Notes from the Bowery

By Benedict Giamo

In the U.S., the homeless have traveled from the freight train to the shelter. Skid row was an extended stop along the way. Giamo reveals his encounter with the city and old Bowery of the 1970s. He simply followed the drift of homelessness. When it led him to the Bowery, the historic skid row, he dropped down to what had been, and still was at that time, the netherworld of New York City.

Striving to attain authenticity, the author and his collaborator immersed themselves in the usual activities of the area and befriended the residents. As a result, they were enlightened about the lifestyle and meaning of skid row homelessness. Notes from the Bowery combines the personal essay, literary nonfiction, and cultural history to represent the significance of American life in the city and on the skids.

Engaging, insightful, and deeply felt, Notes from the Bowery will give readers an enriching experience as they accompany the author on a journey of descent and discovery. For more information on this book, log on to www.Xlibris.com.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 6, 2010
• ISBN: 9781465332004

Benedict Giamo

Benedict Giamo is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He has written several books on homelessness in the United States, including On the Bowery, Beyond Homelessness, and The Homeless of Ironweed. His forthcoming book with the University of Notre Dame Press is entitled Homeless Come Home: An Advocate, the Riverbank, and Murder in Topeka, Kansas. He marvels at the wonders of gentrification, yet bemoans the fact that he cannot book a hotel room on the Bowery today for less than $400 per night. Things have changed.

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The Grid of New York

Although I haven’t lived there for twenty-eight years, the city is embedded in my unconscious. I have a recurrent dream about Manhattan in which the chaotic grid of avenues and streets (and skyscrapers, neighborhoods, passers-by) simply gives way to indigenous features of the island. I round a corner, say Broadway and Canal, heading toward Chinatown for some mouthwatering Moo Shu pork on Pell Street, and all of a sudden I step down into an idyllic pastoral setting of marshes, farms, salt meadows, ponds, hillsides, streams, and woodlands where the trees are pandering, each to each. I’m astonished and delighted in the dream to have both city and country in the same location. Sometimes there are winding lanes coursing through orchards and abattoirs, sometimes broader urban highways. Occasionally, you have to brake for wild boars crossing the road. Once I discovered an Appalachian hollow with cabins and shacks where the Lower East Side should have been. In the background, mother midtown—the Empire State Building—loomed. I wanted to know about vacancy rates, crime, the nearest subway stop, breakfast specials. Don’t mention a word of this to developers and real estate agents. When I wake up from the dream, I know I’m smiling, still clinging to the conceit that the metropolis could very well contain such bucolic and folksy regions if only you’d jump off the grid or derail yourself from the reiteration of right angles or dig down deep enough into the island’s bedrock.

Then, after the first cup of coffee, reality reestablishes itself and I realize the scheme of things. As Whitman put it on one of his ferry crossings from Brooklyn to Manhattan: The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one / disintegrated yet part of the scheme. It was an all-or-nothing proposition—cosmopolis or bust, and the best anyone could ever do in the way of accommodation was to live two or three hours away from the city in upstate New York, western Connecticut, or various parts of New Jersey and commute into New York City. Indeed, a very unsatisfactory compromise. At any rate, when I moved from Ohio to the city right after graduating from college (why oh why oh why oh did I leave Ohio?) I didn’t have the option or inclination to be a man on the train. I had always wanted to be in the vortex of the city, a free electron spinning in and around that well-join’d scheme, a design, call it urban divine, that overlaid the slender, gracefully tapered island with architectural piles of glass and steel civilization.

I went to New York because it was better than traveling west from Cleveland to Toledo or Chicago or San Francisco or, in fact, to any other second city in the vast stretches of the land. I wanted to further my education and I knew instinctively that New York, and in particular Manhattan, was the best place to lose myself and reappear in the nexus of self-assertion—money, power, romance, and sheer madness. Although I was open to the possibilities of romance and madness, the two often intertwined, I did not care a hoot about money and power. I was not going into the bond business on Wall Street. I was not going to reinvent myself from magazines and movies in order to chase fame and fortune—that green light at the far end of the bay. No, I was simply going to get the lay of the land and find out what all the fuss was about. I would book myself a classroom at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research at Fifth Avenue and 14th Street and take it from there. I would stay four or five years, obtain my doctorate in clinical psychology, and get going. The plan was clean, the scheme certain.

