Fall and Rise Page 10

  “What was that in your hand?”

  “Some pâté inside from a party.”

  “That napkin? Give it here.”

  I do. He throws it into the street. Pâté stays inside.

  “You shouldn’t have done that.” I get it out of the street.

  “What are you doing? This is Pig Avenue. Some of my closest associates are garbagemen and the ones who work this route all tell me that. Pig Avenue we’re standing on, and that at the corner going into it is Pig Street.”

  “I don’t like contributing to the mess, what can I say?”

  “Then give it back. I don’t mind contributing. Everyone else is a pig, why not us?”

  “If I gave it back I’d still be—”

  “Then put it in your pocket and squash it without knowing it and send your coat to the cleaners for ten bucks and still not get out the stain.”

  “I’ll find a garbage can one of these nights.”

  “Good for you. But bed? You were saying something before about bed? You’re still too young to climb into one alone, or young enough after you got old enough to go to bed alone. Get yourself a chickie for the night or what’s considered life. I’ve had them—plenty, too many, but you don’t have to believe that and presumably won’t. But five wives and a child from each of them, none of whom—wives or kids—want to see their boo-boozing me-thuselahing ex-husband and pop, if you’ll allow me such verbal abuse, for I’m obviously with a very cultured man. And now I’m too old to remember what I was saying to you, so I’m finding a cop and going back with him to retrieve my lawful bar seat and maybe create a trifle more excitement in that godawful boring place,” and starts downtown again. He stops at the corner, hand holding the hat to his head, waits for some cars to pass or light to change. Light changes and cars stop at the crosswalk but he goes down the sidestreet and once past the corner building is out of sight.

  “Out of my way, you dumb humpky,” I hear him say. “I’ve had a tough enough night for one drunk and also don’t have a cent to my name.”

  Derelict comes out of the sidestreet looking back at what I assume is the man. Sees me and limps over. Has shoes. “Say you—”

  “No really, wish I could help, have a good night,” turning my back on him.

  “Same to you and God bless you,” and I say to him “Same to you and God bless you too,” and go, uptown, thinking I had that last guy wrong all right and that I haven’t said God bless you to anyone for many years except occasionally when someone sneezed, when in front of me I’d say a couple of blocks away there’s this metal and glass crash: two cars, two trucks and a car or something like that, though I doubt a motorcycle or bike was in the crash because of the type of loud tire shrieks and all that shattered glass, and right after I hear it I throw my arms up to my eyes and spin around shoulder slightly raised so with my arms it also protects my face and see the panhandler looking as if oblivious to the noise stopping a woman who’s peering past me to where the sound of the crash was and maybe what she now sees: a car aflame, smoke or human torch in the street, turns to him as if she didn’t see anything unordinary and unlatches her shoulder bag. I turn around and don’t see or hear anything but what I’d think would be normal vehicular traffic for this weather, time and day, though one person is leaning out of a second-story window in the direction of the crash.

  “What was that crash?” the woman says.

  “Something smashed, dear?” he says. “The ears. They don’t hear from anywheres faraway.” His hand’s out. She puts in it a pamphlet from her shoulder bag and says “Do you mind if I speak frankly, sir?”

  “Speak the way you please, dear. I’m a scandal, I’m a dungheap.”

  “Not whatsoever. But in this small tract are the world’s wisest and most helpful words—”

  “That’s so, dear?” turning it around and over several times, walking away reading it and saying while his finger jabs the air “Mat, flap, trap, frat, aspeduty three, crap tract four, roger, roger.” She sees me looking, I turn thinking “That’s so” for “That’s true” might be better I think, in a few seconds she’s behind me saying “Pardon me, sir, but may I interest you in a timely article on why we’re here eternally and what we’ve to expect?”

  “Sure, if just for a minute, but you get around, right, so you’ve any idea why there are so many derelicts, panhandlers and crazies on the street tonight?”

