The art biz got me into a free apartment on a high floor of a waxy Upper Broadway building. College was a few blocks up the street, so the location was convenient. My money situation was tight and I'd been sleeping on the couches of acquaintances since I got off the bus at Port Authority. But then I started dating a famous painter's daughter.
The Famous Painter's long-time assistant had recently quit, to strike out on his own. The deal was that if I stretched canvas, cleaned brushes, fetched art supplies, kept the place swept up and showed the occasional roving collector a painting or two when Himself was out of town, I could sleep on the roll-away cot in one of the palatial pad's former servant-quarters rooms.
The room had a view of another swell building across the street. I could see the river if I stuck my head way out the window. The place was quiet. The place was free. I nearly did a back-flip.
Mick, the assistant who quit, was nice enough to teach me how to knock a stretcher together, staple the canvas on tight as bongos and apply gesso smoothly. The secret is fine-grit sandpaper. He was built like one of those football player bohunkuses who stand way in back, but surge forward with surprising speed, unstoppable force. Forearms like Popeye, ice-blue eyes, high-pitched laugh, plush red beard shot with early gray, Irish to the bone-marrow.
So we headed down to McSorley's after he'd shown me the artsy ropes.
McSorley's didn't serve women in those days. There weren't any sexist signs posted, but if a lady came in, the joint froze. Not as unfriendly as it sounds.
A row of filth-dusted turkey wishbones strung out along a non-functional gas-lamp fixture over the beer-sloshed counter drove it home that I was living in New York.
Mick had finessed a genteel 2 bdr. apartment in a Deco doorman building a block from my new digs. His real estate allotment was subject to shrinkage, due to the steady encroachment of paintings warehoused in crude clear-pine stalls. The paintings looked like they were all the same picture of nothing, but in different colors.
So we talked smut instead of paintings, art, artists or the art world or art life. Mick was an animated encyclopedia of filthy jokes and, he swore, true-life sex stories skewed towards the gross-out end of the raunchy spectrum. He came especially alive when he mimed the girl parts of sperm-odysseys after a few beers.
His cock, he said, was precisely the size and shape of a beer can. To illustrate, he casually dashed off a deft self-portrait as a portly nude non-goatfooted priapic satyr. All-natural draftsman skills got him a free ride through art school, but art and the world went abstract at about the same time.
“Me and this other guy, we painted an orange line all the way around Cooper Union,” he said.
“What the fuck for?” The answer was a completely unrelated dirty joke, after a rare awkward silent stare. He said I could have the drawing.
Mick had trouble getting in with a gallery, but was able to trade the occasional canvas for a month's rent, or a case of wine.
Mick was a born chef who could draw, and whose brother-in-law just happened to be New Jersey's most celebrated butcher. Mick got regular shipments of free meat close to expiration date and knew what to do with it.
Mick smoked pipes, and was fastidious about his clothes. He belonged to a snobby Hudson River rowing club. He'd been around Europe, on the Famous Artist's coattails and off.
Art school kept him out of the Vietnam war. His older brother volunteered, came back psychically damaged and drug-addicted, moved to Seattle, got a job as an ambulance driver.
Vietnam vets, I noticed, tended to avoid New York, or got out of there quickly if that was where they came from before they went to war.
Mick was in the middle of a brother-derived war story about gook whores who stuffed razor blades in their ying-yangs to slice GI wangs and give Cong syphilis a toehold when he stood and quickly crossed the room to hit the light-switch by the Shaker highboy scored in yet another painting-barter deal.
‘Sniper,' I thought. Urban legends, prepare to meet paranoid Big City reality. But Mick sat back down, poured more Burgundy and stared out the window.
“The late show,” he whispered, and pointed to a window on the fourth floor of the slightly less dreamy Deco pile across West 104th, where a pale yellow light had just come on.
We watched a woman enter her living room and remove her chocolate-colored teddybear-plush coat. She flopped on a sofa, wrenched off her high heel boots and sat splayed, dazed, dazzled and generally knocked out by whatever kind of day she had. She stuck a hand up her skirt, scratched distractedly.
“There she goes,” Mick said. “She diddles like crazy when her husband and daughters aren't around.”
“She does not,” I said, but I'd never seen anything like it before. Wasn't possible to casually spy on people across the street where I come from.
The supposedly frig-crazed babe turned the scratch into a slow consolatory rub and stared blankly ahead, not seeing, mouth closed, unblinking, as if her window was meditation-inducement TV.
Suddenly she snapped out of her trance, got up and went into another room, maybe the bathroom. But she left the living room lights on.
