Holy
TSR NONFICTION PRIZE WINNER
New York was deflating in a haze of rot and tar. The poetry reading by Allen Ginsberg at The Public Theater would start in less than an hour. I picked up the pace. I could smell on me my musty fourth-floor walk-up: bathtub in the kitchen, a lonesome spider plant my brittle attempt at coziness. A child’s drawing of a home. Pigeons cried on the fire escape I now kept locked. Someone had broken in, stolen my change and fake jewelry, rifled through the drawers, throwing everything on the floor like a crazed lover.
Things had been disorienting for me in America. There were no rules. Nobody knew who I was. I was confused, myself. The streets were crowded and noisy, a dance floor under dim lights. Barefoot men ran around at dusk screaming.
I heard that Allen Ginsberg lived in the East Village too. I looked for a solitary figure in bars, his dark hair wild. I’d approach him, I would be bold and impressive. He was the one who could explain things to me.
I put the last Muratti cigarette in my mouth in front of the Pyramid Club on Avenue A. In Milan, I had thought that two packs would cover at least three months in New York, but I had been through a kind of queasy, dislocated mania the entire time and smoked more than I had been expecting to.
I teetered forth on my Fiammante high-heeled sandals. Glittering lights, traffic, New York breathing. There was euphoria in the danger of high heels, the ruthlessness they demanded. I had worn them last in Milan, walking along the halls of the advertising agency where I’d worked as a junior copywriter, on my way up like a man. I tapped desires, guessed fears. Like a doctor, I told the clients what would make them feel better. I understood their needs by chasing my reflection in them, the way I bent my head this way and that to catch my features in a store window. I also wrote total crap. Your custodian angel is distracted? Munari
“You don’t take this seriously, do you?” An old buddy asked me over a Campari. Once we had shared dreams of opening a free detox center.
“Oh, not really.” But I did.
Over the weekend there had been a farewell party for the oldest copywriter. I had forgotten and arrived late. He tapped on my chest with a finger at the punchline of a joke he repeated with chilling determination. I responded with exaggerated laughter. Work, a little fun, then death, I thought. I hurried off.
On the way home, I stopped in Via Statale and sought the comfort of the Feltrinelli bookstore. There were only a few customers. Most hid behind stacks to read in peace. A brand new book in a place of prominence caught my eye. It was a volume of poetry by Allen Ginsberg, just translated. I had never heard of him. The author photo had a unique, disorderly beauty: a balding man with tousled long hair and glasses caught in intense sunlight. He stared out at the viewer. I turned the pages and read. Che sono caduti in ginocchio in cattedrali senza speranza pregando per la salvezza reciproca….Who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation. The words cut through my skin. Who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations.
That night the poet walked with me past darkened storefronts, the light reflecting off the windows of the bars. We stopped at everything like fussy birds. Scattered Styrofoam cups, ripped boxes, cigarette butts. Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel! We picked up discarded subway tickets and pen caps, marveling at them under the orange shafts of streetlights. We questioned impermanence and beauty. Holy, holy. A long-haired kid took a dramatic leap across the street, recklessly, like a crazed angel. The wind was in love with him.
I arrived home. I sat at my desk under the tiny light and read aloud late into the night. Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Afterward, I fingered the pages of the rough draft of the new ad copy I’d written for a foldable bed, re-read what I had started jotting down for a resort in Idaho. When the Harry’s Bar in Venice was closed for Aqua Alta, Hemingway went to ski in Sun Valley. I felt a white-hot rage.
On Monday I had the letter of resignation in my hand, banged out on my Olivetti with the door open to the office circus.
My colleagues were aghast when I announced I quit, freaked as if it were contagious.
“Crazy,” they said, “you are crazy.” And I laughed. I was scared in a dopey way. I liked it.
At The Public Theater, the entrance hall was empty, filled with a pale light. There was the buzz of voices coming from an upper floor. The clock confirmed I was late. Goddam heels, and the time spent applying mascara. I pictured Allen Ginsberg adjusting his glasses at the podium, looking up, restless about latecomers. I had imagined that he would notice my thoughtful attention, sitting down in front.
“Tell me. I want to hear your name,” he’d ask at the end.
