The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (40 page)

My own life had gotten a little more stable and a little more directed with the acquisition of the job at the
Trader
, but there was a problem, and it surfaced not long after I had gotten there. The problem was money — there wasn't much. Hallock ran the
Trader
on pennies, some of it his own. Dick was one of those staunchly “anticommercial” idealists who litter places like the Village. Middle-class people who think they can somehow preserve “standards” in the holocaust of monopoly capitalism. They yearn for the epoch of the handmade, of the old craftsmanship, of a sentimental “integrity” that permeates all they hold in reverence. It was a major breakthrough when Dick decided to take advertising other than for the record auctions. And after a couple issues, around the time I came on board, the magazine got more irregular and so did my salary. I got paid when Dick had money, in bits and pieces. But I didn't mind as long as I had a little pocket money. I liked the
Trader
because it brought me close to things I cared about. I thought of it as something like a school for me. Plus I liked Dick and his soon-to-be wife and Nellie and the assorted stream of characters that came in and out.

Steve Korret and company now did not occupy a central place in my life. And in the tiny crib, Jim always had one woman or another, till finally he installed one semipermanent lady, the plump Bernice, and they laughed and cried among the negatives while I was coming in and out. When I wasn't at the
Trader
, I might be at some club with Martin or Will Ribbon or Dick or hanging with Ernie or Tim. I'd started to go also to clubs which featured poetry readings.

One night I went to a party that a painter friend of Korret's gave at a loft in the '20s, probably Walter Williams. I met a white woman there, Dolly Weinberg. I don't know how we met, I wasn't doing much dancing, probably just circling around the walls, a little shyer than is healthy. The party was one of those hollering and running and pushing and drinking bashes where a hundred or so people are mashed into a big old loft. I was looking at people, maybe I talked to some. A few I knew from Steve, but when I left I was with Dolly Weinberg and we walked slowly down Seventh or Eighth Avenue to her house, which was way down below Houston on Thompson Street, near the
Trader
, down there where Tim had warned me against going, especially with white women.

Dolly was much older than I was. She was in her middle or late thirties then and I was twenty-three. She had grey hair with a little black tied into a bun, and she dressed like a classic bohemian, peasant skirt and blouse, sandals, etc. We talked and walked and talked and talked. She was curious. I was so young, she said. One time she took my face in her hands while we were waiting for a light. I was so young, she said.

When we got down to her place, a five-flight walk-up on Thompson Street long before SoHo fashion arrived in those parts, we stood out in front of the building still talking. I had never talked to any white woman before at such length or with such intentions. Because as we wound down toward her place I could see sleeping with her. It seemed to me part of the adventure of my new life in the Village. The black man with the white woman, I thought some kind of classic bohemian accoutrement and so this meeting and walking and talking fascinated me.

But Dolly was not altogether all together. This began to register, some of her conversation was strange to me. She talked about things I didn't completely get because they were out of different epochs and I had been scarcely educated formally. For instance, she talked about the radical '30s. In fact, later I discovered she had been a Communist. She was still, she thought, some kind of fellow traveler. But her relationship, even ideologically, had grown vague and unfocused. She knew about the “fascists” and the “bosses” and she made reference to them in her conversation. But Dolly was no middle-class Jewish girl from an Ivy League school. She worked in some sweatshop. She had come from that kind of Jewish family, her people from the Lower East Side when it was full of Mike Gold's people. The life she talked about seemed mean and cold, the product of a dying economic system. But it had done something to her psychologically
— she spent half her weekly salary on a psychiatrist and had spent some time in at least one mental hospital.

As the sun began to come up on Thompson Street she took me upstairs into her apartment, where I stayed until the middle of the afternoon. When I woke up Dolly had split for work. There was a note and stuff laid out to make coffee. But I didn't like coffee. The apartment was small, maybe three rooms, and though it was cluttered, there was a sense of someone living there, not the chaotic storage space I lived in. She had a few books and records, though it was not the same kind of stuff one saw the youngish fashionable paperback readers carrying around. She was more into secondhand bookstores. The style was old-line radical bohemian, like the faded '30s memories she reflected but really had no direct part in. I sat around, clearing my head. I'd had quite a bit to drink. I sat quietly, browsing through her meager library. There were also a few drawings of Dolly around, in different-colored charcoal, and little Villagey things here and there around the rooms. But there was a meanness, a poverty to the place, that brought something else in with it along with the easy label of bohemian. It was bohemian but it was bohemian poverty. A starkness and bareness that was in no way fashionable. I sat there idle and reflecting. I had slept with a white woman and I wondered what it meant. The act itself had been like any other, but there was a mental “excitement” that this hookup brought that was “other.” No matter that Dolly, as I said, was really an older woman and no goddam beauty queen. A mental excitement. I pondered it as I rose and went down those stairs, ducking my head as I met a few of the other residents of the building, who were mostly the local Italians. It seemed they were all scowling at me and so were the ones in the street, including the clutches of men standing and sitting in front of the private clubs and coffeehouses as I walked up the street a couple short blocks to the
Trader
offices.

For a couple of days things went on as before. I was coming to the
Trader
, packing boxes, and going my way. I was still trying to write, scratching away when I could on my legal pads. I still had no typewriter. But then one afternoon Dolly came into the storefront. I had told her where I worked, and though I hadn't tried to get in touch with her, had only barely thought about her, now she had come into the
Trader
and leaned up against the boxes grinning at me. In the light of day, even the half-light of the
Trader
, she looked even older. We talked a little about the party, about what I had done when I woke up. What she had done at work that day, how she felt.
I was alone for an hour or so, but now Nellie and Dick came in one after the other. Dolly made a bad joke when she found out that Dick was my “boss.”

“This guy don't look like such a big-time capitalist,” she laughed. And Dick, of course, didn't. I could see him peeping over and through his glasses as he prepared to take out his clarinet and practice. Nellie was making faces over at her tiny typing table. I guess they were signals, but I couldn't pick them all up.

Dolly spoke exactly like the stereotypical Lower East Side worker Mike Gold might write about, even though she had wandered around the Village for almost twenty years. That middle-class panache that is supposed to come with the bohemian life she had not picked up at all. She spoke almost exactly like a stage working-class white person and it embarrassed me a little (sad to say), that tough New York accent that bought trouble as easily as it described it.

We left the
Trader
together, going into a coffeehouse and talking some more, and finally we went back to her house. I must've stayed there two or three weeks, maybe more, going back and forth to the
Trader
, and only occasionally back over to East 3rd Street, when I needed more clothes or to get something or other. Jim took it in stride. I was still giving him a little dough for the rent, and by now he was deeply involved with Bernice. He had heard that I was keeping company with Dolly from someone else, who it turned out even knew Dolly, so they said, so he just mentioned it to me to confirm it. He nodded and chuckled at the thought.

Living there with Dolly was a little out, because Dolly was not a little out. The longer I knew Dolly, the more I could see that she was very deeply disturbed. To her the world was a horrible, frustrating place (as it is under the rule of the ancient minority). In this sense she was like Tim and his wined-up, cynical self. But Dolly not only had the radical background, she had gone for the Freudian psychological trip as well. So she actually, literally, spent $20 a week out of a $75 salary on the headshrinker. And she had been doing that over
ten
years! She told me this as matter-of-fact exposition, though she seemed, upon my naive open-eyed questioning, to be a little embarrassed because the shit had not worked. The pain she felt, she still felt, and all those $20s going to this slick psychiatrist had not changed any of that.

