Edges by Stephen Policoff The night Elizabeth and I vowed to honor our literary god, Gabriel Bish, was also the night of our first kiss, the first time I got seriously drunk, the first time I threw up on the street. It was a mysterious, heady night in Saratoga Springs, New York where we had driven in my father’s pork-colored Saab for an evening billed as “Meeting on Edges: Art/Poetics/Performance-for-Now,” featuring Gabriel Bish and other downtown avant-gardists transported to the quiet streets of upstate New York.  Since Elizabeth and I had begun spending every afternoon together plotting our escape from Albany—or Smallbany, as she invariably called it— everyone assumed she was my girlfriend. But she was not. I was in awe of her pale beauty, coppery hair, dimpled chin. I was mesmerized by her wise-ass wit, her passionate love of art and music, her shrugged-off sophistication. But I was scared to touch her.  She was rumored to be sexually experienced, too. “Hey Ned!” Jimmy Bouchever shouted at me one afternoon across Academy Circle, “Guess you’re getting some now, huh?”  But I wasn’t, would not have known what to do with it if I had gotten it. This seemed to suit Elizabeth well enough; she flitted around me like a firefly sometimes, seemed to want always to be in my company, yet maintained dating relationships with other boys, WASP princelings with names like Scooter, Woody, and AJ.  Sometimes, anxiety over this bubbled up in me, though I was not sure why. I had certainly not acknowledged to myself that I loved her. But two or three months into our curious friendship when she was not home for our nightly chat, out with Scooter or Woody, I “broke up” with her. Of course, I didn’t bother to tell her, I simply stopped calling her, made lame excuses for why I could not speak when she called me.  And then, a few days later, without really knowing what I was doing, I began to call her every night at nine, hanging up the instant she answered the phone.  I do not think that was what I intended to do, it was merely what I was compelled to do, over and over. Each night, I believed I would finally speak to her again, tell her whatever it was that I thought I needed to tell her. Each night, at 9:02, the phone leaped out of my hand back into its cradle.  I persuaded myself that this was not merely fear about my feelings or childish pique, that I was sending her a message (albeit an annoying one), that I was being edgy and ominous and masterful. Until one night, seconds before nine, when she called me and blurted, “Listen Ned you sweet stupid asshole, you can’t hang up on me tonight, I have something important to do on Saturday, and you’re doing it with me.”  And so, that Saturday, late May 1976, we sped up the Northway toward the legendary dive called Caffe Lena.  I’ve heard the old place is still there, though Lena herself, a huge benevolent bear of a woman, died years ago. It was the kind of coffee house where you could see a mime on acid one night and John Lee Hooker the next. I had always wanted to go there, had always wanted to go there with Elizabeth.  It is many years ago, but I recall what Elizabeth was wearing almost as vividly as I recall the white mini-dress she wore at our disastrous wedding five years later or the red halter top she was wearing six months after that, the night I found her writhing on the floor of Bish’s Tribeca loft.  She had on a faded, ripped, white Brooks Brothers shirt, probably her father’s, unbuttoned almost to her waist and tied into a thick knot just above the black leather skirt she always wore when she was not in her green Girl’s Academy uniform. She had her beloved black cameo pin prominently displayed on the frayed collar of the shirt. She had piled her hair on top of her head, and wore a black bowler hat, which almost covered her forehead. She looked somewhere between comical and exquisite, like a French schoolgirl out on a Left Bank lark.  The combined excitement of seeing Gabriel Bish in the company of the piquant Elizabeth was almost too much for me. I was jittery, and drove like the maddened teen I was, weaving in and out of traffic, speeding up then slowing down, lurching off the exit through the narrow lanes, screeching to a halt on Phila Street by the laundromat which occupied the lower floor of the redoubtable cafe.  Elizabeth hadn’t said much during our drive—highly unusual—and as we got out of the car, I noticed that her gray eyes seemed even bigger than usual, and that her smile seemed stretched just a bit too widely across her face.  I have no idea—did not know then, certainly, and still do not know—when Elizabeth began taking whatever pills she could get her hands on, whether this was a recent development, inherited perhaps from her massively messed-up sister Cilla, or whether she had been performing chemical experiments on herself since childhood. But the thirty or forty seconds she stood leaning against the car, her beautiful head wavering ever so slightly from side to side, sent a chill down my back, and not one of pleasure. Then, she took my hand; I beamed.  As we began to climb the winding stairs up to the café, she removed a small, silver flask from her skirt pocket, winked at me. “Jack Daniels,” she whispered. “Come on, have some.”  And I did.  I should point out that I had never drunk anything stronger than bad Passover wine, that while Jimmy and Mike and Lee sometimes snuck into bars proud of their fake ids and their old-enough-to-drink faces, I looked fourteen well into my twenties, and had never really yearned for intoxication either. But I yearned for it that night because Elizabeth was so palpably, winsomely intoxicated; I would probably have taken any substance she offered me. That’s the kind of stuff I’m made of.  By the time we reached the small crowded room and slumped at one of the round, candle-lit tables, we had drunk almost the entire flask and the top of my head seemed about to separate and lift off from the rest of my body. Elizabeth held my hand so tightly that I could see my fingers turning white, but I was looking at them from far away.  We were by far the youngest and drunkest members of the audience. Now and then, a woman with long, graying pigtails at the table next to us would turn and glare—I’m sure our whispers were louder than we thought, our giggles more obvious. The second or third time she did it, Elizabeth turned to her and said, “Can I kiss my boyfriend if I want to? Would that be OK with you?” And then she shoved the bowler to the back of her head and kissed me, and I felt as if I were melting into her.  