York ladies, Fedora Dorato. Rest in peace, Mrs. Dorato.

THE BEES TODAY LOOKED JUST AS HAPPY AS BEFORE

2011-10-07T14:14:00.000-07:00

Today was a beautiful day and I went down to the farmers market in Union Square to buy some tomatoes. At one of the farm stands I saw bunches of dark blue grapes covered with bees. I heard a lady exclaim, "Look at all the bees!" And I thought of my very first 'Walkers in the City,' because the day I wrote it looked so much like today. A lot has changed since September 20th, 2004, but the bees looked just as happy today as the ones I saw back then. So I'm going to post an old one, just this once. The original title was:

SHE'LL NEVER GET ONE HERE

It’s already late September and today is one of those beautiful gold and blue days with just a hint of crispness in the air. I went out with a bag of books for the Strand. One of my most regular walks is from Chelsea to the Strand bookstore on the corner of Broadway and 12^th Street, whenever I have books to sell. Then with whatever I get for them, which was today $9.00, I go to the farmers market at Union Square. The book buyer, whose name I think is Marvin, looked meanly down at my pile and said: “Well, you don’t have much here.” But I was pleased with the number he gave me. I never let on whether I am happy with the number or disappointed, and the Strand buyers never seem to have any thoughts or emotions whatsoever when they are saying the number. It’s as if the whole transaction occurs with both of us hypnotized.

Today was a day of apples and heirloom tomatoes at the market, piles of apples in the late afternoon sun and Niagara grapes covered in hornets. The bees made great salesmen. If bees are loving those grapes, then how sweet they must be, and there is nothing offensive about the sight of fat yellow bees sitting on anything because as far as I know, bees only like sweets and they don’t land on anything worse than flowers and fruit.

While I was looking at a bushel of Honey Crisp and Gala apples, I saw a big woman approaching. She was dressed in layers of sarongs and a straw hat, and a trickle of blood was coming from her nose. I said, “Hon, your nose—it’s bleeding,” and she said, “Okay, thanks.” Another woman standing at the same bushel of apples watched the little moment play out and then she made a big display of displeasure with head-shaking and tongue-clicking. I couldn’t decide what her beef was; whether it was with me or with the big woman with the bloody nose, or what. I bought three perfect little apples for $1.25 and a beautiful cantaloupe for $3.00 and thought about what a commodity fruit is these days, like cheese. Cheese is a luxury, like wild fish. It’s important to scrub fruit like mad before eating it, too, which is something I can’t say enough.

A brown and gray speckled dog was barking very loudly and apparently at nothing near a great mountain of corn. I stopped to ask what she wanted. The man with her told me that she lives in the country somewhere upstate in the center of a lot of meadows, and that on a normal day at this hour she would be stalking birds in the grass. The pigeons in Union Square, he said, were confounding and infuriating her with their indifference. “In the fields the birds are so intimidated by her barking that they just freeze,” he said. “She’ll never get one here, but she can’t understand that.” I petted her but she just stood barking and barking, completely oblivious to me, and I could see the pink and black interior of her mouth and all of her shiny white teeth. She was, in her dog way, very obviously provincial. She stood out in her habit as loudly as a tourist in the kind of outfit tourists who stand out are always wearing.

I bought some long and skinny potatoes and three green and fiery-yellow frying tomatoes from a lady wearing a pink and white bandana. It took a while for me to be able to pay though, because although it was my turn, several ladies decided they just couldn’t wait and hurried in front of me. I almost never say anything anymore when people do that, but I do notice it. Usually after the farmers market, I come back up Broadway and turn down 18^th Street and stop into Skyline Books. It is the best of the old-school used and out-of-print bookstores still going and they have a mean kitty who I like very much. The other bookstore with a mean kitty is Alabaster Books on 4^th Avenue. She is of the treacherous mean kitty ilk, the kind who looks very innocent and pretends to be friendly in order to draw her victims in to be suddenly bitten and scratched.

On the corner of 19^th and 7^th Avenue I stopped to look at a table covered with LP records sold by a man with a white beard who has been selling on that corner for years. Sometimes he has books and sometimes he has records, but always an excellent selection of both and always for good prices. I don’t have a turntable but sometimes when I look at what he has--today he had an old Japanese Anita O’Day record-- I wish I did. She’s way up in her eighties now and she’s still singing. Once in a while as I’m passing his spot, something jumps out at me from the book table. Once a few years ago it was a beautiful old copy of The King in Yellow by RW Chambers, the 1895 edition, for $5.00 and I bought it. What I’m always on the lookout for now is a copy of Lowlife in High Heels by Holly Woodlawn. I had a copy once, but I sold it to the Strand on a lean day and probably got a head of lettuce for it. At the time that I sold it, the Strand had a bunch of copies of it in stock, so they only gave me two or three dollars for it. Now, of course, you won’t find a copy of it anywhere. Today at the Strand I saw a man selling a copy of the new Kitty Kelly book, which apparently tells all kinds of gossipy things about Laura Bush. They gave him $7.50 for it. It was the only book he was selling and he seemed perfectly happy with what he was getting.

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A HUNDRED YEARS FROM TODAY

2011-09-22T14:45:00.000-07:00

Walking through Washington Square Park on Sunday I came upon a few musicians—a washtub bass, a couple of horns and a banjo—playing a nice old American tune, and I stopped to listen long enough to enjoy a beautiful trombone solo. It made me think of Jack Teagarden. The trombone player was a young woman, and she reminded me of Jack Teagarden not just because of the wonderful velvet sound coming out of her horn, but because of the casual manner she had with it, which made it look effortless. She played her trombone as if it were something anyone could do, as if she had just come along five minutes before and decided, ‘Oh, what the hell, I’ll play a little music.’

While the banjo played his solo, the trombone lady reached into her pocket, drew out her phone and checked to see what it was doing. After she did that, she dropped it back into her pocket, and lifted the horn to her lips just in time to fall in with a stream of velvet notes that I found dazzling, uplifting, and funny. The music made me forget all the things that there are in the world to be worried about with good reason and for those moments while I listened, my head was completely empty and I felt happy. I thought of my friend Liza, as I do almost every day for all different reasons, and remembered something she told me once that I’ve never forgotten. She said, “No matter what anyone wants to say about America, just remember, we’ve got jazz, baby.”

I left the little quartet playing and wondered if any of them knew that Eddie Condon used to live right there, right at the edge of the park, at 27 Washington Square North. Liza was his daughter, and lived there as a kid. Her sister Maggie still does. I walked towards Bleecker Street and thought of the stories Liza used to tell about Eddie Condon’s club, which was on West 3^rd Street. She and Maggie used to stand in the window of their apartment and watch Eddie walk across the park to the club, beautifully dressed and carrying his guitar. Maggie told me not long ago about how much fun it was to play in the club as kids, because down in the basement where the kitchen was, Wild Bill Davison had set up a marvelous, elaborate, electric train that ran right through the oven, and thanks to the cats working the mouse job, there were always litters of kittens to play with.

On my way home late in the afternoon, I passed the house at 61 Perry Street where the painter Loren MacIver lived from 1938 until she died at the end of the 1990s, and thought of the wonderful times I spent there, often with Liza, visiting Loren. In the time machine of her painting studio was an old grand piano, and I remembered sitting between Liza and Loren one evening and listening to Loren’s friend Willard Roosevelt play what I think was one of his own compositions. Afterwards Loren told us all that once upon a time, Billie Holiday would come once a week and play that very piano, just for the fun of it.

Liza knew a thousand songs by heart—all kinds of songs—she liked old spirituals, she liked songs from the Velvet Underground, and she liked a lot of great old jazz songs. One evening, sitting in her place on Leroy Street, she sang Ten Cents a Dance for me and I can still hear it in my head. She told me a story about visiting the Taj Mahal in the middle of the night once. It was deserted and lighted by the moon. She stood there and sang Amazing Grace to the Taj Mahal, and when she had finished, a watchman in a turban stood up from where he had been sitting in the shadows and clapped. When she told me that story, I saw it play out like a movie in my head, where I still have it to see anytime I want to. I remember that she had a jar on her worktable with a white Lilly in it. She said, “If this flower were a movie, I bet it would be a good one, don’t you think?” Something else Liza used to say was that we have an obligation to be happy. That one stuck with me for all kinds of colliding reasons. Liza had a way of saying a lot with very little.

When I got home on Sunday evening I poked around the internet until I found the lady trombonist, whose name is Emily Asher. I was very happy to see a little notice from her, saying that at eight o’clock on September 27^th, which is this coming Tuesday, she will be playing her first show as a bandleader at a bar called Mona’s on Avenue B off 14^th Street. I felt very lucky to have stumbled upon the little group of musicians in the park that afternoon, because I almost didn’t. I was on my way to meet a friend, and at the last minute I went out of my way on purpose to walk through the park. Liza always insisted on taking the scenic route whenever we went anywhere together, even if it meant going blocks out of our way. It used to irritate me when she did that if I felt like I was in a hurry. Liza was never in a hurry. If she were here, I’d ask her to meet me very early on Tuesday evening and wander over to hear Emily play her pretty horn. Something I’ve noticed about happiness is that from a distance it looks effortless. But I think that is deceptive. I don’t think happiness is effortless, but I know that a nice song can make it feel that way. So, if you can, try to make it on Tuesday night.

22 September 2011

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I REMEMBER

2011-08-18T15:35:00.000-07:00

Yesterday as I walked by the Chelsea Hotel I thought of the hallways inside and felt sad. I had read something about the real estate developer who bought the place and how he had decided to renovate it. And thinking about that depressed me.

I thought of visiting Ira Cohen there last summer, when he was staying in a room with the window open onto the ‘Chelsea’ part of the big Chelsea Hotel sign. He was there for a couple of weeks while his apartment uptown was being fumigated for bed bugs. One day we sat together on the bed in his room and talked about Vali Myers, when she lived in Room 631, and some of the crazy antics that took place in her room. Ira said it was hard for him to believe that Vali was actually dead because she didn’t seem like the type to die. And neither, for that matter, did Herbert Huncke, who had also lived in the Chelsea. When I said goodbye to Ira that afternoon, the halls of the Chelsea looked much the way they had when I walked through them on my way to Vali’s room in the early 1990s, but something was already lost. Passing by yesterday and imagining all the hallways renovated, I felt blue. Then Virgil Thomson’s name on one of the brass plaques out front caught my eye and I thought of Ned Rorem and his wonderful published diaries.

At the beginning of summer my friend Indra Tamang took me to visit Mr. Rorem at his apartment on West 70th Street near Central Park. It was just starting to get hot on the day we went, and I liked sitting in the comfortable and pleasantly worn living room we were invited into. The windows were open and the room was full of late afternoon sunlight. There was the grand piano stacked with sheet music, so black and full of presence like a person, the walls were hung with paintings by Mr. Rorem’s friends, which I took in all at once. “Joe Brainard painted that one,” he said, and looking at the painting made me happy. I thought of the little books Joe Brainard used to make, his I Remember books, full of sentence upon sentence beginning with the words, ‘I remember.’ Reading them always transported me to places I thought were forgotten.

Ned’s niece Mary served cake and ginger ale while he and Indra talked about Charles Henri Ford and some of the people they knew in common. Ned said that he didn’t think he ever met Djuna Barnes in person, even though so much overlapped for both of them. He said that he and all of his friends had read Nightwood as teenagers and been impressed by it, and that he had been part of a whole gang of Djuna Barnes fans. Indra mentioned Leonora Carrington’s recent death and said that Dorothea Tanning is still around, though by now she must be ancient. “What about Harold Norse?” Ned asked, and Indra said, “He’s dead too.” Then Ned said, “I wish people would stop dying. I don’t understand why people die. I mean, why are we born if we have to die?” And Indra said, “Exactly. That’s what I was always thinking when I was growing up.”

Ned asked me where I live, and I told him that I live around the corner from the Chelsea Hotel. He said that once he worked for Virgil Thomson in the Chelsea, earning $20 a week plus orchestration lessons. “I was Virgil’s copyist,” he said, “which means that I copied his music, at his place, while he was in the bedroom dictating his articles over the telephone. He was the best writer on music who ever lived, as well as being a composer of quality, so I learned an awful lot about music.”

At the time, Ned lived in a room on West 12^th Street above the Beatrice Inn, for which he paid $25 a month. “I had a pretty good room with a bed,—and a hot plate, it seems to me—a bathroom of my own and windows that looked out on the street,” he said. "My room was directly above the Beatrice Inn. I wonder who lives there now, in the room that I had. Prices are very different today. Now it would probably cost a thousand dollars.”

“Or more,” said Indra.

