Richard Hell Reads From ‘Godlike‘

In this episode of Private Life, Richard Hell reads from his novel Godlike (2005), which was reissued last month by NYRB Classics with a new afterword by Raymond Faye. Godlike tells the story of a poet perambulating downtown Manhattan in the 1970s and pining for a young poet who probably won’t love him back, closely mirroring the doomed romance between the nineteenth-century French poètes maudits Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. 

Richard Hell is a writer and former musician best known as a pioneer of the punk rock scene in 1970s New York. Some of his books include The Voidoid (1996), Artifact (1990), Hot and Cold (2001), Go Now (1996), I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp (2013), and What Just Happened (2023). 

This reading accompanies the Private Life episode featuring Hell discussing his novels, poetry, and creative process. To find Richard Hell’s Godlike and other NYRB Classics, visit our book imprint at nyrb.com. Subscribe to The New York Review of Books; in addition to twenty print issues a year, a subscription provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963. 

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Host

Jarrett Earnest

Jarrett Earnest has contributed essays to the New York Review of Books on artists ranging from Tom of Finland to Jack Whitten. He is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018) and Valid Until Sunset (2023) and has edited several collections of criticism, including volumes of Dave Hickey and Peter Schjeldahl as well as artist's writings by Nayland Blake and Jesse Murry. His curatorial projects include the acclaimed 2019 exhibition "The Young and Evil" at David Zwirner gallery, New York.

What is Private Life: A New York Review Podcast?

Private Life is a podcast from The New York Review, hosted by contributor Jarrett Earnest. Each episode offers intimate, in-depth conversations with distinguished voices from across the literary landscape—about their lives, their work, and the ideas that shape both. Along the way, they revisit pieces from the The New York Review of Books's robust sixty-year archive (some episodes of the podcast will feature newly recorded readings of these classic essays) to situate arguments within contemporary culture. The show also includes discussions of titles from our book publishing arm, New York Review Books, featuring talks with translator Mark Polizzotti on Andre Breton's surrealist masterpiece Nadja and musician Richard Hell on the re-issue of his novel Godlike. Other early episodes find Joyce Carol Oates ruminating on true crime, while Darryl Pinckney opens up about the perils of memoir and his formative friendship with essayist Elizabeth Hardwick. 

Private Life is a personable, expansive invitation for longtime subscribers and a new generation of readers alike to connect with the past, present and future of The New York Review. 

This is Private Life, a New York Review Podcast. I’m Jarrett Earnest. Today’s episode is a reading from Richard Hell’s 2005 novel, Godlike, republished last month as an NYRB Classic. Godlike follows the relationship between two fictional poets, R.T. Wode and Paul Vaughn, through New York’s downtown poetry scene of the 1970s. Their dynamic bares a striking similarity to the tumultuous romance between a teenaged Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, ten years his senior in Paris of the 1870s. It’s all told in retrospect, by an aging Vaughn, in the form of notebooks, essays and poems. The excerpts here include a preface, the first two chapters, as well as the fourteenth chapter. It is read by its author Richard Hell.

Godlike

I want to make what I know of R. T. and that time into a book so that it won’t be gone. I don’t have the best memory in the world but there is no reason I can’t produce a story as close to true as it would be if these things happened yesterday. It will just have mixed into it what I have become across twenty-five years, but that includes what I’ve learned, and at least I can say with certainty that it’s written with love and without any hidden purposes or self-censorship. Those are more or less the first words in the first of the notebooks I filled during the month I was in the hospital in 1997. I planned to write about T. in the form of a novel. I wrote other things in the notebooks besides my story of T., too: letters, diaries, poems, even an essay. Now I’ve accepted my editor’s encouragement and made this book out of all of it.
As an account of T., it will have to do, because T. is gone and only he could offer a memory to compare. I’ve known for a long time the meaning of the deaths of friends. It’s losing oneself! T. took me with him, but I’ve been what I can, and I want to present my him before it’s too late for me too.
Look, he was a scumbag. Nearly everybody hated him. He didn’t care! He insisted on it. That’s the beauty of it. But it’s important that you not like him either. If you like him, you don’t understand him. To give offense was his mission, his meaning. That was part of his failure, the impossibility of him; I don’t advocate it—it’s just what he was. I do maintain that it’s interesting. But then, a good writer can make anything interesting.
It makes me think of movie stars. People say James Dean was the same way, mean and arrogant and competitive. And I remember having this revelation watching Bette Davis on-screen one time. That everything that was magnificent about her in the movie would be impossibly obnoxious in the same room with you . . .
—Paul Vaughn
NYC, 2004

