Before I Forget

by Fahey, Jacqueline

  I had breakfast at a cheap food bar across the road. A man came in - he was just so mad! He raved on about the food that he wanted. He was crazy, and for the first time I thought I knew the service that the mad do for the so-called sane. We were all secretly pleased and intrigued. He raised all our incomprehensible paranoias and frustrations, called out, ‘Why, what do you mean. Look I don’t know - you just cannot understand, this is what I want - please, oh why can’t anybody see!’ He looked so justified as if he were on a great mission to save the world, not trying to order a poached egg. The waitresses made a great thing out of all this. They went up and down the counter, prowling. They tangled with him - they prowled back again. Up and down behind the counter giving blow by blow accounts. They mimed his madness to the customers who sat on stools all along the counter. I saw him again at the Chelsea arguing with Mr Bard, the manager. He screamed: ‘Read it, Read it!’, forcing a dirty envelope into Mr Bard’s hands. ‘It’s nothing to do with my father. Oh God, oh please, just read it, read it.’ Of course, he had to be staying at the Chelsea.

  Thank God Patrick has stopped ringing me. The poor man. I feel rather awful about the whole thing. Perhaps he did just want to be kind. In this atmosphere I can’t afford to find out. The Russian taxi driver made no bones about what he was after. I was his fare after a book publishing party in Central Square and I was feeling relaxed and happy. He said he was from Russia, Georgia, he was a lawyer there, but here he is driving a taxi. I felt sorry for him and it took me a few minutes to realise that he felt towards me the way most Muslims would feel towards any woman on her own. I found the whole thing so insulting.

  Being here alone - what an appalling sense of my own dignity I have. I can’t become a conservative but I really must have respect for who and what I am apparently. I am prepared though to give this respect to anyone else I meet but I will not accept aggression. I can see how in living in a big city people do become conservative and I think it’s really bad. Order must, in the future, be kept by local governments and local areas of money, work and achievement. The big city thing is so dangerous. You have to have places where real achievement can happen, but not as it is now, here. They are obviously following an old pattern from ancient times where cities grew and destroyed themselves. They fell in upon themselves. Fellini spells it out, Rome, and New York - everything is here, the market place of the world - just like in Roman times. It’s the same thing and that mob is here too, without even the emperors to have enough wit to placate them. But it’s where I want to be at the moment.

  Cree Harland took me to the Frick and then to the Metropolitan. The Frick is lovely but with a lot of very coy François Bouchers. There were two beautiful Rembrandts where the use of paint seems loose but controlled. The Metropolitan was of course the best. Some Goyas. She has a friend, an art historian, who treats paintings with a fashionable perception. It is a great way to control artists to do art history. I think I should like the paint use of the best of the Impressionists and the colour and inspiration of the Giottos.

  When I came in yesterday there was a leak in the ceiling in the lobby and a girl sobbing. Mr Bard yelled at her, ‘Forget about the dog!’ or ‘Forgut about the dawg!’ She had on a leather jacket with chains and very dirty hair. ‘Pay,’ he intoned, ‘or get out by tonight. Alright! Alright!’ A black man and his white wife went by calling out, ‘We’ve eaten nothing for two days.’ They didn’t look as if they had either.

  I met Patrick round the corner at a bar. I thought that even if he was the Boston Strangler, he couldn’t do much in a crowded bar. How wrong I was! Four men stood in front of us and in hysterical tones shrieked out all their marital woes. Two were divorced and two heading that way. By the time we left I think another of them had made up his mind. A girl sat opposite us popping pills and asking men to take her home. Barbra Streisand-type pianist-cum-singer bawled her head off at the piano. I’d give her lungs four years. Walking home we climbed over my black, asleep on the pavement with his head in a bundle of dirty old clothes. He was beside the bum’s steps. Another bum crouched on the top of the steps clutching his inevitable bottle of booze in a paper bag, so like one of Goya’s demons, dark and crouching, distorted, a figure of murky revenge.

