LES MEMES CHOSE

174. LES MEMES CHOSE:

In all it means the same thing one way or another whether I was in time or through time because I knew at one level where I'd started from and Zuider Zee or Nat King Cole - either one - would offer me a NAME of no recognition other than that which I understood to be (and I get sorrowful and sore in such pain and sadly remiss in the telling of same) but I'm sorry for whatever has occurred and everything one way or the other relates to shame and release or sorrow and grief - but in the earliest of morning sunlight when the changeable sky just opens itself up to light and the passing sinecure of the moon to my side is falling and I move along in silence I watch the deer or some single raccoon traipse along and make its own way through nature as the railroad tracks roar with some tired old freight and smokestacks stand silent and barren where nothing is made and all the old fields have fallen to places where only housing now grows like a blight and I watch the Hindi family outside of their tan house piling into some car or another and they make their way out in strange silence while a few geese overhead are pealing and something else moves along the ground near the creek - but these people notice nothing - all might as well be a cactus or a palm and all the morning is silent no matter as people pass in bundles and nothing is acknowledged - the Baron in the trees would know no less and mosey on alone same as I have and THOUGH I've been nowhere I've been a million places and though I've been a million places it's a nowhere I have seen : the brutal cold comes rolling in the portrait of stars is upon the sky the spinning orange planets they dance on high and all tomorrow's lanterns - already lit - are dying embers by noon.
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I was out standing by a doorway and thinking of names and remembering places and all the things lost when I realized that for moment after moment there'd never again be another voice being sent my way another word of any sort NOTHING that I'd have to recreate textuate orchestrate - Althea Goodyear Wetz herself the girl I used to know the one sitting in the front seat back seat wherever and the big guy walks in with the stupid flower in his hat and sits down right next to her then he begins some trance-talk pretending to know what he don't know and the afternoon goes on like that for too long a time while talk turns to Ireland to where he says "I'm going back and never coming back" and silence is the watchword buzzword of that day but then I realize if there's no way to get back what once was yours then life itself has no meaning or not that much anyway but for whatever purposes that can be made of it we live it anyway nothing ventured nothing gained.

