After a two-week trip from Vladivostok, Soviet Russia, on the Trans-Siberian Railway, I fetched up in Helsinki, Finland, without a kopek to my name. Flogging my winter coat in the flea market on the quay, I started hitchhiking around the Gulf of Bothnia in a light woolen sweater and a hooded rain slicker. But auto-stop in Scandinavia is chancy at best. The weather in late April is more like the dead of winter than spring. The Nords themselves are not notable for their solicitude toward shaggy and itinerant young strangers. And there are several times when it’s touch and go. In Turku, I break into a university dormitory and pass the night in a tubful of hot water. On the Swedish border I get caught in a snowstorm and spend the night running up and down the empty highway, waving my arms, beating my chest and shouting into the forest to stave off the cold. In Stockholm, I roll out my sleeping bag in a city park that turns out to be infested with pederasts. The whole way I eat nothing but handouts and amphetamine tabs; and by the time I hit the Norwegian frontier I’m seeing things: giant white marmots in the roadway, white bats swirling about the car, white mice running up and down my sleeves, ghostly white faces from my past.
Then in Bergen, after a couple of nights in jail (broke a store window to get arrested and out of the cold) I get lucky. A Panamanian seaman I meet in a waterfront bar steers me to a freighter called the Balboa Trader. I sign on as an unpaid work-your-way hand an hour before she’s to sail for New York. Fifteen very stormy days at sea and I land at Pier Six nearly penniless, and still three thousand miles from my home in California.
Whereupon, I promptly get mugged by a fat little teenage black boy with a twelve-inch serrated commando knife and a case of the shakes.
Luckily, my sole friend in New York, Sissy Thorssen, happens to live only a few blocks away on Charles Street in Greenwich Village.
Her street is narrow and cobbled, I find, with tall shade trees, buckling sidewalks, and fancy grillwork on the fire escapes and stoops. In the pale light of a damp morning in early June, it seems charming, almost picturesque.
She has described her place to me as a basement apartment in an old, five story, red brick building, and I find it easily. It’s the only red brick building on the block, just across from a row of elegant brownstones with tall narrow windows and beautiful carved wooden doors.
Plucking a white rose from the bush beside her stoop, I step down a flight of mossy, crumbling brick stairs, swing my heavy backpack off my shoulder, lean it against the wall, punch her buzzer, and wait, praying she will be home.
Hoping for maybe a loan as well.
A night’s lodging.
Bus fare to the West Coast.
Yet I am not particularly surprised when no one answers. The address is weeks old, and Sissy has never been one to let grass grow under her feet.
I even have a flash that she might be dead, like several other people I knew on the road.
Heaving the rucksack on my shoulder again, turning to go, I glance at the front window. I notice there’s a crack in the straw curtain, and I can’t resist stopping a moment to peek inside. Adjusting my eyes to the light, I see that the apartment is long and narrow, a three-room railroad flat that runs all the way through to the other end of the building. Bookshelves and posters advertising contemporary art shows crowd the exposed brick walls. Futons and large fluffy pillows lie about the straw-matted floor. Indian bedspreads adorn the ceiling, the beds, and what remains of wall space. Big potted coleus plants dangle in the windows.
Peering in at that leafy little wonderland of bohemian domesticity, yearning to be let in, I allow my mind to wander to the farthest, furriest edges of possibility. The last time I saw you, Sissy, was on board the good ship Sabarmati, on its crossing from the port of Karachi to the Rann of Kutch. Though your Afghan hashish has obscured my memory of most of the voyage, I do recall with absolute clarity the first few hours that we were aboard. A troupe of fancifully attired Gujrati Gypsies got up to sing and dance wildly, wonderfully about the deck. Then quite suddenly, before they could even pass the hat, they all fell seasick at once, dropped to the deck in a great pile of arms and legs, and fainted away on their own vomit. Nor will I soon forget the raging squall that came up out of nowhere to cleanse the deck and drive the sub-continentals below, leaving us alone on the aft cargo hatch when the moon emerged yellow and dripping, like a ghost of Lord Jim, from the Arabian Sea.
Then – something I never divulged to Eugenie, my love interest of the time – you and I, Sissy, we fell under the spell of that moon. Tearing madly at each other, we rolled off the hatch and onto the slippery wooden deck while the wind blew, the spray flew, and the creaking old Conradian steamer heaved, lunged and fell away beneath us.
