Manhattan Noir 2 (13 page)
the parrot probably trained
to do weird shit, yeah
they liked that stuff back then
And on every wall this guy Peter Cooper
rich and famous in 1860
John McSorley’s buddy
they say he brought Lincoln here
after some Great Hall speech
that’s real strange, me here
where Lincoln once drank
At night I oil the old bar
there’s a sag in the middle
the mahogany a wornout horse
I know it’s stupid, but I think
Jerzy’s going to appear one night
we’re all gonna sit here and talk
him and Cooper and McSorley,
Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson,
maybe the fat nude, too
M
AD
D
EEGAN
On the bustling sidewalk
as the last gray light slides
between concrete walls
I move brokenly, madness
a hunched raven on my shoulder
behind Dean & DeLuca’s glass
the elegant consume
and defecate elsewhere
invisible yet ubiquitous
I shit on dark corners
urinate with the feral
apologia to Lowry
but I am his pariah dog
still alive in the ravine
howling, quietly howling
Educated with the elite
Stuyvesant then Yale
in the Seminary I became
a brother of inculcation
so I taught God’s children
the nun Betty and I
fell in love’s despair
we quit our vows to marry
we ate acid
quickly madness won us over
with fists we fought
our words weapons of delight
Betty took a train to
somewhere, leaving then
this tunnel in my brain
a small black smudge
with their pills the shrinks
would me heal a hole
At McSorley’s I swept up
for simple cash and food
washed pots and pans despite
the burgeoning smear
which one night
blotted the running bullshit
leaving the mind a nub
where the raven pecks
I am searching the streets
catching the last sliding light
on my hunched form
the pariah dog is here
is here somewhere
T
HE
L
IFE OF
J
IMMY
F
ATS
Call me Jimmy
I’m not fat, I’m obese
nowhere to hide, pal
but I learned something
people love you
if you’re real fat
I mean, really huge
you save them
So I got my first job
in Coccia’s on 7th Street
Italian sit-down deli
Jewish actors from Second Avenue
Ukey Moms from the block
laborers, clerks from Wannamaker’s
number-runners an’ schoolkids
you know the years
how they quietly roar by
I was the best short-order guy
ate like a champ
then Artie sold the building
Two doors up was the saloon
busy lunch an’ lazy afternoons
nights packed with young guys
J.J. the owner knew me from when
I was a kid, burned my arm on
his ’48 Buick, Irish guys laughing
that fat kid in the photo, that’s
me, walking by the bar in 1950
Stampalia the chef had just died
announcing lunch
he’d sound an old bugle
this time his aorta blew
I got the job
old guys in the bar whispered
but I was big, fast, an’ funny
no bugles, just Jimmy Fats
I won ’em over with laughs
I loved that place
In the doo-wop band
I sang lead, us guys
from Aviation High
we cut some songs, never made it
Joey overdosed on skag
Lou got married with kids
Willy stepped on a mine in Nam
me, I kept cooking an’ eating
McSorley’s in the ’70s
me & an’ Frank the Slob
we humped it all
Ray the waiter, then George
he was the best
took care of everyone
workers, cops, students, firemen
we played nags an’ numbers
then George quit
oldtimers died off
Frank’s fuckin’ bitch drone began
waiters coming an’ going
the only sane ones
Minnie the cat an’ me
Shit, I was up to 630 by ’79
when I fell in love
Lace was beautiful and big
so we starved an’ screwed to 260
after the baby, she got mental
nights she cried a lot
it sounded like me far off
but I can’t remember when
One black night I woke up
Lace was gone
note said she went to L.A.
that was it
I don’t think it was love
just some kind of lonely thing
fat people get
Still, I was McSorley’s chef
I was 500 an’ floating
little Tanya screaming
Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!
raising a kid alone ain’t easy
the fucking dog Blacky
big Lab, shedding
hated the heat he always did
I was on the throne when he
ripped her head halfway off
broke her neck
the funeral was like Ma’s
at Lancia’s on Second Avenue
next to the old 21 Place
the guys from the bar
murmured condolences
shook their heads
if Lacey hadn’t run away
if I hadn’t been on the shitter
if, if, a million
ifs
Back at work
Frank’s
fuckin’ bitch
became a foul mantra
nothing to say nor do
that’s when I began
to eat
really eat
I couldn’t get out of bed
fucking buzz in my ear
a numb hissing
finally I got up
then the buzz was a hornet
the floor rose up, stung me
sideways the last thing I saw
some pizza crust and the doll
Tanya’s dusty Barbie
That was the end of Jimmy Fats
they buried me out in Queens
between Tanya an’ Ma
the stone says 1939-1990
but how’s anybody to know
you know
what
really
happened?
THE LUGER IS A 9MM AUTOMATIC HANDGUN WITH A PARABELLUM ACTION
(Originally published in 1969)
Two years ago I was walking in Central Park around the shallow bowl of water beneath the dollhouse Norman castle that is the weather station. I had approached from the north. I was not thinking.
Ahab said, “You are despondent.” He mushed his consonants. His
s
was lisped. A five-foot branch was wedged rather far back in his mouth. The bark was rough. A string of blood and saliva dipped and swayed from his jaw.
I considered a little. “Disconsolate.”