  “I believe it’s every day; they’ve let them all out. But if you’re concerned about them, you’ll be concerned about this.” She gives me a pamphlet. I look at it, say “I broke my glasses before so I’ll have to get to it later,” fold it to put away, she opens it in my hand and says “I neglected to mention,” and points to the price on the cover. “My eyes again,” and I give her a quarter, she already has out my dime change, I say “Really, I’m sure it’ll go to a good cause,” she says “We’re taught to get what we’re paid for too,” I say “Truth is I can probably use the dime for a call later on,” and put it into my pocket and she says “Good, already you’re rewarded and I am by your having been. But as an added reward to us both, promise you’ll read the cover article which continues on pages nine and twelve. It’s a warning, from God Almighty, and is perfectly written, no zigzaggy ideas, and ministers to all, rich or poor, sick or well. If there are any questions about it or life that trouble you, there’s a telephone hotline which you can use anytime of the day with your dime, or night”—she turns the pamphlet over and points to the number and address—“and this center to come to for a twice-daily meeting of our society and a free hot lunch.”

  “That’s very generous, but it seems—what is this word, ‘Brooklyn’?—a little out of my way.”

  “If you need a ride, we’ve the Bible bus. Door to door, no fare and always a seat and a very congenial group of passengers aboard and nothing required inside the center but decorum.”

  “Thanks again. I’ll think about it, really. Goodnight.” I put the pamphlet into my coat pocket and pull out of the same pocket the notebook and from my pants my pen. It’s just, well, more accurate vernacular and suitable for that section of his poem: “That’s true that the universe or burst goes slow while we trump and rump along so fast, but aren’t we all or almost trying to make up or do for our own undivined lust time? Oh Hasenai, paltry maker of mephitic fishy poems when you would rather be or could like your dada or older breaders who trained you a rather rich unsolipsistic baker of fish-filled bisquits and pungent buns, crucify those last lines,” though I don’t know about the additional rhymed links or any of them in that linkage of lines. Not in the original for sure. Change it. Keep it. Rearrange it. “Thanks you very much,” the woman says to another man she stopped when he let the pamphlet she gave him fall out of his hand, and she picks it up, blows on it and goes. Just think about it then but jot it down now so you don’t forget and send Jun an aerogram asking if all these liberties with his work will be all right. But he’s already said in a recent Christmas card something like “Do your damndest bestest, Misty Dan, and then some and once more again my favoritest friend who isn’t a fabulist or Japanese, and then any way you sayest dost goes, even to the deez and doze. Hey, I play with your linguini also but not too well, so what about that Joe? And here convey big season’s greetings much too early I know, but Christmas has become a temporal event in Japan also and the post lines in the ensuing weeks are the one lines I want to avoid.”

  I write in the notebook “That’s so for that’s true in Last One in is Out, Jun the Souring Shout—Let’s Croak, antepen stanz, and call mom, see and be with her too, and don’t just says, damn yous, dooz!”

