There's a Cow In Manhattan Part 01
There's a Cow In Manhattan
Part One
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There’s a cow in Manhattan who lives in a loft. A loft is a warehouse or a building where small manufacturing was once done, but has now become available for artists to live in and work. A cow is a cow. I’m an artist and I found this loft and divided it into two huge rooms. One is my studio and the other is my living quarters. It is very cold today. Manhattan is very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer. I've painted most of the day and just woke up from a nap. I've peed and slept long enough and it's really too cold here to do much more than stay in bed, so I've decided to write a book.
My windows are all closed and covered with plastic, but the little heat that I can manage to get all goes away so soon. I've built a fireplace that works very nicely, but it has gone out and I must wait till after five o’clock to pick up more wood. This loft is on Fulton Street, near Wall Street, which is a very busy part of Manhattan. There are many wooden sleds left around that were used for hauling and carrying supplies, and after five o’clock I'm free to take some for burning. Naturally, I don’t ask because I would get a no on general principles. After five, there's no one to ask. It's noisy and crowded all day, from eight to five, then at the very stroke of five everyone leaves me here alone and that is wonderful. I'm the only one in the building usually. I'm on the top floor. There are two lofts below me but they are not used. The street floor is a bar that has a steam kitchen and is a popular place each day, even Saturdays, but that's the only activity in the building except for me.
I live here alone except for my cat, Miss Mary Alice O'Neal, who took the vow of chastity at 6 months. She's a common cat, claims to have good Irish blood, but I know it's all lace-curtain Irish. She's a very lovable cat, but, as I said, common.
For about a year now I've painted reproductions. Up until that time I did calligraphy. Abstract writing, not readable, but showing a pattern of writing. This was done in oil on canvas and with drawing. One day I found I could get a pattern of a picture by making a copy of a known picture just like I got the look of writing by making a pattern of writing. That was last year in July. It's now February. It always seems to be February in Manhattan.
Painting has always been my most pleasant thought and I've always painted. I painted a barn once, but my best time was painting bricks around the foundation of a house brick-red. This was in Indiana, in a small city named Vincennes. Naturally, red bricks are not brick-red and it was simple painting red brick because I could always tell where I was because colors are never the color of their names. There is an artist’s paint that is called “flesh.” Naturally it looks nothing like flesh. Nothing looks like flesh except flesh. Then there's apple green. Forest green is really strange. Light white.
Names of colors are not always like names of people. Rose as a name of a person does not make anyone think of the color rose. However when a person is named red, that person is usually red. I know a man named Blue. Once there was a popular name for a man and it was Gray, but that couldn’t last, gray never does. Now that I think of people named red I realize it turns out being a different color red than ever expected. Does Hugh mean hue? I used to think Scarlett and Rhett were Scarlet and Red until I read the book. This of course applies to first names. Last names that are colors are not very interesting. There was a man at home, in Vincennes, who was said to be an hermorphidite and his name was Gawkie Green. That’s the way it was said, hermorphidite. Or that’s the way I heard it, like Scarlet and Red. When we were in high school my friend and I would yell “Gawkie Green!” at him and run. He always carried an umbrella wore a black suit and never seemed to work. I got a good look at him once and tried to see if maybe his breasts showed through his suit but he was a shapeless old man with a gray complexion and looked as though he had no idea that he was an hermorphidite. Of course it could not be that strange to him because he didn't know any different. I know this because I was a twin to a brother who was exactly like me and naturally I don't know what it is not to be a twin. Are twins like hermorphidites? Well, it isn't strange to have a last name that is a color unless you are an hermorphidite. It isn't strange to be named Mr. White or Mr. Brown or Black or Gray.
Now, Orange is a color and a word that cannot be altered. There is Ivory Black or Scarlet Lake, and Indian Red and Primrose Yellow, but never a combination using Orange. In fact there is no rhyme for orange. I once tried writing a song using orange where there should be a rhyme and rhyming it with orange again because that’s the way orange works. There is no such thing as burnt orange, everyone knows that, because it becomes a different color from orange. Orange Orange.
I have a cousin named Buck. He knows a woman who went crazy and drank boiling water. Her name was Tressa. He's left-handed and a left-handed person is like a redhead. My mother was left-handed and she was like a redhead and those people always seemed English to me. Not English background, but English from England. Everybody in the Western World is alike except English people. Spanish and Italian and French and German and Dutch and Scandinavians are all like Americans, but English are not and they are not like any other people. They are all left-handed and that's why they are difficult to eat with, strange, if not impossible, to drive a car with, and they are all like redheads. The smell of redheads and English is not necessarily bad, but there is a smell. I wonder if one still thinks of this after they are married. Buck is like an English person and like a redhead. He is a redhead, but his hair is very dark red, but he has freckles and is left-handed, so that makes him really a redhead. He and I grew up together. My father is his mother's brother and we lived across the field from one another in the country south of Vincennes. He's a few months older than me, but we were in the same grades at school. We've known one another all our lives until we don't remember having met.
