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-- For Daphne, The Commodore
Dear Ms. Wellington:
You do not know me. Let us begin at the pith of my argument. Very recently I have become acquainted of someone you have long known -- and hurt deeply! I met this extremely fascinating, highly moral, and very engaging rara avis in my New York town house through intromission by a common friend.
As a psychiatrist, I can tell you that your victim is a multiple genius, the clinical term polymath also applying, and even if for no other reason, deserves better. However, it is reprehensible that you have willfully much harmed this, your friend, when you should have, rather, revered him as your fine young champion, having introduced you to important impresarios, mentored your writing and logical thinking adeptness, promoted self-esteem, incited courage, and given you shelter; all because you were in need.
You may wish to know that some of my preternatural zeal for helping put things to right was engendered by a very painful failure of my own. The common friend referred to above was, at one time, my patient while recovering from a traumatic head wound and other difficulties caused by a traffic accident.
Due to a horrible error, for which I accept full responsibility, she was left not only with the permanent memory loss and learning problems suffered in the accident. Through a very damaging mix-up in my telephoned instructions to a pharmacist, involving the identical sound of "two" and "too," in regard to medications for her severe, post-traumatic depression and an anxiety disorder, her disablements were heartrendingly added to.
For this I cannot ever forgive myself . Now, though I retain my license to practice medicine, I spend my days helping her; and looking, in vain perhaps, but seeking nevertheless, for ways to undo what I have done -- and, yes, making it my business -- and at long last -- to intercede in other lives badly damaged through any misfeasance or malfeasance, especially those in the social sphere. An arena in which, esteemed by my colleagues, I have forty years of mostly frustrating, nearly fraudulent, so-called professional experience.
I am writing to you because, after hearing this man's incredible story, I must. Because it is not too late to mend tragic and cruel breaches in the fabric of The Good, I must. These tears resulted from (if I am to believe this laudable personage's tale -- and I do, in fact, every word of it) your utter confusion, Freudian transference and projection, and heeding those who are referred to most eloquently in Shirley Jackson's Lottery. Of course, you shall not be surprised to hear that this magnificent man's name is Mr. Owen LaSalle.
It remains to stress one thing: that when you have heard and understood the contents of this enissive, it is hoped that you find yourself compelled -- nay, impelled -- to assist me and the bravlady, my charge, who is also an interested party, (both of us upon this writing at my estate off Tuscany), in returning Mr. LaSalle -- when we can ascertain his position -- to his rightful place within your circle in that -- pardon me, but -- atavistic, provincial, midwestern pastoral; which for reasons to me incomprehensible, is of titular importance to him. To give him back the place in your lives, hearts and minds he so rightly occupied before you, and other specified parties, en masse, defenestrated moral compass and, so to speak, took to reopening the Dreyfus Affair using an unwitting double.
You will please, now, unguardedly attend: upon entering my library, I was struck at once by dint of his striking mien; and, a classisist myself, it registered that he was reading Sophocles in the original Greek. After we had had a chance to become acquainted, at my urging he began to tell me in great detail about the events of the four years prior to our meeting, and the strange circumstances in which he found himself upon awakening one morning several months after the terrible shock of encountering the vicious vagary of an ironically misplaced poster outside his condominium, advertising the Detroit Opera Season, led to his in extremis flight, driving all night to a small city across from Staten Island. What follows is, horresco referens, the story I demand, in the name of morality, that you hear.
...even through the wall, the sound of the television in the next room was, yet again, nearly deafening. The problem, at four a.m., was the schizophrenic brother of the owner of Sayreville Rooming House. Lying in the musty bed of a tiny, dark room, I leaped to my feet, prepared to go next door and solve the problem. It might take forever for someone else to come out along the long hall of the second floor and do something.
I never got the second leg into my jeans. The afflicted was knocking loudly at my door a moment later asking for a smoke; television still cranked absolutely as high as it would go. Standing in the long dusty space, shaking and blinking from drugs, medications, the withdrawal of same -- or who knew what -- holding a freshly-lit cigarette in his left hand and another one, also lit, behind his right ear, the guy jerked in auto-spasm on my sforzando cadence: "No, it's four in the morning, can you turn your TV DOWN!?"
This strange, noir hall of errors configured in a torturous way to remind me of much happier days in the sequence of patinated music practice rooms back at old Schott Hall. It had been home for eleven weeks at $65 per -- not that it was much more than a place to sleep, or maybe indulge a personal yet somewhat palliative interest in forming my intractable thoughts and obstreperous feelings into, I'm certain, obscure, perhaps dreamlike poems.
