Like Rain it sounded till it curved
And then I new ’twas Wind—
It walked as wet as any Wave
But swept as dry as sand— Emily Dickinson
In the summer of 2021 I fell deathly ill. Without a liver transplant the hospital doctors said that the chances of my reaching 72 didn’t look good. I weathered the September equinox, however my health rapidly deteriorated over the next year and I prepared to see out the end with my family in the Western Forest of Thailand. From the house emera;d rice fields stretched to the mountains of the Burma border.
In November I had no energy and rarely left the Clinton Hill apartment on Myrtle Avenue. Three flights of stairs took everything out of me. I asked visitors if I looked yellow, they replied, “A little, but you’re not Post-It yellow.”
My friends were lying and I believed them, until I looked in the mirror.
I had lost over forty pounds and looked like I played with the Rolling Stones in the 70s. An English friend had commented about my thinness, “That’s like losing a Labrador dog.”
At least I was in no pain.
A year ago I had been edging towards obesity. 205. Now a gaunt 162, my high school weight, but strangely the ideal BMI weight for 5-10 man. 155. If nothing happened by Yulemas, I planned on traveling across the world to be with my family in Thailand. All four generations.
In November my friend Ro traveled by train and bus to Clinton Hill once a week to sketch the transition of my illness. These sessions broke up the hours of isolation. To most people I was already dead. The artist and I had been lover since 1976. Now we were just friends. Good friends now I was sober. Back when we first met at David’s Potbelly on Christopher Street, she had whispered in my ear, “You’re an angel under candlelight.”
We had both been in our twenties. We had made love often that month. On Thanksgiving I drove a stolen car from Boston to spare our lives, only to discover she had left New York to study art at the Sorbonne in Paris. She had broken my heart. Not the first time by her or so many others before and after.
Now at seventy I retained the strength of a fallen angel without wings. Lying on my bed I read poetry and excerpts from my journals to Rose, as she sketched my image on paper. The pencil’s lines on paper the truth of my condition.
“Why you never get anything published?”
“A few things. I never thought I was good enough.” My typing suffered from the nuns' having switched me from left-handed to right. At least my excuse was thus.
“You’re like Emily Dickerson. Trapped on a New England farm. Far from her Boston wife. Writing only for yourselves.”
“Now in Brooklyn with you, my lover.”
“Ex-lover, my dear Emily, Emily.”
I hadn’t ever imagined myself as the hermit poetess, but all poets are trapped within solitary worlds by their words and the fears of hearing those words spoken by others. Rose kept drawing lines and I continued to read from my 1970s journals, wishing I had the strength to transcript those passages, so my young downstairs neighbor could read about the the times of freedom before their birth and more importantly in these repressed times. Jack, only 28, was a true fan of times long gone. So long ago that they can only dream of our lust for freedom.
After a simple dinner of fluke, yams, and spinach Ro prepared to leave. The bus stop was a block away. I got up to accompany her.
“You don’t have to. I’m fine. Remember I live on the Bowery.”
The Bowery had changed from the Boulevard of Broken Dreams of our youth. The 1970s.
Gone the drunks, the SRO hotels, and the dive bars. The last years hadn’t been kind to Myrtle Avenue. White people walked the blocks, but it remained the ‘hood.
Evening had run into a dark wet night. Rain pounded against the living room windows. The street was obscure from the fourth-floor. Crime was down in the city, but mad men lurked in the shadows unlit by the street lamps. Even in this rain. They owned the city from Coney Island to Pelham Bay in the Bronx. Not dangerous to anyone, but themselves for the most part.
“I was brought up to be a gentleman, plus I haven’t been out of this apartment in days.” I handed her an umbrella.
Two years previous I had climbed Africa’s highest mountain for the Kili Initiative twice before Covid and had collected good rainwear and boots. I stripped naked to dress. Rose stayed in the room. I preferred an Irish tweed cap and jacket to an umbrella. I like the smell of wet wool, reminding me that the last sense to go was smell. Ready to go I leaned over to Ro and sniffed her neck. Vanilla and rose.
Opened the door, she asked concerned for my fragile health, “Are you sure?” “I can make it.”
I was weary of people questioning my current strength, having sported the nickname ‘the Brick’ at the West 4th Street basketball courts for decades. I was ready for the descent. Not the deluge outside. Wicked gusts swept curtains of rain across the avenue. No one was on the sidewalk, until we reached the bodega before the bus stop. A young crazy man harangued someone inside the store.
“You are all nobodies.”
Ro stopped in her tracks. Scared.
“Don’t make eye contact. He won’t bother us.”
She didn’t seem so sure. The wind lifted the awning and water cascaded on the young unfortunate. The young man danced way from the unexpected waterfall like a live chicken on a Chinese frying pan. Ro laughed. I didn’t think it was funny and neither did the young man. He shook off the wet and confronted us.
“What you think? You somebody? You nothing.” He closed to an arm’s length from us.
I had recently been attacked in the subway by a crazed man aggressing a young girl. His punches hadn’t hurt. I had been hit harder, although having recently lost my mind due to ammonia seeping from my guts to my brain, I had understood hismadness. Not 100%, but enough to understand when you are fucked you are fucked all the way. Not able to decipher the words in your head. Not able to hear the words of others. Madness. The young man’s fists tensed into rocks. I pushed Ro behind me.
“I am nobody . Who are you?” His head cocked to the side and he smiled with a young man’s teeth. All of them. I was missing three back teeth. Not ba for a man in his 70s.
“Are you – Nobody – too? Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!” We saw each other and recited in unison.“How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell one’s name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog!”
At the end of the last verse we two saw someone else. Emily Emily. By the window of her home the Evergreens. We all smiled and the mirage faded with the rainy wind. The young man and I bowed to each other and he walked away into the raging gloom. I had seen him and he had seen me through Emily Dickerson’s most famous poem
“What did you say?” asked Ro. She had heard none of our exchange. There was no explaining the meaning of madness to the sane. The B54 bus pulled up to the stop.
“We shared a few kind words.”
He and me. Emily Emily too No one else.
Ro kissed my cheek. She smelled of the wet and vanilla and paint. Always the artist.
“You are still my angel under candlelight.”
She hopped onto the bus and waved from her seat. The madman had disappeared into the monsoon night. I hoped he got dry. I hoped the same for me. The tweed was soaked. Wet wool smelled of rain and I struggled up the four flights to the apartment, gratified that even in madness we are not alone, if we share the madness of nobodies together.
ps shortly thereafter I miraculously received a liver transplant on Yulemas to become Lazarus II I looked on the yellow leaves in the backyard of Myrtle Avenue. With the eyes of the young madman, and Emily Emily and my ex-lover Ro too.
THE END
I've written a lot. get ready for the avalanche.
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Thank you
ps I survived with good health
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