Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  “My unicorn, you say?”

  “She means … your leprechaun,” Tommy managed, and at the word he and Miriam collapsed in shambles of hilarity there in the doorway, skating into a puddle of their own melting shoes and trouser cuffs. Their limbs glided together, coats like a tent collapsed, brains dissolving in a fever of mirth, whole selves liquid except now in the tangle between them for the first time Tommy felt his hard-on like a brick unlaid, a brick burning for the cool balm of mortar, and then Miriam was on her feet abandoning him there, not even straightening her hair or coat or uncrossing her wild eyes but said, “I’ve got to go, good night to you both, Gogan Boys,” and was down the stairs and gone.

  “Your brother knows about this?” Saying “brother,” Warren Rokeach meant Peter. Rye could—would—care less. They sat on woven mats in Rokeach’s office, where Tommy had been just twice, first nearly three years ago, whisked from Penn Station to ink his new name to their general agreement, then again a few months later to meet the A&R man from Vanguard records and sign the contract for A Fireside Evening with the Gogan Boys. The place was considerably changed. Then, it had been a hive of professional evidence, walls pushpinned with flyers commemorating Rokeach’s roster of acts at career highs, playing Carnegie and Town Hall, glossy head shots, mock-ups for album covers, gunmetal filing cabinets with bulging drawers, wide metal desk heaped with papers and tape reels. All gone now, replaced with a low table of simple blond wood, around which Tommy and Miriam and Warren Rokeach sat cross-legged, sipping, from cups without handles, tea that smelled of carpenter’s glue. Rokeach had been flying to the coast; Rokeach had befriended Alan Watts; Rokeach was “getting heavily into Zen Buddhism”; in favor of Japanalia Rokeach had divested his office of evidence of striving, preening, or neurosis, aspects reduced to making testimony from his as yet un-Buddhafied person. For Warren Rokeach’s face and voice and mannerisms remained entrenched in decades of self-regard, of laying it on the line, of being he whom after a handshake you counted your fingers. Equally un-Buddhafied, the tension-worm of vein at his flat high temples. Rokeach’s fingertip visited the worm, then scratched at the periphery of his neat-trimmed salt-and-pepper beard. “You gotta decide now what your intention is in this deal, because in my opinion this isn’t a thing where you can go just partway.”

  “My thinking was to have you hear the songs,” said Tommy. “I want to do what’s best for the material.”

  “Best for the material, that was your thinking, huh? What I’m hearing is you want me to do your thinking for you.” Rokeach’s eyes shot to Miriam. “Your girlfriend here is biting her tongue. She wants to jump in on your behalf—she’s done some thinking.”

  “We’re to be married in December.”

  “That’s great, because you’ve already got a manager. Relax, I’m joking.”

  Tommy, seated rather awkwardly on the mat, his guitar braced high across his tensed knees, had played “Alfonso Robinson,” “Bernard Bibbs,” “Howard Ealy,” and the album opener, “Overture to Bowery of the Forgotten,” those four songs from Bowery of the Forgotten: A Blues Cycle that were finished enough to play. “To Pass Beneath the Bower,” the finale, was not complete enough to audition. Warren Rokeach had sat nodding, sometimes with his eyes closed and kneading his temple, and then he’d begun to ask questions and Tommy had explained it all to him in an adrenaline rush like that in which Tommy’d written the flurry of songs, like that in which he’d lately been living.

  The songs, Rokeach was made to understand, were named for men, actual living men Tommy and Miriam had gone and interviewed in their rooms in the flophouses of the Bowery, a calamity of inspiration extending directly out of their first day together, at the reverend’s parlor and on the subway and after, upstairs at Peter’s and down on the street. The day of the storm. Tommy further explained: These songs were not merely documentary cameos of the discarded men inhabiting one particular flophouse but an allegory for the individual caught in the grinding gears of the American machine, that which in an allusion to Henry Miller Tommy had in one song referred to as “the air-conditioned nightmare.” That Tommy and Miriam were in love wasn’t concealed—their hands rested on each other’s knees, their bodies grappling in each other’s direction like vines to sunlight. That Tommy and Miriam were stoned out of their gourds most days by noon, not excluding here in Rokeach’s office, Rokeach needn’t be told. He could observe what he wished.

