At dawn, hungry pigeons landing on the windowsill. Stephen O’Kelly’O putting out scraps of bread. Have breakfast. And give the pigeons some. Avoid electrocution while cooking up coffee in the old percolator. A couple of stale rolls, heat them in the oven with butter and save my two cinnamon buns. Today for lunch have some tomatoes, spinach and celery. Pizza pie for dinner. As mesmerizing time passes, play and compose for as long as I can. Put on another sweater and lumber jacket. Lace up my old woodsman’s boots and zip up my lumber jacket. Go to the store. Buy some nourishing cheese. Man who takes care of the garbage cans of the building next door is out chopping up the ice where he has cleared the snow from the sidewalk. He’s in the same thick brown jacket and black hat and earmuffs he always wears. For the first time as I walk by, he speaks.
“Hey, I found out it’s you who plays piano. I like the music. I can hear it a little bit down here on the street, between the traffic.”
“Thank you very much. It’s always nice to have my work appreciated.”
“Hey, that’s your music you composed.”
“Yes.”
“I like it. My father was in a symphony orchestra. Played oboe in Prague. He came here, fought for this country, got killed in the First World War. You think we needed a Second World War. I’m now like the refugee he used to be. That’s what’s wrong. No appreciation for anything. They don’t respect genius. They don’t care. That’s what’s being celebrated in America today is mass stupidity. And kissing asses of celebrities.”
A single small word of praise lightens and quickens the step through the snow. He heard me playing part of my minuet. Brightens the infinitesimally tiny glow on the horizon of the future. For the darkness in one’s soul gets so dark and so bleak that one’s fingers and hands struggle to feel and claw the way out. Folk brushing the snow from their automobiles. Shoveling to dig out their tires. Guy with his car hood up, recharging a battery. Grocery boy with a heaped box of groceries, wheeling it by on his bike. It could be like a little village in France or Italy. At least for eight seconds, until you wake up and know you’re only a stone’s throw away from the Bowery, the last and hopeless refuge of the defeated and forgotten. Now pass this doorway which has always looked suspicious. Two fat, dark, short men, one holding the other by the lapels, shouting into each other’s face. Then they are silent as I walk by, but start shouting again at each other when I’ve gone past. Woman bundled up wrapped in rags and coats, has a place cleared of snow on the sidewalk to sit. She is picking up and squeezing lice between her begrimed fingers.
One seeks for pastoral and civil places away from the wild energy of New York to induce musical ideas and relaxation. And the snow comes a great blanket of temporary silence. Wasted as I merely have lain late in bed. Let the lonely days go by. Forced in the chill to wear the gloves with the fingers cut off in order to play. Even the warmest of melodies fails to loosen the stiffened keys of the piano. Then at noon trudge out through the new drifts to the grocery store. To stack up with beans, potatoes, and the cheapest vegetables money can buy with what is left of my sixteen dollars and eighty-six cents. The rent to pay. One hundred and sixty-four dollars owing for two months. The gas and electricity could soon be cut off. My last steady money was as a war veteran being unemployed and looking for a job and accepted as a member of the Fifty-Two Twenty club. Twenty dollars a week for fifty-two weeks was at least survival until Sylvia came along. I ate all the potatoes she threw on the floor. Then as a last desperate measure, went over to the family-owned saloon farther uptown on the Bowery. Feeling like a begging leper. Warned by my parents never to be seen there. Sat in a darkened booth in the back like a wino. Had a couple of free bottles of beer, a pickle and a roast beef sandwich swamped in gravy. Bartender could have been a little more friendly. A big shiny cockroach ran across the table. To kill it, I took an empty beer bottle, smashing it down on the table. Missed the cockroach, broke the bottle, and left busted glass all over the place. Message will go back to my family I was unruly and maybe even drunk.
My long walks now each day took me north on Broadway. Past store after store selling everything on earth. Rugs, peanuts, hip boots, dresses, trusses for rupture, luggage, Halloween masks. And if I were hungry I could buy a salami sandwich with extra relish at no extra cost. When I reached Fifty-seventh Street, I left another note for Aspasia. Then to eat as cheaply as I could, went to Horn and Hardart. Opening up the little glass doors, pushing nickels into the slots. Pulled out a cheese sandwich and a piece of blueberry pie. Shoved a glass under the tap and pushed the lever for an exact glass of milk to pour out. As I sat eating at a table up in the balcony, a guy my age, and draped in a long raincoat buttoned up to his neck, goes with intelligent poise from table to table, taking the dregs of coffee left in cups and pouring one into another to make himself a full cup into which he puts masses of sugar. And then pours red gobs of tomato ketchup on his collected crusts of bread. And finding a newspaper to read he sits down to his free lunch. So well manneredly eating. Watching him he suddenly nods at me. It must be in affirmation that we both do what we’ve got to do to survive.
Then Jesus Christ. Someone has just walked in to announce that that is who he is. If it isn’t someone proclaiming they’re the Redeemer then nearly everyone else, and everywhere else you look in the corner of or behind something in this city, there is something or someone profane. A man in a large overcoat is lurking over a balustrade of the balcony, watching a woman in her tight white uniform below collecting dirty dishes while he’s pulling his prick. Then when you go out to walk across the park where within the shadows of the thicker shrubbery, guys are loitering with erections, and while they pretend to be pissing, they are instead conducting their own public den of iniquity. But even with all this disgraceful behavior, maybe it’s safer uptown. Because last night, a Mafia don with a cigar half smoked in his mouth just got gunned down in the local Italian bistro. He was ordering his fettuccine and about to taste a glass of wine. Always a nice little reminder that anywhere, just sitting or stepping out for a pleasant stroll on the street, or just as it was on the train from Coney Island, suddenly everything can turn into a fearsome battle for your life. Or sometimes you don’t even get time to battle. When a bullet instead goes through your brain. And your neurons get sent into the centuries yet to be invented.
Back on Pell Street where I hoped every moment there would be some good news, the phone had yet to ring. All seemed a desert wasteland where I wandered lost. No one is ever going to give me a commission to write an operetta. Or announce, Gee, Mr. O’Kelly’O, your minuet is the ten-thousand-dollar winning composition. Good to have reached you on the telephone, we’ve been finding it hard to track you down in order to inform you that the New York Philharmonic is practicing playing your wonderful opus prior to its gala performance. Of course meanwhile we will emolument you at the rate of one thousand dollars a month until your next masterpiece is completed, with the usual use of a concert grand Steinway in the isolated cabin in the Connecticut woods, and so as not to annoy you, all the other composers and commissioning agents will be kept at their distance. Three meals a day delivered to your door. And what you do in private with the female fans lurking in the woods, and over whom we have no control, is your own secluded and personal business.