Round the table in the deli, another Friday night oh it’s getting to be repetitive but every week Frankie felt such relief to be with them, to sit together with them, she’d have been fine just closing her eyes and falling asleep only knowing they were there. Sid stacked sugar cubes on the table, slumped down in the booth chewing gum and drinking coffee. “My father called me an individualist. I suppose because he thought I was the only queer in the world. But just because you left the left doesn’t mean the left left you, understand?” Sammy starts playing a melody, nothing much just one finger on a couple of keys round and round, and Frankie sings just because you left the left don’t mean the left left you—don’t you know that—just because you left the left don’t mean the left left you etc etc round and round “I think I’m an individualist” Roz said “Yeah well try not to be” Sid said being a little Frankie, being Frankie-like in the way she was trying so hard to do but couldn’t quite and Frankie seemed to be getting tireder and tireder and Sid thought maybe her trying to live like Frankie was sucking the life out of her. Sid could fall into being suspicious like her mother who didn’t say certain words out loud in case something heard who shouldn’t “Well I was speaking to Marcy” “Who’s Marcy?” “And Marcy says that the [] are buying the delicatessen by her house and are going to start selling []” “What?” Sid’s father says “I can’t hear halfa what you’re saying dear” “Cause I’m not saying half of it! Can’t you listen! Yadda yadda” “Why bother?” “Oh come on Roz don’t play games” “Shouldn’t I do what I want” “Only if I can” “And me” and somebody at the next table stands up: “And me!” and at the counter “And me!” and somebody just leaving stops at the door and turns back “And me!” and everybody in the next booth says all together: “Us too!” just because you left the left don’t mean the left left you. “Only I never was the left was I?” “No you were the middle” “Exactly and now I find myself among anarchists who tell me I can do whatever I want to do and being as I am [gleaming] my instinct is to do as I please” “So you want the smallest type of freedom then? Only as much as fills your suit jacket. I thought you were a bigger dreamer than that” [she is, Roz is only teasing, really Roz hates the middle she came from and though she’ll probably end up there she’d like to end up there on her own terms and at least regret never having been the liberty bell(es juive) she and her comrades had dreamt up in the bars and here at the deli table every Friday night.] Sid’s all wound up, taking Roz’s bait “You’re a fucking piece of work Butcher, you wanna be free how about you take a hike?” Frankie tells Sid to calm down and Roz is laughing, a shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun is moving its slow thighs, while all about it reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; “But now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, and what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” “The center cannot hold” “That’s what Frankie read out at her bar mitzvah” Roz keeps teasing and Sid laughs [you piece a’ work] “I would’ve!” “Frankie had an anarchist bar mitzvah” Sid teases too “they called her up to the front and she had to read an article from that month’s Stimme” keeps teasing and they all laugh “and all her comrades lifted her up on a chair at the after party singing hay hay daloy politsey” haw haw haw. Frankie had never stepped foot in a synagogue and only ever reached the bar. “I am going to make next week’s meeting so fucking boring Sidney you’ll wish you would’ve joined the Communist party” “You call this a party?” says Roz and Sid says “What are the girls like over at that Communist party?” and Roz shoves her on the shoulder “You’re a creep Stein.” “Where’s Rebecca tonight Frankie?” “She’s at her mother’s for dinner” And they all raised their eyebrows then, like rolling hills and they leaned back in their seats and were silent. Sid stacked sugar cubes and stuck her gum under the table and, after a while, where they all seemed to be dreaming or trying not to think at all Sammy said “Maybe she’ll bring us some leftovers.” A piano starts up again, just the right hand playing the melody (whilst with their left hands) they pass the gravy boat (whilst with their left hands) they rub their bellies.
