But I had not noticed what she reported; no at that moment I was speaking my mind with an eye on the fence, the mesh steel the action viewed through the diamond holes which went away when you looked at the guys through them stopped, gathered around High Kool, all looking into the sky, and like taking up position in advance SQ you’re the one who is fouled, not the guy who couldn’t check himself when you stopped and he ran into you, I can imagine basketball is the key to everything but these guys didn’t play with fouls, and I didn’t want to go home but looked at Miriam wondering when I’d get angry about her disappearing with little Gonzalez and saw that she hadn’t registered a word I’d said, because I was speaking in my mind, and I looked at Ruth tossing her head of thick heavy curls twice our age and shaking her finger at the men, and I thought I would like to speak on how the poor women gathered into their own bags the wastes of flour and wheat from the barrels and wheat sacks spewed by the rioters into the street and how maybe the rain—what month was it? I (didn’t know—came down and mixed in with the flour near the fishmarket until you had a block-long of dough and immigrant demonstrators heated in the oven of the City freely sprinkled with if not sugar as Mir’s Aunt Iris did, then by a free hydrant. But I knew that current events were of more use: a human newspaper I found myself, but talking mainly to Ruth Heard who believe me knew too much and was too much for the authorities to permit her to exist. And then I got angry at Mir’ and walked her home, and she said I was crazier than Miss Heard when I said, Here’s all this news coming in from Russia, from Algeria to see if General De Gaulle can end the war, from uptown and from Wall Street, and I’m not there, I’m here stuck in a neighborhood, know what I mean? "Vacuum-packed for burial in space" I wouldn’t have said then because it had not been said yet, though I don’t mind taking it from the journalist the Chilean met at the launch named Spence I think for he’ll take a thing or two from me like all the rest before we all get sick of ripping each other off.
Neighborhood? There you’re getting close to home, and I confess the school was not a jungle school, not like Juan’s uptown where if they’d had the personnel they’d checked the kids coming into class like passengers emplaning for Florida or Israel. No, my neighborhood, Jim, I go round and round some blocks of it and I don’t understand.
Where’s the mountain in Smitty’s poem? It’s settling down, a new mountain that bends my mind, while that old neighborhood comes in from the top down looking for the street sniping at me with eyes but more like something heavy and rusty that got thrown at me out a window or off the top rung of a construction site. Who did it? I’ll never know, I got to make a move, I’ve got custody of a very, very small pistol in the pocket of a leather jacket that I hardly know how it operates, I never did know one piece from another, I know carburetors, Jim, not like a mechanic but by ear, by touch, and I know pickup and timing. Shall we speak of the weather? Who said that? Ruth M. Heard when I was seventeen or sixteen and unexpectedly finally collected my rain check and walked her home to a different apartment. Speak of the weather—what was it the Chilean economist said to me? That neighborhood comes in, and I’m not here, is what I said except it was the news. Mrs. Erhard (and her tiny firearm)—whose customers come and go. The clip-joint garage around the corner where I take cars up in the elevator, motor running, car rising, run them around the roof, two three four, shift them in twenty seconds, get them in the right spot, or unpark them, bring them down idling and on a cold day missing, missing, no time to warm them up, bring them in for a landing like blinkered ships from Mars that have aged on the trip here.
The Precinct with ten twelve white-and-green squad cars double-parked filling up the street with emptiness and here and there a radio voice, and across the street down two steps the gun and equipment store, and the training cops coming out of Precinct Headquarters with their black bags and was it gray uniforms? not full-fledged, I don’t know how it works, it’s a career with early retirement.
Two blocks down and around the corner our dingy brick church with long, wide, slightly curving steps and the white-and-colored altar you can see if you stand across the street down from the black-and-blue awning of the undertaker and his double-doors down two—no, one step, brownstone.
Couple of pizza joints a block apart, one with the booths down one side where we sat and a wise kid who works there with big horn-rimmed glasses bigger than his face who’s giving us a lot of shit across the counter and the girls are threatening him; the other, a take-out with Sicilian and regular Guinea pizza, the Sicilian like cake. What color are the cop cars?
