by Patti Smith
It occurred to me that my ticket may be worthless, but I didn’t care. I was willingly drawn into the whole scene, like a random character in a B. Traven novel. Lucky or not, I went along with the part I was targeted to play: the pigeon who gets off a bus at a pit stop on the road to Cartagena, hit on to invest in a suspiciously limp lottery ticket. The way I look at it is that fate touches me and some rumpled straggler has a repast of meatballs and warm beer. He is happy, I feel at one with the world—a good trade.
When I got back on the bus a few passengers told me I paid too much for my ticket. I told them it didn’t matter and if I won I would give the money to the dogs of the region. I’ll give the prize money to the dogs, I said too loudly, or maybe the gulls. I decided the winnings were for the birds, even as the people were discussing how the dogs would righteously spend it.
Later at my hotel I heard gulls screaming and watched as two of them plunged toward the recesses of the tilted crown of the great roof outside my terrace. I believe they were conjugating or whatever bird fucking is called, but after a while they were silent, so either they were satisfied or had died trying. I was plagued by a vicious mosquito and finally slept, only to wake again at 5 a.m. I went out on the terrace and looked at the tilted crown as a light mist rolled in. There were gull feathers everywhere, enough for an elaborate headdress.
The winning lottery number was in the morning paper. Nothing for the dogs or the birds.
—Do you think you paid too much for your ticket? I was asked over breakfast.
I poured some more black coffee, reached for some dark bread, and dipped it into a small dish of olive oil.
—You never can pay too much for peace of mind, I answered.
We piled on the bus and drove to Valencia. Several of the passengers were taking part in a strike against the projected demolition of the neighborhood of El Cabanyal. Old multicolored tiled houses, fishermen’s shacks, and bungalows such as my own. Fragile structures that can never be replaced, only mourned. Like butterflies that will one day just disappear. Joining them I felt their proud fury mingled with degrees of helplessness. David and Goliath in Valencia. I was coughing again, time to go home. But which home? I had begun to think of the Alamo as my home. But it would be a long time before it could be made livable. Dogged by projections of the battered coastline, the boardwalk swept away, a majestic roller coaster bobbing in the waves like the skeleton of a whale, more woeful than the carcass of Moby Dick, containing the joyrides of generations of risk takers. All is present tense on such a ride, physically impossible to look back.
I was plagued by an inventory of floating objects, leaping sheep to sleep. But I was past anything as commonplace as sleep. Open your eyes, said a voice, shake yourself from your torpor. Time once moved in concentric circles. Wake up and call out, like the fishmonger from the streets of the Bastille. I got up and opened the window. The sweetest of breezes greeted me. Which is it going to be, revolution or slumber? I wrapped a banner proclaiming Salvem el Cabanyal around my pillow, curled up, and went inside myself, seeking consolation that was mine for the asking.
—
I arrived home some days before Thanksgiving. I had yet to face the changes in Rockaway. I drove out with Klaus for a local gathering beneath a generator-heated tent. My future neighbors: families, surfers, local officials, maverick beekeepers. I took a walk on the beach where cement pylons stretched as far as the eye could see. They had once supported the boardwalk. Roman ruins in New York, something never imagined save by the mind of J. G. Ballard. An old black dog approached me. He stopped and I petted his back, and as if it was the most natural thing in the world we stood and faced the sea, watching the waves approach and retreat.
It was a perfect Thanksgiving. The weather was milder than usual and Klaus and I walked over to the Alamo. My neighbors had boarded up the shattered windows, placed a padlock over the broken door, and hung a large American flag across the front of it.
Credit 10.2
—Why did they do that?
—To protect it from looters. To show it’s under protection of the people.
Klaus had the combination and opened the door. The odor of mildew was so overwhelming I felt faint. There was a four-foot waterline and the wet floors were rotted. I noticed the porch was tilting and my yard was now a small patch of desert.
—You are still standing, I said proudly.
—
I felt something warm and grainy. Cairo had thrown up on the edge of my pillow. I sat up completely awake trying to remember. I looked at the clock. It was earlier than usual, not quite six. Ah, yes, my birthday, drifting in and out of sleep.
