PART 15 BACK TO 77TH STREET

PART 15   BACK TO 77TH STREET

Adrianne’s move to 88th Street galvanized me into doing something about my own digs, which I continued to despise. Besides, though she was closer than she had been, it was a longish and not a particularly pleasant walk; the route took me through some of the worst blocks on the UWS, though why I always walked west to West End and then south to 88th, rather than south on Central Park West and then west on 88th, I have no idea. Creature of habit. More important, there was no point in living where I lived any more. The original idea was to be in range of Columbia, but in fact, it was as inconvenient to get there as it was to get to Adrianne’s.

In our period of limited cohabitation, I took that walk every day. I slept there, but I didn’t have a rack in the closet or a drawer in the dresser. Nor did I have my professional necessities – a table and a typewriter and bookshelves – because Adrianne’s didn’t want me working there in the afternoon when she wasn’t around. And, the place was just too small for two people, its bedroom full of dropcloths and easels, its living room hemmed in by a kitchen on one wall and the sofabed on another.  So there were drawbacks to both of our apartments; I didn’t feel at home in either.

Drawn irresistibly south and west by memories of the street I’d grown up on, I started looking in an area that stretched vertically from 72nd Street to 96th Street but horizontally for only one block, from Riverside Drive to West End. The very first apartment I saw was at 338 West 77th Street, nine buildings south of 320, where I’d lived with my parents, and the rent was only $50 a month more than I’d been paying. It wasn’t next door to Adrianne, but it was close enough.

On the outside, the building had a few architectural pretentions that distinguished it from what one authority called the “mud-colored uniformity” of the brownstones that lined the street. You can see in the picture the details of the exterior (and that of its neighbor, 336, obviously at one time its twin, and the better-looking one at that), details that must have made both buildings more expensive to erect and more appealing to the single families who were settling the block when they were built sixty years earlier: the curved façade, the sill with its carvings over the first-floor windows, the stone frames of the second-floor windows. The effect of the whole is of solidity and respectability, though it’s ruined by the terrible-looking flat wall of yellow bricks, added at a later date.

The apartment had a vestigial kitchenette in one corner of the living room – a tiny four-burner gas stove and a tall but very narrow refrigerator, barely adequate even to my simple needs. The living room and bedroom, though smaller than 105th Street, were big enough. I had been sleeping for the past few years on an old single bed, which was too short for me and too narrow for company, so, with my salary bumped up by the additional two courses I had been given at Hunter, I splurged on a queen. I also had my mother’s old sofa, a gigantic but comfortable piece upholstered in lime-green, which was the centerpiece of my living room, and for the first time, I had my own TV, a 13-inch black-and-white model with a rabbit-ears antenna that could capture Yankee games if you fussed with it by attaching pieces of aluminum foil to the aerial and turning it this way and that. These luxuries, along with the air conditioner from Mom’s 79th Street apartment (she had moved to a larger building at 94th and Park), all bolstered my sense of well-being and made me feel like a grown-up. Adrianne liked it too, and started sleeping over, which I preferred. But we broke up a year after I moved in, so most of my time there I was single.

The thing I loved most about the apartment was the back yard. The apartment was on the first floor, facing rear – no traffic noise, another plus – and a door in the bedroom issued onto a small concrete patio, much like Mr. Deutsch’s up the block, which I had subjected to incendiary attack years before. His was landscaped; mine was not. That little rectangle of open space was for me what the petit madeleine was to Proust, a trip back in time framed by the familiar rear facades of the houses on 77th, 78th, Riverside and West End, across which I’d glimpsed the naked nymph at age eleven.  I could see her window from where I stood now, three stories above me instead of one below, but I couldn’t spy on whoever lived there at the present, 16 years later. Here’s what that courtyard looks like today, my space wedged into the corner at the top right:

 