Godlike
Chapter 1
It was March and the weather was like a pornographic high-fashion magazine. But Raw’s Drink was a gutter derelict in it. The room was see-through brown broken by a debris of battered tables and cluttered walls. There was a little clearing in the far corner where a stalk of microphone stood leaning thinly. Paul felt affection for the poor poets, his family. He probably liked them more than anyone else did. He was popular for that. Tonight’s reader was Tom Bennett. Tom was a filthy drug addict who was too smart for his own good. His face was like a monkey’s carved from a blond wood doorstop wedge, he was going bald, and he wore reddish whiskers that looked like pond scum. He never stopped talking and he considered himself a Buddhist. Whatever else, he was in his element at Raw’s this night, and it was heartening. He was a messenger and Paul was mentally gorging on it. “God made everything from nothing, but the nothing shows through.” Paul played a favorite mental trick for enjoying poetry readings and imagined the reader had died long ago. The reading ended, and everyone drank on, and the room got noisier. People went out into the air and smoked grass together and came back. Paul saw the kid. He planned to find him but hadn’t gotten around to it when he sensed the attention shifting in the crowd. The kid’d gone up to three different poets in the room and told each what he thought of him. He told Bill Miller, “I read your latest book and all I can say is that your only virtue is its own punishment.” He told Barret Combs that he’d “ruined frivolity for a generation.” Then he gave each of the poets hand-copied examples of a new poem and told them that they could suck his cock for $20. He arrived at Paul, and just as Paul realized who he was the kid introduced himself. He was the boy who’d sent him a letter a few weeks before. The letter had read:
Mr. Vaughn! Sir! I write to you most humbly, most presumptuously. I am no one except that I am a poet. And it is because I am a poet that I eat up your books. And that is why Iwrite and enclose the pages you find here. I hope that you will respond to them. I’m going nuts in this nowhere. Used to be I could twist in my misery and big time lusts, sweating, and the breezes of these suburban streets would cool me a little, the fruity sunsets would bring me something, as would old literature, but now I know too much! One must always move on. (It is not important to live.) I’m rotting here! I will come to New York. Especially since I know of you. Do you know what I mean that I am no one except that I am a poet? I will explain so that you cannot misunderstand. I do not want to be anyone. I have nothing to protect! I want to see and be seen through. I am given to see and I see aloud. It is necessary that “I,” that cowardly imposition, be discarded, in order that nothing interfere, that nothing interrupt, that nothing pollute what speaks. It isn’t pretty! But it is poetry and all we know of—of—. I know you know what I mean.Have mercy on me. Your admiring little bro,
Randall Terence Wode
Paul had written back and told the kid he should come to New York and to call him when he got there. “I am drunk,” the boy said.
“You are?”
He lowered his voice. “Come outside and walk with me.”
They left the party behind and the air outside was a nice surprise. The presents kept coming, piling up around them as they walked. Paul got breathless and aroused. R.T. told him his big ideas. He said honestly there were only two or three poets and that he himself was first among the living, with the possible exception of Paul, though he was in danger of going slack. He talked of how the literary was sacred but the literary was shit. That the poets’ poor knowledge must be advanced in life for poetry to be real. That the poem is everything, but incidental—it’s shit and come, it’s tracks and mirrors, hair, snot, ricocheting beams. It’s nothing, but it’s all we get and if we will be receptive it’s the thing itself, the nothing itself, and what else is there to desire, want, have, be, and it only follows from delirium, which is just ordinary life.
