Crying

                                                (for Robert Frost)

She cries because of you, each word, a brick piled upon her back, building a smoke stack of passion, the fumes of which she struggles to contain, under the illusion that each verse brings her comfort, like an old dilapidated mansion she crawls into during the most bitter storms.

She carries you to bed, whispering with you the way a child might nightly prayers, pondering over the meaning of each phrase, worrying over those she doesn’t yet completely understand, your words dropped into her head like coins, her mind a wishing well of pale dreams you’ve created in her, dreams too unrealistic to ever come true. She believes the promise of each misguided rime, her fingers caressing your poems, her thin lips repeating them over until they dance on the bedsheets like lively little pixies poking fun, her shaky fingers turning each page until she drops off, gaze still glazed with your visions that have become her visions, and then dreams, although later, when I pick your book up off her sleeping chest and kills her brow, I find there, the deepest of frowns.

In search of dry land

                                                                                               June 29, 1982

  

Currents of rain sweep before me as if my world was the deck of an ancient ship, with me as an untrusting sailor, scared I might fall off the edge at any moment.

The street like a cloud covered sea has become a gray mass of asphalt liquid, dark drops dripping silver in the sunlight, then smeared again, streaming out of elbow drain pipes in search of lower ground.

My window above our bed frames the gray shapes of Brillo clouds, like the brows of a dark stranger staring down, frowning over this gray city in which I live.

You stir in the bed beside me, squinting at the light despite it not being bright, then reach up, draw the shade and laugh with the chilly discomfort by little world creates; we, floating on a life raft rather than a sea-worthy ship; this sea ready to consume us whether we are ready or not, rocking on the rough water that is fed constantly by small tributaries over which we have no control, the drain pipes, the dripping trees, the small indignities we used to celebrate early on, but now dread for fear of drowning, which I still feel flowing through me while you seek drier ground, like Odysseus who needs to find a place where an oar might be mistaken for a plow.

I need for you to celebrate Spring, appreciate the slow greening under that stormy grey, and again enjoy the dripping gutters, the drain's groan, our gaze out the window at the melancholy spread of dawn.

But you are distracted, and now you listen only to the swish of tires, of cars rushing down the road, wondering after them, and where they go, wandering with them even in your dreams, so that day by day the Odysseus in you fades and Telemachus grows, and I am left stranded on this island, this raft in this rough sea to appreciate these passing storm clouds alone.

Something said, something unsaid.

 04-13-80

I sit across the table from her in the college cafeteria trying to keep from saying anything, while knowing I should.

It is like pulling my own nails out trying not to hurt her even though people tell me the most horrible things about her.

When I turn away, I feel her angry stare stabbing me between my shoulder blades.

I just grip the Styrofoam cup, feeling the warmth of the coffee easing into my sweaty palms.

When I glance at her in the reflection of the window overlooking the Science building, I see her face, and the swell of her breasts rising and falling in her tank top as if she is crying, although we both know she’s not.

Her fingers crawl across the table towards me like something with a life of their own, crab-like, clutching, with a grip I ache to avoid.

She mumbles about writing, but she means something else.

Every conversation she has with a man is always about something else, dressed up whatever the man is interested in, like music, or art, or in my case, writing, as if she sees us as a series of Ken dolls from the Barbie collection, she dresses up the way she wants.

The stories people say about her don’t always make sense, not quite horror tales, but a mixture of bizarre requests, other men trailing behind her as if drawn on a string.

Finally, I look at her, and see her looking at me, a manic stare mixed with admiration.

I’m the older man in his crowd, the boy who came to college a decade late after having live a full if strange life of my own in that time period. She looks at me the way she and other girls look at the professors, pretending they need our guidance, when what she wants is something else.

“Maybe we can do something later?” she says in a squeaky voice that makes me want to find a can of motor oil.

“Later?”

“Oh, not today, I know you’re busy, but maybe later in the week,” she says.

Do something, I think, and curse myself for contemplating it rather than leaping in with arms, legs feet and other parts of my anatomy.

At 29, I’m as horny as I was as 17, and yet I’m not here at college to pick up children like this, regardless of how savvy people tell me she is.

I spent years working with a bar band doing just that, and after a while, that gets old.

I ask her if she knows how old I am, she tells me it doesn’t matter, and when I tell her anyway, her pupils dilate, and I realize I’ve made a mistake.

“So, can we do something?" she ask, more urgent now, she hearing some cry of distant hounds, but sees me as the hound she aches to actually catch her, perhaps just long enough for her to attach a string and I can stumble along behind her, the first or last in the line of men through whose noses the string already runs.

