Tonight the Harbor Belongs to Sarah Smarsh
by Ben Miller
Hyatt is a steep street & descending it you meet steep faces of those ascending, enduring the incline laced with storefronts: MVP PIZZA, JIMMY STEINY’S PUB & the NORTHFIELD BANK that is going out of business soon—workplace of teller Colleen who recently, smoking on the curb out front, described herself & her co-workers as “heartbroken about the deal.” Most of those passed are going to work or coming home from work, laden. Staten Island light now is late September butter. It softens steep looks of pain on the faces suffering the hill & who knows what else besides. Anne, my partner, is with me. We’re going to hear Sarah Smarsh read at The Strand bookstore on Broadway in Manhattan. In the ferry terminal as usual I see backpacks of tourists that have backpack features I wish my backpack possessed—a dedicated water bottle holster; a strap on the outside for an umbrella—though my backpack (from Paris, a world traveler) is wonderful. Anne carries her job search with her. A heavy load. Neither of us have jobs now. What will happen? She almost got hired to be a clerk at an Eileen Fischer store last week. Six hundred resumes received by the store for five part-time $18 an hour spots & she was one of five called in for an interview but in the end—after a second interview, she was not hired. Does any fact better convey how hard it can be for an older writer to find a job to support the art pursuit, any steady job? Anne so articulate, so graceful…it’s unbelievable to me she was not hired. Louisiana State University Press recently published her latest book: Which Way Was North. The terminal is the bluish hue of a gargantuan urinal. Bags from the 9/11 museum tourists clutch. It’s nearing again the anniversary of that horrible day when Anne was in Brooklyn & I in Manhattan & the territory between us aflame. We move forward with the mass of other ferry terminal passengers. It’s sort of like the slow motion start of a road race. Our boat this time will be the Samuel Newhouse. The worst boat. No cool outdoor balcony over the water. It vibrates the most & smells the most like diesel fuel. The cops complain to each other about it. Chains clink, the motor churns, the hull slides over bluish gray vivid Panavision water. All of our walks now, or most of them, include a Biblical crossing of water. Seated in front of an open window wind plays tag with us. Terns out there floating on the current. “They’ve probably had all their babies by now & are partying,” comments Anne. The Seastreak a faster Ferry speeds by kicking up foam. Moored in the harbor are oily looking tankers full of fuel. Bay Ridge, across the water = stripes of trees on hillsides still green. Our first fall here. It’s like being in a 1970s movie being on the ferry—chatter of the other riders mixes with the grind of the motor. Haven’t seen one sailboat yet. The clouds—like long white unlit cigars—are not moving, a suspended tableau of decadence out of an old school men’s club. Sarah Smarsh, the writer we’re going to see, has made it her life’s work to convey to readers the complexities of rural working class communities in the middle of the country—a mission connected to our mission of depicting intricacies of the Midwestern cities where most Midwesterners live, far from farms and open space. Urban Iowa. Urban South Dakota. Governor’s Island we’re passing & I’m imagining arriving safely, intact, at our destination as I do during all forays, as if I’d not arrive safe if I did not. Outside The Strand will still be arrayed the carts of SALE BOOKS. When I arrived at NYU in 1986 with no money—or very little—those sale book carts (resembling literate go carts lined up to race) were hours of entergainment or entertainment. I’d have four quarters in my pocket & before I spent it I’d look at every single shelf on every single cart: chipping yellow paper of formerly popular novels, picture books, philosophical treatises, history books. I fished for the one book that would give me the most pleasure, often the oldest one I found, no matter the subject, its eighty years of perseverance charging my own vulnerable life at a vital time, a time when I was collecting cans in Washington Square park to collect enough money to rent a typewriter for fifteen minute intervals in Loeb Student Center. On the other side of Governor’s Island to the north, in Brooklyn, stands the Industry City retail complex & directly across from the island is the slip where the