“No big deal,” he said, and it was true—Paul’d heard it before (though he hadn’t seen it)—
“You want to kiss me, don’t you.” He took Paul’s hand and pulled it to him and pressed the palm on his crotch. They’d stopped and T. was shuffling Paul back towards a dark building wall on East 3rd Street. Paul’s heartbeat was out of control. He was taller than T. and he grabbed T.’s ruffled head and bumped his mouth on his. The oddness of male on male was sexy. They almost fell over but the wall got there just in time. The mouth was a scooped-out thing that felt unreal; Paul couldn’t adjust, he was still too apart from him, but wanted to feel T.’s cock through his pants and when he did that it went really real for a moment before they separated again. Paul just wanted to run his finger along the crack of T.’s ass, and T. let Paul turn him to the wall and do that. He reached under and T.’s cock had gotten harder and he squeezed its base through T.’s pants. T. gave Paul charge of himself there for a moment, and Paul took advantage of it by pulling T.’s shoulder to turn him, kissing him once again, and it felt closer to a kiss. Paul started them walking back along the street. He wasn’t going to hurry or let T. think he was at his mercy. It was better to stretch it out anyway.
“So how does it feel to be a faggot?” T. asked.
“What? . . . Uh . . . So far, so good.”
“But you always have been.”
“Whatever you say . . .”
They stumbled into Paul’s rooms on Morton Street at about 4:00 A.M. In the house everything was stagnant and half-size, defensively smug. When the pregnant wife came in, Randall threw up. She screamed and stuttered. She looked inappropriate, like a mangy zoo creature in a fake habitat. “What a stink,” T. said. “That stuff smells . . . Let’s try to go to sleep.” He looked at Paul and suggested, “Why don’t you slap that thing.” Paul lurched towards his wife and she fled. Paul turned and grinned as if he’d just scored a goal, started back to T. and slipped in the vomit, then fell to his hands and knees. He laughed. “Ugh.” It wasn’t too bad. T. sat down in an armchair as Paul got up and put one foot in front of the other towards the kitchen around the corner. When Paul came back with a large wet terrycloth, T. had his penis out and was idly playing with it. As Paul kneeled over the pool of vomit he looked at the penis and then at T.’s face. He put his hand down his own pants, but no, he wanted to wipe up the mess. The smell stung, but for a second he liked it: scent of death rot, home, was the sticky inside of his own asshole when he stuck a finger in it masturbating. He was getting a kind of hardon, but he threw the towel over the vomit and tried to wrap it up. His wife scurried through the room holding a soft little overstuffed bag. When she saw them she recovered her dignity for a moment in amazement, and for that moment Paul sank and groaned inside but T. was tougher, and she retired from the house with a sad squeal. Paul crawled over and pulled T.’s cock in between his lips. He filled his mouth with it most gratefully and T. gazed at him with contempt that was tremendous and delicious. Paul was still a little bit ashamed and that’s what made the cruelty right and the perfection of it pooled them together. After all, T. was Paul’s admirer, and T. was the grateful one, for being allowed to be mean with love. The world was young. And in the morning the sun found them out on the floor of the little parlor entangled and gritty, the faint death-smell of the half-digested food and alcohol mixing with the brute light; bodies God’s idle graffito

