Meanwhile, some dozen or so blocks easterly and at this very instant, Gerard "Gerry" Goldsmith (known to his friends as "the Brain") emerged from Bob's Bowery Bar into the heavy and blustering falling snow. The air was bitter and cold, and the fat flakes slapped wetly into his face, but Gerry felt no discomfort, having downed some dozen glasses of Bob's basement-brewed bock over the past few hours in the company of his fellow bibulous gentlemen of shabby leisure.
Gerry looked up, at the oceans of snow tumbling down from the sky between the buildings and the tracks of the elevated train line, the snow falling as if God himself were emptying out the clouds of the heavens upon the earth and transforming the surrounding slum into a quaint small town in a glass globe.
Fortunately for Gerry, he only had to walk down the block and around the corner to get home to Mr. and Mrs. Morgenstern's tenement apartment building and to his tiny "studio" on the sixth floor, a former storage room, but quite suitable for a philosopher like himself. As well, Gerry was convinced that the six flights of stairs he had to climb up and down several times a day added five or ten years to his lifespan, as how else would he ever take exercise, never having been one for healthful walks to anywhere farther than the nearest bar. And this was New York City, thank God, and there was always a bar at least a block away.
Gerry plodded through the foot-high snow down the Bowery sidewalk, being especially careful not to fall, as who knew if he would be able to get get up again should he fall, when, suddenly, he saw the oddest sight up ahead in the pale glow of a street lamp.
A snowman.
A snowman built up against the pole of the corner light.
How extraordinary!
Gerry forged closer, through the swirling thick snow.
And there stood the snowman, amazingly realistic, he even had a snow-covered hat on his round little head. The body was short and fat, and the funny thing was that the round face of the snowman seemed somehow to be smiling.
Drunkenly Gerry extended an ungloved finger and touched the snowman's cheek.
His finger went through an inch of snow and then touched something that did not feel like snow. It felt like frozen meat, like one of those big cuts of beef rump that Gerry's late mother kept packed in dry ice in the basement box for a tasty Sunday roast.
"Uh-oh," said Gerry, aloud, and quickly he began slapping at the head and shoulders and arms and torso of the snowman, and, yes, the snowman was none other than that fellow known as Smiling Jack, the reformed drunkard and zealot of sobriety, now frozen quite stiff.
Gerry would say this for poor Jack, he still had a smile on his rubicund face, even in death. Across his chest was the strap of the leather satchel he kept his tracts in, and in fact his frozen right hand, in its worn and ragged woolen glove, still held a copy of his famous self-written little book. Gerry pulled it loose and brushed it off, looked at the cover made of the cheapest paper stock, with the childish drawing of a drunk-looking man leaning against a lamp post and holding a bottle, and in large letters
ARE YOU A DRUNKARD?
BY
“SMILING JACK”
How many times had Smiling Jack forced one of these pathetic booklets into Gerry's hands? Ten times? A dozen? And what had Gerry done with them? Used them for toilet paper, or to roll cigarettes with. He had tried to read a page now and then, but the prose was just too unbearably bad, no matter how noble the sentiments so clumsily expressed. Nonetheless you had to give Smiling Jack some credit, always earnestly and amiably trying to spread the good word despite his complete lack of literary talent. But still, you would think that even a moron like Smiling Jack would have known better than to stand out here in a blizzard trying to hand out alcoholism pamphlets until he froze to death. At least he could have taken a break now and then and just popped across Bleecker street to Ma's Diner for a cup of coffee or hot cocoa. Didn't he have the nickel for a cup of joe or cocoa?
Curiously, almost as if he were a citizen policeman, Gerry went through Smiling Jack's pockets. He found not only a pack of Lucky Strikes, minus only two cigarettes, and a working Zippo lighter, but also seventy cents in loose change, and a wallet with nine dollars in it. So Jack had had the means to go into Ma's Diner, but he had not the desire or the common sense to do so. How very odd. Was it suicide? Was it an act of penance gone accidentally too far? No one would ever know. And who would care?
Gerry felt that he should care, and he did, in his way, and he imagined (or perhaps he actually heard) Smiling Jack's genial voice saying, "Hey, help yourself, pal, what was mine is now yours," and so, after only a moment's hesitation, Gerry put the seventy cents in coin in the pocket of his old tweed trousers, then took the nine dollars out of the wallet, and put the wallet back in Jack's pocket. He then extricated one of Jack's Lucky Strikes and rolled it between his palms to take the frost off of it, then he put it in his lips and, after a few tries, successfully lighted it up with Jack's Zippo.
An automobile came trundling slowly down the Bowery through the thick falling snow, and it passed and continued on its way.
"Well, here's to you, Smiling Jack," said Gerry, silently. "I'll say this for you, you went out just the way you came in, with a smile on your face and your pamphlet in your hand, a pamphlet filled with the hard-earned wisdom of your soul, and offered to the tosspots of the Bowery one and all, for free, gratis, and for nothing. God love you, Jack, if there is a God, and surely if there is a God, he must love such a man as you. I thank you for the cigarettes, and for the Zippo, and for the nine dollars and seventy cents in U.S. currency. Sleep well, Smiling Jack, and may you keep smiling through all eternity."
Gerry shoved the little book back into Jack's frozen hand, and he pressed the fingers tight over it.
"Ta for now, Smiling Jack," said Gerry, aloud. "I'll see you soon enough, my friend."
Gerry turned back, back toward Bob's Bowery Bar. His friends would all still be there, the noble poets.
Hector Phillips Stone, the doomed romantic poet.
Seamas McSeamas, the Irish poet.
Howard Paul Studebaker, the western Poet.
Frank X Fagen, the nature poet.
Scaramanga, the leftist poet.
And last but far from least, Lucius Pierrepont St. Clair III, the Negro poet.
They would all still be there, as they were every night, at their poets' table. Gerry himself made no claims to being a poet, unless you could call the short philosophical observations he wrote poetry. For well over twenty years he had been writing ("working on") the first volume of these thoughts, currently called Pensées for a Rainy Day. But perhaps he should change the title to Snowflakes Upon a Windowpane? Or, maybe, Lucubrations of a Loon? No matter, he would decide later, when the book was finally ready to be released to an unsuspecting world.
Gerry pushed open the door to Bob's. Here they all were, the doomed and the damned and the lost and the forgotten, in this foggy thick warmth rich with the odors of tobacco smoke, of whiskey, gin, and beer, of unwashed bodies and unlaundered woolens, and there to the left was the round table where the poets sat, declaiming and laughing and shouting as the jukebox played a happy song.
Gerry pulled up a chair and rejoined his comrades in drunkenness and blather.
This time the round would be on Smiling Jack, and the next one too, and the shout after that one as well, until the last of that nine dollars and seventy cents was drunk up, saving of course a nice little tip for Janet the waitress.
Gerry had had the express intention of using the pay telephone to ring up the police to tell them of the frozen dead body at the corner of Bleecker and the Bowery, but, with one thing and another, with the laughter and the badinage, the shouting and the singing and the drinking, alas, he forgot.
{Please go here to read the unbowdlerized "adult comix" version in A Flophouse Is Not a Home, profusely illustrated by the illustrious rhoda penmarq…}
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