There's a Cow in Manhattan Part 06

Date: About 1961 to 1965

There's a Cow In Manhattan

Part Six

Summer began to go away at Saugatuck and later I realized I was never to have summer like those days again. I heard of painters' awards that take them to art camps and these camps supply even inspiration, but I could never believe that that was my way to continue painting.

I started to dance at parties at Saugatuck, just began dancing in the middle of the studio floor while everyone was around visiting, playing records and drinking beer. They all smiled as I leaped and ran around without knowing what I was doing. I got so frenzied I even jumped into the lagoon with my clothes on just to relieve myself of the heat I had worked up from this dancing. I don't know why my heart didn't burst.

The first week of my return I walked around the far side of the lagoon. Suddenly I decided I should rather be on the other side, so holding my glasses between my teeth I decided to swim across. I was in a bathing suit. No sooner than I began swimming I opened my mouth to breathe. I saw the glasses sinking and dived for them, but they sank too fast. When I returned to the surface I was very mixed up, but knew that if I were going to swim across the lagoon I had better continue. I certainly wasn't going to swim back to where I had started, then lament the loss of my eye glasses. Now I wasn't certain of my sight for the next week. It's very depressing losing glasses if you wear them for every reason. 

I sent home for a new pair, and the last night of the summer schooling I lost the new ones in the lagoon again, where I had been appointed to do an evening festival of ending the Saugatuck season. There was a meeting in the gallery, then I arranged for everyone to throw a memento into a huge hole I had dug for that purpose. Like every summer camp season, everyone had marvelous sentimental objects to be buried. Then appointed people were to row across the lagoon and do a fire dance on a barge I had arranged by putting planks and an old door across two row boats. While I was arranging this part of the ceremony somehow everything got off balance and the planks and door all fell into the water while the two row boats began gliding away like all row boats do when no one knows anything about rowing. My new glasses fell to the bottom of the lagoon again and until I returned to Vincennes I again had no glasses.

The day I got out of the army I broke my glasses and had to wear sunglasses to shave. Now I shave without glasses because the mirror steams up and so do my glasses and I decided I could see better without anything. I know what I look like and have not shaved my nose by mistake. Glasses are such a habit and now I still wear them, but make a practice not to always wear them and act like I can see and I do a very good job, but can't convince myself that I can see, so always return to my glasses. I needed glasses very bad at Saugatuck. I had a gummy soft face that seemed to find its correct proportions when glasses held it together and people could make out who I was. Without them no one could see me and I couldn't see them and that is depressing.

From Saugatuck I spent a few nights in Chicago with McKay and Nancy. McKay gave me a few up pills and we went to the dance palaces which he knew and danced or drank beer till all hours. Nancy's friend Ginny McManus was around again announcing her moving to New York. She had quit teaching high school and had taken a job working as one of the girls at a dating center where business men called for dates. I didn't know what it was all about until McKay drew it out in a graph for me. Ginny McManus was all beaten up that day. She was in the kitchen dressed in a blue tailored suit, her hair was all fixed by a beauty parlor, but her eye was swollen because she had been in such a violent fight with her roommate, another girl.

I had to see Ann Grosvenor too because she had kept that portrait I did of her and was going to return it now that Saugatuck was over. I met her at her work, she was a cashier at a big bookstore on South Wabash. I hadn't seen her nor spoken to her since my Dad's sickness called me away from Saugatuck. She expected me and her face changed into the face I so enjoyed when I walked in. She took her coffee break and we went next door for a drink and explained everything to one another and saw to it all was like it once was. I was moving to New York, she was finishing school there in the Chicago Art Institute, so why not say goodby by acting like we still had this fresh and involving association. I made arrangements to drive from Vincennes to Ann's grandmother's house in Northern Indiana and say goodby to Ann, pick up her portrait, so I could roll it and ship it to New York. When I walked Ann back to the bookstore, she tripped as she went in and fell flat on her face as she walked in the door. She didn't look to see if I had seen her, she is that aware, but such a fall made me see her in such a different way and I knew the fall of Ann Grosvenor was the last I would see. I got the portrait back and said goodby to her. Dad rode with me from Vincennes that day and told me he thought Ann Grosvenor was a lovely girl.

The day I said goodby to Nancy and McKay, Nancy was moving her suitcases into an old station wagon. She told me she was glad I came by before she left. A girl was helping Nancy pack the station wagon. I think her name was Mimi. They got into the car and told me they were going to Dallas and drove away and I have never seen Nancy since. McKay found an apartment on Division and Rush -- how I envied him his new apartment so close to all the smart life there on the Near North Side. He was making good wages being a personal secretary to a big executive at Schenley, but as soon as I moved to New York McKay transferred to New Orleans and I never wrote him after that very much.

At home Dad was doing very well and everyone seemed to know their place but me. I told Bud that I didn't want to help him pick watermelons, but I do believe I helped him load a truck anyway. I was busy tying packages to send to New York. I drove the car to the train station mailed my packages and bought a one-way ticket, with sleeping berth to New York City. When I told Aunt Renie and Dad the next morning, they looked surprised, but what else could they do, and I got on the train later that week and arrived in New York City early one morning.

The trip seemed to take much longer than I had expected. I changed trains in Chicago and began again going farther East on my own. After many hours I began feeling tired of anticipation. That type of exhaust is the worst I know. The heart just beats and beats very fast and there is no way to quiet it, then when there is a moment of forgetting what is happening, suddenly you fall into an exhaust that is far beyond trying to sleep, so I attempted relaxing and thinking of the things I had done in my life and found that this was the essence of travel. Everyone does this, that is why one travels.