  Tommy had acquired his own flat now, on Mott Street. Miriam returned so infrequently to the railroad apartment she shared with two students that, really, it was as if the new place was theirs together. Tommy had never lived completely on his own, gone from boarding school to navy bunk to Mrs. Powell’s to Peter’s pullout before the shared bliss of Mott Street. Could he be bothered to regret it? A footnote. March into April he and Miriam had stalked his subjects, bargaining their way past ill-tempered managers behind glass windows, up to rooms astounding in their decrepitude and stench, where aluminum pots of beans sat charring on Sterno cans, where the corridor toilets sat barricaded in junkie occupation, leaving only back windows and fire escapes for pissing and even apparently shitting. They bore with them gifts: White Castle burgers in grease-spotted sacks, packs of Marlboros, clean socks or plastic combs, other minor articles of daily necessity, trading raw sustenance for fantastical conversation. Miriam’s intrepitude took them where Tommy couldn’t have dreamed of going. Her charm opened guarded hearts to inquiry, while her ear for the vagrants’ shambolic, fractured dialect translated what he’d never have fathomed as he sat jotting phrases into his notebook.

  The men were both white and black and in no case ignorant of the difference. However much wrecked together like Robinson and Friday on the reefs of the Bowery, one set of outcastes still proved capable of prejudice against the other, the other of bearing the deeper stigma. Tommy and Miriam distributed hamburgers and cigarettes fairly to all comers but, when it came to the project of collecting life stories, favored scions of slavery. We’ve got blacks of our own.

  The Bowery a Delta at your doorstep. Into the muck with the Jew and the blacks.

  The wallflower at last entered into the dance!

  Howard Ealy had said he was descended from Ethiopian kings and was the first black member of the IWW and that he had once personally tailored a suit for Theodore Roosevelt. Alfonso Robinson, a short-order cook and proponent of phrenological science, gifted them with figures of men he carved from used matchsticks, featuring tiny splintery penises. Bernard Bibbs, going one better, arranged after their interview to expose himself to Miriam in the corridor, but his material was too good not to use and they didn’t hold it against him.

  Tommy wondered if he’d ever explain to Miriam how the Ulster boys called Catholics niggers.

  It was always your guilt, wasn’t it, blocking the way to the life before you?

  But no more, not with her.

  “So the songs are given the true names of these hoboes,” Rokeach mused.

  “Yes,” said Tommy. “The songs are the men. There’s meant to be no distance between the two.”

  “I get it, I’m just wondering if there’s possibly going to be some legal angle and you ought to change them. But”—Rokeach raised a Zen or perhaps a Hollywood Apache hand—“we can address this later.”

  “It’s a form I call the living blues,” said Tommy. “The point is to leave my own voice aside, to bear witness instead.”

  “I like the way you’re talking, from my perspective this is very attractive material, very committed material, and I sincerely want to work with you on this, Tommy. So I think we just need to proceed in a deliberate fashion vis-à-vis your brothers, if you understand. I look at your intended here and I see she does. Maybe she’s already said to you what I’m thinking.”

  Miriam smiled.

  “She’s going to make me say it. She’s making me nervous, Tommy, I mean in a good way. The silent partner. In negotiation that’s a widely underestimated technique. You let them come to you.”<
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  Never mind the small framed watercolor of Mount Fuji, Rokeach was Zen’s utter opposite. The shrewd man was unnerved because Tommy had brought a Jewish girl to his office. I brought a Jew to the Jew, Tommy thought, I brought my own Jew. Never mind solving the Conundrum City, rather marry its exemplar, its spirit creature. Miriam Zimmer was to New York as the Green Man was to the forest, was to Sunnyside Gardens as the unicorn to its walled garden. I wed the Jewish unicorn! He placed his fingers to his frets and without strumming put words to changes in his head: Brought a Jew to you, now you don’t know what to do. All speech, all thought, was song to him now.

  “You gotta dump ’em.”

  Perhaps not all speech.

