The Muse of Newark

AY BE GOD, either me son’s a howlin’ eejit or else he’s a screamin’ cheenius!” My father’s big hands bent back the pages of the manuscript, a long three-page poem entitled “Birds Are Nice.”His blade of a nose flashed; his teeth flashed in a white smile. My mother grabbed me by the neck and began wiping my face with a drab washcloth.

“Ay yi yi, yi yi—you’ve got ink all over your hands,” site said. My Uncle Micky was drunk. He sat at the table and repeated sullenly, “Me guts are bilin’, where’s the food? Where’s the food is all I ask.” Grandpa winked at me from behind his plate and drooled a thin string of gleaming spittle on his yellow hands. He was like a sick bird, a feeble pet parakeet. And the baby cried with confusion.

My mother finished wiping my fingers. “Sit down,” she said, “supper’s on.” But I didn’t hear her. I was listening to my father. He dropped his brogue and picked up a W. C. Fields accent. “Yass, yass, yass,” he said, “I think this young man shows genuine potenchile, yass. Perhaps afterward, m’boy, we could visit the Black Pussy Café, and then later for a bite at the Chili Con Carne Palace, yass. . .”

I slid into the bench behind the table, next to my grandfather. My mother, a silent dark spook of a woman, collected the plates and doled out spoonfuls of spaghetti from the boiling pot on the stove. My father was talking straight now. “Yes, the kid’s got it—the makings of a poet—all the signs are there, not a doubt in my mind. Of course, it will require discipline and rigorous effort, but all the talent’s obvious. He’s a poet from the word go. Look at his hands.” He reached across the table and took my small child hands in his rough mitts. He turned them over like a palm reader.

“They look just plain darty t’me,” Micky said.

“Dirty!” my father bellowed. He scowled at Micky, and his blade sharpened. “The hands of a poet they are. Look at those fingers.” Grandpa sat grinning stupidly, strands of spaghetti hanging out of his toothless mouth, his chin orange with tomato sauce.

“Peter, help your grandfather to eat,” my mother said. The old man grimaced. “Aw now, I’m all right. I can eat by meself.”

“Pass the bread,” said Micky. My father ignored him and broke back into his brogue. “Ah, a fortunate man am I t’have reared such a find build of a boy—and a poet to boot. The muse of Newark he’ll be called, hmmph.” I was grinning like my grandfather, crazy with all the attention.

“Eat your supper,” my mother said. I dug into the spaghetti and slurped it up. Everyone was smiling but Micky. The baby had stopped crying and was drooling onto his bib, saying tiny baby things to himself and picking at the squirming spaghetti with fat fingers.

“Pass the bread,” Micky said again. My grandfather nudged me with a withered elbow and a silly wink.

WE lived then on Ferry Street, in a Portuguese neighborhood, the only family with blond hair or freckles for half a mile around. Our flat was on the third floor of a dying apartment building. The first floor was a store and had changed hands at least twice a year, now a Jewish delicatessen, now a Portuguese bakery shop where the smell of cooked bread burned our noses with hunger. Once a family of Gypsies had lived there, but only for a few weeks. I hated Newark. I hated its drabness and the nondescript gray of its shabby soul as much as I loved the pulse of words my father sang. Newark was a dying town, with an immigrant sadness that neither Irish whiskey nor bar mitzvahs could kill. A brown and broken city of unhappily narrow streets strewn with garbage, scraps of newspaper, old food, and oily rain puddles. It was a city of gutted buildings baring their wooden bones, dark sinister warehouses, and grim factories that sweated their polluted sweat into the river, night and day. Beneath its streets, a tangle of metal arteries hemorrhaged in a hundred places, bleeding water and gas.

