Walkers in the City

MOTHER'S DAY

On my walks around the city I almost always encounter dogs, and also birds, cats, and squirrels. I always stop to chat with them, and I always think of my ma when I do. She would always stop and talk to the animals, just like her mother did. Where Ma lived there were a lot of deer, raccoons, possums, porcupines, crows, pelicans, seagulls, seals & sea lions, and other creatures, who she never ignored. Today being Mother’s Day, I typed this from her hand-written pages of stories from her childhood, and today Ma gets the Walkers in the City.

HALF WILD

Margaret Gillfillin’s place was a couple of miles up the road from our ranch. No one seemed to think it odd that a woman lived there alone with only two housebroken deer and an Australian shepherd dog for company. I was only five. Although I didn’t know it then, our days on the ranch were numbered, because I was the only child in the school district. In another year we would be forced to move back to our house on “The Flat,” a few miles east of Missoula, and walking distance to the Bonner School. It was during that last year on the ranch that Margaret Gillfillin’s dog had pups.

The day we went to see them, the two grown deer were in the house, lying on the bed. I could remember when they were fawns with spots, playing out by the barn, and in fact, I still have a snapshot of myself taken with them when I was four. They, the grown deer, paid little attention to us, but kept a wary eye on the newest member of the family, a nervous coyote, the father of the Australian shepherd’s litter, who paced on a chain affixed to a dog house.

The black and white puppies all favored their mother in physical appearance except for their gray eyes, and were adorable as all baby animals are. Margaret offered us our pick and we selected Tippy, who remained our family dog as long as I lived at home and even after I went away to college.

I remember Tippy incidents, the first while we were still living on the ranch in a rickety farm house lacking both electricity and running water, with doors that did not lock. We hauled our drinking water in 5-gallon milk cans from a waterfall along the side of the road near Bonner, and my mother read to me by the light of a kerosene lamp. My dad worked nights, 6:00 P.M. to 3:00 A.M. at the Bonner Mill, and days raising hay and livestock and ‘breaking’ ex-rodeo horses so he could do stunt riding. My mother and I were alone at night with Margaret Gilfillin as our nearest neighbor.

One night as we slept, there was a huge crash. It came from a room off the kitchen which we called the Separator Room, because it was where my dad brought the pails of milk each morning to separate out the cream and make butter. This was a ramshackle, unfinished, unheated room with its own outside door leading to the path to the barn. This door not only did not lock, but didn’t even close properly and so was braced shut by a chair wedged under the door handle. Not that this was a very secure arrangement, especially since the small window next to it had no glass in it.

My mother and I were terrified. Was someone breaking in? All was silent but we couldn’t just go back to bed. Somehow my mother had to summon the courage to find out what had happened. The only protection she had to call upon was our half-grown coyote dog. But Tippy, despite his wild genetic heritage, sensed our fear and put his bushy tail between his legs as my mother dragged him by his collar through the kitchen to the door to the Separator Room. There she paused. What good would it do to enter the room dragging a dog? So she reached out and turned the knob, then as the door squeaked open she got behind Tippy, who sat down and braced his feet, and pushed him through the door—all this with a flashlight in one hand. It was clear at a glance what had happened. An animal, perhaps a barn cat, had jumped through the window, toppling the chair that held the outer door shut. We were not being robbed—though on another night someone came and tried to take away a calf, but that is another story. For now we were safe, but at no thanks to having a half-wild animal as our guard dog.

The second Tippy story is set in East Missoula, where we lived when I was in the 7^th grade. This was the best house we ever lived in while I was growing up, though probably no more than 700 square feet. There was a porch swing where my mother and I used to sit in the evening and sing “Whispering Hope.” A nice lawn and a flower garden with huge peonies, and a pie-cherry tree, these were things we had never had before. My “room” was a tiny, enclosed porch at the opposite end of the house from the real porch, the only time I ever had a “bedroom” of my own. Because we were now living “in town,” Tippy was restricted to a heavy chain when he was out in the yard. Neither coyotes nor Australian shepherds are large animals, and in fact, if you shaved off his long hair, he’d have been a pretty small dog. One day a neighbor’s black Labrador came into our yard and attacked Tippy. In this instance his native instincts served him well. One well-placed bite on the jugular vein and the Lab was no more. Our neighbor was outraged that our dog killed his, but hey, Tippy was in his own yard, on a chain.