Chapter 2
When they awoke they started drinking again right away. It was a hot day. T. put on an Albert Ayler record and started pulling books off the shelves. He took a Bill Knott, a Borges, a Frank O’Hara, David Shapiro’s skinny little January, and Ron Padgett’s Great Balls of Fire, and put them in his knapsack. A couple of times he oddly kissed Paul like a father. Paul cried once.
T. said, “Today the theme will be time, work, and sex among men. Sex among men is like using your wood to make a violin.”
They walked up Seventh Avenue towards Paul’s bank on Sheridan Square like corporeal beings among the ghosts, or melodic rustling in the silence. It was cloudy, the sky a bruised white that shone too hard to look at. Below it, buildings and streets were pounded from dead hard matter that felt like paining smacks, with all those quaint and obnoxious announcements posted on them in such determined effort to infiltrate and influence people. It occurred to Paul that T. was speaking to him that way: proclaiming himself and trying to enter and take his mind. But he knew he’d been raised a level, and the puke-flecked boy was all the sweeter-seeming for having his behavior seen through unbeknownst. Paul withdrew a little money at the bank and then nudged T. through the angular small streets in the direction of Washington Square.
“Look,” said T., “What do you think of that?”
There before them was a garbage can with a glossy damaged issue of The New Yorker topping the pile of trash. It was open to a picture of a sparkling braceleted wrist and an impossibly elegant woman’s face. The scripture read, “A diamond is forever.”
“This is the hotel I was thinking of.”
In the tiny room they lay in the narrow bed. It had started raining outside and the smell of it came in puffs under the doubly dirty raised window.
Paul said, “Your program sounds like a lot of work. The
good life is lazy,” his arm under T.’s head. T. had his elbow
bone in Paul’s ribs.
“Pure receptivity has a highly valued place in my system.”
“Uh.”
“I think we’re through, Vaughn. You’re uptight or something or we’re in different places and it’s hopeless. Maybe we should get someone else in here to perk up our relationship.”
“Like that desk clerk?”
“Yeah, I bet he knows where the drugs are too. I’d suck
him off . . . So what’s this big idea?”
“It’s kind of the opposite of yours . . . or the other side of
the coin . . .”
“What we need is a coin with one side.”
“You’re a coin with one side.”
“And all of us are merely players.”
“That’s stupid. You’re ridiculous.”
“I beat you to the punch. Aw, I’m sorry. Go ahead and
tell me.”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t sulk now—”
Just then there was a knock at the door. Paul and T. looked
at each other, their noses too close.
“Who’s that?” called T.
Through the door, “It’s Larry, the desk clerk.”
Paul’s eyes had started to water as he looked back at T. T.
asked, “Should I open the door naked?” For a second Paul
felt like he was losing his mind.
“I don’t know.”
“I think I should.”
“Do it then.”
And he did and before long they were all having sex.
So Paul woke up with T. again. The sunlight this second morning was grey again, undone, through the narrow airshaft. Paul had work he had to handle, and a wife with a baby due. There was a half-smoked joint right in arm’s reach and a bottle of wine. He saw a tuft of T.’s armpit hair. He had to decide whether to drink or think. He drank, but he got up to leave anyway. He wrote to T., “Here’s $10. I have to go check on things. Thanks. Soon, Later, Love, Paul.”
On the way out the door he saw a scrap of paper on the floor. It could be deciphered:
see the light look into the hole
cheap hotel room wall to the
next room past
the hole in the crack
of the desk clerk’s bent rear
end he’s shown us
the hole damn catalog
cheap hole tea-room
hair-lined butt like a private
eye out in the saliva
to see the light
look into the hole
and then you eat it
I know the taste of light
Red: cock head, Blue: asshole
(clean), Green: eyeball, White: blood
all sweet, all key fund as glances
in an icy tub and I swill it, drenched
in the gushing seen m, the big pissing
over broken head suppository of it
the wack, the tang, the brassiere
the poop eye candle-flame
slick and cold banana popsicle fuck
in the face the eye the prick slit of it
come next May flowered China haunches
flush to fan rhapsodic array
toe carrot pressed further doe
person of a cartoon persuasion bursting too of it
flowers
