THE BODY ELECTRIC

Photo of book cover / The Works of Walt Whitman / The Collected Prose / Photo by RCS / 2024

            I was sitting in my local watering hole, downing a few glasses of red, thinking about Keats. Wondering what he looked like as he drew his last breath, the exact whiteness and pallor of his skin. What a way to go: consumption racing through your bloodstream at the tender age of 25. I raised my glass to the flat black stamped tin ceiling, and whispered, “Here’s to the immortal lives of poets.” I took another gulp of Happy Hour Syrah and looked at my watch. Happy Hour? I’ve always thought they should call it Contented Hour and leave it at that. It was 5:30 in the afternoon on a Thursday.

            Was meeting a new client at The Black Rose. With the last name of Whitman. Go figure. The Black Rose was a basement level bar on one of the least touristy side streets in Chelsea. It was quiet that that hour of the day. Maybe a straggler from The Village, or a tourist couple having drinks before heading to a Chelsea gallery opening might drop in for a round. Mostly, The Rose was for locals like me. I could scribble down thoughts, read, and ruminate.

            I drifted back into my reverie: the vibrant green English countryside, carriage rides in the cool morning mist, rhymed couplets, coughing up bright red blood on a ruffled white shirt – and then she walked in. Her flowing blonde hair lit up the dark interior of the subterranean bar. A crimson wraparound enveloped her buxom frame. She strode up to my barstool, let out a deep breath and shook around for a moment like she was a diesel rig gearing down at a stoplight, gave me the once over, then got to the point.

            “Are you Poet P.I.?”

            “Yes,” I said. “One and the same.”

            She held out her hand and I felt electricity pass through her fingers for a moment. “I’m Winnie, Winnie Whitman.”

            Said she worked at a club downtown called The Body Electric. It was a large place, it contained multitudes. But, for the Lower East Side, it wasn’t large at all. Do I contradict myself? Who doesn’t? She said it was a funky cabaret-style nightclub for performance poets – catering to fellow poets, out of work actors, meditation instructors, museum night guards, designated dreamers, outcasts and outsiders. Sounded like a nice crowd of folks frequented the joint. Trouble was, one of these nice persons of interest had taken to murdering the lady singers lately. Two had recently been killed under mysterious circumstances. Winnie had a feeling she was next in line.

            Winnie pointed at my glass and the bartender brought a bottle of wine over.

            “What were the names of the victims?” I asked.

            After sipping at her Syrah, she said “Emily and Anne.” Emily has a real nature-vibe type of an act, full of wonder, and Anne slithered around the stage like a cat, pills popping out of her pockets, staring out with her intense eyes.”

            The names went directly to the center of my brain, like Kerouac reading with a jazz combo and the drummer just slammed the cymbal.

            I took a slow swallow of the red, then looked sideways at Winnie. Her baby blues pierced into me. She knew I knew what she was half-suspecting, and it wouldn’t take too many questions to drag it out of me. I decided to save her some trouble.

            “Sounds like the work of The Raven.”

            “I’d heard he was gone from the city.”

            “Over eight years ago, The Raven committed a series of weird murders before he was caught. Got life, and was sent up the river.”

            “Up which river?”

            “The river to the Big House.”

            “The which house?”

            “Never mind, I never understood those terms either. Suffice it to say he was in prison for many moons, but according to your story he’s escaped.”

            “What should I do?” Winnie asked.

            “We’ve got to make sure you don’t get edgy, or drift off to sleep while reading any quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore…”

            She opened her eyes wide. “I read tea leaves, essays, philosophy, poems, nursing manuals, and sometime lay in the grass in Central Park and read the clouds high up in the blue sky.”

            “The only thing missing is a pencil and some paper,” I said. “But back to The Raven. He likes to trail after his victims, making odd birdlike sounds every now and then. He gets his prey into a state of utter anxiety, until they’re ready to drop from nervous exhaustion, waiting until they’re nodding off, nearly napping. Well, you get the picture. He’s a bad bird.”

            “Whoo,” she said. “He sounds like someone I don’t want to tangle with.”

            “He’s as deranged and strange as they come.”

            “Can you help me, Poet P.I.?”

            “When’s your next performance?”

            “Tonight.”

            “I’ll be there.”

