When Lou hung up, he invited me to sit on the floor and then offered me a Hershey’s bar. “If you don’t want it, save it for later.”
I put it in my jacket pocket. He dropped a yellow legal pad and a pen onto the floor next to me. He explained that Rachel had gone up to the Bronx to visit her mother: “A mother and her daughter, you know . . . they can’t be apart for too long. It’s a deep bond.”
I gripped the pen and was waiting for him to start dictating. He explained that he was working on a biography of one of the saints, I don’t remember which one, though it was not a factual, historical biography but more like an imagined interpretation of this holy man’s life. He explained further that it was to be the book or libretto of an opera that he was also writing the music for.
“Okay, okay, okay . . . do you have a cigarette? . . . No, you don’t smoke . . . Good, don’t . . . it’s a filthy habit.” He found his pack under a leather jacket that was tossed over a cardboard RCA-marked box. “So we were just in Amsterdam, don’t write this down . . . and you know in Amsterdam—” The phone’s ringer interrupted him. “Be right with you, pal.”
He stayed on the phone for over an hour. I couldn’t hear what he was saying because he was speaking in hushed, low tones. In the meantime, I ate the Hershey’s bar and read from a book of short stories on one of his stacks. It was about an Englishman who gets captured by some North African tribespeople who cut out his tongue and keep him chained up. They force him to be the jester in the court of the bedouin king. It was a horrifying story and the image of the man dressed in cut-up cans of Coca-Cola stayed in my mind for weeks.
When Lou finally got off the phone he acted as if the call had taken no more than a minute. “Okay, okay, okay . . . you got the pad? Good . . . Oh, wait, you know what’s funny? Don’t write this down . . . I was walking by my old house on the Bowery and I see this old man sitting against a wall—” The phone rang again and he dashed to the kitchen. This time he spoke for only about forty minutes or so.
I picked up another book, this one about a man who was in love with a beautiful Mexican woman with a serious addiction to heroin. This story was not nearly as disturbing as the first one I’d read. I got through about twenty-five pages when Lou came back.
“You can borrow any of those, by the way . . . Okay, okay, okay . . . Act one, scene one . . . Wait, I didn’t finish my story . . . don’t write this down . . . So I’m down the Bowery and I see this old guy sitting against a wall near my old house, he looks kind of familiar but he’s a bum, you know, a piss-in-the-pants drunk, but I know I’ve seen his face before . . . and he’s looking at me and he goes, What are you looking at, faggot? I’m about to go step on the fucking guy and I realize—”
Ring ring ring.
“Shit. Hold my place.”
The call lasted less than a minute.
“I gotta split. Can I borrow you for a few minutes?”
I never found out what was realized on the Bowery or who the old man was. Lou was on to something else. I agreed to let him borrow me for a few minutes. What I would eventually realize was that he was very afraid of being alone and needed someone by his side at all times. I had suddenly become one of those trusted few.
fifteen
I had never been in a bar before. I should say I had never been in a bar without my father. He would bet baseball games with JR, a local bookie my dad went to grade school with. JR’s office was in the Piper’s Kilt, a little Irish pub in Woodside that I think is still open to this day.
The place Lou took me to was a narrow, dark joint near the 59th Street subway. It smelled like old beer, mold, cigarettes, and sweat. The bar was on the left side of the room as you entered. It was long and high. About a dozen men and no women sat on tall stools in quiet contemplation of alcohol, nicotine, and regret. Lit by strands of half-burned-out holiday lights along the length of the back of the bar: the ghosts of Christmas past.
There was a row of four or five red vinyl booths along the right side. They were all empty. The booth closest to the entrance was sealed off with tape. There was a hole the size of a toilet seat in one of its benches. The hole was stuffed with newspaper, matchbooks, empty cigarette packs, and broken glass. It looked like they were in no rush to repair it.
We sat in the rear booth, the pay phone and the bathrooms just beyond us. A jukebox stood right next to the phone. Lou sat on the bench facing the entrance, I sat opposite. He took out a pack of Marlboros and lit one up.
“You got any change? I want to play some music.” He started combing through his thousand pockets.
“I have a quarter.” I handed it to him.
“Get me
