TINY MONTGOMERY STREET

22. TINY MONTGOMERY STREET (Sometimes Sad Whatever Else):

There was a time mind you when we all lived together on Tiny Montgomery Street thinking we were alone and sometimes we'd make fun of the street name which was really Montgomery Street in Jersey City but the situation was so dire we called it Tiny Montgomery Street after a song or something Emil talked about and then he used to joke about whether he'd rather live on Jones Street or Great Jones Street when he got back to New York City same stuff like that kind of joking thing but nobody ever really followed it so we moved on and once we stole an old Buick that was down on its last legs sinking pretty low to the ground but just as it sat in some yard with a key in it that's just how we stole it and rode off and it worked for about 3 days as we rode around here and there and even got back into New York City with it three bucks for the Tunnel and then we abandoned it when it finally needed gas left it on the West Side Highway just off to the side and walked away with our stuff but it was pretty fun for the time we had it cars are interesting like that you can get around with them but sometimes you can't and everything stops and even though you're in a car you're going nowhere and all around you in the city the people walking are getting more places than you so we didn't miss it much for sure but there's nothing like the air and the windows down and the feeling you get passing by places you know as you drive along as if you owned the street and everything and the passing portraiture can sometimes astound as you see the tall buildings from street level all twisted and crazy or the monumental scale of steel and glass and stone and brick and the enormous entryways with their big numbers and frontages where people enter and leave in clumps and the third or fourth floor windows you can see from street-level all cluttered with papers and desk and busy-work stuff and the signs in the windows above the street 'Conde Nast Rothfell Brokers Granite City Lenders Abacus Decorations Pummelio Draperies and Fabrics National Time-Keeping Company Florimund Travel Argosy Books Trendy Costume Company Network Medical Systems Inc. On-Line Solutions The Mad Hatter' it all goes by in a rush and blur too fast to even talk about and just by listening you learn so much (like the guy talking about the wartime photographs of Vietnam just found taken by North Vietnamese photographers themselves neglected all these years stuffed in boxes and many many negatives just found wrapped in cardboard and placed in a box lined with kernels of rice to keep out moisture and all the men who once took these propaganda and wartime photographs from the North's perspective for once not the American or the South's are now all in their late seventies and eighties and are barely reminiscent of what they did back then but some can remember easily the tiniest detail of some of the pictures things like the hundreds of boots cast-off on the last day of the war by the fleeing North Vietnamese soldiers who in their haste to flee took off their uniforms and boots and clothing and wanted desperately to mingle and mix in with the peasants they returned to immediately so as not to be seen as having been soldiers just the morning before and the roadway in the photo is littered quite literally with a thousand boots and the fleeing cars and buses are just running over them and a few people on motorbike are seen heading in the other direction) and everywhere you go people are talking about something and you're walking along to just take it all in and without the car then you realize you are really part of a big middle-mass of life and activity all amidst the lunge and poke of sound and emphasis and meaning and emotion up and down every street and corner and block and avenue the attitude and the circumstance of living is worked out hundreds lunching hundreds for coffee hundreds at the curb hundreds on their way and so "hey forget the car" you wind up saying glad to see it's dead and gone and it's cheaper too to walk away and I remember once there was this girl with him Tea was her name (she called it 'Tay ya' I guess it sounded better) and she stayed with us for some time a couple of months anyway and her and Emil got pretty tight with each other even though it was difficult in our situations to move in on anyone he wasn't stopped no-how by that anyway Tea stayed along with us for a while doing pretty much whatever we did she was a nice girl about thirty maybe straggly hair sort of blond attractive and interesting too and Emil he used to say "You've got to remain interesting in this life for it to be worth anything the last thing I want to see is a boring bunch of pricks who can't do anything differently or fresher than the next so no matter what format we have to do it in we've got to remain interesting and even startling to ourselves to give life that little kick that keeps it from being tiresome and the kind of thing that brings you down so let's go" he'd talk like that a lot a pep-talk to nobody in particular but that's what kept him bringing people around himself he was like the leader in charisma of any of the homeless and low-life's we ever were with he could get people to do just about anything for him if maybe not with him it was funny that whole scene was funny and it was different then too because a lot of what today is considered important and valuable areas were then just ruination I remember seeing boarded up doors and piles of cast-off vegetables and foods along the curbs and broken bags of garbage and debris windows gone doorways boarded the very streets that today draw thousands then were derelict places where'd you'd sometimes be afraid to be seen for fear of your life or getting beat up or stabbed or anything like that the old broken storefronts out of business from twelve years before the broken bannisters and porches and stoops on the houses the one after the other horrible junked cars broken twisted abandoned left there the dogs the kids the old people just staring off into some space it was like some tired old war zone of rubble and destruction being passed off as a city but that's where we lived that's the stuff we walked in it was an entire under-culture of people with no meaning or nothing and so much of that is gone now it's all so different but hey this is memory speaking remember and memory gets its privileges and I spoke to Tea once myself as she was simply and quietly sitting amongst the trees and greenery of a park bench across from the old pet store with all the birds in the window and we'd just the night before been playing off this blues crowd that had gathered outside one of those Bleecker Street clubs grubbing dollars and drinks and whatever we could from the gathered kids and it worked pretty well and she turned to me that day and said "you know I could have been into California by now probably all settled and with a place to live and everything only if I'd done what my people wanted me to do back then which was just simply straighten up and take some schooling and they would support me wherever I wanted to go or do and I did at one time want to be in Hollywood just to be around the stars and all and maybe get picked up by some talent scout or something working tables at a cafe or bar and then I coulda' played myself well and gotten a few roles and things and become a star like on TV and the movies people like Goldie Hawn or Lee Remick or Michelle Pfeiffer or any of them they ain't got nothing on me not looks not talent it's all a matter of luck yet here I am walking around for hunger and want driving all those old thoughts out of my head because they still hurt you know I remember back in '67 when they was casting right over there for Hair and I passed on that and Sam Shepherd was around then too and a lot of the guys now that you see getting older they were just starting and were young too back then taking their chances Hoffman and Pacino and a lot of others but what did I know I just wanted something right then and there because at that time you know tomorrow was a long way off and now I'm in it and here it is like they say you don't miss your water till your well runs dry and now I got nobody anywhere nobody left I'm all alone and that's sometimes sad whatever else" but that was all back when there was changes everywhere and we were just poor slobs but they always listened to Emil even when he'd be gone and now hell the millennium itself has changed around us and whenever I look up I see but a swarm of new modern young faces peering back at me from some stupid place like bars now that have their own brews and copper kettles suspended from the ceiling and they call themselves 'Harvest' or whatever and kids flock to them fill them up drinking and laughing and the old workmen's bars they're all gone I can't even remember where half of them was anymore because all the work that used to go with them is gone too and the old guys are all died off and we bury their memories with them too that's how the old world passes the old ways disappear and everywhere there's gawky kids in strange pants and they laugh and it seems like that's all they do sitting at these places eating food like it was always there but we have to and had to work for it so it meant something first but never for them and they don't understand what's been lost or removed they just play on and sometimes now as I remember even Tea wasn't nothing but a stupid kid at times or at least that's the way it seemed - you can tell people by what they talk about and their references and things and the thing I hate the most is being naive and innocent because my God that's got to go away immediately it's of no value at all once you're an adult and so those are the people who really get me going the ones who fall for shit and take on a story and run with it the kids are like that it's always a cause or a reason or a mission until they weary and get tired of it and then suddenly they can rationalize a way out of the situation that had just been consuming them.