Nirvana on Ninth Street
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Nirvana on Ninth Street
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609404086 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wings Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 112 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Nirvana on Ninth Street
By Susan Sherman, Colleen McKay
Wings Press
Copyright © 2014 Susan ShermanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60940-410-9
CHAPTER 1
NINTH STREET & AVENUE B
Rachel lived in a small, rectangular apartment with eight windows that occupied the entire top floor of a three-story building located in the back of a tenement on East Ninth Street in Manhattan. Two of her windows fronted a concrete courtyard; two, a fenced-in backyard filled with garbage of every description. Two side windows faced an alley, while the remaining windows came within three feet of the building next door. Rachel lived there with a calico cat named Jezebel who was the talk of the neighborhood for her prowess in catching rats twice her size.
For months now, each time she passed in front of the antique mirror framed by gilt angels that graced the most prominent location in her living room, she would pause and look at herself, measuring her present stocky five-foot-five frame with its wisps of graying hair against the tall slender woman with the surfeit of gleaming chestnut locks who had first moved into Ninth Street — was it almost fifty years ago? She watched the years shadow her face with a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach, with a fear that belied her calmness, the cool exterior with which other people saw her approach her everyday affairs.
Buddhists believe Nirvana unachievable until one is able to find peace in the present moment, to cease longing to be somewhere else, someone else. For Rachel, that was impossible. Most often she wished desperately to be anywhere but where she was, burdened as she always seemed by the smallest details of daily life: what vegetables to eat for dinner, what to wear or wash or discard, the mail that had to be answered, the accumulation of years that waited to be sorted, the fear of throwing away the one essential document on which everything would depend at some unknown date in the near or distant future.
Rachel was a cipher, on the one hand simple, on the other too difficult for even her to fathom. One year she strayed and became lost to herself. She remembered as a child being pulled under by the tide and finally deposited, frightened and gasping for air, on a windless beach, bleeding from a dozen cuts caused by the sharp protrusions of stone the relentless waves had washed her across. Even so she loved the sea, loved its sound, was glad when night came, and she could hear it without distraction. The patience of it, moving endlessly across sand, driven by wind and tide and moon. Never wavering, never stopping, never the same. The endless ebb and flow of difference.
If she had not chosen, or been chosen — who knows which? — to drift through the air, to cleanse the heavens, the sea would have been her home. Not the surface, but the depth of it. Down where it was dark and green. She could never understand why fish had such a multitude of color in a place where there was no light. She wondered how they must feel when caught, if the last thing they recognize, as they lie gasping for the water that is their air, is the blazing light of the sun. She wondered if that was why there were so many tales of a blazing white light signaling the approach of death. Was it merely the remnants of an archaic memory, when we too lived beneath the waves, never seeing the light until, with our last breath, we floated finally lifeless on the surface of the water? A dream of heaven that ties us to our past?
Every morning at exactly 8:35, Rachel fed Jezebel, watered her plants and fixed herself a cup of blackberry-flavored tea and one piece of crisply toasted bread. Rachel believed in schedules. How else could she accomplish all she had to do? By 9:10, as soon as she had finished all her morning chores, she would stand by the front window of her house, the one that faced the concrete courtyard, and checking first to see that the sun was in the correct position, would counsel the clouds to make sure that no two were alike. In her universe, imitation was taboo.
Rachel had always wanted to be a character in a novel, preferably a period piece from the Thirties or Forties, so when her movie was made, the score would be the music she loved, the old songs, melodic, romantic, with just a trace of sadness. People would walk out of the theater humming her music, and thereafter, every time they heard it, would remember her. Rachel wanted someone to write dialogue for her, so she would always say something clever, would always know what to say, would never have to stop and ruminate, sometimes a whole day, only to find it too late to confront the person who was no longer there. She wanted to live a plot that was simple, where choices would be made for her and would always be the right choice, insuring that even if the ending were tragic, she would emerge a heroine, beautiful in courage and determination.
But she knew she was, finally, only an aging woman with dreams that sometimes carried her beyond the ordinary. She was not a character in a novel, romantic or otherwise. She was not the heroine of a movie, happy or tragic.
The night before she turned seventy, Rachel dreamt Ninth Street in the old days: PS 37 at the corner, a massive brick structure with two sides that jutted out like a grotesque inverted smile, a u-shape facing the street, waiting to devour the children crowding its hungry path; the grocery store simply named Grocery Store squeezed between two apartment buildings in the middle of the block that dispensed sausage, pierogi, and cigarettes. It was a community store owned by a neighborhood couple, Helen and her husband George, and staffed by Rachel's Ukrainian neighbors Passion and her sister Peace, who worked there until she was frightened by the riots of '68 and went west to work for Sadie Goldstein, the owner of the deli on Second Avenue, taking over Sadie's position when she finally retired.