            A few hours later I drove my dented Buick Skylark downtown to The Body Electric. Winnie had a set at 11:30 p.m. The plan was, I’d meet up with her in her dressing room afterwards. Stepping inside the club, I strolled through the nicotine haze while my eyes got acquainted to the dim nightclub lights. Taking a seat close to the stage, I had a clear view of the layout and most of the club’s inhabitants. A waitress in leather mini-skirt, thigh-high boots, mesh gloves, and a two-story hairdo came up to my table. I ordered a glass of Pinot Noir and leaned back. Surveying everyone around me, before the dim lights went even dimmer for the show. The Raven was nowhere to be seen, but I didn’t expect him to be found so easily.

            There was an opening act before Winnie. Sort of a cross between Sappho and Susan Sontag. The applause was polite yet darkly enthused, which seemed appropriate. And then Winnie took the stage. She wore an all-grass costume. It trailed after her like her blond hair, only more theatrically. She began to sing. She chanted like a modern-day shaman tripping on Ayahuasca. The way she moved on the stage in sinuous circles, she was one in a million. Her act had its roots in the earth, and its branches reached up to the cosmos. By the standing ovation she received, the rest of the audience seemed to agree with my estimation of the show. She did a quick encore, then headed offstage in a flurry of shouts and screams.

            That night, I left Winnie tucked away in my vacationing neighbor’s apartment across the hall, drinking Chai tea, with a cat nestled at her feet. I was lying on the couch with Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Gregory Corso’s The Happy Birthday of Death within easy reach. I interlaced my fingers and stared at the ceiling, trying to piece the puzzle together.

            Next morning, Winnie Whitman came over, and we sat at my kitchen table having coffee and toast, listening to the sounds of the traffic in the distance.

            “What’s happening now?” she asked around a bite of toast.

            “I’ll keep working the case,” I said. “If you can stay another few nights in my neighbor’s apartment, I’d feel much better.”

            “Deal. I feel safer already,” Winnie said, and got up, brushed my cheek with a kiss, and grabbed her oversized purse.

            “Where are you going?”

            “Early dance class in The Village,” she said as she breezed out the door.

            Winnie came back just past noon and let me know she was going to sleep. I read some poems by Ginsberg, Snyder, Notley, O’Hara, Waldman, Baraka, Sexton, and Bukowski. Wrote several lines in a notebook, and took a walk on the Highline. It was one of those perfect Manhattan afternoons that seems to happen as a gift from the poetry gods and goddesses.

            I met up with a well-rested Winnie an hour before her performance. Said I said I’d drive her downtown to The Body Electric, and this time I’d sit farther from the stage so as to have a wider view of the club’s denizens while she did her act.

            She performed for the audience, for the entire city, for the tri-state region, and for the ages. Something had made this night and time key to her life. Her voice rang up to the ceiling, pure and true. I was there to witness an artist rise up to a higher plane. To witness a performer give all they had, and take the audience along with open arms can take your breath away. When everyone in a room becomes one mind – you’re seeing something  to remember. Some performances change your week, others change your life. My mind had been blown, and I was ready for anything.

            Except maybe, what was to happen next.

            While ambling down the hall to her dressing room through a dark, sticky hallway, the sound of the crowd rang in my ears like a busy signal from halfway around the world. I rapped on Winnie’s door. No answer. I knocked harder. Her scream shocked the ringing out of my head. I leaned back and gave the door a hard kick, and then another. The lock finally gave. Winnie lay in a crumpled heap on the floor. I caught a brief glimpse of The Raven through the rain-streaked window. Flying down the fire escape.

            I leaned down and touched her shoulder. “Are you OK?”

            She shook her head and pointed at the window. “I, well, I, he…”

            Winnie was in the semi-catatonic state The Raven inevitably induced in his victims. I could see he meant business as far as Winne was concerned.

            That night, with Winnie tucked away in my windowless guest room, I began piecing together parts of the problematic puzzle at hand. I made a pot of Jasmine tea, poured in a shot of Johnnie Walker Black Label, and hunkered down into my overstuffed armchair. The tea and whiskey warmed me, and the blinking light from the Open 24-Hours a day parking lot next door lulled me into a trance. I may have dozed off for a few seconds, and an idea showed up from out of nowhere, as ideas always do. The idea grew larger. It slowly crept up the base of my skull, then took hold of my mind like a Michael McClure aligned down the middle of the page shamanic chant poem. The idea grew wings. It sailed off into the stratosphere. Following the direction of the idea, I went to my bookshelf and pulled several volumes of Whitman and Poe from the shelf. I opened the books and read poems, stories, and letters written by them. I found out they’d met once, in 1845. When they next met, one of them was dead. Whitman was the only poet of that era to attend Poe’s reburial in Baltimore, in 1875. Of course, Poe wouldn’t just have a burial, he had to go death one better, and have a reburial.

