Phil Cohen War Stories: Visions of Valerie
War Stories By Phil Cohen
During the winter of 1970 at the age of nineteen, circumstances had left me homeless and broke on the streets of New York. A stack of arrest warrants associated with driving illegal gypsy cabs the previous year made finding steady work nearly impossible.
A friend was seeing a girl named Vic who lived in the East Village and she invited me to share the space until I was back on my feet. It was nearly midnight when I exited the subway with an old knapsack containing a few items of clothing and carrying my guitar. I walked for half-a-mile until finding the previously described metal door within a row of tenements on 12th Street between Avenues A and B. “The Studio” was painted across it in large white letters.
I knocked and Vic let me in. She was about to retire and pointed to a ladder leading up to a loft, saying I could sleep there. I climbed the wooden steps, found myself in a large area covered with several double mattresses, removed my clothes and nestled under some blankets.
I looked around and saw to my surprise that a naked girl was in the bed next to mine, her eyes wide open and regarding me calmly. I introduced myself, chatted about my adventures for a few minutes, and then we made passionate love all night. She was twenty-two and I fancied myself beginning a relationship with an older woman.
Valerie was one of the most gorgeous girls I’d ever encountered, with soft orange curls framing an oval face and piercing turquoise eyes. Her beauty was all-the-more enticing because it portrayed a gifted soul and unique journey, rather than resembling a thousand other pretty women. The next morning, as she rummaged through a chest of drawers on the lower level looking for clothes, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. “Let me go panhandle for a couple of hours,” she told me, “and then I’ll take us to breakfast.”
By 10 a.m. we were sitting in a diner eating eggs and drinking coffee, while having our first real conversation. Valerie was from the Bronx―a sweet, tough working-class girl who’d escaped an abusive childhood in her teens and learned to survive on the street. She subsisted entirely by panhandling and was quite successful. Even conservative businessmen, staring into her mysterious green eyes and inviting smile, found it hard to refuse.
When we returned to “The Studio” I asked where the bathroom was and learned she didn’t have one. The one large room contained a sink and bathtub out in the open, but no toilet. Valerie handed me a key to the building next door, telling me there were facilities at the end of the hallway. During the day this represented only a minor inconvenience but struggling with a key in the dark of night was a different story. The East Village was overflowing with predatory drug addicts and had the worst crime statistics of any neighborhood in America. “If you wake up at midnight and have to go, use the bathtub,” she told me. “I’ll rinse it out in the morning.”
Vic didn’t return that evening and I learned she’d unexpectedly moved out for reasons unrelated to my arrival.
Over the next few days I discovered Valerie had a brilliant, philosophical mind and was a talented poet. She listened while I played guitar every evening and wrote songs about her. Our sensibilities were very similar and our bond continued to grow. Unlike me, she took refuge in pot and LSD but didn’t mind that I abstained. One evening she threw a book down on the empty bed beneath the loft. “Read this,” she authoritatively stated. “It’s a book about artists.” I picked up the Day on Fire, dramatizing the life of 19th century outlaw poet Author Rimbaud.
Deep within, Valerie was like a fragile glass unicorn that could shatter at the slightest impact. But her exterior was tough as nails and she feared no one. Late one night we were awakened by loud pounding on the metal door. Rather than ignore it, she threw a t-shirt over her naked body, scrambled down the ladder and opened the door.
“Where the fuck do you come off knocking on my door at this hour?” she screamed at a Hispanic man.
“I just need to borrow the key to the bathroom next door. I’ll bring it right back.”
“I ain’t giving you no damn key, motherfucker! Fuck you! You woke me up! Don’t ever come here again!” my new girlfriend shouted while slamming the door in his face.
Our daily routine began with Valerie leaving to panhandle. When I offered my company to watch her back she refused. “I know how to take care of myself,” she told me. “Besides, a pretty girl alone gets a lot more sympathy.” In the evening we’d walk down Avenue A to 7th Street and have dinner at Leshkos, a small Polish restaurant owned and primarily patronized by immigrants. They served authentic cuisine from back home at affordable prices, and at the time were one of the Lower East Side’s best kept secrets. The establishment was located across the street from Tompkins Square Park, a notorious hangout for junkies and street gangs.