By my ma, Delta

12 May 2024

Story by my ma, Delta. Thank you, Ma.

ALWAYS SOMETHING

For the last couple of weeks my crumbly old 19^th century building has been without any heat or hot water because of a problem somewhere between the street and the very old boiler down in the cellar. The building has all kinds of problems that old buildings have in New York, and the only thing that happens fast for repairs or service is fire trucks, which I won’t complain about. At least we still have our old stoves working, which counts for a lot when it comes to bathing from cookpots the old-fashioned way.

I can remember my mother talking about how they bathed when she was a kid, growing up with no plumbing or electricity, the galvanized tub filled with water from the kettle heated on a wood-burning stove. That was the late 1940s and into the ‘50s, so not that long ago, and I know that over on the West Side, beyond 9^th Avenue, a lot of the old buildings over there still used kerosene in the ‘50s. When the streets are dug up here, that’s where you see the very old city works in the old pipes, and when one thing gets fixed, often times something else gets damaged in the process, which is what I was told happened in the case of our building.

During this past summer, autumn and winter, the water from our taps got warmer and warmer and then hotter and hotter until it was nearly boiling. The city came and unearthed ancient looking steamworks under the street, but when the hole was closed up the gas line was damaged, thus no heat or hot water right now. To make up for it I bought a beautiful bouquet of white tulips.

Whenever I’ve taken a break from work, if the sun is shining I’ve gone out to bask in it and find myself someplace that I like. I always visit Sam at the Florist, and lately I’ve gone up three times to the Morgan Library to see all the Beatrix Potter stars I admire. I looked at one of the watercolors she made, called “The Departure,” showing people saying their goodbyes after a visit, a lady getting her coat on in the painting so timeless that I had to go back and look again. The people in the watercolor are all rabbits, but there’s really no difference. The way she was getting into her coat is something I know I’ve seen uncountable times in my life, and Beatrix P drew it perfectly, the way she painted a little wood mouse in the same exhibit. A day later I saw a tiny gray mouse by the trash cans in front of one of the buildings on 22^nd Street who looked just like him. But he saw me and nearly had a heart attack, the poor wee sleekit mousie, and hid underneath a piece of wood with me standing there with my camera, and did not come out.

I went into the bookshop over on 10^th Avenue and eavesdropped on a conversation between a man who came in just after me and the man behind the counter about translations. They were agreeing that they prefer Moncrieff to Lydia Davis for Proust, and the man behind the counter asked the visiting man if he was a scholar, and the man said, “No, I’m a librarian.” I thought of a day thousands of days ago when I visited the little house where Marcel Proust lived as a child and how small it seemed. They had empty Vichy water bottles to look at in the room where his Tante Leonie had lived. I was reading the Moncrieff translation of Volume One at the time, and I remember the slow little train that brought me to the village of Illiers to see that house, and seeing two very old, bent over ladies on the train platform all dressed in black.

When I traveled back then, I always stayed in the cheapest little hotels, usually in alleyways by whatever train station there was, and those places always had a water closet and a poor shower in the hallway somewhere, never enough hot water, but birds all over the window ledges. At a certain point I decided I would never again stay in a place without a real shower and water closet in the room, and the last time I went anywhere, I did have that, in Oslo, and that place had the most wonderful shower in the world and there were also beautiful black birds everywhere, not crows, but a kind of Norwegian black bird, and there was snow all over the ground.

At the bookstore I decided to buy a book by Lucia Berlin, who I like very much, and who wrote probably the best story I’ve ever read about visiting the little house where Marcel Proust lived. I think that the hot water will eventually come back on in my old building, and maybe the heat will too, but the heating pad goes a long way under the covers at night, and the lamps turn on, and this really is a very old building doing the best she can. It gets down in the 50s by the old thermometer in the kitchen, which isn’t actually freezing.