I read along, following my nose, and found new insights as the night went on. The idea expanded and waved at me from a hidden fold of my brain. The idea peeked out, smiling a twisted pixie grin at me. As the idea flew off into the stardust stratosphere I fell into a nighttime daydream state of mind – half dozing and half ruminating. A hundred “what ifs” spoke up from several dark and whimsical corners of my mind.

Just past 7:00 a.m., I sat up with a stiff neck, and a head full of crazy notions.

            Outside my front window the city was waking up. I shoved aside most of the ideas racing through my mind and went to the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee. One idea from the night before stuck.

            I brought two mugs of coffee into my guest room and set one on the night table next to Winnie. She reached for it and took a sip. Her mussed-up bedhead hair and waking up morning smile were radiant and intense. She looked much the same as she had the night before. In a word, swell.

            And yet…

            How about going out for breakfast,” I said. “There’s an authentic last of the breed diner, just around the corner. They serve omelets like they were prepared in a dream. My treat.”

            A few more sips of coffee and she nodded and said, “Thanks, of course. Let’s do it.”

            On the way to the restaurant, I got one of those tingles on the back of my neck. You know the ones. I was certain we were being followed, and had no doubt it was that bad bird. Before we went in, I strolled into the alleyway next to the Celebrate Yourself Diner, and gestured for Winnie to come along.

            “This is one of my favorite alleys in Manhattan,” I said.

            I showed her the finely delineated shadows on the brick walls, and how the morning sunlight fell on the chipped paint on the alleyway’s yellow and turquoise back doors, and told her about how the light and shadows blended together differently at different times of day. Then I mused about how in another life I might’ve been a photographer, or possibly a cinematographer. In other words, I stalled for time. Before long, I spotted him, skulking behind the nearest dumpster. He seemed mighty out of place in the faint shadow cast by the grimy trash receptacle.

            Grasping Winnie’s hand, I walked her over to The Raven’s hunched and partially hidden figure. To a casual passerby, the bird would’ve appeared as not much more than a ball of feathers and smoke. The closer we moved toward him, the more corporeal his form became. Winnie gazed down in amazement as his widely recognized high forehead and enlarged orbs peered out from the shadows. When their eyes met, enough electricity was generated to keep the lights on in Poughkeepsie for a year. The Raven stood up. He was the first to speak.

            “So, Poet P.I., you’ve obviously deduced the metaphysical proportions and transcendent truths of the sticky situation you stepped into.”

            “Easy for you to say, Raven, or should I say, Edgar…”

            “How could you be so sure?’ The Raven asked.

            “One can never be sure about such things,” I said. “Although, I had a fairly good hunch.”

            “Hunch or not, you’ve earned your reputation this time.”

            As I stood staring at the half-bird, half-man in the gradually brightening light of the alley, he began turning into who I was sure he’d become, Edgar Allan Poe. As I’d suspected, the full strength of early morning sunlight worked to transform him back into his true nature, using the reverse principle applied to vampires and sunlight – specifically the belief regarding direct sunlight being able to turn fanged supernatural beings into an unsightly pile of dust and bones.

            Instead of facing a shrouded corpse, what I had on my hands was a poet who had a taste for alcohol and opium, with deep-set eyes, a strange little mustache, and one of the largest foreheads I’d ever seen. And that was only half of what I was dealing with.

            At my other shoulder, where moments before there had stood a young woman poet and a spectacular nightclub entertainer, was one of the most memorable poets in American literature. Walt Whitman, with flowing gray hair and unkempt beard, stood slightly stooped, one hand in his pocket, wearing a wisely bemused grin on his rumpled features.

            I glanced from one to the other, unable to utter a word.

            Walt broke the silence.

            “Hey, Poet P.I., is that breakfast still on you?”

            “Yeah,” I said. “Order whatever you want. You look as hungry as a ghost.”

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