Buck’s mother is Aunt Hootie. She was born in 1900. His father was Uncle Can and his sister is Tooke. They all have names that are regular names, but no one chooses to use those regular names. Buck also knows a woman named Mona Lisa Biggs whom I don't want to meet. Buck does not collect people, he just knows them without even looking for them. He knew Vestie and I met Vestie and lIked her very much. She was very fat and her two front teeth were missing and she raised cactus. She had hundreds of different kinds of cactus. Each year she gave me a cactus and told me never to water it or it would die. She said she never watered her cactus. I always thought a little water would be alright, then the cactus would, of course, die and Vestie would give me another. She was mowing the levee one September day and the tractor she was driving with the mower tipped over on the side of the levee, rolled over on her, and she burst and died. It was the 17th of September because that day I left the farm and went to the Monastery.
Mary Alice O’Neal sleeps with me but I have such a difficult time telling her she should not clean herself on the bed because it rocks so. She will not sleep under the covers but on top and must always touch me. We get along well and all she has ever eaten is Puss in Boots Cat Food. Once on her birthday I bought her five different kinds of cat food which she would not eat. She has a cleft palate and when she drinks milk she sneezes most of the milk on to the floor. She stays here in the loft all the time. In summer she goes out on the fire escape and up to the roof, but never leaves the building. Before I lived here I lived on Avenue B and she went out the window one evening on to the fire escape which was a common habit of hers. This was on a Monday night at about 7:00 PM. The only thing that was strange was that she did not come back for a month. On Labor Day, which was a Monday, at about 7:00 PM she came down the fire escape in through the window and has never left since. Her mother's name is Turnip and she is a natural daughter. I had a Persian cat, a male named Loox, who died when I went to Chicago from Vincennes. They said he did not eat after I left. Loox and I did have a good life together.
I went to Chicago after I was in the monastery. I was born and raised on a farm, then went to a monastery for a year, then to Chicago to study painting, then to the army, then back to Chicago, then to Manhattan.
I've decided that one can only call Manhattan Manhattan if they live there or if they live in Brooklyn.
If Tiffany asked me to decorate their windows, I wonder what I would do.
Often, when I take a nap or even sleep during the night, I dream that it’s time to get up, get to the barn and milk. I started milking cows at seven years old and that became my most certain source of time. My Dad got so he would never tell me it was time to milk in the evening, I always knew. When we would visit somewhere in the afternoon there was always an established reason to leave that everyone understood. It even happened sometimes that we would milk, then return to the visit afterwards. It always happened at Christmas because we never spent Christmas day at home. Sometimes it happened on Thanksgiving. We had six cows. One Jersey that we got from Aunt Hootie whom we called Hootie and the cow certainly looked like Aunt Hootie. There was another Jersey named Em. She was the cow whom everyone learned to milk on, and she was the leader of the small herd. Imogene was another and my sister and I named her because she was sold to us by a man who had a daughter named Imogene. My favorite was Marge. She looked like a woman who went to our church named Marge Davis and everyone agreed. Finally, names of cows became a common interest and during my life on the farm we had a cow named Lana, one named Paulette, on up to Hepzibah. I finally found out who Hepzibah was when I read "The House of Seven Gables." Marge Davis was my favorite blonde.
My twin brother died when we were four years old, so he never milked. I have a sister named Selma and she milked until she was sixteen. Most girls milked till they were sixteen. At our farm no woman ever milked, but it was common everywhere else.
Selma is two years older than I am and a nurse. My mother was named Laura and in her family there was a sentimental love for a Selma who died. Selma Bobe. My twin brother was named John after my grandfather Bobe and I was named George after my grandfather Deem. I always was told that twin names always rhymed and naturally knew George and John rhymed. Rhyming has always been interesting to me. My mother died when I was three and I hardly remember her. I know she was blond and very Victorian looking in her photographs. She was left handed and her second toe lay over her big toe and she could not pick up her socks with her toes like I could. I'm left handed when I shovel.
The death of my mother caused me to become much more Deem than Bobe because my Dad's sister came to live with us. Her name is Aunt Renie and she reminds me of George Washington. She lived in Chicago with her husband and her two children, Bud and George. Things were going badly and she left her husband and brought her two sons to our farm and began living there. Both the sons milked but she never did. She said she knew how to. It is impossible to milk unless you know how, like driving, and I can do both. My Dad was named George and I was named George and Aunt Renie's son was named George, so that put three Georges in our house and I know a lot about George. Two is a pair and an idea but three is a pattern and when there is a pattern of a name all the time it is possible to learn a great deal about George. I know George coming and going.
I
have a painting called "Aunt Renie and George Washington." It is rather small but, sure enough, there is a picture of each of them copied from reproductions. I always thought Aunt Renie should be in a painting. She looked like Joan Davis the first time I remember seeing her, but then the look changed and it became an Aunt Renie look that set its own pattern. She had a beautiful silk crepe scarf that she would never let me play with, but I would sneak into her room, get into her drawer and put it over my face and pretend I was the Blessed Virgin. The first thing Aunt Renie did to me was wash my ears. She came to the farm one Saturday in February with her two sons, stood me up on a white chair with my shoes on, and washed my ears. I said that it hurt and she said, yes, but it's a good hurt.
Saturday is the most exciting day when living in this loft. On the West Side, on Fulton Street there are many stores that sell seriously on Saturday, such as sound equipment stores, Army Navy stores, Syms discount clothes, and flower and plant shops. I walk around there each Saturday and look at people and things because everyone looks like marketing people which is nothing like they look on weekdays even if the same shops are open and even if they are the same people.