On white winter afternoons, school out, I escaped the city, creeping up into the stacks of the Newark Public Library to murder the day with words. Some afternoons I read entire books; other, colder days I looked down upon the city as the radiators banged out heat, watching the white smoke of desperate factories curl like a whisper across the loud white shout of a winter sky. And I was clean and safe there, tenderly turning each brittle page, the words roaring behind my eyes like a printed waterfall, and alone, except for the scurrying slip of a librarian who peeked in at me suspiciously now and then from behind a particularly thin row of books. In the library that winter, I began my own writing. “Birds Are Nice" was my first real literary effort, and my father’s pride and enthusiasm only swelled mine. Stunned with success I wrote every day after that. In the dark four o’clock afternoons and black Newark evenings, I sat at my father’s grotesque walnut-stained desk, dwarfed by its prairie proportions. I used my father’s only fountain pen—an expensive Gothic-looking piece he had been awarded for five years’ service at the Jolly Chef, the restaurant where he worked as a cook—loving its heaviness and the easy way the ink fell from the nib and stained the paper black with words. I quit the Midgets, out basketball team at the Y, and forgot to shout names at Fish Face the butcher, or peek excited at the calendar of a naked woman in red cowboy boots and ten-gallon hat that was in the back room of the printing shop.

I wrote prolifically, turning out long macabre stories of ghosts and saints, mind-bent scientists and mad doctors (named Doctor Death and Professor Fear) , who slouched like sullen dogs through the black alleys and suspicious backyards under Newark wooden tenement rain. I wrote poems and plays, even prayers, which I submitted to the good sisters of the Holy Heart Grammar School in return for three gold stars in my St. Joseph notebook.

My father was hopelessly proud. He brought in poems to the Jolly Chef to show the dishwashers and salad chefs. “Yessir,”he’d say, “my son wrote that. Nice rhythm, eh? and how you like that line, pretty good, I mean he’s only eleven, a few more years and he’ll be another Wordsworth or one of those other poet people—yes, hummph, now take a look at this one,” and the dishwashers would grin and nod enthusiastically while they scraped the plates. “Nice, si, ve-ry nice,” they’d say, though they were Cubans and didn’t understand English. The best part of those winter days was six o’clock when my father came home. I’d see him through the dirty windows of my room, hands poked way down into the pockets of his long gray overcoat, hat pulled low on his head bending his red ears. Then the first sound of the door opening and slamming downstairs, the interminable wait as he climbed the three flights of steps, and finally, his violent entrance, blowing and coughing, always loud words, and clomping shoes to rid them of snow, exploding like the start of a symphony, praising the smell of dinner or cursing the cold, rubbing his hands, breathing, yelling, coughing, and brring. Every Friday night he brought presents— little things—a bubble blower for the baby, a pair of socks for Micky, a pot holder for my mother, finding them after a fumbling search in the woolen stomach of his pockets. Then he’d clomp upstairs, and I’d bend my head over the page as if I were so engrossed in my writing that I hadn’t heard him come home. He’d knock importantly and enter, bringing the smell of wet wool and nicotine with him into my stuffy room. I’d whirl in my chair and run to him to kiss his rough chin, and sometimes he’d give me “the Beard,” rubbing his tough stubble against my cheek until I screamed with a voluptuous pain. Then he’d hmmph and smile and say, “And how be the poet this evenin’,” and pull out of the pockets of his great coat massive reams of yellow paper neatly wrapped in brown. “Never let it be said,” he’d repeat for the dozenth time, “never let it be uttered in this house that words went unwrit for lack of paper,” and he’d sit down on the edge of my bed, and slicking back his snowy hair, wait for me to read him my latest poem or story. And I’d read as he nodded, grave and sagely dignified, muttering yeses and hmmphs and ahs at appropriate places. When I was finished, he’d stand up and snort—tenderly, if you can see that—and light a battered cigarette. Always this moment of pause as he drew the smoke deep into him, beginning to speak only after he blew it in two white jets from his nose. He was a man in awe of words and men who wrote them, but never realized he was a beautiful storyteller himself. Striding back and forth in the room, he’d talk of “the great Hemingway” (in the same tone of voice Hemingway spoke of “the great DiMaggio “) , and tell stories about Keatsandshelley (all one word in my father’s mouth so that for years afterward I thought they were one man) , stories about Thomas Wolfe stalking the streets of Cambridge, haunted and tall, or standing in his Brooklyn flat in earmuffs, gloves, scarf, and heavy jacket, writing in thick ledgers, too poor to pay the heat bill—endless, almost frighteningly romantic stories that were something more than true—endless until my mother’s voice called up the stairs and we went down together for dinner, to a different world.

