Jacket Weather, page 11
“Oh, you’re not home?”
“No, I’m walking from Chelsea Market. I went to buy squid.”
“You already bought the squid?”
“Yeah. I’m gonna fry it with parsley and garlic.”
“How much?”
“Ten dollars a pound.”
“Ten dollars a pound! You kidding?”
“For the local, from Rhode Island. From Spain it’s sixteen.”
“My mother used to make it all the time, it was pennies. This was a peasant dish, it wasn’t a fancy—”
“Well, this is cleaned and tenderized or whatever. And everything’s fancy now, you know that.”
“I used to go the Fulton Fish Market, they had it ten, fifteen cents a pound!”
“When, in 1948?”
“In 19 . . . 77. The summer of Son of Sam. Lou Salica had a stand there. He was a bantamweight champ. World champ. Ever heard of him?”
“No. Lou—?”
“Salica: S-A-L-I-C-A. Look him up. He weighed one eighteen. He was only about five five, he weighed one eighteen. Not then. By then he weighed probably one thirty-five, had a little pot belly. You couldn’t meet a nicer guy. He used to sell the galama ten cents a pound, sometimes two pounds fifteen, if he was closing up.”
•
The sky is grey and God is on the breeze.
•
Saturday afternoon straightening up the house, Van Morrison playing. Every few minutes I’m at the window. She went to see her friend Mo in Queens, so she’s coming from the J. Quiet out there for a change. Just the crew by the bodega.
One time a guy from Ohio’s staying with me, Mark, his first trip to New York. Woke up on his first morning, went down to smoke a cigarette on the step. The kids across the street, dealers, had their eye on him. Six in the morning, it’s them and Mark. Finally they sent someone across.
The kid said “What are you doing here?”
Mark said “I’m staying with someone.”
The kid said “This building? What’s his name?”
“Mike.”
The kid thought it over. He said “Short white guy with his hair pushed back?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
When I moved back here from San Francisco, I was looking for a place. My friend Greg gave me three real estate agents. He said “Go to this one because they’re Polish, maybe they find you something in Greenpoint. Go to this one because they’re really great, I’ve dealt with them before. And go to this other one because they’re Italian.”
So I went to the first two, struck out.
Walk into the last place, there’s a guy in a tracksuit reading the Form. “What can I do for ya?”
I said “I’m looking for a place in the neighborhood. But I can only spend a thousand dollars.”
Looks me up and down.
Says “Alright, fill this out.” Hands me a clipboard with an application—three, four pages. All this information, they want. And now he’s behind me, as if he’s looking out the window.
I write “Mike . . . DeCapite,” he says “You don’t have to go crazy, filling that whole thing out.”
Then he says “Now. When can you move?”
I said “No rush. I can stay where I’m at for a month or two.”
He says “No: when can you move, when can you move?”
I said “I can move tomorrow.”
Says “Okay, I’ll pick you up nine o’clock, I’ll show you a place on the South Side in a building with an elevator won’t be no garbage.”
I walked out of there thinking Aah, fuck! Why’d I ever get involved with this guy? There’s no elevators in Williamsburg. Who knows what the hell he means by the South Side? Could be Sheepshead Bay!
Next morning, 9:00, phone rings, he says “You ready?”
I said “Listen, I told you I can only spend a thousand a month.”
He says “It’s nine fifty-seven.”
“Okay.”
He says “You’re Italian, right?”
“Yeah?”
He says “Me too. We never believe anything, even when it drops in our lap.”
I don’t know what my neighbors are cooking—some weekend Dominican dish: every Saturday the hall smells like boiling vinegar. In here, I’ve got eight lamb chops on a broiler pan with garlic and dill, a pot of kale on the stove with garlic and oil and two yams in the oven, and I keep looking out the window, waiting for June to turn the corner. Above the rooftops, the sky is bulging white like a grey balloon.
•
Saturday night in Brooklyn, all the barber shops are busy.
•
We get off the elevator at the Vermeer, coming home from a party. She’s telling me she took ballet and tap when she was a kid. I unlock the door and kind of laugh inwardly at the picture of her doing tap, which becomes a stab of shame as I remember this is a real person. Why not her? I think as she goes into the dark apartment and hangs her coat in the closet.
