High Cotton (21 page)
Authors: Darryl Pinckney
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #African American
Jeanette said it did a body a world of good to get away, to hang back and get a good look at things. She licked the remnants of a vodka gimlet, sprinkled my face with talk. I thought of the vending machine in the basement of Furnald Hall that had taken all my quarters and agreed with her that the world was, indeed, in chaos, but I didn’t respond to the suggestion in her face that because of the way things were going we might as well have another. She had attached thick, lustrous brushes to her eyelids that made a scratching sound when she looked down to see how far along I was with my drink. She said she had had a day of bullshit from her agent and was tuckered out with all the trying to keep up with herself. Her chatter was muffled by her empty glass. She put on her space goggles and sighed that she could do no more that night. I said it was nice to see her. “What’s wrong, baby? You’re only as sick as your secrets.”
Jeanette didn’t leave. She was afraid to go home. The doctor might have called. She folded her arms on the bar. I started to
retreat and she said she hadn’t wanted anyone to worry, that’s why she hadn’t mentioned the tests before, she was used to dealing with bad news on her own. She took a cigarette from my pack and waited for a light. She said she had had an operation for her condition three years before and was pretty sure that she was strong enough should a second procedure be necessary.
retreat and she said she hadn’t wanted anyone to worry, that’s why she hadn’t mentioned the tests before, she was used to dealing with bad news on her own. She took a cigarette from my pack and waited for a light. She said she had had an operation for her condition three years before and was pretty sure that she was strong enough should a second procedure be necessary.
I watched her from a great distance, amazed, vengeful, and righteous, the way you are when crossing out a name. I said that we all had our problems, bar talk for “So what, get lost, you’re bothering me” and, emancipated by rudeness, flaunted that sometimes scarce medium of exchange, a drink. I was a regular I’d heard it all. I didn’t even pay attention to my own rap. But Jeanette was made of nails. She laughed, as if I’d told her a funny story, dried her eyes, and said a vodka gimlet would do her friendly. I said I had no money. Jeanette leaned over, as if to clue me in on something big. “Ask Betty for credit.”
I knew not to look at the mirror behind the altar of bottles. I roamed among the regulars, fell into conversations as into foxholes, even into the red booth of the Five Bottoms. “That’s right, I told him, don’t pack, just get out. Can we help you or something?” I forced my way into a circle of bloods, Vietnam veterans, and asked them to tell me about lurpers and door gunners. I scribbled my name on the chalk board, though I had never played pool, and would have asked Jesse to let me buy him a top-shelf Jack Daniel’s had he not departed in a cry of Hi-yo, Silver.
The moment had come, that super feeling we waited out the decent hours for, stared down the disapproval in the clock to get. As if a bell had sounded, everyone was feeling fine out of nowhere and flying around the bar, broad, unreserved. The Five Bottoms blossomed like the last best hope of men, and the pool players slapped five and forgave those who had trespassed against them. The Melody Coast, on these special nights, was complicated
with tight places, hidden squares. I thought I would need a map to get from one corner to another.
with tight places, hidden squares. I thought I would need a map to get from one corner to another.
When the regulars got tired of dancing to throwback favorites, they made Betty turn on the radio. I saw Jeanette rumba in my direction and buried myself in a debate on who was the greatest heavyweight champion of all time. When the good people became impatient with the radio, the oldies on the jukebox came back to glory. I saw Jeanette pachanga over to the pool table to lift some unclaimed dollars. Her hips said, “Fine by me: if you don’t know me I don’t know you neither.” When the good people tired of the Bump and the Camel Walk, they fanned themselves and called out for more.
I surfaced near a woman in gold lame and a man with a gold-tipped cane, two oscillating charges impressed by the binding energy between them. The man scraped me away with his cane. I saw Jesse hug a white boy in a tie-dyed T-shirt. I saw Jeanette peer over a fat man’s shoulder, as if she were hunting for someone more important at a party. I smiled recklessly on delicate negotiations near the bathroom. I saw Betty rinse towels and forget to hang up the telephone. I saw Jesse in the racket arch like a dentist over the white boy who looked passed out. I was thinking of the stories I’d heard about cabinloads of sinners going crazy on the flights to the Mardi Gras in Rio when Betty pulled the plug on the jukebox.
