Idiot Wind

Peter Kaldheim

Description

In 1987 a massive snowstorm hits New York as Peter Kaldheim flees the city, owing drug debts to a dealer who is no stranger to casual violence. Leaving behind his chaotic past, Kaldheim hits the road, living hand-to-mouth in flop-houses, pan-handling with his fellow itinerants. As he makes his way across America in search of a new life, the harsh reality of living hand-to-mouth forces him to face up to his past, from his time in Rikers prison, to relationships lost and lamented. Kaldheim hikes and buses through an America rarely seen, and his encounters with a disparate collection of characters instils in him a new empathy and wisdom, as he journeys on a road less travelled.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 01 août 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786897374
• Langue: English

Extrait

Peter Kaldheim a Brooklyn native, studied English and Classics at Dartmouth. After college, he worked briefly as a copy editor and freelance writer in Manhattan before embarking on a three-decade career as a line cook and chef. Now retired, he lives on Long Island and is currently at work on a novel set in southwestern Montana. Idiot Wind , his first full-length book, will be published in French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch in 2020.

First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2019 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books
Copyright Peter Kaldheim, 2019
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
Excerpt from Little Gidding from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot. Copyright 1942 by T.S. Eliot, renewed 1970 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and Faber Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Copyright Jack Kerouac, 1955, 1957. Reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency.
Excerpt from Night Freight by Clyde Rice. Copyright Clyde Rice, 1987. Reprinted by permission of Friends of Clyde Rice ( www.clyderice.org ).
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Some names, dates, locations and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 736 7 eISBN 978 1 78689 737 4
For Gerald Howard and Susanne Williams
Remember only that in life are many useless things, and but few which tend toward a solid end.
- Theophrastus, The Characters
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Afterword
Acknowledgements
C HAPTER 1
O n the night I escaped from the land of giants, I set off into a blizzard I feared would soon make the roads completely impassable. Gale-force winds were blowing in from the northeast, churning the snow into a white froth that reduced visibility to near zero, but, despite the conditions, there was one thing I had no trouble seeing with perfect clarity: running for my life was the only choice I had.
It was the Monday after Super Bowl XXI - 26 January 1987 - and the sports pages of the New York tabloids were full of exultant headlines celebrating the hometown Giants victory over the Denver Broncos, most of which, I confess, I can no longer recall. Only the back-page headline of the late-edition Post has remained fixed in my mind - as I knew it would the moment I spotted it. At the time, I was riding the IRT subway uptown from Chambers Street, on my way to the Port Authority bus terminal in midtown, praying I d still be in time to catch a bus - any bus - out of town before the snowstorm forced Greyhound to suspend service. When the train reached Fourteenth Street, one of the other passengers got off, leaving behind a copy of the Post on the seat beside me. I promptly scavenged it, and as the train continued rattling north to Times Square I flipped through the paper until I eventually came to the back page. The three-word headline I encountered hit me with such an immediate shock of recognition I couldn t help flinching.
LAND OF GIANTS!
I suspect most New Yorkers took these three words as nothing more than justifiable hyperbole, but in my agitated state of mind that night they struck me as something else entirely. To me, they were a timely - and painful - reminder of just how small my life had become.
How small I had become.
Perhaps I was being paranoid, but to a man in my situation it was hard not to take it as a cosmic rebuke.
And what, exactly, was my situation? Well, for starters, I was thirty-seven years old, unemployed and flat-out broke. On top of that, I was also homeless, except for the pay locker in Penn Station where I stored my clothes and toiletries. In short, my life had become nothing to brag about, only something to survive, and for that I had no one to blame but myself and my accomplices: alcohol, cocaine and a deep-seated streak of what my old Greek philosophy professor would call akrasia - a weakness of will that allows one to act against one s better judgement. If Greek s not your thing, call it what Bob Dylan does: idiot wind. That s what I came to call it, and for nearly a dozen years it had been blowing my life ragged. Along the way, I d watched it carry off just about everything that should have mattered to me. My marriage. My career. The respect of my parents and friends. Even a place to lay my head at night. All gone. Gone with the idiot wind.