Back then, Ned told us, the village felt much more like “The Village” that we still imagine. In 1948, 8th Street was where people did a lot of their shopping, there were bars full of painters who didn’t know what to do with themselves after the sun went down, and everything was cheap. He said that he ate his lunch at the Waverly Inn almost every day because it was just so convenient and cheap. The San Remo bar on Bleecker Street was where all kinds of people with brains would sit and talk all night, and I thought of the nights there recorded in Judith Malina’s published diaries. The Minetta Tavern on MacDougal Street was where a lot of gay people went, and everything was close to Washington Square. Ned said that sometimes he would go to Eddie Condon’s club on West 3^rd Street to hear jazz. He worshipped Billie Holiday and saw her in person a few times. He said he remembered getting completely drunk with friends and going to see Billie sing someplace, and that when she saw them come in, she said something like, “Oh, boy, here they come.”

As I walked home yesterday, I pictured Vali the way she looked in her room, reclining on her pillows with the pretty dog Sheba lying beside her, and Ira appearing in her doorway like a glittering wizard with his beard and his cape and his rings. My sadness lifted a little with that picture, and I thought: “I remember The Chelsea Hotel.” Sometimes writing things down can make everything a little more bearable.

18 August 2011

The first issue of my new little magazine Housedeer is almost ready.

OTHERS, THOSE MYSTERIES

2011-06-30T14:42:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago I saw the Queen of the Netherlands coming towards me on 8th Avenue. She was wearing a tan colored raincoat and a clear plastic rain bonnet on her head. She looked down at the street as she walked, so I was able to stare right at her, but when she was very close she glanced up and saw me and I was caught. I went ahead and told her what I thought: That she looked just like the Queen of Holland. “Queen Beatrix,” I added, and the lady laughed. She said, “Yes, I know her. I mean, I’ve seen her picture, and I’ve seen her on TV.” We stood smiling at each other in the rain. She didn’t say, “Yes, you’re right, I am she,” or “I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken,” and she seemed delighted to be recognized as the Queen. Her pleasant, leonine demeanor was one of humble ambiguity, and when she spoke, it was with a little all-purpose accent that could have originated anywhere from Holland to Iceland. She laughed, thanked me for stopping, and gave me a little regal wave.

I thought of a letter I got a while ago from a Dutch friend in Amsterdam, telling me about a dog she had met named Truffel who had just had something interesting happen to him. She included his picture, which I’ve put here for you to see. Something Truffel can do is wave to people with his paw, in a manner my friend described in her letter as ‘very elegant and small, the way royalty will wave, for example.’

One day, Truffel was out for a walk in Amsterdam with Maria, the lady who owns him, when a car drew up to the curb and stopped. Out stepped Her Majesty the Queen, right in front of Truffel. She had guards with her but no entourage, and Maria said, “Look, Truffel, it’s the Queen. Why don’t you wave to her?” So Truffel sat down, lifted his paw and gave his elegant and small wave to Queen Beatrix. And when she saw what he was doing, Queen Beatrix bowed to him and gave him a gracious little wave in return.

I thought of Truffel when the lady who might have been Queen gave me her little wave, the kind of wave that Gore Vidal once described nicely as a royal salute, "in which the fingers of one hand unscrew, as it were, an invisible upside-down jar of marmalade.”

Last week I was coming home from the grocery store and while I waited for the light to change at 23rd Street, a man stopped and asked me if I would mind telling him where I got my shoes. I was wearing my red clogs, which I bought on sale at a little shop on 7th Avenue that is gone now. When I told him, he seemed very disappointed. He said he had a friend who would absolutely love my shoes. He said his friend actually prefers used shoes, and asked me if I knew of any shops in the neighborhood that sells them. I told him Housing Works thrift store on 17th Street has some. Then he asked me if I would consider selling him my shoes. And that’s when I started to get the feeling something was not quite right. He looked normal enough; he reminded me of Johnny Mathis 30 years ago. But he didn’t ask me what size my shoes were, and it seemed suspect that he would want to buy them for a friend without knowing the size. The fact that his friend “likes used shoes” was already making me a little queasy.

I said, “You know what? I’m kind of attached to my shoes, so I don’t want to sell them. OK?” He said he understood. Then the light changed, I crossed 23rd Street and he went off in another direction. I wondered if he was an actual shoe fetishist. I’ve heard stories about them but I don’t think I’ve ever knowingly met one. And this was the first time someone had ever offered to buy the shoes right off my feet. I usually have one pair of shoes at a time and wear them until they fall apart. I had to wonder why, if this man was in fact a real shoe fetishist, he would want my beat-up old clogs?

Yesterday I was in a store looking at soap. I turned my head and there he was, the shoe guy, looking sheepish and caught. He said, “I hope you won’t think I’m stalking you, but I looked all over the internet for shoes like yours and I couldn’t find any.” I looked down at my clogs. He said, “I really don’t do this sort of thing ever, but I really would love to buy your shoes. This is a one-of-a-kind situation. I’ll pay you anything you want. Or I will buy you two new pair of shoes if you give me those.” He looked terribly embarrassed. I said, “You’re a funny one, you know that?” I said, “Look, I like my shoes and I want to keep them, OK?” He asked me if I would take his name and number in case I change my mind, and he wrote his first name and cell number on a slip of paper. I took it, but as harmless as he seemed, no amount of money, short of a million dollars, would make me want to give him my shoes.

At home I left my shoes in the hall by the door the way I always do, and then just for the heck of it I looked up his name together with ‘shoe fetish.’ Something called Shoe Fetishist Anonymous or something close to that came up. I won’t put his name down here, in case it’s him and he’s trying to sober up, but I’ll tell you this: when I saw that, I went right out to the hall and brought in my shoes.

June 30, 2011

A LITTLE THING THAT HAPPENED SUNDAY EVENING

2011-05-31T14:07:00.000-07:00

On Sunday evening I went for a walk. I’m not sure which streets I took because I walked half in and half out of thought the whole way, but at some point a big, crowded restaurant with a table outside pulled me from my reverie.

I noticed a sign announcing the evening’s special, boiled crawfish, and a white dish next to the sign in which was sitting one live crawfish as a sort of spokesman for the special. I stopped and looked at him sitting there, and as I looked at him I saw that he was looking at me. Two ladies came out of the restaurant just then and they stopped to look at him too. One of them said, “He’s kind of cute.” And the other one replied, “But we just ate two big plates of him. I don’t know if you should say that,” and they went off laughing down the street.

I liked the face of this creature. It was a face full of intelligence and stoicism, and suddenly I felt terrible for him. A din roared out of the crowded restaurant, which was full of people who all looked alike. The crawfish in the dish was a thousand times more interesting as a character than any of the people in the restaurant.

I turned away from the table and started to walk towards 2^nd Avenue, but leaving the crawfish at the restaurant felt something like unbearable to me. I turned to have another look at him and saw a man standing at the table. The man raised his hand like a claw and jabbed at the crawfish. And I watched the little crawfish stand up on his hind legs and show the man his two tiny claws. My heart swelled. I thought: If I don’t do something, I risk being up all night suffering, and regretting it forever. I’ve seen him, and he has seen me. And I can either try to save him or not.

I went back to the table. People eat crawfish, that’s part of life. But if I could rescue this one, that would be part of life too. Instinct told me that if I were to say to the guys in their white aprons behind the table that my heart was breaking at the sight of the critter in the dish, they would dismiss me and that would jeopardize my chance to rescue him. So I asked, “What do these taste like, shrimp?” One of the guys said, “Well, they’re crustaceans so it’s kind of like a little lobster. You get fifteen as part of the meal for thirty dollars.”

I like lobsters. Especially since reading a story I found some years ago, in the Strange But True column of one of the dailies, about a huge lobster found guarding a watch at the bottom of a harbor. It made such an impression on me that I tore the story out and still have it in my billfold. This is what it says:

Lobster Found Guarding Watch

“Divers doing routine maintenance work in a British harbor have discovered a giant lobster standing guard over a barnacle-encrusted wristwatch. The lobster, which is thought to be more than 30 years old, was spotted by members of a diving club in Blyth harbor, Northumberland. On closer inspection they were amazed to find that the ancient crustacean appeared to be guarding the watch, which was still ticking.

Graham McDonnar, a member of the Lady Francis Dive Team, said: "We've estimated that the watch had to have been under water for at least three years due to its condition and what's even more amazing is that it's not even a waterproof model.”

The lobster has been taken to the Blue Reef Aquarium in Tynemouth where it is settling in well in the harbor tank display. Blue Reef's Zahra d'Aronville said: "Lobsters are well known for being extremely territorial. Perhaps it identified the watch as part of its territory and has been standing guard over it ever since. We're not sure whether we will be allowed to keep the original watch but if not we'll definitely supply the lobster with a waterproof replacement.”

After I read that story I worried that the lobster wouldn’t get to keep the watch and wondered what reason there could possibly be for him not to. I sent a letter to the aquarium in Cornwall, England, telling them what I thought. I’m sure they considered me an oddball, or maybe they were flooded with letters, I don’t know; they never wrote back. But over the years I’ve thought of that lobster every so often, and I thought of him as I looked at the tiny version of him sitting in the dish on the table. I asked the man how much it would cost to just buy one. I told him I wanted to take one home and let my cat have it and he laughed.

He said, “Oh you want to do that? Sure! I’ll just give you one.” And I said, “Can I have this one?” The man said, “Why not?” He dumped the crawfish into a plastic cup and handed it to me. I hurried to 2^nd Avenue before the man could change his mind for some reason. I had the lobster. I felt so glad. I decided to take him over and set him free in the East River.

I told him not to worry and held the cup so he could look out on the walk over. He saw the FDR Drive, and a big curious dog, and once we reached the river, there was the Williamsburg Bridge and the old Domino Sugar Factory. I wondered, is it okay for him if the water is brackish? Is it too polluted? He still had fight in him and his eyes were clear and watching, but he had started to blow foam. His out-of-the-water time was up. So I wished him luck and dropped him in the river.

31 May 2011

OUTSIDE TODAY, THINKING ABOUT IRA

2011-04-26T17:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening I answered the telephone and found my friend Indra Tamang on the other end, telling me that about ten minutes before, Ira Cohen had died. When I learned a few days ago that Ira was in Saint Luke’s Hospital, failing fast, surrounded by the people closest to him, I thought: I won’t go. Or maybe I will. What should I do? With Indra’s call it was suddenly over. I remembered one night, standing on East Houston Street with Penny Arcade, who remarked that when the day came for Ira Cohen, it would come as a shock to everyone who knew him, no matter how much we all might think we were prepared.

A few entries from my diary about Ira:

12 April 2000

Out with Ira to the copy shop to make copies of 15 poems and he swiped a marking pen with gold ink. We took a few snapshots outside. Ira likes to take photos with signs in the background. He was saying how a picture of Kerouac on 42nd Street is suddenly timely and nostalgic because of the movie marquee in the background, spelling out "THE WILD ONE" and "MARLON BRANDO" which, at the time the picture was taken, meant nothing special but sooner or later everything becomes nostalgic.

23 January 2001

Gregory Corso laid out at the Perazzo Brothers funeral home. Marty Matz began to cry when he saw Gregory, and Pilar dog comforted him. Afterwards I held Pilar up to the window of Faicco’s pork store so she could look at the sausages. The butcher showed her a huge slab of meat, and he and all the other butchers had a laugh, and then along came Ira. The sun shone beautifully in his beard as he stood there on Bleecker street and I told him so. He gave me a kiss and told me that if ever he gets mad and yells at me to forgive him in advance. (Earlier today on the phone he was pissed off because Our Lady of Pompeii refused to have poems in the church at Gregory’s funeral tomorrow, but Patti Smith gets to sing two songs.)

18 November 2001

Marty Matz’s memorial at the Cantor Film Center on 8^th Street. Took Pilar in her bag. We sat in the rear and I took Pilar out and set her on my lap. Suddenly there was a man behind us hemming and hawing and saying, “So, you got past the guard, hmmm, well, you know…” I told him if he was going to tell me I had to leave with the dog to just spit it out and get it over with, and he said he’d pretend he hadn’t seen her and went away. Ira was the host, and just at that moment he asked for Pilar to come to the podium, since she was such a good friend of Marty’s, and Pilar was appropriately grave at the microphone.

At 11 PM answered phone/Ira. He told me about Paulita Sedgwick, cousin of Edie and sister of Susanna (who she looks very much like) how much he likes her--knows her for many years--and how she turned him down for a kiss at his 36^th birthday party, so he turned to Gianfranco Mantegna, who was sitting next to him on the other side, and stuck his tongue down Gianfranco’s throat instead.