The selection lights disappeared, “Hey Juanita” by the Five Stars slurred to a halt, but the good time went on. Then the news rippled from the crowd around the bar to the good people in the red booths, to the clusters of tables in puddles of light, on to the recess behind the pool table and back again, each time gaining speed, accumulating detail. Someone had been cut. Someone had been cut on the street. A kid had been cut with a razor by assailants unknown, right on Broadway, just outside
the door, and Jesse had carried him in. Word got around and everything ceased for ten years. No one wanted to be seen taking the first sip.
the door, and Jesse had carried him in. Word got around and everything ceased for ten years. No one wanted to be seen taking the first sip.
The lights went up on the smoke. I saw the Five Bottoms put their hands to ruined mascara, make the sign of the cross. I saw good people pour out some of their drinks on the floor as a token of respect. Everyone who had ever been to a doctor was suddenly a medical expert. I heard some say that they knew something was going to happen. It was more than anyone had bargained for. The crowd moved back. I had to look.
“Go on, boy, wipe your ass with your morals,” Jesse said.
I saw him embowered by bar stools, laid out on the floor. His mustache wasn’t more than two weeks old. His T-shirt was not tie-dyed, that was something else. He was completely pink, his arms, his lids. What I saw when I shut my eyes was a thin, raised, red line that went from behind his left ear across his throat and entered his pale green T-shirt just below his right shoulder.
“What the hell are you doing?” A policeman shoved me into the unsteady others who wanted to get out. Policemen were everywhere with walkie-talkies, with midriffs of guns, nightsticks, handcuffs. They locked the doors, cleared out the bathroom and the kitchen, interviewed Jesse, Betty, and Jesse again. Another ten years passed. Word got around that the police were going to take every name in the place. Good people fed on this bulletin, became hysterical, unreasonable, important, insisted that they could not get tangled up with the cops, that they had more than a few answers but due to mysterious policies could not be questioned. The boy was encompassed by a sheet as pure as the Alps. I wondered where they had found something so clean.
“I sure need a drink now,” I heard Jeanette say in line behind me. The law of the binge is that the binge comes first. People
gave the policemen plausible names and phone numbers. “The Double Purchase is open,” Jeanette said. Murder was the best excuse of all to get loaded. Her hand slipped into mine. I gave up my name to a policeman’s clipboard. “Moved. Left no forwarding address,” my eyes said. A summer night waited to take me firmly by the other arm. I wish I could say I was thinking about him, stopped, subtracted, about his parents asleep, unprepared for the anniversary that had entered their lives.
gave the policemen plausible names and phone numbers. “The Double Purchase is open,” Jeanette said. Murder was the best excuse of all to get loaded. Her hand slipped into mine. I gave up my name to a policeman’s clipboard. “Moved. Left no forwarding address,” my eyes said. A summer night waited to take me firmly by the other arm. I wish I could say I was thinking about him, stopped, subtracted, about his parents asleep, unprepared for the anniversary that had entered their lives.
S
ummertime
ummertime
M
anhattan was burning up that Bicentennial summer, and those without air conditioners, those who could not buy refuge in the cinemas or bars, were driven into the streets. Far into the spangled night, welling up from the muggy cross streets and streaming avenues, came the noise of tapedeck anthems, revving motorcycles, breaking bottles, dogs, horns, cats in heat, bag ladies getting holy, and children going off the deep end.
anhattan was burning up that Bicentennial summer, and those without air conditioners, those who could not buy refuge in the cinemas or bars, were driven into the streets. Far into the spangled night, welling up from the muggy cross streets and streaming avenues, came the noise of tapedeck anthems, revving motorcycles, breaking bottles, dogs, horns, cats in heat, bag ladies getting holy, and children going off the deep end.