I tell her I’m late for class; she offers to walk with me, and won’t accept my refusal, her fingers finally clinging to my arm as we both rise and make our way through the maze of tables to the hall, and then out the door and down the stairs into the cool air where I feel anything but cool.

It takes all my strength to detach myself from those fingers, and still more from the gaze that pretends to be hurt, and from the urge I have to not detach at all, needing to give in, let it happen, to go with her to whatever place she has in mind to do whatever that something she wants me to do. And when I finally convince her that we can’t do it now, and must do it later, I feel her intense gaze against my back as I hurry down the path to a class, I know I will not be able to focus on, wondering just when later will be, and about the something said, and the something unsaid.

Dream Bridge

                         

1983

I cross this bridge even in my dreams, even during those two years it took them to rebuild it after a half century or more of neglect, this span of steel, asphalt and concrete that connects the place I chose to live with my ancestors who lived just across it on the other side, a haunted river flowing between us, shared in memory by all of us, as if all this was meant to be.

I knew almost nothing about them only the stories my mother used to tell, some of which she got from her mother, about how they all once lived in Garfield, and Lodi, and how like the old Bowery Boys movies grew up shoulder to shoulder with families that were unrelated then, but later became entwined by marriage and business, and how they all wandered down from Passaic Street on their side to fish in a river now too polluted now except for the homeless men who live in the woods behind Holy Rosary Church, and how all those surviving markers I recognize going over to that side were the icons of their lives, and how the house my great grandmother owned and in which my immediately family lived, stood at the crest of the hill where existed almost to the day I was born, torn down to make way for a Catholic School across from a street lined with factories and Mills which became like ancient ruins for a time, and taken over by the owners of Two Guys who built a store near them, and in which I eventually worked for at time.

This bridge ripped up to its ribs to expose its rusting steel with nothing but brown surging water beneath, our side bequeathed the rats and roaches and junk cars, with chemical plant factories spewing green liquid down into the water from concrete pipes, while dead fish float at the bridge's feet, low water showing its roots like rotting teeth-- a few web-backed carp struggling at the foot of reeds, scavenging the remains of their bretheran, bones of both rising with the morning froth as barefooted children wade across in their rush to school.

This bridge I need to exist in whole so I can keep connected with that side of memories I remember only through the memory of my mother and grandmother, made real that week I brought my mother north for the holidays before they tore the bridge up, and she pointed out what she remembered there, the theater turned into a warehouse, the bank turned into an auto store, the gas station still a gas station though no longer with 10 cents a gallon gas, and those things still the same, the polish stores, the post office, the rail line from Hoboken to Bergen County passing over with a schedule still regular enough to predict, the sewing stores, and the corner store where my mother marched as a kid in the annual memorial day parade where she stopped for soda or candy when they had a few pennies to spare, and she struggling to remember exactly where the old store was and the house over and around it in which her father and brothers took refuge during the worst of the great depression, where her grandmother made great plans for her life but died before any of these could be realized, where her two eldest brothers fought against street gangs with fists and sticks, coming home bloody but victorious, and, of course, beyond this, down at the furthest end of this street, beyond the dream bridge, and the dream landscape, and the pantheon of memories, the graveyard where her father’s father and his father before him rest in peace in tombs so grand I lose my breath each time I walk among them, me the dream-ghost reverently coming to them, humbled by the fact that I exist and that they helped make me, and how I ache for this bridge they have torn apart to be rebuilt so I can remain connected.

A survivor on the streets of Paterson

04/10/80

The fury lump looks so misshapen, I mistake it for something dead, just another dead body on the streets of my hometown, Paterson still bleak even in memory.

I stop to mourn it, only have it move, tail stirring up the dust in an attempt to crawl away, seeking to escape my long shadow that falls over it.

When it manages to rise, I see only three legs, balanced as if from a life time of experience, perhaps a condition not inspired by massive dangers imposed by our machines, but by something worse, some aspect of genes that caused this to come at birth.

Elevated, it studies me with round black eyes, squirrel-like, but not a squirrel, its tail too skimpy for such a breed, small front paws struggling to keep itself upright yet determined to come together as if in prayer.

It takes me a moment to recognize it as a mouse.

When it moves again, it does not walk, it crawls, and towards me, not away.

The mechanic from a nearby garage comes towards me wiping his oily hands on already saturated work pants, peers down at the creature, and then advises me to kill it.

“I can't,” I tell him, already imagining the scream in my head if I do, how it will haunt me for weeks and wake me up from sleep, seeing it against my inner eyelids like a tattoo.

