by Paul Theroux
It wasn’t long before I got a better job just two blocks south, in the oldest building in Soho, a former brothel with shuttered windows and a pitched roof. To work at the Broome Street Bar you had to be an artist: a painter, writer, architect, dancer, photographer—it didn’t matter what kind. I told the owners that I was a Pratt student, but that failed to satisfy them. I had to show them some sketches before they hired me as a dishwasher.
The bar’s owners were two diametrically opposed brothers named Kenn (two n’s) and Bob. Short, bowlegged, cigar-smoking Kenn wore blue jeans, cowboy shirts, and belts with enormous buckles. He saw himself as the rough-and-ready type. Bob, on the other hand, was a slender, soft-spoken, effete man with pale skin. Their love of artists was the one thing the two brothers shared. While Kenn held forth with the patrons upstairs, Bob spent most of his time at a desk he’d arranged by the prep kitchen, keying numbers into an adding machine and chain-smoking Parliaments. He’d take four puffs of a cigarette before snuffing it out, having read somewhere that the first four puffs contained less nicotine. The floor under his desk squirmed with partially smoked cigarettes.
The bar had an open kitchen, with the dishwasher’s station facing one end of the bar. I liked washing dishes. I liked the hot, soapy water on my hands and the sense that I was doing something useful. Dishwashing is honorable work, I told myself as the busboys dumped their greasy loads and I flirted with any decent-looking woman who sat on the last stool at the bar.
The other workers in the kitchen slung omelets and burgers, sliced sandwiches, and cracked jokes. Jimmy, the salad chef, was an architect. Francis, the prep cook, wrote show tunes. Joe Hinkle was writing a novel. The waitresses were mostly actresses and dancers. The griddle chef, a guy in his 40s named Bentley, a painter in the manner of Kandinsky, was the funniest and most cynical of the bunch, with a mop of sandy hair that covered his eyes and that he would toss back while flipping his burgers. Somehow, despite his talking a mile a minute in a flat, nasal voice with which he cut to the quick anyone he disliked, the ash from Bentley’s cigarette never fell onto his grill.
The bar was a magnet for artists. John and Yoko were patrons; so were Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Among the regulars was a sculptor named Bob Bolles. He had a job there, doing what I’m not sure: something to do with plumbing or the beer taps. Mostly he hung out at the bar. Bolles’s artistic claim to fame was on permanent (so we thought then) display at the “motorcycle triangle,” an open space at the intersection of Broome and Watts, where bikers parked their crotch rockets and where, without permission from municipal authorities, Bolles’s jagged iron creations sprouted like rusty weeds, providing windblown papers and coffee cups with crannies to wedge themselves into and neighborhood children with objects to skin knees on. A short guy with an Edgar Allan Poe forehead, Bolles wore hoop earrings and red bandannas and was as much of a fixture in Soho as its loading docks, its bay doors, its freight elevators, as the trucks that barreled over cobblestones to and from the Holland Tunnel. When Bolles died of AIDS in the ’80s, the sculptures fell into ruin. Eventually, under the auspices of a zealous borough parks commissioner, the “dangerous, dilapidated, rusting, falling-apart litter magnets” were carted off to a storage facility on Randall’s Island, making way for a public green space called Sunshine Park—pleas to rename it after the sculptor having fallen on deaf ears.
Looming over the motorcycle triangle, across the expanse of a windowless building, the words I Am the Best Artist were spray-painted and signed by “René.” This early example of guerrilla art was, as far as I know, that artist’s only creation, but for me it did the trick. To be the best artist—that was the main thing. It was why I had come to the city: to practice my own art but also to breathe in the atmosphere of artists, to size up and learn from the competition.
What sort of artist I wanted to be, I wasn’t sure. I had a grandiosity of purpose but no clear vision to go with it. I knew only that I wanted to touch and impress others with my work so they would someday say of me, “He’s the best artist.”
It was an imperative, an obligation—as inevitable as that GAS HEATS BEST sign I’d first seem with my papa as a child. To impress myself on the city as it had impressed itself on me, that was what I wanted, what I yearned for.
Meanwhile, I washed dishes.
