Balls (10 page)

Perhaps my grandfather would be a better subject for a song, said Henry to himself
.
He's got to be.

Grandpa Itchy (
neé
Isaac, Itchala to his mother), unfit to care for himself, moved into an apartment down the hall from Henry, his mother and brother. A proud man, whose legs would still carry him, with a face which was thin and full-moon round, large ears, a macaw nose, Itchy, wearing only his red bathrobe, redid the work of the building's superintendent. He re-swept the floors, polished doorknobs, sorted garbage in the basement. It kept him busy. His kitchen was crowded with canned foods.

Tuna fish,
Sardines,
Pineapples,
Peaches,
Tomatoes,
Spinach,
Asparagus,
Lima, black,
And refried,
Beans
.

Cans were stacked on the counters and blocked out the windows. Grandpa Itchy, preparing for the apocalypse, where he would not go hungry as he had during the Great Depression in the Bronx, made one trip out of the building each day and that was to the grocery store. Whatever cash he had on him he put into his cans. Since the death of his wife, Shirley, Itchy was coming apart. At one in the morning, in the hallway, he'd be mopping the floors, singing.

Henry came from his room in his pajamas. His mother, Edie, would hear the front door unlock and call to him from bed.

Henry? Is that you? Where are you going?

Grandpa. I can hear him in the hallway. I'll bring him to bed.

Itchy would have wet himself. Henry changed him into a new pair of pajamas. The old man having not lost his sense of shame would ask Henry to tell no one about his weak bladder. Henry would spend a few minutes before going back to bed organizing his cans. This cheered Itchy up.

Pie Fillers,
Apple,
Blueberry,
Cherry,
Pumpkin,
Were to be cleaned,
And stacked,
In alphabetical,
Order.
Same with the soup.
Chicken Noodle,
Cream of Broccoli,
Onion,
Minestrone.
Mom was worried,
When Grandpa's apartment,
Started to resemble,
A model of a city,
Populated by,
Many hundred buildings, like,
The GM Towers.

Itchy was severely depressed. His face was losing form. He slept all day. It was Henry's job to keep an eye on him after school. He often discovered Grandpa in the stairwell, his cheek resting flat on the tread, a toothbrush used for cleaning the floors in his right hand. Henry would tap the slumped man's back. Waiting to see if his head would lift:

And I sometimes screamed,
When it did.
Itchy screamed,
Back,
I'd lead him,
To bed,
That was no easy feat,
For Christ's sake,
The mattress,
Was surrounded by,
A damn sea of canned,
Salmon!

Henry, in his apartment, dropped this tune, declaring, But why's it all got to be so dreary.

He started up with another, recalling the day he and Paula met, when he saw her seated alone at a table on the back patio of Café La Fortuna, on West 71st. He asked if he could join her for coffee. For three hours they sat. That she turned out, like himself, to be a musician, injected immediate life into their conversation. She had a recital that night. Henry told her he'd like to come. She admitted that she was only page-turning for a piano player. Henry said he'd like to go anyway. And he did, complimenting her afterwards on a job well-done.

You were so quiet with the pages, he said, in the reception hall where parents, students and professors gathered. So perfectly quiet.

You think so? she said.

And the way your fingers pinched the corner of the pages—you didn't even have to lick the tips. What's your secret?

She said, My fingertips are my secret.

Henry took her hand and turned it over, inspecting them. Rough and hard-worked, he brought them nearly to his lips, squeezing, though not too tight. She asked him what he thought and he told her they were musically important fingertips, words which went right to her head. The next thing he knew she was leading him to a practice room on the floor above, locking the door behind them. They made love, in the dark, against a piano. Afterwards, she invited him to her apartment. He held her body all night. Soon after he wrote a song about it:

The subtle undulations of her shoulders,
The small radii of her nipples,
The slope of her ribs,
The short, light hairs of her neck,
And those which were dark,
And fell to shoulder length from her head
.