Afterwards, lying entwined with you on the wooden deck, drenched in sweat and seawater, I grew suddenly, urgently tumescent again. Yet, as soon as you perceived the direction of my thoughts, you leapt up – statuesque in the moonlight, a halo of salt spray round your golden crown – and said, “I’m sorry, but that’s it, Eduardo.”
“Aw, come on, Sissy…”
“Never take a good thing too far, boy,” you say, flinging me off, moving away, around the bulkhead, down the promenade deck stairway, laughing tauntingly. “Always leave yourself wanting a little more…”
I never ran into you again, Sissy, after I disembarked in India. Barely even heard from you, except for a card now and then, via American Express, from some exotic locale. Your last note came from this same address:
I’m happy to say I’ve finally cleaned up my act,
Eduardo, gotten myself into drug rehab and settled in.
“The hell you looking at?” demands a female voice from behind the door.
“Uh, looking for Sissy,” I say, jumping in fright. “She in?”
“Who’s asking?”
“Eduardo,” I say. “A friend.”
“Eduardo? Is it really you?”
The door flies open and there you are, Sissy, bigger than life. Six-foot-tall in your bare feet, you’re wearing a red silk Chinese dressing gown with a green and blue peacock design, long hoop earrings, an African trade-bead necklace, and jangling silver bracelets. Your full-lipped, sharply chiseled, Minnesota-Swedish face is deeply tanned, as if you’ve just returned from a month in Guadeloupe; your yellow-blue eyes and your wild Pre-Raphaelite hair shine like gold.
“S-Sissy,” I stammer, gaping at you in wonder. “I . . . uh, just got in from Bergen, Norway last night. Got mugged as soon as I stepped off the boat.”
“Poor baby. Still out there kicking up dust, huh?”
“Yeah, it’s come to the point where I’m lugging around nothing but a load of my diaries. They’ve crowded out all but my toothbrush. Anyone with an ounce of common sense would just chuck it all, right? But I can’t bring myself to do it.”
“No difference between ‘the thing and its meaning,’ huh?”
“Uh-huh, but you know what, Sissy? Sometimes I think, after a few years on the road? The exotic thing would be a wife and kids, a straight job, a house, a mortgage and a car. You know what I mean?”
“Don’t make me laugh,” you say, but then you proceed to do just that, throwing your head back to show a long tongue and huge white teeth.
“Yeah, well other times it’s the opposite. One time down in Rio de Janeiro? I drop my rucksack and clothes on the beach at Copacabana and go for a swim. But when I get back? Someone has walked off with it all, including my passport. Anyone else would have freaked, right? Naked, penniless and alone in this huge foreign city? But me? I just raise my hands toward the sea and scream, “Hey, there’s nowhere but up from here, baby!”
“Another of your tales, ‘Nesto. I don’t know how much you make up, but I must admit they’re all pretty entertaining. So come on in, sweetie. The least I can do is offer you a cup of coffee.”
Hefting the backpack from my shoulders, you light some incense, seat me on a large yellow Indian pillow, and put “White Rabbit” on the stereo. You retire to the kitchen for a moment, bring out a plate full of Danish and a couple of hand-turned ceramic mugs full of steaming café-au-lait, and set them down on your low cable spool coffee table.
“Wow,” I say, lounging back on a pile of Indian pillows, “this can’t be real.”
“You’re right. Gotta go to work in a minute or two.”
“Mind if I stick around?”
“Be my guest. Use the bath, if you feel like it. There’s a jelaba in the closet. Fits all sizes. I’ll be back this evening sometime.”
Taking your advice, I curl up on one of the futons and don’t know a thing until you come in the door that night.
“Now, where were we?” you ask, going behind the closet door, stepping out of your clothes and into your kimono again, slipping “Ruby Tuesday” onto the stereo.
“I was about to catch you up on my most recent adventures.”
Folding your long, long legs, you sit down beside me on the futon, produce a vial of cocaine, and pour out a couple of lines on a piece of red wrapping paper.
“Hey, I thought you said you were cured of your drug habit.”
“I had a relapse.”
“Mmmmm, well lemme see,” I say, accepting your rolled hundred-dollar bill, snorting deep and long, feeling my heart take off like a quail. “A month ago, I found myself in Tokyo. I had a four-tatami room in Shinjuku, and a pretty girlfriend named Masako, but the winter had been long, and. . . .”