And now, thanks to the stunt I d pulled on Bobby Bats over Super Bowl weekend, I was also about to lose the city I loved.
Bobby Battaglia was not a dealer you could screw over with impunity. They didn t call him Bobby Bats for nothing. I d once seen him splinter a guy s shinbone in three places, just for talking trash in a pick-up basketball game at the city gym on Carmine Street. Back then, he was just a teenage sociopath with a Louisville slugger, who ran with a pack of like-minded Italian kids from the West Village. Now Bobby Bats was a twenty-nine-year-old sociopath who had pumped so much iron over the years he could no longer shoot a jump shot that didn t clang off the rim and ricochet to half-court. But he could still swing a bat, and what he d do to a guy who d just stiffed him for a thousand dollars worth of coke was something I was determined not to find out.
Common sense should have warned me against doing business on credit with someone like Bobby Bats, but somehow common sense never seemed to factor into the equation when I had the idiot wind at my back and a sure-fire scheme to make a score. I figured Super Bowl weekend with a New York team in the mix would be a golden opportunity. The bars in Tribeca - where I d been hustling grams and half-grams for a living ever since I d proved myself too unreliable for more legitimate employment - would no doubt be packed all weekend with Giants fans looking to score something to help snort the home team to victory. All I had to do was show up with the product and the cash would come rolling in. At least, that was the theory. And as theories go, it wasn t all that far-fetched. It was the eighties, after all. Bright lights, big city. Even the starving artists in the neighbourhood would turn out their pockets for a half-gram when they saw Pete the Hat walk into the bar.
And so, with some - but not enough - trepidation, I went up to the West Village on the Friday before the big game and, following Bobby Bats established protocols, I placed a call to his apartment from a pay phone on the corner of Carmine and Bedford Streets, just down the block from his apartment. No one got buzzed into Bobby Bats building by simply ringing his doorbell. You had to call from the street first, where he could check you out from his second-floor bedroom window. If he told you it was okay to come up, you rang the bell once, and once only. Then he d buzz you into the building and he d be waiting with his bat in hand on the second-floor landing to make sure it was only you coming through the door. (Lately, he favoured aluminum bats. Said he d got tired of the wood ones cracking.)
Once you got up to Bobby Bats apartment, he d check his watch. The rule was, you couldn t leave for at least a half-hour. I m not the fucking 7-Eleven , he d say. You come up, you stay long enough to make it look like a social call, or else forget about it. Keeps the neighbours off my ass that way. He did his best to keep his business low-profile, I ll give him that. You d never catch him slinging Sno-Seal packets in a bar-room toilet like I did. Bobby Bats only dealt weight , in quarter-ounce increments, and only to a select clientele. That way he kept the traffic at his apartment to a minimum.
As I ve said, I had known Bobby Bats since he was a teenager, but, even so, he would never have taken me on as a buyer just because we d played hoops in the same gym. You had to be vouched for by someone who was already one of his regulars, and it wasn t until a friend of mine who owned a bar on Hudson Street gave Bobby the go-ahead one night after hours that we started doing deals together. At first, it was strictly cash-and-carry. Then, as he got more comfortable dealing with me, I d occasionally convince him to front me a quarter-ounce and he d give me two or three days to come up with what I owed him. Which should never have been a problem if I d handled my business properly. Bobby sold some of the purest Peruvian flake in the city - coke potent enough to take a good stepping-on with baby laxative or powdered vitamin B and still leave you with blow that gave your customers the jolt they were looking for. I could buy a quarter-ounce for five hundred dollars, step on it till seven grams turned into fourteen and, at a hundred bucks per gram, double my investment, no problem, with a few grams left over to feed my own nose.
Sometimes things worked out that way and I came out ahead. Other times I fucked up the package , as they say in the trade, getting high on my own supply, and as the deadline for repaying Bobby Bats came closing in I had to scramble around borrowing money or taking pre-orders from any of my customers gullible enough to entrust me with their cash in advance of delivery. I did whatever it took. If I had to string some people along for a while, so be it, as long as Bobby Bats got his money on time. And