Down in Greenwich Village I buy shirts and socks in shops called haberdasheries and I don’t know what material they’re made of even though there are people telling me you have to be careful what you put on your body nowadays, you might have allergies and break out in a rash. I never worried about such things in Limerick but here danger lurks even in the buying of socks and shirts.
Things in shop windows have names I don’t know and I don’t know how I traveled this far in life in such a state of ignorance. There are florist shops along the avenue and all I can name beyond these windows is geraniums. Respectable people in Limerick were mad for the geraniums and when I delivered telegrams there were often notes on the front door, Please slide the window up and leave messages under the geranium pot. It’s strange to stand at a florist’s shop on Fifth Avenue remembering how delivering telegrams helped me become an expert on geraniums and now I don’t even like them. They never excited me like other flowers in people’s gardens with all that color and fragrance and the sadness of their dying in the autumn. Geraniums have no fragrance, they live forever and the taste makes you sick though I’m sure there are people over there on Park Avenue who would take me aside and spend an hour persuading me of the glories of the geranium and I suppose I’d have to agree with them because everywhere I go people know more about everything than I do and it’s not likely you’d be rich and living on Park Avenue unless you had a profound knowledge of geraniums and growing things in general.
All along the avenue there are shops with gourmet foods and if I ever enter such a place I’ll have to bring someone who grew up respectable and knows the difference between pâté de foie gras and mashed potatoes. All these shops are obsessed with French and I don’t know what they’re thinking of. Why can’t they say spuds instead of pommes or is it that you pay more for something printed in French?
There’s no sense at all looking in the windows of antique furniture shops. They’ll never let you know the price of something till you ask and they’ll never plant a sign on a chair to tell you what it is or where it came from. Most of the chairs you wouldn’t want to sit in anyway. They’re so upright and stiff they’d give you such a pain in your back you’d wind up in the hospital. Then there are little tables with curved legs so delicate they’d collapse under the weight of a pint and destroy a priceless carpet from Persia or wherever people sweat for the pleasure of rich Americans. There are delicate mirrors, too, and you wonder what it’s like in the morning to see your face in a frame agog with little Cupids and maidens frolicking and where would you look in such confusion? Would I look at the stuff oozing from my eyes or would I be enchanted with a maiden succumbing to a Cupid arrow?
With the dawn glimmering far down in Greenwich Village Fifth Avenue is nearly deserted except for people making their way to St. Patrick’s Cathedral to save their souls, mostly old women who seem to have greater fear than the old men mumbling along beside them or it may be that old women live longer and there are more of them. When the priest dispenses Communion the pews empty and I envy the people coming back down the aisles with the wafers in their mouths and the holy look that tells you they’re in a state of grace. They can go home now and have the big breakfast and if they fall dead while eating sausages and eggs they go straight to heaven. I’d like to make my peace with God but my sins are so terrible any priest would drive me from the confessional and I know once again my only hope for salvation is that I’ll have an accident where I’ll linger for a few minutes so that I can make an Act of Perfect Contrition that will open the gates of heaven.
Still, it’s comforting to sit in the cathedral in the hush of a dawn Mass especially when I can look around and put names on what I see, the pews, the Stations of the Cross, the pulpit, the tabernacle with the monstrance holding the Eucharist inside, the chalice, the ciborium, the cruets for wine and water at the altar’s right side, the paten. I know nothing about jewelry and the flowers in the shop but I can recite the priestly vestments, the amice, the alb, the girdle, the maniple, the stole, the chasuble, and I know the priest up there wearing the purple chasuble of Lent will change to white on Easter Sunday when Christ is risen and Americans give their children chocolate rabbits and yellow eggs.
After all the Sunday mornings in Limerick I can skip as easily as an altar boy from the Introit of the Mass to the Ite, missa est, Go, you are dismissed, the signal for the thirsty men of Ireland to rise from their knees and flock to the pubs for the Sunday pint, cure for the woes of the night before.
I can name the parts of the Mass and the priestly vestments and the parts of a rifle like Henry Reed in his poem but what use is all this if I rise in the world and sit in a stiff chair at a table where they’re serving fancy food and I can’t tell the difference between mutton and duck?
It’s full daylight on Fifth Avenue and there’s no one but myself sitting on the steps between the two great lions of the Forty-second Street public library where Tim Costello told me to go nearly ten years ago to read The Lives of the English Poets. There are little birds of different sizes and colors flitting from tree to tree telling me spring will soon be here and I don’t know their names either. I can tell the difference between a pigeon and a sparrow and there it ends except for the seagull.
If my students at McKee High School could look into my head they’d wonder how I ever became a teacher at all. They know already I never went to high school and they’d say, That’s it. Here’s a teacher who stands up there giving us vocabulary lessons and he doesn’t even know the names of the birds in the trees.
The library will be open in a few hours and I could sit in the Main Reading Room with big picture books that tell me the names of things but it’s still early morning and it’s a long way to Downing Street, Bill Galetly cross-legged and squinting at himself in the mirror, Plato and the Gospel According to St. John.
He’s flat on his back on the floor, naked and snoring, a candle guttering by his head, banana peels everywhere. It’s cold in the flat but when I place a blanket over him he sits up and pushes it away. Sorry about the bananas, Frank, but I had a little celebration this morning. Big breakthrough. Here it is.
He points to a passage in St. John. Read it, he says. Go ahead, read it.
And I read, It is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing, the words that I speak unto you, they are the spirit, and they are the life.
Bill stares at me. So?
What?
You get it? You dig?
I don’t know. I’d have to read it a few times and it’s nearly nine o’clock in the morning. I’ve been up all night.
I fasted for three days to get inside that. You have to get inside things. Like sex. But I’m not finished. I’m looking for the parallel world in Plato. Guess I’ll have to go to Mexico.
Why Mexico?
Great shit there.
Shit?
You know. Variety of chemicals to help the seeker.
Oh, yes. I’m going to bed for a while.
Wish I could offer you a banana but I had the celebration.
I sleep a few hours this Sunday morning and when I awake he’s gone leaving behind nothing but banana skins.