By early afternoon I'm working in my studio and all set up to hear the opera broadcast. One Saturday I went to the Opera House that was then on 41st Street and watched the people go to the matinee, then I rushed home to my loft and heard the broadcast knowing what some of the people looked like in the audience. I also spent the night at the Metropolitan Museum and was not caught. I once worked there and knew all the private routes. There was one hidden staircase that was not public that had a great space under it. Instead of leaving at five I took my coat and settled there for the night. I wasn't caught and the next morning went to work. It was very unpleasant but I did it in case I was on the television show “I’ve Got A Secret.”
Sometimes I go out on Saturday night just like people all over the world Saturday night is Saturday night. On times when I don't go out on Saturday night I am in a huge fold of silence and I am alone. The bar downstairs closes on Saturday at noon. All the machines have really stopped because tomorrow is Sunday. Even the little sandwich shop that's run by the Greeks sometimes closes on Saturday night. Saturday night is really itself, but I think it is so noticeable because it's largely tied up with Sunday morning. Everyone has been out all night and seen the daylight coming that contains the next day, but there is no excitement so great as knowing that daylight is Sunday daylight and Saturday night has caused it all.
There were nine children in Dad and Aunt Renie’s family. Uncle Big Boy was the oldest, he looked like Zachary Taylor and said goddamn all the time. Aunt Stell was second, she never married, but still talks about her boyfriend Jess Hughes who died, who was really Henry Fonda. Third was Aunt Teet who married Uncle Pete, and then Aunt Renie, then Dad. Number six is Aunt Ollie who smells like cedar, and Aunt Hootie. Last were Bump and Cy, who I understand were always together. Bump died when young because he drank water from a brook in the woods behind the house and got diphtheria, but I never believed that. I don’t remember Grandpa Deem, but I remember Grandma Deem. She always whistled without making a sound, just the noise of brushes, and always told me she had worn out the whistle. She taught me how to make shapes of real things in the clouds. She was a real Grandma, but every Grandma is real, they are merely nothing like your Grandma. Uncle Big Boy married Aunt Mamie who was Uncle Pete’s sister, which made Aunt Teet and Uncle Pete’s children double cousins to Uncle Big Boy and Aunt Mamie’s children, which I always thought was a silly thing to ever worry about. However, it’s like being a Grandma, if you are one you have no choice except to be one and you bother about it accordingly. It’s enough having been a twin, which is similar to being a double cousin.
Everyone married in that family except Aunt Stell who taught school. Uncle Big Boy married Aunt Mamie, they had three children: Edna Marie, Bud, and Bernie. Aunt Teet married Uncle Pete and they also had three children: Virginia May, Bill, and Jack, the double cousins.
Aunt Renie married Uncle Ed Ottensmeyer and had Bud and George.
Dad married Laura Bobe and had three children, Selma, me and John. John died the winter after Aunt Renie came to live with us.
Aunt Hootie married Uncle Can and had Tooke and Buck.
Aunt Ollie married Uncle Ed Tislow and had three girls: Mary Lou, Marge, and Jean Ann. Uncle Bump married Aunt Tillie and they had two children: Stella and Emmett. Uncle Bump died and Aunt Tillie got a goiter, and Stella was killed by a train. Uncle Cy married Aunt Theresa and they had seven children: Rosemary, Florence, Cy, Pat, Dolores, Tom, Paul, and Janet.
Everyone lived in Vincennes or on a farm nearby except Aunt Renie who lived in Chicago until my Mom died and she came back.
There were seven in our house when Aunt Renie and her two sons came to live there. Dad remodeled a room for the boys to sleep in, I slept with Dad, John slept in a little bed in the same room, and Selma and Aunt Renie slept together in the pretty bedroom which had the chest of drawers which had the silk crepe scarf. It was cold in all the bedrooms. There was only coal stoves in the kitchen and living room and no electricity nor plumbing. George was called George Otts to distinguish him from the other two Georges and I was called Gus. George Otts began a diary and in it he said, “Cows are not what you think they are, they stink.”
I never thought of Selma being a grandma, I never thought of Selma being a mother, I never thought of Selma being a girl, and that is what a sister is. She didn’t like the Ottensmeyers coming to live with us like I did and didn’t change over to being one of seven after having been the oldest of three. That must be impossible to do. Older sisters are a category. They never act like one would think girls should act, like second daughters do who know all about should. Older anybodies cannot know about should. Anybody could see that Uncle Big Boy didn’t know, and it’s not because he wouldn’t know, it’s because he can’t know. If he knew about should he could not have been the oldest. Aunt Stell only knows about should and she became a schoolteacher. I am the youngest. I will always be the youngest knowing only should and Selma being the oldest knows nothing about should.
Selma started off to public school and George Otts went with her. He was in the eighth grade when she was in the first. After the first grade her teacher said she could read. In the summer Aunt Renie said she should read to her and she couldn’t. Aunt Renie said she could read because she had read in school in the first grade. Selma said she could only read from the first-grade books that had pictures on each page because she read the pictures and thought that was reading. I guess everyone thinks that is reading before they can read. Later Selma took piano lessons and after a year of practicing and doing well enough, George Otts told her to play a simple melody from the notes printed in his piano book. She said she couldn’t because she didn’t know how it went. He said that that is why you play the piano, so you find out how things go. He was the younger of the two boys. Selma said she only played music that she already knew and everyone discovered she could not play the piano at all, she would have the teacher play a new piece for her, Selma would remember it then and there, then she would pick it out and put it all together so when the music teacher came the next week Selma was all ready. That is being older.
George Otts then went to Decker High School and Selma transferred to a parochial school called St. Thomas, which was part of a parish where we went to church and talked to Marge Davis who looked like our cow. John and I were all ready to start school the next year but John died. He had measles, then Selma said, after she became a nurse, it was really rheumatic fever. Anyway, he died the winter before we were to start to school. The room where Dad and I slept, with John in the small bed, had been made warm and we all stood around trying to talk to him, but Dad said he was out of his head. Aunt Ollie and Uncle Ed were there, so was Aunt Stell, and Selma was spending the night at Aunt Hootie’s. I went to bed and wished they would turn down the light. Dad had tried to make John talk, but he couldn’t and everyone was crying. The next morning John’s bed was not in the room. I asked Aunt Renie, who had come in, where John was and she said something and I could not hear it. She said it two more times before I heard that he was dead. She helped me get up, then held me on her lap and told Dad she was worried about my ears. I thought that she was wonderful to worry about me when she had been so tired of worrying about John. The rest of the day was like Sunday.
When Mom died they arranged for the body to be right in the home with a wreath on the front door. They did the same for John, and generators were brought and set up behind the house, and there was electric lights around the caskets and a pungent smell of carnations. Many people came over and it was like a holiday until when it was over Mom nor John ever came back.
I am working on a new painting called "A Limited Guide to Famous Portraits." It is a limited guide to famous portraits. Andrew Jackson is in it and so is George Washington because I love him so. No one knows how he looked, yet everyone knows how he looks. It doesn’t matter what a saint looks like. I have a photograph of St. Bernadette and it doesn’t even look like her, she really looks like Jennifer Jones as everyone knows, but George Washington is easy to recognize, yet no one knows what he looked like. I’ve seen his death mask in Washington D.C. and it has no resemblance to the Stuart portraits. If you are famous in America and not a saint you are like George Washington, the most famous of Americans. Like Aunt Renie. There are rubber stamps of George Washington and I always wondered how they could look so much like him yet be so crude, but they do because we know they do. Even though there are photographs of the veil which St. Veronica used to wipe Jesus’s face, and there are X-rays of the Holy Shroud that show his features, and there are important enough paintings of Jesus so that anyone could establish the way we prefer his features to be, there is no real way of concluding what one wants Jesus to look like. Anyone can draw a George Washington, anyone can dress like George Washington and everyone knows who it is because everyone has decided what he looked like and of course he does look like George Washington. Anyone can draw Jesus, but it never looks like him. What would Jesus have done if he had lived?
Across the street from my loft they have constructed a big bad concrete parking hotel with a car elevator that makes more noise than any of the cut-and-die factories even with their windows open. The car elevator whirrs like it is greatly sore and it keeps up all day. I thought it was bad when the builders used a power hammer to drive huge steel beams into the ground in order to begin this strange ugly structure. It was a terrible sound that lasted all during the summer when I had my windows open. Now everything is closed and sealed in my loft, it is still February, and the noise is very loud. I felt sorry for the earth when those steel beams were being pounded like that into the earth, now I only feel sorry for myself knowing that when summer comes I'm going to hear that sore elevator all day. I know I’ll get accustomed to it somehow, like I got accustomed to living.
One day I looked down on the concrete wall that fenced the car hotel and they had painted it that tired green that is always used in hospitals and public toilets. It's supposed to be some kind of color that psychiatrists decided was best for the mind. Color of course is for the eye, the mind cannot remember color, that is not what minds do, minds cannot remember sound only associations of sound, and that particular public green is merely a committee green, a general hue that comes nor goes. I had some enamel paint that was construction-blue, a deep almost Prussian blue, just a bit lighter, and late at night before the green wall was finished, I painted on it the words “Paint Me Blue.” By the end of the following week the wall was completely painted psychiatric green, and signs were put up saying Grand Opening and that world was taken care of and completed without my suggestion. When the opening of the car hotel was ready there were miles of red white and blue bunting swags hung on the first three floors. I did approve of this, it was really a beautiful sight. After a week the bunting looked sad and I took it upon myself to take it in order to make draperies for my loft and I did and I did.
Now I have red white and blue draperies hanging on my two windows from floor to ceiling, they must be sixteen feet long, and they are very beautiful. My walls are yellow ochre enamel with a construction-blue line near the floor all around the walls. I don't decorate my studio, that's the way I found it. A barn is not decorated on the inside.
I had to be mean to the car hotel because it was so mean to me. I can see that some kind of new system is taking over Fulton Street, they've done so much ugly reconstruction already and there is a terrifying threat that something is going to happen to my beautiful loft when I hear that sore elevator and see cars sitting on concrete floors above my top floor. Now the sun doesn't shine into my windows anymore from that side.
