True Stories of the Philosophical Theater

By S. Yerucham

An eighteen year old chameleon abandons academic philosophy and a small town for New York City in 1981, and for two years is immersed in bohemian life while working in a bar on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. Moving on to other jobs and peculiar relationships, his mind becomes perceptually clogged, and so he haphazardly pursues madness in an attempt to experience life “Apparelled in celestial light” once again. The experiment is a destructive success, and he’s tossed through several historical calamities while quickly learning the mad breakthrough was only a beginning.

Embracing world philosophy and religion, he travels alone to India for six months, but it ends up a sixteen year migratory journey through nine countries, the latter thirteen years exiled in Asia, an exile filled with danger, love, farcical mishaps, and a passion for goodness, wisdom, and genuine identity. The story concludes one year after his scrappy return (but not alone) to America. Fourteen years later, the narrative jumps to a postscript.

Many stories have been told of self-discovery and coming of age in the sixties, and rightly so. But this contemporary nonfiction novel, a novel as much about people and places as ideas, follows the path of a child of those days into the eighties and beyond. Encountering many renowned radical teachers, great spiritual masters, and anonymous holy people, he concludes that all received doctrines and illusive social fads are inadequate fragments for living a life of truth. Deftly assembling the pieces of a fragmented time, a fragmented soul, and fragmented popular beliefs, Philosophical Theater is both an antidote and homage to our era. Five books complete in one volume.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781669857297

S. Yerucham

S.Yerucham, born in Baltimore in 1962, attended the University of Wyoming and Brooklyn College, and has been a student of notable teachers throughout America and Asia and Israel. After abandoning academic philosophy and a small town for New York City in 1981, an eighteen year old chameleon becomes immersed in bohemian life while working in a bar on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center.

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Copyright © 2023 by S.Yerucham.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Previously copyrighted 2009. Expanded and revised edition copyright 2023 by S. Yerucham.

Rev. date: 01/09/2023

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

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With kind permission, excerpts have been reprinted from:

The Essential Rabbi Nachman

Translated by Avraham Greenbaum

Copyright 5767-2006-7 Azrama Institute. Reprinted with the permission from the author. www.Azamra.org.

Zen Essence

Translated by Thomas Cleary

Copyright 1989 by Thomas Cleary. Reprinted through an arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston, MA. www.Shambhala.com.

Seven Taoist Masters

Translated by Eva Wong

Copyright 1990 by Eva Wong. Reprinted through an arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston, MA. www.Shambhala.com.

The Earth Is the Lord’s

By Abraham Joshua Heschel

Excerpt is from The Earth is the Lord’s: The Inner World of the Jew in Eastern Europe © 1949 by Abraham Joshua Heschel. Permission granted by Jewish Lights Publishing, P.O. Box 237, Woodstock, VT 05091, www.jewishlights.com.

Public domain works quoted:

Dark Night of the Soul

St. John of the Cross

Translated by E. Allison Peers

The Odyssey

Homer

Adapted from the translation by Samuel Butler

Maxims

La Rochefoucauld

Translated by Bund and Friswell

Novum Organum

Francis Bacon

Translated by Spedding, Ellis, and Heath

Purgatorio

Dante

Adapted from the Translation by H. W. Longfellow

Nada-Bindu Upanishad

Translated by K. Narayanaswami Aiyar

Midrash Tanhuma

Translation from Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East: Medieval Hebrew

Bhagavad Gita

Translated by Sri Swami Sivananda

World Wide Web Edition 2000, Divine Life Society

Laghu Yoga Vasistha

Translated by K. Narayanaswami Aiyer

Confucian Analects

Translated by James Legge

Cicero On Old Age

Translated by E.S. Shuckburgh

Phaedo

Plato

Translated by Benjamin Jowett

Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes

Translated by John Ormsby

The Varieties of Religious Experience

William James

Biblical quotes adapted from public domain translations.

Diogenes Searching for an Honest Man

Jacob Jordaens

Two Composite Elephants

    India 19th Century

Cover art from Wikimedia Commons

To my wife for her great patience and encouragement.

To my daughter, who helped reawaken my eyes and ears and heart and mind.

A special thanks to my parents for abundant and varied resources provided throughout my childhood, and for many years of financial assistance (given with the assurance of complete freedom of thought and practice, a crucial component of spiritual and intellectual independence.)

To the Xlibris staff who continually urged me on to finish this manuscript.

My most sincere thanks to everyone who appears within these pages.

To spiritually devout readers, please bear with unsettling passages: ask why and how they disturb you and utilize any answers to further your spiritual development. To stubbornly secular thinkers, bear with the absence of excessive lurid details, and with an eventual movement into a renunciative spirit in the narrative. Lurid details can be found aplenty in other sources: use your imagination. Better yet, ask yourself why a movement into the renunciation of coarser aspects of existence disturbs you, particularly if you cherish the life of the mind.

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CONTENTS

Book I Farewell to the Philosophical Theater

Book II A Fugitive

Book III A Wanderer

Book IV A Wanderer and a Fugitive

Book V Farewell to the Ingrown Hero of the 20th Century

Book I

Farewell to the Philosophical Theater

And in the plays of this philosophical theater you may observe the same thing which is found in the theater of the poets, that stories invented for the stage are more compact and elegant, and more as one would wish them to be, than true stories out of history.

—Francis Bacon

Novum Organum LXII

August ended and I moved into a dorm and fell in love: six months later (a teens eternity) she dropped me and I left college and planned an escape to New York City while working a month in the dry windy western town I’d lived in for six years. Happier moments recall mind-blowing skies over prairies and valleys and mountains—I’m not one to flee to a city without a good word for the small town left behind; but even fond words can’t placate people who regard departure as a snub. But honestly, for three years I desperately wanted to bolt out of town, but couldn’t determine why. Heartache is a great excuse to quit a place.

Before enrolling full-time and moving into the dorm, I’d already taken classes part-time in the university for two years, while living at home with my parents. In the middle of my eighteenth year that spring of 1981, a dry, skeptical agnosticism held my mind hostage after a brief but intensive study of Western philosophy. Still captivated by philosophical novels, I wanted to experience the external world and write about it, and imagined doing it all within six months.

My study of philosophy bloomed at age fourteen: while reading George Berkeley’s Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge on a grassy green hill on campus one afternoon, a flash of transcendental awareness revealed to me a new world. And yet I never adopted Berkeley’s philosophy. Four years after my ivy and grass green campus transcendental flash, after serial whackings from skeptics, I regressed into an agnostic funk.

