16

My apartment on Spring Street was not exactly an enchanted palace, but it was my first real apartment and it was all my own. Iris’s apartment on Rivington Street was a brief stopover after the trauma of declaring myself independent. The place in Brighton Beach was, after all, only a large furnished room with cooking privileges. But Spring Street was really my own, even though it was on a sublet from a friend of Jean’s who was in Paris for a year. He had left a very complicated hi-fi hookup, a wooden rocking horse, and unbelievable filth encrusting everything in the kitchen. Otherwise, there wasn’t much else except dirty linoleum in every room and ashes in a fireplace which was the only source of heat for the whole little three-room apartment. But the rent was only ten dollars a month.

I moved in two weeks after the abortion. Since I was physically fine and healthy, it didn’t occur to me that I wasn’t totally free from any aftermath of that grueling affair. But the months between that birthday weekend in February and the first stirring smells of spring in the air, as I took a train to Bennington for a weekend, are very much a blur. I was visiting Jill, one of The Branded.

I came home from school and my part-time job, to sometimes sit on the edge of my boxspring bed in the center room, still with my coat on, and would suddenly realize that it was the next morning, and I had not taken off my coat yet, much less put away the container of milk I had bought for the cat I had found to join me in my misery.

The house was the only thing I had that belonged to me, and the cat I got from the neighborhood grocery store, and two Javanese temple birds in a little cage that Martha and Judy had brought me as a housewarming gift. They were still seniors in high school, and had appeared one Sunday afternoon with the birds and a bottle of apricot brandy and four strong young willing arms. After we hung some curtains on the tall narrow windows of the front room, which faced the back windows of the tenement in front, the three of us sat on my couch before the fireplace, contemplating ripping off the cracking plaster above the fireplace to expose the beautiful old red brick of the firewall just beneath. We sat, listening to the indignant caw of the temple lovebirds, and Rachmaninoff on the record player, and drinking apricot brandy in the chill. Later that evening we built a fire in the fireplace, and I knocked over the bottle of brandy or Martha did, because she was always doing things like that and then apologizing profusely. So we all made a lark of it and fantasized about digging through the softwood boards to see if we could find clean wood for apricot-brandy-flavored toothpicks.

But that’s the only day I can recall between moving in and the first of summer. Yet I went to school, and passed all my subjects that term. I also went uptown every Thursday night to meetings of the Harlem Writers Guild.

The apartment was very small, and it is shocking to think of any more than one person living there, but of course a whole family had once lived in these three tiny rooms. The building faced a narrow courtyard separating its three stories from the main tenement, which was six stories high.

In the front room was the fireplace, and the main door of the flat. The center room was even smaller, with no windows at all and just enough space for a double bed, a thin chest of drawers, and the door to the kitchen, which had a sink, stove, refrigerator, and bathtub. There was another door leading to the outside hall, but it was bolted shut. This kind of apartment was called a floor-through. There was no hot water at all in the building, which had six apartments in it, two on each floor. The toilets were in the outside halls, one to a story, every two apartments. Ralph, my next-door neighbor, and I put a padlock on ours to keep the Bowery bums from coming upstairs and using it.

I scrubbed the apartment as best as I could, not quite believing the dirt that the former owner had allowed to accumulate. I got rid of what was possible, and resolved to ignore what I couldn’t erase. The kitchen was the worst, so I concentrated on making the two other rooms my own.

I moved in my bookcase and my books and records, my guitar and my portable typewriter, and it seemed like I was acquiring an awful lot of things, including a little electric space-heater.

The two big purchases were a boxspring and mattress on sale, with two plushy feather pillows. Sheets and pillow-cases I had from Brighton Beach. I also bought another woolen blanket on Orchard Street. It was a bright red and white Indian-design blanket, warm and fuzzy, and it seemed to heat up the cold, dark bedroom.

I could seldom bring myself to use the kitchen, except to boil water. It was mostly a place to store the refrigerator, in which I kept whatever little food I did not bring home already fixed. I do remember making chicken-foot stew for Jean and Alf one Saturday night. I got very thin, for me.

When summer came, The Branded descended upon Spring Street one weekend and scrubbed and scoured. After that, I cooked more often.

I tore down the plaster wall around and over the fireplace and hand-sanded the old brick until it was rich and smooth and even. I hung Gennie’s guitar over the fireplace, a little to one side.

Summer came down with a vengeance into the tiny backyard tenement, and the two windows in the apartment gave no relief. I began to learn how to lay back and enjoy heat, how not to fight it, to open up my pores and let the heat in and the sweat out.

I used to sit in my underpants and a half-slip and type on a card-table in the living room, at 3:00 A.M. in the morning, with the sweat pouring down the front of me and between my breasts. The lovebirds were now dead, and the cat had run away after he killed them. Writing was the only thing that made me feel like I was alive.

I never reread what I was writing. They were strange poems of death, destruction, and deep despair. When I went to the Harlem Writers’ Quarterly meetings, I only read old poems from my high school days, a whole year before.

I came from the valley

laughing with blackness

up between the mouth of the mountains I rose

weeping, cold

hampered by the clinging souls of dead men

shaken

with reverberations of wasted minutes

unborn years .…….

……………………

I was the story of a phantom people

I was the hope of lives never lived

I was a thought-product of the emptiness of space

and the space in the empty bread baskets

I was the hand, reaching toward the sun

the burnt crisp that sought relief …

.………………………….

And on the tree of mourning they hanged me

the lost emotion of an angry people

hanged me, forgetting how long I was

in dying

how deathlessly I stood

forgetting how easily

I could rise

again.

April 20, 1952