22 July 2004

On the phone Ira talked about how he and a kid named Richard Raskind were in the same class at Horace Mann and how later Richard had a sex change and became Renee Richards who was Navratilova’s tennis coach and also a famous eye surgeon. At the class reunion, there she was, Renee Richards, and she looked at Ira’s eye and said, “Oh, that’s a papilloma. Come to my office and I’ll get rid of that in ten minutes.”

6 January 2005

As the E train came into the station I saw that the driver was a glowering person in a turban who looked like Ira.

8 October 2005

Talked to Ira on the phone in his hospital room. He said they keep asking him questions to see if he has dementia. They ask him who the president is and he says, “Fuckhead!” and they don’t argue.

May 23May 2006

Ira had another stroke. Went up to see him at Lenox Hill on 77^th Street. He was still Ira, talking about the bottle of personal hygiene spray they had given him for his “perineum.” He kept scaring Raphael by pretending to have a heart attack and Raphael kept saying, “Pop, you gotta stop doing that, you’re scaring me.”

30 May 2006

To visit Ira at the Jewish Home on West 106^th btw Amsterdam/Columbus. He talked about making the Thunderbolt Pagoda movie. Then he farted and got up and walked by himself to the bathroom to poop, and told me all about it when he came out.

Last summer Ira spent a few weeks in the Chelsea Hotel while his apartment was being fumigated for bedbugs, and I was glad to have him right here in the neighborhood so I could go over and visit. I saw him a lot at the Chelsea, once upon a time, in Vali Myers’ room when she lived there. Ira’s memory was shot by last summer, but even so diminished he was still a thousand times more interesting to talk to than most people who have all their faculties intact. Passing the Chelsea Hotel today, I realized that I saw Ira both for the very first and for the very last time at the Living Theater. The last time was November 2010. He looked very good in a purple and black shirt and a black hat, sitting in a wheelchair. He said, “If I knew you were coming I would have brought a cake.”

Of course I thought I’d see Ira again. Penny Arcade was right. There’s no preparing for the loss of so dear, marvelous and irascible a wizard.

Ira Cohen 1935-2011

26 April 2011

GINGER

2011-03-06T15:53:00.000-08:00

Last week my bookseller friend was out on Seventh Avenue in his regular spot and I went to see what he had on his table. He said, “Look at this,” and he handed me a book of poems by Richard Brautigan called Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork. I opened it to a tiny little poem called “Ginger” and read it aloud:

“She’s glad

that Bill

likes her.”

We stood looking at the poem for a few seconds, letting it sink in. He pulled on his beard and said, “Yup.” Then he said, “I felt bad when he shot himself,” and I said, “Me too.” It was something that didn’t make any sense at all when it happened, already decades ago. I remember it happening, and I remember reading a story about it in Vanity Fair magazine. It felt shocking and all wrong, and it still does, but less so now. In the picture on the cover of the book of poems, Brautigan had a beard. I always remembered him as just having a long saloonkeeper style mustache, but not a beard. He always wore a ten-gallon hat on his head, like a frontiersman. If he had lived and kept the beard, he might look something like the bookseller guy now, if a few years older, because by now Richard Brautigan would be getting up there in his seventies and I would guess that my bookseller is someplace in his sixties.

I thought of Seaweed, my dad, and wondered what he would say about a little poem like that. I couldn’t guess either way, but he’d either like it or hate it. Sometimes he wrote awful poems and sent them to me in letters. One of them was about a romance between two garden slugs that lived in a rooming house and slept on a sagging four-poster bed. Seaweed was as much a misfit as Richard Brautigan, but he was nothing like him. Brautigan had a sweet look about him, and Seaweed was more of a Charles Bukowski character, although he didn’t like Bukowski at all. He was rough around the edges in appearance and he never had any money. He was unable to not stop and pet stray cats, feeling under their throats to see if they were purring. He wandered around picking butts up off the sidewalk to smoke, and spent whatever money came his way on beer in the trashiest taverns, declaring Mozart great at the bar, bumming smokes and living on blackberries all through the late summers and early autumns when he could pick them.

He haunted the library and called me up whenever he liked a book to expound on its virtues. He got his food for free at the food bank and ate a lot of stale bread while he gobbled up all the books of Herbert Asbury about old criminals and gangsters and molls. He read Hubert Selby’s Requiem for a Dream and said it was a masterpiece.

He re-read all the books of Thomas Wolfe and Theodore Dreiser that he’d read back in the 30s and 40s, checked out from the library. He thought that An American Tragedy was a masterpiece, more so than Sister Carrie. He told me that Theodore Dreiser’s brother changed his name to Dresser and was an actor on Broadway in the 1890s. He told me that he had just read the autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant, written on his deathbed. Seaweed had a Newsreel Voice that he would use when he talked about something he thought was truly great, such as this book by Ulysses Grant. “He was lauded all over the globe! Egypt! China! Japan! Russia! The Mid East! They treated him like he was a God!” He said that the book was a masterpiece. He said Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy was his masterpiece. “Find it at the library and delve into it,” he said. “Right now I’m reading a book about an old baseball player who was a spy and in that book, to my great surprise, I came across a ball player named Heinie Manusch! And all this time I thought “Heinie Manusch” was something I saw in a movie when I was sixteen years old, describing the sound of a train! ”

He liked limericks and told me he thought they had a way of making the stupidest thing possible sound absolutely true. He said that a limerick was actually a straight-faced piece of life without introduction, and that’s why people like them. As he was talking, telling me these things over the telephone, I was scribbling everything he said down on a notepad so I would remember it later and I’m glad I did. He read Last Exit to Brooklyn in one sitting and said the part he liked most was about a very dirty lady who picked her nose and smelled awful. He declared the whole thing “A Masterpiece.” Around that time he sent me this letter, about what I think might have been the last book Selby wrote:

“Today I picked up in the library a book called The Willow Tree by Hubert Selby. I’m partly into it, and I venture to say that this one might be his masterpiece. I just finished Bukowski’s Ham on Rye. Henry is among the most despicable characters I ever met. Is that actually autobiographical? Here is that bit of doggerel I recited to you over the phone the other day:

Activated charcoal is good for you

In the chewing gum you chew chew chew

So plunk down a nickel, say here I come

For Ten Crown Activated Charcoal gum.

Love and kisses,

Dad

I bought the Brautigan book for five dollars and read most of it while I waited for lights to change on the short walk home, because most of the poems in it are about the same length as “Ginger.” I put it in the bookshelf, and I think if Seaweed were still here I’d risk giving it to him.

March 6, 2011

DOES MACY'S TELL GIMBELS?

2011-02-20T13:21:00.000-08:00

On Saturday afternoon I went down to the farmers market to sit for a while in the sun on a crate behind the turkey stand and watch my friend Joanne weighing out fresh turkey breasts on a scale. I saw all her regular customers coming to buy turkey, and they all had things to ask or say to her about turkey. “What breed is this?” a man asked, and Jo told him that she wasn’t sure because she doesn’t work on the farm itself, but that she knew these were big white turkeys. A very tall woman came hurrying over and said, “Do you have any necks left?” and when Jo said she didn’t the woman looked crestfallen. “Oh no,” she said. She told Jo that the necks she’d had the last time were excellent and she had been just dying to have more necks that very night. I thought of a woman my mother told me about who lives in a trailer park and keeps a big turkey as a pet. She calls her turkey “Turk,” and when she comes home from work, Turk runs to greet her and then cuddles up beside her on the sofa and lays his little head in her lap.

I sat watching the life of the market play out before me and listened in on an argument happening a few steps down into the subway entrance directly behind me. A lady was shouting at a man, and from where I sat I could see them clearly through the bars surrounding the subway entrance. The lady wore huge sunglasses that made her look like a bug, and she had a tight little mouth that grimaced around each word she shouted. They didn’t notice me looking, but if they had, I don’t think it would have changed a thing because while the lady was doing all her screaming the people going into the subway had no choice but to walk between them even as the lady screamed, “If you LOVE me, you wouldn’t do what you’re DOING! You talk all the time about LOVE, LOVE, LOVE and it’s ALL BULLSHIT!” She didn’t look good when she shouted out those words, and it was difficult to imagine anyone loving her. Then a man of about seventy wearing a big, full mustache like a walrus stopped to look at the turkey. Jo told him she thought his mustache looked very good. He said that he had worn it for most of his life. “You’ve probably forgotten what you look like underneath it,” Jo said, and the man answered, “That was the pernt.” Then he quickly corrected himself to say, “That was the point,” but we had both heard it, Jo and I. “Pernt,” said Jo after he was gone. “You don’t hear that one much anymore.” The old accent popping up is something like an old creature thought to be extinct suddenly appearing on the street with all its horns and saber teeth shining.

On a recent Friday evening after visiting my friend Bobby downtown on Grand Street, I had to ride down in the shabbos elevator that stops on every floor whether anyone wants to get on or off or not. An old man was in the car with me on the long trip down, leaning on his cane, and when we reached the ground floor he said, “Ladies foist,” and let me go ahead of him. I can’t explain why, but “foist” and “pernt” are relatives from the same tribe. When I told Bobby about the man saying, “Ladies foist” in the elevator, he said it was probably his neighbor Saul. Then he told me about an old phrase his mother used to say to thwart nosy people: “Does Macy’s tell Gimbels?” And hearing that little expression spread a warmth like brandy through my heart with the same pleasant soporific effect as when I heard an old man in Hell’s Kitchen say, “Well, what am I supposed ta do? Stand on my head an’ spit wooden nickels?”

I sat on the crate thinking of other old expressions so taken for granted once and gone the way of Gimbels department store, shut for decades already just like B. Altman’s. It was B. Altman’s where one of my friends used to buy all her brassieres and tell about the old lady clerks who would accompany you into the changing room and measure your bosom. They would all have surely had the old accent, those ladies who would work their whole lives in the lingerie department of Gimbels or Altman’s and take it all very seriously, too. Thinking about them made me wish I could run and buy a potato knish on the corner, the way you always could before. You can still find knishes, but they aren’t everywhere the way they were, on any block off any of what felt like ten thousand Hebrew National hotdog stands, and if you had one of those with a coke, you were good for the whole day.

Things can disappear so gradually that one doesn’t take notice that people aren’t givin’ each other agita the way they once were, or making sure they have carfare. You just forget about it until some old guy decides to say, “That was the pernt,” and it all comes rushing back in an instant and hangs around a while before it fades away again.

A great big lady with sparkly glasses began to shout into her phone by the subway entrance. “Yeah, you BETTER tell me where you at, ’cause if I get in that L train an’ you ain’t there when I get out I’ll be callin’ the police on my own SELF is how bad it’s gonna be, so you BETTER tell me where you at!” I saw Jo turn to see what the fuss was and then go back to what she was doing. When you work in the middle of the whole theater, you sometimes just drown it all out.

February 20, 2011

SOMETIMES IT JUST DISAPPEARS

2010-12-28T08:50:00.000-08:00

On Sunday came the big blizzard that howled through the city all day and all night. At about six or seven o’clock I went out in it, down to the corner of 21st and 7th, to see what the Empire State Building was doing. It had disappeared entirely, like a magic trick. But it was not a gentle, magic snowfall. The snowflakes were like sharp glass shavings flying around from every direction at once. Trash bags went bouncing down 7th Avenue full of trash, the sky flashed like a strobe and then came a very ominous rumble of thunder, which is something I had never before experienced in a snowstorm. I went back inside and got into bed to listen to the pipes banging and the wind howling at the windows, which glazed over with ice.

In the morning, the storm had passed and the sky was blue. I read in the Daily News about hundreds of people stranded on the A Train all night long out by Aqueduct Racetrack, and I felt very lucky to have been safely home listening to the snowplows grinding through the furious wind. Imagining being stuck on the subway with no heat and no escape momentarily erased the swarm of little worries flying around my head; What if not enough jobs turn up to pay the rent in the months to come? What if the slum next to my building gets torn down and this old building is damaged in the process and is condemned and we all get turned out? And what about the bigger, much more terrible worries plaguing the whole world? There are those to worry about!

