THE DAYS now having drifted toward Christmas and the New Year, I was now walking a mile or two to even save a dime and had by miraculous means accumulated $115 with a further $50 to go to pay for my fare overseas. Finally, my ever dependable mother giving me the remainder. The New Yorker magazine rejecting a first few drawings now asked to see more of my fish cartoons. Earlier having booked passage in middle January and in my desperation to secure some last-ditch foothold of achievement in the U.S., I delayed my departure and booked instead on the Cunard liner Franconia, sailing out of New York on February 13. But again, when more cartoons were sent, a letter came back saying they had similar ideas in the works, and their indifference made me send no more.
One of my later cartoons, marine life having become a ready symbol, for in aid of their own survival they often swallowed one another whole.
Gainor too I knew was contemplating his exit. But from his position ever growing more complicated with Mutt and Jeff holding onto his mail till his rent was paid, and his continued consistent reportage to me over the telephone of his dealings with money and its being wired here and there and everywhere, there seemed to be only more chaos compounded by yet more chaos in his life. Which since his rape scene in Queens and the ensuing dunning for damages and his previous indebtedness from his subway assaults and his day-to-day survival getting more and more precarious, one could not see how he could afford a ticket to get out. Nor did it seem he could get free travel by air as he might have been entitled to, and one guessed his employers must have discovered who it was who was sending folk to Helsinki. He was now spending more and more time in touch with me and indeed was planning to come stay as a guest with me in Woodlawn.
Ernest Gebler from Ireland sent me a copy of the Irish Times with a picture of a bullock running amok in Dublin’s main thoroughfare, O’Connell Street. And this newspaper seemed also full of meanness and the overtones of the Catholic church’s repression. But even this I found a brief and lovely relief from America and the gadget-crazy desires of its populace. More and more of them, always looking for any label to boast of and searching for anything to shine, anything to represent their continued whiteness of skin, cleanliness of body, sameness of mind and their camaraderie cemented by their heartfelt bigotry. My sister’s husband, Jack, moving house, was already concerned that the new neighbors might see their old refrigerator, and although I had sympathy for this honest and hardworking man, this widespread American attitude made one want to dent their bloody cars and appliances and spread horseshit and cow dung everywhere across the nation.
I went to see the agent Diarmuid Russell, suggested by Wheelock. The meeting was short and not so sweet. He thought I could write but that S.D. was an unlikely book for publishers and that John Hall Wheelock had probably not read the book at all. Which I knew he had since he was able in our talks to vividly describe details of scenes and seemed especially taken by the stout bottles that were secreted in a pile of turf. It made me realize that this well-meaning and quite kindly agent actually didn’t believe I’d even spoken to Wheelock. And with the manuscript of S.D. again under my arm, I walked out of an office on Fifth Avenue for the second time. And brought the manuscript to Random House on Madison Avenue. Writing back to Valerie to say that everywhere it was said that editors couldn’t find authors who wrote with feeling and that there was no interesting literature to publish, and here I was putting it in front of them and their cozy little minds seize up. But then a copy of a letter I’d written to someone describing a visit to Lea and of her lavish optimism in the Fountain household and sent to Ernest Gebler immediately elicited Gebler’s response that I was indeed a writer and that my manuscript should be sent to his agent, Mavis MacIntosh.
Meanwhile, as Valerie wrote back tolerantly to my continued depressing news of rejections, with my letters containing nothing but proclaimed hope and renewed resolves, her letters contained no good news either. I was now even getting reluctant to return to the Isle of Man. Full of anger as I was at Valerie’s treatment by her mother, who, hearing the book was rejected by a publisher, now said that she was not allowing Valerie her money in order that I could exercise my libido. I soon let it be known that I never had any intention of ever seeking money from her or anyone else. Nor was I to be used as an excuse for someone being denied that to which they were more than morally entitled. Always having held that a moral matter was as binding as one legal and therefore legal. It seemed now a battle on both sides of the Atlantic, with it being no longer clear as to where or even if there was somewhere a promised land.
It was now every bit a certainty that with the roots of our strength withering, Gainor and I were as on a raft, isolated and adrift on an endless ocean. The sharks’ fins circling. America had beaten us both. But still I felt I had, albeit three thousand miles away, Valerie’s courage, faith and wisdom to in many ways depend upon. And that they were there to escape to. However, as I wrote in my letters of land and of a cottage again somewhere, even she was losing hope in any future. And as the days passed of further fruitless waiting, the lifeline between us was being relentlessly stretched and torn. I was now down to simply having to say, have faith in me. Still unable to believe that there wasn’t at least one other person somewhere in America with enough or some integrity, or even the desire to grow rich by publishing S.D.