I finally arose out of sorts. There was a small misshapen cat toy in my boot. I looked at myself in the mirror. I cut the ends of my braids because they felt like straw, depositing the dried-out wisps into a brown envelope, definite DNA evidence.
As always, I quietly thanked my parents for my life, then went down and fed the cats. I could not believe another year was ending. It seemed like I had only just shot the silver balloon heralding its beginning.
I was surprised when the doorbell rang. Klaus was at my door with his friend James. They were armed with flowers and a car and insisted we go to the ocean.
—Happy birthday! Come to Rockaway with us, they said.
—I can’t go anywhere, I protested.
Yet the prospect of being by the sea on my birthday was impossible to decline. I grabbed my coat and watch cap and we drove to Rockaway Beach. It was bitter cold but we stopped by my house to say hello. The door was nailed shut and the flag was still intact. A neighbor stopped us.
—Does it need to be torn down?
— No, don’t worry. I will save it.
I took a picture and promised I would soon return. But I knew it was to be a long winter of waiting, the destruction was so vast. We walked along the street where Klaus lived. Styrofoam snowmen and waterlogged sofas were draped in tinsel. His massive garden was ravaged; only a few resilient trees survived. We bought powdered donuts and coffee from the only deli still open, and they sang “Happy Birthday.” Back in the car we passed high mounds of appliances from flooded basements. Like the Seven Hills of Rome: the hill of refrigerators, stoves, dishwashers, mattresses, looming above us, like a massive installation in memory of the twentieth century.
We continued on to Breezy Point, where more than two hundred homes had been burnt to the ground. Blackened trees. Paths once leading to the shore obscured by an industrial mesh of strange fibers, scattered limbs of dolls, shattered porcelain. Like a tiny Dresden, a small stage replaying the art of war. But there was no war, no enemy. Nature knows nothing of these things. She is one with the messengers.
I spent the balance of my birthday watching Elvis Presley in Flaming Star, reflecting on the premature end of certain men. Fred. Pollock. Coltrane. Todd. I have lived well past them. I wondered if one day they would seem like boys. I had no desire for sleep so I made coffee, slipped on a hoodie, and sat on the stoop. I considered what it meant to be sixty-six. The same number as the original American highway, the celebrated Mother Road that George Maharis, as Buz Murdock, took as he tooled across the country in his Corvette, working on oil rigs and trawlers, breaking hearts and freeing junkies. Sixty-six, I thought, what the hell. I could feel my chronology mounting, snow approaching. I could feel the moon, but I could not see it. The sky was veiled with a heavy mist illuminated by the perpetual city lights. When I was a girl the night sky was a great map of constellations, a cornucopia spilling the crystalline dust of the Milky Way across its ebony expanse, layers of stars that I would deftly unfold in my mind.
I noticed the threads on my dungarees straining across my protruding knees. I’m still the same person, I thought, with all my flaws intact, same old bony knees, thanks be to God. Shivering, I got up; time to turn in. The phone was ringing, a birthday wish from an old friend reaching from far away. As I said good-bye I realized I missed that particular version of me, the one who was feverish, im
pious. She has flown, that’s for sure. Before retiring I drew a card from my tarot—Ace of Swords—mental force and fortitude. Good. I didn’t slip it back into the deck but left it faceup on my worktable so I would see it in the morning when I awoke.
Vecchia Zimarra
A sudden gust of wind shakes the branches of trees scattering a swirl of leaves that shimmer eerily in the bright filtered light. Leaves as vowels, whispers of words like a breath of net. Leaves are vowels. I sweep them up hoping to find the combinations I am looking for. The language of the lesser gods. But what of God himself? What is his language? What is his pleasure? Does he meld with the lines of Wordsworth, the musical phrases of Mendelssohn, and experience nature as genius conceives it? The curtain rises. The human opera unfolds. And in the box reserved for kings, more throne than box, sits the Almighty.