ALL OF WHAT I MEANT TO TELL

173. ALL OF WHAT I MEANT TO TELL (nyc, 1968):

There were all sorts of things which were falling into place at this time : for me it was all a distant oblivion running from me and not towards me - a good perspective as I saw it - men had embarked upon riding the moon nuclear submarines were cutting beneath the sea people in old China were following leaders without any mirth (a mere funny man swimming in the Yellow River) confessing to anything and killing thousands Africa fried in its Limbo and Europe slept away oblivious and useless too - I read all of William Blake and the Bible too I absorbed the passing moments of Bellow and Mailer and Roth and whatever else came through I grabbed it as I could I swallowed T. S Eliot whole Hart Crane and Lucius Beebe too Lincoln Pindar Paine and Emerson and Thoreau ten million times of little things and big : I was never alone and with the flickering candlelights and gas-lamps of Patchin Place and MacDougal Alley and Washington Mews it was easy for me to remain old and I swore to myself someday once to out-write them all and undo their past to the present and I evaded nothing and was glad of that ('to the touchstone of merit alone you should be - all certain and sure of what you will see') and I realized that circumstances don't always control one's situation because by other means you can erect through imaginative fury far better reflections and angles of light through which to view what's there - one day someone took me uptown with them and we walked along the reservoir deep within Central Park simply so that he could take me to a spot wherein he'd hidden a metal box filled with purloined jewelry which he'd learned to obtain from some rich estate or something in the Catskills where he'd spent the summer and although I didn't quite get the reason for it having to be buried right there nor why right there it was all amazing to me just to watch him take a few pieces and enter a pawnshop in the mid 30's somewhere and as I watched I saw the Pawnbroker behind the counter take the merchandise and step back with it to a small area with a heavy desk and a lamp and as he put on a magnifier strapped by elastic to his head and covering one eye he inspected carefully what he saw - the jewelry for purity and carat and gleam and - as he said - he also inspected it for any telltale traces of 'violence' - of having been 'ripped from someone's neck or arm' and he said that such activities leave marks and stresses and broken clasps and the like and he would not handle any goods brought to him which seemed to have possibly been results of theft or violence and I thought to myself that that was a purely random code of honor I'd never really understand - since what difference did it make to him - and he said he wanted to know nothing of how we'd come by this nor any stories with it and his appraisal being what it was he offered us like 40% of that for 4 months or whatever it was take or leave and the rest of it all I really forget but I remember a signature and a promise and a locker number and then some cash being dispersed (about $160 as I recall) and with that we were back out on the street and set to do more of this and the person I was with said that he'd go to other pawn-shops to do the same and never use the same one twice on such an endeavor as this - so it all meant a few trips back and forth to the top of the reservoir and then back down to the next peculiar establishment with the three-balls displayed out front (the last real pawn-shop I saw was along Hudson Street and it disappeared about 1982 - the kind with the metal balls suspended over the entrance and a display window filled with varied and sundry goods - trumpets and saxophones and telephones and shoes and coats bicycles and bowling balls - nowadays what passes for 'pawn-shops' are really no more than sloppy jewelry counters with a cash window and a display case amidst really cheesy and small surroundings) and then I went back to the library a few times just to find out information as I could about pawn shops and how they began and what was behind that entire idea and who and where they originated - interesting material but really having to do now with nothing at all - the old sorts of pawnshops as I said have disappeared but the ones we were hitting back in the late 60's of this time were most certainly the leftover remnants of another place and time in that they still captured all of that 1920-40's mystique of darkness and stealth and tobacco-stained walls and dim lamps and seedy interiors meaning merely business and no glamor at all and the proprietors of these places - whether bent-over old Jew men or more cavalier Lebanese and Turks - operated well within the knowledge and awareness of their ancient hold on an old capital of stealth and trade and tricks and misrepresentations and all of that went without saying but the most telltale aspects were of the cages and counters which kept the 'client' at some remove and in an always-somewhat-humbled position as a beseecher of favors and a supplicant - having to look up at a caged dealer set slightly higher than you and more secure than you - and sometimes there were gloves and guns too - pistols often on display or barely concealed - and it was all of a very low-level game of crime and punishment in its own way - 50 or 60 bucks here or there for rent or food or something else to tide one over the next 30 days - or (as in our case) merely a simple means of turning purloined material into ready cash - starting from zero as we did each time it really little mattered what final figure we came away with : all in all a very curious business model with which to operate but it somehow worked.
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After a while I became resigned to an idea of perfection - an odd concept that I'd seemed to have constructed myself and made personal parameters from - small guidelines with which to judge some almost ephemeral quality of my own existence - and it consisted in some ways of a really genteel view of daily life - an almost routine yet casual form of operating which allowed great space and time to be used in quite regular operations and this in turn required a set place and a set number of personal items to be at hand (which meant that my lodgings in the Studio School basement room had to take on more the complexion of a real 'place' for me to be in than a mere 'spot' in which to sleep - and so I did make it such) - and the very idea of 'resignation' to the qualities and happenings of life led to a feeling of 'perfection' or of having a 'perfect' life and one able to be lived without judgements being made and without categorical designations for every thing - just acceptance and detachment just a resigned sense of goodness and its manifestations no matter how confusing - which did away with much of the pessimism and cynicism I'd been acquainted with and that once bleak emotional landscape then was able to be replaced with a more flexible religious optimism and even joyousness (these all were curious new qualities for me to see and recognize in myself - MYSELF which had once been a mere empty vessel and an un-marked amoebic slate of experiences) I'd found some sort of HOPE in a blighted world and any questions I may have had about the 'meaning' of life included conclusions now about that bleakness and anguish and disenchantment (as Albert Camus had suggested 'the fundamental question of philosophy' is to ask whether or not life is worth living and he'd also mentioned that the kind of insistent optimism our culture was pushing was 'like a bad joke in today's world') and Camus had also said that our sense of the absurd arises out of the encounter between the human need for meaning and the 'unreasonable silence' of the world and in my own musings on that subject (I don't want you to think I was a walking philosopher everywhere I went but you should understand the enormous thirst and desire I had for acquiring ideas and knowledge and conclusions - thus I thought as I walked along) I decided he'd meant that we each desired that our lives made sense and did not seem valueless and insignificant and that made sense to me and I was able to stay with that.