“Well if you don’t want to kill it, then pick it up and take it home with you,” the mechanic says. “The last thing I need is something like that sitting in my driveway.”

But what does anyone do with a crippled mouse?

What do you feed it, and how do you keep it from feeding the pet cats I have already adopted?

Who do you call to come save it?

Does this city have a mouse-catcher the way it does for dogs?

And what would they do with such a beast except kill it as the mechanic suggests, seeing it for what it is: a rodent?

Before, I can decide, the crippled mouse hobbles off, making good time with the feet it still has, vanishing into the underbrush from which it likely came, just another survivor where perhaps survival is enough.

There are no white knights

04/09/80

The My Way is crowed with burly men in heavy coats, overdressed against a mid-spring chill, anxious for the seasons to change so they can shed these and flex their muscles in an offstage strip show meant to impress dancers – who are never impressed.

I come underdressed carting a notebook and a bundle of pens I put down on the wet bar next to the beer mug Mary has waiting for me, knowing just when I usually arrive, greeting me with a smile she saves for people who aren’t constantly hitting on her or pretending to care as much about her as men do the dancers.

Most of the men overlook the barmaids in their hunt for something they can’t ever take home to their wives.

Mary doesn’t even mind my talking to the dancers, who are drawn to me for many of the same reasons, all wondering why I come here to “do my homework,” and then paw at my notebooks to see if I’ve written anything about them – when I always do.

Many tell me their deepest secret even when they do not mean to, stripping off more than their clothing when they settle into the stool beside mine to accept the drinks I buy them.

Tonight, it is a straw-blonde (the color of which comes from a bottle of bleach or bad hair dye) who settles next me, mockingly at first, and then eventually, she talks about pain.

Ultimately, they all do, pain or misery of some kind that has brought them to this place where they can bask in men’s admiration, accepting their drinks without the commitment most other barflies have to suffer through.

After all the usual preliminaries, she starts to talk about the men she’s known – and loved, and how at age 16, she fell in love with a man who beat her if she even looked at another man or another man even looked at her.

And routinely in this, she stops, frowns and asks: Why am I talking to you?"

Because I listen, I think, but do not say, and do not seek the same comfort in these women’s arms as other men do, a kick myself for it, needing such comfort as they do.

Perhaps, I simply need to hear it all, to get a glimpse of the dark world `that I tread lightly around, like a butterfly landing on the extended leaves of extremely poisonous plants, too insignificant to get sucked in easily, a daring escapade that could end with a wink or a nod, and with any mistake I might make about thinking I can survive such a plunge, regardless of how tempting it may seem.

I’m not nearly as naïve at Hank or Michael, one who thinks he can touch and not be stained by the dark forces that underlie this world, and the other, who foolishly sees the dark world as more authentic than the Madison Avenue world we live (the illusions of morality and order), and perhaps it is authentic, the way our primal brains are, and deadly, we needing the façade of society to protect us from our most primitive selves.

I know where nights like this end, and know I have to leave soon, break away from this flower before I get sucked into where the nectar and the poison reside, waiting only for the moment when she must climb back onto the stage to dance.

I don't want to reach that point where she might ask me to come home with her the way some other dancers have, knowing that no such invitation comes without a cost. I don’t want to have to fumble around until I come up with a socially acceptable way to say, “no.” I don’t want to turn into another abuser, a vicious bee dipping into the deepest part of her only to flirt away covered with her essence and leaving her empty and bitter at yet another man.

Like others before her, she touched by pad and ponders what it is I find so interesting in this world to write about, and why I don’t ever let anyone read it, and why I won’t let her read it now.

I cannot give her a reason, knowing that each word I write here amounts to a confession, me as guilty as any other man in this place, my head filled with the same dreadful drama.

Then, she goes and mounts the stage, pouting as I pay for my beer and turn to leave, her eyes full of promises I don't want her to keep.

"How often do you come here?" she asks as the owner shouts for her to dance.

"About once a week," I say and take up my note books, and turn to leave, feeling sorry for her, but knowing, too, I am not the answer, just an example of what is possible beyond this place and this life, one of many men who don't immediately want to fuck her. Deep down, through all the horniness and guilt, I want to be kind and loving, even though I don't always achieve that goal.

I feel sorry for her use of drugs which she said she needs to shoot to help her erase the memory of the men.

"One man is as good as any other," She whispers, her hard eyes saying she means every word.

Why does she continue this if she hates these men so much, these worst of men, truly flawed men, the men who breathe violence and hate as part of their everyday lives?