He is greeted by the turning skirts of novices singing his praises as they recite the Masnavi. His own son is portrayed as the beloved lamb and then again as the shepherd in Songs of Innocence. Within an offering by Puccini from La Bohème, the impoverished philosopher Colline, resigned to pawn his only coat, sings the humble aria “Vecchia Zimarra.” He bids his ragged but beloved coat farewell as he imagines it ascending the pious mountain, while he remains behind walking the bitter earth. The Almighty closes his eyes. He drinks from the well of man, quenching a thirst that none could comprehend.
—
I HAD A BLACK COAT. A poet gave it to me some years ago on my fifty-seventh birthday. It had been his—an ill-fitting, unlined Comme des Garçons overcoat that I secretly coveted. On the morning of my birthday he told me he had no gift for me.
—I don’t need a gift, I said.
—But I want to give you something, whatever you wish for.
—Then I would like your black coat, I said.
And he smiled and gave it to me without hesitation or regret. Every time I put it on I felt like myself. The moths liked it as well and it was riddled with small holes along the hem, but I didn’t mind. The pockets had come unstitched at the seam and I lost everything I absentmindedly slipped into their holy caves. Every morning I got up, put on my coat and watch cap, grabbed my pen and notebook, and headed across Sixth Avenue to my café. I loved my coat and the café and my morning routine. It was the clearest and simplest expression of my solitary identity. But in this current run of harsh weather, I favored another coat to keep me warm and protect me from the wind. My black coat, more suitable for spring and fall, fell from my consciousness, and in this relatively short span it disappeared.
—
My black coat gone, vanished like the precious league ring that disappeared from the finger of the faulty believer in Hermann Hesse’s The Journey to the East. I continue to search everywhere in vain, hoping it will appear like dust motes illuminated by sudden light. Then, ashamedly, within my childish mourning, I think of Bruno Schulz, trapped in the Jewish ghetto in Poland, furtively handing over the one precious thing he had left to give to mankind: the manuscript of The Messiah. The last work of Bruno Schulz drawn into the swill of World War II, beyond all grasp. Lost things. They claw through the membranes, attempting to summon our attention through an indecipherable mayday. Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen. Have you seen my coat? It is black and absent of detail, with frayed sleeves and a tattered hem. Have you seen my coat? It is the dead speak coat.
Mu
(Nothingness)
A young man was tramping through the snow with a great bundle of branches tied to his back with a measure of vine. He was bent over from the weight yet I could hear him whistling. Occasionally a branch would slip from the bundle and I would pick it up. The branches were completely transparent, so I filled in their color and texture and added a few thorns. After a time I noticed there were no tracks in the snow. There was no sense of backwards or forwards, only blankness sprinkled here and there with minuscule red droplets.
—
I tried to map out the fragile spatters, but they kept rearranging themselves, and when I opened my eyes they dissipated completely. I felt around for the channel changer and switched on the TV, careful to avoid any last-year wrap-ups or New Year’s projections. The warm drone of a Law & Order marathon was exactly what I needed. Detective Lennie Briscoe had obviously fallen off the wagon and was gazing at the bottom of a glass of cheap scotch. I got up and poured some mescal in a small water glass and sat at the edge of the bed drinking along with him, watching in stupefied silence, a rerun of a rerun. A New Year’s shot toasting nothing.
I imagined my black coat tapping me on the shoulder.
—Sorry, old friend, I said. I tried to find you.
I called out but heard nothing; crisscrossing wavelengths obscured any hope of feeling out its whereabouts. That’s the way it is sometimes with the calling and the hearing. Abraham heard the demanding call of the Lord. Jane Eyre heard the beseeching cries of Mr. Rochester. But I was deaf to my coat. Most likely it had been carelessly flung on a mound with wheels rolling far away toward the Valley of the Lost.
So foolish, lamenting a coat, such a small thing in the grand scheme. But it wasn’t just the coat; it was an inescapable heaviness reigning over everything, one perhaps easily traceable to Sandy. I can no longer take a train to Rockaway Beach and get a coffee and walk the boardwalk, for there is no more a running train, café, nor boardwalk. Just six months ago I had scrawled I love the boardwalk on a page of my notebook with the effusive sincerity of a teenage girl. Gone is that infatuation, that untapped simplicity embraced. And I am left with a longing for the way things were.