As if all this weren’t enough, one of my heroes lived right up the street. In college, the prospect of driving six hours to hear Miles Davis play at the Blue Note or the Vanguard never put me off, and now he was my neighbor. He lived halfway up the block at 312, a row house that he had decorated with fake terra cotta tiles to suggest a Mexican hacienda. He had a little yard in front, and from spring to fall, I often saw him sitting there as I walked home, his folded arms resting on the brickg balustrade, cradling his chin as he surveyed the street with unblinking eyes. Those eyes followed me as I made my way past, but I knew enough not to acknowledge his presence. He was the coolest cat alive, and one didn’t want to make a fool of oneself by presuming on a relationship that didn’t exist. Then, one day, amazingly, he spoke. “Hey, baby,” he said in his rasping voice. “What’s happening?”

“It’s all good, Miles,” I replied, and his gaze moved on. I was thrilled. The next time I encountered him, I took the initiative. “Hey, man, how’s it going?” I said. He looked at me without a flicker of recognition, and I slunk home. But I didn’t hold a grudge, and I was not the only resident of the street to bask in the glow of his celebrity. A bunch of my old neighbors formed a group a few years ago that got the street renamed Miles Davis Way in commemoration of the great man who had graced it with his presence.

Shortly after I moved in, another apartment became vacant. Michael’s girlfriend Dorothy’s girlfriend Ciba moved in within a week. Ciba was a folk artist who made all sorts of clever handicrafts; there was a Renaissance of American crafts going on in the later 20th century, and she was part of it. Eventually she joined forces with Dorothy, who would herself become a publisher and editor of shelter magazines. And she was bubbly, funny, and bright. always a little out of step with the rest of America, and great company for me, because she worked at home, surrounded by quilts and cigarette smoke, and was always up for a coffee break. We became great friends.

Ciba

In a short while, as other apartments became vacant, others of Ciba’s friends moved in, and after a year, I was the only male resident of a building populated by young single women. I referred to them as my harem, but in truth, we had an unspoken understanding that I was there to serve them, not to service them. The building’s official super was never around, so if a toilet backed up, or a window got stuck, I’d hear a light knock on my door (often late at night), and there would be a young lovely in her bathrobe and slippers, importuning me to save her from the gigantic spider in her kitchen or replace her blown fuse.

One of the most interesting stories to come out of this group was that of Ciba’s friend Maryte, 22 at the time, of Lithuanian extraction. She had been born in the United States, and spoke unaccented English, but though she was arriving not from Vilnius but from California, her dress and demeanor were that of a refugee just off the boat at Ellis Island in the 1890s: she looked to be of sturdy peasant stock, with a wide, open face and hair pulled back under a kerchief. She favored dirndls and bulky sweaters. She wore sturdy boots and no makeup. She had come to New York to learn the craft of film editing, and she did in fact become a director of documentaries later in her life. But for now, she was an odd combination of old world and new.

She needed a New Yorker to orient her in the ways of city life, and she found him in the unlikely person of Harold, Miles Davis’s lawyer, who lived with Miles up the block. Harold was a fiftyish black man with a hangdog look but great taste in clothes, and a vast acquaintanceship with hip culture. Somehow – and this still seems to me deeply strange – Harold and Maryte met (odd) and began a relationship (odder still). Over the course of six months or so, he took her to clubs, to jazz concerts, and to parties at Miles’s house. And he performed, or was the catalyst of, an astonishing makeover on her. Whether by design or not, she lost about twenty pounds, and her peasant stockiness transformed into the svelte default body of the young urban woman. She grew her hair long, and wore it in a lustrous cascade down her back. She abandoned the Central Casting clothing in which she’d arrived, and acquired from thrift shops and second-hand stores a wardrobe of slinky jeans, modish sweaters, and the sort of dressy going-out clothes that, apparently, Harold wished her to wear. She was stunning – the inevitable comparisons were to My Fair Lady or a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. How Harold had acquired his expertise in cosmetology, coiffeur and clothing I have no idea.

