Walking north chasing the ghosts of my city and cities past

Strange addresses on yellow post-its lead me to forgotten backwater haunts

208 West 118th Street – Minton’s Playhouse – the pale neon sign still glowing – where Bird blew off the top of the night with Dizzy and Monk

198 West 134th – Clark Monroe’s Uptown House – Bird wailed here and around the corner too on 7th and Maestro Duke and Lady Day just under night shadows of City College where the revolution never was televised teasing out the strip tease of the strange changes to “Cherokee,” bastard child of Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm.”

Over on 7th the hulking, sooted shades of the Renaissance Ballroom, the Audubon and the Savoy – the “Home of Happy Feet” – still stand. Maybe you can still hear Chick Webb – his frame bent from in front – banging the hoodoo high-hat and tom-tom, the Lindy Hoppers defying gravity to the mad mad beat, tragic Fletcher Henderson slowly losing his Jehova Choir, Little Jazz piercing the octave barrier or the rim shots ringing out of FBI guns into Detroit Red’s heart…

I can hear Chu and Pres and Pops and Duke and the Count through fuzzy 3 AM mind bend band and the shuttered windows of Great Depressions past… good bye Pork Pie Hat…

The El Train running from nowhere to here and back again… a sound of joy… King Kong grabbing Fay Wray on his boys’ night out…

Great great grandfather (God said to) Abraham (kill me a son) Isaac Trager watched the grains of sand slip through the hourglass of his one hundred and four years on this jumpin’ green sphere in this hood back when it was all Jews and Italians and the IRT was new

Born in Vilnus, a rebbe, 1846 émigré to the All New Improved World, hoop skirt magnate, slave owner, Zionist I think maybe, traveled to Palestine and back and through the sweet, sunny south raising shekels and confederate bucks fo a synagogue that still stands near the other end of Manhatanna mystical isle


373 St. Nicholas Avenue is address written on this little post-it or St. Nick as it called around here. But there is no Santee Clause coming down the chimney of his old building but no bag of coal either – just a baker’s dozen of ten-year-old Latino kids playing this millenium’s version of Ringolivio torrid as a summer thunder storm
‘Cept it’s a dark wind blows off the North River through the alleys and the valleys and me to Convent Avenue – didn’t Bob buy a house here a few years back? Great limestone mansions, Edith Wharton shades of several cities long gone – a faded oasis of grandeur losing ground quick, a Harlem of the mind… a little shelter from the storm – the idiot wind blowing in the bones of a tomb… no gypsy gal out tonight…

Brother Louis a spy for Union Army in the War Between the States which rages on like echoes in the tunnel of love

Alexander Hamilton – Mr. Knickerbock hisself – lived just over yonder and died there too. Hoboken duel. America never could gets its act together

Ballyards of yore and lore emerging on the horizon of this night of starry dynamos. Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in all its bland ‘50s white-bricked institutional inglory spread over acres of once sacred ground. Ambulance lights and sirens on their rounds to Rue Morgue Avenue searching out a poet dying in the gutter – a black bugbird hovering over the night

Take away the frozen architecture and there’s Ty Cobb sliding into 3rd, face clenched into a demonic grimace, spikes high. A triple? A stolen base? No corresponding box score to say for sure. The Highlanders played here on this escarpment if you could see it now on upper Broadway. Highlanders changed their name to the Yankees and moved over there to the east below another bluff called Coogan and into that horse shoe-shaped green metal hunk of a temple

The Polo Grounds. Say it with a whisper: the Polo Grounds. It always feels good to say. Polo Grounds. Housing Projects now – rough ones too but so were the guys that did pirouettes on this field of Elysia. McGraw and Mathewson, Hubble and Ott, Casey and Koons, Dizzy and Ducky, Leo and Willie and Frisch, Hodges and Hunt and Throneberry. “The Shot Heard ‘Round The World!” “The Giants Win The Pennant! The Giants Win The Pennant! The Giants Win The Pennant!” “Let’s Go Mets!”

Across the Harlem River twin Yankee Stadiums loom like anabolic Death Stars readying for the Clone Wars

It’s a living mythology: “If you are not a myth whose reality are you? If you are not a reality whose myth are you,” said Sun Ra and me too

Great grandmother lived around here too. My dying father may be going out but he’s going out Mardi Gras-style, still telling stories about visiting here from Scarsdale circa early ‘30s waking to the sound of ancient Italian peddlers pushing carts of produce up the early morning streets hawking their bounty: “Bluuueberriess! Straaawberries! Rassberriiees!” in elongated mournful Sicilian soul song chants

Friends and lovers dead and/or gone… a frown on the moon… the smile in the fading autumn leaf…

Yeah, there’s a there here… you could say that…

The old crystal movie palace looms ahead. Seen better days but who has not? Reverend Ike’s digs now – that ageless ebony charlatan who used to pitch a brand of redemption after midnight TV. Big goof between bong hits – every hair on his ’74 conk in place. Reinvented now – toned down so they say… semi- semi legit – a third or is a fourth act? – but still the worth the price of admission every Sunday morning

But to scoff a little gold for the treasury, Ike leases the sooty hulk of a hall now and then for big time acts and old Iron Range Jews who seldom keep kosher anymore but maybe a little continuity… at least not on this late November Friday eve. But who’s counting? Every day is a holy day, right? Why limit it just a mere union sundown to union sundown once a week?


Bob must know that this is a tax-exempt hall of worship. All theaters are, in fact, churches. He doesn’t sing “Gotta Serve Somebody” anymore – not much anyway – but I were him for just a few minutes tonight (and maybe sometimes I am) that’s what I start out with. Last gig of a tour that took him across the North Country Blues… pull a little white rabbit out of a Stetson hat

I’m a little early so I walk around the theater three times like it was some Vaudeville Kabba reciting baruch attoy allajanus and the odd Zen Jewdist mantra or three.

The witching hour is nigh. The pilgrims gather. Old friends bumping into one another, strangers stopping strangers just to shake their hand and the odd exchange of coded lore.

We’re here… still here and so is Bob. We know what to expect of one another but it makes no difference. All ritual and romance entwined. Infinity ‘bout to be put on trial one mo’ time. Always a hung jury crying for more I’ll give you that and then some ready to take what they gather from kismet

Inside I thaw, find a space in the upper deck rear pews with just enough elbow room to dance in the dark

The lights dim, the band takes the shadowy stage, the familiar intro invoked, the all-seeing eye furls open with a flourish and a familiar blue note rhythm fills the Deco room

A Jokerman in a long black coat takes center stage under a shimmering spot poised for tonight’s take on the sermon mount. “You may be an ambassador to England or France…” bleating harmonica between verses, finger pointed at one and all, rich or poor, blind or lame, livin’ in another country, underneath a rose by any other name…


                                  … now everybody…