The Ballad of Paul Presti
Brian Cullman
Paul turned up at my door on 16th Street at three in the morning. He was out of breath and sweating, though it was cool outside. Maybe it was raining. I got him a glass of water. He put the guitar case down, but he kept holding onto it.
I got him another glass of water. He was trembling. “Some junkie….” he said. I waited. “Some junkie,” he said, “He had a knife. Tompkins Square Park.” He was quiet for a minute. “I hit him really hard. I think I fucked him up. I think I fucked him up badly. He wasn’t moving.” Was he after your guitar? I asked. Was he trying to get your guitar? Paul got very quiet. “No,” he said. “This is his guitar…” * * * I met Paul at JP’s, a club on 77th St and 1st Ave. The sound man, Tim Wright, told me about him. His playing was so powerful and so emotional, and he was finger picking a Strat in between rhythmic lurches and long, swirling solos. I loved that style of playing, which was uncommon then. Richard Thompson was the only player I knew of that did that. And Paul had never heard of him. I made him a cassette of 3 of Thompson's albums. When I met up with him a few days later, he’d already learned every song. * * * We started rehearsing a band. There was a heavy metal bass player and a very stoned drummer who managed a rehearsal space in a basement off of Ave A. We’d rehearse Tuesday nights when no one else was in there. It was a crappy space with low ceilings with steam pipes running across, lightbulbs dangling from a wooden beam, and no PA, but there was a pretty good drum kit, a bass amp and two Fender twin reverbs. And it was free. We weren’t good, but after 3 or 4 rehearsals we weren’t bad. At the last rehearsal, there was a flood. The building manager came running down, screaming at us to disconnect all our gear. It sounded like he was yelling BIG DOG!!! But he was probably screaming at us to unplug. Water started streaming out of the overhead light socket, a black cat bolted for the exit, and three feet of dirty water came pouring down the steps. Guitar cables, beer cans, notepads and song charts floated on the scummy water, the overhead lights flickered, and I held my guitar and my case over my head and waded up the stairs, Paul did the same. The bass player and drummer ran off toward Saint Marks Place without saying anything. Paul & I sat on the steps of the building and watched the sun go down. I looked at my watch. Paul seemed shaken. “You’re not going to leave, are you?” I must have looked puzzled. “You’re not going to leave.” It wasn’t a question. “You know how to do things. You can talk to people, have dinner, write stories. You know how to do things.” He held up his guitar. "This is the only thing I know how to do. This. If I can’t play, I’m lost." * * * There’s an unreleased song of mine that he plays on, and he’s on an album by The Holy Modal Rounders and on a tape by Marc Johnson & The Wild Alligators. And the sound is fine, you can hear that there’s a real power, that there’s some sort of magic if you listen hard enough, if you close your eyes. But the sound on those tapes and those records don’t capture the sheer physical heft of his playing or the wildness of his attack. When you were there in the room with him, in the studio or a club, it felt like you were being mugged by the sound, it was sexual, it was violent, it was beautiful, it was personal, it was anonymous, it was an avalanche, a roar, it was an animal with teeth and claws and strings and electricity, and the world was a jungle, the world was his jungle, the music was his music, and the music, the sound, could pick you up and shake you and pick your pockets and throw you down the stairs before picking you up and dusting you off and kissing your secrets one by one in a flurry of roses and promises, and then it was over, and it was just a lost, gangly man with a big nose and a ten dollar haircut fumbling for a cigarette. * * * Sometimes Paul would turn up at my building unannounced. Mostly he’d turn up unannounced, and if I wasn’t home, he’d sit on the couch in the lobby. There was an artist who lived on the ground floor, behind the elevators, past the mailboxes. She did beautiful but disturbing illustrations and made paper cut-outs that were slightly maniacal. They were often of fairy tales, but you wouldn’t want to show them to children. “I met your friend Paul,” she told me one evening as I was coming home. “I’ve seen him with you in the neighborhood.” I nodded. “He seemed so tired. I invited him in for tea,” she said. I had been to her apartment a few times. There was a futon on the floor and paints and brushes and scissors everywhere. She’d made tea and played old blues records. She told me that she’d hitch-hiked to Indiana in the early sixties to hear Howlin’ Wolf. She’d lived in Pennsylvania and supported herself for six months drawing insect genitalia for The Philadelphia Museum of Natural History. “Do you think it’s okay that I gave him the keys to my place?” I