She lives in a self-created jail cell she can’t easily walk away from, in love with the attention these men give, if not with the men, each of them a prison bar or a jail guard that keeps her contained. She cannot survive in the Madison Avenue world where we live with other illusions, with pretenses of morality that do not exist here. Perhaps, Michael is right. Perhaps we come closest to the essence of who we are in places like this.

And yet, this girl like most of those I talk to here, holds out the illusion of a different kind, that somehow out of this pit of pestilence a white knight will rise up to rescue her, and each girl like her growing more and more bitter when each one turns out to be an empty suit of armor.

I see this hope in this girl’s eyes as she mounts the stage and smiles back down at me at the bar, the flash of armor reflected there, when I am no more one than any of the other men around me.

There are no white Knights, no one to rebuild her.

She has to do that for herself, only she can’t do it here, in a dark world full of demons and death traps, where foundations of any castle she builds are constructed on ill will and despair built by and designed to appease desperate men.

Filmore George is dead

Sept. 7, 1971

Louise got the call from New York yesterday, and learned George was dead.

We knew he worked for the Filmore as a bouncer but died out in Central Park at some rock concert where he’d been hired freelance.

He was only 22 yet seemed older in my memory from late last year and earlier this year when we lived up the street and later downstairs from him on East Sixth Street.

“He was working a concert for The Who,” his wife told Louise, her voice lost to emotion or perhaps to the uncertain circuitry of long distance. She loved him, but not so much as to be shattered at his demise. He had been in fights before at the Filmore and had even been stabbed once or twice.

The dispute came as result of someone screaming about not being able to get into the concert and when George went to escort him away, the guy stabbed him, said Caroline, his wife, girlfriend or whatever, we never knew.

George – who the paper said was George Byington (not a name we knew him by) apparently had been taking up these gigs since the Filmore closed earlier this year. His wife had called to Louise to tell her about his working The Mother’s concert at the Filmore before the doors closed for the last time.

We knew him as George Ethridge and he lived at 422 East Sixth Street for a few months prior to our return to New York last year on Labor Day. He supposedly lived in Florida before that, although he told us at the time, he was raised in upstate New York.

This was sad news, if not surprising and for me was the last contact with Filmore's greatness fading into an attack of broken bottles and knives – although George was that kind of man though that was likely to get stabbed.

He had a suppressed rage that he someone overcame with a diehard dedication to The Doors and The Dead.

George was thrilled to be a part time a bouncer at the Fillmore East.

He wore his hair in a white man's afro, blonde hair frizzed out like Garfunkel's and he had thick blond mustache, which showed the trail of drugs that he used -- his nose the main entrance to his body for almost anything he could consume.

I was always struck about him and his chosen profession, since he seemed too small for the part.  He was skinny and short, about five foot six with bones that look like they would break once they got a good grip on him.

His face was pot marked with the scars any reference of a bad case of teenage pimples, although at 22, those problems were only memories. The scar down his right cheek was a memory to another attempt of someone stabbing him which he survived and was extremely proud of.

When he was relaxed, he often would sit with his hands clamping and unclamping unconsciously. Whenever someone noticed this and mentioned it to him, he denied it as if it was something terrible to admit it.

His house was always ready for a party with the beer in the refrigerator a bong by the fireplace and dope stashed in various different locations about the house.

Caroline was always scared that the police would come, and they would not be able to find all the dope in time to flush it.

He thought this fear absurd and he told her as much.

He lived on the second floor of the second East Sixth Street tenement while we occupied one apartment on the first floor.

He had inherited the apartment through a string of girl and boy friends.

He had the whole floor of what was called a rail road style apartment and somehow managed to acquire the rail road apartment across the hall. So, he actually controlled all four doors that looked out onto the hallway – although only permitted people to come and go by one of the two doors at the rear of the hall, the one near the head of the stairs coming up from the street. This allowed him or one of his minions to look out through the door on the opposite side of the hall to see just who was knocking and if it was the police. He had an escape plan that included letting the cops in that door while everybody else fled out the other and down to the street.

A person could circle the whole floor from one room to another without actually stepping out into the hall.

George sometimes called it “the hive,” though this described the situation as well, such as the remarkable collection of people, men and women, who started out as lovers and he hung on to in some perverse sense of an extended family. Each person adopted a corner of the vast space and then adapted it to their own personal turf.

One person had racks and racks of silk screen equipment stacked in his corner, and shelves stuffed with t-shirts and other items he peddles to local merchants or in bulk or on consignment.

In another corner, a woman made candles, drips of hot wax clinging to her usually bare breasts as she dipped the wick into a bubbling caldron against and again, smiling at me and others who passed.

