He stopped.
Flowers. Foliage in the wilderness. Growing behind glass in a city of steel. Natures Own Rarity. Century-Old Branches of Dwarf Peruvian Cypress. The sign chortled on, No Care Necessary. Will Last Forever! And who wants that? Will I last forever? Purchase of these eternal leaves would be folly.
Lovely, though, inside. Sweet smelling touches of life on the drained earth. Always on the inside. The door is hard to open. Sir, I am pleased with your flowers. Of course you realize they aren’t really yours. Whattaya mean! I paid good money for then! Pass on sir, you do not understand.
Maybe next time.
Twenty to eleven on the black church façade. The home walls ringing with cries. I won’t have the jerk in the same house with us. Oh, why don’t you shut your big fat stupid mouth. Him screaming it. Grace’s husband lunging, clench-fisted, temple veins pulsing. Mother screaming weakly and bursting into hysterical tears. Him crashing his typewriter to the floor, rushing out the door. His mother calling after him—Please don’t leave me, oh please Erick! Her frail voice fluttering down over the street as he hurried away from all he hated, rushing away blindly in escape.
All thought of as he saw twenty to eleven on the black church facade.
Black fingers poking at the hot hair. Dark steeple pushing a gold cross at the sky. Can’t hardly see it, Ma. Shut up, you ain’t supposed to. And trees growing beside the sacred abutments. And a holy man with hand on hip, watching the people hurry by with stony ridicule. I am holy too. He leaned against a building, staring.
Omnibus passing, foul breathed, heavy-tongued omnibus. People crowding into its belly for a price. Carry me away bus! To eternity? Hell, no, to 29th street.
I see stomach, turgid flesh creeping about the heart putting more distance between that pulsing meatball and the sun. I see that here. He pressed fingers into his own enlarging stomach. I see a world sucking on a weed ugly and foul. I see smiles of death.
A finger of sun touches a window and glorifies the common pane with pure gold for a moment. Brief purge. Mother what is that green stuff poking up between the gravestones? That is grass, my son.
Cedar. Wall. Sunglasses, signs. More strikers. A pretty girl dressed in blue. In your sweet little Alice Blue Gown, on strike you walk up and down …
“Would you help a poorman to a cup of coffee?”
He stopped. He looked at the old man. The old man had red fish eyes, a beard, a cane. He fished in his pocket and drew out a dollar bill. He pressed it into the old man’s hand. The man looked up in rheumy astonishment. He passed by the old man and strode on quickly, legs like pistons on the hot sidewalk.
Young breasts and old. Sly glances and no glances. Fast breath and even breath. Love and fatigue. Salt and pepper. No brush, no lather, no …
He glanced into a liquor store passing by. Scotch. Rye. Whiskey. Gin. Rum. Life. A sign—Scotch, 20 years old. A fact—American, 23 years old. Shake.
A watch store. He stopped and looked in the window. Dozens of watches, round square and shapeless. Money for time. Put it on your wrist and watch it pass away. Watch your hair fall out, your belly expand, your dreams grovel to the tick tock of our time-honored piece. Die to the tick tock of … ask about our special …
Eve.
What would you say to all these means of glorifying those fleshy mounds on your tired chest. You know, dear one of the purloined rib, that even if you had no more than Adam you could still wow men. Yes, definitely. Those warm structures are a sort of pivot of civilization now. Adoration of the female breast it is called in a book. Did you know it? I guess not. When you were kicking around, you fed your kids with them and let it go at that. But today! Oh Christ, Eve, what civilization has done for women.
Civilize: to be civil to one another.
Civilization: A society of people who are civil to one another.
Folks I have a grand idea.
Let’s change the name.
He passed a man sitting in a black Cadillac. Smooth. Shiny. Costs money. I have nothing. Walk, your health is yours. Great consolation.
The sun shot its beams together. They knit a hot blanket which fell over his head. His head was hot and his neck and upper lip had great drops of sweat that clung and then fell into his mouth. God begins with a G, he thought, and so does garbage.