But I was late. There would be standing room only at the very back, if any at all. No ushers were in sight, and the two elevators were blinking in sync, occupied. I sighted a freight elevator to the side of the hall with the door open. I hurried in. There was plenty of space, but I could barely breathe. Anxiety. Exhilaration. I glanced furtively at a middle-aged man in the way back. He was frowning, lips tight. The man pushed the button without asking what floor I wanted.
I pressed my hands gently over my cheeks. The man kept his eyes down, babbling to himself. Hi hi hi hi ha. I tried not to look at him. He cut a curious figure, unsettling. Cleanly shaven, hair cut bluntly just under the chin. He wore a red tie, a white shirt and an oversized dark jacket. He had dressed without a mirror, I thought. He had red lips. Red like from lipstick. A bold color I liked. The elevator wobbled. Kept going.
Ah ah uh hi ha. I had to turn this weirdo off like static on a radio. There were so many things I wanted to say to Allen Ginsberg. I strained to remember them and concentrate. Ah ah ah he ha. Things like. What the heck is going on in this city, it’s freaking me out. It was supposed to be marvelous. No. Not this. Something like. I had read somewhere that there were salt particles in sand, that’s what made it shine under sunlight. Yes, this. He would ask for more. When I spoke English, I felt weightless, treading air. But I would tell him of the old man who thought I was a drunk because I swayed on my heels, and who told me that all Poles were drunks.
“I’m Italian,” I said.
“Them too.”
The elevator wobbled some more and gave out a rumble. It came to a stop. We both stood still. The man kept mumbling with a kind of sinister intensity. I wondered if he realized we would be late to the poetry reading. We might miss it altogether. The one and only time I could hear Allen Ginsberg. I fought to regain a regular breathing. The man’s breath was just fine. I presumed it was reciting a prayer that kept him centered, his whispering had a rhythm. Maybe he did not care about missing the reading. It was this that made him serene.
The man pushed the button again. Nothing happened. He took a tube of lipstick out of his pocket and put it on, no mirror. This was impressive.
My agitation was clearly disturbing his concentration as he had turned away, whispering with more determination, but we were both doing our best, really. I was. The man moved a few steps to press the red alarm button; rescue would come. It might take too long, but it would. The elevator moved on its own. Slowly. It kept shaking then stopped and it opened at the right floor. The man walked out without a nod. I slipped out after him.
I was confronted with a poster. The face of the same man, sans lipstick, stared at me from the wall, announcing tonight’s poetry reading by Allen Ginsberg. In the photo he was clean shaven, his hair cut bluntly right below the chin.
I continued looking at the poster as if my sheer desire would conjure up the image of the man I knew, with a mustache and long tousled hair. I was deeply upset, as if Allen Ginsberg had promised to say something personal and vital to me that he knew I needed badly to hear and now refused to speak.
The sound of applause became audible. The audience was welcoming Allen Ginsberg to the podium. I was a silly young woman in a cheap dress. Allen Ginsberg could not care less about me. Worse, he might recognize me as the jerk who’d driven him nuts in the elevator.
A few latecomers were hurrying into the theater, bumping into me. I did not want to listen to this man recite the poetry I loved. He was a stranger, not the friend of the dark times I had known. That man had written down the fragments of thoughts in his mother’s mind as a glorious paean and we cried together. I cried for my mother and his. I had come to meet the man who had asked his doctor to bring him Gertrude Stein on a phonograph and wrote the LSD poem listening to her voice. I read it aloud over the noise of the M1 subway in Milan, knocked around by commuters holding on to straps and wet umbrellas, after a friend had died of an overdose. That day there had been a service for him in a small church that I had not attended. Chanting Ginsberg’s poetry amid the chaos of strangers on the subway had been my memorial.
I left The Public Theater and headed wherever I felt like going, which was nowhere.
I remember walking. I walked for a long time. Anyway, there was nothing else I could do. Nothing else mattered at that moment except this special thing that had been taken from me. The streets, the lights—they did zero for me. I kept walking, but New York wasn’t doing its magic.
