CHAPTER ONE: Floating Weightlessly Above A Jazz Club

Throughout the entirety of the writing of this I have struggled with

how to begin. There's the once upon a time of fables, the starting

from the ending and working your way back to the beginning, the

how-I-got-here beginning as well as the piecemeal,

drop-you-in-the-middle-of-nowhere beginning that forces you to start

reading before you are even aware of what is going on and who is

talking.

This doesn't exhaust the possibility of beginnings of course but

simply samples the possibilities that have exhausted me in trying to

figure out where to start.

The way I look at it, you don't meet friends or even strangers from

the beginning but you meet them right in the middle of nothing

usually, somewhere in your life and theirs where the stories

intersect and if there's any kind of spark, any kind of adhesive

substance to that intersection then the stories come later, the

histories are unravelled with time.

Ernesto reminds me the Bible seems to begin from the beginning.

Fair enough but I'm here right now. Three of us, actually.



Two dozen bars or so into "Better Get It

in Your Soul," the band mossy with sweat,

May 1960 at The Half Note, the rain

on the black streets outside

dusted here and there by the pale pollen

of the streetlights.

William Matthews, from "Mingus At the Half Note"

Before you even open the door, you can hear the strains of music

leaking out and once it's opened, a blanket of sound and smoke and

promise shields you from the truths of the world outside, wraps you

in the womb of jazz.

As we descended the short stairway into the main room, the stage was immediately to the left, crammed with musicians like a rush hour

subway. In such close quarters you can smell the respect of one

musician for another. Competition reeks. It's humble but it's a

humble one-upmanship. Sacrifice for the development of initiative.

To the right, a row of booths all flanked with black and white

photos at crooked angles and dust-collected frames; the club's

highlights through the years, spelt out in haunting images as the

past so often is.

The interior smells of years embedded in the walls and the floor,

tobacco smoke, drinks spilled in 1957, the stale feet of Handsome

Eddie who played barefoot here throughout the 60s and whose photos are prominent in every corner, the breaths drawn and expelled through Rico Royal reeds, everywhere, the interminable hours of music, which unexpectedly, if collected throughout the years, would still have numbered less than a lifetime of a single one of the musicians themselves.

There is a tingle of perfume from a trio of women who stare up at

the stage like groupies, wet with excitement, lips parted

expectantly, dressed exuberantly for a big night out, coaxing,

preening, gawking. One of them, a redhead with nearly matching

lipstick, lit a match and held it against her cigarette whilst her

foot tapped to the syncopation.

In seeking out accommodation for the three of us, we spoke in

respectful whispers as though we'd arrived on camels to see the

magical Jesus baby in a crowded little tent. A tenor sax, which had

been giving birth as we approached the entrance, had hushed, its

holder's head bowed as the pianist went into a solo to subtle

applause for the saxophonist.

There was little conversation at other tables and even those

conversations were muted, respectful. The pianist, tall and lean

with age, was the only regular at this once-weekly jam and he was

not unlike a reverend speaking psalms through the keys he touched

with expertise. And jazz, at its most mournful is not unlike a place

of worship.

This outing had been conceived by Ernesto Zambrano, self-promoting pioneer of the modern guitar montage who, within a few weeks of our first meeting held an impromptu exhibition for me in his flat: chilling photographs of mothers holding dead babies, the rotting corpses of Frente Martí Liberación Nacional fighters on the dirt roads of the peasant underbrush, graphic imagery everywhere, life histories he'd constructed from dust and put to music, composing song after song, a Goyaesque concert to the capricious affairs of incessant human cruelty. Quite an introduction.

Now he was sat in front of me, anxiously fiddling with the sugar

packs in the condiment set on the table, waiting for the first beer

as though he were in a hospital waiting room expecting bad news.

Beside Ernesto was Lydia, his girlfriend, a non-cloying but powerful

presence of dark curls hiding all but the chin and the mouth and the

nose, symmetrical until the eyes, housing some spirit indelibly

powerful, shone through like beacons leaning you toward her. The

kind of girlfriend a boyfriend spent a lot of time fending off the

advances of other predators for, the kind of girlfriend everyone

else around the boyfriend was secretly in love with but never spoke

about, men and women. She could be lively, fiery, brutal and

persuasive all at once; dragging others in around her the way the a

whirlwind makes pieces of paper dance on a chilly autumn afternoon.

But more than anything, she was Ernesto's. Yes, Ernesto was talented

and handsome even without her presence but the fact of her presence,

the fact that he and he alone was immune to her, shall we say,

magnetic qualities, the fact that he could maintain at the worst of

times a sort of playful indifference to her made him artificially

seem even more so.

And to maintain his hold of her, the grip of the relationship firm,

not dissimilar to the way a horse is handled by its trainer in a

circus or a groom at a stable, he had the habit of taunting her when

he spoke in Spanish. He was a gentleman to her when he spoke in

English, cognisant of the ears of Americans and their politically

correct hypersensitivities, aware of what others might learn and

judge about him but in that labyrinth of Spanish which hid all the secrets of their relationship, he could be brutally indifferent.

Ours was an easy triangular friendship forged in the vertigo of

intoxication and smoke, laughter and creative tension, hidden

thoughts and secret glances. Playing at feeling.

They had initially arrived in New York by virtue of, and then far out-

stayed, their student visas both, from the same fishing port town in

the northern Spanish province of Asturias, called Llanes, intertwined

by history, love, language and experience, and had both clothed

themselves in the appropriate anonymity escaping both discovery by

the INS and, perhaps by virtue of the transient nature of their

immigration status, even themselves, neither of whom ever seemed

particularly destined to anonymity in the first place so mutually

exclusive were their personalities and characteristics, somewhere in

a Bronx we never bothered spoke much about.

To them the Bronx was a place of habit, of hiding, of housing. For me, a borough I avoided for years and took care to block out both in rare daylight hours and even in semi conscious thoughts in midnight bars with the sound dulled for reasons I might explain in greater depth a little later but for the purposes of describing these two accomplices in front of me without deviating too far from the course of the describing, I will say only that somewhere out there I was certain my mother still existed, somewhere there even though I hadn't seen her in years since she'd disappeared without a clue.

But there, I've deviated already and Ernesto is getting impatient.

As a means of survival, Ernesto is a photographer and guitarist. He

is classical enough with his fingers to find studio work with his

guitar and disturbing enough with the view of his camera that in

Spain, he had already published a pair of books photographing human suffering. Not that I'd ever heard of him before I met him. Coffee table books on human suffering was not a priority of mine before meeting Ernesto and whilst it still isn't, the knowing of Ernesto

has lent more credibility and poignancy that might have otherwise

escaped me had he remained an anonymous soul and traveller to me.

It makes you wonder at all the millions of things people have ever

written or created in the history of humanity, books, scraps of

paper with recipes, diaries of profoundly disturbing secrets,

unpublished chronicles of misery and delights, photographs taken and

lost in moves or in estate sales, poems that have never been read by

a single other person in history and have long since disappeared

like the papyrus they were written on, brittle and then dust.

For Ernesto, such endeavours were merely part of daily life, a

shrug in the face of complexity. He was talented and he was talented

in that nonchalant way that only artists and athletes can perfect

without appearing to give even the minimal effort in making it

happen, despite all the hours and years of practice hidden behind

the façade.

In her role, which Ernesto would say in Spanish to her, sotto voce,

as the human footnote to the life of Ernesto, Lydia appeared content

to revel in her dewy infatuation, her own talents like a child that

doesn't cry and attracts little attention.