When I started to school Selma was in the third grade. We walked a lane to get the bus. The lane got shorter as I grew older until now, when I visit that farm I see it has only to do with a small hill and a mud puddle. Then, at the time I began school, it was a great distance and I was always frightened at the thought that not only was I at the end of the lane so early in the morning, but also a bus came and took me out of sight of even the lane. It was my first experience of being away from home by myself for such a long time. Finally I got accustomed to it and the thrill of going away to my own things became so great I moved to Manhattan. The lane was so important because up until that time I thought people I did not know only appeared so I could see everything was normal when I was away from my home and lane. While I was home everyone whom I didn't know did not exist. I went so far as to think even all my aunts and uncles and their families secretly lived in our house, they came there after I was asleep because how could anyone live outside my house? After a few weeks of school I saw everyone was as involved with their homes as I was. They had their own mothers and fathers and sisters, but I still wonder if they were alright without Aunt Renie.
Everyone has a lane. When I got here to Manhattan I was so pleased to understand entrances because entrances are lanes. Huge marquees are in front of theaters and department stores. There are some involved and strange entrances that are arranged at the beginnings of apartment buildings that I thought were for passersby to be impressed with. After working at the Metropolitan Museum, I had chances to pass these huge impressive entrances and found them all in use. People don’t only stand there waiting for cabs and friends, they stand and sit there after the cabs and friends have gone away. No doubt the friends have gone to their own entrances and have sat down in them and are being at home. Hallways to apartments are lovely lanes. Some are not to be looked at and some are more beautiful than any apartment. Everyone always has his lane and he stays in it, walks to the end of it, waits and lives with his lane. Everyone has his own Aunt Renie up that lane waving from the kitchen window too. Nobody exists when you are in your lane they all disappear when you are not out there with them. They all go to their lane and live there. There are no lanes in the Army.
When I got to school Buck was with me he rode the bus with Selma and me. We were all in the same schoolroom. The school had three rooms. One held the First, Second and Third grade. The big room held the fourth, fifth and sixth, and the smallest the seventh and eighth. Sister Bertilla was the principal and taught the seventh and eighth and was very frightening to me, so much so that I cried each time she asked me a question. Sister Colette was my teacher for the first three years and I loved her on sight. Sister Monica taught the fourth fifth and sixth but was transferred when I was in the sixth and Sister Vincentia took her place. Sister Colette was beautiful and taught music too. Sister Monica had a voice like Ethel Merman and was that hefty. She was the main disciplinarian and was in no way afraid to slap anyone a very good slap. Sister Vincentia was removed and a nun named Sister Fideus took her place but she was dull and a bit yellow. Vincentia went a bit crazy. First she had all the students drawing a square, one inch by one inch, and coloring it a certain way. If one forgot it, she cancelled the paper. She also had a theme dealing with the sixth grade boys asking them to please keep their hands on their desks because at that age we would be too tempted to fondle our private parts. This lecture was told us again and again. I later found out she was required to teach some introduction to sex. When Sister Fideus took the classes after Sister Vincentia was taken away, the sport for all the boys in the sixth grade was to fondle themselves for one another under the desk and this was my beginning of learning about sex.
When I was not going to school after the nine months of the school year, which I thought had something to do with pregnancy when I found out pregnancy was a nine-month term, I worked on the farm. This farm was never interesting to me because it never looked nor worked like a farm when thinking of a farm. We had no tractor for years and a mere sixty-five acres which were planted with cantaloupes and watermelons mostly. Sometimes we had small patches of sweet potatoes tomatoes, sweet corn or green peppers, which Aunt Renie called mangoes, and cucumbers. It was called a truck farm or a garden farm and it seemed less sincere than the farms around St. Thomas that had hundreds of acres of corn and wheat and the farmers there seemed to be like the farmers in magazines and stories. This finally made me know that wherever you are there seems to be a more definite example of where you really should be and I learned this and accepted this and now it's no worry. The summer after the sixth grade my Dad told me it was time I learned to plow melons. So early one morning I went out in the field to learn at plowing melons. It's a very difficult thing to learn. The plow called a sweep glides over the ground and the man plowing behind the single horse that pulls it must learn how to press or carry the sweep so that it does all of its plowing textures properly. I was too little, did not weigh enough to command the sweep and was sent back to the house very relieved. Aunt Renie said she certainly thought I would be plowing this year and I asked her if the time was coming when all I would do was work. She said that indeed that time was coming. The next summer I learned to plow melons and became Dad's great pride. I learned to enjoy it and even was given authority to plow a field by myself which was my Dad's greatest compliment.
There were times when Selma had to work in the field, but generally on our farm no girl worked after a certain age except in the house. There were jobs at different seasons, in May setting out melons and June turning vines. Selma was a star at turning vines and could keep two men plowing. It was merely turning the growth of melon vines in a certain direction so that the plow could go between. I was never so good at turning vines as plowing. One Fourth of July hot day we were working the watermelons, laying them by as the term goes for plowing them the last time. Dad asked Selma to help that day so we could finish early and go to the Carnival in Vincennes, which was a yearly treat. Selma was in no mood to turn vines, so late in the morning as Dad and I plowed we both noticed Selma turning vines so quickly and with such hot temper that some of the vines were being broken off. Dad walked over to her, addressing her with unkind and loud words. They met and both talked loudly, but I was too far away to hear until Dad said very loud, "Get out of this field and don't ever come and turn vines again." She stomped out of the field and indeed never worked in the field again until the time I ran away and she felt sorry for Dad and helped him sow winter rye. When I went to the house at noon that Fourth of July day Aunt Renie said Selma was a young woman and working out in the field was not the proper work for a young woman.
