Jacket weather, p.1
Jacket Weather, page 1
Advance Praise for Jacket Weather
“Poetic and compulsively readable, Jacket Weather invents a new genre—call it lyrical realism. Mike DeCapite casts a cool but affectionate eye on New York in the 2010s, as it lives on despite having become a replica of itself. Like Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex, Jacket Weather traces the lives of those who’ve stayed on after the party. It’s a love story improbably set at the beginning of late middle age, and it’s also a story of cities, survival, adaptation, desire, and a celebration of the small pleasures we invent and discover to offset unavoidable loss.”
—CHRIS KRAUS, author of I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker
“Jacket Weather describes in exacting detail what daily life looks like when you see it through the lens of romantic love. Every scrap of talk and every sign on the street is irradiated by love—and its step-sibling, anxiety. The book is funny, tender, often exhilarating, and borne aloft by DeCapite’s ardent, plainspoken lyricism. You can’t stop reading it.”
—LUC SANTE, author of Low Life and Maybe the People Would Be the Times
“Mike DeCapite’s books all feel like movies to me. The characters, and the rooms and seasons they inhabit, are clear before my eyes. For example, if anyone should ask me to describe the goings-on at the YMCA, I feel expert on the subject. Not that I’ve ever been in a Y, but from reading DeCapite’s novels and short stories, I’ve spent a good amount of time there. I know the ins and outs of the Ys in Cleveland, San Francisco, and New York City. I know that in these YMCA locker rooms around the country, naked men are standing around talking at length (and quite hilariously) about the preparation of pork cutlets, meatballs, and sauces. The other thing I’ve learned from reading DeCapite’s work is that love is a messy business. As surely as there will be sweaty weight rooms there will be ruined marriages swapped out for doomed romance. The losses are crushing. However, here in Jacket Weather, Mike has finally found June. Sure she’s married but that’s beside the point. In this case, Mike writes about a more matured, lasting love. The love is both for June and for New York City. I hope he isn’t jinxing anything.”
—KELLY REICHARDT, director of Wendy and Lucy and First Cow
“Jacket Weather is a tender love story that blossoms like a rose in the concrete of a city always on the verge. DeCapite’s effortless prose stirs echoes of certain New York School poets, of ‘cold rosy dawn in New York City,’ night streets illuminated by great bars and the music streaming out of them, the endless possibilities of a place where, despite persistent evidence to the contrary, ‘love is the heart of everything.’”
—MAX BLAGG, author of Slow Dazzle and Loud Money
“I don’t think there exists another novel like Jacket Weather. Mike DeCapite has flawless pitch for dialogue and an imagist’s eye, and his prose is lucent and uncluttered, but what’s really a surprise (and should not be) is this: he’s written an almost unbearably tender love story for adults. The days and weeks and seasons and every quotidian detail vibrate with newness and suspense.”
—MIMI LIPSON, author of The Cloud of Unknowing
“Mike DeCapite has an eye for deep beauty in the mundane. He writes prose that makes poetry of just walking down the street. What he observes injects a charged current into life’s moments between. Reading Jacket Weather is like listening to the world reveal its secrets.”
—ROBERT GORDON, author of It Came from Memphis and Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion
“In this roman à clef—minus the clef—I can clearly hear the music of the NYC streets, feel the L train as it hums, and can smell something cookin’—a modern Moveable Feast.”
—CLINTON HEYLIN, author of The Double Life of Bob Dylan and From the Velvets to the Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk Rock
“This could almost be a young man’s account of a life and a love, almost a collection of youthful journal entries, but it’s clearly not. The gravitas of age permeates these artful, observant pages. Mike DeCapite has been around, has seen things, including all the ways we attempt to come together, and all the ways we will always remain apart. Love under the weight of age reads quite differently from young love, and is not often this well portrayed. Jacket Weather is chock full of living, of years spent noticing the streets at dusk as the lights turn from green to red and people make their crosswalk migrations and sometimes attempt small connections, to relate a thought or observation, tryin’ to tell a vision.
