Love among the Ginkgoes

She's got everything she needs, she's an artist, she don't look back

However, I don’t have everything I need. I could use some more subscribers.

She walked down Perry Street every day because that was where she lived.  Perry Street with the Ginkgoes, Perry Street with the little French restaurant on the corner, Perry Street with the garbage piled along the curb like all the other streets, Perry Street with its brownstones and townhouses, Perry Street where you could still get a walk-up railroad flat with a tub in the kitchen and window on an airshaft for $90 a month.  If you walked west on Perry Street a few blocks, you could smell the river and then you could see it, the great Hudson River, wide and brown and ever flowing south -- except when the tide came in -- the jumping off point for the West, because all of America was out there across the river, the rest of the country she was always threatening to leave for, the open skies and the weird accents and the cowboy hats and the highways that didn’t stop until they hit the other coast.

She was an artist.  She designed fabrics, except she could never get enough work to pay the rent, so she was a waitress at a bar on Christopher Street, too.  Nearly everyone she knew was an actor, or a singer, or a writer, or pianist, or a puppeteer, or a set designer, or a lighting technician, or a grip on movies – and something else as well -- a bartender, or a carpenter, or they sold shoes on 8th Street, or they waited tables like she did, or they dealt a little grass on the side.  You could still do that back then, work two jobs and make enough to live in the city if you were young enough and flexible enough and willing to carry your groceries up to your fifth-floor walk-up and deal with the roaches and the occasional rat scampering out of the pile of garbage on the street when you were coming home from your job at 3 a.m., if indeed you were willing to deal with coming home alone from work at 3 a.m. when you were 23 and you were a woman and the streets of New York weren’t safe, even in the Village, and especially not at 3 a.m.

See, if you were a woman and you lived alone, or even if you had a roommate like she had had when she first moved to Manhattan a few years ago, you spent most of each day by yourself.  Walking alone down the street, like she was walking down Perry Street right now, on your way to work, or back from work, or to the store to pick up milk and cream cheese, or to Sixth Avenue for bagels, or to 14th Street to catch the uptown subway to 34th Street to walk downtown a few blocks to see Bernie to show him the designs you’ve been working on for the past few days, another trip to the big dusty crowded factory with all of the women and the sewing machines and the noise, and who knows what he did with your stuff?  Shopped it around to the dress-makers and blouse-makers to see if any of them thought it would sell, and then somehow if somebody bit, one of your sheets would make it down to North Carolina or Georgia or wherever they were still making fabric and then in six months you might be walking past Barney’s on 17th Street and there it would be, the colors and lines you drew, fitted on a mannequin right there on the street in a big window where everyone could see, there was  what you worried over and hoped for and sweated over up on the fifth floor on your kitchen table next to the tub, weak light from a winter sky seeping through the dirty window from the top of the airshaft, with  nobody watching, nobody caring, nobody to talk to, nobody to ask what they thought, just you and a big sheet of paper and your watercolors and your brushes and your dreams.

You spent hours alone with your dreams.  You could feel them filling up inside you like a big balloon, dreams so big you felt they would burst, dreams that would explode out of you like a sob or a shout or a scream, dreams that kept you going until they didn’t, until they collapsed and you couldn’t feel them anymore. You didn’t know what was worse, to have them or lose them, to dream or just to throw up your hands and stop the whole thing, the struggling over your paints and your brushes and the images flowing out of your mind through your fingers onto the paper, just give up and forget rushing uptown on the subway with your portfolio praying that someone would dream along with you and see what you saw, see the beauty, see the light, see the colors, see the shapes and lines the way you did, that they would see you, because what was on those pages wasn’t a dream, it was you.

Sometimes you would lie in bed and you’d look up at the ceiling in the dark and think, I’m too big for this city, or I’m too small, you didn’t know which.  Sometimes it mattered a lot, and sometimes it didn’t matter at all.  Sometimes when you closed your eyes, you could see huge spaces, big denim blue skies with giant cotton clouds or inky black skies filled with swarms of stars from horizon to horizon, more stars than you ever imagined there could be, and around you the world was so big you couldn’t imagine ever reaching its edges.  Sometimes you would be walking down the street and the world would close in around you, branches of the trees reaching down as if to block your way, the sounds of the city blaring at you like a jazz combo in a basement room, plinks and plonks pounded on the piano over the bleats of the sax, the chrome hits on the snare, the brassy clangs on the cymbals, cries of pain and screams of freedom filling your ears until your eyes teared up and you just wanted out.