Queen Mary docks. I’m enjoying draughts of the air cleaned by the ferry’s motion, the washing machine of the wind. We watched M.A.S.H. (the brilliant Altman movie) a few days ago & as I hear the chop of the tourist helicopters landing at the heliport near the Manhattan ferry terminal I think of the film’s opening scene of wounded soldiers strapped to sides of copters descending to land as the spooky theme song plays: Suicide is painless…. War in this movie no arena for regimented valor, but a morass of confusion & burnout, nihilism and isolation, actors talking over each other in many scenes. The meat of war depicted—its human slaughterhouse run by the generals concentrated on improving their golf games. The only movie that reminds me of M.A.S.H.’s surreal realism is the obvious one: Dr. Strangelove. But they are very different movies from very different times. The booming voice of the ferry PA: THANK YOU FOR RIDING…means we must rise & we do. We walk to the ramp leading to the shore of the literary world. We go up it. We walk under a digital sign advertising, no kidding, FIG FEST AT THE NATIONAL LIGHTHOUSE MUSEUM. A FIG KING WILL BE CROWNED. R train to 8th Street. Up Broadway toward that bend where there used to be an apple orchard in colonial days that belonged to a man powerful enough to change the course of the city’s main thoroughfare. Was his name Henry? I think so. Huskie being walked south & Huskie being walked north on the sidewalk exchange barks then sniff. One owner exclaims: “Maybe they’re cousins!” We reach the sale book carts in front of the store & stop. The cheapest books are $3 now. The 8 miles of books the store had in 1986 has extended into 18 miles of books as if the canon were training for a marathon. We’re early. We hesitate to enter & as we do so out of the store steps a familiar silver-headed man followed by a woman in her twenties with long black hair. The man’s leaning as he talks, shrugging boisterously. They don’t see us. They turn right, walk north toward Union Square. “I think that’s Jonathan Flesh and his daughter Eloise,” I tell Anne. She looks. She agrees. The Flesh’s lived below us at 435 Convent Avenue for years in uptown Manhattan. Eloise who stuck her head out the window at age ten & screamed up at me, her voice echoing in the courtyard: “TURN YOUR RADIO DOWN!” Jonathan, the decorative painter, who introduced me to his brother, the writer Henry Flesh. Henry—thick glasses, stubble, sweater ash flecked, wet lips—who told me that he come to New York as a young gay man in the last 1960s & fallen in with the Warhol crowd, sleeping for a time on the couch of Candy Darling, the Candy mentioned in the Lou Reed song “Walk on the Wild Side.” Henry died a few years later of cancer. I went to his memorial ceremony at Cooper Union. Jonathan was harder to take. He called me in the middle of the night to complain about the co-op board, about their apartment being too cold, about being a misunderstood white man. Eloise grown up now! I can still see them a block away, Jonathan easy to see because of his dipping head, always agitated about something. We enter the store shaking our heads. “What are the odds?” Up to the Rare Book Dept. event area passing on the way a collection of Lenny Kaye’s sci-fi fanzines 1941-1970. Who knew? But why bother? The cults around so many of those lower east side artists of the 70s are overblown—fetishistic—a zoo of palpitations—but it was a special time, it was different—good there be more preserved than less, I guess. Jazz piano playing on a PA in the book-lined event space, lights low, calming. Is it the right venue to convey to New Yorkers what they are misunderstanding about working class America? Pretty posh. James Earl Jones just died. The predator Weinstein has been rushed to the hospital for emergency heart surgery. It’s all part of the city news weather on this day. I get up & walk around, looking at rare books & see DORTHEA ROCKBURNE on a binding. The Black Mountain College painter who, a year ago, was wheeled into the hospital where I was working in Manhattan & asked by Patient Care Technician Evelyn: “Can I have some of your art for my kitchen area?” Evelyn popped all around the hospital doing things, lifting bodies, wiping asses, everything & we she told me about “the painter” on five & told me her name, and what she had asked, and I suggested: “She won’t give you a painting but you could ask her if she’d draw something for you on a napkin…” I open the book, abstract