The 11th Street Ruse — as name might suggest — doesn’t take itself too seriously. It goes to press on Xerox or mimeograph machines and is passed out for free. Subscriptions are more expensive — four issues for $2.
Each issue comes out when it’s ready — some more hastily put together than others — filling one or two notebook-sized pages, both sides. Contents include articles and letters and poems, vocabulary lists and quizzes, an occasional bedtime story, and plenty of typos.
Ellen Carter and Sparrow, two regular Sun contributors, are the creators and the publishers of The Ruse. In it they record their observations and adventures in the streets and subways of New York City, accounts full of squalor and beauty and a stubborn sense of the humorous and the absurd. But Sparrow and Ellen don’t limit themselves to reality: their writings are enlivened by unlikely digressions and surrealistic what-ifs. The result of their keen perceptions and delightful imaginations is an offbeat, funny, thoughtful, lyrical paper, The Ruse.
Here are some of our favorite selections — minus the typos — introduced by Ellen and Sparrow.
(To subscribe, send $2 to 322 E. 11th Street, #23, New York, NY 10003. All subscription money is donated to the anti-apartheid African National Congress.)
— Dana Branscum
The 11th Street Ruse is a community newspaper/newsmagazine designed to raise the eyebrows and the social/poetical consciousness of the world. So far it has failed. However, it is very popular. Its subscribers number more than 100, mostly paid (not by us).
As one cannot become an avid girl baseball player without practice, so one cannot be a writer without writing. So, we write. We write about 11th Street, and about the successes and blackouts beyond 11th Street. As 11th Street is located in the East Village section of New York City, The Ruse is characterized by a distinctly Manhattanite flavor. Nonetheless, we speak English to the universal being.
The Ruse began four months after Ellen landed from Kathmandu and soon after Sparrow returned from Calcutta (November ’87). Sparrow spent seven months reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson and grew serious about the eighteenth-century practice of submitting a weekly journal to the streets, in which one addressed topics like “Strawberries, and How They Have Improved Me.” Ellen’s major influences are Hazel the Alphabet Lady, the Man Who Wore Yellow Sneakers to Synagogue, and the dictionary.
The Ruse’s first issue could not be read because of a technical dispute between an Underwood typewriter and a Gestettner mimeograph machine. Sparrow distributed it at a poetry reading by Richard Hell, formerly of The Voidoids. The response varied from delirium to outrage. Ellen was outraged. This editorial dialectic continues today.
Now we are sitting in a sports field in Jersey City. It is Sunday, and we feel like working-class characters in a Camus novel. In half an hour, we have to go back to Manhattan, Home of the Homeless.
This introduction has a contribution to make to the Common Humanity but may be too high-spirited. In this way it is like The Ruse, which is named after a pair of sneakers (“Roos,” short for KangaRoos).
One night last summer, police in Tompkins Square Park started hitting 100 people on the head. One cop got so angry he beat up a bicycle. The Ruse was not there, but was only three blocks away. The Ruse got better from writing about this, somehow.
Sparrow is, in name, the publisher of The 11th Street Ruse. Ellen is the editor. Violet Snow, R.L.S., Lucid, and “Grapes” O’Rathe are some of the contributors. They may exist, but then again they may be angels. It is a great honor to publish angels, if in fact we do.
— Ellen Carter
Sparrow
East Of Ego
Dear Ruse,
Walking down First Avenue to buy bananas for breakfast, I met Ida. She was huddled in a shop doorway, looking nervous but not homeless: carefully groomed, elderly. I glanced at her a second time, she asked for change, and I stopped. She explained, “I have to wait till the first for my Social Security check. Every time I go to the post office to pick it up, they get me. Last time I took a different way home, and they still got me.”
“Who got you?”
“These guys. Last time I had to get five stitches on my head,” she said, pointing to her scarf. “They took care of him, though, put him away.”
“You mean they attack you when you’re leaving the post office and steal your check?”
“That’s right. There’s three of them, and they stake out all the streets so’s they don’t miss me, and then, pow.”
“And this time you called the cops?”
“Yeah, they got one, but the other two are still around.”
“I thought you looked kind of wary standing there.”
“Yeah, they’re tough guys. You live around here?”
“On 11th Street,” I said.
“Me too. I live with a friend.”
“Why don’t you have your checks sent to your friend’s house?”
