Lonesome Traveler (13 page)

Prez the Negro chief cook had been fired and was going into town with me and say goodbye on the sidewalks of old New Orleans.— It was an anti-Negro management—the captain was worse than anyone else.—

Prez said “I'd sure like to go to New York with ya and go down to Birdland but I gotta get a ship.”

We walked off the gangplank in the silence of the afternoon.

The second cook's car en route to New Orleans zoomed by us on the highway.

AT THIS TIME MY MOTHER was living alone in a little apartment in Jamaica Long Island, working in the shoe factory, waiting for me to come home so I could keep her company and escort her to Radio City once a month. She had a tiny bedroom waiting for me, clean linen in the dresser, clean sheets in the bed. It was a relief after all the sleepingbags and bunks and railroad earth. It was another of the many opportunities she's given me all her life to just stay home and write.

I always give her all my leftover pay. I settled down to long sweet sleeps, day-long meditations in the house, writing, and long walks around beloved old Manhattan a half hour subway ride away. I roamed the streets, the bridges, Times Square, cafeterias, the waterfront, I looked up all my poet beatnik friends and roamed with them, I had love affairs with girls in the Village, I did everything with that great mad joy you get when you return to New York City.

I've heard great singing Negroes call it “The Apple!”

“There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves,” sang Herman Melville.

“Bound round by flashing tides,” sang Thomas Wolfe.

Whole panoramas of New York everywhere, from New Jersey, from skyscrapers.—

EVEN FROM BARS, like a Third Avenue bar—4 P M the men are all roaring in clink bonk glass brassfoot barrail “where ya goin” excitement—October's in the air, in the Indian Summer sun of door.— Two Madison Avenue salesmen who been working all day long come in young, well dressed, justsuits, puffing cigars, glad to have the day done and the drink comin in, side by side march in smiling but there's no room at the roaring (Shit!) crowded bar so they stand two deep from it waiting and smiling and talking.— Men do love bars and good bars should be loved.— It's full of businessmen, workmen, Finn MacCools of Time.— Be-overalled oldgray topers dirty and beerswiggin glad.—Nameless truck busdrivers with flashlites slung from hips—old beatfaced beerswallowers sadly upraising purple lips to happy drinking ceilings.— Bartenders are fast, courteous, interested in their work as well as clientele.— Like Dublin at 4:30 P M when the work is done, but this is great New York Third Avenue, free lunch, smells of Moody street exhaust river lunch in road of grime bysmashing the door, guitarplaying long sideburned heroes smell out there on wood doorsteps of afternoon drowse.— But it's New York towers rise beyond, voices crash mangle to talk and chew the gossip till Earwicker drops his load—Ah Jack Fitzgerald Mighty Murphy where are you?.— Semi bald blue
shirt tattered shovellers in broken end dungarees fisting glasses of glistenglass foam top brown afternoon beer.— The subway rumbles underneath as man in homburg in vest but coatless executive changes from right to left foot on ye brass rail.— Colored man in hat, dignified, young, paper underarm, says goodbye at bar warm and paternal leaning over men—elevator operator around the corner.— And wasnt this where they say Novak the real estator who used to stay up late a-nights linefaced to become right and rich in his little white worm cellule of the night typing up reports and letters wife and kids go mad at home at eleven P M—ambitious, worried, in a little office of the Island, right on the street undignified but open to all business and in infancy any business can be small as ambition's big—pushing how many daisies now? and never made his million, never had a drink with So Long Gee Gee and I Love You Too in this late afternoon beer room of men excited shifting stools and footbottom rail scuffle heel soles in New York?—Never called Old Glasses over and offered his rim red nose a drink—never laughed and let the fly his nose use as a landingmark—but ulcerated in the middle of the night to be rich and get his family the best.— So the best American sod's his blanket now, made in upper mills of Hudson Bay Moonface Sassenach and carted down by housepainter in white coveralls (silent) to rim the roam of his once formed flesh, and let worms ram—Rim! So have another beer, topers—Bloody mugglers! Lovers!

