April 26, 1998 New York

Neighborhoods have changed such that the Puerto Rican places, the Ukrainian places, and the Polish are being replaced with French, Japanese, Nuovo Italiano. I had read as much and flew up to see for myself. Driver took me over the Williamsburg, ran the light through Delancy. I made a little window in the fog and watched Queens under rain and we came out and went up Orchard. A little porthole in the fog and watched the old neighborhood slide by as if already a memory. From memory to memory, past to past without passing go, running the light at Houston into more fog.

Marcelo's bar is right next door and he knows all the suspicious EV types, they all smile at him and he tells me about last September and dope. Marcelo, as I found him, still has the habits of his old self. The ones I remember, anyway. A quiet Argentine kindness. We started drinking at about five, the usual East Village dives that change a little each time (didn't recognize anyone in Joe's) and it's like graduation with him: the cigarettes, the disturbed sleep he told me about. I have nothing real to trade against that, dope. No development in my life that would cast a shadow on that. In September, I was working on my play and was loving Virginia nearly every day. I don't remember September really well. I'm learning to talk to the new Marcelo who, it turns out, has spent some time in jail.

We met a Croatian woman and a Brit at Lucy's while he was trying to tell me about jail. We flirted with them and I extracted information from the Croatian by introducing Marcelo and making up all sorts of nonsense. (I'm in the movies. What do you do?) A Croat takes you seriously here. They have no idea. We can leave anything for saying later when there are women around.

But he just keeps talking as if they aren't there. Marcelo got picked up for nothing at all, watched the ninth precinct cops beat a handcuffed black man, spent two days in a cell with a broken phone and a toilet that wouldn't flush, two days sick and he told me of how they arranged themselves on the floor in that space, all forty of them.

The Brit was a photo stylist and more this awful knit hat "an old dear woman" had given her. Marcelo said it looked like a tea cozy and we had a laugh about it. Walking up, up Avenue A, she kept taking it off and putting it back on. Whenever I looked at her she took it off. "What are you doing?" I asked. She didn't believe Marcelo had been raised in Rosario, said I looked more Argentine than Marcelo and the Croat agreed.

Marcelo kept on telling me how he got his record erased. He met a uniformed cop at Lucy's and paid him off. He said it was like a miracle that the judge was late, someone else called the parts and the room cleared before the sentencing. Marcelo knows every criminal lawyer in New York. "How did your record get erased?" I asked him. "They just went in there with liquid paper," he said. I think he'll be blackmailed later in life. He just deals with criminals and is gone this morning to serve a subpoena. I don't believe you can liquid paper someone into a better future. Even if the charge was invented in the first place. Not without getting down on your knees, anyway.

Here I am back in NYC, watching national television while outside Croatia is reforming as best it can, and UK is selling yesterday's style today and I'm even wearing Marcelo's coat because I thought it would be warmer that way.  I'm always borrowing coats it seems.

Years ago, just after having moved to Manhattan, I asked Jenny Harth where to buy a watch.  "Dunno," she answered, "Macy's?"  Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies.  Daughter of a Mississippi journalist. 

I went up there, walked from Marcelo's through Union Square (there's a K-Mart just below Fourteenth Street now!)  Looked in the faces of all the Greenmarket workers to see if one of them was Dean. Karl Leiber said with some disdain that Dean works there once or twice a week.  Which, come to think of it, needn't sound so dire.  The market itself only comes around that often.  And so I walked up Broadway and through Madison Square Park, saw no one from Harcourt, but the place has come up a notch or two and was full of, I suppose, St. Martin's employees reading on their lunch hour.  There was a beautiful woman sitting on a pedestal beneath the statue. Saw her from way across the park and let her draw me.  Walked towards her, getting enough of her details into my eyeball so that she could be my guiding vision for the day. No sign of the famous bag pipe player, either.  Dean plays bagpipes now?  Isn't that the way the logic of the world works?  Why didn't I run into him?

Walked Macy's for about an hour, looking for a goddamn umbrella.  Found the watches, all the expensive kit right away.  Went upstairs to the post office (how I had remembered there was a post office in Macy's I will never know).  Imagine it and it will appear.  Mailed postcards to Jefferson City, Tulsa, and Sacramento.  Still couldn't find an umbrella.  Fuck it.  Went across to Daffy's and bought socks. 

Remembered when last at Macy's, buying a cappuccino machine for Sandy, an eleventh-hour Christmas gift.  Went down to the cellar with my sister.  There was snow falling and just an inch already, so I could slide along in my fancy shoes.  Nearly fell crossing the street.  They were ready to close and all I could hear were the wooden escalators rattling.  Now have Virginia's old cappuccino machine, same type as the one I bought for Sandy, but an earlier year.  I wonder if I hadn't bought Virginia that dress last Christmas at the same hour, or indeed on the same day two years hence from that almost forgotten December evening, whether things would have turned out as poorly as they did.  Felt blessed to find both gifts at the final hour and perhaps assumed I could carry that blessing forward into the coming year.  Didn't buy a watch, but Daffy's had a six-dollar London Fog umbrella for me.  Bought blue shades on the sidewalk outside and everything is blue and nothing is blue all at the same time. 

Took the F train down to have coffee with Ali.  We had our usual conversations at some Spanish café near the Hudson.  Passed, on the way, the crêperie where Sandy and I had breakfast with Lorna Tocchi while we were watching Alice Hahn's place on Thompson Street.

Marcelo has this frame in which there is no picture. I keep catching myself looking into it as if it were a mirror.

April 27, 1998 New York

Dinner with Aurélie at Savanne. What a voice, a woman to be worshipped, in a way. She says things well and at the right time and I suppose I will always love her a little. She has been dating, of all people, the city manager of Saint Louis. A lot of distance and scene changing in between. I hope she doesn't depend too much on this. Aurélie is for marriage and she wants them to live together first. I can't imagine her outside of Manhattan and, indeed, she says she has never been to Saint Louis. How can a city manager simply leave for the weekend?