  Sirens—police, fire or ambulance—heading my way though not necessarily to the crash. I look, still nothing, stop at a florist’s a half-block up I always seem to stop at down here for its original window displays on seasonal or topical themes. This one has a row of Pilgrim’s buckled shoes on the floor with flowers and earth in them and ceiling track-lights highlighting each one. The quick slide changes
behind it, from a projector I can’t see but believe is behind the screen, are of the various stages of a turkey: from two mating, to the birth of one, I close my eyes to the slides of a headless turkey running around, to one roasted and dressed on a festive table. Most of the shoe flowers I’ve seen but can’t name though once made an effort to. Exotic, must be from more Southern states at this time—perhaps the florist’s birthplace—or else I don’t get the point. Obsequial? Delphiniums: think that’s them. In the next shoe some sort of orchid: lady’s nose, girlie’s big toe, something close. Someone once started to teach me about them and trees and birds and their songs and leaves, but who? Yes, effort, once did, forgot or got stopped by that old chainsmoking translator what was his name, died of a long-windedly named kidney disease a month ago. Saw the obit and photo. Two columns and a sampler and appreciation of his work and list of the many writers he’d translated and often almost recomposed. Always a relatively poor and brusque though noble and articulate polyhistoric fellow. Loved Iceland for its cheap airfares, migratory birds and heroic prose. His name though. Shvern? Slappern? Slade? Once heard him read at the Y and nearly had to leave because it was in that last-leg delivery so many poets seem to favor when his real voice, when it wasn’t raucous before or after an outpour of cigarette coughs, was sonorous and strong. Like something unguent oozing through, but I was never adept at similes or even much esteemed their use. “A good simile,” Hasenai says in his poem “Look Alike,” which if I don’t find one weaker will be the weakest of all the poems I choose, “is like a computer readout compared to an acceptance letter, meaning rhyme and poetry are better and like acceptance letters can’t be written on a word-processing machine, or so it seems to me.” Deep forehead crease he once in an unusually puckish mood hid a toothpick in or two, but how’s it possible I forgot his of all translators’ names? Snipper, Switter, Stade? Drove a red Rambler I remember with its fenders held together by picture-framing wire and with no reverse or door handles outside or in. “Jump over,” he’d say when he drove us to our walks, or open the door on my side with a screwdriver and I’d sit on what looked like hay. Invariably cigarette ashes on his lap, vest and sleeves, which is such a characteristic cliché, and which he never—and this too—seemed to notice or whisk away, so they’d just float off or fall. And gaunt, worn, tall, with thick rich brown hair, which several people said he dyed, but he was never vain in that way, and close-cropped, and never in need of a shave. “I look like a toy goy in a boy’s play convertible,” he said, “but I doubt they ever fabricated one with a ravaged backseat replete with Flemish newspapers, Praenestine glossary, field guides, Audubon postcards and Low Franconian journals.” And tweeds. Even at breakfast at the colony I met Diana at several years later and where I started to accompany him on what he called his “quotedium post-scrambled egg and prune juice promenade.” And a tie. Rumpled, same one, college stripes and soup spots, shirt collars he ironed without removing the stays. Must remember to attend his memorial service at Columbia next week. Heard that many of the serious East Coast translators will be there instead of anything resembling a family. Lived alone, in a two-room Bronx apartment over a Syrian bakery which before that made bialys and before that Irish sodabread, “which tells you how long I’ve lived there and what rent I pay, place always toasty, except on the respective Sabbaths, even when it was a cold-water flat.” Because he refused to teach, which almost he alone of us got offers to, saying he was as driven to translate poetry as his poets were in delaying to create them, no students at the service except maybe a few who might have read him and venerated his dedication and work. A number of those other translators are what’s been discouraging me from going though I’ll go, but not to talk about possible literature positions anyone might know of at some not-too-distant school and the latest translating grants and awards which Switch, it is, Simon Oliver Stritch, in fact, often got, though far as I know never went to memorials, literary functions and parties to make contacts and get references and inside dope, but what is it I started out to say? Right. Stritch urged me to hold off any but the most utilitarian interest in fauna and flora till I got to around his age and had nothing better to do with my nontranslating time than take trips to bird and seal sanctuaries and go on long art colony nature-walks. He even, after a while, wouldn’t let me accompany him on one and also checked out every colony library book on the subjects, so much did he want me to finish a large body of work before I was forty when he said most promising translators get restless and tired and need to get permanent addresses and partners and, because of their sinking incomes and no eventual pensions, comparatively easy tenure-track teaching jobs. “Send me your next book,” he said when I last saw him, which I did and then another copy care of his publisher, but he never acknowledged receipt. On both I wrote my inscription for that time: “From the poets and me or I,” and added a lie: “To the contemporary master of us all,” hoping he wouldn’t see through the compliment and that he’d write back he essentially liked my translation and would do what he could to get it reviewed and in the future boost my work and grant chances and maybe even help me get a university appointment or let me know of an opening of one, but why couldn’t I remember his name? Shame maybe, that I also thought to use him. More likely some different kind of slip, one with lots of answerable or to some people logical problematical possibilities predicated on something I don’t quite understand now though as far as I’m concerned—But what do I mean by logical possibilities, if I didn’t mean probabilities, or even answerable or problematical or possible or predicational ones? And how can I defend “different kind of slip” when I know damn well when it comes down to it—What I mean is that when I get to the deepest truth of it or something like that the possibility can’t be, what? Just drop this or go back a bit. Shame. That I forgot his name. Simon Oliver something or another—oh shit, can’t believe it—spit, slip, snit, shift, Stritch.