One Friday night in February, my father got a raise. At seven he still wasn’t home, and Micky, who had been drinking all day, sat in front of his plate like a curse. “Where is that brother of mine? I ain’t et for years.” Grandpa wandered in, squinted at the clock in the kitchen, and said, “Five o’clock, Micky, he won’t be home for a while.”

“Ah yar seventy-eight an’ va can’t tell time yet,” Micky said. Grandpa shrugged and scratched his bald skull.

“Ah,” he said, “clocks,” and walked out disgusted. My mother sat by the stove, her mouth pursed, pulled, drawn into an O by the drawstrings of worry —my father was rarely late. At seven fifteen she threw up her hands and turned toward the stove to serve the meal. But suddenly we heard my father’s heavy steps on the stairs and an outrageous pounding at the door. My mother and I ran to it and threw it open. Standing in the darkness of the hall, puffing and blowing like some colossal seraphim, was my father with a huge brown box in his arms. “Make way! Make way!” he was yelling. He stumbled in and set the box down carefully on the floor where he proceeded to destroy it with his great hands.

My mother did a double take and screamed, “Books? Books? We need more books?” But my father could not be stopped. He stank of whiskey. My mother had her hands in her hair.

“Books, woman, not just books. This is a whole set of encyclopedias for the poet. You want your son to be a poet, don’t you? Well, he needs knowledge. Poets need to know a lot of things.” My mother sat down heavily on the broken sofa. “Ay yi yi, yi yi,” she lapsed in her confusion into Portuguese, Santa Barbara e São Geronimo. We haven’t the dinheiro [“money"] for a new rug, and you buy books. How much? How much?”

My father only half-listening opened the first volume with tender care. “A real bargain,” he said, “a deal. Only ten dollars. Hmm, aardvark . . .” and turning to me, “You know what an aardvark is?”

“Ten dollars! Ah nothing. Um pau por um olho [“a stick in the eye”]. Ah you are crazy Irish. Throw on another herring!”

And my father reading “Yes, hmmph” trying to ignore my mother’s teary tirade. And then Micky and Grandpa came in as my mother rushed out to the kitchen to cry along with the crying highchaired baby, Grandpa laughing in his funny birdy way (“Books, Bill, heh? That’s nice”) , Micky, disgusted, saying “You’re late for dinner because of that, agh,” my father oblivious to them all as he turned the crisp pages delicately with awkward hands.

He looked at me, “Well, me lad, they’re all yours, but I never thought it would make such a scene—‘man can’t live on bread alone’ y’know,” and he strode into the kitchen to ease my mother. He must have told her about the raise, because she was drybut red-eyed when we finally ate dinner.

My mother wasn’t a stingy woman by any means, but she hated extravagance with as much passion as my father loved it. She had a Portuguese frugality that was uncompromisable. Her olive fingers somehow squeezed each nickel into a dime and each dime into a quarter. She took care of all the bills, because my father said it “depressed” him. I think my mother hated Micky. He didn’t work, or if he did at times, he was fired in a few days. My father had gotten him a job once at the Jolly Chef as a dishwasher—but he quit within a week saying, “I’ll be damned if I take arders from me kid brother.” Most of the time he hung around O’Finn’s Bar & Grill, swigging drunken whiskeys and cadging drinks. He was the sullen loud-mouthed mick you always see in crummy Irish bars, kidding the bartender and talking baseball with the regulars. And my father, when pressed by my mother for the reason he let Micky live off us, eating our food and income like a tapeworm in the guts of the family, would shrug innocently and say, “He’s one of God’s handiwork, but not one of his masterpieces, that’s for sure. But he’s my brother.” And the subject was dropped with a temporary finality.