•
Yogi Berra dies at 90. I didn’t know he was still around. Lou says he met him. Lou was 10 years old. “He talked to everybody. And everybody the same, didn’t matter: the owners, presidents, kids, guys on the street—because that’s how he was.” Berra noticed Lou watching warm-ups from the rail.
“You Italian?” he said.
“Yeah,” Lou said. “Sicilian!”
“Me too,” Berra said.
Lou said “You like lasagna?”
Berra said “I can’t get enough of it!”
Nearly sixty years later, Lou pockets his wallet, closes up the small-valuables locker, and says: “I always wanted to meet him again, years later. See if he remembered this incident. I don’t know why I said that, just came out of me. I always hoped I’d run into him again. Never did.”
•
In the elevator she was bunching her hair in her fist and releasing it.
“Does my hair look crazy?”
“You look great.”
“Because I didn’t put anything in it this morning.”
“You always look great. Forget about your hair.”
She’d stopped listening.
“Does a tiger worry about how it looks? Do you ever think This is a bad hair day for this tiger? No, it’s a tiger no matter—” The bell went ding and she walked off the elevator.
•
Rainy wind announces the season. I stay in bed with her astral self until 7:30, then put on a jacket for the first time in months and make it to the subway, pointing my umbrella every which way like a shield, and zoom over to the Y in time to catch her umbrella coming along 14th Street . . .
After work, we come up the stairs at Essex into a wet mist. Fiddling with her umbrella, she gives me a look.
“I ask you if it’s raining. ‘A little,’ you say. It’s pissing with rain!”
I hold out my hand. Barely a drop.
•
With nowhere to land after work, we’re always looking for something to do. Tonight it’s a gallery on Orchard Street for a show of collages by Genesis P-Orridge. Once I was early for an opening at this same gallery and went for a walk to kill time. I walked past 56 Ludlow, which it occurred to me was the building where the Velvet Underground was born. I stopped on Orchard to look it up on my phone and a guy in a yarmulke sold me a suit. Walked up, said hi, and in fifteen minutes he went from “My father was in the store seventy years” to “Follow me, I’ll give you a card” to “I’ll take up the sleeves and see you Tuesday.” Sammy, he’s famous down there. A master salesman.
•
Halal carts, honey locusts, the sound of a small generator, a van backing up. Traffic moving forward. A few flags.
•
We follow Division past the bottom of Forsyth, through the wet lettuce boxes and broken pallets and under the Manhattan Bridge. Wherever you are in New York, you’re at the heart of it. New York is holographic: every part contains the whole. Up Bowery to Bayard, where the puddles never dry and the garbage trucks never cease. I get a coffee with condensed milk and June gets a bun from a bakery where it’s always three a.m. On a rainslick step I light a cigarette, she grabs me by the collar for a kiss. And we walk up Mulberry through Little Italy and what’s left of the rained-out feast . . .
•
silvergrey sky pouring over the fountain’s edge
•
At St. Mark’s Books, I go up behind her to see what she’s looking at. Of course it’s the most interesting thing on the table. She’s always drawn to the real thing. She has no taste for trash. Unlike me, she avoids it. Why consume something fake or toxic? She has a strong inclination toward self-improvement and none toward self-destruction or self-pity. Again, unlike me.
•
I’m buzzed if she uses the future tense. Any reassurance. It doesn’t have to be “I’ll never leave you.” It can be “I’ll see you in the morning.” That’s how uneasy I am. It could be “Let’s go see that.” If she leaves a bottle of conditioner at my house it’s dizzying. Something anticipatory starts to sparkle in my chest, some chemical reaction. Fizzes up inside me.
•
Up Broadway, Strand is a night market. Verlaine’s out by the dollar books, under the lights, with the moths. People don’t look like that anymore in New York. Ascetic. Interdimensional. Not buying it. For me it’s like there’s Einstein and everybody’s just passing him by on the sidewalk. Seeing him reminds me what’s what. June too: he’s her New York. Tonight someone’s talking to him, he’s half listening, with a cigarette in his mouth. “Don’t ask me,” he’s saying. “I never met the guy.”