  Coming from a part of the Bronx which contains about as much culture as a broom cupboard, it is surprising that Patrick is so well read. Not that I consider myself the last word in well read, but he had certainly read more than I had, knew all the right writers, and more. He is something we don’t see in New Zealand, a Mick on the make, a large size James Cagney, top dog on the Bronx block, great-grandchild of bullock teamsters and world weary policemen, cynical but humane, the full blooded sergeants of New York who have come of age and make up their own rules as they go along. But I resent Patrick for throwing me out of context, leaving me fumbling about looking for a plausible role, clutching my virtue to me like my handbag. At 50 this makes me seem positively coy, ridiculous. Patrick talks, like so many Americans, about their rich and famous friends. On this occasion he held forth about his friend the art dealer who also runs three restaurants, he owns them all, he also owns his own art gallery. They’re much more open here about their status. I mean, we let each other know what our status is but never so openly. ‘My friend, he is rich, he owns four houses, six cars, two lovely children at the best schools. My friend is just great - you must meet my friend.’ However, I do think it has dawned on Patrick that I am not the dark lady of legend, wise in the ways of sex. Being alone in a room with Patrick would be getting into the bull ring with a crazy bull.

  The women I have contacted have been remarkably good to me but it is a duty - for some men it is a pleasure. Fraser does not even begin to worry about this. He enjoys women helping him in his work and why should he feel guilty about it - and why in hell do I feel guilty about it. I must remember the demon black, all soot coloured, her hair in desperate ringlets. She carried away two great muck-coloured rubbish bags outside the Chelsea. All demon Goya soot. Another demon in the middle of the pavement - true Goya, legs cut off right at the knees, arms out, facing up to the skyscrapers - all soot but small bright red sawn off pants and juggling four coloured balls. He was standing - kneeling on a small wooden trolley.

  The industrial revolution - the peninsula wars. Did my black live through the cold of last night. How long does it take to die? After I left the opening I went the wrong way and after a while seeing two very working class Jewish women, I said, ‘Which way is Washington Square?’ They said, ‘This way lady, to The Bowery’ - very Yiddish. ‘You don’t want to go there - go back quick - not that way. That way not safe. You know, not safe.’ I had already seen the bums on the last block but I was so used to 23rd Street that I didn’t take any notice. As I went back, I heard one bum say to another - they were both sprawled on the pavement, ‘You know something - I always liked you, I’ve never told you before - always liked you.’ I hoped it was some momentary comfort for his ghostlike companion. They must be out in all sorts of weather but there is an ageing bum whose skin is so deadly white and fragile - is it what they drink?

  I do like Perelman’s description of a New York City crowd: ‘It flows, sluggishly, Hare Krishna’s, a group of loafers undreamt of in the slump of ‘36, screwballs and screw boxes, losers of beauty contests, Texas’ gigolos, nature fakers, shoe salesmen and similar voyeurs, absconding bank cashiers, unemployed flagellants, religious messiahs and jailbait. Did there exist anywhere a Hogarth, or Hieronymus Bosch who could do justice to these satanic troglodyte faces preoccupied with unimaginable larcenies arid chicaneries.’

  This is, of course, even to me, a crowd around say Central Park. He gets nearer to my block when he gets to my lovelies, ‘crouched in doorways, pruning each other’s hides for fleas and puffing on reefers, eager to impart their knowledge, however, they swarmed around us offering special private tutelage and free Wassermann’s.’ If nothing else, and after all there is a lot else, the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council can congratulate themselves
on lightening up Perelman for me. I have always liked him but until now I missed the guts of him. Now, as they say in Yiddish, ‘Perelman’ (down beat), ‘I love him!’ (up beat).

  Went to an opening with Ann Stout. She behaved very oddly indeed. The party after was great fun, in fact the first time I have felt really at home. I did not think, They are Americans and I am a New Zealander, but felt they were decent people. Tomorrow night I am going to a dinner party given by a Mexican/Italian/Spanish painter (I’m not quite sure what he is). Pity I have such a hideous sinus - it’s really bad. What a handicap. Sometimes when it’s really bad I can hardly see, I have no focus. Maybe it’s a brain tumour. I do hope with the medical set-up here that it waits to reach its climax until I get home. The hospital expenses would really do Fraser in. In fact their gallery party was not all roses. It had a real sense of fear, fear of failure, fear of competition oddly enough. You would think that that would be something they would be used to. I have to paint anyway -failure or success. If I don’t paint I write. Either method, writing or painting is a way of translating to my poor thick psyche what is going on out there. It’s an awful responsibility, as it - that psyche - only wants the truth, but it wants the truth with passion.

