Dissident Gardens (27 page)

Topical Tommy had a year in the sun, maybe that long, before the
fish-wrap songs quit coming with such ease. Tommy was soon humbled, by American voices, by songsmiths with a claim and purchase on those materials he merely browsed, men who’d never dream of being photographed in a brocade vest but posed strictly in sheepskin coats while squinting at skylines from rooftops, men in the presence of whom though he was most certainly their elder he felt as tongue-tied and chagrined as the younger sibling he was to his core.

In some excess of gratitude at being there in the first place Tommy couldn’t keep from grinning and glad-handing from the stage like the Gogan Boy he was, no matter if the subject was potato famine, busted levee, or electric chair. Out of what his mum would have called
respect
and in memory of brickie days, he still wore a tie, feeling it was an affront to a true workingman to assume a workman’s clothes.

The new singers coming along just now felt no such compunction. Wherever they had or had not originated, they donned the cloth cap and the scowl.

These were cool customers indeed.

Tommy wondered if he had what it took to fake himself up yet another outfit and a manner to go with it.

Later Tommy imagined he could trace it all back to a cad’s vanity in tossing over the Sullivan girl, and wished or imagined he wished to find a way to telephone her and went so far as to leaf through a Penguin William Blake where he’d sworn he’d jotted her number. A girl from Ohio and rumor was she’d gone back there.

“Sideburns Raining to the Floor”

“I Held the Door, Phil Ochs Walked In”

“Tried to Visit Woody on His Deathbed Too (But Ended Up in the Bronx)”

Yet burnishing private myths, revisiting girlfriends, ruing forks in roads, these too were blind alleys, indulgences of the blocked writer. In his Chelsea Hotel room Tommy Gogan lit another cigarette, his last. After this he’d have to go out into the night for a pack—for night had long since fallen. He knew frankly how Lora Sullivan had bored him. There was no song to be gleaned in recollecting a girl who bored you. That life had been, in truth, another counterfeit, the dry run for a self-devising that could stick. That faltering, sporadically splendid interval while he was still in brocade, still on Peter’s pullout bed, that
interval during which he’d located a protester’s voice yet remained a sibling, one fully and unprotestingly beneath the thumb not only of Peter and Rye but soon of Phil and Bobby as well—that had been a life of mere fumbling postures, of sincerities faked sincerely and passions faked passionately and all of it only preamble, so it seemed, to the day when his whole self would be captivated and catalyzed by Miriam Zimmer.

It was one famous wintry morning in February ’60 when he trekked to Corona Park in a famous howling snowstorm in the company of a famous young white blues singer to pay call on a famous old black blues singer, one who was also an ordained minister, and so, as the legend would be carried between them for the rest of their lives, he and Miriam Zimmer ought to have asked the reverend to marry them on the spot. The enlivening fame of it all—of Dave Van Ronk and the Reverend Gary Davis, and the fame of the storm, photographs of which dominated the papers the next two days, halted plows and choked subway entrances and skiers in Central Park—became subsumed into the mad dream of that day and those immediately following, the intramural fame of two lovers’ discovery of each other. He’d wonder forever and find no good answer to why on earth he’d braved the storm in Van Ronk’s borrowed Nash Rambler to go sit at Gary Davis’s feet to witness a tutorial on fingerpicking the riff to “Candy Man,” he who fingerpicked (or so the joke went) as if his right hand was a foot, and a duck’s webbed one at that. Why he’d overcome what Miriam would later explain to him was his “classic case of borough-phobia” for the expedition to Queens. Tommy supposed the answer was that he and Peter had been clashing, as they did, and he’d sought an excuse to vacate the Bowery loft and just then had run into Van Ronk. Who knew whether Van Ronk was even clear on Tommy’s name before then, but in his gregariousness the older folkie swept Tommy along. There was in retrospect something servile in Tommy’s apprenticeship—a doggish willingness to follow Bob Gibson or Fred Neil on a trip to buy groceries or to the toilet that might not have been wholly attractive. Yet there was a romance in visiting the reverend. If
there were songs to come they should come from recollection of this sort of day.

She’d been at the table with the reverend’s wife. The house was tiny, in a suburb of tiny houses on tilted streets, snow piling up like it might bury the whole thing by the time they scraped into a parking spot using garbage-can lids, then scurried inside to warm up their hands. Gary Davis occupied his chair with the solemn posture of a wooden carving, aside from the flurry at his frets and the tapping of his right shoe, wearing shades indoors, for he was blind and likely never removed them, indoors or out.

To enter this sanctum of warmth and coffee savor, such unexpected distance from Manhattan and on a day when the boundaries of night and day, curb and cobblestone, roof and sky were all effaced in white, was a sublime transport. Astonishment to Tommy, forever a seaman clinging to shore, exile but no wanderer, mouse in the Greenwich Village maze from which he neglected even to seek an exit. She sat at the table in the kitchen with the reverend’s wife and another couple of Negro women—Tommy was fairly sure there had been another couple of Negro women in the kitchen, dressed like younger versions of Missus Annie, as she was introduced. Daughters perhaps. Another white man had preceded them in their visit here, sat in study with his own guitar on the sofa across from the reverend. Tommy recognized him, Barry Kornfeld, a banjo player, Tommy thought. Tommy felt a stab of exclusion at the belatedness of his arrival in the reverend’s parlor as in life itself totally, even before he saw Miriam and conceived the jealous notion that Kornfeld might be her boyfriend. She didn’t get up immediately but beckoned in friendly hilarity to see Van Ronk stomping his feet clean at the foyer, hale greeting like that of one pal calling to another across two West Fourth Street subway platforms.