I had veal and she had sea bass, both piled and so similar one depended on the waiter to sort out which was which. She was troubled to hear that Ari wouldn't return my calls. "Ari is Ari," I said, "Now more than ever." It seemed like wisdom at the time, but the truth is, as Aurélie suggested later that Ari wouldn't talk to me because he knew about us. Ari is one, evidently, for holding grudges. Poor Aurélie sometimes struggles to remember what she has said to me, but doesn't lie about the hospital. I wished there were more I could have done for her that summer three years ago and said so. She was all forgiveness. I ate from her plate to test her. And she laughed that broken china laugh. She told me, 'Don't play it Virginia's way." Why didn't I come to New York and have dinner with Aurélie sooner? This is the first sensible advice anyone has given me since January. I told her I didn't know if I cold call Sandy for lunch or not. I feel, as I've told Marcelo and Ali that I've only left New York ten minutes ago. This frightens me. I would expect to see her as I did that day in August when I dropped her off at the station and watched her for the train. Were I to have lunch with Sandy, a proper lunch, what would I say? I can recall her quite well. The rest of our story was just a few months of strained telephone calls. A proper lunch with her could be nothing other than a roast chicken in our apartment in Ossining. It is too frightening. Three years. Who knows why I am here, there, or anywhere? I almost put the question to Aurélie, so deep is my faith in her glib takes. Don't play it Virginia's way. Aurélie is closest to known my sheer terror. She knows a deeper me than does Sandy or even Virginia. She knows the me that Virginia fled. "Do you remember that building?" she asked when she dropped me at the train. It was her old apartment. I told her I still had a key to the best room in the place and it took her a moment to realize that it was the one she had given me. In fact, that same key had worn a hole in the breast pocket of the jacket I was wearing. Nathan, Aurélie's brother, told me over the phone once that the night she was admitted to the hospital I had been the only one able to make her laugh. She had called me and constructed her polio fantasy and I listened as a Nathan spun her gurney. I heard her tell him crossly to "stop it." He told me that she was, as I knew, a gem except for the odd black moment. Throughout dinner, she kept saying that happiness was a fleeting and impossible thing. She doesn't know one thing about it yet. I knocked over her pile of bass with my fork. I love to make her laugh. She just gives herself to it cleanly, without hesitation. The sound of a child breaking china. I was, I think, an odd black moment in Aurélie's life. Long may she wave. The trains were exactly right going back to Marcelo's. For once the N-R stopped at eighth and I didn't get burned by having to make an odyssey up from Soho. All I had to do was walk across eighth, which was deserted though there were drinkers at Holiday Cocktail.

Marcelo sleeps in the next room and I hope that it is a right sleep and the he doesn't wake or that the light under which I am writing doesn't make him dream. We have all had too much light, too soon.

April 28, 1998 New York

Panhandler, Tompkins Square, sitting in the sun, doing a maze from a puzzle book for children.

The gray bag I checked at the airport came out soaked, as if pissed on. It didn't smell like water anyway. All my clothes have a damp ghost in them.

And when she pointed out the building last night I was surprised to see it sat on the hill of--what? Have I forgotten already? Seventy-ninth street? I had always come the other way or I entered the subway from the corner near my sister's apartment. It sat up there and it was no longer just larger than me, it was larger than my memory of it, perhaps the only building in history that hasn't become smaller upon revisiting.

It was from there I walked barefoot to my sister's our first night, when she wouldn't stay over and it was a brilliant night like last one, a perfect temperature. One felt anything was possible, that nothing could be destroyed by physics or time. She now describes her undergraduate career as one of a physicist. Ah, but when pressed you know--it's the folly--and you allow for her eyes. That this is another beautiful description of her ideal, larger self, and she does it to say, "Look out, darling, look at whom you've involved yourself with. Will you follow suit?" So I passed myself off as casual last night as well as our first, as nothing slightly uptown in Savanne.

Virginia can keep a secret, but how it gnaws at her. Guilt has come up inside of her to the same extent as her legs and arms and eyes and its the ghost of the crow-scaring kind that motivates her limbs. The girl who once told me she wanted her own "little self-sufficient farm" and threw her Bible into the orchard to warp and rot. What water gets added to us that makes ourselves, expands us to the limit of our memories. En vino veritas.

I told Ali that I was spending my time in the EV, dodging Proustian moments, looking for the anti-madeleine, oh what talk. Oh what talk, the madeleine become a dab of semtex on my shoe heel that I had to disarm very carefully. Stomp too hard on memory lane and you lose your legs from under you. There's your physics for you, Aurélie. (I had told her that now I was in the simple mode of recording that perhaps nothing needs rearrangement in my life or that perhaps I could stand no further arranging, that I'm letting life write me, or some such rot, oh what talk.) But there it was, the apartment so risen, exactly to the extent of my memory of it and my throat was empty when I thought of how we had made love in the middle of a rare thunderstorm, how we had made love, even, on its roof and then ran naked through the penthouse halls in those after attitudes.

Jenny Harth, that first NYC love, lives right around the corner from where I am now, an annoying place called Limbo. I came here probably because of the blue glasses. I'm no longer responsible for my choices. I'm still not quite equal to this blue world, but I will be. She took me around her little village, showed it off like a small dinner she had fixed herself. "Fixed" because we have both spent time in Texas and that is why we were friends at first. I remember we even went up to Inwood together, to visit Sharon Cardinal. She, Jenny, is a bit like Marcelo, in love this nasty EV filth. (My god, the bathrooms at both of their apartments). They lead anti-lives in a way, afraid to venture beyond whatever all this represents. The riots had just happened in Tompkins Square when she first took me over to Bennies and then to a video store on St. Mark's Place. What did we want? I want to say BADLANDS, but that has been the case with each woman I've been serious about, at a certain point I have Her Whoever go out and get BADLANDS so I can see her reaction when Charlie Sheen jumps on that dead cow. I am exactly like that, would have jumped on the cow myself. It was maybe Days of HEAVEN. I don't know. Last I heard of Jenny was running into her husband at Joe's after his band practice. She was living upstate. At least three years ago, it was.