  As for Patrick - talking about passion - underneath the shambling teddy bear act operates the smoothest sex maniac in New York. The buckaroo from the Bronx is the Irish-Catholic answer to Portnoy’s complaint. Patrick’s instant satisfaction. I’m just not fast enough on my feet for that kind of thing. And talking about men in New York, the whole success capitalist thing I think is what’s behind it. If they are with a woman one represents a commodity called sex, therefore you’re successful if you can get her to give you as much of that as you can get, I mean, of that commodity. In the time it is practical to allot to her. It’s a ‘I’m not going to be had by anyone attitude’. It’s not altogether fair but there is something in it I think. Well … a bit anyhow.

  I like the way New Yorkers are not very clean. They are unaware of dirty, it’s first things first. It’s the opposite of respectability. I had always thought of America as the home of the flush lavatory, immaculate kitchen, plastic wrap, all hygiene. It took me some time to adjust to the fact that outside every entrance, there would be broken bottles, discarded tins, sodden newspapers, and just plain filth. And here we have the dynamic New Yorker, climbing over it all, oblivious, eagerly chasing his new enterprise, his eyes set on the new dream that’s going to catapult him to glory. They don’t care about dirty old jeans or holes in their socks - and I love it. In the lofts it’s not squalid though, rather grand in fact. Everything is for the use of - and living in the best aristocratic sense. Perhaps one beautiful expensive antique, but that, when I come to think of it, is as likely to be a clock, or a bed, or a coat stand - everything for a purpose - nothing for show, and the result, a lovely sense of freedom. Oh, I know the city is bankrupt, there are not enough garbage collectors, but they don’t really seem to care all that much anyway. All their energy is concentrated on living. A lovely fusion of a Protestant work ethic, and the Catholic-Spanish wasteful fiesta.

  Visions again. Brendan Behan in squalor and despair at the Chelsea. Out cold on his bed. The room a mass of broken glass and bottles, cigarettes, dirty clothes and unopened bills. Brendan Behan twists in a dirty sheet in an alcoholic epileptic fit. Beatrice desperately unravelling him. Brendan in the care of Katherine Dunham and her friends in the Chelsea - a dance group. Picture such a tragic pantomime of dance. Thomas Wolfe, lonely, desperate with loathing, and love for Aline. He drinks too much. He reacts with anger when the switchboard operator calls him Toots. He actually complains to Mr Bard of her familiarity.

  Mr Bard sacks her and Wolfe is horrified. Lovely demonstration of his ambivalence about everything. Perhaps I am being unfair to Mr Bard. Mr Bard does run a zoo alright but he has decency - of course he has, and I can see how irrational I have been. I thought he ought to know that if he would not accept American Express he should wait until the Morgan Guaranty Trust would send me my money. What a great big baby. But he did wait - partly because of Eve, his very nice secretary - but partly because he would have anyway. His father ran the Chelsea when, after all, it was a great deal easier to be understanding of the wayward artist.

  I woke with an appalling hangover to a beautiful summer day. There is nothing worse than a beautiful summer day when there is nothing you can do with it. There is a punk band from England at the hotel and business is picking up next door. Since I had heard that the Mafia had moved in on 23rd Street one of my favourite fantasies goes something like this. The Mafia decide to teach those amateurs at the Chelsea a lesson. Up the lift to the fifth floor, their violin cases under their arms, down the hall to that narrow long annex to the right with just two doors at the end of it. They machine gun the wrong door, burst in, and there I am in my new lace cotton nightdress, the corpse across the bed, and I’d be in all the newspapers. It’s becoming an obsession - what an awful way to go, how ‘50s.

  I woke with a ghastly start - midnight and a banging on my door and a drunken Southern voice, my neighbour next door, begging for his pussy: could he please have his pussy, his pussy had run away, did I have his pussy in my room, could he look in my room for his pussy. In my most prissy voice I said I had no cat in my room and good night. Back to sleep until another loud banging and an angry black voice demanded would I please present myself at the desk downstairs immediately. I rang the desk and a drunken bellow informed me that I had not paid my bill for three weeks. With withering scorn I told him to check. He screamed he would not check. With icy rage I informed him that I had no intention of leaving my room at two in the morning. My God! What a night! I had only seen Mr Range, desk clerk, in daylight. With trembling hands and red veined bulging eyes, he crept about his enclosure with spectacular hangovers. I have no intention of viewing him when, at night, booze had returned him temporarily to life. Back to bed, relieved to find when really threatened I am not afraid. The telephone rang at four. By this time I was ready for the C.I.A. and a spy charge. My cousin Ted, ringing from his monastery in Vermont. He thought it was a good time to ring as he had just finished his vespers. He said the desk was very understanding. I know they have heard some really good ones at the Chelsea but a cousin, a monk, at four in the morning!