  “Assuming it’s not taboo to say aloud what we’re each of us thinking here.”

  Miriam spoke for the first time since they’d been introduced and seated. “Mr. Rokeach means you should quit the Gogan Boys, Tom.”

  “Warren, please. You see, I knew I had another functioning brain in the room. I heard you talking but I heard her thinking every time you talked. You should listen to your young lady, Tommy. I couldn’t be happier for the two of you, incidentally.”

  Tommy felt he was in a kind of delirium. Of course this is what he’d come to this office to be told. Or had been brought by Miriam, since, as Rokeach plainly saw, it was she who’d egged Tommy into requesting this private audience.

  “The Gogan Boys are hands down the corniest act in my book, Tommy. I keep them on because of loyalty and amusement and because I book them reliably, which brings good karma on all sides, but the routine is going exactly nowhere. The minute you joined the act you were the best thing they had. What was corny in 1956 when Peter and Rye walked into my office was nonetheless the good kind of 1956 corny—Eisenhower exotica. Ireland was as bohemian as anyone could stand at the time. In 1960 Ireland is as hip as a crutch. The Gogan Boys might as well be a rock-’n’-roll act.”

  What lately was exempted from new states of delirium? Tommy was drunk on what went on between his bare body and Miriam’s on the bare mattress on the bare floor, windows without curtains but since they lay below sight at the level of the floor it hardly mattered, the barely furnished Mott Street flat constituting a minimalism less strained than that of Rokeach’s Zen offices. Tommy was drunk, too, on the particulars of the derelict men in the flophouse rooms, on the texture of their sorrow and what it had done for his art. Such gifts weren’t given mistakenly. For the first time Tommy felt himself to be not a performer in a musical act but a musician. He was in the right hands with the two Jews here. If Tommy’s talent was of a passive nature, if he was less a generator of his own intensities than one making of himself a prism for the intensities of others, he was nonetheless the talented one. He would be married. He would be managed. So let him be split from his brothers by the craft of these two, a craft he couldn’t have conjured on his own behalf. This was their Jewish art. He absolved himself of the unspeakable stereotype by the blessing of his total and awestruck admiration.

  “The appetite now is for these committed issue songs that galvanize young listeners who want to believe what they’re hearing is performed with conviction by someone less hoary than Pete Seeger, God bless him. This thing of yours is terrific with the blues refrains, I want you to stick with this and I believe I could place an album like this in a serious position with a serious company immediately. You have no idea who comes sniffing around. I had a guy asking if I’ve got anything like a white Odetta in my books. A bunch of alter kockers sitting around dreaming of a white Odetta if you believe it. Just a question, have you by any chance debuted any of this material with the Boys?”

  Miriam shook her head. “They haven’t heard these songs. They don’t even know they exist.”

  “Good. That’ll make extricating you just a degree or two easier. Look at her, sitting there. What are you, fifteen? She’s contemplating what’s best for you from a very definite perspective. She could have my job, Tommy. When I go live on a mountain she’s welcome to it. Did you know that I’m buying a mountain?”

  “No.”

  “Not cheap. I’m buying it for Watts, who demonstrates no practical sense whatsoever. The bottom line on this, Tommy, is the separation ought to be total, between this material and your former activities. You’re right coming to me, because if someone else tried to break up an act in my book I’d have their balls in a vise. This way, I do it myself.”

  The nearest Tommy and Miriam had come to a fight was when, after her urging him to find himself the Mott Street place, after forbidding him mentioning the new songs, after a series of snubs and curt remarks at gigs—Miriam borrowing a cigarette from Rye only to turn her back and shower attention on one of his discarded petitioning backstage girlfriends—Tommy had, in a hot twist of distress that he might be meant to choose between them, accused her of hating his brothers.

  Miriam’s look had been unsentimental. “Let me tell you a Rose story,” she said.

