55 REMSEN
Let no one who loves be called altogether unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow.” ― J.M. Barrie, The Little Minister
In the fall of 1975, I worked as a substitute teacher at South Boston High School. I taught Math and English to the few black and white students so bored with skipping school that they preferred the gulag of the high school. Some days there were more Staties, i.e., state troopers than pupils. The city's school system fragile racial truce had been torn by busing riots. Poor white kids attended schools in poor black neighborhoods and vice versa. None were bussed to the rich suburbs or the Italian North End
The only times the classes were full came with the arrival of national TV crews to interview a white politicians preaching segregation. The white boys egged on by their parents fought the Boston City riot squad. Few of them attened high school. Their only fates were Billerica School, the Marines, or a job with the city. It was a bad scene, but I was getting $85/day to insure no one firebombed the empty classrooms. Most school days only 3-5 students came to class. They read books for forty-five minutes. I kept my head down and wrote poetry.
Some of it wasn’t bad.
In October I moved into a cheap Brookline basement apartment. Upstairs was a two-family holistic commune. The two parents believed in free love. This was their second marriage. Joe and Kate had eight kids between them. I had dated the mother's second daughter. Hilde had told me that she was 18. We had lasted less than three weeks. Her parents said that the young blonde was too young for me.
"How young?"
"16."
"You're right." I was twenty-three. Too old, but their daughter's next boyfriend was a thirty-year-old car thief. Dennis.
My best friend had come over to visit me and met Hilde’s older sister. Terri was almost twenty and was very sexy as to be expected of a Combat Zone stripper. Two weeks later AK deserted his college girlfriend and joined the commune to live in the attic with Terri. We were one big happy family.
AK also taught school during the day. At night he played keyboards for a popular funk band. The New Yorker was Jump Street's token white boy. He dealt with the white promoters and club owners. Many of them Jewish or Mafia. Neither cared for schwartzers or blacks, but Jump Street was one of Boston's best dance bands.
When Jump Street was hired for a weekend gig at a club in NYC's West Village, AK invited me to accompany him. Hilde's sister was staying behind for a family gathering and AK confided in my basement bedroom, "I have this old college girlfriend in New York. Rose is an artist. She looks like an East European refugee. Maybe I'll get lucky. I was once before.”
I painted my own portrait from his scanty description.
Dark-hair, slim, feminine, maybe East European.
That Friday night Jump Street rode down to New York in the van. AK drove his Firebird. He wanted to impressed Rose. I was the passenger and rolled joints. AK liked his weed.
"It's not a GTO."
"But it is fast."
We crashed at a black friend's place in Harlem. Duke Booty. AK invited several friends to the show. I knew no one in the city. Rose entered ten minutes before the show, I was on my second beer AK introduced us. She stared into my eyes, as if we were meant for each other. She was just like I imagine, wearing a cotton shift complimenting her Slavic gracefulness. Her hair was cut short like she might have been a dyke in college. Her accent was Appalachian. She laughed at AK's stories. They knew each other from college. Their friends were all gay. Several hit on me at the show. I let them buy drinks. AK had his arm around Rose's shoulders, when his girlfriend entered the bar. Terri had smelled a rat. Ex-strippers are hyper-sensitive that way.
“Pretend you're with Rose.” AK whispered in her ear, plotting to meet her later.
His girlfriend was too smart to fall for such a simple subterfuge, and after the gig she dragged him away to Harlem. I grabbed my bag out of the trunk. I had to find someplace to stay, but first I accompanied Rose to a late dinner at David’s Pot Belly Restaurant on Christopher Street. It was open 24 hours a day. She worked as a waitress to support her painting. We had omelettes and spoke about art. Mostly I listened to her plans to study at Beaux-Arts in Paris.
“In PETRIFIED FOREST Bette Davis’ character seeks to leave her uncle's desert cafe to do the same. Lesley Howard, a failed writer, has the outlaw shoot him, so she can collect his insurance. I thought it was very noble.” It ruined my desire to be anything else than a failed artist. Something I had achieved early in my life.
“Anyone ever tell you that____”
“Tell me what?”
“That you look like an angel____” She struggled for several seconds for the next words, as if she was lost in time. “______under candlelight.”
"No one has ever said anything like that to me." Certainly not Hilde.
"It's true_____."
She apologized for not finishing sentences.
"Don't worry, I have several speech defects. S_s-s-stuttering just for one."
She smiled at our failings and she invited me to spend the night at her Brooklyn Heights apartment. Certainly better than sleeping on a couch or even the floor at Duke Booty's place.
We rode the 7 train to her neighborhood. 55 Remsen Street.
"I have a roommate."
Her apartment was four flights up. One floor above a Chinese brothel. A dragon lady in a sheer silk stood at the door. I guessed her to be about forty. In red light over the door, she passed for twenty.
“You want good time?”
“No." I had never paid for sex.
“Maybe sometime you not lucky. Come see me.” She hissed the invitation like a snake slithering through dry grass.
“I hate that____.”
“Woman.” Rose didn’t have to finish off that sentence.
Straight women hated those that aren’t straight. Rose opened the door to her apartment. She shared the two bedrooms with a lanky West Virginian. They knew each other from college. He held a pad of paper in front of him on which he scribbled numbers with a pencil. Rose introduced him as Bix.
He lifted sallow eyes from the scratching pencil point. He didn’t say a word. Rose led me into the bedroom. I tried to be quiet, but she called out my name with each thrust nearing orgasm. Women were echoing other men’s names from the sex den below.
Every time I exited from the bedroom, Bix was at the kitchen table.
An unlit cigarette in his hand.
An empty beer can to the left.
Several piles of paper were scattered about the table. Numbers filled them to the edges. I had been a math major in college. I tried to make sense of the progressions. The numbers were years abstracted out of sequence. None were zero or 1978.
"I met Rose in 1970. I reduced the years to prime numbers. When were you born?"
"1952."
"One year after Rose. I'm two years before." An expression of hurt paralyzed his face. Words were lost in his mouth. Finally on Sunday morning, he asked, “How does it feel to fuck another man’s woman?”
"Rose said nothing about a relationship."
"No, she wouldn't, but what can you expect from someone who can't finish sentences?"
"I don't know. I have a stutter."
"So I asked you before." Bix put down the pencil and picked up a knife. I hoped to sharpen the pencil. He pointed it at me. "How is it fucking someone else's girlfriend?"
“Wait a few minutes and I’ll tell you.” T
The door behind me shut and said to Rose, “Your roommate said____”
“I know what he said. Don’t___” Her hands drew me back into bed to complete her sentence. Her first kiss swallowed my soul. “I love your lips.”
We made love twice more that day. She stretched me nude and said how she was saving money to study art in Paris. On Sunday, Rose escorted me to Penn Station, where I caught the evening train to Boston. I had no idea where AK and his girlfriend were. I kissed Rose on the platform.
“I’ll wait until you get out.”
“It will be late.” Hesitation rimmed her reply.
“I can wait.”
The train conductor called ‘all aboard’.
“After all this is the city that never sleeps.”
Back in Boston, AK grilled me about Rose.
"Did you?"
"Did I what?"
"You know."
"The answer is no."
"You're lying?"
"No, nothing happened with us. Besides, she has a boyfriend."
"Bix?"
"Yes."
"Bix has been following her around for years. He's a hillbilly from Carolina. Kind of tragic. I don't know why she lets him do that. She says that they are finished. I'm not so sure."
"Me neither."
Thoughts of Rose killed Boston. Its streets were empty after dark. The bars seemed provincial. None of the women possessed Rose's beauty. The next weekend I trained south to Penn Station and took the subway to the West Village. I stood before David's Pot Belly. Rose waved from inside the restaurant.
The cook Michael served me a Gruyere and mushroom omelette.
Afterward I killed time at the Riviera Bar with a silver-haired jazz impresario. I recited a poem about hitchhiking. James said that I was almost a genius.
“How do you know?”
“I manage Cecil Taylor and Merce Cunningham. They are real geniuses. Not fakes.” He smoked a cigarette like Marlene Dietrich. The Riviera was a middle meeting ground for gays, bi, and straight. James was 100% playing for the other team and proud of his sexuality.
“I once made it with James Dean.”
“The movie star? I heard that he had been with Sal Mineo."
“He went with anyone. You care for a drink?”
"Yeah, why not?"
James and I drank too much at the Riviera Cafe. Him whiskey and coke. Me Gin-tonic. I arrived at David’s Pot Belly at closing. Ro was waiting. James wandered off toward the meat racks on West Street.
"I'm exhausted. Let's go back to my place."
We took a taxi.
There was no traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge.
I paid the taxi fare. We climbed the stairs. The dragon lady smiled at my passage.
“You lucky man.”
“Yeah, tell me about it.”
"This one never go home same man. You must be special."
"I'm an angel____"
Rose slapped my hand. She didn’t want me socializing with her downstairs neighbor. We climbed the final flight and she opened the apartment door. The wall clock said 3:16. Bix sat at the table. Once more an unlit cigarette in his hand. The pages of numbers plastered to the walls. None of them were equations. Only numbers and now not years, but five-digit prime numbers.
Rose and I retreated to her bedroom. She wasn’t in the mood for sex.
“I’ve had a long day______at work.”
“What’s with Bix and the numbers?”
“He feels as if he can find the right number maybe he can reverse the hands of time and win back my heart.”
“And do you know the right number?” I had loved the poetry of math until LSD warped my perceptions of dimensions. Then words became my math.
“No, and neither will Bix. He’s crazy and that’s why I______stopped being with him,” she whispered from bed. We kissed under the sheets. She murmured with a cuddle, “I love your lips. Go to_____sleep.”
“All right.”
I fell asleep reading Henry Miller's TROPIC OF CAPRICORN. The profane author had spent his childhood in Williamsburg. Brooklyn Heights was more for successful artists such as W. H. Auden, Truman Capote, Hart Crane, Bob Dylan, Norman Mailer, Carson McCullers, Arthur Miller, Walt Whitman, and Mary Tyler Moore. I woke to the screams of a Chinese woman fighting a man.
Not everyone was as happy as me in Brooklyn Heights.
The next day we brunched on Montague Street. Rose had to be at work at 4. We made love quickly on her bed. I liked her tongue more than her lips. She liked oral better than penetration. I let her have her way with me.
“That was better than good.”
I can only try to do my best."
Saturday night repeated Friday night. Dinner at the Potbelly and drinking at the Riviera with James. Ro was off on Sunday. We went dancing at the Limelight on 7th Avenue. James came along with us. He bought drinks. We shared a taxi back to Brooklyn. His apartment was in Park Slope. He dropped us in the Heights.
“You ever need a place to stay call me.” James blew me a kiss, as the taxi disappeared into the shadows.
“You know what______he wants?”
“Same thing as everyone. A little love.”
On the stairs I didn’t even notice the dragon lady. In the apartment I didn't see Bix or hear the cries of pleasure from the brothel. Ro and I were the only two people in the world. I wrote several poems. Ro had me read them to her. They may have made more sense than Bix’s numbers.
On Monday morning we ate in the city. I went to the train by myself, telling her that I would be back in two weeks.
She smiled and said, “I’d like______that.”
Throughout that fall and winter I commuted on weekends between Boston and New York. I’d phone during the week. Ro rarely answered the phone. She was either at art school or work. She told me that Bix never picked up the phone. He was even deeper into his numbers. His scrawlings infected the hallways. I asked Rose about her plans to leave for Paris.
"They are just a dream."
One Friday night, the dragon lady greeted me. Her name was Lee. Bix stuck his head out of the top-floor apartment.
She asked Bix for numbers.
He handed her a sheet of paper.
“If I like number. I make bet. Win big money.” Lee followed the twisting cortex of numbers for a lottery winner. “Open restaurant. Sell food. No pussy.”
I plotted a strategy to quit teaching in June and collect unemployment through the summer. I informed Rose about this plan on several occasions.
"This apartment is small."
"Bix could leave."
"No, it's his place."
"We can get another apartment."
Obviously Rose was stalling, but I didn’t care, because I no longer wanted to live in Boston. My parents were sad to hear about my departure. They wanted me to have a life in Boston. Find a nice wife. Have children. I was sad I wasn't that man. I didn't tell them about Rose.
AK said I should thank him for introducing Ro.
“You owe me.”
"I'm not sure how to pay you back."
"I'll think of a way."
Hilde's car thief boyfriend arranged a job driving a gas-guzzler to New York. The owner paid me $300 to ditch the Oldsmobile to collect the insurance, then claim that the car had been stolen.
"It's easy," her boyfriend explained. "Once in New York, park the car by the Hudson, throw the plates in the river, and leave the keys in the ignition. Joyriders will steal the car within minutes. Easy."
I never liked it when anyone said something was easy.
That Friday morning I phoned Rose several times. No one answered the phone. After packing my bag in the Olds, everyone in Hilde's two-family commune stood at the door and waved good-bye. This was for good. It was a little after noon.
“You be careful.” Hilde was a little teary-eyed.
"Don't break any laws," cautioned her boyfriend. Dennis was glad to see me go.
