mikerol[@]outlook.com
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The cab stopped smartly at the front of my loft building
in Tribeca, in downtown Manhattan, as I continued to chat with the driver, who
was from Madras, and as I was tipping him, generously, as I did even when I was
broke, which I was not then: I had a small stipend subsequent to the recent
catastrophe that allowed me to analyze all that had gone wrong. The driver,
Ahmed, who was from Madras, and I had had a lively chat about Mumbay which had
been much safer, as had Karachi, when I had visited fifteen years earlier and
where I had walked, in horror, through Falk/ Fuckland Road and its cages full
of whores and admired the Zoroaster’s consign their dead to the tops of trees
where vultures fed on the flesh, leaving nothing but skeletons. The vultures,
so I had read, were in trouble, the eggshells were breaking too soon, fragile,
DDT, or one or the other carcinogen, the flesh rotted and liquefied and dropped
down on passersby on the bluffs. I had also been with a whore, which I did not mention
to Ahmed, which whore and I had picked each other up along the fine Mumbay quay.
However, I had gone completely cold in her barren but clean room and been
unable to perform as I had had a powerful urge just a short while before. Nothing
that the attractive girl did to revive the recent ardor had the least effect:
the more she tried the colder I felt, an onslaught was impending, a major
intestinal event of what in Mexico was called Moctezuma’s revenge, but for the
sake of my presence in India I called “the Raj’s revenge.” I felt that I must
have picked up the bug in Karachi, the Hellenic
Splendor’s previous port of call, or shipboard; this was my first day in
Mumbay and I hadn’t been with a woman since the day of the freighter’s
departure months earlier in Brooklyn, specifically with a new young girlfriend.
...
It was early on a Sunday morning in June and it
felt quite idyllic at the spot I stood on with the sun shooting through the
streets and glistening all around and the early morning cool breeze from the
Northwest, and so before entering my building I decided to take a look around,
to take a deep breath, to re-orient myself in what had been my immediate visual
sphere for so many years, and I put down my bag. The building opposite mine of course deserved the first look of
recognition that, reassuringly, it still existed and not only in my
imagination, that nothing appeared to have changed during my absence: its
façade still a first rate example of turn of the 19th century
American mercantile architecture with certain requisite doodads as it could and
can still be found in nearly all American cities that had been a city of some
kind during that time, and I continued to be proud that I was hip to the fact
that the Ganymede - the building’s name stenciled in protruding sandstone
lettering above the entrance - was a mere twenty feet deep, that it was mostly
façade, that it was a three-quarters-of-a-block wide six-story tall lady that,
as it were, had a substantial shelf but a very flat ass! And flat-assed Robin of the many years ago
came to mind. And no eyes out back to the West, windowless! The other, fourth quarter
of the block, its northern section, was now a parking lot – who knows what it
might have been at some time was a thought that flitted through my mind at each
of the many holes in the street scene downtown - whose attendant doubled as the
Ganymede’s super, my friend Egbert Romain, a Trinidad-Tobagonian, evidently of
both British and French slavery extraction with the physique of Sugar Ray
Robinson, an idol of my American bantam weight youth when my stepfather, noting
excess energies, had put some boxing stuff up in the garage and I had started
to watch boxers on 50s television. There
had been a time that I had planned for Egbert to be both body guard and
chauffeur and conversationalist if the well-dreamed fantasies of grand success
and buying the Ganymede and the printing shop on its third floor, had
materialized, Egbert was a delight to talk to, his pidgin was sweet and if
things had gone really well I or if the partnership had held – we had even
planned to acquire the Elysian a few blocks north on Hudson, a chunky square
Florentine four story job, painted battle-ship grey at present, with stairs
leading up from left and right to a small balcony platform entrance perfect for
holding forth and mounting the Blakean flag of the enterprise, at its center
the swimmer who, however, reaches the water and does not drown as the
enterprise did in a sea of debt and corruption and thievery and endless
lawsuits - one of the great messes, one
of those complete de-constructionist, insides turned out affairs that reveals
everything, and what an everything it was.