didn’t know what to say. “Do you think it’s okay?” “Have you already given him your keys?” I asked. She nodded. “Then I guess it’s okay.” She nodded. “He needs a place to go sometimes,” she said. We stood there a moment. “He likes tea,” she explained. * * * Years later, Paul was sent to a rehab facility in Hawaii. He was gone for six months. When he returned, he looked different. He had gained more than fifty pounds, mostly from an experimental drug he’d been given. He was not used to his size, and he kept knocking things over. He was manic, in a hyper mode that I’d never seen before, and he was frightening to be around. I’m not sure if his fingers were too chubby for the frets of his guitar, or if his brain simply didn’t translate motor information to his hands anymore. It was hard to tell. But he was constantly reaching for instruments, then hurling them away, as if they’d offended him * * * Soon after his return, he saw me on the street in Soho and followed me to a meeting with Ornette Coleman. I was trying to get Ornette to record a Stephen Foster song, ”Old Black Joe,” for a project I was working on. Ornette agreed to meet me at a club on Greene Street. Paul was carrying a mandolin, no case, just waving it around. I tried to shake him, but he stuck fast to me and pushed his way into the club (turns out it was a private event). Ornette was in a back room and seemed intrigued by the mandolin. “Ohhh, what’s that?” He reached out to touch it, and Paul pulled it away and lashed out. “It’s a mandolin, you asshole! Don’t you know anything?” Ornette wasn’t upset or put off. He and Paul bonded, over what I don’t know. But I never got to discuss the Stephen Foster project. * * * I don’t know where he was living. I don’t know if anyone was looking after him. He would turn up at my apartment and just sit on the floor. He couldn’t find a comfortable position. He’d get up and sit back down, maybe try perching on the couch before slumping against the wall. He’d look to see that there was a guitar within reach, but he just needed to know that it was there and have it within his field of vision. He didn’t want to listen to music. Sound hurt his ears and light hurt his eyes. He was on such a wild cocktail of drugs that he couldn’t sleep (though he’d nod off in the middle of a sentence and then snap back into consciousness a minute later). He had no sense of time, and he had no appointments (except with pills). He was suspicious of everyone and everything, but he couldn’t bear to be alone * * * Paul was taken to Beth Israel on East 16th St. I don’t know whether he’d had a seizure or had run amok or had checked himself in. Unlikely as that last choice sounds, he really might have done that…. I could see the hospital from my window, and sometimes I’d look out and try to imagine what floor he was on. I couldn’t get any information on the phone, so I walked over. It was only a two block walk, but I was reluctant to go. Paul was in a room cordoned off with thick grey curtains and in a bed that was too small for him. To make up for that, he was in a hospital gown that was too big. There were machines and wires everywhere, and in the hallway there were carts being pushed back and forth and bells going off constantly. I stayed for five minutes. I asked if he wanted anything. I have no idea what I meant by that, and neither did he. He just stared. There were no windows to look out of. A pretty young nurse walked in holding a tray and then walked back out, still holding the tray. The room smelled of cleaning products and loss. I left, and I didn’t go back. Once in a while, back home, I’d look out the window in the direction of Beth Israel. I wondered if that counted as a visit. * * * What I was told was that Paul would bum cigarettes from the nurses. This was the 1980’s, you could still smoke in hospitals. No one had told the nurses that he suffered from bouts of narcolepsy. One minute he’d be awake and waving his arms in the air, the next minute he’d be passed out. He bummed a cigarette from a nurse. She lit it for him. He fell asleep. The cigarette set fire to the sheets on his bed and to his hospital gown. Paul slept through the first minute of the fire, long enough to get second and third degree burns over most of his body before the fire could be extinguished. From there, it was all downhill * * * Paul turned up at my door on 16th Street at three in the morning. He was out of breath and sweating, though it was cool outside. Maybe it was raining. I got him a glass of water. He put the guitar case down, but he kept holding onto it. I got him another glass of water. He was trembling. “Some junkie….” he said. I waited. “Some junkie,” he said, “He had a knife. Tompkins Square Park.” He was quiet for a minute. “I hit him really hard. I think I fucked him up. I think I fucked him up badly. He wasn’t moving.” Was he after your guitar? I asked. Was he trying to get your guitar? Paul got very quiet. “No,” he said. “This is his guitar…” |