I remember very little of the other performers that evening. There was a wraith-like woman with a buzzcut, who sat on a folding chair, poured red paint down her shirt, and ranted about rape; there was a man who methodically shaved while a woman (who looked eerily like him) pretended to be his mirror; there were several gibberish poets, and a thin woman in lavender who played drums and dulcimer while intoning “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”  By the time Gabriel Bish came on, Elizabeth and I had been pretty much doing nothing but kissing and I was beginning to feel just the slight tinge of nausea from the bourbon, creeping up from the pit of my stomach.  Then, Lena Spencer, the guiding angel of the café, stood in the center of the airless room in a scarlet muumuu and said, “Well, wow, that’s all I can say, wow, this next one, well, he’s the real thing, you’ll know, you already know. Gabriel Bish.”  Elizabeth sat up, as if jolted by an electrical current. She dropped my hand for the first time that evening. We both turned toward the tiny stage area. There was a melodious chime, and the lights went up to reveal Bish, sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring out at us. Behind him were two young women, wearing neon pink bikinis and playing beautiful, red and silver gongs, which I later learned were Indonesian gamelan instruments.  Bish himself seemed to be wearing the same black batik shirt I had seen him in 6 months earlier. His hair was longer, wilder; he looked as if he had not shaved since the last time we met, but his face was lit up by a shy little boy’s smile. Something glittered in his hands, but I couldn’t tell what it was, and there was a black wooden box on the floor next to him.  He rocked back and forth as the bikini girls banged on their gongs. He began to speak, first in a whisper, then in a normal voice, then in an unsettling falsetto: “Is anomie the enemy? Is anomie the enemy? Anomie. The enemy. A NO MIE THE EN E MY. Oh yeah. MMMHMMM ANOMIE IS THE ENEMY.”  That’s all he said, over and over. After a few minutes of this, he opened the palms of his hands to reveal a shiny wind-up toy train. Slowly, methodically, he turned its silver key. He let the train ride around in a circle on the stage. As it did, he reached into the box. He took out small, gleaming statues of the Buddha—each a different color, size, pose, style. One by one, he placed the little Buddhas on the cars of the toy train, until the train was filled with Buddhas going around and around on the bare wooden floor.  When the train stopped, he stopped. He closed his eyes, rocked back and forth to the din of the chimes, stood up, swept the train and the Buddhas back into the box, left the stage.  “Wow,” Elizabeth whispered.  “I think I’m going to be sick,” is all I managed in response.  I raced down the rickety stairs. My forehead was drenched in sweat; I could feel it trickling through my hair onto the collar of my blue Arrow shirt. It was cool for May and for a moment, the breeze felt soothing. I muttered, I’ll be all right I’ll be all right to no one, but I had only to say it to know it was not true and then the gurgle of poison in my stomach seemed to explode. I doubled over, vomiting onto Phila St.  I am not sure how much time passed in this manner, but some of the audience had already begun to file out (including the gray pigtailed woman, who shot me a pitying look). I was a little surprised that Elizabeth had not come down to look for me. It suddenly occurred to me that she might be sick too (this was before I had recognized her almost inconceivable capacity for drugs and alcohol). “I have to make sure she’s OK,” I said, wiping my sleeve across my damp forehead. I stood up; I was no longer dizzy. I felt renewed.  I bounded up the stairs. The performers were mostly milling about, chatting with some of the audience. At the far end of the room, I saw Elizabeth’s bowler hat but it was not on her head. It was on Gabriel Bish’s massive head, and Elizabeth was sitting next to him, chattering away.  “There you are,” she said, as if I had just popped out for a cigarette. She turned back to Bish. “Your second biggest fan.”  He squinted at me. “I know you,” he said.  I felt a surge of pride. “You remember me?”  “I didn’t say I remember you, I said I know you.” He gave me a funny, little smirk. “You’re the boy from Albany who wants an extraordinary life.”  I nodded dumbly.  “So,” he said, rolling his head around his shoulders, “how did you like our little show?”  “Why the Buddhas?” Elizabeth asked, reaching out vaguely for my hand. “Why the train?”  “A dream, a recurring dream.” He stood up, stretched, as if just waking from a long nap. “That’s always what it is for me, a dream. A picture that I can’t get out of my head.”  “I…we…we loved it,” I stammered.  “Did you? But it doesn’t work, does it? Should be vast. Huge statues, a life-sized train, big empty black stage, the whole gamelan gonging away… Maybe one of these days. When my little ship comes in.”  “We loved it just as it was,” Elizabeth chimed in. “We love everything you do.” I noticed that she had not taken her eyes off of him.  “Not everything.” He was staring at her, just for a moment, then he stood up, sighed. “I hope not everything.”  Elizabeth giggled. “And we always will, right Ned? We’re going to follow your work forever, right Ned?”  “Yes,” I agreed, solemnly. “We will follow your work forever.”  Elizabeth giggled again; this time it seemed as if it might go on too long, and I looked away. Then she stood up. “Maybe we’ll even follow you,” she added. She rose, wobbled a little, just long enough to make her look as young as she actually was. Bish gazed at her thoughtfully, took off the bowler, placed it back gently on her head. She flinched. “No, no,” she said, “we want you to have it. Don’t we, Ned?”  She placed the bowler back on top of his tangled curls. Then, she kissed his cheek, grabbed my arm, and we ran out of the café.  Back in the Saab, she hugged me hard. “Look!” she beamed. She pulled the toy train from inside her shirt. “He gave it to me. Sort of. Oh, Ned, this is the best night I’ve ever had,” she murmured. “Ever.” And within seconds, she was sound asleep.

