“Well pal, I guess none of them get anywhere till they’re dead.”
“Well Max, guess you’re right. Anyway, this is a real fine evening I won’t soon or ever forget.”
“Pal, that makes me glad. Plus, in this smashingly splendid room is where you belong. Anyway it’s an appropriate place from which to contemplate my ending up in alimony jail.”
Max raising the golden liquid, a blissful smile across his lips, closing his eyes and placing his nose over the rim of his glass and inhaling.
“Pal, just put your ole proboscis to this pure nectar.”
“It sure is, Max. And I’m sure costing a fortune.”
“That’s what money’s for, pal, to aggrandize the spirit by elevating the perception of the senses to pleasure. But not to ignore all the other most important things in life of sentimental value.”
“Well Max, while I’m contemplating buying a baseball bat I’m also enjoying this wine and turning over the wisdom of your remarks in my mind.”
The first real meal since the evening out with Dru, and famished as I was, I could feel the champagne and wines and now the food bringing back energy flowing through my veins, my body suddenly reviving in a most miraculous way from what seemed a long term of tiredness. And one realized these wisdoms which were of a culinary nature, were profound. And tonight there could be no more triumphant host. But poor Max, even as a high school home-run king, could go down as an embezzler. And through my mind went a flash of dread and then I could hear choral voices singing and a bugle blowing taps at dusk and the Stars and Stripes flowing in the wind as it was being lowered in the breeze and the sad words of “Now the Day Is Over” being rendered. And I felt that Max needed some encouragement and maybe even a suggestion as to where he could run to ground, to use one of his own expressions.
“Max, maybe you need somewhere to be for awhile out of the limelight, so to speak. Maybe back to Chicago where Benny Goodman, the great clarinetist was born.”
“Yeah, pal. The feel of being somewhere home would kind of keep the ghost of disquiet at bay. I always remember that while we were still in the navy my greatest fear was not sharks or torpedoes or bombs or Jap kamikaze pilots, but going ashore on liberty with all the pent-up frustration accumulated incarcerated for interminable days belowdecks, behind steel bulkheads at sea and then, for what you think is going to be relief, ending up in some same godforsaken sailor-saturated port where the streets were black in winter with swabbies and suddenly overnight going white when summer uniform was the order of the day. It sure demonstrated a spectacle of regimentation that could end you up getting drunk. And then—and this was my real nightmare—ending up going to a tattoo artist to have a girlfriend’s name tattooed with a heart conspicuously on your shoulder or arm, with an arrow stuck through it. Or worse, to be overcome by the drunken temptation to do what old Chief Bosun Mate Lomax did, long before he ever became a chief, who had a tattoo of a fox chased by hounds running to ground right up his anus. I suppose my sense of dignity kept the more undignified seafaring temptations at bay. And you know, old buddy, in a like-minded way, after tonight I don’t ever want to see you having to frequent Horn and Hardart or in straitened circumstances having to go sit at the counter of that Nedick’s food stand place down in the subway on the middle level at Fifty-ninth Street and Lexington Avenue where I used to incognito go. And where on the bottom level just below, if you wanted to be even more incognito, you could take the BMT to Queens.”
“Gee Max, I in fact did occasionally go there and sit.”
“Well pal, at least they had the best baked hot dogs, if sometimes a little overcooked for one’s liking, but then you could apply plenty of relish and mustard if you wanted to overcome the taste. Boy, in the first few days I got back to New York before I got my job and I was so damn homesick to get back west to Chicago and the Loop, I used to wind up there on the station platform with the feeling I was hiding away from the whole city, hunched at the counter over a coffee bought with next to my last dime. Here, old buddy, a little more of this old Château d’Yquem.”
“Max, as much as New York is an unforgiving place, it is heartening to know that this most wonderful wine is here to be found. And I suppose one must presume that even in a harsh urban reality, sometimes humanity and understanding are encountered where you least expect.”