Just
now there was no sign of Egbert or his relief man, a cousin of his, who always
wore one of these knitted rainbow-colored Rasta caps no matter the heat and
whose exotic ancient colonial British name eluded me at the moment - it was
altogether still too early in the morning, though I would not have minded to
hear the sweet laid-back reggae sound of Toots
and the Maytals. And there, from the
fourth floor fire escape railing, still dangled, in the breeze, the remnants of
the South-American rope bridge that at one time, briefly, connected that fourth
floor of the mercantile façade to the fourth floor roof of the so very obscure
building opposite whose loft and roof was mine. That rope bridge had made for a
fine and famous photo on the front page of the Post the day we strung it up and
showed it to the world. How unfortunate that the city would prove humorless and
made us cut it down in short order. Things hadn’t worked out as planned, as
envisioned, as dreamed - and I punched “You can’t always get what you want” in
the Juke Box in my mind and assured myself I wasn’t going to be grumpy, was I
now, after all I had gotten what I really wanted, my kitbag of experience that
I had lacked, a past a real past, and rather more of it than I could have
dreamed and what an ”egg of experience” I now had to brood on and … wasn’t that
one of our downtown space cadets floating high up in the breeze? a left-over
from the Saturday night that had been. Magdalena? Was she, the so bereft after
she and her boyfriend Zejlko had split up against all our odds that this couple
would hold forever, still in space-cadet mode? No, on a closer look it was just
a balloon, with furles; my fantasy was just a tad too vivid.
From my
fourth-floor corner office in the Ganymede I had always looked forward to this
first slither of the sun shooting in from the East as I got to work, after a swim
in Mr. Woolworth’s marble swimming pool in basement of the eponymous Woolworth
Tower, just a few blocks over, often taking my swim in company of the mayor of
the city who dog-paddled and politicked, aquatically greeting fellow swimmers,
body guards on either side, before dashing across City Hall Park to his office.
Noticeably, the mayor, a man with a surprisingly small head for such a tall
frame, never lost the makings, modest pregnancy of a pot belly, and I
attributed this phenomenon to his needing to consume a lot of chicken during
civic luncheons. Pregnant with chicken fat he was, looking a lot like Jack
Perdue a purveyor of chicken on T.V. At about seven in the morning in summer the sun shone directly
into the two east-facing windows of my office… I quote my analytic friend, Rose Reich-Habsburg's description: "Yugi sougt to get to his office
early for all the obvious reasons, because the few hours before the office
opened, and the hours after closing, after a late afternoon nap, was when
"the real work," as he called it, “my work,” got done;
so-called normal working hours consisted of fragments, interruptions,
distractions that left him frazzled until he took his afternoon nap. It was a sunny morning and the sun glinting
along and half through the edges of the louvres of the two large East-facing
windows seemed to electrify the motes especially at that time of day, also in
my head; but the sun, or rather the earth's incline to it, would soon be
concealed, first by the Internal Revenue Service [IRS] cantilevering box diagonally
opposite, severely, eliminating even sun aura; by the 70 story Woolworth Tower
towering over the IRS and then by the huge slabs to the south. One wonderful
Southwest shaft reappeared briefly late in the late afternoon through the south
facing windows, a shaft that shot in between an ATT tower on Greenwich Street,
to the west of the North Tower, on Greenwich Street, and yet another hulk,
shooting in through the two south-facing windows of Yuri’s office and back out
through the ones that faced East across the street, but to draw dim reflections
from the unwashed windows on the loft opposite, on the other side of the
streer. At those moments the light played quite enchantingly in Yuri’s big,
square high-ceilinged room. I always looked forward to that last sudden slither
of the sun. In winter the sun existed as an absence. But because the sun shone
directly into the two east facing windows at this time, around 7 of the morning
Yuri, and often I, who visited him in my capacity as his friend and shrink,
could not make out what if anything might be transpiring at the top, equivalent
fourth floor in the building opposite, and even if the sun had not blinded
Yuri, me, us, its double-insulated windows unwashed outside since the day
Lincoln had spent a night in the half of it that had been a hotel during the
Civil War, all I might have been able to make out was whether, possibly, one or
the other light had come on to dispel the there gloom. So I presumed that
Yuri’s somnolent 'Roos, who were over-staying their welcome by a year, were, as
was their custom, sleeping through the finest part of the day, to start
hopping, tentatively, out from under their drugged states sometime around
noon, readying themselves for another
drug filled alcoholic nite, another romp with “Dancing Matilda.” “My
'Roos." Yuri said, " are a Maoist theater troupe, Night Shift,
led by an actor who was great when he rode a horse called horse, and an Aussie
Revo who cultivated the cultivation of marijuana plants under the influence of
neon, in the crawl space, beneath the stairs that led to Yuri's small bedroom
on top of the loft, sort of like a captain's bridge, anyway that's how I
thought of it, or referred to it when describing its, Yuris sometimes nighttime
location.