Edges
by Stephen Policoff

The night Elizabeth and I vowed to honor our literary god, Gabriel Bish, was also the night of our first kiss, the first time I got seriously drunk, the first time I threw up on the street. It was a mysterious, heady night in Saratoga Springs, New York where we had driven in my father’s pork-colored Saab for an evening billed as “Meeting on Edges: Art/Poetics/Performance-for-Now,” featuring Gabriel Bish and other downtown avant-gardists transported to the quiet streets of upstate New York.

Since Elizabeth and I had begun spending every afternoon together plotting our escape from Albany—or Smallbany, as she invariably called it— everyone assumed she was my girlfriend. But she was not. I was in awe of her pale beauty, coppery hair, dimpled chin. I was mesmerized by her wise-ass wit, her passionate love of art and music, her shrugged-off sophistication. But I was scared to touch her.

She was rumored to be sexually experienced, too. “Hey Ned!” Jimmy Bouchever shouted at me one afternoon across Academy Circle, “Guess you’re getting some now, huh?”

But I wasn’t, would not have known what to do with it if I had gotten it. This seemed to suit Elizabeth well enough; she flitted around me like a firefly sometimes, seemed to want always to be in my company, yet maintained dating relationships with other boys, WASP princelings with names like Scooter, Woody, and AJ.

Sometimes, anxiety over this bubbled up in me, though I was not sure why. I had certainly not acknowledged to myself that I loved her. But two or three months into our curious friendship when she was not home for our nightly chat, out with Scooter or Woody, I “broke up” with her. Of course, I didn’t bother to tell her, I simply stopped calling her, made lame excuses for why I could not speak when she called me.

And then, a few days later, without really knowing what I was doing, I began to call her every night at nine, hanging up the instant she answered the phone.

I do not think that was what I intended to do, it was merely what I was compelled to do, over and over. Each night, I believed I would finally speak to her again, tell her whatever it was that I thought I needed to tell her. Each night, at 9:02, the phone leaped out of my hand back into its cradle.

I persuaded myself that this was not merely fear about my feelings or childish pique, that I was sending her a message (albeit an annoying one), that I was being edgy and ominous and masterful. Until one night, seconds before nine, when she called me and blurted, “Listen Ned you sweet stupid asshole, you can’t hang up on me tonight, I have something important to do on Saturday, and you’re doing it with me.”