I was, as the expression goes, beginning a new life. I was still on the Upper West Side, but every change of address within the twenty-two square miles of Manhattan was, back then, before I knew better, a hymn to starting over. So, two rooms with splintered softwood floors and walls the dingy, off-white color of a boy’s Jockey shorts after scout camp; two rooms at 2—West Ninety-fifth Street in a small, shaggy building of only two apartments, rooms sanctified by rent stabilization.
The old brick held the mean heat, sun streaked through the windows and lit up the smoky dust that hung in the air. The pipes leaked, the doors were warped, spiderwebs formed intricate designs in the corners. The oven and refrigerator refused to work on days that were not prime numbers. In the mornings paint
dropped from the ceiling like debris idly flung into traffic from an overpass. The bathroom tiles had buckled and the cracks in the plaster resembled outlines of fjords on a map of Norway. Roaches?—Yes, the totemic guerrillas of urban homesteading were there.
dropped from the ceiling like debris idly flung into traffic from an overpass. The bathroom tiles had buckled and the cracks in the plaster resembled outlines of fjords on a map of Norway. Roaches?—Yes, the totemic guerrillas of urban homesteading were there.
None of this mattered. I was unpacking boxes of secondhand and overdue library books, fondling dirty envelopes of tattered letters, hitting my shins on milk crates of blackened pots, tarnished flatware, and chipped Limoges plates. In the new, ascetic life I imagined I would not need much. I was not made for keeping up the perfect kitchen for the right sort of dinner party, not equal to the task of digging up that intriguing print for the gleaming, glossy-white vestibule. I was through with telephone madness at 5 p.m.—that calling and calling to find someone home while a tray of ice melts on the thrift store table. And the nights of the wide bed, of the mattress large enough to hold the combat of two, were definitely over. The seediness into which I had slid held the promise of a cleansing, monastic routine.
My rear window looked out on a mews, on Pomander Walk, a strand of two-story row houses done in mock-Tudor style. The shutters and doors were painted blue, green, or red. The hedges were prim and tidy. Boxes of morning glories completed the scene. An odd sight, unexpected, anachronistic. I thought of it as a pocket of subversion against the tyranny of the grid and the tower. But Pomander Walk’s claims were modest, as were its proportions—a mere sideshow of a lane that ran north and south, from Ninety-fifth Street to Ninety-fourth. Its survival probably had something to do with its being in the middle of the block, not taking up too much room, and that it was family property.
A little street in the London suburb of Chiswick was celebrated in the play
Pomander Walk
, first produced in 1911. I was told that an Irish-American restaurateur was so charmed by it that
he brought a designer over to help build a replica of the set. That is what he got—a set. It was built in 1921, a rather late, unhistorical-sounding date. When Pomander Walk was finished, the land immediately west of it was virginal, undeveloped. Residents had a clear view of thick treetops down to the Hudson River. Perhaps then it was close in mood to the ideals of the City Beautiful period, to the harmony of Hampstead Way or Bedford Park. Perhaps not. This was a mirage inspired by haphazard Chiswick, not by an architect’s vision of a utopian commuter village.
Pomander Walk
, first produced in 1911. I was told that an Irish-American restaurateur was so charmed by it that
he brought a designer over to help build a replica of the set. That is what he got—a set. It was built in 1921, a rather late, unhistorical-sounding date. When Pomander Walk was finished, the land immediately west of it was virginal, undeveloped. Residents had a clear view of thick treetops down to the Hudson River. Perhaps then it was close in mood to the ideals of the City Beautiful period, to the harmony of Hampstead Way or Bedford Park. Perhaps not. This was a mirage inspired by haphazard Chiswick, not by an architect’s vision of a utopian commuter village.
I was disappointed to learn that Pomander Walk had always been apartments. I thought each structure had originally been a house and, like those of Belgravia, had only later been violated, cut up, humbled by the high cost of living well. Pomander Walk harbored high-ceilinged efficiencies “intended for and first occupied by theatrical people,” the
WPA Guide to New York City
reported in 1939. In the twenties, so the lore went, it was a pied-à-terre for the likes of the Gish sisters, Katharine Hepburn, and Dutch Schultz. Bootleggers threw scandalous parties at which guests refused to remove their homburgs.
