I was so distracted by these useless esoteric reflections that I came up on the White Horse Tavern unawares. It was after one and there were quite a few people at the tables and bar — regulars, tourists, and the odd drop-in.
At a table in the corner, in the front room by the window, a group of nine people were being addressed by a young man wearing black jeans, a dark green sports jacket, and a T-shirt that read GINSBERG FOR RAJAH.
“... among many of the recognized and lauded lights of the New York poetry scene the allure of Dylan Thomas has faded,” the clean-shaven raven-haired young white man proclaimed. “They criticize everything from his depth of linguistic complexity to the obvious melodrama of his most well-known works. But what these poetry pontiffs fail to understand is that Thomas was a people’s poet, a man that connected song and meter and the concerns of every human being living their lives and suffering the consequences. His work, in its every repetition, fights for the survival and the lifeblood of a form that most so-called great poets have moved beyond the reach of the common man...”
Not only the tableful of tourists with their pints and bitters were listening to the lecture but people all over the bar were enthralled. The bartender, a red-faced man, was smiling at the effect.
The young man continued, and I found myself taken by his ideas and obvious passion.
Someone tapped my shoulder and I turned to see Sweet Lemon Charles. At the bus station his skin looked olive under the fluorescent lights but in the window, bathed in natural, if murky, sunlight, he was more a wallet brown.
“She’s sumpin’ else, huh?” he said.
With a twitch of his head he indicated a small white girl with short brown hair, standing behind the lecturer. She was slight, but still with a figure under the maroon dress. She wasn’t what you’d call pretty but she had a look that would make a man pass up a dozen comelier girls just to see her smile.
“That’s Morgan?” I asked.
“Yep. My girl.”
“She could be your daughter, man.”
“Every young girl needs a daddy until she has kids of her own.”
“That’s pretty good, Lemon. You read it somewhere?”
“Auntie Goodwoman,” he said, shaking his head.
“Shhh!” a woman seated at the bar near us hissed. She wasn’t part of the paying group, but still... “Let’s go outside, LT,” Lemon suggested.
On Hudson in the afternoon there was lots of foot traffic. People walked dogs and toted laptop computers in dull-colored rectangular valises. There was every race, gender, subgender, and age, hoofing it around us.
Lemon lit up a cigarette and I stood close to share the secondhand smoke.
“So this is your new gig?” I asked. It was an obvious question but safer than the ones lurking at the back of my mind.
“Oh yeah,” the lifetime thief opined. “I live, breathe, and fuck poetry twenty-four hours a day. Morgan had me go out to Wyoming to this writers’ retreat with her. They gave us a cabin out on the prairie. You know one night I saw a coyote not six feet from our front door. A coyote and me!”
“You got any scams?” I asked. I had to.
“They go through my mind,” he said with unusual candor. “You know how people get all trustin’ when they’re excited. They want you to help them lose their money, or at least that’s how it seem.
“One night this woman and her husband wanted me to score for them. They would’a paid two hundred dollars for what I could get for fifty. But instead I went back to Morgan’s place and wrote a prose poem of what my auntie would say after I had did what would’a been so easy for me to do.
“Now that’s what I do every time I’m tempted — by anything. I plan that to be my first book. I call it Sour Lemons, Sweet Nevermind.”
The grifter was beginning to get to me and that’s always a problem. The best con men believe their stories up until the moment they let you down. They’re telling you the truth, they’re telling you the truth, they’re telling you the truth, and then, all of a sudden, they see a different light, take the money and run, before either one of you knows what happened.
“What you call me for, Lemon?” I asked.
The question snapped him out of his reverie of poetry and sex, bad thoughts and the alternative of words never spoken by a woman that died before he went wrong.
“I asked around all over the place, LT,” he said. “It was easy enough ’cause I had a name. I was at a readin’ last night and there was this woman there that Morgan knows, Tourquois Wynn. Tourquois used to be a adjunct creative writing professor at Hunter College. When she was there, five years ago, she had this older black man student named William Williams. He was in her fiction class.”
The chill that flowed into where fever had lain for so many days almost made me shiver. I considered various inappropriate responses: 1) I thought about hitting Lemon with a roundhouse right, knocking him unconscious; 2) I might have taken off, running up the street, back to where there were no answers to unanswerable questions; and, 3) I entertained putting my fingers in my ears and chanting, “Nah, na, na, na naaa, na, na, na, naaaa, na na, na, na na, na.”
“This Tourquois still at Hunter?” I pronounced the name as he did — Tur-kwa.
“No. She got a tenure-track job at NYU after her first book of poetry won the Sanders Prize. She told me that Williams said that he named himself after a writer because before, when he was a politico, he said that the movement ground him down until he was just a mirror. He said that when a man becomes simply a reflection that writing is the only honest thing he can do.”
That simple explanation meant that the man in the fiction class was my father, Clarence Tolstoy William Williams McGill. There was no doubt in my mind. I had to clasp my hands to keep them from shaking.
“Did she know how to get in touch with him?”
“Said she hadn’t talked to him since that class five years ago. I believed her. But me and Morgan said that the three of us should meet up for a early dinner at the Nook Petit down on Seventh at seven. You could come with. Maybe you got a question she can answer.”
“Why you doin’ this, Lemon?” I asked. It was a reflex question, like right cross after a left hook to the body.
“Favor.”
“I thought you were leavin’ my world behind.”
“That’s right. I stay out of the life. But everybody says that you don’t mess wit’ gangsters no more, LT. And even if you did, a guy like me might need a friend someday.”
“Someday is fine, but how much do you want right now?”
“Nuthin’, man. All I ask is that you remember that I gave you this.”
32
I’ve always liked the West Village, through all of its varied incarnations. When I was a kid it was a wasteland, with lots of factories and old Italians, the Meatpacking District, and even a few private homes. As time went on would-be artists, aspiring models, and prostitutes (of various persuasions) moved in. There were late-night clubs where jazz musicians sometimes showed up after their uptown gigs.
Back then it wasn’t a tourist destination, with overpriced trés chic clothes shops and big hotels; you didn’t have to plow through crowds of tourists or the investment bankers who transformed every building into million-dollar plasterboard condos and seven-thousand-dollar-a-month one-bedroom apartments.
The West Village had changed, and changed again, but it still had charm. After a little wander I sat myself down at an outside café on Hudson south of Christopher. There I ordered a café au lait with almond biscotti and waited for inspiration.