And so, that Saturday, late May 1976, we sped up the Northway toward the legendary dive called Caffe Lena.

I’ve heard the old place is still there, though Lena herself, a huge benevolent bear of a woman, died years ago. It was the kind of coffee house where you could see a mime on acid one night and John Lee Hooker the next. I had always wanted to go there, had always wanted to go there with Elizabeth.

It is many years ago, but I recall what Elizabeth was wearing almost as vividly as I recall the white mini-dress she wore at our disastrous wedding five years later or the red halter top she was wearing six months after that, the night I found her writhing on the floor of Bish’s Tribeca loft.

She had on a faded, ripped, white Brooks Brothers shirt, probably her father’s, unbuttoned almost to her waist and tied into a thick knot just above the black leather skirt she always wore when she was not in her green Girl’s Academy uniform. She had her beloved black cameo pin prominently displayed on the frayed collar of the shirt. She had piled her hair on top of her head, and wore a black bowler hat, which almost covered her forehead. She looked somewhere between comical and exquisite, like a French schoolgirl out on a Left Bank lark.

The combined excitement of seeing Gabriel Bish in the company of the piquant Elizabeth was almost too much for me. I was jittery, and drove like the maddened teen I was, weaving in and out of traffic, speeding up then slowing down, lurching off the exit through the narrow lanes, screeching to a halt on Phila Street by the laundromat which occupied the lower floor of the redoubtable cafe.

Elizabeth hadn’t said much during our drive—highly unusual—and as we got out of the car, I noticed that her gray eyes seemed even bigger than usual, and that her smile seemed stretched just a bit too widely across her face.

I have no idea—did not know then, certainly, and still do not know—when Elizabeth began taking whatever pills she could get her hands on, whether this was a recent development, inherited perhaps from her massively messed-up sister Cilla, or whether she had been performing chemical experiments on herself since childhood. But the thirty or forty seconds she stood leaning against the car, her beautiful head wavering ever so slightly from side to side, sent a chill down my back, and not one of pleasure. Then, she took my hand; I beamed.

As we began to climb the winding stairs up to the café, she removed a small, silver flask from her skirt pocket, winked at me. “Jack Daniels,” she whispered. “Come on, have some.”

And I did.

I should point out that I had never drunk anything stronger than bad Passover wine, that while Jimmy and Mike and Lee sometimes snuck into bars proud of their fake ids and their old-enough-to-drink faces, I looked fourteen well into my twenties, and had never really yearned for intoxication either. But I yearned for it that night because Elizabeth was so palpably, winsomely intoxicated; I would probably have taken any substance she offered me. That’s the kind of stuff I’m made of.

By the time we reached the small crowded room and slumped at one of the round, candle-lit tables, we had drunk almost the entire flask and the top of my head seemed about to separate and lift off from the rest of my body. Elizabeth held my hand so tightly that I could see my fingers turning white, but I was looking at them from far away.

We were by far the youngest and drunkest members of the audience. Now and then, a woman with long, graying pigtails at the table next to us would turn and glare—I’m sure our whispers were louder than we thought, our giggles more obvious. The second or third time she did it, Elizabeth turned to her and said, “Can I kiss my boyfriend if I want to? Would that be OK with you?” And then she shoved the bowler to the back of her head and kissed me, and I felt as if I were melting into her.

I remember very little of the other performers that evening. There was a wraith-like woman with a buzzcut, who sat on a folding chair, poured red paint down her shirt, and ranted about rape; there was a man who methodically shaved while a woman (who looked eerily like him) pretended to be his mirror; there were several gibberish poets, and a thin woman in lavender who played drums and dulcimer while intoning “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”

By the time Gabriel Bish came on, Elizabeth and I had been pretty much doing nothing but kissing and I was beginning to feel just the slight tinge of nausea from the bourbon, creeping up from the pit of my stomach.

Then, Lena Spencer, the guiding angel of the café, stood in the center of the airless room in a scarlet muumuu and said, “Well, wow, that’s all I can say, wow, this next one, well, he’s the real thing, you’ll know, you already know. Gabriel Bish.”

Elizabeth sat up, as if jolted by an electrical current. She dropped my hand for the first time that evening. We both turned toward the tiny stage area. There was a melodious chime, and the lights went up to reveal Bish, sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring out at us. Behind him were two young women, wearing neon pink bikinis and playing beautiful, red and silver gongs, which I later learned were Indonesian gamelan instruments.