Nathan Hale. He looked at him statued over the people. He had piano hands. His coat was out of style. So was his gallantry. Did you really say what they claim you did? Did it really matter to you whether cigarette-rolling Americans prided themselves on your death and put a statue for the bus gas to light on? Nathan what were you thinking of? I’m sorry. You died in vain.
“Here you are, pal!”
A man pressed a pamphlet into his hands with messiah fingers and rushed on spreading THE TRUTH OF LIFE.
He leaned against the pipe fence that girdled the park and read quietly, dully.
The BIG QUESTION is—Have you been born again? Let’s see, his other mind asked. Christianity is Christ. I see. NOT trying but trusting. HOW may I be born again? THEN connect section A-6 to section T-9 through joint ABF using screws in envelope.
God has a wireless everywhere, poemed the book. We call it (quote) the Word of God. (Unquote) And every one may daily win, God’s choicest gifts by (quote) tuning in (unquote) Only $14.95. Hear one today at your local …
He dropped the pamphlet on the bleached and short-chopped grass and pushed away from the fence. On and on. Alone.
Here comes a car, he thought. If I walk faster he will miss me. If I walk slower he will miss me. If I walk just right he will grind on his brakes but the heavy steel will leap out upon me and black tires will crush breath from my body.
He walked faster. Habit, said his mind.
A woman stopped him.
“Chambers Street is near here, haah?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know,” he said.
She looked displeased, she passed on. He watched her broad buttocks move up and down like meshed gears. What am I sorry for? He wondered. What’s the difference if you find it or not? What difference? Where is this and where is that? And when you get there you’d just want to leave and go somewhere else.
Store having a birthday. Banner across the building. 75th Birthday. Happy Birthday to you, he thought. Hands clapping, happy laughter, cries of “Speech!” Store groans to its steel feet. “Friends!” Applause. “Unaccustomed as I am to …” Laughter, giggles, hands clapping, singing—For he’s a jolly good fellow!
An old woman in black selling shoe laces.
He stopped and leaned against the building in a burst of sunlight. He stared at her.
This is your noble civilization, he thought. This is your beauty and your grandeur and your mountain structures and your progress words.
Tears came to his eyes. He wanted to rush out at the people and grab them by the clothes and shake them and make them look at the old lady.
She was looking at the sidewalk with dead eyes.
The fetid hot city wind rustled the voluminous black skirt lightly around her thin ankles. She wore heavy black shoes. Her face was thin. Her shrunken lips were tight together.
What are you thinking about? You were not always this way. Is it not so? Recipient of brief glances and pitiful pennies from the grubby hands of bright-eyed monster children. And your parents, tell me of them. Your youth. When those parchment cheeks were red with love and those drawn eyes feasted on a loved one’s face. And now, black shoe laces. To hold feet together so they can run from here to there.
Sleep, old woman!
He almost cried it out. His lips trembled. He was lost in his pity for her. Let your hair blow softly in the foul zephyr. Dream and die and leave the sadness and the blank. Let the box of black shoe laces slip from your tired fingers and fall to the sidewalk. Let the people stare as you sit open mouthed and dead. You will be free of them. Happy in the garden spot where shoes mean nothing. Where your cares will be nothing. Where once more those faded cheeks will flood pink and th
ose set unhappy lips curl into a smile. Come with me! I love you, old woman!
He put a bill in her box and passed down the city gash. A long way to go. He did not look back at her. Because I’m lying. Because there is no garden spot. All is desert.
A chinaman selling ice cream. Notary Public sign. Duane Street and people still hurrying. Liquor? The suggestion came. No, it is tasteless. I will not start now. Be brave. Brave. The word was repelling. Once he was brave. Once he had hope. With his finger he was to trace his pattern on the world. Now it was shattered, bent and junked like his typewriter, hurled to the floor.
Cards for all occasions.
His eyes pierced the window panes and he stared dully at their ludicrous phrases, their infinitude of the saccharine. A birthday wish for YOU so much have you given to others. From the bottom of my heart for twenty five cents. Odd that the more a person spent the more tears should flow from the restless pen of the semper paratus poet.
Happy Birthday Mother exclamation point.
Happy Birthday Sister exclamation point.
Happy Birthday Sweetheart exclamation point.
Happy Birthday Old Woman Selling Black Shoe Laces.