GISELLE

172. GISELLE (nyc, 1968):

Giselle was just a regular person a really nice girl and someone I'd grown accustomed to - she had money and a mother with whom she lived in the east 60's and her father was some sort of big-wig administrative type in the United Nations or the State Department or somewhere I never got straight (and I do think that story changed often) and he was never at home and whether they were all estranged or not I never knew - the mother liked the ballet and some old art but not much new stuff (we spoke somewhat haltingly of that a few times) and frankly for a 45-year old or whatever she really was not bad looking at all in fact a few times I lusted (I admit) and I think there was also an occasional boyfriend gentleman companion lover whatever around here and there - Giselle kept mum on that stuff and many were the times therefore that the apartment itself was empty but for the two of us while Mom was 'away' or whatever - Giselle was quite adept sexually and far more than I ever was then and having had what I assumed were many other partners and many other 'types' she'd take a look at me and see 'well let's bring that over here and see what we can do with it' which I of course always took as some form of diminutive put-down of the 'me' of me - if you know what I mean - but of course at that age one is not really so aware of all these issues which seemingly do consume people later on and I never minded - I took advantage of every opportunity I could for having a piece of her - wonderful breasts soft skin lovely breathing adorable noises and all the rest - she'd make little snacks and things to eat and we'd always have something to drink and a place to hang around - television phonograph photo albums and even a nice dog - she'd been attached for a while to the United Nations High School which was a place where the children of diplomats and others posted at the UN in Manhattan could go to school and it was rather nice and quite exclusive but at the same time I thought way too aware of itself and puffed up and often the caterwauling of all those different people and languages and national traits could just be too much - intermarriages and romances often bloomed and then had to be stopped or kept quiet or whatever - and we'd go a few times to any of the different programs they'd have a recital or an artshow or lecture or travel show and occasionally a 'mixer' or dance and they were always fun enough but weird too because there was always so much political turmoil going about that you'd worry about who could talk to whom and who could kiss whom and where and all that : Vietnam and Israel and Congo and South Africa and all those 'observer states' who couldn't really have missions at the UN but did anyway and all the weird Soviet communists and their agents - they all had people AND kids present in the vast commingling of New York City with cops and 'diplomatic immunity' and people coming and going and spies and double agents - all that really crazy stuff you'd read about and it was out in the open mostly like some political Mafia of international proportions with everyone exactly knowing who everyone else actually was - an odd scene but one fraught with both peril and pleasure and the pleasure for me was mostly Giselle : and then she was finished with that and trying to decide what she wanted to be doing she thought of a receptionist sort of job at a really nice upper eastside art gallery and tried it for a few weeks but soon got bored and decided that 'too much of the art shown there was blue or green and I really hate those colors' - which was the sort of sensibility she used - and then another time she decided she wished to be Edgar Allan Poe all over again and she set out to write Gothic stories - things about 'unexplained murders ambiguous deaths odd horrors caves castles dungeons and keeps' as she put it - and once she quoted Poe himself to me 'horror and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages' as her reason for castles and caves corpses and cauldrons subterranean labyrinths extinguished lamps and hollow groans all in some form of twisted reality in which a protagonist navigated the hazardous world of sensations in pursuit of and before being pursued by a murderer in ostensibly haunted houses set in darkness and in which troubled dreams and uncommon sensations and moral dilemmas were omnipresent - and I must say she often did quite a good job of it all and once or twice I took her down to the Village to visit either of the two Poe houses which still then stood there (both now gone) and the old Dispensary (still in place) where he was treated more than once and I could tell just by the looks in her eyes of the exquisite pleasure and perverse pride she took in seeing and knowing these places - as if she was partaking of some secret information from another world not of this modern age at all AND I found myself perfectly in tune and aware of that so that we shared these moments in fits of almost sublime passion and strange reverie.