She still struggled with shaping the English language like bashing

the dents out of a Mercury's body despite her best efforts. In a

sort of fitting rendition of the competitive struggle she endured in

their relationship, Ernesto, predictably, spoke a fluid, guttural

English and had mastered American idiomatic nuances with a flourish.

Whatever she endeavoured, he could outperform, wherever she went

he had been before, whatever words she spoke, he had already heard.

Ernesto was a competitive man and Lydia, perhaps inexplicably, was

content to be in his shadow. Perhaps she thought he was greater than

her, perhaps she loved and admired him, perhaps because her own

insecurities prevented her submitting a wilful personality of her

own, a proper competition to face Ernesto with, or perhaps just fear

of losing. You don't know these things about people when you know

them solely in a social drinking way. You can only guess, or make

assumptions. And whilst some of their personality will rise up like

a dead body in a water other elements of it will remain deep and

distant, unspoken, unknown, a human hieroglyphic which can be

interpreted only by the partner.

There was nothing to dislike about Lydia, she merely dulled in

comparison given how little she was willing to compete against him.

Ernesto often speculated aloud that she should have been with a much more usual man, a man she could outshine by merely remaining in repose. But it was up to the relationship gods that she should be

saddled with an overbearing bundle of inexhaustible achievement like

Ernesto as a lover.

They came as a matching set, his and hers illegal aliens,

multi-talented, infinite wells of surprising phrases, compelling

angles of observation and despite the distances they had travelled

carrying personalities stunted by a foreign language, they were

appealing to me from the first meeting, as much for the intrigue as

their capacity for drinking.

Our first meeting ever had been the Oblong Club. Albert and I and a guitar player we had hooked up with for the occasion named Ernie Lee stood on stage, between numbers, standing in postures that bled indifference and fatigue when I smelled the unmistakable black odour of Ducados wafting through the air. Through the crowd, I searched tables before spotting Ernesto sitting back calmly, exhaling Ducado smoke like a factory worker on mid morning break. I coughed into the microphone and requested the culprit come forward and donate a Ducado.

Ernesto obliged and as we chatted at the foot of the stage, Albert

and Ernie Lee pretended to tune up, act busy. And with the crowd,

shuffling and restlessly murmuring, it came to light that he was a

guitar player himself and although he wasn't so very well versed in

the blues, or really much in jazz either, well, he was sure he could

fake it if we wouldn't mind his joining us on stage for a song.

Of course it would not surprise me any longer, but then, I didn't

know this guy but for his Ducados and it was a shocking surprise

when he borrowed Ernie Lee's guitar, fumbled quickly with the

strings and then burst into a sort of flamenco version of Cry Me A

River, which bowled the crowd over and pretty much ruined any

semblance of being coherent musicians I and Albert and Ernie Lee had the rest of the night.

I didn't resent it of course. We knew we weren't very competent

musicians. Maybe we even took pride in it. But from that moment on,

Ernesto and Lydia were with us like mascots to our mediocrity.

In any case, here I was, months or perhaps years, it is sometimes

difficult to tell, back from the grand journey, one man's dust

scattered in the East River, another decomposing and the two

remaining friends sat here as we all pretended I hadn't been moping for weeks, that they had to nearly physically drag me out and bring me here, this once-favourite haunt of ours.

Adding to the tension was the revelation that they'd invited a date

for me to this meeting, a date who was running late already and who,

even if she did show, was not likely to be impressed with the speed

of my beer consumption, the ragged edginess of my discomposure and the rapidity of my frequent descents into quietude and drunken

reflection.

She arrived in a rush, this Tamara, although despite the rush, the

outward presumption of regality of her entry was a dead give away to

me, straight away that Ernesto and Lydia had been overly optimistic

about our pairing, their matchmaking. I could sense like an animal

sensed fear that this meeting was going to be doomed and perhaps it

was fear and it was Tamara, not myself who sensed the fear and knew

at once we were not destined to be despite the matchmaking and we

would all simply have to hunker down for a socially acceptable

period of time before one of us made our excuses to leave.

I wasn't sure if I could like her at all no matter how much Ernesto

and Lydia genuinely wanted or pretended to want to believe that I

would like her at all but we all seated ourselves and listened to

the music as it gradually poured on to us like a spotlight, grateful

for the temporary distraction.

There had been others my two matchmakers had involved in the past,

and I, a somewhat willing albeit pessimistic participant, had

suffered them freely these matchmakees, perhaps eager for

affirmation once the minimal interest had flickered and faded as

quickly as it originally appeared.

Fortunately we had the music to transfix us for awhile after cursory

introductions allowed us all to seat ourselves at the same table

under the semblance of knowing one another before allowing the music to distract us.

I'd been briefed on her for days. Tamara would come along like an

unannounced song whose melody was familiar, rebounding from a bout of post-infatuation traumas emitting milongas which were as they say, pleasing to my ear. Mutual pain attracts and the assumption was we might get along well primarily because of our mutual yet secret pact never to bother spreading the miseries of our past relationships like a runny egg yolk ruining a perfectly good piece of dry rye toast.

The pianist's solo sutured seamlessly with a trumpet player who'd

suddenly stood from a chair on the stage having previously sat

motionless, head bowed, a mannequin springing to life, a flower's

petals opening.

Our rapture was broken by the waitress' long awaited arrival with

beers and even though we seemed entranced by the trumpeter, once the beer had made its appearance, gradually the humble sense of our

silence began to give way, the music a background rather than the

speck of sound the spotlight sprayed upon.

We were two couples, minutes into a binge without specific

purpose, two couples feeling their way through each other, trepid

syncopation as we fumbled through the chords of conversation

attempting to find one mutual note.

The talent was too sobering and the intoxication too fleeting.

None of us felt any particular compulsion to speak despite the auspices of this blind date sort-of gathering. We nestled, the four of us, at this table, clarifying our silences with taciturn sipping, as the musicians lifted us before gently bringing us back down.

Later there was a break. Even though the musicians from shadows were gradually replacing each other, taking turns to be spell-binding, the tall and lean pianist stood his full height at the end of one song, raised his arms above his head slowly, turned his head left and right. He slurped at his drink then mumbled a vague banter about taking a break, everyone taking a break.

And into this new silence came the suddenly oppressive need to address the issue before me, the blind date before me, Tamara who now, equally cogniscent, as were we all by this point, of the begging need for small talk, began a few tentative forays.

Lydia and Ernesto tell me you are also a musician, she urges. I am in the midst of rolling a cigarette but nod wordlessly until the roll-up is done and lit and I can speak between exhalations of smoke as though this action somehow lent me an unspoken credibility.

Yes. Not very well, of course. Not like Ernesto, for example. Not like any of the musicians assembled here for this jam. But yes, I play. Saxophone. Just back from a somewhat ramshackle tour of a few cities in Europe. Not sanctioned or official, mind you. You might even consider it a sort of glorified busking but with indoor venues. Or you might consider it a bunch of shit me and a friend or maybe two friends cobbled together on the run in the spare moments before the drinking set in. In any event, wow, there I’ve gone and not even taken a breath, in answer to your question again, yes, I am a musician. Of sorts.

This sort of long-winded reply was not going to help me at all. I saw out of the corner of my eye that Lydia and Ernesto had exchanged nervous glances while Tamara bravely feigned interest. Or perhaps it wasn’t feigned. Perhaps, at least for the first 30 seconds of explanation, it was interest but an interest which was fully capable of retracting, waning, shutting down and closing shop.

Naturally I allowed myself a silent self-castigation. Nothing was easy any more. Simple conversation with strangers.

But Tamara was up for the task, temporarily anyway.

Wow, she allowed herself to exclaim delicately balancing real interest with phoney over-exuberance. She attempted to move her head away from the stream of my cigarette smoke. Europe. I love Europe. Where were you then?

