Since I long ago lost the key the door of my flat is always open and it doesn’t matter because there’s nothing to steal. Strangers begin to appear, Walter Anderson, an aging public relations man, Gordon Patterson, aspiring actor, Bill Galetly, man in search of the truth. They are homeless bar patrons sent by Malachy in the largeness of his heart.
Walter begins to steal from me. Good-bye, Walter.
Gordon smokes in bed and causes a fire but worse than that his girlfriend complains to me at Malachy’s bar about Gordon’s discomfort and my hostility. He, too, goes.
School is over and I have to work again, day by day, on piers and warehouse platforms. Every morning I shape up to replace men on vacation, men out sick, or when there’s a sudden rush of business and they need more help. When there’s no work I roam the docks and the streets of Greenwich Village. I can make my way to Fourth Avenue to browse in one bookshop after another and dream of the day I’ll come here and buy all the books I like. All I can afford now is cheap paperbacks and I’m content on my way home with my package of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, a weekend of reading. I’ll heat up a can of beans on my electric ring and boil water for tea and read in the light that comes from the flat below. I’ll start with Hemingway because I saw the film with Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power, everyone having a fine time of it in Paris and Pamplona, everyone drinking, going to bullfights, falling in love even if there was a sadness between Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley over his condition. It’s the way I’d like to live, roaming the world without a care, though I wouldn’t want to be Jake.
I take my books home and there is Bill Galetly. After Walter and Gordon I want no more interlopers but Bill is harder to dislodge and after a while I don’t mind if he stays. He has already installed himself by the time Malachy calls to say his friend, Bill, who has renounced the world, left his job as an executive in an advertising agency, divorced his wife, sold his clothes books records, needs shelter for a short time and surely I won’t mind.
Bill stands naked on a bathroom scale before a long mirror propped against the wall. On the floor are two flickering candles. He looks from the mirror to the scale and back again and again. He shakes his head and turns to me. Too much, he says. This too, too solid flesh. He points to his body, a collection of bones topped with a head of lank black hair and a bushy black beard flecked with gray. His eyes are blue wide staring. You’re Frank, eh? Hi. He steps from the scale, stands with his back to the mirror, twists to look at himself over his shoulder and tells himself, Thou art fat and pursy, Bill.
He asks me if I’ve ever read Hamlet and tells me he’s read it thirty times.
And I’ve read Finnegans Wake, that’s if anyone can read Finnegans Wake. I’ve spent seven years with the damn book and that’s why I’m here. Yeah, you’re wondering. Read Hamlet thirty times and you start talking to yourself. Read Finnegans Wake for seven years and you want to put your head under water. The thing to do with Finnegans Wake is to chant it. It might take you seven years but it’s something you’ll be able to tell your grandchildren. They’ll look up to you. What’s that you have there, beans?
Would you like some? I’m heating them on the ring there.
No, thanks. No beans for me. You have your beans and I’ll give you the message while you’re eating. I’m trying to reduce the body to bare necessity. The world is too much with me. Know what I mean? Too much flesh.
I don’t see it.
There you are. Through prayer, fasting and meditation I will drop below one hundred pounds, the despicable three digits. I want to be ninety-nine or nothing. Want. Did I say want? I shouldn’t say want. I shouldn’t say shouldn’t. You’re confused? Oh, have your beans. I’m trying to eliminate my ego but that action is ego itself. All action is ego. Are you following me? I’m not here with my mirror and scale for the good of my health.
From the next room he brings two books and tells me all my questions will be answered in Plato and the Gospel According to St. John. Excuse me, he says, I gotta take a leak.
He takes the key and goes naked to the hall toilet. He returns to stand on the scale to see how much he lost with the leak. Quarter pound, he says, and lets out a sigh of relief. He squats on the floor, faces the mirror again flanked by the candles, with Plato on his left, St. John on his right. He studies himself in the mirror and talks to me. Go ahead. Eat your beans. Books. That’s what you have there, eh?
I eat my beans and when I tell him the book titles he shakes his head. Oh, no, oh, no. Hesse, maybe. Forget the rest. All Western ego. All Western crap. I wouldn’t wipe my ass with Hemingway. But I shouldn’t say that. Arrogant. Ego stuff. I take it back. No, wait. I said it. I’ll leave it out there. It’s gone. I read Hamlet. I read Finnegans Wake and here I am sitting on a floor in Greenwich Village with Plato, John and a man eating beans. What do you make of those ingredients?
I don’t know.
I despair sometimes and you know why?
Why?
I despair I might push too far with Plato and John and find them wanting. I might come to a nowhere. You know?
No.
You ever read Plato?
I did.
St. John?
They read the Gospels all the time at Mass.
Not the same. You have to sit down and read St. John, hold him in your hands. No other way. John is an encyclopedia. He changed my life. Promise me you’ll read John and not that goddam stuff you brought home in the bag. Sorry, there’s that ego popping up again.
He cackles into the mirror, pats himself where his belly should be, and rocks from book to book reading verses from John and paragraphs from Plato, squeaks with pleasure, Eek, eek, oh the Greek and the Jew, the Greek and the Jew.
He talks to me again. I take it back, he says. There’s no nowhere with these guys. No nowhere. The form, the cave, the shadow, the cross. Jesus, I need a banana. He takes half a banana from behind the mirror and after mumbling something over it eats it. He crosses his legs under him, rests the backs of his hands on his knees, lotus position. When I cross behind him to drop my bean can into the garbage I can see he’s staring at the tip of his nose. When I tell him good night he doesn’t respond and I know I’m not in his world anymore, that I might as well go to bed and read. I’ll read Hesse to keep the mood.