Jacket Weather, page 6
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Humid air blowing up the subway stairs smells like the pachyderm house at the zoo.
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Walked you to the subway, went home and waited for your call.
Now it’s just me in here, with a notebook.
But writing to myself seems like a step in the wrong direction. Toward myself, away from us.
Something happened in there tonight. Right? Something more. Like now there was nothing below us. Or there was more to it than just you and me on a bed.
•
Saturday morning the guys are getting dressed, they’re talking about music. Manny recalls the Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You.”
“Written by Harry Warren,” Lou says. He stayed out of it until credit was due to an Italian. “Born Salvatore Guaragna, 1893. From Coney Island.”
Philly says “I remember the first time I heard it! You remember those trucks they used to park in the street with the rides, for the kids? It was playing on one of the rides. This was 1958, ’59—Mikey wasn’t even born yet. I saw the Flamingos at one of the Alan Freed shows.”
Saul, who’s tall and glum and usually silent, speaks up from the next row. His voice comes over the lockers. “The Christmas Jubilee? With Jackie Wilson?”
Philly goes to the end of the row to answer him. “I saw the Flamingos at the Easter Jubilee at the Brooklyn Paramount.” He comes back saying “But I saw Jackie Wilson at the Brooklyn Fox. Man, he was so great—he had that song ‘You Better Know It.’ He was better than anybody.”
“Mr. Perpetual Motion,” Lou supplies.
“No, Mr. Excitement.”
Saul, over the lockers: “At the Labor Day show? I was there.”
Philly says “It was Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers, the Elegants had ‘Little Star’—”
Saul: “Bo Diddley!”
“Four in the morning, I met the guys on the block and we walked there. Thirteen years old. And we stood on line till they opened the doors at nine forty-five.”
I said “You and Saul were on the same line.”
“I saw Saul! He was only this big, then.”
“That’s right,” comes the voice. “We argued about Eisenhower. Philly was just about to vote for Nixon.”
“That’s right!” Philly says. “And Saul was a Commie even then.”
•
Saturday afternoon at the Vermeer, reading on the bed. I keep looking up from the book to the outside wall, with its window reflecting water towers and rooftops and sky. A view like an old linen postcard. Read another page or two. Back to that window, and those cutouts climbing against the sky in jumbled reds, blonds, and browns, doubled in the glass, no weight, no mass, no movement. Pigeons.
•
Before she left here last night, she sat on my leg at the table and I took a picture of us with her phone. Today she sent it. And although she was here two nights till midnight, and yesterday we were together all day, the picture’s a surprise, like a photo from when you were young. That transcendent glow. The way she’s looking at me. That she’d want a picture. That she’d send it. Sometimes, it seems improbable that she should say my name. I guess you spend so much time thinking about something, you’re startled when there’s evidence of it in the world.
•
One morning I was reading in bed, June was still asleep.
“Hear the birds?” I said.
Pretty soon there was a little smile on her face. It was the incipient smile of figures in religious paintings and children’s drawings.
She had a feeling for birds. We’d wake up in the morning and she’d say “Ohh. Do you hear him? He’s back.” The sound made her aware of another dimension. Like opening a window, or stepping outside. Unlocked the wider world, or a more complex worldview. One that included nature in the city.
That ohh was something that just escaped her. As if she remembered something she forgot to do, or a life she forgot to lead.
A few days before, in the subway, I saw a white bar of sunlight on the wall, shot in from above. You know, it’s only there at a certain time of day. It’s there on the wall, this unremarked fact.
Sitting up in bed, I thought maybe the birds were for her what that patch of sunlight was for me. Information from elsewhere, like the breeze.
•
Back in our second month, I’m telling Tere: “So far I’ve dropped fifteen pounds. Back to my fighting weight of one thirty. For burning calories, there’s nothing like romantic distress. Round-the-clock mental activity. Better than cardio. She keeps saying ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen.’ Imagine hearing that from your lawyer. Or surgeon. Consumed as I am with her past and our future—anything but right now—I’m a furnace of mental activity.”
•
She has an event tonight, so for lunch we meet halfway at a diner on Seventh Ave. Omelette for her, sardines on rye for me. Greek place with Spanish staff. LA PARISIENNE RESTAURANT / STEAKS CHOPS & SEAFOOD / EST.
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On a warm afternoon an overcast sky in the shine on the floor . . .
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Across from me on the L, two girls were trading a nod. Doing the statue. You don’t see it much anymore. One of them was holding her hands rigid as though she got her nails done last night and forgot to relax. The other—wearing a huge white flower in her hair like a dahlia that fluttered slightly as though with the speed of the train, as though she were in timelapse—was trying to drink a Pepsi but too busy dreaming to get the bottle to her mouth or tilt it sufficiently when she did. Eyes closed, she lifted it to her cheek for a minute or two, and then got it to her mouth and kept it there for about three stops, the Pepsi sloshing around in the bottom of the bottle, until her face creased in irritation and she opened her eyes. Slowly she turned to locate her companion, who’d reared back and was gazing at her, appalled, and whose eyes now settled shut, on the downswing of the see-saw of consciousness they shared.
