Love and Will by Stephen Dixon Read Free Book Online

outside our building. He beeped his horn. I turned and saw him in his parked car, the windows up and motor running. He often sat there like that, reading, singing, sleeping, not doing much. In the eight years I’ve lived here I’ve never seen him with another person. He rolled down his window and said “You get any heat today?”
    â€œSome.”
    â€œBoy, my place is an icebox. Can’t understand it. We’re all fed from the same boiler and pipes. That’s why I’m here. And last night my fuse blew and the box is in the locked basement and the landlady wasn’t answering her phone. After sleeping with an electric blanket for fifteen years, I couldn’t get in three winks. So what, right? And getting too cold for me. See ya,” and he rolled up his window.
    The next people I met were from the block and immediate neighborhood. I must be acquainted with a couple of hundred people from around here including neighbors, supers, kids playing, shopkeepers, city service people, people from the bars and stores and the local street winos and summer domino people and the like. The seven or eight I met till I finally got out of the neighborhood I either smiled or waved to or said “Hey, how’s it going?” and they said “Fine” and I said “Good” or they said “How are you?” and I said “Fine” and they said “Good” and that was our conversation. Occasionally when I’ve said “How’s it going?” someone would stop to tell me. Usually it was the blues. Today the only person who stopped me was the owner of several remodeled brownstones on the block. I nodded as I passed. She grabbed my arm and said “Those people.”
    â€œI looked around” and said “What people?”
    â€œThose people. There. Look at them,” and she ripped a sign off the lamppost which said there was going to be a block party with guitar entertainment at the corner church one week from tonight: free admission, bring cookies, wine and soda sold. She’d been in a Nazi death camp and had numbers on her arm and a few times had told me how the Russian soldiers liberated a boxcar of women she was in and raped all of them and shot half of them and shaved off all their body hairs and carved Cyrillic letters into their montes veneris and heads. She said, tearing the sign in two, “All these committees are nothing but pseudoliberal gudgeons or Reds.”
    â€œWho knows,” I said, “and try and have a nice day.”
    The first person I recognized outside my neighborhood was someone I went to school with at Music and Art and Juilliard. He was entering a bank. I yelled out his name. He didn’t hear me. I followed him in and joined him on the teller’s line. “Hey, Enos.”
    â€œBuddy old boy,” and he kissed my cheek. “God you look good. What’s new? Still in their pitching?”
    â€œNo sell or soap though. But you’re strong. Mr. Jingle, name up in brights.”
    â€œLet me tell you about it.”
    â€œGreat if it’s what you like. How’s Lola?”
    â€œWhere you been? She unloaded me for my lyricist and took the girls. Third page in the Post . Don’t you read anything but scores? I’m with a new chickadee now. Young. Great flautist. Really does those scales. Gomes from a fine family of virtuoso pipers that go back to Prince Kinsky and Rasoumou. And anti-marriage and big knockers that Lola never had. Remember? Flat, like everything else about her. I’m going to snap a time shot montage of those tits with me blowing and playing on them and send it to Lo just to make her seat sweat. You married?”
    â€œNah.”
    â€œTeaching?”
    â€œThose kids were nuts. Throwing the music stands at me, pouring mucilage between the keys. Screw it. Even for money I wasn’t going insane.”
    â€œTry college.”
    â€œNo master’s.”
    â€œGet a