Dad looked at me and told me it was up to us to farm and I began working all the time.
Red and Blue together is very exciting if they are the same intensity, and they are close in the American flag, but where did the white come from. It takes all the power out of the system. Even the word arrangement, Red White and Blue is weakened with that white in the middle. There are not many countries that have only two colors in their flag but it is a much better idea. Three colors in a flag obviously has to do with a committee deciding the colors one day, saying white means purity, red means blood, blue means water or things like that. It's so much more pure to just have a color or two because you've always had it. Three colors is too much. It makes everyone forget what it's all about because they must translate. In medieval times two colors were used mostly because anyone could see from a distance who was coming with no need to translate the many colors wondering what they all meant. Red and Blue should be the colors of America. Red meaning Red and Blue meaning Blue and both meaning America. Everyone would know much more about what they were up to.
There are people whom I should mention in my book: Mike Helfgott, Hugh Niehaus, Tom Johnson, George Freedman, Verdalee Tombelaine, Ann Davis, Marilyn Outlaw, Angela Papikious, Lee Guilliatt, Richard Arve, Ellen Robbins, Tony Ellis, James Waring, Peter Redmond, Bruce Mailman, Rachel Fawcett, Marilyn Fillis.
In Manhattan summer is best in the winter and winter is just winter. Everyone talks of summer in the summer and in the winter. Mary Alice O’Neal spends a great deal of time on the roof in the summer. Once I followed her up the fire escape to see what she did. She went to the roof next door and sat on her haunches at one certain spot hissing. I walked over to see what she did and there was a skylight that had a part of a glass window that was propped open. In the rather large room I could see down into, there were about one hundred cats, all looking at me and Miss O’Neal. No human beings, just cats. I then concluded what they were doing there. Two women are in that building. They are not friendly but once in a while I see them and twice they asked me about stray cats, if I had seen certain ones. We do not get along because on occasion they have telephoned the police when I have guests that cause a party to get loud late in the night. I've concluded it's them because no one is around after five in the afternoon except them. They must live there and have this room of cats which they collect. The smell is awful and at times when I'm on the roof in the summer the smell floats into my area and now I know what it is.
Another summer memory that is much more delightful than the actual event is my Fourth of July eve party for people who are not invited to go away for the weekend. For three years I've done it. I walk through the Village or go to the beach and hand out invitations to interesting-looking people. I do it with friends a few days before the Fourth. They are instructed to bring their own drinks, I supply ice and mix. It works out very well. There are usually too many people and lots of misunderstanding, but seldom any trouble, and the police always come at around 2:30 A.M. and everyone leaves and I go to the beach the next day and there are lots of people to talk to. Of course there is the Staten Island Ferry ride late on summer evenings that is always a better thought during the winter. Right now the best thought of summer is heat. I sometimes cannot believe that I can open all my windows and have summer come into my loft and never close them until the cold comes. In September mosquitoes come to the loft. I'm seldom made sick by them but they do worry me when they get around my ears while I'm trying to go to sleep at night. My latest solution is putting bug candles all around my bed, four on each side and sleeping among the candles. They are made to burn till they go out, and cannot start a fire easily. I have wished for prowlers at times because it would be such a shock finding someone living here, not to mention him lying naked with up to eight candles all lighted and all around him. Rain in the summer is my best thought of all.
In Manhattan February always seems to be going on because January and March are all like February, cold and not in any way interesting. April is always a month when one concludes they are happy because winter is so far along and it isn't until May that one can really see winter is in its last stages. Here you think of summer in the winter, but never winter in the summer. Do I love summer in Manhattan! but it seems to me with all the heat in Manhattan the cold would be weakened, and I don't think this way about summer being cool because of all the air conditioners. When the electric power failure hit New York I was in the basement of the Metropolitan Museum, delivering office mail and suddenly complete darkness.
It was on a Fourth of July that Dad took me up on the highest hill on our farm, which was not high at all, and offered me the farm if I would work it and stay, he would help me but I would be the one to really run it. I was so surprised and shocked and did not know what to do, so I laughed and said no, I wanted just to be an artist, not a farmer. That evening, Bill Updike, my friend from high school, and I went to the Carnival in Vincennes and saw our first stripper show. A man came out from behind a tarpaulin after we paid our 75 cents to get in and said, “Gentlemen, if anyone touches the girls during their performance, the show is automatically over. thank you.” Torchy O’Day came out in a leopard-skin bikini and said, “Oh, Daddy, it hurts so good! Is that your pipe in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?” Then she shimmied around rubbing herself on the tent pole. At the end of her number, having danced to a scratchy record by Frankie Laine, she took some man's hat and bumped around with it until she introduced another girl, Carolina Cotton. Carolina Cotton was pretty, but didn’t have the zing that Torchy O’Day had and during her number, to the music of Ray Bostic, Torchy O'Day had to join her to keep the tempo up. Together they told us if we dropped a quarter in the piss-pot they would show us twenty-five ways to do it, the Grand Canyon and give us all a souvenir. Bill and I paid our quarters while a surprising number of men left and suddenly the girls had taken off their bras and were tangling themselves around one another calling off numbers from one to twenty-five. Then they took off their panties, spread their legs and announced The Grand Canyon. Carolina Cotton’s heart wasn’t in it and Torchy O’Day grabbed her leg, pulled her into a wider position, and said, “Show it to ‘em, Carolina!” Then the two started pulling hair from their pubic area and asking us to take the souvenir. Suddenly the lights went up and the girls were gone. Bill said, “Let’s smoke cigarettes and walk around the Carnival grounds.” It was the first time I smoked in public.