I think about the time when my ma and I were on the Great Northern train in the wintertime somewhere in Montana and it came to a slow halt in the night, everything shut down, and we could hear the faint shouts of the train conductors and here and there a lantern swung by outside the black window. We were in a “roomette.” It was so cold that the water in the little toilet froze. I was just a kid, and Ma opened up our suitcase and got out all our clothes to pile on top of us. But eventually the train started up again, just as it was getting light outside and we didn’t freeze to death, which I’m glad for.

16 March 2024 copyright Romy Ashby

JANUARY'S FIRST SNOW

During the night we had a little snowfall with twinkly flakes swirling around in the light of the streetlamps. In the morning there was a white outline to all the fire escapes. Rain was coming down and turning everything to slush, making it feel very good to stay inside with the radiator.

A few days ago I unearthed some old notebooks from the closet, and today I decided to open one of them and have a look. As always, I was surprised by things I have no memory of, and glad that I wrote them down. This one, from a visit I made to Gianni Menichetti not long after Vali had died, was full of notes about Napoli.

When Vali was still alive, whenever I visited her in the Valley in Italy, one of the highlights was always making a trip to Napoli to wander the streets, each one its own little drama. Vali knew where everything was, and she loved shopping for her favorite necessities, stopping for ice cream, and saying hello to everyone whether she knew them or not (and she did in fact know a lot of them). I remember large size ladies’ underwear for sale beside big tuna and swordfish in the fish market, where one could also buy hand made slippers for 1000 lire, lavender-scented brilliantine that Vali always liked, and coffee. She would buy enough coffee to last several months until the next trip from Positano. Gianni would buy cartons of black-market cigarettes, and there were always old ladies in house dresses sitting in chairs on the street selling Bic lighters. We would stop at a very old-fashioned caffe near the train station just after arriving, and just before leaving, to have a coffee, or if the weather was hot, a te alla frutta. They had a little case full of pastries that were very good, and it was in that caffe by myself once where I suddenly fainted, and two ladies working behind the counter like magic brought a chair in the nick of time.

In the notebook, I wrote about watching three little boys, ten years old or so, pile newspapers against the side of a church and then light a match. A few old ladies came out of the church as the flames took off. Another lady rushed from a caffe with a cup of water to douse the little fire while all of them shouted after the boys scattering into the streets. Also in the notebook, I found one of Gianni’s police jokes that I hadn’t remembered. Someone asks a policeman why he had a suppository behind his ear. “Oh, shit,” says he, “what did I do with my pen?”

A few pages later, while sitting in the Bar Internazionale at the top of Positano, Gianni had written:

“At George Plimpton’s place in New York once, when Vali was showing the Death in Port Jackson Hotel documentary, she met Charles Adams and liked him very much. The showing of the movie was a disaster: nothing worked, the lightbulbs were blown and George had to go on his bicycle to get new ones. By the time the show was on, everyone had left except Charles Adams and very few others. Vali told me he was a very gentle sweet soul, and once he was brained by his woman with a high-heeled shoe.”

Also on that page I had noted: Read Njal's Saga. A book that Vali liked very much.

One night some months later, on a dark and nearly-deserted block of East Houston Street, I came upon an old storefront where someone was living and having a “sale,” in which I found a copy for fifty cents.

This 900-year-old story took me almost twenty years to finally read, which I very gladly did last summer. Vali named one of her foxes after a main character in that book, a fierce and beautiful girl called Halgerd. In Gianni's book of animal stories that I worked on with him recently, just published as Animal Loves of My Life, there’s a photograph of Vali holding that fox. Gianni and I both marvel sometimes over the phone about our still being here, and what a miracle of luck or chance it is that we are.

Photo of "Foxy" by Vali Myers

Near the end of the notebook, I wrote in 2004 about meeting a kitty with very green eyes on 22^nd Street, and also about an old boxer dog with a tricked-out set of wheels for his hind end, very springy and efficient, and a miniature collie approaching him, transfixed with curiosity.