A high breasted jewess strode past him, blouse shaking like six delicious flavors stuff. Excites the transient groin. Gone, a thrill. Passed, a possible erotic night or day. Pass on good or bad or indifferent woman. Our paths uncross, we lose the moment.
Lunchtime.
The buildings spewed forth the masses. For frankfurters and roast lamb. Orange drink and wine. Swamp and the Mountain. It all comes out the same. Leonard Street. Franklin Street. Cottons. Rayons. Naked under the cloth. Brutal currents under the placid jaws chewing a sandwich. All different. All go home different. Stay different. Clothe different. Eat different. Cry different.
He looked at young full breasts ripe for the taking. At old and dried up breasts taken or atrophied in frustrated silence. At bland eyes, then noses, thick noses, square jaws, double in a city haunted by ghosts. Spectres passing in the sun and gone in the night. The end, the beginning, it is one.
He was walking along a ditch.
A great lengthy ditch whose sides were concrete and yawning windows. But they weren’t windows. They were eye sockets barren of the eye showing the bare shallow blackbrains inside. Sluggish of operation, impervious to change. Closed in winter, empty and sightless in summer.
And if they had no eyes, what then? Then they would stumble about in much the same manner. They would find means of tripping. There. A socket-less people blundering through their days.
Would they see less?
How they run and scamper. He leaned in the sun and watched them. He felt strange. He was a ghost standing there. Only the sex eyes of young girls pierced the spirit shell. That only for a moment. Then they were gone and he was alone where millions walked. Surrounded by loneliness that walked and chattered and ate and ran and had a million voices. Where eight million people live and enjoy the benefits of democracy and don’t know who lives next door.
Signs. Sweaty armpits. Orange drinks. A lonely milk can. A bank. Bodies clothed by tradition. Tired eyes staring at the sidewalk black with perished gum blobs. Woolworth. Old men. Red ribbons bedizening the breast of a smocked girl smiling at him. A resting taxicab crouching like a smug cat before a fireplace. A red building baking on a corner. A fat boy whistling a never-written melody, blowing out music that died at birth. The scream of a coarse girl. Three comradely fannys rolling to lunch. Giggles. Then back to the office and the bald boss. And the limping clock. Breathless stale shells, dens of nine to five.
The lunchtime smoke. The unconscious dream time. The curling of idle smoke across the line of vision. Relaxation. Lazy flow of thoughts. Idle limbs. Rare moments when they wrested themselves from the wild current and watched it tumble and bob past. A brief second before leaping back in and being swamped again.
Broome Street.
Old and young. Teeth by nature and machine. Smiles, laughter and gesticulation. A tugging at his stomach. He was hungry. He had eaten no breakfast.
The argument had started early. He had gone to a movie the night before, come back with his brain teeming with ideas for a story. His brain which had been a dead unpromising lump for months. And, in the early hours, he had jumped up with long lost energy and started to type. Grace came out and said that her husband was trying to sleep. Erick took the typewriter all the way to the sun porch and sat there with the door closed. But it was under their bedroom and there was a stamping of feet on the stairs. And George came bursting through the doorway and his face was hard and it had begun.
His teeth clenched. He shivered as he walked on. He remembered the time a man had pushed him in Germany. And he had wanted to unlock his rifle and just empty bullets into everyone. He wanted to do it now.
He remembered leaning his rifle on the dirt parapet and watching the three German soldiers fall over from his bullets. One had leaped and then twitched on the ground. Thinking of it made his body shake. He stopped and looked at everyone passing, feeling sexual desire and a wild shapeless lust for violence and brutality.
He passed another store. Surplus war material. How familiar it was. The partitioned trays. He saw himself hanging over it, sunken-eyed and sweaty, crosslegged and slumped in a smokey mess hall. Perhaps it was the very tray he ate from once. That was the horror of things alike, you never knew.
He looked at holsters and bayonets and knives and bugles and flash lights and flags. Relics of an ancient war. And he thought—Don’t throw them away, we’ll probably be able to use them again.