Elsewhere the All-Americans are drinking bottles of beer and eating peanuts. It made Vic want to puke how many people had touched those peanuts. Vic wore a pharmacist’s coat all day bright white then at night she put on all black apart from her t shirt of course which was bright white like her pharmacist’s coat but her leather jacket was black and her hair was black under the grease and her jeans were black and her shiny shoes were black and her motorbike was black. Was it that she put on a leather jacket and became a butch? Or was it that she took off a leather jacket and became a pharmacist? Or was it that she put on her pharmacist’s coat and became a pharmacist and took off her pharmacist’s coat and became a butch? Whatever it was Vic felt like a fraud. Like she could keep peeling off coat after coat and she’d never get to anything but more coats. Vic lit a cigarette. Marg is saying: “Bartender’s on the bar yelling I’m gonna fucking kill you all if you don’t kill each other first and there are sirens outside and” and Laur remembered everyone had blurred into one another, that the bar had looked like a giant leather jacket flung onto the floor like somewhere there was a butch bigger than any butch had ever dreamed they could be who’d arrived and flung off her jacket—“and the jukebox is playing where the boys are [Marg sings it moves her arms like a conductor] you know: wheerrree the booys arrre etc etc and everybody’s barging into one another and holding each other back” Marg is loving it, retelling the bar brawl, her heart beating faster, taking big palms of peanuts and Laur remembered how the glass sprayed like a fountain in bottle green and red. Real blood of the people they usually bought beers with “till he holds me, I’ll wait impatiently” Marg is singing, and flailing her arms showing how they swung for one another and Laur remembers how the music swelled and their bodies started to swell and Vic can’t picture it clearly just sees a giant bardyke flinging her leather jacket on the floor. “And the bartenders yelling get the fuck out my bar you barbarians, you bardykes—where the boys are, where the boys are—the song’s on” and Laur remembers all the other sounds glug glug and thud and someone’s laughing. Vic remembers turning to see Laur laughing—glass like a fountain—and how she stopped to watch her and around her arms are swiping like they’re wiping tables the same movements, over and over. Beautiful sprays of glass arch over them and catch the light and scratch their cheeks and Marg is pointing “Here, and here, and here” at the parts of her face and her neck where it caught. And Vic thought maybe we’re too old for this, maybe violence is something you grow out of which is sad if it’s all you’ve got. Laur says to Teddy the end of something Vic didn’t hear the beginning of and they laugh. Vic goes to the bar and orders another drink. “Hey hunk” Laur says. Vic turns “Hunka’ what?” she says back. “You waiting for somebody?” Laur says “Nobody special” “Lucky for you” Laur said “she ain’t here if she is.” “You’re wearing a tie tonight” “Yeah I’m old school you got a problem?” “You look smart” “Yeah and you look dumb” like this was the only thing they could start. Vic walks back to the others. It got later and Laur’s tie got looser but the knot got tighter. She kept pulling it one way then the other one way then the other like a dog trying to take off its own collar. “Forgettin-I-got-two-lef-feet” Laur slurs to this girl she’s standing too close to, stinking of beer near, and spitting when she speaks but it could just be that she’s filling up and spilling over. Trying to dance and stumbling about. “You gonna do something about that?” Teddy sat with Vic in the booth. “Are you?” Teddy sighed and pushed himself up. If Teddy was a piggy bank he’d be empty. Butchness had been kind to Teddy, to let him sit in it like a sofa for eternity, knowing there was probably some other seat he should be sitting in. Yeah maybe there were a few coins under the cushions of Teddy but Teddy had been so thoroughly rifled through, so shaken about so turned upside down in this life of his that Teddy wouldn’t go searching again. And butchness had never asked Teddy to move along, and it had never fallen through, no it had couched him gently enough and Teddy had left his impression on it, a dip the same shape as him so that yes, butchness had been there but it most definitely wouldn’t have been the same without him. “You being a schmuck for a reason greasemonkey” he grabbed Laur by the top of the arm “or you need someone to give you one?” “Don’t take a bite out of me Ted I ain’t worth chewing” “I know it, now come over here will you, you’re dripping all over the dance floor” “Am I raining?” “Yeah” “Can I stay at yours tonight Teddy?” All Laur’s stuff was under the table, she’d come to the bar looking smart hoping to hook up with somebody smart, whose bed was smart whose life was smart whose smart life she could fall asleep in. “The bar was churned up” Marg had told them how after the brawl the place had looked “ploughed like a field” Marg’d said. And Laur slipped about on the dance floor, Teddy holding onto her arm like a new calf. Full to spilling, it had begun to cascade down the sides of her “it smelt like it too” (Marg) “like soil, fields of mud” splashing and gulping. Teddy held her arm. Different from how you held somebody in your arms and swayed but not so different that it didn’t look a dance. How she skidded, her legs going wide and splayed and how Teddy pulled her up again like picking a carrot out the earth or pegging washing on a line (it’d never dry) gulps, splashes.