I counted my blessings: For now the rent is paid, the heat works in my old tenement building even though it snows over the toilet from the skylight, and for the moment, all is well. There had been Christmas parties with sweets and no trouble. In front of one of the parties, I saw my friend Debbie’s long, white 1971 Chevrolet parked on the dark, cobbled street with its blue Jersey plates, and I remembered being in it on a particular day years ago. She pulled into a spot somewhere downtown, across the street from an old building being demolished. Two big workmen with sledgehammers stopped what they were doing to admire the car, and when we got out, one of them said, “You know, up where I live, in the Bronx, people would steal just that car, over and over again. You come up to Hunt's Point with that car, you only gonna have it a few minutes. On my block, people just gonna steal that car, and who steals it, he gonna get it stole from him, and on and on.” And Debbie said, “Really? I feel so flattered.” And after the party, walking through Thompson Street on my way home, I passed by the little shop called Stella Dallas, still there after many years of selling vintage party dresses with its windows all aglow. A man and woman who looked to be in their mid sixties, all bundled up against the chill, stood admiring the mannequins in their finery. I heard the woman say, “Now these dresses are going back to our parents’ day.” And in a quiet voice that made the little moment feel to me like something I was privileged to witness, the man answered, “Mm hmmm, that’s right.” I thought of my old friend Emmy Caporale who sends me a Christmas card every year, this one included, and how much she's always loved party dresses. Every so often she would treat herself to one from Stella Dallas. Many years ago she wore one of them to a party we both attended, a dazzling black and white polka dot fanfare from the 1950s that looked like something Marilyn Monroe might have worn in a movie. And at the party, Emmy told me that she had come on the subway, and that she had bumped into a great big, angry lady on the platform who said to her, “Watch yourself girl, or I’ll knock those dots right off that dress.”

With the blizzard over yesterday, I waded through the snow to the grocery store. There were hardly any customers, and in the produce department I found the shelves almost empty. There was not a single zucchini, and almost no potatoes. I put two Floridian blood oranges in my basket, and a few feet away a big, tall lady of about seventy, wearing a long fur coat and a fur hat, held up a bunch of bananas and said, “Do you know what kind of bananas these are?” I thought she really wanted to know, but then she said, “I’ll tell you what they are. These are cooking bananas. And these here, these are for eating.” She leaned forward and looked over her glasses at the bananas. “Come over here and look,” she said. So I did. She showed me the different bananas on display, and said, “Look at the different shapes. See how these have corners? And these do not. You see?” I looked, and I could see the difference when she pointed it out. “You must wonder why I know so much about bananas,” she said. I told her I did, but what I really wondered was why she was telling me about them. “I’m Jamaican, and bananas is what we do,” she said. “It’s ALL we do.” She smiled at me and pushed her cart off towards the fish department, where I heard her exclaim something there in the same friendly voice. She was just a very chatty lady.

I waded back home with my bag of groceries. On every corner were people with shovels. I could hear someone whistling. The side streets were fields of perfectly undisturbed snow, and the cars looked like long rows of tremendous marshmallows. And I saw that the Empire State Building was back in the usual place, as if nothing had happened.

28 December 2010

WINTER

2010-12-16T15:33:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a very cold day like the day before was too. I had to go up to Madison Avenue and 33^rd Street to the FedEx office to get an envelope with a work check in it, and because the tag left on the door of my building said the envelope wouldn't be there for me until after four pm, the sun was already going down when I left. I was anxious to get the check so I decided to take the subway up, over and down, rather than walk. I took the number one train to Times Square. It was just past four, so it was not too crowded yet. Between the one train and the shuttle, I came upon a woman singing along with a little music machine. She looked like Sister Souljah, wearing a great big puffy blue coat and rhinestone hoop earrings, and she was right in the middle of the famous aria from Carmen with a big, powerful voice that followed me all the way to the shuttle.

The shuttle train came rattling into the station all dressed up like an American Airlines plane and stopped with a noise that sounded like a big sigh of relief. All the people poured off and everyone waiting poured on. Inside, the whole train was decorated seats and all with photographic images of European capitals. I sat down on a row of tulips between Brussels and Zurich and as soon as the doors closed, a woman a few seats away from me switched on a little music box of her own and announced, “Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s time for a little local entertainment!” Then she started to sing the old Donna Summer song, “On the Radio,” and I saw that she had a lot of gold teeth in her mouth. She was Puerto Rican and all bundled up in an army coat. I thought her voice sounded good. She finished the song as the train pulled into Grand Central and said, “Thank you so much for your attention, ladies and gentleman, this is real, honest-to-God local entertainment, and all donations will be appreciated very much by my eight cats and four dogs, I can tell you that, and may you all have a blessed holiday.” I wondered if it was true, what she said about the eight cats and four dogs, and something about her made me think it probably was. And it reminded me of something I’ve noticed for years in New York, which is that among people who love pets, it seems that Puerto Ricans outnumber everybody else.

Halfway through the tunnel leading to the number six train, I came upon a pair of volunteer underground preachers offering free literature about going to Hell. A big hand-painted sign was there to let us know that God Will Judge the Whoremongers, and two card tables were covered with pamphlets and books. The volunteer preachers were busy telling everyone to please take whatever they wanted, and I stopped to look. “Go on, everything’s free,” the preacher near me was saying, and I looked at a very well-worn bible lying there, and shiny books emblazoned with hellfire and pamphlets full of gospel. “Eat ‘em up, people,” he said, “They’re all free, so eat ‘em up!” I opened one of the books with the shiny flaming cover and looked at a random line saying that dogs are often better friends than people, and that dogs have medicine in their tongues. The preacher approached and said, “Please, take it!” But I closed it and put it down. I didn’t want to take it, but he wasn’t overbearing. I had the feeling that the little sentence I had just read was part of something bigger that was going to suggest Hell as a consequence, but I can’t be sure. I agreed with the sentence, with both parts of it. Now I wish I had taken the book so I could look the sentence up again and see how the passage ended. What I did take was a little folded pamphlet with a big red question mark on it and the words, “HEAVEN or HELL—Which For You?” Inside it offered a list of suggestions on how Hell might be avoided if a person wanted to follow the simple instructions, but it left the decision entirely up to the reader. There were no judgments in the pamphlet, just the tips on getting your soul all cleaned up and saved if you felt like it. It was much gentler than the lady preacher I used to pass every day on the corner of Broadway and 42^nd Street who would tell each person passing her by that they were going to Hell for sure, with no apparent alternative. She was not friendly about it at all, standing there with her little bullhorn. “That means you, Miss,” she would say, and I would hope that it wasn’t true.

I took the number six train one stop to 33^rd Street, and when I came up from underground, there was the upper half of the Empire State Building awash in soft pink light, and the top of the Chrysler Building and its platinum eagles gleaming in the same gentle and frozen glow, while down on the ground it was already night. I walked as fast as I could toward Madison Avenue to the FedEx office and got my envelope. Once I had it in my bag, I decided to walk downtown rather than take the train at rush hour. I passed a bum with sign that said, “MY LUCK WENT TO HELL AHEAD OF ME.” He had a cup sitting at his feet, but the message on his sign seemed self-defeating. Another bum I saw had a sign offering to listen to complaining for a quarter, and I thought he probably makes better money. It was just five-thirty when I reached my corner, but the Empire State Building had already turned on her big lamp, because it’s winter.

December 16, 2010

THE PENNY MAN

2010-11-14T09:33:00.000-08:00

Yesterday in front of the library on 23rd Street, I saw a little man in a red and black lumberjack’s coat race over to the curb and grab up a nickel that was lying there and shove it in his pocket. Then he dashed into the street to wave down the cross-town bus, coming right at him, even though it was stopping anyway. Something was wrong with him, and he reminded me very much of a man I used to see when I had my coffee wagon years ago, on the corner of Liberty and Broadway. I had my wagon next to Old Helen the Greek, the pretzel and chestnut vendor. Helen looked tough as leather from all her years of working on the street, but she was a very goodhearted person, even though that wasn’t always obvious.

There were certain unwritten rules that the street vendors had to abide by, and Helen was their enforcer. Once when she showed up and found a brand new vendor on her spot, I watched her tell him in a friendly way that he’d have to move and he refused. So she took hold of his wagon and pushed it right out into Broadway with him in it, yelling her head off. She had been on that spot since 1967 and she was much tougher than her husband, who I’d see early in the morning pushing his hotdog wagon down Broadway towards Trinity Church. It was impossible to imagine how old Helen was, but she must have been in her sixties then. Her mother sometimes came and sat on a wooden box and visited with her, and she was a very regal looking lady with white hair. When her mother was around, Helen never used the kind of language she did the rest of the time. She told me once that her mother was a close friend of Melina Mercouri, the actress who was then the Minister of Culture of Greece.

Every day at fifteen minutes before noon, the peculiar man I was reminded of yesterday would come tearing across Broadway and circle around Helen’s wagon. He always wore the same plaid suit and the kind of thick, coke-bottle glasses that make a person’s eyes look enormous. He had some kind of job in the Trade Center, and something was the matter with him. Whatever his affliction was, it was apparent in everything he did. His mental capacity could be wondered at, but whether he was a genius or an idiot was blurry. He walked with his head tilted drastically to one side with one of his magnified eyes pointed directly at the ground. The pockets of his plaid suit jacket were crammed with papers and pencils, and he had an unbreakable stare.

The first time he came, I heard him say, “Lady, how much is a pretzel?” When Helen told him, he shouted, “WHAT? ARE YOU CRAZY?” He turned and hurried away, made a big circle in the plaza, and came back to ask her again. She told him to get lost. For a while after that, he did the same thing every day without buying anything. Finally Helen got sick of answering him and started to ignore him. Then he got bored and came over to me. He said, “Hi there. What’s your name?” I said, “That’s a secret.” He aimed one buggy eye at me. “Oh, yeah? Well then I’ll just call you Secret then. How much is a coffee?”

Before I could say anything, Helen came over to intervene. She took hold of his plaid sleeve and said, “Listen, Malaka. You know you don’t want nothin’, man. You not gonna pay. So look. You get lost, I pay you.” She opened her hand and showed him a few shiny pennies. She threw them out into the plaza, where they rang out in all directions over the bricks. He shot out after them with his legs like two bent sticks and his eye to the ground. Old Helen doubled over laughing, watching him race around the plaza picking up the pennies and stuffing them into the pockets of his plaid suit. She shouted, “Look! Look! Just like chicken! He chase penny just like chicken!” He came back to Helen winded and smiling. She handed him a pretzel and said, “Get out of here! Get lost!” He went back across Broadway towards the Trade Center and Helen laughed some more. She named him “The Penny Man.”

Whenever she saw him coming, she’d shout out to me, “Look! Look! Penny Man! He’s coming!” She kept a little stack of pennies waiting for him and every day they played that game as if it were the first time they had ever done it. Sometimes she’d throw the pennies out over Broadway and he’d dash right out into the traffic, dodging cars while Helen laughed her head off and shouted, “Be careful! Just like chicken! You crazy! Don’t get run over!” And after he’d snatched up all the pennies, she would give him a free pretzel, which he would eat right away, standing right next to her, and while he was eating it she would be telling him that I was a prostitute while winking at me and burning holes in his plaid jacket with her cigarette. She was both kind and horrible to him at once, and somehow, he both did and didn’t deserve it. Sometimes Helen would toss a penny suddenly, without any warning, and then just like a cat with a mouse, he would tear off after it even if he was in the middle of eating his pretzel. He just couldn’t not chase a penny.

Yesterday wasn’t the first time I’d thought of The Penny Man since then, it was just the first time I’ve seen anyone so much like him. I think of him every time I see a penny lying in the street. And whenever I see one I pick it up and put it in my pocket.

14 November 2010

FEDORA'S RESTAURANT

2010-07-22T18:33:00.000-07:00

Last night I walked downtown to Fedora’s on West 4^th Street, the little restaurant down a short flight of steps under the street, to sit at the bar and enjoy the presence of Fedora Dorato herself.

A friend told me that she is about to retire, so I’ve been going as much as I’ve been able to go before that happens. It feels good to sit there. It’s a little breath of honest-to-goodness old New York caught in amber, and Fedora is so tiny in stature she has to reach up to punch the keys of the old cash register.

I once read an article about Fedora in The Villager, which told how she was born in Florence, Italy, in 1921 and named for an opera by Umberto Giordano. I was curious and looked it up. I learned that it was first a play written for Sarah Bernhardt, and that the opera played at the Met in 1906 with the soprano Lina Cavalieri in the role of Fedora opposite Enrico Caruso. I read about Cavalieri’s glorious singing career, the silent movies she made, an advice column she wrote and the glamorous husbands she had before she was killed in a bombing raid on Florence in 1944. At the bar, Fedora mentioned being born there, in Florence, and when she named the country of her birth, she pronounced it “It’ly,” in the pleasant accent of old New York.

She brought little red baskets of bread to her regulars, leaning on her cane. At one table a plump man with a beard dined alone with a book, which he read by the dim light cast from over his table. Next to him sat an old leatherboy with white whiskers and a white-haired butch lesbian, twinkling over their plates of lasagna and chopped liver. I tried to eavesdrop on a silver-haired man sitting with a great big lady who resembled Bob Hope wearing a dress and a wig in Road to Morocco. Her hands were big and her nails were beautifully manicured and pink, and around her hairy wrist she wore a delicate old-fashioned watch. Her voice was deeper than her companion’s, but I couldn’t make out much of their conversation through the hum of the old air conditioning system. I thought: So this is where you all went.

Fedora said, “You know I’m closing next week, don’t you?” I said I did know, and that it made me sad. She said, “Yeah, I loved it. I’ve been here sixty years.” The lady beside me asked her if she was ready, and she said, “No. But my back is broken.” She said she gets an hour or so of relief from pills, but mostly it just hurts. “I got this back from standing,” she said. “Standing in the kitchen cooking for sixty years. I cooked and baked, I was always on my feet, standing, lifting, standing. They can’t operate because I’m 90, and they don’t operate on people who are 90.”

“I heard that Zsa Zsa Gabor was having an operation and she’s 94,” said the lady. “Is it her back?” Fedora asked, and the lady said, “I think it’s her hip. That’s probably the difference.” Fedora said, “Yes, that’s why. The back is different. My son is a dentist and he took me all over, and they all said the same thing. And it’s because I’m too old. They did quite a few nice things though. They cemented a lot of my fractures and that helped some for a while. So I’ll put up with it. I’m only going to be here for another week anyway.” She smiled at us. She reached out and pinched my arm. She thanked us for having our beer straight out of the bottle. “Two less glasses to wash,” she said.

I sat talking with the other customer at the bar, about how certain ladies personify the true heart of New York, including ladies like the Chrysler Building, the Cyclone and the Empire State Building. And how Fedora--with her standard New York accent, her brand of warmth so peculiar to the city, the way she manages to work very hard but make it look relaxed, and the way she dresses so nicely each evening in a pretty blouse and matching brooch--was one of them. “That would mean that New York is a lady of 90,” she said, and somehow that rang true.

Yesterday evening the place was very crowded, with just one waiter and Fedora to serve the whole room. Every table was full with more people waiting to get one. A man asked Fedora when the last time was that she had people lined up out the door that way, and she said, “Last week.” He said, “Betcha you’ll be sorry you sold the place,” and she said, “Not me.”

In an article about Fedora’s from several years ago, I read that it’s the kind of place that can exist only as long as Fedora is in it, and I believe that is true. And because of that, I don’t think it matters much what goes into that little old cellar next, as long as they don’t hurt the building. And I don’t imagine anyone will hurt it, because it’s Fedora’s building. She’ll be right upstairs, sleeping under the same roof as always, and she’s got family. Thinking about that made me feel not so blue as I walked home in the dusky light. In my experience, there’s nobody more savvy than a lady who’s run a bar and restaurant in New York for sixty years, especially one who owns her building. She knows what she’s doing, and whatever Fedora decides will be right.

Yesterday was hot and steamy all day. The sky was full of thunderheads, beautiful and dramatic, standing straight up and radiantly glowing. And suddenly without any warning there was the Empire State Building having turned on her white lights for the evening, looking sublime at eighty, and not going anywhere.

22 July 2010

THE BEST GUY I KNOW

2010-05-03T12:14:00.000-07:00

My friend Charlie works as a tour guide on one of those open-air buses we see all the time. He’s the best guy I know. I will be honest: I have found those tour buses annoying, just because. But one evening I took Charlie’s tour. As the bus lurched away from 8th Avenue and Forty-something Street, Charlie said, “Okay, here we go, don’t stand up,” into his microphone, and I felt excitement. And as we sailed across town, he told stories, not just about the big stuff, but everything. “See those two green globes right down there with all the people going in and out? That’s the subway,” Charlie said. “Those are people going home from work.” There they all were, the regular people, going in and coming out. New York had become a big, glittering magic theater. And I was one of those people on the bus watching, just like the ones I’ve found annoying. In a weedy Brooklyn no-man’s land we parked at the river’s edge in the gold glow of sundown and looked at the stately, quiet figure of the Statue of Liberty. Charlie recited that famous poem by Emma Lazarus, not just the very famous lines, but the entire poem. It was beautiful.

A piece of legislation was just passed that I could say a lot about, but this letter that Charlie wrote to Pete Hamill says it best:

Dear Mr. Hamill,
Soon I will be out of a job. It will be hard to find another. I have been working as a NYC tour guide for the last seven years. Standing up on top of those red buses with the wind in my face and doing my best to do justice to the story of New York. You have been a great inspiration to me and an influence on my tours. Reading your book Downtown twice and watching the Ric Burns documentary countless times. Reading and studying the great New York historians. I thought: “The tours should feel something like this. History alive and flowing, positive, warm, poetic, dignified, humorous, and yet not whitewashed, and most importantly, told in a New York voice.”

I started getting deeper and deeper into Walt Whitman, memorizing passages from "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and reciting them with my 'living crowd' as we crossed the river together on the Manhattan Bridge; one of a' living crowd'. Quite often people would have me write down the name of the piece so they could look it up. Reciting that poem every day it became like a mantra to me and riding the F Train home, the adrenaline still flowing after giving back to back tours, Walt would be with me and I could see the humanity in every living soul and know that we swam together in this wild mystery story.

Well, I could go on and on about my love for the story of this city; I mention you and your story of the Castro impersonator at the Hotel Theresa on the uptown tours and it always gets a big laugh.

The city council has passed a law, the tour guides will be replaced by headphones. Some Greenwich Village residents had been complaining about the noise. A problem I think that could have been rectified, a very small portion of the tours go through relatively quiet residential areas. There was some talk of a provision in the headphone law that would protect our jobs that somehow fell by the wayside. Smug quotes from residents about "these idiot tour guides giving boring information". I know what its like to have your neighborhood invaded after bar after bar went up on my Lower East Side street; my only source of light becomes a brick wall 12 inches from my window when the adjoining recording studio builds a sun roof. But it is not worth the cost of our jobs and the killing of the human element in a living story.

The ability of the tour guides is widely varied. They are like New York itself, a group of misfits from twenty years of age to seventy, from the highest degrees of formal education to very little; neat-as-a-pin to hairy guts and shirt-tails flapping in the breeze, and they are a goodhearted crew.

My life is devoted to my wife and child and my vocation the arts; painting and theatre. I've never figured out how to make a living at those passions, and a series of jobs kept me afloat. I was never really at good at most of them; this tour guide thing is the first that I can honestly say that I am. Soon it will be gone if the mayor does not veto the bill and ask for it to provide some job protection for us. Perhaps it will send me deeper into my work, the old blessing in disguise, but I know that for many it will be a long rough road and no machine--no piece of plastic in the ear-- is going to talk of Emma Lazarus, read the entire poem; Jackie Robinson, J.P. Morgan, Boss Tweed, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra, Martin Scorsese, Edna St. Vincent Millay, or recite the intro to the Grand Central Station Radio Show. Martin Luther King at Riverside Church, Frank McCourt at Symphony Space, the flea circus, the gangster, the immigrant, the dock worker, the steel worker, the great democratic island city... What automated voice will patiently answer questions, help with those wheelchairs, tell them how to get to Carnegie Hall, and be grateful for a chance to serve? Well, don't get me started, I've got to catch a bus.

Charles Schick

My windows face 7th Avenue so I always hear the subway, sirens, jackhammers, and the din of weekend revelers. New York has all kinds of noises, and that’s just the way it is. From Charlie I learned that the people who take bus tours aren’t the ones ruining things. They’re curious. They look and feel awe and delight, sometimes at the smallest things.

Romy Ashby, May 3, 2010

PS:
There is still time to get the bill vetoed.
Please send letters to the mayor and tell him he should really think this one over.
Mayor Mike Bloomberg
City Hall
New York NY 10007
*Photo of Charlie crossing the Manhattan Bridge, Summer 2008.

WHAT I DID WHILE THE LAUNDRY WAS GOING

2010-04-10T18:28:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I put in a load of laundry and then I went to the grocery store. On the way to the store I saw the Newspaper King by the Radio Shack on 7th Avenue and 23rd Street. He was pulling a plastic bag out of the Village Voice paper box on the curb and talking at a man standing a few feet away. He looked at me as I was passing and said: “That man wants to steal my sandwich. I see him looking!” I glanced back at the other man, who was standing there minding his own business, and I recognized him as someone who works in the little discount mens clothing shop next to the Radio Shack. He likes to stand outside the shop and I see him standing there almost every day. On my way back about 15 minutes later, the Newspaper King was sitting on the sidewalk between the Radio Shack and the clothing shop, which has a big sign up now that says: “Recession Special—All Suits $59.00.” I see the Newspaper King all over the place, and have for a long time. A couple of years ago I saw him up on 35th Street and 8th Avenue and I had my camera with me. He told me that if I gave him a dollar he would let me take his portrait. So I did. And yesterday he looked just as resplendent as ever, sitting there on the sidewalk with his bottom half tucked into a Hefty trash bag, leaning against the Radio Shack.

I went to the library and while I was there a man charged in, looked at the line of people waiting for the check out and shouted, “Next!” He raced down the line toward the back of the library, saying, “Who’s next? You next?” He had a big smile on his face and when he laughed it was contagious. Even the librarians were smiling. A lady checking out a book asked, “Does he come in all the time?” And one of the librarians said, “Yes. He comes in every day for a drink of water.” The man came tearing back to the front, turned his big smile on the librarians and said, “How YOU doin’? Next!” He stood beaming into the library and then he whirled around and ran out. It was the second time I had seen him. The first time was a few weeks ago when I was just leaving and he was coming towards the library. He had on two coats and the same big smile. I heard him say: “I’m going in there to tell a buncha lies and eat a lotta berries! Yup! That’s what I’m gonna do, I’m going to go in there and tell a buncha lies and eat a lotta berries!” His words sunk in just as he was passing me and I laughed. He stopped and said, “My dear! I’m so happy to see you again!” He seemed to really mean it. I said, “Me too,” even though I had never seen him before.

On my way back to the Laundromat I saw a man and woman coming toward me on 22nd Street. They both looked about forty and very regular, like a couple of off duty bus drivers. I saw the woman lift to her lips a big cigar, light it, and then very luxuriously smoke on it. Then I saw the man produce a big cigar of his own and light that. They walked leisurely towards 7th Avenue, puffing their cigars. It’s not every day you see a woman smoking a cigar, and this one made it look like something women do all the time. I could imagine them having a little ritual--of meeting in the Cuban cigar shop on 6th Avenue up by Superior Flowers, and buying their cigars together after work--and how much they probably look forward to that. I went in to the Laundromat and my machine was still going, so I took a little walk over to 9th Avenue. All the trees along 22nd Street were exploding in flowers and crowded with birds.

On the corner of 9th Avenue and 20th Street I saw Dominic, one of the bums who usually hangs around my block, foraging in the trash at the curb. He looked up and saw me and said, “Hi, Patty.” I’ve never told him what my name is, but he always calls me Patty, and sometimes he calls me Pat. I saw a taxi driver who looked like a magical swami in a white turban and the longest beard I have ever seen come out of the Punjab deli with his lunch and climb in to his cab, which was parked there. I saw him open the bag and pull out a plastic fork. Then I saw another swami with a huge belly and a blue turban run over and tap on the window. I saw the first swami’s face light up with happiness at the sight of who was tapping his window.

By the time I got back to the Laundromat, my clothes had been taken out of the machine by the attendant and piled in a basket. I threw them in the dryer for two quarters' worth of hot air and went next door to the Salvation Army to look at books. I found a thriller for 99 cents and the cashier rang it up as $9099.00. He got all flustered and the manager who came to fix it said, “Jesus, just go take a break or something, will ya?”

In the laundromat I read the police blotter in the free paper, which made it seem as if 9th Avenue is just crawling with old-style pickpockets bumping into people in broad daylight. I read about a man arrested for swiping seven tubes of Colgate from CVS on 8th Avenue, and then I took my clothes out of the dryer and hauled them home to finish drying on the fire escape.

April 10, 2010

SPRING

2010-04-07T08:19:00.000-07:00

One recent evening I found a few old LP records put out with the trash downstairs, all very colorful and labeled as “Prohibido” and “Solo Para Adultos.” I guessed that they had belonged to my neighbor Tito, who was moved from St. Vincent’s Hospital to a nursing home somewhere. I see his daughter sometimes. I kept two of the records. They might not have been Tito’s, but I find it hard to imagine anyone else in this building having records like that, and I know sure enough that he did have some salsa records, because I heard him play them whenever the weather was nice. Tito was a meticulous housekeeper, and over the years I often caught sight of him mopping his kitchen floor. His door was always left ajar in the old-fashioned tenement way, music and fried cooking would waft out into the hall, and sometimes I’d look up from down on the street and see him propping his mop over the fire escape to dry in the sun. And just about this time every year, he put his stereo speakers on the window ledge and then the whole neighborhood would get to hear his salsa records. One of the records that I kept was made by a company called Spanoramic Recordings, located in the Lower East Side at number 106 Rivington Street, N.Y. N.Y. There’s no date on the record, but it was printed before there were zip codes.

