Steve Katz - The Compleat Memoirrhoids - 137.n

After some time passed Putana visited, freshly doused in lavender and patchouli. “Meestehr Steeb,” she said, reaching for me with one of her pudgy paws. “Non dare mai. Non dare niente a quella. Mai. Mai , Meestehr Steeb.” Never give her anything. Nothing to that one. I felt a hopeless outrage. I wanted to argue, tell her how horrible this was, but my Italian wasn’t yet strong enough. I turned my back on her, and walked away, feeling her fingers score my shoulder. “Non dare niente.”

The week we left to go north to Verona (back to live in the civilized world, said a couple from Trieste who lived in the building) where I took a teaching job on a US base, there was a crisis in the house of Putana. The girl had escaped, they said. She had run away. They didn’t look worried. I was trying to negotiate our damage deposit, but there was too much distraction, Putana too preoccupied to listen to my plea for money back. The girl was loose for a couple of days, then recaptured. We heard her cries again, pitiful, hopeless, and we trembled with shame and impotence. We saw the Putana drag her through the hall below. They had shaved her head. Her face was swollen. My kids looked worried. How could this happen in the twentieth century, we asked each other? We came to realize that they had actually encouraged her to escape. There was a young man involved. They had let her sneak out to breed, to make a little slave for Fiorella when she grew old enough to need her own. Then they beat her just to show which side her bread never got buttered on. I was a coward, so powerless in the thrall of that cruelty, that barbarity. This wasn’t just a cultural difference. We left for the North before we found out if the mating had succeeded. Everything seemed futile — kindness, generosity, compassion. O humanity, I cry out for myself. O humanity, I cry out for thee. The Putana never returned our damage deposit.

This is a night market in Taipei. I would happily feel again what it’s like to be in Snake Alley. You go there to spend what you’ve got, and there’s a bargain under every streetlight. There is no such market in Denver, not even in New York City, Portland, L.A., Chicago. Throughout Southeast Asia these markets open only at night, allow people to shop after the subtropic heat and humidity of day has faded. The scene is crowded with families, merchants, hustlers, hawkers of the latest cures for arthritis and subtle conditions of the triple burner. There are many crazies, and monks, and beggars and hookers. From stores and street stalls people hawk all the world’s merchandise — the knock-off fashions, the computers, the cameras, the cell-phones, the TVs, the fake watches, the medications, the sneakers, the skateboards, the scooters, everything a consumer desires. Families are up late and loving it, loving the noise, the action, the shopping. The restaurants stay open all night, and are packed well past midnight with families and dating couples and odd tourists like ourselves. The food is always fresh and delicious.

Much of the commerce in Snake Alley is about the snakes. Snakes and sex. If you want to eat a snake you go to Snake Alley. You want a taste of sex, you go to the girls who live in the brothels on the street below the line of snake vendors. Snakes and sex here go together like hot dogs and mustard. To get what you want you pause by the line of snake vendors, in the tinny broadcast of music, the strings of tiny lights blowing in the breeze, the shirtless snake butchers. The snakes are skinned and hang from hooks behind the vendors’ tables, some still writhing. It’s a wide variety — long ones, short ones, some thick as your forearm, some thin as your pinky.

A young man, shirtless, in shorts and sandals, cigarette hanging from his lip, dragon tattoo across his left shoulder and down his arm, points at the snake he prefers, and the vendor slips it off the hook. Nearby a salesman at a folding table, wearing suit and tie, pitches his specially formulated moxa and liniments, his cupping set, his moxibustion system, all guaranteed to relieve whatever muscles ache, and soothe your joints that swell with arthritis. A kid breaks loose from a family watching this demo and crosses over to study the snakes. His mother pulls him back. Another young man, this one in striped sweater and pressed chino pants, negotiates at the stall. He looks like a college student. The snake guy slips the kid’s choice off the hook, bleeds the snake into a plastic cup, squeezes some of the snake bile on top of the blood, and adds this to an equal measure of wine. He hands the cup to the customer, who looks at the mixture, wrinkles his nose, takes off his glasses, shuts his eyes, and tips the stuff down his throat. He swallows and shakes his head, hands the cup back to the snake guy. In the brightly lit restaurant down some steps below the snake butchery, some solitary men, only men, are eating snake. The young man walks down between the restaurants into the dim, veiled orange and red lights that announce the brothels. Girls move like shadows in the shadows below the snake stalls. The young man enters a dim shack down there, fortified by the snake juice for his adventure in skin. When he emerges the snake he chose will have been stir-fried, perhaps with scallions, ginger, and bamboo shoots, ready to restore his strength.

The ritual at the snake stalls repeats and repeats. Neither Rafael nor I have the interest or courage to participate. The girls look beat up and nasty. The snakes twisting on the hooks, some of them longer than five feet, are victims of a visual pun that promotes their alleged function. I wonder if a language written in ideograms makes such visual puns more potent. I hope there’s more to it than that snake/penis analog. I hope also that the advent of Viagra, Cialis, and other boner enhancers will save the lives of a few snakes. That could be a beneficial side effect.

Jayhood Wright was my park. James Renner, online historian of Washington Heights, indicates my spelling has always been wrong. It’s J. Hood Wright. Wright was the “banker and financier from Philadelphia whose home once was located within the 6 1/2 acre park.” The city bought the property in 1925, and converted it to a recreation space and park consistent with the style of Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of Central and Prospect Parks. This park is located between Fort Washington and Haven Avenues, from 173rd to 176th Street. Across the street on Ft. Washington Avenue is P.S. 173, where the N.Y. Bullets Social and Athletic Club got their early education. At one big assembly there I was traumatized by Mrs. Driscoll as I sang some Stephen Foster songs in a trio of kids. My vocal chords had been paralyzed by bulbar polio and I had to twist and stretch my neck to help compensatory muscles make the sounds. Mrs. Driscoll thought I was clowning. I had a rep as a clown. She stopped the assembly, and started to chew me out in front of the whole school. Mrs. Navazio came to my rescue, and explained the situation to her colleague, but despite the fact that Mrs. Driscoll relented, I haven’t to this day got over the anxiety caused by that attack.

The park came to be called Jew Park because the orthodox Jews in the neighborhood, who were forbidden to drive or touch anything mechanical or electrical on Friday nights and Saturdays, would stroll through and fill the benches with muttering. For me the park was a source of exhilaration, the mysterious “power center” of Northwest Manhattan between 168th and 181st streets. I woke up every day to a view out my bedroom window of a line of poplars along 173rd Street behind the park wall. Those poor poplars, my own gothics to the heavens, were toppled by the hurricane of 1938, called The Long Island Express, with winds they claim up to 180 miles an hour. The poplars were never replanted.