Pages from a Peddler’s Notebook

Ivan Klein
April 2022

Around fifty years ago, I spent most of a fall and winter peddling incense from a
big wooden box held around my neck by a clothesline knotted through steel loops
screwed into its sides. I think of it as a very instructive time and have an impulse, with
 what’s left of the here and now, to write a bit about the lessons that came my way and
 my imperfect efforts to master them.

How did I wind up on the street with that box loaded with “Spiritual Sky” incense around my neck? — How did I wind up stretched out on a rough slab of timber on the side of Pier 40, the waters from the Great North (Hudson) River lapping below me, filled with nausea and just about done in at the tender age of thirty? — It’s not even worth the telling. Whatever story I can conjure is not worth the telling. Just the experience, the sensation of utter filth and emptiness inside, maybe that’s worth about a nickel.

There’s a Yiddish word, luftmensch — a useless fellow living on air and dreams and fleeting metaphysical aspirations. — A useless bit of flotsam with no ballast to his body or soul. Lying on that splintery timber down on that pier at the edge of the West Village, my wife heavily pregnant, I question whether I’m even a man. — What sort of father can I be to the child in her womb? — I can barely breathe, barely move, frozen in every sort of indecision, including whether to pick up the enticing Village girl a few feet away, obviously making herself available … what sort of man in this world am I?

— Who can’t write a damn word, who can’t fuck worth a damn or work worth a damn. — Breathing in and out, prone under an autumn sky. — That’s how it started. That’s how come I got up and sawed and nailed my box together and painted it Chinese red. The emptiness and disgust and fear still deep inside, but really, I had to do something.

The Box As Impediment —

It was big and bulky and when filled with various kinds of incense, quite heavy and awkward to lug around. Often, when people bumped into it on the bustling Manhattan streets where I plied my trade, they would excuse themselves, as if the box were an extension of my person.

The box, and all that went with it, a mammoth stumbling block in every way. No decent coffee shop wished to sell me a cup or let me use the washroom. That tempting anal girl on Pier 40 passed by me and my box on 8th Street as if there was a cloak of invisibility wrapped around us. Something of a shock and how could I have been so naïve? — It was as if I had to learn or relearn the most basic facts of this life. Reminded myself of the title of that Kipling collection, “Life’s Handicap.”

………………

Everything from scratch, out on the street as a peddler — standing up for my unprotected self, overcoming whatever residue of ghetto fear lingered deep inside me. At the same time accept that I was a cipher for real. As a nobody it was easy to see just how low down and crummy men and women could be when they came in contact with anyone they took to be below them on the social scale, or whatever determined the idea of themselves in their desperate little world. I wondered at the time if they thought of themselves as Americans and still wonder as to the fluidity of that term in this precarious moment.

………………

Those lost Jewish kids on the street — a blind man could pin them, yet they often had no clue as to who and what they were.

“I’m a human being”

Is what they mostly came up with. — A human being who almost no one would truly regard wholly as such. — Their feelings of inferiority, degradation in regard to their hair, physical setup, heritage. Down and outers, they could say anything to me, an anonymous wooden Indian of a peddler man. It was with regret that I saw what history had come down to on the sidewalks, with winter closing in and the sorrows of our exile made manifest. Not even like the luftmenschen with their spirits dwelling in the clouds. — I’m just talking about lost souls I encountered. Lost souls and stateless hearts.

All sorts of experiences and lessons to be grasped as I look back over the years. — Start with manners and how to interact directly with a finicky and/or volatile public. And, in fact, I did learn a bit about manners while street peddling, although I’m sure I’ll be dust and ash with still a good bit to learn. — How to exquisitely get it right while making the transaction, overcoming my crude instincts and untrained persona. The public, of course, helped me along. The lecture from that uptown girl on not trying to sell her some other flavor incense when she specifically asked for frankincense which I was out of. Quite refined and didactic along with a whiff of disdain. I’m not sure how much good it did me at the time, being rather keen as I was for her dollar. — That black guy on 14th Street with the bandage wrapped around his head, going nuts on me when I didn’t have the coconut flavor in my box that I thought I had. “Don’t you know not to promise something you can’t deliver,” he screamed, and I believe that did sink in. — Lessons from what’s thought of as high and low. — Easier and truer just to take it all as it comes.