“Oh, ‘Nesto,” you say, when I am done recounting my adventures. And there is an expression of warmth and affection on your handsome, strong-jawed face that is unfamiliar to me, “what a wonderful liar you are!”
“It’s God’s truth, I swear.”
“Of course, it is. Come here, sweetie, and give us a kiss…”
You will not let me do anything. You push me down on the purple coverlet, fling a leg overme,and settle with a sigh.
Later, you put on “Strawberry Fields Forever,” lay out another line or two, strip me to the skin, and anoint me with olive oil. Smelling like tossed salad, slippery as eels, we rock and roll on your tatami mat till we look like straw dummies.
Later still, after a lingering bath, we make love tenderly to Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl,” my favorite song, and I break down in tears.
“The hell you crying for, ‘Nesto? Just a while ago you were full of beans.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know — for joy, for sadness, for things I’ve. . .”
“I’m sorry, man,” you say, and stiffen beside me on the bed, “but I just can’t deal with that kind of cry-baby crap right now. You know? Got way too much on my plate.”
You ask nothing of me after that, make no demands. You even cut my hair, shave my beard, give me some clean clothes to wear (a tee shirt, sweatshirt, Levis, and sneakers that belonged to some previous lover), and let me sleep on the futon across the room. Yet you keep the refrigerator bare, and most of the time I am left entirely to my own devices.
After you go out each day, I stay on in the apartment for hours, watering the herbs and plants that hang from your windows and fill your kitchen, feeding the tropical fish in your aquariums. Later, I patter barefoot out to your tiny overgrown back garden. I recline on a rusty, mildewed, lounge chair to read your High Times magazines, your books on astrology, on the occult, on obscure Eastern religions:
TRANSCENDENT TRUTH CANNOT BE REVEALED
TO ANYONE WHO HAS NOTGAINED THE SELF-EXPERIENCE
OF GOD BECOMING MANIFEST IN MAN
I listen to the subway trains rumble by under Seventh Avenue. I smoke stale cigarettes that I find in odd crannies around the apartment. I drink gallons of water from your garden hose to stave off the hunger pangs. Sometimes the phone rings. I pick it up. Sometimes I’m asked to relay messages, in the cryptic jargon of the drug marketplace, from someone called Al, someone called Ray whose voice sounds familiar. Eventually though, hunger drives me into the streets. I do not have a key, so once I’m out I must stay out until you get home. Most nights you come in late. Sometimes you don’t return until three or four o’clock in the morning. Weekends you don’t come home at all.
I could sneak on the subway and ride up to the George Washington Bridge. I could hike across to the Jersey side and stick out my thumb. I might get a ride with a traveling salesman, or a long-haul truck, all the way out to the Golden State.
But you, Sissy . . . you have milked me of my will.
I could phone my father collect, asking for enough money to get me home, and there are times I am tempted. Yet when I think of our harsh parting words, when I ran out on my job at his beloved San Quentin Prison without giving notice, I figure it will cost me more in pride than it’s worth.
It’s the height of spring. The air is full of pollen, buzzing insects, the smell of flowers, sunshine. But it’s all wasted on me. For days and nights, I wander the streets of Lower Manhattan, ransacking garbage bins for refundable bottles, hawking stolen newspapers, begging in the subway, sleeping in parked cars, on the sparse grass of Washington Square Park, dreaming of a warm bed, patiently awaiting your return. One night, plopping down Jane Street in the rain, I spy a short, muscular Hispanic boy in white sneakers leap to the trailing end of a fire escape ladder, catch it, swing up like a trapeze artist, climb the steps, and disappear into an unlit window on the second floor. It is such an amazing performance, and it happens so fast – in a blink or two of the eye – that it occurs to me I might do something of the same. In college I did some rock climbing. I’m still nimble and light on my feet. It’ll be a cinch. I could crawl up your fire escape to the roof, run across to the rear, slide down the rain drainpipe, and break into your place through the back window. Still, when it actually comes down to it, I can’t. You might get angry, I think, and throw me out.
