Scratch On The Stoop

My first girlfriend, my first love was Marylin Majkowski. I was fourteen or fifteen at the time and she was a year younger. We dated, were “going steady” all through high school. Even though she lived in Southampton and I lived in Queens, I would take the train out to see her once a month and would also see her during the summers. For me that meant all summer because my folks worked in Southampton, my mother at Saks Fifth Avenue, where she sold Emilio Pucci clothes and my father who played regularly at one nightclub or another. I was living on Lewis Street on the second floor of the Waldron's house. My father had being playing at Dick Ridgely's Trade Winds, a restaurant/night club in Water Mill that was a favorite of high society and the local business people who were in service to the wealthy. My father and Dick were friends from the old days when they were in Paul Whiteman's Band. Ridgely's was a place where the social ball field was leveled, where the rich and not s...

During that period from 1971 to 1976 I lived as a New York City bachelor. From September through May I would frequent the taverns along the avenues on the upper East side and lower West side. I dated women who would pick me up in their Jaguars and bring me to clubs, pay for my drinks, buy me presents and do favors for me. In the summer I ‘d occupy myself in the Post House, Bobby Vans, Bradleys and the Drivers Seat. I met Jinxy, my anorectic live-in who ate lobster roe and didn’t speak a word of English but somehow we lasted a summer. The previous summer she had been the live-in lover of a very old and very rich European who I had met while living at the old Irving Hotel, a Gatsbyesque kind of gatehouse on Hill Street. I met Jinxy the following year at the bar of the Driver’s Seat and we motioned to each other our remembrances of the previous summer. That night she came back to my room and never left. We went on one date all summer, to the Lobster Inn. The rest of the time we went out i...

Herb Wood hired me at Billboard Magazine, he said, because I was crosseyed, and that in particular my left eye turned inward. He said that if my right eye turned outward he never would have hired me. That is because supposedly, the left eye was looking inward toward my soul. And the right eye turned outward was a sign of sexual deviation. Of the two, to be perfectly honest, I was glad that my left eye was looking at my soul, though also in honesty I sometimes questioned some of the sexual thoughts I had. After a few weeks on the job Herb called me into his office to tell me about a former employee he had worked with. He said that the man was highly spiritual and that even though he had been a clerk, everybody at Billboard, including the publisher Mort Nasatir, had become enamored with him because he taught esoteric concepts centered around Gnosticism and in the late sixties and early seventies many people had been turned off by formal religion and were searching other areas for answer...

Alan Haig was a jazz pianist, best known as one of the pioneers of bebop. Haig was born in Newark, New Jersey. He started playing with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and then performed and recorded under Gillespie.  Later, as a member of Eddie Davis and His Beboppers they featured another friend of my father's, Fats Navarro. Haig went back with Parker from 1948 to 1950, and then Stan Getz from 1949 to 1951. He was part of the celebrated first session of Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool album. Although Haig became known for his distinctive and pioneering bebop style, he in fact spent much of his career playing in non-jazz contexts. His work was the subject of a revival in the 1970s. In 1969 Haig was acquitted of a murder charge. He had been accused of strangling his third wife, Bonnie, at their home in Clifton, New Jersey in October 1968. He had said in evidence that his wife had been drunk, and had died in a fall, down a flight of stairs. Grange Rutan, Haig's second wife...

I remember that near the end for John Jennings’ mother. At that time of my life I was swallowed up with the idea of god and was thinking about becoming a Catholic since I was beyond the fear of hell, which didn’t drive the decision but instead was most in love with the Latin ceremony, the choir’s angelic echo and chants and my ego centric thinking that God may even be tempting me to join the church. I was living in what I thought was a state of grace even if it were between games of nine ball, straight pool, Chicago and dragging on a cigarette. On the night before Phil Jennings died, after eleven in the evening I walked a steady paced toward Physicians General Hospital a long distance, deep into Jackson Height thinking, believing that my prayers and discussion with God would spare John’s mother. I don’t remember if it was summer or winter or spring or fall but what I know was that the hospital was incredibly quiet and subdued; the lights were dimmed. Curiously, I had no problem finding...

Get off my foot. Scratch is towed up the mechanical stairs in Grand Central Station. He threw the Daily Mirror into the waste paper basket. He used it to occupy the time spent in the awful morning subway ride to Manhattan. He watched the cadence of the asses of the secretaries in blues, blacks, reds and yellows. And, the men behind. Hoping that the best will happen and the worst will not. Remembering their sleep conversations? Martha? Yes George? Martha, are you sleeping? Yes, George. Martha, do you remember when we were first, married? Yes, George. Goodnight, Martha. Yes, George. They are all here in front of me and their destination is nine o’clock. Scratch stopped in the coffee shop for his morning cup of tea. He spied the boss at the next counter and nodded. Taking out money to pay for the tea, he noticed a nick on the edge of silver. In God We Trust it said. Speak for yourself please. “Good morning Scratch.” “Good morning Mr. Kowalski.”  “Bye.” “Bye.” And the ...