That woman, French, who lived in the next street and limped
around and scuffled in the trash cans and ate her cat
The man with bloodhound eyes who ran the bodega on Avenue
A above 12th, who had been in prison for something horrible
and who held my hand
Ingrid, a squatter, who made pillows out of old clothes and sold
them on the sidewalk in front of the park for 20 dollars—but to
whom?
Me, with my phony double life of uptown glass-walled magazine
drudgery and haute lunches and then, greased curls and
rayon paisley after dark
The man I loved, who slumped around in epic gloom, threatening
us all with the consequences once he became Cultural Commissar
The upstairs larcenist named Betty, and I can’t really go into it but
her sex life was known to everyone but her Danny Boy husband,
and when she had the lounge job I used to lace her into her rubber
dress, and she was always stealing my hairclips and my cognac
The lover of the famous poet, who periodically drank himself
into a low moan at the harmonium, his strange tuneless Hank
Williams filling the cement courtyard, until he would heat up to
actual mayhem, beating through the wire glass in the front door
with his bare fists, arms torn, in runnels of blood
And the photographer who kept young girls and snakes
The art critic skeletal as a quattrocento Christ, one August wandering
around with a vodka slurpee in one hand and a bottle
rocket in the other, offering to help me blow the door off its
hinges when I had forgotten my key
Too many. The man called Bag Hat; the trumpet player with the
4 A.M. reveille; the sex-change herbalist; the performance girl
who liked to go nude for higher purposes and lie amid food; the
heavy-metal jewelers; the desperate filmmakers; the sidling
poets; the painters, monkey-loud and twice as vague; the
uptown visitors who wouldn’t leave; the nobly annoyed; the
haircuts
They really were all crazy. But if you are hoping for drama
from this collected personae, forget about it. Though they kept
busy, mostly they were waiting for the weather to change.