And it comes like particles in the wind, snowing me, pouring in and I’m the funnel, but you know that already some bull on the corner of Third Avenue is yelling to some bull two blocks away, "Hey Johnny," "Hey Eddie," "Hey Marco," "Hey Eric" "Hey Sal," when a refrigerator truck stops for the light and blocks the view and the guy goes on yelling, under the truck, around the front, over the top, through the high cab where the driver with his arm on the rolled-down window ledge looks straight ahead, gunning the motor.
Six flights up, I’m old enough now, taking a can of beer out of the icebox, shaking it a few times, get a rise out of my mother—"it’s going to go all over the floor, Georgie"; my dad standing in the kitchen door, "At it again, fuckin’ freeloader."
Telling them when I’m in high school about Ruth Heard. Why do I? I know what they’ll say, do you understand, Jim? I know what they’re going to say but I still go ahead and tell them. Very smart lady, funny, went to college in London, England, fastest tongue in the East—dismissed, reappeared, dismissed, disappeared, rehired as substitute still talking, still doing it her way, calling New York schools so bad they might not be an instrument of the class system after all, commanding us to write down the best lies we could think up: "Eric can beat up Jeannette because boys are stronger than girls" (when the truth was that Eric had hypnotic powers and everyone knew it and in those days boys had more pockets than girls and Eric had some very bad things in his pockets, no mere switchblade knife but tricky electrical devices he said his father had taught him to miniaturize). (But, no no, said Ruth Heard, that lie’s just confusing, it’s not persuasive; get to what matters, what we live with.) "My father don’t go to church on Sundays because my mother takes care of that side." (But that’s no lie, that’s true, isn’t that true?) "Someone I know, her sister she’s getting married now not waiting till June because she wants to get out of the house she can’t stand it no more." (Getting out of the house? Ah yes, a substitute for the real reason, and a good substitute, and so a persuasive lie. Right.) "If you study hard you will get a good job." (Well look at me, I’m a product of the English school system, ruined my eyes, speak two languages, don’t read any more, only speak, intelligent, brave, and beautiful, and here I am, waiting to get started.) "America is the best country." (Of course it is, that’s why I came.) "This is where the money is—I wasn’t finished, Mrs. Heard." (Not "missus," thanks but no thanks, marriage is important, it’s one of the most interesting and dangerous ways of distinguishing between two people. Otherwise, religious cant.)
No one asked her what "cant" was; and so she asked us. Quite a person. I said there was no such word, and that got a laugh out of her.
"Sounds like a Communist," my sister says, getting ready to come out of her room. "She speaks the King’s English, I’ll give her that," says my mother in her rapid way that wasn’t only her relief at finding something sensible to say but also her secret protection against being found out to be a bright woman who didn’t want to be especially noticed—bearing a tall can of grated Parmesan cheese out of the kitchen. "What do you mean she speaks the King’s English," says my father, "you never met her. They all come over here. You can’t even be sure of the English immigrants any more. This is where the money is." He has enjoyed all four of his statements, each strong and taken together better than he could have even guessed from his chair, and they earn him the right to go on being clear of the rest of us as he hauls himself out of the eas
y chair and stumbles yawning and stretching to the head of the table. "Who knows why she’s here," I say; "but it ain’t the money and it isn’t the job." "Make up your mind, Georgie," says my father. "Yeah," says my sister, but I’m not looking back and forth between them. "She can speak Spanish," I reveal. "Well, that’ll help her in this fuckin’ city," says my father. I’m not looking back and forth between whatever and whatever, I can tell you; I’m seeing my mother’s plump knuckles mix up the shells and the meatball sauce in the big bowl she mixes her cake mixes in, and I say, before I know I knew it, "She talks about factory workers never being alone."
"Sounds like a Communist," retorts a voice yet why do I not recall whose? high or low, light or glum.
I know I go round and round, Jim, but not so fast. You see I could get through to her father, I decided. Miriam didn’t know what to say to me any more, for sure not a report of that colloidal message that came sliding out of her while she looked the other way even more beautiful at twenty, twenty-two, than at sixteen when we took over secret control of a temporarily vacant "flat" as Ruth Heard put it.