Most nights I would join the run on, multiple streams of turnpike flow in the Jaguar -- left-over from a six year, post-marital bliss, quick-fix attempt, stock and commodities brokerage position cum spending spree, on the tails of an anti-intellectual, philistine, amateur Machiavellian, in-law fashioned divorce (was it William S. Burroughs who wrote that, in America, all intellectuals are considered deviants?) -- which vehicle, among other things, badly needed a brake job -- well, my intentionally limited clientele [doubtless because I spent my time monitoring their positions and analyzing markets rather than, necessitas non habet legem, do as I was told (read: threatened) and probably as saving my marriage would have dictated, push to open hundreds of new accounts instead] had most certainly been very well cared for indeed. "Geenuhyus is a bull market," yes, but sophistry aside, it happens that genius presages a bull market; though still (sorry, Thales) "the cobbler's children go barefoot" again -- into Manhattan -- about 35 minutes north -- and hang around in bars, up-scale or not, or meet the odd personals ad at bar/art-flick/concert/ poetry reading/museum/restaurant, to try to arrive at something that meant a connection, a beginning to divert me from the fact and course of my recent disconnection in Michigan.
In a few hours the sun came up one more time and, encouraged by the absence of television noise, sleep returned until ten-thirty. The old chair and window suggested a place to transmogrify into the waking world. A bleak, black Washington Road came into focus, wet from a March snowfall. Half a dozen New Jersey lottery tickets needed disposal. I put on a clean shirt before picking up a book borrowed from the library down the street: Journey to the End of the Night, by Cline. The novel unconditionally befriended me for a few hours till it was time to go out and eat.
A liquor store stood next door to the nearest restaurant. Abruptly, thoughts of eating lunch no longer obtained; a gallon of Thunderbird replaced them. The sun had come out. Parked cars glinted with color and chrome in the parking lot behind the stores, but they looked to me like some surreal car-world honor guard next to the Jag, brakes or no.
Hopefully not for the last time, the brake shoes stopped me at the rooming house, complaining in a declasse metal-on-metal sound evocative of pigs about to feed. This set the stage for my Salmanazar of fourth-rate wine to invite the admiration (if diluted by ataxaphasia) of several alfresco colleagues. One miles gloriosus offered to demonstrate how "a real man drinks 'the bird.'" There was a battered old wooden radio on the bedside table. A missing tuning knob brought my resourcefulness into play such that soon the thin green metal cap from my jug was functioning flawlessly. I made a futile gesture to gentility in electing a reasonable volume in order to, at least mentally, distance some of my neighbors.
Rock and roll channels weren't mawkish enough and hadn't the secondhand Schadenfreude inventory, so I switched to country. Then I poured a glass of Thunderbird into my old coffee mug from Shearing Payne and settled in next to the window. Extreme vigilance was required in avoiding classical stations -- serious music loosed a grotesque parade of salivating gargoyles down Washington Road: a lost highly promising musical career, lost wife, loss of home, of each and every "friend," of youth, of mind, and the poster. But country almost always reminded me mercifully of other peoples' miseries. Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys.
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Ray, Lance and Burton had been drinking for three days up in Ray's apartment by the time I got there. None of us had regular jobs as of very recently; just occasional temp work or pawn loans kept the rent paid and the booze flowing. The door opened in front of me that day and all I could see for a minute was cigarette smoke pervaded by light from the little patio which looked out on one of the crummier views in downtown Detroit.
The building had been a motel at one time and now the rooms were rented on a monthly basis as "studio" apartments. Gradually, as I walked into apartment 318, I could begin to make out a few figures and some shapes, which turned out to be busted furniture, but at first just appeared to be garbage strewn about the place; some torn magazines, broken ash trays, became clear. The computer was alone in the middle of the room, the only thing that seemed to be in one piece.
Lance was talking on the phone, which was also broken; you could call out but the ringer was smashed or something and no one knew if there were incoming calls. He was talking without his dentures so his drunken, slurred speech sounded like water balloons rolling around inside a clothes dryer. Apparently, he was attempting to talk a priest on the other end of the line into enofringing over some bags of food. I knew him to be amazingly successful with this routine; not that anyone was eating very much, and more often than not people who used the stove or oven fell asleep or passed out before a pizza or some other concoction could be rescued and eaten.