A full moon was rising and glistening white across the landscape on these December nights. Then a day came pouring rain and washed the snow away. Duffy invited me downtown for a meal, and his quiet voice and his smile would come as he bid welcome as he always would with his two reassuring words.
“Hello, friend.”
And he was one of the few people I was now feeling safe with. For I was finding Gainor a more and more nightmarish ordeal. And as I tried to pound sense into him, even referring to him in letters to Valerie as a lazy, irresponsible bastard who was now planning to leave his job sending folk to Helsinki and to go on the dole. Then one would sheepishly regret such words, as I’d find he was sending money back to support his children in Europe. But with Duffy, all was a respite as we had spaghetti and Chianti. His now wife Judy had left Sarah Lawrence College to be a housewife. They had moved from their tight tiny apartment in Thompson Street to a much larger, airier, brighter place nearby at number 50 Grand Street, where they installed a concert grand piano. And I remembered that when they found a big chair and table on the street in front of their old apartment and took it in as furniture, that it made me feel that it was at least one pleasant and contradictory certainty about America that people would throw away useful and even luxurious items as garbage and refuse, which vicarious generosity one would never encounter in Europe. Although Jack and Judy did wince over my vehemence on matters American, I did try to provoke a little laughter and avoid a lot of lies. I read them the end of The Ginger Man just as Gainor arrived, took a glass of wine, sat down, listened and applauded. He was impossible to beat when showing his discrimination, commendation and wholehearted appreciation. But survival now was another matter and just like fighting air. And daily forbearing the time to pass. While in fold-up postal air letters, and hardly missing a day, I wrote paeans of love to Valerie.
But now closer to home, tragedy struck. Early morning, a policeman called at the door on East 238th Street to inform that T.J., having been stabbed in an affray, was in a critical condition, clinging to life downtown in Bellevue Hospital. The story unfolded that with his car remaining parked at Tenth Street, he’d left his girlfriend, with whom he’d had a fight, and then at three in the morning near Brooklyn Bridge had got into an altercation with two ethnics of the moment as T.J. referred to them, one with a knife and the other with a gun. T.J., an outstanding athlete, not only as a speed ice skater but also in track and field and as a discus thrower had, when confronted with the two armed assailants, knocked the gunman to the ground and while grappling with the assailant with the knife and lifting him up over his head to throw him at the other man reaching for a gun, was stabbed three times in the back. With both attackers briefly on the ground, T.J. ran, and running had just enough time to get far enough away not to be an easy target for the bullets whistling by. Realizing immediately as he sprinted that he was losing blood fast and might not get far, he was lucky to be able to hail a passing taxi and be brought to the hospital.
Sister Rita, my mother, myself, at the side of our Dodge car replaced by my father with a new one every two years. Again Thomas standing in front of his mother with his somber demeanor.
Following in my footsteps as he too left Fordham Prep and followed me to Manhattan Prep to be taught by brothers of de la Salle, a French order, my brother, Thomas, in front of St. John the Baptist de la Salle, whom he maintained was the only decent man in the academic movement who understood him. T.J. much cheered up in his Manhattan Prep school days, which he said were idyllic, but he decided to be deliberately photographed wearing, as he described, “the sneer of the year of 1947.”
Misery and apprehension within one, I approached this famed New York City landmark of Bellevue and one of the oldest hospitals on the North American continent. Its great anonymous reception halls patrolled by armed security police was lined with brown benches and a motley bewildered-looking assortment of waiting patients. Having to ask directions to find the way to T.J.’s emergency ward, my English accent seemed to elicit immediate, helpful attention. Walking past medical orderlies emerging from myriad other wards, wheeling bodies under their white sheets and on the way to the morgue. Reclining back with tubes from bottles stuck into his arm, T.J. seemed alert enough. His forthright and intelligent sense of observation not deserting him on what had to be thought was his deathbed. The doctor saying that although it seemed he had not suffered any clinical shock, it was now touch and go over the next twelve hours. Back in Woodlawn, I for the first time in my life heard my mother break into sobs, but then heard her say that she would rather see T.J. dead than married to his present girlfriend. One realized that despite the battering one’s confidence had already undergone that one now could not let oneself crack any further and had to undertake an even greater steely resolve to battle on and cling ever harder to the wall of the abyss and prevent falling while awaiting the strength to take the slow, clutching climb back up and out. A tension now gathering in my throat. And my tendency to speak growing less and less.