When I arrived in Manhattan, the nation had just celebrated its bicentennial, which took everyone’s mind off of Watergate and the fall of Saigon, and Jimmy Carter was soon voted the thirty-ninth president. The economy was reeling from the oil crisis and revving up for stagflation, and the spirit of the sixties bifurcated into the disco and punk rock scenes. It was a good time to be an individual again; the me decade of the 1980s was just around the block. I knew no one in the city except for Merk, a dear family friend, more like an adopted aunt, who lived way out in Queens and worked as a dental assistant on 57th Street, near Carnegie Hall. The initial shock of living and studying in the city, the utter insignificance of one’s puny existence amid the vertical and horizontal intricacies of the honeycombed island, was eased somewhat by running into Eddie James, a college acquaintance, who let me stay with him in his one-bedroom apartment at 88th and York on the Upper East Side. This was a rather genteel introduction to the city. Just down the street, on East End Avenue and 88th Street, sat Carl Schurz Park and Gracie Mansion, home of Mayor Beam at the time. The East River lay beyond. I hardly knew Eddie while in college; he was a year ahead of me. But he insisted I stay with him on a pallet at the foot of his bed until I got situated. His father was a famous minister in Harlem and was written into the pages of Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land. Eddie, steeping himself in business and city politics, was taking a different route from his father’s. I had a feeling that he chose this particular apartment building in Yorkville because of its strategic location. He could live in close proximity to power and keep a watchful eye out for all the comings and goings at Gracie Mansion.

I had a long commute on the IRT from Yorkville to the New School, but I was thankful for Eddie’s generosity. In those early months, he helped me from making an utter fool of myself as I made my rounds throughout the city. I greeted prostitutes in passing and gave beggars money; ask and you shall receive, no? He knew what I knew. Though I was no country bumpkin, I was terribly young and naive and undergoing an acute case of dislocation. According to Eddie, the problem was that I was too civil; I needed to be more aggressive—wear the metropolitan stamp of indifference on my face, you know, create a mighty bow wave, and leave a frigid wind in my wake as I cut through city streets. Mostly, I was amused. But he was serious about this and tried to make me over into his image of a sharp, fast-dealing, loan shark New Yorker. Once, when I asked him to trim my hair and beard, he turned me into Lucifer. I was no longer amused. From the neck up I was all angular and pointed. It scared me to look at the menacing stranger in the mirror. I had to cut my beard way back in order to restore some of the roundness of my face and wash my hair every day until the brown curly locks eventually bounced back into place. For a while, I only left the apartment to attend classes, which were held in the evenings, so I had the cover of night going for me. The sole person I talked to was Ruth, an attractive, older stewardess who lived in the next apartment building. As in a Truman Capote novel, we’d open our respective windows and chitchat across the stale air shaft between buildings. It was cute. I told her I was recuperating from brain surgery.

To make matters worse, Eddie did a very stupid thing. He went and got married. I had to vacate after the first of the new year.I didn’t know where to go until Jeff, part of my New School cohort of grad students, and later fellow-collaborator, suggested the place where he was ensconced—The International House, built by John D. Rockefeller in 1930. Evidently, it wasn’t necessary to hail from a foreign land to get a room in that palatial residence. The price was right, about $120 per month, plus I would have a room of my own and a view of the Hudson River from the ninth floor. Showers and bathrooms were down the hall, dorm-style. And, as a microcosm of the cosmopolis, the building had students from all over the world, including a beautiful, saronged woman—a violinist from Jakarta—and a modern dancer from Greece who wore a rose in her hair and moved about so gracefully, so majestically, with her head tilted back, that she reminded me of a Minoan processional figure. Also, there were earnest men from Europe and Asia, who would master high finance and return home to run the business as the torch was passed from one generation to the next. And one or two guests who simply didn’t fill the bill, but somehow got into the I-House on the sly, like Milton, an elderly and stocky Jewish man, who held hand-pushing contests. Try as we might, no one, male or female, could set him askew. His sense of balance and strength was unsurpassed among representatives of one hundred nations. Although the individual rooms were cell-like and austere, the I-House itself was spacious and even grandiose, featuring a stately lounge, brown study, and a cafeteria and pub in the basement to boot. It made me feel as if I was living in the heart of New York. If you left by the front door, you were on the still-fashionable Riverside Drive, just across from Grant’s Tomb and right next door to the lovely Gothic Riverside Church, whose tower houses the world’s largest carillon, with seventy-four swinging bells of mercy. But if you walked out the back door you landed on Claremont Avenue, which is another way of saying Harlem. Being there, in both places at once (front and back doors), I was finally on my own in the city of dramatic contrasts I had so often heard and read about.