Ray was sitting on the bed and I took the chance that it would hold both of us. After he had also joined the firm, until recently we had traded commodities together at Shearing Payne for five years. During that time, Ray's brother Greg, currently in a detox program, had devised a computer model that he was certain could give reliable buy and sell signals, such that it would only be a matter of months before we could all retire in the South Seas palace of our choice. Privately, I was more than a bit skeptical. I had surreptitiously looked at a hard copy of the program and, while there was precious little documentation, I still had enough time with it to experience serious doubts about several lines of code at the point in the algorithm where handling the confluence of data would be critical. But, enfants perdus, it was fruitless to cast doubt on Greg's program. It operated like the McGuffin in Alfred Hitchcock's explication of mystery and thriller movies. Without it, there wouldn't be a show.
These guys and I were perpetually on the verge of being dead broke. Yet there we were, hovered around the computer, waiting for Soybeans to give us their signal to buy. The atmosphere was charged with a mass-hypno-drunken excitement centering on the imminent soybean signal. I mixed an iceless drink of half and half, Canadian and water, in a big plastic tumbler with a crack in it. There never seemed to be any money for luxuries like ice. In the corner were a case and a half of quarts of whiskey. Overcoats were piled on top to protect the bottles from flying objects if somebody got pissed or from people falling.
I asked Ray, next to me on the bed, if I could open the patio door to get some of the smoke out. It was a thick, sticky fog in there. He screamed something at Lance who pushed the door open a few inches, and who I think said to me: "Okay, Owen, I 'specially been keepin' it fresh in here for ya. I know ya don't smoke. -- Hey, Owen, how come you quit the music business when your wife hit the road?" Ray started to stop him from this line of inquiry, but I said, resignedly, that it wasn't a problem. "Well I believed I could get her back by ASAP making the money I thought necessary to do so, and after a few years, the music business grapevine and political machine had blackballed me. I was, simply put, a pariah. If you'd like to know why, take a sabbatical and read the thirteen volumes of The Golden Bough by the anthropologist Sir James Frazer, you'll probably find photographs of my detractors right in there, for your convenience. It's all about the origin of these types of primitive religious and magical rites, beliefs and practices." "Hey, Owen, can you write down the name of that Golden Bow for me, and the guy who wrote it?" "Sure, Lance. So otherwise, how are things going with your therapy at the Behavioral Sciences Center?" "Not so good. They kicked me out of the program. The psychologist guy told me I was, what were the words? 'being mentally ill incorrectly.' Then he went back to his negotiations with the priest. All this time Burton had said nothing but I had a feeling he was about to.
Burton had been listening, of course. He thought of himself as damage control officer. A Vietnam Vet, they said once he'd been on the fast track at a large downtown bank and trust company before the war. Something must have gone wrong over in Vietnam. When he got back to his hometown of Sergeant Bluff, Iowa, he started drinking. The first time I met him he had been drinking for a week or more on the other side of the Missouri River with a group of aboriginal Americans from the nearby reservation. He had a wife and kids back there somewhere, though Ray cautioned us never to ask about all that. As far as we knew he'd not seen them lately.
Suddenly Burton stood up somewhat stiffly, had a look around him as if something was wrong, and started to feel for his back while his body jerked like a person afraid he was about to drop something. He felt for his pulse with shaking hands through all the jerking. This signified another anxiety attack; the indication was three little white pills.
Ray took a small orange plastic vial out of his shirt pocket with the same hand that held his cigarette and burned a hole right through the thin cloth. "Shit!" he said loudly, then lunging off the bed, he teetered in front of the shaking man and managed to get three pills in his mouth and help him swallow them down with some Canadian. It took about twenty-five minutes but Burton calmed down considerably. "Thanks Ray;" he said, "I'm sorry, Owen, I can't go back into that jungle. I can't get you out of there." "Please Burton, just relax," I gestured to him palms out, "It would take Alexander the Great to do that, no offense."
Everybody was quiet for a time and then we all decided to mix ourselves another drink. I moved to the sink first and got another 50/50 into my yellow plastic tumbler, then returned to sit by the computer. Ray came over and said, "Do you know what the beans did today, Owen?" I said I didn't know, but looked expectantly at him. "They made a head and shoulders formation on increasing volume." He had a look on his face like he'd just won a big hand at poker. "No shit?" I said. "That's right, the computer went nuts telling us to short the beans."
