Then the daydreams of glory vanish as quickly as they come. Sink back into depression. Unused hours to go by. Relive the misery of all the parting words Sylvia said. Unable in my despair to compose at the piano. Each day wrenching myself out of the apartment, to merely set out and walk again north along Broadway, through these canyon streets. Until dressed now in a jacket, shirt, and tie in order to frequent the better hotel lobbies. Pass by Broadway Central Hotel once billed as America’s most palatial hotel and greatest of all of New York’s hotels. Still there and long faded from its glory. I went in to stand and survey its large and once most fashionable lobby. I even looked at a room when a most civil gentleman manager inquired if I’d like accommodation. And then, cheered up by this courteous attention I continued on, as I did this day, tramping all the mile after mile of city blocks. Through the bleak streets of the Garment District, cutting across to Hell’s Kitchen, where the most secret of the family’s saloons was located and where the Irish gangs used to scare the shit out of the Italians. Then back through Times Square and onward to Columbus Circle. Ranting speakers on their soapboxes. So many cowed dark figures. Almost seems as if everyone has given up and is too tired to insult each other. Remembered the feeling throughout the war of dreaming when it would be over. And the life of freedom one could look forward to. Lazing about on a beach drinking mint juleps. And here it was. The war was over. And the dreams shrunk to a struggle to stay clothed, housed, and fed. The main things of life survival that one took for granted in the navy. And complained about. Three meals a day. And no longer having to swing in a hammock but given a canvas bunk tiered one on top of the other but at least a dry, warm place to sleep and comfortable so long as someone wasn’t trying to stick a prick into you. Now it seems like the last act of desperation to hope that one might even run into an old prep school chum who could ask me if I needed any money and invite me for a week to his mansion up farther north on the Hudson and well out of the Bronx. Or even someone, a gunner’s mate I knew from my turret on my ship, who’s made it big on civvy street. Or best of all, Max, who married Sylvia’s closest friend and transplanted in total silence to big big money in Texas. But my thoughts got all different as I finally detoured on reaching Fifty-ninth Street, to walk east along the conspicuous elegance of Central Park South. Thinking of the rich, like the Witherspoon Triumphingtons. And all these other folk who passed me as I loitered on the steps of the Plaza Hotel. Then I went in, walking through the marble halls, past the Palm Court to the Fifth Avenue-side lobby to further loiter. Doing the same thing was a pleasantly eccentric tall, dark-haired woman in an ankle-length black Persian lamb coat, thick gray socks and sandals. She elaborately wiped off the seat before she sat down. And then suddenly getting up again and in retrieving a discarded newspaper, she came back, and as she sat, missed the chair and landed on her ass. I nearly gave a guffaw, until I saw the look of humiliation on the woman’s face, and I rushed to help her up, and there were tears of appreciation in her eyes.
But nobody I knew was to be seen on my walk. The exhilaration and hope I first felt in taking my ambling strides now faded and died as I took the subway back downtown. I went to drink three beers in Minetta’s in Greenwich Village and could overhear these artistic bullshitters in their cashmere sweaters talking about the nobility of art. And then I walked the remaining blocks to Pell Street. Past the buildings that had now become familiar. As I entered the apartment, the telephone was ringing. Such was my haste to answer that I tripped over a chair and nearly ripped the phone wires out of the wall and the earpiece fell off the hook. It could be a commission. Or at least Sylvia saying sorry she left and wanting to come home. But it was instead a deeply growling, hostile voice.
“You white cock-sucking motherfucker, I’m going to come there and cut your balls off and then your prick. You go fucking my woman, you hear, you honky cock-sucking motherfucker.”
The phone hung up. And later, Aspasia rang that she was hiding out up in Harlem on Sugar Hill and in the Florence Mills Apartments on Edgecombe Avenue. At least one had the consolation of the apartments being named after that wonderful musical-comedy star. Her boyfriend broke her door down and threatened to choke her to death to get my telephone number I wrote on the piece of paper I’d left at the Art Students League. And now her boyfriend was looking for me to cut off my balls but didn’t yet know my address. And if he didn’t kill her in the meantime, she would call me again. I growled my own few angry words that I’d break his ass and blow his fucking head off if I saw him. Meanwhile as deaf as Beethoven I spent the rest of the day sitting with my head in my hands and my balls spiritually in a sling. That night I propped a chair against the door and stacked milk bottles to get knocked over to alert me from sleep. I slept with the carving knife, part of a canteen of cutlery I planned to soon pawn, from Sylvia’s adoptive parents. My hand gripped to the handle under my pillow. Waking up bleary-eyed, it was a struggle to go out to buy something for breakfast. Heading downstairs, I had to look in every shadow to see if anyone lurked there. Standing then looking left and right to see if the way was clear in the street. But I already had in my hand a letter from the mailbox. My name written in flowing beautiful script on an elegant cream-colored envelope. A gold-edged card inside, and beneath the Butterfield 8 telephone number were a dozen brief words.
As promised instead of my tinkle
my card.
The Steinway awaits.
Dru
Boyo boy I mean it, did I in one goddamn hurry dial Butterfield 8. And those words I heard on the other end of the phone. “Come right over, why don’t you.” And I nearly broke my ass in the speed with which I took a shower. Ripping the shower curtain down as my feet slipped on the soapsuds in the bath I crashed on one buttock and one elbow and banged the back of my head. It was a wonderful feeling. Even with my broken ass trembling I was elated and as if I were on the stage of La Scala in Milan I sang an aria from La Bohème and looked at my naked form in the mirror. Not bad. And looking trim. Then putting on my clothes and trying to find clean underwear, socks and an ironed shirt. New York became a different city as I rode north on the BMT line and got off at Fifth Avenue and Central Park South and now I didn’t give a good goddamn how sad the look was on people’s faces. Or maybe I did but they were now too crushingly dismal to contemplate. Also any second I expected some black bastard to come charging at me with a knife, screaming, “I’m going to kill you, you white bastard.” But at least for a moment or two, I had somewhere to go in life and play music. I walked east on Fifty-ninth Street, stopping off in the shoe-repair store, where, from one of their efficient team of shiners using about a dozen different creams, I got a badly needed shine. And here I was, all the way from Pell Street. And on these quieter pavements of Sutton Place again, that you would believe was another and nicer world. In which my presence produced a slight suspicion and then surprise in the eyes of the doorman, who pretended not to recognize me and had stepped back behind his desk, his finger already pointed at names in a book.