What?! He cracked a syllable of laugh out loud. T. must’ve written it the night before. What a night. The writing brought it back. And it blew him away, poem of his sixteen-year-old boyfriend. He thought of the sight of T.’s penis, and how it was shocking, like the exhibition of a person’s internal things, but so great. Everything was changed now, though inevitable (as things will be once they’ve happened). Maybe he shouldn’t leave. But he wanted to be out in the morning, and not altogether dependent on T., and he had to do something about his wife and job. He went, descending the smelly back staircase the flight down. A different desk clerk was on duty. Outside the day was brilliant by Washington Square Park. He felt himself turning in the cold fiery cranks and mechanisms of the new day, like something from a Blake poem or Dante. “Scent of garbage and patchouli and carbon monoxide . . .”
•••
They call me the Chinese Monkey. Smear me like icing. “Oh fuck, what do I do now?”
Um . . .
Take a breath now. . .
I’m a little confused about those days.
My memory’s not the best, and I don’t trust memory anyway. Randall’s dead and my wife hasn’t spoken to me in years.
Pink and blue smear. How do people do that (believe in
their memories—it’s like believing in art)? I remember the
feelings, I think. But I’m not who I was twenty-six years
ago—I have to imagine that person.
Nothing wrong with that. One’s “personality” is continuously being modeled by the, the things that happen. Isn’t that right? (It’s not like we’re instruments that are played, we’re like dogs that are trained. Or hairdos. ((I, hairdo.))) Plus one tends to get more selfish and conservative, if maybe less judgmental, upon coming with age to realize one will actually be dying. And I guess I do have an advantage across all these years for having the same genes and experience as the second lead in the story . . .
Then again, maybe there’s destiny (“Character is fate”). (“Tomorrow is another day. But then, so was yesterday.”) Maybe I’m just too fastidious (yeah, right)—but be that as it may, I wouldn’t presume to call it “nonfiction.” It’s all true though! If the truth be told, I’d rather think about Liv Tyler right now. She’s such a distraction. I wonder is her glow subliminally tinged by her name’s hint of “Liz Taylor”? Nah—that’s pretty far-fetched. Her coltishness—velvety—, and (star-) crossed eyes, her overbite, so lovely it makes my room change color (“teeth to hurt”). That’s what we want from a star. How will she age I can’t help but wonder. Imagine her with a dick! Wow! (Anyway I’ve never been so impressed by Liz Taylor. She’s for real faggots. I’m not really a faggot. I just have a queer streak. A little fond affection for cock.)
I still do things that I absorbed from Him. Where are the dead? Piled up in me like a logjam? Is that why my chest is dry and hurts, why it’s hard to talk? Don’t be overdramatic. It’s true they (the dead) can take care of themselves, whereas we need to take care of ourselves (each other). Maudlin (word derived from “Mary Magdelene”!). “One’s soul is in other people.”
Yes, I’m over fifty now!
and mentally skipping
around the hospital room
surprised to be alive
(don’t ask)
but here-and-now so pleased
to be that suddenly I break
break I tell you, break
into
song like Anna Karina!
Good grief. Sorry. This anesthetic or pain killer (same thing, isn’t it?: no-pain=numb) (on top of everything else, I had to have a hernia operation) they have me on is nice, but it has me lulled (and riddled, shuddering, with parentheses)—woozy, giddy, and well-ventilated. I am fond of freesias. I close my eyes and go to the most marvelous places. Opiation. Opiation freesia places. And M. Jean-Luc! He’s the poster boy for getting old (and making things more and more beautiful and wild, not to say funny, less to say sad ((I don’t want to say “deep” at all, as you might imagine))). The window and the freesias are where the eye goes (when not inwards). Freesias Where the Eye Goes. Freesias: those Picabian mechanoerotic clusters like the unlikely so-fragrant flesh-pockets of the air itself (revealed by some colorful method of scientific staining). God, what am I talking about? It is a flower like an old-time movie star (Claudette Colbert, Norma Shearer) with those stunning and elaborate, bright butter-yellow, deceptively delicate heads on those swaying bent thin stalks. But aren’t they all? The “stars” altogether more like flowers than stars . . . As penises are . . .
