Michael Martone

Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and grew up there.  He attended Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana, where, every Thanksgiving holiday of his tenure there, he borrowed his mother’s car, a 1970 beige and brown vinyl-topped Chevrolet Camaro, and with his friend, Dan Cooreman, drove to New York City.  They always left late Tuesday afternoon, after their final classes, taking turns as they drove through the night, through Ohio and along the dark and sometime snowy I-80, avoiding the pricey Pennsylvania Turnpike, the Camaro’s massive 350 engine’s consumption of fuel necessitating the rapid spelling of the two drivers as they no sooner started but they then had to stop for gas.  In the morning, they skirted the always-misty water of the Delaware Water Gap, dropping through New Jersey, into the city over the George Washington Bridge, drifting down Riverside through Hell’s Kitchen, pulling up at last on 43rd Street to the door of the Hotel Carter.  Martone waited in the high revving Camaro, its fuel gauge smoothly indicating the steady and speedy depletion of the gas tank, as Cooreman checked them in to the decrepit hotel, its 42nd Street entrance long ago boarded up against the decay of that street.  Martone ignored the obscene shouts and gestures of the teams of teamsters impatient to emerge from the Times loading docks opposite the hotel, now blocked by his conspicuous idling.  A reason for staying at the Carter was its ready access to the Times.  Each year Martone and Cooreman retook the tour through the newspaper where, years later, Cooreman ended up working as an editor of its financial pages, checking the long gray stock columns of Dow Industrial names.  The tour ended in the composing room where the room-sized linotype machines rumbled, coaxed by frowning operators to transform melting lead ingots into searing slugs of movable type that then were slotted into frames to be printed as the paper’s pages.  The tour guides always shouted the message, reiterated on printed signs surrounding the machines, that one should not talk to the operators as this distracted them from their missions of accuracy at the ancient keyboards.  One time, however, an operator, perhaps on a break, asked Martone’s group who they were, their names, and then turning back to the machine, deftly struck out several slugs of tourists’ names he told them to take once the metal had cooled in the bin.  Martone received his own slug, enotraM, completely reversed, the letters themselves backward.  He kept it in his pocket the rest of that trip which included stage seats for a production of Equus with Anthony Perkins playing the sad psychologist, the opening of a Tom Stoppard play called Travesties, and a very rainy Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade Martone viewed near Harold Square where the frequently stopping participants would take off their raingear in anticipation of the few brief animated moments before the television cameras in front of the store.  Martone’s habit during such visits was to open the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York magazine, and The Village Voice to their various entertainment sections and spread the schedules of daily events on the sagging single bed in his room at the Hotel Carter.  It made a bedspread print with print.  The exercise always reminded Martone of the limitations of time and money, that it was impossible, of course, to do it all, much less do much of anything that one could do on this long holiday weekend in the city.  New York, then, was covered with graffiti, much of it stunningly artistic spray-painted chiaroscuro, embossed with highly-stylized and brightly-colored letters on the canvas of what seemed like several strata of previous rendered tags.  Every surface was scoured by writing that was then over-written so that the strokes of the letters Martone stared at (during the subway rides or over lunch on the counter-tops of delis or on glass walls of phone booths while he made his nightly call back home to his mother) had to be unraveled patiently as if he were untangling balled strands of Christmas tree lights.  The graffiti was not profane.  Everyone always said there were no dirty words, though Martone was hard-pressed to see how one could tell that the italic tangles, the cursive knots contained no curses.  It was an urban camouflage of simple names and perhaps sometimes numbers.  The numbers, he realized, were abbreviated addresses, a street or avenue name.  Martone took the 1 train uptown to see Grant’s Tomb getting off at 86th Street into another neighborhood of the familiar flaking cacophony of paint and magic marker, signs defaced by signs, the plaster plastered over. It was a running fence of burbling color as high as one could reach, channeling him the few blocks to the mausoleum overlooking the Hudson River, the late afternoon chop on the water reflecting its own brand of vandalism.  The building appeared to Martone to be a ruin in the tiered shape of a frosted wedding cake supported only by a cantilevered truss of grimy alphabets adhering to the stonework like a web trellised into a smudged and smeared cocoon of a million names, an accretion of signatures, a kind of fat flat black reef made up of hollowed out husks of letters climbing the walls in scallops and swirls, wrapping up the columns like ivy, ivy intertwined with real climbing vines, so that the one actually carved inscription, “Let Us Have Peace,” appeared to float, bobbing on the crayoned waves of a forest canopy coating the lintel.  On the plaza before the wreck, sitting on a recently added but inexplicable modernist mosaic bench, its shards grouted with scribbled pointing, Martone tried to read the building, decipher its theatrical message, the drama of time and death and decay, no doubt, but also of the sheer volume of names, a kind of infinite puzzle of the infinite, a Victorian engine of memory with its exhaust of beautiful babble.  The tomb was quoting the most famous mausoleum, that wonder of the world, at Hallicarnassus.  Martone knew this because back in Indianapolis, where he was enrolled in school, he liked to walk on the mall in the center of the city, visiting its pristine monuments and memorials including the Civil War obelisk, the vehicle park of surplus tanks and cannon waiting to be shipped by the American Legion to the front yards of VFW posts and stadiums and coliseums all over the country, and the Great War Mausoleum, with its cenotaphs listing the rolls of dead Hoosiers, boasting that it too was modeled on the very same tomb of ancient Asia Minor.  Returning from New York, Martone again walked through the cold empty streets of Indianapolis.  All of the marble, all of the granite, all of the limestone of the city glowed in the slanting winter light.  The sun skidded over the skin of ice in the reflecting pool as Martone worked his way through the deserted forests of flagpoles, between the herds of equestrian statues resonating in the stinging wind.  The drained pools and fountains, their bottoms painted a watery blue, empty, like everything else, of defacement, not even a heart with some addition of initials.  The only names were those officially chiseled in the stone or standing in relief on rubbed bronze plaques. At the mausoleum, Martone took out his slug of type, a souvenir of the most recent time he had spent in New York, and an inkpad acquired for the occasion.  He inked the reversed Roman letters of his name, a headline, 12 point, and then after looking around applied it to the blank-page plinth at the base of the War Memorial.  The letters now reading right seemed to take, drying in the cold wind, the ink advertised as indelible.