Some pages later, in the middle of my random jottings and phone numbers, I'd written about sitting atop the lightship Frying Pan over on the Hudson, watching people take tango lessons before it rained. On my walk home I passed an invitation-only party happening on the ground floor of one of the newer tall buildings, with a big ugly guard stationed on the sidewalk, and I wrote that I felt lost, not because I wanted to be at the party, but because of the big, delicious looking buffet they had. Going up onto the roof of my building after the rain had stopped, the buildings were all steamy and the Empire State Building had vanished in mist “except for her syringe all blue, emerging from the fog, and a full moon.” Now, twenty years on, my roof-top view of the Empire State Building is no more, blocked by a very drab new building, which is a shame, but the mist still comes. That same day, in 2004, I saw a kitty sitting in the window of a furniture store, and on her collar I could read her name tag: Minouche.

This morning I looked out my bedroom window at the building across the way where, in his own quiet window, there sat a black and white kitty, looking out at the snow and the seagulls sailing by. And before he could disappear from his spot, I took his picture.

Across the Avenue, 16 January 2024

Copies of Gianni's new book can be ordered from https://www.spdbooks.org

WHAT'S DOWN BELOW WE NEVER KNOW

On one of the side streets a few days ago I stopped to have a look into a hole that had been dug there, unearthing a length of very old pipe. I always look when I come upon holes in New York, and sometimes in pits dug after some poor old building has been knocked down I’ve seen beautiful old stonework from early 19^th century cellars. The old pipe in this particular hole made me think of the building I live in, also from the 19^th century, and the annoying problem it’s been having for the last half year or so, which is that we have no cold water. All we have is hot water, and most of the time it’s scalding. In the old kitchen sink there’s only hot water, in the bathtub there is only hot water, and the john—the twalah itself—is full of hot water and steaming. It affects the whole building, but the problem, whatever is causing all the scalding hot water, originates outside the building, somewhere under the streets. And nobody can say where exactly.

Sometimes down on the corner Con Ed will come and put up one of the orange and white striped steampipes, but there hasn’t been one for a while. I like the steampipes. I like steamy old New York. But most of what goes on down inside the city is a secret.

In this neighborhood I have one friend who I visit regularly, and that’s Sammy in the florist on 8^th Avenue. Sometimes I visit him before the shop opens when he’s still asleep in the window with all the potted plants. He’s at his most friendly at that moment. After the shop opens, he comes out and goes around the corner to the cellar door and down the iron steps to the underworld, where he does his job. Something I learned a long time ago from hanging around florist cats is that rats like to eat flower bulbs. I also know that a lot of the old cellars have passageways into other cellars, and that rats and cats both probably know all kinds of underground routes to whole other neighborhoods. Whenever I walk Sammy to work, he always pauses at the top of the iron steps to look back and wink.

Sammy on his way to the cellar 2023

Something that was a secret to me until recently has to do with a little building on 22^nd Street where a neighbor lady I was friendly with lived for a long time. Her name was Tina Rossner. We started talking on the street because we each had a dog, I had Pilar and she had MacDuff, and both of them had mustaches. Pilar and MacDuff always stopped to greet each other and I remember how exciting it was when Tina and I figured out, on the corner of 7^th Avenue and 22^nd Street, that our two dogs had been born in the same house in the little village of Tivoli, in Dutchess County.

I remember one day, September 12^th 2001, spotting each other waiting on line at Gristedes grocery store on 8^th Avenue with everybody else buying Poland Spring water with the sky still full of fighter jets. She gave a sad little shrug that said more than words would have. Once she invited me to see a pianist she knew give a concert at Carnegie Hall. She had an extra ticket, and before going uptown, she invited me into her apartment on 22^nd Street. It was very nice and full of books. She had lived there since the mid 1960s and she’d worked as a graphic designer. She didn’t tell me many details about herself, but there was an appealing casual glamour to her little place.