It’s funny, I liked the least the other week that picture of Schiele’s in the show at the Modern that depicted bare winter branches, like insect-legs’ -legs with -legs, in a crackling dry web or network across the canvas, sky—it looked to me like a motel room abstraction—but somehow now it has me finding a similar freezing view from this window so pleasing, which I would have hated before. Viva art. About writing as acting—but how you can’t err (Indivi duum est ineffabile)—how we wondered and worried and gossiped re R. Terence.
See you later (or earlier I mean).
Paul found himself wandering in the direction of his old friend Ted’s apartment and so he called him up. Ted asked him to pick up some Lucky Strikes and come on over. Ted, large in a smudged white t-shirt and unshaven, was squeezing the blankets up to his neck as he lay in the bed that took up most of the apartment’s only real room. As Paul entered, the wooden bed was in the far right corner, with narrow pathways beside it against the left wall and at its foot. Next to Paul at the foot of the bed was a typewriter on a tiny table with its kitchen chair, and alongside it a few small overstuffed bookcases covered with papers and ashtrays. A smoking filterless butt hung and bobbed in the corner of Ted’s mouth, forcing him to squint his eyes.
“Hi buddy, I just made a new poem and it got me thinking. I want to try a kind of mental suggestion on you, OK? Now I know I’m not a pretty picture, though I have my partisans—but imagine you’d just come from looking at a totally great painting, one that did things in a way you’d never seen in a picture before, that isolated this class of look you’d never noticed, or at least appreciated the greatness of, till now, and to which I, here, am closely enough related in my magnitude and general vista as to thereby reveal to you my own heretofore overlooked and unfairly neglected beauty . . .”
“Not necessary, Ted.”
“Great. You knew all along. I’m glad you see it my way. And you, you too are beautiful . . .”
“May I ask what’s the pill situation?”
“Atrocious.”
“Oh.”
“And that’s the least of it.”
“I’m glad you admit that.”
“I admit it, son . . .”
Paul’s eyes focused on a piece of notebook paper that was taped to the wall. Scrawled in a big baby-handed script onto it were the words “don’t understand” and Paul felt a little dizzy. He felt as if a larger reality was just beyond his comprehension, though possibly reachable. It was trippy. A ringing sound swelled from one ear through his skull to the other. He shuddered, his whole body’s position-sense vibrated, and he was momentarily deeply, nicely smeared. He staggered slightly. Ted laughed and asked if he was all right.
“I had a crazy night last night—wait—days, actually, well . . . two nights and a day . . .”
“Tell Ted.”
He hadn’t realized how worn out he was and grateful for a little kindness. He sat down in the wooden kitchen chair he pulled around into the doorway. “I’ve been with this boy and he has me completely turned around . . .”
“A boy, huh . . .”
“It sure is going to make a mess of things.”
“What do you mean he has you ‘turned around,’ exactly?
Your butt in his face?”
“Ha ha.”
“Well, he makes you dizzy?”
“. . .Yeah,” said Paul nasally.
“Yeah, but you are fucking—or whatever you homosexuals call it—him . . . ?”
“Well, what am I talking about?”
“That’s exciting, or suspenseful anyway. He’s the kid at the reading, at the party, right?”
“You know about him?”
“Yeah. I was there, I got there late. People were talking about him. I actually saw you leave with him . . . I wondered how long it would take once you got married.”
“I know, god damn it. What the hell does it mean? Shit. He already has me half pulled into his psycho way of looking at things. I need a little perspective. On the other hand—”
“What I’ve got is yours, pal.”
“Do you have a drink?”
“A drink? Nope. Sorry.”
“What the hell do you have?”
“Me. It. And . . . But no butt!”
“Uh . . . Ah . . . It’s all so weird . . .Why don’t we go to a bar right now. Do you want to go sit at a bar? Like the Blarney Stone on 14th Street?”
“Sure!”
So they went out. Ted had brought his new poem to show Paul. Paul glanced at it, tipsy and preoccupied.
Most of all I meant to come to you;
along the way, my boat
got entangled.
I know it seems it’s always that way.
In breezes, at dawn, with the heavy
metals of the current blasting, I can’t
seem to get a single moving profile caught
or I am tacking and the wheel’s
awry, birds already long awake.
For you I salvaged the prow
and partly wasted
coffers of plight. Headings
that exposed me to the vagaries of urine
razed my thoughts, and
if I run aground it’s probably decided
by the grateful dead
those who have kept me from coming to you