IV. Promiscuity
The Pratt dorm was in a high-rise on Willoughby Avenue, lording it over a neighborhood of tenements and gnarly trees. From there I took a share with a retired church organist named Fletcher on Washington Avenue—or was it Clinton? After that came the sublet on DeKalb and another off Flatbush, down the street from Junior’s, where, for the price of a cup of coffee, I’d fill my belly with specimens from the sour-pickle dispenser. From there I took a one-year sublet in the East Village, on Seventh Street, where the avenues are alphabetized and the women wore orthopedic shoes and drab scarves around their heads. Next came the loft on Broome Street, the summer the lights went out throughout the city. By candlelight at the corner tavern they dispensed free lukewarm beer and half-melted ice cream. Then back to Brooklyn, a fifth-floor walkup two blocks south of the Heights, one of those jobs with a clawfoot tub squatting in the kitchen and cracked, sticky linoleum. Followed by another share, this one in Stuyvesant Town, where they didn’t permit air conditioners (fans only) in the casement windows and where, during the holidays, they strung colored lights around the lampposts. Was this before or after I lived with that crazy woman on Cornelia Street, the one who nicknamed me “Leonardo” and vowed to make a star out of me? Through her I auditioned for the singing waiter job on Third Avenue and the talent manager in Hell’s Kitchen—the one who, wearing a velvet robe in his living room, by means of an exercise called “The Boy on the Mountaintop,” tried to get me over his knees. After the crazy lady threw my things out the window, I moved into the office of the literary agent for whom I’d been working and who, for a cut in my $100 a week salary, let me sleep on his sofa. After that, for a while I left the city, returning to housesit for a lady whose dog mauled me. Then the railroad flat in the area adjoining Soho north of East Houston that my songwriting partner (I was writing songs then) and I dubbed “So What.” The greasy exhaust fumes from the diner downstairs made my partner sick, so he left the city and me. That was when I broke my leg and moved into the Gramercy Hotel. There, lying prone in bed, I could reach out and touch both walls while listening to bottles breaking in the air shaft. Then the Greek woman who taught me typography offered to share her Astoria apartment, a shag-carpeted, plastic-slipcovered efficiency over a garage a few blocks from Ditmars Boulevard, where the cafés featured excessive chrome and glistening mounds of baklava. After Ourania and I split, I moved to Sunnyside, to a one-bedroom near Calvary Cemetery, in a neighborhood of dismal pubs with shamrocks on their awnings. Shortly after this I met, proposed to, and moved into a two-bedroom with Tara. The apartment had French doors. I’d step out of the bathroom or the kitchen and see Tara there, through the grid of glass panes, bent over her watercolor block, smoking. Tara’s smoking put the kibosh on our engagement, so I told myself, when in truth I’d been ambivalent from the start. For a while I hung on in Queens until, with a journalist named Steven, I went in on a rental on 1st Avenue, off 14th. It was a one-bedroom; we put up a makeshift wall. We spent a lot of time on the roof there, Steven and I, drinking a brand of cheap red wine called Gato Negro and having aggressive philosophical conversations. I stayed there until Paulette, my new girlfriend, and I got tired of squeezing into my captain’s bed. She and I rented a floor-through in a brownstone on 101st near West End. In its living room, in the presence of two witnesses, a gay Episcopal priest married us. Six months later we bought our own place, a foreclosure on 94th and Columbus in an art deco building with a sunken living room and built-in sconces. Though on the ground floor and dark, it had a nice view of the dogwood tree in the courtyard. I set up my studio in the master bedroom and decked the walls with paintings of passenger ships and the Empire State Buildi
ng at night. In spite of the rap deejay living downstairs, we were happy there until one morning I woke up from a dream in which, instead of a dogwood tree, our window faced the wide, gray-green expanse of the Hudson River. That same morning I boarded a train from Grand Central to the Bronx. At a place called Spuyten Duyvil I got off. Nothing but weeds, trees, water. Water! How I’d missed it! We lived on an island but rarely saw the stuff. Overhead loomed the blue arc of the Henry Hudson Bridge—the same bridge my father and I had crossed into Manhattan in his Simca. Six months later, my wife and I bought a co-op there. We called it home for the next 12 years, until we divorced. I was 50 years old.