MY FRIENDS AND I in New York city have our own special way of having fun without having to spend much money and most important of all without having to be importuned by formalistic bores, such as, say, a
swell evening at the mayor's ball.— We dont have to shake hands and we dont have to make appointments and we feel all right.— We sorta wander around like children.— We walk into parties and tell everybody what we've been doing and people think we're showing off.— They say: “Oh look at the beatniks!”

Take, for example, this typical evening you can have: —

Emerging from the Seventh Avenue subway on 42nd Street, you pass the john, which is the beatest john in New York—you never can tell if it's open or not, usually there's a big chain in front of it saying it's out of order, or else it's got some white-haired decaying monster slinking outside, a John which all seven million people in New York City have at one time passed and taken strange notice of—past the new charcoal-fried-hamburger stand, Bible booths, operatic jukeboxes, and a seedy underground used-magazine store next to a peanut-brittle store smelling of subway arcades—here and there a used copy of that old bard Plotinus sneaked in with the remainders of collections of German high-school textbooks—where they sell long ratty-looking hotdogs (no, actually they're quite beautiful, particularly if you havent got 15 cents and are looking for someone in Bickford's Cafeteria who can lay some smash on you) (lend you some change).—

Coming up that stairway, people stand there for hours and hours drooling in the rain, with soaking wet umbrellas—lots of boys in dungarees scared to go into the Army standing halfway up the stairway on the iron steps waiting for God Who knows what, certainly among them some romantic heroes just in from Oklahoma with ambitions to end up yearning in the arms of some unpredictable sexy young blonde in a penthouse on the Empire State Building—some of them probably stand there dreaming of owning the Empire
State Building by virtue of a magic spell which they've dreamed up by a creek in the backwoods of a ratty old house on the outskirts of Texarkana.— Ashamed of being seen going into the dirty movie (what's its name?) across the street from the New York
Times
—The lion and the tiger passing, as Tom Wolfe used to say about certain types passing that corner.—

Leaning against that cigar store with a lot of telephone booths on the corner of 42nd and Seventh where you make beautiful telephone calls looking out into the street and it gets real cozy in there when it's raining outside and you like to prolong the conversation, who do you find? Basketball teams? Basketball coaches? All those guys from the rollerskating rink go there? Cats from the Bronx again, looking for some action, really looking for romance? Strange duos of girls coming out of dirty movies? Did you ever see them? Or bemused drunken businessmen with their hats tipped awry on their graying heads staring catatonically upward at the signs floating by on the Times Building, huge sentences about Khrushchev reeling by, the populations of Asia enumerated in flashing lightbulbs, always five hundred periods after each sentence.— Suddenly a psychopathically worried policeman appears on the corner and tells everybody to go away.— This is the center of the greatest city the world has ever known and this is what beatniks do here.— “Standing on the street corner waiting for no one is Power,” sayeth poet Gregory Corso.

Instead of going to night clubs—if you're in a position to make the nightclub scene (most beatniks rattle empty pockets passing Birdland)—how strange to stand on the sidewalk and just watch that weird eccentric from Second Avenue looking like Napoleon going by feeling cooky crumbs in his pocket, or
a
young 15-year-old kid with
a
bratty face, or suddenly somebody
swishing by in a baseball hat (because that's what you see), and finally an old lady dressed in seven hats and
a
long ratty fur coat in the middle of the July night carrying a huge Russian woolen purse filled with scribbled bits of paper which say “Festival Foundation Inc., 70,000 Germs” and moths flying out of her sleeve—she rushes up and importunes Shriners. And dufflebag soldiers without a war—harmonica players off freight trains.— Of course there are the normal New Yorkers, looking ridiculously out of place and as odd as their own neat oddity, carrying pizzas and
Daily Newses
and headed for brown basements or Pennsylvania trains—W. H. Auden himself may be seen fumbling by in the rain—Paul Bowles, natty in a Dacron suit, passing through on a trip from Morocco, the ghost of Herman Melville himself followed by Bartleby the Wall Street Scrivener and Pierre the ambiguous hipster of 1848 out on a walk—to see what's up in the news flashes of the
Times
—Let's go back to the corner newsstand.—SPACE BLAST… POPE WASHES FEET OF POOR…