Postcards, microcassettes, I'm going to walk to my old place on Stanton Street and then call Marcelo.

There is a Japanese restaurant in place of the old Vietnamese one I so often at from on Houston. I say I ate "from" this restaurant rather than "at" in the same way someone would say "Don't drink milk from the bottle--pour a glass and sit down at the table." Two bars with fancy awnings. Someone, whoever lived in my old room, had left the window open. It was blocked by a computer that place where I loved look up at nothing but sky from my bed. I felt lucky because the sightlines toward Houston were clear. Too bad for him because a fine grit always falls through that window, particulate exhaust from the diesels that go up Allen Street or else the municipal workers who park on Orchard and take short naps at three in the morning while their engines idle. I was once so bent out of shape about the noise, I went down in my underwear and tapped on the windshield of one such idler. He must have waked with his boss's voice in his ear, for the straightened up right away. "Knock it off" I yelled and he understood exactly what I meant.

I know why Marcelo comes home and immediately turns on New York One, the station that broke the Brooklyn police brutality story. You come home at some odd hour after having seen upward of a thousand faces on the street or you've been stopping in the African tchochke store and seen the see-, hear-, speak-no-evil monkeys or you're subject to the mental law of constant motion, said law related to my often spoken about but unrecorded rules for Andrés's happiness in New York City. First, head toward an unknown destination with (second) someone you shouldn't be with and, third, take a cab. There is a fourth rule which I will not record here.

You turn on New York One if you are home before 15h00 or after 19h00 because you've been connected with the city itself, not just those who work a regular schedule and it is good, for a little while, not to sever that connection until, say, something domestic happens, a phone call from a friend to take you out of it. It's okay to watch New York One on television for a little while. I used to listen to 1010 WYNS twenty-four hours a day, would sleep to fifteen minute updates of the WTC bombing, staying connected to everything. Before I came back this time, I dreamed about my old block between Allen and Orchard Streets. It was a fuller block in my dream than it is in life and it had burned. Daniel Truman, my roommate at the Stanton Street apartment, had fixed up a corner and got the plumbing going again. For some reason dope was involved, but we played cards.

Marcelo's cats purr like coffee pots and scratch. Reminds me of Stephen Abecrombie's Poocha ("pussy" in Hindi, I am told) which I tormented because I had too much time on my hands, watched too much television those first days in the city. She got pretty good at hiding from me, behind the books in Abecrombie's bookshelf. That one took me hours. Here I am at Marcelo's. Exhausted but not much sought after.

April 29, 1998 New York

Someone flung a clock at my head last night. Or I just happened to be walking down Second Avenue and it just happened to pass eight inches from my head. It didn't occur to me immediately that I might have been the target. I was happy, coming home from dinner and drinks with the Belleville sisters, had just put my hands in my pockets and was almost home, was letting myself stroll a little and heard it before I saw it come apart in the street. A clock face, from three to eight broken off somewhere. It is funny that I would see the hands still moving.

I was coming home from dinner with Flora and Lee, had been looking around Thirteenth street for Zelika, but I couldn't see which window it had been thrown from. My first thought wasn't anything but "Whatwasthat?" My second was probably "That came from across the avenue" because there is one of those awful high-rise NYU dormitories. But I think it was too far. There was a panhandler over there, too, but he was likewise too far or his eyes were too bad. He didn't seemed crazy and my third thought was "They threw it at you," and the bouncers at the bar I was passing were both looking up at the near building. They didn't say anything and I stood in the doorway and looked up, too.

But one can't see anything standing in a doorway, of course. It was then that I think the idea originated: that someone had been waiting for the right target, had seen me put my hands into my pockets, had sense my satisfaction with the evening. I was singled out because I had put my hands into my pockets and I was well dressed. But I had been looking for Zelika, who I had first taken for a German a few days ago, and it didn't matter that I couldn't find her because I had just spent forty dollars at Zim with Lee Belleville, hearing how she had used our first meeting, the instance of our first meeting, in a story.

She used me as a "malignant force" who had called her whole existence into question. I was terribly flattered, of course. I remember how I had buttonholed her because she was such a darling and I hadn't seen anyone so clever and young in Jefferson City ever and so she was quite an attraction. I was a malign force who came in and used the word "cocksucker," a word she claimed she had never heard used before in a social situation. Her teacher had loved the story and had read it aloud to the class and now the word "Andrés," if it ever occurs to this man whose writing I adore, must ring all the more untruly, as Lee must surely have been one of his cleverest students. (I think he sides with even the fictive distress of women at all times).

We sat there at Zinc and the crowd was quite the sharp jazzy crowd, everyone there to hear a guitarist called Dane Gilmore, whom, for some reason I mistook for Dave Matthews, a name I had heard but whose music is unknown to me. Lee asked me, since I had explained my concept of the anti-madeleine over dinner, who I had been there with last and how it had been. She and her sister have the most well-spoken and intimate way of questioning; the weight and care with which they ask such questions is what I imagine to be British. I told her "I was last here when I was going out of my head and beside me was the woman who had my heart and who was also going out of her head." I phrased it better than I can record here. I think she suspects I make everything up.

Well, it was very beautiful, I said. It was such an evening, I told her. The candles on the tables were blue then, I told her. She said, "Yes that would make everything different." In the story she wrote for my hero-writer, she had hung a "brown air of dissatisfaction" around her Andrés. For the party where we had first met, she told me, she and Flora had exchanged dresses. I remember that she wore a black dress, but that was an easy guess and I think she suspects that as well.

Today I saw a beautiful woman trying to exchange sheer panties with a sales clerk who would have nothing to do with the matter. "But it still has the tags!" she insisted. She did not exclaim "I never wore them!" Suspicious characters everywhere.

