Peace, Love and Understranding

Along with the unseasonably hot weather in New York City, there have been a few strange sitings: the coyote treading water like a dog in the East River... the dolphins, putting on a small show for the Upper East Side... and then the usual fires, suicides, shootings... a woman brutally attacked near the Central Park Reservoir. It's enough to make me nostalgic for the 1970's when a parallel April heat wave ushered in the unforgettable Summer of Sam.  

I can remember browsing the stacks of the un-airconditioned Strand bookstore while my guitar-player boyfriend was setting up at Broadway Charly's across the street. Sometimes I'd leave my shoes at the club and sit barefoot on the old wood basement floor reading proofs and review copies which sold for less than $1.  People hung out there--- the piles of books were intimidating... one by one the dedicated staff browsed and perused and classified and logged.  If you were looking for something, you could call in... if they didn't call you back within 48 hours you'd assume the search was unsuccessful. But they were dedicated.  The place was dusty and musty, as were the books... mice ran in and out of shelves; once or twice I witnessed some unsavory behavior but for the most part it was a haven for us book-people.  We met and talked... we exchanged.  Tom Verlaine was often there Friday nights, checking the review stacks.  Ben McFall came a bit later.

So I have a new book out-- my fifth.  The Strand has been a sort of platform for me; as a student I longed to be among their indie writers and seeing my first book on the New Poetry table was like winning a Pulitzer.  Granted, the pandemic affected everyone... but this time, instead of delivering happily and being greeted or congratulated by the incomparable Ben, he has left the world... the Strand no longer takes telephone calls and their online search is punishing for small presses like mine.  In fact, they managed to mis-read the title and post it incorrectly.  Who is this author?  I don't know, but it take some effort to even locate my name.  Not so the major labels, the merchandise, the best-sellers... it feels remarkably like a slightly more dense version of Barnes and Noble.  

No barefoot hippies, no intellectual clerks anxious to discuss and learn and find... it's a pressurized department store, the brands books instead of hoodies and sneakers.  Actually, you can get your hoodies there, too.  Surely they sell better than local urban poets who publish carefully and slowly without press or publicity machines. The cream no longer rises to the surface but paddles hopelessly like the coyote in the east river.  

In the Summer of Sam I found a stray dog.  When I moved further downriver, he leaped off the boardwalk at 59th Street and half-swam north while I yelled frantically, running uptown, until at the 96th Street pier a man with a boat helped me retrieve my wet animal from the swift current.  No news media, no photos... but today's news resonated.  

Tonight hoping for a dolphin-siting, I walked along the river... at the 111th St crossover, two boys were throwing rocks at the cars-- a dangerous pastime, but a sort of rite-of-passage for kids.  Something about these moving targets-- and it's not as though they are trying to cause injury-- it's just the act.  I remember doing the same as a girl, hitting someone in the eye and having to get scolded and shaken by the girl's father who warned me I was going to city court where they would put me in jail.  I was terrified.  I was nine.  But there was just something so timeless and 'boy-mischievous' about these two tonight- on the cusp of adolescence... here I am this old white lady brushing by, asking them to spare me-- I'm someone's Grandma, and they let me pass, unthreatened.  It was as though their life was sped up by the early summer-- their already-racing biological clocks were being pushed forward by the weather.  

Three shootings last night.  Jesus.  The heat is always an incendiary. Summer is on... all bets are off.  In my world the illnesses and deaths continue, like a relentless accelerating wheel.  I look at my Facebook page and it is filled with sad notifications and griefs. News. We look at the obituaries daily with trepidation.  In the rock and roll world so many people of my generation have disappeared-- it's as though each loss is somewhat diluted by the next... two on one day, three on the next... we have barely time to grieve.

Last night on the corner of 86th Street someone had left a few piles of books.  A youngish man and his girlfriend were looking through. Good stuff. Biographies.  Classics.  On the sidewalk.  I feel a certain simpatico with these piles of books; in some sense I am my own work-- the books which are increasingly disrespected by the corporate machine, the instagram world of branding which sends me poetry memes from people who have no sense of rhythm or lyricism... but unlike me have huge consumer audiences. 

Yesterday I browsed the kiosk on Fifth Avenue by the Park... the classics are still considered best-sellers-- but the new titles... who am I, I thought, like one of those children's books?  I felt like a misplaced coyote.  There was a time when I'd visit friends and there on the shelves would be familiar things-- great things, like old comfort.  If I had to wait for someone, I could take down a Faulkner or a Baldwin or an Anne Sexton... we all had these things-- Shakespeare, Proust. Now everyone sits everywhere consulting their phone like a God. People buy books like merchandise-- like souvenirs... many of them will end up on sidewalks, or on the Strand outdoor displays, unread, waiting to be rescued by the next owner like a stray dog, hoping, as I do, to be read.  

As though they read my mind, The Paris Review today published a piece about Larry Campbell, one of those guys who had a used-book table on Sixth Avenue for decades.  The interview had been conducted pre-pandemic across from the Strand which, over the years,  sorted through his wares and picked out the valuable things. Where did he get them?  Dead people, he used to say.  There was a quotation in the Review: "The best books I've found are from people who died.  Older people have the best shit." Larry is now 72.  Amen. 

