Geoffrey Bartholomew - Manhattan Noir 2 - The Classics

then Artie sold the building

Two doors up was the saloon

busy lunch an’ lazy afternoons

nights packed with young guys

J.J. the owner knew me from when

I was a kid, burned my arm on

his ’48 Buick, Irish guys laughing

that fat kid in the photo, that’s

me, walking by the bar in 1950

Stampalia the chef had just died

               announcing lunch

               he’d sound an old bugle

               this time his aorta blew

I got the job

old guys in the bar whispered

but I was big, fast, an’ funny

no bugles, just Jimmy Fats

I won ’em over with laughs

I loved that place

In the doo-wop band

               I sang lead, us guys

               from Aviation High

we cut some songs, never made it

Joey overdosed on skag

Lou got married with kids

Willy stepped on a mine in Nam

me, I kept cooking an’ eating

McSorley’s in the ’70s

               me & an’ Frank the Slob

               we humped it all

Ray the waiter, then George

               he was the best

               took care of everyone

workers, cops, students, firemen

we played nags an’ numbers

               then George quit

               oldtimers died off

Frank’s fuckin’ bitch drone began

waiters coming an’ going

               the only sane ones

Minnie the cat an’ me

Shit, I was up to 630 by ’79

when I fell in love

Lace was beautiful and big

so we starved an’ screwed to 260

after the baby, she got mental

nights she cried a lot

it sounded like me far off

but I can’t remember when

One black night I woke up

               Lace was gone

note said she went to L.A.

               that was it

I don’t think it was love

just some kind of lonely thing

fat people get

Still, I was McSorley’s chef

I was 500 an’ floating

               little Tanya screaming

               Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!

raising a kid alone ain’t easy

the fucking dog Blacky

               big Lab, shedding

hated the heat he always did

I was on the throne when he

ripped her head halfway off

               broke her neck

the funeral was like Ma’s

at Lancia’s on Second Avenue

next to the old 21 Place

the guys from the bar

murmured condolences

               shook their heads

if Lacey hadn’t run away

if I hadn’t been on the shitter

if, if, a million ifs

Back at work

Frank’s fuckin’ bitch

               became a foul mantra

nothing to say nor do

that’s when I began

               to eat

really eat

I couldn’t get out of bed

fucking buzz in my ear

               a numb hissing

               finally I got up

then the buzz was a hornet

the floor rose up, stung me

sideways the last thing I saw

some pizza crust and the doll

Tanya’s dusty Barbie

That was the end of Jimmy Fats

they buried me out in Queens

               between Tanya an’ Ma

the stone says 1939-1990

but how’s anybody to know

               you know

what really happened?

Central Park

(Originally published in 1969)

Two years ago I was walking in Central Park around the shallow bowl of water beneath the dollhouse Norman castle that is the weather station. I had approached from the north. I was not thinking.

Ahab said, “You are despondent.” He mushed his consonants. His s was lisped. A five-foot branch was wedged rather far back in his mouth. The bark was rough. A string of blood and saliva dipped and swayed from his jaw.

I considered a little. “Disconsolate.”

He gagged, dropped the branch and insisted on despondence. His consonants were clear and his lisp was gone. I shrugged. We went on in silence. Padding alongside, he cocked his head up at intervals to look at me. Then he stopped and began snuffing the air. He pinpointed the direction and trotted off with a light springy step. His vibrancy sometimes fires me with jealousy. It was an oak, which he read with his nose. Then he made a tight circle, deciding, balanced on three legs and urinated.

He returned and said, “Disconsolation suggests an edge of emotional keenness, whereas despondence—”

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

“You err. Whereas, as I was saying, despondence is essentially ennui, a moribund state lightly salted with bitterness.”

“You cut me up, moving the way you do.”

“Do I?” The corners of his long mouth pulled back in his equivalent of a smile, which is not grotesque, but which, neither, is the legitimate article. You must project certain responses to understand that it is a smile. “That’s improvement,” he said.

“I don’t see it.”

“Sure you do.”

“I don’t like this conversation.”

He sat down and scratched his ear. He asked me if I would like to throw a stick for him to chase. He was attempting rapprochement, but he was also going for himself. Like everyone. Though why this should matter, I don’t know. Quivering, poised, eager, focused, he was naked and ugly in his exposure. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have minded. That is what he is, that is what he is about. But he had made me angry. And the walk had not helped. I was still weary, incredibly. Often the walks were successful. Watching him run and cavort and do all his healthy animal things, my shuffle would lengthen to a stride and I would begin to feel vigorous and defined, primed with purpose. “No, I don’t want to throw a stick for you.”

“I sigh,” he said. “Langorously.”

“Shutup.”

Climbing the walk to the weather station we came upon seven fat pigeons pecking bread crumbs in a semicircle around a thin young girl in a skirt that, it being short and she being seated, was well up her skinny thighs. She wore no stockings. Her knees were bony, like flattened golf balls. Ahab’s ears clicked forward and his shoulders bunched. He went into his stifflegged walk. Fifteen feet from the fat pigeons. His mouth opened, drops of spittle appeared. Ten feet from the fat pigeons. He breathed with explosive little pants. Five feet from the fat pigeons. He now looked a sloppily worked marionette. Four feet from the fat pigeons….

I caught him an instant before he lunged, an instant so close to the act that they shredded into one another. “Ahab, heel !”

He jerked, half wheeled, went up on his hind legs and scored the pavement with his claws when he struck, but there was no forward progress.

In place, eyes wild on the seven fat pigeons thrashing the air in panicked escape, he performed a zealot’s dance, a dance of possession. He was a plastique detonated within a steel room, all that power, all that energy — contained.