Homage to Walter Wilczewski

1.

After many years, I was again in Paris, this time in the good company of my wife, Nirmala.  Our four day bike tour in Burgundy was cut short when Nirmala was hit by a car.  We had to stay an extra week in Beaune, a quaint little town south of Dijon, due to Nirmala’s injuries.  Three broken ribs, a mild concussion, a fractured scapula and a leg wound were bad enough; it was the pneumothorax, however, that kept us in France.  It is medically contraindicated to board a plane with a pneumothorax, since the negative pressure during the plane’s ascent could make the pocket of air in the thorax expand. 

The subsequent X-ray a week later indicated that the pneumothorax had resolved.  We lost no time; we traveled to Paris the next day.  Our new flight was to depart in three days, so, poor us, we were forced to spend three days in the City of Light.  Nirmala’s arm was in a sling; the leg wound was starting to respond to antibiotics; she had some mild to moderate pain, but other that that she was willing and able to walk around Paris with me for about six hours a day.

Nirmla and I stayed at the Best Western Kapital Opéra, in the eighth arrondissement, not too far from that famous building where I saw a performance of Carmen many, many years ago.  After arriving in Paris from Dijon on the TGV, the fast-speed train, and after having lunch at the Gare de Lyon, we checked into our hotel and were ready for a walk.  Oh, it was so good to be in Paris again!  After about an hour, I noticed the classical portico of La Madeleine in the distance. I told Nirmala we just had to go there.

It is an impressive structure.  The neoclassical building contains fifty-one Corinthian columns, each 20 meters high, which surround all four sides.  It was based on the Maison Carrée of Nîmes, one of the best preserved of all Roman temples; we had seen it during a bike trip to Southern France two decades earlier. Originally begun as a church, Napoleon had it reconstructed in the classical style as a temple to la gloire de l’armée.  Well, that glory was short-lived; the building was rededicated as a church after Napoleon’s fall; it has remained a parish church ever since.

Nirmala thought sure that the church was closed, since its west façade appeared to be deserted.  I persisted.  We found an entrance, walked up the Freitreppe, and came to the level of the church itself.  We passed a group of young men gambling; they appeared to have roots in the Maghreb  They were sitting on the ground around a sheet on which the card game was taking place. (I wonder what Napoleon would have thought of that.) One of the gamblers gave us a quick smile. I had the feeling he was pleased to see a mixed-race couple pass by.

We hesitated to walk along the perimeter wall in order to get to the main entrance. A group of Japanese photographers was taking pictures of a “bride”, who obviously was not a bride, but a model whose photo was most likely destined for a fashion magazine.We waited for the picture to be taken, then proceeded.  We eventually entered a church that doesn’t look like a church at all.

I suddenly realized why I had felt compelled to visit—I met Walter there, a childhood friend from Jersey City.  The year was 1968.

Walter wanted to visit me in Paris, where I had been staying for the preceding week.  He agreed to come straight from the airport and meet me at La Madeleine. (A ridiculous place to meet! Why didn’t we agree to meet at my hotel?  I don’t know).

I waited several hours before he came.  There were no cell phones or computers in those days.  Patient waiting was much more common then than it is now.

My patience had been fraying for some time before he arrived.  I remember commenting on the garish alter, on which Madeleine with outstretched arms is flanked by two angels that appear to be wrestling. The nineteenth century statue was sculpted by Charles Marochetti; it supposedly depicts an ecstatic vision of the saint during daily prayer.

As memories came back to me, I felt overwhelmed by the passage of time.  We were in our early twenties then; I am in my early seventies now, while Walter has been dead for the past forty years, considerably longer than the time allotted to him on earth.

While Nirmala and I sat before the altar, we noticed a man placing a drum to the right of us.  I asked him whether a concert was being planned.  Yes, he told me, there would be a performance of Mozart’s Requiem at 8 P.M., and tickets would go on sale in ten minutes.

Chopin’s funeral took place in this church on October 30, 1849.  One of Chopin’s last requests was that a performance of  Mozart’s Requiem be included in the ceremony.  Chopin hadn’t realized it, but this posed a problem, since at that time women were not allowed to sing in church. (Mulier taceat in ecclesia—Women should remain silent in church.)  There is no way to delete female voices from the Requiem—think of the haunting melody for altos as they sing “Ad te omnis caro veniet”, ("to You all flesh must come"). A special dispensation was granted for the funeral with the stipulation that the female singers remain hidden behind a curtain.  Times have changed, thank God!

I thought of unforgettable Chopin and my friend Walter, who is remembered today as much as a spectacular yellow leaf is, having fallen off a maple in October many years ago. I am glad Nirmala and I were very tired and decided not to attend the concert  I don’t think I could have got beyond the orchestral introduction without sobbing, perhaps uncontrollably. 

We sat for a few minutes longer, as I stared up into the dome, thinking about my friend Walter and all the relatives, friends, acquaintances and strangers who have passed away during the past fifty years. Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine.  I remember feeling intense sorrow.  As we were leaving the church, however, I experienced a sudden rush of joy and consolation—Why?

2.

Walter Wilczewski was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, on January 6, 1946.  He was the fourth of five children of Polish immigrants, each of whom had a thick accent.  I watched his father many times returning from the local bar with a white pail full of beer.  I can still see the beer sloshing about as he walked.

Walter had it rough.  An example: we were sitting in the back of a car; his father was driving.  There were no seat belts in those days; we knelt on the back seat facing the rear window, watching the world whiz by.  I suppose we had been talking about where babies came from, I don't remember.  Walter turned to his father and asked, “Daddy, what makes a lady have a baby?”  Without a word, his father stopped the car, turned around and gave his son a powerful slap on the face.  Not a word from him as he started the car again, while his son wailed.  We were about eight years old.