WPA Guide to New York City
reported in 1939. In the twenties, so the lore went, it was a pied-à-terre for the likes of the Gish sisters, Katharine Hepburn, and Dutch Schultz. Bootleggers threw scandalous parties at which guests refused to remove their homburgs.
Pomander Walk had seen better days. The sentry boxes were empty. The caretaking staff had been reduced to two elusive Albanians, the apartments themselves were in various stages of decay, and behind the valiant façades, in the passageways between the tombs of West End Avenue and the cheap clothing stores of Broadway, were fire escapes grim as scaffolds and mounds of garbage through which chalk-white rats scurried. These were the days before gentrincation—where is the gentry?—before the ruthless renovations that would turn entire neighborhoods into a maze of glass, chrome, exposed brick, polished blond oak, and greedy ferns.
Pomander Walk had become a kind of fortress, as it had to be, surrounded as it was, like the enclaves of early Christian merchants in the Muslim ports of the Levant. Pomander Walk struggled against the tone of the blocks swarming around it. High gates at either end of the lane, at the steps that led down to the streets, spoke of a different order. DO NOT ENTER. PRIVATE PROPERTY. A peeling red rooster kept vigil over the main entrance. The fields sloping down to the Hudson were long gone. Sandwiched between dour, conventional buildings, Pomander Walk seemed an insertion of incredible whimsy and brought to mind Rem Koolhaas’s phrase in
Delirious New York—
“Reality Shortage.”
Delirious New York—
“Reality Shortage.”
During my vacant hours I fed my curiosity about the inhabitants of that pastoral, pretentious, Anglophile fantasy. The tenants were mostly women. I imagined that they were widows surviving on pensions or on what their husbands had managed to put aside, and that there were a few divorcees sprinkled among them, the sort not anxious to define themselves by respectable jobs with obscure galleries. Their custom, on those hot afternoons, before, as I supposed, trips to married sons at the Jersey Shore, was to leave their electric fans and gather on the stoops. They sat on newspapers, pillows, or lawn chairs for cocktails. Sometimes large, festive deck umbrellas appeared.
The women got along well with the blond or near-blond actors and dancers who lived in warring pairs in some of the smaller apartments. The artists, when they came out in tight shorts for a little sun, joined with the women in discouraging intruders from looking around. No, they said, there were no flats available and the waiting list was as long as your arm. Defenders of the faith. I kept the frayed curtains over my rear window drawn after some tourists, as non-leaseholders were called, stepped up to the bars and, seeing me, a black fellow struggling with a can of tuna fish, asked, “Are you the super?”
Once upon a time I was morbidly sensitive about the impertinence born of sociology. Taxi drivers would not stop for me after dark, white girls jogged to keep ahead of my shadow thrown at their heels by the amber streetlamps. Part of me didn’t blame them, but most of me was hurt. I carried props into the subway—the latest
Semiotext(e),
a hefty volume of the Frankfurt School—so that the employed would not get the wrong idea or, more to the point, the usual idea about me. I did not want them to take me for yet another young black prole, though I was exactly that, one in need of a haircut and patches for my jeans. That Bicentennial summer I got over it. I remembered a gentleman of the old school who, after Johns Hopkins and Columbia, said his only ambition was to sink into the lower classes. By the time I knew him he had succeeded, and this gentle antique lived out his last days among harmless drunkards at a railroad yard in Norfolk, Virginia. I resolved to do the same, as if, away from my mother and father, I had been anywhere else.
Semiotext(e),
a hefty volume of the Frankfurt School—so that the employed would not get the wrong idea or, more to the point, the usual idea about me. I did not want them to take me for yet another young black prole, though I was exactly that, one in need of a haircut and patches for my jeans. That Bicentennial summer I got over it. I remembered a gentleman of the old school who, after Johns Hopkins and Columbia, said his only ambition was to sink into the lower classes. By the time I knew him he had succeeded, and this gentle antique lived out his last days among harmless drunkards at a railroad yard in Norfolk, Virginia. I resolved to do the same, as if, away from my mother and father, I had been anywhere else.