“She’s kind of a heavy drinker. I do some drinkin’ myself, of course, but not as bad as her. She gets her hands on my check, she’ll drink the whole thing up. I like her a lot though, aside from that.”
“Where did you live before?”
“I had my own apartment on 11th between B and C. I had to move out because it got too heavy there. The landlady had a nervous breakdown and started doing crazy things. Doubled my rent so I couldn’t afford it. Tried to move other people in with me, some of them men! I’m an old woman, I’m not gonna live with no man, that’s crazy. It was hassles, all the time. So I moved out.”
“Did you used to work?” I asked.
“Oh yeah, sure. I was a waitress, a bartender, and I used to sew. I was real good at sewing — dresses, shirts, anything.”
“You worked at home or in a factory?”
“In a factory.”
“Were you married?”
“Yeah, I was married, had seven kids, but only one of ’em lived. He’s married and has kids of his own now.”
“Where does he live?”
“East Rutherford, in Jersey. I go visit them sometimes, he’s always glad to see me, ‘Hey Ma, come on in,’ and then he has to go out to the store, he’s gone for hours. Then his wife goes to look for him, and she don’t come back either, and I’m left there to watch after the kids. But I don’t mind, I like the kids.”
“What happened to your husband?”
“Oh, him. Listen, I don’t want to say anything against him, he’s a good man as far as he goes, but when he got his temper up with me, watch out. I’m glad to be rid of him.”
“He used to hit you?”
“Hit me? I got stabbed more’n once.”
“Wow. So you divorced him?”
“Yeah, got it done in court and everything. Later on he tried to get me to come back to him. Crazy. Oh sorry, I know it don’t come out right when I laugh, that’s ’cause I had all my teeth out. I went to a dentist and asked him to pull all of them, twenty-two at one time.”
“Why did you do that?”
“ ’Cause I hate going to dentists, it gives me the chills. I didn’t want to deal with it no more.”
“But how can you chew your food?”
“Listen, my gums are stronger than your teeth. I can even eat steak.”
I asked her name and whether she’d mind being written up in The Ruse.
“Course not, I got nothin’ to hide. I could tell you some stories — about gangsters, about all kinds of people.”
“Like what? Tell me one about gangsters.”
“Oh, I knew some gangsters. Shazy Moridi, I knew him. Bugsy Milano.”
“How did you know them?”
“Shazy Moridi, I worked in his store. I didn’t know nothin’ was goin’ on till I had to balance the books at the end of the month, and things didn’t match up. The store was just a front, he was makin’ bundles of money.”
“How?”
“Well, like he’d lure some drunk in there and then his boys would roll ’im.”
“What kind of store was it?”
“A candy store. It was down on Eldridge Street.”
“What was he like?”
“Oh, real nice, polite and courteous. His wife was real nice to me, too. He died, though, got shot down in the street. Yeah, I could tell you about all kinds of people.”
So next time I run into Ida, I’ll get some more stories for you.
Love, Violet
Is This Taking Too Long?
The theme is hesitation — how to begin? (That’s a joke.) Just now I turned around twice on 11th Street, making a Subway Strategy: “The F train is more certain. . . . The 6 will give me more time to write.”
If you turn around twice it’s like you haven’t turned around at all. Except you’ve turned around twice.
People always say, “It’s six of one and a half-dozen of the other” — as if those are the same. But I’d much rather have a half-dozen — you get a carton with a scratchy, antiquarian look. I’m speaking now of eggs.
“Do zen” is “dozen” with a space.
Last night I learned the duodenum — a part of the intestine — comes from the Latin for twelve because it’s twelve fingerbreadths wide.
There was an Egg Store on Nagle Avenue in my youth — a mysterious place, rather empty, except for eggs. (“Rather empty, except for eggs”?)
A guy named Whitey ran it. Which fits.
Have you noticed there’s a lot of repetition in this article? I said, “Have you noticed? . . .” That makes sense, because hesitation uses repetition. You think, “The F is farther, but it’s surer . . .” — then you think it again. That’s the hesitation. Hesitation is filled with repetition, much as the egg store was filled mostly with space.
Do zen.
I just passed that cube sculpture in Astor Place, where a man was laying out pornography on the sidewalk. The wind was blowing open one of his magazines and he said, “Shit!”
Then I went to look. OK, folks, here’s my rationale: I half-saw two symmetric photos, and the word SEE.
“SEEING DOUBLE!” I thought. “A magazine of naked identical twins!”