Holland and the Czech Republic, mainly. But a lot of other ridiculous and occasionally sublime places in between as well. Far too many places I think sometimes now in hindsight. But, there you go. I shrugged.

And now she was allowing herself, having completed her trepid toe-in-the-water line of questioning, to bring out both barrels of her powerful, powerful ability to talk. Ironically, I found myself amazed that I’d ever worried about my own verbosity, which now, in comparison, seemed like a miniscule little single chirp in the wake of her verbal onslaught.

It was a losing bet, I knew this. But I’ve mastered this little technique over time. You don’t have to listen to anyone, not the words anyway. Just the intonations which instinctively, you can pick out from the regular rambling sufficiently to discern where one juncture of the sentence or breathless run on required comment or acknowledgement. I see. Or uh huh. Or wow. Really? These kinds of fillers.

Worse still, the free time now allotted to me by virtue of Tamara’s extrapolative discourse on Europe and European culture and European anything, time for my mind to wander.

And wander it did.

It was as though no one was with me any more. As though I’d left my body and was floating not above this table observing me pretending to listen to Tamara or even floating above the city the bar was situated in. Just floating. Far and away, as I was prone to do lately. Away from the present. Hovering yet again over the past…

CHAPTER TWO: A Journal of Sustainability Gradually Sheds Its Pages

“I was raised with the strong of heart
But if you touch me wrong I fall apart
I found a woman who's soft but she's also hard
While I slept she nailed down my heart.”

-Morphine, All Your Way, from Yes, Rykodisc, 1995

I'd been underachieving for years.

There'd been a period of unemployment, a spotty record of warehouse jobs at minimum wage and night after night alternating between intoxication and hangovers.

Pervaded by a listlessness and lack of direction, punctuated by

lonely nights listening to jazz or blues in dark rooms lit only by

candles, chain-smoking, thinking about as little as possible until

the veil of drunk slowly eased over the eyes, through the pores,

numbing and transcendent yet all the while as though killing time

with the acupuncture of oblivion, bottle by bottle.

And perhaps just as inexplicably, what had seemed acceptable for the

better part of winter suddenly tasted like the bile of a bad meal

eaten too quickly.

I had to find something else, some other method of living, some

escape from the futureless present into a more tangible reality. I

needed a career.

Yet the two primary contributing factors to my DNA, namely two people whose antics I will detail more forensically later, consisted of two polar opposites, both of whom eventually affected my lack of upward mobility, motivation and general, all-around championship apathy.

Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s time to play that age-old favourite of finger pointing and responsibility shirking called “Blame The Parents”:

Contestant One, My father, Zbiegniew, being a second generation Pole growing up in the Lower East Side and Contestant Two, my mother, Miranda, a first generation Puerto Rican living in Spanish Harlem, were not, at the time of the onset of their little conspiracy to create then ruin my life, moving in intersecting circles, either socially or culturally.

Compounding the improbability of their meeting, my father had two

great passions which dominated his life and shut out most else: he

had been an electrician's apprentice by the age of 14, dropping out

of school to help his mother make ends meet (my grandfather had died in a construction accident many years before forcing my grandmother and father into early destitution.) and gradually building on his experience to start his own small company, beginning with the wiring and rewiring of his own building to that of several buildings owned by the same landlord all over the city once he had proven himself. One of the buildings happened to be the one on the Upper East Side in Spanish Harlem, where my mother lived.

My father's other passion was Dixieland Jazz. Whenever he wasn't

working he was at home listening to recordings by trumpet player

Henryk Majewski, pianists Mieczyslaw Mazur, Wojciech Kaminski and of course, Jan Boba. He bought his first trumpet when he was 12 and had played both trumpet and piano ever since, sometimes for church functions, sometimes for social gatherings, sometimes for street fairs but with virtually every spare moment he had away from working his lips were puckered, or his fingers were exercising the keyboard.

The day my father met my mother was one summer afternoon when he happened to working on a flat in my mother's apartment building and overheard a bomba recording emanating from one of the adjacent flats. So intrigued by the drum ensembles, the rum barrels, maraca and the singer and chorus calls responding alternatively to one another that he took the brazen step of actually knocking on the door to ask what it was.

As it turned out, it was my mother who answered, just 16 at the

time, who knew little about the specifics or the history that my

father wanted to know about, but loved to dance to it and because

she was able to bridge the language barrier between her mother's

historical narrative and my father's inability to speak Spanish, she

acted both as an interpreter and demonstrator of some of the dance

moves.

Not to mention that Zbiegniew was astounded from the moment my

mother opened the door.

Some days, many years later, my father would catch me off guard in the middle of a Saturday afternoon whilst he'd been seemingly, though not yet literally drown in his own thoughts propelled by whatever symphony or jazz combo he was absorbed in whilst drinking one bottle of beer after another, contemplating perhaps one of my mother‘s frequent, unexplained disappearances, he would suddenly stand up, pull the lone, tattered and barely populated photo album out of the closet and sit next to me in beery recollection, one photograph after another like precious and out of print baseball cards, collectors editions, black and white, sometimes colour Polaroid photos of Miranda, my mother, the 16 year old girl who'd invaded my father's up-to-then unblemished heart.

Look at how beautiful she was Witold, he would mutter. Imagine what

it was like to walk along 1st Avenue with her on my arm, by Christ,

the stares we'd get from passers-by made me imagine I was walking

with a movie star. You just didn't see beauty like that in this

neighbourhood. Not back then. It was all blonde and blue,

child-bearing hips and pinched immigrant faces. Miranda was like a

matinee of fireworks shooting off stars in everyone's eyes.

I often wonder about that afternoon, somewhere in some anonymously massive apartment complex overlooking the East River on a warm June afternoon, my father transfixed by a new sound he'd never come across before and my mother, dancer and translator of music from her native island. What an odd sight it might have made; the electrician and the beauty school student, weaving a new history in the course of an afternoon delicately balanced on a common interest in music.

Of course, it didn't end there. There wasn't anywhere in his own

neighbourhood where he could listen to such music live and he

certainly wasn't socially capable of making the leap to weekend

visits to Spanish Harlem on his own to watch live bomba dancing and

singing and so eventually, it was sorted out that he would join

Miranda, her family and friends one afternoon for a delicately

monitored social visit which would include an evening of local food,

music and dance.

And perhaps it's not such an amazing surprise that from those

twice-monthly visits, my father attempted boleros, started listening

to music like the Rafael Munoz and might have forgotten all about

his precious Dixieland Jazz musicians were it not for my abuela's

interest when he casually mentioned one day that he too played

musical instruments quite passionately.

This eventually led to an excursion of the Melendez family down to a late August Sunday afternoon of stifling Dixieland Jazz at the Ukrainian Street Fair where they formally met the Kazmirsky family (Zbiegniew and babcia) over kielbasas, pierogies, blintzes, bacalaitos, carne guisada and empanadillas washed down with cold Polish beer and rounds of Puerto Rican rum in a cultural summit of unprecedented proportion for ours or their neighbourhood.

Zbiegniew was swollen with some sort of love sick hangover for

months and this festival was the culmination of it all. Meeting by

meeting Miranda and he had been exchanging secret glances, passing

notes in mutually yet characteristically different broken English,

using music and family gatherings as excuses to sneak away when

nobody was looking.

And before anyone was the wiser, they were already hammering out the fine print of their relationship across the front seat of Zbiegniew's pick up, pushing away the tools, lying down on estimate sheets and newspapers well after the light had escaped from the

afternoon and windows had steamed up enough, the rum was gone,

nothing but crumbs left and both families were approving of what was

impossible to disprove: Miranda and Zbiegniew were an item.

