1 Dispatches From The Fringes: An Anthology of Wandering Roy Lisker 8 Liberty Street Middletown, CT 06457 [email protected] www.fermentmagazine.org Table of Contents 1.) Philadelphia, 1961 …………..page 3 2.) Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1964 A. Depravity……………….. page 28 B. Noon, Incident and Aftermath …page 48 3.) New York City, 1966 A. Smokey …………………. page 71 B. The One Mile Bar ……….page 80 4.) Paris , 1968 A. Toy Boats ………………………..page 91 B. Hotel Room ………………………page 96 C. Café Crocodile …………………...page 99 D. Despair ……………………………page 104 5.) Dublin, Ireland, 1970 A. The Poet’s Circle ……………..page 117 B. Brendan Casey ……………..page 132 2 6.) Paris, 1971 Transience …………………………page 148 7.) Beaver Falls, PA 1974 ………………page 214 8.) Cambridge, MA, 1980 The Delusion of Juan Rodriguez ……page 238 9.) San Francisco, 1984 A. The Post Hotel ………………………page 246 B. The Red Light District ……………. page 253 10.)Monaco, 1986 Princess Grace to the Rescue …………page 265 11.) Lawrence, Kansas, 1987 The Beat Generation Poetry Festival …. Page 279 12.) Hudson Valley, New York State 1989 ………….page 319 3 1. Philadelphia 1961 Philadelphia, south-east of the downtown center, the weary inner city, torpid with melancholy, conservative, long blocks of charming old residences, a gallery of historic facades masking the panoply of sordid misery. Sad, yet beautiful, not without its aureole of grandeur. Notice that small silver-headed crumpled shape, shabby coat and battered hat, standing in a doorway along 10th Street. And the couples immobilized on the doorsteps along Spruce waiting out the stifling summer evenings. Strange physiognomies will sometimes emerge from alleyways thick with overgrowth. These, too, should not be taken for granted. Nor the frightful ship-wrecks, mutilated by time, mottled with skin diseases, their odd disfigurements, their crazy eyes. Mirages of squalor and decay, sorrowful venues nestling terrible secrets and stern vengeances. Our attention will be focused upon a narrow quadrangle, between 8th Street to the east and 12th Street to the west, South Street as southern border, Lombard and Pine in the middle, and Spruce to the north. A garden plot of about 1/5th of a square mile. A world unexpurgated. The Afro-American ghetto of the downtown area fills up the length of South Street: sacrificial altar to the religion of progress, a desert, a 4 howling waste, an abyss of hunger, humiliation and defeat. A remove of two blocks to the north allows one to withdraw temporarily from its unrelieved cry of despair. Between 13th and 9th streets one may stroll along Pine, to lose one's heart within the dusty labyrinths of the antique shops, emporia of jewelry, old china and cutlery, of lamp stands, stained Victorian opaque glass lampshades, costumed dolls and outsized surreal mannequins, of trivets, pokers, bellows and brooms, sofas, hassocks, of shuddering ghosts and farmstead furniture. But those with tougher stomachs will want to continue on yet another block north to Spruce Street. It is primarily in this section of the garden plot, between 12th and 8th, that one can coax familiarity with the hypertrophied tumor in the heart of American hubris, one of the more pitiful chapters of the human comedy. The area is residential with a sprinkling of shops and stores, though far from being a neighborhood. Spruce has no private homes. There are restored colonial streets, Quince, Jessup and Camac running into it from the north and south, where one finds miniature houses, all very charming, with the tiny windows, narrow staircases and open hearths of the 18th century, their small gardens clinging at the margin of their eroded doorsteps. These are occupied by young professionals, 5 couples, students. Once established, the doctors, lawyers, actuaries and architects who give the city its drab complexion do not stay in this neighborhood. Society Hill, (not that far away), beckons. Spruce Street is the principal thoroughfare. Here stand the stately rows of rooming houses. Most of them, substandard by any standard, would be condemned after any honest inspection; but people have to live somewhere, don't they? Including those substandard by any standard? All the sidewalks are covered with slicks of refuse and garbage, while bugs, including some abnormally large ones, migrate through the sewers and stairwells. Behind their picturesque exteriors these buildings overflow with derelicts of every species. Through the open doors of the bars one sees the worn prostitutes, some old, some mad, the regiments of alcoholics, the drug addicts, the panhandlers. I once gave some money to a lively unkempt kid on the step of a house across the street from my building. Within half an hour no less than 40 hungry children, slovenly, sickly, had emerged from the surrounding houses to demand their share. A small gift had turned me into the neighborhood