There was a very old pipe in Tina’s apartment, and one day it burst, causing a terrible waterfall. She eventually moved away after taking a buyout from the landlord who, as it happened, was one of a series of new owners of the Chelsea Hotel. And what I learned about the little building is that hiding beneath it is a secret passageway leading to the back of the hotel, used for ferrying loads of laundry and other supplies that parking on 23^rd Street made difficult to do. This I found out while looking around the internet to see if I could find my old neighbor and discovering a little article about her, and that she’d died in 2021. I read that she’d once designed a record cover for Yoko Ono, and that once upon a time, she’d worked for Al Goldstein, which once upon a time I did too! He was the nicest pornographer I’ve ever met. If Tina and I had realized that detail, there is no telling what kinds of interesting things we might have talked about on the street corner.

Learning that she’d died made me sad. I’ve missed seeing her around the neighborhood with her dog and her gentle manner, and I felt sad when she left New York. But she was so tired of all the troubles with her apartment and so relieved to have gotten the buyout that she didn’t feel sad about leaving the city at all. She felt excited. She was going to live in New Mexico. She knew how to enjoy life, and doing that was exactly what she had planned, and I have no doubt that she did.

When my downstairs neighbor Sheldon moved out I felt bereft too, but at least he only went as far as Queens and I can find him. I can only imagine what he would think about the boiling toilets in our building. For all I know it might be the whole block getting no cold water. Is the toilet boiling in the hardware store? These are the kinds of things my neighbor Sheldon was the absolute best at finding out. He would find out every neighborhood secret, and then tell them in a whisper on the stairs.

December 2, 2023

BRUCE GOOSE

Yesterday I went for a walk in the West 20s with two friends to see what the galleries might have. A lot of them were in between shows, and we didn’t see anything that made us keel over. It was nice and cool outside with a storm threatening. We all made it home just ahead of the rain and thunder, and as happens sometimes after the galleries, I found myself thinking of a man I knew forty-odd years ago in Seattle, named Bruce Fearing.

I met him in 1982 in a little art gallery called Ground Zero, where I accidentally had an unlikely show of watercolor fish pictures for a whole month. Bruce was a sort of caretaker there, and a poet. His father was the writer Kenneth Fearing. I’ve written about Bruce before, about how he took me down to the Elliott Bay bookstore on 1^st Avenue to show me a book of Alice Neel’s paintings, one of which pictured his father, whom she knew, and Bruce himself as a tiny little baby. At the time, he was living in the Matilda Winehill mission, not far from the bookshop. He didn’t have much money, but he was saving to buy that book.

I thought Bruce was pretty old, but I don’t think he was yet fifty. He reminded me of Columbo from TV, with a New York brogue, a little unkempt in a pleasant way, always an adventure to be around. The funny thing is that while back then I thought he was old, I wouldn’t think so if I met him now, when he actually would be. He’d be about 87. He certainly didn’t think of himself as old. Now I understand.

I’ve often wondered where he got to, and what it might be like to find him here in the ether. For all these many years I’ve kept the letters and postcards I got from Bruce in the early ‘80s, from Seattle. He typed all of them, sprinkled with little poems, and signed them “Bruce Goose,” or “b.g.” Yesterday I dug them out of the closet and read one, postmarked 20 March 1984, sent from the Alps Hotel on South King Street in Chinatown, also called the international district. I’ll put in some of what he wrote in the letter because why not? Maybe he’ll stumble upon it.

I had mailed him a watercolor fish picture, and this was his reply:

Romy…pink fish in deep water…came across dry to the mission but now I’m living in the Alps…isn’t that Nice? I always wanted to live the life of a writer high in the alps…yes, I like the i.d.

You lived around here once, no? So thanks so much for that nice card…look at this:

it’s the miracle in poetry

it can be lyrical:

beat & offbeat/repeat &

flow…sometimes, sometimes

it even seems it glows.

b.g.

A friendly professor with whom I correspond & who initially I came across on account of he was a fan of my dad’s said he didn’t like that one on account it reminded him of Rudolph the rednosed reindeer…I pointed out to him that rrr sold millions & if I could get even slightly slightly close to that I’d be pleased as punch.