Sure, it was an unusual cultural stew, taking up with a white boy,

taking up with the Puerto Rican teenager, a West Side Story without the gangs and knives, the choreographed dancing and well-rehearsed singing.

Both families were compelled to agree: there was something

appealing and endearing about them – memories of their own past

passions sprang up in front of them and as though they were looking

at the children of others and remembering their own, the

cross-cultural romance of Zbiegniew and Miranda was compelling

enough for both families.

As things progress in natural causes, eventually, I became the next

bit of miraculous news to hit the two families.

It was a bit stressful of course, given that Miranda and Zbiegniew were not married, but once that sticky situation was resolved with a ceremony that covered two different Catholic churches, one on East 7th Street near Tompkins Square park and the other near East 91st Street, the only unresolved problem was whether I would grow up in Spanish Harlem or in the East Village – as it turned out, a bit of both, until the timely death of old lady Sadowicz in a building just around the corner from my grandmother's flat provided an opening which Miranda and Zbiegniew seized without much hesitation once it was agreed there would be plenty of subway and bus rides back and forth between the two neighbourhoods.

*****

How does this explain my own shiftlessness and dead end career

choices? Well, as in many romances which begin with focused passion, inexperience and closed quarters, reality gradually set in, almost imperceptibly; nearly translucent cobwebs formulating in the corners of each's heart, petty arguments over money and of course, the constant nip and tug and pull of two distinct cultures grinding against each other like sand in the gears.

My mother's career as a beautician was in essence, ended upon

impregnation. My father was earning a decent living as an

electrician, we were in a rent-controlled flat and there was little

need for my mother to work.

And so their intentionally interwoven lives might have strangled

them.

Most weeks went on the same; my father off for work near dawn, my

mother trying desperately to find a means of idling away the hours –

housework in a small flat was no day-long episode and by noon, the

cleaning and shopping had been done, the boredom set in.

Some afternoons if the weather was bright, she'd drag me out to

Tompkins Square Park, mingling with the homeless and the junkies

just for a sniff of a few trees, a glance at the skies by staring

straight upwards. In my country, she liked to say, the sky is

everywhere. You don't have to break your neck to find it. Here we

live like rats in holes, staring everywhere around you Witold, look,

apartments, windows, brick and concrete. How can we live so trapped

like this?

Other afternoons, she'd pack us up on the subway or the uptown bus

to the barrio and I would spend the afternoon lost in a word of

foreign sounds and smells. It was incredible that we could travel

such a short distance to find ourselves in another world. What was

this world? It must have been similar to what it was like looking

out at East Berlin from West Berlin in the 70s. My mother made that

commute as often as possible, from the black and white and drab to a

vibrating binge of colours, animation where stoicism had only hours

before, prevailed. My sky is here, she said, looking out over the

East River. It isn't pretty, but at least it's alive.

My mother often reminded me, in her occasionally bitter, nostalgic ways, of a fruit ripped from the familiarity of its tree, gathered by migrant worker on a bleak hourly wage barely above starvation level, placed into a box with other fruit the hungry labourer couldn’t eat, and transported to the supermarket where it was then selected by someone who had a better paying job, and later, or perhaps right there on the spot, greedily consumed, juice dribbling down the chin.

Despite the consumption of her outer skin her seeds yearned to return to that same tree and begin the process all over again.

This was how we wiled away the hours of my childhood. Long walks

seeking clear views of the skies, subways and buses, leaving one

world for the next and then returning.

Later, we'd retire home to prepare dinner and begin the vigil of

waiting for my father. Depending on how business went that day he

might be home by 6 or 7, weary, but emotionally bouncy at the

thought of what he'd accomplished that day.

Other times, the harder days, the days with disagreements with customers or, more inevitably, other contractors and labourers, he'd stop somewhere on the way back to wind down with a beer or two in one of several neighbourhood Polish or Ukrainian watering holes. Some nights, after particularly gruelling days, the socialising took a more serious form and the drinking was more concerted and meaningful with oblivion being the goal, shots of vodka with mugs of cold beer chasers being the mode of transportation.

Those nights my mother and I would wait around for hours and then

gradually, she would acquiesce to allowing me to eat but would hold

off herself on the vague hope that any minute he would come bounding up the stairs and through the front door.

Over the early years however, a pattern emerged, as it often does,

and as time went on, we ate every night at the same time, regardless

of whether or not my father was planning on being around, once a

silent, mental deadline had passed in my mother's mind, her eating a

distraction from the seething disappointment that wallowed in her

like a taxidermist's fluid.

And when my father did eventually make it home, it was no longer

fatigued but angry. Angry with the world, with the contractors, with

the crooked businessmen, with the fact that dinner was no longer

waiting, that neither I nor his wife were there at the doorstep to

great him. Those nights all hell would break loose – screaming,

yelling, threats, dishes shattering, bottles breaking – a world

within the walls of our flat of a slow breakdown of détente, a

renewed vigour for finger pointing and accusations.

And although most nights it didn't reach histrionic proportions; a

few minutes of hushed voices, the slam of a door and that was the

end of it, the pace was gradually set in stone. Some afternoons we

would take the uptown bus and rather than a few hours of cosy chat,

"we" would decide to spend the night with the abuelos. Rather, I

would, and my mother would disappear for hours at a time.

But my father, despite his habits of late nights in bars after

particularly frequent rough afternoons, was still a hard-working man

and regardless of the state he woke up in the following morning he

was always out the door by five or six at the very latest, freshly

showered, ready to take on the world. In some ways he was

machine-like in his ability to shake a hangover off, a

characteristic I would later inherit and come to appreciate but at

such a young age, at the time, I had no sense whatsoever of what was

ever going on behind the scenes.

Sometimes, if my mother and I spent the night in Harlem, my father

would return home early the following afternoon with flowers and the

world's troubles long ago off his back, smiling and singing, playing

the trumpet whilst she prepared the evening meal. Those were

harmonious and happy nights which all of us recognised as being part

of a larger pattern of redemption – the ebb and flow of happiness at

home.

My father worked Saturdays as well but usually much shorter days and when he came home it was never with the same menace or venom he returned with on the weekdays. Saturdays and evenings following overnights my mother and I spent in Harlem, were always the happiest times in our home.

My parents would play records with teenage abandon all afternoon and evening, starting with Chopin and Debussy, moving on to the avant-guard jazz of the Polish 60s, Kurylewicz and Trzaskowski's hybrid of modern jazz and contemporary philharmonic hall music,

followed later by the Andrzej Trzaskowski Quartet and my father's new favourite, "Ptaszyn" Wroblewski, the brilliant tenor sax and flutist. And while this went on they'd sit in the parlour drinking rum or vodka or cold beers, smoking and talking like the two youngsters they were as though they'd peeled off the thick skin of adulthood for an afternoon and enjoyed themselves in precisely the manner they'd have done if they'd had a longer youth together before

I'd come along to add the weight of parenthood around their necks like a millstone. I would watch them quietly fascinated, only vaguely acknowledged and perpetually attempting to be as obsequious as possible.

When I was older, my father would try and teach me a few things with

the trumpet and although I was receptive, it was the tenor sax that

really tweaked my ear. The first inklings were of Lester Young and

his gentle manner I listened to within the Count Basie Band

recordings before unconsciously following the chronology, the

gawking aggressive sound of Coleman Hawkins, especially in those

days leading a combo with Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and Max

Roach, among others, as sidemen.

And then Coltrane swung into my hearing and whilst at one time I had

merely dabbled, it was Coltrane's mad spiralling; his out of

consciousness playing that hooked me once and for all on the

instrument.