These garbage cans—I mean her father had a respect for them. They were vehicles he kept hosed down and he hammered out the dents more than once. He knew that if the ironing board lever sticks and you can’t fold the thing up, you don’t throw it like Miriam so it hits the TV and scares her aunt who blames it on Miriam’s old man for putting the screws to Miriam—when he himself saw mechanical devices as life we have brought into being to be treated kindly, kept in working trim, not mechanical brains to suck all the bones out of our heads like that mountain that’s making the rounds.
Who are we then, Jim, you to come here like you had something to tell or had something you wanted to get out of me—and who am I to be there with you now or be a man you’ve told your friends about who think they will never see me? But by colloidal action they may find, out of their minds, me on their doorstep a substitute for another trip, escaped from outside to inside, like my always waiting for Ruth Heard, escaped from England to America, to tell us what?
In our very early twenties—to answer your question that, admit it, Jim (though you’re a pro) was a substitute for further query re: the Chilean’s wife’s plans to get back at the journalist who sought information concerning the Chilean’s continuing activities on behalf of interests undermining the military state-capitalist regime in Chile that had killed his friend and leader Dr. Allende—Miriam left me over a considerable period of time for an older man (smile). I guess I mean her father, too, but the part-Jewish part-Hungarian guy who had a share of a foreign bicycle shop was three years older than she and she had gone out with him once in a while, long (a) before her message to me in the tax office but long (b) after the Sunday morning she slept late in order to keep from her conscious mind that she had told her father I was going to be saying some controversial stuff about Jewish homeland Sunday at the schoolyard fence and if a good discussion ensued it would not be surprising.
And when at the end I saw him down the block across the Sunday street at the German Mrs. Erhard’s newspaper store and we knew each other in the message he received from me but which we, the boyfriend and the widowed father, together created, I follpwed his sudden absence the seven and a half blocks to the well-tended tenement and the string of bright garbage cans because I had to be on the scene in case he burst in to tell his daughter her boyfriend was planning to concentrate all Jews in the limitless Australian desert at whose edges according to Ruth M. Heard Cockney long ago became audible because the settlers were cons shipped there out of sight out of mind and low class low speech. But what could I say to Iris who opened the door all dressed up, her beloved, the printer Eddie, her size, in his blue suit, a tattoo on one hand, ready to take her out after Sunday dinner (which I smelled through Iris’s perfume and her hesitation between asking me in and wishing I’d go away, it would be so much easier) and who when I tilted or cocked my head to say to Eddie, "How’s it goin’, Ed?" was replaced by Miriam’s father as if he was all face, vdice raised not to shouting proportions only to the violence of one who didn’t know, poor bastard, that he had communications to make to me only by colloid suspension express (smile) and was in no mood to be told especially by one who did not have a name then for this power to which our lives and spirit are to be raised, not an anger voicing what was false, namely that Miriam was sleeping late and she didn’t want to spend her time with no bum who ought to be out of school and working, whereupon I shushed him if Mir’ was sleeping, and he slammed the door, and I could hear steps coming out of an apartment two, three floors up, and as I heard the old man’s stupid sound going on—"At least she’s not with him"—and seeming to calm down, I found myself admitted—half admitted—again to Mir’s home, or facing the door magically ajar again and heard the old man’s voice go on and saw that he hadn’t calmed down at all but only faded into the next room as if there was something there, too, and Iris, I see her holding her apron bunched in her hand, saying to me softly, Miriam went to the movies already, her father thought she went with you.
I know I could have killed the old man except he was Miriam’s father —I admit it, Jim. You learn to go for what is inside you like no stigma at all. You go round and round it till you see it, then you don’t need to say it except in these particle facings between you and your self, or you and me, which the Whole Turning Factor turns thank God into the Two Screen never fully known till I came here to prove it in my body, my touch, the presence of others whatever their race or social class—and thanks be to the Giant Colloid Swirl we share whose galactic disk we can see, or flat Earth, or on end a gibbous bike-wheel, or the full mass to live within by letting it find itself an infinite neighborhood, such as this, and between the Great Swirl and the Two Screen, between the back-and-forth and the endless curve that will come of it—as between the centrifugal coagulation away from a cleared Center, and the penetration from one to another heart, we find a back-and-forth trip of substitutions to collapse our history at a cost anyone must afford.