“Well, so far, outside of my good ole city Chicago, pal, I haven’t found much understanding and I don’t expect to find too much humanity. But I’ll fight the good fight against all those who assail me.”
An almighty sadness overcame me as Max’s muted words of defiance to this city were uttered, that perhaps things were even worse than he had described. And it was strange how the comraderie one had in the navy where you would trust your life, and had to, to a buddy, once back out in the civilian world it was erased. Every man for himself. Disheartening despair appearing on old Max’s face, his chin falling forward on his chest. Sudden look of fear flashing across his eyes. My own fears, deeper sown. And always lurking. In the navy, it was the terrible loneliness going ashore on ole liberty and getting drunk in some god-awful place like Norfolk, Virginia, with nothing, as Max said, but sailors everywhere. And with no ship heaving under your feet and feeling homesick and thirsty and just looking for a meaningful way to waste one’s time, you could end up getting so desperate that you’d go to the local library, pretending you were literary, to try and proposition the librarian behind a stack of books.
As we left the Plaza there was a little group of admirers around the Bentley as Max made a sidewalk ceremony of donning his helmet and goggles and the heavily tipped doorman opened the Bentley door and saluted. There were more than a couple of cheers as we circled around the Pulitzer Fountain and drove off down Fifth Avenue. Past the great glass display windows of women’s jewels, gowns, leathers, and fashion goods. Farther downtown came darker buildings. A man stretched prostrate asleep on the steps of the New York Public Library, its massive elevation looming into the sky. Then the Empire State Building from which a suicide had jumped the day before. Max signaling with a jerk of his thumb.
“Always look upward here, pal, in case someone is coming down.”
Back in the Village we went into a basement where they were playing jazz. Sloshing back unidentifiable brandy and dancing with two girls, one of them trying to get Max to take her to Bermuda. The other one accusing us of sounding ritzy and that we were there slumming, until I explained we were two deep-sea divers ashore recovering from the bends. And that Max had dived much deeper than me.
“Hey gee, is it dark down there under the ocean.”
“You betcha.”
Although the quality of brandy was poor, the music was of a quality of serious musicians. And while the girl danced off with someone else, telling me with her first captivating words that if I wouldn’t buy her another drink, she couldn’t see any long-term future in my company, I passed my alcoholically influenced compliments to the musicians and was invited to sit at the piano to knock out a few jitterbug beats of my own. Perceiving I had an appreciative clientele, I played a passage accelerando from my minuet and could sense the cascading notes reaching deep into my listeners’ guts. My fingers producing fifty lightning notes a second, I knew I might turn the entire nightclub audience into jibbering emotional wrecks as I did once drunkenly sitting at the piano in a previous nightclub while in an animated alcoholic state. And now came a voice over my shoulder.
“Holy Christ, fella, where did you learn to play like that. It sounds like it’s a full orchestra.”
On the spot I was offered a job by the management playing jazz piano five nights a week at twenty dollars a night and thirty dollars on Saturdays. Nobody wastes time in this city hiring you at a low salary if you’re really good at something. But I was turned down when I offered a Saturday evening of Scarlatti.
“Well fella, thank you very much. We don’t know this guy Scarlatti, but you think about it, twenty bucks, and call us tomorrow.”
&nb
sp; But Max was both shouting and clapping, euphoric and unstinting in his applause, his cravat now wound around his head to make him look like a pirate. And it was balm to my ears to hear the previous voice over my shoulder again.
“Hey maestro, I’d sure like to hear the two Scarlatti slow F Minor sonatas, but boy, what was that before you were playing. Beautiful, but wasted on the people frequenting this joint.”