All I could enjoy thinking about was Saugatuck and how there was a taste on the back of my tongue that tasted of loss and sickness of never returning there. It was like an island that held the summer where one could exist all over the place all the time. I had never really been involved with swimming in the Ocean, except when I ran away and swam at the beach in Savannah, Georgia, and that was too long ago to call upon. All I wanted was the sight of Lake Michigan. Did the ocean come up to New York City? I saw summer end, but knew Saugatuck had only taken on another summer group and summer was staying there. It had to go somewhere. I had never experienced summer people before and could not forget how everyone moved to Saugatuck for the summer and had no reference to winter. I had even burned my shoes and when I was visiting in Chicago on my way back to Vincennes, people wanted to take me to dinner and all I had to wear was some broken sandals, so I couldn't go to The Embers. I couldn't understand how such a state of mind should hit everyone the same way as it did at Saugatuck. An old lady named Maggie Cary gave me the address of some of her friends in New York who were dancers and I held firmly to this address because it was the only connection I had left to summer. I had told Kerig Pope, a student whom I had graduated with from the Art Institute, that I was no longer interested in being a painter as I was being a dancer.  Paul Berne had quit the Art Institute and studied ballet in Chicago and was getting ready to move to New York. He managed too, I've seen him dancing on Broadway many times. This was the same feeling I once had when I quit my plans for becoming a monk. When I had decided to really quit and went back to the farm, I really decided that the return home was the real mistake and still have dreams about returning to the monastery. Aunt Stell still thinks I'll return. I don't think I will, but I sometimes wish I could. Another thing that summer ruined for me was the lovely people whom I had met, who lived in Chicago, and when I did see them again or telephoned them after returning to Chicago, they still had that marvelous lack of fear of everything. Helen Stoner said she was forty-two, but I bet she was fifty. She was so informed and so adult, yet she was so playful and so ready for anything that happened to come along. I stayed with her in her apartment for a few days and she remained just as fresh as she was during cocktail parties at Ox-Bow. Helen Stoner looked like a farm girl, and each day she cleaned up at about six o'clock and put on a fresh dress and she had such a crisp way of applying her lipstick. She taught me the word vicarious. She knew all kinds of words. Burr Tillstrom was there with Kukla and Ollie and his friendly warm personality made me begin to see how far away I was from any development. Burr was beginning to be old and I admired him so much for that. Everyone I was impressed with were beginning to be old. I guess Helen Stoner was forty-two, I didn't understand forty-two in those days. Each thing I did during that summer was understood by these people. At the end I burned all the paintings I had done. I didn't want them because they were not very good. I had four or five I had done during my schooling that I would keep forever. One of my favorite paintings was a portrait of Pamela Brown which I copied from the Sunday Indianapolis Star when I was nineteen, before art school. Somehow I always had it with me. In my first year of school a girl friend arranged for it to be exhibited in a theater lobby. I went to the theater and saw the movie just to see Pamela Brown hanging in an exhibition, it was like all exhibitions that have my work in them, disappointing. McKay stole it from me when we moved from the first apartment we had in Chicago on Dearborn. I was offered a scholarship to continue at the Art Institute to work on my Master's, but I had said no because I couldn't believe one studied painting more than four years. One couldn't learn more from a school in another year or two, and then go out on his own and work all that training away until they were painting by their own habits. Now that all sounded grand but I knew I couldn't return, I knew seeing Saugatuck ever again would be useless because the memory of everything was much too exciting. New York seemed very frightening suddenly. I was a bit sad and closed my eyes and decided I would live a sad and lonely life now that school was over and I was trying to take dance classes and work part-time. I took one modern dance class in my life in Heidelberg and when I returned for the second class the teacher saw me enter, sat down on the floor and put his arms over his head and the class laughed and I turned around and walked out. Now I wouldn't. Isobel MacKinnon who taught me life drawing then painting at Saugatuck also taught me the word sycophant. Lee Guilliatt said it was juke not jute. She found this out because she heard me say odvious instead of obvious and began to know the words I would mispronounce. I had always thought it was juke, but pronounced jute. Lee Guilliatt doesn't have as many words as Helen Stoner, but the ones she knows, she knows all about and how to spell them. She says she has a photographic memory, but she doesn't, no one has, just like no one is colorblind. May Wilson taught me the word anxious. I had never known how to use it except as a jumping up and down child anxious to go outside. David Gamble taught me the word pastiche, but I haven't come to him yet. Ronald Vance taught me the word their and I always thought their was pronounced like there, just like weather and whether sound alike, but it doesn't when Ronald Vance says their and there. Fr. Hilary taught me the word mesmerize. Aunt Stell taught me that alumnus is the singular of alumni. Dad taught me the multiplication tables and the word he taught me he must have made up. It is anticygoglin which means not quite crooked, or cattywumpus which he made up too, I think. Buck taught me the word beaubash and Bill Updike taught me about synapses. He also told me that one could get a suntan when the sun shined through quartz but not through window glass. Aunt Renie taught me the ABC's, but she never could teach me to spell. Selma told me all about sex and the words she taught me I don't remember because they are technical and medical. Jean Rigg told me about laser beams. McKay taught me the three marys: merry, marry and Mary and how in the South each one is pronounced differently. Ann Grosvenor taught me to say those kind instead of those kinds. Jim Zver taught to say poetical, but I don't say it anymore. Tommy Johnson taught how to listen to "Der Rosenkavalier," which is the best thing anyone ever did for me.

The porter came to me and told me my bed was ready anytime I wanted to go there, and he gave me a key. I had forgotten I was on a train going to New York. All the things I had been thinking and not able to think yet were traveling thoughts. I noticed that everyone in my coach were looking like me because by this time everyone was doing their travel thoughts. Travel thoughts on a plane are different from the travel thoughts on a train for many reasons, but the prime reason is that one walks sideways on a train and not on a plane. Walking sideways on a train is no longer interesting to Americans, and it was so comforting in those days. Buck and Aunt Hootie used to take a train from Vincennes to Porterville, California, but now they don't, they can't, there are no more trains. You don't walk sideways on a subway, you run and stop.

I went to my berth to see it and there was the door, a brown leather chair and the window. The porter asked if I wanted the bed made now or if I was going to watch the movie. I decided to watch the movie. It was a film about a nun who wrote the hit song "Dominique" and was played by Debbie Reynolds. When I returned to see my berth, everything was unfolded and the chair had become a bed. It was so clean and crisp, like a good hotel and I undressed and lay down and smoked cigarettes and looked out the window with the light off and was finished with worrying about what I was going to do, because I suddenly realized I was doing it.