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One day Giselle and I were talking and we were speculating and going on about about life and its meanings and possibilities and all that stuff and she said that it was all well and good for people to determine things about the lives they lived but what she didn't like was when their conclusions were expected then to apply to everyone else too and she said that 'we're all walking to the end of our own personal lines - no more no less - and when that string runs out no matter what it's over and that's the sum total of existence that 'running out' of one's own personal line and whether we call it destiny or fate or free will or reason that's all there is' and then she went on to try to explain why societies falter because people tend to try and mesh everything together and think one rule can apply to all and even if we ARE by society's rules all together in what we do one action in no way really affects another person's action except in an experiental sense but philosophically they remain completely separate and only have validity to that one person alone and I tried to speculate with her that if I had a gun and shot her or that 'guy over there' in the head that one action by me would most certainly have affected the other person - in this case by a bullet in the head - and she agreed that 'yes' it would perhaps appear to be so but that actually all appearances deceive - as they themselves are not philosophically pure once they are 'articulated into action' and I said I didn't really understand that and she said that was okay too (I really think this was all very indicative of the kinds of time we were then living in - all this idle time and idle speculation amidst new and sudden onrushes of ideas of 'freedom' and thought).
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Another time Giselle and I were walking along down around Hudson Street and Jane Street or Perry or nearby and I saw this girl in the short white summer dress with nothing on underneath showing a shot of ass as she reached up kissing her boyfriend at the light as they waited and then grabbing his crotch - a fistful of balls and dick apparently - twice while she stretched up some more while she clutched with some vigor at his privates and continued to show everything - she cared little and stayed like that until the light changed and as we watched I said to Giselle 'there's some articulated action I could really get into' and she laughed a bit and said 'I bet' and then she said 'you know the world is really a matter of indifference to me and that just exemplifies it' and I had no clue what she was trying to say but just let it go and only later I ferreted out another Camus comment that I tried to fit into this context : 'if the world is a matter of indifference to someone who feels that life itself borders on absurd it is because that person has an idea of something that is not or could not be indifferent to them.'
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My time with Giselle was near perfect and met all my criteria for both pleasure and attainment and it was comprised of many different things - shared interests shared likes and dislikes certain understandings sexuality and other things of the most accidental nature - she did things with me far downtown and with her I again re-entered the earlier uptown sphere I'd gotten easy with - the extreme east area of Yorktown and Carl Shurz Park and Gracie Mansion and all those strange and deeply tree'd hospitals and clinics the oddities of Sutton Place and that area and so much more : awkward meetings with friends of her family (those of course who did not know me in any way) here and there as we'd cross paths her old girlfriends and chums of childhood - people she'd mostly turned away from now - and mostly the sorts of people everyone knows who only 'know' you as they remember you - and allow nothing for development or change or alteration - the sorts who become simply and instantly critical of any different aspiration they suspect you've followed YET we got over all that and managed for quite some time to stay together and in pleasured company with each other and I prospered through her funny ways of talking and seeing things her odd points of view and her ways of just blurting out ideas and whims which otherwise and normally would have passed for deep philosophical commentary and yet the very REAL authenticity of anything she said or did was what amazed me the most - it caused me great pleasure and happiness for a time and then ONE DAY she was just gone ! like that ! leaving behind only a dense and obscure note to me about having been 'forced' to relocate to Belgium under the tutelage of her father and from which place she saw no way out nor any quick means of returning and to compound it all I could then find no trace of her mother either so that I was eventually and over time just erased as was she - her from me and me from her - and time passed ALAS and I got over it all : a certain sadness has no sisters or brothers nor any following and it left behind it nothing but a wistful and morose feeling of wishing Death itself had stepped in and taken one or both of us away instead - as 'Belgium' just wouldn't do.