Frankie’s home alone writing. A lamp on in the living room and a typewriter on the coffee table and Frankie on the couch with her legs apart making space for her arms typing clack clack fast with a cigarette out her mouth like her father had looked and all the men you ever saw like that, then Sammy comes home. “Why dyu have to smoke when you write? Does writing make you forget you’re a singer?” Sammy takes Frankie’s cigarette out her mouth and smokes it “It’s a part of the atmosphere” Frankie keeps typing “Is it lyrics?” “For what, the charts?” “Or the stage” “Did I miss the memo on people wanting to hear us sing originals?” “We’re working on it at the BOP” “The dance sensation that is sweeping the nation” “That’s the hop” “Well then let’s go to the hop” “Oh baby.” Sammy sits down next to Frankie, starts yawning and closes her eyes and soon she’s dreaming. Sammy being there had never interrupted any of Frankie’s thinking or writing. She could write a poem when Sammy was there, or come up with a song, or a letter to the editor. Frankie had been published frequently since she’d left her father’s house in her father’s boss’s newspaper only anonymously. Letter to the Editor Regarding Your Use of the Word “Deviant” to Describe the New York Nightlife, Dear editor, is it simply nighttime which is deviant to you? Does the editor believe that American values have something to do with sunlight? And since when did the editor of any anarchist paper have any interest in the propagation of American values anyway? Letter to the Editor Regarding Mutual Aid and the Dissemination of the Family, Dear Mr editor, does it occur to the anarchists that having a blood tie to another human being does not make them more worthy of our responsibility but can sometimes when put into action make them worthy of less? Does it occur to the editor and to his readers that blood ties need to be tended just as much—no more or less—than our other ties, our bonds of brotherhood? Asha did or didn’t know it was Frankie. She sent her articles to the music press and sometimes she sent her poems. Mostly they piled up, really, stacks of paper and Sammy read them and said yeah I like it or, didn’t you write this one already? By her Sammy dreamed, twitching her leg like a dreaming dog. She was in the living room of their childhood the one which in dreams like this was always funnel shaped, wide at the top and small at the bottom and she always shuffle shuffled towards the middle hoping no one would see and just as she was about to slip down and out of the funnel to where? she’d wake up! Or something else would happen which would make leaving impossible. In this dream the living room was full and Frankie’s father was reading poetry from a pile of poems almost as high as his hip, he’d read one and reach down and pick up another and another but the pile never went down. The living room was full, people standing everybody on all the couches and the kitchen chairs and she was sitting on the carpet with the children but with the adults too, who held the children to them and squeezed them at moments of exultance, scruffed their hair. Sammy sighed in her sleep. “Did you hear that? Did you? I hope you’re listening kid, can you feel it?” they’d ask, and she could, the lasting pinch on her shoulders. Frankie’s father read his poem:
I HAVE WRITTEN FOR YANOVSKY; a poem by Asha Gold
I have written for Yanovsky,
So you better mind your kopvsky
If you want to
Open doorskys
Sell your soul to
Saul Yanovsky [laugh]
Once I was a wannabe it
Then I let Yanovsky see it
If you want to
Open doorskys
Sell your soul to
Saul Yanovsky
Now I’ve written for Yanovsky
See the size of new kopsky? [hawhaw]
If you want to
Fit through doorskys
Get a no from
Saul Yanovsky
Once I was a no-good poet
Now I’m a poet and don’t you know it!
I have written for Yanovsky!
See the swell of my swell kopvsky?
I can barely fit through doorskys
Opened wide by Saul Yanovsky.
[squeeze, scruff etc]
In the living room, sitting next to Sammy dreaming, Frankie was writing a play: [Man walks in dressed very smartly and looks clueless] MAN: You always seem to need to use the toilet when I’m ready for bed! [Man is speaking to his pet poodle. Man is in the street outside his house]. The play was a staging of a meeting of anarchists in a living room like the ones of her childhood. In this scene the man had just finished tidying up after the meeting and was, as he said, ready to go to bed but the poodle needed to piss so he’d taken the poodle outside and was waiting for the poodle it was, Frankie thought, a way of reversing roles. The whole play the man would be trying to get on with the great business of toppling the government and redistributing the wealth among the people and meanwhile his poodle and all the other pets kept asking for things and pulling their owners in different directions on their walks. Refusing to bring back balls and pissing wherever they wanted were eating on the floor were organizing, really, they were. And Frankie imagined the fleas on the backs of all the dogs and cats and maybe someone had a rat they kept in their top pocket no, a parrot! Yes! Frankie laughed at the revolutionary, the anarchist who kept a parrot who had been his mother’s parrot who was older than him, much cleverer than him and who of course sang the Internationale whenever it liked which was getting the man into much trouble with the neighbors “Shut up shut up!” he’d hiss at the parrot whenever it started singing and the parrot would reply: “Traitor.” There were no women in the play but Frankie imagined staging it in the bar and all the dykes playing the pets. They never spoke (apart from the parrot) but had long rambling stage directions to follow to do with the looks they gave one another. Their pooling mirror-black eyes