~

After working two restaurants in the month before my departure, with $200 earned in my pocket, I felt ready enough to leave town. I caught a ride three hours south to Boulder, Colorado with José Vazquez, a gentle, black-bearded Mayan Puerto Rican philosophy student. The car coasted down the coiling mountain highway and he said that after graduation he’d get a job in Disney World, and spend his spare time reading. Inwardly I scoffed, oddly unaware I sought much of the same, but without bothering to graduate.

~

The Boulder apartment door opened, and we were greeted by a grinning mass of overripe intoxicated flesh ready for an imminent drop from the academic tree. José, several years older than us both and in graduate school, warily withdrew a step upon seeing him, then politely declined an invitation to come in. Perplexed by his apprehension, I thanked him for the ride and said farewell.

Rawly, a University of Colorado film student, cheerily puffed up over living off-campus with two female roommates, frequently wore the bloodstained shirt from his recent motorcycle crash, while I wore a pair of tan pants, shredded by long use, a temperate form of this fashion. Years later factory shredded pants would be sold new in malls. I stayed a week with Rawly.

Recently Rawly’d acquired a pound of pot and had been ingesting most of it himself. I’d never smoked marijuana, merely from an aversion to inhaling any sort of smoke. Rawly baked a batch of brownies with an overdose of his stash; from sorrow and a rapacious lust for chocolate, I grossly exceeded my share of cocoa pipchicks. And then we motorcycled to a theater to see All That Jazz.

Early on in the film, while the heart-surgery scene flashed on screen, my own pulse rapidly increased. My nose seemed to be dissolving. Subduing a powerful urge to vomit, I staggered to the bathroom as if dashed overboard into a wild dark sea. My heart machine gun fired and I feared it would explode: this is the end. Rawly soon joined me in the bathroom. Can’t . . .watch . . .movie, I whispered through an airless breath. So we left the theater.

After the physiological attack passed, we both turned high and ludicrous, riding around town, with me hanging by a finger from the back of the motorcycle. And then we wandered around on foot; lacking ordinary resistance to gravity, I squat-walked low à la Groucho. (Silly boy sloshing around in his own modified mental productions.) Ghosts materialized and approached and then faded as we drew near, and I imagined passersby to be from the land of the woman (six years my senior and industrious) who’d left me to marry someone from her own tribe. Her cold yet melodramatic justified rejection tainted my genuine desire for knowledge (I’ll show her).

After a long ridiculous night we returned to the apartment courtyard, where I continued babbling away. From a floor high above the courtyard, a voice said something in answer to my loud speeches. Who is that? I answered airily. This is God, the voice commanded matter-of-factly, with obvious glee. Oh, I said, unable to register his reply.

A couple of days later, Rawly invited me to ride solo on his motorcycle. Straightaway I crashed into a tree.

~

Sitting in the last row of a film class, ready to watch Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar: The professor arrived and announced to the small audience that our recently inaugurated president, Ronald Reagan, had been shot. Later we learned the gunman lived in Colorado.

Colorado to Indiana

We boarded a bus to Denver, and I fell into a light sleep; the bus hummed, and I too hummed, involuntarily droning in tune with the rolling machine. Rawly worried over me—a thoughtful, sensitive creative fellow with a keen satirical edge, we are not catching him here at his best. On the other hand, he’d often crack a schadenfreudean grin whenever I mentioned bad news about myself. Perhaps it was only a nervous smile. Ten years later he apologized sincerely for this fiasco, although by then it seemed unnecessary, for I knew we’d both been raving pompous fools back then.

Buying a ticket to Manhattan left only $100 in my wallet. With a bloated faded brown leather accordion briefcase and two suitcases, my back pocket stuffed with my newest fictional gloom pal, Hedayat’s haunting Blind Owl, I stepped into the bus, leaving Rawly behind to finish his semester.

~

In the back of the bus a couple of mind blown freaks across the aisle took turns smoking grass in the bathroom; one got locked in by accident and turned hysterical, so our poor harried bus driver stopped abruptly roadside and threatened to throw the freaks off the bus if they didn’t stop smoking marijuana.

Kelpstein and Kelpstein

In Chicago late night I left the bus for a stopover; no rooms available in the YMCA, so I sneaked up the stairs and slept a few hours on an exercise mat in a gym until janitors threw me out before sunrise.

At sunrise I looked up a professor who happened to be a family friend. Her husband Buddy Kelpstein, also midthirtish, taught at Purdue in nearby Indiana. A brilliant and inquisitive woman, but a tad too mordant and quick for my lumbering and yet uncalloused soul. On the phone a few years after this visit, for example, I mentioned something of interest about someone and she cryptically quipped, Grist for your fiction mill? First of all, I hadn’t published or even written much of anything yet; second, didn’t all her beloved favorite novelists have their own grist? But it’s not unusual for people to get morally uppity over the questionable necessary means to all they thrive upon. Some of her favorite novelists and philosophers were fragmented monsters, and all of them fed upon the lives around them. Nevertheless, she was marvelous.

So she invited me to her sociology class to spend time before going home to meet with her husband. Sitting in class, I gawked at a student in a lower tier with bright blue florescent hair. None of her sort yet at the university I’d dropped out of. Only longhairs at best.

Evening in their Chicago apartment they kindly prepared stir-fried tofu and vegetables in deference to my diet. Buddy affirmed the moral imperative to be vegetarian, and glumly castigated himself for not being so.

Inevitably I obsessed over my brownie episode and the topic of getting high (which won’t be a focus of this story. Nor will it be dysfunctions of my upbringing, for that matter). The brownie dose had seared the past from the surface of my mind: my entire life, including recent events, now seemed remote, but sorrows remained. Yet I’d long been a natural space case, ever since my sixties childhood. The mental realm I fortuitously inclined towards, but which would’ve been natural to me in whatever age I may’ve been born into, was the psychedelic; if it’d been a time before the word psychedelic existed, the pleasure of entering another world by gazing upon the green veins and arteries of a maple leaf, or upon the undulating fur of a traveling caterpillar, would’ve wordlessly identified the mind behind my senses. Yes, that’s better, for psychedelia is more of a fabrication, a picture show: my childhood vision embodied clarity and truth. Many people are susceptible to contact highs, and I more so in those days when we lived on a college campus and everyone winged high. Children were naturally more open in general, so hippies gazed down upon us for inspiration, while looking up to older beat icons for guidance. In 1969 we lived in a rented house in an older neighborhood of Lafayette and with my little friends we sometimes peeped into the window of a house of hippies performing their own psychedelic music in a room filled with uncaged fluttering parrots. At last when invited in, we accepted. Another hippy house nearby burned down, purportedly due to smoking around open cans of flammable paints. Unknown to me then, it would be my eventual task to respectfully combine hippy, child, and beatnik mind (so many different breeds of hippies, children, and beatniks) with their variegated opposites, who also lodged within my soul—soldiers, policemen, and officials—to become both an antidote and personified homage to my era. Amalgamating and transcending and honoring every element would eventually return me to the crystalline unified vision I’d eventually lose. Ah, but for many readers, hippies and beatniks are as obscure as Russia’s 19th century Nihilists, Decembrists, and Narodniks, and America’s Transcendentalists, Utopians, and the later Lost Generation.