"I thought the consensus on the street is to buy beans, not to short them." Ray shook his head for a long time, very slowly, looking out the window. Then he said, "Owen, Owen, Owen, when will you learn to listen to the markets and not the Wall Streeters?" He looked very disappointed in me. "In the morning," he said, "we short ten contracts of the December beans." He took a long pull at his drink. "As soon as Lance is through screwing up the phone, I'm calling Heather and borrowing the money. You'd better call that woman you still see from the Pontiac Club, Sondra what's-her-name, and get your money ready, they want cash only all of a sudden." I said I would try. He yelled for Lance to get off the phone. Lance hung up. The receiver flew through the air to Ray who rattled off a number to dial; it was Heather's. His mouth left the drink and his throat made clearing noises while a lighter flared for another cigarette.
As Heather was regaled in a soft, syrupy voice, Lance and Burton gathered around. I held my tumbler up to the chart on the computer screen; looking through it, the yellow plastic made an optically exaggerated male genitalia formation in the drink.
[[[[[[[[[]]]]]]]]]]
During the afternoon, in my by then stimulus-controlled cocoon, I got some good ones going way back to Buck Owens' "It Takes People Like You (To Make People Like Me)" and such, only slightly overproduced, newer selections as "Let's Give 'Em Something to Talk About" and "Not on Your Love." At four-thirty, upbeat premonitory visitations dictated following The Yellow Brick Road, which transported me down the second story stairs, put me in the car, slipped a CD into the stereo, let the engine warm a little, and spun off in the direction of the Emerald State Building.
I allowed myself the habit of carrying a small, Treasury model 9-mm pistol in the breast pocket of my jacket, and this afternoon was no exception. The divorce therapist once told me that the Gun Thing was about competing with my police officer father, though I never had seen his piece. My own feelings were that I carried the heavy metal because twice I'd almost been killed in NYC, both times by multiple assailants whom I survived by prete nding to be carrying, in one instance, and getting up off of $500 in the other. Clearly, most of the assorted occasional women I met wouldn't appreciate this feature, but I couldn't do it all. Someday when I developed super powers or moved to Iceland, I'd leave the 9-mm at home. And yes I knew all about drunks with guns -- believe me!
So I drove north, listening to a CD called She Blinded Me With Science feeling hopeful that I would find something interesting in The City. As that CD was finishing, on my right, a portentous adagio contrabassoon matrix, the grime-darksome mammoths of Manhattan implacably accompanied me. I felt I should try and handle some non-orchestral, tenor with piano, Schubert songs. The first selection was Der Doppelgnger. Heinrich Heine's lyrics threw resonant shadows of Düsseldorf on the walls of the Holland Tunnel:
Still is the night, the streets are calm,
In this house lived my treasure;
She long ago left this town,
But the house still stands in the same place.
There stands also a man, and stares into the heavens,
And wrings his hands for pain;
I shudder when my face I see,
The moon shows me my own form.
Thou double, thou pale companion!
Why do you mock the love-sorrows
That tortured me in this place
So many nights, in bygone times?
When I emerged, I just made random course moves, turning here and there until, in Times Square on West 45th Street, I passed a hole in the wall, step-down, tourist restaurant with celebrity pictures covering the whole of the front window space. It was called Bonnie's Italian Restaurant. Maybe some kind of kitschy aura in there, I thought.
Around 5:00 p.m., finding a parking place where I could keep an eye on the car was impossible, but I found something on 6th Avenue and walked back down 45th. The place was so tiny I walked past it and reached the end of the block, breaking on the square. A bag lady in badly depleted rags, who suffered from micturition, with a shopping cart full of mysterious keepings, was shrieking incoherently at a hooker in a gold lam micro-dress with negotiable pink panties. In the midst of the ravings, the businesswoman asked me, en passant: "Do you want to go out?" Standing there bewildered, wondering how I could have missed my mark, I must have blended well with the throng. Doubling back twenty-five yards; there it was. The entrance led me in through a universe of signed 8x10 b&w glossies.
Down some steps, more framed glossies, a little bar, tended by a black-haired man of medium height and build, about 55, who was very focused on reading the Times. He interrupted himself long enough to greet me, nearly cordially, ask if there would be just one this evening and if I'd be having dinner. A dining area opened up in back, with felt or cardboard reprosuctions of mostly red Italian-looking scenes.
A curious part of the ambience was the Christmas decorations hanging all over, including a large decorated tree, though it was March; and there was no room for them, regardless. By the dust and the obvious difficulty in doing so, I was certain that they weren't ever taken down.
