One day I got wise. I saw a fat kid delivering groceries. He was wearing an apron over his clothes and pushing a cart, one of those wooden carts with giant steel-banded wheels. The name and address of the grocery was painted on the slats. His arms full, he went down the steps to the trade entrance of a brownstone, rang the bell and disappeared inside. The cobra strikes! I raced down the street clattering the cart over the cobblestones, I tore around the corner, I went down a side street made dark by the gridwork shadows of industrial firescapes and dark green iron fronts, I felt like Charlie Chaplin, turning one way, braking, doing an about face, scooting off another way, I think I was laughing, imagining a squad of Keystone Kops piling up behind me, I thought of the fat kid’s face, even if he knew where to look he couldn’t catch me. I sat down for a while in an alley and caught my breath. Eventually, like the most conscientious grocery boy in the world, I trundled my cart back the way I had come and delivered every last one of the orders. Each bag and box had a bill stuck inside with the name and address of the customer. I took tips and cash receipts. I was polite. I pushed my cart back to Graeber’s Groceries Fancy Fruits and Vegetables and found Graeber himself loading up another cart grumbling and saying things in German and making life hell for his clerks. No fat kid among them. Graeber was angry, suspicious, skeptical. He didn’t believe I found the cart abandoned at a tilt in an alley. And then I turned over into his hands the cash receipts. To the penny.
And that’s how I came to be a grocery delivery boy in the rich precincts of Murray Hill. I wore the long white apron and pushed the wooden cart and I earned three dollars a week and tips.
At one home in Gramercy Park I made the acquaintance of a maid she had an eye for me she liked my innocent face. She was an older woman, some kind of Scandinavian wore her hair in braids. She was no great shakes but she had her own room and late one night I was admitted and led up all the flights of this mansion and brought to a small bathroom top floor at the back. She sat me in a claw-foot tub and gave me a bath, this hefty hot steaming red-faced woman. I don’t remember her name Hilda Bertha something like that, and she knows herself well before we make love she pulls a pillow over her head to muffle the noise she makes and it is really interesting to go at this great chunky energetic big-bellied soft-assed flop-titted but headless woman, teasing it with a touch, watching it quiver, hearing its muffled squeaks, composing a fuck for it, the likes of which I like to imagine she has never known.
Come with me
Compose with me
Coming she is coming is she
She was very decent really and for my love gave me little presents, castoff sweaters and shoes, food sometimes. I tried to save as much of my wages as I could. My luxuries were cigarettes and movies. I liked to go to the movies and sit there you could see two features and a newsreel for a dime. I liked comedies and musicals and pictures with high style. I always went alone. In my mind was the quiet fellow trying to see himself, hear what he sounded like. He fitted himself out in movie stars he discarded them. I was interested in the way I instantly knew who the situation called for and became him. For Graeber, who wore a straw hat and a bow tie, a stubblehead German with an accent you better not laugh at, I was the honest young fellow who wanted to make something of himself. For Hilda the maid I was the boy who thought he was lucky to have her. When I went along after work with my tips in my pocket I was John D. Rockefeller. I came to make the distinction between the great busy glorious city of civilization on the one hand, and the meagerness or pretense of any one individual I looked at on the other. It was a matter of the distance you took, if you went to the top of the Empire State Building as I liked to do seeing it all was thrilling you had to admire the human race making its encampment like this I could hear the sound of traffic rising like some song to God and love His Genius for shining the sun on it. But down on the docks men slept in the open pulled up like babies on beds of newspapers, hands palm on palm for a pillow. Not their dereliction, that wasn’t the point, but their meagerness, for I saw this too as I stood at the piers and watched the ocean liners sail. I watched the well-dressed men and women going up the gangways, turning to wave at their friends, I saw the stevedores taking aboard their steamer trunks and wicker hatboxes, I saw the women wrapping their fur collars tighter against the chill coming up off the water, the men in sporty caps and spats looking self-consciously important, I saw their exhaustion, their pretense, their terror, and in these too, the lucky ones, I understood the meagerness of the adult world. It was an important bit of knowledge and no shock at all for a Paterson mill kid. Adults were in one way or another the ones who were done, finished, living past their hope or their purpose. Even the gulls sitting on the tops of the pilings had more class. The gulls lifting in the wind and spreading their wings over the Hudson.
I distinguished myself from whomever I looked at when I felt the need to, which was often, I felt I could get by make my way whatever the circumstances. I would sell pencils on the sidewalk in front of department stores I would be a newsboy I would steal kill use all my cunning but never would I lose the look in my eye of the living spirit, or give up till that silent secret presence grew out to the edges of me and I was the same as he, imposed upon myself in full completion, the same man with all men, the one man in all events—
I remember this roughneck boy more whole than he knew. Going down the dark stairs of the mansion on Gramercy Park one night trusted to let myself out by the drowsy spent maid, I lifted a silver platter a silver creamer and teapot and a pair of silver candlesticks from the dining room. Even now I see the curved glass cabinet doors in the streetlight coming through the French windows. I hear my breathing. I catch sight of my own face in the salver. Loot-laden I tiptoed over the thick rug I half walked half ran through the streets clutching my lumpy lumberjacket. I had a room on the West Side in a rooming house fifty cents a night no cooking. In the morning going to work from across the wide cobblestone street the cars going past, the streetcars ringing their bells horns blowing trucks ratcheting along with chain-wheel drive I see in Graeber’s Groceries Fancy Fruits and Vegetables an officer of the law in earnest conversation with my employer.
Come with me
Compute with me
Computerized she prints out me
Commingling with me she becomes me
Coming she is coming is she
Coming she is a comrade of mine
Sometimes around those fires by the river a man would talk a war veteran usually who had a vision of things, who could say more than how he felt or what was so unfair or who he was going to get someday. And invariably he was a socialist or a communist or an anarchist and he’d call you brother or comrade this fellow and he was always contemplative and didn’t seem to mind if anyone listened to him or not. Not that he was wise or especially decent or kind or even that he was sober but even if none of these in those fitful flashes of lucidity like momentary flares of a dying fire he’d say why things were as they were. I liked that. It was a kind of music, I lingered by the edges of the city with the hobos and at night that grand and glorious civilization now had walls all around it we were on the outside looking up at this immense looming presence, a fortress now it was a kind of music to point to the walls and suggest why they would come down. And if you didn’t have a true friend, someone in the world as close to you as you were to yourself, this kind of music was interesting to hear. At night you smelled the river in daylight you didn’t, I smelled the river scum and felt the mosquitoes and followed the shadows of the great rats who butted right through the tar-paper shacks and dove into the shitholes, and some poor tramp on Sterno would suddenly present with incredible grace an eloquent analysis of monopoly capitalism. It would go on two three minutes he’d take a swig eyes would roll up in his skull and he’d pass out falling backward into the fire and he’d roast his brains if we didn’t pull him out his hair smoking his singed burned hair. Wide awake again he’d tell us more.