When the polkas and waltzes and jazz records had all been played, by

that time the room was thick with smoke and the careless, incessant

laughter and howling of late afternoon/early evening Saturday night

drunks and then my mother would insist they listen to jibaro

records, the cuatrom guitar and guiro ensembles, bongos and bass,

the old periódico cantaos of the plena, made up from old stories of

old neighbourhoods of my mother's former island, the seguidors,

segundos and requintos reverberating off the walls, shaking past

midnight with the boleros and danzas until the flat was magically

transformed by booze and music into a personal dance hall for my

parents – furniture shoved aside, yipping and clapping themselves

into a frenzy which would inevitably end with me being left sitting

in a room alone whilst they disappeared into their own for

mysterious yet equally noisy undertakings.

And of course, on Sundays, there was atonement. I, of course, had

nothing to be sorry for, nothing for which to ask forgiveness – sins

are few and far between until you first are aware that they are

possible and second, are willing to try them out.

It usually began and alternated between St Stanislaus Church ,

followed by dinner at Babcia's of stuffed cabbage, kasha, peirogies,

blintzes and pickles, a quiet afternoon of dulled senses from the

church service to the heavy meal to the silent hours sat in the

front parlour listening to the condensed orchestras of Liszt's piano

and Chopin polonaises before Mozart, Bach and Beethoven were all

brought out in due course – music for remembering in that household, dark, craven thoughts, not conversing as it was clear in my household of my father's youth, little talking, unless absolutely necessary, went on at all. My babcia would only stare morosely at photographs of my father's father, showing my the black and white albums, their youth in Poland, the countryside, the funny dress, the world outside a world outside a world of memories and lost hopes. It

was depressing, even for someone as young as myself who hadn't even started school yet, just to be sitting in such a heavy, stilted air of musical harmony yet emotional distress. We could all feel it and not a single one acknowledged it. Still, the flickering snatches of a past and a country and culture I didn’t know fascinated me, filled me with wonder, lent substance to dreamy afternoons of silence sitting, staring at nothing.

On alternate Sundays, we would dress up and all climb into father's

pickup truck with the words Kazmirsky Electricians painted on each

side door and we would drive up town to meet my mother's family for

the day, and afternoon invariably filled with contrasts, afternoons

which whetted my appetite for exotic day dreams and although we were still on the same island of Manhattan, it was easily as though we had transported ourselves to another world altogether.

Of course, my parents' translation skills were required in all these

endeavours – afternoons with babcia would require my father to

translate the Polish to English for my mother's sake. I was already

familiar with the language and the sounds yet owed to age, my

vocabulary in any language was strictly limited.

On the days in Spanish Harlem, my father would endeavour to muddle through some of the phrases he picked up via my mother, via labourers he came across, via the little islets of Hispanic culture appearing on nearly every street corner, and of course, via the lyrics of the music he'd become so fond of, but even then, for the more serious conversations he required my mother's interventions for dialectical phrases, specific questions requiring specific answers rather than broad, philosophical strokes of whimsical speculation.

And in the early days especially, for its flavour, colour, beat and

sassiness, pure interest alone, I was growing up more Hispanic than

Polish and imperceptibly, as they'd likely intended, large weeds of

Americanism sprouting up through the cracks in the pavement of my

Puerto Rican/Polish heritage.

But more often, I grew up in a house of boredom that epitomised the

hopelessness, the gutted future of my mother since I spent so much

time around her and so little around my father.

Although only a 40 minute bus excursion through traffic back to her home, my mother was in some ways, cut off from her own life, the life of security and familiarity, to be thrust in to a new role of motherhood in a neighbourhood of prying, fat babushkas who spoke in dialects she could not understand as they sniffed and pointed and mumbled whenever we entered a deli or stopped in somewhere for a egg cream.

She was ostracized from social circles outside of my father and

grandmother by those who bled jealously at her steamy beauty, her

flamboyant personality and the loud salsa that emanated from our

windows.

She took me out of the neighbourhood frequently, enough so that I

grew up hearing more Spanish than Polish, but it wasn't enough to

take field trips thrice weekly to Spanish Harlem simply to have a

brief dip in the pools of her culture. Gradually, the unease

graduated to unhappiness, mild at first, growing as I did and my

needs for her waned.

Thinking of the future, my father began taking on more and more work which in turn led to being home less and less frequently and even when he was home, he was tired, overworked, grumpy, no longer the hard-working yet simultaneously carefree Pole with a passion for

Dixieland Jazz but simply greying in flesh, tiring in spirit, dying

in soul.

Then there were fights – many of them in fact, some weeks, nearly

every night so that I grew up with the impression that the two

people who were meant to mean the most to me simply hated each other

outright, tolerating one another's existence simply out of a sense

of duty to me, as if I'd had any say in the matter at all, as if I

were the collective anchor weighing around their necks, as if it

weren't for me, Miranda would be working as a beautician somewhere

in Spanish Harlem, surrounded by her culture, surrounded by her

family and friends, surrounded by boys who chased her and praised

her beauty knowing it was not being disassembled daily by the

existence of a half-breed son neither Puerto Rican nor Polish,

simply existing somewhere on a plain of foreign American neither

here nor there.

No one came right out and said this of course, but it was there,

palpable, for all someone who spent the entirety of their day with

another, to begin to allow to sink in. My father resented me for I'd

meant more work, driven a barrier between himself and the sexual

passion of his wife, not to mention, taking away any semblance of

free time to practice his beloved music. And my mother, although at

first enthusiastically carrying me from place to place with her like

an adult pacifier, gradually began to lose interest. She was too

young to be so old and it was too early to have packed in a

promising future so early.

So rather than a prize in a game of tug of war, I became the object

of mutual resentment and blame, the cause of unhappiness, the ending

of potentials and futures. Or so it seemed. Sometimes it doesn't

take a complicated thought process or a license in psychotherapy to

draw simple conclusions.

Don't think it wasn't a relief to get out of the flat and finally

start school. It meant freedom for us all.

Well, not exactly freedom. True, I was free from being toted from

place to place and let out of the environment that was suffocating

me with it's resentment and blame, but I wasn't exactly free, just

on furlough.

For my mother, there was first the relief of not having to take a

kid around with her everywhere she went, but also the freedom in

there not being me around to report on our comings and goings to my

father when he came home. This in turn led to some rather strange

behaviour on the part of my mother who discovered a vicarious

excitement in affairs of all sorts which might pop up from anywhere,

any street corner outside of our or her neighbourhood, any chance

propositions, any furtive glances of lust in her direction for

regardless of being burdened with motherhood, my mother was still

quite young and still quite attractive.

Eventually her disappearances became more frequent and lasted longer.

Some times my father would come home from work, find me buried in

books and command me to come along with him, driving up to Harlem,

riding in silence up and down the streets in search of Miranda, a

habit I would later undertake myself, albeit without the pick up

truck and a lower quotient of anger boiling inside of me.

Like watching water swirling down the drain after uncorking the

bathtub so was it to watch the disappearances eating away at my

father, so it was like watching the marriage flounder, Miranda's

sudden appearances at home, drunken or remorseful, bursts of passion

flowing between them as though they both knew the legacy was ending

for both of them and I was forced to stand witness to it.

Years went by like this – it's remarkable to think how normal it all

seemed somehow. Day after day turned year after year, schooling

continued, dinners were burned, arguments erupted but were quickly

placated by my father who, although resigned to my mother's

scattered disappearances, knew there always existed the possibility

of avoiding them just like the arguments – by keeping silent,

seething within as if she wouldn't notice the resentment, as if she

were impervious to being ignored, she would remain faithful, not at

his side but not utterly abandoning the two of us either.