I was astonished.  I had it rough as well, but not that rough.  (Well, maybe I did.  Several years later, my mother, having received a telephone call from a bartender, asked me to bring my intoxicated father home.  The bar was barely a block away.  As I guided my staggering parent home, I noticed that many neighbors were watching.  My father suddenly broke free, and, without a word, gave me a hard slap on the face.  The sting of humiliation was worse than the pain from the slap.)

I can still see the joyful expression on Walter’s face, when, years later, he informed me that his father had just died.

Walter had a very low opinion of himself, not uncommon among those raised in poor, dysfunctional families.  In 1963, just after graduating from high school, I  remember the delight in Walter’s voice when he called me on the phone and informed me that he had just been accepted to study at Jersey City State Teachers College.  Walter didn’t expect to be accepted anywhere.

He became a math teacher at Dickinson High School in Jersey City from which we both had graduated.  (It was integrated—sort-of—Every black student was in the vocational program.  We college-preppers had no contact with them).

Walter was a good teacher at first, but by the mid-seventies his teaching abilities as well as the quality of his life began to deteriorate.  By his late twenties, many of his students, with some justification, thought he had gone mad.  I remember him showing me a little figurine of a cartoon character with a cracked skull, which one of the students had given him.  Yes, kids can be cruel, but the gift didn’t appear to bother Walter; he seemed to like it.

At this stage of his life, Walter liked to wander around New York City on the weekends; he was a frequent patron of bars in Greenwich Village.  He began to drink and smoke heavily; he had developed a paunch and looked years older than he was.

I had given him a copy of  The Dekalb Literary Arts Journal, in which one of my first published poems appeared.  Walter was so proud of it!  He apparently showed it to everyone who would listen.  I was with him on one of those occasions.  The man on the bar stool beside him had obviously seen Walter before, and reacted to the praise of his author/friend the same way I imagine a brahmin responds to a beggar in Calcutta.

One evening in the fall of 1973, Walter and I attended a performance of a mass by Haydn, Missa in Angustiis, at a church in Greenwich Village.  As in La Madeleine in 1968, Walter met me there.  Before arriving at the church, he had been roaming around the village, and had had a few drinks.  He looked a bit disheveled. After the concert, Walter wandered off and I returned to my home on Congress Street in Jersey City.

Then Walter disappeared.

All efforts to locate him proved vain until a few weeks later, I discovered that he had been picked up by the police and delivered to the psych ward of St.Vincent's Hospital.  He had no identification on him; he had been beaten and robbed.  He was unable to identify himself.

Later on, he became coherent and revealed his name and address.  He was then transferred to the Jersey City Medical Center, a monstrous complex which the corrupt Mayor Hague built in the 1930s.  An angiogram revealed multiple brain aneurysms, some of which had already burst.  The neurosurgeon informed me that there was nothing they could do.  “I wouldn’t attempt anything on a brain with that many aneurysms,” he told me.  The source of his deterioration had at last been found.

I visited Walter many times in the hospital.  One afternoon I was sitting beside his bed while the TV, looking down on us from its shelf at a corner of the room just below the ceiling, blared the usual nonsense. Suddenly the nonsense was interrupted by a bulletin: Elvis Presley was dead.

During my visits, I watched Walter writhe in discomfort.  He must have had terrible headaches.  The care was inadequate, and I was too passive to do anything about it. The poor man’s head in the poor man’s hospital continued to toss and turn.  Less than a month after Elvis’s demise, Walter was no more.

Nirmala and I had received a gift from Walter on our first anniversary in 1975, a glass bouquet of frangipani.  He died on our anniversary, September 12, two years later. The glass bouquet is the only concrete thing I have left to remind me that I once had a friend named Walter.  The few photos I had of him were destroyed when our basement was flooded by a burst pipe in 2015.

Ad te omnis caro veniet.  Some, unfortunately, a lot sooner than later. I still miss him.

3.

A few years later I composed the following poem, “Homage to Walter Wilczewski”, with which I conclude this tribute:

Your arteries shone like distant stars

in a doomed galaxy.  Remote and

detached as a Hindu god, the doctor

pointed out several bulges of light

against a dark cortical sky.  “Each of

those spots is an aneurysm.  A brain

that has that many lesions puts

surgery out of the question.” Very soon

the suns would burst and become dwarf stars.

The first time I met you, you were

sitting on your little sister,

beating her head on the porch.

After she went wailing in to Mother,

I introduced myself; we became friends.

Two poor working-class outsiders

who despised their alcoholic fathers;

we had much in common.  (Except that

you had more to hate: your mother, often

drunk, was cold as your father was cruel.)

Twenty years later, when another blew,

cops fished you from a New York alley

and dumped you at St. Vincent's Hospital.

Another kid on drugs, they thought;

yet when the tests proved negative

while you stayed wild and combative,

the diagnosis changed from "drugs” to “crazy”.

They sent you to recover on the psych ward;

to my shame, I accepted their verdict

Until an arteriogram was done, weeks later.

The boy who shot clips at his dog

in a sack hung on a clothesline

from the fourth floor; the boy

who told me with a puzzling smile,

“Guess what?  My father died!”

The man who left his mother’s funeral

to wander about in New York was

no misfit, mugger, or murderer;

despite expert predictions,

he had become an excellent teacher,

generous, sober and kind: a star,

till many starbursts later, he died

incoherent on a dirty ward

in the building where he had been born.

Who knows how much hard work it took

for him to become average?

Though forgotten by almost everyone,

in my sky your remain a first-magnitude star,

like Schubert, dead at thirty-one,

Walter Wilczewski, my friend.