The bartender introduced himself as Gary, and I told him my name was Owen, ordering a glass of Burgundy as I took a seat in the middle of the little bar. I immediately noticed to my right it curved inward just enough to allow for two more seats below the celebrity window, and that behind them in a small space there was an old jukebox. Frank Sinatra crooned from it in his pleasant quasi-Sprechgesang. A moment's inspection revealed 90% of the records in the machine were of Frank Sinatra. The little clerical guy inside my head filed this along with the Xmas theme. There was one John Denver-Julio Iglesias duet: "Perhaps Love," an off-the-record poignant pang favorite of mine.
Gary started reading the Times. Right off I settled into, in retrospect, an unusual mood of calm well-being that could not be attributed to the Libation Expectation Effect. Something else was at work. Could it have been the old Christmas decorations? I even forgot that my brother, two sisters, and my mother had recently informed me I was no good, was too old to do anything important or finish my Ph.D., had no talent, should be hard at work janitoring, and my wife was right to have left me. Most horrendous of all, I should stay away from Michigan and from them in particular. Normally this, catalyzed by Christmas decorations, would have reduced me to a malaise competitive with the toxicity of the East River. Originally it had landed me in a hospital. But not so here at Bonnie's. I wondered why and ordered another wine.
Gary spoke to me through his New York Times, "Are you sightseeing or do you live here Owen?"
"It's rather hard to define my situation."
"Ah, a 'Hard To Define...' There's more than a few of you passing through New York... If you are thinking of moving here you'll need between twenty to twenty-five thousand dollars to do it, I'm just telling you the truth, of course this would be on a very modest scale, no frills; and you'd have to start looking for a job immediately." The way Gary said these things he made it sound as though Sir Edmund Hillary had made a mistake in choosing Mt. Everest -- he should have attempted a move to the Upper West Side instead.
"Do you aways speak this directly to people you've just met?" I asked.
"Only to the 'Hard To Defines.'" When he said this, laughing at the same time, the words took place just below the laughter somehow; and they seemed to look you right in the eyes. His, by the way, were as black as his slicked-back hair; as the newsprint on his paper.
Time and wine passed. Gary was in the back talking on the phone with some caller whom it sounded as though he knew, and didn't want to. The door half a dozen steps behind me swung open. A young woman swung in with it. There was a medium-sized white dog with a seeing-eye handle on its back leading her. She was otherwise alone, smiling presciently down towards the bar with a delicate-featured, beautiful face, upon which rested a pair of unusual oval-shaped, copper-framed shades. The woman wore a navy peacoat with matching sailor hat that rode a little over five feet off the floor of Bonnie's Italian Restaurant.
A moment later they were down the stairs. The coat and hat came off to reveal one of those short, fitted, little black, square décolletage dresses that she obviously had the shape for. A single strand of what appeared to be flawless pearls encircled her neck; above two, very much larger, fuller ones.
"Hello. Excuse me, I'm blind, is there a seat at the bar that's free?" she asked in an FM-quality, ethereally melodic voice.
"Yes," I said sanguinely, "they all are, you can even have this one if you'd rather."
"No problem, I'll sit next to you. Come on Rodney," she said and, feeling her way lightly across the shoulders of my pricey, gray wool, better times blazer, before I could offer to help, sat down next to me on my right side, nearer the jukebox, slightly rubbing my hip with her left knee s she twisted forward on the stool. Rodney immediately made himself at home underneath us. Gary had hung up the phone with a bang, then, looking around the corner, noticed the new arrival. "Miss Desmond! What a pleasure to find you gracing our little bistro once again."
This textbook example of New York serendipity looked, really, really good; glamorous was the word. After our host asked the ritual greeting questions, the jukebox caught her attention and momentarily had her turning away from me, so it was possible to dwell on her big hair which, strange but true, was precisely copper-colored.
Introducing herself as Anne, before Gary could get a word out, which was fast, she shook my hand; I said my name, then she ordered a glass of "...have what he's (?) oh, Burgundy, (?) having, sure, (small sniff), Burgundy...."
"Owen, tell me what you look like so I can get to know you." -- Well, that was unabashed, I thought, what kind of woman is this?
"Oh...um, people tell me I remind them of somebody, now who is it? Oh, I know, the young Orson Welles!"
Gary looked up from the other end of the bar where very sporadically he'd been taking drink orders from a couple of skinny, middle-aged, foreign-looking waiters. "Orson Welles in that film with Loretta Young, where James Cagney is a good guy; at that age, yes, very much, they're right."
I said, "No, not Cagney. Litle Ceasar...who was Little Ceasar?"
"...Edgar J. Robinson," she said, looking pleased, shaking back her interesting hair for a moment.
I said, "Edgar G.".