New York City Serenade

from As It Were: The Long-Lost Blue-Noted Romance Yarn by Amos Bankhead

Our tide had ebbed again, but I woke one morning, hazy from a dream of Calli, and immediately I thought of Chuang Tzu: was I a man who’d dreamed I was a butterfly or was I a butterfly dreaming I’m a man?

I set the question aside and decided to fly out to see her. She’d spent the summer in Paris but was now back in New York for the fall semester. I had her address from the letters we’d written; she lived above a pizzeria on Mulberry Street, and she'd told me she paid her rent in cash over the counter to a guy who was a dead ringer for Richard Castellano in The Godfather.

It had been a few years since I’d been on an airplane, and as I made my way through my first TSA screening I could hear Charlie in my ear: Everybody’s making money. Everybody but me. On the plane I read Daniel Ellsberg's memoir which Charlie had passed off to me. Once on the ground again, I hailed a cab from JFK, my palms sweating all the way to Little Italy.

I was a nervous wreck but pretended cool, leaning against the facade of the pizzeria with a cigarette, until I spotted her walking up the street. She wore a herringbone overcoat, over my missing-till-then Basquiat t-shirt, blue jeans, and her trusty Jack Purcells. Her hair was half-up and she wore her tortoiseshell glasses, and when she saw me she squinted as her gait slowed, and then she broke into a wide if wavering smile.

We dropped my bag upstairs and then set out to walk. On the street together, we fell into a rhythm, at once familiar and fresh. We had coffee at Reggio and discussed the war in Iraq. It was in reading my father’s books, hanging in Charlie’s garage, and in these conversations with Calli that my political conscience had been born; we’d been having this particular conversation (though when it came to our country and war they were all pretty much the same) since that fateful day in ’01. There at the café we talked of fathers and their progeny, the U.S. war machine, and the fact that we’d spent the majority of our lives being lied to by the people who we were supposed to trust.

In Washington Square Park I sat across from a chess hustler and lost a five-dollar game in five minutes, albeit in somewhat respectable fashion. And then we sat together by the fountain, the geysering mist bracing at the onset of autumn. She told me that she’d dreamed I’d do just what I’d done and show up at her doorstep, and that a big part of her wanted us to be together like we were meant to be—but that another part of her knew she needed to live life without me for a while, to learn herself by herself and maybe have something to contrast me against. I snatched the iPod out of my jacket pocket and found Springsteen’s ‘New York City Serenade’ and we each took an earphone, and there was David Sanctious’ spellbinding piano and Bruce’s heartbreaking acoustic solo, and there was Calliope Jones in my lap, gazing up at me, her Washoestained eyes and the sun off the water embroiled hopelessly.