“This is a beautiful, evocative account of a late-in-life love sprung into being in early twenty-first-century Manhattan, characters tossed forth from the aftermath of the punk rock seventies. Protagonist Mike spins cryptic, poetic observations of his daily life, strikes random and true chords, pen as Telecaster. His plaintive adoration of June, the love of his life, is painted with enduring mystery and great respect. I loved this book.”
—LEE RANALDO, Sonic Youth, author of Road Movies and jrnls80s
Praise for Through the Windshield
“One of the better American novels published in the past several years.”
—HARVEY PEKAR, The Austin Chronicle
“Ravishing . . . One of the reasons Ed’s stories are so great is DeCapite’s gift for dialogue. Conversations here are full of partial words and creative punctuation that artfully capture the pattern of the characters’ speech. The reader can hear every intonation, see every look.”
—BARBARA SCHULTZ, San Francisco Chronicle
“Read it for its humor. Read it for its pain. Or read it for its language, a hard-boiled version of Beat expansiveness. One thing’s certain: with all the different and sometimes contradictory things that this book accomplishes, you’ll never read anything else like it.”
—FRANK GREEN, Cleveland Free Times
“DeCapite’s achievement is so extraordinary that a belated appreciation must be penned . . . [A] Whitmanesque hymn . . . Through the Windshield triumphs by being about watching, listening, capturing for posterity, eulogizing life and ‘leaving the headlights off, so as not to disturb that shadow.’”
—JOCKO WEYLAND, Rain Taxi
Praise for Creamsicle Blue
“The same night I finished Creamsicle Blue, I dreamt that some non-existent jacket copy said the book was like a ‘soul-friend’ . . . Whether he knows it or not, he writes for me, the reader, naming things I’ve felt but rarely articulated . . . I felt while reading Creamsicle Blue that I was experiencing the gradual recognitions and awarenesses that come from the folding-together of thinking, feeling, writing, and living. That is, sometimes life and writing can seem like two parallel realms—but writing about one’s life with a clean enough motivation (considering life as lived and felt) can change both the life and the writing and become a third realm . . . Following the uncharted, DeCapite forges a path found only by writing in the quietest moments, by paying attention to the silences in between words and events, and by walking around his city, struggling with the unsayable.”
—KAREN LILLIS, Karen the Small Press Librarian
Praise for Radiant Fog
“This is a book that will prompt you to head out and take a walk through your city and a book, one better, that will help you see and feel that city in a new way.”
—SPENCER DEW, decomP
Jacket Weather
ALSO BY MIKE DECAPITE
Through the Windshield
Sitting Pretty
Creamsicle Blue
Radiant Fog
Jacket Weather
a novel
Mike DeCapite
Soft Skull
New York
I saw the color that sent the geese south
TOM VERLAINE
I’ve got a girl named
Rama Lama Lama Lama Ding Dong
GEORGE “WYDELL” JONES JR.
Jacket Weather
Contents
Jacket Weather
Acknowledgments
Standing on the corner, ringing my bell. Here comes Nile, crossing 14th Street. Blazing hot outside, we move over by the bank.
She says “Hey Cleveland, guess who I just ran into? June.”
“No kidding.”
I never see Nile, but when I do, I ask about June. For years now. She never has any information.
Now she says “I was crossing Twenty-Third Street and she was on the other side, waiting for me. We should get dinner.”
•
I slide the gate open with a crash and climb out over South 2nd Street, Williamsburg. It turns out there are heads of Apollo above my windows, and the putty’s dirty around the frames. There’s a big white rooster in the pigeon coop across the way. Rust has seeped through the crackled paint of the fire escape.
I like the view from the middle of the air, the urban canopy. The mysterious thrill of a streetlight seen too close, too big, as in a dream. The way some convergence of shadows on a window ledge makes it a place, or the relationship between the leaves and a projecting sign seems to define an area. There’s a liquor-store sign around the corner that’s too big for its height from the sidewalk. I want to be up there, near the sign, or in the shadow it throws on the building. To inhabit it, somehow. I see these as places to live. Right? Even though it’s only from a distance that they’re places. I want to live on that ledge. Or I could see myself on one of those art deco lighting towers near the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. Or How long could I go unnoticed in a guard box on the Manhattan Bridge?