work, the colors vivid & fresh. Tap tap tap on the mic. & I take my seat next to Anna to hear the Author’s Guild rep. tell us, as if we did not all know, “It’s never been harder to be a working writer..” Then the guest of honor comes out of a door next to a shelf of books & is applauded. Sarah Smarsh grew up on a Kansas wheat farm that long had been in her family. She still lives in Kansas. Tonight, first she marvels at the rare book room ambiance, telling of how when she was a grad student at Columbia she cheered herself up by coming to The Strand to browse & then she gets into it. “My subject is socio-economic class as it intersects with place…I’ve been writing about the same thing for decades…often I’ve been the only person on a journalism staff with an experience of poverty…when you are talking about poverty you are talking about policy choices…we’ve been telling ourselves we’re a meritocracy for centuries & we are not…I provide a corrective from the ground…” I wonder if I am the only person in the room—other than Smarsh—who has attended a foreclosure farm auction with the family losing the farm stoically lined up in front of the house that will not be theirs in a few hours—lined up there like the floors were burning to the ground. The auctioneer caterwauling in the barn do I hear…, I.H. and Deere farm machinery to be sold parked in rows in the farmyard. Unforgettable. Smarsh urges the audience, each member, to ask themselves: “How can I be of service at this consequential moment?” Great question. But attempting to be of service doesn’t guarantee you can be of any service at all. I flash back to our time in South Dakota, the fall that I went door-to-door in an impoverished Sioux Falls neighborhood knocking on doors to promote the candidacy of a candidate fighting for health, education, better wages. It was a place the candidate himself did not want to go. A college student bobbed at my side as we approached the decaying box of a home with a sagging tiny porch. I knocked. Waited. I knocked again. Door opened a few inches to reveal a sliver of a soft unshaven face. I slid a political flyer through the crack. “I’m hoping you’ll vote next week. This candidate is fighting for better wages for South Dakotans.” He laughed. “You mean for kids that work in fast food? What the hell do they need more money for?” Door slammed shut. Who was I of service to as I served that consequential moment? Smarsh is now discussing how each member of a rural community has an enhanced impact on the others since there are fewer people & that intensifies every agreement and disagreement. “I value justice over unity,” she says, then adds: “But when we shut down communication with each other, only bad things can come of that…what matters is real connection & real communication with people & it rarely happens through a screen. You know, when I met Walker, the coordinator here, we got to talking & you know what? He grew up in Aberdeen, South Dakota…:” Audience rustling, audience heads turning. They thought they were at The Strand on Broadway & now Aberdeen is in the mix in the form of a mustache telling them to line up to get books signed? We bolt, ferry to catch. Down Broadway to 8th Street. The R to the Battery. Darting into the terminal we just make the 9:00 clock boat. Dark water like a sea of coffee. Anne gazes, mouth open as if drinking. I stare at the golden comma of the moon and crush of water against the hull. The name of this ferry is the Dorothy Day & suddenly it occurs to me one good use for A.L would be for it to study the cadences of Day & regenerate her voice so that it could give the safety announcements as the boat prepares to dock, a nice connection with her legacy of promoting access to safe, reliable, contraception. The ferry is now preparing to dock. Be sure and take all of your belongings, including condoms, with you. Dipping hem of Verrazzano Bridge lights. Swinging red glow of a wave-rocked buoy and its weird music of a wayward maritime cow—bell harnessed inside tinkling, tinkling, in the slosh and glint of a liquid pasture. Consequence is sequential. The next moment matters most.
Ben Miller is the author of the recently released nonfiction work Pandemonium Logs: Sioux Falls 2020-2022 (Rutgers University Press). His writing has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Experimental Writing, New England Review, The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, One Story, The Kenyan Review, Inscription, and other venues.