Nights of 1964—1966: The Old Reliable

for Lewis Ellingham

The laughing soldiers fought to their defeat . . .
James Fenton, “In a Notebook”

White decorators interested in Art,

Black file clerks with theatrical ambitions,

kids making pharmaceutical revisions

in journals Comp. instructors urged they start,

the part-Cherokee teenage genius (maybe),

the secretary who hung out with fairies,

the copywriter wanting to know, where is

my husband? the soprano with the baby,

all drank draft beer or lethal sweet Manhattans

or improvised concoctions with tequila

in summer when, from Third Street, we could feel a

night breeze waft in whose fragrances were Latin.

The place was run by Polish refugees:

squat Margie, gaunt Speedy (whose sobriquet

transliterated what?). He’d brought his play

from Łódź. After a while, we guessed Margie’s

illiteracy was why he cashed checks

and she perched near the threshold to ban pros,

the underage, the fugitive, and those

arrayed impertinently to their sex.

The bar was talk and cruising; in the back

room, we danced: Martha and the Vandellas,

Smokey and the Miracles, while sellers

and buyers changed crisp tens for smoke and smack.

Some came in after work, some after supper,

plumage replenished to meet who knew who.

Behind the bar, Margie dished up beef stew.

On weeknights, you could always find an upper

to speed you to your desk, and drink till four.

Loosened by booze, we drifted, on the ripples

of Motown, home in new couples, or triples,

were back at dusk, with IDs, at the door.

Bill was my roommate, Russell drank with me,

although they were a dozen years my seniors.

I walked off with the eighteen-year-old genius

—an Older Woman, barely twenty-three.

Link was new as Rimbaud, and better looking,

North Beach bar paideon of doomed Jack Spicer,

like Russell, our two-meter artificer,

a Corvo whose ecclesia was cooking.

Bill and Russell were painters. Bill had been

a monk in Kyoto. Stoned, we sketched together,

till he discovered poppers and black leather

and Zen consented to new discipline.

We shared my Sixth Street flat with a morose

cat, an arch cat, and pot plants we pruned daily.

His boyfriend had left him for an Israeli

dancer; my husband was on Mykonos.

Russell loved Harold, who was Black and bad,

and lavished on him dinners “meant for men”

like Escoffier and Brillat-Savarin.

Staunch blond Dora made rice. When she had

tucked in the twins, six flights of tenement

stairs they’d descend, elevenish, and stroll

down Third Street, desultory night patrol

gone mauve and green under the virulent

streetlights, to the bar, where Bill and I

(if we’d not come to dinner), Link, and Lew,

and Betty had already had a few.

One sweat-soaked night in pitiless July,

wedged on booth benches of cracked Naugahyde,

we planned a literary magazine

where North Beach met the Lower East Side Scene.

We could have titled it When Worlds Collide.

Dora was gone, “In case the children wake up.”

Link lightly had decamped with someone else

(the German engineer? Or was he Bill’s?).

Russell’s stooped vale brushed my absent makeup.

Armed children spared us home, our good-night hugs

laissez-passer. We railed against the war.

Soon, some of us bused south with SNCC and CORE.

Soon, some of us got busted dealing drugs.

The file clerks took exams and forged ahead.

The decorators’ kitchens blazed persimmon.

The secretary started kissing women,

and so did I, and my three friends are dead.

Source: Marilyn Hacker, "Night of 1964-1966: The Old Reliable" from Selected Poems. Copyright © 2002 by Marilyn Hacker. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2002)

Nights of 1964-1966: The Old Reliable