She had another male friend she talked about incessantly. An older dude who, as the ironies of class society would have it, was the brother of a friend of my sister's. The woman, Shelley Ransome, went to Teachers
College with my sister, and Shelley's brother, Luther Ransome, had come to New York seeking to be a sculptor. They were his drawings strewn around the house. But “Mensch,” as she called him, seemed only to hook up with Dolly when he was broke. And while they had lived together in a loft on Great Jones Street, Dolly said she couldn't take his beatings, his arguments, his blaming of the world's ills on her, his taking her money and her love and leaving her nothing but the imprint of his flailing hand on her face.

The whole story chilled me. In fact, Dolly's life, the apartment, the weekly psychiatrist, all chilled me. A little boy from a little brown house and family. All these things, including her speech, seemed out to lunch to me, too extreme and pathological. And Dolly peeped as much, telling me what a child I was, what a little boy. She even told me one blue night high up over the street that I didn't know anything about sex. What with the straight-ahead stuff I knew, the same thing going in the same place, that was truly humbling and humiliating, though thinking about it, how much could I know? Though I had sneaked and read Krafft-Ebing when I was in high school and
The Kinsey Report
, but I had scant experience except with Betty from Newark and I never saw her anymore. She had never complained except that she thought that doing it during my lunchtime on the family couch was a little abbreviated.

But I was still mostly there at Dolly's but drawn away in a funny way, tilted away from her. I had never been there all the way I guess.

One night after work Nellie's boy on the motor scooter didn't show and I walked her home. She lived just a few blocks from the
Trader
, in the opposite direction, on Morton Street. In the central, more fashionable Village where the middle-class, hardly bohemian residents cribbed. We had talked in pieces every day I went to work, but it was distanced and polite. She was always friendly and helpful. I always wanted to ask her why Will Ribbon greeted her the way he did. But Nellie was funny. I'd seen her one night dressed in black, leotards and top, from head to foot. She was so little she reminded me of a mouse. But she had been jumping up and down talking to someone, the scooter guy (his name was Guy, as well), and it knocked me out. She seemed so antic and clownish.

Nellie said she had wanted to be a clown. She liked circuses and show biz. She liked making people laugh, with her little hopping walk and neat Mary Washington clothes, combined with instant bohemian getups. I was walking her home, I had no other intentions, maybe because we worked together everyday, and that was as far as I saw it. But when we reached
Morton Street, she quickly invited me up for coffee. I didn't drink coffee, so she offered me a piece of watermelon she had in the refrigerator. (The source of Korret's gibe a few months later.)

We talked about literature, she could see I was serious and that made her want to know how come and what it meant or maybe she just wanted to get laid, I donno. Anyway, by the early morning hours I was still there and still talking. We were talking about Shakespeare, Hamlet or Lear or Macbeth when I made my move.

Nellie lived in a one-room efficiency-type apartment, painted white with bullfight posters and Mexican hats on the walls. She had a narrow wall of books, many of them from school, a white rag rug, a tiny kitchen section with a table and refrigerator and stove and not much else. But it was in a really fashionable West Village area and one paid for that.

By now Nellie was looking for work in the mornings because it was clear that the
Trader
was not long for this world. She was gone when I woke up and I rummaged around and went over to the storefront. When she did come in we looked at each other from time to time and smiled, and after work, as Barbara and Dick looked on, we went off together towards her place. I didn't have much at Dolly's, maybe nothing at all. But whatever it was I got it out, though there was one scene where just before I left we were together one last night and then the next evening Dolly sees Nellie and me coming out of a coffeehouse. She called me at the
Trader
the next day and says, “You're with me one night, the next night I see you with the little whosis. Do you think that's right?” I said I didn't, but that was the last time we spoke as people relating to each other intimately. I had “moved in” with Nellie and went on sleeping there and going back and forth to the
Trader
, while Nellie looked for another job.

Though the relationship with Nellie had its tentative aspects as well, still there was much more a sense of us actually “going together,” to the extent that such a definition could apply to us. I was open, naive, in the sense that I did not know what such a relationship involved — i.e., the black-white thing. I don't think Nellie knew much either, on the real side, about such a hookup. But she was much less naive than I thought about the general man-woman connect.