I realize this is not much of a justification. Actually it was called “SEEKING” and may’ve been one of those Herman Hesse-type Naked-Women-Who-Want-To-Realize-God magazines, but I couldn’t open it because the ones on the cover had had too many hangovers and their faces couldn’t be looked at without pain.
So I picked up another. (All this was accompanied by hesitation: “I’m on my way to my meditation group. What if my feminist friends walk by? I’m on my way to my meditation group. What if my feminist friends walk by?” But those arguments only make you want it more.)
One woman made me happy. She was a blonde — a kind of country-western blonde, whose vagina opened as if by will on the left page, while on the right page her eyes seemed to say, “Yes, I have a vagina. I’m tired of pretending I don’t!”
Then I looked at a mailbag-type mag, with mussy black-and-white photos paired with addresses — women, mostly, most of them pretty, though some had omitted their heads, or placed them under a pillow. (Didn’t Jesus say something about that?) But their eyes — such as a rent-a-camera photo could evince — had a type of loneliness one associates with Colonists of Mars.
It was sad how they looked across their tits — like you look at your grandmother across a plate of spaghetti as a kid — not yearningly, but somehow knowing in advance the answerer of their letter would be their identical Twin in loneliness.
Great Hesitators are forgotten by history — I’m thinking of the Syrian general who stopped his troops in the six-day war because he saw a large hand come down from the sky.
R.L.S.
East With Agamemnon
Steve hasn’t seen the East Village in years. (He lives in Miami.) We give him and his brother Larry the tour. The Hare Krishnas are playing the park and feeding the Saturday poor. R. goes up and jiggles to the chant.
On our way to the band shell a man being choked by his shirt collar hands us a Mennonite tract which asks, What’s the net worth of your soul? On the stage, a choir of twenty sings hymns to an audience of four: a man and his dog sitting on the ground, a man in grubby yellow singing along, and a guy on a bike with a huge black and silver sombrero. We add ourselves to the audience. The choir huddles together, never raising their eyes from their hymnals.
As we walk across to Avenue B, a middle-aged woman is standing at the 8th Street crossing. She holds a small paper bag with her fingertips and stares straight ahead. “Are you OK?” R. asks. No response. We go up to 9th and peek in the shiny pink lobby of the Christadora. “These are the people the park is being cleaned up for,” R. tells Steve. A resident glides through the door, a young man with a thrilling haircut. I point out the carved reliefs over the doorway: a griffin, a centaur, an angel. We check for the frozen woman on our way back, but she has made it across the street and is shuffling up 8th. We head for the bookstore as it starts to rain.
“Too bad,” says R. “You’re missing the street-peddler scene because of the inclement weather.”
“Why,” asks Steve, “doesn’t anyone talk about clement weather?”
Sunday night we go to the Continental Divide to see Don Cherry, the great black jazzman. “He’s God,” someone tells us during the break. Outside, a smiling black man with a Roy Rogers cup wheedles us for change. “You got some for me?” asks Steve. “Sure.” He pours four pennies out of his cup and hands them to Steve, then looks around. “Anybody else?” Steve gives him back the pennies, and R. gives him a dime. He walks away. A minute later he’s lying on the ground, a cab is pulling away, a big white guy is striding up St. Mark’s Place with a blond woman.
“Did someone hit him?” R. yells. “Did he hit the cab?” The Roy Rogers cup is on the ground. “My dime!”
The man lies on the sidewalk, head in the gutter. Larry squats down and holds up the guy’s head. Blood seeps through his teeth.
Steve pursues the white guy into a deli and stares at him. The guy says, “Get out of here before I smash your face too!” Steve ambles back up St. Mark’s while the bully postures outside the deli yelling, “So what! What are you gonna do about it!” He heads toward Second Avenue, and R. follows.
The black guy is out cold. I can’t take my eyes off the blood in his teeth. Larry’s books from the Strand have become his pillow. A white cop arrives and asks questions. A couple announce that the bully has punched someone else down the street. “Where’s R.?” asks Larry, worrying. He and Steve go off with the cop.
Down the block some locals are bobbing and weaving with the white guy. “I just did ten years on Riker’s Island,” one says, “I ain’t afraid of nobody.” A big black man is trying to hold the others off. “He punched a homeless guy,” someone tells him.
“Oh, OK, then beat the shit out of him.”