On Kelpstein’s windowsill a scrawny marijuana plant struggled to survive. Routinely they chastely plucked a couple of leaves to smoke for self-analysis. Laughably unaware before this, never imagining either smoked: reflecting upon their talk in those days, it should’ve been obvious. I suppose they only mentioned it at this juncture from hearing the tale of my careless initiation, and the fact that I’d broken loose from my parents: it did me good to hear of less moronic ways to utilize it. Now I’d go further by suggesting never using it at all. Unfortunately their advice entered one ear and out the other, and I continued smoking foolishly for several years.

Let me add a Sorrows of Young Werther alert, from a distance of forty years forward: Don’t ape this brownie scene knucklehead...read on, and you’ll understand why. If you desire any kind of unity of soul or mind, then the consequences of drug experiences must be considered, particularly ones in which you wander around physically and mentally, further scattering your tangled mind. Unfortunately many people imagine this foggy march through time as an abandonment of their past; yearly revolutions of earth around sun spiral time as a coiled snake, while dim or forgotten actions continue tugging and directing beyond our control. Boasting about the amount of drugs and alcohol one can consume erroneously portrays a weakness as a strength.

The greatest rebellion is to think and feel for yourself; awkward displays of chaos and self-destruction are mere spectacles which weaken true inner freedom. Many sadly believe it natural to embrace one’s desires and fulfill them. However, what is truly natural for human beings is to use the power of reflection to discern whether the pursuit and/or fulfillment of each desire is in the long or even short term destructive for oneself or others.

~

Kelpstein gave me a volume of essays by Charles Sanders Pierce before I left Chicago. Inside the front cover he wrote a kind little note, wishing me well and that I become aware of my own virtues. His wife gave me a small studio photo of her husband. And we never met again. But more of them, later.

My Old Indiana Home

Detouring south by bus into Indiana, I arrived in Lafayette at daybreak feeling transcendent and bright, but couldn’t find a local bus to West Lafayette, and lacked money for a taxi. So I stuffed most of my bags into a bus station locker, and in the pale, fresh early morn, walked up Highway 52 and over the bridge above the dear old Wabash River, happily nearing my old home—first visit since moving away over six years earlier.

I stopped briefly by our old house, on the outskirts of a large wooded ravine leading down to Wabash River. Welcomed by green lawns and suburban houses and the forest I’d played in and explored, I thought of my little friends, Ladoo and Josh and Mark and Bruce and Ian and Les and Kenny, Michelle and Julie and Beth and Nina and Kirsten, Robbie and Richie, Phil and Alex, Pam, Bill and Squire and Mike, and Peter.

After walking past the apartment house where Ladoo had lived, I continued on to Cumberland Elementary, my school for five years, and found one of my two favorite teachers, Mrs. Johnson from 3rd grade. I met some of her current students and snapped pictures of her with them. I showed her photographs of friends and family and my lost girlfriend and told her of my sad heart and of enthusiasm for my next destination. Crawdad bogs behind the school, where I’d sometimes played, were not yet paved over.

In these neighborhoods I’d skipped over cracks in the sidewalk and avoided graveyards, of course. The rule amongst us boys required us to hold our breaths while passing graveyards, and I took it to heart. Only in a car could I pass a graveyard, for then it was possible to hold my nose until we were safely past. Trapped one day alone on foot as the sun disappeared, I rushed past the cemetery with small lungs capped shut with only one shot of air.

One teacher wrote on my report card that I had perceptual motor problems. Other teachers spotted a gift. At eight years old, I suffered a nagging fear of amnesia, so I quietly chanted to myself, over and over, Scott is my name, and fun is my game. Perhaps in a previous life I’d intended to carry my identity after death to my current body, but mistakenly applied that intention to the easily remembered identity of my current incarnation. Or mundanely, the overuse of amnesia as a gag in TV comedies drove me to this fear. Or visits with mystifying senile Floridian kin. Or fear of that greatest of losses, forgetting one’s own divine nature: Daily we are all ultimate amnesiacs, alzheimer patients wondering over existence and souls: what is existence and what are souls? What lies beyond our perceptions?

One of my best friends from those years lived only a few minutes walk from school. I’d always envied this proximity, which couldn’t beat my fantasy of actually living in the classroom closet, stepping out each morning only minutes before the ring of the bell. Usually I didn’t fall asleep until one in the morning, and woke up early to start the one mile walk to school, so I arrived exhausted. How nice it would be to sleep in my clothes and just pop out of the homeroom closet fully dressed!

Mrs. Lipschutz answered the door and told me her son was away at college, and then mentioned some news about other little elementary school friends who’d also metamorphosed into inscrutable adult bodies.

After meeting with old schoolmates Randy and Otis, I had dinner that evening with Randy and his parents in their home. When questioned about my vegetarianism, I pitched them a familiar greenhorn explanation for being a potatoes-and-potatoes man, defensively hoping it tactfully justified skipping the centerpiece of their fine meal.

That night I slept in the house of an old family friend, Professor Shaffer, after meeting him at Purdue University, where my father once taught. So now you see I come from a middle-class academic family; these encounters with universities and professors midway journeying east were to be my last gasps of university life for some time.

Next morning on a bus again, headed straight for New York City.

Arrival

Lincoln Tunnel growled a long moaning auuuuum as our Greyhound passed through, and silence snapped abruptly into place as we reemerged from the long dark tunnel into cavernous gray geometrical valleys below steel and glass and stone and smoky brick New York City mountains and hills. Splendorous omnipotent dream metropolis, boundless now, freed from earlier eyes peering through bars of a cramped mind. My perceptions were as baroque as these words, words merely descriptive of a fantastical gaze. After passage through Boulder and warm Midwestern reunions, barriers to my vision had fallen, but my ignorance remained, an ignorance liberating and restricting and dangerous all at once: Youthful naïveté is an excellent but volatile tonic for repelling confining preconceptions. All my old selves and wreckages of experience were now blown away, thrown light-years to remote parts of my mind, hibernating, awaiting a truant springtime to reappear, while sending me whispered messages, fears and loves—faint and indistinct as the hum of a distant city in a deafened ear.

