THE CHARNEL HOUSE ON JOYCE KILMER AVENUE
URBAN ADVENTURE
I hadn’t been a student in several months, so I signed up for summer classes, which began the final week of May. Jazz and American Culture. Urban and Maritime Adventure.
*
The jazz appreciation course lasted six weeks.
I loved Cecil Taylor beating his piano until it bled.
His fingers stalked every key on the keyboard with the souls of more than one spider.
I thought of it as a love song to the last spider I stepped on—
the one that cried like a note split open.
I volunteered my discovery—that the fingers influence the ambitions of spiders—to my professor, who sneered: “It’s jazz. Not music for arachnids.”
“Charlie Christian exploited the box position, and went no further,” I said, more as attack than opinion.
“The difference being he did not listen to his fingers. Christian understood the fingers were not to be trusted, just as the spiders are not to be trusted. And Taylor could hear the exact sequence of one life’s erosion. He just chose to speed it up a bit.”
I heard a lot of music after that: Bix Beiderbecke. Coleman Hawkins. Sydney Bechet. A sudden drop in blood sugar. A bird laughing. The second decline of Metallica. None of it healed what had been said to me in my life.
None of it kept my fingers from failing to expose on the guitar what they’d been thinking about for twenty-eight years.
*
Urban and Maritime Adventure began on a sunny yet somehow dark day during the second week of the damp June inferno. Four class trips. Manhattan. Philadelphia. Port Newark. The Raritan Canal. One multiple-choice quiz. A creative project of much significance.
Entering the lecture hall—again, the Ruth Adams Building—fifteen minutes late, I attracted the immediate attention of the academic and literary star Professor Michael Rockland, a tall, mantis-like structure with the voice of something darker than dirt falling, and the expression of a man always looking for a chin.
“You! We have a special seat for you right up here in the front row. Since you’re late, you get to wear the dunce cap.”
He pointed to the designated seat and I sat in the one next to it, closer to the aisle.
“Good enough,” he sighed. “Next time you’re late you get to stand up and I will have an actual dunce cap for you to wear.”
At least I had my latest poem to think about. Maybe it was brilliant, or at least good enough that it wouldn’t make its way back to me the way all the others did. Or that it would take longer to do so, and I’d have a better strategy of how to defend my fortress when the stuffed envelope arrived with its cold but brief editorial regiments.
It changed nothing about the architecture of class trips, the long bus rides and the certainty of lulls in whatever excitement had been planned lengthening into infinite, thought-filled isolations.
*
We had to write a one paragraph proposal for our own urban adventure.
I decided to write about New York City, where I have yet to see my girlfriend. Just thinking of the name of that city made me think about my girlfriend and again wonder if she was anywhere.
Maybe her roommate, Brad Boonshaft, was making her, right then, clean up the toilet he overflowed with his diarrhea, like he had a few weeks earlier.
“Doll, would you mind cleaning this up for me?” he asked, balling up another brown-smeared Kleenex and leaving that final bouquet on the spillage.
I would have to drive there myself and hit him until he was nothing enough for me to stuff inside his phone. But Donny, his friend, would find him there. It would be the first place anyone would look if Boonshaft were to disappear.
Boonshaft never, ever stopped talking. Three cell phones could not contain the mightiness of his game show vapidity. Charming as George W. Bush at the moment of melting, he was always dating some very beautiful and very empty woman or other.
Many years before I met her, I read every book where I believed my girlfriend was waiting for me—I knew exactly which crows roosted in her eyes, but did not know how to finish my tunnels to the gunshot sloughs of her sleep, in Iowa, in the one poem I was able to write before she made it clear that she knew I was out there, somewhere, looking for her.
In the meantime I went back to my room and tried to correct its course through the night whose entrepreneurs I heard being fucked to sweet tickles by Ben Franklin after Ben Franklin after Ben Franklin, the wind knocking at the window that followed my bed to the hard-to-understand warmth of the day where the poems come to only the smallest harm.
*
The morning of the Manhattan voyage arrived.
Bus departure time: 9 am.
Time I woke up: 8:45 am. (The bedroom suffocated me half the night with its ravenous pillows.)
Time allocated for getting to the sunken campus: 5 minutes.
Time needed to secure safe parking, with breathable air: 1 minute.
(Summer campus: parking spaces lonely and desperate to be taken.)
Time necessary to arrive at Ruth Adams without losing my courage: 3 minutes.
Calculation: 6 minutes to beg my body for consciousness, acclimate to that consciousness, urinate, get dressed, tie hair back, make lunch, compose project proposal, brush teeth, descend stairs, open door, close and lock door, locate car that looks like something that belongs to me, insert key, turn key, enter planned 5 minute travel zone.
Goal for trip to Manhattan: not to wear the dunce cap.