As Bellevue Hospital became a daily visit, and T.J. at last seemed to be mending from his additional wounds done by a stiletto, a thin, round blade which had punctured him in face and legs as well as lungs, one could still not chase the morbid gloom out of one’s brain. So sapped by everything on every side. Lonely, without lust, without joy. Each day purposefully taking the bus to the terminus of the Lexington–Jerome Avenue line. And in the roaring noise of the train riding downtown. And before plunging underground, staring at the passing windows at all these lives stacked up in their living boxes. Arriving at Twenty-eighth Street, jammed with cars and people. All seeming wretched as one walked in the direction of sunrise to reach this vast complex of buildings located bordering the East River and occupying a dozen city blocks along First Avenue. The grim barred windows of its huge, gloomy, psychiatric building, lurking full of brooding death and violence. Which gave the name Bellevue its latency of haunting fear. Its vast corridors leading to its massive wards. The beds full of cancer patients, accident and murder victims. T.J. said that as he thought he might live instead of dying that now lying there just watching and hearing them die on all sides had shattered his last illusions.
But then for all its grimness, this was also one of the great hospitals of the world. Where, if you had any chance of living at all, they could keep you alive. It was also, as T.J. said, the kidneys and bowels of New York. Excreting out its demented and dead. Keeping full its massive, somber morgue. From which were taken daily the boxes of amputated limbs and the unclaimed deceased to the back of the hospital and a barge T.J. could see awaiting in the East River. A derrick lifting the wooden-cased corpses and lowering them into the barge’s hull. To be towed on the East River up past Sutton Place of the rich and farther through Hell Gate and past the prison windows of the apprehended on Riker’s Island and thence to Potter’s Field on yet another island called Hart. Nothing in New York could make a greater impression than the fate awaiting the failed. As these, the tens of thousands of bodies, passed through this vast morgue of this great hospital, half of whom, unable to pay for death, are never claimed. And then who go to final rest on this small piece of land standing in view of the shore of Orchard Beach, a massive man-made crescent of sand teeming by summer with swarms of New Yorkers who come to swim and sun and occasionally drown. Growing up, I would go for the day to visit childhood friends like Alan Kuntze and Gerry McKernan, who worked there as lifeguards. Saving the living from death. Pulling those crying for help back to shore. Kneeling over their bodies to resuscitate them. The skin of these drowned turning blue and lips white when they failed.
Returning each day as I would to Woodlawn from the hospital, one would remain in a pall. Despite walking along Fifth Avenue for some cheer, and feeling a guilty response to the Christmas organ music, and the white-bearded Santa Claus ringing a bell. Then to brave the evening hours away eating at my desk in the front room, hunched over a tray of turnips, broccoli, mashed potatoes, and chicken. Could it ever leave one in any doubt about withdrawing and living forever away from this world. And go instead back to where one was surrounded by nothing but bogs, moorlands and open fields. Able to walk amid the purple heather, the cornflowers, the golden gorse, thistles and nettles. And these flora coming alive, I now found in such books as Patrick Kavanagh’s Tarry Flynn and The Green Fool. Reminders, and I needed them, that a writer’s life and work was worthy to the world. And that there was at least some solace in having written the first sprawling draft of The Ginger Man.
It turned out that Gainor’s friend John Preston published by Scribner’s whom he occasionally visited in Greenwich Village, when told of his publisher’s reaction to S.D., said I was being treated with great consideration, which he said was rare for an unknown writer and certainly meant that one day someone somewhere would publish such a manuscript. I remembered too Wheelock’s words that there was hardly anything he could criticize about it as a novel. But with the thump, thump, thump pounding of daily reality, what might be in the future did leave me now with none. It seemed that only letters I wrote to Valerie allowed one to at least briefly escape out of one’s own painful little world of angst. Gainor saying on the phone, “Mike, in Europe it was merely petty pilfering out of one’s emotional reserves, but here in this nightmare it is wholesale rape and demolition.”
