The Collected Novels of Charles Wright

by Charles Wright

  I had a couple of drinks, talked to several pleasant people, then went into the bedroom. Randy’s always spaced out. But he was shooting for Zeroville. Since nothing was happening, I said, “Let’s split and come back later.” But like most schizos, Randy is extremely distrustful. I continued in my opium-saint voice, and we left. In the street, I suggested that we visit an old friend of his, a friend from vocational high school. Randy has a funny little habit of dropping to the floor or sidewalk when he is being advised to do something. He didn’t want to see the old high-school buddy. So he fell to the sidewalk about twenty feet from where Wing Ha Sze had been murdered a couple of weeks before. I pleaded with Randy. People stopped, cars slowed. “Old sport,” I said, “if you don’t get up, I’ll have to call the police.”

  Randy rose like Jesus on the third day. Then we walked down the street, and I bought a couple of Colt 45’s. We sat on the stoop of a boarded-up tenement and talked. It was useless. Randy took a swing at me and missed. I took my half-empty can of beer and hit him hard in the corner of his mouth. He fell to the sidewalk.

  “Get up,” I screamed. “You’re making me lose my cool. I’m taking you to Eddie’s. I’m tired of trying to help romper-room weaklings.”

  By the time we reached Grand Street, darkness had set in. Once more, as if following stage directions, Randy fell, between two parked cars. His mouth was bloody. Several curious, longhaired cyclists stopped.

  “He’s all right.” I sighed. “He’s only acting.”

  The cyclists did not believe me. “Listen,” I said angrily, “unless you know something about first aid, you’re wasting your time.”

  Silently, they averted their eyes and drove off. About three minutes later, a tall pale-blond woman and a short dark-haired man with a Thomas Dewey or Hitler mustache stopped. I repeated the story for them. And you know—they didn’t believe me. Like an expert rescue team, they picked Randy up and laid him on the sidewalk as I cursed them. Up ahead, two policemen were approaching. The dark-haired man ran to them and said, “Officer, this boy has been hurt.”

  The two policemen and I went over Randy, who went through his first-day Jesus act.

  “What’s wrong with him?” a cop asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “He’s stoned.”

  “Who hit him?”

  “I did. He took a swing at me, and I hit him with a can of beer.”

  “A full can of beer?”

  “Half full.”

  The policeman searched me, but I was clean as a whistle. And if I never, never had seen hatred before, I saw it in their eyes. Need I tell you, Randy is white and I am black.

  The policemen went over to Randy. “Are you all right?” one of them asked.

  Randy mumbled. I laughed at the absurdity of it all and was led toward a building with a nightstick in my back. The cop questioned Randy. He continued to mumble.

  “Can’t you see he’s stoned?” I asked. “There’s nothing wrong with him but his head. His old lady left him, and his mother moved and told the neighbors not to give him her new address.”

  The nightstick-lover of a policeman said, “If you don’t shut up, I’m gonna beat you.”

  Just then a squad car pulled up to the curb. One of the street policemen went to the squad car. The two smiling men in the car had arrested Randy the night before; he had tried to attack a bum with a broken wine bottle. Then they drove off. The cop asked Randy if he wanted to press charges against me. Randy shook his head. The nightstick-loving cop was really angry now. He swung the stick like a demented drum majorette.

  The four of us stood on the street corner silently for more than twenty minutes. Apparently the two policemen did not like the end of the happening. Finally, one of them came over to me. Pointing his nightstick down Grand Street, he said, “See those two guys coming this way? One of them has on a red shirt. I want you to start walking in that direction, and don’t look back. I don’t want to see you in this neighborhood again. I’ll lock your ass up.”

  I walked away, inhaling the absurd Saturday-night air. Later that night, I saw Randy.

  “Charles,” he said, “I’m sorry. I need help.”

  I nodded but did not say anything. Mentally I was saying, Come on, feet. Let’s make it.

  * * *

  Rain again. Dawn: gray but the light coming through slowly like mother-of-pearl blades on an old windmill. Against the grimy, windowless wall, rippling lines of rain water become an iridescent brick mosaic. Pigeons stir; yawn like grouchy old men. Early subway rumbles, six floors below in the earth, shake the old hotel. My feet want to dance or run.

  The morning light expands. A haze evaporates in the room. I dress, go out for The New York Times, cigarettes. Return, make tea, eat a cream-cheese-filled bagel. I have decided to read and think about writing again.