Locked out again on another long, rainy weekend night, desperate for shelter, I have a stroke of luck. I find a short metal bar in the gutter. Watching and waiting on Charles Street, lurking in doorways, I clutch my metal rod. When the coast is clear, I thrust the rod into my belt and run up the stairs outside your building. Standing on the handrail, I lean out, reach for the window ledge, pull myself up, grasp the bars of the first-floor window, and hoist myself onto the next ledge. I continue crawling up the wall like an ant, gripping it with my ragged fingernails and the rubber tread of my sneaker soles, until I reach the fire escape on the second floor. Breathing hard, I pause, listening for some sign of discovery. But all is tranquil on Charles Street. After that, there’s nothing to it. I climb swiftly and silently to the roof, slip across to the roof next door, and keep going until I’m four or five doors up the street. There, I creep down a rear fire escape past open windows and blaring television sets until I find an unlit, unbarred window on the fourth floor. Waiting, breathing hard again, I listen until I’m sure no one is home. Then I pull the sharpened rod from my beltand punch it through the window just above the latch, making a small, jagged, hand-sized hole. The glass falls onto the ledge with a light tinkling sound, drowned out by tinny TV laughter from the floor below. Listening again for any sign of discovery, I slip the latch, lever the window slowly, silently upward a few inches, and squeeze through.
Inside, I throw a doily over a table lamp, switch it on low, latch the door chain to prevent surprise, and find myself in a small, crowded apartment with musty wall-to-wall carpeting, faded overstuffed furniture, yellowing photographs, stained brown wallpaper, green plastic light fixtures, and a low ceiling. Though the place is neat, and the beds are made, it smells of old people, and dust lies thick on all the furniture.
Breathing easier, imagining its elderly residents in some shabby condominium on the West Coast of Florida, I proceed methodically to search the place for money and valuables. I go through the bedroom, the bathroom, the living room, the guest bedroom, the kitchen. I go through the closets, the bed clothing, and drawers. I search under the furniture and above the shelves. But I find nothing. Not a penny. Not a strand of pearls. On the point of giving up, I think of the refrigerator, where my Grandma Wasson used to keep her money. And there, in an old Mason jar, I find a crisp, cold, twenty-dollar bill.
“Awwwright!” I exclaim aloud, shadowboxing around on the kitchen linoleum. Replacing the twenty with an IOU, I strip and stuff my filthy clothes in a plastic trash bag that I find under the kitchen sink.
In the morning, after a long bath, dressed in a double-breasted white linen suit that looks like it’s not been worn since 1944, I crawl out the window, climb up the fire escape, and scamper across the roofs to Charles Street.
With no illusions about how I will be spending the coming long Fourth of July weekend, I work all that week like a pack rat, begging in the subway, ransacking trash bins, collecting refundable bottles, selling them in supermarkets, stocking up on beans and rice, until I reckon I’ve got enough to hole up for the entire four days. On Wednesday night, I boil the rice and beans, stir them together in a giant pot, season them with your leftover spices and chili sauce, and dine at the kitchen counter amid the plants and fish tanks that have become my responsibility.
While the rest of New York City spends a long, patriotic weekend with street fairs and fireworks, I pass my days in peaceful contemplation. I browse through your library of science fiction. I write in the last few pages of the journals I have packed around the world. I listen to the top forty songs, most notably the Doors’ “Light My Fire,” and “Feelin’ Groovy,” by Harpers Bizarre, on your portable radio over and over again, my tranquility disturbed only by some pushy reporter named Carla Brown calling with urgent messages that I must copy verbatim and leave for you on your coffee table:
“Can you please tell Ms. Thorssen that I’m a journalist seeking information about the death of a drug dealer named Mike Willis?”
Finally, on Sunday night, I am forced out of the apartment and into the garden because of the heat wave. For some reason – I hate to call it prescience or fate, perhaps merely because I want easy access to my journal – I bring my backpack along.
An hour or two before dawn, I am awakened from an old and familiar bad dream – a two-year-old sexually assaulted in a tool shed – by the sound of muffled voices inside the apartment:
“. . . fuckin’ reporter…”
“. . . do her now, Ray…”
“. . . never touch a cop or a news-hound…”
For a minute or two, I lose the drift of the conversation, which until that point has seemed quite casual in tone. When I pick it up again, however, there’s a pleading note in your voice, Sissy:
“. . . who’s Al to…”
“. . . got a man in your house…”
“. . . friend of mine…”
“. . . could be a cop, a reporter…”
Then I hear some smothered cries, and someone gets slammed up against a door.
