The most amazing thing, when I look back on it now, is that the first prose poem I wrote for this project was inspired by the Bowery Savings Bank. It was the architecture of their new building, not the gold in the vaults, which kindled my enthusiasm. The Bowery Phoenix, I called it. My friends weren’t very enthusiastic but they coughed up. After all, it was only the price of a meal I was charging for these dithyrambs. Had we sold the five hundred we would have made a tidy little sum.
Among other things we tried to get yearly subscriptions, at a reduced rate. A half dozen subscriptions per week and our problem would have been solved. But even my best friends were dubious that I could keep it up for a year. They knew me well. In a month or two I would be broaching another scheme. At best I was able to persuade them to take a month’s subscription—mere chicken feed. O’Mara was incensed with my friends, said he could do better with utter strangers. Every morning he got up early and began plugging for me. He went all over town—Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island—wherever he had a hunch that he would be welcome. He was trying to bag subscriptions.
After I had turned out two pr three Mezzotints Mona came forward with another plan. She would sign her name to them and peddle them from place to place in the Village. The night spots, she meant. People who were half-drunk weren’t very critical, she thought. Besides, it would be hard to resist a beautiful looking woman. O’Mara didn’t take to her scheme—it was too unbusinesslike for him—but Mona insisted that there was no harm in trying. We had an assortment of back issues, all in different colors; my name had to be blacked out and hers printed below it. No one would know the difference.
The first week she did famously. They went like hot cakes. Some bought the whole series, others paid her triple and quintuple for a single Mezzotint. It seemed as though she had hit on the right idea. Now and then we got orders in the mail. Now and then O’Mara got a subscription, for six months or for a year. I had all sorts of ideas for the coming issues. The hell with editors—we could do better on our own.
While Mona made the rounds of the Village nightly, O’Mara and I went in search of material. We couldn’t have gone about our task more energetically had we been hired by a big syndicate. We went everywhere, looked into everything. One night we would be sitting in the press box at the Six Day Bike Race, the next night we would have ringside seats at a wrestling bout. Some nights we would start out on foot, to explore Chinatown more thoroughly, or the Bowery, or we would go to Hoboken or some other God-forsaken town in New Jersey, just for a change … One afternoon, while O’Mara was plugging away for me in the Bronx, I called up Ned and induced him to go with me to the Burlesk on Houston Street, to write it up. I wanted Ned as my illustrator. We invented a yarn, of course, about the magazine which had requested the article. Cleo was no longer there, unfortunately, but there was a young, racy-looking blonde, who had replaced her, who was a seething mass of sex from head to foot. After a little chat with her in the wings we persuaded her to have a drink with us after the show. She was one of those witless-shitless bitches who grow up in places like Newark or Sandusky. Had the laugh of a hyena. She had promised to introduce me to the comedian, who was her boy friend, but he never turned up. A few of the girls from the chorus straggled in, looking even more horrible with their clothes on, poor wretches. I got into conversation with one of them at the bar. Discovered that she was studying to be a violinist, of all things. She was as homely as sin, hadn’t an ounce of sex in her, but was intelligent and sympathetic. Ned went to work on the blonde, hoping against hope to get her to go to the studio with him for a quick one…
To make a Mezzotint of an afternoon like that was like working out a jig-saw puzzle. It would take me days to whittle my prose-poem down to the required length. Two-hundred and fifty words was the maximum that could be printed. I used to write two or three thousand, then reach for the axe.
Mona, of course, never got home till about two in the morning. It was a bit wearing on her, I thought.
Not the hours, but the atmosphere of the night clubs. Now and then, to be sure, she ran into an interesting person. Like Alan Cromwell, for example, who claimed to be a banker from Washington, D. C. A man of this calibre always invited her to sit down and talk to him. In Mona’s opinion this Cromwell was a cultured individual. He had begun by buying everything she had with her. Seventy-five or eighty dollars he had handed over for a pile of Mezzotints, and in leaving he had forgotten to take them with him, purposely no doubt. A gentleman, what! He had to come to New York on business once every ten days or so. Was always to be found at the Golden Eagle or at Tomtit’s Nest. Though he drank heavily he was ever the perfect gentleman. Never parted from her without leaving a fifty dollar bill in her palm. Just for keeping him company. There were lots of lonely souls like Alan Cromwell floating about, Mona maintained. All these lonely souls were well heeled, what’s more. Soon I would hear of the others, like that lumber king who kept a suite of rooms the year round at the Waldorf; like Moreau, the professor from the Sorbonne, who took her to the most exotic places whenever they happened to meet; like Neuberger, the oil man from Texas, who had so little conception of the value of money that, whether it was a long haul or a short haul, he always tipped the taxi-driver a five spot. Then there was the retired brewer from Milwaukee, who was passionate about music. He always notified Mona in advance of his coming so that she might accompany him to the concert which he came expressly from Milwaukee to hear. The little tributes which Mona exacted of these types represented so much more than anything we might have hoped to earn legitimately that O’Mara and I stopped thinking about subscriptions altogether. Any Mezzotints which were left over at the end the week we sent out gratis to people we thought would like to read them. Sometimes we sent them to editors of newspapers and magazines, or to the members of the Senate at Washington. Sometimes we sent them to the heads of large industrial organizations—just for the fun of it, just to see what might happen. Sometimes, and this was even more fun, we would go through the telephone book and pick out names at random. Once we telegraphed the contents of a Mezzotint to the director of an insane asylum on Long Island. We signed a fishy name, of course. A crazy name, like Aloysius Pentecost Omega. Just to throw him off the track (!).
An idea like this last would come to us after an evening with Osiecki who had now become a frequent visitor. He was an architect who lived in the neighborhood; we had met him at a bar one evening just as it was closing. In the beginning his talk was fairly rational—the usual humdrum stuff about life in a big architect’s office. Fond of music, he had bought himself a beautiful player piano and, after getting quietly soused all by himself, he would start playing his records—until the neighbors pounded at the door.
Nothing unusual about such behavior. We used to visit him now and then and help him listen to his bloody records. He always had a good supply of liquor in the house. Little by little, however, we observed a strange note creeping into his conversation. It was his hatred for his boss. Or rather, his suspicions about the boss.
It required a little coaxing at first to draw him out. He was coy about revealing the full extent of his misgivings. But when he saw that we swallowed his remarks without a murmur of surprise or disapproval, he unlimbered remarkably fast.
Apparently the boss wanted to get rid of him. But since he had nothing on Osiecki, he was at a loss how to do it.
So that’s why he puts the lice in your