Rachel dreamt she looked in the antique mirror framed by gilt angels and saw herself young again, careless of hair, the necessity of make-up and excuses. She dreamt that Jennifer was back in her old apartment, one wall covered with sketches her downstairs neighbor Alison had drawn one night when she was high on LSD, drawings whose grotesque figures were wrapped in greens and purples and blues, like Rachel's ocean.
She dreamt that she was lying next to Jennifer, that she was fixing Norma her favorite pasta with pesto sauce and garlic bread, that she was greeting Alison's lover Solomon (one of the many who passed through Alison's welcoming threshold) on his way to the garage on Third Street and Avenue C to scavenge for pieces of iron and tin to use in the construction of his intricate sculptures. Rachel dreamt she was young and her life was before her, that the shadows that haunted her apartment, shading it from light and warmth, once more had flesh and blood. She dreamt she had at long last found the intimacy she so desperately craved.
Rachel missed Norma. She missed Sadie and Jennifer and Solomon and Paul and Alberto. She even missed crotchety old Mrs. Mitchell who had made life on Ninth Street impossible for Jill and her canary Peter only to find her existence empty without them. Rachel missed Margaret Hansen who had died of a stroke with all of their histories laid out before her in strange and intricate configurations. She missed her old friends and lovers and everything she had lost. She missed the future she felt she had betrayed.
She felt if she could recall her friends, even people she had disliked and dismissed when they had been beside her, their lives might become part of hers. Rachel knew that she no less than Sadie, the inveterate neighborhood confidant, lived through other people's stories. Or maybe she had all along made her story theirs.
CHAPTER 2SOLOMON
Solomon lived on the other side of the tracks. Or more precisely, he lived east of Avenue C which was, in some circles, considered the same thing. His was a neighborhood that one ventured into cautiously, the stated line of demarcation being Tompkins Square Park, even though some of the blocks — like the one Rachel lived on — were still considered relatively safe.
Solomon's parents had moved to the Lower East Side from South Carolina when he was still a small child, sacrificing the warm days and nights and known limitations of the segregated rural South of the Fifties for the freedom and frigid winters of New York City streets. After graduating from high school, Solomon rented an apartment only two blocks from them and then, much to their dismay, announced his intention to become a sculptor.
Solomon loved the smell of the molten steel he twisted into forms and shapes that resembled the chaotic ramblings of his imagination. The images he thought in, even in his dreams, although vaguely figurative, were far from realistic. They followed the lines and patterns of the barren twigs and dusty roads of his youth, the bantering of his mother, the harsh echo of his father's footsteps, the fear that had driven his family northward, that had finally filled him so full that it catapulted him outside his self-imposed boundaries into the cafes and bars that ringed the park, into the words and gestures of the painters and poets and students and musicians that frequented their corridors. It was from them Solomon learned first to draw and then to paint.
But that wasn't enough for him. He still felt stifled by memories, the small dank apartment he had grown up in, the endless arguments, his own confusion. So he began to collect scrap metal, rummaging through garbage cans, empty lots, gas station discards, the impromptu dumps that dotted the neighborhood. At first he made his new creations with his bare hands, and then one summer evening a sympathetic mechanic loaned him an acetylene torch, and Solomon knew he had at last found the materials and method to express the rage and despair he had held so long inside him.
He filled his sculptures with it, coated the blackened surfaces of the scarred skin of his work with it, as if he were pulling off pieces of himself, covering the jagged frames of his "people" with his own dark flesh, with his marrow, his blood.
Because that's what his sculptures were to him, even though no one else could see it — people. His mother and father; his two brothers; Beatrice, the sister who had died in childbirth; the boys he had fought with before he grew too large for them to bully; the Puerto Rican boy he had almost killed one night in a drunken brawl over a girl neither of them really wanted; the adults, black and white alike, who still intimidated him with their doubts and recriminations — all these shaped themselves at the end of his torch as he created and re-created them in an endless processional.
His sculptures were small, no more than a foot in height, sized to fit the dimensions of his kitchen studio. Sometimes he splattered their bodies with brilliant color, sometimes they were polished to a gleaming silver and chrome, but more often he left them bare, gray and blackened, naked and vulnerable before the intensity of his flame.
Solomon's father, almost six feet tall, slender of build, could hardly be described as a little man, but his son towered above him, tall and massive of bone by the time he was sixteen. His father had nicknamed him Solomon, joking that what he lacked in wit, he made up in size. His size both got him into and out of trouble. Enemies were reluctant to attack him, passers-by hesitant to confront him. Consequently, Solomon labored under a dangerous delusion — he believed he led a charmed life.
CJ was Solomon's best and only real friend. In many ways, CJ was the exact opposite of Solomon. He was short, slight of build, but nonetheless quite strong. He counted success in dollars and cents. Unlike Solomon's parents, CJ's mother and father had both been born in Harlem. His father ran a small tobacco store, and CJ had grown up on a well-tended middle class block on 138th Street. He admired his father and dreamed of one day having a business of his own.
"Solomon," he would say, "with all your talent what do you really have you can bank on? Bank on, man, that's the ticket in this world. Money equals power, man. Money equals power."
