Christo and Eddie

     It wasn't my idea.  It was Tom Kokis who invited us to see the Gates of Christo in Central Park.  My point of view was that, just as Churchill said golf was the best way to ruin a good walk, Christo is the best way to ruin a good anything.  Tom Kokis invited us.  He had probably already been there four times.  But Chung-Yung and I  hadn't been in Central Park in many months, so we went.

    "Art," I said to Chung-Yung.  "Central Park has unusual art in it.  But we can try to ignore it and look at the trees."

    And we got to the park and met Tom, and I wasn't surprised, after we had strolled about for one half hour, when Chung-Yung asked, "Where is the art?"  At that moment she was facing one of the gates.  Tom thought that was the best critical statement of the day.

    In reply I pointed to a terrier rollicking his way up the path and said, "That's the best art in this park today.  If only Chip were here," I said.  "Nobody can cut down modern art like Chip Cummings."

    The park was jammed.  Tons of people.  I said to Tom, "This is why we're failures - we should be at one of the gates with a table and box telling people it's $1 to enter, only $1."

    I reached up and touched one of the curtains.  I rubbed it between my fingers.  I said, "You know... I once owned a Christo."

   Kokis said that was impossible.  "No one can own a Christo. You think he can sell this when the exhibition's finished?  That's the biggest mystery to me.  How the guy earns a living when nobody can buy the wrapped Reichsteig."

   "But I did own a Christo," I said. "If possession is nine-tenths of the law, I owned a Christo.  But it wouldn't have happened without a phone call from Paris."

   Tom said, "A phone call from Paris.  How come it¡¦s never a phone call from Yonkers?"

   "Paris," I said. "And a porkpie hat, like the one Gene Hackman wore in the French Connection.  And the guy who wore the hat.  The cathedral of St. John the Divine and Woody Allen.  And a parting gift from someone who'll never give another gift to anyone...if my information is right."

  It began on a day in March, 1991.  How strange were the events of the next two months to be, but how encapsulated and muffled they were in comparison with the roiling catastrophic events of that summer.  Eddie Schmit formed a story small and gem-like in comparison.  The summer of 1991 cannot be told so briefly or neatly and will not even be attempted here.  We will skip the summer of 1991 and tell of Eddie during those two months plus his coda in September and merely keep in mind that the strangeness of his tale was simply a prelude, a stringing up of Christmas lights and holly wreaths, in effect a portent of finding out that, yes, Santa Claus can come down the chimney and he does eat the cookies and drink the milk.  Keep that in mind, perhaps.  Or forget it.  Just listen to the story of Eddie.

   It began with a phone call from Paris, from Mirriam.  She said a friend of hers, Eddie Schmit, was coming to New York for about two months, and she'd given him my name and phone number.  Eddie was into art, a dealer or I don't know what.  Any friend of Mirriam's was a friend of mine.  No more be said.

   Days passed and then my phone rang.  Eddie was calling, from a phone booth in Soho.  I said I would meet him.  And I walked to Spring and West Broadway and there saw Eddie by the phone booth on a dank, damp March day.

   Eddie was Alsation.  He was skinny if not actually emaciated.  He wore a courderoy jacket, jeans, a scarf and a porkpie hat.  I didn't know then they were his only clothes.  I suppose his hair was auburn, or light brown with a reddish tinge, and he had a scraggly moustache and  goatee.  It wasn't that his goatee was a stylistic comment.  I think that Eddie simply didn't shave, and a wispy goatee was all the hirsuteness his undernoursihed epidermis could sprout.

   He suggested we repair to one of those Soho bars/tea rooms.  Soho never knows if it's drinking or sipping.  And Eddie therein explained the purpose of his New York visit and his life actually.  Eddie had lived in Peru.  He had been shaken by the poverty and particularly by the plight of orphans in Peru.  I didn't know it then, but Eddie had combined the ruling passions of his life and was acting upon them with all his might.  It is a rare thing for people to do, and you readers should look into yourselves and see if you have it in yourselves.  It is a way to say that life has not been wasted, even if defeated.