“Ah crap,” Mick said. But he left the lights out, lit a pipe instead. “You should see what she does when she's home alone. Got this vibrator like a fucking jackhammer. And her daughters are always patting their bunnies too. Like the decorator mixed Spanish fly in the fucking wall paint.”
“You're so full,” I said, “of shit.”
The lady's husband entered not much later, hung up his coat in the closet, got his wife's coat off the couch and hung it up too. He wore glasses, and the fey weedy moustache a lot of city men wore those days to seem non-threatening to women. I pegged him for the sensitive psychologist at a private girls' school, or a upper-echelon Public Library employee.
“What's his deal?” I said. “Secret fag? Leather boy?”
“Who gives a shit about him?”
Mick sucked his pipe to a rolling boil, set it in an ashtray he'd swiped from Cafè Fleur, then went to get dessert, an incredibly delicious butter-and-raspberry jam bread pudding, out of the oven.
I asked Mick for another drawing to put up in my cell at the Famous Artist's place, requested a full-length, spread-out excited girl. I gave him my beat-up Navy jacket in exchange. One of my father's friends handed it over when I split for college. “Gets seriously cold up there,” he said.
Later I wished I could get the jacket back.
“Ooh! Ooh!” Mick said, when I went over to his place for yet another free, excellent dinner. “The younger daughter let the dog eat her out the other night.”
Mick's then-girlfriend was built like a German soprano. She put away his wonderful dinners with a positively sexual gusto. My girlfriend, the Famous Painter's daughter, was often present, so there were no late shows, or even any mention of such voyeuristic delights. Those were nice enough evenings, with candles on the table, polite talk, but Mick and I kept sneaking peeks at the late show screen windows across the street.
The Famous Painter's daughter was squeamish about steamy dates in her Pop's palatial studio pied-à-terre. Didn't help when I pointed out my cabin wasn't technically in the pad, since it had a separate backstairs entrance.
Mick wasn't shy about filling me in on his operatic-scale girlfriend. “Big as my thumb, I swear. Barely have to touch her and she flops around like a fish, stuffs her fist in her mouth so she won't yell. She said her mom told her the doctor who pulled her out thought she was a boy at first.”
Had to wonder why Mick didn't immediately ask that amazing lady to marry him, or at least move in. Beercan and hypertrophic joy-buzzer seemed a good bet for two things meant to stick together. Maybe he did ask her.
The lady who lived across 104th Street from Mick came home one summer night, got nude and went into a blue oyster yogini pose on the living room sisal. She looked lonely, sad, disappointed.
“Man you can see up her yoni and out her nostrils,” Mick said. “Check out this Nazi periscope-view of the Atlantis sign, way the hell out at Coney Island.”
She must've heard her husband coming down the hall, fumbling keys. She bolted to a squat, grabbed her garment puddle and hot-footed it to bedroom, bathroom or closet-dungeon. More than a family, the late show cast seemed like four people forced by metaphysical circumstances to share a 2 bdr. holding pen provided by The State or The Man in some cruel, freaky work-release program.
After post-dessert grog, when I was set to take off, Mick said, wait, hang out. He had a feeling the older daughter was up to something hot. Either he kept psychic track of the girls' menstrual-horny cycles, or he had harder gory evidence. He never used binoculars, even though he owned a heavy German pair. Binocular use turns legit peeping into a felony. He'd done the legal research.
We kept drinking, stayed quiet, lights out, waited to see what a girl who lived across the street would do when the people who lived with her straggled off to bed while she stayed up, allegedly to watch some gorgeous rock star on a late-night chat show. She reclined on a La-Z-Boy TV chair from game show ads. Her bare feet eventually went their separate ways on the footrest like a spoiler on the cheap cars Puerto Ricans fetishistically customized for street drags on deserted stretches of West Side Highway. Tribes of motorized island-circlers rumbled through the night, around and around.
“She's off,” Mick said, like we were watching a horse race. “Frig-a-dig-dig. She hasn't got a boyfriend yet.”
Whatever she was doing, she did it discreetly. Crucial lap area blocked from sight by corduroy-upholstered armrest. Action conveyed exclusively by toe-wiggle signals, which eventually led to tell-tale toe-curls.
“Oh man I'd shrimp her till her little tummy hurts and she pees her panties.”
Shrimping was an unsuspected kink. No shortage of new, weird, interesting sex thrills then, including watching a lonely girl's toes move because she was trying to make herself feel better about living where she lived and the relative strangers she was doomed to live with and the changes occurring in her body and mind. Or maybe she just wanted to show her sincere physical appreciation of whoever was on TV that night.