Henry could recall her whole body in great detail. His powers of mental retention, that he could speak from memory about,

The smooth backsides of her thighs,
The curvature of her orbital bone,
The jagged lines of her palms,

had made her fall in love with him.

To see Paula play her violin was thrilling.
She
was thrilling. Waking to the sound of her violin strings vibrating through the apartment, Henry was overcome by the desire to make something great. On the piano he wasn't the
virtuoso
that Paula was on the violin, however, he knew how to write a song. And to do something truly inspired—why not me? asked Henry of himself. For as a younger man he'd had high hopes for his own life. He'd been determined to live
in
music, surrounded by great visionaries of the past, the present and future. He'd believed he would feed off their smarts, their energy. Rejected in America, but loved in Europe, identifiable by his music, his persona—above all else he would write great songs. In the years prior, he'd lost track of those hopes.

No longer.

What he decided on—his
great
project—wasn't a whole record, but
one
song that perfectly defined the thing he loved most: that is, New York City. And no matter how long it took or how many failures arose in the course of his trying, he would fulfill this mission. Maybe his thinking was narrow, foolish, quixotic, but he began work on the song. Meanwhile, he and Paula were growing closer. She was proud. When they first met, she thought his music ordinary. The way Henry spoke about his latest project, she changed her mind. Perhaps he was a smart man after all. She became less convinced of this over the next year when his song was never written. Henry blamed New York. He was too much in love with the city to write honestly on the subject. In truth, he felt so much anger. Greed seemed to be doing in its beautiful spirit, this time for good. Yet he couldn't make this clear in music, not with any real success. Eventually he gave up.

But what was happening here on the piano? It took him several minutes before he even realized that a song was coming together under his fingers. He stopped playing to write down words intermittently, the lyrics lacking the catchiness there in all his earlier writing. He sang:

Impotent, I blame the powers,
That have without conscience,
Watered-down the streetscape,
(I.e. he who has erected a,
Residential tower fast and cheap,
So as to fill it with new,
Paying residents,
Removed a century old deli,
For the sake of a bank,
Moreover, torn down historically,
Important theaters and,
Inserted chain-pharmacies in their stead),
They have demeaned our intelligence,
Street by street, and left,
My cock timid and confused.
We are all of us down to one ball. (x3)
Boom-bop-bop-bop-bop-bop-boom.

Arranging the song's
structure, its piano lines and vocal melodies, his state was euphoric, though mentally unsteady. In a hard-thinking pose, with his hands spread wide over the piano keys and his face hovering just above them, he felt a strong pressure in his head. Fearing an aneurysm he grabbed his coat and went out into the night. The streets were empty. It was one reason he lived by the U.N., it became a ghost town after hours. And if every New Yorker went home to convalesce after a long hard day, then the silence here was equal to the ocean air recommended to the consumptive.

Henry brought all his new material to J. Van Gundy's, a bar on 40th. Just as more details could be gleaned about a song by listening to its recording, to play it live, for people, in a public setting, brought its own new understandings. Parts which worked and those which didn't became evident. Why this was true, Henry didn't know. It just was. And J. Van Gundy's had a piano. It wasn't a great instrument, but it was in tune, there wasn't a single dead note and the worn down keys felt good against Henry's fingertips.

He entered, the heavy front door swinging back, closing Henry in. From behind the bar Orion Doherty looked up.

Schiller, how goes it? he said.

The room was quiet and dark, fetid, warmer than the outside air, but it agreed with Henry. The same two men who drank here day after day, old with silver hair, they came from neighboring villages in Italy, were huddled drunk at the bar. Beside them a man with a short bourbon-wet mustache was asleep on his feet. No one else was present. Henry ordered a beer. His eyes were on the piano at the back of the room. He wanted to go to it and play his new song, to find out if what he had was any good. Certainly Orion would let him. He always gave Henry access to the instrument. All he had to do was ask.

