Just Kids [44]
Harry zeroed in on me with his mock, menacing stare. I started laughing.
“Why are you laughing?”
“Because it tickles.”
“You can feel that?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“Fascinating!”
Occasionally Robert entered the game. Harry would try to stare him down, saying things like, “Your eyes are incredibly green!” A staring match could last for several minutes, but Robert’s stoic side always won out. Harry would never admit Robert won. He would just break away and finish a previous conversation as if the staring match never occurred. Robert would flash a knowing smile, obviously pleased.
Harry was taken with Robert but wound up with me. Often I called on Harry on my own. All his Seminole Indian skirts with delicate patchwork would be lying about. He was very particular about them, and seemed delighted to see me wear them, although he would not let me touch his hand-painted Ukrainian egg collection. He handled the eggs like they were tiny infants. They had intricate patterns akin to the skirts. He did let me play with his magic wand collection, intricately carved shaman wands wrapped in newspapers. Most were about eighteen inches long, but my favorite was the smallest, the size of a conductor’s wand, with the patina of an old rosary rubbed smooth from prayer.
Harry and I spieled simultaneously on alchemy and Charlie Patton. He was slowly piecing together hours of footage for his mystery film project based on Brecht’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. None of us knew exactly what it was but sooner or later we were all summoned to serve in its lengthy inception. He played tapes of peyote rituals of the Kiowa and songs of the common folk of West Virginia. I felt a kinship with their voices and, so inspired, made up a song and sang it to him before it dissipated into the musty air of his cluttered room.
We talked about everything, ranging from the tree of life to the pituitary gland. Most of my knowledge was intuitive. I had a flexible imagination and was always ready for a game that we would play. Harry would test me with a question. The answer had to be a sliver of knowledge expanding into a lie composed of facts.
“What are you eating?”
“Kidney beans.”
“Why are you eating them?”
“To piss off Pythagoras.”
“Under the stars?”
“Out of the circle.”
It would begin simply and we would keep it going for as long as it took to get to the punch line, somewhere between a limerick and a poem, unless I tripped up and used an inappropriate reference. Harry never made mistakes, as he seemed to know something about everything, the undisputed king of information manipulation.
Harry was also an expert at string figures. If he was in a good mood he would pull a loop of string several feet long from his pocket and weave a star, a female spirit, or a one-man cat’s cradle. We all sat at his feet in the lobby like amazed children watching as his deft fingers produced evocative patterns by twisting and knotting the loop. He documented string figure patterns and their symbolic importance in hundreds of pages of notes. Harry would regale us with this precious information that regrettably none of us would grasp, as we were so mesmerized by his sleight of hand.
One time, when I was sitting in the lobby reading The Golden Bough, Harry noticed I had a beat-up two-volume first edition. He insisted we go on an expedition to Samuel Weiser’s to bask in the proximity of the preferred and vastly expanded third edition. Weiser’s harbored the greatest selection of books on esoteric matters in the city. I agreed to go if he and Robert didn’t get stoned, as the combination of the three of us in the outside world, in an occult bookstore, was lethal enough.
Harry knew the Weiser brothers quite well and I was given the key to a glass case to examine