by Jeet Thayil
As the snow came down on the anxious city he typed up his last piece for the day, ninety words for the books section cribbed from the back cover and flap of a bestseller about India’s Partition. Indian Angle reporters were forbidden to read the books set aside for review. It was a reckless waste of time for an item that would run to no more than a couple of paragraphs in the back of the paper. Furthermore, only those books available in the bestseller section of an airport bookstore were to be considered for review.
“Books with traction!” had been the editor-in-chief’s exact words. “Traction is action!”
When he was done it was almost seven o’clock. He paged Tony and waited fifteen long minutes for a call back. The address was in the East Village, a good half-hour away. He packed his messenger bag and locked the Two Marys in the bottom drawer of his desk. He found a pear on the compositor’s table and stuffed it into his jacket, the office empty except for Jose who was on the phone at the receptionist’s desk.
“Nada,” he was saying. “Nada lo es todo.”
Dismas shrugged at him and gestured to the clock on the wall. Late o’clock.
Jose waved back and told the phone, “Existe el hombre del mal en los suenos del hombre bueno.”
Outside the snow had stopped and the air was frigid. He was wearing a beanie and fingerless gloves and under his heavy coat were a twill cardigan and flannel shirt, but the wind sliced through everything. On Twenty-Third Street he stopped at an ATM to check his current account. The Bank of New York held eighty dollars for him, the sum total of his hard labour in the Empire State. After several moments of reflection he withdrew fifty.
He ate the pear on the subway. The woman seated directly opposite was bundled up and layered but her breasts were terrifically vertiginous. Nowhere near Goody’s level of gravitas but then what was? A version of Xavier’s jingle floated into his head. The breast of the east beats the best of the west. If Goody was the prototype for the Two Marys, Xavier had an in-house model and muse with classic Tang Dynasty, seventies Bollywood, plus size curves. What more could a man want? He licked pear juice off his fingers. The woman got up and took a seat at the far end of the car.
At Bleeker he went up into the end-of-the-year end-of-the-world streets of the East Village. He turned east on Houston and walked three blocks up the Bowery and east again to a building on Second Street and was buzzed up to a one bedroom-hall-kitchen where a small group of unopiated punters waited for the man they called Tony.
“Wake up and hustle on over to the village for what? He’s always fucking late,” said a guy in western garb.
“He’s a busy man, got people to do, things to meet,” said a tall man dressed in several shades of blue. He held a cigarette and moved his hand in the Queen Elizabeth wave.
“Easy for you to say, Rico, you’re always holding,” said Western.
“I plan ahead, darling,” said Rico, sitting up straight and batting his eyelashes. “So go ahead, shoot me. Shoot me first.”
“Fuck, that line’s so old it should be put to sleep.”
“Whose line is it? Let’s snort it up real quick,” said Rico, cackling throatily around his cigarette.
“Yeaha,” said a woman lying completely still on a couch in the corner. “Doctor Ricard, famous poet, hung out with Warhol, brown-nosed Schnabel, discovered Basquiat, yadda dada, except it was twenty years ago. Now you can’t see talent when it’s under your deviant septum.”
“Twenty-two years ago, my dear, and I’m not a famous poet. I’m a famous critic and obscure poet. What talent?”
The woman nodded at Western.
“Clayton here,” she said. “Three shows already, one solo. That’s his stuff on the wall. You see but you don’t see.”
Only then did Dismas notice the pictures, gleaming acrylics of cowboys in squalor. A blond boy passed out in a tenement hallway with his jeans around his ankles; a boy smoking crack in an abandoned lot; a boy having sex in a public toilet with two obese men. The boys all wore white Stetsons.
“It takes talent to know talent, darling,” said Rico. “Maybe I’ve misplaced mine or sold it or traded it in. Now stop being disagreeable. Our guest must be wondering what fresh hell he’s stumbled into.”
They all turned to Dismas.
“Well-appointed hell, if you ask me,” he said.
Rico cackled again and Dismas noticed a filigree of nicotine stains around his otherwise white goatee. He adjusted the mustard cravat around his throat and pointed his cigarette at the woman on the couch.
“May I introduce you to your host, Lysistrata?”
She said, “Warhol superstar, painter of poems, art arbiter. You were a beautiful boy. What happened?”
“I like that, arbiter, like Petronius.”
“Petronius.”
“Nero’s personal fashion consultant, a man of taste and decency.”
“What’s taking him so long?” said a woman who was stretched out on the floor. “Fucking Tony, keeps you waiting every time.”
She was in the punk uniform of ripped blue jeans and black leather motorcycle jacket but she was well past her teens, too old to carry off the role with any clear authority.