V. Dissolution
The dreams of my youth, where had they gone? At the midcentury mark, one is entitled to such inquiries. I’d struggled, worked hard, produced, yet there was the nagging sense that I’d wasted myself, that I’d poured my essence into the city only to see it washed away like so much scum down its storm grates and sewage drains. Another part of me wondered, was it my own damn fault? In abandoning the city (and as any New Yorker will tell you, when you say “the city” you most assuredly do not mean the outer boroughs), had I forsaken my dreams? Had I been as fickle with them as with apartments and women? Had my quest for artistic glory been nothing but one long flirtation—as feeble and hopeless as the flirtations I had engaged in from my dishwashing station at the Broome Street Bar? Had my romance with New York, New York, been no more than a prolonged, fruitless act of mutual seduction?
The city was a vast repository of passageways and doors, any one of which might lead me to my destiny. To choose one door was to slam all the others shut. I remember one day, back when I was still in my 30s, coming home from one of a series of assignations with a woman who lived in a basement apartment on the Lower East Side. As I walked, the streets seemed to stretch out ahead of me like a cartoon stretched on Silly Putty, growing longer and narrower. Four-thirty in the afternoon. Ruddy, low-pitched sunlight spilled over the tops of buildings that frowned down at me, their cornices furrowed like brows. It might have been my imagination, but the doors of all the buildings seemed to have big padlocks on them and red-and-yellow signs shouting KEEP OUT and SECURITY ZONE. The gates were down on the bodegas. I had to resist the urge to run—a flight toward, or away from, innocence? The woman’s name was Greta. Her lobby buzzer didn’t work. To gain entry I had to phone from the corner or stand there on the sidewalk, hoping she’d see me through the bars of her window. We’d met at a loft party, a gallery opening, a play or poetry reading, somewhere where bad wine and cheese cubes were served. With a pocket full of toothpicks I’d left with her for her place in a taxicab. Her pet cockatoo squawked in its gilded cage. A pachinko machine hung by a mandala poster over her bed. All this is grasping at the past. There was no Greta, or there were dozens of Gretas, each as insubstantial as photographs in someone else’s album, one for every address where I’d lived and for every woman I had loved and ought to have been faithful to. But I was never faithful. I was too circumspect, too terrified of anything binding, to be faithful. By choosing not to choose, I expunged all choices.
There were times when, on a busy street corner, I’d stand there, frozen, unable to make up my mind which way to cross, other pedestrians jostling me, casting me annoyed looks, cursing me under their breaths though still loud enough for me to hear. I’d learned my way around the city only to find myself directionless there. This lack of impetus led to awkward situations, like the time when the English actor intercepted me on the corner of Eighth and University. He was with the Old Vic, he said, in town to do a production of Macbeth. He looked like Richard Basehart, so I believed him. I had no hair; I’d shaved it off down to the skull. This attracted homosexual men. Macbeth wondered where “a bloke from out of town could get a good drink.” I was still living in Brooklyn at the time and said so. This didn’t dissuade him. We went to Chumley’s and from there to his place, the borrowed “flat” of some other actor. Having mixed us each a screwdriver, Richard Basehart lay on the floor fondling himself while reciting apt passages of one of Henry Miller’s more explicit books. He didn’t seem to notice or care as I stepped over him and out the door.
Another time, during a blizzard that fell on my 23rd birthday, a former priest who’d taken me to dinner for my birthday invited me to spend the night with him, which I did, gladly, having always resented those midnight subway expeditions back to whichever miserable borough I happened to be living in at the time. When the ex-priest took me in his mouth, I pretended to be elsewhere, with someone else, enjoying the dim ministrations of an altogether different set of tongue and lips. In the morning my host was beside himself with shame. Me, I couldn’t have cared less. What did it matter? Why should I have cared?
Back then I was subject to a recurrent dream, a nightmare that parachuted me into the combat zone amid its vaporous lights and alleyways. Always in the dream I’d end up in a movie theater, one of those sordid theaters near Times Square, attached to an undeployed regiment of hunched men in Burberry coats, and where the naked bodies projected on the screen were always teasingly out of focus, looking more like Cézanne’s peaches than like figures engaged in carnal Olympics. However, the soundtrack was always clear: a moan is a moan is a moan. As if by my own tumescence, I’d be lifted out of my seat and led toward a red sign glowing over the door to the men’s room, behind which ultimate depravities lay in wait, tinted with ultraviolet light, perfumed with stale urine. Debased by my own dreams.