Let's go across the street to Grant's, our favored dining place. For 65 cents you get a huge plate of fried clams, a lot of French fried potatoes, a little portion of cole slaw, some tartar sauce, a little cup of red sauce for fish, a slice of lemon, two slices of fresh rye bread, a pat of butter, another ten cents brings a glass of rare birch beer.— What a ball it is to eat here! Migrations of Spaniards chewing on hotdogs, standing up, leaning against big pots of mustard.— Ten different counters with different specialties.— Ten-cent cheese sandwiches, two liquor bars for the Apocalypse, oh yeah and great indifferent bartenders.— And cops that stand in the back getting free meals—drunken saxophone players on the nod—lonely dignified ragpickers from Hudson Street supping soup without a word to anybody,
with black fingers, woe.— Twenty thousand customers a day—fifty thousand on rainy days—one hundred thousand on snowy days.— Operation twenty-four hours a night. Privacy—supreme under a glary red light full of conversation.— Toulouse-Lautrec, with his deformity and cane, sketching in the corner.— You can stay there for five minutes and gobble up your food, or else stay there for hours having insane philosophical conversation with your buddy and wondering about the people.— “Let's have a hotdog before we go to the movie!” and you get so high in there you never get to the movies because it's better than a show about Doris Day on a holiday in the Caribbean.

“But what are we gonna do tonight? Marty would go to a movie but we're going to connect for some junk.— Let's go down to the Automat.”

“Just a minute, I've got to shine my shoes on top of a fire hydrant.”

“You wanta see yourself in the fun mirror?”

“Wanta take four pictures for a quarter? Because we're on the eternal scene. We can look at the picture and remember it when we're wise old white-haired Thoreaus in cabins.”

“Ah, the fun mirrors are gone, they used to have fun mirrors here.”

“How about the Laff Movie?”

“That's gone too.”

“They got the flea circus.”

“They still got donzinggerls?”

“The burlesque is gone millions and millions of years ago.”

“Shall we go down by the Automat and watch the old ladies eating beans, or the deaf-mutes that stand in front of the window there and you watch ‘em and try to figure the invisible language as it flees across the window
from face to face and finger to finger… ? Why does Times Square feel like a big room?”

Across the street is Bickford's, right in the middle of the block under the Apollo Theater marquee and right next door to a little bookshop that specializes in Havelock Ellis and Rabelais with thousands of sex fiends leafing at the bins.— Bickford's is the greatest stage on Times Square—many people have hung around there for years man and boy searching God alone knows for what, maybe some angel of Times Square who would make the whole big room home, the old homestead—civilization needs it.— What's Times Square doing there anyway? Might as well enjoy it.— Greatest city the world has ever seen.— Have they got a Times Square on Mars? What would the Blob do on Times Square? Or St. Francis?

A girl gets off a bus in the Port Authority Terminal and goes into Bickford's, Chinese girl, red shoes, sits down with coffee, looking for daddy.

There's a whole floating population around Times Square that has always made Bickford's their headquarters day and night. In the old days of the beat generation some poets used to go in there to meet the famous character “Hunkey” who used to come in and out in an oversized black raincoat and a cigarette holder looking for sombody to lay a pawnticket on—Remington typewriter, portable radio, black raincoat—to score for some toast, (get some money) so he can go uptown and get in trouble with the cops or any of his boys. Also a lot of stupid gangsters from 8th Avenue used to cut in—maybe they still do—the ones from the early days are all in jail or dead. Now the poets just go there and smoke a peace pipe, looking for the ghost of Hunkey or his boys, and dream over the fading cups of tea.

The beatniks make the point that if you went there
every night and stayed there you could start a whole Dostoevski season on Times Square by yourself and meet all the midnight newspaper peddlers and their involvements and families and woes—religious fanatics who would take you home and give you long sermons over the kitchen table about the “new apocalypse” and similar ideas:—“My Baptist minister back in Winston-Salem told me the reason that God invented television was that when Christ comes back to earth again they shall crucify Him right on the streets of this here Babylon and they gonna have television cameras pointin' down on that spot and the streets shall run with blood and every eye shall see.”