MARCH came like a plague, melting the black snow of winter and lengthening the days. I changed schools and took a bus across town every morning to a public school where my father said I’d learn about “Sophocles instead of St. Francis and his damned pigeons.” On the roll call my name was wedged between a Henkelmann and a Horowitz.

In March, too, my father became sick. He went to work irregularly and then quit altogether. Flesh fell from him like water, sinking his cheeks and flooding him with waves of nausea. Bones seemed to grow in his face and pushed outward against the skin like hard, inward fingers. Waking late at night, I’d often see a light burning in the kitchen and would creep on padded toes to see him sitting at the table reading the encyclopedia and chainsmoking—or sometimes just sitting, his bones collapsed. and his face strewn with a new kind of sorrow or pain. “What are you doin’, Dad?” I’d ask, and his heavy eyes would lighten for a moment and he’d lie. “Oh, just studyin’—tryin’ to keep up with the poet.” And then I’d sit by him, and he’d put his arm around me and ask, “What are the signs ol the Zodiac?” making a big point of not letting me see the encyclopedia In putting it behind his back. And I’d say, “Aw pop, I haven’t read that far. You know I’m only up to M.”But he was hardly listening. He’d pinch out a cigarette and say something like “Of course” or “I forgot,” and then, “You’d better get back into bed before your mother comes down here.” His voice withered now as it rose; his pulse was weak and hardly felt. As the month passed, he wasted, his six feet of hidden angularity suddenly apparent now, his body broken up as if by a grim cubist painter into sharp squares and narrow rectangular solids, straight bone lines where once muscle had made graceful half curves. My mother hoped the coming warmth of spring would strengthen him, but it only seemed to melt him more, as it the sad squares were really hopeless blocks of piled ice.

And as he dwindled, I grew, shooting up two inches that spring, and though I was thinner than my father, my thinness had a solidity and health to it. I began lifting weights at the Y and bought a yellow cloth tape measure, awaiting the burst of my muscles, visions of biceps, triceps, deltoids, calves, and thighs rippling in a catlike ecstasy. But I continued writing and began a long, tortured, terribly descriptive novel, which I never finished, about a Newark boy abducted by a band of Gypsies. And my first love poems.

Spring murdered the city with its youth. Newark showed its age: its wrinkles and lines and the sagging bulk of its old buildings. The April sun penetrated the town, touching every dirty corner, each bleak alleyway, melting the few remaining patches of crusted snow that had lain all winter in a cold shadow. The sun’s pulse was mine as was its warmth, and the soft insistent push of grass between the cracks of sidewalks mine, as was the strut and brag of the young tomcats, as was the whoop and zany shout of the April air. The day after my twelfth birthday, Howie Frank, a new school chum, invited me to his bar mitzvah. At the reception I sat next to Susan Feinberg. She was beautiful.

”I know all about them,” Micky said. He was drunk. ”I used to work with them in Paterson. Lot of funny rules they have, like they can’t eat bacon and eggs at the same meal. B’Jasus, or ham for that matter. Lots of them wear beards, too, especially the priests, or whatever the divil calls ‘em.”

“Rabbis,” I said.

Micky ignored me and continued. “Well all I know,” he said, “is they got a grand lot of stupid rules. That’s all I know.”

“It’s no more stupid than not eating meat on Fridays,” I said. Micky turned on me viciously, “Are you sayin’ them damn Choos is better than us?”

“He’s not sayin’ anything,” my father said, “so simmer down.” Micky shook his head like a man wronged. He looked around the table and his tone changed, “Say Bill, are you goin’ to eat them spuds?” My father looked down at his plate, distracted. “Take them,” he said.

Grandpa nudged me. “I’ll betcha she’s a cutie,” he said and drooled on his pants. Micky laughed sarcastically. I blushed, “Ah, she’s all right.”