Many of the corners of this vast apartment housed musicians, guitars, drums and less rock and roll oriented instruments scattered along the walls or in closets.

But the Hive held a fair share of painters and photographers as well, though these last apparently dedicated their lives and craft to capture images of one subject: The Grateful Dead.

In fact, George’s passion for the San Francisco-based band seemed to be the one and only criteria for living in the Hive. Anyone who expressed interest in the band was welcome to say.

George’s space included a horse-shoe shaped couch, a fire place into which George had installed a stereo.

Grateful Dead album covers leaned against the leg of a table, along with the covers of other legendary San Francisco bands from the period George called “the classic period” by which he meant 1963 to 1966.

He also had a few albums by LA bands such as “The Doors” and “Buffalo Springfield.”

But nowhere in the apartment could you find a record by more commercial bands such as “The Beatles” or “The Stones.”

George did, however, have a number of band posters, mostly billboard advertisements from Grateful Dead appearances at the Filmore East where he worked.

George was one of the few people I knew who actually had a telephone. This was kept in a small table in remote corner of the vast apartment, with George acknowledging the need for an occasional contact with the outside world. He tried his best to discourage this, of course, and he monitored those who used it, keeping in that section of the apartment he considered his.

George was born upstate New York; his father was a politician for a time then retired to some sort of law firm in Albany and George despised him.

His mother was an ex-Miss New York who came twice a month to see George bringing him that extra bit of cash that she managed to sneak around his father these days usually came around the 1st and the 15th and were marked on the calendar with a large red M.

There were no parties on these two days or the days before them either. Those were the days when the apartment was cleaned, and the dope stashed.

The party's came after mother left and these usually were marathon events which brought most of the block dealers down. Many saw George as a little god, someone who got them into the Fillmore got them to meet the stars, got them good dope. He was a fun guy.

Caroline – girlfriend or wife – loved and hated him and cheated on him often, and especially with people close to him. He didn't seem to mind as long as she stayed with him in the end.

George invited me up to his apartment frequently. This was one of those mysterious attractions that I never quite understood. He seemed to trust me when he rarely trusted anybody else. Maybe because Louise was pregnant at the time, he figured we didn’t pose a threat.

As with his other friends, Louise and I were expected to think of him as cool.

Louise and I were naive enough to believe this, even though in some ways he was just a grouchy young man strung out and lonely, who surrounded himself with a lot of lost people; so, he felt less lost than he was. We were all lost souls on a ship lost at sea, knowing that the ship was slowly sinking and the whole effort to keep it afloat was pointless.

But George loved the short walk up East Sixth Street to his job at the Filmore.

Caroline loved the strange sexual scene they had created.

George and Caroline made up the inner core of The Hive, with Bob and Mary, a foursome that was supposed to be exploring sexual extremes, overseen by George, but manipulated by Caroline.

Bob was a strange fish in this world because he looked so normal, more like a Madison Avenue executive than a freak, although he and Mary were even more naïve than Louise and me or any of George’s other followers.

Mary was Caroline's best friend from Atlanta, Georgia and brought Bob with her at Carolyn's invitation.

Bob was a dirty blond hair Southern boy with more of a taste for whiskey than pot but grew slowly more familiar with George is kind of high. Mary was a black-haired beauty, always made up with shimmering red lips.  Carolyn had a beauty, too, but hers was quieter. She was a small woman who wore her brown hair in pigtails and who dressed in sandals and leather Native America Indian dresses.  There were many artifacts both authentic and imitation scattered about the apartment many of the rugs and pictures had Indian scenes in them.

Mary dislike this tendency in Caroline's. She like things modern. she liked wearing tight silk and leather pants. She liked hard rock music.

Bob was like Carolyn and agreed with her often which was the cause of many of his problems with his wife. Mary's favorite fantasy and one that she engaged in often was partner switching.

The problem is George never cooperated. George would often rather sit back and watch another man make love to his wife then participate actively with another woman. Many times, Mary enlisted other men letting her own husband make love to Carolyn.

These sessions, of course, were close to the general party crowd.

We knew about them only because Mary more than once tried to enlist me as the fourth party – and I was always tempted because when pregnant Louise did not want to have sex even though I did. I kept these invitations secret from her because Louise liked Mary and I didn’t want that to change.

But it wasn’t for any noble reason that I kept out of the fray. George and his world scared me, and I had the ugly feeling that I could get sucked into something without knowing it and see my world spin out of control.

Now, 3,000 miles away in Portland, Oregon, I wonder what will become of The Hive and the crowd now that George is dead.