The cop comes up and the white guy says, “Yeah, I hit him. I was worried about my wife. She’s pregnant.”
Meanwhile the homeless man has come to. “What happened? Why am I on the ground?” A middle-class black is soothing him. “Don’t worry about it, man, you’ll be OK.” By the time the cop gets back, the homeless man has wandered off, so there’s no one to make a complaint. Steve and R. saw the guy fall but not the actual blow. The only witnesses are the black men down the block who, for personal reasons, melted away when the cop arrived. So the white guy goes home with his wife.
As we walk Steve and Larry to the F train, we pass an old man eating out of the garbage. Six aged black dogs loll near him on the sidewalk. “Wow,” says Steve, “the East Village is amazing.”
Violet Snow
Saturday Night
Lately I’ve changed my mind about going out on Saturday night. I’d been doing it since I returned from India. Then, at the demonstration after The Tompkins Square Park Riots, I ran into Elinor Nauen. It was Saturday night and she was going home to write Poems. It was as if she’d said, “I’m going to use a crucifix as a can opener.”
One must go out Saturday night — it’s one’s duty to the City, I’d thought. The City needs our attention. It’s like a cabaret singer. If you ignore it too long it goes home and shoots itself.
But Elinor’s right. You can give the City love in other ways. This week I’m going to the St. Mark’s Bookshop to read “Batman.”
Ah, comic books never disappoint — particularly if you don’t pay for them. Comics are frivolous at their core — I mean, look at their name.
The last one I read was one of those 1977 D.C. horror numbers, “Tales of the Unexpected.” One tale was this old unemployed actor who gets a job playing a man in a coffin. “Great performance!” the director enthuses. Turns out he died during the take.
Why do I like those stories so well? The very artificiality that irritates me in Swedish Art Movies — that the boy always ends up walking by the beach alone with a troubled Look — cheers me in “The Blue Devil.”
I think of a couple of Spiderman villains almost every week: the Kingpin of Crime, for one — a very fat man with a cigarette holder, yet when he moves, he’s faster than a three-card monte proprietor (does everyone know these fast-moving men who shift three playing cards on a cardboard box, calling, “Find the Red, get ahead”?), and “he’s solid muscle,” as Spidey has said numerous times. This is what Death feels like: when twenty people have gathered around someone lying on the sidewalk on 48th Street, as if a Strong Fat Man, the Kingpin of Crime, had flung out one arm and leveled this man, Ralph Rodriguez.
The Kingpin had a wife; for months, they were playing this up, but then I ran out of money or went to college, because all I recall is her silhouette. She was little and elegantly slim and he was terrified of her. (I think she emerged later as the Empress of Crime.) Who would be Death’s wife — Immortality? (And wouldn’t he be frightened of her?) Everything in a comic touches us like a philosophical principle.
In a movie, you know Jeff Daniels is really a person when he goes home, whereas the Kingpin always is the Kingpin. When the comic is over, he lies on the sofa, pulls off his black shoes, mixes a daiquiri and tries to relax, but he can’t relax. He’s a fixed entity — he’s always fat and strong, the Kingpin of Crime.
So this is my new stance toward Saturday night. Because Saturday night is a weapon, it can be used for good or evil. You must use the proper spheres of your mind, or you’ll wind up in the drink. (I mean, a river.)
R.L.S.
Editorial
What can one do about the current political messages we have been receiving?
Sadly, The Bush Of Presidency has been telling everyone to volunteer, and everyone I know has been volunteering. I was at The Catholic Worker, till my left knee gave out. You should go there. I love Catholics: one day after we fed the Poor, I went with everyone to mass, and we all made long faces and ate the God.
Such a sense of humor in that act. God will eat us, too.
Graffiti
“It was really such an experience I will never forget,” a woman with a German accent says on my bench, in Astor Place. “It was creeping!”
Ah, here comes the shiny train. All trains are shiny now. Graffiti has disappeared, and is anyone any happier? Not me. Sometimes for an hour out to Queens, I’d stare at the phrase “2-Tone” and Think.
Why would someone name himself “2-Tone”? I’d think.
Did he have two Tones, like Angry and Cunning? Maybe he meant dial tones?
“2-Tone” would enter my Inner Book, along with Krishna and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. (I believe there’s no g in “Ramblin’ Jack Elliot.”)
Everyone has a Book within, just as they carry an address book without.