The street vendors at Union Square were packing up their records, bags, and old toys that lay spread on blankets. My eyes stopped on a pair of sandals. I was done with high heels. I negotiated hard and loud in poor English for the sandals. New enough, the buckles worked. I ended up trading them for the Fiammante heels I now hated. I made my way through darkened streets and small groups…wandered around and around at midnight…wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts… Tourists took pictures of each other and me. I started making my way home. Kids in ripped t-shirts gave me flyers…big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets…
The East Village was going to sleep like a big animal, skin twitching. At the corner of East Fourth Street and Second Avenue, a man in an embroidered jacket held a powder-blue parakeet on his extended arm for photo opportunities. What’s the point, I thought, wanting it.
“Hey, everything is temporary,” a tall man said, and offered his arm “Let’s do this.” He wore cowboy boots, a hat, suspenders over his bare chest. The parakeet skipped onto his wrist. The man offered the bird to me next. The parakeet clutched my wrist—the simplicity of trust, this beauty under garish lights. I stared hard to remember this moment always. Passersby hung around, watching. Transients, punk kids, a well-dressed couple looking high. We admired this little blue creature and each other, staring.
Afterward I went for a margarita at the Binibon on Second Avenue. It’s funny how you think of people and they appear. From the corner of my eye it seemed I caught a glimpse of Allen Ginsberg enclosed in a tight group. He might have been there, after the reading. I did not turn for a better look. Who cared about that guy. I was elated at my combative mood. I chatted to everyone about the parakeet. When I went for my wallet to pay for the drink I saw it was gone. There had been just a few dollar bills in it I called “mugger’s money.” The bartender knew me. It was okay.
“It’s New York,” he said.
“It’s New York.”
We cracked up. Someone offered me a cigarette. It was so tender I almost cried.
It was getting really late and I headed home. There seemed to be a soft haze over the empty streets, with only a few lights still on. I was exhausted. I could not wait to be home.
When I reached it, a young man was sitting on my doorstep, legs extended across the entrance. He had blond curls, large blue eyes, a white shirt with one sleeve rolled above his elbow. He was shooting up. We froze in mutual fear.
“I’m cool,” he said. “Are you cool?”
We held eye contact. He looked like a fallen angel.…angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…
“I’m cool.”
I stepped over his legs and unlocked the door. The stairs were slippery in the dark. I was high on fear. At the first landing I had to stop and leaned with my back against the wall.
“Oh, God. Did you see that guy? Fucking scary.” I whispered to Allen Ginsberg, calling on him to comfort me as he used to. “Your poetry materialized. It’s really good, but it was scary.”
I closed my eyes, imagining that he was there. He looked just like in the old photos: long hair, beard. I sensed him scoff.
“Where did you think you’d find my poetry?” It wasn’t the response I wanted. But he was right.
“Well, okay,” I said. “The parakeet was cool. I’ll give you that.”
A door opened on a floor above me, someone listened for a moment then slammed it shut. I was just another lunatic in New York talking to an imaginary friend. It felt delicious.
“They think we are nuts,” I told Allen Ginsberg. “They’ll leave us alone.”
We started climbing up to my apartment. He was frazzled, adjusted his glasses. They were dirty.
“Give them to me,” I said. He did, I cleaned them with the hem of my skirt. “I thought you had shaved.”
“That’s a godawful idea. What for?”
“Exactly.”
At home I poured myself a glass of wine. Maybe the young man on my stoop was now calm too and had forgotten how frightened he had made me feel, how lonely. He’d seemed to feel the same.
“Time to try and sleep,” I said. Maybe someone was telling the same thing to the young man, tapping his pillow delicately with the tips of their fingers. I noticed a roach slowly making its way over to me. It was the one I’d heard plunging from the ceiling at night. Such determination invigorated me. The little legs crawling, the shiny wings fluttering. Looking for what? I gave it what I could: my attention. It felt my eyes, stopped. We remained frozen, then I turned away and released it to its journey. Going, going. Its task impossible to know and wondrous in its mystery.
I picked up Howl from a pile of books under the sink. Allen Ginsberg sat by the small light on my table and started reading to me in a soft whisper, one hand marking the rhythm.
…run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality, who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer…