Supper consists of a couple of Joe 'n' Nemo's hamburgers at two for a quarter--plus a carton of coffee which serves as mouthwash and handwarmer. Through the window he watches Boylston Street humanity and the Western demise of the sun. Harold has been known to mumble a few words about the weather to either Mr. Nemo or the corner cop--but they are measured words.
Thirty-five cents; a total of seventy-five.
Harold has a can of beer and a package of gum remaining; or a one-way subway token to Scollay Square (he can come back tomorrow); or English muffins and a cup of tea. Or a package of cigarettes. But it is night, the time of neon and lengthy shadows, streetlamps, hushed voices, nervous laughter, and sex. Night is Harold's garment of life.
Night, the repository of eternal verities, that time when inspiration sits like a lump between your ears and genius is a genie from a Chianti bottle. Night for Harold is a series of brown-ringed coffee cups and so many cobble-stones; a collection of footsteps, frowns, and scraps of paper; a time when janitors and hotel clerks are reading sex novels.
"Sex," writes Harold on a sheet of yellow paper, belongs to the night and together they conspire against Boston. They live illicitly, caress each other with streetlamps and shadows and juke box symphonies, the soft sob of loss, the subway shudder and the sigh. Night warms is black limbs by the gutter fires and furnace spit. We should bottle the night, prone and passive, siphon it into leather canteen flasks, take swigs of it while sunning ourselves by the river, savour it after a French loave-lunch, rub it on our arm in lieu of excrement.
Harold, you see, writes at night, and, as he finishes each page, rolls it into a little ball and puts it in his coat pocket (he reads that somewhere.) And then he dreams, strange dream of motorcycles and frisbee discs, the mystery of Bermuda shorts and one summer of happiness. Harold is, as well as an artist, a dreamer.
II
Shall I tell you of the other ones? The squat little man with the crewcut who sold his soul and pen to an Elsie's wall mural for three blue punch cards. Or the intense young man with thinning hair and a changing voice who reads Wallace Stevens to a saxophone solo. Or the boy from the Bronx who writes Spanish poetry.
Every Saturday night they have a blow-out--the ninety-nine cent steak at the Waldorf and a bottle of Vat 69. (Sometimes they buy a can of soy beans instead of steak; more protein for less money.) As the evening dwindles away, they sing camp songs and conjure spirits and chart their astrology from cryptic directions on a weight machine. Look closely, and you will see they have holes in their socks and need a man's deodrant, and the only thing which sustains them is a vision.
He is a bitter old man, lacking even the salt of irony. With a single yellow eye, and white hair growing in his ears. Leaning on a hickory cane, complaining out of pride, sexless slowly rubbing one palsied hand across his navel and nodding in that dead omniscience of the past. Waiting for the world to come to him like a pig-tailed child. He is a Society, a god sometimes called Moloch.
A dollar a day, and you begin to see him without too much imagination; a dollar a day and you have bought your way into the conspiracy against him. But then, you wouldn't know about that. In your Bermuda shorts and crew-neck sweater, your sweat socks and white tennis shoes and Jones Beach tan.
I can only tell you this: if you spot Harold on the street (you can tell him by the flies) pause to flip him a dime. You're buying posterity's culture cut-rate, not to mention tomorrow morning's toast