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The Gleaners

Kenneth DiMaggio

    The Gleaners is a famous French 19^th century painting by Jean Francois Millet. The painting depicts three women picking up leftover seeds in a field. Gleaners are people who pick up scraps. I recently discovered that I was a gleaner. I discovered it one Sunday morning when I scoured for leftover roaches or if I was lucky, complete joints, outside of Lower East Side clubs and bars.
    I did not make this discovery alone. I made it with a fellow poet who calls himself “Orion.” He is a fellow poet who reads his rants at the various open mics that quickly open and close throughout the East Village, Lower East Side, and occasional, abandoned, industrial edges of Brooklyn.
    Orion is homeless. He is schizophrenic. He refuses to take his medication. He does not believe in his illness. He believes that smoking marijuana is good for him.
    I am partially homeless. I sleep on a cigarette-scarred futon in a loft above the Pyramid Club on Avenue A. The Pyramid Club is a Drag Queen club. The loft above the club is a failed rehab and temporary shelter for unknown poets and performers who have fled the suburb-abyss for a more engaging life through poetry, performance, and gleaning.
    I don’t think I’m crazy. Yet I have an illness that I refuse to believe in. That illness is called a job, a mortgage, and a wife who looks pretty like a mannequin, but is hollow like one. I believe that drugs like marijuana, books like Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, and wandering New York City all day and writing about it at night, is good for that illness.
    Sometimes though you need money for things like books and marijuana. Luckily, there are enough lofts, squats, trashcans, cafes, library dumpsters, and other places where I can always steal books. Luckily, I also had Orion show me how to get free marijuana when you are broke.
    “No one goes home right away after the clubs close,” he said. “They smoke marijuana before going home. They smoke it out here because their homes spy on them. Their homes spy on them, and then make reports about them, through their televisions, computers, DVD players, and newspapers like The New York Times.”
    “Don’t forget magazines like The New Yorker,” I reminded.
    “Which is written by the CIA,” he noted.
    I don’t know if The New Yorker is written by the CIA, though I suspect it is written by the PR office of some South African Diamond conglomerate that recently used forced slave labor to dig for the precious rocks in countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone. But Orion was right about all the joints and roaches outside of bars and nightclubs in our neighborhood. There were two stubby joints (or roaches) right outside of The Pyramid Club (and with cherry red lipstick on them; these girls dress to kill). There was half a joint and three roaches outside of the metal bar, King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, on the corner across from Tompkins Square Park and a few more roaches in front of bars like Downtown Beirut and The Mars Bar. On the brown stoop of a tenement on East 7^th street and First Avenue, there was a copy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Cool.
    “What do you think of Nietzsche, Orion?”
    “Did you know that he admired Emerson? And that his sister later started a Nazi colony in South America?”
    “I didn’t know that.”
    “Yes. And last time I saw him in the hospital, he was still not speaking except to say, ‘God is the next apocalyptic war waiting to be declared in Kansas.’”
    “Hmm.”
    By 10 a.m., Tompkins Square Park was not very crowded. Most of the people who slept in beds instead of cigarette scarred futons were having something called “Brunch” in upscale cafes with names like Song of the Lark or Pilgrims at Tinker Creek. We would have the next hour or so to smoke this joint.
    Orion was an expert at knocking the tobacco out of a cigarette, and filling it in with the unhealthy resin, seeds, marijuana and phlegm of unknown origin from the several joints we gleaned, and which he expertly opened. Sadly, such street skills were beyond me. I had things like an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, which supposedly taught you some useful things, like how to write poems and stories that would get published in magazines secretly underwritten by the PR offices of South African diamond conglomerates that use forced slave labor to dig for their precious rocks in countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone.
    While Orion prepared our “Gleaners” version of brunch, I took in the view of Tompkins Square Park, so far, one of my favorite places in New York City. Despite rumors that were becoming more rampant, the band shell was still standing, and presently, there were six or seven homeless folks bundled and snoring on its stage. Every third of fourth bench had some empty or semi-filled beer bottles nearby. (Neither Orion nor I believed in mixing stray beers together. That’s something that immature Frat boys would do, not immature poets.) The sidewalks might have a new chalked in or spray painted Anarchy “A” sign with a line drawn through it, or a slogan like, “Who’s Fucking Park? Our Fucking Park!” and there was always a rat or few popping out of the trash barrel you just rummaged through and where someone just threw out a copy of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls in it.
    “Damn! I don’t know what’s worse!” I said. “The rats or people throwing away good literature!”
    Still, I was glad to have found this classic. That makes two in one morning. (Even if some folks may not find classic status in anything written by Jacqueline Susann. But if Jane Austen had a secret guilty pleasure, I suspect that the author of Pride and Prejudice would write books like Valley of the Dolls.)
    “It’s only in the gutter, with the rats and other vermin, where you will find good literature,” Orion said.
    “You got a point there,” I said.
    “I once met a rat who remembered Jack Kerouac and some of the other Beats when they lived in this neighborhood.”
    “Hmm.”
    “Let’s smoke!” Orion said.
    “Good idea!”
    Whatever toxic resin or unknown phlegm inside of this joint was not that bad. I only coughed for a few minutes. Even if this joint had hardly any toxicity in it, I never took more than a few hits. See, I didn’t believe in marijuana as much as I did this city where you could easily find the detritus or whatever else you needed to illegally live, and then smoke or live it right outside in places like Tompkins Square Park, which was still safe from the pilgrims having brunch nearby. For how much longer, who knew. For today though, the park belonged to people like Orion, and also people like me.
    “There are a lot more bars in the West Village,” Orion said after he finished the joint. “We can probably find enough joints and roaches to smoke for the rest of the day, and also sell.”
    “Sounds like a good plan to me,” I said, “except for the part about selling some of the drugs you got for free. That’s like—being a Capitalist.”
    “Hmm, you’re right,” Orion said.
    “I’m just going to sit for a bit, think about my life going nowhere near Wall Street, and then read some great literature.”
    “I met Nietzsche while I was in the hospital.”
    “Hmm.”
    “And I think it was religion, and the people who start wars over it, who are also the same people who ban books or jail or kill authors, is what put him there.”
    “I think you’re right.”

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