Reminded me of Jane talking about Nico the other night.
“You were doing her press?”
“No, I was trying to manage her! Musta been through John Cale, when I was with John. A few years before she died.”
“She must’ve been in pretty bad shape already by then.”
“Every morning she called me, woke me up, saying ‘Jaaaaaaane, it’s Niiiico—’”
“In case you don’t recognize the voice.”
“‘Jaaaaaaaane, I vass at the baaaaaaaaaaar all niiiiight, and this man kept coming ooooover to my stooooooool. And in the mooorning he stole my booooooooooots. And Jaaaaaane, I had all my money in my boooooooots, Jaaaane.’ Every morning the same story, with the man and the stool and the boots.”
“You had to know what you were letting yourself in for, no?”
“Well, she told me she was trying to get clean and she was on methadone . . . Which was true, but she was also on smack. That’s the part she didn’t tell me.”
“Yeah.”
“‘Jaaaaaane, I don’t know how I’ll get hooooome.’ Because she was living with me. ‘Jaaaaaaane, he stole my booooooots, I need moooooney!’ It was a nightmare.”
•
We’re at Film Forum waiting for a movie to start.
June is saying “When I was in my twenties I went to every movie. It was so exciting.”
Two minutes ago I was telling her we should come see Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy here in a few weeks, and all about the beauty of those films. Maybe it was two minutes. Now they’re running a trailer for them.
She says “We should see this.”
I can tell she’s not connecting it with the films I just told her about. She doesn’t listen to half of what I say—I’m always telling her about something.
She says “I’d really like to see this, Bun.”
“This is what I was just telling you about.”
She’s looking at me.
She says “Well I want to see it too. Not just you.”
Before it starts, she puts on her glasses. She sits straight up with her face in profile reflecting the screen, both feet on the floor, both hands holding the purse on her lap, chin raised, watching with the perfect attention of a dreamer, so that I can see in her that part of each of us that’s reverential to narrative: here for a story, here for the show.
•
One night we were sitting on the rocks at the end of Grand Street, by the old Domino Sugar factory. The East River was sliding by, slapping up on the rocks in the wake of party boats. She said “No one’s ever been this nice to me. Ever.”
Across the water, cameras were flashing on top of the Empire State Building.
She said “Maybe some rich person will come along on Sunday and buy the place so we can be together whenever we want.”
•
And what about these guys she got off the bus with in Santa Cruz? They got hold of some acid. What went on there?
•
Joe waves me over from a stationary bike. Not Father Joe—this Joe’s an artist, a painter, teaches at Bard. Within moments, somehow, we’re talking about food.
He says “I tried what Lou does with the aglio olio—”
“What’s that?”
“You keep the water you boiled it in.”
“I was doing that with the cacio e pepe. You use very little water and the water gets white, with the starch. And the starch helps the cheese stick to the pasta.”
“Yeah, I didn’t get it quite right. There must be a trick to it. I gotta ask him.”
“You’ll get it. There’s always something.”
He says “I’m still making adjustments to my mother’s gravy. I only make it once or twice a year.”
“With the meat, I cook the sauce in the oven. In a roasting pan. So it doesn’t stick.”
“Yeah?”
“You know the black enamel roasting pan? I brown the meat and lay it in there—the sausage, the spare ribs, whatever I’m using—braciole—and pour the sauce over. You cook it three hours, you don’t have to stir it.”
“Really,” he says. “I gotta try that.”
“All I heard when I was a kid—my old man: ‘Stir the sauce, while you’re up.’”
“Right. My mother. And you’d dip a crust of bread, while you were there.”
“Right. So that’s my innovation, the oven. That’s my addition to the—y’know. To the literature for pasta. I only make it a few times a year, with the meat.”
“I make it Christmas,” he says.
“Alright,” I tell him. “I’m going to Faicco’s. I got June’s brother coming over for his birthday.”
“What’re you making?”
“Pork chops with cherry peppers.”
He okays that and keeps pedaling.
•
That coppery grey near the bottom of the sky . . . the color of a headache . . . where Broadway runs through the canyon of the buildings into forever . . .
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O.K. UNIFORM CO. INC.EST. 1938
253 CHURCH ST.212-
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June takes a break from packing, she’s on the phone with Jane. Every year she works a big festival in Cannes. Not the film festival. This one’s for corporate types who want to stay at Hotel du Cap so they can feel like movie stars. June’s on the bed, slumped against the wall, chewing gum, blowing bubbles. She’s killing time. It’s one of these New York conversations you can’t tell if she’s bored or fascinated. It’s a little of both. Bored fascination. Indifferent to the story, relishing the details. Jane’s been cleaning out her closets.
“But wait a minute,” June says. “The stuff you’re finding, is it nice, or is it caca?”
Later she hands me the phone.
Jane says “And what are you going to be doing while your honey’s away? Call me, I’ll be right here.”
“And you too. I’ll cook you dinner. You shouldn’t feel abandoned.”
“I won’t,” she moans, as though sobbing.
“I’ll call you this week.”
“And you don’t have to cook, we can go out.”
“Sure.”