OH KENSINGTON 04

171. OH KENSINGTON 04:

Never wanted to be like that be the one holding the memory book and waiting for signatures be the one with the pitchfork and the spade waiting for Spring the one building bookcases for books which never come NEVER wanted to sing a’capella in an orchestra of sound never wanted to walk when riding would do never sought to be the stevedore with the jaunt black cap or the watchman holding lanterns as each one burns down never wanted to sketch in a painter’s color class never sought the robin or the trout NEVER wished to wise up and be the best man in the class NEVER sought the kerosene when all they sold was gas never washed the paint board in turpentine or gum never learned to mumble when the words just wouldn’t come never rinsed the sailboat in a sea of sky-blue water never carried burdens never wanted nothing never sought forgiveness easy payments or reduction NEVER called a saint down from his perch on high never cursed a Goddess never learned to lie and the long and twisty road I rode I learned from every curve first calling it conjecture then steaming in a rave never read the fine print with scheduled arrival times never danced for dollars never cried for dimes never sat back listening for the turtle dove or jay never washed shut windows NEVER said OK - and so slack-jawed that a Jimmy with a cavern at the edge could take a long-lost waller to the miller in the town and stop along the baseball tracks and whistle down a freighter or lob stones at passing churches and check up on them LATER than anything else I wouldn’t linger near too long the water’s edge where the fright-men buy baloney and the oilers jump the ledge and turkey doves and crane-men shoot from hollers in the trees and look down at miasma and true sickness and disease where doctors call in nurses and the sutures are unnerved on mornings after horseback and the dredge of history’s urge and toil means circumference in the math-man’s filthy room while in scabbards ten wild fencers throw bayonets on through the gloom of distaff and collection and thirty wild men who’ve all come up from something and will end up there again wear wash buckets from Fourteenth Street and come around the legend’s curve while rain comes down in buckets and comic horses herd along the bozo-blank of landscapes written in by Willy Drayer and Ted Stevens and the dreadlocks call the uncle up for Mayor and the tony rathered police-chief douses fires with a laugh and they stripe the lines ‘cross Main Street and cancel out the yellow glass where amber waves of grain are seen subscribing to the Post while rabid hounds of circumstance grow tired and at fault three turkeys land between two yards and talk among themselves with ribald raps of weary jokes and late-lamented hopes and harbingers of westerly along the nasty touch bring serpent tails and pestilence grown furry and as such we listen to laments sung in a very minor key of horsemen and of barnyards and Lancelots for free who fly to steady mansions piled high atop the sky and wonder willy-nilly if the reason’s worth the try but WHO KNOWS WHEN THE SANDS WILL STOP and who imagines less and forty sailors dreary drunk curse at the sea and YES for just this once they’ve walked on water whether celebrated high or not they all return like chieftains to engather what they’ve got and some will learn by doing while the ones who can’t learn teach and they line the shelves up everywhere but put them OH JUST out of reach - until MY FURRY FRIEND the end becomes the means AND WE ALL WALK DOWN TO STARBOARD to see if it’s really what it seems.

RESTING THE CASE

170. RESTING THE CASE:

If I’d ever had a dream like this before I figure I would have known it so I keep on walking and thinking about different things – odd things – things of no import things like ‘Catcher In the Rye’ stories and ideas about books and scenes and funny thoughts about living and the clumps of words which come up rise and pass as quickly and if they’re not recorded and built upon they’re just as quickly lost forever and DIGRESSIONS or as it’s said in Catcher ‘Digressions’ and that whole entire slim book is – it seems – a much simpler book about its own opposites as it claims to be about hating digressions but is actually one huge digression and it claims to be against movies but it’s in really a big reference to movies and the people and scenes which go with movies and it claims to abhor phoniness but it’s about one particular phony – in this case a kid phony – trying to be singular and wise and tough but who is in the end nothing more than a weakened sympathetic and comforting character who seeks the comfort and culture of a smothering home as much as he claims to abhor it and so that particular book is one big twist around its own subject matter but it seems – living on its own massive reputation of know-nothings who are continually forced to read it – to be something else and millions of stupid kids and teachers apparently adopt it yearly as their own particular ‘coming of age’ novel by which to rule and line-out their upcoming feeble lives (well whatever) and it’s written by a hideaway eccentric who seems to fear everything and lives alone away by himself afar in the noxious anti-city weeds of New Hampshire while living of the proceeds and fat of his famous urban book – so like they say in comedy school ‘go figure’ – but whatever I WENT ON and continued the ample reverie with Pinkerton and anyone else who happened along and it became quickly one of those days when you wind up talking to anybody willing to listen and you find yourself happily sitting about anywhere in a public space where you can find a seat and there are lots of other people doing their same things whether routine or not the people with lunches in bags eating mindlessly away and the others drinking water from bottles or smoking cigarettes or talking or exchanging notes and pictures with the person next to them and outside along the river the slow boats pass either filled with people looking for something or filled with something looking for people - any odd cargo of goods and material bound for port - but unlike the very old days there aren’t any of the rugged or drunk or nasty sailors and ship-hands staggering around momentarily on land looking for a squeeze or some brew or some action (for all that inconsequential stuff has passed long ago from our scene and what we live with now instead is a completely ordered and far more meager paradise of deportment and niceness) and spitting itself has become an offense so those who walk along do so in orderly fascination and children in tow are happy and the grandmother out for the day seems less bemused than burdened by the sunlight and the open air and all meanings have subsided into something else but a something else of which no one cares any longer no one even swaps an opinion because they’re all the same both the opinions and the people and we’ve reached a rigidized format of frame and reference wherein anything out of that frame is immediately de-recognized and left out and no longer identified and because of that all life has become bland and far sadder for no harmony no grace-note no lightness no happiness no funniness is all that’s left and if a man has no meaning does that then make him meaningless ? if he becomes immaterial to everything around him does he still exist ? if there remain no portions of him which are engaged in what’s around him is he still in existence or instead completely foreign and alienated and no longer part of his world ? and the passing bum singing to himself while all grizzled and sour is he no better or worse than that man in the suit reading to himself ? and so tired and by myself I did as a lawyer does – I rested my case.