VI. Falling Out
The City of New York had become my illicit lover—a woman of the night whose sordid charms I could not resist but to whom I could never entirely give myself. I thought of my papa and of his “business trips.” Decades passed before I finally accepted that he’d kept a mistress in the city, maybe more than one, though a single name, Berenice (Beh-reh-nee-chay) stood out for me, having surfaced time and again in my parents’ frequent fights, so those four syllables still send their chill up my spine. According to my mother, I once nearly drowned in the Hotel Paris swimming pool, my treacherous papa having left me there to attend to his courtesan upstairs. I refused to believe it. Anyway I never saw this woman, this Berenice, who to this day exists for me on roughly the same plane as Cleopatra or Attila the Hun. My father, too, was unfaithful. The city was his lure, his temptress, his domestic and moral undoing. For her sake he betrayed his own family. Though when all was said and done, my father chose us.
But then—as scorned mistresses will—the city avenged itself.
I remember one of the last times Papa visited me there, a year or so before the first of a series of strokes felled him. Paulette and I were still living on the Upper West Side, in the 94th Street deco apartment. My father and I lunched at a diner, where he ordered a bowl of vegetable soup. When I asked him how it was, he looked down at the soupspoon trembling in his fist and said, in a voice heavy with sorrow, “Not so hot.” He had come to the city to see me but also to gain an audience with the literary agent to whom he had sent his latest opus, a book titled Beyond Pragmatism, by which he hoped to advance William James’s psychological theories into the 21st century—a hope against hope for this obdurate eccentric inventor who rarely read books published after the Hague Peace Conference and whose own manifestoes were riddled with hyphenated to-days and plastered with Ko-Rec-Type. The agent had not returned his calls. Having paid for our disappointing lunch, my father repaired to a telephone booth across the street, where, for the 10th time that day, he tried to reach her, only to lose a quarter to the out-of-service phone. With uncharacteristic fury he slammed the receiver down. A few blocks uptown we found another phone booth, this one occupied by a young African American man, prompting my father, until then the least bigoted person I’d known, to combine one garden-variety epithet with one racial slur. “Papa, take it easy,” I said (or something to that effect). “What’s the matter?” But I knew perfectly well. It was no longer my father’s city, the one he’d invented for me, his son. It had become an unfamiliar, hos
tile place. As I led us away from that phone booth, in my father’s murky pupils I read an accusation of betrayal, as if I’d let him down, and not the city or his agent.
Now here I was, a few years later, with my papa dead and I, his son, suffering from his ailments, his insomnia and indigestion, not to mention a hefty slice of his egocentricity and more than a few of his eccentricities, feeling no less betrayed by the city that had been our mistress. By then Paulette and I had completed our migration to the Bronx. Though our window faced the northern tip of Manhattan, and though Grand Central Terminal was but a 22-minute train ride away, we’d turned our backs on the real city. In the shallows across the turbid waters we watched a snowy egret—a feathered vase—do its slow-motion dance for fish. We kept a pair of binoculars handy. Like having one foot in the country, we told ourselves and the friends we had ditched downtown. They assumed that the move had been voluntary, but I knew better: I knew that the city had already forsaken me, that I had failed to live up to its promises. Not that we never enjoyed ourselves, my wife and I. We took regular trips to Europe, ate good meals, threw parties packed with Manhattanites who risked nosebleeds and blown eardrums to venture north of 14th Street. But an undercurrent of distress ran through my contentment. It was this undercurrent that often woke me in the middle of the night. I felt bloated with regrets, thinking we should never have left Manhattan, that we might as well have buried ourselves alive. I tried to reassure myself. I told myself I’d wanted light, air, sunshine, fewer car alarms and idling, poisonous-fume-spewing buses. If I never saw Upper Broadway—that ragtag tunnel of produce stands and baby strollers—again, it would be too soon. Besides, the city wasn’t the city anymore. It had been co-opted by the sitcom crowd. The popularity of television shows like Seinfeld was commensurate with its cultural decline. How I missed seedy Times Square! How I longed for the days before the peepshows succumbed to Walt Disney! Such had been my logic, my excuse, for abandoning the city and the dreams of my youth, a move that would prompt me, on those sleepless nights, to stumble into the bathroom and demand of my no-longer-quite-so-young reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror, What have you done to my dreams, fucker?