I was at Grand Central Station at ten o'clock in the morning. Judy Brady met me. She told me we had to shuttle. I had no idea what that meant. She didn't either, but she had been here since June and had found this out. I was so eager to take someone shuttling. Judy Brady was a friend of Jenny Lou's. They had both come to New York that June. Judy told me I could stay at her place at 96th and Central Park West. It sounded grand to me. How could I know that East is East and West is West in New York. I thought it was all East. It was a good building, remodeled in that typical clumsy way that New York apartments are remodeled. New doors put on old overly carved wooden door frames that have been filled in from the top because a standard door wasn't tall enough, everything painted white except the light meter. I never know why a painter refuses to paint a light or gas meter. They paint radiators and marble fireplaces.

Judy Brady had just got her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa. She majored in painting and had four of her paintings hanging on the wall. They were schoolish group compositions that showed little talent, but showed a great deal about the University of Iowa's painting department. Few universities have good Art departments. I am not talking about History of Art, only studio work. Few Art Schools have good history of art departments, so it's a fair trade. Art Schools won't admit that History of Art is history, they think it's religion. Universities think that art studios are laboratories and measure the work by quantity and attendance. Seeing a student's work tells the tale. Universities never tell a student that burnt sienna is red and naturally the student thinks it is yellow and uses it as dark yellow. Raw sienna is dark yellow and that's the end of yellow as a raw color. Judy Brady's group paintings were all burnt sienna used as yellow. She told me she was now studying at Cooper Union, taking the basic course as if she had never taken any art training. She didn't know it was too late. Her talent had been measured already. However Judy Brady was a great comfort to be with. She had energy and grand dreams and a large brave nose. She looked like an art student from another place and was a bit too adult to have this long hair and this fresh excitement that new students have. Joan Brady was her young sister who was dancing at New York City Center and took classes from Balanchine himself. She was in the chorus of "Stars and Stripes" and I was very much admiring of her; to a point of timidity. One day their mother visited and took us all to dinner at Fleur de Lys. Mrs. Brady did a phone call to Cooper Union asking why Judy had to take a certain subject. Everyone knows that the basic course at Cooper Union cannot be altered, but Cooper Union talking to Mrs. Brady on the telephone becomes something else, and Judy did not have to take anatomy any longer. Mrs. Brady put down the telephone, looked at me and said, "How do you like my telephone voice?" It was like being struck by lightning. Anyone would have obeyed her. Mrs. Brady was senior editor for Consumer Reports Magazine. I found out her name, but forgot it.

There was a roommate that shared the apartment with Judy Brady whose name was Marge. Marge wore her hair in a thin ponytail and talked of how frightened she was of going bald because everyone was talking about the ponytail being so bad for hair. Still she wore her ponytail and her glasses. She was not at all interesting and she wore white cotton underskirts and I think she wore a fabric scapular. Joan did not live with Judy. She said she lived at a Girls Club like the Barbizon, but we found out later she was living with a man. This made Judy's eyes blink, but I thought nothing of it except that she should be a better dancer than what I saw when I saw her. Surely a dancer who has a lover should be a better dancer than one without. Judy said she didn't care about Joan living with a man, if it just wasn't that man. I've forgot his name, but he wrote a novel called "The Accident" and was Judy and Joan's mother's first lover. Mrs. Brady found it out and said that she understood far better than either daughter could in her telephone voice.

Jenny Lou was living with a man. His name was Jim Doolin and they lived in the Village. Judy and I went to see them a few times. Jenny was so delightful and so happy with her lover and glowed with pride. She had a cat named Turnip O'Neal who lived with them.

I stayed with Judy for about two weeks and tried to find my way around New York. You don't call New York Manhattan unless you know all about the subway. I began looking for jobs and thought I had it made with Speedball Pen Company because I had demonstrated Speedball pens in Chicago at a Trade Fair. The manager at the Fair said whenever I needed a job I should go to Speedball and mention his name. I went to Speedball, but had long forgotten his name. The secretary asked to see my portfolio. I had none, but I spent the weekend making one by doing a series of Speedball lettering. Naturally it didn't work. Such things might work for some people but never for me. Judy Brady told me to see if they are hiring for Christmas help at the Metropolitan Museum. Judy Brady has star quality at times and this was the time. She casually started my New York life by sending me to the Metropolitan Museum. I wonder if she ever really knew what a great favor she did.

The Christmas job at the Metropolitan Museum was collating Christmas Cards. Jenny Lou was in need of a job, so she applied too, soon after I was there, and one day she walked in and we began working at the same job. We got to be very good friends.

Although life was comfortable and very cheap at Judy Brady's, I knew when my welcome was at an end. That is one thing I am proud of: knowing when to stop visiting. I took my bags and left Judy's. I was going to stay in a hotel or a YMCA and look for an apartment. I knew no other subway route but the 7th Avenue IRT, so naturally got off near Jenny Lou's stop, then walked on Bleecker Street and found the Greenwich Hotel. The man at the Greenwich Hotel told me I didn't want to stay there because it was a flop house. That was alright with me, but then he said no again and explained the rooms were wire cages for sleeping in and I wouldn't last one night there, even though it was fifty cents a day. I went across the street to another hotel and got a room for a dollar and a quarter. It was a flop house too. Although I had a private room, my door wouldn't lock except from the inside. It was a Friday night and I couldn't sleep because of the noise in the streets and in the hotel. I wasn't miserable or sad, I knew something would come up and it did.

On Saturday I went to see Jenny Lou and Jim and told them about my hotel. Jenny Lou squared with me. She told me she had an apartment where i could stay because she was living with Jim Doolin and never used it. I insisted on paying her rent and she was pleased. Within a month I talked her into letting me have it, I was prepared to give her the security she had paid the landlord, just to get it into my name. Why I concerned myself about that I don't know, but I made arrangements with the landlord to have the lease put into my name and began living in New York a few doors east of Second Avenue on Sixth Street.

I began calling New York Manhattan. I learned how to walk through the Village, that Fourth Street intersected with Tenth Street, that there were subways that had nothing to do with the 7th Avenue IRT, and that Cooper Union was close to where my apartment was.

