successful records. Without Billy-Boy, though. He formed a band of his own not long after we left Englander’s, an all-black combination that played Dixieland and ragtime. They did real well down south, and I was glad for them. It was just as well. Lots of places wouldn’t even audition us with a Negro in the group.
But I was telling you about Maureen. She made great news copy, and not just because she was a kind of Ma Barker with brains, although that was part of it. She was awful big and she was awful bad, and Americans from coast to coast felt a strange sort of affection for her. When she died of a heart attack in 1933, some of the papers said she weighed five hundred pounds. I doubt it, though. No one gets that big, do they?
Anyway, her funeral made the front pages. It was more than you could say for her brother, who never got past page four in his whole miserable career. It took ten pallbearers to carry her coffin. There was a picture of them toting it in one of the tabloids. It was a horrible picture to look at. Her coffin was the size of a meat locker—which, in a way, I suppose it was.
Rico wasn’t bright enough to hold things together by himself, and he fell for assault with intent to kill the very next year.
I’ve never been able to get her out of my mind, or the agonized, hangdog way Scollay had looked that first night when he talked about her. But I cannot feel too sorry for her, looking back. Fat people can always stop eating. Guys like Billy-Boy Williams can only stop breathing. I still don’t see any way I could have helped either of them, but I do feel sort of bad every now and then. Probably just because I’ve gotten a lot older and don’t sleep as well as I did when I was a kid. That’s all it is, isn’t it?
Isn’t it?
Paranoid: A Chant
I can’t go out no more.
There’s a man by the door
in a raincoat
smoking a cigarette.
But
I’ve put him in my diary.
and the mailers are all lined up
on the bed, bloody in the glow
of the bar sign next door.
He knows that if I die
(or even drop out of sight)
the diary goes and everyone knows
the CIA’s in Virginia.
500 mailers bought from
500 drug counters each one different
and 500 notebooks
with 500 pages in every one.
I am prepared.
I can see him from up here.
His cigarette winks from just
above his trenchcoat collar
and somewhere there’s a man on a subway
sitting under a Black Velvet ad thinking my name.
Men have discussed me in back rooms.
If the phone rings there’s only dead breath.
In the bar across the street a snubnose
revolver has changed hands in the men’s room.
Each bullet has my name on it.
My name is written in back files
and looked up in newspaper morgues.
My mother’s been investigated;
thank God she’s dead.
They have writing samples
and examine the back loops of pees
and the crosses of tees.
My brother’s with them, did I tell you?
His wife is Russian and he
keeps asking me to fill out forms.
I have it in my diary.
Listen—
listen
do listen:
you must listen.
In the rain, at the bus stop,
black crows with black umbrellas
pretend to look at their watches, but
it’s not raining. Their eyes are silver dollars.
Some are scholars in the pay of the FBI
most are the foreigners who pour through
our streets. I fooled them
got off the bus at 25th and Lex
where a cabby watched me over his newspaper.
In the room above me an old woman
has put an electric suction cup on her floor.
It sends out rays through my light fixture
and now I write in the dark
by the bar sign’s glow.
I tell you I know.
They sent me a dog with brown spots
and a radio cobweb in its nose.
I drowned it in the sink and wrote it up
in folder GAMMA.
I don’t look in the mailbox anymore.
The greeting cards are letter-bombs.
(Step away! Goddam you!
Step away, I know tall people!
I tell you I know very tall people!)
The luncheonette is laid with talking floors
and the waitress says it was salt but I know arsenic
when it’s put before me. And the yellow taste of mustard
to mask the bitter odor of almonds.
I have seen strange lights in the sky.
Last night a dark man with no face crawled through nine miles