“Part of the life, dear, don’t underestimate the lure of being kept waiting for your reward,” said Rico, pulling his hoodie over his head. But in an instant the blue eyes had turned watery and the charm disappeared. “I fronted you a bag and I want it back. If you can take a moment out of your busy life.”
Then the doorbell rang and Tony came in and showed them pictures of his bulldog, Clinton. He stood in the middle of the room, puffy-jacketed, handing out glossy prints of Clinton posed under studio lighting. When it was Dismas’s turn he gave the man forty dollars and received four bags in return. He spilled half of one on his wallet and snorted it with a rolled-up dollar. Then: the slowing of time, the cooling of time, the annihilation of time. Much later he left the building with Rico and the punk woman. On the sidewalk Rico told her she owed him a bag or ten dollars. It was now or never. The woman reached into her purse to rummage. And a stocky man in jeans and a stained Dolphins sweatshirt materialised in front of them.
He said, “All right, open your hand.”
He made them hold hands and walk to a car parked at an angle against the sidewalk. He assured them that he would shoot if they tried to run. They got into the car as he bid, Rico and Dismas in the back and the woman in front. Rico told the cop he’d been through all this six months earlier and could they please come to some kind of arrangement, please? The woman said her name was Rita and could they come to an arrangement too? Only Dismas had no arrangement to offer. At the East Fifth Street station house they were booked for possession and only Dismas had no identification to show. A detective accompanied him to Indian Angle. Other than Sheri-from-the-Islands and one of the compositors the office was empty. It was the first bit of luck he’d had all day.
Sheri cracked her knuckles when she saw Dismas and the policeman.
“Oh ho,” she said. “Who this strapping young ’un you bring with you, Dismas?”
Then she squinted and scratched her chin to indicate confusion.
“Man, you in some trouble?”
“It’s a long story,” said Dismas. “I need to pick up a small thing.”
“What small thing now?”
“Passport.”
Inside, the compositor was singing the hit tune from Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham. Most of the lights had been turned off and there was a terrific smell of methi in the air. The detective examined the open editorial section, the cabins, the stained walls, Dismas’s own small desk and battered computer, and though there was nothing grand about any of it the man seemed impressed; perhaps he was comparing it to his own grubby policeman’s cubicle with the overflowing trash cans and faulty ventilation.
On the way out Dismas asked Sheri-from-the-Islands for a favour.
“If I’m not in tomorrow tell Mrs Merchant I had urgent immigration work. Can you do that?”
; “How you mean? Tell her you go do immigration on office time?”
“Listen, just tell her.”
“Sure, man, I tell her and I tell you right now what she say. You want hear?”
And Sheri-from-the-Islands laughed at her own joke.
The detective laughed too.
They drove back to the station house where Dismas was charged. At eleven fifteen he and Rico were in a detention cell for the night.
There was one other occupant. A shirtless man whose rich stink filled the room. He was barefoot; his khaki cargoes bulged at the pockets; he sucked his teeth and said nothing all night. Because they were hungry Dismas and Rico talked about food. Rico said his name was Rene and nobody called him Rico but the crazy lady at whose house they had met. He said some people were of the opinion that the Poles had no cuisine to speak of. They say the Poles are cuisineless but this is untrue and it can be proven, said Rene. Whenever he had twenty dollars to spare, which was not often – and how heartbreaking it would have been if he’d known as a young man in New York City, living that young man’s charmed life, that one day dinner would be moot – when he had the money he went to Veselka and ate Polish because it was solace food, nutrition for the disaffected. He had to admit that he wasn’t a huge fan of Indian. The restaurants on Sixth seemed to specialise in three dishes, green, red, and brown. Those are not Indian restaurants, said Dismas, they’re Bangladeshi and the joke about them is true. All the food comes from the same kitchen. I knew it, said Rene. A nose is a nose is a nose. You recognise quality in one thing you recognise it in another. He’d given away so much, he said, everything but his divine attribute: the nose that knew the good from the not good, the good from the great, the great from genius.
He mentioned his radiant Basquiat essay, the thing that had changed a young artist’s life and his own. It had made him famous but only for discovering the boy genius. People forgot the other things he’d done, the film and the poetry. They forgot the others he had championed. Stephen Mueller, Brice Marden, Robin Bruch, Hunt Slonem, none of whom had seemed avant-garde to him because he saw the work as manifestations of the classical.
“And my great achievement,” said Rene, “do you know what it is? The one thing that will prove to the future that I was indeed a poet, do you know?” Dismas shook his head. “My portrait by Alex Katz.”
He didn’t want to talk about Warhol, he said. There was no point. Rene was all talked out when it came to Andy. In any case all he ever did was work, work, work, and save up his money. He never spent a penny except when he took you out for pierogis and borscht and mined you for material. And for Andy everything was material, every little thing that came his way, gossip, a subway token, somebody’s suicide, insanity, infinity, groceries, buildings, someone sleeping – it was all fair game.
