The Ballad of West Tenth Street

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The Ballad of West Tenth Street Page 4

by Marjorie Kernan


  Ree first saw Sadie as she walked across the floor of a club. He wasn’t playing there, just having a drink as he waited for a band he wanted to hear come on. About to raise a pint to his mouth he stopped, looking at her face, her tousled hair, her small frame. Something about her made him want to know her. She seemed perfectly assured of her place among the crowd yet somehow not at all a part of it. She disappeared behind a mirrored wall. He seemed to wake, cried out, “Wait!” then fought his way through the mass of people. He looked everywhere, jumping up to get a better view, even went around the block at a run. But she was gone. He felt at the same time that he wished to die and that now, having seen her, now at last he knew who she was.

  After that night he went out constantly, accepted any and all invitations, took the bus rather than the tube, and sat in the top so he could scour the faces on the street below. He played and replayed the fragment of film in his head, he could see her perfectly, her eyes more inward than outward, her straight spine, the fine hair caught behind her ear, her nose, her jaw, the loose, fluent walk, her moodiness.

  Several weeks passed and he alternated between hopelessness and the feeling that the gods could not be so cruel, so insane as to show a mortal a peek, then drop the curtain forever.

  In the years to come he always described their eventual meeting as so mundane you’d think there was nothing of the roll and thunder of fate to it. Someone said, Oh, have you met Sadie? He was never able to dredge up any memory of who. They stepped aside and there she was. She offered her hand and smiled. She said hello. He learned a thousand things he’d ached to know about her.

  The band moved from playing at small clubs to bigger ones, to opening for other bands at concerts, to record deals and radio performances. Ree played for her. He couldn’t play if she weren’t there. She’d stand in the center of the flailing dancers near the stage, intent on the music. He invented all his famous moves in those months, the leaps, the flourishes of his guitar, a spin that made his hair fly out, for her eyes. He’d look out and see the crowd as a meaningless mass, with her as their still center. The lights rained down, gilding his long, gingery hair and the glints of it that peeked from his armpits, the narrow line of it that ran down to his groin, and his milky white body as it flexed like rawhide to the music.

  4

  Sadie had a dinner party at the end of the week. She often did when Brian was there. He liked to see his New York friends and though he wasn’t much help in the kitchen, preparing the dinner with him in the room was far less of a bore. And dinners with him present were more successful, Sadie had to admit. It didn’t occur to her that the truth was, she hadn’t had a dinner party without him since Ree died.

  The children had entertained the guests before dinner with a poem they’d written called “Fabulosovich.” Hamish recited it while Deen played an accompaniment she’d written. The poem was about a lion who is cursed by an evil sorceress and must travel to a land where cows rule, to persuade their king to give him a cloak that will free him from the curse. The cloak is made of grass and the lion must control his terrible urge to leap on the cows and devour them.

  The guests had been charmed, the dinner edible, and the conversation wide and amusing around the long table. As was their habit, Brian and Sadie settled in for a nightcap in the living room after the guests had left.

  “Right then,” Brian said, sprawling on one of the sofas. “That all went off well. You should have company in the evening more often, love, look at you—it’s gone midnight and you’re not a bit sozzled.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll catch up,” Sadie said, pouring herself a large vodka rocks. “Want a brandy?”

  “Ta. Those kids of yours are bloody naturals for the stage, you know.”

  “Gawd, don’t I. All three of them.” Sadie sat on the other sofa, kicking off her shoes and putting her feet up on the coffee table.

  “Remember that first apartment we all rented, with that ballroom with the cracked mirrors? Not a stick of furniture and the place looked as if it’d been looted by soldiers. Bloody great crack in the wall where a bomb had hit the house next door. My word, the partying we did there. Threw us out because of it, didn’t they?”

  “And that silly girl Mona you were screwing. Always standing on her head with no panties on, waggling it in Ree’s face.”

  “She was a real tart all right. Weren’t we all just mad with the excitement of it, sex for the asking, drugs for every psychic journey, biting all the hands that fed us? I feel a bit sorry for kids these days, honestly, what’s left to overturn?”

  “Oh, don’t start getting wistful on me, Brian. Have you got a girl these days, I mean, one you can legally be seen about with?”