Like all fine and stylish women at this moment in New York, she was wearing running shoes with no socks. So I clumped around in the new shoes that will today destroy my feet when I go to meet Lynne Theo today. Marcelo packed this morning to stay the night with his girlfriend in Brooklyn. He told me about how he had spent the entire afternoon trying to head off a crisis an acquaintance of Patty Rigby was going through. Some artist whose first one-man show had been hung was undergoing what Marcelo termed a "schizophrenic break" and had threatened everyone he knew with death, had told Patty he was "prepared for battle," was in the Queens county holding pen. Marcelo managed to get him sprung, I think. A few hours later the police were at the artist's door again, but this time he was transported to Bellevue (luckily not Riker's Island, said Marcelo).

I told him about the clock striking pavement that was nearly my skull in greatly abbreviated form. Once I worked up the courage to cross Second Avenue, looking in every darkened window, I could feel someone looking back.

On New York One this morning on the "World Outside NY" program: Long Island (not too far outside I guess) man shot his neighbor on the rumor that he was a molester.

My law of motion was formulated when I was twelve and had come home from a long bicycle ride to the library downtown. I was then intoxicated by motion but was stuck with the strongest heart palpitation that has ever shaken its way through me. "Steve Smooth" was my mental double who always, always remained in exact motion, quiet or quick. Flora, last night, supposed two ways of understanding life: as a continuum or as a series of failures. I've heard others to say the same thing! I told her that she should learn to ski: it's impossible to think and one must physically contend with a continuum as presented by gravity and the mountain.

Waiting now, at Bryant Park behind the library for Lynne Theo. Was less crowded when it was less renovated. Used to sit across from the library building when I worked at McGraw-Hill and think of how Bryant Park reminded me slightly of the parque zoológico in Buenos Aires, based solely on the similar crushed brick with which both places lay their walks.

Came here through a Grand Central also under the trowel. That little corner in the southeast side that had been cleaned, the ceiling I mean, has now bloomed across the whole ceiling. It is, I think, what is called cerulean. The constellations can be seen clearly! The smell of Grand Central remains, slight bleach, but that awful crowded bread place, where Sandy and I bought so-called Irish Soda bread, that was a cross between a cinnamon roll and cardamom bread and, somehow, gave one awful gas, is mercifully gone. Displaced by a bank of bank machines. Bread displaced by bread, so to speak.

So, I am sitting here, waiting for Lynne Theo, in a crowd of people reading books and everywhere the black suit and blue shirt combo that Virginia used to object to when I wore it. "Black and blue," didn't go together . We had each our own sets of rules, Virginia and I. I had my obsession with heated roads and "grotto people" who owned "grotto ponies." Black and blue don't go together, as a corollary of her sweety-meaty rule, according to which no ham may be adorned with pineapple wheels.

Well here I am hoping I can spot Lynne by her gait and I don't want to forget the sugar peanut smell of Fourteenth Street. That smell will always wave, for it has by now settled into the sidewalks of Fourteenths Street, where yesterday I remembered my "rule of the nose" for walking through crowds. I walk down the crosstreets and avenues making crisp motions with my head, pointing my nose between the people I would like to part so I might pass. It works except when one isn't crisp enough with the head. One must then enter the dreaded Passing Dance in which star-crossed pedestrians become mirrors to one another, guard each other like basketball players, and progress in their lives become doomed. I passed a crooked woman, old, waiting for the bus, and noticed how the old exude a concrete zone about them through which the pointiest and strongest nose cannot penetrate, that is the Rule of the Crook. I wish I could discover the Rule of Conjuring Lynne, for she hasn't appeared yet. It may be as simple as a wave.

Lynne appeared familiarly and with panache. I caught her by her gait and she dressed down in such a way it was impossible to mistake as one of those strivers. In addition to her surprise about the mob at Bryant Park, she also mentioned Grand Central's ceiling, how it is now much less remarkable, that the whole deal has been achieved. (On New York One right now, writing at Marcelo's apartment, a story about the lawsuit over the fellow who wrote on his back and streaked across Yankee Stadium during a game).

So much has changed, says Lynne, who left New York for college. I told her the Rule of the Nose and together we came up with Amble Corollary: when caught behind a baby-stroller, pushers of those mysterious black boxes on wheels (we saw two around Empire State) grocery walkers, etc., you will not be able to pass them without brushing them rudely. Lynne who walks according tot he Rule of the saint, by which she walks with her hands held before her as if ready to push back, but saintly anyway. As a saint walking through the dark, detecting light with her hands.

Her surprise errand turned out to be a trip she is considering for her and Lenny's wedding. It's on Thirty-ninth street and we stepped in n a service. Once we had had a look and stepped out again, a pastor in his --habit? vestments?--came charging down the stair, humming the hymn that had just ended. Lynne knew him and we went downstairs--it had been arranged as a kind of thrift store/café. There was an outdoor fountain front and center. Lynne says that this church had been put back to order by the pastor, who didn't recognize Lynne or stop humming. (Beyond New York on New York One: outstanding demand for an impotence drug called Viagra. Government may ask for proof of impotency before approving prescriptions). We hopped on the N-R because I don't like Korean food. Lynne grew up in Murray Hill and loves the stuff because it is so spicy.

So down to KK for pirogies. She so gracefully took the check out of my hand when it came. I said I wouldn't argue because it would mar the grace of her gesture. She was very surprised to hear how Virginia and ended up and it occurred to me, after she asked what I wanted now, and I suppose it is a graceful exit from all this badness, this tea-weak life in Jefferson City. ("It's the trainyard welcome to the railroad," says the Bronx trespasser when describing his treatment by the legal system on New York One). Before we went to DeRobertis's for meringues, Lynne had her change abducted by our cut Polish waitress. She brought the changes and Anne thanked her. Quickly she said, "Oh is this for me? Thank you!" before disappearing. There was a notion that is difficult the city may be, it is one of the few places in the U.S. where small gestures register. One may pave the way for another, hold one's hands up in a gentle manner, press back the crowds.

