Jacket Weather, page 2
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We’re there about four hours. Then we walk Nile home, and I walk June home in the mist. We wind up under the scaffolding on 16th Street, out of the rain, talking about the prison of being with someone and the release of getting free. She’s starting to imagine it. I recommend a book of Vivian Gornick essays I just read, Approaching Eye Level, about the pleasures and satisfactions of living alone, for a woman especially, and especially in New York City. June’s putting the title in her phone and it’s wet below the scaffold and there’s a lot more to say, so she invites me up.
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So I go up, she gets changed. She makes a pot of tea. We get talking about the different things we’ve been through since the early nineties and how you lose yourself and even good things go stale. We’re at their table under a ceiling fixture—that last-call of every kitchen where you’ve sat up late with people drinking, except I’m not drinking and she’s only had a glass of wine all night. Her husband’s not around. He works in a restaurant, they barely cross paths.
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She gets a text from her friend Steph, who’s just off a tour with her band, Lez Zeppelin. All-girl band doing Zeppelin. Steph’s the Jimmy Page. June’s supposed to meet her at the Cubbyhole, on West 4th. So we walk over.
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Place is packed—we wedge ourselves into the window corner. Steph’s talking about the tour. The whole band quit and she’s auditioning new people. “Don’t Stop Believin’” comes on, loud, and it’s like everyone’s been waiting all night to hear that song. There’s a shift in the room, the crowd pulls together. It’s that opening “Chopsticks” figure: kind of a stairway to the stars. We’re entering the realm of pure imagination. And then half the bar is singing along, whether ironically or nostalgically or because it’s what was playing when The Sopranos went black or it’s just okay to like that song now I don’t know. I’m captivated by its total falsity—its comprehensive pretension—the striving of this suburban jackass with feathered hair to convey some kind of hazy urban fantasy with these counterfeit images: “the midnight train,” “a smoky room,” “the boulevard.” South Detroit? The song seems like it was written by someone who’s never been outside. Don’t stop believin’ in what? Don’t lose what feeling? Its meaninglessness is like the sky: it goes on and on and on and on. This is what’s happened to New York: a bar full of people who brought the suburbs with them, punching the air. June and Steph don’t notice, they’re talking about something else.
Anyway, that stupid song will always remind me of that night.
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Talking about it later, June said “Everything was new. In my marriage I was alone, all the time. I was totally on my own. So that night I felt like I was living. I was myself, and I was hanging out with my friends. I felt single, I felt free, I felt seen. Everything was like a discovery and shiny and new. It was like the windows were wide open in my house. This is where I belonged. In the world.”
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I went out to smoke a cigarette. They could see me through the glass. When I went back in, Steph was at the bar. June said “She thinks you’re cute.” She was still on her first scotch on the rocks, but she was a little lit. “And I agree,” she said, and laughed, and knocked into me.
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Lez Zeppelin had a show coming up in Asbury Park. I told June we should drive down, rent a car, and she said from now on she’s not saying no to anything. I walked her back home in the rain. She slid on the wet sidewalk, I caught her arm. When I got down to the L platform it was 3:30. First time that’s happened in a while.
•
Locker room, the guys are talking about La Maganette.
Philly points at Hector: “He was there! Every Wednesday!”
Hector’s a trim old guy with a full head of white hair and every hair in place, still wears a gold chain. Keeps to himself. Looks like he knows a few sweet secrets.
“The King of the Mambo!”
Hector gets himself turned around in his white socks and A-shirt and gives me a nod—he’s forced to admit it. “They had a Latin dance night,” he says.
“And they had a great band,” Philly says. “Charanga! Orquesta Broadway.”
Hector agrees.
“Where was it?”
“Fiftieth and Third,” Lou puts in.
“Mob joint?”
“They all were.”
“Just a club, or restaurant too?”
“Italian restaurant upstairs,” Lou says. “Downstairs they had dancing.”