He gagged, dropped the branch and insisted on despondence. His consonants were clear and his lisp was gone. I shrugged. We went on in silence. Padding alongside, he cocked his head up at intervals to look at me. Then he stopped and began snuffing the air. He pinpointed the direction and trotted off with a light springy step. His vibrancy sometimes fires me with jealousy. It was an oak, which he read with his nose. Then he made a tight circle, deciding, balanced on three legs and urinated.
He returned and said, “Disconsolation suggests an edge of emotional keenness, whereas despondence—”
“I’d rather not talk about it.”
“You err. Whereas, as I was saying, despondence is essentially ennui, a moribund state lightly salted with bitterness.”
“You cut me up, moving the way you do.”
“Do I?” The corners of his long mouth pulled back in his equivalent of a smile, which is not grotesque, but which, neither, is the legitimate article. You must project certain responses to understand that it is a smile. “That’s improvement,” he said.
“I don’t see it.”
“Sure you do.”
“I don’t like this conversation.”
He sat down and scratched his ear. He asked me if I would like to throw a stick for him to chase. He was attempting rapprochement, but he was also going for himself. Like everyone. Though why this should matter, I don’t know. Quivering, poised, eager, focused, he was naked and ugly in his exposure. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have minded. That is what he is, that is what he is about. But he had made me angry. And the walk had not helped. I was still weary, incredibly. Often the walks were successful. Watching him run and cavort and do all his healthy animal things, my shuffle would lengthen to a stride and I would begin to feel vigorous and defined, primed with purpose. “No, I don’t want to throw a stick for you.”
“I sigh,” he said. “Langorously.”
“Shutup.”
Climbing the walk to the weather station we came upon seven fat pigeons pecking bread crumbs in a semicircle around a thin young girl in a skirt that, it being short and she being seated, was well up her skinny thighs. She wore no stockings. Her knees were bony, like flattened golf balls. Ahab’s ears clicked forward and his shoulders bunched. He went into his stifflegged walk. Fifteen feet from the fat pigeons. His mouth opened, drops of spittle appeared. Ten feet from the fat pigeons. He breathed with explosive little pants. Five feet from the fat pigeons. He now looked a sloppily worked marionette. Four feet from the fat pigeons….
I caught him an instant before he lunged, an instant so close to the act that they shredded into one another. “Ahab,
heel
!”
He jerked, half wheeled, went up on his hind legs and scored the pavement with his claws when he struck, but there was no forward progress.
In place, eyes wild on the seven fat pigeons thrashing the air in panicked escape, he performed a zealot’s dance, a dance of possession. He was a
plastique
detonated within a steel room, all that power, all that energy—contained.
The skinny girl was on her feet. She was not pretty. Her skin was the color of sour milk. She was jabbing her finger at me and shrieking. It had to do with Ahab and the birds.
Ahab said, “Kill, kill,” and turned to her with ferocious urgency.
I grabbed his collar and slammed him back. It is a pinch-collar, misnomered by many as a spike-collar. When the short sliding length of chain is pulled, the linked circle tightens. This causes blunt prongs to meet, pinching the neck. It is an effective, and with Ahab, a necessary collar. There is no question, however, that he would disregard the pain of pinched flesh if he thought that killing were really appropriate.
“Overprotective,” I said to the skinny not pretty girl who was the color of sour milk and had knees like flattened golf balls and who was shrieking and jabbing her finger at me. Shrieking, she did not hear me. “Fuck you,” I said. Jabbing her finger, she did not hear me. I don’t know if I said anything. If I did say overprotective and fuck you, then neither one of us heard anything and they were passionless sounds without significance, like fog, and they disappeared under the bright summer sun.
“Heel,” I said to Ahab.
He said nothing more. I believe he was thinking, with a growing sense of injustice or some such, of the seven fat pigeons and the way in which I had stopped him an instant before he lunged, an instant so close to the act that they shredded into one another. But I might very well be wrong.
We went home.
Ahab remained silent—that is, he did not say anything, in words, for more than a year. Most surely he carried on dialogues in the style assumed natural.
We were again at the park late one pleasant fall night, some fifteen months after our initial conversation. We had just entered and were walking down the ramp and I had not yet unsnapped the leash from his collar.
“Freedom
now
, freedom
now
,” he chanted.
He had recently spent several afternoons playing with a bitch in the yard of a garden apartment down the street. Apartment and bitch were owned by a militant blueblack oboe player and his wife, both of whom wore their hair natural. “Freedom in a minute, there’s a squad car passing.”
“Baby, I’m not gonna wait no longer. You don’t like it, that’s your lookout.”
“What are you going to do if I keep the leash on?”
“Like the man says, violence is as American as cherry pie. Take it from there.”
“Shit on America, you’re violent by nature, that’s all.”
“True. What are you by nature?”
“You mean am I violent or not?”
“Don’t jive me, baby. You dig the question.”
“You know, if I do keep you on the leash, you won’t touch me. Matter of fact, if I clobbered the hell out of you, you wouldn’t touch me. That’s your nature too.”
“True, very true. You have the knowledge, man, but unfortunately not the wisdom.”
I unsnapped his leash. “Thanks,” he said, raced in wide circles, then went foraging into the darkness. He came back, fell in step with me and said, “Been thinkin’ on your nature?”