At Fifth Avenue, June and I stop to look up at a water tower charred into the sky. Then another goddamn good night at the L.
•
Looking down from the 22nd floor at the soft, seamed street below, a manhole cover embedded in the asphalt and the yellow lane stripes and white crosswalk nearly worn away.
•
Rooftop Manhattan, one in the morning. Her husband’s at work. She said something I’ve never forgotten. We could see the flashes from the Empire State Building, the observation deck. She said she used to sit under the window sometimes watching those flashes up there in the night to feel less alone.
•
Back in that first September, I sat up in the corner of the couch smoking cigarettes. Scenes of her in various positions tumbled inside me like an X-Acto knife in a dryer. I waited for them to blunt their edge. For about a year. Bluewhite train smoke in a deep blue dusk.
•
I was at my locker getting dressed.
“Here, you’re a big jazz fan,” Lou said. “Read this.”
I’m not a big jazz fan, but he once heard me mention Ornette Coleman, and because Lou tends to place the people he knows at the top of their respective fields, it pleases him to think of me as a “top jazz guy.” I took the clipping, which came, as these pieces often did, from the Italian-American Herald, a paper in New Jersey. Lou’s a subscriber.
He said “Jazz was invented by Italians.”
“No kidding!”
“Ever hear of Nick LaRocca?”
“No.”
“Cornet player from New Orleans. Wrote ‘The Tiger Rag.’ Sicilian. Ask him,” he said, indicating Philly on his stool. Philly was pulling on a pair of pants of a color I can’t quite name, somewhere between yellow and pink.
“Ask me what?” Philly said. “Ask me anything, I know everything.”
“Ever hear of Nick LaRocca?” I said.
“No.”
“He knows nothing,” Lou said.
“Would a guy who knows nothing wear these pants?”
I said “You’re claiming jazz now for the Italians?”
“At one time, there were five hundred thousand Italians in New Orleans.”
“Sure,” I said, “look at Cosimo Matassa.”
“That’s right!” he said. “He just died. How about Cosimo Matassa?” he asked Philly.
“I know Cosimo Matassa,” Philly said. “He invented linguine.”
•
THE JUNE AND JANE SHOW
We’re walking home after a dish of pasta on Prince Street, Jane and June and I. With those two stopping at every window, it’s only just faster than standing still. It feels like we’re at least keeping ahead of the turning of the Earth, so we’ll get home eventually.
We float into Washington Square in the dark, past the chess players . . .
JUNE: Parks are my favorite thing. Because everyone belongs. It’s for everybody. Anybody could come here. Doesn’t matter how cool you are, or uncool. Old, young. Anyone can come here and just sit. And not be bothered.
JANE: I always wanted to have a place at that end of the park, one of those townhouses.
MIKE: June has you growing up in one of those houses. She always points it out.
JANE [laughing]: No.
JUNE: Number seven.
JANE: No, I grew up on Ninth Street.
JUNE: You told me you grew up on the park.
JANE: You’re confusing it. Maybe I told you Eleanor Roosevelt.
MIKE: Easy mistake. Just tonight I said we were having dinner with Eleanor Roosevelt.
JUNE: You make it up as you go along, don’t you?
JANE: And Gertrude Stein lived there for a little while.
MIKE: Gertrude Stein was from Oakland.
JANE: She might be from Oakland but she and Alice lived here for a long time before they went to Paris.
MIKE: Really?
JANE: I’m not sure. That could be not true.
Now we’re out of the park and waiting to cross.
JUNE: This is the part I don’t understand. How can you just tell us things? If you don’t know if they’re true.
JANE: Nothing I tell you is true.
JUNE: How can you stand yourself?
JANE: Or ever will be.
JUNE: Knowing you lie, like a rug.
•
Wind—everything thrashing, swaying. Everything riding an ocean of wind.
•
Going over the Williamsburg Bridge on the J through the X-ing of girders and supports: the sky is orange and the river’s mirror-blue and you know there’ll be another winter.
•
A woman with a purple afro gets a running start, drops her board, and rolls past us . . .
•
I was standing in her kitchen about six in the afternoon, looking at the living room windows. The place was empty. The furniture, all the boxes. His stuff too. I slipped a roll of packing tape around my wrist, put a black marker in my pocket. My flip phone vibrated. To someone outside, the apartment would have been a box of late-in-the-day light just then.
