After about twenty minutes, I could no longer keep balance, so with the use of the cane I tried balancing myself. But a cane is only as sober as its master. I flopped down on some people sitting on the couch. One lady got indignant and threw her booze on me. As I hobbled away a young lady with a beautiful face mumbled to me, “Good for you, serves the bitch right.” I nodded in agreement, but I didn’t want to talk to anybody.

“What’s your name anyway?” she asked.

“Je ne parle pas anglais.”

“Je parle français.”

“Je ne parle anything.”

“Fuck you, too,” the beautiful face said. Now she could link up with the first bitch, and they could both discuss what a bastard I was. I drank more alcohol. The figurative seems to become the literal when drunk. My sails swelled, my keel rose and dipped, the winds blew, and the waves pounded over my decks. A drunken vertigo spun me, the booze was a typhoon, a whirlpool, and ultimately a tidal wave. Drinking more and more and more, I vomited in an ice bucket behind the bar and drank more. I could batten my hatches no longer and tried to go to the bathroom. I stumbled through the party to a smaller room in the back, which seemed to have a haystack of coats. Upon them I collapsed, forgot about the toilet and dug a foxhole in the cloth and furs and fell deep asleep.

“Where’s my coat? Where’s my wrap? Where’s my jacket?” Questions bombarded my little sleep, but the drunkenness provided extra cover. Slowly people plucked at the haystack of clothes. Gradually I got cold and began to shiver.

“Where the hell is my boa?” I heard some whiny Queens accent screaming. “Where’s my boa … where’s my coat … where’s my …”

“Fuck your where!” I mumbled.

“Who is that!” she hollered. “Irving, there’s a human being under that stole.”

Someone removed the thing above me and my face was exposed. Through squinty eyes I saw a blurry Helmsley. “Helmsley? Is that really you?”

“You know this guy?” Helmsley asked Owensfield.

“Helmsley?” Owensfield asked. “You mean Helmsley Micinski? I heard he committed suicide.”

“You know Helmsley?”

“I knew of him. We published some translations of his. He was a good translator.”

“Why didn’t you publish any of his poetry?”

“Get off the lady’s wrap,” the guy who looked like Helmsley said. Helmsley was dead.

“Please get off the lady’s wrap,” Owensfield corrected the fellow.

“Why didn’t you publish any of his poetry?” I asked Owensfield.

“What poetry?”

“Get the hell off the coat,” the Helmsley look-alike said. This time he grabbed me by my shoulder and wheeled me around onto my feet.

“Helmsley was constantly sending out poetry. He had a file full of form rejections from the Harrington.”

“I never saw one poem from Helmsley Micinski.”

“He wrote more than anyone I knew.”

“Well, he never sent me a thing. I heard he wrote some decent poems back in the sixties, when he was just a kid in his teens. Word was that he was finished. Now please, the party’s winding down, try sobering up a bit.”

I slowly made my way over to the bathroom and peed my guts out while wondering whether Helmsley had lied to me. Maybe lie is a harsh word since he was his own victim. Writing was everything to him and maybe he couldn’t write. He was always preparing, making notes, making tedious outlines, doing subtle character studies, forever sharpening the knife that, if he never truly used, he would one day have to turn on himself. To come to terms with the fact that he was burnt out at thirty would be devastating. As I drunkenly thought this, the squawking lady’s words were still echoing in my ears, Where’s this, where’s that? I sat on the toilet seat and murmured, “Where?” The word seemed to be a philosophy unto itself, and all the implications right down to the homonyms seemed to embrace Helmsley:

When your ware

wear

where

from there?

I then pulled my pants up and did the buckle and belt and rejoined the party. Lying on the bar was a pen and napkin. I scribbled down the little poem and stuck it in my pocket. Retreating back to the couch, I reclined in a pain-minimizing posture and napped a bit until I started feeling the earth rumbling. I awoke to a bunch of people hauling the couch I was on. They were clearing the room to dance. I rolled off the moving couch and landed on the floor: pain. Owensfield came over and after he helped me to my feet, I asked him, “When is my poem being published?”

“In this issue.”

“When is that making its debut.”

“What do you think this party is all about?”

“It’s out?”

“Eureka!” From thin air he seemed to produce a copy. I grabbed it and thumbed to the table of contents, no name. I skimmed the magazine, but I couldn’t find my name anywhere. Snatching it back, he quickly turned to the poem and handed it to me. I recited it proudly and drunkenly. Then I noticed the byline and started worrying, “Thi … who? Who is that?”

“That’s you, remember.”

“Like hell it is.” It was a bizarre name—Thi Doc Sun. It was as approximate to my name as Cassius Clay was to Muhammad Ali. He took the magazine, pronounced the name aloud and asked, “Isn’t that you?”

“No, but maybe I should change my name to that.” Thi? I drunkenly recalled the name from somewhere, and then I remembered; it was the Cambodian night porter.

“God, I’m sorry. I promise you, I’ll print an errata in the next issue.”

“It doesn’t even matter,” I laughed. “The only reason I wanted to do it in the first place was to impress Helmsley.” But it did matter. I thought for a minute about Janus and Glenn, I proudly told them both about my getting published. Now, if they bothered to check, they’d find out I was a fraud. Poetic justice.

Owensfield brought me over to the bar and secured a very expensive bottle of booze, which he uncorked and poured into shot glasses, “This is my favorite.”

He poured more drinks and we talked awhile. Finally he mentioned that he had heard several people compliment my poem. He summed it up, saying, “For thirty-four words it offers a raw glimpse into gutter-level East Village.”

“Glad you liked it. You know, I’ve just completed another poem. It’s only a couple of words really.” I took out the napkin and gave it to him. He mumbled it aloud.

“When your ware wear, where from there.” He thought about it a moment and said, “There’s not a word here about East Village.”

“I have a broad sweep.”

“When we want a broad sweep we get a broom.” He handed me the napkin back. He was bored with me and he walked away, mingling with others. I chuckled drunkenly, considering that I had been fired from the theater and there was no way Owensfield would ever get his film presented. I remained loyal to the bar. The preppie bartender apparently had abandoned it and people were helping themselves. I was so drunk that I was somebody else, but that person was still conscious, so there was still something left to liquidate. A blur of bottles and glasses, somebody was reading poetry, but all I could recall was a couple lines of white dust.

I’ve never been able to recollect going to sleep, but I’ll never forget waking up the next morning. I had had my unrestrained go at the drugs and alcohol, and now they had their go at me. I don’t know the clinical terms, but the result was some kind of partial amnesia which lasted for the next couple of weeks. My memory of those weeks to come remains choppy. I vividly remember waking that pivotal morning because of several foreboding images and sensations which I made into dreams. The first “dream” was being back in a hospital, perhaps Roosevelt Hospital, and sitting very still next to someone, perhaps that poor Yuppie, because he was coughing and hacking uncontrollably. I just heard the constant groaning sounds, but I never saw a doctor or a nurse. Perhaps we were all just put in some kind of quarantine ward. The next dream was the earthquake, a long snake-like torso that kept sinking downward. Then I dreamt that I was in Ternevsky’s hot tub, and then I got very cold and itchy.