Poetry
Maria lived on the fifth floor. No matter how hot it was, she wore a black merino coat which she must have owned for the fifty years; a navy straw hat, slightly battered; a black umbrella. Even in her dusty dark clothes, which always seemed unwashed, which made it a little scary to get too close to her when one was, say, fated to pass her on the stairs, she still was a good-looking old woman. People in our building said, “Wow, she must have been beautiful when she was young.” Now, she looked like a demented Jessica Tandy at a distance. Closer up her rage and disorientation swirled around like a force field. Maria hit – often with her small claw-like hands, more often with her large bony umbrella.
It is still remarkable to me that none of us in the building ever called the police on her — when Maria hit, she hit hard. But no one seemed to get too upset, or really even tangle with her. When Maria was in a hitting mood, we ducked and darted away and treated her like a bird caught in a house. The rest of the time we ignored her.
Maria had a soft spot for my boyfriend, Andrew. Most people didn’t like him because he was caustic and proud and intelligent. Later I would learn that he was contending with an unofficially diagnosed mental illness, which would lead to a psychotic break the year he turned 30. But that was to come. For now, he was just another artsy type who hung around the East Village on weekends and tried to write the Great American novel or paint pictures when he wasn’t working his night job, a gig with a law firm where he was pulled files. Andrew was the only person in the building, except our landlord Mr. Rodriguez, with whom Maria would have a civil conversation, and it was only because Maria liked Andrew that I came to learn a little more about her.
She had come to New York from Elizabeth, New Jersey to be a poet, in thrall to Ms. Marianne Moore whom she had discovered through Poetry magazine. She was one of twelve children — four girls, eight boys, who were (according to Maria) savage and cruel. She had discovered Poetry in the local public library, and it had changed her.
Once, or so she claimed, Maria had walked 100 blocks uptown from the West Village in the company of e.e. cummings, who accompanied her to her door. A real gentleman. Maria told us many other stories in her breathless style, inflamed by invective, dropping names none of us knew as if they lived next door. “I was with that little red-haired whore Dottie, you know the one I mean, thinks she can pull the hussy on me in her lavender brassiere!”
In fact, e.e. cummings first moved to New York in 1922, and in 1926 established himself at 11 Patschen Place in the West Village. In those years, he had tried unsuccessfully to find a publisher for his poems, following up his well-received autobiographical novel The Enormous Room about his service as an ambulance driver in World War I. No one was interested in his poems back then, but he self-published – with money from his father — two volumes of poetry, later considered by some to mark a formal shift in American poetry. In 1926, his parents were on their way to their New Hampshire to their second home when, during a heavy snowstorm, their car crossed a train tack near Center Ossipee and they were struck by a train. The car was cut in two, killing his father and gravely injuring his mother. Cummings, who was close to his father, fell into a crisis – of nerves, confidence, grief. Maria claimed to have come to know him that very year —”we both drank in the same gin joint.” This was also when he wrote the poem Maria recited for us on our staircase — “somewhere i have never travelled gladly beyond.”
Whenever Maria talked about e.e. cummings, she would soon veer off into talking about Dottie, her whore friend, as if the two were someone connected in her mind, which made me wonder about the origin of her e.e. cummings story. In the Collected e.e. cummings I owned, the introduction quoted his notions about poetry:
“My theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk, viz. “Would you hit a woman with a child? — No, I’d hit her with a brick.” Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.” This statement made me wonder, perhaps unfairly, what he had been like. The introduction also quoted him as saying, “My advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world …”
Andrew said Maria had once shown him some of her poems. As far as he could tell, they were complete gibberish, though Maria did have, we both agreed, beautiful penmanship. We knew her handwriting well because she frequently passed notes under our door — and not just to us but to everyone in the building. These notes were tucked inside business envelopes, slightly yellowed from having sat in one of the many boxes in Maria’s disheveled fifth floor hole. Usually her envelopes weren’t opened, because Maria filled them with dead cockroaches. The first one she gave to me had my name on it, and I tore it open right in front of her. Ten tiny dead cockroaches slid out with a sliver of paper which read: “I thought these must be for you.”
“Fuck her with her cockroach notes,” said Junior the super when I told him. “I mean fuck her with those cockroach notes.” Maria, we agreed, was not only cuckoo crazy, but a total pain in the ass. In a different building, she would have been thrown out to the street or locked up as a public nuisance, but our landlord had the gift of an unusually sanguine temperament. His name was Mr. Rodriguez — none of us ever felt comfortable using his first name, which was Elio, though he urged us to. He came from Extremadura, a village outside Merida in western Spain along the border with Portugal. Travel posters of this part of Spain plastered the boiler room, which could be reached only through green wooden doors that opened to the street. Mr. Rodriguez, having bought our row of buildings cheaply, and, who according to Junior, was heavily mortgaged, did all the work himself, with the erratic help of Junior, who was strong but given to crack benders after which he would usually find Jesus for a time and begin preaching on our corner through a microphone run through a boom box.