“Are
you all right?” a voice interrupted me, my reverie. “Oh… ” I said to someone I instantly recognized as a
commuter who must have just stepped out of the nearby Hudson Tubes. “You had your eyes closed and were just
standing there, starting to sway.”
“You didn’t see a dog falling off the roof,
did you?” I said to him, associating this Jersey commuter with one just like
him who had been frightened out of his wits when one of my and Elle’s one-year-old
German shepherd mix puppies had fallen off the balustrade of my loft roof and
landed on the sidewalk, barely missing him.
“Dogs falling out of the sky in Manhattan,
I’m going straight back to Jersey,” had been that commuter’s memorable words. That dog’s fall, that dog accident, that
accident due to an impulsive leap, or to too fast running, to that slip, had
been a sign, symbolic retrospectively, of Elle’s and my love for each other’s
impending crash, doom, the first sign that I could put my finger on: I was
over-extended. The dog had broken one leg and limped off, dragged himself to
the landfill, to our beach, a hundred yards further West where, tracking his
blood spoor, I found him and had carried him in my arms to the animal hospital
where they were amazed that he had survived a four-floor fall and had only one
broken leg to show for the experience. They said they would also check his
internal organs, that there was no bleeding. It was pure chance that I had
encountered that commuter these years ago. The dog had fallen off while I had
been walking down the stairs, the commuter was standing right next to the blood-stained
spot where Wolfie had landed.
This commuter now gave me a very strange,
somewhat frightened look as he stepped back and said “have a good day” and
hurried off. I now turned around and was glad to note that nothing seemed
to have changed on “my” building. Its ground floor had a pizza joint, at the
corner, and the pizza joit was still a pizza joint, opposite the modernistic
maroon and greenish glass multi monstrosity the third generation modernistic
IRS building on the side street corner. The pizza joint adjoined a now girlie
lounge that occupied what had been the Boar Head, a restaurant, which had been
frequented by the merchants that had once dominated the area and that I in my
fantasy future had turned into the Central
Europe that served Leber-knoedel
Suppe, Goose; and other central European specialties and where chiefly
writers and editors and artists hung out. In my fantasy I had even imported the
chef and his family from Prague. Next to the Girlie Lounge entrance was the now
metal door entrance to “my” building which was such an obscure dark grey lady
she might actually - to a certain kind of observer - become noticeable for her very
obscurity, certainly for no other reason, as though she were trying just a bit
too hard to hide but going about it in too obvious a manner. What she is hiding
is that she is bifurcated, that she is two buildings of very different kind
that were joined at some point early in their unheralded past, that one of her
shoulders is higher or lower than the other, that she is askew, and you used
the staircase, the marbled stairs from the southern half or two thirds, that
was once a hotel, that dated back to the civil war era, rumor fantasy had it
that Lincoln slept here, perhaps even in the same perch that I now occupied.
Marble, of course, is about the last component you expected as you looked at
that considerable expanse of black and gray paint, those uninviting surfaces
with placards that people kept pasting there.