After this there were great plans made to go to all the County Fairs to see the strippers. We saw Cleo who grabbed Bill’s hand and rubbed it over her breast, Rita Arleeta who did splits and wore ballet shoes, and Honey Bee who spread the cheeks of her butt to show her rectum. In the Indianapolis State Fair the strippers were forbidden, but they did have an art show of real people. Honest-to-goodness real nudes in the exact poses of masterpieces. They showed Goya’s Naked Maja, a Rembrandt woman at her bath, and a Rubens Venus. During the still pose of the Rubens Venus, the mistress of ceremonies said, “Now, boys, let's don't make Betty laugh!” I certainly began laughing, so did the entire audience and Betty began giggling and her buttery body rippled until the curtain was lowered. That following Christmas, Dad and Aunt Renie gave me a Zippo lighter because they said everyone knows you smoke cigarettes and now you can light up here at home and I began smoking every day.
High School made a difference. I had no more nuns to teach me and we students had to walk from room to room for different classes. I had a terrible time remembering which class was next and there were different arrangements on different days and no one had told me this was the difference between grade school and high school. Had I known that I would have been a completely different type of student. I didn't realize it was this kind of a system until the end of my second year, so I moved away from it altogether and went to the monastery.
Buck and I were glad to be with one another the first day of high school. I rode the bus with Selma and didn't see Buck till I got to school and that was very exciting. We were placed in the study hall alphabetically and that was perfect because Buck’s last name is De Lisle (later I found out that means “of the island” and concluded Buck must be Hawaiian). Our first class on the first day was shop taught by Mr. Wampler. In the class there was nothing to do because Mr. Wampler was not there that first day so all the boys sat around and talked. I knew some of them from St. Thomas grade school. One very fine-looking boy began talking to Buck and me and said he had seen us on the steps of St. Thomas talking to the nuns every warm evening when his bus came by to make some connection there. He had been going to Decker grade school, which also was the High School and included in one building. Which was news to me because I thought the entire building was a high school and as one went upstairs they were seniors, but the first grade was really upstairs and the seniors had most of their classes in the basement. This boy was named Bill Updike and he lived very near St. Thomas but was not Catholic, so did not go to St. Thomas. I told him he could have gone because St. Thomas did not forbid non-Catholics, but he said he didn't want to go to Mass each morning and I found out non-Catholic students in the grades didn't go to their church each morning. I found out many things in high school. Bill began to talk to Buck about Knowles's Grocery Store, a farmer's grocery store, the first store as one enters Vincennes. Bill hadn't remembered Buck on the steps of St. Thomas so Buck said he had seen Bill in Knowles's store. I don't think he really did but he had to get some common recognition in somehow. Buck asked Bill if he knew Tootie Noe, a little clerk at Knowles's who had two thumbs on her right hand and Bill laughed a great deal and said he did. We all three began talking about strange women we had seen or met and Bill talked about Iola Bass who came from Gobbler's Knob, a place where families who lived on welfare lived. It was also called Bunker Hill and Tootie Noe came from there too. It was across the road and up the hill from Knowles's. Iola Bass was a thin homely girl who walked around town always angry and all the boys called after her “Iola Bass with a red face” and she would run toward them swearing and wishing great lists of evil upon you. This Bill enjoyed and laughed with all his might until a vein would protrude near the center of his forehead showing the pressure of his humor. Buck then hit on Dorothy Donna Jean, whose last name no one knew, and Bill brought up Katie Frances Gravel, the meanest woman in Vincennes. Miss Gravel whom we all knew lived near Buck and me and we feared her greatly. If you walked through her farm she was capable of sneaking up on you and screaming like a great witch, "Get your ass off my property, you dirty little son of a bitch, or I'll shoot ya!" Adults and children alike were aware of Miss Gravel. Selma was so curious about her that she took me and Buck to her house one day, knocked at her door and told her she was George Deem’s daughter and she stopped by to say hello. Of course Miss Gravel was pleased and said our Dad was the only farmer around whom she really respected. Later she sold her house and farm and moved to Vincennes next door to Bill Updike because he had once lived in Vincennes. That's when I realized there was something slick and polished about Bill Updike, he had gone to Decker grade school, but to Vincennes Junior High School where they walked to different rooms for different classes and that made him smarter than I because our classes were all in one room and there were even other grades in the same room with us. Bill Updike was a member of the Y in Vincennes and could swim there on Saturdays in the winter for nothing. I only knew dog paddle and had only been to the Rainbow Beach once. Bill called Miss Gravel Katie Frances Gravel and he and his family had got along with her very well until she made cookies for the children and put sand and dog hair in them. They didn’t say anything to her, they thought she had made a mistake, but the next day she screamed at them and said she hoped they all got sick on the cookies because she had put sand and dog hair in them and she pasted newspapers on all her windows and told Bill he wouldn't be able to peek at her anymore. That weekend, Bill Updike and I met and went roller skating on Saturday night. Buck couldn't skate.