  Around 10 A.M., finished rereading two favorite Ernest Hemingway short stories: “A Clean Well-lit Place” and “Hills Like White Elephants.” Then the phone rang. And although the sky was now fair—it had somehow become black. I will always remember it as a day of silent protest.

  SEVENTH AVENUE, NORTH of Forty-second Street. Traffic flowing downtown. The streets are uncrowded at this hour. But the old gray buildings and the old shops with their face-lifted fronts are a staunch reminder of the materialistic present—the present of New Yorkers, Ltd. Three Japanese tourists photographed a florist shop, but I looked away and walked toward the Hotel Passover.

  The first person I saw in the hotel was Abe Singer, a widowed accountant. He had his fifth-floor door open. An airline bag and camera case were on the bed. Seventy-year-old Abe Singer was in his underwear, drinking a water glass of bourbon as I passed.

  “Jamaica, this time,” he said, then added, still beaming, “I’m sorry.”

  The South Carolina maid was a large woman. She looked like an enormous lamp shade in her jungle-print cotton dress. She wore felt houseshoes and always complained of being cold. Age forty, the maid walked beside me, sighing.

  “The poor thing,” she said. “Sally wouldn’t hurt a flea. The police were here, son. Don’t touch a thing.”

  Sally Reinaldo’s room was immaculate. A headless Hollywood bed, covered in dark blue satin, was the hub of the room. The turquoise walls were as bare as the gleaming wood floor, except for three white fur rugs. Silver-framed photographs of family and friends formed a semicircle on a round table by the bed. But I did not look at them. Green plants in red clay pots crowned a radiator shelf. The Venetian blind was closed. I walked over to the dressing table, which had a mirrored top. Perfume, cologne, oils, powder. Bottles and jars—their contents foreign to me. All I knew was that they had something to do with the mystery and magnetism of a woman’s face. A wicker tray overflowed with costume jewelry. I shook the tray, listened to the jangling metal sound, then sat down in a slipper chair and smoked a joint. That was when I discovered the overnight bag and the wig box, shiny as black patent leather. The lid had a thin layer of dust on it.

  “You really put the icing on the cake this time, baby,” I said aloud, and turned on again.

  After a while, I could look over at the blue-covered bed, which had dark stains on it.

  I could watch memory flash a kaleidoscopic report from the old world. I saw Sally on West Fifty-seventh Street in May. She had on a black skirt and a white blouse, and I had on a black shirt and white trousers, and we laughed and kissed on the street. Sally asked me to visit her at the Hotel Passover. I promised, but at the time, my social, sexual life was shared only with booze, pills, and pot. Ah, Splendid Solitude! The blessed hours. It is only now that I see the desperation in Sally’s eyes, hear that sound in her voice. We had been lovers years ago in Hell’s Kitchen. A divorcée, mother of four-year-old Nelson, Sally wanted to marry me. I was not even wedded to my own budding maturity. We got on damn well together. I remember that if money was tight, she insisted on Nelson and me eating the steak. I remember the Saturday she shopped on Ninth Avenue for food, bought material for a dress, cooked d
inner, made the dress and wore it to the opening of Sergi King’s Port Afrique on East Sixth Street, just off Second Avenue, in the zone that would become the East Village. Later that morning, Sally and I walked up Second Avenue with Sarmi (a Black Muslim before the great Black Muslim conversion). He had a hard-on for me because I reminded him of a young boy. Mona, a French poet, wanted to offer Sally lesbian love. Mona and Sarmi were friends, and the good-byes were warm, uncomplicated. But Sally cried before we made love, and in the afternoon, she leaned out the window screaming rape, pelleting a smiling, freckle-faced policeman with pecans. In June of that year, I returned to the Lowney Turner Handy Writer’s Colony in Marshall, Illinois. Sally made the Las Vegas-Hollywood la ronde. It was rumored that she was making $100 a day in Hollywood. No one knew why she returned to New York. No one would ever know. Sally Reinaldo committed suicide on the fifth floor of the Hotel Passover.

  I walked all the way back downtown, oblivious to the teeming, early-afternoon streets. Grief, loneliness, self-pity never touched me during the long walk. I simply felt that I had lost something. I opened the door of my hotel room, turned on the radio, drank a beer, showered, and took a sleeping pill. But I couldn’t sleep. So I whipped the memory of Sally Reinaldo, who danced a little, sang a little, modeled a little, whored a little, and who wanted to become a star or a housewife, into an olive-green towel and threw it across the room.