  “No, there’s no one much I fancy these days. There’s a couple of birds I take out now and then, silly cows really, don’t know why I bother. Got to keep up appearances I suppose. Randy old Brian Brain, still pulling the girls.”

  “You always did like them singularly stupid.”

  Later, between the sheets in Sadie’s guest room, Brian smoked a joint and wished he’d blurted out the truth, that he dated girls he found physically attractive but otherwise completely uninteresting…. Oh, why couldn’t she see it, that he’d never wanted girls for anything but their bodies, so that he wouldn’t have to love them, so that his heart could stay true to her? And why the hell didn’t he ever tell her what seemed to him an obvious truth? Maybe if she knew he loved her she’d start to get used to the idea, turn it over in her mind. He knew she hardly ever had dinner parties except when he was there, which meant—here the pot started to kick in, sending his thoughts aloft—which meant she thought of him as a sort of consort, a fill-in husband to preside over the table at her side, didn’t it? Why the hell didn’t he walk down the hall and into her bedroom right now, draw her arms up and caress them, kiss her, and show her he loved her, in the only way he knew?

  He groaned and took the last toke, dropping the roach in the ashtray. Of course he’d never even allowed himself to think like that while Ree was alive, he and Ree were mates. But Ree’d been dead twelve years and here was Sadie, pining right away, boozing and dreaming her life away like some princess locked in a tower. But he was too scared he’d see that look on her face if he tried, of shock and sad resignation, oh no, I trusted you never to do that…. And then, worse, her inability to conceal her distaste. No, he didn’t have a chance with her, see, because she was Ree’s girl, had been Ree’s one and only queen. No other woman had ever meant anything to Ree, though many had tried. And she, having been Ree’s queen, wasn’t likely to take up with his ugly, less famous mate, was she? Step down? Not her. Other women, beautiful women, gave him a whirl gladly, wasn’t he Brian Brain, Ree Hollander’s legendary collaborator and, some said, the real driving sound behind the band? But not our Sadie. Our Saids had sat on the throne while Brian and the rest of the world had cavorted below, desiring only her approval.

  Christ, this line of thinking was just driving him mad. He got up and put his clothes back on. He crept up the stairs and listened at Hamish’s door. Sure enough, the lad was still up. He and Hamish had a secret—he’d been teaching him to play guitar. He tapped on the door.

  “Who is it?”

  “Oi, kid, I thought of some new stuff to show you. Bring your guitar into your dad’s room, we’ll work on some bar chords.”

  In the morning Sadie was washing pots and pans and stacking the dishwasher with the remains of the party’s wreckage, mentally looking over her shoulder as she did, wanting to get it done before Brenda arrived. Their agreement had stipulated that Brenda cleaned the house and did not wash sinks full of dirty dishes, do laundry, or iron. Brenda scared Sadie just a little bit, which all in all she decided was a good thing.

  The area door opened just as Sadie scoured the last pot. Brenda put her bag down and hung up her jacket. “This is my boy Liall,” she said. “Liall, say how do you do to Mrs. Hollander.”

  Sadie wiped her hands on a tea towel and offered one
to Liall, who smiled up at her shyly. He had a very square face, a very nice face, Sadie thought, wondering if he might not grow up to be a handsome man. His skin was darker than his mother’s and his checked shirt was starched to a boardlike sheen.

  “I’ll start him on some polishing right now, then get to doing something about this kitchen,” Brenda said. “You sit down at that table Liall and keep yourself quiet.”

  Sadie said, “Well, I’ll leave you to it. Hamish and Deen are upstairs, I’ll see if I can get them to do something about that bathroom of theirs. Liall, why don’t you come up later, when your mother says you can, and meet them?”

  The boy nodded, looking pleased, then looked down.

  Oh dear, Sadie thought as she climbed the stairs, children are so tenuous. So exposed, everything flying at them and not yet knowing when to duck, only beginning the process of learning to hide things in order to preserve the inner core of self. These thoughts were rather rudely challenged when she saw her two youngest lolling on the twin sofas upstairs, reading magazines and looking as indolent as pashas.

  “You two are going to march upstairs and do something about that foul pit you call your bathroom, this instant!” she yelled. “And I don’t mean make any little dainty dabs at it either. You’re going to scrub some of that scurf and pestilence off it. Now!”

