Three-Martini Lunch: A novel - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Suzanne Rindell is the author of The Other Typist. She has published her short fiction and poetry in Conjunctions (online), Nimrod, storySouth, Crab Orchard Review, and Cream City Review. Rindell lives in New York City.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2016 Suzanne Rindell

Cliff

1

Greenwich Village in ‘58 was a madman’s paradise.  In those days a bunch of us went aroundtogether drinking too much coffee and smoking too much cannabis and talking allthe time about poetry and Nietzsche and bebop. I had been running around with the same guys I knew from Columbia – giveor take a colored jazz musician here or a benny addict there – and together wewould get good and stoned and ride the subway down to Washington Square.  I guess you could say I liked my Columbiabuddies all right.  They were swellenough guys but when you really got down to it they were a pack of poserwannabe-poets in tweed and I knew it was only a matter of time before I outgrewthem.  Their fathers were bankers andlawyers and once their fascination with poetic manifestos wore off they wouldsettle down and become bankers and lawyers, too, and marry a nicedebutante.  I was different from theseguys because even before I went to college I knew I was meant to be an artist,even if I didn’t know just yet exactly what form I wanted my creativity totake.  As far as I was concerned academiawas for the birds anyhow, and the more I spent time below 14thStreet, the more I realized that the Village was my true education. 

When I finally threw in the towel and dropped my last classat Columbia, My Old Man came poking around my apartment in MorningsideHeights.  He ahemmed quietly to himself and fingered the waxy leaves of theplants in the window and finally sat with his rump covering a water-stain on ahand-me-down Louis XVI sofa my great-aunt had deemed too ugly to keep in herown apartment.  Together we drank acouple of fingers of bourbon neat, and then he shook my hand in a dignified wayand informed me the best lesson he could teach me at this point in my life was self-reliance.  His plan mainly involved cutting me off fromthe family fortune and making long speeches on the superior quality of earned pleasures.

Once My Old Man broke the news about how I was going tohave to pave my own road it was all over pretty quickly after that.  I threw a couple of loud parties and didn’tpay my rent and then the landlord had me out lickety-split and I had to golooking for a new place. 

            Which is how, as I entered into mystudy of the relative value of earned pleasures, I found myself renting aone-room studio in the Village with no hot water and a toilet down thehall.  The lid was missing on the tank ofthat toilet and I remember the worst thing I ever did to my fellow hall-mateswas to get sick after coming home drunk one night and mistake the open tank forthe open bowl.  But even without mywhiskey-induced embellishments the building was a dump.  It was a pretty crummy apartment and when itrained the paint on the walls bubbled something awful, but I liked being nearthe basement cafés where people were passionate about trying out new thingswith the spoken word, which was still pretty exciting to me at the time.  In those days you could walk the streets allaround Washington Square and plunge down a narrow stairway here and there tofind a room painted all black with red light bulbs screwed into the fixturesand there’d be someone standing in front of a crowd telling America to go tohell or maybe acting out the birth of a sacred cow in India.  It was all kind of bananas and you were neversure what you were going to see, but after a while you started to come acrossthe same people mostly.

I had seen Miles, Swish, Bobby, and Pal around theVillage, of course, and they had seen me, too. We were friendly enough with one another, all of us being artytypes.  I knew their faces and I knewtheir names but the night I really entered the picture I was in such a sorrystate it was a real act of mercy on their part. I was slated to read my poems for the first time ever at a place calledThe Sweet Spot. Earlier that afternoon I had been looking over my pages when itsuddenly struck me they were no good. The discovery had me seized me up with fear until my whole body wasparalyzed and I sensed I was rank with the stench of my impending failure.  The poems were bad and that was the truth ofit.  My solution was whiskey, and by sixo’clock I had managed to put down half a bottle before the poems finallystarted to look better than they had at three p.m.  In my foolish state I decided finishing theother half of the bottle would be the key to gaining at least a few moreincrements of poetic improvement.  By thetime I took the stage I could barely hold myself upright.  Somehow I managed to get off two poems… moreor less… before I heard the wooden stool next to me clatter to the ground as itfell over and I felt the cold sticky black-painted floor rise up like aswelling wave to my hip and shoulder and, seconds later, my face. 

When I came to I was lying on a couch in Swish’s apartmentwith the whole gang sitting around the kitchen table talking in loud voicesabout Charlie Parker while a seminal record of his spun on a turntable near myhead.  After a few minutes Pal came overand handed me a cool washcloth for my bruised face.  Then Bobby whistled and commented that I had“some kind of madman style” in anadmiring tone of voice that made me think perhaps the two poems I couldremember getting off hadn’t been so bad after all and maybe it was even truethat in getting wasted I had actually made the truest choice an artist couldmake, like Van Gogh and his absinthe.  Icould see they were all deciding whether I was a hack or a genius and the factthey might be open to the second possibility being true fortified me and filledme with a kind of dopey pride.  ThenSwish boiled some coffee on the stove and brought it over to me.  He told me his religion was coffee and hecouldn’t abide his guests adding milk or sugar and so I shouldn’t ever expecthim to offer any of that stuff.  Thecoffee was so thick you could have set a spoon in the center of the mug and itwould’ve stood up straight and never touched the sides.  Later when I learned more about Swish he toldme that was how you made it when you were on the road and once you’d had yourcoffee like that everything else tasted like water.  I guess some of Swish’s romantic passionabout cowboy coffee wore off on me, because after that night I sneered atanything someone brought me that happened to have a creamy shade or sweetenedtaste. 

Swish’s given name was Stewart and he was nicknamed Swishbecause he was always in a hurry.  He wasone of those wiry, nervous guys with energy to spare.   After I’d taken a few sips of Swish’s coffeeand managed to work my forehead over some more with the washcloth I was feelingwell enough to join them at the kitchen table and dive into the talk aboutDizzy Gilespie and Charlie Parker, and all of a sudden it was like I had alwayshad a seat at that table and had just never known it.  The frenzied tempo of their chatter wascontagious.  They conversed likemusicians improvising jazz and I hoped some of this would find its way into mywriting.  Between the five of us wefinished off a pot of coffee and two packs of cigarettes and fourteen bottlesof beer and shared the dim awareness that a small but sturdy union had beenformed.

Swish regaled us with his adventures riding the railsacross America like a hobo and about the year he’d spent in the MerchantMarines.  Even though he’d never finishedhigh school he had still managed to feed his mind all...