Furniture falls over.
Glass breaks.
Startled from my torpor, I consider heroics for an instant, Sissy, but I have a sense that I might only make things worse for you…
All right, the truth is I’m in such a panic that I can do nothing but make myself scarce.
Rolling off my deck chair, I slip behind the bushes and over the mossy garden wall just as a man appears at the French window.
A small, pot-bellied man of about fifty with a smudge of goatee and long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, he switches on the outside light, slides the window open, and steps into the garden, breathing hard. His grey, hairy body, clad in a greasy t-shirt, stained pea-green Bermuda shorts, and dirty white loafers, is gleaming with sweat. Tightly, tensely in his right hand, pointing downwards, he holds a slender, silencer-equipped automatic pistol, which answers my unspoken question as to how he has so easily intimidated a strapping six-foot woman.
With his left hand, he reaches for a soiled handkerchief to wipe his glittering eyes and pointed snout, while at the same time he swivels his long, narrow head back and forth with the quick, twitching movements of a weasel searching the shadows for prey.
The thing is – the world is so small! – I know this man. Granted, he has changed. When I met him, on my way down through Central America, his hair was short, he had no beard, and he wore a pin-striped suit. But how could anyone forget a rapist like Ray?
For an instant, I think of jumping over the wall and stepping out in front of him, relying on the shock of my appearance, and a reminder of our shared experiences on the road, to appeal to his better instincts.
But then a healthy prudence intervenes.
“You out there, pal?” he asks, in his high-pitched Brooklyn accent. Then, shaking his handkerchief rapidly back and forth rather daintily, he stuffs it into his back pocket. “Come on out. No one’s gonna bite you, right?”
You appear behind him, Sissy, in a long white cotton dress of Mexican peasant design, ripped at the bodice. A stream of blood runs from your nose and mouth. Your eyes show very round and very bright.
“‘Nesto,” you say, slipping past him into the garden. “If you’re there, please come out.”
Standing on the roof of somebody’s old doghouse, peeking over the wall through the shrubbery, holding my breath, I go over my options. And I decide that I’ve got only one.
“Please,” you repeat, in a quivery voice that is not your own, “he only wants to talk.”
“Goddamnit, what is this shit? There’s nobody out here,” says Ray. Then, in a more conversational tone, leading you into the apartment and out of earshot again:
“. . . big mistake…”
“. . . I swear…”
“. . . knows too much…”
“. . . you and me, Ray…”
“. . . wag your tail at me…”
“. . . begging you…”
“. . . you think I like…”
The radio comes on, very loud, Paul McCartney singing “Yesterday.”
There’s a low bap-bap sound, like a couple of little firecrackers going off.
The music stops.
Someone, surely Ray, says, “Sorry, sweetheart. Bye-bye now.”
The front door clicks shut.
Curled up on the dewy tar paper roof of the doghouse on the other side of the garden wall, I try to make sense out of what has just happened. But there can be no doubt about what happened. The only question is whether to stick around to confirm a foregone conclusion, or instantly disappear.
Across the garden I go, over the wall and up the side of the house next-door like a human fly, up the fire escape, over the rooftops, down somebody else’s fire escape, and out onto Christopher Street.
If someone has called the police, they’ll be there in a minute. The station is only three blocks away on West Tenth Street. And there’s little doubt about who the primary suspect will be.
I do not cry for you, Sissy. Already you are something other than yourself. It’s like . . . I had this flash before, the first minute I came to your door. In a way, you’ve been dead all along, and everything that happened in between is like a dream.
Down in the subway, I vault over the turnstile when the token clerk isn’t looking and catch a Number 3 Train uptown to 153rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue.
Emerging just as the sun comes up, I walk briskly over the George Washington Bridge with my rucksack bouncing on my back, stopping only at a phone booth on the Jersey side to anonymously report a crime, including its probable motive, the name of the perp, Ray, and the name of his employer, Al… whoever he might be.
I will never learn the outcome of the investigation, and never really want to find out.
Shading my face from the sun, which is now directly in my eyes, I stand beside the westbound lane, just beyond the tollbooths, and hoist a large hand-lettered sign toward the oncoming traffic:
“AROUND THE WORLD BACKWARDS”