It was more interesting to go farther east and farther south when living on Second Avenue. I found the Bowery and Delancey Street and even Orchard Street. On Sunday I walked to Washington Square and thought I was surely in news reels by just passing by. I got fascinated with the idea of going on to school, perhaps getting a master's degree at NYU in Art History so I would be able to take courses at the Metropolitan Museum and act like the big boys and girls that I saw there all being able to walk through the private doors and chained hallways. NYU told me that I did not qualify for graduate school because I had not taken enough French and also needed a reading knowledge in German if I were interested in History of Art. I hadn't known that the good books in Art were in German and French, nor had I known that a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree didn't really mean anything. As I worried about these things I found my G.I. Bill was going to expire if I didn't get to some school by Christmas. Perhaps I could go to the Art Students League and take painting so that I could collect the G.I. Bill. I had forgotten about dancing and Christmas Card counting was going to stop even before Christmas.

One Saturday night I was milling around near Washington Square on Sullivan Street when I saw Benny Andrews. I yelled Benny Andrews. He was pushing  a baby carriage and there was a baby in it. Benny Andrews, Benny Andrews. He was with a woman. No, that woman is not with him. She's with that dwarf. Benny Andrews, Benny Andrews, how important it was to catch up with him. I hadn't seen anyone I knew in Chicago since I had got here. I ran towards him and it seemed he ran away from me. He was running away from me. He can't do that. So, I caught up with him. There was a baby in the carriage. He was with that woman who was with that dwarf. It was Mary Ellen Smith. I wondered if she knew the dwarf was with them because neither of them seemed to know he was standing there. He had a marvelous face that kept looking at me as though I was dangerous. Benny said right away that he and Mary Ellen were staying with friends and had no idea where I could stay. I explained to them I had my own place in my own name and they were friendly and told me who the dwarf was and who the baby was. I don't remember who the dwarf was, I never saw him again, but the baby was theirs and its name was Christopher Robbin, but Benny called him Rocky and Mary Ellen called him love is dove and I saw why because his eyes were full of love. He was fat and such a lovely peaceful thing to watch. I hadn't even known Benny and Mary Ellen were married let alone had a baby and a carriage. They were avoiding me with such panic because everyone whom they met from Chicago had been staying with them and they couldn't stand it. They had an apartment on Suffolk Street. I knew where it was.

I don't remember how I did it, but somehow had arranged for my packages to be held until I could pick them up from Grand Central Station. I did one Saturday and unpacked my belongings and began making my home. Jenny Lou had painted some of the public green apartment white, and I finished it. Then hung bamboo shades over the windows. This was a long back apartment on the ground floor and the two solitary windows looked out on a waste yard. It takes a while, but when one comes to understand it, they certainly understand it without questioning it again. They understand that Manhattan has public waste yards behind all their buildings. That is what they do instead of have alleys. Some people make gardens but always know that on the other side of their fence there is that smell of dead earth that grows only the saddest weeds because it is so busy being involved with plaster chips. This backyard had never been looked at before, and although I began thinking about using it somehow, I could not stay out there very long because the backs of apartment buildings were gaping at me and I felt like the only person standing on earth which was somehow against the law. The two windows began to disturb me, so I painted tar on the wall around them, painted the window frames locomotive black and it worked very well. It worked like this: the wall and window frames could not be seen, they had been painted out, and the windows became so bright I couldn't see out of them but only the light that was coming in. I then began to paint.

I had long forgotten about not painting anymore and had finished two large paintings when suddenly I remembered about not painting. So I decided that I would not paint some other time. Everywhere I looked I saw a dead Pope and a New Pope. The New Pope was very alive and I painted two paintings of the New Pope, a calligraphic baroque red painting with no figures, but it was called "The Coming of the New Pope." Then there were group paintings of old priests sitting in their church stalls, dressed in red and white church regalia. At least my group paintings were not in burnt sienna and yellow.

Jenny Lou had her Jim Doolin, Joan Brady had her mother's old lover, Judy Brady had her mother, her father was an invalid and had once been a professor of history at the University of California in Berkeley. It was similar to early Chicago days when I lived at the YMCA and dreaded the weekends because school was closed. For some reason I never asked anyone the way to any place and always found my way by trial and error. I found that I should never stay on the 7th Avenue Express after Fourteenth because the next stop is Park Plaza, where no one gets on and no one gets off. I got off and fumbled my way back uptown early one morning when I was trying to go to the Metropolitan Museum. There was a train just like that one which seemed to go away from everywhere and made downtown turn into uptown. It was the Lexington IRT, but understanding the two is very advanced. Never take the IND, never. It goes many places, but always very far away from where it says. There is a Fifth Avenue stop on the IND and there is no subway station on Fifth Avenue and if you get off there, Fifth Avenue is just the opposite of where it should be. If you stay on the IND Express after 57th Street, you might as well quit. It stops at 125th Street where people only talk of their visits to Manhattan.

New Yorkers never listen and finish what you're saying. The bums are more advanced than in any other place. One would think of a cow when one heard that Rappaport's is a dairy restaurant. I went there and ordered a hamburger, being certainly experienced enough to know it was a Jewish restaurant. It didn't smell like a Jewish delicatessen. They have a very overpowering smell, a good smell, only after you recognize it, like all smells. It is wonderful that manufacturers of scent can decide to publish a scent that is liked. If we were to smell the scent which Egyptians used, we would be sick. A Jewish delicatessen is understood by everyone in Manhattan and no one knows to tell you about them. If you walk into one you cough because of the great smell. I've sat near the door and watched everyone come in, especially on a cold day, and cough and rearrange their breathing for the smells of a delicatessen. Rappaport's is a dairy restaurant. The waiter, a New York Jew did not hear me say hamburger, he told me what I was going to have and went away to get it. I kept asking him what dairy food was if it wasn't cow and he said dairy food was fish and eggs. 