Overcoming the thrill that runs through your bowels while being rousted by the cops when they’ve had enough of you lice blocking the entrance to a midtown department store. — In these lowliest of fucking circumstances in which I have placed myself or fortune has placed me, get past every fear, general and particular. Be a man is what I tell myself. Get ready to be a true father to your newborn son no matter what.

That cynical, pseudo-worldly Hispanic security guard in front of Macy’s sneering something about peddlers on the street and the idea of us being brothers. — He wasn’t buying the residue of the age of Age of Aquarius washing over from the just recently done sixties. Every man for himself is what he must have held firmly in his mind — what things boil down to — and how did I see it? Would I have thought of all men as brothers back then when I was young, or even up to now? Could we call that brutalized scumbag of a security guard our brother? Well, maybe it’s all men or none. — Something tenuous that it won’t do to overthink or talk about that much.

Even More Lessons —

— Yeah, I think of him as a White Working Class Hero. — The guy who pulled the two burning sticks out of their holes at the opposite ends of my box where they were sending fragrant clouds of jasmine into the pre-Christmas air near the entrance to the subway on Sixth Avenue. Righteously broke them up and stomped them out. I’m still not sure, but I think he may have seen himself as something of a soldier for Christ. A bit like old Mr. Met, I’m more than a trifle freighted, and I just wonder what was eating the guy. — A visible Jew profiting from Christmas? — filthy sinful incense (something like marijuana) fouling the air he breathed? Maybe just a target of opportunity for all he despised that was beyond his reach.

There were two professional Jewish peddlers I ran into in midtown. I forget what the older guy was selling, but he saw me carrying the box around with those burning sticks, and out of his survival intelligence and kindness said to me, “That’s a very good idea.” The younger fellow, large, portly, mustached, selling those oblong segmented balloons, I think it was, immediately engaged me in conversation about a recent court decision that he felt would make us more legit on the street and allow us to continue to earn some kind of living. I had a Peddler’s License myself, bought for a few bucks from the City, my picture like somebody’s nightmare of an anarchist wanted poster. The restrictions that went with it were impossible as I recall. — No way to survive without breaking the rules as to where it was permissible to be and to sell.

They were intelligent, humble men those Jew peddlers, with their feet on the ground, doing their best, as I was, everything considered. I was proud to be their fellow in that cold season of 1971.

The Beats and their putative saints — hey, I’m no one to judge. But it seems to me they used the term rather loosely and theatrically. Whereas the men I’m scribbling about from deep memory were completely down, without pretense or knowledge thereof.

Nighttime —

The sun sets, the temperature falls, a middle-aged German man drops a dollar into the box as charity. I tell him I don’t want it, but he leaves it there after giving me a compassionate look. Blood money. And what a shabby figure I must have been, even in the dim light. An object of pity, an artifact. Fuck it twice over … memories crowd each other now that I’ve gotten started, and I try to separate the strands. Another chill night and I’m working my favorite hole in the wall on 8th Street just south of Electric Ladyland Studio. There’s a young woman decently dressed and expectant of the evening. She stations herself about ten feet from me and the fragrance of my box, making it clear in a white college girl’s voice that she’s waiting for a guy named Gordon whose virtues she enumerates in my direction. Maybe a half hour goes by, and she begins to shiver. Gordon, that rock of her time and place is a no-show. Still, there’s a certain ring to his name, something that during the course of her free-associative encomium makes me think of Beckett’s Godot. She eventually wanders off, stood up by that real or illusory Gordie.

A black woman at the wheel of a car beats somebody to a parking spot. — Laughs out loud, rubs it in — “Sucker!” Winds up waiting at least 45 minutes for the passenger, who had departed her vehicle on an errand, to return. Only I am a silent witness. Between us, we know that she has turned lonely and uncertain and that life is emptiness and karma the proverbial bitch.

