Peter Kaldheim - Idiot Wind: A Memoir

Contents

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

On 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 Id 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 couldnt 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 ones better judgement. If Greeks not your thing, call it what Bob Dylan does: idiot wind. Thats what I came to call it, and for nearly a dozen years it had been blowing my life ragged. Along the way, Id 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 Id 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 didnt call him Bobby Bats for nothing. Id once seen him splinter a guys 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 didnt clang off the rim and ricochet to half-court. But he could still swing a bat, and what hed do to a guy whod 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 Id been hustling grams and half-grams for a living ever since Id 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 wasnt 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 hed buzz you into the building and hed 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 hed got tired of the wood ones cracking.)

Once you got up to Bobby Bats apartment, hed check his watch. The rule was, you couldnt leave for at least a half-hour. Im not the fucking 7-Eleven, hed 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, Ill give him that. Youd 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.