Living in Manhattan is lonely for a very long time. Everyone whom I met that was from Manhattan always asked me how far south I came from and when I said Indiana, they were completely surprised I was that far south. Then there is no time to tell them Indiana is not southern because they are already telling you something else which they think you've said. I wasn't going to leave Manhattan because I thought this was easy compared to Paris. I began going to church every day and lots of times in the evenings I would just go and sit. Churches are very good for that. You don't talk, you just sit and think. Churches are much better to read in than subways in Manhattan, if you don't know the subways. I tried reading and riding to the ends of lines, but unlike Chicago, there are some ends of lines where you have to pay again, so churches were more suitable. My favorite church was the one on Second Avenue and Fourth Street, not far from the Anderson Theater. It should be a Jewish church, but it's Puerto Rican. It looks like my holy card collection and I went there a lot thinking about paintings for the new Pope. The other one I went to is St. Ignatius Loyola in the eighties, on Park Avenue. It's very beautiful. I went there in the mornings before working at the Metropolitan Museum. There are huge pillars there and marble panels made from split pieces of marble so that the grain in the panel is a little like a Rorschach test and that wonderful pattern is what I used for my painting "Coming of the New Pope." I hadn't been going to church and now that I had started, decided to go to confession. I hadn't been since I was in Fort Valley, Georgia, where Dad was in the hospital. I told the priest it has been four months, and told my confession. He told me the most interesting things, I liked his ways so much, but then he said I had lost my faith and that I should go on a retreat and attempt regaining my belief in the Holy Mother Church, then told me of retreat centers I could go to. I told him I was not interested in a retreat, to which he answered that he understood and then said, "It's obvious that you are not at all interested in your faith or you would at least want to make a retreat. Why don't you quit the Catholic Church altogether, you already have, but once in a while only attempt a comeback. I won't give you a penance, I'll just say, leave here and quit fully, and God be with you." I was a bit relieved and told him thanks and left, but when I got to my Sixth Street apartment I realized I didn't have a church to go to any longer. I had my counting Christmas Cards at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and my apartment on Sixth Street.

Time in Manhattan is different from any time I've known before. One is a seasoned New Yorker when he finally knows one Thursday is like another Thursday, but it does take a long time. Everything was going so fast I found Thursday was following Thursday and never remembered where I was in the week. It was like going to a huge college where different classes were held in different parts of the country and I was consulting my schedule all the time. I couldn't understand those people who knew their schedule by memory. Even though I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art each weekday, there was always the event of getting there, often I still got lost and no one understood why I was late because of the subway going places where I had never been and I was certain I was on the train I had taken the day before. Then everyone was talking about where they were going after work and how they did many things even before returning to their homes for the evening meal. It was so important to be involved with that so I got an artist discount membership to the Museum of Modern Art and once a week, right after work, on Thursday, went to the film showing at the Modern Museum until I saw every film of Marlene Dietrich. During the week I could at least talk about some of the things I had been doing before I got home from work.

Verdalee Tombelaine was my boss at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I fell in love with her. She was older than I and had a husband, and was the first New York woman I met. She wore Chanel suits and cried whenever a parade went down Fifth Avenue and was not a New Yorker at all, but was from North Carolina. No one is born in New York, no one dies in New York. Lots of bodies are shipped to New York after death but always people are out of town when they die. New Yorkers become New Yorkers, they are never born into it. Those who say they were born in New York are really born in The Bronx or Brooklyn. Verdalee could tell when a play was good or bad and it was convincing. I let her read my copy of "Death in the Family" and she returned it the next day and merely told me it didn't change her life, and she did look the same after reading it. Her husband was named Michel and although I met him, I never found him interesting. He was French and worked at the United Nations evidently doing important work because he went to Africa to represent the United Nations and that should be an important job. He was there for a long time, in Elizabethville, and Verdalee decided to join him and took a freighter, but had to sleep with a shoe near her bed because the captain of the freighter was always threatening to go to her cabin at night. This was after she worked at the Metropolitan Museum. I visited her many times at her apartment and I was so pleased knowing it once had belonged to Gwen Verdon. Verdalee worked at the Museum because she didn't have anything to do and that is a New York woman. She taught me all the attitudes that one must know to be a New Yorker. She and I have gone to many plays together. We have even gone to P. J. Clarke's. It was so necessary to have someone to tell me the secrets of New York and I would not have believed anyone but Verdalee. She's been written about in books before this one because she's mentioned in a book describing Elizabethville during the time Africa was getting its independence. Verdalee was there.

I knew a life of some kind would begin for me, but never expected what happened. I knew that in Chicago I would have an apartment in a brownstone building and that I would identify myself as a student. If I should ever live in London I already know what kind of apartment I would have. It would have old wallpaper, a door painted green and no way to put up an easel and make a studio. Anyone knows how they would look in any place except in New York. I could not understand who I was knowing Verdalee and living on East Sixth Street working at the Metropolitan Museum and not going to church. It was becoming even more difficult seeing who I was in Manhattan.

Patrick Smith was a young actor from the University of Michigan at Lansing whom I had met when I hitchhiked there to visit a friend whom I met in the Army. The friend was Francis Imbraguglio. He was a very close friend of McKay and was a musician from Mississippi. We corresponded and Francis told me Patrick Smith was in Manhattan. No sooner had we met when Patrick told me his summer lease had expired and within a week of our knowing one another he had moved into my apartment with me with his telephone. I had never had a telephone in any of my apartments when I lived alone and really dislike telephones. Patrick was such a pleasant person to be with, and while I was working each day, I didn't mind his being in the apartment except when weekends came and I wanted to paint. I painted on my knees and enjoyed the clumsy situation I was in and just couldn't bear to be interrupted like this.

Jenny Lou had introduced me to Fred Merida and when Fred visited me and met Patrick Smith I felt all sideways. It was suddenly a repeat of artist friends being with Army friends. Fred was an artist. He and I spent hours together talking art, drinking too much at the Cedar Bar acting like New Yorkers. Then we discovered McSorley's Bar and found it was much more interesting than the Cedar Bar, and we began to have a very close friendship. Jim Zver was in the Army and visited for a weekend and Fred, Jenny Lou, Jim Zver and I had a very close world of common interest. All of us had been to Saugatuck and all of us were going to be New York artists and this seemed to be the right slant. So, when Fred visited and now that Patrick was there, I was again all scrambled.