It was a man’s city, that was part of it, the jazz guys were men and the rockers were men and the bodies along the bar at midnight were men and the people running things in the garment district were men and the bankers were men and the politicians were men…oh, there was Bella Abzug, but look at the way they treated her, the men, like they all knew better than her, like she had walked uninvited into their club and she had to shout to be heard over the bottomless din of their bullshit.  She wouldn’t last, neither would Shirley Chisholm, they’d run both of them out, the men’s club of the congress, they’d run them out because they couldn’t stand to listen to what they had to say because what they said was the truth and the truth hurt.  For all the toughness men thought they had, they couldn’t stand even the tiniest microscopic prick of pain, it was like underneath the armor of their suits and ties and wingtip shoes they had the skin of babies, so soft and pink and puffy if you pinched them they’d yelp like you’d driven a nail into them. 

You had to listen to them at night in the bar waiting on tables, you had to smile and ask if they’d like another beer or another bourbon, and you had to listen to them pounding their chests like they were chimpanzees trying to show all the other chimps who was bigger, who was tougher, who was the alpha chimp, one of them would buy a round and puff up  his chest and out would come another story about another deal he’d made, how he’d screwed the other guy and he didn’t even know it, and all the other chimps would bounce up and down in their chairs and they would toast the big chimp and he would yell at you across the room, hey, darling, how about another round, and put one for you on the tab on me, and you’d have to fill the order and deliver the round and smile like you were playing along when you knew it was their game, and the game was rigged, and it was rigged against you, and the whole thing stunk like a gigantic sewer, and all you wanted to do was get home and soak in the tub until you got the smell of them off you.

You’d get in bed and you felt stiff and your legs hurt and your arms fell along the sides of your body until you couldn’t feel them anymore, like somebody had taken them away and left you with nothing to draw with, nothing to paint with, nothing to turn your dreams into colors and shapes, nothing to create the beauty you felt inside of you that was so hard to get out.

And the next morning it started all over again, the sounds of the city leaking through your window like a discordant drum solo, and you knew you had to get out of bed and pick up the jeans and bra and top you left on the floor because you couldn’t deal with them, you couldn’t deal with any of it anymore, but you knew you had to because you lived in this city, you lived in this world, and part of being a woman was to take it straight, no chaser, walk down that street like you belonged, like you meant it, like no one could get in your way and stop you from moving forward, from being who you were, because you belonged to yourself, nobody else.  You owned it, your life, and nobody was going to scare you away, nobody was going to take it from you, certainly not any of the men who thought they were running things but were really just running from themselves.

It was late in the afternoon, and you had spent the day at the kitchen table with your watercolors and your brushes and it had been a good day, and you had the night off from work at the bar, and you were feeling pretty good about yourself, so you walked down Bleecker Street to Jones Street and went to the butcher and picked up a steak, a good steak, a piece of prime beef all marbled with streaks of milky fat, and you stopped at the vegetable market and got a couple of potatoes and some lettuce for a salad, and you picked up a bottle of red wine, a new one from California the old man running the place said everyone was wild about, and you were heading up West Fourth Street toward home when you saw him.  He was one of the guys from the bar, another writer, another guy standing there telling stories and full of himself, but one night he had asked you what you really did for a living, and you told him you were an artist, and he had said he would love to see some of your stuff, so you told him a little about a piece you had been working on just that day and he had listened.  He was the first guy you had told about your work in a long time and he had listened.

Men didn’t listen, but he had, so she took a chance.  Hi, she said.  What have you been up to? 

I just came from that electric shop on Sixth Avenue.  I’ve got to put a new socket on my desk lamp, so I picked one up.  It’s a great place.  They have everything.  Have you been there?

She had been there just the other day to get a new plug for a floor lamp that was frayed and shorting out.  Do you know anything about plugs?   

Sure, he said.  Let me take that bag for you.  I know all about plugs.