With $114 in stock boy savings
I bought a ticket for New York where I found
a job at Orange Julius in Times Square
and a room at a West 43rd hotel.
I worked from midnight to 7 and gave
free Juliuses to methadone addicts
who showed me their clinic IDs
as if they were magic passports.
Afternoons I walked and saw the new immigrants
through basement apartment windows
crowded in smoky rooms, laughing and talking
after their day of hard, tedious work.
An Indian mystic in the subway told me
how long I would live and my mother's name
and showed me a worn photo of his class
gathered around a robed man who
must have been a hundred years old.
In the subway I also met Mark the socialist
who I believed until I found out he was
a corporate president's son from Chicago
living on the dole in Manhattan.
Everyone had a cause in New York,
from the cabbie who lectured me on doom
and deliverance to the man at the deli
who spilled my coffee and told me
he knew the secret of getting rich but
you had to work 23 hours a day.
I went to hear Charles Mingus at the empty
Two Saints where he sat Buddha-like
at the bar on breaks, sipping Pouilly Fuisse
and nodding to me as I passed unable to speak.
I rode the Staten Island ferry with the lost
men and women who stood in hooded raincoats
and stared out over the water toward the hidden
Atlantic. June rainstorms swept the streets
empty for an hour as people waited in Wall Street
lobbies, marble museums, and under marquees
and I ate hot dogs at Nathan's. The rain
reminded me of my Midwest home when the winds rose
bringing dust and black clouds. I was free
in New York, and broke, alone, and hungry.
I went back to the jazz clubs when I could afford
the cover and nursed an underage beer,
trying to look as hip as I could in clothes
from a $2.99 store and a red bandanna
that added a mature touch, I hoped.
One night Rahsaan Roland Kirk, blind
and half-paralyzed from a stroke, played
like three men with his crazy horns,
a manzello, stritch, harmonium and nose flute,
simultaneous saxophones and a crepuscular voice
that told us he had to go to the moon, soon.
Between sets I approached him with a request
and waited as he told a young woman drummer
who later became a jazz prodigy at eighteen
about the old days of Bird and Diz on 52nd Street.
His new band members didn't know the song I
asked for but Rahsaan fit it somehow in the middle
of another. He left earth a month later.
And in Central Park on Sundays everyone had an act--
furious magicians and dreamy steel drum players
whose music whispered, "We are not here."
The park was haunted by those who
had no place to be. An army deserter
who said he lived in the park a year now
showed me his secret, spindly tree
where a large green parrot perched. I met
a gray-haired woman who might have been
a former actress or aristocrat. She spent hours
in the travel section of the library
looking for a country to spend her exile in,
and we had tea one afternoon
in a dusty shop on 8th Avenue where
she fell asleep in the warm sun.
My job was unraveling as I missed days
and kept the change when the boss
sent me out for supplies. In Joan Crawford week
I brought apple pies and foreign papers
back to my room and watched the old movies and
heard muffled, desperate words through the walls.
It seemed you could disappear in New York
without being noticed but when I went back to work
I was fired. So I stood in Times Square
where ragged chess masters played
as if it were their last game and
I considered my options. Hanging low
in the sky was a huge, overstuffed, pale
circle. You couldn't tell if it was
a sun or a moon.