I had
seen the destruction of Lower Manhattan starting in the late 60s as Danny Lion
photographed it and it was amazing that of all the buildings that had survived
the wrecking ball was this gray corner once Civil War hotel with its barge of a
roof and ships construction that swayed and creaked when the Arctic Northwest
Express hit in Fall and Winter, and when it hit the Wall, the wall of downtown
sky scrapers, it broadsided them, slammed into that Wall and the Wall turned
the Express around, compressed it, from a Northwesterly into a South to North
jet exhaust (like the Subway right below) that swirled garbage and garbage cans
through the narrows of West Broad as high as the fourth floor of my office and
the top floor of the loft on the way North uptown. Memorable, no? N’est pas?
I
finally picked up my bag and felt hunger pangs and put my keys away and turned
to the adjacent Greek Greasy Spoon, the buildings only other ground floor enterprise,
a six-foot-wide sliver, twenty feet deep, too, its one big window steamed as it
had been always all these years at this hour, a steam bath of a breakfast
joint, just as always, who made excellent eggs and home-fries. I had been
looking forward to having a few goodbye breakfasts there and decided, for old
time’s sake, to have one of them right there and then. The aging
Greek, all wattles, looked cooked blonde-white like his noodles when they came
steaming out of his pressure cooker or steam-bath or whatever that enclosure
was, offered a grunt of recognition for a greeting. No “long time no see” as I
had expected. Time must pass differently for him I concluded and said “the
usual” and he failed to ask what my “the usual” was – it had been a few years -
but poured the usual tepid coffee and turned three eggs into the fluffiest of
scrambles that I spread across my toast, and toasted the fries just right. It
was then that I could feel it taking hold, the past, I was starting to enter
it, I was eating it, I had entered the past, someone who had not had a past,
who had written himself out of his European past in college, and who had
written the childhood out of himself, now had his American past to step into,
if only for a time, and not just any past, but a past that I was already
writing about, a fairly recent past yet also one that I had felt I had put
behind me. A past during which I felt I had done it all or at least a lot of it
wrong – Always the Wrong People, the
title of the memoir of my twenty five years in New York – and I well knew that
the equation “wrongness” involved me, moi
meme, that I was one side of it. Yet: “No over-berating yourself,” I told
myself, “no satisfying whatever tad of disgusting heroic masochism might reside
in you, a cool assessment is what is needed,” but enough wrong, just enough to
make difficult success even more difficult. “Always the wrong people” it had
been, wrong women too! And far too many! I had succumbed far too often! At
least half the time, and that was bad enough. And not been discrete. Live and
learn, never live long enough! – was another truism for which my internal
jukebox lacked a melody. I recalled the wounded
shepherd puppy dragging its broken leg to the landfill to nurse himself! Moi meme! But pretty well recovered now,
just a tad of a limp! The dog that had slunk away to nurse its broken leg, just
like myself when the Ganymede Elysian field dream had imploded. I had been a
shmuck I concluded. My experience of the city that had glistened and still
glistened so temptingly if seen from the distant cliffs, it had singed the
wings of this moth while it itself had turned into a glittering pile of garbage. I
pulled out my medium-sized three ring note book with the legend “Always the
Wrong People” & the Roman numeral “I” neatly inscribed on a label pasted in
the upper right hand corner of its plastic cover and started to read its
opening and make emendations:
===============
I grabbed
the phone: it wasn’t Elle as I had feared Elle who for reasons that were
entirely beyond me despite having been multiply unfaithful and leaving me and
then having been kicked out of my life had decided - while trying to entrap her
current boyfiend! - to pursue me after she and the Heartache Kid had been
through a breakup that lasted seemngly forever until I told her I wanted her
out of my life. „Kiss me through my panties!” „Spank me!” Whew!
No, it was
not darling ballerina Elle but CeeCee the biggest heart-ache prior to Elle!
Well... anyhoo. During my twenty five years in New York! There had been others in adolescence and
shortly after, and even earlier, I wasn’t called, people didn’t call me the
Heartache Kid for nothing! The then, now biggest previous Heartache the
Heartach Kid reminded himself right there and then. It had taken that trip on
the Hellenic Splendor halfway around
the world, of which I had just the briefest of deja vues, to heal the
scratches - “Catskills skilled cats cats
kill” had been the dream shorthand for CeeCee and my affair in those anything
but comical foothills – the scratches she had administered to my vulnerable
stupid heart, a heart that actually ought to have become scar tissued as only a
muliply injured heart can! A wonder I thought to myself, thinking back, that
until I seemed finally – I prayed – made myself invulnerable by seceding from
the scene, fleeing – that I and my heart had actually lasted as long as I did.