On my way home from work downtown yesterday, I went into Economy Candy, which has been there since the 1930s. They have every kind of candy imaginable; so many choices that I always become paralyzed and just buy Necco Wafers. They have all the old-fashioned chewing gum too; Blackjack, Clove, Teaberry; it reminds me of childhood but I never buy any. Ever since an old Pan Am stewardess told me once when I was twelve that a lady shouldn’t chew gum I’ve hardly had any, even though I don’t agree with her and she’s probably dead by now. As I left the store, I noticed the address, 108 Rivington Street, right next door to where Spanoramic Recordings once was. I walked back up to my neighborhood thinking about that and eating Neccos, which tasted just the way they always have: like chalk.

When I got home, I carried my dog down the stairs to let her inch her way along 21st Street and get a little air. I tell her I love her a lot as I carry her up and down the stairs because it’s true, but saying it also distracts me from how heavy she is as an ancient, tired being, closer every day to heaven. When she was young she used to fly up and down the stairs and impatiently wait for me to catch up at each landing. She doesn’t seem to mind being old any more than she worries about her warts. So I try not to worry about those things either.

My friend Jo told me about a remedy her grandma swore by for warts. What you do, she said, is find a rock and put it in a box. Then you make the box look very beautiful and you take it into an unfamiliar street and leave it there. When somebody finds the box and opens it, that’s when your wart disappears. What I wondered is whether a man who opened the box and saw the rock would get the wart himself. I thought that if the remedy was one that lots of people knew about, a lot of people would be afraid of opening the pretty box in case there was a rock inside. And then I thought that even now it might not be such a good idea to open a pretty box just sitting on a street corner. Even if the remedy did work, I would need to do it 25 or 30 times to get rid of all the warts that have sprung up all over Pilar since she’s gotten so old. And I would have to go to Staten Island to find a street that wasn’t familiar.

I read in the newspaper today that St. Vincent’s Hospital will close, meaning there will be no more emergency room downtown. The article spoke of how St. Vincent’s treated survivors of the ship Titanic, and that it is $700 million dollars in debt. Then I read another article about how 10,000 poor people in this city are about to lose their housing vouchers because the housing authority is $45 million in debt. I felt my blood pressure rise the way it does when I read things like this, the way I felt when I read last fall in the New York Times about how Michael Bloomberg had spent more of his own money than any other person in the history of the United States in the pursuit of public office, an amount predicted to reach $140 million dollars by the end of the campaign.That kind of money goes a long way toward putting people into a “why bother” kind of trance on Election Day. He almost didn’t win, and a lot of people didn’t bother to vote. If the other guy had won, St. Vincent’s and the Housing authority would still have their troubles, I imagine, but Bloomberg won. And he has billions of dollars just sitting there. He could buy all the candy at the Economy Candy Store if he wanted to. He could pay those hospital and housing debts and not even feel it. And I imagine it would feel very nice to be able to make such a gesture. Sometimes a kind gesture makes a big difference.

Today I remembered something sweet from a day when Pilar was just a puppy. I carried her on my arm to show her New York, and outside Lincoln Center a lady stopped to pet her. She said, “Long life, Sweetheart,” and those words worked their magic and came true.

April 7, 2010

A DAY IN WHICH TO BE WELCOME

2010-03-14T15:23:00.000-07:00

At the Goodwill store on West 25th Street I came across a book called The Double Helix by James Watson, the scientist who discovered the structure of DNA. I opened it and looked at a picture of the author. I knew his name from my friend Gemma, who lives in a crumbling mansion on the water in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, a hamlet where the famous DNA laboratory sits. She knew this James Watson. I bought the book for a dollar and on Friday I took it with me to read on the train to Brooklyn for my tax appointment. It was full of crystallographic X-ray data and chains of polynucleotides and I understood almost none of what I read, but somehow it held my attention anyway. And what I did learn from it was that apparently certain magnified protein structures look, to certain scientists, very beautiful. It was pouring that day, and when we came up from underground the train filled with silver light and there was Brooklyn spread out around us.

I sat down in the tax office waiting area, across from a man reading the New York Post with the headline, "SUBWAY HORROR! Gal Killed in Track Leap For This Bag," and I imagined myself as the victim with the train bearing down upon me. Would I ever do such a thing as jump onto the tracks if I dropped something? How does a person manage to drop their bag onto the tracks? I came back to my senses on the hard chair, hugging my bag very tightly and surrounded by glum-looking people.

It was my second trip to Brooklyn in a week. A few days earlier I went with my friend Joanne in her car to retrieve something she needed from her storage unit. She said she can’t go there alone, and once inside the place I understood why. Until that day I had never been inside one of those facilities. It was a vast, windowless cavern full of dark rows of padlocked metal doors. “Murder lockers,” I whispered as she opened her padlock, and she said, “Ach.” She found what she needed and then she handed me the horn from her father’s Victrola. We took turns putting the small end of it to our ears and singing into the big end, and we realized that the old ear trumpets that hard-of-hearing people used to use must have actually worked very well. On the drive back to Manhattan in the dusk, we passed the overgrown ruins of empty mansions along old Admiral’s Row on Flushing Avenue. I said, “Do you still love New York?” And Joanne said: “Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t.”

Tax problems are the reason my friend Gemma lives in a mansion that is crumbling. When I first knew her almost twenty years ago, she kept a studio apartment on 57th Street near the Russian Tea Room. I knew she had the mansion on Long Island where Cole Porter had lived and composed a lot of his famous songs, but much of the time she stayed in the city. She must have been close to 70 then, and she was still very beautiful and glamorous. She had traveled all over the world and collected marvelous tapestries and jewelry and paintings. She had collected books since she was 16 and still living in a tenement on the Lower East Side. She loved to read and she loved to tell the secrets that she found in books and stories about poets who did shocking things in public. She loved eccentrics and she had a beautiful dog, Gala, named after the wife of Salvador Dali. Now and then she would allude to certain tax troubles that were plaguing her and her husband, who was much older than she was, and those troubles would eventually cost her the place on 57th Street. The house on Long Island fell into disrepair and the roof caved in on one side. There was no money to fix anything and Gemma and her old husband lived in the ever-diminishing dry parts of the old house, while every so often the ceilings in certain rooms would come crashing down like glaciers collapsing. None of this was Gemma’s fault. The tax problems came with her husband, who, before she ever knew him, spent time in prison for something to do with taxes. In prison he befriended Julius Rosenberg and the wardens pressed him to pump Julius for details and rat him out. But he refused. Instead, he arranged to have money given to the Rosenbergs’ defense lawyer on the outside, and after the Rosenbergs were executed, that lawyer killed himself.

Gemma said that learning how much he tried to help the Rosenbergs was what had swayed her towards him, and she married him. The IRS tortured him for the rest of his life. At one point, he tried to sell the mansion and James Watson considered buying it. Gemma described him coming to look at the property, and how he looked like a mad scientist grasshopper striding all over her lawn. He brought with him a famous cytogeneticist named Barbara McClintock who had achieved something monumental having to do with the different colors of corn. “I don't know what the hell it was all about,” Gemma said. “But she got a Nobel Prize for it.”

Suddenly my name was called. The advantage, the accountant told me, of having the kind of crap year I obviously had, was not owing as much. So I left feeling happier than I thought I would, and when I got home, my ancient dog spotted me and came forth on her rickety legs with her tail wagging. She’s deaf now so I can let the door slam with no barking. Tomorrow I will go buy a metal funnel. If I put the small end to her ear and say “I love you” into the big end, I think she might actually be able to hear me.

March 14, 2010

MR. HOLLYWOOD

2010-02-12T11:19:00.000-08:00

One evening last autumn I was walking along the West Side not far from the river when I saw coming towards me one of the prettiest-looking people I had seen in a long time. When he reached me and was about to go on past, I felt compelled to tell him how pretty I thought he was. I came very close to not saying anything, but I gathered up my courage and spoke. I think what I said was: “You are the prettiest person I have seen all day.” He didn’t seem to mind my saying that at all. He was just as gracious as he was pretty. I had my camera, and I asked him if he would mind if I took his picture. He said he would be happy to pose for a picture, and he told me that his name was Floyd Leon Fuller.

Since that evening when I met him, I have thought of Mr. Fuller every so often, but I especially thought of him a couple of days ago during the big blizzard. In the late morning I waded through the howling sleet along 12th Street all the way over to Avenue C. I was going to the Social Security Administration office to get a paper related to my social security card, something that would be a tedious errand on any kind of day. But I regretted even trying it on that one, especially when I reached the place and found it closed and dark. A handful of old men were standing around the door in their coats, looking at a sign saying that service had been suspended for the day. One of them looked at me and said, “What day is today?” I said, “It’s the 10th.” And he said, “No, what day? What day of the week is this?” And I said, “Wednesday.” The sign on the door didn’t state the reason for the suspension of service, just the fact that the place was closed. I was kicking myself for not checking before walking all the way across town, as far as 12th Street went almost to the East River, just to find the office shut. I promised myself that once I got back home nothing would get me outside again for the rest of the day.

I love the kind of big snowfalls when the city goes all hushed and forgiven in its silence of white magic. But this was not that kind of snowstorm. What was coming down was ice and slush whipped around by the wind. I started back the way I came and let my mind loose to wander as I walked home. Passing Stuyvesant Square near the Friends Meeting House and St. George’s Episcopal Church on East 16th Street, I saw the little park enveloped in the blizzard, and thought of a day not long ago when I sat there on a bench for a while. I sat and watched squirrels racing up and down the trees whose branches were crowded with pigeons, and listened to an old man with a cane belting out Give My Regards to Broadway over by a clutch of bums going through the trash.

I thought of my friend Victor Bockris and visiting him one March afternoon just as snow began to fall. I sat on his sofa and noticed, on the table beside me, a roll of toilet paper that Victor had scribbled all over in black marker as if it were just regular old notepaper. I wondered how deep into the roll the notes went, but before I could ask him, something distracted me and I never found out.

I remembered a night some years ago when I went down to visit my friend Lionel Ziprin on East Broadway. He lived in one of the big buildings originally built as low income housing to replace the old tenement houses that stood for so long on the Lower East Side where he grew up during the Great Depression. Lionel called those big buildings “memory batteries.” In his living room, which was full of big black hats and bookcases full of Jewish scholarly texts, Lionel had a beautiful divan. The back of the divan was of hand-carved wood in the shapes of leaves and vines. Sitting on it that night for some reason made me think of the great actress Sarah Bernhardt. Lionel was sitting in his rocking chair opposite, and I patted the cushion beside me and said, “Sarah Bernhardt.” Lionel nodded and said, “Yes, she gave that to my mother once,” and somehow neither one of us seemed to feel surprised by any of it. I remember looking out the window and seeing that it had started to snow. And walking uptown a little later that night I saw, way uptown, the Chrysler Building standing by herself all blurry and beautiful, like a nighttime watercolor.

By the time I got home from the closed Social Security office I was soaked and very glad to be inside again. And then I remembered Floyd Leon Fuller. Because on the autumn evening when I was compelled to stop and tell him how pretty he looked, he gave me a little flyer on which was hand-written: “Floyd Leon Fuller will appear at the Apollo Feb 10th at 7:30 PM. That’s a Wednesday. He is as talented as MJ.” I looked him up on the Apollo site and found him listed as an Amateur Night artist and read that Floyd Leon Fuller, also known as Mr. Hollywood, has “a five range octave and knows how to use it.” I had been looking forward to it for months. Just to be safe, I checked the Apollo Theater site, and I found this little announcement: “Due to inclement weather, the show scheduled for Wednesday, February 10th, has been canceled.” I sat by the window watching the storm, hoping that wherever Mr. Hollywood was sitting at that moment he didn’t feel too disappointed. I felt disappointed and relieved, both.

12 February 2010

THE NEIGHBORHOOD JEWEL

2010-01-31T14:58:00.000-08:00

My friend Joanne called me three or four days ago and told me there was a mouse in her kitchen. She said he was hiding in the basket where she keeps all of her pasta and grains. “Can’t you find something to catch him in?” I asked, and Jo said, “No. I’m afraid.” I said I would come down and catch him then, and she said, “Really? Okay!”