  Stoned, walking through the early-morning streets, clutching a tumbler of despair. The bars closing. Gradually people appear in the early-morning streets, unsteady in their walk, uncertain of which way to go, what to do. The full white moon, stationary, like a manmade object flung into space, like a flag announcing, “We have arrived. We have set foot on the floor of your dead planet.”

  And it seemed to me that the street people were tourists on that dead planet. Against their will, they had detoured from the route of dreams. Frightening, oblique—loneliness became the fellow traveler. But there was nothing I could do about it. I felt that I had left part of my insides in Sally Reinaldo’s fifth-floor room at the Hotel Passover. I considered myself extremely lucky. A practical man, I gave up Waterloo and concentrated on exile. New York. Hades-on-the-Hudson. It is time to take leave of it. But for the moment, I am comforted with nothing but the prospect of another sunrise, buried in my own mortality.

  On the Bowery, bells do not toll. But cocks crow at the Shangwood Live Poultry Market, and sincere hymns blare from the two Bowery Salvation Army havens, pleading with the classless, transient army of men to come unto God. And it seems to me that they should try Him or seriously think about hitting the road. Urban renewal is upon them. A broom is all that is needed for these powerless, nonpolitical men. (Most of them believe they are part of the political scene, hard-hatted in their wine stupor.) “The Bowery will never change,” one of them told me recently. “I should know. I’ve been here twenty-five years.”

  The Bowery has been changing for a very long time. And there was nothing subtle about the change. Three years ago, non-AIR residents were evicted from lofts, small businesses were forced to move. The raunchy bar called Number One, between the Bowery and Second Avenue, was the first to go, then the Blue Moon. Betty’s became the chic circus-yellow front. The pissoir-rich old Palace bar is now Hilly’s, where an old-timer rapped on the door one early dawn, like a Scott Fitzgerald ghost in “Babylon Revisited,” and asked hoarsely, “Is Jimmie still here?” The legendary Horse Market restaurant folded, replaced by the Bowery Coffee Shop, which also folded. The hotels are going, gone. The Boston, the Clover, the Defender. But what soured hearts was the closing of Sammy’s Bowery Follies, although few winos were Follies customers. It was a symbol like the White Horse, the Lion’s Head, St. Adrian’s, and Max’s Kansas City.

  Now live rock blares on the Bowery. There are elegant living lofts, waiting only for House Beautiful’s photographer or Vogue magazine and art galleries. Now local color is provided by the affluent children of Aquarius with their frizzed hair, dirty jeans, and expensive, scuffed boots, and their dolls with their frizzed hair and 1930s style of dressing and their talk of pot, peace, and pollution. They are as cold and capitalistic as the parents they fled. To them the bums are a nuisance. They lack the old bohemian feeling of togetherness. As one tall, bearded artist said to me, “Hell, I’ve told you about sitting on my stoop. I got an old lady and kids.”

  All the winos have is each other and the Capital of Pluck (wine). The Capital of Pluck is the Municipal Lodging House for Men on East Third Street, which throughout America’s wine world is called “the Muney.” Only in the city of New York are these men able to breathe. The Muney will secure free rooms at Bowery hotels, plus three decent meals a day. With the advent of the Nixon regime’s phase-in, phase-out, the Muney is uptight. Even the annual Muney summer riots failed to materialize. (The parent group drifted away, got busted, went to the Catskills to work. The main man had severe drug hallucinations.)

  On the Bowery, drugs are running a close second to wine. Especially with young blacks and Puerto Ricans. Indeed, Eugene O’Neill’s Iceman would come down to the Bowery looking for a fix.

  Like New York night life, business is off in the bars, although men are sitting at the tables before the official 8 A.M. opening. But they sit all day, trying to hustle drinks like pitiful old whores, like shameless clowns.

  Sitting and waiting for the silent mushroom in the sky, watching the desperate jackrollers, who in turn are watching them. Money is tight. A daytime robbery is a common happening. Most of the older men try to make it back to the hotels before darkness sets in or go in pairs, groups.