During a weekend I got up very early on Saturday morning, bought a Village Voice and began looking for an apartment. I didn't tell Patrick because I hadn't thought of it until I had left him sleeping in my apartment. I found a fifth-floor walk-up on Avenue B for thirty-five dollars a month. It was called a cold water flat, but they have hot and cold running water, but actually no steam heat. This apartment had a gas heater that took care of that problem. I told the landlord I would think about it, and went to Fred Merida and asked him to look at this newly found apartment. He did, he agreed and I signed the lease. I enjoyed doing this searching for an apartment and walking from Second Avenue to Avenue B and was all warm inside from having done so many important things that day. The walk on any street from Second Avenue to Avenue B is something for young artists to do. It's the heart of a certain class of people who have more patience and more clarity that any other neighborhood I ever found in Manhattan. I was eager to move to my new place. It needed painting and lots of fixing. I had only the few pieces of furniture I had bought from Jenny Lou and could find lots of things in thrift shops or even on the street. Suddenly the dread of facing Patrick Smith clouded in on me when I left Fred and started towards my Sixth Street apartment. It wasn't so terrible as one might think. I was pleased that suddenly I had two apartments. Patrick could stay on until he found his own place or could have this place he was in. I didn't care, I was doing my things and found I could do a lot. The moment Patrick saw me he asked me where my new apartment was. I was shocked that he knew. He knew, one didn't need to be very wise to determine what I was up to. We went out that evening to see "The Seventh Seal," which Patrick had already seen and liked. I didn't like it. I thought it all had been done in everybody's mind before and Patrick said that is what was so special about it, but i still think it's a much better art to make something that is not already in someone's mind. We bought a New York Times and Patrick made telephone calls to people who were advertising for roommates. He said he didn't want his own apartment. I guess actors don't like to have their own apartments. By Sunday evening Patrick Smith had moved out to a huge twelve-room apartment on the Upper West Side. I think it was Eighty-fifth and Central Park West. There were three other roommates, all sharing the apartment. It looked like a very good situation for him. I was surprised that all three of the men were educated, interested in theatre and wholesome. I left Patrick Smith there. Later i saw him performing in "Little Mary Sunshine" many times. Then I lost him and hear he went back to his hometown in Detroit to teach. Walking from Sixth Street and Second Avenue to Avenue B is still a fond memory.  My dealings with Patrick Smith made me feel like a New Yorker for the first time. I had a great way to go, but this gesture fit the neighborhood perfectly. When i was in a new neighborhood I would do something else. We were at an age when we could move many times and arrange to get out from under people's obligations and never have a misunderstanding. Patrick never visited me on Avenue B, but I always thought of him while I moved. I had two or three weeks to move and each night I would take a few of my things to Avenue B and I always thought of Patrick Smith and what a carefree attitude we had.

It takes many years for one to become a New Yorker. Many years to know where you are and who you are no matter where you are in Manhattan. Many people try doing it before they are ready and become loud bombastic people, although they manage to become New Yorkers. I don't have any certain technique I just wear a path to and fro, back and forth to where I go and where I return until I know who I am wherever I am, but it takes going and returning to every place I can get into, then I know more and more about being a New Yorker. If you live in New York, you have no choice, you have to become a New Yorker of some kind, and I think the category has little variation. Knowing Verdalee helped me to see so much more of what to be like. Knowing her gave me an insight into what handsome women were like walking on Madison Avenue and working at the Metropolitan Museum. Naturally Fred Merida and I got along well because we were doing the same thing, walking back and forth moving from one apartment to another with boxes and canvases on our heads. We don't notice the filth and horror in the neighborhood. It didn't dawn on me that it was terrible that you can't touch the handrail while going up the five flights to my Avenue B apartment. It wasn't my business that nobody swept the hall floors, that the front door was never locked and the roof door was broken, so that anybody could jump from one building to another or use any rear fire escape. When you don't notice these things they are not there.

Jenny Lou was becoming a New Yorker in her way, but suddenly I found headlines in the Daily News that Virginia McManus was arrested by the police. She made headlines. "High School Teacher Is Part-time Call Girl." Ginny McManus never seemed to me to have this much energy, but it takes this much energy to become a New Yorker if you're Virginia McManus.

Mr. King scared me a bit. I kept expecting him to visit me. He might even have a key to the apartment. Usually an apartment is cleaned out and repainted, but that doesn't happen for thirty-five dollars a month. There was no furniture, just a kitchen sink, a tub, a cooking stove, and the gas heater. These apartments conserve on plumbing and in order to save on pipe, the tub is installed next to the kitchen sink. It was my delight to discover the toilet in the hall was only used by me, so I had a private bath, even though I had to leave my apartment. Mr. King left all kinds of letters on the floor of the toilet. There was a few piles of dirt in the other room off the kitchen. There were two rooms and one tiny room where I put my bed. Mr. King left a great deal of dirt in that tiny room too. Each room had a window leading to the next room, but there was no glass, just rectangular openings. I never figured out why. I finally got rid of Mr. King's junk, painted over his pin-up girls, pulled up all the linoleum and painted the wood floor mosaic oak, then painted the tiny room the darkest brown I could find. I decided I would probably have no guests for a long time and wondered would I get lonely. I visited Jenny Lou and Jim right before I made my final moving trip and collected the kitten which Jenny Lou had promised. Turnip O'Neal had a litter of five kittens and I saw one who was white and striped. Its forehead had a pattern that looked like the hair was parted in the middle. The cat looked like a Victorian doll. I named her Mary Alice. Mary Alice O'Neal. She fit into the hood of my loden coat, so I walked from Eighth Avenue and Twelfth Street to Thirty-five Avenue B and Mary Alice enjoyed the trip very much.

This apartment is the apartment which Mary Alice O'Neal left and was gone for one month. She left on Labor Day which is the first Monday in September, at about seven o'clock in the evening and returned on the first Monday in October at seven o'clock in the evening, but never told me where she had been.