It’s pre-Christmas, as I mentioned, and I’m about to wrap it up around 9:00 pm with the street still crowded, when a tall young man wearing a yarmulke and a full- length coat takes long emphatic strides down 8th Street while yelling at one and all, “Never again, you bastards.” — My brother’s angry, I mutter to myself. — He senses what lies beneath, yes, he does, even though he may be a bit off kilter.

A Scavenger In Harlequin —

On my way to work West Broadway in the early afternoon when I see a scavenger in harlequin rummaging through the garbage cans left at the curb for the Sanitation Department on Spring Street. Harlequin — the bright-colored, diamond-shaped pattern of the clothing traditionally worn by the buffoon clown in the circus, complete with tights.

He sees me with my peddling box, wild profusion of hair, Zapata mustache, figures, I think, that I’m some kind of kindred spirit and begins a rambling, but not unintelligent discourse on America, it’s abundance and its waste that allows him to live just on what people discard. Predicts that there will be a price to pay for such profligacy. — Not the word he used, but that was the crux of his case.

“Like the Jews,” he says, “ahead of the game for a while, but it always catches up.” Figures me for a Tartar, or something like that, given the look, the fact that I don’t talk all that much.

The scavenger in harlequin, I think of him as a sacred clown who boiled all Jewish history down to its unavoidable essence. Who offered me the gift of the truest kind of street knowledge.

Some years later I was in an elevator in Quebec City ascending to a lawyer’s office on some urgent family business when I saw a swastika carved into a side wall. On the way to the airport for the flight home, I noticed the Jew names on the big department stores we pass on the highway. I imagine the suppressed rage of the habitant who used his knife on the wall in that elevator to get it off his chest.

Up against the wall of history
come to town;
walking & talking with the truth
dressed in that sad-ass sacred clown suit.
The journey through this life …

On Christmas Eve —

In front of the old Nathan’s that used to have the corner of Sixth Avenue and 8th Street. Pimps and hustlers peering out the front window of the huge hotdog emporium. I’ve got my spot on the curb, the Krishna kids with their bells, tambourines and drums doing the freak all around me. Police and ambulance sirens blasting on the great thoroughfare which some years before had been designated as the Avenue of the Americas. I take a drag on a cigarette, try to keep everything straight in my head. A black girl walking by picks up on what might generously pass for my sanity in the middle of that crazy-ass gumbo, inhales from a sweet cloud of incense, gives me an undeserved, but still treasured smile.

“Pop” — That old guy who saw me working the street, engaged in curious conversation, came back a few days later to sell some sort of ephemera off the top of a cardboard carton. I called him “Pop.” He said, that ancient, decaying fellow in his crummy suit and really old-time two-tone shoes

“Don’t call me Pop.”
Not sure I’m not older now than he was back then …

Yes, the journey through life … the red box, well and thickly painted, repurposed as a heaping repository for toys as our children grew in number to three. And then with great rapidity grown to adulthood and out on their own. — The box now empty and only in the way in the kitchen of our cramped Village apt. Brought downstairs and placed in the designated area for unwanted bulk items to be removed.

Under the stairs the box lies
empty, discarded, detached from all use,
without known past or future.

On some level, the process reminds me of those Zen ox-herding pictures with which I became reacquainted on a recent cross-country flight while reading the Shambhala pocket edition of Zen Flesh Zen Bones.

Not that I have any legitimate spiritual claims. Just that I feel a parallel to the process of finding and losing whatever it is that possesses us and that we possess.

Sequence of the Phases of the Box —

1) The burden around my neck.
2) Instrumental bestower of a minimal sustenance.
3) The box removed from around my neck, I am able to walk freely.
4) An overflowing toy box, kids everywhere.
5) The kids leave the nest. The box only a container of a nostalgic remnant.
6) It’s under the stairs with broken appliances and an old mattress.
7) An emptiness inside when it’s gone for good.
8) Memories of my time on the street, here written down after a fashion.

The Ox-herding Pictures *

I — In search of the Ox, who, according to the Zen way of thinking, has never been lost.

Tell that to our peddler man, his neck bowed under the weight of his box and its contents.

“Many crossroads, but which is the right one I know not.”

The peddler also goes an uncertain way. The Ox is lost because the seeker is fundamentally lost to himself.