  There are no black bars on the Bowery. The blacks prefer to drink on street corners, which is cheaper. There are hotels that will not rent rooms to blacks, and there are hotels which have separate but equal floors for blacks and whites, although both use the same bathrooms. The wine climate of the Bowery has always been racial. This has not changed. The majority of these weak drinking men come from the primeval American South. Wine has not shrunk their racial war; it has enlarged it to the point of fanaticism. Ethnic to the last pint of La Boheme white port (the most popular brand), the mix is roughly Irish and blacks running neck and neck, followed by Poles. There are few Italians, Jews, Chinese. But keeping pace with the national cultural explosion, increasing numbers of young men are nestling in the ruins. Most of them are very hip, according to the old-timer’s social register.

  The story goes that the police are tougher on white winos than on blacks. Whites are superior and shouldn’t sink to that dark level. But it is only the old black men who retain the hairs of machismo. Before sunrise, black and white men are in the streets, walking up and down like women on market day, like desperate junkies. At that hour they are waiting for the early-morning “doctors,” peddling illegal wine. Illegal wine is now $1.25 a pint. Yet the men who sleep in their own urine on the sidewalk and wipe car windows with dirty rags manage to pay the “doctor,” just as more affluent Americans manage to have charge accounts.

  For these Bowery men are American, too, with that great American dream. Tomorrow we will seek a new design for living, new territories, which is why the Bowery has expanded into little Bowery zones. The main zone is the Greenwich Hotel on Bleecker and the Lady Jane West, both old zones. If it were not for the drugquake, the press, and law-and-order citizens, very few people would be aware of the zones. The Keystone Hotel in midtown, one block from Macy’s, has been operating for a long time, and the winos have Herald Square, Bryant Park. Another group of winos operates exclusively on Forty-second Street. From the Port Authority, the junction being Grant’s Cafeteria and the end of the rich line, Grand Central. Now they’ve made it down to Wall Street and up to Central Park and the chic East Side streets. Many of the new buildings have openings where a man can seek shelter from the rain or cold. Just for a night.

  But then bums have always been transient, always on the move, returning to their home which has always been there, even if only in the mind. The artis
ts will go, too, in time, just as the winos are going. And although Kate Millett may be liberated and celebrated, she, too, will go.

  The Bowery is a cinema museum in hell where classic films play forever. Occasionally, selected shorts play, are spliced together, and become classics themselves. And although I still visit the Bowery, there is nothing more to learn. Ravished by their own weakness and the conditions of American life, Bowery men have their Grand Hotel and are content. But other men are attracted to the Bowery because of laziness. All they want to do is drink and shoot the breeze. I hope you realize that is the entire frame for the Bowery.

  The Chinese say that the first step is the beginning of a ten-thousand-mile journey. But what is the first step?

  At the end of the Bowery, there is Chinatown and the Chinese Garden.

  Once almost as remote as a desert fortress, my Chinese Garden, my bête noire, is a symbol of the goose-stepping ’70s. Sometimes I think nature, man, space-age progress are conspiring to build a terrible corrupt monument for the year 2001. Can this be true? Or have I been on the downward path as far as my fellow human beings are concerned? But once my garden was my church. Layered in concrete, the cesspool of greenery rises at its highest level about thirty feet where the Bowery and Canal meet to channel traffic to Brooklyn and elsewhere. Motorists consider it an unexpected, delightful slice-of-life landscape. Soon it will become a mini-tourist attraction.

  Recently, a group of young black, white, Puerto Rican, and Chinese artists set up shop between the hours of eleven and three, painting pop designs on all surfaces except dirt and grass. Against the weathered gray of concrete, black silhouettes. A prisoner hanging from his cell. Two Afro heads in a heavy chess game. And from the old world, stencil designs of Chinese dragons. Although I applaud their slow, sincere efforts, this is of no value to me. All I know is my garden has been invaded by people who represent the blowup of New York. People arrive, perform, depart. Countless variations on an urban theme. These people make police reports, signal, Bellevue, Kings County, pay the bread man of drugs. These people confront policemen, merge with the winos and the gold-bricking Department of Parks workers, the artistic elite from the neighboring lofts and the Chinese immigrants, who instantly, magically, accept the American middle-class outer garment. You see, I am the senior citizen of the garden. Six years, day and night, summer and winter—I have sat on that stone ledge, surrounded by thirty-nine trees, watching people arrive like ghosts in a real dream.