One day at work I got a telephone call from Lee Guilliatt, who had moved to Manhattan with her roommate from Chicago Ann Petit. Ann was an actress, so she had her telephone. All people in theatre go with their telephones. Lee asked me to visit, she was living near the Museum and I was pleased to visit because I could do that as something to do after work. I did, and met Ann Petit for the first time, although I had seen her perform at Goodman Theatre School in Chicago. There was a piano in the apartment and Lee played and sang some of the songs she had written. They sounded like Off-Broadway songs, and I thought that was correct. Anyone can write Off-Broadway songs, but so few people do so it was a strange and interesting discovery I made about Lee Guilliatt. Ann Petit had a boyfriend named Rob who wrote novels for a paperback book company and got three hundred dollars for each book. He said they were not good books, just sexy stories that were never made for hardback publication. Lee Guilliatt said she would like to write one of those books but she would never sign her real name to it and I couldn't imagine why not. I asked her what she planned to do with her name.

The closest one can get to a Puerto Rican is by living in their house after they have moved. They are similar to Chinese in that all their energy sources are the opposite to ours. Next door to my Avenue B apartment was a Puerto Rican bakery. I bought milk there every day and each day the people in the bakery had no idea who I was or what I wanted. These people don't move from Puerto Rico to Manhattan. They conclude they are in another Puerto Rican village and continue their thinking and continue their habits and their language and only know they are in Puerto Rico. I've met some Jews who tell me of their grandparents who have lived in New York for many years and still cannot speak English, but they really can. At the least they think American English. It might come out Yiddish, but it is conceived in an American way of thinking. Puerto Ricans do not speak English and never think American because they are still in Puerto Rico. The best way not to communicate with them is by speaking Spanish. They look at you as though you are really foreign. I learned from Puerto Ricans that I was in no way Puerto Rican, and saw to it I was going to learn the Manhattan language and become a New Yorker as much as I could. This was my reason for being in Manhattan. Indiana is not down the road. It can't even be thought of from here like Puerto Rico can. I have never been to Puerto Rico but it is evidently like Manhattan.

One night I was going home late, and as I passed the bakery shop, I saw Mary Alice O'Neal in the window. This was during her absence from my apartment. I talked to her through the window and asked her how she got in there. She could not remember. Cats cannot remember things like that. I told her she got in there and I couldn't get her out, although the next morning, when the shop was open I went in to ask them about a cat. They smiled at me, asked me what I wanted and though I think they understood what i was talking about, had no idea that there was ever a cat in the bakery. I'm sure they had never seen Mary Alice, they don't see things like that, and that is something to know about Puerto Ricans.

One of Lee Guilliatt's songs went: "It's spring in the Village and I'm in love with love." I always thought it very funny. She did too after we had become more friendly. It always amazed me how and why we became friendly. It is a Manhattan story, and a very long one. It is my Manhattan story.

Aunt Renie said I should get a telephone and should give her my number, in case something happened. I did and i did, but nothing happened. A lot happened to me in Manhattan, however. It was a time when everything became numb, but was falling in place. My Christmas Card job had ended, but another position was open and I got a steady job delivering office mail all through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lee Guilliatt had become friendly with Tracy Lyons, whom I had met through Nancy, McKay's wife. Tracy had married Larry O'Dwyer, so her name was now Tracy O'Dwyer, but I seldom saw Larry, although he was in Manhattan living close to Avenue B. Everyone moves into Manhattan, then moves again very soon after they have found their first place. It happens regularly to young people in big cities. Ann Petit married Rob the paperback writer and they honeymooned in Cuba. Lee and Tracy became roommates and got another apartment very far East, somewhere in the seventies. I was still interested in doing something after work, so visited them once in a while. Going there was the beginning of seeing unfurnished apartments that were lived in without furniture ever appearing. There are always candles, bare light bulbs, no dishes, a mattress, and clothes, everywhere. My apartment was by now actually furnished. I had bought a refrigerator, had a nice set of white dishes, which were seconds that I found on Orchard Street. I had a dining table, I made it from a piece of marble I found. It was a slab from the side wall of an entrance to an office building. I had painted my rooms and hung posters and a few drawings, and it all looked like someone was living there. Lee and Tracy's place looked like someone had just moved out. The walls were newly painted white, the place echoed and it was very cold and had the look that both Tracy and Lee didn't know what they were doing. I've seen so many places like this where the occupant acted happy and preferred the apartment to be this way, but one could see they were frightened and would sit on their mattress for hours alone, not moving, not doing anything, then explaining how exciting it was to be living in such a new situation. I couldn't stand it and they couldn't either.

Lee telephoned me one day and asked me it I would help her and Tracy move. They had found an apartment in Benny Andrews' building. I told her it would have to be a Saturday, but she explained it would have to be in the middle of the night. They were slipping out of the apartment without paying rent. Mike Gilligan had a truck and if I helped it would go very fast and could be completed before anyone could catch on. Mike Gilligan was from Nebraska, from Lee's hometown of Lincoln. They both went to the Art Institute of Chicago, then to New York. Mike Gilligan was so beautiful, that when he applied for a Christmas job at the Metropolitan Museum, he was given a receptionist job in a little booth in the great hall, where he sold tickets for concerts and lectures and looked quite correct there. I was very envious, but knew I didn't have that type of beauty or personality. We got Tracy and Lee moved, Benny helped too. The truck was mainly used to haul the helpers. The apartment they moved into was less white and for some reason it was shabby enough to look less cold and new. Both Benny and Lee got Christmas Card jobs at the Metropolitan and all of us were riding the subway together and having the same neighborhood.

I was painting each evening and finding out a lot about what I should be doing as an artist without depending on school. My mail delivery job took me throughout the Museum and when there was a special exhibit, my route took me through every new show. I saw the Gauguin exhibit three hundred times and am still the same. Gauguin is not for artists, he is for people interested in art, and of course art students. Gauguin's work shows no effort but of course is all effort and that is what art is supposed to do, but I can't see it like everyday people because I am an artist and I see only the effort and can only walk by. Winslow Homer had an exhibit later in the same gallery, but I had found another route to the offices behind the gallery and didn't need to study Winslow Homer and his rainy watercolors. So Gauguin and Winslow Homer were eliminated from anything I meant to do something about as an artist.