New York…I naturally wish you’d meet up with Alice, Alice Neel…I’m on my way out this morning to buy her book so’s I can cut out her portrait of my dad (with the infant me apparently in it) & her nude self portrait & mount them in a Woolworth frame or something…family album you know though, as a matter of fact, family album is exactly the title of one of my dad’s poems…strange twisted life, my ex-mom recently (just) sent me my winnfield day nursery kindergarten graduation diploma dated June 27, 1941…She must figure I’m grown up by now…I don’t agree…

I like the International District just Fine…there’s still absolutely nothing “going on” around this town that doesn’t go on faster harder better & worse in N.Y. I went to the store last night around 11:30 & walked back the deserted streets cheerfully amazed I wasn’t really worried about getting mugged…that’s Seattle for you but beyond that…well…

I donate plasma pretty regular. I recited this to a bright young worker who was sticking me there:

You can’t cross bodies

Without first crossing brains

& I don’t really care

How much it rains

She said: “Who made that up?” incredulous…of course it couldn’t have been me. (sometimes I do feel tired.)

Thing is Alice…she deals mainly out of Graham Galleries 1040 Madison…Harriet Goss manages…

personally, I know I’d be fascinated to hear what you bump into there…I mean what the low rent art scene is…that way all I cld guarantee you is there’ll be 50,000 more of it than there is here, all be weird, hard-edged & positively positive about itself. Every artist seems to believe he’s the source of absolute truth & authority ‘cause that’s where the arts bag is.

Here, I’m enclosing another one that’s sort of woundup. Best, Bruce.

unseen help

the languages of earth

are broken discarded things

I don’t bring into my bedroom

or study…muddy waters is

a clear bag when it

rains a lot upstream…3 things

don’t fly on a straight beam

1 is a team of mismated oxen

another is lox on a mint-scented bun

&the last I’ve forgot so

thanks for what?

b.g.

My eyes prickled reading Bruce’s letter, not least because of the lead he gave me: go see Alice Neel. Tell her Kenneth Fearing’s son said to find her. He was generous that way. He suggested a few other things, too: places to send articles—you might make 25 bucks! I don’t think I would have had the nerve to try and find Alice Neel then, but she died half a year after he sent the letter so I can imagine that she might not have wanted a visitor. I’m glad he finally had enough money to buy the book.

Kenneth Fearing (& Bruce as baby) by Alice Neel

I COULDN'T HAVE IMAGINED

I got in big trouble a few weeks ago at the Morgan Library Museum, which is one of my favorite places. I’d just gotten my new membership, and I went with a lady who I like very much and who also loves the Morgan. She’s someone who will stand and read every handwritten letter on display in the glass cases, and every little description of who wrote each letter, and those, she says, are often her favorite of everything currently exhibited.

A beautiful window at the Morgan

After going through the Rotunda and reading the letters, we went into one of the gallery rooms. I don’t remember the specific painting we were looking at, but it had some details in miniature that one of us pointed out to the other.

Suddenly a guard appeared from around a corner and shouted, “No pointing! No pointing!” He then went into a spiel about how pointing is NOT PERMITTED and that we were in VIOLATION. One of us told him that neither of us had touched the glass over the painting or even come close, but that just agitated him more, and then even more loudly he said: “You pointed! Like this!” And he jabbed his finger in the air. “No pointing! You must not point! Don’t point!”

As we left the room, the guard made a decorous, formal bow and thanked us for coming in. The whole thing felt ridiculous and theatrical, but at the same time embarrassing, with other people looking at us as if we’d gone in and made tentacle fingers all over everything on the walls. It took the fun out of our visit, that was certain, so we left.

Out on Madison Avenue, my friend told me a funny story about her grandmother, a very proper and refined lady who lived to a very advanced age. My friend told me how she’d once taken her to a museum for her 85^th birthday. Her grandmother was curious about a large painting by Richard Serra, a very black, heavily textured work of art, and she reached out to touch it with the tips of her fingers. A guard hurried over and quietly told her to not touch, whereupon her grandmother said, “Oh, but I only did this,” and she reached out and touched the painting exactly as she had just done. I knew and respected my friend’s grandmother and imagining her doing such a thing, in all innocence, made me laugh.

