Read an Excerpt
The Christopher Park Regulars
A Novel
By Edward Swift OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1989 Edward Swift
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-7041-5
CHAPTER 1
THE PARK
Christopher Park, a small triangle of benches and trees enclosed by an iron fence with three gates, is, oddly enough for Greenwich Village, bordered by four streets: West Fourth, along with a sliver of Seventh Avenue South, Christopher Street, and Grove Street. The gate at the main entrance is graced with a vine-covered arch, but the other two gates are unadorned, and sometimes all three are locked for an entire day. When that happens the police officer in charge of opening the park each morning is met with severe reprimands by a handful of regular benchsitters. These devoted few, the Christopher Park regulars, expect all three gates to be open when they arrive, usually by late morning or early afternoon, and to remain open until midnight. For the most part they reserve their benchsitting to the warm months, but some of them, Andrew T. Andrews for one, and C.C. Wake for another, will often brave the coldest days of winter; Andrew, to work on his epic novel-in-progress; C.C. Wake, to answer the public telephone located near the main entrance.
CHAPTER 2
ANDREW'S PLACE
On the first warm day of the year Andrew T. Andrews sharpened his pencils until they were all the same length. Then he capped each one with a new eraser and tested the points against his wrist. They were very sharp, and that made him feel secure. "I am ready to write the truth," he said as he left his Bleecker Street apartment. His pencils were in one hand, his notebook in the other, and a wadded-up dollar bill along with his house keys made his left leg feel heavier than the right one. That bothered him. He felt out of balance, and didn't know what to do about it. "I'll be all right once I sit down," he assured himself. At Christopher Park, not to be confused with the nearby Sheridan Square, Andrew sat on his favorite bench and began scribbling in his spiral notebook. He was relieved to be able to pick up exactly where he left off the day before. Suddenly his world seemed balanced once again. At the age of forty-eight Andrew had completed two unpublished novels and was determined to become a famous writer. "With a name like Andrew T. Andrews, how can I fail?" He held tenaciously to this point of view.
His first book was about himself. His second book was about himself, and his work-in-progress pursued the same theme. Yet he insisted that he was not writing a trilogy. "I am displaying the full range of human propensities and probabilities." That's how he sometimes described what he was doing.
Andrew T. Andrews was what some people still called "Old Manhattan." Born on the Upper East Side, he had spent his summers on Long Island and had attended boarding school in Connecticut. At Yale he majored in mathematics. At MIT he received a masters and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. Then he married a woman from Boston and returned to New York where he went to work for a prestigious consulting firm in the financial district. His father, a successful surgeon, had urged him to accept the position. Dr. Andrews had also encouraged his only son to move into a townhouse on East Sixty-sixth Street. But what Andrew really wanted to do all along was to live in artistic poverty while writing a great novel, or better still, several of them.
Twenty-four years later, immediately after the death of his father, Andrew left his job, his wife, and his twin daughters, who were graduating from Harvard. He packed one suitcase with three changes of clothes as well as a coffee pot, a cup, a plate, and a frying pan. "This is all I'll ever need," he said when he left East Sixty-sixth Street and moved to the Village. "For the rest of my life I intend to devote every minute of my time to writing."
Three years and two books later he considered himself an undiscovered success. His family considered him a problem. The regulars in Christopher Park tried not to consider him at all.
"I am almost ready for exposure," he assured himself on that first warm day of the year when Christopher Park was suddenly filled with familiar faces, and Andrew, although he rarely spoke to the regulars, was aware of their presence and was hoping they were taking the time to admire his display of artistic discipline. That day he was dressed in a new, carefully chosen outfit, an "Art for Art's Sake" sweatshirt with baggy, white pants from the paint store and tennis shoes worn without socks or laces. His eyes were magnified by horn-rimmed glasses; stemless, they were held to the bridge of his nose by shoestrings wrapped around his ears and tied under his chin. His new haircut, short on the sides and long on the top, was designed to elongate his face, and it did.
Andrew lived alone in three rooms on the second floor of a tenement on Bleecker Street. His windows were covered with sheets, and a bare mattress was on the floor. He hardly ever swept, cooked, or washed his clothes. Sometimes he even forced himself to starve.
"On Bleecker Street I have learned to recognize my true voice as it appears on the printed, that is to say, the handwritten as well as the typewritten, page." He wrote this in the margin of his spiral notebook. He had no idea how he would use the sentence in his novel, but something told him that he would eventually find a place for it.
From the beginning of his writing career Andrew had enjoyed working in public, and that day was no exception. It pleased him to know that someone might be watching, that someone might be trying to guess his subject matter. But it displeased him to be interrupted, so he always isolated himself from everyone else by sitting on a bench that the Parks Department never bothered to clean. Pigeons roosted in a plane tree that shaded the bench, and their droppings dirtied all but a small space at one end. That's where Andrew usually sat. He could be alone there. The pigeon droppings put distance between him and the next person.