In Grand Central Station a stale man in a business suit invited me home with him. I moved on. I walked up to Central Park South to meet my uncle, as planned, then sat around with my bags in the reception room of his office on Columbus Circle until his workday finished, before driving to his home in New Jersey to see my aunt and young cousins. I’d spend a week in their furnished basement room.

That night I trimmed my hair and the following day looked for work in Manhattan, which resulted in two job offers; the first with a charitable organization, which did something or other for the city. My job would be to knock on doors and ask for donations, getting paid by commission. Too often chronically reserved, a job interview itself I regarded as an intolerable test; this job seemed like a daily job looking for a job. I’m no salesman, not of myself, nor of anything else. And that job wouldn’t get me the experience I craved. And I would have to think too much: Unwittingly I was trying to escape the tyranny of ideas.

That same day a city-government employment agency sent me to a personnel office on the 106th floor of #1 World Trade Center. They needed a barboy for City Lights Bar in the Windows on the World Restaurant complex on the 107th floor of the same building. In the spacious pleasantly subdued low-lit reception lounge I filled out an application, while glancing frequently through windows at distant miniature landscapes.

A large hyper-wound-up tight Italian American with a worried dark mustachioed face, dressed in a white bartenders jacket and black tie and black pants, beamed into the room to interview me shortly after I’d filled out the forms. Delmonico managed all of the bars in the restaurant complex. After offering me the job and I accepted it, he asked, in a hurried, harried Brooklynese voice, Will you stay? I didn’t know what he was getting at. Will you stay? he repeated insistently, athletically puffing a cigaret. My uncomprehending face projected an optical slow Western drawl through a brownie-eating mind mist, while floating and swaying caged between creaking skyscraper beams amidst real clouds. Will you stay? he asked again. Well, I guess so, I finally answered, not knowing whether he meant a year, or fifty years. It would be two years.

Next day I took two service elevators to the 106th floor—employees had to change elevators just as we had to transfer subway lines to shift to and from work. Restaurant customers rode a bedroom sized express elevator straight to the 107th floor.

In the 106th floor locker room I received a gray Nehru jacket with removable brass buttons. I’d been told to get my own black shoes and black pants. I already had the pants, but had to go to Chinatown to buy a pair of cheap black velvet Chinese slippers, which would have to do until I had money for a pair of shoes good for working feet. I donned the heavy jacket of thick cloth armor, stuffed my street clothes in my locker, then accompanied Delmonico to the bar on the next floor.

This is Saul, Delmonico said, handing me over to another barboy. He’ll show you the job. Saul flashed a sour mute face: Who the hell are you, and why do I have to waste my time training another one? He wore a faded gray jacket identical to mine and had a rough-looking black face decorated with scattered fine scars and a mesmerizing sinister top front gold tooth amidst bright white ones; his hair was oiled and waved back early Ellington style. A rough guy, a scratched and chipped gem hastily ground and polished for setting within an elegant piece of jewelry. He seemed to tower over me but was in fact short and exhausted.

City Lights Bar

City Lights Bar was the only bar serving directly to the public, except for portable tables set up by banquet bartenders for private affairs in banquet rooms. Other bars were service bars within kitchen areas, providing drinks for waiters and waitresses to serve in the restaurants.

City Lights was not enclosed, except for a wall of liquor on glass shelves with wooden slats behind the bar, where you could see through to the long corridor which led to the lobby, coat room, concierge desk, and the express elevator. On the other side of this considerable wall of liquor, higher up, a page in an immaculate white Nehru jacket with brass buttons and black pants usually stood at attention, guiding guests to the left or right, or back to the other side of the hall. Most of these young pages with stunning ebony complexions looked fabulous in their starched snow-white jackets. Late at night they had the bearing of supernatural sentinels in early-forties fantasy films. Even the lighting looked spot on.

This wall of liquor contained more varieties of booze than any other bar on the planet; waiters from every corner of the restaurant complex occasionally dropped by to retrieve special or rare drinks unavailable in service bars. At closing time we rolled down a heavy linked gate over the bottles, but the rest of the bar remained unsecured. Someone told me that after a couple of graveyard shifts, when the entire restaurant complex was closed and only small cleanup crews remained, a couple of bottles behind the linked gate were discovered nearly empty, with straws stranded inside.

Saul and I entered the wood-and-brass bar, which overlooked a pond of tables filled with people: a restaurant where only drinks and selections from an interesting menu of international hors d’oeuvres were served. Further down stood a small stage in front of the continuous line of floor-to-ceiling, two foot wide, rectangular windows, which resembled pillars from inside, and surrounded the building and overlooked the boroughs. On this stage a trio played light jazz throughout the night, with regular half hour breaks filled in by a solo pianist. To the left of the bar, swinging doors led up to the corridor and into the lobby, and more directly to a small bathroom next to a cozy round room with glass walls, the Cellar in the Sky restaurant. A few shallow steps down, a person would encounter another section of the row of windows, where people frequently stopped to gaze. Left from there, a short walk through a gleaming window-lined hall brought one to the entrance of the main restaurant.

An overflowing chattering crowd surrounded the bar when I first approached with Saul. Two bartenders in white jackets and black ties worked furiously. One, a Chinese man, about forty-five, worried, efficient, comical, wore outdated standard thick black rimmed glasses. This is Mr. Chow, Saul said. Excuse me!, Mr. Chow yelped in distress as he pushed past me in the narrow space behind the bar. Next we greeted a fast meticulous round-bodied red faced and bald headed Irish American with graying sixtyish temples. He looked ready to explode under the weight of a wall of multitudinous deprived customers. This is Eddie, Saul said. Hello, I said politely. We need ice, Eddie blared sternly in reply, not stopping for a second.

Saul and I retreated into the enormous kitchen complex to get ice; scooping it into a metal bucket from a large tin machine, we then hustled back to fill the small basins behind the bar. Periodically through the years, while struggling through the bar with a bucket of ice, I’d encounter a customer perched lordly above me, his anesthetized rear glued to a bar stool, theatrically proclaiming through a satisfied grin, The iceman cometh!

Early that first night I entered the bar with a tray of clean glasses and someone let the slatted green swinging bar doors snap back at me and the glasses crashed to the floor, cymbals abruptly smashing a moment of silence in a symphony. A sympathetic young white couple later made this initiation a giddy refrain in our conversations whenever they dropped by for a drink.

