The crows are circling high above the tree line, and the Quaker parrots that I always hear but rarely see are ruffle-feathered, a pair outside their condo nest, the morning after Barney died. Barney Rosset. Aged 89. Today (Feb. 22) is not just another day.
We, his family and friends, didn’t expect this. Not now. Just this past weekend we were all there in Manhattan’s civic chapel waiting area on Worth Street. Barney was too much a storyteller of the here and now to say our wait was like Godot. Still, to mention it would elicit that naughty, subversive, snake-like smile. (In an interview, Barney called himself “an amoeba with a brain.”) He wasn’t one to hold a grudge against someone for making such a lame reference.
Four days before Barney died his lovely daughter Chantal was married to her love, Charles. Barney was too frail to get up and walk around to see what M and I could see in the wedded-to-be’s waiting area. But we told him all about it; made up stories for him.
Barney Rosset was the only American publisher his friend Samuel Beckett would ever have. Barney near-bankrupted himself in order to fight all the way to the Supreme Court to overturn obscenity laws in service of freedom of expression. We’re talking “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” the works of Henry Miller. He published Beckett, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Jean-Paul Sartre, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence and William Burroughs in the Evergreen Review (1957-1973), so many of its framed covers lining his Manhattan apartment. And he never stopped. A short story of mine, “Try Mongolia On for Size” he chose to be slated to run in April in Evergreen Review, the online edition.
I knew many of Barney’s legendary stories: his car trip to Mexico and back with teenage sweetheart and, later, his first wife, the artist Joan Mitchell; the cross-Atlantic trip aboard the QE II after reading “Waiting for Godot” to meet Beckett in a Paris café, where they drank and talked and ate and drank for hours. And, just four days ago, he told a story that as a boy he had many memories of running the corridors in the Hotel Nacional in Havana, Cuba, back at a time when Fidel Castro was in short pants. (Later, at the wedding reception after-party, Chantal talked of how M’s father Sol in April 2000 on the occasion of our daughter K’s Bat Mitzvah recalled a little boy named Barney running the streets of Chicago in short pants, what would never do in his day, such a hipster dresser he always was.)
Here is some of what we told Barney last Friday:
We exit the N Train, Centre Street, and walk south, carrying a paper cone of flowers, orange-yellow hybrid roses, looking for the marriage hall. When we come to a crossroads that says, “The Avenue of the Strongest,” we know we’ve come to the right place.
The magazine and breath mint seller lets us in on a secret: 141 Worth, he says, that’s your destination. He is grinning too broadly at us in our go-to-worship clothes and looking at the roses.
“He thought we were the ones getting married,” M said.
No time for smart-alecking, for the likes of “Once is enough!,” or “Boy, did he get that wrong!” In fact, a wisecrack didn’t cross my mind.
“You’re right, honey,” I said, giving M’s arm a squeeze. “He did, didn’t he?”
M found a vantage point near the front of the marriage hall where we could see the brides and grooms to be, most arriving with the smallest of entourages.
What place beats NYC for people-watching and what place in NYC beats the civic marriage hall for people-watching? Grooms with Latin King neck tattoos, a bride the size of a Clydesdale, her groom, a ringer for Wally Shawn, lesbians and gays in all variety of sizes and clothing, a long-legged groom dressed like Tony Manero of “Saturday Night Fever,” a bride in gold lame, a camel (We’re kidding about the camel ...)
The gift shop is a must-see. Most of the outright gift items – mugs and T-shirts and such – are directed to same-sexers, but granddaughter Frances and I liked the emergency bow tie (although we didn’t see any buyers wearing one), and who could resist the cake toppers: one of a groom forcibly dragging a bride to the altar, the other of a bride doing the same to the guy. Ha!
And, Barney, the ceremony itself was the shortest but sweetest I’d ever had the pleasure of witnessing. It was wonderful to be there for Chantal and Charles, and I will never forget the magical smile on your face.
Next: Running for Your Life: A Pause That Refreshes
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