Gainor also felt that Lea, who, like us decamped from Ireland and who invited us both back again and again to her house and continued to show us boundless hospitality, was a lady who in fact hated us both, if not for one particular reason then maybe for a million. And Gainor said that he was already depressed enough without being further depressed by her. It could have been that Lea had achieved respectable survival, whereas Gainor and myself, for all our struggles, were samples of the very opposite. Lea had, however, attempted to chivy along Ernie’s agent Mavis Macintosh over S.D., so that as much as I might suspect Gainor’s words of being true, I for the time being had to withhold judgment. But then Gainor’s predicaments were now so many. And his friends in America perhaps growing fewer. Especially in matters where he had incurred indebtedness, when Gainor was likely now to resent any move or action to recover same.
“Mike, it seems that for whatever one has been accused of having done, one must then naturally expect to be disliked, hated or sued. But lawyers, Mike, they seem to come in their legions out of the woodwork. Indeed, I think this whole bloody country and its citizens have set sail out upon one vast uncontrollable sea of litigation. Upon which I would hope one day soon to have my own monetary little craft to cruise about upon the topmost waves. But, Mike, above all, beyond all, we must ourselves keep possessed of the admirable, the seraphic, and trust to fondness and charity, no matter what destiny doth deliver us in woe.”
Days going by now, one’s animation suspended, and able to stand less and less the brunt of misfortune. Taking one’s temperature by morning and evening. And knowing numerous symptoms from medical studies, I was then choosing a matching disease that might be in the slow process of killing me. I was kept meanwhile alive by tuna fish, mushroom soup, lettuce and home-preserved peaches. My mother said if my sister, Rita, had gold she should wear it to be seen by the world. But I also sensed that despite my nonaccomplishment in the American tradition of success, that my uncompromising words and more my behavior was making itself felt on the whole of this family. Although I despaired the telephone, which seemed to ring insistently with the most purposeless interruptions to destroy one’s mornings, there were still these wonderful long calls from Gainor for which I am sure he still owes the bill. He would enunciate in his precise manner his opinions and comments, which could be enjoyed and savored at a safe distance.
“Mike, forgive me if I should bore you with this. But I am still bedeviled by the event of my involuntary erection in front of Mutt’s girlfriend in the chill hallway, where my member sprang to its full limits of rigidity in about the three or less seconds flat. And as it did so, it actually quivered. It positively seemed as if it were provoked by something primeval and had its own mind in the matter. Mike, can you from your broad knowledge obtained in the study of zoology possibly give me an explanation of this. I know that dinosaurs had a plexus of nerves situated at the latter end of the spine which served as a secondary brain to operate the back half of their body.”
“Gainor, you are quite correct about dinosaurs, but I must in your case, based on what you have told me of the incident and the girl’s physical features, assume that you were overtaken by purely hysterical, unpremeditated lust, which may have been aided and abetted by you and Mutt’s girlfriend having both been to high school in Ohio.”
Gainor seemed amazingly to turn my explanations over in his head, thanked me and hung up the phone. But now came a week of silence from him. And I was to later learn that he was away again visiting pals he’d made of a decidedly Bohemian couple, Justin, a painter, and Sally, his attractive heiress, who lived at Woodstock, upper New York State. A town of a thousand in the Catskill Mountains, where Gainor urged me now to come with him to sample the peace and calm that could be found in the rural surroundings but where he said a rainstorm unleashed a cloudburst, which washed out the roads. But I found myself now tending to decline invitations which took me into strange company. I preferred, with my own hopes growing fainter, to reclusively stay afloat midocean with one’s tiny life preserver. It being harder and harder to awaken and come alive to rise up in the battle once more. The tentacles of despair locked around one. Sitting there in the old white house atop the hill. Deep in trouble. Staring at my fingernails. Hart Island on one’s mind. And the unsung who died friendless and unmourned in this city. Their flesh and bone abandoned to be taken to be buried with the other unknown and forgotten. Under a cross bearing an inscription over their anonymous graves, “He calleth his children by name.” And April had said, “J.P., what does it matter what happens to you when you die.” And I wrote out in tiny capitals on a piece of paper I gave her.
IT MATTERS ALL THE DAYS YOU LIVE.