  “Like a nice flower, mister?” boy’s voice behind me. I turn. Foot shorter, slim, around fourteen, dark-skinned, seems like black hair, olive skin more like it, Mideastern, smiling, insincerely, continuously, tiny chipped front teeth, gypsy could be, seen plenty but much more aggressively and usually choosing to go after a man holding a woman’s hand or two men doing the same, holding out to me a carnation and I say “No thanks, just window-shopping.”

  “Yes, from me,” and sticks it in my hand, closes my fingers around the stem, “Looks nice,” and I say “Christs, what do I do with you?” and he says “Buy it,” and I say “Maybe just to get rid of you,” and think quarter? two? and he says “A dollar please.”

  “A dollar please? Thought you were giving them away at first, though figured pretty quickly once it came back to me what city I was still in that—forget it. I’ve really nothing against this city. Don’t want to make generalizations about it either and no doubt because this city doesn’t make it easy to make them, though I knew soon enough I’d have to cough up something to you, but a buck?”

  “No, not giving—selling. Beautiful red rose. One no more anywhere like it in the city. True. You shake no but flower is fresh, like new. Smell it.”

  “I know what it smells like. And it’s a beautiful red carnation—at least one of those in the caryo I think it is family—and not wilted but certainly not new. But okay. Let me smell one again. I can use a big lift.” I sniff. Nothing much. Harder. I smell car and bus exhaust. Even deeper. Trace of burnt coffee from someplace, but didn’t May say that was toxic to noxious petrochemical fumes drifting over the ridge and river from New Jersey’s gasworks? “Gorgeous. Never smelt a flower that smelt so much like a flower before. Seriously, I’ve a cold in my nose, but thanks,” and I try giving it back to him.

  “No, true. Brand-new. And cost me not a dollar each but close.”

  “Come on, kid, what do you take me for? This is my city. I used to shine shoes on these streets when I was half your age, but only in the daytime.”

  “So what do you say to me this for?”

  “So
what am I saying?” He nods. “I’m saying, you work this late, it’s not healthy for a kid your age. I’m also saying, up and down Brooklyn’s biggest boulevards I went with my wooden shoeshine box my dad made me pay him back for on time payments, so I’m saying I’ve known the price of things and value of a nickel and dime. So if you paid twenty-five cents, I’m saying finally, for one of these flowers, it was a lot, not that I’m saying anything bad or angry against you, remember that.”

  “No, wrong. Ten dollars a dozen to me. Maybe I was cheated, because they tell me where they sell them that Mexico flower fields where they grow are drowned by rain all year. Still, give it to a beautiful lady. Wish her on it. She make you her first mate.”

  “Now that’s what I’d like, no horsing around there, but not a dollar. Let’s say fifty cents, since you sure ain’t looking at a pile of money, my friend. And just for the smell and to have held it, because right after I pay I’ll give it back for you to sell to someone else.”

  “No, you pay for, you keep. That’s the fair bargain, so a dollar,” and smiling again he sticks out his hand. Hungarian or Basque or even Berber letters though familiar numbers except for what looks like an upside-down nine are tattooed on his palm.

  “What language is that?”

  “Of what?” Closes his hand.

  “Those letters and numbers mean anything? No harm in telling me. Numbers aren’t, except for at the top and bottom of pages, but written words are my business.”

  “You want to know?” Opens his palm, presses it over his right eye and closes the left eye. His smile widens. Carious too. Lights flash off them, move. From streetlights, headlights. “They say things only my people know.”