II — “Discovering the Footsteps”

Well, what is it we are searching for? — In the case of the subject of the ox-herding pictures, enlightenment (satori); that is, a sudden way out of darkness and perplexity. — and what was I searching for on the street, beyond the scratch to put food on the table, keep the baby in Pampers? Looking back, we’ll call it lost manhood, identity of some sort. — the truth unwrapped.

III — “Perceiving the Ox”

“Here no ox can hide.” — The herder is in the midst of nature. — I was in the urban jungle. The herder, according to that most eminent authority D.T. Suzuki, is beginning to see into the origin of things. As for me, it was a cold, bitter winter. My spirit was obscure; things in general were opaque, uncertain. Circumstances were food-stamp desperate.

IV — “Catching the Ox”

He proves wild and intractable. The spirit wanders. The ox is lost and found. With me, as I mentioned, it was the heart of winter and I was selling incense on the street in leaky boots. My thoughts became focused on physical survival, the existence of the family, dry feet.

V — “Taming the Ox”

The metaphor in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones is that of the use of whip and rope. In Suzuki, there is a warning against wandering into a world of defilement. — The ox is supposed to become “well-trained” so that our thoughts focus on enlightenment. I think of the nature of thought after dying, psychedelically speaking. Sitting cross-legged long ago, tears on my cheeks, thoughts were spare, grudging, down to the spirit’s bones. Here in fogbound old age, I remember that much.

VI — “Coming Home On The Ox’s Back”

He’s riding high and free now, playing his flute; the simple tune vanishes on the sweet night air. — The rider’s joy beyond utterance. The ox tamed, as my heart and soul haven’t been in all the years since my time on the street. — A very ordinary victim of attachment, ignorance, desire.

VII — “The Ox Forgotten, Leaving The Man Alone”

That is, the ox is completely out of the picture. Our seeker is seated barefoot under a circular moon, in front of the thatched hut that is his home.

The ox is at rest, ignored. According to the Commentary there is only unitary clear light. The instruments of taming (whip and rope) lie idly by.

The spectacle of enlightened man with his thoughts
& non-thoughts.

VIII — “Both Ox And Self Transcended”

The picture is of a perfectly empty circle. “Here are the footprints of the patriarchs” is how the accompanying poem in Zen Flesh Zen Bones puts it.
Self-congratulation concerning spiritual attainment is vulgar. My father, a Jew who suffered much, taught me that. And when dead broke and hunted by the law, also told me with a mixture of regret and astonishment that he had lost his belief in God.

That picture of a perfectly empty circle is the representation of stupendous, if invisible effort. — What it takes is the whole of Being. Even I have learned that much, more or less on my own.

IX — “Reaching The Source”

“The river flows tranquilly on …” — There are birds and bees and a deep-rooted weeping willow tree. We imagine the old rider retired to his simple hut, toes through the floor. — that is, completely rooted in the very moment, on the very spot.

The sumi-e painting in the Suzuki series contains the blessed triad of bamboo, plum blossoms and pine. There is a verse along with the painting warning that to be back to the source is already a false step. — Nothing but utter simplicity, absence of cognition, absence of self-awareness will do. — Tough all around.

X — “Entering The City With Bliss Bestowing Hands”

The subject goes his own way, neither holy nor unholy. (Both of those putative states being obscene mind traps.) No tracks, no cares. He hangs out with riff-raff in the marketplace and according to the Law, all are made blessed.

As for myself, a lone wolf by choice and circumstance, only the wavering darkness and light remain. The box taught me that the street devours pretense, attitude, weakness of any kind. Lessons learned and largely forgotten. This little piece, a reminder of a sort, if anything at all.

* The ox-herding paintings traditionally attributed to Tenshō Shūbun (天章周文) (1414- 1463).

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Ivan Klein published Toward Melville, a book of poems from New Feral Press, in July 2018. Previously published Alternatives to Silence from Starfire Press and the chapbook Some Paintings by Koho & A Flower Of My Own from Sisyphus Press. His work has been published in the Forward, Urban Graffiti, Otoliths, and numerous other periodicals.

For information on Ivan Klein’s latest book
The Hat and Other Poems and Prose from Sixth Floor Press
click here →