Climbing back in the window, I notice how much louder it is out there, even with nothing going on. It’s the roar of
•
I saw June right after I moved back from San Francisco. In Union Square subway. I was with my girlfriend and we got separated going up the stairs, and there was June. She stopped. I stopped. We were ten feet apart. The crowd’s going by. It’s twenty years since we saw each other. I figured she doesn’t recognize me because I used to have long hair. Or she heard so much about me from my ex-wife she doesn’t like me anymore. Later I found out she didn’t have her glasses. Anyway, she walked. Lucky my girlfriend missed the whole thing, because I was rattled.
•
Philly comes into the locker room, he opens with “So what’s gonna happen? Where we gonna go, when we die? Do we go to heaven? Do we go to sleep? So many questions, not enough answers. Harold, don’t lose hope. Patsy, Frank Sinatra’s dead. I hate to break it to ya. But he went to heaven, that’s the good news. He’s with Georgie Jessel.”
•
Upstairs, the treadmills face the street. The red vertical Salvation Army sign bounces above the panels of pebbled glass, and a sapling at the curb has gotten its leaves. I cool off walking around the indoor track. Someone’s bellowing “Volare.” Down below, twenty heavyset elderly women are ranged along one of the lanes of the swimming pool, squiggly black lines at the bottom and white snakes of light slithering on the surface. They’re doing their Saturday morning water exercises in their swim caps, bouncing their great big breasts on the water.
•
Philly comes out on the track. I point to my iPod and say “Ray Barretto.”
He says “I met Ray Barretto!” We move off to the side, he says “I’m at this club, everybody’s in the bathroom doing coke, I see Ray Barretto at a table. And he was the nicest cat! I said ‘Ray, baby—remember Acid?’ ’Cause he did this record called Acid. And he kinda laughed, like ‘Yeah, I remember acid.’”
Philly starts talking about Johnny Pacheco, the Fania All-Stars, Joe Cuba, Joe Bataan. He’s clicking his fingers, he’s singing.
He says “I can dance a little bit, so I used to go dancing at the Village Gate, a couple of buddies and me—they called us the Jewbans, because there were a few of us Jewish guys who were into Cuban music. I was never into the rock thing. When I was in high school I heard ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ and said ‘I wanna hold your hand’? Gimme a break! This is the squarest shit I ever heard! And from then on, all anybody cared about was the guitar, and everybody sounded the same. They ruined everything! But while everyone else was going to see rock bands, we were going dancing at Roseland and up in Harlem and down on Bleecker Street. One night I’m at a club and I see Machito in there. He was an old cat by then, he’d been around since the forties. He was it, man. He started the whole thing. So I go up to him—that was the thing about the Latin guys: you could talk to them! Not like the rock guys: you couldn’t get anywhere near them. So here comes Machito, and I stand in front of him, I give him a little of my bullshit, y’know—‘Machito! The one and only! The King of Afro-Cuban Music! Number one!’ Right? ‘Numero uno! El primero!’ And he stops. Because he pinned me, right? And he looks at me, he says—‘Vus machsta?’”
“[Laughter]”
“‘Machen a lebn,’ I told him. ‘Making a living.’”
•
Six months later in Whole Foods I saw June again. And again I was there with this girlfriend. There was no Whole Foods in Brooklyn so we used to go to Union Square. It was right before Thanksgiving, June was over by the greens. You know the momentary alarm you feel when it’s not you moving backward but the other train moving forward? Time didn’t stop, but I stopped and time kept moving past me. I thought I could walk out of here and follow her anywhere. I would marry her right now. Partly it was this miserable situation I was in. I was so on edge with this girlfriend I’d be sitting across from an old Polish woman on the subway thinking She looks nice. Kind. I could trust her. June didn’t see me at Whole Foods. She had a list, and I could tell she was out of her depth. She looked very much alone. And again I didn’t speak to her. Would have been nothing but trouble.