She hadn’t moved to New York for glamour and excitement, but she wasn’t averse to it either. The soiree´s up the street – which I was never privileged to attend – attracted not only every musician in town but celebrities of all stripes: actors, writers, painters. I loved hearing her describe these parties, which went on all night, fueled by a variety of illegal substances. But Maryte neither drank nor used drugs, so she was able to navigate her way through the thickets that might have trapped a less sensible girl. Miles himself took an interest in her. Despite the fact that Harold was, or was supposed to be, his friend as well as his attorney, Miles would sidle up to her and whisper raspily into her ear, “Just cause you in love with one man don’t mean you can’t fuck with another. But she had no groupie in her soul. She didn’t want to become Miles’s playmate, and she wasn’t in love with Harold, so she ended the relationship.

Harold took it very hard, and began to stalk her. She refused to buzz him into the building when he came around to importune her at odd hours, and she asked me and the other tenants to be sure they knew who they were admitting – and sure enough, every other day or so, there would be Harold, pressing bells at random, or merely waiting outside for Maryte to come in or go out.

She changed her phone number, a fact I discovered at five o’clock one morning when my own phone rang. “Maryte K--------,” please,” said an operator’s voice.

“Who is this?” I said groggily.

“This is the operator. I have a person-to-person call to Miss Maryte----------‘”

“She doesn’t live here,” I said. “Who’s trying to call her?”

My question was ignored. Then I heard Harold’s voice: “He’s the manager. Tell him to go get her.”

I began to understand. Harold had apparently told the operator that Maryte lived in a residence for women, like the Barbizon or the YWCA. Perhaps he even believed that, though how he got my number I didn’t know. “Would you please summon her to the phone?” asked the operator, in an aggrieved tone. I felt some sympathy for Harold, but still, it was the middle of the night. “Fuck you, Harold,” I shouted, and hung up. But that wasn’t the end of it. There were other pre-dawn conversations of the same surreal nature, so many that I started taking the phone off the hook before I went to bed. I didn’t blame Maryte for this state of affairs, but I did complain to her about it, and she shrugged helplessly. Pygmalion had turned into the phantom of the opera; there was little she could do short of taking out a TRO against him. Finally, after a few more weeks, she told me that he’d given up, and that it was probably safe for me to put my phone back in its cradle. I never heard from Harold again, and though he’d been a fixture in the neighborhood, one of those people you nod to as you pass, I never saw him again – nor did I ever attempt to discuss him with Miles, when I passed him lounging in his front yard.

Then there was Marjorie, who moved next door into the street-facing ground-floor apartment. Marjorie was from deepest Long Island, and had the accent to prove it – a deal-breaking flaw, for me, in a very hot-looking girl who fiirted with me from day one. I knew better than to have a fling with someone in whom I had no interest except for the physical and who lived twenty feet away, but a palpable sexual tension hung over all our chance meetings.

Early one morning, before sunrise, I was awakened by a pounding on my front door. Its urgency made me leap out of bed and rush to the doorway in my boxers and tee shirt; this sounded more like a fire alarm than a routine request to tighten a loose screw on the hinge of a cupboard. I flung open the door and there stood Marjorie, wearing not much.  “Richudd!” she said in her imploring Nassau County voice. “Soul Cat locked himself in the bayathrooom!!” Soul Cat was her Siamese, upon whom she doted. That explained the urgency, but not how a cat could close, let alone lock, a door behind it.

“Bummer,” I replied sleepily and a bit sharply; I was not on good terms with the early morning. “But what can I do?”

“What can you do?” she asked indignantly. “Break down the friggin’ daw!”

I was intrigued by the proposition. I had never had permission to break down a door before. I had seen plenty of movies, though, in which doors got broken down by cops or thugs, so I thought I knew how to do it. “Really?” I asked Marjorie. “You’ll take responsibility?”

“Of cawss! Now just do it!”