SO PLAY ME OFF YOUR HAND

169. SO PLAY ME OFF YOUR HAND (nyc, 1967):

Nothing kills quicker than misplaced faith and it's the slowest quick ever and I knew that and so remained wary of believing things I'd hear - those stupid preachers belting out choruses of 'must-do' on the streetcorners and the tightly-wound black guys haranguing passers-by while dressed themselves almost as bizarre eccentric businessmen and trying to sell copies of Muhammed Speaks to a blacks-only audience (all bizarre all twisted and weird - this cultural undercurrent of black separatism fronted for by the disenfranchised trying to adapt military discipline and businessman clothing-success in a world where those attributes were supposed to have been meaningless : I never got that and it all seemed a mad parody of itself unfortunately in a time before humor) and nuns in their habits trying to walk like angels along dirty streets and black Cadillacs slowly perusing the pickings along the avenues and crazy sports names plastered on storefront windows and newspaper back pages : Bill Mazerowski Carl Yastremski Moose Skowren Bob Gibson Harvey Haddix Louis Aparicio Clete Boyer Stan Musial Tom Tresh and the rest : in the sit-down booth at the 38th Street record store I'd listen to Robert Johnson singing about Ella Speed and I'd just sit there and think about what I was hearing - the thin sound of a really strange voice from another time and place for sure but someone trying hard to put across sentiments and feelings I just never really understood - try as I might to think I did - and it was hard to fathom these distances the big spaces of places and times once existent but now separated by the great gulf of story-line and circumstance internal factions wars and battles : I remembered a guy telling me once about his great grandaddy a drinker who was 'killed - shot through the head one day while toasting'... this was where I got screwed up because I never learned exactly what he meant to say - toasting 'this Union forever' or 'disunion forever' - but for one or the other of those two phrases this guy's great grandaddy had been shot as a Blue or Gray I never found out but a good story nonetheless it was and another time I remembered dreaming of myself at a huge banquet table filled with people and food and someone approaching me carrying a huge platter of meat and asking of me 'white meat or dark matter?' - which to me immediately was a great theoretical physics joke/reference and at about that time I'd been reading exactly on that subject (dark matter) at the time a new and cutting-edge theoretical cosmic theory in the field of quantum physics and it was all like that - all people who were never here and things which never really existed to me as I spent my days and nights in a bizarre theoretical world of figment chimera and might-have-beens and might-be's and a rich field and exalted one too - I remained thereby aloof and quite happy distant and sound.
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Life itself had a big duplicity to itself anyway as if it was broken and sundered by new things rushing in and breaking up the old - maybe duality would be a better word - and everything was (and is) exactly (first) what it IS first and then (second) what it is called and those two items don't always rightly coincide and thus the duplicity or duality and commonality of all life is underscored : would you rather have more 'tality' or less? : (mortality joke) and totality of course has to be worked in at that point but the fluid and changing nature of everything I saw in New York City in those years - literally - gave the lie to any feelings or ideas of security or settled-field or static scenery and that in turn effected everything else AGAIN a great flux and a flow of change and alteration everywhere.