All these rogue aspects, Lynne's grace, Marcelo's serenity generosity, the wonders of the Belleville sisters, all resolve in some person, ideal person, formal person. Some idiot, an actor at the company on whose board I am a member, said he was interested in trying to find the ideal person. I suppose I'm saying there is the ghost of everyone in the body of anyone and the all these places I go are company in themselves.

New York One: A street in Queens has had its sidewalks repaired in such a way the driveways are now a foot too short for the new pavement. The woman interviewed says in disgust: "Our children will have to live with this." Oh, and much, much worse chère madame, I want to tell her.

[note written in the margin in another color: This notebook's spine must be scored in such a way that it always opens to this page. My eyes must be trained so that they read neither the first or last item, but always light on this news item about Queens.]

Giuliani's New York: When the cab took me down Delancy Street, a sign read DO NOT HONK HORN EXCEPT FOR DANGER. Noise control on Delancy could only be achieved by Serbians.

How funny it must be for Marcelo to always encounter me in some new position or state of dress. I must be sometimes only his wrinkled visions and a new smell beyond the cats, someone who leave the windows open or closes the curtains or who opens them. He's about to come home. What would he think if he found me as he does each morning? I always wave good morning to him like a lunatic. Only in the general sense is it an appropriate gesture. Like that time in Las Varillas when I simply bumped heads with Gabriel because I had kissed too many male relatives that day already, or that I could tell everyone was watching.

I suffer from an illusion. Perhaps it isn't an illusion at all, as I doubt that other people share it: if I can see some for-off object, a mountain peak, those pyramid buildings around Union Square, a bright blank space between the buildings on the crosstown street that means the Hudson, then I assume it is no trick to just nip over there. If I can see it, it can't take more than ten minutes to walk there, can it? Crow Flies Syndrome. It caused me much exhaustion when I lived here. I could not be content with my neighborhood because they were so often hostile places. Marcelo is a pleasant person, I think, because all this E.V. requires a certain insane give-and-take that is more visual than a give and take of manners or position. You have to watch and odd things happen here. Like the clock (It was on Third Avenue, I realize as I write).

The hipsters are changing. Ate few slices on the corner and noticed shoes. More bridlebit loafers but still red rubber Swedish shoes and they're otherwise dressed in New York black, of course. It was about 19h30, Everyone was out, including those who work regular jobs. The rich are on the march, even on the lesser east side of Manhattan.

April 30, 1998 New York

After Marcelo came home (I was writing--no, I was reading Lenny Bruce) we went to the Sidewalk Café and made each other's heads spin. He about warrants served. The berserk artist is under wraps in Bellevue. Then we had an annoying encounter with a junkie, very aggressive, who walked over to our table and demanded a rhyme from me. Or else the guy tied up on Fourth Street and Eleventh would get it, he said. "It means his life" he said and he was holding out his fists. He wore a long purple coat that held who-knew-what so I said "Now don't tease/untie me please."

He broke into a long spiel about Satan and Hitler, etc., and I could tell Marcelo was thinking what I was: when do we crash our beer bottles into this guy's face. I'm also thinking that long coat was destined for better states. It must have come resplendent from the factory, been sold in White Plains to some nice mother who donated it to the S.A. so Byron here could hide his machete.

After this, Marcelo told me about meeting a killer just out of prison at Lucy's. Put this in your little storybook he said, "What I was a boy my mother gave me a shovel. I saw she had one too, and she said we would now kill all of the animals in the house. If I didn't want to help, she would kill me with her shovel. Se we did the rabbits and the dogs [even the fish?!] and we took our shovels and dug graves in the back lawn.

Standing there on Sixth [Avenue] and Thirty-sixth Street thinking about lost souls/white glove/the baby carriage.

Met Alice at Keen's Chop House where she was interested to hear me sketch out Argentina business as best I could. She is seeing Samuel again. Afterwards, I went with her and watched her "pull stripes" from the 1800s. I watched her pull florals from Imperial Japan. She bought many samples and I asked her her method. At her firm, they look for "fun", "crunchy", and "army"then mix the three. Today, she was looking for FUN swim ideas.

We looked through bandana samples and imagined which short of cowboy belonged to each. Bandana with a rooster was a French cowboy. Black Eagle was a German cowboy, Orange and blue was a Tahitian cowboy, etc. She has plucked her eyebrows most severely, I noticed.

The baby carriage is a man I noticed on the Second Avenue F train stop. I heard the ticking of bicycle wheels and saw it. But no baby. Photography equipment instead.

Suspend the law of motion as long and as completely as possible.

Last night Marcelo told me how he noticed that age, aging, was always on Sandy's mind. Yes, I felt a bit hostage to it, honestly, but I hadn't heard it so clearly stated.

New York will only be over after I get off the train in Jefferson City. The airport, the flight, the passengers, will all be members of an outer borough that extends itself all the way to Los Angeles but falls like firework pollen the moment you step outside of it.

The line of text printed on my hand I noticed while having lunch with AB did not come from this book It was far too small . It must have come from a blotting the postcard I wrote to Virginia. I must have carried it around all day, both before and after I posted the cards on University Place. It was on me when I sat with C and C and D. It was on me after I went looking for the Croat Zelka The line read: "My glasses are blue and my shirt is gold."

REVS/COST signs are still around!

[written on facing page: I must ask Marcelo about this bit of urban lore.]

May 1, 1998 New York

At Café Life, where Larry and I hung out after the Rodney King "riot" a few years ago. Last night met Russ Morton for the cast and crew premiere of Spike Lee's HE GOT GAME, up at the theatre on Eighty-ninth Street and Broadway.

Movie was one of those long overdone bits Lee seems to specialize in. the score by Aaron Copeland (!) is the final giveaway. Music as cloying as S.L.'s oeuvre. There was no Denzel Washington or Millo Jojovich but the properties people would send up a cheer when a certain watch or car would make the scene. Lots of low-level schmoozing going on. RM apologized in advance for having to do it. He's still getting into the notion he doesn't have to feel guilty about behaving super friendly in such situations. He really is a poet and a gentleman, a believer in character. He quoted, and I paraphrase the most important lines, "We chose word or we burn." Yes. And listen to the sizzle of the semi-worded or the over. (In HGG the phrase "I overstand" in response to "Do you understand?") Am having trouble keeping my own effort up, because it feels like burning and I've nodded off before finishing sentences and left much unrecorded.

