What kind of embrace led to your conception? Was it loving? Mechanical? Or a drunken bed rattler? Does the spirit in which the effort is undertaken affect the outcome? My name is Tiger Lily, and this is the tale of how I came to be as well as a peek into the life of an average writer.
Everyone has a story, but my father couldn’t tell his. Therefore, his work was competent but never memorable. He lacked the guts to write about what he knew. Couldn’t see the poetry in his mundane life.
My mother reads tiny magazines in search of writers she can turn into authors. She went to the New Year’s Day reading at Saint Marx’s church to give my father a story he could tell.
Joe, the poet, my father, had received an invitation to read at Saint Mark’s Church on the Lower East Side of Manhattan on New Year’s Day.
The folks on the committee to select readers had a discussion. The leader clapped his hands together to bring everyone to attention: “Two weeks from show time and we have vacant slots.”
Somebody’s grandmother with a colorful scarf said, “What about Joe? He’s been around forever. We’ve all read his work.”
A man in his fifties with extremely well-organized hair replied, “Read it onece and never recommended it. That guy applies for every competition but never wins. This is a prestigious reading.”
Grandma didn’t agree. She waved an expensive fountain pen at organized hair and said, “He never quits. Joe reads wherever he can. He always has new work. He gets a slot for devotion.”
“Don’t wave your pen like a scepter. It won’t change the facts. The Institute of Dead Poets isn’t going to rent a venue and host a wake, famous guys aren’t going to read his poems and tell Joe stories. Do you know any? His tombstone should say Here lies a man who lacked panache.”
“You are a bitter man with a nasty temperament,” replied Grandma. “Last time we spoke, he told me he was content to be a bearer of the art spirit.”
“Yes,” said a fellow in the back. “He’s an amateur, a hobby artist, who earned a taste. He’ll tell his grandkids about the time he felt like an author.”
The leader a man in his 40’s, from Nebraska living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment on the island of Manhattan with his wife and kid, was devoted to writing but not prepared for poverty. A humbled man, who had to pick up his kid from school in 56 minutes said, “Enough. He buys our books.”
Joe lived in Queens his entire life and worked at the university library, never had a passport. He lacked charisma and suffered doubts. He spent his days in the stacks and his nights writing.
My father was a modest man, but somehow regal in his modesty. Genius, he believed, was something other people called you. He submitted to the New Yorker, but it was little magazines made of folded paper, held together with staples, that published him.
While seated in a plastic chair at the back of the stage waiting for his turn to read, he wondered if Allen Ginsburg had sat in this same chair while waiting to read “Kaddish.”
That thought inspired Joe. He felt authorial and imagined an editor, reporter, or interviewer asking how he’d teach a writing class. He rehearsed the opening lines of his imaginary class so he’d be ready. “Avoid algorithms. Anything but Warhol’s soup can. Your can! A can I’ve never seen before.”
The ancient poet on the stage, my father Joe, assumed the pale lady with unruly teeth seated in the second row, my mother, was looking to his left or to his right, not at the old man discreetly wiggling his toes and massaging his thigh. Of late, his right leg went numb sometimes when he stood. He hoped he’d make it out of the chair and onto his feet on the first attempt.
My mother had a thing for old guys, for writers who needed a nudge, for three-legged cats, and one-eyed snakes. When the announcer called his name, she put on a beat-up corduroy cap that read Books are Magic and stood.
Joe’s delight was palpable. It lightened his step. He couldn’t believe a reader of tiny magazines without any circulation was walking down the aisle toward the podium. The delight not only cured his uncertain legs, but the hum of his anxiety. Joe had his first erection in a decade.
As Joe approached the podium, she put her thumb on her nose and wiggled her fingers deliciously and Joe experienced the magic of desire. His thoughts swerved. Her skin isn’t pale. It has the luminescence of Botticelli’s Venus. Joe had never had a fan.
His opening lines were sonorous and authoritative. She took the vacant seat in the first row, in front of the podium, and smiled. Her teeth aren’t stained and snaggled. They’re marvelous. Nobody can write a poem about straight teeth.
They waded through the crowd of handshakers. Walked past the row of reader-pickers without a nod of thanks. A minute later they were together in a cab holding hands on route to his place, and baby names were popping into his head: Tiger Lily for a girl and Socrates for a boy. Joe was dancing to the song of his DNA, an ancient tune.
When his fan paid the fare, Joe lifted her hand and kissed it ardently while looking into her smiling eyes. He promoted her to patron. He lived on a skinny budget, a subway guy. He only had ten dollars in his pocket; he never carried more.
Joe’s apartment was on the fourth floor of a walkup. Most days he paused at each landing to check his pulse and wonder what would happen to him when a trip to the fourth floor became his Everest. But on this New Year’s Day, he ran up those same steps. His patron, my mother, stood between him and extinction.
Then they were doing it on his folding couch. He’d never had a groupie. She wrapped her legs around his back as though she wanted his child, like she heard all his thoughts and agreed. That thought, the connection, caused Joe to climax. And when he did, she pulled tight and down with both legs as though she wanted to pull him inside her.
They both heard Joe’s spine crack. It was the kind of sound neither of them would ever forget. Louder than a car wreck.
