Thou should'st be living at this hour

There were hot and muggy days like this on Avenue B in the mid-Sixties. People yelled or screamed, but you were used to it. Cops were on every corner. You’d be afraid to enter or leave your building. A window was just as good as a door and your apartment was sort of on the way to someplace for just about everybody. Your neighbor cried when he discovered another cherished possession stolen. You didn’t cry because you didn’t cherish your possessions. On a day like this you’d buy some wine and make some curry-seeming food and listen to a raga. You’d go to see a movie, or two movies, or a friend, or a bunch of friends, staying out as late as you liked, standing on streetcorners or looking at books. Then a strange kid follows you home because he thinks you were looking at him “with significance” on the subway.

(This sounds like some really old novel. If I did write a novel I guess it would be old at birth. When people began writing about the Sixties, I thought that they all had it wrong and that I would get it right if I made the effort. I don’t think that now. I’d rather channel Lawrence Tierney. A lot of noir in my diet lately.)

The tenement I lived in isn’t there anymore. I noticed this about three years ago on a visit to see friends who had a new baby. They lived in the west 60s and going downtown was a tourist kind of thing. Well, I’m a tourist kind of person, I thought. We got to Avenue B and I saw the gap between two tenements. The gap, the ghost gap, was where I lived for about two years, two fairly eventful years, in the old-novel era.

When I moved to Avenue B I was working as an office boy in the ITT headquarters building on Park Avenue in the 50s and in another building around the corner on Madison. I worked in the Patent Department. I get the two buildings mixed up now. The one on Park had the top executives’ offices, including the nearly always empty one belonging to the ex-CIA director.

We had a library, with law books and official government publications filled with diagrams and descriptions of inventions. I spent many lunch hours there reading poetry books. One attorney noticed this. Indulgently, he told me that he had written poetry when he was in college. Some time later when he saw that I was still reading poetry, he showed some irritation. “Still reading that stuff?”

The Madison Avenue building overlooked the rear of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. One time a pope came to visit the city and stayed at St. Pat’s. Another celebrity visited and I actually shared an elevator with him. It was Walt Disney! His New York offices were in the same building.

During most of this period I was waiting for my first book of poems to come out. It finally did, in the spring of 1966. A courier delivered a copy to me while I was at work. I looked at it with indefinable curiosity. Shortly thereafter, I quit my job