  Deen and Hamish jumped up, startled. They looked at each other and shrugged, oh boy, Munster was on a tear. They mooched off toward the stairs in silence, their shoulders telling a tale of childhood woe.

  “I’ll send Brenda up with some carbolic soap and a blowtorch!” she yelled after them. “Maybe some napalm!”

  Deen and Hamish rolled their eyes and made a gesture known only to them. They drew their mouths back in a leer, showing their teeth, and raised their hands up, shaping them into raptor’s claws. It was their secret signal for “Munster’s on the warpath.”

  Slowly, ever so slowly, they cleared some of the clutter out of their bathroom and looked around dispiritedly at the grimy tiles, the scum in the tub, the layers of gunk coating the shelves.

  “Look at you two,” Brenda said from the door. “Wanderers in a strange land. This is my boy Liall.”

  “What’s the matter with your leg?” Hamish asked him.

  “I fell down onto the tracks and it got cut off. See, it’s a fake leg,” Liall said, lifting his pants to reveal a plastic ankle with metal hinges.

  “That is totally fucked up,” Hamish said rather admiringly.

  “Yeah, and it’s white.”

  “I thought they had all kinds of fancy robotic legs now, and like, well, why’d they give you a white leg?”

  “Not if you’re on Medicaid.”

  “Now you quit that, Liall,” his mother said. “They gave you a leg, didn’t they, and fixed you up the best they could. You didn’t die, did you?”

  “I could get some paint and make it look more like your other leg,” Hamish offered.

  “You leave that leg of his alone,” Brenda said. “It’s got all sorts of parts to it and I don’t want it gummed up with any paint. Now, your mother’s gone off somewhere, and she’s thinking to have this bathroom cleaned, so the three of you get on out of here, it gives me a pain to see you two wiping at those walls with your little hands. There isn’t a child on earth that knows anything about scrubbing. Go on, get moving.”

  “Say, your mother’s pretty tough, isn’t she?” Hamish asked Liall as the three children walked down Tenth Street. “She like that all the time?”

  “I heard your mother yelling at you. Is she like that all the time?”

  “She just drank too much lion water last night,” Deen told him.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Means she wakes up all mad and roaring,” Hamish said.

  “It means,” Deen said, “she drinks a shitload of booze each night and wakes up with superhuman powers.”

  “Why does she do that? Drink so much, I mean.”

  “She just does. Some mothers do, some don’t. What’s your mother do?”

  “Just always after me to be good, stay on the right, keep clean, no swearing.”

  “That’s what they all do. Like we’re gonna listen. The hell of it is, we have to listen.”

  “Hey, let’s go over to Gray’s Papaya,” Hamish said. “See all the hookers looking tired. They eat six dogs and drink fruit shakes and say really weird things,” he explained to Liall.

  “Let’s go by the park first, see if Cap’n Meat’s there,” Deen suggested.

  “Who’s Cap’n Meat? Sounds like one scary motherfucker with a name like that,” Liall said.

  “He’s a bum,” Deen told him. “We like him. He keeps a cat in his coat; it has a specially designed pocket.”

  “Still sounds like one scary mother, name like that,” Liall said.

  “Look, there he is,” Hamish said.

  Cap’n Meat sat on a bench, or rather, was spread majestically over a bench. His gray-white hair and beard fanned out over his bulky coat and his knapsack was beside him. He’d placed a copy of the Post on his other side and was giving his boots a good polish.

  “Ah, my little friends,” he said as they approached. “Always a pleasure to see your fresh faces.”

  “This is Liall, Cap’n Meat,” Hamish said to him.

  “A pleasure, my boy, a pleasure. Here Deen, sit over here. The boys can stand but a lady must always be offered a seat. I think you’ll find someone you know in my knapsack.” He opened the flap.

  Titus, his ginger cat, lay curled on a sweater inside. Deen reached in to stroke him and felt his rumbling purr.

  “That, young Liall, is the best cat in all of New York. It is also the smartest cat that ever was. I have lived from shelter to shelter, from one doss house to another, where no pets are welcome, and that cat has escaped detection each time. Would you like to pat him?”