Dismas said he had published a book some years earlier, a slim book with a descriptive title, Twenty-Twenty Poems. A poet, said Rene, looking at him as if he was a time-traveller from a future planet. Then he took a book out of the waistband of his jeans.
“In case I’m arrested,” he said, “it helps to show the judge I’m not just another criminal and faggot.”
It had a handmade cover with a gold border. The colour was teal or tealish, said Rene. It was meant to be Tiffany blue, a stipulation of his, the only thing he had insisted on, but they hadn’t been able to do it, Raymondo and Francesco. They had only been able to manage a facsimile thereof. GOD WITH REVOLVER was printed in silver capitals above a picture of the poet in a Confederate cap and a Cuban revolutionary’s wispy beard. His name was also in silver capitals, under the author photo captioned, ‘Photo Booth Portrait, Penn Station Arcade, Spring 1988’. The title page informed the reader that the poems had been written between 1979 and 1982 and printed, astonishingly, in Madras by Hanuman Books. A thin plastic casing had been attached to the cover with a drop of glue on the front and back flaps.
“Hell to publish,” said Rene, “the compositor knew no English. Each correction meant a bunch of new errors.”
The copyright, dated 1989 and 1990, belonged to Rene Ricard and Hanuman Books. The volume was hand-stitched, the cream paper properly thick and heavy to the touch, the smell of the pages cool and woody. There was something old-fashioned about the way the words were arranged on the page. Spaciousness had been a consideration. Poem titles were in capitals and each full stop was followed by a double space; and if the punctuation was eccentric, it was consistent. Dismas opened at random to page 47, the last poem of the first section, and he read the opening of ‘The Pledge of Allegiance’.
Ah, Painting, my love is true
Painters are so horrible it’s amazing they come up with you
And though the artists are all shits, I still love you
The poem went on to berate painters for a multitude of sins, chief among them the inability to resist wealth and stupidity. Yet, despite themselves, they made the work that would hum in the museums of the future. There was a blank page titled ‘Lost Christmas poem 81’ and a poem in Spanish. One, in its entirety, read:
I wake up hallucinating
I lock the windows so I don’t jump out
into this glorious view
I’ve become so corrupt.
Dismas turned the pages and noticed that the poems were always about the same subjects, early and late trauma, the imminence of death, the futility and necessity of love inseparable from art. The tone was mixed tenderness and contempt, much like Rene’s speaking voice. He noted the references to murder and suicide and the names of poets who had died unnatural deaths, many names, listed like some kind of crime-honour roll. He read and dozed and read again and toward morning he asked Rene if he had heard of the Indian painter and poet Newton Xavier.
Rene said, “Who?”
At seven a.m. they were taken out of the cell and escorted to police headquarters, which was already noisy with the first instalment of the weekend’s business, prisoners and detectives finishing up paperwork, and because the officers were undercover you couldn’t tell the cops from the criminals, they all had the swagger and the dead-eye stare. The detective assigned to them was a jittery man named Paolo who pushed them through to the front. Dismas was photographed first. They went before a judge and their cases were read into court records and in less than five minutes they were granted an adjournment to arrange counsel. Rita’s bail was set at two thousand and Rene’s and Dismas’s at fifteen hundred each. They were dismissed and given receipts for money, keys, wallets, identification, and in a back room they stripped and turned their pockets out. An officer went from one man to the next, pinching seams, tapping shoes, flipping over underwear, and at last they were sent to the showers, followed by a visit with the medic. Dismas told the man he was not an addict and so he was assigned to the fourth floor, not the ninth, which, according to Rene, was the worst floor in the Tombs. All night you heard men screaming in withdrawal.
The thing that bothered him most about being arrested wasn’t the way life stopped and started in reverse so he had to learn all over again how to shit (quickly, with other men in the room), how to shower (quickly, economically, with other men in the stall), how to eat (quickly, methodically), how to talk (without inflexion or expression, because you never knew who was watching), how to sleep (with your blanket over your head so when they put the lights on at the ass-crack of dawn you had another sweet minute of darkness). It bothered him that when Paolo said he was allowed to call someone – and it better be someone important because not only had he fucked up and got himself busted, he was an alien, an immigrant, which meant the Department of Homeland Security would be on his ass in a heartbeat – the only person Dismas could think to call was someone who had no reason to come to his aid. He made his phone call and settled into the routine decided by meal times, exercise periods, and work assignments, breakfast taken in the cell, lunch and dinner in the mess hall, and he swept and mopped, stacked blankets, and gave out toilet paper and soap. He and Rene met during the lockout periods from ten
to eleven thirty in the morning, from one to four in the afternoon, and from six to eight thirty at night, when they had to vacate their cells and go to the recreation area.