Just Kids [43]
Robert and I didn’t fight very often. He seldom raised his voice, but if he was angry you could see it in his eyes, his brow, or the stiffening of his jaw. When we had a problem that needed hashing out, we went to the “bad doughnut shop” on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Twenty-third Street. It was the Edward Hopper version of Dunkin’ Donuts. The coffee was burnt, the doughnuts were stale, but you could count on it being open all night. We felt less confined there than in our room and nobody bothered us. All kinds of characters could be found at any given hour, guys on the nod, hookers on the night shift, transients and transvestites. One could enter this atmosphere unnoticed, inspiring at the most a brief glance.
Robert always had a powdered jelly doughnut and I had a French cruller. For some reason they were five cents more than normal doughnuts. Every time I ordered one he’d say, “Patti! You don’t really like them; you’re just being difficult. You just want them because they’re French.” Robert tagged them “poet’s cruller.”
It was Harry who settled the etymology of the cruller. It wasn’t French at all, but Dutch: a fluted ring-shaped affair made from choux pastry with a light and airy texture eaten on Shrove Tuesday. They were made with all the eggs, butter, and sugar forbidden at Lent. I declared it the holy doughnut. “Now we know why the doughnut has a hole.” Harry thought for a moment, and then scolded me, feigning annoyance. “No, no, it’s Dutch,” he said. “It doesn’t translate that way.” Holy or not, the French confection connection was permanently squelched.
One evening Harry and Peggy invited us to visit with the composer George Kleinsinger, who had a suite of rooms at the Chelsea. I was always reluctant to visit people, especially grown-ups. But Harry lured me with the information that George had written the music to Archy and Mehitabel, a cartoon tale of the friendship between a cockroach and an alley cat. Kleinsinger’s rooms were more tropical forest than hotel residence, a real Anna Kavan setup. The draw was supposed to be his collection of exotic snakes, including a twelve-foot python. Robert seemed transfixed by them, but I was terrified.
As everyone was taking turns petting the python, I was free to rummage through George’s musical compositions, stacked randomly among the ferns, palms, and caged nightingales. I was elated to find original sheet music from Shinbone Alley in a pile atop a filing cabinet. But the real revelation was finding evidence that this modest and kindly snake-rearing gentleman was none other than the composer of the music for Tubby the Tuba. He confirmed this fact and I nearly wept when he showed me original scores for the music so beloved in my childhood.
The Chelsea was like a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe. I wandered the halls seeking its spirits, dead or alive. My adventures were mildly mischievous, tapping open a door slightly ajar and getting a glimpse of Virgil Thomson’s grand piano, or loitering before the nameplate of Arthur C. Clarke, hoping he might suddenly emerge. Occasionally I would bump into Gert Schiff, the German scholar, armed with volumes on Picasso, or Viva in Eau Sauvage. Everyone had something to offer and nobody appeared to have much money. Even the successful seemed to have just enough to live like extravagant bums.
I loved this place, its shabby elegance, and the history it held so possessively. There were rumors of Oscar Wilde’s trunks languishing in the hull of the oft-flooded basement. Here Dylan Thomas, submerged in poetry and alcohol, spent his last hours. Thomas Wolfe plowed through hundreds of pages of manuscript that formed You Can’t Go Home Again. Bob Dylan composed “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” on our floor, and a speeding Edie Sedgwick was said to have set her room on fire while gluing on her thick false eyelashes by candlelight.
So many had written, conversed, and