It was a tough block in what was a tough neighborhood. The buildings down the block toward Columbus Avenue were all crack houses. If you parked your car on our block and left it overnight, by morning the tires might be gone, or even the doors. We all knew that if you bought something for the house – a television, say, or a boom box in your window, you should bring it into the building concealed in a laundry bag or you’d be robbed. We often thought we knew or at least rightly suspected who these robbers were. But that didn’t stop us from having conversations with them on the stoop, sharing cigarettes or a bottle of beer. Everyone on our block favored El Presidente, a delicious Dominican beer with a picture of El Presidente himself on the label, a man with twinkling but steely eyes and a magnificent moustache.
No one now seems as eccentric to me as the people in that building. Yet I’m still nostalgic for what, in retrospect, feels to me something like what people mean when they speak of “Christian kindness,” though in this case it was more a matter of “live and let live.” Mr. Rodriguez, for instance, agreed with the other tenants that Maria was a menace, and it appeared unlikely that he ever actually received much of her meager Social Security check. Yet he let her keep living there. When she was particularly violent or loud for long periods, he might say, “I should just shove her out on the street,” but always he continued, “but you know I just can’t stand to think about that. Maria on the street – man, she would destroy the people out there. Am I right?”
Twice a year Mr. Rodriguez took the initiative to clean out Maria’s apartment. Doing this was no doubt in violation of her civil rights, but it was a practical necessity because by the time Mr. Rodriguez did it, Maria’s apartment was so stuffed with newspapers and milk cartons, tin cans and whatever she dragged in that everyone feared her place as a source of fire or rats. There was a ritual to this cleaning. First, Junior and Mr. Rodriguez would lead Maria out to the sidewalk, ignoring her kicks, punches, and vigorous profanity. They would sit her on a folding chair brought up from the basement. After serving her a meal of takeout Chinese or fried chicken, thus marginally calming her down, they would march a group of neighborhood teens up to her apartment with Lysol, buckets and mops. The kids were instructed to throw out most everything and scrub what was left. Then the woman from the fifth floor next door — famous for her red velvet curtains, five sons, and lack of window guards — would be called in to give Maria a shower. I would hear Maria’s screams, as did everyone up and down 107th between Amsterdam and Columbus. They even washed her clothes.
Once, I ran into Maria on the stairs between my third floor and the fourth floor just after this bi-yearly cleaning. She was sitting in the middle of the stairs with a dazed, almost meditative expression. Instead of shouting at or attacking me, she reached up to pat me on the sleeve. “Listen, girlie” she said. “I’ve lost my poems. I’ve looked and looked and I can’t find them. Will you help me?” I told her I would. And she repeated her story about e.e. cummings. “We kept right up Broadway all the way from the village, past the whores, there were so many whores. They looked just like you.” She stopped, then said, “A cockroach whore that’s you are. Cockroach whore.” She muttered these two words over and over, not even noticing when I slipped away up the stairs.
I stared out the window of my apartment. Night was falling fast and the sky was electric blue, the mystic blue of trains and oriental carpets. It was a terrible apartment with pitted pine floors and pitted walls; two windows in front that looked about to give way and tumble to the street, but we loved our building precisely because it was so scrambled together with spit and wire, open to whatever passed through. So full of life that even the walls sometimes appeared to crawl with it, and not in a good way. And yet, it was a curiously tender yet fragile feeling one had living there in the midst of so much human energy, animal energy, walls so thin you heard and ignored even the most intimate details of your neighbors’ lives.
When I went out two hours later, Maria was still out on the stairs, but sitting between the second and first floors as if she was heading out but had gotten stalled. She was speaking to herself in a low urgent voice, patting her lap over and over, “Come on girlie, it’s all right. Get up. You know you can do it. Just get yourself up.” Once again, I slid right past her.
Maria would be long dead now, and Mr. Rodriguez is surely an old man. Junior died the year I moved out. This was the year after Andrew and I broke up, and he had his nervous breakdown and moved to Maine where he still lives. Junior died on the corner of a heart attack while preaching about Jesus who, Junior claimed, was just like us, wandering the world in bare feet. He was only 38, though I had believed he was older. Mr. Rodriguez, who grieved for him, told me that the heart attack was brought on by acute cocaine poisoning.
There are many people who dearly admire the works of e.e. cummings and many others who find his poetry childish, incomprehensible, slight or annoying. The poem Maria had recited for Andrew and me is generally considered one of his best, and I thought of it as I slipped past Maria, rocking herself to-and-fro on that long-ago evening as I went out to the darkening streets:
“(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands”