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By Root 6027 0

I’d be thinking of one thing only,” he stated publicly (I was the only one listening). “For twelve months I’d be a Jew and nothing else. I can’t afford to give an entire year to that.” But I think a better explanation is that he was having a grand time being mad in New York. He was seeing psychiatrists and making scenes. He invented a lover for Kathleen and then he tried to kill the man. He smashed up the Buick Roadmaster. He accused me of stealing his personality for the character of Von Trenck. He drew a check on my account for six thousand seven hundred and sixty-three dollars and fifty-eight cents and bought an Oldsmobile with it, among other things. Anyway, he didn’t want to go to Germany, a country where no one could follow his conversation.

From the papers he later learned that I had become a Shoveleer. I had heard that he was living with a gorgeous black girl who studied the French horn at the Juilliard School. But when I last saw him on Forty-sixth Street I knew that he was too destroyed to be living with anyone. He was destroyed—I can’t help repeating this. He wore a large gray suit in which he was floundering. His face was dead gray, East River gray. His head looked as if the gypsy moth had gotten into it and tented in his hair. Nevertheless I should have approached and spoken to him. I should have drawn near, not taken cover behind the parked cars. But how could I? I had had my breakfast in the Edwardian Room of the Plaza, served by rip-off footmen. Then I had flown in a helicopter with Javits and Bobby Kennedy. I was skirring around New York like an ephemerid, my jacket lined with jolly psychedelic green. I was dressed up like Sugar Ray Robinson. Only I didn’t have a fighting spirit, and seeing that my old and close friend was a dead man I beat it. I went to La Guardia and took a 727 back to Chicago. I sat afflicted in the plane, drinking whisky on the rocks, overcome with horror, ideas of Fate and other humanistic lah-de-dah—compassion. I had gone around the corner and gotten lost on Sixth Avenue. My legs trembled and my teeth were set hard. I said to myself, Humboldt good-by, I’ll see you in the next world. And two months after this in the Ilscombe Hotel, which has since collapsed, he started down at 3 a.m. with his garbage pail and died in the corridor.

At a Village cocktail party in the Forties I heard a beautiful girl tell Humboldt, “Do you know what you’re like? You’re like a person from a painting.” Sure, women dreaming of love might have visions of Humboldt at twenty stepping down from a Renaissance or an Impressionist masterpiece. But the picture on the obituary page of the Times was frightful. I opened the paper one morning and there was Humboldt, ruined, black and gray, a disastrous newspaper face staring at me from death’s territory. That day, too, I was flying from New York to Chicago—wafting back and forth, not always knowing why. I went to the can and locked myself in. People knocked but I was weeping and wouldn’t come out.

six

“Actually Cantabile didn’t make me wait too long. He phoned just before noon. Maybe he was getting hungry. I remembered that someone or other in Paris toward the end of the nineteenth century used to see Verlaine drunken and bloated pounding his cane wildly on the sidewalk as he went to lunch, and shortly afterward the great mathematician Poincaré, respectably dressed and following his huge forehead while describing curves with his fingers, also on his way to lunch. Lunchtime is lunchtime, whether you are a poet or a mathematician or a gangster. Can-tabile said, “All right, you dumb prick, we’re going to meet right after lunch. Bring cash. And that’s all you bring. Don’t make any more bad moves.”

“I wouldn’t know what or how,” I said.

“That’s true, as long as you don’t cook up anything with George Swiebel. You come alone.”

“Of course. It never even occurred to me—”

“Well now I’ve said it, but it better not occur. Alone, and bring new bills. Go to the bank and get clean money. Nine bills of fifty. New. I don’t want any grease stains on those dollars. And