You wonder what goes on in two peoples' minds and hearts, linked by

a sentence of marriage with occasional furloughs of genial grace,

walls dripping with polite interaction, please, sorry, excuse me,

might I…etc.

And then as if by silent, mutual accord the incessant bickering and

the wild, drunken arguments ceased. I would often wonder for years

what precipitated this truce – if they had in fact conspired

together in the interests of their lone son's sanity or perhaps

their own, to put a definitive end to the hostilities and carry on

quietly with their lives together, yet apart. Or if this had been

precipitated by one, perhaps my father was having an affair to

counterbalance those my mother was most certainly if not openly

engaging in herself, but in any event, during the winter months a

change came over the both of them.

*****

Perhaps it was at the point when the arguments ceased entirely that

whatever lingering passion was extinguished forever.

To me and perhaps to my father it was clear my mother was merely biding her

time. She argued for the chance to go to night school and finish her

diploma. She started taking up interests completely outside the

realm of our household; palm reading, bowling, jogging, drinking and

smoking less, calm, collected, cleaning on schedule, putting dinner

on the table like clockwork, agreeing to everything my father said

much in the way he agreed with any suggestion she made. A truce of

magnificent emotional retraction, two icebergs passing in the night.

It was early in my 16th April of having played the role of millstone

around the necks of this couple with this accumulated and

uncomfortable truce of silence and impeccable politeness that an

evening arrived and my father did not make it home for dinner. As I

said, this happened once or sometimes twice a week, as it had most

of my life but that the primary difference between the early years

and the last several months being that although he would arrive back

to the flat late, he did not reek of alcohol, did not come home

shouting his displeasure or swaying with one hand on the kitchen

table, rather he would return meekly, quietly on tip toes in the

darkened room so as not to wake me and then push open the bedroom

door for whatever silent fate awaited him inside. It was on these

nights the atmosphere was almost feral and their lovemaking, no

matter how discrete they believed themselves to be, was enough to

keep me awake until the early hours of morning.

And because this was almost like clockwork, these once or twice a

week midnight returns to the flat I did not grow concerned until

one day dawn had begun to rub the black from the night and I had not

witnessed his return. By five in the morning I was out of sofa bed

and ritualistically having removed the sheets and pushed the

mattress back down into the recesses of the sofa quietly, having

folded and put away those same sheets in the storage space just

above the sofa thinking in the back of my mind perhaps he had

arrived with even more stealth than usual and I had simply missed

his return or slept more heavily than normal, when I had set about

making the coffee as I did most mornings so that it would be ready

for my father when he slipped out to go to work I had convinced

myself by then that this must have been the case, I must have simply

slept through his return.

But hearing the rustling in the kitchen, the bedroom door opened as

if on cue only this time, instead of my father's weary face it was

my mother's tepidly poking out and I watched as she took the scene

in quickly, myself standing there alone, and the recognition in her

face, like mine that the convincing it had taken our minds to

entertain explanations for this figment of imagination, that Witold

had somehow arrived without our knowing and perhaps left just as

stealthily, was a fabrication the light of day would not allow us to

continue believing.

And as my mother sat at the kitchen table in her nightgown slowly

sipping the coffee I could see the wheels of imagination turning in

her mind contemplating all the possible explanations. And being

privy to a not-so-secret secret regarding Zbiegniew's affair we both

allowed ourselves to believe if fleetingly that perhaps rather than

simply stopping off for a few hours of blissful infidelity, my father

had decided to spend the entire night this time and would arrive

through the door at any minute, sheepishly and fighting off the

accusations with the excuse that he had no time to discuss things,

he was running late for work,

I could see my mother seething silently at this possibility. I could

almost see in her eyes the scenario she held for him upon his

return, how this would be the last straw, how this indiscretion

would invoke the final argument and all hell would break loose

either this morning or by evening.

And just as easily I could see as 5 became 6 and then nearly 7, this

seething was replaced by uncertainty and as though we were one mind

we turned over the idea that perhaps he had in fact decided to leave

us, had taken the initiative to decide our fates for us without

further discussion and perhaps had simply moved in with this woman

without further preamble and there would be some word, a telephone

call, some explanation of the decision taken, regardless of the

repercussions.

Whilst my mother continued busying herself with these possibilities

I got ready for school and before leaving, kissed her once upon the

cheek and took my books along with the silent acknowledgement in

both our eyes of what had transpired and the confused state this

left us both in.

I couldn't concentrate that day in school. I secretly entertained

the idea that magically my father would appear at my school either

to pick me up and take me to this new place of his or to offer an

explanation of what had happened the night before as a preamble to

explaining the same to my mother. But he did not magically appear. I

felt every hour passing with excruciating anticipation for that

evening's meal both dreading the consequences of my father's

decision and the arguing and fighting that would be the hallmarks of

this final showdown between himself and my mother.

I ran home after the final class and found my mother still sitting

there at the kitchen table still in her nightgown and accompanying

her at the table an ashtray filled with finished butts and a bottle

of rum slowly inching its way down to its conclusion. No music

played and nothing was said between us. There would be no dinner.

There would only be the waiting for this grand finale which was

certain to kick off in grandiose fashion now that my mother had

lubricated herself against all possible scenarios, plotting the

details of her revenge in silent fury.

I decided then that rather than try and occupy this space with my

presence, intruding yet again on their private turmoil, I would

instead take my books to the public library and spend the late

afternoon and early evening until closing time at 9 at first

feigning study and later simply sitting by myself at a table staring

blankly at pages of a book I was pretending to read.

And at 9, as they were turning the lights on and off signalling the

close of library hours I gathered up the books and made the 35 block

walk back to my neighbourhood, back to the apartment where I had no

idea what would or would have transpired. As I made it down the

street I stopped meekly looking up to the windows of our flat and

saw that no lights were on.

I entered the apartment expecting at the very least some remnants of

the carnage but instead there was nothing. No sounds coming from the

bedroom, the air stale with cigarette smoke and no one inside. I

even pushed open the bedroom door after knocking twice and getting

no response and finding only my mother lying there still in her

nightgown, splayed across the unmade bed, snoring comfortably to

herself.

Unbeknownst to me whilst my mother had sat at the at the kitchen

table in her nightgown slowly washing down a bottle of rum with her

cigarettes, the phone had been ringing off the hook. At first she

ignored it believing it was only him, checking to see if she were

there, if it might be safe for him to slink back to the apartment

and gather up a few clothes for the secret move. She waited with

great anticipation for that moment, surprising him at the door as he

crept in slowly reeking of guilt but he did not arrive at all and by

the afternoon she allowed herself to answer the phone whose ringing,

in combination with the rum was beginning to drive her to the brink

of madness she believed.

But every time she answered it was someone different. A contractor,

a customer, his employees, friends all asking the same question of

where the hell was Zbiegniew, why hadn't he shown up at this job

site or that one, why hadn't he picked up his employees as he did

every morning before work with a few donuts and several cups of

coffee?

Having no explanation herself and finding herself increasingly

embarrassed to play the role of the wife who had no idea of the

whereabouts of her husband, she stopped answering the phone the rest

of the afternoon and concentrated fully on her bottle of rum trying

not to reflect too deeply on what it meant that not only had

Zbiegniew failed to come home the evening before, not only had he

not dropped in to pick up his clothing or his shaving kit, but that

he had shirked the responsibilities of his work equally and

uncharacteristically.

She didn't want to contemplate what it might have meant. She had

never known him to be anything but industrious. No matter how much

he'd had to drink the night before, no matter how enthralling their

lovemaking or hatemaking had been the night before he was always

awake the following morning by dawn ready to start the day again,

eager to begin work.