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Listen to the story. When I was about twelve, there was this man who lived in the Gardens, Abraham Schummel, and Schummel’s wife had died, and he lost his job, and then he sort of went crazy, began writing all this schizophrenic gibberish on the walls of people’s houses, and ended in a breakdown. They came and took him away and his house sat empty. And a bunch of the neighbors were raising funds to engage a private doctor and to help Schummel get back in his house and Rose refused. And you have to remember, my mother at this point defines herself as the most community-minded, neighbors looking out for neighbors is her constant refrain, and I at twelve am still innocent as to what grudge she bears for Schummel, I see him as a victim too because of the misfortune. And Rose said, I’m quoting exactly, He was a bastard to begin with. If you fix Abe Schummel’s mental illness, she said, you get yourself a mentally repaired bastard. If you put him back in his house and job you’ve got a bastard with a house and a job. Because some things can’t be fixed.”

  “I’m to draw from your fine parable that my brothers are like this man Schummel. Unfixable bastards.”

  “This is what growing up and having someone else dislike your family is for, Tom. So you can quit thinking it’s your personal burden, some problem you alone can solve. It frees you to see them as plain workaday assholes like the rest.”

  Ah, and then Rose. Speaking of the unfixable. Rose, the wonderment of Tommy’s new life. Rose, the unmistakable point of origin for Miriam’s intractability, her cynicism and ideals, her New York native’s expertise, and yet again, the point of origin for the force Miriam brought to the struggle against her point of origin—against Rose, who occupied the ground Miriam had had to flee from. Against the dead utopian Gardens. They spoke on the telephone every single day, mother and daughter, often for as much as an hour. Sorting grievances, intricate politics of the living and dead, the exclusion of blacks from the Queensboro Public Library’s board and how to weigh Stalin’s starvations in the Ukraine against the ovens of Hitler.

  If Miriam was the Jewish unicorn, she whom Tommy had sought without knowing she existed, Rose might be she whom Tommy had hoped not to find waiting (without knowing she existed, either): the toad in the unicorn’s garden.

  What if the toad knew something the unicorn didn’t?

  Schummel a bastard to begin with.

  Some things can’t be fixed, but which things?

  Tommy and Miriam rode the 7 out to Bliss Street to visit Rose and as they walked from the el Miriam excitedly sketched the years of her youth, indicating sentimental touchstones of the borough from which she’d run screaming. Yet as they grew nearer to the Gardens, Tommy felt he was plummeting, on beyond Rose’s youth, to his own. A portion of him hurtled backward to Belfast, the mysteries of Europe.

  When Miriam and Rose spoke on the phone and Tommy sat in the flat’s one comfortable chair, scavenged from Houston Street, pretending to tune his guitar, instead trying to make sense of their talk, thinking of the laundry trucks deco
rated with swastikas he’d seen on a visit to Dublin, and his secret uncertainty as a boy as to what side of the war an Irishman was on.

  Miriam’s ascent in Tommy’s sky was to free him, then, from the leaden orbit of Peter and Rye. Mounting revolution against the Gogan regime was prerequisite to gaining an adult life. How, then, to navigate Rose Zimmer? On the one hand, Miriam could be said to have broken from Rose at fourteen, a matter of sheer psychic survival, like clawing out of a bomb crater. On the other, Rose had never even begun to be overthrown. She loomed monumental, a dark tower, a ziggurat. The toad might not merely be bigger than the unicorn; the toad might be bigger than the garden. Of Tommy she demanded nothing specific in the way of behavior or attitude, in exchange for his steady contemplation of that which wasn’t to be solved by any man. Look ye upon my works and despair.

  When Rose laughed up her sleeve, the sleeve was the twentieth century. You were living in her sleeve.

  Was Tommy to love Rose? She’d brought Miriam into being, a point in her favor. Yet the prospect was terrifying and he wouldn’t have known how to begin. Was Tommy to hate her? Miriam hated her mother enough for both of them—little margin there. And then again, again and at last, Miriam shared with her mother a depth of affection such as to make Tommy jealous as a lover and as a son. His own mother wrote letters, one a month, folded into blue tissue envelopes boundaried with red and white stripes, her fountain script flowery and microscopic and barely worth the strain, so humdrum were her homilies. Tommy wrote back, into the uncomprehending Ulster past, that which refused to grant that it was past, a storybook from which he’d graduated.