Jo lives way down east near Avenue D on 3rd Street in one of the old tenement houses still standing and unmolested by change, with the kind of pretty hand-carved wooden doors that so many buildings used to have in New York. It was very cold outside and steam poured from the manholes in the streets. I avoided patches of ice as I walked, thinking of something Jo told me recently. She told me how her grandfather, who had a horse-drawn ice wagon once upon a time, would cross the Brooklyn Bridge in the winter and chop ice out of the frozen East River for his customers. When she told me that, it made me think of Nick the Iceman. He was an Italian fellow who delivered blocks of ice to e.e. cummings for his icebox when cummings lived on Patchin Place in the Village. My friend Loren MacIver was there a few times when Nick the Iceman came, and they all liked him so much that e.e. wrote a poem about him, which Loren read aloud to me from a book one night. The poem was called Nick the Iceman, and as Jo told me the story, I could imagine so clearly how it must have looked, her grandfather still young, jumping down off the wagon with his pick axe on the shore of the river, with the great anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge behind him like a cathedral as he wrapped the chunks of river ice in burlap. And my hair stood on end, knowing in my heart that Jo’s grandpa was Nick the Iceman. There was something utterly thrilling in that notion, and my heart raced when I asked her, “Was his name Nick?” And Jo said:
“No, it was Pasquale.”

Sunlight poured in through the windows of Jo’s kitchen and I emptied out her basket of pasta and grains. The mouse was nowhere to be seen, but he had chewed a hole in a bag of oats she had in there, and when I lifted it they spilled onto the floor. We sat and talked about how fast time rushes by, given the fact that we first knew each other almost 25 years ago when we both worked for the coffee wagons in Lower Manhattan. For a long time we fell out of touch, but I always remembered some of the stories she told me back then. Her family had an Italian restaurant called Scarola’s for many years, with the first pizza delivery service in Brooklyn.

Back then she still had one of her Italian grandmas living in Brooklyn, and one day she told me that her grandma had called to say that her record player had just quit on her. The turntable would not turn. Jo went over to look and saw the turntable not turning, and her grandma said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with it, but I’m thinking maybe it needs a new needle.” I remember laughing together about that, standing at my coffee wagon down by the US Customs House at the bottom of Broadway. I thought it was the funniest, most innocent thing I had heard in a long time, and I still think so now. Jo told me about the big, hand-drawn map of Brooklyn on the wall of the restaurant that was used for finding the locations of people who had ordered a pizza. She said that as a kid she would go along for the ride sometimes. The delivery van had an oven in it to keep the pizza warm and swirled on its sides, the painted name: Scarola’s.

One day Jo called me on the phone and told me about something that had just happened. A few days earlier she found a perfectly good little charcoal cooker out on the sidewalk with the trash. She brought it home and put it on the fire escape. The weather was still nice so she decided to cook a rack of ribs on it. She lighted some charcoal and went to take a shower. Suddenly a herd of firemen came banging on her door and there she was in the shower, truly in flagrante delicto because her crime really was blazing, out on the fire escape. She threw some clothes on and let in the firemen. One of them noticed her last name and asked if she was related to the Scarolas of Brooklyn, where he grew up, and when she said “Yes,” that seemed to do something and all his gruffness fell away. He saw Jo’s ribs marinating in a bowl on the table and said, “Aw, geez. Sorry. But ya know you’re not s’posed to cook on the fire escape, right?” He had to say it even though growing up in Brooklyn he would remember a time when everybody cooked on their fire escapes, the way anyone of a certain age who grew up in Brooklyn would remember Scarola’s.

Jo told me that if I want to know about the restaurant I should meet her Uncle Angelo. I found a New York Daily News story from September 27th, 2000, written by longtime staff writer Bill Farrell with the headline: SCAROLA'S, A NABE JEWEL, CLOSING DOORS. And there was Uncle Angelo, born right upstairs, talking about the place, telling how a certain monsignor and a gaggle of priests came so religiously to eat every week for so many decades you could set your watch by them. Jo said we should go find him some night. She said he still hangs out at the Melody Lanes bowling alley in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

31 January 2010

SKYLINE

2009-12-30T19:20:00.000-08:00

Every other day during the last week I have found myself at Skyline Books on 18th Street, where everything is fifty percent off. Once upon a time I would have been thrilled to see a sign announcing a fifty percent discount in that wonderful place, but this time I’m not. I browse among the shelves full of books with prices written in the familiar hand of Rob Warren-the-owner, I pet Linda-the-store-kitty, and everything blurs in tears. Because Skyline Books is the last secondhand bookstore in the neighborhood, always my favorite, and soon it too will close, lease lost.

For a long time there was no better way to spend a rainy afternoon than poking around the many secondhand bookstores of Chelsea. So often I came home with something I hadn’t imagined until the moment I found it on one of those shelves. Every time I’ve gone to Skyline Books this past week I have bought something; a collection of letters written by Tennessee Williams, a hardcover book in Italian called Intervista con la Storia full of pictures of Oriana Fallaci, and yesterday I bought a little book by Jack Smith called Historical Treasures, edited by my friend Ira Cohen. Out on the street with the book in my hands, I opened it and read a paragraph at random:

“I’m being haunted now by a performance in a movie. It was in Dark Passage. Agnes Moorehead plays this pest, and fills out the character in detail. In a huge close-up you see the twitch of her little purse of a mouth.”

I walked home imagining Ira choosing what to put into that little book, published after Jack Smith had already died, and pictured him smiling at “her little purse of a mouth.” And it occurred to me that browsing in Skyline Books was always a pleasure not unlike that of listening to the stream-of-consciousness blabbing that Ira was always so good at. It made some of his friends complain that they couldn’t get a word in edgewise, but listening to him on a good day always made me feel as if I’d been given an injection of a hallucinatory genius better than any drug. Walking away from Skyline yesterday, I felt the weight of the countless times I had stopped in just to look, all the times I got excited when someone from the shop called to tell me they’d found a copy of something I wanted, and suddenly all those books and all the words of Ira’s stories appeared to stretch out before me like lights strung in the dusk as I walked home with Jack Smith’s little book in my pocket, discounted 50 percent.

I thought of all sorts of things Ira has told me over the years; about going to Hubert’s Flea Circus on 42nd Street and watching real fleas pulling little chariots, and how once Paul Bowles showed him two embalmed Mexican fleas in little boxes that he had in Tangier, dressed in tiny, colorful and authentic handmade costumes. On another visit to Tangier a few years later, Ira asked to see the fleas again, but when Paul went to get them the little female flea had disappeared, box and all. Later still, the male went missing too. Someone suggested that Mohammed Mrabet might have swiped Paul’s fleas because he had it in him to be a little shifty, but who could say? Ira said that Paul told a story about sticking a pin through a spider to keep it as a specimen and in the night the spider got up and left, pin and all.

He told me about a dream he had where Socrates and a bunch of friends were sitting on a beach somewhere, wearing no underwear beneath their cloaks, and leaving the imprint of their twig and berries in the sand by which they could be measured.

One day when I visited Ira in the Jewish Home on 106th Street after he had a little stroke, a nurse had just given him a little bottle of personal hygiene spray. Ira told me that it had directions on the label for how to keep one’s perineum clean. I had never heard the word “perineum” but Ira was all over it like a rash. He spoke of a famous Indian named Sri Orobindo, and how the hair of his perineum apparently smelled like sandalwood paste and if one could get some of it and plant it under the right conditions, one just never knew what might grow out of it. He said that because of his diabetes when he makes love now all the blood rushes to his head and his nose gets hard.

He told me a story about a scam that Gregory Corso and Roger Richards apparently hatched at some point where they forged TS Eliot’s name in a book and sold it for money to cop dope with. Ira said that at Roger’s memorial he made a joke about that where Roger and Gregory were up there in heaven and God said, “OK, I know what you guys were up to with the TS Eliot book, and I want some of the money.”

And he told me about his old friend Irving Rosenthal, the author of a very good book called Sheeper, and how he had an extra tooth growing out of the roof of his mouth. He said that once when Irving took an overdose of pills he tried to get him to throw up by sticking his hand down Irving's throat, “past that mean little tooth.”

When I got home yesterday evening, I found my copy of Sheeper with a photograph of Irving Rosenthal taken by Jack Smith on the cover and the price, $20, written in Rob Warren’s hand. I remember buying it one rainy summer day many years ago, and I remember Ira telling me that if it rained when I got to the beach, I should think of a big golden banana and associate it with him.

31 December 2009

BLEECKER STREET

2009-11-23T13:33:00.000-08:00

On a pretty evening a couple of weeks ago I walked through the West Village with a friend who has lived forever on Perry Street. As we passed an old building grown over with ivy on its West 4th Street side, we heard what sounded like hundreds of sparrows getting ready for bed. My friend said: “Let’s listen,” and we stood under the ivy and did. She told how walking home from work in the evenings lately she often passes this spot and hears that sound and it makes her feel happy every time. It felt good to stand under the ivy and listen to that sweet racket, and after that, as we walked towards my friend’s apartment, we saw a group of young women squealing and photographing each other in front of one of the brownstones on a certain block. Apparently the stoop was used in the TV show Sex and the City and because of that it has become a tourist attraction. My friend said she heard a lady who lives in the building telling someone on the sidewalk one day that having so many tourists posing on her stoop was becoming unpleasant. We saw that she had put out a little collection box for a dog rescue effort, asking people to make a donation for each photo taken.

One of the worst ways that part of the West Village has changed for regular people like my friend who live there is by having disembarrassed itself of its delis and bakeries and laundries, which until a few years ago were all taken for granted like shoes. On a Saturday afternoon not long ago I walked through Bleecker Street with no delis or laundries and saw Marc Jacobs clothing stores, one after another, with long lines of people waiting to get in. I can’t say why exactly, but being there made me feel embarrassment. I imagined myself, if I had a business, having three or four shops on one street with my name on them all and the thought embarrassed me. And then I stopped in front of number 375 Bleecker Street where Marguerite Young used to live. Marguerite was a real Village character I knew for a while because of a friend in common. I can’t say that I liked Marguerite because she intimidated me, but I didn’t dislike her either. Once I sat in on her literature class at the New School and felt intimidated there too. Mostly I saw Marguerite at Tiffany’s restaurant.

I remembered meeting her one day in front of that building on Bleecker Street and helping her load box after box of manuscript pages into a taxi. It was her endless book about the American socialist Eugene Debs, which had taken her decades to write, and we hauled it uptown to Random House. Somehow it fell to me to push the six or seven boxes of pages on a hand truck into the elevator and way up high into the office of a lady editor who looked at all the boxes and said, “My goodness!” Brevity was not Marguerite, and it was around that time that she inscribed for me a copy of her endless novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, which is apparently one of the most acclaimed novels that almost nobody has ever read. I haven’t read it either, but every so often I open it at random and see what sort of sentence flies up at me.

On most nights then, in the early ‘90s, you could find Marguerite holding forth in one of the booths at Tiffany’s, which was open all night on the corner of 7th Avenue and Christopher Street in a spot now taken up by a big bright Bank of America, and the whole place was always full of old ladies and drag queens. The waiters wore white shirts with black vests and it was the kind of place where you really could get anything you wanted, or where you could just sit all night with a cup of coffee and a lot of people did.

I used to jot down things she said and put them in my diary. Marguerite said that literature is nothing but gossip and that it is as much what could have happened as what did. She said you have to give Henry James or anyone else at least twenty pages to get used to their particular way of seeing the world, and she said that when she was writing Miss MacIntosh, the head of the writing department at Iowa State said to her, “The time has come to cut the baby’s nipples off.” She said that life is inherently meaningless, and that Bertrand Russell had aptly said it when he wrote about how we all come into the world by accident and go out by accident. She talked about what a wonderful guy Isaac Newton was and how he had a little dog who ate part of the law of gravity and that Isaac Newton said that the dog did God’s work by eating it. She said that reading biographies would make a person a better writer and that her favorites were the biographies of Tallulah Bankhead, Leadbelly, Benny Goodman and Ava Gardner. She thought True Detective was a very good magazine, and that when it disappeared somebody somewhere wrote in some publication, “Now what will Marguerite Young and Carson McCullers write about?”

She was eighty-something, and she said that her ideal would to always be forty-four. She said that getting old is the strangest of all experiences, and that looking back on it, a whole life looks like one long, single day. One year, I had Thanksgiving dinner at Tiffany’s with Marguerite and all of the tables were full of Village oddballs.

Thinking of Marguerite today I opened the giant Miss MacIntosh at random, closed my eyes and put down my finger on page 996. The line under my finger read: Could anything be worse than a drunken arithmetic teacher?

IT IS, OR IT ISN'T

2009-10-22T07:21:00.000-07:00

On the subway going uptown yesterday, a man got on with the crowd at 34th Street and when the train started moving again he gave his version of a familiar spiel: “Excuse me ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “I am not doing this because I have any kind of problem with drugs or alcohol. I never imagined myself becoming a beggar, and had I any other choice I would not be doing this. I’m asking you for whatever you can spare because I have a family here in the city and this is the only way I have to make any money.”