The following week, my friend and I decided to go to the Morgan again. We went up to one of the galleries on the second floor, where there was a beautiful display behind glass of a large collection of tiny leather stamps in great variety, once used to imprint leather-bound books. Each stamp had gorgeous detail, and none were larger than the flat head of a nail. We both found them delightful. “Look at this one, the little skull and crossbones,” my friend said, and just then, a very petite but terrifying lady guard tore around a corner and announced to us: “You’ve been reported! You can’t be pointing and touching!” The expression on her face was somewhere between fury and despair.

I started to tell her that neither of us had actually touched anything, but she interrupted me with, “Shush! Shush! Don’t talk! You cannot point!” Then she too went into a loud, admonishing spiel. We had been reported, and we were on notice! She scolded us about how close we were. Much too close! The whole display could come crashing down because of us, she said. And in the same embarrassing way as the week before, people passing by were taking all of it in and giving us the kind of dreary looks reserved for the kind of people we obviously seemed to be. I asked the guard how far from the display I would need to be in order to point something out to my friend. She waved her finger around in a vague way and said, “Like this.” After she’d finished her scolding, she said, “Now, welcome to the Morgan.”

By then our hearts weren’t in it anymore, so we left. Out on Madison Avenue, we wondered aloud what was happening. In all the uncountable visits we’ve both made to the Morgan Library over so many years, we’ve never been spoken to at all by a guard. Now we’d been publicly and loudly admonished two weeks in a row, by two different guards in two different rooms, for pointing. And what did it mean when the second guard said, You’ve been reported? Someone had to be watching from an office somewhere, but we hadn’t touched a thing. There were no signs saying Pointing Prohibited. Was this just part of the creeping authoritarianism that seems to be currently permeating everything? My friend said it felt like the Stasi.

Not long after that, I told another friend of mine (my hairdresser), who also likes the Morgan, about what had happened. She thought I should tell the museum. “I’d tell them it’s psychologically damaging, that it took something from you,” she said.

When she went herself to the Morgan a week or so later with a friend, they both did everything they could with pointing and touching to see what might happen. But nothing did. Nobody seemed to care at all, in fact, which surprised them.

Maybe I and my museum friend just have a questionable look about us. Like two ladies who might suddenly dump soup all over everything the way all those climate change activists enjoy doing. Whatever it was, it did take something from us—all authoritarian ham-handedness does—it took away a little bit of the familiar that the Morgan has always been. So, from now on, rather than point out some tiny detail or objet to anyone with me, I will just describe its vicinity: “The lower left corner, about three inches up—no, down an inch and over a little—” with my hands safely clasped behind my back.

28 May, 2023 Copyright Romy Ashby

EVERETT & RAINDROP

On March 28^th 2022 Everett sent me an email, saying:

“Wanted to let you know that Raindrop went to be with God yesterday. I know you loved her. I’m gonna take her to the vet now. I wrapped her in a white sheet tied in a lavender chiffon curtain. Glad she died at home. She hated the vet. Like she was going to the electric chair. Another vet once said she was the most anxious dog he’d ever seen in his life. I told him just to use a gentle shhhhh.”

Raindrop was Everett Quinton’s adopted daughter dog, who he doted on and spoiled with love. I met her ten years ago when I went down to his place to interview him for Housedeer. I had already loved Everett to bits for a very long time then, ever since I first saw him on the little stage at One Sheridan Square in The Mystery of Irma Vep, in 1985. Like so many countless other people have said, no actor has ever made me laugh the way Everett could. With just his voice, a little laugh from his vast collection of various giggles, or his making the sound of an ice cube dropping into a highball glass with his mouth, he could bring the house down. (Anyone who’s seen him perform will know exactly what I mean.)