NO GETTING OUT OF THIS HOTEL

168. NO GETTING OUT OF THIS HOTEL (nyc, 1967):

"If you come in here you come in here for action and it's that simple" so just like the Simple Simon Pieman that I was I entered the fray - up five stairs and to the left another fifteen or so up and then a long narrow passageway with door after door in one long corridor which actually did then pass over into another building although you didn't know that by walking and the adjoinng buildings had long ago been joined somehow in a co-habitation of old space as something the owner(s) could do to double-up the income since much of the time most all of the rooms were filled or busy or occupied as the case may be and the lights along the way were weak and dim and the doorways all seemed pretty solid - crime cover-up intrique murder drugs whatever all and any of that could be easily done by the simple stealth of the place and NO words were spoken we just walked and then the guy with me turned to me and said "how long you know Tony Main?" and I said "about a year or so but probably not long enough or maybe too long - I'll have to let you know" (my stab at humor) and the guy turned and said "look kid I don't care about your life story - he just said a 'friend' would be stopping by and I didn't expect you" and figuring the less said the better right then I clammed up as it was I kind of was wishing I was there for the skin business which I'd liked to have partaken as here and there a few very lovely employees of this staid boarding house were apparently about to be boarded and I liked the freight cars that I saw but that was not to be on this jaunt for I was there simply to pick up some material (a valise and a bag) and my instructions were to look like a traveler a student or something on the go with a bag or two and not give myself away with any smirks or looks just try to be cool and stay mostly invisible and I did - he handed me the stuff in a room marked 24A and as we sat down next to each other he said (while handing me an envelope) : 'give this to Tony too and he doesn't know it's coming just tell him it's a little bonus - some loose cash I found lying around that needs a home and I counted it too so don't try no shit" and I looked at him and said "no shit ? you're the one with the shit - how do I know what you counted is what you told him or what you're gonna' tell him was there - it's simple entrapment that's what it fucking is and no matter what I do you can say I stole" and he smiled and said "smart thinking kid now get lost I ain't gonna' do no such thing" and he handed me a ten for my troubles and said "here's your fare - come back some time and I'll give you an appetizer too" and I said "thanks" and walked out after him - another doorway and apparently another exit and I was out on the street behind what seemed to be a restaurant backdoor and some alley with a few alley doors and a couple of cars parked and a gaslight or two too and the whole scene looked pretty nice to me - cobblestones nice windows and stuff - and I paid little mind to much else while I just took in the scenery - only later did it dawn on me I should have checked the cars to see what was in them - occupants I mean cops and stuff - but nothing came of it and if there was surveillance I saw none of it and just calmly walked on - liking the night and liking the situation and I turned out onto the main walkway which was well-lit and busy and there were a few stores and things and I saw I'd exited out towards 86th Street over by Broadway where I was in a block or two and nothing came of it I easily made it back over by the park to where Tony was going to meet me and he did and we went upstairs with some small talk as I dropped the bags on his couch and he just left them there - all unsaid - and I handed him the envelope and said "this came along too I haven't touched it I swear" and he said "it's OK kid - that jerk always does something like this and whatever it is that's exactly what I'll tell him no matter what so don't worry there" and I asked "what was he trying to do test me or something?" and Tony said "I don't know and I gave up trying a long time ago - let me tell you something about Frank - he's OK as far as it goes but he's always up to something and you can't trust him unless you do exactly what he's asking - which is what you did - so even if it was a test you passed it and there's nothing to worry about - he's been at it a long time and he's just probably wary of a new face or someone he's not seen before - there's a lot a stake in the shit he's doing and it probably pays him to be extra careful and known as a creep too and remember I met him in jail so we share some of the same traits see" and I nodded and then he took the bags I'd brought and opened them and I saw what I figured it was all along - bags of dope pot white powders and pills and everything was clipped and bagged and separated and I quickly wondered about what value I'd just transported and what danger I'd been in but I figured shit on that it was too late now I'd already done the walk and was probably the newest face in town too but I got my sixty bucks from Tony plus the ten from that Frank guy which I didn't mention and I figured it was a pretty good haul for a night's work so I was happy enough so I just got up and said "Tony I'm going and if you want me back tomorrow or whenever just let me know" and he said "give a few days but probably like Saturday would be fine - about noon if you can" and I said 'OK see you then".