He was forty-something, with a trim gray beard and short-cropped hair and wearing a tan overcoat that he held closed at the neck with his fist. “Anything will help out,” he said. “A penny, a dime, or a folded dollar bill.” He walked through the car and his voice got a little rougher. “Yeah, okay! You all know what it is, right? Yeah, he got a promotion, that’s right! They wanted to say that I’m on security detail. That’s what they said! I’ll tell you what. They just wanted me down here in the subway! That’s right! But I haven’t got a nickel. That’s the truth. I haven’t got a nickel! I haven’t got a nickel and any one of them who tells you something different is a LIAR.”

The train stopped at 42nd Street and he got off with the big wave of people that poured out, the way it happens at 42nd Street, and his last words hung in the air as crowds of other people poured in, oblivious. Something about him was different from other train beggars, I thought, but it took a moment to figure out just what the difference was. And what it was, I realized, was his diction. He had perfect, precise, impeccable diction. And it was not just the diction either, but the way his words came together when he said, “I haven’t got a nickel!” That little sentence and the way he pronounced it and everything else he said made me think of Jimmy Stewart. I did not think he was pretending; he wasn’t. But everything about him somehow brought to my mind a play, written in the 1950s, about a man with a lot of troubles.

One evening some years ago I was walking to see a play in a little West Side theater in Hell’s Kitchen, near 10th Avenue. All of sudden I heard screams coming from a three or four story tenement building across the street from where I was, and someone shouting, “I’ll kill ya! I’ll kill ya!” Another terrible scream followed and I stood there, paralyzed on the sidewalk. I looked around for a pay phone, thinking: My heavens! Someone has just been stabbed or worse in there! There was not a single other person on the street, but in the next block over I could see the yellow and red awning of a bodega and a pay phone out front, and I thought: I better hurry before the killer comes canon balling out that door and sees me standing here! And I actually felt the hairs on my neck stand up. I started to walk, very fast, but at that moment there were more screams, and then: “I’ll kill ya! I’ll kill ya!”

It was exactly the same thing, happening again. I stopped and listened. I heard a woman’s voice say, “Could you put more emphasis in there when you say that line? I’ll kill ya! I’ll kill ya! OK? Let’s do it again.” And then the scream came. I felt a tremendous relief. I walked on, very glad that I had not called 911. How real that seemed, while I stood there truly believing that I was overhearing somebody being murdered in a crummy tenement just like something I might read in the Post. The man on the train I think was probably the real thing, just a fine elocutionist not taking his pills.

A few weeks ago on the downtown number 1 train a man beside me, who looked perfectly ordinary, suddenly leaned forward and said to the a man across from him, “You got somethin’ ta say? You want to reach in my pocket? You gonna stare at me?” His voice was loud and full of menace. The man across from him got up and moved down a few seats. The man next to me shouted: “Yeah, he’s lookin’ at ME! This whole train fulla sex perverts and homosexuals and he’s gonna look at ME? Yeah, he’s the one. Are you a sex pervert, sir? You a homosexual? “Cause I know I’m not!”

The whole train glazed over. The lady across from me stared into space but I saw one of her eyebrows rise. I was glad when the man got off the train and I think everyone else must have been too. I thought about my friend Charlie Schick, and how, when he was in a Tennessee Williams play a month ago, he took the train in his makeup and costume. The makeup made him look like an old man in ratty clothes, and he carried a cane that had cracked and been repaired by winding duct tape around it. He sat on the crowded train like that. An old lady got on and he got up and offered her his seat. The old lady said something like, “Well, you old too, and you got a cane, so you sit yourself back down.”

Charlie found that lots of people believed the makeup. In a bodega somebody called him “Pops.” He went home in the makeup and decided to knock at the door and see what Regina would say. She’s his wife, but when she looked through the peephole and saw him, even she didn’t know who he was for a minute. I saw Charlie like that in the play, and it seemed to me he was just made for Tennessee Williams.

LOREN'S ROOM

2009-10-09T17:41:00.002-07:00

Walking by the little parking lot at the corner of 6^th Avenue and 17^th Street (where a weekend flea market used to be) and finding it empty and fenced, I felt blue. It wasn't my favorite flea but I liked it just the same. On one of my last walks through, I came upon an old issue of Time magazine from January 1953, and read in it the following item:

“LOREN MACIVER, 43, started painting her personal world with a child's vivid imagination at three and is still going strong. A shy, blue-jeaned figure who roams Manhattan in winter and enjoys the seacoast in summer, she paints sand dunes, dilapidated beach shacks, blistered city sidewalks and budding trees. Most of the time her subjects become misty, almost phosphorescent fantasies. Sometimes she turns sharply realistic and does a meticulous study of a battered window shade or a pair of old shoes. One of her best: Emmett Kelly, a sympathetic portrait of the sad-eyed circus clown.”

And I remembered Loren telling me about Emmett Kelly herself a dozen years ago or so in her yellow-painted bedroom on the top floor of number 61 Perry Street. Thanks to him, Loren said, she was allowed to hang around the circus right up close and make a whole bunch of drawings. He was a real pal, Emmett Kelly was, and the portrait she made of him ended up on the cover of Life magazine in July 1947.

Loren was someplace in her eighties when she told me the story, but she was like a kid in a lot of ways. I can still conjure up her voice in my head. It was low, rich like honey, and very easy on the ears. She told me that on the opening night of the Big Top, she stood among the ropes and sandbags and watched as just a few feet away Marlene Dietrich mounted a magnificent white horse. Loren smiled up at her. And Dietrich looked down at Loren and winked. Then she rode out into the big ring to start the first night of the circus in Manhattan. Loren said that little exchange, just between the two of them and the wink, was a thousand times better than anything that could have been spoken in words.

She had hundreds of little stories like that. There was nothing more pleasant than going to hear her tell them, sitting side by side on the edge of her bed in her pretty bedroom with the marble fireplace, where she had been sleeping since 1938. She had some Beatrix Potter figurines sitting on the mantle that had so delighted Dylan Thomas when he first saw them that he clapped. And he wrote some of his finest poems in that very room. Loren told me how the chimneysweep used to come and use old corsets called Mae Wests to clean the chimney, and that Alexander Calder would come over and bring champagne and marshmallows after the chimney was swept and a fire was blazing. She said he used to drive around in an old Rolls Royce, delivering his sculptures. Her friend e.e.cummings lived nearby in the little mews over by the Jefferson Market Library, and hanging above her fireplace was a beautiful little painting of a carousel that he had made and given to her. Sometimes she said, “I think e.e. would have liked you and that you would have liked him.” And that was magic. Even if she was only saying it to please me, it made me feel as if it were true. She told me how several afternoons a week she would walk over to e.e. cummings’ place at five o’clock for tea and cookies. He was probably the only person living in the Village who didn’t drink, she said. Everyone else sure did. Loren drank with Dylan Thomas and she drank with Dawn Powell, and she made me laugh one night telling me about the time she and Dawn Powell went out to eat and the host told them to wait at the bar for a table to open up. They sat and downed a few and when he came back and said, “Ladies, your table is ready,” Dawn replied, “Thanks, I’ll crawl right under it.”

Sometimes we talked in her studio and she let me sit at the piano that once upon a time Billie Holiday used to play a lot just for the fun of it. That was magic too, like the studio itself, especially on nights with moonlight coming through the big skylight, or with rain pounding on it.

She told me about painting a big mural of butterflies and fish in the library of the steamship Argentina, for which she and her husband Lloyd Frankenberg got free passage to France. And then in Paris they both fell terribly ill and a young nun came every day free of charge to look after them in the little room they had, and they’d fill her pockets with sweets. She told me that once in Venice she wore a real Chanel suit in a gondola, and about some friends who had a big white kitty so beautiful they decided to give her an ugly name just to balance things out. I said, “What did they call her?” And Loren said: “McGurk.”

She told me about telling off Evelyn Waugh at a party because he was just so pompous she finally couldn’t stand it anymore. And about Greta Garbo, who she knew, she just shook her head and said very quietly: “Poor sad creature.” Sometimes though, Loren just felt like watching Entertainment Tonight, which she called “The Silly Program,” and so that’s what we did.

It was nice to ring the buzzer and hear Loren ask, “Who is it?”

“It’s me, Romy,” I’d say. And she would exclaim, “Hooray!”

Somehow, even though I know she gave that to many, she had a way of making it sound, every visit, like the first time she ever said it.

9 October 2009

THINGS BUFFIE SAID

2009-09-29T19:06:00.001-07:00

Down on LaGuardia Place the other day I passed by the statue of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and the café behind it and thought of my friend Buffie. She liked that statue and she had liked the actual man when he was the mayor. Sometimes we used to sit in that café and watch the world go by. She lived over on Greene Street in a big loft full of paintbrushes and books, where she was from the early 1970s until she died in 2006. She was a painter and a scholar, and she was also a socialite. She knew hundreds of interesting and famous people and her gossip was much better than average even though so many of the people she was talking about had already been dead for a very long time. She had a certain way of smiling when she told a certain kind of story that was so contagious it was impossible for me to not smile myself whenever I saw it appear on her face.

Buffie told me that once upon a time she went to a birthday party for Greta Garbo in the apartment on Sutton Place where Garbo lived. She said Garbo looked at her and said in her slow Swedish accent, “Well, well, what have we here?” Buffie found it insulting so she ignored her. She said she always regretted doing that, looking back on it. “I might have been Garbo’s lover,” she said. And she pronounced the word “lov-ah” in the same manner that she pronounced the word “again” so it rhymed with “rain.” I could always make Buffie laugh with a little rhyme that my father liked, which went: “There once was a lady from Spain who liked to make love on the train. Not once in a while, but mile after mile, and again and again and again.”

It made Buffie laugh every time because nothing in this world appealed to her more than talking about lovers. She loved to tell stories about people she’d had affairs with, or didn’t have affairs with. She told me about an affair with a football player named Johnny Blood who took her up in an airplane and buzzed Honolulu and then filled her full of coconut wine in a big pink hotel on Waikiki Beach when it was still almost pristine. She told me about how she once gave Pablo Picasso two kittens and that he would paint with them hanging off his trousers. She said that Henry Miller couldn’t stand her and that she couldn’t stand him either.

She told me about Princess Aspasia of Greece (Queen of Greece until her husband died of a monkey bite) who she met in a bar one night near Saint Mark’s Square in Venice. Princess Aspasia hypnotized Buffie by telling her that she was the granddaughter of a mermaid. She said her grandfather found her grandmother washed up like a fish on the beach and carried her home. Buffie was spending her long summer holiday in Venice where she had rented a marvelous palazzo with the most beautiful bottleglass windows “on the Grand Canal, if you please,” and she had it all to herself for $75 a month. Princess Aspasia became completely smitten with Buffie and wanted to have a love affair with her.

“Did Princess Aspasia visit you at the palazzo?” I asked her.

“No!” said Buffie. She had an island!”

Princess Aspasia offered Buffie a splendid tour of Austria but Buffie had other plans and so it didn’t happen--but it could have.

She had an affair with Lawrence Durrell who she said was the best one of them all, but when she went with him to London to visit TS Eliot, Larry made her wait outside while he went in and she was furious. She had a one-night stand with Jane Bowles in Paris, who she first saw on the terrace of the Café Flor. All of her gestures had great charm, Buffie said, “But once you got to know her she was a pain in the neck. And I got to know her very well the first time I met her.” She said that Jane was overly dependent upon Paul Bowles and very insecure. She said she was an awful drunk and that she always embroidered the truth. She said that Paul was always stoned on half-cut kif when she had the apartment right beneath his in Tangier, and that Tangier was just crawling with beautiful hustlers.

She showed me a picture of herself standing beside her friend Carl Jung, and told me how once he and Sigmund Freud sat in Freud’s study talking for thirteen hours until a glass sitting on a bookcase shattered by psychic force.

One day Buffie and I sat outside at the little café behind the statue of Fiorello LaGuardia with tea and I told her another little rhyme my father liked that went: “My favorite pastime after dark is goosing statues in the park. If Joan of Arc could take it, so can you.” Buffie reached over and squeezed my hand and said: “I love you.” A lady with a very big behind passed by just then, and Buffie followed her with her eyes. Then she turned to me and said, “Either she cultivates it or she’s unaware.”

As I passed the statue, I realized that every time I pass it I think of Buffie. I couldn’t have known I would back then when we were sitting there together, it just was what it was: walking over from Greene Street and bringing tea to one of the tables outside and sitting for a while. One day Buffie looked at the statue and said, “What do you suppose they called Fiorello at home for short?” I think it was autumn, the day she said that, and after she did, she sat chewing her finger. And I said, “What are you doing, trying to pull off a hangnail?” And Buffie said, “No, I’m depositing spittle on it.”

2009-05-09T19:11:00.001-07:00

It's just regular old New York, that's all it is.