Iris made Sunday dinner in that house mainly for her sister’s husband, my Miriam’s father; he burst out the front door muttering like a super whose building’s suddenly getting bigger over his head behind his back and passed me standing there in the first-floor hallway seeing cast of thousands featuring in the three or four movies I knew she wanted to go to, and on the other side instant and constant a void for whoever she was with, a void I couldn’t fill except with the feeling of myself and couldn’t see but as the dark reflection of her friendly face, Jim, turning after several seconds of my watching her enjoying the movie in the seat next to me, turning like a wife, I guess, Jim —you have had a wife because you have a daughter, so much I know like a wife I say, so beautiful, her glasses on because she wore them at the movies starting around age fifteen; garbage lids crashing outside, I in the hallway standing back to let a rent-paying tenant-couple pass and knowing that turning the hidden, living-room switch for the garbage-can circuit the day Mir’ and I had occupied all too briefly the vacant apartment, hadn’t been much of a joke and I had hated him for being the reason why Mir’ said up there that it was too risky, and minutes later when her old man came storming in and blamed Iris for flipping the juice hoping he’d go up to one of the upper floors so I could get out of the building—
—I thought she loved me enough to have followed me the day of the rain-check walk-home with Miss Heard to her apartment which was no longer the "flat" she had when I was in junior high, for she had been in and out of New York several times since then, though that earlier "flat" I one day heard described by another English voice.
That is, one of the three similar-looking van-driver friends of R. M. Heard but not the one who said so unforgettably in 1959 that you could see flour caking blood in the street, a monopolist was the sole seller of a commodity that has no substitutes, to which definition I could apply the Whole Turning Factor to connect the van driver’s definition with that Law of Substitution I learned fro
m the Chilean gentleman between us when I proposed burial in space as a substitute for cemeteries or our precious oceans—a Utopia dissolving interface between outside and in
—instituting an elite brother- and sisterhood working together with the inmates to make the Inside a center of self-supporting craft and industry, not license plates but clothes and furniture, and exported therapeutic services, all maintaining a balance of payments with the Outside and always a center too of communal thought directly engaged in like democracy in your inter-lunar space settlements while enriched unpredictably by individual thought alone in contemplation, call it subsistence thought whose surplus can be saved by being shared by the men and women in communion here or stored like my own lone swirls of colloid light forever and a day—from, as I say, these Foleynomic projects for a great articulated structure where an infinity of whatever you called small-scale units may find their being—all the way to changing the concrete itself they wall this retired compound round with—so that someday each new vacancy here would be an opening for a new and different freedom, it would be a resource vied for with an elan that someday in future could dissolve guard and con not into one non-individuated mass, but—
that is, Jim, if you’re there still, Miriam would not receive all this because Miriam did not reach that swirl that Juan by fits and starts leans into, then loses, working deeper into Surplus Contradiction alternating by fits with his attempt to see where in the building site his very small brother has disappeared; and Mir’ paid off (if I had let her finish the job) with her once precious self, the shadow I’d hopefully thought she’d engaged to follow me the day Ruth Heard and I met at Mrs. Erharjl’s, each waiting for another, each waiting for the other I do believe, and while Miriam did not come to meet this temporarily but structurally unemployed old friend of hers George, her bike-shop Hungarian not at that point in time identified by me as who he was pedaled past upstream and downstream several times, along Third Avenue truck’d, bus’d, taxi’d, brimming, jammed, but with one sinister space for him, while Ruth, my elder by nine years, and I walked her home, seen by not only the bike-capitalist Hungarian on his wheel and by my mother so that she walked right by the gleaming meat market, but seen also by Gonzalez who must by then have been age fifteen or sixteen easing into his father’s business, profiting by each new day—
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