NOBODIES TOGETHER

by

Peter Nolan Smith

Last autumn my health was challenged by my sickness. I had no energy and rarely left the apartment. My New York friends lied about my condition. When I asked if I looked yellow, they replied, “A little, but you’re not Post-It yellow.”

They were lying and I believe them, until I looked in the mirror.

I had lost over fifty pounds.

An English friend commented, “That’s like losing a Labrador dog.”

I was a little gaunt, but strangely at my ideal BMI weight.

I had been at the edge of obesity a year ago.”

In the autumn my friend Ro came over to Clinton Hill once a week to sketch the transition. These sessions broke up the hours of isolation. We had been lover since 1976, although we were now just friends. She said I looked handsome. When we met at David’s Potbelly on Christopher Street, she had whispered, “You’re an angel under candlelight.”

I didn’t have the strength to be a fallen angel and read excerpts and poetry from my journals.

“Why you never get anything published?”

“I never thought I was good enough.”

“You’re like Emily Dickenson. Trapped on a New England farm. Far from her Boston wife.”

I hadn’t thought of myself as the hermit poetress, but all poets hare trapped in solitary by their words and the fears of hearing them spoke by others. She kept drawing lines and I continued to read from my 70s journals, wishing I recorded what I was saying so I could force my young downstairs to listen to the times before their birth. So long ago that they can’t even comprehend our freedom.

After a simple dinner Ro said she had to leave. The bus stop was only a block away. She protested when I offered to walk her there, but the last years hadn’t been kind to Myrtle Avenue. Evening had become night. It was raining hard outside and couldn’t see the street. Mad men might be lurching in the shadows. They owned the city from Coney Island to Pelham Bay in the Bronx.

“I was brought up to be a gentleman, plus I haven’t been out of this apartment in days.”

I handed her an umbrella.

For some reason I had plenty of them.

I just put on rain gear.

Having climbed Africa’s highest mountain for the Kili Initiative twice before Covid hit, I had collected good rainwear and geared up for the downpour on Myrtle Avenue. Opening the door Ro asked with concern, “Are you sure?”

I can make it.” I was tired of people questioning my strength having had the nickname ‘the Brick’ for decades. Thankfully the gusts of wind were not too strong. No one was was on the sidewalk until we reach ed the bodega before the bus stop.. A young crazy man waas haranguing someone inside the store.

Ro stopped in her tracks.

“Don’t worry, I got this.”

She didn’t seem so sure, but a wind lifted the awning and water cascaded on the young unfortunate.

Ro laughed.

I didn’t think it was funny and neither did the young man, who shook off the wet and confronted us.

“What you think? You somebody. You nothing.”

He stepped forward to an arm’s length from us. I had recently been attacked in the subway by a crazed man. His punches hadn’t hurt. Having recently lost my mind due to ammonia seeping from my guts to my brain, I understood madness. Not 100%, but enough to understand when you are fucked you are fucked all the way. His fist tensed into rocks. I pushed Ro behind me and said, “I am nobody. Who are you?.”

His head cocked to the side and he smiled at me.

“Are you Nobody too?”

I nodded my head.

We both knew this poem.

Emily Fucking Dickenson.

“Then there?s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise you know!”

We recited together.

How dreary to be Somebody!
How public like a Frog
To tell one?s name the livelong June
To an admiring Bog!

We bowed and he walked away into the raging gloom.

We had seen each other through Emily Dickenson’s most famous poem.

“What did you say?” asked Ro.

Her bus was pulling up to the stop.

“We shared a few kind words.”

Thee words between us.

He and me.

No one else.

She hopped the bus and waved from her seat.

I waved back and walked back to the apartment, gratified that even in madness we are not alone, if we share the madness of nobodies together.