Voyeur life skewed in the opposite direction, for me. Still feel like a creep I never told Mick about the dawn show at my free pad. Or maybe I did and can't remember. Or he wasn't interested.
Wasn't much. The room I slept in was equipped with inadequate wax-papery roll-down blinds. Waking up early's not the worst thing in the world. First thing I usually did was walk over to the window to see what was in store, weather-wise. Figure out what to wear.
Light flooded a window one floor down across the street and bounced off a pale soft lady with short blond hair. She stood at the window, nude like me, and looked out.
We never waved, stroked, patted, wagged tongues or gave any sign we could see each other. Just faced the outside world full-frontal. Due to our North-South situation, she got shone on and I got shown. Maybe she couldn't see me. Maybe dawn dazzle blacked out a college kid with too much uncombed hair and an unresolved piss-dong. But I still felt flattered she showed up at her window every morning, the whole time I lived at the Famous Painter's place.
Her husband was a cop. They had a baby boy. Once I saw her, clothed, holding a nude kid in the window, pointing at the things that fill up the city and saying the names. That was the only time I ever waved. She pointed at me. Maybe she said, “Nice man”, since I had my clothes on. The little boy waved back.
One afternoon at the supermarket, when loading up the month's supply of peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich fixings, I spotted Mick's late show lady pushing a cart full of coffee, canned tomatoes, tuna, rice, milk, spaghetti, cereal and all the other stuff required to keep a family going. Timed the shopping spree so she was just ahead of me in the cashier line. Caught her eye while the minority kid in paper hat and plastic apron bagged her groceries. No recognition. Nothing that said, you and that other creep better knock off spying on me.
She didn't yell for a cop when I sidled up and said hey excuse me but I live on Broadway and 105th, I've seen you around and you've got a lot of stuff and I only got this one bag. Let me give you a hand and carry your groceries as far as your doorman.
The Dominican in the ancient but distinctly non-motheaten double-breasted brass-buttoned overcoat looked at me like I was some cheap tip-hustler, potential competition on his racket. He only twigged the true game when I handed off the bags and said have a nice evening, ma'am. Guess I'll see you around.
There was only a short mental step involved. Older girls appreciate the notice, aren't bothered by polite forward behavior. Some guys figure this out too late.
The lady's daughters didn't interest me. Felt like I already knew them, their hangups and desires.
Not long after the supermarket incident, Mick whipped up Irish stew and invited me over. If he could've sloshed the way that stew tasted onto a canvas, he could've given Pablo Picasso painting lessons. But how can you tell a guy who helped you out and befriended you that he should've been a cook instead of a painter, when a painter's what he wanted to be. Mick was a cook who could draw like a dream. Maybe the world goes round the way it does because most people never figure out what they really are or ought to do.
The husband across the street must've taken his daughters to see a movie or something. Maybe his wife said she had a headache, or just didn't like going to the movies. Some people don't. She sat in the unreclined corduroy recliner reading a book whose title couldn't be discerned without binocs. Brass reading lamp focused on everything but her head.
Across the street, we slurped Irish stew and watched, without making a show of watching. Mike's dinner concluded with a surprise breakfast-for-dessert French toast soaked in diluted orange-blossom honey.
We made it look like we were retiring to wash dishes or discuss art or some other crap in the non-existent back room. Off went the lights. We shadowed back into our balcony seats.
Something in the book had gotten to her, or maybe she felt eyeball-generated photons on her skin. Beam-particles pierce the clothes but don't penetrate to the bone. They're weaker than X-rays, in that sense. She pulled her turtleneck out of her skirt waistband and cupped a tit with the hand not holding the book, tweaked a mom-colored nipple, licked her fingers and tweaked it again. Mammary organ-eye stood like a brown-red menhir on a pale goose-pimpled hill in reading light.
“Oh man I love when she does that. Probably an inch long from all the nursing. She kept it up till the girls were four or five.”
Had to admit, the sight was intriguing. Not sure what I'd have done if I was watching her on my own. Maybe I wouldn't have watched, or wouldn't have known that spying on horny neighbors was something to do. Her hand went back under her pleated work-skirt, raised same to show no panties and a girlish black Origine du Monde.
“She aimed that chair so it faces the window. Saw her do it.”
The recliner looked heavy. She kept licking her fingers, never put the book down. Maybe it was porn, maybe it was poems. She went slow. Her toes curled slightly.