“It was different every night,” Philly says. “Friday was soul dance night. Jake LaMotta used to sit at the bar with a cowboy hat.”
“Sit upstairs, in a cowboy hat, with a cigar,” Lou confirms. “He’s still alive, Jake LaMotta. All the shots he took. Still got all his marbles. Born July 10, 1922. Married seven times.”
“You met him on Raging Bull?”
Lou has had bit parts in half a dozen mob movies.
“I knew him before. From Times Square, the Metropole, a strip club, he’s the bouncer, I used to go see him. Mean! Mean guy. Didn’t want nothing to do with nobody, never smiled. Then later I saw him on Raging Bull. He still owes me fifty bucks, from a card game.”
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Monday I’m outside One Time Warner, at Columbus Circle, late rush hour, leaning on a post. June does events up there. This afternoon she called to ask if I want to walk her home from work, so I rode the train from Brooklyn. People pouring out of the building, I’m wondering what I’m looking at here. Riding it. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: something in us wants action. No matter the danger, no matter the trouble, uproar, or damage. The imp on his throne in the back of your mind, he’s always setting you up, putting things in motion. You’re telling yourself there’s nothing to this, it’s two old friends. The imp fidgets. He doesn’t care that you’ve sworn off entanglements and reclaimed your precious time, he’s bored with your maxims and regimens—he wants a story. Right now I’m just trying to be here, I’m scanning the people—everything takes so much longer than you imagine and then wham, here she is: bright eyes, big smile, dressed for the corporate tower. She takes me back upstairs to show me where she works—I’m walking behind her, watching those Rockette legs . . .
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And then we’re walking down Ninth Avenue, through Hell’s Kitchen—part neighborhood, part hallway—people going home, picking up dry cleaning, heading out, all part of what the streets let go of, late in the day. With the heat. Over to Eighth, getting reacquainted, sky bright, streets in shadow, realizing we don’t know that much about each other, leaves streaming on the breeze, JESUS SAVES, playground full of kids, the Actors’ Temple, woman on a stoop with a plastic tumbler. I was hearing June’s story: growing up in Canarsie, yanked out to the island at 15, back and forth between a hospital job and a job at the Ritz, and her lucky break falling under Jane’s notice. “We lived on coke and cigarettes and lots of black coffee, we were working with every hot band, and for five minutes we owned New York.” She says if Jane hadn’t taken her in she’d have wound up turning tricks or dead.
We stopped at Uncle Nick’s near the main post office. For some reason I wasn’t hungry, I asked the guy for a carton. I carried it five blocks with us before I put it in the trash. Then we made our way down through Chelsea toward the L, trying to make it last.
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So, to recap. I met them on a Friday. June shows up saying she’s done with marriage, done with romance, from here on out she’s on her own. I felt the same. I, in fact, was in the middle of writing a manifesto about the quiet thrills of solitude. So we stayed up till three in the morning talking about that, self-reliance, keeping the hell out of relationships. Monday she called and asked if I wanted to walk her home from work. Columbus Circle to 14th Street, 45 blocks. So we did that. And then I had to hurry home and finish my manifesto.
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For three days, I didn’t eat, didn’t sleep—I was living on the qui vive, boys. Storms that week, and by night I lay there doing the mental equivalent of shallow breathing, then got up and wandered from room to room naked and starving with a towel around my waist, smoking cigarettes and talking to myself like King Lear, while lightning flashed and thunder cracked and the rain ran off the awnings of the bodegas. All in all, a nervous week.
•
I wrote to my friend Tere—out in San Francisco—who’d counseled me in all weathers.
“I feel crazy. Dizzy, frightened, strange. I can’t tell if I’m making all this happen or if I’m kidding myself that I have any control at all. It’s like a tab of acid coming on. Or like being drafted. I don’t know if I can handle this, T. Overnight, she’s my only way to breathe. Why do we do this?”
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There must have been a time when it was possible to see this as the renewal of a friendship. There must have been a day when I was just a little buzzed and happy. Before the—you know—agonizing transformation began. But I don’t remember it.
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Philly came in this morning in yellow pants and a Hawaiian shirt with the papers under his arm.
“Dja hear the news, Patsy? Frank Sinatra’s still dead!”
He asked what I was listening to. I told him Tappa Zukie.
“Tryna get the spring back in my step,” I said.
He said “Who is it?”
“Tapper Zukie.”
The name didn’t register.
“Reggae guy. Dub.”
He said “I once took a girl to the Reggae Lounge.”
“On Canal Street.”
“I took a woman there named Madeline Silver. She was beautiful! She had beautiful red hair, she had”—he pointed at his cheekbones—“little freckles! Came from the richest Jews in Brooklyn, but she quit them! They disowned her. She was a real lefty. Took her to the Reggae Lounge. Every song sounded the same. I went to the DJ, I said ‘Don’t you got any James Brown?’ He said ‘No, we don’t do that here.’ I took her once to Fat Tuesday to see Larry Harlow. Remember him? Latin bandleader. They called him El Judio Maravilloso.”
“The Marvelous Jew.”
“The Wonderful Jew, yeah. He was great. Anyway, took Madeline Silver to see him. Then after, I walked her through the park, tried to kiss her, she said ‘No, that’s not gonna happen. We’re just friends.’ So that was the end of that story. I never saw her again. And years later, I went to a party in Brooklyn, I ran into one of her friends, and what do you think happened?”
“She died,” I said.
“I asked this woman what ever happened to Madeline Silver, she said ‘You didn’t hear? She killed herself.’ I couldn’t believe it. She had everything to live for! I couldn’t believe it. She lived in those buildings at Prince and Sixth Avenue with the benches out front? She lived on the top floor. I still think about her every time I walk past there.”
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And here comes another chorus of rain. Lightning, voices, laughter. I roll around, I get up and move across the windows in a blanket like some crazy hermit. Whatever room I go into, this thing is true. The rain trickles out, it’s over. And here it comes again.
•
To Tere: “I told myself I wouldn’t write to June today unless I heard from her, but finally I wrote anyway, just to ask how she was doing, about 1:00. Like a drunk who tells himself he’s okay because he hangs on till 1 p.m. before he hustles down to the corner for a half pint of Popov.”
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No solid food since the few smelts I ate at Uncle Nick’s. Day and night I feel like throwing up. It’s Soup Week, here at Mike’s House of Insomnia. In the cafeteria at work, I manage to get down a little broth. Just to settle my stomach. I’m leaving all that behind anyway, the physical realm. Transmuting to pure awareness.
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Thursday she calls, says she needs to talk to me. She meets me at a reading at Telephone Bar and when it’s over we go up the street to Little Poland. I order soup.
Guess what?
So does she.
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I still see her poking cautiously into the back room at Telephone Bar, trying to slip in unnoticed, shy about intruding.
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In a booth at Little Poland, she says “I have to talk to you. I can’t let myself get involved. I’ve got too much going on: I have to sell my apartment, I have to separate from my husband and get a divorce, and I need for it to be clean. I don’t want to stop seeing you. I’ve always had a thing for you—twenty years ago I had a thing for you. I was nervous to be around you because you’re a writer, I just thought you’re so smart, you were the coolest thing, but you were married. Now I’m getting divorced, I need to be there for my divorce. I need to feel it and go through it, and I need to take my heart back and have my own life again.”
“Maybe someday” would be easy to say, but she doesn’t say it. For everyone’s sake she doesn’t say it.
She says “I don’t know who I am anymore, I need to figure that out. I don’t want to stop seeing you—I’m so excited I feel like I’m sixteen. Every morning I go out of my way to walk past the Y, hoping I catch a glimpse of you. I hate the thought of not seeing you. But I realize it might be too hard. I’m being very honest with you. If we have to stop seeing each other, I totally understand.”
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And that’s that. She said it, I listened, and now we want dessert. We walk down to Veselka. A little relieved, a little jumpy, as if we’ve disabled an alarm.
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Veselka’s packed, we sit at the counter. She’s talking about growing up. She hated her parents for taking her out of Brooklyn. “I hated everything about Long Island—the trees, the sky, the grass. I just never fit in.” The sound of the crickets was the sound of all of that. She lay awake listening to them and then dreamed about escaping with her kid brother in the family car. Her father was a hard case, her mother wanted to keep the peace. They were Old World people—Jews who escaped Germany and Poland: June was a mystery to them. As a teenager, she started coming into the city with five bucks in her pocket—round trip on the Long Island Rail Road, the subway, and a slice—and going to the Palladium.
“How’d you get in?”
“The way it started was it was pissing with rain, and I was with Merri, we were going to see Hot Tuna at the Palladium. Because that’s all I listened to growing up in Brooklyn was Hot Tuna. And we didn’t have any money for tickets, and Merri said ‘What are we gonna do?’ So I said ‘Leave it to me.’ And we were at the back door just standing there in the rain, and Lisa Robinson was there, and all the writers and people who were on the guest list and friends of the band—all the cool people were there, everyone I wanted to be. That’s all I wanted, was to be one of the cool people. And everyone went through until it was just me and Merri. And the guy at the rope said ‘What do you guys want?’ Because we were kids! And I said ‘To get out of the rain?’ And he let us in. And we said ‘Can we stay for the show?’ and he said ‘Yeah, gahead.’ And it became our thing—we kept coming back after that! We were just these two girls by ourselves, and so these ushers sort of took us under their wing and looked out for us. We were like the honorary—like mascots, or pets! And we didn’t have to do, you know, sexual— We weren’t groupies, we just wanted to see music. And after years of this, we became very brazen and just said ‘Hi!’ and walked right in.”
•
“When Merri and I were listening to Hot Tuna, I had the bright idea, Let’s go to their record company.”
“What, looking for them?”
“Yes, Michael. That’s how naive I was. I thought they’ll—”
“They’ll just be sitting around. Playing cards, watching Green Acres. ‘Whatta you guys wanna eat?’”
“Yes, I thought they’ll be there, or we can get some pictures and stuff. We never made it past the receptionist, who was astonished. ‘Can I help you?’ ‘We’re here for Hot Tuna, please.’”
“‘Go right up!’”
“‘Well they’re not here!’ Can you imagine?”
“I like the idea they’re always together. Like the Fantastic Four.”
“I was so dumb. I can’t tell you how long before I realized that when you heard a song on the radio, the band wasn’t there playing it live.”
“No.”
“Yes, Michael. I was really dumb.”
“But you had records at home. You must’ve known a DJ was spinning records.”
“I believed what I saw on TV. The band was always there together in the studio. I believed everything and everyone. It’s a miracle I was never killed. I got into every car, I hitchhiked—and I was always the ringleader. I was always the one who said ‘Let’s hitchhike to the beach’ or ‘Let’s hitch to King’s Plaza.’ And we did!”
•
First thing out of school she took a bus to California. This is the seventies. Picture it in Instamatic prints spilling out of a Fotomat envelope. She got off the bus in LA, a guy on a motorcycle followed her along the curb, and she got on.
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The place was clattering all around us. While she was talking, my eyes were on the grill and its steel backsplash . . . and the steel hood above the griddle . . . and an open flat of eggs . . . and the stacks of plates . . . the white bowls and mugs stacked up—that heavy ceramic . . . and it all had this glow, like we were in the past. After the past few days, everything was illuminated by relief, and gratitude. Isn’t the past just the present, minus the uncertainty? Now minus fear.
•
“Why LA?”
“I wanted to go to San Francisco and I thought Well, I’ll stop in LA first.”