Monday after work, rainy night, turned cold later, I went to Bamonte’s—I had a taste for braciole, pork braciole. Dinner was mediocre but it killed the craving. And then I was walking back on Devoe. The rain was stopped, and at the end of the street there was a tree—backlit—just standing there with its branches flung out against an orange mist in a grand statement. For me alone. I was going straight home because I had to work in the morning. Then I thought What the hell’s become of you? Go smoke a bowl and make a pot of coffee and write something and listen to music till three in the morning. Pull an art book off the shelf. Have a fucking thought! Who cares if you’re tired at work tomorrow?
Right away I wanted a cigarette. But forget it, I’m not doing it. It’s been a week.
Last time I quit I didn’t have a smoke for a month, then I went to see my folks, in Cleveland. After four hours I was so tense I bought a pack at the gas station and drove around the suburbs with the windows open, smoking and blasting a bunch of T. Rex songs. They still sounded great. And that first cigarette was one of the great cigarettes. Big winds were blowing the clouds behind the signs for Rite-Aid and Dunkin’ Donuts, which are brighter than God. The profound eternal life-and-death teenage night was up there too. You never get older, not really. You never age inside.
While I was there my mother went in for an emergency triple bypass. That night I saw her in the recovery room. A person never looks quite so vulnerable as she does in a pale blue surgical cap. It’s disturbing. Lying there with a tube down her throat and her tongue swollen to one side, she looked like she’d been hit by a truck. Like in a cartoon, with her tongue stuck out and Xs for eyes. Her first words—I had to lean down to hear, she said “How’s your father?”
Men go on dreaming and pitying themselves while women turn the crank that makes the world go around.
I stuck around to take care of my father. He’d had Parkinson’s for a few years by then. I fixed his meals and saw to his medication. If there was nothing on TCM, I went to the library to get a movie for him.
I knew what to look for. Cagney, Bogie, Edward G. Robinson. I don’t know how many times he asked me to look for Dust Be My Destiny, with John Garfield. Time and again I had to tell him the film was unavailable. And felt as if I was letting him down.
“See if they’ve got Dust Be My Destiny.”
“They won’t have it. That movie’s never been rereleased.”
“Oh, no?” he’d say. Newly disappointed. “See if they’ve got Torrid Zone.”
“They won’t have Torrid Zone. It’s another one of those lost movies.”
“See if they’ve got it.”
“They don’t.”
“Why not? That’s a damn good movie. James Cagney and Ann Sheridan.”
“They don’t have a special section of movies you saw at the Jennings Theater for a nickel when you were fourteen.”
“Well, check anyway.”
One of those first nights, after he was in bed, I snuck over to Walgreens. I wanted some disposable washcloths. You go in there out of the dark—Walgreens—it’s an adjustment, a shift in consciousness. First of all, the place is lit for surgery. It takes a moment to adjust, you’re like an animal that got in there and can’t find its way out. You’re confused by the lights and the things on the shelves—the sports drinks and counterfeit foods—99% of which have nothing to do with your life: the colossal plastic containers of cheese balls and the fabric shavers and Snuggies and neck pillows. They’ve got a wearable sleeping bag! How comfortable does a person have to be? Suburban life is stupefying. Two hundred kinds of toothpaste. Like everything else in this country, it’s only the illusion of choice. Toothpaste or politician: a thousand choices, all of them mediocre. All toxic and differing only by the lies they tell: extra whitening, cavity protection, tartar control/Republican, Democrat, Independent. By that extra twist of mint. The only thing comparable in my life in New York is Bed Bath & Beyond. You go in there for razors and you come out a couple hours and $200 later with no memory of how you got there, or what else you were involved with in your life at that point—or your family or the town you grew up in, or your sexuality, or your name. You’re starting from right now, with two big plastic bags. Back at Walgreens, the lights are buzzing, you go up and down these aisles: you feel really alone among the people who consume this stuff. And you get a sense of the predatory powers massed above you. Obviously if they’re trying to sell you microwavable Beefy Mac & Cheese they mean you harm, right? And you’re the only one there: it’s like everyone else has been wiped out.