CeeCee had
been the constant and I mean constant deja vue, as Elle’s previous edition,
especially during the analytic sessions with Enigma, during Elle’s and my
break-up. That break-up had been well examined, that had proved really interesting
to do that, dream by dream and step by step, as compared to CeeCee’s and mine
that had been suffered in the ignorance of oblivion in oblivious ignorance, in
acting out. I now could
pride myself that I knew where my fault (s) lay in the break-up, my
contribution. CeeCee and I had never lived together, not as much had become
involved. She had not suffered from
sudden neglect after a torrid opening, she had not been yet another of the
„most beautiful woman in the world” who turned into my „emasculating
governess.” The „hunk,” the apparent „it boy” by the evidence of how the
pretty one were seizing on me, had not turned into... what? A sudden monk? That
was a part of the problem that I brought with me to the proceedings of our
Elle’s and my near marriage, well yes, and if I didn’t have an invariable Albatross a beloved never hated Albatross
around my neck the revolutionary enterprise or work of some kind, and never
enough money to run away for a permanent Wild Palms, my work, invariably an Albatross of some
kind about.
And I had
even had the dream -referring to my
neglect of Elle and its dreadful conseqeunce - that said „remember that and
don’t forget it!” Talking about talking super-ego dreams where I address
myself! And then starting to write the book that would make all the ladies
happy: The Well Laid Woman!
CeeCee’s and my affair had been the rehearsal
for the far more calamitous, the catastrophe of Elle’s and my breakup – a
break-up under analysis no less, ah what you can learn what you experience when
denial is thrown overboard and a thousand eyes cry their hearts out at what
they now behold.
CeeCee felt
she always knew where I was, that we were in constant contact and
communication, which played into a fantasy relationship I had had with my
mostly absent mother, my conscience,
that she knew what I was doing, it was spooky to find out how often CeeCee had
been right. The first time I had made love to her in a bed she had pretended
and wanted me to pretend, and I had, that I was her father, and when I made
calm gentle love to her, diddling her clit to make sure she would come, it had
been perfect for her. “Perfect” she had said, and my cock had felt awfully snug
inside her cunt, well and snugly held, a memorably unique sensation, though the
breach of the Oedipal order, if only as pretense, introduced a troubling note –
musically forewarning, like the repeated opening of Mozar’s Haffner
QUOTE NOTES
- into my sleep, once we did get to sleep that
night. There also had been humor. I had heard of I.U.D.s but never encountered
or seen one. When I started to fuck CeeCee, after petting that she loved as
much as I did, something inside her womb started to tickle my cock and I told
her „What’s that inside you that’s tickling my cock?”, and she said, „Oh,
that’s my I.U.D.” And I said, „it’s tickling me!” and CeeCee said „You’re not
the only one!” Twenty six lover had been there – no, she had not had the good
sense to get an I.U.D. prior to losing her virginity nor after I forgot whether
it was her first or second abortion. CeeCee at age twenty six still dressed mostly
in some variation of schoolgirl uniform but had been virginal only until age
sixteen and had been gyrating and hot to trot as soon as she heard Elvis
Presley at fourteen.
And
here I was back in the Big Dark City and its Heart of Darkness, three of whose
ventricles I had come to know, two of them via CeeCee or because she and I had
worked together. You needed to work all night to penetrate the heart of
darkness and the spiders of the dark and to stay awake at those hours requires
stronger meds and the trail of that medicine might could did also led to one of
the entrances to the heart of darkness, and I had shied back, that was too
black and dangerous, I lacked resolve, that domain was too deep and wide
ranging for me. Inadvertencies. Who goes to the Big City and looks for its
heart of Darkness? As a cab driver to take you!