Bish himself seemed to be wearing the same black batik shirt I had seen him in 6 months earlier. His hair was longer, wilder; he looked as if he had not shaved since the last time we met, but his face was lit up by a shy little boy’s smile. Something glittered in his hands, but I couldn’t tell what it was, and there was a black wooden box on the floor next to him.

He rocked back and forth as the bikini girls banged on their gongs. He began to speak, first in a whisper, then in a normal voice, then in an unsettling falsetto: “Is anomie the enemy? Is anomie the enemy? Anomie. The enemy. A NO MIE THE EN E MY. Oh yeah. MMMHMMM ANOMIE IS THE ENEMY.”

That’s all he said, over and over. After a few minutes of this, he opened the palms of his hands to reveal a shiny wind-up toy train. Slowly, methodically, he turned its silver key. He let the train ride around in a circle on the stage. As it did, he reached into the box. He took out small, gleaming statues of the Buddha—each a different color, size, pose, style. One by one, he placed the little Buddhas on the cars of the toy train, until the train was filled with Buddhas going around and around on the bare wooden floor.

When the train stopped, he stopped. He closed his eyes, rocked back and forth to the din of the chimes, stood up, swept the train and the Buddhas back into the box, left the stage.

“Wow,” Elizabeth whispered.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” is all I managed in response.

I raced down the rickety stairs. My forehead was drenched in sweat; I could feel it trickling through my hair onto the collar of my blue Arrow shirt. It was cool for May and for a moment, the breeze felt soothing. I muttered, I’ll be all right I’ll be all right to no one, but I had only to say it to know it was not true and then the gurgle of poison in my stomach seemed to explode. I doubled over, vomiting onto Phila St.

I am not sure how much time passed in this manner, but some of the audience had already begun to file out (including the gray pigtailed woman, who shot me a pitying look). I was a little surprised that Elizabeth had not come down to look for me. It suddenly occurred to me that she might be sick too (this was before I had recognized her almost inconceivable capacity for drugs and alcohol). “I have to make sure she’s OK,” I said, wiping my sleeve across my damp forehead. I stood up; I was no longer dizzy. I felt renewed.

I bounded up the stairs. The performers were mostly milling about, chatting with some of the audience. At the far end of the room, I saw Elizabeth’s bowler hat but it was not on her head. It was on Gabriel Bish’s massive head, and Elizabeth was sitting next to him, chattering away.

“There you are,” she said, as if I had just popped out for a cigarette. She turned back to Bish. “Your second biggest fan.”

He squinted at me. “I know you,” he said.

I felt a surge of pride. “You remember me?”

“I didn’t say I remember you, I said I know you.” He gave me a funny, little smirk. “You’re the boy from Albany who wants an extraordinary life.”

I nodded dumbly.

“So,” he said, rolling his head around his shoulders, “how did you like our little show?”

“Why the Buddhas?” Elizabeth asked, reaching out vaguely for my hand. “Why the train?”

“A dream, a recurring dream.” He stood up, stretched, as if just waking from a long nap. “That’s always what it is for me, a dream. A picture that I can’t get out of my head.”

“I…we…we loved it,” I stammered.

“Did you? But it doesn’t work, does it? Should be vast. Huge statues, a life-sized train, big empty black stage, the whole gamelan gonging away… Maybe one of these days. When my little ship comes in.”

“We loved it just as it was,” Elizabeth chimed in. “We love everything you do.” I noticed that she had not taken her eyes off of him.

“Not everything.” He was staring at her, just for a moment, then he stood up, sighed. “I hope not everything.”

Elizabeth giggled. “And we always will, right Ned? We’re going to follow your work forever, right Ned?”

“Yes,” I agreed, solemnly. “We will follow your work forever.”

Elizabeth giggled again; this time it seemed as if it might go on too long, and I looked away. Then she stood up. “Maybe we’ll even follow you,” she added. She rose, wobbled a little, just long enough to make her look as young as she actually was. Bish gazed at her thoughtfully, took off the bowler, placed it back gently on her head. She flinched. “No, no,” she said, “we want you to have it. Don’t we, Ned?”

She placed the bowler back on top of his tangled curls. Then, she kissed his cheek, grabbed my arm, and we ran out of the café.

Back in the Saab, she hugged me hard. “Look!” she beamed. She pulled the toy train from inside her shirt. “He gave it to me. Sort of. Oh, Ned, this is the best night I’ve ever had,” she murmured. “Ever.” And within seconds, she was sound asleep.