“No, I’m walking from Chelsea Market. I went to buy squid.”
“You already bought the squid?”
“Yeah. I’m gonna fry it with parsley and garlic.”
“How much?”
“Ten dollars a pound.”
“Ten dollars a pound! You kidding?”
“For the local, from Rhode Island. From Spain it’s sixteen.”
“My mother used to make it all the time, it was pennies. This was a peasant dish, it wasn’t a fancy—”
“Well, this is cleaned and tenderized or whatever. And everything’s fancy now, you know that.”
“I used to go the Fulton Fish Market, they had it ten, fifteen cents a pound!”
“When, in 1948?”
“In 19 . . . 77. The summer of Son of Sam. Lou Salica had a stand there. He was a bantamweight champ. World champ. Ever heard of him?”
“No. Lou—?”
“Salica: S-A-L-I-C-A. Look him up. He weighed one eighteen. He was only about five five, he weighed one eighteen. Not then. By then he weighed probably one thirty-five, had a little pot belly. You couldn’t meet a nicer guy. He used to sell the galama ten cents a pound, sometimes two pounds fifteen, if he was closing up.”
•
The sky is grey and God is on the breeze.
•
Saturday afternoon straightening up the house, Van Morrison playing. Every few minutes I’m at the window. She went to see her friend Mo in Queens, so she’s coming from the J. Quiet out there for a change. Just the crew by the bodega.
One time a guy from Ohio’s staying with me, Mark, his first trip to New York. Woke up on his first morning, went down to smoke a cigarette on the step. The kids across the street, dealers, had their eye on him. Six in the morning, it’s them and Mark. Finally they sent someone across.
The kid said “What are you doing here?”
Mark said “I’m staying with someone.”
The kid said “This building? What’s his name?”
“Mike.”
The kid thought it over. He said “Short white guy with his hair pushed back?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
When I moved back here from San Francisco, I was looking for a place. My friend Greg gave me three real estate agents. He said “Go to this one because they’re Polish, maybe they find you something in Greenpoint. Go to this one because they’re really great, I’ve dealt with them before. And go to this other one because they’re Italian.”
So I went to the first two, struck out.
Walk into the last place, there’s a guy in a tracksuit reading the Form. “What can I do for ya?”
I said “I’m looking for a place in the neighborhood. But I can only spend a thousand dollars.”
Looks me up and down.
Says “Alright, fill this out.” Hands me a clipboard with an application—three, four pages. All this information, they want. And now he’s behind me, as if he’s looking out the window.
I write “Mike . . . DeCapite,” he says “You don’t have to go crazy, filling that whole thing out.”
Then he says “Now. When can you move?”
I said “No rush. I can stay where I’m at for a month or two.”
He says “No: when can you move, when can you move?”
I said “I can move tomorrow.”
Says “Okay, I’ll pick you up nine o’clock, I’ll show you a place on the South Side in a building with an elevator won’t be no garbage.”
I walked out of there thinking Aah, fuck! Why’d I ever get involved with this guy? There’s no elevators in Williamsburg. Who knows what the hell he means by the South Side? Could be Sheepshead Bay!
Next morning, 9:00, phone rings, he says “You ready?”
I said “Listen, I told you I can only spend a thousand a month.”
He says “It’s nine fifty-seven.”
“Okay.”
He says “You’re Italian, right?”
“Yeah?”
He says “Me too. We never believe anything, even when it drops in our lap.”
I don’t know what my neighbors are cooking—some weekend Dominican dish: every Saturday the hall smells like boiling vinegar. In here, I’ve got eight lamb chops on a broiler pan with garlic and dill, a pot of kale on the stove with garlic and oil and two yams in the oven, and I keep looking out the window, waiting for June to turn the corner. Above the rooftops, the sky is bulging white like a grey balloon.
•
Saturday night in Brooklyn, all the barber shops are busy.
•
We get off the elevator at the Vermeer, coming home from a party. She’s telling me she took ballet and tap when she was a kid. I unlock the door and kind of laugh inwardly at the picture of her doing tap, which becomes a stab of shame as I remember this is a real person. Why not her? I think as she goes into the dark apartment and hangs her coat in the closet.