Night Manager

In the 1970's, New York City was a very different place.  It was dangerous and sleazy; anything could happen.  You'd walk down a side-street at night with a sense of shadows, with your heart beating.  Muggings were common; crime was woven into the fabric and you expected to be threatened.  In a way it was like the dare of the city-- are you tough enough, are your dreams compelling enough to lie down with rabid dogs, spar with the urban devil himself?  There was a certain underlying surf we had to ride out-- a dark fire we were expected to navigate.  The noir permeated our art-- our music and poetry-- our clothes, our choices.

On the other hand, there was a wild freedom in our private sex lives.  We were walking an edge-- trying out things.  There was no internet or linked-in.  You'd meet someone and take a risk.  There were no personal phones-- only a door or a window to crawl out if you found yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I was young and all-connected.  I was straddling worlds-- downtown, uptown-- the art world and the music underground.  It was thrilling and new.  Every day I'd get introduced into someone's world that rocked my own.  I'd walk into a club at night and hear something new-- see someone trying to change things.  Sometimes you'd exchange ideas; sometimes you exchanged bodies.

One afternoon I was studying at the Figaro on Bleecker Street, and this actor sat down at my table… he wasn't super famous but I recognized him.  He was slightly older… and he was smart; we spoke about theatre and Proust.  We made a date to meet the next night at a west-side bar.  I went to the library that evening and looked him up; he'd written a couple of books, and his publisher was well-known.  Everything in those days ended up in bed, and we had a few nights of passion.  I was dating a guitar player at the same time who came back to town and I wasn't home much to answer calls.  I don't think I even had an answering machine.  Anyway, one day I was getting into a car with the guitar player and the actor passed me… I looked the other way.   He called me a few nights later, sounded drunk and insecure about his sexual performance… it was a stupid conversation and I was 22 or 23 and didn't feel like getting into a whole psychological tunnel…

Two days later, someone broke into my little apartment on the first floor.  It was a vulnerable place and I probably never even drew the curtains when I stayed out all night… but they took everything.  In those days everything fit into a couple of suitcases-- but it was all I had, and when I came home on a Sunday evening to find my window smashed, the mattress stripped and the place ransacked, I was spooked.  The cops assured me it was no Kojak episode but most likely a desperate junkie looking for cash and things to sell for dope.  My guitar player was going on the road; I stayed with a friend at the Chelsea Hotel for a few days while they put in a new window and locks on the door.

At the Chelsea I inhaled the quintessence of 1970's New York.  Sid and Nancy were there; Viva and I shared a cigarette on the stairs.  My friend was working with John Cale; he'd been robbed too and he processed the dare of the city with a certain bitter mistrust.  It was a cool hang, but I needed to face my independence without a support system.  I moved back to my little place, bought new sheets and a cheap little TV, was at last drifting off to sleep with Johnny Carson on the black and white 12-inch… when the phone rang.  I'd been gone for a week and thought it was my guitar player-- whispering… but then I heard the actor's voice, indisputably, asking me if I knew what he was doing… I jumped out of bed in a cold sweat, and ran up the stairwell to the next floor-- banged on a random door.  Some guy answered-- I begged him to let me in… I'm sure he thought I was crazy; thinking back, he had no pants on--  I stuttered something about someone stalking me…  anyway, he went into his bedroom and I curled up on his dirty carpet.  He had a small dog and it had new puppies… I lay there like a dog myself until the sun came up and I had the nerve to go downstairs.

I hadn't thought about this for so many years, but it was maybe the first coming-of-age reality check of the city.  In a way I'd been lucky; no one had really hurt me… and thinking back, it was undoubtedly a total coincidence that the actor phoned at that moment.  I'm sure he had no knowledge that I'd been robbed, that I'd been away… or did he?  It was the first time I felt genuinely unsafe-- a little terrified-- and had thoughts about finding a more secure apartment, about making wiser and less random choices, about becoming part of a couple as opposed to being the wild and free girl.  In a way I changed my vision that night; in a way I accepted there would be a kind of dependence on men in my life.  The end of innocence, which for girls is so often some threat or unmanageable fear which changes us and forces us to make a slightly desperate choice.  It's not 'live free or die', but  'live'.  It's a form of terrorism, but that's another discussion.

Like most things in life, we give up one thing for another; nothing stays the same, no one retains their innocence unless someone else arranges this for us.  Of course life in the city today feels much safer; people have phones for emergencies, everyone's marital and employment status is pretty much general knowledge, as is their age and address, their political affiliations and criminal record-- their net worth.  People sort through hundreds of prospects on dating sites-- they hook up, they regroup, they text and sext and move on.  I seldom walk into a club these days and encounter something that changes my world.  I no longer fall in love and rarely walk the dark streets with a sense of danger and excitement.  I miss those times; I've had a good and a rich life here, but I do miss myself when I was still brave enough or maybe dumb enough to take a nightly walk on the wild side.  When there was a viable and findable wild side.