  Today I woke up feeling fine. This is what I had missed - the emotional exercise. Yesterday all despair and fear, and today all joy and hope. Lovely day, looking at paintings and bought a silk Indian scarf, new lipstick, two bras and a lovely billowing white cotton gown. Staggering to my room with all my goodies, plus my hot pepper steak, a bread roll and a tomato for my dinner. Put them all down, opened my door, and a small cat shot past me into my room. He would not get out from under my bed. After six weeks of bizarre voices next door I just had to get a look at them and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. So much heard, my neighbours, but never seen. Their door was partially open. I knocked and a black voice called ‘Enter.’ In the middle of a large room a black man dressed as a desert Arab occupied a centre settee. A small hippy elf-like creature who appeared to have only one leg hopped about in a gypsy skirt and assorted jewellery, rather like an Esmeralda in an early Hunchback of Notre Dame film. The Southern young man seemed very surprised to know his cat was in my room. Bemused he wandered into my room and fumbled about under my bed and at last came out with the poor little undernourished thing. I think it is quite possible that the Southern young man comes from a good family and is basically wholesome and he’s just living it up in New York, maybe. He is what Americans admire most, tall and fair with even features, rather blurred I’m afraid by dissipation. Now I feel perfectly at ease with them being next door. It’s the unknown that’s so scary. They are like a medieval travelling acting troupe. Maybe the dwarf was just not home that afternoon. They really need a dwarf.

  I read all this now with as much astonishment as that Atlanta adventurer of the senses must have felt in finding a real live cat under my bed, for it i
s now two weeks later and two days before I leave for England. I now know why he could look at me as if he knew me very well, intimately. I came back to my room early this morning after a farewell party, beautiful dinner and opening, talk and drinks. I was so tired, tired, tired. It was time to go home. I was like a child at a party who can see so much more to eat, frosted chocolate delights, marbled ice-cream with jelly and cream, mystery lollies in gorgeous coloured paper, on and on, but not one more mouthful can she eat. Time to go home. My bath is so deep and hot, I lay there, nearly asleep. Now and then running little bits of hot water in, pure bliss. Time stood still.

  At the end of the narrow bathroom was a long thin window with shatterproof, opaque glass. I know it is shatterproof because it is shattered. Someone had thrown a large, heavy object at it. The glass was shattered but not broken. That static explosion gripped me, was it Sid Vicious? No, even Sid Vicious would have had a better room than this one. That cut out Janis Joplin too. An anonymous L.S.D. trip? Bathroom closing in on him. He is in prison, he tries to escape, hurls a gin bottle at the window. There is no escape that way. The bastards have thought of everything. And then, for the first time my eyes move up - there is a small square of clear glass at the top of the window. I have never noticed it before. My fantasies had never led me to move higher than that record of past violence. It was early summer by now and dawn was breaking and there, quite clear, was the cat man. When I think of that window now, the cat man is there forever, like the burst of cracked glass further down. I think - how long had he been watching me. How often had he been watching me? When I was a child I had a terror of gargoyle faces pressed up against the windows in the darkness outside, threatening the warmth and light inside, watching. New Yorkers know it is an act of aggression to watch; bums and Blacks won’t be watched anymore. No photographs, no drawings. The older woman alone - the victim. A figure of ridicule. Is this my paranoia? Then I think, prankish, silly boy games, like the boys from Caroline Bay boring holes in the girls’ changing sheds, sniggering. No, this was very solemn and calm. The morning I left he was waiting in the hall as I came out of my room. I suppose it would be a good idea to live in a hotel with Victorian fire escapes if you were a voyeur. It was really time for me to go home. Perhaps he didn’t want what was given but had to steal. There would be young women who would be perfectly happy for him to look at them or anything else he wanted to do, for that matter, did it fit in with his breaking the law, selling dope? He didn’t want money he was allowed to have, he wanted illegal money and yet I see his act as an act of anguish - no other words seem right. Strange to think that they are still there, having chosen parts in a play and now the play has taken over and it is running out of control. I feel they invented their roles as a joke and that now they are trapped inside those roles. They are being pulled out of shape by powerful forces and there is just no way they know how to stop it. My, by now, good friend Joe DiGiorgio, on The Bowery, asked me to dinner.