•
Yogi Berra dies at 90. I didn’t know he was still around. Lou says he met him. Lou was 10 years old. “He talked to everybody. And everybody the same, didn’t matter: the owners, presidents, kids, guys on the street—because that’s how he was.” Berra noticed Lou watching warm-ups from the rail.
“You Italian?” he said.
“Yeah,” Lou said. “Sicilian!”
“Me too,” Berra said.
Lou said “You like lasagna?”
Berra said “I can’t get enough of it!”
Nearly sixty years later, Lou pockets his wallet, closes up the small-valuables locker, and says: “I always wanted to meet him again, years later. See if he remembered this incident. I don’t know why I said that, just came out of me. I always hoped I’d run into him again. Never did.”
•
In the elevator she was bunching her hair in her fist and releasing it.
“Does my hair look crazy?”
“You look great.”
“Because I didn’t put anything in it this morning.”
“You always look great. Forget about your hair.”
She’d stopped listening.
“Does a tiger worry about how it looks? Do you ever think This is a bad hair day for this tiger? No, it’s a tiger no matter—” The bell went ding and she walked off the elevator.
•
Rainy wind announces the season. I stay in bed with her astral self until 7:30, then put on a jacket for the first time in months and make it to the subway, pointing my umbrella every which way like a shield, and zoom over to the Y in time to catch her umbrella coming along 14th Street . . .
After work, we come up the stairs at Essex into a wet mist. Fiddling with her umbrella, she gives me a look.
“I ask you if it’s raining. ‘A little,’ you say. It’s pissing with rain!”
I hold out my hand. Barely a drop.
•
With nowhere to land after work, we’re always looking for something to do. Tonight it’s a gallery on Orchard Street for a show of collages by Genesis P-Orridge. Once I was early for an opening at this same gallery and went for a walk to kill time. I walked past 56 Ludlow, which it occurred to me was the building where the Velvet Underground was born. I stopped on Orchard to look it up on my phone and a guy in a yarmulke sold me a suit. Walked up, said hi, and in fifteen minutes he went from “My father was in the store seventy years” to “Follow me, I’ll give you a card” to “I’ll take up the sleeves and see you Tuesday.” Sammy, he’s famous down there. A master salesman.
•
Halal carts, honey locusts, the sound of a small generator, a van backing up. Traffic moving forward. A few flags.
•
We follow Division past the bottom of Forsyth, through the wet lettuce boxes and broken pallets and under the Manhattan Bridge. Wherever you are in New York, you’re at the heart of it. New York is holographic: every part contains the whole. Up Bowery to Bayard, where the puddles never dry and the garbage trucks never cease. I get a coffee with condensed milk and June gets a bun from a bakery where it’s always three a.m. On a rainslick step I light a cigarette, she grabs me by the collar for a kiss. And we walk up Mulberry through Little Italy and what’s left of the rained-out feast . . .
•
silvergrey sky pouring over the fountain’s edge
•
At St. Mark’s Books, I go up behind her to see what she’s looking at. Of course it’s the most interesting thing on the table. She’s always drawn to the real thing. She has no taste for trash. Unlike me, she avoids it. Why consume something fake or toxic? She has a strong inclination toward self-improvement and none toward self-destruction or self-pity. Again, unlike me.
•
I’m buzzed if she uses the future tense. Any reassurance. It doesn’t have to be “I’ll never leave you.” It can be “I’ll see you in the morning.” That’s how uneasy I am. It could be “Let’s go see that.” If she leaves a bottle of conditioner at my house it’s dizzying. Something anticipatory starts to sparkle in my chest, some chemical reaction. Fizzes up inside me.
•
Up Broadway, Strand is a night market. Verlaine’s out by the dollar books, under the lights, with the moths. People don’t look like that anymore in New York. Ascetic. Interdimensional. Not buying it. For me it’s like there’s Einstein and everybody’s just passing him by on the sidewalk. Seeing him reminds me what’s what. June too: he’s her New York. Tonight someone’s talking to him, he’s half listening, with a cigarette in his mouth. “Don’t ask me,” he’s saying. “I never met the guy.”
At Fifth Avenue, June and I stop to look up at a water tower charred into the sky. Then another goddamn good night at the L.