Chapter 14

T. got close to one of his crazy friend John Schwartz’s friends, Catherine. John Schwartz knew her from the hospital. She was nineteen and had dropped out of Barnard. The doctors’ diagnosis of her was that she was a paranoid schizophrenic. That was worth some helpful medicine, but the prescriptions and dosages were always shifting and her episodes were frequent. Sometimes she didn’t take the medicine. She often sought out Terence when her mind started to go.
One early autumn day they decided to walk up to the Gotham Book Mart in midtown, about forty blocks—two miles—from the Lower East Side. The sharp air was like liquor, like crisp thick Aquavit from the freezer, or fermented rough cider.
Catherine was tall, almost as tall as T., and her hair was dark red-blond. She had deep-set eyes, high cheekbones, and sea-shell white skin that was palely freckled and nearly poreless, as smooth as water. She was big and pretty enough that when T. first met her his impression was of power and independence, but though she was proud and kept to herself, he quickly learned about her fragility. She was frank with him about it. That morning he saw uncertainty in her face but they didn’t refer to it. They were happy to be making the excursion they’d planned.
New York seemed dignified and demure and teeming with treasure in the hour just after noon when they started uptown. They walked up Second Avenue a few blocks and shifted west through the little park that faced the Quaker meeting house above 15th Street. The air was windy. They looked at the buildings and talked about what the streets and weather made them think of. Broad, bland Third Avenue with its small apartment buildings over ephemeral bar-restaurants wasn’t very tempting and neither were the camera shops and delis and tall office buildings of Park. They walked further west and then turned right to take Broadway’s diagonal up past the Flatiron Building and across Fifth and Sixth Avenues via the street’s intelligent and actually narrow path of vintage New York business districts, towards Times Square, where they had the idea of getting lunch.
“Man, New York does make me happy,” said T.
“Yeah,” said Catherine, wild-eyed.
As they walked he let his hand brush hers and it was like walking on the moon. They’d had sex a couple of times, and Catherine had seemed frantic for it, but T.’d wondered whether her abandon came not so much because she cared for him and felt safe but because she was fleeing her brain. Then, at another time, she’d seemed to do it by decision and he’d wondered whether the sex might be a courtesy she showed him. She knew about Paul.
Looking at her made his own reality more delicate, not because she was crazy, but because he liked her so much. They stopped to sit under the trees just above 23rd Street in Madison Square Park for a minute.
“I’ve been having problems,” she said.
“You have?”
“Yeah.” The rims of her eyes were red. “I am a problem child.”
“What’s happened?”
“The usual.”
“Is it bad?”
“I don’t know, not really.”
“What happens?”
“Well,” she began, “windows want me to jump out of
them.” But she still seemed as if she could start crying.
“Oh . . .”
“Why are they there if you’re not supposed to go through them?”
“They’re there so there’s light and space instead of just blank walls.”
“It doesn’t make any sense . . .What do you know? You were brought up in a cave.”
“Yeah I was raised by goats.”
“So what do you know?”
“Nothing.”
He stood up and did some kind of weird jig, his head bent forward and index fingers pointing up along his temples. Ridiculous as he looked, it was also grotesque enough that she might have actually been shocked. You could see that in her face. She laughed though.
They started back up Broadway. After a block T. took her hand. He smiled inwardly at his juvenile imagination. He held her hand as if it was natural, but the linking of their hands charged them so that it was like they became invisible; they could see everything with more knowledge than the things they were looking at. Catherine seemed calmed and happy. They looked in the store windows and watched the people that passed.
