240
JOHN HOLLANDER
West, the good weather would occasionally see me, like the eager sub–
jects of the newspapers' inquiring photographers, in "various spots,"
tapping at long and aperiodic intervals, jingling the coins in my cup,
studying faces and necks and shoes, among other things. And all this
with no embarrassment or other harm. Was it for nothing that I had
been reared in a real City, one of the very few, and that its priceless
lessons had been taught me early? Glimpse:
Myself, fifteen, in high
school. Running with a sweetly innocent cabal, reading coterie books
but struggling for unnecessarily high marks and not getting
laid
at
all at all. Listening to string quartets in the dark (it was better that
way). Now
we
are at a Stadium concert: darkness is starting to
curtain a not-Long-since yellow sky. The opening measures of the
Rachmaninoff
Paganini Variations
are greeted with scorn by those
of us of more advanced views; the music dims under the sound of
a pa'Ssing plane. Enter, a porky thug of a since-exhausted vintage:
Truman shirt, huaraches, little tummy pressing out against the pleats
of mocha slacks (what was he doing there?), crossing us awkwardly
to take his hard, stone seat. Some mutterings come from us; says
thug: ((You wan' I should rap your teeth down your throat?" (Please,
may there be no real ugliness, here, now.) From us, nothing. He turns
to another, a stranger on his left: «And yours, too, shithead?"
Other: ((What did I do? Why?" Openwork shoes (whose attribute
I am eyeing now with more practical calm; they are like the open–
work privates of an Etruscan, an Ajax' toe; I can stomp if it comes
to anything):
"BECAUSE YOU'RE LOOKING AT ME."
My silent
riposte, «Indeed, who isn't?" is now unneeded; the whole tempo has
changed. A Person has become a Scene, and it is all right to look.
Huaraches has lost, and accepts the stares of the surrounding benches.
They are no longer the penetrating public peeping that I am at this
moment considering for the first time:
"Because you're
looking
at
me,"
the urban slight when administered under all but decreed oc–
casions. Only at what are properly spectacles is it all right to look.
A drunk shouts obscenities at a busdriver, a baby is smashed in a
revolving door, a suicide on a ledge discovers that she really isn't one
and dies by what is, in the last analysis, an accident. It's okay to
look, lady. But don't look a't me.
Hence, in later years, my blindness, that I might better see. I
don't want to traffic in paradox,
if
I can at all help it. But there it
is: seeing is a funny thing at best. Whatshisname unscrews his 20-20