It was reassuring to be reminded yet once again that there was always someone somewhere in this city who out of its vast sea of chosen ignorance, would emerge with fine sensibilities to let his intelligent, appreciative voice be heard. And I tinkled the ivories up and down the octaves a couple of more times till the joint closed up at four and it wouldn’t be too long before the coming dawn would have the sun blazing up out of the Atlantic Ocean. Max with one of the two girls in tow, at last depositing me on the nonritzy foot pavement in Pell Street. And I somehow had a strange premonition that something terrible could happen to Max in his generous and friendly pursuit of pleasure in this town. The girl’s arms hanging around his neck as he shouted, “Hey, here’s the scuttlebutt, pal. Next weekend, Sagaponack, out on Long Island. Nude-bathing party in this cute girl’s swimming pool. I know her parents who have this kind of nice estate on the ocean. On the way maybe we’ll stop off again at the old Oak Room for another bottle or two of Krug.”
“Well Max, thanks. I’d like to respond affirmatively to such a distinctive stimulus and high spirits but I may attend upon the prophet and preacher Father Devine’s memorial parade up in Harlem.”
“There you go pal, eccentric exotic, as always.”
“Well, people of an African origin are naturally possessed with a beautiful sense of music sadly missing in the white man.”
“Well, we’ll talk more about that later, old pal. And hey old pal, hasn’t it been some great night. And you were great. And hey what about the naturally possessed sense of philosophy the Chinese have. Hear any good proverbs lately. You’re practically living right in Chinatown.”
A smell of rancid cheese in the hall increasing as I climbed the stairs. The lock broken on the door. Papers and music sheets strewn on the floor. Chairs knocked over and crockery smashed. Someone in the apartment while I was out. Fear and sadness. Depending upon who it was. Too tired to stay awake to find out or to clean up the mess. Chain the door. Take the carving knife and go fall asleep in the broken bed. Close eyes to the despicable of the world and another vision of discontentment awakes somewhere else in the brain. That Sylvia was having a nightmare next to me as she usually did. Her teeth grinding as they would in her sleep every night. Asking her, Annie, “get me out of hell.” Her voice mumbling in the darkness, “Annie,” the name of the mother she craved to find. And I woke in a sweat, wiping tears from my eyes, having dreamt the words she said when once, packing to leave on one of her searches and wanting to know when she would be back, she suddenly screamed, “How the hell should I know when. When I want to find my fucking mother. To know what her face is like when she’s crying. To know what her face is like when she’s smiling. I want to be able to thank someone for telling me where my mother is. So that I can know that I had a mother. And it’s none of your flicking business when I’m coming back. Especially to this dump, when you know more people are bitten by other people than they are by rats in this city. Good-bye.”
That was one of the doors Sylvia slammed closed between us. Resenting that I knew my mother and had watched her work peeling potatoes in our kitchen for her large family. And in my dream, Dru came. She seemed to be approaching me down the center aisle of St. Bartholomew’s Church which suddenly changed to a great lawned vista where now we walked hand in hand toward a glowing marble temple in the distance, choral voices humming to the tune of the taps one had so often gone to sleep by in the navy. Her slender figure swathed in flowing white veils. Small beads of diamonds in bracelets she wore around her wrists and in a many-stranded necklace crisscrossed upon her throat. She said, “Let us two lie down.” Her blond shining hair coifed back from her brow. And in my dream, rolling, groaning and grasping at her body. It was a rude awakening from such a dream. For she had just huskily whispered in my ear words that sounded like some hackneyed song. But worthy enough to hear for those extremely hard up.
Lover boy. O lover boy.
Strength of my desire.
Fire of my fire.
Love me some more, lover boy.
But what more could one ask for but to have a reverie of ecstasy about someone whom Max described as one of the richest women in the world. And who, if that a dilemma be, can be accused of no crime but who, in being rid of the struggle to financially survive, might be found far richer in her soul. Yet who, on that evening when the East River was flowing by below us and Brooklyn’s lights twinkled in the distance and I played my minuet for her, said she felt haunted by what seemed a curse growing up, which made her, through tragedy and by trusts and wills, richer and richer. Her closest little cousin girlfriend with whom she played, died of scarlet fever. Her father when she was thirteen, got electrocuted by lightning on their private golf course while he was throwing the switch for the sprinkler system. Two years later, her mother was killed in a head-on collision coming around a bend on a coastal road at Cap d’Antibes on the Riviera and her favorite uncle one day later went out on his estate in Virginia and blew his head off with a shotgun. And a more distant relative hearing of the shocking news, then went and stood on railway tracks in front of a train along the Hudson, near a train stop named Camelot. And none of this did Sylvia ever reveal. As if she expected something worse to happen to her.