Kornfeld wasn’t her boyfriend. Or wasn’t any longer. Tommy was never to press Miriam for the facts of her relations before, least of all to any singers or guitar players preceding him. She was twenty years old—well, almost twenty, she’d corrected later—and a MacDougal Street familiar, diaphragm in her purse until she could be among the Pill’s first customers. Whatever went on before had been blown away for her as totally as it had for him, or if not he didn’t care to know.

He’d learn soon enough from her own lips she was a confidante of
both Phil Ochs’s and Mary Travers’s, also that she worked at the Conrad Shop on MacDougal and Third, piercing comers’ ears by hand with a safety pin and an ice cube, radicalizing lobes one at a time. (Lacking her phone number, he’d have to visit the jewelry shop to find her the second time.) He’d learn of Rose the Red mayor of Sunnyside and of Albert the spy. For now he wished to repossess that instant she’d first come into the parlor.

The reverend had been slowing down an arrangement of “Sportin’ Life Blues” so the younger men could follow.

Someone placed a saucer with a piece of fresh crumb coffee cake awkwardly on Tommy’s knees.

Plucked notes rising to the steamed windowpanes and beyond, to cold heaven.

To hold on, if he could, to that moment she stood from her place at the table with the reverend’s wife and entered the parlor where the men sat. To halt that instant and try to see her face as he first saw it. To know what it might be like to have gazed into her eyes before she began talking.

By the time he took anything remotely like full stock she’d donned her own sunglasses, dark Wayfarers, well advised in the pale blare of the storm. Therefore to gaze in the direction of her eyes was only to watch the fat flakes spatter against those dark windshields below her wild unhatted raven-black hair—which, captured in disorganization by a broad mother-of-pearl clasp, collected a bonnet of snow at the outermost, where the heat of her body left it unmelted, as blobs clung unmelted to the shoulders and front of her coarse heavy checkerboard coat. Beneath that only her black-stockinged legs appeared, her skirt briefer than the coat’s hem. Becoming bored at the guitar lesson (as Tommy himself was bored, the reverend working the same changes a hundred times over with Van Ronk and Kornfeld, and Tommy’d not brought his guitar and so felt unmanned yet perhaps not so unmanned as he’d have felt attempting to follow the old wizard’s fingering), she’d excused herself to Missus Annie and the men and insisted the el would
still be working and that she knew her way and maybe Tommy would care to walk her? He would care to, yes.

The two tumbled and staggered together on the clotted sidewalks, the whole sky swirling mad flakes plunging to melt at the heat of their cheeks and tongue and hands or array on her coat. By this time she’d been talking so much he couldn’t regain his head, couldn’t recapture his ground. Before he’d begun to ask she’d said,
Yes, I know who you are. I’ve seen you sing
. Had they met before? He couldn’t imagine it but feared he’d forgotten her in some passage of stage dizziness, the bewilderments typical in the company of his brothers. No, they’d not met, not exactly. But she knew him. And now he knew her. Miriam Zimmer.

She said,
I know who you are
. As if to know Tommy Gogan’s name was to possess knowledge of some definite person who bore it, knowledge he lacked himself.

And then by acting as if it were so, she made it so.

Beginning that famous day in the snow when she drew him back to Peter’s loft and they shared some reefer and then brewed a pot of coffee for the derelicts and she explained to him why the Bowery was called what it was.

The el barely slugged along its rail where snow had amassed, their car entirely empty though the trains tottering past on the opposite track bulged with the snow-fearful workers fleeing the island at three in the afternoon while they could, as though Manhattan had been hit by the hydrogen bomb and only fools would go in the direction they did, and as they inched into the tunnel the skyline was effaced, white turned to black, and still she wore her sunglasses, and for all he knew he’d missed forever his chance to see her eyes.

He’d had a puff of reefer two or three times before and found it not a revelation, not like this day, but which was chicken and which egg on such a day of revelation? In defense against the onslaught he’d picked up his Silvertone, shoring his fumbling tongue with a few barre chords, no advantage in putting his fingerpicking against the
reverend’s. Thank Christ, Peter was out, no sign where. The dark fell almost before they’d gotten upstairs, but they did nothing but light Peter’s candlesticks. She arranged both their shoes on the clanking radiator then found her way to the cabinets and uncorked a bottle of red wine she discovered there, filled two juice glasses halfway. The reefer came out of her handbag as if she’d planned it, this absconding, this near kidnapping. She lit it on a candle. They’d kissed already once, everything else not delivered but promised, in the snow-smashed route from the subway, no saying who’d initiated what as their plunging footfalls arranged collisions. Not so once indoors, where couch, armchair, man’s body with coat removed, woman’s body with coat removed, table between them, door for possible entrances or exits, all stood at a concrete and painful distance to be navigated with deliberation or not at all. His skin hived with risk, supersensitivity to her presence, the soda prickle of frozen extremities reclaiming life, dread of the clock’s advancement to some outcome.