Buck couldn't ride a bicycle when younger and he owned one for a year and always wheeled it around with him wherever he went. Selma finally taught him. It took two days and she hit his left hand so many times it swelled up and Aunt Hootie called us on the telephone to make sure Selma’s beating was the reason for his swollen left hand. She said, “Well, he can ride the bicycle, can’t he?" It took me a great long time to learn the bicycle too. Dad tried and gave up, so did George Otts, even Aunt Renie tried to no avail. One Saturday morning Selma came down the driveway and told me that this was the day I was going to ride a bicycle. She hit my hand because I had it on the seat all the time. “You can’t ride with your hand on the seat!” she said to both Buck and me. When we no longer had need to put our left hands on the seat we were riding. Buck mounts and rides a bicycle right-handed because Selma said she didn’t know how to teach it left-handed. I learned to spell “bicycle” the day I rode it. For some reason I learned to spell "picnic" the same day.
I didn’t know the alphabet until I was twelve and still don’t know how to tell time, that’s why I never wear a watch, but I can tie shoelaces faster and better than anyone I know and like tying them better than telling time, which no one understands and of course they would understand it if they would relax from their love of telling time. Why so many people are so interested in the time at a certain time I will never understand. I know what time it is because I know where I am in the day. It's never a problem knowing what day it is unless you're flying, but people love the problem of what time it is. Regardless what time it is by numbers, it's now on a certain day, the numbers do not identify now so people ask again after a half hour, only to find it is now again.
George Otts went off to the Seminary one day in September. No one told me he was going and I had no suspicion until I saw suitcases and heard many questions from Aunt Renie regarding towels and soap, do they furnish sheets? I didn’t know what a Seminary was and George Otts had malaria and I thought the Seminary had something to do with malaria and music because he was a musician too. Finally I found out that it was all to do with becoming a priest. Of course music and malaria also has a lot to do with becoming a priest.
It was then George Otts changed. He got respect from everyone, he talked for hours with Dad and Dad talked to him and they both enjoyed one another for the first time. He was able to come home for the summer and tell Aunt Renie what he wanted for breakfast and I never knew one could think of what they wanted for breakfast, that people in kitchens just knew. Aunt Renie still knows what I want for breakfast every time. When George Otts came home the first Christmas he didn’t even have to milk and that was unusual, he had become a guest and that was very exciting. Aunt Renie used the best Rogers Plate silver all while he was home and I really knew he had gone away. His neck got longer and his carriage more definite, but when he came home for the summer he still had to turn vines and pick cantaloupes and melons. He had to milk too, not the day he arrived, but the next morning there he was in strange summer clothes unlike any of our everyday clothes. This all happened when I was in the third grade. When I graduated from high school George Otts became Fr. Hilary.
George Otts became my favorite person during these years. There was nothing so exciting than his coming home for Christmas holidays and summer vacation. I claimed him as my idol and would lie on the carpet in the good room all while he practiced on the piano, dreaming of becoming a musician. When we turned vines he would tell Selma and me such wonderful stories and I later found out he had told us most of Shakespeare’s plays. He's the one who named the cow Hepzibah because he was so fascinated with "The House of Seven Gables." He was the only one who could help me arrange my holy card scrapbook. I could never understand the day he went away to stay. It was his fifth year at the Seminary and he told me he was not going to return that following Christmas, nor the summer vacation either. I asked him where he was going and he told me he was staying at St. Meinrad during that time because he was going into the monastery and was to serve his novitiate which meant all sorts of cloistered privacy. I thought the Seminary closed in the summer. It was very strange to me and I could not understand it. What was I to do without his coming home for his holidays? The summer wore on until August and he was to leave in early August instead of the usual September. I must have followed him about a lot looking puzzled, but he never said anything about it. That summer when he played the piano I lay down on the rug close to the piano and stared at the wooden magazine rack that we got from George Menefee one Christmas. George Menefee imported all the wood that we used for crates to pack cantaloupes in and each Christmas he gave all the farmers a wooden present. The year he gave us the magazine rack we were all so pleased with it that Aunt Renie put it in the good room right by the piano. Aunt Hootie has hers even today and she calls it thee Menefee. Hers has a picture of a thatched cottage and ours had a picture of Venice on it. I stared at our Menefee all that summer and thought of Venice because I couldn't think of anything else to do if George Otts were to be gone. Then the day came. He didn't have a suitcase with lots of new clothes because the monastery supplied everything, he just rode away with Dad and Aunt Renie and I went to the shed where we packed melons, it was in the late afternoon and no one was there, and I cried for a very long time. I had never cried so deeply before. When Dad and Aunt Renie returned home everything was different and I have never been the same since.
End of Part One