I couldn’t tell Dru my own deeper devastations but I told her my most haunted story of having, as a small boy, to kiss a dead aunt at an Irish wake. And then related about the clairvoyance of one of my closest boyhood friends who lived in an area called Irishtown in a big spooky gray house surrounded by verandas, in the shadow of which we used to sit on rainy days singing songs inside their big chauffeured limousine parked permanently in the drive. And my friend was haunted by his mother who could by telepathy scare the shit out of him wherever he was. Even off somewhere miles away and usually spending money his mother gave him to pay off some urgent bill like his school tuition and which he was spending on our underage drinking pleasure of Tom Collinses in the Astor Hotel downtown, pretending that instead of being delinquents out on a spree we were big-time playboys. He would, after our first couple of Tom Collinses, always panic and interrupt our philosophical speculation and say he could hear his mother calling him. “Hey,” Fd say, “how can you, more than twenty miles away, hear her.” “Because,” he said, “she knows I’ve spent the money for my school tuition getting drunk—that’s how I know she is calling. And she’s going to beat the hell out of me when I get home. Box my ears. That’s how I know she’s calling.” And finally I believed him, because he would disappear into the big gray house with all its verandas shrouded in the trees and I wouldn’t see him again for weeks until he would finally appear, thinner, having emerged from incarceration locked somewhere in an attic or cellar, his food passed into him through a flap in the door. And although he never said so, I was certain it was bread and water.
Despite the long night out with Max I felt strangely full of energy this next day, my head slowly clearing. Propping a chair against the broken front door I made a feeble attempt to clean up the apartment but the goddamn cockroaches rushing for cover every time I lifted something up sent me instead with a desperate urge to sit at the piano and compose. My fingers itching to race across the keys and to mark new notes in the manuscript of my minuet. And placing the score in front of me on the piano, I sat in the manner of Rubenstein, fingers poised to lower them on the keys. Then as my fingertips touched, there was a strange silent sensation. No note sounded. I propped open the piano top. And drew in my breath in horror. There inside, except for a few of the heaviest bass chords, were all my piano strings, curled and wound upon themselves and cut and chopped to pieces. And
the phone rang.
“Hey, hi. God, I at last got you. I phoned several times yesterday. It’s Dru.”
“Hello ma’am.”
“Stephen, what’s the matter. You sound awful.”
“Well, I am presently digesting a matter presently assailing my spirits.”
“Oh dear. We’re not, are we, like two ships passing in the night.”
“No ma’am, I hope not.”
“Well, my ship’s signaling, sending you some semaphore.”
“What’s it saying, ma’am.”
“It’s saying, Stephen, you’re my sunshine. And I need some badly right at this time.”
“Well gee, ma’am, I could do with a little ray or two myself at this time.”
“Well in that regard, perhaps you can in two hours meet me.”
“Yes ma’am. You bet I can.”
“Wait outside the Yiddish Theatre at Seventh and Fifty-eighth Street.”
“Sure thing ma’am.”
Upon the prospect of seeing Dru, my sense of crushing defeat and abysmal futurelessness wasn’t yet totally absolute. But with the unpredictability in one’s life rampant, even ole Dru might be getting ready to bust me one right on the kisser. Take that, you inferior impostor. How dare you ill-treat my beloved adopted daughter, and blatantly marry her for her money. Now find a shirt. Something silk and refined. Dress for the occasion. Search amid Sylvia’s dozens of discarded brassieres and leotards. Get out my gray flannels. Wear a carefully striped tie of quiet distinction. Select a light green plain sports jacket that I might have last worn on the prep school boat ride. But avoid one that annoyed the school prefect of discipline who said, “Do not. Ever again. Wear that. In this school.” And in these garments I will look out of uniform in this part of town. Jam the apartment door closed. Walk out and down this Oriental street to Mulberry and cross over to the West Side. Try to do as I often have tried. Walk away the burden of sadness mile by mile. Step by step. Head up Hudson to Ninth Avenue. Eardrums assaulted by the modern symphony of the flow of backfiring, horn-blowing, gear-grinding trucks and cars. Pass the lunch-rooms, saloons and pushcart vendors. Hoping that as one gets farther away from the cut piano strings, it will ease the pain and drive it out of the soul. And yet, there, just sounded, is a most beautiful bass, base reverberation. The deep throb of a ship’s whistle blasting on the river, pulling out of dock. Slow, stern-first to midstream. Faintly hear the echo of the throbbing sound coming back across the Hudson from the sheer rock cliffs of the Palisades. Bound to be one of the great liners off to Europe. Upon which I would so much like to sail. To that older world where the musician and composer can so much better avail of their dignity. Even in Vienna, where the whole audience is waiting to hold you up to ridicule. Ready for even some poor little bastard violinist in the back of the strings to miss a single note or play a wrong one. In order to boo and hiss the whole orchestra. But as things are now I shall never be able to get to that distant but civilized shore. And am instead reminded of the only trips I can afford to take, by the hoots of ferries back and forth to Hoboken, Jersey City, and Weehawken. And in this city, obscurity perpetuates on great men. As they, their fierce fury spent, recluse themselves from the eternal indifference of this city. Somewhere not far from here, Herman Melville was a customs inspector. And no one gave a hoot or cared. In that side street, there is the Straubenmüller Textile High School. And maybe plenty give a hoot and care that it’s there. And here I am now in Hell’s Kitchen. Where you can never tell if they have, in the back of liquor stores, a policeman crouched behind boxes, a gun in his hand. He waits for a stickup. A cross marked on the bullet so that when fired and hits, he doesn’t have to shoot twice. Bang. And the holdup man, a big hole blown in him somewhere, drops dead. Kids roaming the streets with zip guns, firing bullets out of pieces of pipe. Hypodermic needles shooting stuff they buy on the street corner into their limbs to get a few hours of mindless reverie. In this world where the hoodlums abound and where I’ve been caught frequenting my family’s bar, of which no one is allowed to know about or to go to because of the disgustingly undignified things that have happened there. A girl giving a blow job to a drunk customer in a back hallway leading to the men’s room. But where, still under drinking age, I ventured on a few dawn occasions to meet this same girl with a pockmarked face who had to support her out-of-work father and younger brother by giving blow jobs for two dollars. Holy cow, she was like a millionairess on a busy day. And to whom I enjoyed to talk and who told me that she, once on her knees giving a guy a blow job, got socked in the face because he said she was doing such a dirty, disgusting thing, and didn’t pay her. And that’s how she got her broken nose and spoke so sonorously and told me not to wear a striped tie with a striped shirt. I was for awhile unrecognized till this son of a bitch who didn’t pay for his blow job picked a fight and started to call me “pretty boy,” and before he could draw his gun, I kicked him in the balls and busted him one in the chops. Bullets later, or knife, or whatever he had, flying, the bartender spirited me out the back door. Soaked to the skin in the pouring rain, I hid in an empty garbage can before I finally got a chance to run away. But nothing now, and no knowledge I have of this city, is lessening the pain. Even here in the Garment District. And only words come to mind that could be construed as pedantic speak, which I repeat over and over. That I utterly utterly condemn the cruel inhumanity wrought upon me by persons of grievous intent. And I swear I will with every ounce of my one hundred and seventy-six and a half pounds bust into the next century the next rude, inhumane son of a bitch I come across.