Spring Street. Shirts. Underwear. Sweaters. All in windows. A big Technicolor sign. Kotex. GIRLS! Your secret is safe! Oh Christ, how magnificent! He yearned to shout it out. And, to whom is anything physical a secret anymore? It is an institution bereft of mystery in this teeming oven. The joy was gone, swallowed by proliferative advertisement, by free talk, by people leering, by endless mental elbows in the ribs. The Body heaved on the public dissection table for all to see.
BUT MUSTN’T TOUCH!
He felt himself tighten violently and hate burst from his throat and dripped from his chin. He wiped it away quickly, awkwardly. He walked on, shoulders slumped. Posture poor. Straighten up, son. How many times had his mother told him that? He slumped over even more. He was sick of her and her pale face and her grey hair and her eternal sitting in her wrapper in the living room chair, knitting and knitting, coughing. And never getting angry. In his cruelest moments, showing no anger but only looking at him with mute, pleading eyes. And, even in pain, never speaking a harsh word to him.
It enraged him.
He tried to walk with his eyes closed. He kept bumping into people. He cursed at them. His mind turned over like a slowing machine. What is life but death aware? What, I beg you, is underneath? Is there no meaning to all this? The old ladies, the fat and the thin, the stringent laughter, the hackles rising, the beauty and the body?
There must be a purpose to all these wanderings. To be born, to live, and then to die for the consummation of physical wants. It seemed the gist. There must be more though. But he couldn’t find it. Lost in private despairs, he could see none of it. And he was weary of trying. Ready to leave. He was throwing up his hands. The world was not for him. It was unfathomable. Else there was nothing to fathom and it was just a ghastly cosmic mistake.
East Houston Street.
A casual-eyed negro was selling glass rings to eager customers while the sign clearly read—Diamond Rings.
Mother what is that? It is a nigger, it is a coon, it is a boogie, it is a jig. Naah, naah, naah, mustn’t touch, Mother will kick your little ass in.
Sprawling resters. A little time before the machines roared again. Young deathbornes chatting in their clipped irrevocable tones. Shouts of laughter. Skin stretched so tautly and so efficiently over emptiness. A young Italian girl was leaning against a sodden wall, dreamily watching her cigarette smoke drift into the light.
A girl was s
tanding with a boy. She was swinging her arms in front of herself and clapping her hands, in back of herself and clapping then again. Chatting.
You married? No. Well you’re young anyhow. Huh, how old do you think I am? You’re about 25. Oh yeah? Yeah. You’re 18 then. Yeah, I wish I was 18.
Bond Street. G.T. Jones. Hot breath of the subway rushing out of earth slits. Suddenly—East Street. He stopped and blinked. Lost forever 3rd and 2nd and 1st. It is very sad. Where did they go?
Washington Place.
Hot and terrible, a canyon of heat and sweat. A truck and a horse-drawn wagon were side by side.
The horse was old and motley brown. There was a valley in its back. The eyes were glazed and tired. There was a noisome tired munching of oats. The ribs stood out like covered xylophone slats. The thin body heaved and gasped. The legs stood akimbo for more balance. The old straggle tail hung limp in the sun. The ears twitched the flies away wearily. And the old red wagon stood behind, derelict and old.
Die, horse.
Let your tired soul loose. Come with me and the old woman. We will walk together side by side, the three of us. To a happy place.
Lies.
Waverly.
And this prize you shall win for learning. This reward for a fulsome mind. That your eyes shall be opened. That your ears shall hear. That the mirth shall be undone. That you shall see gaping wounds where you saw nothing. That you shall see futility where before there was hope of progress. That you shall see evil and poverty and sadness where before your callous eye passed over these things and could not focus beyond your tiny life. That you shall see the raping current on which the world is chip-tossed.
This is your gratification.
Talk to me, city! Tell me of your loves and hates, your rapine and your tortures. Your lusts and frustrations. Your hollow lights and flinching at the honest sunlight. Of your loans up to $500.
He traced his mechanical steps up 14th Street.
The sun burned on his head. He felt his body wet under the clothes. The people jostled by and pushed him aside. His mind worked slowly and artificially. The sun was too hot. He walked unobserved beneath the awesome facades of business, searching. He was hungry and thirsty and tired. But he couldn’t stop. Something kept his feet moving. Oblivious, he moved on.