Frost: Are you Christian or Muslim?

Baldwin: (Laughing) I was born a Baptist.

Frost: It’s not that funny.

Baldwin: It is to me.

Frost: And what are you now?

Baldwin: I am trying to become a human being.

“Are We on the Edge of Civil War,” David Frost interviews James Baldwin, 1970

Marty, as you know, ordered iced coffees all through the winter. His life was filled with places where he was a regular, so he never had to order precisely. He always got the regular.

Marty relished ordering, enunciating item by item, his daily prayer. The waitress would nod her head chuckling.

Perhaps I remember him best the long winter break of sophomore year. I had flunked out of college, so could I call it a break?

Marty and I met often for early lunches at the Greek diner where he saw everybody those days. I misremember the name, I want to say Manatu, a gobbledygook plural of manatee.

I remember the menus with a hoary map labeled in another language, not Greek — Dutch? And the splotches for landmasses that we recognized or imagined we did. Mannahatta and surrounding isles.

That February, Marty and I conspired to found a literary magazine called Caliban whose motto from the Bard himself would read “the isle is full of noises.” I had the pretension to recommend instead the original folio spelt “the Isle is full of noyses.”

Marty may have disagreed, he kept eerily silent. Caliban to me sounded too similar to Taliban. Marty responded only “yes.”

Why do the menus at Manatu seem important to me now? Did dragons and other beasts crane and breach from lacunae on the map on the menu? Dragons are not real. Dragons breathe fire.

The diner closed like all dives in the Village to accommodate a sparse boutique.

One day, while Marty peed (all the iced coffee refills) and I hung around by the register, I interrogated our beloved waitress on who she believed Marty to be. “He is a composer no, and you are his music students.”

You see that winter I did not know why I had flunked out of Bard, or even how. I had planned to leave anyway. I wanted to work and write. It seemed likely I was an idiot, a strange idiot, with a insatiable literary apatite.

It was not so much that Marty encouraged me. He made me feel that how I thought and felt came naturally to me. It was not necessarily good so much as true. I am not sure how I would have processed that winter otherwise.

I never have to know.

Likely depressed, I slept in. Marty had been awake since 4 a.m., had been a regular all over the Village, at Starbucks, in the health food store, as a presence on Christopher St. He moved slowly as the clouds went by.

We met at 10:30 for what Marty called lunch. I was still groggily sleeping off my adolescence. Well before dawn Marty had prepared his regular breakfast, sodium rich and perhaps with some mystery powder from the health food store.

By lunch Marty had already mulled over nuggets he discovered in the Threepenny Review, snippets overheard from the very early morning Starbucks clientele, episodes from his dreams and his childhood which he recalled quite well. Marty usually began the conversation and talked for a while before I caught the drift.

Many of the stories I had heard before. I had heard many of the stories before.

We sat at a round table in the back corner of the Greek diner flanked by mirrors on both sides. I could be misremembering, the table perhaps was square and there were only mirrors behind the bar. Regardless the table was always reserved for Marty and guests.

Only now do I realize this made no sense.

Marty’s regular table was the most hazardous possible for an old man with knees that cramped up and a back that buckled. Marty insisted he could hear better in that corner. I think rather he could see better. He could see everything. Besides nobody sits behind the king, the anarchist king that likes to put on airs.

Marty believed I think that all people should put on airs.

Marty certainly could not hear so well, special table or no. He often drifted off mid conversation, responding triumphantly with a non sequitur. I soon found that these non sequiturs unlocked like skeleton keys the whole city.

Marty could improvise over all of its changes. He had heard Thelonious as a regular at the Five Spot Café and Bobby as a regular at Cafe Wha? He heard the regular ranters and ravers outside of Dunkin’ Donuts. He wrote beside those getting off of graveyard shifts and those that slept on the 1 train. He jotted down thoughts with a bold ballpoint on the Village Voice.

What did we gab about that February? Same things you did — people we all knew, breaking news, which we responded to as one would zen koans, neighborhood mythology, our oeuvres, squirrels.

I guess that winter I mostly talked to Marty about this wild thing we called writing that mostly had to do with reading and with listening closely to and caring about people.

That February I was deep in the throes of Rilke and Juan Ramón Jiménez, whose lyricism I could not replicate, Marty gave me a few of his books to keep, musty tattered New Directions.

Marty gifted me Regarding Wave and Earth House Hold by Gary Snyder, and the Journal of Albion Moonlight by Kenneth Patchen. And he sent me his own short pieces.

Marty made the dense isle full of noises where I was raised speak to me. His short pieces which I read and reread, which Marty often often revised and included month to month as they went through their changes, put eyes in the back of my head and ears in the walls.

I did not know then that I would stop writing for years, and only begin again long after I stopped lunching with Marty, and from another angle that felt natural, that was not good, or even trying to be, so much as true.

When I began to write again, I began with gifts Marty had given me like talisman

The thing is, as you know, Marty died. He vanished.

I begin to write, never knowing why or even how.

By now this meandering homage must return to its source. The title is from Chekhov’s The Seagull. Of course, of course. Listen, offstage.

I have been trying to remember what class was like with Marty. I can barely remember a thing. I am not sure I can. Who knows how it was then?

What I remember now is just before class began. A table full of gossip, theories, noises, Marty sat at the the head of the long table.

We were reading The Seagull. We were always reading The Seagull, which I loved and others hated, a classic, a classic who cares. Eventually the class quieted. Marty never lectured to begin a class. All was silence while we began to look around at each other. We expected so much of each other in there.