Lover boy. O lover boy.
Strength of my desire.
Fire of my fire.
Love me some more, lover boy.
But what more could one ask for but to have a reverie of ecstasy about someone whom Max described as one of the richest women in the world. And who, if that a dilemma be, can be accused of no crime but who, in being rid of the struggle to financially survive, might be found far richer in her soul. Yet who, on that evening when the East River was flowing by below us and Brooklyn’s lights twinkled in the distance and I played my minuet for her, said she felt haunted by what seemed a curse growing up, which made her, through tragedy and by trusts and wills, richer and richer. Her closest little cousin girlfriend with whom she played, died of scarlet fever. Her father when she was thirteen, got electrocuted by lightning on their private golf course while he was throwing the switch for the sprinkler system. Two years later, her mother was killed in a head-on collision coming around a bend on a coastal road at Cap d’Antibes on the Riviera and her favorite uncle one day later went out on his estate in Virginia and blew his head off with a shotgun. And a more distant relative hearing of the shocking news, then went and stood on railway tracks in front of a train along the Hudson, near a train stop named Camelot. And none of this did Sylvia ever reveal. As if she expected something worse to happen to her.
I couldn’t tell Dru my own deeper devastations but I told her my most haunted story of having, as a small boy, to kiss a dead aunt at an Irish wake. And then related about the clairvoyance of one of my closest boyhood friends who lived in an area called Irishtown in a big spooky gray house surrounded by verandas, in the shadow of which we used to sit on rainy days singing songs inside their big chauffeured limousine parked permanently in the drive. And my friend was haunted by his mother who could by telepathy scare the shit out of him wherever he was. Even off somewhere miles away and usually spending money his mother gave him to pay off some urgent bill like his school tuition and which he was spending on our underage drinking pleasure of Tom Collinses in the Astor Hotel downtown, pretending that instead of being delinquents out on a spree we were big-time playboys. He would, after our first couple of Tom Collinses, always panic and interrupt our philosophical speculation and say he could hear his mother calling him. “Hey,” Fd say, “how can you, more than twenty miles away, hear her.” “Because,” he said, “she knows I’ve spent the money for my school tuition getting drunk — that’s how I know she is calling. And she’s going to beat the hell out of me when I get home. Box my ears. That’s how I know she’s calling.” And finally I believed him, because he would disappear into the big gray house with all its verandas shrouded in the trees and I wouldn’t see him again for weeks until he would finally appear, thinner, having emerged from incarceration locked somewhere in an attic or cellar, his food passed into him through a flap in the door. And although he never said so, I was certain it was bread and water.
Despite the long night out with Max I felt strangely full of energy this next day, my head slowly clearing. Propping a chair against the broken front door I made a feeble attempt to clean up the apartment but the goddamn cockroaches rushing for cover every time I lifted something up sent me instead with a desperate urge to sit at the piano and compose. My fingers itching to race across the keys and to mark new notes in the manuscript of my minuet. And placing the score in front of me on the piano, I sat in the manner of Rubenstein, fingers poised to lower them on the keys. Then as my fingertips touched, there was a strange silent sensation. No note sounded. I propped open the piano top. And drew in my breath in horror. There inside, except for a few of the heaviest bass chords, were all my piano strings, curled and wound upon themselves and cut and chopped to pieces. And the phone rang.
“Hey, hi. God, I at last got you. I phoned several times yesterday. It’s Dru.”
“Hello ma’am.”
“Stephen, what’s the matter. You sound awful.”
“Well, I am presently digesting a matter presently assailing my spirits.”
“Oh dear. We’re not, are we, like two ships passing in the night.”
“No ma’am, I hope not.”
“Well, my ship’s signaling, sending you some semaphore.”
“What’s it saying, ma’am.”
“It’s saying, Stephen, you’re my sunshine. And I need some badly right at this time.”
“Well gee, ma’am, I could do with a little ray or two myself at this time.”
“Well in that regard, perhaps you can in two hours meet me.”
“Yes ma’am. You bet I can.”
“Wait outside the Yiddish Theatre at Seventh and Fifty-eighth Street.”
“Sure thing ma’am.”