After nearly a week at Windows, a New Jersey bus strike made commuting impossible, so my 106th floor locker served as home base for the next week, while locker room showers became a necessity rather than a convenience.

But where to sleep? I had no money for a room: it would be another week until my first biweekly paycheck. So I worked nightly until closing and afterwards went out on the town, by myself, not yet friendly enough with anyone at work. After the city quieted down and the streets emptied of people, I’d settle into an all-night diner and eat and read and write until light appeared and dew still glistened. And then off to Washington Square to sleep the day away in the grass, usually undisturbed. Once I awoke at the light tap of a cop’s nightstick, with an order to move along.

After some light sporadic sleep under a tree, around mid-afternoon I’d head to a restaurant for lunch, then stroll down to the tip of the island to zip up to the 106th floor, usually by four thirty, and be washed and ready at the bar by five. I developed a habit of keeping only one pair of pants, which simplified and hastened dressing in the locker room. I also delayed the changing of my shirt to the limit to reduce the times needed for the ritual transference of brass buttons from soiled Nehru jackets to clean ones. These habits continued beyond my one week habitation in the park, after my first paycheck got me a cheap room in a Manhattan YMCA for a couple of weeks.

During YMCA week, I instinctively checked an outdoor New York University bulletin board in search of an apartment or room. One notice had been posted by a sensitive and polite, nervous Hispanic fellow who wished to earn extra cash by sharing his spacious brownstone, somewhere in Brooklyn. On the phone he suggested trying one night to see how well it worked, for after living alone so long, he feared he couldn’t bear someone else’s presence in the house. Feeling crappy and resigned, I looked no further for rooms and went on to the brownstone with my bags; I hit the bed late and slept very well, then jolted awake early by these distressed words from a face staring down upon my unfocused eyes: I don’t think I can do this. He had decided not to rent out his extra room, to anyone, so he said. After masking my irritation with politeness, since he clearly was an affiliate neurotic with feelings akin to my own, I schlepped my two suitcases and overstuffed briefcase to a park nearby, to catch a couple more hours of sleep.

Bedford-Stuyvesant

Returning to the bulletin board, I found a notice from a fellow who wanted to sublet the entire upper floor of a two-story house he rented in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, near the Atlantic-Pacific subway station. I paid him a months rent.

The neighborhood was a wreck, but I felt at ease there. Neighborhood people, nearly all black, were friendly and down-to-earth.

My roommate Steve (with an Italian surname), wild and spontaneous scraggly long blonde haired eater of psychedelic roots, nearly thirty years old, was a sophisticated horticulture student, but not at NYU.

Steve ruled the ground floor while I lived above and had cooking rights downstairs in the large cluttered kitchen, piled high with unwashed dishes and iron pans.

My spacious floor above, with only an old double mattress on an otherwise empty floor, lacked glass in its window cavities: through clear plastic duct-taped over shoddy window frames, I gazed down upon the weedy backyard with its heaps of junk and small scraggly trees, recalling eerie alien planet vegetation from fifties science fiction novel covers. Steve delighted in my comparing the landscape to old science fiction book covers.

Sometimes I’d return home five or six in the morning to the thumping sounds of a nearby dance hall; that great kitsch sci-fi song Rock Lobster blared in the distance once as I eyed illuminated dark pink nips of sunrise alien planet terrain below.

Whenever I climbed the stairs to my floor, I was greeted by Patty Smith on a poster above the stairwell. Just after passing Patty one evening, I froze at the sight of a beautiful bare-breasted Jewish woman, blind in one eye, lounging on my bed. Steve said he’d met her on the telephone after dialing a wrong number; instead of quickly hanging up, they talked for over an hour. He wanted me to meet her sister.

Later, with hungry eyes, palming a psychotropic root, Steve said: Look at this new root I had sent from South America! Wanna try some?

He regularly rode an electric scooter over Manhattan Bridge, but one black night fierce wind and rain slapped hard and he skidded out on the bridge and police arrived and he rose to his feet and his loosely tied sweatpants slipped to his ankles and he laughed maniacally in the rain.

Naturally kind and fond of me in an older brotherly way, in spirit Steve resembled many of my coworkers of a similar age: but they tried keeping up appearances, to be trimmed and able to function with elegance, while at the same time blowing their minds and doing as they pleased. Unbounded and overflowing, in spirit Steve also resembled me, and I liked him, but nevertheless needed to break from this mirrored spirit—much to do with being caught up in my own mental world. I feared slipping back into dreamy long-haired years, isolated in my teen bedroom hermitage, lost from other new people and experiences. Life with Steve lasted only a month. We’ll return to him later.

The Job Routine

Fill the ice basins; remove dirty glasses and soiled napkins; stock clean glasses, napkins, olives, tomato juice, pineapple juice; cut and trim lemon peels; slice lemons and oranges; mix Bloody Mary mix; restock fast-moving liquor and beer from the storeroom; mix and serve drinks when bartenders were too busy; sweep the floor; empty garbage; cash in tabs on the new electronic cash register (the first I’d ever seen); and so on. When the bar got crowded, we worked like mad. At slow points we just stood erect, talked amongst ourselves and isolated customers, shined and dusted things, and developed varicose veins. Bartender Eddie complained when business dragged, and my habitual clock watching also slowed time for him, exacerbating his irritation. I’d yearned for a job which needed little thinking, so I could have my own thoughts and meet and observe people. I couldn’t understand why Eddie complained over an empty bar: tips were pooled amongst the many bars. He said being busy made time pass quickly. But I couldn’t understand why he’d want to compress time—I enjoyed being there. He’d been working over forty years; I had no idea yet what that could do to a person.

When moderately slow, I gazed through windows, listened to live light jazz, and talked with amusing mysterious coworkers and customers while surreptitiously popping green cocktail olives. When dead slow, I could disappear awhile—not so with bartenders: an unwritten law made it okay for barboys, since our wages were significantly lower than bartenders, who were glued to the bar, except for meals and occasional five minute toilet or cigaret breaks. With my long breaks I could really disappear in this vast complex, this town in the sky.