The following morning I repeated the ritual of making the coffee and

waiting but there was still no arrival of my father, sheepishly or

otherwise and this time my mother did not stir from her slumber and

I spent my breakfast with my heart in my mouth no longer capable of

imagining scenarios simply wishing something might return to

whatever might be construed as normal.

The following afternoon when I returned from school, launching

myself up the stairs with eager desperation for news, I found my

mother dressed this time, still seated at the kitchen table and

drinking coffee this time instead of rum although the pile of

finished cigarette butts was at least as high as the day before.

I've had to notify the police, she stated in an even voice without

looking up at me.

What do you mean?

Your father has disappeared.

Just because he hasn't come home for a few days…it went unspoken the

accusation that given all that had happened over the last year, her

infidelities and his, it wasn't so odd in hindsight that he would

fail to come home – this was the speech I had rehearsed so often in

my head over the last several days convincing myself that the

abnormal should in fact, have been expected - but I let the sentence

die there without saying another word until my mother lit another

cigarette and finally looked up at me with what I mistook for

amusement.

So you think that this is all my doing, do you, she accused,

exhaling. Her eyes were not playful at all rather sealed with a deep

seeded hatred I had never seen focused on myself before, only my

father. Would I now become the target?

I'm not saying it's anyone's fault, I'm just saying that perhaps he

hasn't disappeared but…

Your father has not shown up for work for the last two days, she

interrupted triumphantly as though in revealing this she could grind

my argument into the dirt as quickly as the suggestion had arisen.

And of course, we both new what this meant. We both understood

without stating so that whilst his not coming home for a few days

might have been folly the fact that he hadn't shown up for work was

a darker sign indeed.

What did the police say?

They took the details. I don't know if they took it very seriously,

of course. Men leave their families quite often apparently, she

laughed bitterly. They took the details and said they would look

into it.

And although my mother hadn't quite brought herself to believe in

their sincerity, let alone their professionalism, two days later

they reported that his pick up had been located on the corner of

Avenue C and 4th Street, not very far from home in fact, but there

was no one in it and no sign of where he'd gone or why he'd

abandoned it.

Perhaps the police themselves began to take the disappearance a

little more seriously thereafter because it appeared that after a

few more days, they had canvassed the neighbourhood near the

abandoned pick up and had found a person or two who could vaguely

recall having seen a man plunge himself from the East River Park off

the banks into the East River and begin swimming toward Brooklyn on

the other side.

No one could be certain of course if this was my father. As those

sightings had appeared after midnight, the few witnesses having

thought little of it, a madman swimming across the East River in the

middle of a Spring night perhaps drunk, perhaps encouraged by

whatever inner evil they could not imagine springing forth, none had

considered notifying the police. Not in that neighbourhood whose

residents were more concerned with turf wars and shootings to be

preoccupied with a man swimming across the river.

What he did or did not reckon for was that the Atlantic tides that run

through the narrow channel of the East river make it the most

turbulent in the area and were famed for the problems they gave to

sailors in the 17th century, so much so the midway point was

nicknamed, because of its deadly whirlpools and rocks, Hell Gate.

My mother didn't make it to the memorial service.

Once the idea that my father had drown himself, either intentionally

or accidentally, began to sink in, she appeared to see the light.

I was 16 by then, old enough to know the time was drawing near and

sure enough, within days, I came home from school one afternoon to

find the house empty.

Well, the furniture was all there, there were foodstuffs in the

cupboards, the laundry and dishes had been done. One less chore for

the guilty conscience. But she was gone, I could smell it the moment

I opened the door. This wasn't a disappearance to aggravate my

father, my father was dead. This was a disappearance to liberate

herself entirely from the memory of her life.

I checked the closets for her clothing and found a great deal of

them gone. All the shoes, all the dresses, all the hats and scarves.

A few winter coats remained, a few drabber styles and retired

undergarments stayed behind but all else, toothbrush, mascara,

deodorants, perfumes and soaps, shampoo and the essentials for

running away for good were gone.

And there I spent my entire afternoon, morbidly sorting through all their private stuff neither had wanted to take with them, wherever they ended up.

There were some bits of correspondence in my mother’s boxes; letters in Spanish back and forth from Puerto Rico, little scraps of paper pledging love in my father’s careful script, notes she kept to herself on mundane miscellanea, bits and pieces torn from magazines with tips on hairstyles, skin care, love- making, fulfilling dreams, get-aways.

Odd, I thought. My father was dead yet all of his personal effects,

all his clothes, all his documents and papers, auld tax returns,

business statements, photographs, music – all of it were still here

lingering like a foul odour. On the other hand, my mother had left

little behind but the shell of the skin she had shed, free for the

first time in her life.

On the kitchen table, which I had somehow missed in my investigative

rummaging, was what I thought was a letter but as it turned out,

merely bank statements, account numbers and passwords. Their legacy

to me.

She'd put the bank accounts into hers and my name jointly so that I

could take money whenever I needed it. I never really knew if she

trusted me not to simply empty it out, if she had another stash off

a life insurance policy she planned to cash in or if she simply

didn't care, had another source of income to draw from, hell, maybe

even another man, a sugar daddy. Or a series of them. I didn't know

and yes of course I was curious but more than curious I was hurt,

abandoned and very busy turning my emotions and my soul into a

tempered steel I presumed would be strong and durable enough to

withstand any future such abandonment.

Not that I had any intention of drawing close to anyone. I had never

been that close to anyone to begin with. Having spent as much time

as I did growing up either on my own or in the company of a quasi

catatonic grandmother who didn't speak a word of English anyway, I was rather accustomed to entertaining myself. Games, fantasies, books, finding little niches in the cityscape that would allow me to watch people from a secluded vantage point.

I can't really say that I was ever lonely. No, I didn't have many, or

perhaps on reflection, any friends to speak of. There were a few

Polish boys in my neighbourhood about my age who went to my school

but mostly they targeted me for spare change or verbal or physical

abuse rather than friendship.

There were a few kids who were about my age in the barrio my mother

took me to during her family visits when she was utterly sick of the

East Village and dragged me along with her on a series of buses back

to her home. Those kids seemed to despise me even more than the kids

in my own neighbourhood. What was my mother doing with that white

kid. What was that white kid doing in their barrio, on their turf.

They didn't want to befriend me, they wanted to beat me. They wanted to abuse me for being different or for even being some impurity between white

and Puerto Rican, having a foot in both worlds but a foot hold in

neither.

So I’d already learned from the start to stay away from them and everybody else. My mother was quite satisfied that I left her to her own whims. When I was younger, and probably only because I was too young to be left alone or my mother had serious doubts my grandmother was capable of caring for me, she

had no choice, but it didn't take much cajoling from me, once I'd reached 10 or 11 to convince her I could be trusted to stay in the flat on my own content with my instruments or my books and when I told her I wanted to spend the

day in the library, sure, even she looked at me a little disdainfully but agreed without much protest.

They tell you that shit about not feeling loved but the truth is, I

don't think I was ever really aware of what that was. I wasn't

cogniscent of missing out on anything because frankly between what I

saw in my own household and what I saw or heard of or about those

around me, it didn't seem like I was really missing out on much

anyway. For the most part life was pretty much a self-contained

world of wonder at that around me, the greatest city in the world,

and the strangers in it. Wondering who they were but not wanting to

know the truth, just imagining what their own daily lives were like.

So despite the fact it was still somewhat shocking, the duel events,

formative perhaps but still, when it happens to you it's as though you're dreaming it anyway, there isn't the distance to judge it by or really even the wisdom to perceive it either from up close and inside or further away, the situation never felt as traumatising as I would later read others believed it was when they told me or I read about their own experiences. A bunch of excuses

not to get on with it, or get on with it in some shitty way that made you miserable instead of feeling lucky.