   Eddie was passionate about art.  Eddie was passionate about Peruvian orphans.  Eddie was going to fund the building of a Peruvian orphanage.  He had come to New York to solicit donations of art from famous artists.  The art would be auctioned for cash to fund the orphanage.  That was his dream and that would be his plan in New York.  He intended to accomplish it in two months.  He had brochures and documents he showed me.  He intended to distribute them.

   I have always been naive.  I was more naive in 1991 than I now am.  And yet, even then, deep inside I did not feel a rush to join Eddie in his enthusiasm.  I doubted the success of his plan.  His plan seemed, how shall I say, doomed to failure.  And this was coming, mind you, from a person, me, who has never been acclaimed for his steely business acumen and crystal clear eye for the primacy of realism.

   Oh, blame me for lack of imagination if you will.  You may say, "It sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea to me, Archer."  But you didn't see Eddie in that bar/tearoom.  He was, how shall I say, unprepossessing in appearance.  He had that fabled Victorian earnestness, of course; he was dead serious, and earnestness really does count for something in life.  If you are sufficiently serious, you can convince people that pigs can fly if wings are attached.  They will even help you attach the wings to the pigs.  I've seen it.  It reminds me now, this issue of gaining followers through the mere exertion of earnestness, of something that occurred years later.  I was visiting a Soho gallery/studio with a girlfriend.  Arrayed upon the floor over a space of 10 square feet were hundreds of purple cylinders set upright.

    "There's the artist," said my girlfriend.  She walked up to him and said, "You've been working hard."  "Yeah," he replied without a smile.  "I been working on this all summer."  The artist had an assistant.  I later told Chip about this.  Chip said, "Uh huh.  Uh huh," as though he'd heard it all before.

     But Eddie's appearance was downright shabby.  And this is coming from a man who no one has ever compared to Fred Astaire when it comes to wearing the right jacket and ascot.  Eddie looked shabby.

   And he stank.  He had body odor.  Or he hadn't washed.  Or his jacket needed dry cleaning.  Or burning.  I would become more aware of this when Eddie was sitting on my apartment couch, probably most acutely during those moments when he was trying to get me to let him reside in my apartment.  Yes.  That's when I noticed the stench most.

   And so I did not allow myself to become a part of Eddie's dream.  I said do keep in touch and call and we must have a drink now and then.  And boy did Eddie call.  Almost every day.  He visited.  He was doing most of his soliciting in Soho.  So it would be ideal, Eddie said, if he could have a temporary home close to Soho, like in my apartment.  That would be ideal.  I was made of stern stuff in those days.  I just wouldn't let it happen.  He only asked to stay there occasionally, two or three days a week.  But even I could add together one homeless person and two months in New York and come up with no good deal for Archer for precisely the next two months.

   So no.  And, Mirriam told me later, Eddie had actually been homeless at some point in his life; he had lived the classic clochard life under the bridges of Paris.  Well, then, he knew the routine, didn't he?

   "But can you do me one favor?" Eddie asked.  "Can I at least store the artworks here?  They won't take up so much space.  I need some place safe."  So.  Eddie wanted to store the artworks in my apartment.  Now this sounded like a much, much more solid business proposition.  I looked at Eddie and calculated that my possible inconvenience from this arrangement was, oh, about zero percent.  "Yes," I said.

   And then one day I came home from work and Roger the doorman beckoned to me.  He stood up from his desk and walked around and headed for the storage room, crooking a finger briefly to indicate I should follow.

   Roger the doorman.  He takes some explaining.  He never wasted words, energy or smiles.  Round bald head, round body, shirt tail perpetually creeping out, black horned rim glasses, wrinkles that accentuated his round head and body.  From Haiti and semi-dark skinned, but without really Negroid features.  What he looked like was a cartoon, with those rubbery features that should have been expressive yet never smiled or even frowned.  Expression was too much effort for Roger, too much condescension to what was expected from doormen.

    Excuse me.  He was a concierge.  Doormen held the door.  Roger was the least servile doorman in New York.  He spooked the hell out of Chip Cummings.  You see, Chip would arrive to see me, medicated of course, and Roger would call up to my apartment, and I would be in the bathroom, and Roger would wordlessly hold out both hands, still holding the telephone, and shrug his shoulders without any expression at all on his face.  And Chip, who never could handle authority figures in any guise whatever, trembled at the thought of having to speak with this tower of imperturbability that was Roger.  And Chip would always say to me after these visits, "Would you do me one favor?  If you know I'm coming to visit, would you just call down to that guy Roger and tell him to just let me go past?  I hate talking with him."  But I never would.

     And then one day I came home from work and Roger beckoned to me.  He motioned to me to stay outside the storage room.  He strolled within.  He walked out carrying three large rectangles of different sizes, wrapped in bubble wrap and packing tape.  They were paintings.  Paintings.  Roger said, "Eddie left them for you."  Six syllables from Roger and back to his desk.

    Eddie left them.  I looked at the outermost one, protected by glass.  It was a lithograph.  In the corner was a name.  Christo.  The dark shiny dome of Roger glistened in the cone of artificial light above his desk.  His eyes were turned downwards, engaged in matters of great state on his desk.  I took the works of art upstairs, where I inspected them.  It was a Christo lithograph.  The second was by, I swear, Rauschenbug.  The third was by I can't remember whom.

    I later examined the Christo of course.  I'm surprised that I'm not sure I remember its subject.  In my mind's eye I seem to recall that it portrayed a stick of margarine in the process of being wrapped by little men, like Lilliputians.  But I may be wrong about that.

    Three works of art from Eddie.  Two famous names.  It was miraculous.  "How is it possible," I said later to Chip, "that a homeless guy who smells bad could finagle works of arts worth thousands or ten thousands from famous artists on the plea of helping orphans in Peru?  Why would they listen to such a guy?  Why?

    "I'll tell you why," said Chip.  "There's the artist sitting on the toilet, and he's painting watercolor x's and o's on the wall beside him, and he says 'It's art!  I'm a genius!' and his tax attorney says, 'You'll owe another $10,000 in taxes if you sell that.  You better give it to charity.'  And Eddie was the first guy who asked him for a donation."

    That's why they call him Easy Answer Chip.

    But as usual I was not totally convinced.  Even artists seeking tax relief have more established venues in their quest for deduction.  And the miraculous fact remained that I had famous works of art in my apartment.

   And they kept coming.  A Rothko.  A Warhol.

   Once a week or so Roger would exert himself again as he had the first day.  He would come out with artworks worth thousands and thousands and hand it to me exactly as he did shipments from the Book of the Month Club.  I have never seen a man who could convey such indifference without words or facial expressions.

    They were piling up.  I was having trouble thinking where to store them in my apartment.  Even a philistine such as I didn't wish to be careless and let the Christo fall down and get punctured on my bedside lamp.  I valued them for Eddie's sake, and I valued them perhaps even more as a manifestation of the miraculous.

    Eddie helped me.  He would come by and we together would find safe inconspicuous storage spaces for the treasures.  Someone who knew me at that time asked, "Aren't you even tempted to display them, at least for as long as Eddie is in New York?"  But I am not vain.  I would not be known for inviting guests and gesturing and purring, "Yes.  My Christo.  I enjoy it immensely."  And they frankly looked best to me girt in their bubble wrap and stacked in the corners.  I kept them stored.

    A spell of late winter weather settled in and Eddie became sick.  Seriously sick.  Pneumonia perhaps.  And he would turn out in his courderoy jacket and jeans, his scarf and porkpie hat, turning his coat collar up, wandering the streets of Soho at night while dying from pneumonia, eating nothing but art gallery opening cheese and wine.  I'm serious; I believe that was his total bill of fare.  So it wasn't a matter of preference to wander through Soho while sick to death.  Soho was where the nutrition was.

   All right!  Stop booing me.  He wasn't homeless.  He had managed to find some family of Peruvians to take him in out in Woodside, Queens.  They had given him a cot to sleep on.  It was during this period of his illness that I imagined I might get a phone call late at night and receive this message in Spanglish.  "You friend of Eddie Schmit.  Please come.  Here is address."  And I would ride out to Woodside and be greeted at the door by a somber Peruvian and would follow him up narrow, smelly steps.  And the Peruvian would pause at the top step and open a closet door.  And there inside on a cot would be Eddie, cold and stiff as frozen fish sticks, mouth open, dead in the moment of trying to suck in one last breath.

   And I imagined making a story out of that, like what I would do with all that valuable art, and maybe the police would make inquiries, and there would be other people with interests in the art, like maybe the Russian mob.  Or maybe the story would go like this:  Why not kill him for the art myself?  A fall from my twelfth story window.  A Hitchcock turn of events.

  In actuality, Eddie began to call me so constantly and attempt to gain residence in my apartment that I finally told the day doorman to ring me twice if it was Eddie at the desk.  That way I would know not to answer.  It sounds cruel, but people get far more out of me than I get out of them.  They always have.  What on earth should obligate me to house someone who stinks?  For two months?  He'd been homeless before.  He must know the routine.

   Did Eddie really need my help?  No.  That was part of the miraculous.  Eddie in reality needed nobody's help.  Could you get in to a nightclub to meet Woody Allen?  Eddie did. I met him one day.  He happily told me how he had read in the local tabloids that Woody Allen visited a certain nightclub on a particular night of every week.  He had loitered outside the club, waiting for Allen.  When Allen alighted from a cab with two Chinese girls, Eddie raced to their rear and pressed against them.  The goon on the velvet ropes assumed Eddie was one of Allen's entourage and let them all in together.  Once inside, Eddie pressed a bunch of his pamphlets into Allen's hand, made his plea and exited.

     "What did Allen do?" I asked.

     "He smiled," Eddie said.

   The last day of Eddie in New York came.  He had arranged to pick up the artwork from my apartment on a glorious May day.  I couldn't get too sentimental about his leave taking.  He needed to catch a cab down to Soho and get one more donation.  He stood near my front door.

   "And I have a small gift for you," Eddie said.  He presented it to me.  Don't forget that gift.  You're going to hear more about it at the very end.

    I hadn't intended to accompany Eddie to Soho, but he needed help with all the art and, what the hell, he was leaving town.  So I went with with Eddie to carry the art to the studio of an elfin, mad-looking, continually smiling old artist who didn't speak English and who helped Eddie pack the art to get it through customs.  His studio was quite near Houston St.  We left and flagged a cab on Houston.  Eddie stepped into the cab and shook my hand.  The door closed and the cab went east, with me waving goodbye.  I walked back home on the glorious day thinking what an odd little period of adventure had just ended.  I can hear the cab door closing even now.

   What else happened in those two months regarding Eddie?  He had a girlfriend.  Eddie!  Yes!  He had a girlfriend.  And she visited him.  I take that as yet another manifestation of the miraculous which seems to hang all about Eddie.  His girlfriend visited - and I drove them through the Bronx.  I was big into showing people the Bronx in those days.  Remember the vacant - not lots - blocks!  Blocks and blocks of rubble.  You wouldn't know.  It was long ago and long gone.  Those were the days when I could take Tom Kokis on an involuntary nighttime drive through Harlem and hear all sorts of mewling from him in the back seat about how we might get shot at any moment and then feel the press of his knees into the back of my seat as he tried to sink down to a safe position below the level of the car windows.  New York of those days is a lost world, gone like Carthage.  The Lower East Side was the Lower East Side then.  Stroll south of Houston at night and there were lights nowhere, no club, no restaurant, no handmade earring shops.

     And it got worse further east.  On a Sunday morning in the rain Chip and I drove along Ludlow Street and saw a man huddled against a school building shooting himself up.  Paul Racette lived in a building on Ludlow with an elevator.  But the elevator had no up button.  There was nothing there but a black circular hole.  I was about to insert my forefinger and probe for the electrical connection when my good friend Chip pulled me back bodily.  "Don't do that, you idiot.  You're liable to get shocked," he said.  "Do it like this."  He held up his umbrella and deftly inserted the metal ferrule into the hole.  He jumped back as the electricity coursed down the umbrella and up his arm.

     Now there's a bar on Ludlow that sells $10 margaritas.

    The Bowery had genuine rummy bars then with genuine rummies.  I remember a Village Voice article by a man who told of his descent into stickier and murkier alcoholism.  He went through a series of bars in the Village and Soho over the course of years, like Sir Richard Burton searching for the source of the Nile, and finally found his Lake Victoria on the Bowery.  The man wrote that he knew, when he put his elbows on the Bowery bar, that he had found the companions and environment best suited for his continuing decay.

    Gone.  Gone.  But it's more than a world that is gone; it is our past lives as well, and none will be seen again.  Like Eddie.

    Obviously I'm describing a period of life that now seems as nostalgic as my childhood, a sun washed period of fresh morning air and memorable people.  In my recollection Roger was flanked by two other immortal doormen, immortal because they were the first I met when I moved to Fifth Avenue.  All are now retired.

     It¡¦s funny to think that one realizes the passage of time through the absence of doormen.  Upon meeting them one thought nothing, and time passes, and they are there every day as little more than the kitchen sink faucets that are there every day.  And then they go, and one realizes that one has lived long enough in one place to span a career.  The humans in that place have served their toil, day by day, year by year, and are gone for good into wherever doormen go in retirement.  And others come.  And they go.  And the resident lives on and on in the same place.

     The dramas those doormen could relate if they would.  At that little desk they see who comes and goes and the emotions upon their faces, residents and visitors, and the doormen¡¦s skills of inference and deduction must become as strong or stronger than those of homicide cops.  It must.  Doormen almost never ask.  They observe.  They are probably able to chart with medical accuracy the rise and decline of relationships.

    I remember a period of about two or three years in the late 1990¡¦s when I had a view into an apartment across Ninth Street.  A man lived there.  One night I saw him being pressed against the window by a light brown haired girl who seemed to be unable to kiss him hard enough.  She reappeared on subsequent nights.  She washed his windows in the nude.  She would be absent for a time.  And then upon a Friday I would see suitcases upon the floor and know she was back.  Hey.  They were the ones without any curtains.  And then she was upon one of her absences.  And one night the man sat on the sofa with a curly black haired woman.  And then one night once more appeared the old, familiar bags.

     Did that man¡¦s doormen know the contents of the man¡¦s life?  I am sure they saw less than I did and yet realized more.

     I once walked into my building¡¦s lobby on a Friday afternoon.  An enormous bouquet of flowers waited on the package table for someone.  When the intended recipient appeared, presumably Roger would hold one finger in the air and utter a loud syllable like ¡§Grah,¡¨and then say, ¡§Flowers,¡¨ and return to the duties of his desk.  I went out that night.  The flowers were still there upon my return.  They were there Saturday morning.  And Saturday night.  And Sunday morning.  And Sunday night.  At that point I said to Roger, ¡§I hope the guy hasn¡¦t been waiting at home all weekend for the girl to call him.¡¨  Roger actually smiled.  I didn¡¦t need to tell him anything.  He knew.  Obviously the girl was not missing the giver, wherever she was spending her weekend.  Those flowers ¡V one set of thoughts pining and not even knowing that the other set of thoughts had no remote cognizance of the existence of the first set of thoughts.  Life, right?

    Aguilo was the morning doorman.  Pasty pale with a face that seemed to have no blood at all.  A crew cut head of 70 years perhaps and the opposite of Roger in quick smiles and jerks of the head when dealing with the residents.  He was allegedly Spanish, but in my mind there was something in him Germanic beyond refutation.  I became convinced Aguilo was an ex-Nazi, that he had fled to some South American nation for the purpose of acquiring a Spanish accent and then, his past washed clear, came north to spend his life indoors behind a desk in North America.  You see, the smiles and jerks of the head were but for the residents.  His face in repose squinted and frowned, as though the words were always about to burst out of him, "Vot did you saaaaay?"  I remember him sorting the day's mail packages with a cigarette squeezed between his lips.  Fancy, in those days doormen could smoke in apartment house lobbies while on the job.

    And then there was John, the night doorman.  John was a huge old black man from British Guyana with a high-pitched raucous laugh.  He was the most friendly of the three, and when he talked he would often disconcert me by holding up a flapper of a hand, palm outward, and I would stare at how his fingers splayed backwards impossibly.  John told me he had been a chief of police in British Guyana and I imagined that he got those fingers from hard work, night after night pushing in the eyes of prisoners as he interrogated them.

    John told me how he had lived first in the Bronx upon arriving in America, in a boarding house.  One night the boarding house caught fire.  John leaped from his bed and ran down a burning corridor toward a locked door that he burst clear through, in flames himself.  Indeed, he was scarred all around the fringes of his hairline and down his neck.  John said he lay in the hospital for days between life and death.  And one day John's doctor had walked by and looked at the chart while John appeared to be comatose.  And the doctor said to the nurse, "Isn't he dead yet?"  And John said, "I'm not dead yet Doctor."

     John cheated death.  Not everyone cheats death.  I was totally wrong about those fingers.  John played the organ.  He was a church organist.  That's how he got those fingers.  And by a strange coincidence, in September of 1991 I was getting paid to listen to organs play.

     Well, not actually.  I was out of a job.  A friend had steered me to a week of labor at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.  An artist was exhibiting work in one of the side chapels, and someone was needed to sit and watch.  Yes.  I was a security guard.  I sat on that woven seat chair, and my bony little posterior got imprinted deeper and deeper with the design of the weave, and I watched the occasional person stroll in and glance at the art and leave.

     The best thing about the job was the cathedral itself.  I had to be in there at 8 a.m., and I was fascinated by the sounds of the morning life of the cathedral.  Vague voices were raised far away, and I could hear the vast organ exhaling and blowing out its pipes in the morning like most people blow out their various pipes in the morning, the exhalations in diverse tones and timbres.  Cathedrals have life too.  Why mightn¡¦t they?

     And it was during this week one morning before work that Mirriam called  ¡§Archer,¡¨ she said.  ¡§Eddie¡¦s dead.¡¨  Eddie was dead.  How?  He¡¦d been at a party in France.  He had sat on a windowsill on the fourth floor.  And he just toppled backward and out.  Someone later suggested it was a plausible way to go.  Old French townhouses often have ancient window guards.  A window guard might easily have torn free under the weight of someone leaning upon it.

     Eddie was dead.  I found it hard to believe.  I went to work, and I listened to the keening and flatulence of the organ, and I saw Eddie in my mind every minute.

     What became of the art?  How would I know?  Maybe I could have reached his family.  Maybe they would know.  Did Eddie achieve his auction?  Did someone put into action what I conceived as a dramatic plot?  Was Eddie¡¦s art in his murderer¡¦s hands?  How easy it would have been to accomplish.

     I can't get one other idea out of my mind.  Is Eddie out there?  Maybe the lure of so much artwork was a temptation not for others, but for Eddie himself.  It's a lot easier to collect the means to effect a dream than to effect a dream itself.  I imagined the long annals of idealism extinguished in the collecting of the means.  Peru, without the orphanage, may have beckoned to Eddie, and he may have looked from the artwork to the map and from the map to the artwork and made a decision.  Reality may have obtruded on Eddie's imagination whereas imagination, courtesy of Eddie, had intruded upon my reality.

    In sum, I can't say anything bad about Eddie.  I imagine he was age 30 or less.  He had a noble idea.  He almost made it work.  Bricks without straw.  Bricks without straw.

     That gift Eddie left me deserves description.

      ¡§And I have a small gift for you,¡¨ Eddie said on that last morning.  He handed me a rectangular piece of reinforced cardboard.  It was a piece of art.  A painting.  ¡§I made it,¡¨ Eddie said, ¡§to thank you for helping me.¡¨  The front was painted bright deep blue.  There were squiggles of gold paint across it.  Eddie pointed to two upright gold squiggles.  ¡§That¡¦s an eye, and that¡¦s the vision coming from it,¡¨ he said.  Eddie pointed to a series of horizontal gold squiggles.  ¡§Those are the footsteps the vision sees,¡¨ he said.

     I looked on the back.  Written on the back in blue were the words, ¡§There is no illusion so perilous as that of believing that there is only one reality.  Eddie Schmit  ¡¥91¡¨.

     I hope that my face at that moment did not betray my actual depth of indifference.  I probably did a reasonable imitation of Roger.  I am positive I had no appreciation of Eddie¡¦s gift at that moment.  Now I do.

    The most perilous of all illusions consists in believing that there is only one reality.   I've met a lot of people who should do a lot of thinking about the meaning of that gift.  It would benefit them.  Eddie Schmit represented something - the humble position of apparent reality when measured against the Idea.  I wonder if they buried him with that hat?

                                                                                                         Flushing, March 2005