Making Rounds and Foraging Food

Reminiscent of my short-lived childhood paper route, I made regular rounds, visiting people in corners of enormous back rooms, kitchens and public areas. In some of these corners I could count on food and drink. The employee cafeteria on the 106th floor wasn’t yet fully operating, but only supplied sporadic piles of unattended leftovers from the restaurant—so another unwritten law allowed us to eat food from wherever we could find it. Starting with the bar itself, I popped green olives throughout the night and drank peppery Bloody Mary mix without vodka, which I prepared myself from a simple recipe. When patrons ordered a bottle of champagne at the bar, sometimes enough remained for a glass or two for me. Moët & Chandon Don Chow called Moi-Shang-dong, knowingly and amusingly transforming this popular French ambrosia into an offering to Kuan Yin. After tiring of cocktail condiments behind our bar, I’d move on to banquets. If lucky, I’d bump into John Vigushin, bent over his little waiter’s cart, slowly wheeling it through the hall, grimacing under a madly furrowed brow as if he were pushing a block of Egyptian stone. If he was carting off leftovers rather than conveying food to a party, I could count on some stuffed baked mushroom caps. Satisfied with those succulent morsels and some cultured words and friendly cynicism from Vigushin, I’d hike back to the bar and briefly check if everything was okay. That done, sensing a need for protein, I’d go right next door to Cellar in the Sky, a tiny round restaurant serving superabundant courses of food and dozens of varieties of cheese with bread and rolls and hundreds of wines, accompanied by the music of a classical guitarist. I gorged on leftover cheese from large wheels of brie and smaller cylinders of pungent goat cheese rolled in gray ash, all slapped onto fresh crusty rolls and bread and washed down with wine from abandoned open bottles.

Not quite satisfied, the time had come to procure dessert: my best bet was in the Hors d’Oeuvrerie, which we all called The Grill. Before heading there, I’d quickly survey the bar again, then pass between the dining area of the Hors d’Oeuvrerie and the small jazz stage, then weave past the Japanese sushi-sashimi chef (another performer) stationed publicly just outside the Hors d’Oeuvrerie kitchen, long before sushi and sashimi became commonplace in America. I doubt a word passed between us: he always maintained a dutiful, precise, attentive presence, light years beyond me.

Once inside the Grill kitchen, I’d grab a slice of sextet layered chocolate cake composed of crisp crunchy cocoa biscuits stuffed with layers of rich gooey dark chocolate, and delicious superficially healthy miniature custard pies topped with slices of the then-rare kiwi fruit.

Sometimes I took breaks in dark empty banquet rooms on the other side of the building to be silently alone and peaceful while gazing through windows facing uptown.

Friends in the Grill Kitchen

While nabbing dessert inside the kitchen, I’d catch some remarks from old-timer James, the one-eyed bald black chef, and get caught in some ridiculous banter with his young assistant, who everyone called Yah-Yah (a play on his Arabic name), for he was truly yah-yah...fun with a touch of spleen. Together they prepared all sorts of hors d’oeuvres, including steak tartare with raw ground beef. Most of their hors d’oeuvres were exquisite, but I wouldn’t touch that even if I did eat meat.

An amiable middle-aged Indian with long curling horns of hair sprouting from his ears, always wearing a wool sweater vest with diamond shapes in muted colors, manned the cashier’s box in the Grill kitchen.

Raymond, a fiftyish barboy in the Grill, could pass for thirty, with wispy moustache and long black man’s hair ironed and teased upwards six inches; he wore enormous shaded glasses, and had a lean, wiry fluid body kept in shape bicycling to work from Brooklyn. He claimed to be a gigolo and had a hilarious vulgar sense of humor which couldn’t offend, since he shared it so genially. With affection he called me little brother.

Another James, a suave queer black waiter with clean oiled hair and a meticulously trimmed moustache, momentarily deflated my chocolate sugar dreams one night: You know, you wouldn’t have pimples if you didn’t eat so much sugar. He had a point, but I cringed upon hearing a voice other than my own internal one pointing out what pained me whenever I looked into the mirror. Daily I dosed tetracycline from a canteen sized bottle left over from college to keep my skin reasonably clear. It wasn’t that bad, but I regarded it as leprosy; however, if I’d seen the real thing then, in the rotting flesh, I would’ve counted myself blessedly fortunate.

And yet...Only eighteen, my first obsessively serious girlfriend lost to me after a swiftly orchestrated wedding, I remained blindly unaware that despite my imperfections, girls were hanging all over me, not to mention some good-natured fairies and a few vulgar ones as well. Good natured ones included a waiter’s captain named Ralph and his friend Alan, a thirtyish Jewish waiter with a thick black horseshoe moustache stretching to the bottom of his jaw, incongruous with his delicate face and sensitive eyes. One night we shared a long thoughtful conversation together in his apartment after work, one of those endless conversations void of any sexual moves, because either neither cares to, or both are too placid to initiate anything. For me, the thought of anything beyond conversation never occurred.

Closing Time

Eddie always went home early; his shift began a couple of hours before mine and Sid’s, when afternoon club members still populated the bar. After locking the gates over the wall of liquor at night’s end, I’d accompany Sid Chow to deposit the night’s earnings with the lean caustic friendly Greek cashier and his young Chinese assistant in their glass booth in the main kitchen. I longed halfheartedly for the assistant, never making a move, forever knowing her only through a pane of glass.

And then I’d ride the quiet late-night journey down the elevators with Mr. Chow. When I eventually settled into a more permanent apartment, we usually took the double-R train together into Brooklyn on nights I didn’t hang around Manhattan, parting ways when I transferred to the B line at DeKalb or Pacific. But let’s not jump ahead.

Leibniz and His Preposterous Wig of Curls

One evening at the bar three florid Italian hairstylists approached me and suggested I model for them. Serious people without sinister intentions. I was impressed by the address on their card and the fact that they’d won, at least once, a world championship in hairstyling. Unfortunately, I never thought to ask for money; years later I learned people usually got paid.

So I received free haircuts and styling for a couple of years, walked once in a hairstylists show in Atlantic City, and received a pair of fine clothes and expenses paid for my time. The actor Hal Linden sat in the chair next to mine while they worked on my hair one afternoon; he looked over at me with what appeared to be concern or irritation, and asked them what they were doing. Diffident muteness wrecked an easy opening to speak with him.

This new turn may sound conceited and fatuous after earlier discourses on my philosophical seriousness. But no, I enjoyed observing and being around people passionate for excellence, whatever their occupation might be. Hairstyles may seem trivial, but even Kafka obsessed over his own. And take a look at that enormous cascading curling wig on Leibniz, and Kant’s austere yet unnecessary wig. Fine hairstyling reminds me of a Japanese bonsai that Will, a banquet bartender, meticulously revised over and over again for excellence and balance. Brutish minds may say, Why bother, it’s just a puny shrub.