Ah, my meal’s rolling away — the result of putting it in a margarine container and riding a train.
Also we each have a personal Atlas, maybe with Madagascar mislabeled Malaysia because of something someone said at a party once.
But now graffiti’s gone, and there are only ads like
PREGNANT?
WE CAN HELP
to read. But I’m not pregnant so they can’t help.
A woman in a neon tutu and that homeless scent has sat down next to me. She has a brand-new Italian bread and is drifting out to sleep.
I read a good graffito in the 8th Street station:
“Don’t you love money?” (In quotes, like that.)
Graffiti is the best literature because it doesn’t ask your permission.
My God, the woman stood up and the bag she’s holding — a kind of Sarita sack — has graffiti on it. “JANET” it says in chubby letters, and above it a Cleopatra-like gal winks.
“That’s a beautiful bag,” I say.
“Thank you. It’s a T-shirt.”
“Did you make it?”
“No. A artist did that.”
Now I’m thinking of Joni Mitchell singing, “He Played Real Good for Free,” an awful, and expensive song, but she was right: the real artists are pursued by the police.
This Charming Man
Radiation Is Safe
R. and I went to Washington, D.C., for four days. Here is my report:
The white people look so American, scrubbed and casual; you picture them all in high school, at their lockers. They say things like, “Michael, you’ve got to change the number of your deductions.” The city is eighty percent black, and so are the buses, but the subway (at least the Orange Line) is ninety percent white. There are lots of Salvadorans. We saw many of them at a humorous rally to persuade illegal aliens to register. The emcee used his tail as a microphone.
Everyone on the street likes giving directions, and they go into great detail. Where a New Yorker would say, “Take the second right and then the first left,” a Washingtonian says, “Go two blocks straight ahead and turn at the yellow drugstore. Then you’ll see a big white building with columns. Walk toward that building and turn left at the dry cleaners. Then on the opposite side of the street. . . .” And they watch you as you walk away to make sure you get it right.
The most obvious difference between New York and Washington is the subway, called the “metro,” like in Moscow. The metro is absolutely clean. All the stations are exactly the same, with huge arched ceilings of tile, acoustically shaped to create a hush. All the lighting comes from below. Connecting lines are linked by a half-minute walk and an escalator ride, as if the whole system had been designed at once, instead of line by line. It’s awesome for about five minutes, but who wants a subway you can’t complain about?
However, I’ve been assured this refinement is all a veneer. The local politics are ugly. The mayor has been treated for cocaine abuse. His mistress took the rap for him for possession of coke. The political machine gave her $50,000 to spend two years in jail.
I feel sorry for Washington. Being the capital, it has to be so image-conscious. Everyone knows New York is a mess — we don’t have to pretend otherwise (except at the Statue of Liberty).
On a gloomy day, R. and I went to the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History, formerly the Museum of History and Technology, back when technology was sexy. I saw an exhibit about blacks migrating north for the Industrial Revolution. Under glass was an application for the Ku Klux Klan. (It was signed.)
I was waiting in the lobby for R. to come out of the printing presses, when “The Star-Spangled Banner” started playing. One man put his hand over his heart. A huge panel sank into the floor, revealing the extant third of the flag that flew over Fort Henry while Key wrote his song. A blurry voice told the flag’s history, the panel re-ascended, and the tourists went back to their business.
Violet Snow
Saving Space
By the time you read this, our nation will either be up in Space or back on TV, interviewing panicked fourth graders. Last time, three years ago, Sheila and I were at The Dewdrop Inn and Jane came in, with a look of her-lungs-having-been-reversed. She works for Omni, and still believes in the Spatial Program. Who would’ve known?
I don’t get the Outer Spaces idea — unless it’s the final extension of climbing trees. I loved climbing trees as a nine-year-old, and once, in a “Thor” comic, they pictured Yggddsrrl, the mythical Norse tree that encircles the Earth. Climb that, and yon moon is close.
But interplanetary vacations are never my strength. This planet seems so hostile, and there’s air here, and fast food joints all over the place. Imagine the other planets! I say, send out invitations through the universe and let them visit. (But tell them to give a couple weeks notice. We need to buy curtains.)
When is the proper time to wash your windows? We keep waiting for some kind of sign. My birthday’s coming, but that seems like the opposite sign — a time to let the windows cloud.
Here’s a place Government could help. I was in Turkey one day when No One Could Go Outside. Actually, you could go outside, only then you had to spend a year in jail. This life is full of such ingenious choices. They were counting everyone, that’s why.
Anyway, suppose four times a year — April 3, June 19, September 29, January 12 — was Clean Your Window day? Of course, you’d also have the option of defrosting the refrigerator.
This is reminding me of a plan I developed while taking the New Haven Express one Tuesday. I thought of all the cleaning women leaving Harlem, one of the dirtier spots in North America, to ride to Connecticut, which is already desperately too clean. “The Rich Get Richer,” is a sad adage but “The Clean Get Cleaner and The Mussed Mussier” is much worse.
Let’s raise money for a day when we reverse the Cleaning Gradient and send all the cleaning women back to the blocks that need it. (Is there a cleaning man? Only Mr. Clean, who’s more a supernatural Arabian White Slave.)
Clarion H. Call
Haystacks Vs. You
I ran into Hazel the Alphabet Lady again last week. She was at the corner of Spring and Broadway with her coffee cup when I went out for a cookie. She wasn’t swinging around street lamps this time. Some of the signs pinned to her coat had been changed. Most prominent was a Toys Я Us handbill, with the Я outlined in magic marker. I wish I’d thought to tell her that Я is the letter “ya” in Russian and means I.
I asked how she was doing, and she said her welfare application was coming along, she’d finally got the right ID, so she’d be on the rolls soon. Meanwhile, she didn’t mind panhandling a little longer.
“You meet a lot of people this way?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. A lot of people. Some really innocent people.”
“Innocent?”
“Yeah, like people who can’t even speak English. They don’t know what’s happening to them. Can you imagine, no one understanding a word you say?”
“Well,” I said, “some people who speak English can’t understand each other either.”
“One language everyone understands. This one.” She tapped her coffee cup. “That’s why sometimes you see me with a gag on my mouth. It don’t matter if I can even speak. Long as I hold out this cup, everyone understands.”
“That’s so,” I agreed. “Well, take care.” I went back to my work, and she went back to hers.
Lucid
Cher Speaks
Last night, when the cops came through the A train, at first I expected them to beg for money. You know how you hear that click at the end of the car, and brace yourself for: “Ladies and gentlemen, please excuse me . . .”? (Have you noticed how the pleaders are becoming more apologetic: “I don’t want to insult your intelligence . . .” the last one said. Believe me, I’m used to it.) Some chemistry changed when Koch introduced his dictum Not To Give. I started to resent the guys. Why can’t they move to Indonesia, if they insist on starving to death? I thought. My response has been, of course, to give more, like Jimmy McCluskey, my father’s friend, who takes revenge on an arrogant waiter by tipping him grandly.
Everyone says New Yorkers are cruel (at least New Yorkers say that — it’s part of our Self-Love), but the fact we’re suffering Benevolence Burnout shows we must’ve had some.
I got this idea for a New Yorker cartoon: a guy’s lying on the ground with a sign that says: “I AM HOMELESS. I HAVE NO FOOD. I AM SUFFERING APPENDICITIS. PLEASE GIVE. GOD BLESS YOU.” And all these businessmen are passing with signs that say, “I HAVE A HOUSE IN CONNECTICUT WORTH $220,000. I MAKE $65,000 A YEAR. I HAVE A HONDA CIVIC. I’M $40,000 IN DEBT. PLEASE DON’T ASK FOR MONEY. GOD BLESS YOU.”
Is that funny?
Telling your story on the subway is a good idea. The problem is it doesn’t go far enough. After the young man and his cane-wielding “grandfather” shuffle off, someone should stand up and say, “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen. I live in a home shelter in Queens. I don’t want to take up your time, but I’ve been having a lot of trouble with my girlfriend. Y’see, she wants us to move to Long Island and I just can’t see it. All I’m asking for is sympathy. . . .”
This morning it rained and a strange thing happened. You know how there’s always a beggar at the uptown exit of the 86th Street No. 6 train? Well, today there was only a puddle with a piece of cardboard in it, but this cardboard looked at us as yearningly (and we avoided its gaze as guiltily) as that black-haired little girl.
Daniel Da Friend
Read Gently
As I left St. Mark’s Church after mimeoing The Ruse at the Poetry Project, the door locked itself behind me. The gates, I soon discovered, were also locked, and I was stuck in the courtyard with Peter Stuyvesant. “No problem,” I thought, “I’ll climb over this stone thing in the corner.” The monument filled the only gap in the spiked fence surrounding the churchyard. With the aid of a signpost, I climbed onto the roof of the stone thing and peered at the distant sidewalk. I didn’t feel like breaking my ankles, so I waited for an appropriate helper to pass by. Most people didn’t notice me.
Finally I called out, “Hello?!” to a tall young man in denim, and he looked away as if I had tried to bum a quarter. Another passerby paused and said, “Watch out.” “Can you help me get down from here?” I asked. He suggested I climb down the front of the stone thing, and let me use his hands as a step to reach the ground. He was black. He asked my name. I explained how I’d gotten stuck in the courtyard.
“Are you from some kind of group? You must be in some kind of group.”
“I’m a poet. And a writer. See, I was here printing up this newspaper I write with my boyfriend.” I showed him The Ruse.
“They pay you for doing that?”
“No.”
“What? I wouldn’t do no work for free.”
“I do it because I like to write, and I want people to read what I write.”
“You like to write? Man, that’s weird. What you write?”
“This article is about homeless people in the East Village, and this one is about the strike at NYU.”
“East Village ain’t nothin’. Where I live, someone should write about that. All the junkies and hookers and people livin’ on the street, it’s a sick world. Someone should write a book about that. It’s a sad world.”
He then launched into a passionate monologue on the state of the world. I couldn’t follow most of it. This is what I made out:
He’s twenty-five, and he lives in Spanish Harlem. He works in a hospital mopping floors and is training for a more skilled job involving, I think, disabled people. He grew up in a welfare hotel on 42nd Street until his mother found a job and moved the family into an apartment.
He kept saying how hard life is for people who don’t have money or a decent home. Then he turned bitter about women. “Women have it easy. They just have to ask, and they get it — food, money, anything.”
“Not all women,” I said. “Some women have kids and no husband, and they have to work and take care of the kids all by themselves — that’s really hard.”
“Why they have kids, then?” He took off on a diatribe about women and sex, ending with, “Why they give in so easy?” He was angry at women, both girlfriends and whores, for being after his money and his gold chain. Some of them live for drugs. He tells them to stay away from crack, but they don’t listen. It’s crazy to take crack, but some people are desperate and just don’t know any better.
“What’s the solution?” I asked. “What do you think people need?”
“Space,” he said. “You live a whole family in a hotel room, the stove right next to the bed, you got no space. You can’t bring a friend home, you can’t do nothin’. You gotta go out on the street. Yeah, someone should write a book about that.”
Violet Snow
Our Party
This letter is part of an ongoing correspondence between R.L.S. and “Legs” O’Brien, a Sri Lankan rickshaw driver.
Legs,
We gave a party last night, in honor of the newest year. “It’s a palindrome,” Etan said, on the roof, but I said no, 1991 will be a palindrome. “We’re Two Years Before The Palindrome,” I quipped. Then the fireworks stopped and we went downstairs.
“There’s a leap second this year,” Laurie said, in Brooklyn — but the damn thing is finding it.
I, being a Jew, live under two systems of time, and celebrate two New Years every year. The Jewish New Year coincides with my birthday and the First Day of School — also When I Usually Move To A New City. That seems the true beginning; as the tree discards its finery, and stands naked, then a year can honestly begin. This deal that some midwinter day full of alcohol is somehow new has always seemed specious.
Beyond this, the Jews ride the moon, the Christians the solar body, so I cannot escape the sensation that I am a Christian by day, and by night a Jew. (Christopher Columbus, it is rumored — by Jews — was such.)
You Hindus have everything so easy. The universe repeats every once in a while, like the episodes for “Love That Bob,” and you know what to expect. Everyone here was so upset the airplane from Britain was blown out of the sky by a plastic bomb. Many the family of a victim said, “Revenge must be ours!” But when they’d thought God did it, they didn’t prepare an assault against Him. You Hindus have it easy.
So, this party went well. Someone brought those potato chips that don’t have a name, they have a sentence — “These are very natural potato chips, made especially for you, my dear” — on the cover. They were good, very chewy. We still have eggless ice cream in the freezer; no one ate it because I never took the lid off — or maybe because there weren’t any plates. The stew was fabulous, but nobody ate that (except Bettina and Peter): no plates. At our next party, we’ll put out plates.
Also we didn’t have cups — we didn’t want to buy plastic and wreak shit on the ecostructure. Consequently, there was little drinking. I think we did the right thing, there.