BUT Susan was more than all right to me—she was small and fine with looped brown hair that fell in bars against her neck, a straight sweetly bumped nose, and breasts that pushed small and cautiously against her sweater. She moved with a sparkling dark gracefulness, a real contrast to tall awkward spic-mick me, confused by the apelike length of my arms, my gangling legs, never sure where to put them, always surprised when my bewildered feet walked me into a wall, high-strung and electric and taut as piano wire tuned an octave above; me who poked little kids’ eyes with wandering accidental elbows and who slouched all over chairs, each limb, each joint pointing the Other Way. Or imagine an embarrassed Irish-Portuguese version of Shiva, with six arms and six dancing legs, thrashing its way down Ferry Street.

I courted Susan with notes passed in the halls, nervous conversations by her school locker, walks home and countless Cokes, jokes, and Saturday night sundaes in cluttered high-school luncheonettes. Friday afternoons, we sometimes went to the Fox to watch the Three Stooges biff each other all over the screen, Moe slapping Curly, Curly kicking Larry, Larry punching Moe, pie fights and endless (woolwoo!) chases through Hollywood streets, all done with a painful dignity by those three classic shaggy goofs. And me smoking cigarettes with her behind the trees and tombstones of the Holy Heart Cemetery, buying nickel Sen-Sen afterwards to cover up my breath.

And finally “making out” at lights-off parties in the basement rooms of friends, my first love kisses planted awkwardly on a girl’s mouth.

Newark seemed to change its color, lose its drab winter coat, and become almost exciting, naked in red neon. She and I found secret places, hideouts like the cemetery and a deserted garage across the street from her house, where we’d sit for hours holding hands and talking. I wrote her poems, explaining them carefully and at length, so she would understand everything about them. She, my first love, with the Midas touch, who made the streets bright even in the dreariest drizzle.

But spring passed and she passed—as slowly and quietly as spring. No big arguments, only a fading out, a slow deadening that I never suspected until it was too late. And then the final breakup when I saw her in a luncheonette nestled beside Harry Blackburn, fourteen-year-old junior-high-school track star, and then her phony excuses, “He’s so mature,” and her last words as we stood away from the table by the candy counter, “Peter, can’t we just be friends?” I remember the jujubes I was staring at when she said that, the place of every candy on the counter, and then I was numb, shattered, and threw myself out at the night—tears, curses, unforgiveness—and finally sitting down in the wet gravel of a dark, ruined lot where I cried, ashamed, betrayed, and more than miserable. I’ll get drunk, I decided, never having been drunk before, and gave a buck to a sleepy wino.

That night I wandered the city hours beyond my nine o’clock curfew, totally drunk and unhappy, on the verge of sickness. The city looked like a freak, blinking nauseously neon and cheap, the waxy faces of a hundred sad bums who saw me move by them, hunched and dizzy. Outside our house I puked all over my shoes and then stumbled up the three flights of stairs that moved under my feet like an escalator.

My father was at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette and reading the paper as I came in. He looked up at me with pained eyes, but my face was white, wild, and pulled out of shape with grief. Neither of us spoke; I stood shaky at the door, holding on to a wall; he sat gaunt and bloodless, watching me with a broken look, his blade of a nose sharpened by sickness, the edged bone tight against the skin.

“You look terrible,” he said softly. “Come here.”And I went to him, to be wrapped in the shawl of a thin arm, my head buried in the shallow ditch of his chest, as he stroked the hair from my forehead with the heel of his palm. And I felt myself on the edge of tears, holding them back, then silently crying, surrounded by my father’s smell of stale cigarettes and wool. We sat there a long time, until my tears had stopped, the electric buzz of the refrigerator the only sound in the kitchen, as he held my head with thin, anxious fingers. We were a sad boy and a dying man, angled and frozen with sorrow, together in a dying house in the dying Newark night. Someone coughed in another room, and my father spoke. “It’s very hard . . .” he began to say, but stopped, and gave up on the pointless sentence.