Must've been a quick movie, or maybe the separate-but-equal evening was part of a parents-of-different-religions program, but suddenly she slammed her skirt and shirt down, set the book on her fevered lap and settled into the fell-asleep-while-reading-‘cause-I'm-so-tired-from-teaching-arts n' crafts pose. Husband-father and daughters fake-woke her up, despite their silent-movie theatrical attempts to get coats off and stashed in the closet without a sound. She shook, stretched, and the family regrouped to hit bathrooms, bedrooms, the sack.
“Well thanks for a fantastic dinner and a memorable late show, Mick. You're the host with the most.” I'd given him a pair of genuine tortoise-shell eyeglasses fashioned by some dead craftsman to fit small Irish noses. All he had to do was change the greasy scratched lenses. Found them at the 6th Avenue flea market for $5. Kind of surprised the sharp old Jewish guy couldn't tell he had the real thing, not plastic. Got to use your teeth, like with pearls.
The night's show got me upset enough to opt for a long walk instead of a quick return to the Famous Painter's place. Made it down to the Battery just as the last Staten Island ferry left, but I wanted to go to Coney Island, for some reason. Maybe because I'd never been there before. I found out it's a long walk and not much to look at, in the morning.
The next time I ran into the late show lady, we just happened to be outside the Abbey Pub, a notorious swingles' pick-up spot. I asked if she'd have a drink with me.
The place was dark, wood-paneled, with a low ceiling. They didn't serve grub, therefore no meat-fumes to wreak havoc on female-in-wool and other mating perfumes. We got Irish whiskeys. Maybe she was Jewish, since it was the Upper West Side, but didn't display any of the outward signs. She agreed to come up to my place, which wasn't my place but a Famous Painter's town studio/pad. She liked the idea of two nude lonely people humping on a roll-away cot under Army blankets piled on top of a sleeping bag in pale late-winter twilight with the useless blinds rolled up.
Hot as hell, until the Famous Painter's daughter who was my official girlfriend showed up for a surprise visit. She'd scored free tickets to a Broadway show she wanted to see even though she knew I hate song-and-dance corn, especially if there's tap-dancing involved.
She said oops, sorry and left, even though it was her place, technically. So I wouldn't see her cry.
No one needed to tell me I didn't have a free place to live in Manhattan any more.
Mick invited me over. One look when he opened up the door said are you out of your fucking mind? He made a good dinner, as usual, but couldn't offer me a place to crash because his unsold, untraded paintings had crowded out all surplus living space. His bed furniture had been downgraded to a single. The near-future was either YMCA till cash reserves ran out, or the bus station and a long ride south.
When the city shows you a secret, it's better not to let on. Got to learn. The late show doesn't work like metaphysical television. You can't smash your head against the convex glass screen and suddenly be in on the action. The audience is not invited invited to mount the stage where the Broadway babies yowl, emote and tap their hearts out, sweating the realization of their show-biz dreams.
Luckily a guy in the Victorian Lit seminar let me have one of the extra rooms in his sprawling Morningside Heights pad for $125 a month.
The Late Show turned into permanent stake-out observation of the neighborhood's slices of life from a new window further uptown. Turned out the Japanese restaurant across the street was the Chop-Sukiyaki front for a 2nd floor Oriental brothel. The cut-rate bar in the basement was a heroin wholesale joint. Cop cars lined the street when a Puerto Rican super turned up a chopped-off head in a garbage can.
Mick and I stayed friends. One late show after a maple-smoked bacon-wrapped roast beef dinner proved Mick's story about the late show lady's older daughter and the family's tongue-wagging dog was true too. But I never shadowed her into a bodega or waylaid her outside a meat market tavern.
Mick found out that a rash of non-hangover, emergency room-grade headaches behind the eyes, were nothing more, or less, than a rapid-gro brain tumor. He knew he was fucked as soon as the gruesome medical terminology was out of the doctor's mealy mouth. His ambulance-driving brother made long-distance sure he went out in a hospital that was generous with the serious painkillers. I was there to watch him go. Something fluttery happened to his eyes, then the room rushed into quiet.
Mick wasn't exactly thrilled that he had to die without ever having sold a painting out of a gallery, let alone a 57th Street gallery. I said, Mick this is how old van Gogh went out too. When he asked, I promised I'd try to move his stuff.
But I didn't try hard enough. Mick's life's work went into my former room at the Famous Painter's place and stayed there. I wasn't invited to help out with the art haul.
Found out at the funeral that Mick went to early mass every morning. Or at least that's what the priest said. My ex-girlfriend, a few pews ahead, obviously didn't know either. But she wouldn't look my way.
story by Matthew Licht
copyright 2011
matthew_licht@yahoo.com