They arrived at Times Square and looked for where to get lunch. Times Square was battered and scratched but cozy, with the theater marquees lining 42nd Street advertising genre movies and exploitation movies and second-run double features, the sidewalks dark with furtive people looking for trouble, and trouble advertising itself somewhat furtively from the midst of jumbo timeless-seeming neon signs, novelty shops, and game parlors. They found a tiny luncheonette tucked among the dusty tourist traps along Seventh Avenue near 47th Street and took a two-person table along the wall. They opened up the sharp-edged laminated menus a guy handed them across the counter and read the listings and looked at the shiny though faded-looking color pictures of three or four of the place’s most appetizing entrees.
T. saw her get stalled as she read. She was frowning at the plaque of a menu, her face uncertain and almost ashamed. T. looked back at his and in a minute saw that the big picture of spaghetti with meatballs was captioned “Fried Chicken Dinner.” He asked, “Can I look?” and reached across and pulled her menu around and it was the same. She smiled but with an embarrassed look.
T. laughed happily, not quite fully aware. He asked: “Have you been out in the sun? You look freckly.”
“You sound freckly.”
“No, really, you could almost be someone else, the way your face is like switched on so the . . . freckles are backlighted.”
“I am someone else. I don’t like my freckles, don’t you know that? You said I was like a female cardinal. Why did you say that?”
“Because I like female cardinals.”
“I see through you, bird-boy . . . Don’t get me wrong.” She looked really frightened and ashamed.
They ate a little bit. In a minute he caught her looking at him in a startled way and she said, “Where’s your arm?”
“This is my arm.”
“I want to go,” she said. “Can we go someplace quieter?”
“How about Central Park, or Bryant Park?”
“OK.”
They went outside. She said, “Everything dead is alive. Everything alive is dead.”
“Let’s go to Bryant Park—it’s closer. Or do you want to get a cab home?”
“I’m dreaming,” she said. T. pulled her through the doorway of a building and into a corner of the little vestibule in front of revolving doors. She looked at him distraught but
insistently.
“What do you want to do?” he asked. “Where do you want to go? Can you think of a good place?” She looked close to panic. “Do you want to get a drink?”
“Yes.”
“We need a liquor store because I don’t know any place they’re going to serve me around here.”
The drinking softened things, and they drank for the next few hours. They eventually passed out, and when T. woke up he found her writing his name in her lower belly with a razor
blade, and he talked her into checking into the hospital.
There were features typical of her episodes: the inanimate becoming animate (chairs being insects) and the animate inanimate (people mechanical: “Where’s your arm?! That’s not really your arm!”); and her sense that the world was being revealed as it actually is, only free of the distortions and interpretations imposed by the brain, without hierarchies or classifications or stories, and, most importantly and frighteningly, without the world having any relation to her. It was a kind of spectacular hell, with no emotion except for the sadness and panic that followed from her memory that it hadn’t always been that way, that there was a more comforting state that she’d known.
When she was OK, T. would try to talk about it with her, hoping it might help. “You know I think you actually are seeing things the way they are, or in a way that is more correct than the ordinary ways of seeing things, but if it’s agonizing and horrifying there’s something wrong with it. That’s all there is to it. Truth is harmony if you’re going to be alive. It may be a highly customized kind of harmony, but it’s harmony. Suffering is only right as a means to an end. I wish that instead of arguing with me you’d try to see it this way. You are not apart from things.”
He told Paul that one loves the person who gives oneself expression by being receptive, by being capable of perceiving oneself. Most of the time we are only a little alive, like a book in an obscure language. But because of those who can read us, who understand us and what we are signifying, we are brought to life, and we love them for realizing us.