Upon the prospect of seeing Dru, my sense of crushing defeat and abysmal futurelessness wasn’t yet totally absolute. But with the unpredictability in one’s life rampant, even ole Dru might be getting ready to bust me one right on the kisser. Take that, you inferior impostor. How dare you ill-treat my beloved adopted daughter, and blatantly marry her for her money. Now find a shirt. Something silk and refined. Dress for the occasion. Search amid Sylvia’s dozens of discarded brassieres and leotards. Get out my gray flannels. Wear a carefully striped tie of quiet distinction. Select a light green plain sports jacket that I might have last worn on the prep school boat ride. But avoid one that annoyed the school prefect of discipline who said, “Do not. Ever again. Wear that. In this school.” And in these garments I will look out of uniform in this part of town. Jam the apartment door closed. Walk out and down this Oriental street to Mulberry and cross over to the West Side. Try to do as I often have tried. Walk away the burden of sadness mile by mile. Step by step. Head up Hudson to Ninth Avenue. Eardrums assaulted by the modern symphony of the flow of backfiring, horn-blowing, gear-grinding trucks and cars. Pass the lunch-rooms, saloons and pushcart vendors. Hoping that as one gets farther away from the cut piano strings, it will ease the pain and drive it out of the soul. And yet, there, just sounded, is a most beautiful bass, base reverberation. The deep throb of a ship’s whistle blasting on the river, pulling out of dock. Slow, stern-first to midstream. Faintly hear the echo of the throbbing sound coming back across the Hudson from the sheer rock cliffs of the Palisades. Bound to be one of the great liners off to Europe. Upon which I would so much like to sail. To that older world where the musician and composer can so much better avail of their dignity. Even in Vienna, where the whole audience is waiting to hold you up to ridicule. Ready for even some poor little bastard violinist in the back of the strings to miss a single note or play a wrong one. In order to boo and hiss the whole orchestra. But as things are now I shall never be able to get to that distant but civilized shore. And am instead reminded of the only trips I can afford to take, by the hoots of ferries back and forth to Hoboken, Jersey City, and Weehawken. And in this city, obscurity perpetuates on great men. As they, their fierce fury spent, recluse themselves from the eternal indifference of this city. Somewhere not far from here, Herman Melville was a customs inspector. And no one gave a hoot or cared. In that side street, there is the Straubenmüller Textile High School. And maybe plenty give a hoot and care that it’s there. And here I am now in Hell’s Kitchen. Where you can never tell if they have, in the back of liquor stores, a policeman crouched behind boxes, a gun in his hand. He waits for a stickup. A cross marked on the bullet so that when fired and hits, he doesn’t have to shoot twice. Bang. And the holdup man, a big hole blown in him somewhere, drops dead. Kids roaming the streets with zip guns, firing bullets out of pieces of pipe. Hypodermic needles shooting stuff they buy on the street corner into their limbs to get a few hours of mindless reverie. In this world where the hoodlums abound and where I’ve been caught frequenting my family’s bar, of which no one is allowed to know about or to go to because of the disgustingly undignified things that have happened there. A girl giving a blow job to a drunk customer in a back hallway leading to the men’s room. But where, still under drinking age, I ventured on a few dawn occasions to meet this same girl with a pockmarked face who had to support her out-of-work father and younger brother by giving blow jobs for two dollars. Holy cow, she was like a millionairess on a busy day. And to whom I enjoyed to talk and who told me that she, once on her knees giving a guy a blow job, got socked in the face because he said she was doing such a dirty, disgusting thing, and didn’t pay her. And that’s how she got her broken nose and spoke so sonorously and told me not to wear a striped tie with a striped shirt. I was for awhile unrecognized till this son of a bitch who didn’t pay for his blow job picked a fight and started to call me “pretty boy,” and before he could draw his gun, I kicked him in the balls and busted him one in the chops. Bullets later, or knife, or whatever he had, flying, the bartender spirited me out the back door. Soaked to the skin in the pouring rain, I hid in an empty garbage can before I finally got a chance to run away. But nothing now, and no knowledge I have of this city, is lessening the pain. Even here in the Garment District. And only words come to mind that could be construed as pedantic speak, which I repeat over and over. That I utterly utterly condemn the cruel inhumanity wrought upon me by persons of grievous intent. And I swear I will with every ounce of my one hundred and seventy-six and a half pounds bust into the next century the next rude, inhumane son of a bitch I come across.