Goal for written assignment: homelessness.
i.e. twenty-four hours as a homeless man, to be written about in exquisite, Rocklandian prose.
*
At 9:15 the charter bus pulled up beside the Ruth Adams Building. Like an entire generation, I wore a backwards baseball cap. Seattle’s expansion of ironic dunces.
His voice an avalanche that morning, Rockland did his roll call once everyone had boarded the bus.
Fifteen names and their accompanying grunts and hello-chirps went by without mine being called. I walked to the front of the bus where the professor was hard at work.
“You didn’t call my name. Am I still in the class?” I asked him.
“I’m going to take literary license here and say ‘yes’,” he said with more and even louder dirt in his voice.
I couldn’t figure out what he meant, but later I learned that he liked to say things like “literary license” or similar epithets that could nudge any conversation back to his writing.
En route, I lost the scattered parts of myself in the soft chatter of the other students who’d already paired up or separated into small groups that grew farther and farther into the day’s distant sleep.
The clouds passed away in the blue sky and came back as thoughts I believed were mine, but weren’t.
Trying to remember the nice things my girlfriend said about me while I slept, I succeeded only in circling back to the same harsh forest whose birds sang nothing but quiet, quiet, quiet.
I brushed at my pants, as if trying to wipe away the mid-morning glare.
Rockland had been quoting himself the whole trip, to such a point of grotesquery that my own unvarying self-pity seemed endlessly fascinating. But he did approve my project proposal. In fact, he said it was an “excellent” idea. I would be allowed to be homeless. To fulfill a now possible potential.
*
We arrived at the Empire State Building where we de-bussed and Rockland repeated his roll call. We were to walk downtown to Wall Street and then cross the Brooklyn Bridge, with Rockland narrating the day-long slog.
Among the rest of the populace, we stood there stomping at the sidewalk like prosy little pigs.
The city vanished bit by bit as I mixed up the hard-to-move minutes with the hard-to-reach hours and the narrow delivery streets with the river-wide avenues, interspersed with thoughts that merely repeated on their own.
Rockland bragged on and on about his own hike from the northern limits of Manhattan to its lower hells and the literary techniques he’d used to write about it in his multiple-award-winning book Snowshoeing through Sewers: Adventures in New York City, New Jersey, and Philadelphia.
“If we had enough daylight, we’d have started at Inwood and descended from there,” he said.
And with that we began our inferior version of a classical Greek descent worthy of M. Rockland, Ph.D.
Storefronts and skyscrapers and whole minutes passed.
Sinkholes crept through my body, causing a tiredness that had not been studied.
After I started falling noticeably behind, Rockland halted and called out in his gravel-moving voice, “What’s with you? Are you ready for the geriatric ward? Keep up or you’ll miss the bus and then you’ll be SOL.”
Soon another guy also found it difficult to keep up. He was short, round, wore glasses and a properly-aligned baseball cap. He looked like that man on television everyone talked about, the one tolerated by Jerry Seinfeld, but without the endearing yet clumsy chum factor. I knew him. It was Dave—squat, obnoxious, faux-British, Monty-Python-worshipping Dave from La Nova Italian Kitchen, where I’d worked a few months earlier. It seemed impossible—he was always forcing a conspicuous, loud, and already strained wit into situations that called for no witticisms whatsoever—but some inner survival mechanism must have kept me from noticing him to that point.
He started talking at me as if no time had elapsed, flaunting his allusions to sophisticated British humor.
Desperate for a wit of my own, one that didn’t cause my hands to sweat, my hairline to tighten by another day, I had only a stop sign’s idea of how to respond.
“Are you Benny Hill? No? Do I know you?” I asked, an awkward attempt at a joke.
“Sarcasm isn’t for amateurs,” he said with his bald-headed smirk, his eyes like crooked eggs.
Immediately I regressed to the introversion of only an hour before.
“What’s the matter, Bob?” he asked in that voice I tried banishing past the sound barrier.
He spoke to the termites living in my head and the termites had nothing to say.
“What, Bob? I can’t hear you,” he said.
I thought being left alone would be easier than this, so I told him I had a headache.
“Now was that so hard?” he said as a declarative and not an inquisition.
To keep myself alive, I decided to count how many people made it from one side of the street to the other.
Dave having given up after searching and quizzing and evaluating my comedy tastes, my need or disdain for personal European expansion, and what he perceived as the xenophobia of an inferior sensibility, I made sure my termites weren’t gone, that they were only sleeping and would let me continue to eavesdrop on their poetry.
Again I thought about my girlfriend, who might’ve at that very moment been searching for where I died for the fifth or sixth time in New Brunswick.
“Strange things happen,” I said once in a silent mono-stitch.
A small brown man handed me a flyer for dry-cleaning and a small brown woman chased a large white man from her jewelry store—“Next time I call the mafia!” she yelled.