“And we can go somewhere cheap and cheerful, you know, it doesn’t have to be somewhere fancy-dancy.”
•
June’s in France, so Jane and I go for a walk to get dinner. At West Fourth and Bank there’s a new hamburger place, a retro soda fountain with a marble counter and a tiled floor. Type of place you’d go for a black cow, or a ginger fizz. Every detail’s perfect: the pressed-tin ceiling, the chrome fixtures, Hamilton’s Luncheonette in 1940s cursive backward on the glass: it’s like an art installation. The whole Village is now a museum of itself. But Jane’s looking around, she remembers the room.
She says “Timothy Leary used to have this as a place, um. Where you could come—like if you were high? And you could lie down, there were mattresses, and candles, and there’s quiet music, and it’s very soothing, and Timothy Leary’s going around in a white robe, making sure you’re okay . . .”
“Like an opium den but for acid.”
“But where you feel safe, and there’s nothing scary.”
“You came here to trip?”
“I think I did press for it for two weeks before the police shut it down.”
While we’re eating, I ask her “How do you do press for an illicit business?”
“It wasn’t easy. You’d put the word out underground.”
“Is that what you did with Woodstock?”
“Yeah.”
“How, though?”
“Well. First of all, the newspapers didn’t cover rock and roll. They did classical music and opera. And occasionally someone like Frank Sinatra or Doris Day or these old farts. But I had my list. I hadda read everything, every newspaper, every magazine, every one-page mimeograph from all over the country. And, um. I came up with about. I dunno. Three thousand names, on a list.”
“List of who?”
“Of anyone who was doing anything to rock the system, anybody who ever, y’know, said anything progressive or said anything sympathetic about the counterculture. So for Woodstock, we sent out three thousand pieces of mail every night.”
“Every night?”
“Every single night a different press release, for three months. We sat in the office after six o’clock, and we were usually there at three in the morning, because we had to address everything by hand. All night, addressing envelopes, stuffing envelopes, licking envelopes, stamping envelopes to get it to the post office.”
“Seems like it worked out pretty well. What’d you get, half a million people?”
She burps and says “Pig!”
“Very nice,” I hear June say.
Jane goes into her purse for a compact and reapplies her lipstick with a defiant flourish.
“Why does June disapprove of your doing that at the table?”
“She’s very bossy, your girlfriend.”
I can hear June: “One might consider using the restroom for something so personal. It’s not nice.”
Jane drops the compact in her purse. “Is my lipstick fucked up?”
“Perfect. You look like Klaus Nomi.”
“That’s what I was going for.”
“What is that color?”
“Ugly Red.”
•
In the parking lot of the Long Island City Costco at dusk, an old woman swaddled in a pink-and-blue sari is sitting on the tailgate of an SUV eating a peach and paying no mind while a young woman fits a pair of Day-Glo sneakers on her feet, fresh out of the box.
•
She was away for work, but I was going to her place anyway, walking up Seventh Avenue. It was late in the day, nearly August, and block by block something in the light intensified, as though the world were trying to tell its secret, or as though everything meant more and more itself, verging on some sort of orgasm of wordless meaning, its best self, its absolute, and when I stopped for traffic at the corner of 12th Street that moment came—it came pouring in between the buildings with the light and the taxis on 12th Street, the day’s exact climax, the moment when it meant something bigger than itself, something more than here, like God, or something more than now, like history, and I was there to see it and paying attention: I saw it happen.
And then I walked on.
I stopped into Westside Market and bought two cans of minced clams. Upstairs, I put a pot of water on the stove for pasta. When June and I took a trip to San Francisco—this was within our first few years together—I picked up a CD of Gene Clark’s White Light demos, so I put that on. I set the big pan on the stove and drew a few loops of olive oil in it. I moved around the narrow kitchen, flicking shallot skin into the clean white sink; smashing garlic; opening drawers; turning a flame up or down; draining the milky clam juice into the pan while reserving the meat; measuring white wine; chopping parsley as the water increased its pitch, came to peak, and settled into a boil; dropping in a sheaf of linguine. When the pasta was drained, I tilted it from the colander into the pan and tossed it with the clams. I let it sit while I washed the pot and pan and put them in the rack. Then I fixed myself a shallow bowl and took it to the table by her big window. Down the hall, someone was practicing scales on a piano. There was still some light in the sky.
Sun orange below the bridges. That’s how you know it’s August: sun orange below the bridges at seven a.m., the way it lays itself on the streets. Now it commingles with the white fuselage of a Continental 737. I’m waiting on an early flight to Cleveland. My usual early-August trip.
Meanwhile, the usual asshole’s on his phone, talking about his territory. A jet backing out, a luggage truck circling by, people moving past the glass toward the waiting area.
•
When I got to the airport I sent my stuff through the machine, phone and keys and coins. In the bin, right? But these new scanners you can’t have anything in your pockets, metal or not. So I had to step out and send my wallet through, try again. TSA woman says “What’s in your back pocket?” I reach for my bandanna—pull out a pair of panties.
Black lace panties with a little white pearl attached.
Which I then have to hold above my head. In the glass cylinder. Like I’m under the mistletoe. While the scanner goes around.