looking lovingly at one another, cat and dog, rat and cat. Frankie was doing her best to imagine everybody, all things, but her mind kept bumping up against the walls the world had built in it. She thought zooming in was a decent writing technique for trying to outdo the limits of her mind, to bamboozle herself. To not look out and out and out but in and in and in so everything got bigger and clearer and not smaller and blurrier. A blur, though, that seemed like something she could work with, Frankie scribbled the word blur down and thought she’d work on something maybe a poem about it later. The play of course was a musical and she would be in it, and Sammy would score it. The dykes dressed up as pets would look lovingly at each other on stage and as the animals got smaller the dykes would get bigger, zooming in and in the really big butch ones playing fleas who lifted each other up with no effort above their heads and sat on each other’s shoulders FLEA ONE: We’re as tall as you like! FLEA TWO: As wide as you need! FLEA CHORUS: We’re as tall as you like [two three] We’re as big as you need [repeat]. Me as flea two?? Frankie scribbled down. She was going to ask Roz to play a Doberman called Dewey. She thought next time she ran into Surly she’d see how she felt about playing an American spaniel named Samuel. Yeah Frankie just kept writing whilst Sammy slept by her and dreamed, her head back and her legs sprawled out and her hands resting on her thighs. Sammy was taller than Frankie by a head or so but Sammy was always sitting down and Frankie was always standing and Frankie was always at the front of the stage and Sammy was always at the back. No one had stopped Sammy looking how she looked or living like she liked to but she didn’t. Sammy wasn’t doing what she wanted or living like she liked, though she was nearly. She wore the clothes she wanted and didn’t have to change them for work. She played the music she wanted though she wanted to be better, to play the best music, her and Frankie both wanted that, to write and play music that was in some way close to the feeling it gave them when they played it. Sammy had never had to pretend much only to be quiet and to go along no her mother had seen her hair get short like plenty of the women to whom anarchism had meant a complete disregard for what was and wasn’t allowed but really Sammy wanted to grow her hair long. Not like a girl does but like a boy does. Sammy wanted first to be a boy and then grow her hair long like a virtuoso, like a beatnik, like some of the boys were doing now. Instead she cut it short not bothering to become a boy with long hair but to exist instead in asymmetry with what she wanted, to be a girl with short hair. She cut it short around the sides and left the front a little longer and she didn’t slick it back like the others did so she could have, at least, the same view as the long-haired boys who saw the world through the hair falling over their eyes.
“Good evening Sidney, where is everybody?” “Evening Reb, everybody’s late” “For what?” They laughed. “Aren’t you with Frankie?” “Apparently” “Oh I see” “Can I get you a cup of coffee Sidney?” “Will it taste any different from the first one?” “Only hotter I’m afraid” “Don’t be” Rebecca came back to the table and sat with Sid hunched over pouring sugar into her cup. “My brother is working a high-paying job in another city” she said “And you?” “I feel like I’m sitting with my brother drinking coffee right this minute” “Oh brother” “Oh brother” [sigh and clink clink, tap their spoons on their mugs together and slurp their coffee.] “Slurp” “Slurp” everybody was late. “Does your mother know you’re here?” “Does yours?” “With Rebecca Samuel? She could care less” “I suppose so” “Oh brother” “Yeah” [slurp, slurp] “She doesn’t know you’re an anarchist now though. She isn’t so excited by anarchists. Nice Jewish girls, yes, yes, she is excited by them well, not excited not like I’m excited by them though I never have been—” “Never?” “—I’ve been with nice girls” “Oh?” “And I’ve been with Jewish girls, but—” and Sid laughed “Oh brother” Rebecca said. “Listen Reb Samuel if my mother comes in here don’t show her your union card ok?” “And if my mother comes in here you better hope Frankie’s still running late” “Must be a big night at the bar” “Didn’t you go?” “I like hearing them play I really do, I love hearing Frankie sing really, I think Frankie singing is the last thing I’d wanna hear on earth, really I do and the way Sammy plays piano really I like it, I do, but lately Frankie’s heart’s not in it and I can’t get to enjoy it if I know she isn’t. I’d rather not hear it at all” slurp “didn’t you go along?” “I couldn’t bear to hear the love songs” “But you’re here” “Well is it tonight she was planning on telling me?” “About love?” “Is tonight’s meeting on love?” “Would you leave if it was?” “If it was it’d be about loving something you can’t hold” “That’s pretty, Reb. Frankie make you a poet these past few months?” “Is this how poets feel?” That summer’d been hot and Frankie’s shirts had panes of sweat through them and dried out by the open windows and Rebecca had worn dresses. Rebecca had made lemonade and Frankie’d said it’d made her sing the best she’d ever sung and that every time she sang now she’d taste lemonade. And Rebecca had woken up at Sammy and Frankie’s house most mornings, grease stains on the pillows and piano keys drawn onto the kitchen table. And Sammy’d touch a note [touch] and Frankie’d hum it [hum] touch, hum, touch, hum like the notes were coming out the table. Then when Sammy touched the wrong key Frankie’d stop and they’d start over, whilst across the table that summer Rebecca ate breakfast. “Anyway” Rebecca said “if my mother comes in here” she points at Sid “tell her you’re my brother.”