My mother, from her continued remarks about T.J.’s girlfriend, seemed to have no thought for the years T.J. had got yet to live and that it was his life. His very life. Which indeed I thought she might now see end. Although one started one’s withdrawal and was even becoming fearful of stirring out, I went daily to visit T.J. in the great anonymous bowels of Bellevue. I still had left my life-giving letters of love I wrote to Valerie in Europe. And I somehow garnered enough strength to brace myself and to face everything. For now I felt that the whole family could go. One had heard the expression “big casino.” And I in some way began to connect this term with catastrophic disease, that when it came to one or another member of a family it could wipe the entire family out, striking almost as a lethal pestilence sowing its seed of death. I could not believe that doctors, with the largest incomes of any professional sector in American life, were against any form of socialized medicine, which could protect from such ruinous calamity. I was more concerned now than ever that my passage was finally booked. And that at least and at last I was able to focus on that final day one could get out.
Although he seemed to have amazing powers of recovery, each day of T.J.’s survival came with relief. But there was no doubt that T.J., whatever else besieged him, had heart. The doctor admitting that they had not expected him to survive. His good physical condition and his will to live keeping him alive. Moved to another ward now, T.J. had spoken to a young man who was of an Irish background and had been to good Catholic schools. One day he noticed he had a sore on his side which got progressively bigger and grew into a hole, and he had to be removed to the hospital. His mother came each day visiting as the hole got even larger and he was slowly dying. And T.J. announced that he suspected the mother was killing the boy and now the boy was dead. As were other occupants of the ward each day when someone new appeared in their bed, and they were taken away, white sheets drawn back over their faces.
I made now every effort to get T.J. home. Out and away from the atmosphere of despair, sorrow and death. That what there might be of hope and recovery was better found back in his room, where the winter branches of a cherry tree could be seen out the window. But I could also sense that life in America was for T.J., as it was for Gainor and I, becoming impossible. I was hardly even keen to get calls from Lea, who had previously been asking Gainor and I to breakfast, which when we were unable to accept was now converted to lunch. She seemed exhilarated but told Gainor she was living out of her top emotional drawer.
“Mike, I told her so were we all. Except in our case, we had no drawers left.”
I showed up first at Lea’s. Ringing the doorbell and at the delay of an answer, I had looked in the window to see if anyone was home. A large fire roaring in the front living room where John Fountain was sitting alone and seemed to look vacantly out into space. Now answering the door, he welcomed me in and offering whiskey to drink, he explained Lea was still out shopping. Minutes later Gainor arrived freezing without an overcoat and in sandals and white socks. And then all of us ensconced by the fire, suddenly Fountain asked Gainor of his life and then of both our marriages and then he smiled, a killed smile, and said,
“You don’t know what happiness is till you’re married and then it’s too late.”
When Lea arrived out of a taxi and overflowing with packages, the neighbors on either side were invited in and champagne flowed. And all three men were jolted out of their doldrums. There was no doubt that if this beautiful and vivacious lady had shortcomings, she had many fewer than most. And even Ernest Gebler, left back in Ireland without her, had written me that she was innocent of any grave intent and a woman he had, and still did, deeply love.
But going to and from Bellevue Hospital day after day, I was randomly wandering and making visits elsewhere in the city. Seeing tall April, the golden girl of the rapierlike words and tumbling blond hair, who said she wanted and would get a steel priapus for Christmas to give the girl downstairs to use instead of her Great Dane. She was, in spite of her betrayal and leaving us in the lurch with the lesbians, becoming Gainor’s and my mentor and mascot, and joining us on a visit to see Tally Brown. She came all bundled up as if ready to go skiing. And as arctic winds blew snow down the Hudson, and along by the barren high cliffs of the Palisades, it was nearly what we had to end up doing, only snowshoes would have proven better than skis. But inside Tally’s, we were safe from the descending blizzard. Incense burned as we sumptuously dined by candlelight off pasta, filet mignon, creamed spinach, garlic bread, and exquisite Burgundy. These two ladies contrasting so much in shape and size, traded equally wise words of wisdom and kindly for dessert offered us both blow jobs to which suggestion Gainor rose to announce,
“Although I only speak for myself, I am ready, my dear ladies, in acknowledgment of your great compassion, kindness and charity to have my brains blown out if it makes, as you suggest it does, for any modicum of contentment and indeed serves as a dessert which clearly shall have no peer.”