As a matter of fact, I had been sinking for some time since my job as an auditor’s trainee. Next stop downward: a bookshop. Not the supermarket variety where women phoned in orders for two yards of books, repeating specifications of height and color, completely indifferent to title. Not one of the new boutiques where edgy Parisian slang skipped over the routine murmur. But a “used” bookshop, one of those holes-in-the-wall where solitude and dust took a toll on the ancient proprietor’s mental well-being, much like the health risks veins of coal pose to miners. That summer, unable to pay the rising rent, the owner gave up, wept openly at the auction of his stock. Next stop: office temp (let go). Waiter (fired). Telephone salesman (mission impossible). Then I found my calling—handyman. The anonymity of domestic service went well with the paranoid vanity of having a new and unlisted phone number.
I should have advertised my services in
The Westsider
. Even so, I lucked into a few appointments. Among my clients was an exalted bohemian on the upper reaches of Riverside Drive. I spent most of the day cleaning up after her impromptu seances. Two mornings a week I worked for a feminist psychologist who lived in one of the hives overlooking Lincoln Center. I walked her nasty Afghan hound, which was often woozy from pet tranquilizers; stripped the huge rolltop desk she hauled in not from the country but from Amsterdam Avenue. I was not allowed to play the radio and, in retaliation, I did not touch the lunch of tofu and carrot juice she left for me on the Formica counter. Then to Chelsea, where I picked up dry cleaning for a furtive youngish businessman. His mail consisted mostly of final notices from Con Ed, Ma Bell, and collection agencies in other states. I was certain that I was being tailed whenever I delivered one of his packages to the questionable factory outlets with which he had dealings. I made him pay me in cash.
The Westsider
. Even so, I lucked into a few appointments. Among my clients was an exalted bohemian on the upper reaches of Riverside Drive. I spent most of the day cleaning up after her impromptu seances. Two mornings a week I worked for a feminist psychologist who lived in one of the hives overlooking Lincoln Center. I walked her nasty Afghan hound, which was often woozy from pet tranquilizers; stripped the huge rolltop desk she hauled in not from the country but from Amsterdam Avenue. I was not allowed to play the radio and, in retaliation, I did not touch the lunch of tofu and carrot juice she left for me on the Formica counter. Then to Chelsea, where I picked up dry cleaning for a furtive youngish businessman. His mail consisted mostly of final notices from Con Ed, Ma Bell, and collection agencies in other states. I was certain that I was being tailed whenever I delivered one of his packages to the questionable factory outlets with which he had dealings. I made him pay me in cash.
One glaring morning someone I knew in publishing called to say that she knew of a woman who was getting on in years and in need of some help. The only thing Djuna Barnes required of her helper was that he not have a beard. I shaved, cut my hair, and fished out jacket and tie in spite of the heat, having been brought up to believe that I was not properly dressed unless I was extremely uncomfortable. I was so distracted that my socks did not match.
Miss Barnes lived in the West Village, just north of the old Women’s House of Detention, in a blind alley called Patchin Place. Shaded by ailanthus, a city tree first grown in India that in the days of the pestilence was believed to absorb “bad air,” the lime-green dwellings of Patchin Place had once been home to Dreiser, John Reed, E. E. Cummings, and Jane Bowles.
Through the intercom at #5 came a deep, melodious voice, and after an anxiety-producing interrogation, I was buzzed in. I found the chartreuse door with its DO NOT DISTURB sign, and after another interrogation, it slowly opened.
Through the intercom at #5 came a deep, melodious voice, and after an anxiety-producing interrogation, I was buzzed in. I found the chartreuse door with its DO NOT DISTURB sign, and after another interrogation, it slowly opened.