We played Pin The Tail On The Donkey twice. I bought it for seventy-five cents at The Party Store on Avenue C — but Martin did so well on his first try, there seemed no point in continuing. I mean, he pinned the tail right on the donkey.
What did we talk about? I calculated later I conversed for seven hours. The only thing I remember is that Jan and Girish had lent us Arabian Sex Practices and this eighteen-month-old, Gideon, pulled it off the shelf and gave it to his mother. Anyway, I confessed to them — Jan and Girish — that I borrowed it only to parody in The Ruse. It goes like this:
As regards the vulva called el feurdj, the slit, it has this name because it opens and shuts again when hotly yearning for coitus, like the one of a mare in heat at the approach of the stallion.
But that’s not the parody — that’s it.
Any other conversation? Sacco and Vanzetti weren’t mentioned, I recall that, though a guy with glasses and I were on to Using A Computer To Solve Artistic Problems, until we were interrupted. Etan and Richard Kahn told Mark Twain jokes at 2 a.m. The best was: “Hard work is so repulsive it bothers me even when some other poor bastard has to do it.”
Valerie and I discussed how unpleasant it is to model naked for art students, and Bettina said, “For all work one must demean oneself,” and I said, “What about Bruce Springsteen?” and she said, “That’s different.”
Maybe all we did talk of was work, and Kahn said a cellular phone helps.
Well, it was very exciting at the time.
Love, R.L.S.
Birds Fly
I’m a workaholic — yeah, I admit it. On weekends I just want to lie around the house but I can’t, I get too anxious, so I have to make myself do things like look at the city.
Saturday I went toward the river. I rode my bike to 31st and Eighth, and the main post office with that long, long sweep of columns, and I turned left, and there were two long semis. I love that word, semi, such an insounding and graceful word for a leviathan. The sign up the block on the parking lot said “tractor trailers” — so prosaic. Anyway, on 31st flanking the post office are the loading docks, ten or so, and a few monster semis sat there. I wondered how many letters would fill one (or is it packages?) riding toward New Braunfels, Texas, and Needles, California, to people who would never know a great white semi carried their mail.
Then on the next block, as I mentioned, was a lot full of them — semis I mean — of different sizes, some with full-color eagles on the side and the words: “When we say overnight, we mean overnight.”
I came out on the West Side Highway, and above it was a helicopter about to nestle down between the road and the river, and it said on the black and red helicopter: “TRUMP.” I crossed over to the fence that fenced off the little space labeled “30th Street Heliport” and watched ten or so people exit the helicopter, but none of them was Donald Trump. Limousines awaited them, nevertheless. I hung around waiting for someone famous to show up until my voyeurism embarrassed me and drove me south.
And lo and behold, a yard full of cement mixers! What a splendid sight, like a pond of hippos. My day for monstrous trucks. I rode home happy, the sun in my eyes.
Sunday, again, my ends were loose and I went to Tompkins Square Park thinking to interview some homeless people. But they were all asleep, taking advantage of the autumn sun, so I wandered around. A man in dreadlocks did tai chi to the sound of a flute played between the public toilets, where the acoustics are good. A woman twirled her baton in a nether corner behind yellow leaf curtains.
A drunk went up to a sleeping homeless man and shook him. The sleeper’s tall friend stood up and told him to beat it. The drunk replied that he would beat the tall one up.
“With what?” The drunk was very short.
“I got a bottle.” He wagged a mostly empty rum bottle.
“Man, you need more than a bottle.”
They yelled at each other for a while. Sad, I thought, that they must fight each other instead of the mayor. I noticed a papier-mâché dog’s head on a lamppost.
On the way home, I saw this graffito on 9th Street: “SAVE MAGNUM OUR DOG,” and on a pillar I saw a down-arrow and the words “GOD’S CROTCH.”
Then on First there was another fight. A black man had rear-ended a white man’s car, and the two of them were shouting.
“Fuck you!”
“No, fuck you!”
“Fuck you!”
“No, fuck you!”
“Fuck you!”
“No, fuck you!”
This went on an improbably long time until the black guy said, “And fuck your old lady!” and the white guy went for him, just as a cop pulled up. I crossed the street and saw that there was indeed a middle-aged woman in the white man’s car, looking bored and cross, as if she wished the whole East Village would blow off in the brass November wind.
Lucid