But yes, vanity played a part, a burdening vanity shared by ordinary men and boys, and Great Philosophers with aroused genitals and gnashing teeth, elements indecipherable in official dignified philosophical portraits; defecations and categorical excretions, animal grooming and gnarled convulsive copulations, all ending in decay and death, hidden behind carefully cultivated veneers of philosophical dignity: attributes not often explicitly included amongst the categories and syllogisms of philosophers—even the death of Socrates, considered a paragon tale of dealing with death, dissatisfied me. Socrates was relatively old, renowned, and certain his legacy would live on. What of everyone else? What of the death of a promising twenty-five year old, shocking an entire community, but forgotten forty years later? Unamuno and other existentialists, less dry in their explications of reality, were notable exceptions, but their words seemed shackled protests against the ruling obtuse dry analytic masters of the 20th century. And many existentialists were poets or dramatists at heart. Classical philosophy seemed best at dealing with death when its siamese partner, religion, took the lead (frequently), but I wasn’t quite ready for for religion. We resist accepting death as a fact, superstitiously imagining acceptance will deliver it prematurely. So I suppose that is one reason I exited philosophy for literature, and later literature for religion...and later, a new perspective on philosophy, embracing philosophers who balanced philosophy with spirituality. But in the end, no matter how well you learn to deal with it, as Cervantes’ Sancho Panza reminded us:

‘There’s a remedy for everything except death.’

Anyways, why expect an eighteen-year-old to be anywhere near transcending the burdens of gross instincts and feminine childhood coddling? Particularly in 1981?

Before we move on: It’s funny when a reader encounters something embarrassing on the page which he or she also does or thinks or embodies, past or present, and then reacts with scorn or repulsion towards the author or character, especially while fully conscious of the resemblance.

Philosophy and television swiftly faded from me: New York City dwarfed philosophy and turned television into a dry shadow show.

Popintoxicated

Pop culture, live performances, and encounters with celebrities are mentioned now and then in this story. To the overly serious (if any exist anymore), this may seem irrelevant. But come on! We all enjoy a bit of catchy pop culture now and then (mainstream and avant-garde), let’s not be so pompous. Tidbits dropped here and there, retro or contemporary, evoke a feeling for the time. And our egos are inescapably riddled with threads of pop culture. We may be made from the stuff of celestial stars, but sadly, closer up many of us are creations of pop culture and egomaniacal pop stars. My tastes are generally loftier now (as with many geriatric symphonic-eared rock stars, and former comics turned into dramatic artists who’d inspired our youthful tastes), but it would be wrong to think my pop references are in a spirit of condescension: if it’s on the page, it once meant something to me and sometimes still does (but rarely now, as I revise these words once again, for my attachment to them has naturally fallen away through years of meditation and prayer and study...and re-exposure). This applies even more so to the real people close to me over the years, no matter how far our paths eventually diverged. As for celebrities, at one time recounting encounters had been largely for the pleasure of name dropping, but now it only serves to complete descriptions of the terrain of my past, as with pop culture also described. On the other hand, perhaps someone might consider freeing us from the pop culture Blob which has since devastated most of academia.

Angelic Beauties

Nearly four months after I began working in Windows, the Miss Universe contest took place on July 20th in the Minskoff Theater, while the girls roomed in the new Vista Hotel in #3 World Trade Center. And one evening they banqueted up on our 107th floor. In the corridor between City Lights and the lobby, I came face-to-face with Bob Barker, television game show host and animal rights activist, and host of the beauty contest, and he flashed me a gracious beaming smile. When I passed through a banquet hallway later that night, three Miss Universe contestants approached me for directions. Petrified, I quickly pointed the way and nearly darted off, but they continued the conversation with personal questions about me. My jaw dropped. Another eighteen-year-old boy might scornfully laugh at my answering so briefly and fleeing so fast without pursuing the conversation further.

Not long afterwards, in the above mentioned Vista Hotel, I made a similarly innocent blunder (considering the natural goals of my youthful lustful loins). After chatting awhile with two young white women at the bar, we decided on sharing drinks together elsewhere after I finished work, which we did. Then it got late and they invited me to sleep in their hotel room to spare me the long trip home. So I slept on their floor without continuing our banter, without even a thought of pushing our relationship further. The idea failed to enter my mind until many years later.

...And a Literary Demigod

Rarely did I enter the main restaurant itself, as you really couldn’t be there unless you were supposed to be, for its relatively bright illumination exposed interlopers at once. Usually I socialized with main restaurant waiters and waitresses and busboys in the enormous central kitchen and backrooms. Sometimes during slow cycles they dropped by our bar to chat awhile. One evening when a waiter from the restaurant came by to pick up a special drink, he informed me that one of my current deities (a deity for many of the souls working in Windows, whether they knew it or not) was dining with his legendary sister. I contracted my demeanor like a silent creeping cat and skittered into the vast restaurant to see Tennessee Williams, a year of life left in him, displaying an antique white matriarchal Southern manner under a pale broad-brimmed hat, radiating a presence which temporarily suffused the restaurant with the sanctity of a theatrical stage.

Frequently I could be found in the Hors d’Oeuvrerie, for it existed nearly as one with City Lights Bar, known as the front bar to employees. I stood here or there with this or that waiter or busboy or waitress, each resembling animated statues, alert at their stations, awaiting a signal, a command, a glance. I didn’t shave as much as I should’ve, and could’ve washed my pants more frequently, but it didn’t matter much, for lights were dim and many minds were in a haze. Vain about appearances in theory, yet careless in practice, I couldn’t keep the look for long. Decades later my slothful unshaven style became an acceptable fashion, even in formal settings!

Two Tommys

When I first arrived on the scene, a ridiculously flamboyant waiter, whose short brown hair thrust upwards, resembling a tufted titmouse crest, approached me in the Grill kitchen. He gazed up at me bemused, with fussy dancing hands, and in an inquisitorial serpentine voice asked, Who...aaaarrrr...you? Unsure of the answer, I could only reply with an amused smile. Shortly after that introduction, he bumped into me while carrying an empty shot glass in hand, then stared mock imperiously at me a moment before gently cupping and twisting the shot glass upon my chest, where he estimated a nipple to be. His name was Tommy, not to be confused with a young busboy with the same name, nephew of Walter, a calm sweet diminutive old Chinese waiter with scanty long threads of white whiskers resembling filamentary roots dangling from his chin over the collar of his formal uniform. Walter and his nephew both worked in the Hors d’Oeuvrerie.