I went down to feed the cats but got waylaid on the second floor. I mechanically took a sheet of drawing paper from my flat file and taped it to the wall. I ran my hand down the skin of its surface. It was nice paper from Florence with an angel watermarked in the center. Searching through my drawing materials I located a box of red Conté crayons and attempted to replicate the pattern that had slipped through my dreamscape into my waking one. It resembled an elongated island. I noticed the cats watching as I executed it. Then I went down to the kitchen, put out their food, adding a treat, and made myself a peanut butter sandwich.
I returned to my drawing but at certain angles it no longer resembled an island. Examining the watermark, more cherub than angel, I remembered another drawing from a few decades ago. On a large sheet of Arches I had stenciled the angel is my watermark, a phrase from Henry Miller’s Black Spring, then drew an angel, crossed it out, and scrawled a message—but Henry, the angel is not my watermark—beneath it. Tapping it lightly, I went back upstairs. I had no idea what to do with myself. Café ’Ino was closed for the holiday. I sat at the edge of the bed eyeing the bottle of mescal. I should really clean up my room, I was thinking, but I knew I wouldn’t.
At sundown I walked over to Omen, a Kyoto country-style restaurant and had a small bowl of red miso soup and complimentary spiced sake. I lingered for a while, ruminating on the coming year. It would be late spring before I could begin to rebuild my Alamo; I would first have to wait until work was under way for my more unfortunate neighbors. Dream must defer to life, I told myself, accidently spilling some of the sake. I was about to wipe the table with my sleeve when I noticed the droplets eerily formed the shape of an elongated island, perhaps a sign. Feeling a surge of investigative energy I paid my check, wished everyone a happy new year, and headed home.
I cleared my worktable, placed my atlas before me, and studied the maps of Asia. Then I opened my computer and searched for the best flights to Tokyo. Every once in a while I would look up at my drawing. I wrote the flights and hotel I wanted on a sheet of paper, the first journey of the year. I would spend some time alone, to write, in the Hotel Okura, a classic sixties hotel near the American Embassy. Afterwards, I’d improvise.
That evening I decided to write to my friend Ace, a modest and knowledgeable movie producer of such films as Nezulla the Rat Monster and Janku Fudo. He speaks little English, but his com
rade and translator Dice is so adept at congenial and simultaneous translation that our conversations have always felt seamless. Ace knows where to find the best sake and soba noodles as well as the resting places of all the revered Japanese writers.
On my last visit to Japan we visited the grave of Yukio Mishima. We swept away dead leaves and ash, filled wooden water buckets and washed the headstone, placed fresh flowers and burned incense. Afterwards we stood in silence. I envisioned the pond that surrounds the golden temple in Kyoto. A large red carp darting beneath the surface joined with another that looked as if it was cloaked in a uniform of clay. Two elderly women in traditional dress approached carrying buckets and brooms. They seemed pleasantly surprised at the state of things, said a few words to Ace, bowed, and went their way.
—They seemed happy to see Mishima’s grave tended to, I said.
—Not exactly, laughed Ace. They were friends of his wife, whose remains are also here. They didn’t mention him at all.
I watched them, two hand-painted dolls receding in the distance. As we were leaving I was given the straw broom I had used to sweep the grave of the man who wrote The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. It leans against the wall in a corner of my room next to an old butterfly net.
Credit 12.1
I wrote to Ace through Dice. Greetings for the New Year. When I saw you last, it was spring. Now I am coming in the winter. I place myself in your hands. Then a note to my Japanese publisher and translator, finally accepting a long-standing invitation. Lastly to my friend Yuki. Japan had suffered a catastrophic earthquake nearly two years before. The aftermath, still intensely present, eclipsed anything I had ever experienced. From afar I had supported her grassroots relief efforts centering on the needs of orphaned children. I promised to come soon.