The home of this “genius with little talent,” as T. S. Eliot said of Miss Barnes, was brutally cramped—one tiny, robin’s egg—blue room with white molding. The kitchen was such a closet that the refrigerator hummed behind French doors in a little pantry packed with ironing board, vacuum, boxes of faded
cartes d’identité,
linen, and, so my covetousness led me to think, hoarded Tchelitchew costume sketches. Great adventures, I was sure, awaited me in the clutter—bibelots on the mantels and side tables, picture frames on the floor turned toward the wall, shoeboxes under the fat wing chair. On either side of the fireplace were bookcases. Her low, narrow bed was flush against one of them. Two plain wooden desks dominated the dark room. Stacks of letters and papers had accumulated on them like stalagmites. Meticulously labeled envelopes warning “Notes on Mr. Eliot,” “Notes on Mr. Joyce” rested near a portable typewriter. The blank page in the Olivetti manual had browned.
cartes d’identité,
linen, and, so my covetousness led me to think, hoarded Tchelitchew costume sketches. Great adventures, I was sure, awaited me in the clutter—bibelots on the mantels and side tables, picture frames on the floor turned toward the wall, shoeboxes under the fat wing chair. On either side of the fireplace were bookcases. Her low, narrow bed was flush against one of them. Two plain wooden desks dominated the dark room. Stacks of letters and papers had accumulated on them like stalagmites. Meticulously labeled envelopes warning “Notes on Mr. Eliot,” “Notes on Mr. Joyce” rested near a portable typewriter. The blank page in the Olivetti manual had browned.
The booming voice was deceptive. Miss Barnes was bent, frail. The lazy Susan of medicines on the night table was so large that there was scarcely room for the radio, spectacles, and telephone. Her introductory remarks were brief. She came down hard on the point of my being there. “See that you don’t grow old. The longer you’re around the more trouble you’re in.” Miss Barnes had been old for so long that she looked upon herself as a cautionary tale. The first day of my employ I was told to see to it that I never married, never went blind, was never operated on, never found myself forbidden salt, sugar, tea, or sherry, and above all, that I was never such a fool as to write a book.
Yet there was a hypnotic liveliness to her, moments when the
embers of flirtatiousness flared. The thin white hair was swept back and held together by two delicate combs. She wore a Moroccan robe trimmed in gold, white opaque stockings, and red patent-leather heels. Her eyes glistened like opals in a shallow pond and her skin was pale as moonlight. Her mouth was painted a moist pink, her jaw jutted forward; her bearing was defiant, angrily inquisitive. The tall, stylish eccentric of the Bernice Abbott and Man Ray photographs lived on somewhere inside the proud recluse who cursed her magnifying glass, her swollen ankles, overworked lungs, hardened arteries, and faulty short-term memory. “Damn, damn, damn,” she said.
embers of flirtatiousness flared. The thin white hair was swept back and held together by two delicate combs. She wore a Moroccan robe trimmed in gold, white opaque stockings, and red patent-leather heels. Her eyes glistened like opals in a shallow pond and her skin was pale as moonlight. Her mouth was painted a moist pink, her jaw jutted forward; her bearing was defiant, angrily inquisitive. The tall, stylish eccentric of the Bernice Abbott and Man Ray photographs lived on somewhere inside the proud recluse who cursed her magnifying glass, her swollen ankles, overworked lungs, hardened arteries, and faulty short-term memory. “Damn, damn, damn,” she said.
My inaugural chore was to refill the humidifier. Under her scrutiny this task was far from simple. Her hands flew to her ears. “That’s too much water. We can’t have that.” Next Miss Barnes wanted me to excavate an unmarked copy of “Creatures in an Alphabet.” Stray pages were tucked here and there, none clean enough for her. She settled on one version of the poem, retreated to the bed, and set about crossing out the dedication. “Can’t have that. He ruined my picture.” The explanation of how some well-meaning soul had smudged a portrait when he tried to wash it gave way abruptly to a denunciation of modern pens, how they were made not to last. I gave her my Bic, told her to keep it. “Why, thank you. Would you like to support me?” She sank into the pillows and laughed, dryly, ruefully, as you would at a private joke.
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