The next person was Cherokee Rose. She was eighty-nine years old and had published one novel, entitled Neither Here Nor There. The book was 1,915 pages and no longer available, even at the Strand.
That afternoon Cherokee was wearing what she called her Cherry Orchard skirt. It came from the Circle Rep, was ankle length and dark blue. Her Ukrainian blouse had lots of yellow on it, and her Chinese slippers were black and gold with green dragons. Her long, red hair had just been shampooed and was dripping wet. While it dried in the sun, she smoked filterless cigarettes and read the National Enquirer. "This is the only newspaper in America that's brave enough to print the truth," she told Andrew.
To him she was just a familiar face and not a name. He had never heard of her book, which took forty-five years to complete, and, although he was vaguely aware of being addressed, he did not acknowledge her presence. He was too busy writing about his life in the crib. His last five pages were filled with mathematical formulas expressed in baby talk and nursery rhymes. "I'm trying to create a new language," he kept telling himself.
The High Fiber Man, the thirty-four-year-old heir to a breakfast cereal fortune, was sitting on a row of benches lining the other side of the park. Presently he got up and approached Cherokee, who was staring into space.
"Can I have a light?" he asked.
"No! Because you interrupted me while I was thinking." Cherokee slid a book of matches under her voluminous skirt.
"Shhh," said Andrew, without making eye contact.
The High Fiber Man was dressed in a dusty tuxedo and Red Ball tennis shoes, his daily uniform. He had decided to ask Andrew for a match, but a Mexican transvestite, Maria la Hija de Jesús, stopped him. She was wearing a turquoise gown that wrapped and tied behind her neck. Costume jewelry was pinned to her turban, bodice, and gloved arms.
"Darling," said Maria la Hija. "Do you like dis, and dis, and dot?" She pointed to her necklaces, bracelets, and a few other things.
"No, you're wearing them all wrong." The High Fiber Man, gripping a briefcase between his legs, rearranged the jewelry. Maria squealed when he touched her throat.
"Shhh," said Andrew. "Someone is working on something that's very important." No one paid him a bit of attention.
He had abandoned the new language to work on another chapter. Now he was writing about the time a horse threw him and he escaped without injury.
The High Fiber Man and Maria la Hija sat opposite Andrew and discussed Maria's married lovers. She had four. The High Fiber Man said that he lived above romance.
"What? You expect me to believe?" said Maria. "I am not the idiot around here." She glared at Andrew.
He was trying to remember the name of the horse that threw him and did not feel Maria's eyes, nor did he notice that Dr. Walter Wormser, the noted Jungian analyst, was carefully observing the goings-on in the park. Dr. Wormser, whose grey hair clung to his head like a cloud of smoke, was standing outside the park and wondering when he should make himself known to the regulars. His three-piece suit was wrinkled and stained, and his "brief case," a Mexican shoulder bag embroidered with plumed serpents, was hanging from his neck like a giant amulet. With a pair of binoculars he brought Andrew T. Andrews into sharp focus, but his attention was soon diverted by a new arrival.
Victor L. (for Lloyd) Russell, the composer, not to be confused with his brother Victor L. (for Lawrence) Russell, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, entered the park on the Seventh Avenue side and sat on a bench directly across from Cherokee. Andrew had never heard of the composer, but he had heard of the Nobel scientist. Dr. Wormser, an authority on the interpretation of fairy tales, had heard of neither.
Victor L., the composer, was always being mistaken for Victor L., the late physician whose mutating flu vaccine was being used the world over. While the Nobel brother had been rapidly achieving fame, the composer had been slowly sinking into obscurity. His compositions were hardly ever played anymore except on his own Walkman. He was plugged into it that afternoon.
"I'm listening to myself," he announced in a loud voice. "Somebody has to. It might as well be me. I can't remember what I sound like anyway, so I could be listening to just about any body. That's what happens when you get to be ninety-eight."
He was wearing a fisherman's hat with mosquito netting hanging from the brim. Because of his fear of all flying insects, no flesh was left exposed. "Anything that bites or stings is always biting or stinging me." He was listening to his fifth symphony and did not realize that he was shouting. "My blood is sweet." His voice carried into the traffic. "That's why they bite me. That's why I'm all covered up. I can't stand to be eaten on. Drives me crazy."
While conducting his symphony with a pencil, pigeons fluttered about his feet, and three parakeets, refugees from the bird store on Bleecker, strutted with the pigeons. Victor L. changed his conducting tempo abruptly, and the birds took off like a cadenza in a mad scene.