I went with her back into her apartment, which was filled with the yowlings of an unhappy cat. I examined the portal in question, which was of course just like the one on my bathroom: a flimsy hollow-core wooden door. “Stand back,” I said, and hurled myself at the door, shoulder-first. I bounced back, a searing pain traveling up into my neck and down my arm. The door held firm. I reconnoitered. Though it wouldn’t be as cinematic, the thing to do, clearly, was kick it just next to the doorknob. I debated going back into my apartment for a pair of boots, but instead thought what the hell, and, balanced on my right leg, I kicked out with my left foot, the sole landing just above the latch. I must have hit it just right, because the door splintered and flew open, leaving the knob and lock dangling from the sill. Soul Cat whizzed past me and into Marjorie’s arms. I stood there panting, very pleased with myself. Marjorie and I looked at each other. Dawn was seeping through her windows, silhouetting her body in the gauzy thing she was wearing. She put the cat down, walked over to me and took me in her arms. “Thank you,” she said, and parted her lips for a kiss.

Jesus, what self-control I exhibited at that moment! “You’re welcome,” I answered, and ended the kiss before it really got started. Then I went back to my own apartment and opened the book on Jacobean City Comedy I’d been reading the night before. If anything would get me back to sleep, that would.

Ciba must have had some appreciation of the gap between my sitcomish status – the only man in a houseful of women – and the reality that for so many reasons, I had to keep my hands, if not my thoughts to myself. So she decided to throw me a bone. “By the way,” she told me offhandedly the next time I saw her, “my friend Candy is coming to stay in my apartment while I’m home for Christmas. She’s only been to New York a few times. Can I tell her to call you if she needs directions or advice or like that?”

“Sure,” I said, thinking, what’s one more? “What’s she like?” I asked.

“She’s a lot of fun; she’s actually kind of wild,” said Ciba. “She has this one problem: she can’t say no to men.”

“Oh?” I managed. That was the last time she mentioned it. A couple of days after Christmas, I saw a nice-looking girl who could only have been Candy lugging grocery bags up the stairs. “Let me give you a hand with those,” I offered. She invited me in; wine was poured; conversation was made; carnal knowledge ensued. “How long are you going to be around?” I asked her an hour or so later, as I was leaving. “Just till tomorrow,” she answered. Too bad. But on the whole, not so bad at all.

I had other interesting neighbors as well, people you just don’t see on the East Side. Broadway, like Park Avenue, has a median strip dividing it, filled with vegetation, but Broadway’s has benches at the end of each block, encouraging the neighborhood’s elderly population to get out and, if not socialize, indulge in contemplation surrounded by their cohort. Old people have always made up a disproportionate share of the neighborhood’s population, and some of them took pleasure in assigning themselves roles as the neighborhood’s “characters.”  Take the spectral figure called “The Question Man.” Everybody knew about him, though some thought he was a myth, perhaps derived from Coleridge’s “The Ancient Mariner.” Michael swore he’d met this being who stopped strangers on the street, but instead of holding them spellbound with a tale of sin and retribution, merely asked them questions – trivial questions, but ones that were hard to answer. And he wouldn’t take “I don’t know” for an answer either, or “Sorry, I’m busy,” or even “Leave me alone!” It was impossible to escape him once you were caught in his web, Michael said; there was always some contingency, some addendum that had to be addressed before you could wrench yourself away. I only half-believed in his existence until one night, when I was on my way to some black-tie function at the Perls, and there I was, in my tuxedo and patent-leather shoes, hot-footing it up to West End in search of a taxi when I saw a silhouette that I knew, uncannily knew, must be he: a rumpled, dwarfish figure, with wild hair, like Chris Lloyd’s in Back to the Future, and a moth-eaten overcoat. I was determined to ignore him. But when I came abreast of him, walking swiftly, he said something indistinct, and I, like a fool, said “What?” He peered anxiously at me. “If you took enough aspirin,” he asked in a heavy Yiddish accent, “could you die?” “Maybe,” I shouted, and sprinted past him. “What about Milk of Magnesia?” he called after me.