Midas! Their disappointment was acute, but brief; mine long-lasting. An important 6 lesson, not easily forgotten. But in the garden plot one also finds students in pursuit of professional education. They come from the Museum School of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Medical and Nursing Schools of Jefferson, Hahnemann, Philadelphia General, St. Luke's and Pennsylvania Hospitals, some business and preparatory schools, even, (at 10th and Lombard), the Henry George School of Economics! Between the bars, the filthy diners, the slum housing, tenements and crumbling firetraps, like the gold teeth in a mouth of rotting cavities, one finds a few medical student residences and fraternities. At the time these observations were collated, the Gladstone Hotel on 11th Street between Pine and Spruce, (a municipal disgrace since demolished), still stood at the mouth of crypto-suburban Clinton Street, two prim blocks garlanded with blossoming trees, blessed with asphalt unlittered, neat rows of empty trash cans, fresh painted brightly shining doors, shutters and casements, fine cars and other evidences of respectable society, a hygienic oasis all too quickly amputated against the seeping ivy and lichen-covered brick walls surrounding the well trimmed hedges and lawns of Rush and Franklin's Pennsylvania Hospital. 7 Mike Steiner, curator of urban blight, owned and managed several buildings in the neighborhood. The shingle indicating his business office hung perpendicular to the door of the house adjacent to my residence on the north side of Spruce between 11th and 12th. I lived there through the winter of 1961, from October to March. It was really one building with two doorways, connecting on the ground floor. He did not look like a slumlord. Unlike the melodrama caricatures of a bygone age, the humped misers and shriveled hags, Steiner belonged to a new breed of aggressive young businessmen out for quick profits. The exemplum of the 20th century man, shallow rather than villainous. His manner was brisk, as if he tolerated no nonsense; but the set smile never vanished. The calculated neglect that was virtually a trademark of his properties was nowhere in evidence on his sleek, cautiously dressed and groomed person. He treated me with deference because of my education, meaning that he actually listened to my complaints. Sometimes he did something about them. It was a day in mid-December. Choking I arose at dawn. My moderately large room was thickly invested with fumes and gases from an undamped flue, the source being the coal - burning byproducts from furnaces in the basement. It was not the first, only the most severe, of 8 such attacks. I went to throw open the window at the far corner of the room. Within minutes the temperature had dropped below freezing. After some consideration, I dismissed the expedient of lighting all the burners on the gas range; neither a fire nor an explosion were entirely ruled out. Thereupon I closed the window and went back to sleep. Within minutes I was off the bed, scrambling for my clothing, vomiting from the stink. I hurried out of the house down the street, to the Spruce restaurant two blocks away. Nick let me wash up in his apartment. Talking over breakfast with art students from the Museum School, I hung out at the Spruce until 8 A.M. Before returning to my room I stopped by Steiner’s office. "Hello, Mr. Lisker; is everything all right?" Steiner's secretary might perhaps have been better designated his Secretary of State. "No. Don't you know about the coal fumes? I almost died in there." "We're aware of the problem, Mr. Lisker. The janitor forgot to close the flue." "What's being done about it? How soon can I return to my room?" Her brows contracted: a signal to me that I should understand that she recognized that this was no joking matter: 9 "We're working on it, Mr. Lisker." I went up, discovered the room habitable, and organized my day. Steiner's buildings reeked with squalor, filth, neglect and some more tenebrous attribute that might best be labeled contempt. The mounds of trash filling up the vestibules extended into dark corridors illuminated, if at all, by weak bulbs standing in the wall-sockets. No sunlight penetrated. The rooms themselves were bright enough owing to their large windows from the previous century, when this neighborhood reverberated with bourgeois elegance. Stained, greasy wallpaper peeled from the walls, paint chips covering the floors. Where the plaster had fallen down or been punched through, wooden slats and planks lay exposed. Everything exuded a lamentable aroma of mold, the environment, (that did not lack indigenous charm), retaining in fact only one good feature: that one didn't have to feel responsible for it, that without regrets one could gladly leave on a moment's notice. Mr. Hoffman lived in the room adjacent to mine on the second floor.