My sister, yesterday, said that Sandy's current boyfriend seemed gay to her. This is a tragedy because of Miguel, the man she saw before me. he came out of the closet. Sandy had this pervasive fear that I was gay, even asked me as much. We had moved our things into her roommate's side of the Tribeca apartment. It was a weeknight, warm, and I was then working at Harcourt Brace. We had an air-conditioner and were lying in that just arranged room. I can smell it still, laundry detergent and I responded warily to her question. Why would she think this? I went over my behavior but then remembered Miguel. My sister says that "at least he's nice," which does little to put me at ease.

I shouldn't see her, I think, until I don't know anything like this, have forgotten it, can pass her on the street without instant recognition. Until her aspects are on equal footing with that ghost of the perfect wife. Russ said to me "You new lover takes seven years," meaning that this is how long it takes the cells of the body to completely overturn themselves, but meaning, also, that I change over as well. I have been, then four people with the same gray matter, or similar gray matter.

We were drinking pitchers of beer at some awful spot on Amsterdam while the Knicks brawled with the Heat on the screen and Russ said how mannered he had found Virgina on his secret mission to Jefferson City. She had acted as if nothing had passed since they had seen each other last. He has a notion for a play called Tug and Fondle; I told him he was better off with just "Tug" and he agreed. The Knicks coach was knocked to the court and he looked like a little turtle beneath the black giants beating each other senseless.

I am letting my mornings grow longer so that I can control more on the page and I think about a novel of the city based on laws and ghosts with some of the noble sentimental construction of Charlie Newman's NEW AXIS. Russ had to watch what was left of the fight because he life depended on that and I tapped the pavement with my umbrella like an old man with an impatient cane and I chatted with a book scout friend of his who knew no languages but "spoke English good." She was a sweetheart and knew my Rights friends at Knopf and spoke of them with considerable respect and not a little awe.

I want to get it all down, all the ghosts, the way I am and I sat where I am sitting now, in Café Life, while outside no riot raged except in Los Angeles. We had heard Cleveland, Baltimore, Chicago, and even Reno had burning precincts but, for some reason, one couldn't smell the ash of Crown Heights though everyone had expect it. Kids from Harlem were coming down with bags of rocks. They came down on the Lex and even in cabs and they broke the windows of the only high-profile Black business in E.V.: BBQ. Someone had thrown a wire garbage can and Larry and I had bought 40 oz. bottles of St. Ides because if felt good to have something heavy in hand that night. The cops had chased us from the corner of St. Mark's Place and First Avenue. We ran all the way to Second Avenue when the marchers hit and the bricks and bottles broke against the Fifth and Ninth precinct riot shields.

We never saw the crowd, but circled back to the Café Life, past the command center the cops had set up at Tompkins Square (northwest corner). The wait staff standing in the doorways with the shutters half-down and it was just as if one hell of a thunderstorm had hit. But nobody had seen anything and trouble was only in the air and the only other evidence might have been the way the drunks and homeless were throwing their elbows out when you passed them on the sidewalk. I have walked in the center o the street ever since. Whenever I feel that electricity or smell more than one building burning, I don't care if I'm on an Avenue, I'll take my chances over those doorways they pull you into before the push a knife in, or else the meters they might bounce your head off, the trip-up steps where they give you a curbie.

It really happens: after a beating down that goes well and quietly, the open the jaw of the subdued and rest the mouth on someone's doorstep, give the victim a swift kick in the head and look around for teeth. I noticed on New York One that after a mob hit outside of a strip club on Staten Island, two days ago, nobody had bothered to mop up the aftermath of a head wound. They had, the killers, taken the corpse elsewhere and set fire to it, but that stain in the fourth numbered space (why numbered spaces at in a strip club parking lot?) is something for the rainstorms predicted by Weather on the One. It hasn't rained yet, as they said it would today. I've been hiding out, but I have an umbrella now and I can rattle it up and tip it and hold it at the crook in such a way as to make the bad men step off. (Or so I imagine).

I did so once in Chicago, near the Palmer House, while walking about Virginia. She feared that in me, that I would make any response, however slight. But I did come off too quickly then and I am now developing a more subtle way of broadcast. But there is still a riot of ghosts somewhere in the streets. There was no New York One then and I don't think anyone ran any photographs of the "marchers" but I remember the snipers and the wardens very well in silhouette against cells that have since replaced themselves in my head. Oh, they all come apart in me, everyone. Ross and I walked past the Natural History Museum and past my sister's old building and past the place on Central Park West where I went to my first party in New York, for Lillian Pley.

It all gets built up around me so quickly, the rises of this city and the downward steps and the open roofs and unexpected back yard views, like the one I look upon from the table I use to write at Marcelo's. We walked past the museum and talked about some lunatic artists Russ had met the night before "a friend" who had sculpted a huge hand that had been installed somewhere around Eighteenth Street. He had told Russ to take a woman with him when he saw it, give her a leg up to sit inside the hand and then stand and fuck her there.

I drink, so I don't remember small important things like how Aurélie shows her need for company by making future plans. I called Brian, Dennis, thinking for a moment about Saintly Lynne Theo and she said she made the same mistake all the time. I said "I hope not" but she didn't see the irony and then came a silence, so I suggested we meet in Chicago. "If not sooner" she said. What lovely lives women sometimes speak to me! Sooner than Chicago won't serve for a title, but it serves wonderfully as a sentiment to make me smile which driving through some future cornfields. We waited in a nearly empty L train, Russ and I, and he told me of a stay in Tucson and the girls he had then with a tongue ring and how he had gone soft at the moment he had been anticipating all week. After he had got off at Fourteenth Street and the doors had closed he made a V his hand against the glass and I did likewise and that is how I left him early this morning.