After living in Manhattan for six months, I had a solid touristic conception of the city. If I were a cab driver, I could take my passengers without hesitation to the Empire State Building at 34th and Fifth, to Grand Central and the Chrysler Building at Lexington and 42nd, to Times Square at 42nd and Seventh, up to Carnegie Hall at 57th and Seventh and Lincoln Center at Broadway and 64th, over and down to St. Patrick’s Cathedral at 50th and Fifth and nearby Rockefeller Center, and up the Avenue to the Plaza Hotel, Central Park, and the MET. The cognitive map of the city taking shape in my mind was marked with various districts, landmarks, parks, neighborhoods, bus routes, and subway lines. It was the grid structure of Manhattan that made the city so manageable to learn. In a short time, the vast reverberating circuitry of The New York Experience illuminated portions of my brain, as spectacular and garish as the Great White Way of Times Square. Life was getting to be predictable.

The environment of the I-House was comfortable and conducive to a student’s schedule. I fell into a rather disciplined routine—up at the crack of dawn, a long early-morning jog with Jeff through Riverside Park, occasional games of tennis, reading, and reviewing, commuting on the subway, attending classes, more studying, mingling with the international students, and milling about Columbia University and upper Broadway. Even though several Columbia students were shot and killed on a street corner for laughing at their mugger one weekend night (as if to say, why, my man, don’t be preposterous, you can’t possibly mug us), the neighborhood didn’t scare me and I came and went as I pleased. My favorite spots were the Hungarian Pastry Shop at 111th and Amsterdam (across from St. John the Divine) and, of course, the West End Bar and Chock Full o’ Nuts, both on Broadway near the University. At that time, West End had good live jazz playing in the backroom, groups like Count Basie’s band (sans the Count). Jazz at West End was not commercial like it was at the Village Gate and Vanguard. The scene was more casual, relaxed, and spontaneous. One night as Basie’s group was playing, I spied a note being passed from a man at a table near the front and the bass player. Before long, the man left his table and walked up to join the group. He unpacked his clarinet and laid down a version of Misty that rained down inside of me for days on end, the drizzly November of my soul, sayeth Ishmael. This very beat clarinet player, a music man par excellence, being burnt and tattered in his wear, was made for the song too. It seemed that all of his life he was being made for this moment. He stayed on for a few more numbers and then resumed his spot at his table, alone but satisfied. The audience was appreciative, and the boys in the band were beaming with beatific righteousness, for they had done a fellow traveler a good turn.

I must have been the youngest grad student at the New School, which was the epitome of adult graduate education. (As I said, classes were held only in the evening and at night.) The average age of a grad student was around thirty-five; some were in their fifties and sixties. On the whole, the students—most worked full-time during the day—were bright, quick, competitive, and experienced. A few had their problems they were attempting to work through by studying abnormal and clinical psychology. In the group process lab for one course, the two most dominant members—male and female—reconstituted their own dysfunctional families. Yours truly, a Dominance One (the lowest) according to the Edwards Personal Preference Scale, got caught in the crossfire regularly. Jeff began to call me Dominance One. For a while, it stuck, until, out of sheer necessity, I began to climb up the scale on that category. And I recall one very peculiar student who walked backwards, even up the escalator. Word had it that he was very paranoid. To the classroom, to the cafeteria, to the library he was always moving swiftly in reverse. (The better to see you with, my dear.) Finally, the registrar had to escort him out of the building and out of graduate life altogether, all the way back to the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health.

For a while, I fell into a very lively and prosperous study group with a Park Avenue address. We’d be going over our Freud, Jung, and Adler together and, presto, a delivery man would arrive with a roasted chicken dinner for three. On another occasion, we’d pause while a strange white powder was arranged into thin lines on the glass coffee table. Freud used it to ease his pain. I guess that was all the legitimacy I needed. I digested the material we were reviewing so quickly and thoroughly I thought I had eaten through my texts and sprouted a second cortex. I was even ready to debate the formidable Mary Henle, our professor for Systems and Theories, a student and secretary of and mistress to (rumor had it) one of the original Gestalt psychologists, Wolfgang Kohler, when the New School was originally named the University in Exile, because of all those roaming European scholars fleeing Hitler’s rise to power. In true Germanic style, Henle lectured authoritatively and, at times, disdainfully, to a class of about one hundred. Only one exam was given, a cumulative final at the end of the semester. This was my largest class. After the fist year, seminars were the rule; but for now I was still in the winnowing process. It took me a full year to acclimate myself to the impersonal nature of graduate education at the New School. But I had a healthy