"I won''t." Our rule was only break one law at a time.
I drove down south on I-95 at 55. Everyone else speeding over 65 or better, but I didn't need a state trooper stopping me.
The trip from Brookline to the West Side Highway took a little more than four hours. I unscrewed the license plates and tossed them into the black water flowing upstream past the desolate docks. I walked to her restaurant. I had $300 plus my savings in my pocket. A new life awaited me and I entered the restaurant with a smile.
"Where's Rose.
"She quit yesterday," said Michael the cook.
“She say why?”
“No.” He knew, but wasn't saying.
Brooklyn Heights was a couple of subway stops away from Christopher Street. On the way I reflected on the unanswered phone and her quitting her job. That one and one didn’t add up to two, but a myriad of possibilities. Too many to count. Numbers and more numbers. Just like Bix.
I arrived at 55 Remsen at 5. A prime number. I rang the downstairs doorbell a few times without success. I tried the buzzer for the whorehouse. The door clicked open. I climbed the stairway. The dragon lady waited under the red light.
“Today I lucky. Find good number.” She pointed to a scrawled number on the wall. “Tomorrow no work. You come back. Have good time. Okay.”
"I'm here to see Rose."
"Oh, yes, you." All Gwai-lo looked the same to Lee. "She not home."
"Not home. You ask Bix. He know."
The door to the apartment was open.
Bix sat at the table.
A burning cigarette in his hand.
Not a number anywhere other than the walls. All years boiled through addition to their prime. My birth year added up to 17.
“You know that Hitler was anti-smoking. So was Rose. When Hitler killed himself in the bunker, the first thing the Nazis did was light up a cigarette,” Bix inhaled deeply and then said, “Rose’s gone. She left this afternoon.”
“To where?"
“Off to Paris to study at Beaux Arts.”
The famed art school.
“I thought it was just talk."
“I know. I was surprised too.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, but you’ll have to go to France to find out what it’s like to see another guy fucking your girlfriend. Not me. I already know.”
It was a shitty thing to say and I probably should have hit him, but I had said the same thing several months earlier, so I figured us even.
“You know she never kissed me.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“How was it?”
“Good.” I had no reason to lie.
“I thought so.” Bix took out a pencil and paper. The numbers were his friends. I walked out of the apartment with my bag. On the stairs the dragon lady said me, “Look you not lucky no more.”
“No, not lucky.” Fucked was a better word, except that word had only one meaning in Lee’s bordello.
I wandered onto Remsen Street. A plane flew east overhead and I imagined Rose looking down from an Air France 747. From that height people were not visible. Certainly not me. Somehow I had ceased to exist for her. I couldn’t say why.
At the corner phone I called James Spicer. The jazz impressario answered on the first ring. I told him that I needed a place to stay.
“I knew you’d call me one day.” He sounded drunk.
“Why?” I wanted drunk too.
“Because that girl had heartbreak written on her face. More hers than yours. Get in a taxi and I’ll tell you more.”
“Okay.” I glanced back over my shoulder at 55 Remsen. A taxi came down Montague. I waved it down. Like Rose I was gone and I wasn’t coming back either.
I ran into Bix two months later. He was living on the street. I got him a job as a carpenter. He stayed about two weeks. That winter the police found him dead below Brooklyn Heights. Starved to death. A burnt cigarette in his hand according to the police report. His ragged clothing had been stuffed with paper. All of them blank according to the police report.
He had buried that demon of numbers in the peace of his death, as I had tempted to excommunicate my pain by writing the same poem to Rose about a hundred times. Each ended as a crumpled paper. James Spicer called the pile of rejects 'the hill of THE END'. I didn't laugh at his joke. After that I stopped writing poetry. The words were simply letters, not magic.
Rose and I met each other years later. We had another affair.
Very brief. She was working at a fish restaurant. Her paintings were of fish. They were very good.
I mentioned Bix. She said that she had heard about his death.
"There was no helping him."
“None?"
“None____.”
I waited for her to say more.
Rose was a woman of few words and I couldn’t bring myself to ask why she had left me or why she never kissed Bix, but then I had always known the answer.
It was in the movie PETRIFIED FOREST.
Art was more powerful than poetry and numbers or love. Only life was stronger, although sadly not for everyone and Bix knew that better than most.
I’m only glad not to discover the same yet. Maybe one day, but not now.
ps I am still friends with Rose. She paints me on occasion. I like her work, especially the nudes.