Now the notion of the Ghost of All Things Left Undone. In a sense, the city is every seat on the MTA empty of me as well as every love I am not at the moment with. Outside it is May Day and the police are out in force, the scooter patrol is parked in a rank along Avenue B and is smoking cigarettes. The circus I thought to see but no doubt will miss, is just as much a ghost of mine as every long empty gray bench on the A line to the Bronx.

Not to mention MetroNorth, on whose trains I most acutely feel my own absence.

One ghost I forgot to raise was of Lost Souls. I stood on Thirty-sixth and Sixth Avenue and thought over and over and over, while waiting for Alice to take me to Keen's, White Glove/Baby Carriage/Lost Souls. This last refers to the couple of men whose picture I took just south of Jefferson Market Library, where Ulysses was tried and where I once read, and they were very much in love. I will always see them through the viewfinder of the tiny camera I agreed to take their picture with. There was only one button on the whole apparatus, but the fellow, about my age and dressed in the subdued way of NYC tourists, nevertheless pointed it out. They drew together, facing back from the corner, uptown from me and looked very much in love and a bit lost. They will remember me, if at all, as the man who composed them with the Empire State in the background. I was doing it anyway when one said "Get the Empire State." But of course I don't have the picture. They smiled for each other's future selves and then relaxed back into their street faces. But I wanted to see them again so I insisted on a second picture. They struck the same poses, the same faces, and now they were smiling for me, my lost souls.

Cripes. Marcelo just popped back in. Caught me on the crapper. He popped in earlier, still in bed in my underwear. We talked over the Crimes of the Times and I realize, with horror, that my wang was likely hanging out of the drawn too-tight boxers. I am getting really fat. He is always going here or there for ten minutes. Must remember to record his job prospects.

Livesavers/Union(istas)/Rule of Three.

[Note written on facing page: Three things held in mind at once. Four at best. Five, though, easier than four. Six impossible as it is the double of three and impossible to average. If I lived in Manhattan again, it would be by the rule of three/five. I could only buy three things at the grocery store, etc.]

Woman on the corner of MacDougals and Bleeker, across from where I once waited for Franklin Hall, is videotaping each car as it passes. The cabbies don't notice, but the big fat Borough or Tunnel Italians do and flirt with her and she smiles and moves her tripod and misses therefore the lechery, aggression, sheer murder that these men carry about in public. Just over on Bleeker, I can see it here at Café Borgia, is the building where some guy tried to rent out the space beneath his bed loft for something like $500 per month. What a trip that was, all those room I looked at. Manhattan opens up only at certain times for certain people. It could be a month only, or a day, and you might be living in Iowa, or Texas for that matter, and never know your chance passed you by. I am still learning this city in that my experience outside it helps me greatly a kind of negative equivalent of the knowledge of city living. The Belleville sisters, in spite of their superficial naiveté, have great stores of it, as does my sister. Ali, quizzically, seems to entirely lack it, as must Virginia. Moving here would mean a few years of mild pleasure growing to misery on the Upper West Side. Sitting here at Bleeker and MacDougal, looking at that building that can still conjure a nightmare of having to sleep below some fat-ass rock n'roll guy form Long Island, I see that the practice of painting the cement between the bricks of the rennovated bildings has spread from my old building on Stanton Street. Buildings so panted stand out and look as tony as those larger-scale ones on the Upper East side. Just two--three?--days ago, Ali and I ate lunch beneath that building and were served by a lovely woman from London. I said of her "She speaks with the accent Patricia Colby endeavors to invent." It was just the right snark to set Ali to laughing through his nose. There was a woman who I would have had to share this apartment and she was sitting in this odd living space cut from the kitchen. I was introduced to her in the same way a landlord introduces one to the bathroom fixtures. When left to speak with her she didn't. The woman across the street has now been obscured by an enormous St. Ides beer truck and I wonder if she is still filming, getting the doors as they rise on the bottles. In a way the woman is Manhattan, especially on the Upper West Side, are like Virginia: quiet, watchful, kind to strangers, but not ones of grand statement or excitement as Aurélie. Russ Morton told me in an even voice that he was in love and would marry her.

[Note written on facing page: How I took my breakfast at Joe's with the Fifth Precinct nightshift, these cops bellying their way home to Long Island. Joe's a shiny and clean with ambitions, good eggs, excellent Spanish rice. It is gone now--Stanton and Orchard, no more fried plantains and has become a mirrored room where cheap clothes are sold.]

I don't remember her name. It occurs to me that the gates opened for me in the same way they did for James Purdy's Malcolm. This statement is a risk because I think it is true, but I cannot supply the proof without more thought than I am willing to lend the matter. Peril of the headlong explanation, obligatory explanation: why I love Aurélie, she does not demand them. Russ has been unblocked in a similar way, but he is in with an element who appreciate his natural conviviality. He can show himself for what he is and get paid for it. I suppose the same is true for me and Malcolm: we are both appreciated for our negative capability, so to speak. Malcolm for being a blank. impressive in any situation, able to bob like a social cork. I waited for Franklin here the last time he was in New York. I can't remember why we weren't together. I was on the doge quite a bit because of Aurélie, on odd-hour trains to Ossining, making good money working likewise odd hours, so very much was possible between us, even whole night together. I sat here for nearly an hour after having gone to another café first. I was wearing a seersucker suit. And I think I thought about that awful apartment across the street, waiting for me, even then. Franklin showed up--in a matching suit?!--and I was preoccupied with calling Aurélie to set something up that night, that I had to cut our greeting short, walk across the street to the payphone, give her a call. I apologized to Franklin and told him a half-story, changing the name but alerting him to the affair. he had that grin about him, made more feral by his moustache. This is a nothing corner to me, not like Broadway and Seventy-eighth Street, but there is accumulated accident here that I guess brought me out of Union Square. It has been raining slightly and that place of past Labor riots was today deserted save for maybe fifty members of the American Communist Party blowing whistles and carrying banners on the Fourteenth Street Side. I wrote a postcard to my parents and walked down Fifth and noticed a few grayhairs carrying those banners furled with the air of something trying to make a train they are only slightly late for. A couple of them went in and one of the drug dealers (I twitched my face to answer whether I wanted smoke or coke from a big clocker and he said "Okay. Have a nice day) and past the chess players who slap their clocks and don't mind the rain at all. So here I am come down to this corner, Bleeker and MacDougal and I've said nothing of Thompson Street, my sister's graduation dinner at Grand Ticino, how my hand was broke (or so I thought). I've said damn little, after all, and Eldridge Cleaver is dead at Sixty-two says the radio. It is five P.M. and everyone is going home. The man changed with trespass in the 96 World Series has been given community service and a fine. That is too bad, because he lives now in San Francisco. New York is where the railyard is, welcome to the railroad.

