As he turned to continue his way on up along Fifth Avenue, he said, Well, welcome to the city of the fables and the fleshpots, man. Then he said, Maybe we can get together and swap some lies long and short about the old country. I’m in the phone book.
And when I said I just might take you up on that, he said, Some down-home lies in and out of school, foul mouth or fancy tongue, about all this stuff. And I said, I’m for it, man.
On my way on along Forty-seventh Street, I suddenly realized what I could have said about my roommate whom Taft Edison probably would have remembered from the band cottage during my freshman year, because from time to time my roommate would rejoin the French horn section of the marching band because it was being expanded for some special upcoming event, such as a trip up to Chicago for the halftime show during the annual football game with Wilberforce at Soldier Field.
Which, however, was only partly the reason I arrived at 41 West 47th Street thinking of the one and only self-styled Jeronimo as in Geronimo and also Hieronymus as in Bosch whose real name was T. (for Thomas) Jerome Jefferson, also known on campus as The Snake, as in snake doctor and snake oil salesman, because a tent show magician claiming a diabolical contract is what Herr Dr. Faustus came across as in a bull session in which I referred to him as the best of all possible roommates that first September. Of course, “best of all possible” was a phrase I got from him, who got it from Voltaire’s “best of all possible worlds” in Candide and by which he assumed Voltaire meant things good and bad as they actually are because such is life in our time, but by which I meant and still mean that you couldn’t have dreamed of having a better roommate if you had gone to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cambridge, or Oxford.
The brief encounter with Taft Edison was reason enough for my train of thought, but even so who else if not my old roommate back in Atelier 359 would pop into mind as you stepped down from the sidewalk and into the entrance of Gotham Book Mart? Not even Miss Lexine Metcalf, who in this instance would come after Mr. Carlton Poindexter.
V
One late morning about a week after I overtook Taft Edison on the way up Fifth Avenue that afternoon, I looked up from my usual place in the south reading room in the library and saw him standing at the checkpoint on his way in. I stood up and raised my hand and he nodded and headed toward me, and when we met in the center aisle he said he had stopped in to double-check a few details in the Americana section, which was at the south end of the reading room in those days, and also to invite me out for a midday snack and chat if I could spare the time. And I said I could and ended up spending most of the afternoon with him.
That was when I found out that when we had parted at the corner of Forty-seventh Street the other time he had continued on up Fifth Avenue only as far as Forty-ninth Street. Because at that time that was where he did what he did from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. every week Mondays through Fridays; because what he was using as his writing studio at that time was a book-lined back room of an exclusive jeweler’s showroom on the eighth floor of the Swiss Building on the southwest corner of Forty-ninth Street.
I said, Hey, man, I said, Hey, goddamn, man! I said, This is some little cubbyhole you’ve got yourself up here, man. And he said, Man if I ever get enough of this stuff ready to start publishing it nobody’s ever going to want to believe that I was up here cooking it up in a place like this. If they don’t try to put me in the nuthouse.
And that was when he also said what he said about trying some of it out on me before long. Me being not only a down-home boy but also a graduate student in liberal arts by way of becoming a literary type myself.
And I said, Let me know and I’ll find the time, and he said, Maybe during some weekend, and I said, Just let me know.
As I stood looking down through the window onto the low roof of the southeast corner building of Rockefeller Center, I saw that we were diagonally across Fifth Avenue and Forty-ninth Street from Saks and in the next block north was St. Patrick’s Cathedral and as far as you could see in that direction in the hazy midafternoon light there were more yellow cabs than any other vehicles weaving in and out of the traffic southward from Fifty-ninth Street, and there was also a steady flow of city Transit Authority buses pulling over to the curb every several blocks.
He said, Man, I come down here on schedule every morning just like everybody else working in this part of town. I check in here just like punching the clock, he said. And I said that I had been surprised to find that he had given up the trumpet and music composition but was not at all surprised that he was working on a book, because I had kept coming across his name on the checkout slip in so many of the books I