Everett and Raindrop, West Side Highway, March 2013 Romy Ashby

Everett & Raindrop by the River April 2013 R. Ashby

I sat beside Raindrop on the sofa for the interview, and Everett cautioned her to not growl at me or bite me, and she didn’t. She behaved herself. She was a character. She was an extremely intelligent girl. She could read the words FED EX on the side of certain trucks passing on Hudson Street. She hated them with a passion, and she let everybody know. Other trucks just like them but without FED EX on the side held no interest for her. She noticed terrifying cats in shop windows and they noticed her. She was a hunter, and she was exceptionally good at grabbing rats off the street.

In the interview I asked how many rats she’d caught, and Everett said:

“Four. She’s caught four rats. I called the vet and asked if it can hurt her and he said, ‘Is she eatin’ ‘em?’ And I said, ‘No.’ She doesn’t eat ‘em, so it can’t really do anything to her. My little baby Raindrop was an impulse. I came home from my sister’s one night and saw her on Facebook. “ This dog needs a home!” When I first got her she was emaciated. You could see her ribs. I thought maybe she was some kind of whippet. But a year later when she had put on a layer of body fat, I realized that she had been dying and I started to cry. But I didn’t know I was getting Attila the fucking Hun! She loves to catch rats. It’s the terrier in her.

“One hot night we were walking on Downing Street and there was a mountain of black shiny garbage bags full of refuse outside this one restaurant. And millions of rats were running all over them. It was like a moving, gray-velvet ribbon all over this black shiny stuff . Zillions of rats just flying around the bags. And I know they’re plaguy, verminy, flea-bitten things, hahaha, but it was fascinating. They’re fast. That’s what scares us. If you have mice in the house they’re tiny but if you open the light, it’s that fast-moving thing that scares us.”

Raindrop & Everett, West Side Highway March 2013 R. Ashby

This week, ten months after the passing of Raindrop, Everett died too. When the word came that he had, I imagined the pageant that Raindrop must have given him when she saw him get off the elevator at the entrance to heaven. I remembered him talking in the interview we did about how ridiculous it is that some people just can’t accept the notion of a dog having a soul and going to heaven. He said, “You can see how the world is fucked up just by the notion that animals have no souls. I always say that Jesus had to be ascended bodily because if he was still here the constant rolling over in his grave would create earthquakes that would do us all in. And also, if there were no queers there would be no fucking pearly gates!”

Terrifying Deli Kitty & Raindrop's face between her paws Romy Ashby

During the lockdown in the early days of the pandemic I recorded a few phone calls with friends in case we all perished, and today I listened to Everett talk about little food pleasures he was having. I’ll share those here for anyone who might like to try something that Everett considered heavenly:

“I discovered this culinary miracle: I was sittin’ here one day and I had this can of black-eyed peas that were gonna go bad in June. So I said, we gotta eat those! I didn’t want to throw them away. So I went to bed and I dreamed this. You ever go to Cowgirl, that restaurant on 10^thStreet? You go in and they give you this little appetizer of black-eyed peas in salsa. So I went and I got a jar of salsa and I threw it on a can of black-eyed peas. No fuss no muss! The first time I did it I rinsed the peas. But then I thought, I ain’t even gonna rinse ‘em! I threw ‘em in the bowl and it was heaven! It took five minutes, and lunch!

“And you know what I have developed? It’s called Dirty Cream of Rice. One day I got this chicken. I had to boil it, and I put all this fabulous stuff in with it and I decided the next day to break it up and make a little soup out of it. And then the next day I thought, well, why don’t we put some cream of rice in it? And it is fucking great! So now I can make this meal—it sounds like nun food—with two potatoes and two carrots and two stalks of celery. The first time I did it I sautéed ‘em first and then boiled ‘em. But you don’t even have to sauté ‘em first! You just throw ‘em in with a cup of water and you boil it. And then I have these vegetable bouillon cubes that are vegan, and you just throw one into the water and it cooks in like ten minutes. And then! You put in: cream of rice. And it’s like—it’s heaven!”

Until we meet again, sweet Everett. Thank you for everything.

Romy Ashby 25 January 2023

For anyone who would like to read it, here is a link to a PDF of my Housedeer interview with Everett. It is 7.5 MB in size so it can take a little time to load.

http://romyashby.com/EverettQuintonHousedeer.pdf