Quoting from his novel A Bliss Case, Michael Aaron Rockland forced Seventh Avenue south to the next block and somehow, with no books published, the rest of us arrived safely behind him.
*
We followed the rapids of Wall Street where I bought a lukewarm, two-dollar pretzel from among the fleets of Vietnamese vendors.
I had fallen behind more than once since the bus landed at 33rd St.
Walking with my classmates across the Brooklyn Bridge, I almost got hit by two bicycles, one right after the other.
My voice was too tired to yell at them.
No one else came close to getting hit, or even noticed by the bicycles.
Walking across the vast church of the Brooklyn Bridge took as long as reading Whitman.
It lasted longer than the many ways I remembered summer.
Tired. Tired. Tired.
*
The whole afternoon I had noticed an awkwardly thin and book-tanned woman tagging along with a short, awkward sophomore who said very little other than possibly pointing out a well-evolved sidewalk stain.
And like the most middling event ever ignored by the rigged daylight, she approached and started talking to me though I had done nothing to offend anyone.
She was tall enough to be threatening.
“I go to Princeton, but I needed another class,” she told me.
Again, I hadn’t done anything.
I wanted to ask where the sophomore had vanished to, but I hadn’t learned his nomenclature or even if he was, indeed, a sophomore.
When she asked for my name I couldn’t think of anything, so I told her my actual name:
(a sudden burst of yellow taxi fire).
She talked about things I could never comprehend while standing.
She must have noticed me staring at her bag of potato chips: the chip she was eating, and the chips waiting to be eaten, though the way the chips made it past her lips, which I guessed to always be engaged in some motion or other, caused no feelings below the belt. No romance. Not even in my ankles.
“Would you like a chip?” she asked.
“No, but I’ll eat the bag when you’re done.”
Her eyes fled from me, followed by the chips, her shoulders, her feet, and the rest of her. The sky retreated as well, but it still looked the same.
I would go on to talk about this unsolicited rejection for decades.
Meanwhile, the bus pulled up like a coffin to be buried later in New Jersey.
*
I got home soon as my landlord lost what was left of the daylight. I said hello as he watered his tomato plants, his back already turned away from me and the rest of the world.
He’d left a note on the door.
The vacated room would soon be populated if not filled.
Slept in if not known.
This person would have to figure out the directions of the walls for her or himself.
And though I’d tried to follow those walls many times, even to the point of packing a tent, sleeping bag, cooking utensils, canned and dried food, they led no closer to that one morning others only talked about.
I realized this when I studied the maps left by whatever occupied the apartment when I was gone.
Really it was a map of my simulated homelessness, my paper that Rockland mailed back to me in its large brown self-addressed manila envelope.
(“Some colorful writing here,” he scribbled in black, indifferent ink.)
*
I wanted to wash my hands in case my girlfriend arrived from the city whose history she invented before anyone knew about cities.
My girlfriend always called me on a phone that rang in another house.
I worried she might have fallen asleep inside my old roommate’s head, because it was quiet there.
I wrote a letter to the poet who called himself Walter Griffin asking him why my girlfriend does not know about me in this world:
Dear Walter:
Do the ones with names ever make it to you
hiding under your phone bills in that yellow house of yours
in Georgia, at the dew saturation point,
where there are no friends to man?
Or do you consider women adjectives and nothing else?
And also, please tell me
how to make it to the city where someone
might have looked like her
and those failed kisses that she revised
and sent back to me.
And then I mailed the poem to my girlfriend in New York City, where no one sees the moon, or notices the moody fringes of sweating season, when the leaves turn to dry blood.
The same blood that keeps me awake at night.
The same blood with which my girlfriend will find me again, tracking the Lincoln Tunnel on a night that ends.
And because I did not have a phone, I wrote down every word I would have said and waited for her to respond in her farm world prose.
I don’t know whether or not my sheets had quit whispering on their own or got spooked by the way I moved after all the eyes in my body went dark, but it rained that night, and I fell asleep finally.
*
Every morning my bedroom lands on a different planet, but always at 154 Joyce Kilmer Avenue.
The cars pass the way they always do.
One morning the sky is blue, and on another it is filled with the holes my loud music makes.
I pick a flower growing from my stash of decaying magazines, because no matter how far away in space, my girlfriend always knows how to reach me, though upon waking I’m never sure if her city is anywhere. I think about the way she can force a bird flock into the formation of a smile. I think about the way she enters my room every time I daydream about her. I hand her the flower, and she doesn’t laugh or point out the staples holding the stem and the blossoms together.
Sometimes the sound of the grass outside seems real and other times it is real.
It always sounds like two people talking.
Sometimes there is no oxygen, no sunlight, no blue sky until a day later and sometimes I wake up knowing exactly where I am.