Mr. Rorimer wore boots and his secretary Mrs. Kerr knew more about running the Museum than he did. That is how Mr. Rorimer was able to do such a good job. The Oriental offices are above the Egyptian gallery and it's very frightening there on Monday mornings. Mr. Fong Chow is the curator. He and Mr. Lippe each have offices there and they are the reason why I decided to spend the night in the Metropolitan Museum. Often I went into Mr. Fong Chow's office and was greeted by a bright voice saying "Good morning," then silence. Once in a while, after I had said good morning to the voice which was in some back room, it would repeat the good morning again. Well, that must be a Chinese habit. Finally I got suspicious and wandered towards the back room to see who was greeting me. I was interested in knowing everyone I could. It gave me cold chills and such a stupid feeling to know I was blushing. I was all alone in this office with its back rooms and a minah bird was saying those good mornings.

There is a door painted beige like the walls. It is behind the stairs that lead down to the decorative arts section of the Metropolitan. One can get to it by finding that huge Spanish screen that is in the medieval section. At the left is the stairway. I had a key to the door under the stairway and that door leads to the restoration department. Before actually getting to the restoration department, I found another stairway that leads up to where the telephone operators have their offices. It is under that stairway where I spent the night. This was before Lee and Tracy moved downtown to Suffolk Street. I had planned to spend the night in the oriental galleries, but all the hiding places there were too close to the path of the night guards. Spending the night at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is totally uneventful.

Mr. Rorimer's office was beautiful. It was the best office in the Museum. I don't know if it was because of the medieval tapestry that hung the length of the wall or the huge clear window that was behind his desk that made it so special or both. It made Mr. Rorimer look like a Vermeer, however. Mrs. Kerr had a large painting of a still life that contained many small green apples. It was by Walt Kuhn. I always thought Mr. Rorimer picked out the painting to go with Mrs. Kerr and he did, even if he didn't. Mrs. Kerr could sign Mr. Rorimer's signature and I could see she was as tickled as I was about that.

Mr. Rousseau was the curator of European paintings and his offices were like a library. There was that strange linoleum on the terrazo floor that was a hollow tan color that snapped when anyone walked on it. Mrs. Albert Gardner was Rousseau's assistant and she could make the linoleum snap very efficiently and I liked her for it. Of course Rosseau wore suede shoes with gum soles and made no play with the linoleum. Claus Virch worked there too. He had gum-soled shoes, of course, he was European too, but he still made sounds and I knew he was not in charge. The curators of European painting were a disappointment to me. They were always dressed in green tweed which makes anyone disappear like sad trees disappear and they glided along thinking of the other side of European painting and I could never make them see me carrying mail to them. I could never make them smile nor have them realize they were in the presence of an artist. They were not at all interested in artists, nor art, but in paintings that they were wanting everyone to know about.

There was my neighborhood, my job, my apartment, my painting, my cat and me all in Manhattan.

Matisse is like Gertrude Lawrence. Although Henri Matisse did it first. Gertrude Lawrence could not sing, yet she was known for her singing. Henri Matisse could not paint, yet he was known for his paintings. It took me a long time to see the paintings of Matisse and when I finally did see them I saw that I was merely seeing what I had always been seeing. That is unusual for me and a wonderful experience. It is French too.

If Paul Cezanne had written music instead of having painted no one would be listening to his music anymore. Music is like that, and that is the difference between hearing and seeing. Paul Cezanne is still being seen but you have to have little bitty eyes, or you have to squint to make it all fall into place. One must watch a Cezanne, not look at it because watching it allows it to all fall in place. These are the first paintings that need watching.

I always follow Cezanne with Picasso because Picasso puts everything in place. The best part of Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein is the hands. No one has been able to place the two-dimensional in such a way that it becomes three-dimensional except Picasso. Georges Braque worked with the two-dimensional and ended with the two-dimensional which is very French. Picasso worked with the two-dimensional and it becomes three-dimensional right there before your eyes. Some people have their way of saying Picasso could do this because he was Spanish, but Picasso could do this because he was Picasso.

Tracy O'Dwyer's husband, Larry lived in one of those apartments that had no furniture and he insisted that I go see it with him one day. It was indeed like all those sad places which contained a bed and a candle. The walls were white, but a bit more interesting than the usual white walls, because they had been green and the white was only one coat, so there was a smear of white, which I liked. Larry had one thing to tell me and that was about Lee Guilliatt. He asked me why I treated Lee Guilliatt with such respect and went along with anything she said as if she were a great authority. I could only get angry with him and really not answer him. He was correct but for some reason it was the way to associate with Lee Guilliatt. At the end of the summer Tracy disappeared and no one has seen her since.

She and Lee had gone on a summer stock job somewhere in the Midwest, probably Iowa, and that was when Tracy disappeared. Ginnie McManus had served some time in the Women's House of Detention, had nowhere to live, so found a way to stay at Lee Guilliatt's apartment, where she wrote her book, "Not For Love."

Once she visited Benny and Mary Ellen Andrews who now had another baby, a boy, named Thomas. Mary Ellen was working an office temporary series of jobs while Benny was painting. They were very poor and lived in a worse squalor than Lee or I, because of the babies. Ginnie McManus bought some drawings from Benny one day and gave him one hundred and fifty dollars. When we left, Ginnie threw the drawings into a trash can.

The room where I painted was white. I always have white walls where I paint. I painted it myself so that I could hang my pictures on them. The kitchen was yellow and green. I always thought I would paint it something else, but got so I finally liked the look of a room being part yellow and part green. Both the colors were that sick flat dime-store color, and the largest wall had been all yellow, but someone began painting it green and quit quite before it was completed, so it was smeared with both colors and I enjoyed it. I had a party once and Fred Merida had someone draw his profile on the wall from the shadow cast by the light. I kept the wall this way for all reasons, it was an environmental bulletin board.

 

End of Part Six