  Liall put his hand in hesitantly, then smiled at Deen. “He has the softest fur, doesn’t he?” she said. “You see, he’s not a long hair and not a short hair, but has a special layer of soft fur underneath.”

  “And is the devil for the cleaning of it,” the Cap’n said. “He has been an example to me. I’m much neater in my ways than I once was, through the shining example of that cat.”

  “Tell him the story about how you found him,” Hamish said.

  “Oh, that’s too sad a story for this bright day and your young ears.”

  “Please?”

  “Another time, dears, another time. You see, it makes me sad and today I’m not strong enough. I’ve had some setbacks lately. No, no, nothing to fear, I’m all right,” he added to Deen, who looked worried. He smiled at her to reassure her, his red, porous nose growing fatter as he did.

  “My mother said to give you this,” Deen said, taking a ten-dollar bill from her pocket.

  “Now, that’s a generous, good-hearted woman. You sure she gave it to you for me?”

  “Yes, I told her we might see you. She said to ask if you needed anything else.”

  “Oh my, no, this is certainly kind. Please tell her that Titus and I will feast with this.”

  “What’re you gonna tell Munster about that ten?” Hamish asked Deen as they left the park.

  “What, that wasn’t for that old bum?” Liall asked.

  “I’ll say it must’ve fallen out of my pocket.”

  “Man, my mother’d kill me I did that,” Liall said.

  The story of Titus’s early days on this planet. That’s how Cap’n Meat always thought of it, on this planet, seeing that cool blue ball floating in nothing, everlasting nothing. A planet that through a series of strange occurrences had come to host animal life. And here we are, the various animals, born to serve out our days on that cool blue ball, struggling as we might, being born on it and dying on it.

  Cap’n Meat sighed and tried to get comfortable on his blanket. The underpass in Central Park was damp and smelled of urine but seemed safe enough, so far. Titus was curled up by his side, tucke
d into his coat. One hand rested on the cat’s stomach and the other was outside, cradling it.

  Sleep is a strange thing, he thought, not for the first time. That all animals needed to lie quietly for some part of each day and go into another state of being. It seemed, if one thought about it logically, to be something a properly functioning animal ought not to need. In fact, a huge design flaw. Because a creature’s first and greatest mission here on this planet is to preserve. Preserve the self. And how exactly was one to do that well if one spent a good part of each day blissed out in a state of near unawareness? Why, he’d known men who’d slept right through a mortar attack.

  There wasn’t much chance he’d do that, he thought. A bum sleeping rough has to learn to sleep with all preservation systems on high alert. Mainstream man, as he thought of most others, mainstream man knows this and accordingly builds himself a shelter in which to sleep safely. Christ, most animals did too. Bums just have some twist in them that makes them spurn the safety. But he could tell you another thing about bums—they may spurn it but they long and moan for it inside their minds and dreams like babies, set it highest on the pinnacle of longings, spin elaborate pictures in their heads of cozy rooms with polished furnishings gleaming in firelight, of silken eiderdowns folded at the foot of a maple bed, of sunny linoleum shining with wax.

  The story of Titus. The Cap’n had been going down hard, a bum on the fall to the lowest rungs of the streets when he’d found him. He was dossed down in an old subway tunnel, in with the screamers and the worst of the underworld, where they lived and fought like the rats that teemed around them. He’d gotten his hands on some horse, not a lot but some, and a mickey of Four Roses and was dreaming the good dream. He’d woken hours later, cold and filled with a hellish despair. Some rat was dying nearby, letting out little cries. Much as he loved all animals he didn’t love rats, and it gradually came to him that a rat couldn’t make a sound like that, that a rat was shrill, enraged, and this was weak, soft. He stumbled up, dragging his gear with him—you don’t leave a scrap you want to keep in the tunnels—and scented his way to the sound. To a cardboard box lying in a corner, one side bashed in. In it a dead cat lay on its side. Four kittens also lay dead next to it, having tried to suck from its teats to the last. A fifth kitten lay curled next to them, mewing and waving its paws. He picked it up held it in his large hands, warming it. Then he got a flannel shirt from his pack, tore it, and made a square to wrap the kitten in, tying it with twine and hanging it around his neck, to keep it warm against his chest.

 

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