May 2, 1998 New York

This morning up to soft love in the next room which I soon confused with the sound of someone cutting pipe [instead of laying it?], sawing wood, and even a child playing in the little courtyard. Perhaps this has put dreams of construction in my head, for a dream that my building in St. Louis had gained another storey. Though my rooms were still on the top floor, the building was severely canted to what I suppose was the Northeast. I had painted a chair with hard enamel and left it on the balcony to dry and was pleased to find it was in nice shape upon returning. It needed, perhaps, another coat but the building definitely wanted repair. I could sit in my living room, on the floor, and look straight down at the rabbits grazing on the lawn through the window that had once only held the sky and the medical school. I dreamed that I ate an orange, sweeter in the early stages of rot than it would have been fresh. On the other side, I found a dollar-sized mite investigation. Mature mites cruised through the pulp, so I tossed it off the balcony, narrowly missing a woman standing at a barbeque grill. I noticed that Navy Dick had planted eucalyptus trees! So this is the dream the soft love next to me inspired, but I also dreamed a woman who shushed me in the company of others when I started to tell them of how I had dreamed my apartment had fallen into disrepair. "I tell it better," she began and I was edgewise to her every after.

So last night a cab took me down to Canal, my favorite street in this world where Ali was waiting, having laid in a reservation for eight, then six, four and then only us. Marcelo didn't want to cab down there in all that rain, and Lorna was set on seeing an awful play, and the elder Belleville sister took herself away to Boston and Oriane had eaten a whopper at Burger King but would join us later at Shark Bar.

Nha Tracy [restaurant?] a disappointment in spite of the long uptown line. Just the usual hot dog variety Viet. My pork had been reconstituted and what did we walk about? There are now little prerecorded messages in all the cabs, reminding you to pick up your belongings, advising what a good tip is and I said to the cabbie, when we pulled up to Canal on Baxter street, "Don't those little messages drive you nuts?" " What little messages?" he answered. "Oh, just these little messages I hear, no matter."

I walked Ali through upper Church Street but missed El Teddy's but we were passing so many little store fronts that I can recall seeing before, but which I cannot record here. the quality of something half remembered, like the annoying place Reine Kretchler and I ducked into four years ago. It must have been around Baxter Street, it is on Baxter Street, because I was thinking of the best way to write the White Glove idea as we drove down Baxter in this pissing, filthy, unhealthy rain New York suffers sometimes, and all is Reine there and that white stucco place in lower Little Italy which probably had not had a customer all week, judging by the cartoon Italian who fawned over our late night supper. Or perhaps it was similar weather on that night four? five? years ago when it was pissing rain too and I was simply in the vague vicinity of the place. He fawned over everything. Here ordered something impossible like lobster and I was in low spirits for some reason. She was trying to breath some life into me, "some spirit" were her words, lovely Reine and her Austrian accent, while I inhaled a spaghetti pomodoro I could have made better myself. I was in no mood for drinks afterwards, or anything else, but she led me off. She knew the general direction of my apartment, so she dragged me up Mulberry. I remember passing, or trying, at the graveyard and going across the park where Rivington ends--no place for a woman like Reine at any hour and it turns out she had an unerring sense of where my apartment lay, Stanton Street and Orchard.

So last night, after dinner, I dragged Ali through Tribeca, but unlike the time with Reine, we both had umbrellas. I said "Ali, we are the same sort of Victorian." He said, agreeing, "You see a could? You bring an umbrella along." And I walked slightly ahead across Chruch and couldn't at all concentrate on what he was saying because I was trying to see whether another old lover's window was lit. It was and all I saw were plants and well kept walls. Even though my roommate at that time was then in Brazil supervising the installation of some large sculpture, even though my window was dark and the building covered in the same Dominican scrawl as even the mailbox and the meters wore, Reine found it, we went up, made love in the living room. I perhaps remember putting her in a cab at daybreak. Perhaps because I did the same for another at Houston and Allen. What matters is that I can recall the scene perfectly and it is no less me for perhaps not having happened.

That is what I mean by ghosts, though it would be nice to write a ghost with some agency, describe a train in high metaphor, by its actions on the body. But this rain wouldn't quit and by then it had crept into my shoes and it had become my collar We followed the Church Street jog uptown and looked into the windows of the beautiful lofts and talked about--what? Movies, but nothing else. I could remember it another way. I saw a head in a window, maybe someone watching television before going out and I could make the head a lover or a friend, but surely Ali would find it more interesting if the head belong to an enemy. [Written on the facing page: THE ENEMY HEAD].

It was surely watching television, the head, but just an enemy wouldn't do. If I were to make up the story it would have to be the head of an enemy who I had done, one who, until I had seen him at that moment, I had forgotten. The case, the strongest dramatic one. I can think of anyway would be that I was undone by this head, perhaps moved to throw something at it through the pane, yell at it, but also show some fear, running to the corner but stopping, walking back clear-eyed and righteous. All this would be fore the benefit of poor Ali, but the city changes this way when one has an audience for memory. It owes to me that much of this notebook, continuous conversations that would have likely bored Virginia right away. The best I might have hoped for would have been her breathy "Really?" or the register of brief amusement before the suggestion we go shopping.