•
Looking down from the 22nd floor at the soft, seamed street below, a manhole cover embedded in the asphalt and the yellow lane stripes and white crosswalk nearly worn away.
•
Rooftop Manhattan, one in the morning. Her husband’s at work. She said something I’ve never forgotten. We could see the flashes from the Empire State Building, the observation deck. She said she used to sit under the window sometimes watching those flashes up there in the night to feel less alone.
•
Back in that first September, I sat up in the corner of the couch smoking cigarettes. Scenes of her in various positions tumbled inside me like an X-Acto knife in a dryer. I waited for them to blunt their edge. For about a year. Bluewhite train smoke in a deep blue dusk.
•
I was at my locker getting dressed.
“Here, you’re a big jazz fan,” Lou said. “Read this.”
I’m not a big jazz fan, but he once heard me mention Ornette Coleman, and because Lou tends to place the people he knows at the top of their respective fields, it pleases him to think of me as a “top jazz guy.” I took the clipping, which came, as these pieces often did, from the Italian-American Herald, a paper in New Jersey. Lou’s a subscriber.
He said “Jazz was invented by Italians.”
“No kidding!”
“Ever hear of Nick LaRocca?”
“No.”
“Cornet player from New Orleans. Wrote ‘The Tiger Rag.’ Sicilian. Ask him,” he said, indicating Philly on his stool. Philly was pulling on a pair of pants of a color I can’t quite name, somewhere between yellow and pink.
“Ask me what?” Philly said. “Ask me anything, I know everything.”
“Ever hear of Nick LaRocca?” I said.
“No.”
“He knows nothing,” Lou said.
“Would a guy who knows nothing wear these pants?”
I said “You’re claiming jazz now for the Italians?”
“At one time, there were five hundred thousand Italians in New Orleans.”
“Sure,” I said, “look at Cosimo Matassa.”
“That’s right!” he said. “He just died. How about Cosimo Matassa?” he asked Philly.
“I know Cosimo Matassa,” Philly said. “He invented linguine.”
•
THE JUNE AND JANE SHOW
We’re walking home after a dish of pasta on Prince Street, Jane and June and I. With those two stopping at every window, it’s only just faster than standing still. It feels like we’re at least keeping ahead of the turning of the Earth, so we’ll get home eventually.
We float into Washington Square in the dark, past the chess players . . .
JUNE: Parks are my favorite thing. Because everyone belongs. It’s for everybody. Anybody could come here. Doesn’t matter how cool you are, or uncool. Old, young. Anyone can come here and just sit. And not be bothered.
JANE: I always wanted to have a place at that end of the park, one of those townhouses.
MIKE: June has you growing up in one of those houses. She always points it out.
JANE [laughing]: No.
JUNE: Number seven.
JANE: No, I grew up on Ninth Street.
JUNE: You told me you grew up on the park.
JANE: You’re confusing it. Maybe I told you Eleanor Roosevelt.
MIKE: Easy mistake. Just tonight I said we were having dinner with Eleanor Roosevelt.
JUNE: You make it up as you go along, don’t you?
JANE: And Gertrude Stein lived there for a little while.
MIKE: Gertrude Stein was from Oakland.
JANE: She might be from Oakland but she and Alice lived here for a long time before they went to Paris.
MIKE: Really?
JANE: I’m not sure. That could be not true.
Now we’re out of the park and waiting to cross.
JUNE: This is the part I don’t understand. How can you just tell us things? If you don’t know if they’re true.
JANE: Nothing I tell you is true.
JUNE: How can you stand yourself?
JANE: Or ever will be.
JUNE: Knowing you lie, like a rug.
•
Wind—everything thrashing, swaying. Everything riding an ocean of wind.
•
Going over the Williamsburg Bridge on the J through the X-ing of girders and supports: the sky is orange and the river’s mirror-blue and you know there’ll be another winter.
•
A woman with a purple afro gets a running start, drops her board, and rolls past us . . .
•
I was standing in her kitchen about six in the afternoon, looking at the living room windows. The place was empty. The furniture, all the boxes. His stuff too. I slipped a roll of packing tape around my wrist, put a black marker in my pocket. My flip phone vibrated. To someone outside, the apartment would have been a box of late-in-the-day light just then.