In this acoustically resounding chamber, April vocalized a song of her own called “My Jangles No Longer Jingle for Yingle Yule.” Then Tally, whose unparalleled bel canto voice could tear at one’s heartstrings and ranged through opera, the blues, jazz and to Stephen Foster, sang from Fauré’s requiem and arias from La Traviata. And then came the Hungarian lament “Gloomy Sunday,” which Gainor often played upon comb and paper and hummed back in the old sod. Tally’s graceful fingers gently touching across the keys of her great black concert grand piano, as this haunting music and its words pervaded the sprawling drawing room and her exquisite voice rung from the words their deathful sadness. Tears welled in Gainor’s eyes, and a couple of globules of moisture fell down even my own cheeks. And it almost seemed in these transcending moments that we could be back in Balscaddoon House on Howth Head in Ireland with the stormy seas pounding the cliff side.
It was as if a sacredly if brief wonderful redemption had been given us this night in Washington Heights which could preserve us through all the clobberings and defeats that had been or might yet come. And stave off for indefinite time that last and fatally depressing ignominy that Gainor and I awaited to befall us. But as I began to retreat into a shell of silence to fight my last round, this was to be nearly the very last of social occasions in America. A blizzard had fallen during the night, leaving the city silent, traffic stopped and stranded all over New York. And good ole April was the only one ready for the weather. Holed up as we were next day till early afternoon with Tally’s pancakes, sausages, maple syrup, homemade raspberry jam, and coffee. With no shortage at all of further compassion, kindness and charity interspersed by laughter and croissants. Plus a tot of brandy for the road to aid us, hiking away, climbing the hill to the subway in the deep snow, when Gainor said,
“If there’s any voice anywhere in this world as magnificently beautiful as Tally Brown’s, I’ve never heard it.”
With him Gainor had been carrying a book, Berkeley’s Immaterialism by Arthur Aston Luce, M.A., Litt. D., D.D., a senior fellow and vice provost of Trinity College, Dublin, as was Berkeley himself in 1707. When asked by April about the book, Gainor waxed lyrical.
“Ah, it concerns Bishop Berkeley. A remarkable man of salty satire and teasing wit. Who selflessly devoted himself to the economic and spiritual betterment of Ireland. Recommended tar water as a general medicine. He was a believer in natural logicality and meditative philosophy. Espoused purity of sentiment and good will toward mankind. Espoused insight into principle. Theorized on the perception of space. His dictum, April, was Esse is percipi. To be is to be perceived.”
“Well, Gainor, this ole hillbilly gal can’t perceive a goddamn thing you’re talking about, but I’m listening.”
“April, you see. Here in my hand. A snowball. The existence of immediate objects of sensation consists of their being perceived. The whole corporeal world only exists as a set of objects of consciousness. It’s all in the mind and its internal sensations.”
“Well, Gainor, you sure could have fooled me. But too many of those kind of internal sensations could make you a nut case for Bellevue. And my little ole external sensation right now is to get us some goddamn transport downtown out of these snowdrifts, before somebody comes along and thinks we’re looking for a fight. Hey, but you know if you two guys do go skidaddling out of here back to Europe, I think I’m really going to miss you and could die.”
As we stood atop this hill down to the Hudson, these were prophetic words of April’s spoken in reference to Bellevue and someone coming along looking for a fight. The winds were now swirling over the drifts of snow as a plow made its way through the streets. The area populated by apartment houses, and once reasonably respectable, was not now thought entirely safe. Her own husband away, April was concerned at Gainor’s and my survival in this roughest and toughest of cities.
“Hey, J.P., you and Gainor are my dearest, closest, mostest soul-mates, but you should get wised up. Like in this town where we were the other night. You see a fight about to happen, hey, gee, you just get right the hell out of there soon. And as I said before, I just didn’t want to get my little ole ass all busted up by them big ole ornery bull dykes. Not anyway while I’m still hard struggling to support a nonsupporting husband until I can get permanently rid of him and sell half my ass on a monthly lease to the highest bidder. You guys forget I was in the military and had big dirty ole dykes trying to jump and rape me all the time. Except that I was a first lieutenant, they would have been trying to stick their tongues anywhere they could get them into little ole me.”