Orion looked like Pavarotti or Francis Ford Coppola. Hirsute, corpulent, olive-skinned, he wore dark prescription sunglasses which took up half his face. His black hair was a tangled bird's nest on his head. He was discussing the slow state of business. For some reason Henry's thoughts shifted to his appointment at the sperm bank tomorrow. A kind of electricity moved through his spine. He rolled his shoulders backwards and forwards, releasing tension. He brought air into his lungs. At the moment of exhalation he saw Orion's middle-aged face, shadowy and thin-lipped, become excited. He was about to say something. Henry was so eager to play, however, he couldn't listen to another word.

He said,
Hey
, if it's all right, I'd like to use the piano.

The piano? Oh, yeah, sure, sorry, Henry. An injured look shot through his face, disrupting the balance of his sunglasses. Holding his hand out towards the instrument, he told Henry, Be my guest.

Henry went to the back of the room. The only light shone from a single brown bulb hanging above the piano. Henry could see Orion and the three men watching him. The long room had a sloping floor, and with fifteen feet between them, they appeared to Henry at a tilt.

So what are you going to play? asked Orion

It's a tune I started work on tonight.

Does it have a title?

He was about to tell him no, but the words
Castrated New York
were spoken. Around the bar all did silently nod their heads. The first notes of the song rang out. Hesitant in his playing, Henry missed notes in the opening verse. He was feeling better by the second. Reading from a sheet of paper, he sang:

I remember a time,
When New York City's newest structures,
Decayed gradually,
Now one site is hardly ever finished,
Before its parts are coming undone,
Unfortunately, the reproducing male,
Observing daily the structural depreciation,
Of his city,
Finds these days not even the insistent cries of fuck me,
Can get him to come,
No, the decaying visible world has yielded a body,
That knows better,
Than to release its seed,
To make children who will live in a city,
That is fast falling apart—the body wants to know:
Why consent to this?
We are all of us down to one ball. (x3)
Boom-bop-bop-bop-bop-bop-boom.

After finishing the song, Henry realized his rests between phrases had been inconsistent, and unintentionally so. He'd played the outro exactly like the intro, but he knew he didn't want to come in and out the same way. And the song needed a bridge. Tomorrow, in the afternoon, when he was through banking sperm, he would spend more time working on these things.

As it were, the problems which concerned Henry went unnoticed by those listening. Their reactions were overwhelmingly positive. The two men from the neighboring villages in Italy cheered. And to congratulate him on a fine achievement the man with the bourbon-wet mustache bought Henry a bourbon. It was Orion, standing at the end of the bar with his palms facing up and a look of wonderment on his face, who said:

You've been trying to write a song about New York for twenty years, right?

Two years, Henry corrected him.

Isn't this the
one?
Having heard many attempts at his song about New York, Orion had a sense of Henry's struggle. I think you've done it, he said.

Not for reasons of modesty but with the belief that he was assessing his own work honestly, Henry told him, Thanks, really. The song is just decent.

No! shouted the man with the bourbon-wet mustache. His shirt was buttoned low so that his stomach showed. His eyes were full of anger. He said, You're wrong. It's got something special, Henry. From the first notes, I heard it.

Well, thank you.

Don't
well thank you
me. I mean it, he said.

Orion sternly told him, You have a gem, Henry. A gem.

I appreciate your support, replied Henry. But it needs more work. Couple of days, maybe weeks, I don't know.

It's what you always say, went Orion. He'd come out from behind the bar. He stood within a foot of Henry and the piano. Resting his arms on the instrument, in the dim brown light, he said,
This
isn't any good.
That
isn't any good. What do you know about
good
, Henry.

The men from neighboring towns in Italy were staring at Henry. The smaller of the two, his skin was ruddy, and he looked ten years younger than his age, said, Why fight it, Henry? This is your song.

He is right, said his Italian neighbor. This is a great song about our city.

Do you actually think so? Henry addressed everyone in the room, his groin tender.

We do.

You don't think the verses could be a little stronger?