CHESTER SEEMED TO FILL UP THE CAR. I was sick of him, the look of him, fidgeting and mopping his brow. He called frequent bathroom breaks. He said he must have eaten something. I suppose at some point he ran out of heroin, and I ran out of any desire to be around him. A sharp ammoniac scent rose up from his clothes, curling into my nostrils. Somewhere around DC I began to feel nauseous, as if my very guts were rejecting his presence. I was never more happy to pass the turnoff for Newark and see the Manhattan skyline on the other side of the river. It was frustrating, having to wait in the fug of gasoline fumes, edging the old station wagon forward foot by foot to enter the Holland Tunnel. We sat on Canal for almost an hour, crawling towards Brooklyn. Finally I dropped him at his hostel and was free.
I abandoned the car in the first spot I saw in the Village, not really caring if it would still be there the next day. Carrying my suitcase and a package containing thirteen rare 78 records, I staggered home, pushed open the front door and climbed the six flights to my stifling little room. When I got in, I opened the windows, switched on the fan, and bolted the door. Manhattan in August had never felt so good. I tried to do the things you do when you get home, the things you do to make yourself feel “at home.” I showered. I lit the burner and made a cup of coffee. I sat and drank the coffee, listening to the whirring sound of the electrical converter in the closet, the soundtrack of every cheap apartment in the city.
I did not feel at home.
I went out again, drifting down to the Washington Square fountain. As usual it was a nut house, art school girls in leotards and long skirts and Mexican peasant blouses, bearded guitarists sporting the plaid and denim of the working man. I got a hollow laugh out of a guy in overalls, doing a phony rendition of “Reynardine,” accompanying himself on a lute. The asshole college bongo players were out too. It was unbearable.
Back at the apartment, I opened the package. I carefully cleaned my acquisitions, sleeved them in uniform brown paper, wrote out cards for them and filed them with the rest of my collection. The real thing, not the circus down by the fountain. The real thing, in my possession.
But I didn’t play my records. I filed them and looked at them, lined up on the shelf in their brown paper sleeves. I was pleased with the way they looked, but I didn’t play them. Instead I did other things. I went to work. I drove around, looking for new hubcaps for my aunt’s car. I dropped off the car with my aunt and took a train back to the city. I hung around on Fifth Avenue, looking in shop windows. I went to work. I drank an egg cream. I rode the subway. I went to work. But I didn’t play those records. I didn’t play any records at all.
Without understanding how it had happened, I found myself locked out of the world. The perimeter was everywhere and nowhere, but it excluded me as surely as a wire fence. The city seemed hazy and insubstantial. I moved through the newsroom, across Washington Square, without really touching anyone or anything, braced for the moment when I’d try to take a sheet of copy or lift a cup and it would pass straight through my hand. When I got dressed in the morning, my image in the mirror seemed like a film overlaid on the moldy fixtures of the bathroom, thin, nearly transparent, not the substantial body of a living man. At the Tribune, I avoided Chester. I only saw him in the distance, through the haze of smoke. He looked raggedy and tired. Before, he’d always looked sharp at work. I kept my head down and tried to do my job. I didn’t talk about my vacation. I didn’t talk much at all.
It was too hot to spend time at home. There I sat around in my underwear, a wet towel draped round my shoulders. I felt guilty every time I ran down the stairs, out onto the street. Guilty for leaving my record collection. It was too hot for shellac records, which turn to the consistency of pizza dough when you leave them in the sun. They needed to be stored somewhere cooler, or they could get horribly warped. Instead of rescuing them, I draped a batik cloth over the shelves and left the apartment. Out of sight, out of mind.
I hung around a bookstore on 8th Street, pretending I had enough money to buy. I kept ending up back in Washington Square. The folksingers there were terrible frauds, but at least they were alive. They were young people singing in the sunshine. And there were some passable musicians. A burly man with a booming voice and a decent fingerpicking guitar style, a little curly-haired guy who played an autoharp. Usually you could wander around, hang at the edges of different cliques—the bluegrass mafia, young communists singing about unions, Zionists singing about irrigation. There were a couple of Flamenco guitar players, a Senegalese who plucked a kind of lute-harp thing called a kora. That dude always drew a crowd. Whenever he was there, I listened to him, this living man plucking living strings.
I needed more life all the time. I craved it. It wasn’t that I didn’t make an effort. I asked one of the secretaries at the Tribune to go to a movie with me. We saw The Defiant Ones and made out in the subway on the way home. I began to think I might be finished with 78’s. Maybe all that had run its course.
Then I got a card from Chester, slipped into my pigeonhole at work, an invitation to one of his listening parties. I read his meticulous handwriting and swore to myself I would not go. I would not travel out to his spartan room and sit on a hard chair as he played music he had grubbed up out of the past.
A long subway ride. The train clattering across the river. The train going underground, running express. Stations flitting past, rectangles of light, there and then gone. Insects battering themselves on the kerosene lamp.
I did not want to go. I did not want to go and listen in that stifling little room.