Sunday evenings were dreadfully slow, so slow that a careless mind dropping by only on that night might flatulently gossip about us doing little work! On one of those nights, titmouse Tommy hung around the bar, pestering Mr. Chow for a drink. Bartenders ordinarily gave fellow workers drinks now and then, while taking care the stock of liquor didn’t come up too short. The management understood that happy employees with reasonable measures of discipline and long leashes, make happy customers. Please Siddywinny, Tommy whined to Sid, please give me one teensy-weensy shot of whiskey? After he persisted and whined enough and Sid finally gave in, Tommy thanked him in a silly, prissy voice. Sid’s shoulders collapsed and he dropped his head low and stared at Tommy over black wide-rimmed glasses, perched precariously on the tip of his nose. In his medical white bartender jacket, he momentarily transformed into the role of shabby mad scientist. You’re a pain in my ass! he said with a thick Chinese accent in an otherworldly tone he sometimes assumed. You wish! Tommy replied, slipping away from the bar like Bugs Bunny with a stolen carrot.

Most everything here would soon be absorbed into mass culture, as with all significant fringe trends nowadays. Then it was handcrafted and isolated, as opposed to the superficial mass-produced culture which followed. But what followed would also be interesting...the birth of the ‘80’s happened here. But then forty years after these deceptively golden days this culture grew beyond mass exposure to almost dictatorially demanding to creep into every aspect of life. The fringe deserves toleration, but forcing its way into every aspect of mainstream life diminishes its uniqueness and generates resentment. Nowadays mass absorption is much quicker, tiny sprouts of culture cannot escape the burning rays of media for long. In a matter of seconds, billions of people are alerted to original new trends, and within weeks, scores of imitations appear in the popularity market. Many young people working in elegantly decadent Windows were newly cut throwbacks to 1920’s bohemian life: deshagged hippies synthetically spined with fine manners. Combined with my momentary focus on the literary bohemian café culture of that earlier time, Windows also transformed my shaggy hippie life into a slick chic new act. Management demanded sharpness, elegance, and beauty; nevertheless, employees were allowed unrefined edges and individual temperaments. AIDS was only an occasional new bit of reportage, just an opening for lewd jokes in the kitchen. Employee behavior with customers usually appeared impeccable, understated and soft-spoken. Yet behind the scenes a raucous comedy and tragedy of love affairs, conflicts, and warm camaraderie rolled on. Our humor ranged from queer sitcom to vaudeville to screwball comedy. But we rarely let it impinge upon customers, unless they clearly wanted to join in, and then things really rolled. An eccentric grandson of President Grover Cleveland, chief attorney for a large corporation, spent many long evenings in City Lights Bar. One night Bob McDonald, millionaire businessman, locked his keys inside his car in the WTC parking garage; I helped him, with the aid of a coat-hanger, to safely break into it and then he handed me a crisp $20 bill. Repeatedly he told me to contact him when ready to publish: he had connections. Years later I learned people were making relatively huge sums in their humble jobs in Windows. My $20 couldn’t compare. But back then I could care less about increasing my wealth, happy enough just to keep up with rent and bills and food.

More Friends in the Sky

Thirty year old Denise, whose sassy liquid black lesbian Southern tongue and manner I adored, was one of several dazzling delectable gorgeous unattainable waitresses in the Hors d’Oeuvrerie, most in late twenties, all far beyond me in maturity (you’re just a baby they’d coo sweetly). Sleek exotic skin-tight modest Asian-inspired Hors d’Oeuvrerie dresses were a sharp contrast to restaurant waitresses’ plain matronly tan colored dresses. Of course, being in Manhattan rather than in the clean consuming sunlight and greenery of Southeast Asia, the brighter lights of the restaurant would’ve made the exotic dresses appear gaudy. The Hors d’Oeuvrerie’s dim lights, alcohol, and narcotics fashioned a burlesque of humid timeless hazy tropics. Draping extravagance in exotic trappings may turn vice into virtue. Bubbly curly-haired smiling blonde Grill waitress Sherry sang lead in an all girl rock-and-roll band. I took in one of her shows in a small club: a fine singer with lots of energy, charm, and warmth. She’d once posed for a solo layout in a nudie magazine. Alex the Hors d’Oeuvrerie busboy, a pale walnut brown haired fortyish actor, a kind gentle soul on the brink of frustration (not Czech Alex from the main restaurant), showed me the photos and remarked that she adored them and had them prominently displayed on her wall at home (true).

Wendy, a lovely sharp-tongued perpetually dark tanned Jewish woman who stylistically handled a cigaret and martini during rapid emphatic conversations recalled a youthful version of my paternal grandmother. Hanging around the Grill service bar especially frazzled one evening, Wendy inspired bartender Cal into mixing a martini, which he then presented to her while theatrically plopping in a Valium instead of an olive. Not a good idea. Cal hadn’t yet been hired at this juncture. More of him later.

A mysterious married fiftyish Asian waitress, appearing twenty years younger, truly at home in her costume, presented a stable conservative subtly joyful presence. Another Asian woman, younger, her hair teased high, with striking but gentle warrior cheekbones and a sharp nose and sparse perfectly placed facial freckles, knew how to hold her tongue, as opposed to many of our coworkers.

A Photo-shoot

A tough blonde waitress with short mottled dark blonde hair and a hoarse deep voice worked from her apartment as a photographer, doing head shots and so forth. A fair-skinned black queen busboy, also from the Grill, served as her makeup artist. What a pair.

Trying a halfhearted attempt at extending modeling and acting beyond my hair, I scheduled a photo-shoot in her apartment. Distressed over facial blemishes, I attempted a quick eradication of the affliction by sitting overly long under a cheap sunlamp at home, completely disregarding the warning about photosensitivity caused by tetracycline. The makeup queen nearly screeched at the sight of my roasted red face. He painted and drew and powdered the best he could to rid me of red, but that left a thick beige cosmetic mask on my face. The photographer snapped photos while complaining of back pain, so her assistant suggested she should get laid: that would cure it. I’d only read about people such as this, or seen them as bit characters grilled by sarcastic detectives in 70’s crime dramas. Far better than television!

A week later I returned to the photographer’s apartment to pick up the photos; unsatisfied with them herself, she snapped another role on the spot: unshaven, skin now clear and tan after ripening from sunlamp excess, I wore a waist-length unlabeled pea green wool army jacket. Those photos looked good, but I ended up using one with the kabuki mask for what would be a futile display in a modeling catalogue. Vain, vain, vain, little Leibniz with powdered face and outrageous curled wig.

Royalty

Imelda Marcos, grand matriarch of the Philippines, and her