I admit, I did feel lucky.

The Blame Game was officially over.

All I'd ever really wanted to do when I was growing up was to get grown

up and get on with my life. With both parents gone by 16, sure

enough, my life was there to get on with.

In some ways I'd have expected my father to have been a little more romantic, a little less pragmatic considering his early love of music. It's

probably the main thing I wondered about him as I grew up in my late

teens and watched others. What event had caused him to forsake the

music and get down to business, to become so focused not just on his

trade but on making money from it.

Sure, I felt the resentment - it was brought up often enough to

stick in my memory, the idea that if I hadn't come along when I did, or if I'd been aborted, there'd have been plenty more good times in the years ahead to squeeze in before parenthood for both of them.

I read enough immigrant stories in my time to realise how many

parents sacrificed their own futures for the sake of their children and certainly from all appearances that was the noble business my father was carrying on with. But perhaps it was tinged ever so slightly by the unnerving feeling that even though he was doing it, he did so grudgingly, resentfully, maybe even angrily.

Adults would ask me stupid questions when I was a kid like, what do

I want to be when I grew up. I want my youth to end abruptly,

caesura by parenthood, to adopt a profession that I might well have

cared about but was forced out of a sense of responsibility to take

far more seriously and far earlier than I'd ever expected. I wanted to resent my life, my child, my spouse, all anchors, millstones around my neck so that at least even if I hated every second of my life I could shroud myself with a sense of chivalric justice that I'd done the right thing.

Here's how I'd hear about it: a favoured theme I'd overhear in drunken

arguments in the bedroom late at night- it'd be muffled of course

but eventually, if you hear the same phrases enough times, even

muffled, you begin to get the gist. You begin to decipher, to

translate, to read between the lines.

My father would be complaining about the injustices of it all, the responsibilities of work and fatherhood, how his life was ripped from him and logically, my mother would feel offended and hurt, would scream in Spanish at him until he'd slap her quiet and then you'd hear that angry, hard cold

voice asking snidely and rhetorically, what - should I be like

people in your neighbourhood and just forget about it, shirk my

responsibilities, run away, abandon them for my own freedom? Should

I go on welfare like your father? Then he would snort in disgust, a

few more slaps would ensue and more often than not he'd go back out,

doors slamming everywhere, somewhere into the night to drown his

sorrows even deeper and find other drunks to drown them with. Drunks

who understood exactly what he was talking about.

So naturally I was curious: what would my father's life had been like had I not been born? What would he have been doing?

I asked him this once when we were out walking along the

piers on the West Side looking out over the Hudson River at Jersey

when he'd spat out some incomprehensible hatred he'd been mulling

over in his head unspoken for days but for monosyllabic grunting.

He smacked me in the head. Not hard, mind you. Not out of anger,

more out of some barbaric form of loving denial. What kind of stupid

question is that Witold?

I shrugged. It was a Sunday, early in the morning and we were on one

of the walks he would go on every Sunday morning, usually alone only

this time he'd dragged me along for some reason and clearly seemed all the more annoyed for having done so.

I don't know. I was just curious.

It was his turn to shrug. In his world an honest question deserved

an honest answer. Or maybe he was just still a little drunk from the

night before. I didn't know. I didn't inhabit his world, just a satellite around it.

Well I don't know Witold. I don't waste my time thinking about things like

that. Nor should you. You are my son and that's that. Why would I

waste time thinking about if you weren't my son? What would be the

point?

I dunno. Sometimes I think about what if I'd been born with one leg instead of two or if I'd been born in another country instead of America or if we lived on the West side instead of the East side. I don't know why.

Well, it's a stupid way to think. You are what you are. You have two legs,

not one, you live in America, not Russia or Poland, for which, I

would add you should be very grateful for on both counts. So don't

waste your time thinking about what could be or could have been or

might be. Just deal with what is. You should be happy that you are

in the situation you are in. Do you know what kind of life I had as

a boy? Nothing but work. You don't have to work at all. You will

eventually, but you don't now. It's a luxury I didn't have. My

father made me work when I was 8 years old, helping him with his

deliveries, helping him try to make ends meet so we didn't starve to

death. And you know what Witold? As crummy as my childhood was it

was a million times better than my father's, just like yours is a

million times better than mine. Don't be an idiot. Enjoy it. Soon

enough you'll be a man of your own with your own real problems, not

fantasy problems. You'll have your own responsibilities and then you

won't have time to worry about what if. Only about what is.

And my mother? Sure, for many years when I was growing up, despite

the burden, I was the source of immense pride to her. She took me

everywhere, bragged to her friends and family what a bright and

promising boy I was, taught me to be a gentleman to ladies, light

their cigarettes, open doors for them, flatter them about their

beauty and worship them.

But eventually, who knows what age exactly, 5 or 6 or 8, somewhere

along the line I began to resemble my father too much perhaps. I

asked too many pointed questions which were unanswerable perhaps,

but anyway, I became less important, less a source of pride, more of

a burden, more of a reminder of what she couldn't have as long as I was tagging around.

Maybe it started when she stopped going so often back up to the

barrio, like it was too much work or there were too many

complications, but somewhere along the line she started drinking

more frequently - not with my father but alone, in that flat, in the

afternoons once she knew my father wasn't coming home for dinner anyway so I'd be left to sort out my dinner on my own.

In any event, she stopped bringing me anywhere she went. If I stayed

in she'd look over at me and ask me why I wasn't outside. Sometimes she'd

demand it, go out and play with the other kids. Why do you sit at

home all the time reading, dreaming your time away? What's wrong

with you? Why don't you have any friends? Get outside, it's

beautiful out, GO play. Leave me alone. Leave me in peace for

crissakes. Get out of my hair. I don't care what you do, just go,

get out. Here, take a few dollars, just get out.

And frankly, it was easier being away. All the theatrics would be

concluded by the time I'd gotten home. Usually after midnight. Yeah, the library closed at 8 or 9 and I'd just wander the streets, never really getting in

trouble - sometimes I'd go to the movies, sometimes I'd just wander

around Times Square watching all the strange people doing weird

things to themselves and others, sometimes I'd just wander along on

main avenues where it was safest, away from gangs and troublemakers,

just another anonymous figure in the darkness. I'd learned from

boyhood beatings to sort of blend into the background as though I

didn't really exist or as though I were invisible. And I preferred

it that way.

It helped too that I did well in school. I didn't mind school, other than all the bullshit about getting picked on or made fun of or beaten up. The parts in class, absorbing, listening, demonstrating I knew the answers, that was all good fun.

But year after year, the classes became less interesting, more time

was spent trying to control uncontrollable classes and thus

eventually I lost interest in that too.

Which of course, was all resolved once my father disappeared and my

mother followed in short order.

I was 16, I could drop out and didn't have to bother any more. It wasn't that I didn't want to learn.

It was wanting to learn what I wanted to learn at my own private

speed, not limited by the abilities of teachers to simultaneously

subdue the rowdiness whilst continuing to teach. And to learn about

what interested me, oftentimes which wasn't part of the curriculum.

***

I didn't have many marketable skills to speak of. I'd learned a few

whispers of the trade my father worked in and picked up skills like

lint in the bellybutton merely by the experience of being on the job

sites in my own free time when I wanted to earn a little extra cash

after school.

My father probably dreamt some day of passing his electricians

business still intact down to his son one day but of course, without

my father, that business didn't last forever.

And so without even a High School diploma as well as the absence of any clear, marketable skills, by default I was destined to simple meandering from one listless dead-end job to another, a future of underachieving for years to come.