Monday after work, rainy night, turned cold later, I went to Bamonte’s—I had a taste for braciole, pork braciole. Dinner was mediocre but it killed the craving. And then I was walking back on Devoe. The rain was stopped, and at the end of the street there was a tree—backlit—just standing there with its branches flung out against an orange mist in a grand statement. For me alone. I was going straight home because I had to work in the morning. Then I thought What the hell’s become of you? Go smoke a bowl and make a pot of coffee and write something and listen to music till three in the morning. Pull an art book off the shelf. Have a fucking thought! Who cares if you’re tired at work tomorrow?
Right away I wanted a cigarette. But forget it, I’m not doing it. It’s been a week.
Last time I quit I didn’t have a smoke for a month, then I went to see my folks, in Cleveland. After four hours I was so tense I bought a pack at the gas station and drove around the suburbs with the windows open, smoking and blasting a bunch of T. Rex songs. They still sounded great. And that first cigarette was one of the great cigarettes. Big winds were blowing the clouds behind the signs for Rite-Aid and Dunkin’ Donuts, which are brighter than God. The profound eternal life-and-death teenage night was up there too. You never get older, not really. You never age inside.
While I was there my mother went in for an emergency triple bypass. That night I saw her in the recovery room. A person never looks quite so vulnerable as she does in a pale blue surgical cap. It’s disturbing. Lying there with a tube down her throat and her tongue swollen to one side, she looked like she’d been hit by a truck. Like in a cartoon, with her tongue stuck out and Xs for eyes. Her first words—I had to lean down to hear, she said “How’s your father?”
Men go on dreaming and pitying themselves while women turn the crank that makes the world go around.
I stuck around to take care of my father. He’d had Parkinson’s for a few years by then. I fixed his meals and saw to his medication. If there was nothing on TCM, I went to the library to get a movie for him.
I knew what to look for. Cagney, Bogie, Edward G. Robinson. I don’t know how many times he asked me to look for Dust Be My Destiny, with John Garfield. Time and again I had to tell him the film was unavailable. And felt as if I was letting him down.
“See if they’ve got Dust Be My Destiny.”
“They won’t have it. That movie’s never been rereleased.”
“Oh, no?” he’d say. Newly disappointed. “See if they’ve got Torrid Zone.”
“They won’t have Torrid Zone. It’s another one of those lost movies.”
“See if they’ve got it.”
“They don’t.”
“Why not? That’s a damn good movie. James Cagney and Ann Sheridan.”
“They don’t have a special section of movies you saw at the Jennings Theater for a nickel when you were fourteen.”
“Well, check anyway.”
One of those first nights, after he was in bed, I snuck over to Walgreens. I wanted some disposable washcloths. You go in there out of the dark—Walgreens—it’s an adjustment, a shift in consciousness. First of all, the place is lit for surgery. It takes a moment to adjust, you’re like an animal that got in there and can’t find its way out. You’re confused by the lights and the things on the shelves—the sports drinks and counterfeit foods—99% of which have nothing to do with your life: the colossal plastic containers of cheese balls and the fabric shavers and Snuggies and neck pillows. They’ve got a wearable sleeping bag! How comfortable does a person have to be? Suburban life is stupefying. Two hundred kinds of toothpaste. Like everything else in this country, it’s only the illusion of choice. Toothpaste or politician: a thousand choices, all of them mediocre. All toxic and differing only by the lies they tell: extra whitening, cavity protection, tartar control/Republican, Democrat, Independent. By that extra twist of mint. The only thing comparable in my life in New York is Bed Bath & Beyond. You go in there for razors and you come out a couple hours and $200 later with no memory of how you got there, or what else you were involved with in your life at that point—or your family or the town you grew up in, or your sexuality, or your name. You’re starting from right now, with two big plastic bags. Back at Walgreens, the lights are buzzing, you go up and down these aisles: you feel really alone among the people who consume this stuff. And you get a sense of the predatory powers massed above you. Obviously if they’re trying to sell you microwavable Beefy Mac & Cheese they mean you harm, right? And you’re the only one there: it’s like everyone else has been wiped out.
