Leonard Michaels - Sylvia

I told her that below the ice of Antarctica, huge trees had become coal, which meant the theory of continental drift was true; that Norell, an American designer, had introduced culottes — pants that looked like a skirt — for city street wear; and that American Orientalists had left for Egypt to save the temple of Ramses II from the waters of the Aswan High Dam, built by Russian engineers.

I wanted to see Marcel Marceau and his mime company at City Center, and Krapp’s Last Tape at the Province-town Playhouse, just down the street at 133 MacDougal. Sylvia enjoyed both performances. I had to make the suggestion, buy tickets, and, when it was time to leave for the theater, say, “Come on, come on, let’s go. We’ll be late.”

She didn’t like to commit herself, far in advance, to leaving the apartment at a particular moment. Who knows how you’ll feel when the moment comes? Besides, it could be more pleasing to read reviews than actually go to a movie or a play.

I told Sylvia that Dr. Menges, professor of Central Asian languages at Columbia University, had been stopped by a gang of kids while taking his evening walk on Morning-side Drive and knocked to the pavement with a heavy board. He rose, flailed at them with his cane. They ran away. He spoke to a reporter and was quoted at length. “I have traveled alone through the interior of the Caucasus. . amid primitive tribes. I have gone among bandits. But in a so-called civilized city,” he said, “near a large university, I am attacked by jungle beasts.” It was clear he meant “Negroes.” In the early sixties the word appeared with increasing frequency in the newspapers.

Awakened affectionately by Sylvia. She looked at my cigarettes beside the bed and said, “You shouldn’t smoke so much. For my sake.” I said, “I smoke because we fight.” She began biting my arm. I yelled. She leaped out of bed and announced, “That’s the beginning and the ending of a day.” I lay there a long time. Finally, I dragged myself out of bed and turned on fire for coffee, got bread, honey, and an orange. Sylvia went back to bed and said, “You really take good care of yourself.” I ate a slice of bread and put everything else back. Then I sat on the bed beside her. I was about to make amends. She sat up, slapped my face, and said, “Have a cigarette.” Later, still in bed, me sitting beside her, Sylvia brought up the New Year’s Eve party we’d gone to in the Brooklyn tenement. She said that when Willy Stark kissed her, she had turned her face at the last moment so that he kissed her on the cheek, not the lips. She said she should have necked with him so I could have seen it and had my evening ruined. I said, “I would have left and never seen you again.” She said, “That’s impossible. You love me. Besides, your mother would make you return to me.”

JOURNAL, JANUARY 1961

Almost all of our friends were Jewish, black, homosexual, more or less drug-addicted, very intelligent, very nervous, or a combination of two or three of these things. Willy Stark was from Mississippi, very black, very handsome. We met at the University of Michigan. When he moved to New York, we’d go out to jazz clubs and sit for hours, listening to the music, hardly talking. He never said very much. We heard Charlie Mingus at the Five Spot. Another time, we heard Miles Davis at Basin Street. It was a rainy night in the middle of the week, and there were few people in the audience. After one of Davis’s solos, performed with his back to the audience, Willy whispered, “He’s a poet.” Though I couldn’t say exactly what Willy had in mind, I was moved by his comment. The university hadn’t made his feelings thin and literary. He’d been raised on a farm. He knew about guns, wild weather, snakes, jazz, and much else that was real. Compared to Willy, I considered myself effete. He hardly talked; I talked too much and too easily. He made me wonder if I’d believe the things I said, let alone think them in the first place, if I didn’t get caught up in the momentum of talk. Sylvia never objected to me spending time with Willy. He was among the few exceptions to her rage.

Willy invited us to a New Year’s Eve party in Brooklyn. At midnight, everyone kissing, Willy kissed Sylvia. Later, back on MacDougal Street, as we fell asleep, Sylvia said he had wanted more than a kiss. “He said you wouldn’t mind. He said you were hip.”

She thought about Willy’s kiss during the next few months, mentioning it several times, as if it had settled in her nervous system like a slow-growing virus. She also wanted more, at least in her fantasies, if not at the moment he kissed her. She said she’d turned her face away. That wasn’t enough.

Willy worked as a counselor three days a week in a drug rehabilitation program for high school kids. On weekends, he sometimes made extra money by selling heroin, sharing the profits with a radical group in Ann Arbor. Willy had no politics, only tremendous anger. The radicals took to him. In his silence, they heard what they wanted to hear. They introduced Willy to a heroin source in Montreal, and gave him the money for his first buy. Heroin came by freighter from refineries in Bulgaria. Willy drove to Montreal, picked up the heroin, then drove back to New York.

He rented three or four apartments in Manhattan, and would arrange to meet his distributors in one of the apartments. He didn’t tell them which apartment until the last minute. When they entered, the phone rang. It was Willy. He’d say they had ten minutes or so to get to another of his apartments. When they arrived there, the phone rang again, or else Willy was waiting with the heroin, a gun, and a bodyguard. If the distributors were two minutes late, Willy left. He believed that being punctual was crucial. He said, “If somebody’s late, somebody’s dead.”

When he completed a sale, he flew to an island in the Caribbean, checked into a hotel, and stayed drunk until he stopped feeling frightened. A few times he rented a car and crashed into a tree or a wall. For some reason, it helped to free him of his fear. He told me all this after the kissing incident, as if to give me something personal and keep our friendship whole. He also offered me a chance to sell drugs. I was very touched, and actually thought about doing it. He said all I had to do was wear a suit and stand on a street corner with a briefcase. I said no. We didn’t see each other again. Years later, I learned he had died of pancreatic cancer.

Through Willy, the healer-dealer, I had a sense of what it meant to be hip. He was my friend, but would have fucked Sylvia at the New Year’s Eve party, if she’d let him, while I was in the next room. We sat together in jazz clubs for hours, saying almost nothing. I’d feel myself entering a trance of music, the meaning of this minute. How sad, or exciting, or weird it was to be alive in the sixties. I heard it in the jazz voices in the dark, smoky clubs. One night, at the bar in Birdland, with Willy beside me, we listened to Sarah Vaughan. She sang “Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise. .” The wheeze in the rhyme of “breeze/Louise” vanished. She sang it out of existence, rendering only the exquisite mystery, such sweet and melancholy love as belonged to music in those days.

Because of our fights, Sylvia often didn’t begin studying until after midnight. Sitting on the edge of the bed, remains of dinner all about, she held a grammar book in her lap and flipped pages, sometimes glaring at the words as if they were a distraction from her real concern — me. She said I was “doing this” to her, starting fights, trying to ruin her chances, make her fail. In fact I was proud of her, but it’s true I was at least partly responsible for her suffering. I regretted having influenced her decision to study classics. She wasn’t much interested in Latin and Greek, but she did the work because she feared academic disgrace, and, maybe, despite all the bad feeling, she wanted to please me. Night after night, she steeped herself in Homer and Virgil, a frenzy of mechanical performance that may have reminded her of her childhood schooling.