They flew directly over Andrew's head and barely missed him, but he didn't realize this. He was striving for the courage to write about the time his mother kissed him goodnight twice in one evening. He was pleased with Proustian overtones, so pleased that he paid no attention to C.C. Wake.
C.C. called himself the Earthquake Expert of Lower Manhattan. He was standing near the Christopher Street entrance and lecturing on the killer quake that hit Mexico City a few years ago. He thought it had happened yesterday. He thought that the tremor that awakened New York City had happened that morning, but that was years ago also. C.C. believed he was a seismologist trained at Stanford. He didn't know exactly where Stanford was and sometimes confused it with Philadelphia. He came from Philadelphia. His family was Main Line, and for thirty years his mother paid him to stay away.
"I felt it hit before it hit," C.C. said. "That's how you can tell if it's a real quake. If you feel it one day and it hits the next day you can bet your life on it. Real quakes let you feel them beforehand. That goes for just about everything else too."
"What method will I use to break through to this individual?" Dr. Wormser asked himself, while Andrew, chewing on his pencil, read a passage he had just written. He read aloud but only to himself. "In a consulting firm pregnant with resources I seemed to have been the only resource available. Flaming innuendos of discontent proved detrimental to my budding awareness. I found myself floundering with uncomfortable aspirations and drives." He was very pleased with this passage. It made him smile to read it.
Lulu, sometimes called the Statue Woman, strolled past Andrew as he chewed his eraser. At the narrow end of the park she turned a trashcan upside down and stood on it. She was a young woman with a sad face who shopped at the Salvation Army and lived on welfare.
"At last she has arrived," exclaimed Dr. Wormser, rapidly adjusting his spy glasses. He had been observing Lulu for months and was anxious to know her.
"Today I have a patriotic pose for you," she announced from the top of the trashcan. "I'll hold it exactly one hour, which I will time by counting 3,600 seconds."
The patriotic pose was very simple. Her right hand was protecting her heart. Her left hand was resting on her left shoulder.
"The erotic poses are your best," declared the High Fiber Man. "Do one."
"Oh yes, yes, yes," said Dr. Wormser with uncurbed exuberance.
"The erotic poses were part of yesterday's theme," the Statue Woman explained to the High Fiber Man. "Don't make me repeat myself, I'll get embarrassed. You'll make me turn red, and then I'll lose count. You know how I get. You know how confusing it is. I've already lost several seconds because of you." Suspiciously looking over her shoulder, she began whispering audibly. "The police don't want me here. They're timing me. They know how to count too."
Andrew had just written another sentence that pleased him. As the Statue Woman counted aloud, he read to himself.
"Assertive, perceptive, resonate voiced, I was held captive not only by a job description limited in nature, but also by an authority bold in participation, sympathetic in understanding, and allegorically equalistic in concern."
Just outside the park a large woman in a powder-blue gown was getting ready to sing an aria. Once on the brink of a promising career as a coloratura soprano, she had been forced to give up her ambition when a stage accident rendered her slightly tone deaf. "I no longer care to sing in the fine opera houses of the world," she explained to the small crowd waiting for her to begin. "My audience is right here on the streets."
"Do a mad scene," the High Fiber Man requested.
"Which one?" the soprano asked.
"Just any one as long as it's wild," the cereal heir joked.
The soprano turned on her cassette. "First I will sing 'Sempre libera'," she announced with hands folded at her expansive waistline. "You understand this is merely a warmup for today's speciality, the Queen of the Night."
Nearby, a woman dressed entirely in black was feeding the pigeons and starving the stray parakeets. "Those damn parakeets eat too much," she told Dr. Wormser as he crossed the street to enter the park.
"Who do those displaced parakeets represent to you?" he asked the woman, a noted book reviewer whose name was Frances Judd.
"Guess what's wrong with me?" she shouted in response to Dr. Wormser's question. He drew a blank as the soprano trilled into the heavy traffic. "I'll tell you what's wrong with me," said Frances, "I've read too many books, that's what. Thirty-seven a week is my quota. That's a little over five a day. Ask me something. See if I know what you're talking about."
"Nobody wants to ask you anything!" Cherokee Rose threw her voice across the park. She hated the reviewer. She hated all reviewers, but Andrew liked them. He enjoyed imagining that the critics would one day praise his style as well as his content. He enjoyed knowing that one day everyone would be reading his many books and that college students would spend semesters analyzing his symbols and layers of meaning.
He quickly scanned his afternoon's work. "Well, I have stated it all." He gave himself a congratulatory pat on the leg. "Today I have written with uncontrollable insight." Then he got up to leave. No one noticed his exit except Dr. Wormser, who had just read a colleague's book, The Once and Future Self.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Christopher Park Regulars by Edward Swift. Copyright © 1989 Edward Swift. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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