Jerry Vale to a disco beat that carries across the wide street,
through air freighted with other weight, screams and blasts,
and into the epicenter of my brain. If I close the windows,
however, I will probably die. But it is the vibration, in this
case the endless clucky thumping of the badly abused instruments, that worms its way under my skin to make me itch with discontent, irritation, a rage directed, in this case, at
Italian weddings, but on other nights at French crooners, at
Jaggerish deadbeats, at Elvisian charlatans, at Haggardish
kvetchers, and even, on occasion, at Patti Pageish or even Peggy
Leeish dollies embellished by brass.
I watch the limos pulling up, parking in front of the fire
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hydrants and no-parking signs. I see a man in a tux tear down
with his bare hands a no-parking sign. I see an endless supply
of kids attending these adult parties. The house used to be a
synagogue. One day it was empty. Then a man with many
boys moved in. The boys had tattoos and did heavy work and
had lean thighs. They all lived on the top floor. The parties
were on the lower two floors. The boys flew a flag from the
top floor. I called it never-never-land. The parties drove me
mad.
The women who went into the house were never contemporary cosmopolitan women. They always wore fluffy dresses or full skirts and frilly blouses, very fifties, suburban, dating,
heavy makeup. Even the youngest women wore wide formal
skirts, maybe even with crinolines, in pastel colors, and their
hair was set and lacquered. They were deferential and flirty
and girlish and spoke when spoken to. Sometimes they had a
corsage. Sometimes they wore female hats. Sometimes they
even wore female gloves or female wraps. Always they wore
female shoes and female stockings and stood in a female way
and looked very fifties, virgin ingenues. They never met the
rough boys from the top floor, or not so that I could see. They
came with dates. There were floral arrangements inside, and
white tablecloths, and men in white jackets. Then, during the
day, the boys from the upper floor would ride their bikes or
get wrecked on drugs. Once my favorite, a beautiful wrecked
child who at fifteen was getting old, too covered with tattoos,
with hair hanging down to his shoulders and some beautiful
light in his eyes and thighs, had a young girl there. She too was
beautiful, dark, perfect, naked, exquisite breasts and thighs,
they hung out the window together and watched the sun rise.
They seemed exquisitely happy: young: not too hurt yet, or
young enough to be resilient: he must have been hurt, all
tattooed and drugged out and in this house of boys, and she
had been or would be, and I prayed for her as hard as I have
ever hoped for myself. That she was and would be happy; that
she was older than she looked; that she would be all right. It
was only at dawn that the human blood seemed to have washed
out of the cement and that injury seemed to disappear: and
men began emerging from the park where they had been
fucking and sucking cock all night: they were weary and at
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peace: and there seemed to be a truce just then, for the duration
of the dawn, between night and day, between people and despair. The boy and girl, radiant and tender with pleasure, hung out of the window. Underneath them men dragged themselves
toward home, tender with fatigue. I sat by the open window
and smiled. It was the only time to be awake and alive on that
Lower East Side street corner. The light would be not quite
daylight: night was still mixed in with it: and there was peace.
Then the sun would be up, glaring and rude. The night would
be defeated and angry, preparing to return with a vengeance.
The vagabonds would shit and move. The fumes would begin
anew for the day, inevitably thicker and more repellent than
before, more repulsive than it was possible to be or to imagine
or to engineer or to invent. The whores would go home short
and lose more teeth. The boys across the way would shoot up,
sleep, eventually ride their bikes or go stand on street corners.
I would go to the small distant room and try to sleep on the
Salvation Army mattress under the open window. I would hear
the sirens. I would wake up burning, with ice not fire.
*
I would sit by the open windows in the living room and watch
the dark, then the light: dawn was my pleasure, a process
pungent with melodrama, one thickness edging out another,
invading it, permeating it: dark being edged out, a light
weighing the night down until it was buried in the cement.
You could slice the night and you could slice the day, and it
was just the hour or two, some parts of the year it seemed like
only minutes, in which both mixed together resembling peace.
The light would begin subtly and I could just see some tree-
tops up the street in the park. At first they looked like a line, a
single line, an edge of jagged mountaintops etched against a
dark eternity with a sharp, slight pencil, and gradually the line
filled in, got deeper and deeper until the shape of each tree got
filled in, and then color came, the brown branch, bare, the
leaf-covered branch, green, the blossom-covered branch,
chartreuse. I could see some dogs being walked early, the first
ones of the day coming, forms under artificial light turning
into creatures of flesh and blood when the real light came. I
could see, in the next room, the tousled head of my love, the
boy I live with, sleeping. Soon he would wake up and I would
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go to sleep and he would go to work and I would have stopped
working: now while he still slept and I was a vigilant consciousness I opened the windows that had been closed in the living room and sat down next to them to watch the dawn, the
kindest time.
In the hour before my turn came, my turn to sleep, night
would brand me: it would go through my brain, and make
pictures there of itself: every figure of horror would escape the
night and enter my brain: and each mundane piece of a living
day, the coming light, would grow huge and induce fear: a
drip under the sink was a torrent, irresolvable, menacing: so
there was no time to sleep: and the plaster falling from the
ceiling would become the promised disaster: and there was no
time to sleep: and the crack in the toilet threatened sewage and
flood: and so, it was impossible to sleep: and there was the