I was loathe to disclose to April Gainor’s own frequent and often justifiably violent behavior caused by his quickness to anger but also provoked by his being dreadfully, eye-poppingly rude. Which was just about to happen as we approached the 175th Street station of the subway, to take April and Gainor downtown. Gainor was inquiring on my behalf for the train to take me uptown to the nether wilds of Broadway and 242d Street on the western edge of Van Cortlandt Park and had walked up to a line of people waiting for a bus. With his first question for directions receiving no answer, Gainor demanded one. And still there was silence.
“Look here, you people, can’t anyone of you tell me where the goddamn nearest subway stop is of the 7th Avenue-Broadway line. One of you must know. Or is that too much for your brains to fathom. What the hell’s the matter with you all. Are you all dumb. Do you understand English.”
It was not for the first time in our friendship that I was tempted to tell Gainor he was on his own. That both of us having grown up in this country, he knew as much as I did about handling oneself in a strange street. And although indoctrinated with the principle of fair play and a fair fight, we were both ready for the situation to any second get unfair. Nevertheless, we were raised at a time when the world seemed to be getting bigger and better. Faster and faster. With more leisure, less work. Cleverer machines making for less to do for more of men. And nothing you dismay. Except as Gainor was finding out in Queens, that when you reached to use anything, everything, as he said, became fucked out of kilter. But with all this evolution and change, one might have also thought the place had to be getting a little more courteous too. But not so. Just as one would now awkwardly and rapidly find. While this cold day’s bright sun shone blindingly on the snow. And as a man swaggered forward out of the line who looked tough enough to be acting as spokesman for the group waiting for the bus. And one was to hear again those old-fashioned provocative words said to Gainor, this once-upon-a-time paragon of diplomatic behavior, who had perhaps been one of the most courteous men who ever lived.
“Hey, bud, are you looking for a fight.”
“No. As a matter of fact, I’m looking merely for directions, which surely any halfway civilized person would, considering the snow, reply to, even to the extent of informing that they do not know the answer.”
For all these measuredly statesmanlike words spoken by Gainor, one could nevertheless sense rising in him a blazing anger. And with us all wanting to go home to our would-be firesides, April was pulling on Gainor’s left arm as I was tugging on his right to move him backward away. April whispering in his ear,
“Hey, Gainor, come on, honeybunch, let’s get the hell out of here.”
“I’m not going till this rude individual apologizes.”
The gauntlet dropped, the rude individual to whom Gainor referred took an astride, intimidating stance, cocking back his head, belligerence written all over his face and menace in his sneer. All the very appropriate behavior necessary to turn Gainor Stephen Crist, the erudite follower of Bishop Berkeley, into a killer.
“Well, bud, it so happens I’m not apologizing. What are you going to do about it.”
Both April and I knew what Crist could do about it. And April, an admitted lover of peace, and I, who still with the pink fresh scars of my last affray to remind me, wanted, as much as April, to get the hell away out of there in one big hurry. And not to delay with splashing blood, ears bitten off and chewed, and the usual bicuspids flying everywhere. Plus police cars and ambulances in pronto abundant attendance. One was actually toying with the idea of running. When just at that moment, April suddenly stepped forward to take up a position between Gainor and his antagonist. And right smack in front and only a hairsbreadth away from the so-called rude individual, who continued to be rude.
“Hey, lady, you get the hell out of my way before you get hurt.”
“And you, buster, member of pipsqueaks anonymous, had better get the fuck back in that line. Before first you get your ears pinned back, second your jaw broken, third your dumb nose flattened across your face and fourth get socked fifty miles into next Tuesday. Because after that we’re going to pick you up by the ears and shake your balls off.”
Now then. As the words were loud enough, a woman nearby taking a bottle of milk in from her windowsill stopped midmotion to watch. And I was immediately sure that nowhere in the annals of potential confrontational violence had one ever come across such an astonishingly long agonizing pause. And April stood. And she stands. On her honor. And on her long, tapering legs. As she always did. Even when she abandoned us to the dykes. Her stunningly blue beautiful and brave eyes staring steadily into this shocked man’s face. Boring holes in his head as the seconds ticked away. Kids pulling a sleigh along the sidewalk. Another snowplow passing in the street. And your man taking a backward step. And then looking behind him, took two steps. Then three. And turning. Just as April bid him do. To join his place back again in line. And I’d remembered April once reminiscing and talking about back up there in the mountain gulch where she was born, saying her mother had her in April, when they were expecting her in May. And April said, “You see, guys, they got it all wrong, because I was born already. So eager was I.
“To get out there
And
Start winning”