He would end his lectures with a gruff laugh, giving Solomon the high sign and a playful push.
No matter what CJ said to him, Solomon never got mad. In fact, CJ had never seen Solomon get really mad at anyone. Solomon could stand for hours at the northeast corner entrance to Tompkins Square Park waving his arms, railing about the state of the nation, the CIA conspiracy, the racist neighborhood police, drug dealers, the FBI, filthy streets, crummy schools, pollution — brandishing the morning paper like a defiant flag. But CJ had never seen him actually yell at anyone. His eyes were always turned to heaven, as if it were God he was lecturing; as if God, as far as Solomon was concerned, was a criminal not even the Republican National Committee could match.
CJ and Solomon did share some things, otherwise they could not have been such good friends. They shared a love of making things with their hands, of feeling cold, hard materials grow into life. CJ had a passion for wood; he loved to build things. But his creations, unlike those of Solomon, were practical — chairs, tables, bookshelves, windowsills, kitchen cabinets. He could take pieces of wood that had been discarded as useless and find purpose and meaning behind their splintered shells. He dreamed one day of having his own construction company, of expanding his talents to rebuilding rooms, apartments, even houses. Of taking what was spoiled and making something new and useful of it.
CJ and Solomon also shared the same girlfriend. Her name was Alison. Alison was one of Rachel's closest neighbors. She occupied the basement and first floor of their little back-house building. Alison was a painter. Every morning Rachel watched Alison usher her two girls — aged five and seven — out the front door of their adjoined stairway, after which Alison sometimes waved Rachel down to her apartment to share a cup of coffee and the morning's gossip. Often they would go down one more flight of stairs to the basement to view Alison's new work.
Alison had left her husband the year before due to irreconcilable differences — he wanted her to assume the life of a respectable Long Island matron. She had a different idea of what she wanted her life to be like, and it didn't include suburban PTA meetings. As much as Solomon wanted to be a sculptor, she wanted to be a painter, so she had moved to Manhattan with her children and their two cats, Citrus and Cyrus — one was orange, the other male.
Unlike Solomon, whose motivation for painting was rage, Alison's was humor. She felt all her life she had wanted, but had never been allowed, to laugh. She felt her life had been punctuated by punch lines that fell flat, not because they weren't funny, but because their audience had no sense of humor. And so she went in search of the perfect joke and an audience that could appreciate it.
Her paintings were large, populated by balloon-like figures that seemed to float in space. Her colors were bright — she almost always stuck to primary tones. As an artist, her paintings were a direct contrast to the sharp, jagged edges of Solomon's imagination. But where his rage formed the skin of his sculptures, leaving him as a person childlike and benign, her paintings left her a person devoid of humor. It was as if the two of them drained their souls into their work, leaving them, as people, reverse images of their creations.
CJ and Solomon had met one day by accident at Alison's apartment and, instead of becoming bitter rivals, had become close friends. Neither's relationship with Alison was particularly deep, a level of emotion she reciprocated. They enjoyed her company, and she enjoyed theirs. CJ was handy with tools and broken things. Solomon amused her and, more important, her two small children. He would sit with them for hours, telling them stories, playing nonsense games with small metal toys he made for them.
Sometimes Alison questioned if it was her he came to see, or whether her company gave him a chance to be with people he could really relate to — small people, like the small figures with which he decorated his life. Oddly enough, he seemed happier when CJ was there, and she began to wonder whether she and CJ represented to him the parents, or at least the older brother and sister, he needed to fill his life. People who accepted him, unlike his own parents, unlike his own brothers, so close in distance, yet so far from being able to give him the understanding he craved.
Solomon had an aversion to drugs. It was built both on his own natural disposition — he had tried marijuana once or twice and had found it harsh and abrasive, his world already having enough sharp edges — and on a subconscious longing for CJ's approval.
For CJ, drugs belonged to the world of his adolescence, an environment without discipline, solidity. He craved stability in much the same way others crave excitement.
For Alison, drugs were the staff of life. She thrived on amphetamine, the rush it gave her, the energy it generated. For her, marijuana cleared the haze that grayed her world. Alison did not consider herself an addict. She was, rather, a connoisseur, taking her pleasure at will, not under any compulsion other than that of occasional triumph, and delight.
That is until someone gave her LSD.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Nirvana on Ninth Street by Susan Sherman, Colleen McKay. Copyright © 2014 Susan Sherman. Excerpted by permission of Wings Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Prologue,Ninth Street & Avenue B,
Solomon,
Caroline,
A Little Night Music,
Rachel Goes Shopping,
Ninth Street Tries to Get a Word in Edgewise,
A Collector, of Sorts,
Mirror, Mirror,
The Secret Hearts of Clocks,
Mr. Groan,
Passion & Peace,
The Magician & The Poet,
The Party,
The End of an Era,
Rachel Says Goodbye,
An Afterword by Rona L. Holub,
Acknowledgements,
Biographical Notes,