Then it’s almost three years I don’t see her before I run into Nile.
•
R
O
S
E in red neon, a pair of sneakers hanging from the moon. Sitting on the bench outside Atlas, the coffee shop, in the warm night. The traffic signal goes yellow to red to green on parked cars, on the phone box, in the gutter puddle.
A cab rolls up, window down. Cicada sound of its receipt dispenser. Nothing’s right anymore, nothing’s much good. Maybe it never was. Hank Williams told me this forty years ago: you’ll never get out of this world alive. Did I think it was just a funny song, or he was just singing about himself?
•
When I walked in on Thursday, Lou was sitting at his locker, still red from the steam. He had three cans of coffee for me, in exchange for the magazines I’d been taking him from work. Every week I took him five copies of People and Entertainment Weekly and he gave them to women on his rounds. I didn’t want anything for them but he was Italian, so he enjoyed transactions. He was at the age when a person starts putting things aside for people and carrying them around in bags: pieces of interest clipped from newspapers and coupons and canned tomatoes. Come to think of it, so was I, with these magazines. This is how it starts.
I thanked him for the coffee and went to my locker.
“Where’d you eat, this weekend?” he said from his row. “Where’d you go?”
“Nowhere: I cooked.”
“What’d you make, pasta fazool?”
“No, I made linguine with clams.”
“The red?”
“No, the white.”
“What’d you do?” he said.
I made my way to the end of the row.
I said “I softened a shallot in oil. I put red pepper flakes.”
“Parsley?” he said.
“Yeah, parsley, oregano, then half a cup of white wine, and the juice from the clams.”
“You used the canned? What’d you buy, Snow’s?”
“Cento.”
“Aw, you bought the clam sauce?”
“No, the chopped clams.”
“I didn’t know they made that. I’ll have to look for that.”
“Yeah. So I put those in about a minute before I drained the pasta, and squeezed some lemon juice.”
Lou frowned, approving. He was applying his facial cream. We were naked, this whole time.
I went back to my locker and got into my gear. I said “What about you? Where’d you go?”
“I cooked.”
“Yeah? What’d you make?”
“Linguine with clams.”
“The white?”
“No, I made the red this time. With the whole baby clams from the can.”
“What kind?”
“Doxey’s,” he said. “What kind of linguine did you buy?”
“Barilla,” I said. “You?”
“De Cecco. That’s good pasta.”
“De Cecco’s great, but it’s two fifty a box.”
“They got it Western Beef, dollar a box.”
•
Spring thunder, one a.m. All these bare-bulb windows hanging this way and that in the rain. A yellow, a pink, two blues. In the morning, the lights are still on in two rooms across the street. Man, am I glad I no longer live in rooms where the light stays on all night.
•
That Friday I met them for dinner, Nile and June. Funny place in Chelsea Market, half restaurant, half clothing store. June shows up in a trench coat—BAM: big curls, big smile, red lipstick, green eyes—grabs me by the shoulders and kisses me on the mouth and sits down starts talking about she’s getting a divorce, selling the apartment, can’t wait to get her life back, can’t wait to be free and a-lone.
•
I never saw her dressed so uptown. I knew her in the eighties, when she was working for Jane Friedman, who used to manage Patti Smith and Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn but also did press for bands, including my friend Tony’s band, Pere Ubu. In those days June’s life was all about rock and roll. From record release to club to cab to club to after-party: black biker jacket, black leggings and boots, and a mass of blueblack curls. For me, she was the living night—all the glamour and potential of a New York night when you’re 25. She took people as they came, without judgment. She looked right in your eyes and took you more seriously than you admitted to taking yourself. She surprised you with her interest. And here she was with a raincoat over the back of the chair talking about getting a divorce and saying she’s done with relationships. Her ice-calm eyes are the same, the same her glory of curls.