Already familiar with Leshkos from previously living in the East Village, I was accustomed to grabbing a seat at the counter, ordering pierogi as an appetizer and then enjoying Kielbasa with hot sauerkraut. But as I reached for a stool on our first visit, Valerie stopped me by declaring, “I don’t eat at counters. There’s tables over there by the window,” sounding like an affluent woman from uptown asserting her status. I wrote a song that began: She does not eat at counters when she spends her panhandled dimes…
Valerie never hesitated to get in someone’s face and speak her mind, but on occasion her roughly-presented insights were infused with wisdom. One night as we strolled back home on Avenue A, I was approached by a pleasant young man asking for a handout and I gave him a quarter.
“Thanks. I really needed that,” he told me. “I’ve been saving up for a hit of speed and this really helps.”
As we walked away I remarked, “Dammit. If I’d known he wanted the money for drugs and not food, I wouldn’t have given him anything.”
Valerie pivoted and stared into my eyes. “Who the fuck do you think you are to judge him?! Let me tell you something. There are two types of people in this world: People who have choices and people who don’t have choices. Maybe he’s one of those who never had a choice. So fuck you for trying to judge him!”
After several days of contemplating this encounter, I had to acknowledge that, all positive-belief systems aside, she was spot-on right. My partner had a brutally honest vision of the real world. I’ve always remained grateful for this moment and have on occasion cited her perspective about choices.
For three weeks Valerie and I shared paradise but then occasional quarrels turned into daily fights, as often happens when sensitive, angry street kids get together. During the next three weeks we shredded each other’s brains into confetti. One night, after visiting friends, I arrived back at “The Studio" around 2 a.m. Valerie was awake and sitting on the lower bed beneath the loft. “You have to go,” she said. “This isn’t working. I need you to leave.”
“OK,” I said. “I understand. I’ll find somewhere else to stay tomorrow.”
“No,” she replied. “You have to leave now.”
“But it’s 2 a.m. and I don’t have any money,” I told her. “Where am I supposed to go?”
“I don’t know,” she said firmly. “But I need you out of my space now.”
I emerged on the dimly lit crime-ridden streets with a guitar and knapsack across my back, and began walking up 12th Street feeling very exposed, as if I were wearing a sign that read please mug me. Surrendering direction to the moment, I headed uptown and west for two hours, eventually finding myself in Times Square. As a last resort, I placed a collect call to friends with an apartment on the upper west side and then bummed sufficient change to get on the subway.
Following a twenty-minute wait, I boarded an empty car on the Broadway Local and took my customary seat on the two passenger bench in the far corner, as the long ride to 116th Street began. Two stops later an obese man with a deranged look on his face entered and despite the availability of seats, squeezed in beside me, his enormous girth forcing me into a narrow fraction of the sitting space. He didn’t attempt to communicate but my survival instincts were on high alert.
I began to get up as the doors opened at my stop but suddenly felt the man’s powerful arms around me, pulling me back down to my seat. “DON’T LEAVE ME! DON’T LEAVE ME!” he bellowed repeatedly in a deep mournful voice as I struggled to break free. I realized that he was much stronger than me with something in mind that wasn’t good, and that the doors would shut in three seconds. Summoning a desperate burst of energy I pulled away and made it through the doors just as they were closing.
Two years later, I was running errands in midtown Manhattan and ran into Valerie on the street. She seemed genuinely glad to see me. “Are you still living at The Studio?” I asked.
“No. I got some clerical work at the Village Voice and rented an apartment in Chelsea. Here’s my phone number if you want it.”
A few days later, I called from a payphone. “Do you wanna hang out?” I asked.
“What do you mean, do I wanna hang out? You sound like a fuckin’ drug dealer.”
“I just meant do you wanna get together?” Without getting a response to my question we chatted aimlessly for a few minutes and hung up. There goes round two with Valerie, I thought to myself.
A couple more years passed and I again stumbled into Valerie while shopping in midtown. The odds of running into someone twice on a crowded New York street, in a neighborhood where neither lived nor worked, were ten million to one. This time we talked for twenty minutes and have been close friends ever since.
Valerie’s Chelsea apartment was on 21st Street between 8th and 9th Avenue, in a working class neighborhood situated between the Village and Hell’s Kitchen. We had both been released from the degradation of poverty into what Jack London described as the abyss of manual labor, which can be interpreted to mean any tedious, low-paying work. She had a clerical desk at the Voice and I was driving medallion taxis.
I began visiting about two nights per month, carrying my guitar and a bottle of gin. Valerie’s voice was as beautiful as her face and we sang together until 3 a.m., getting totally drunk in the process. Finally, we’d both squeeze under the covers of her single bed. We’d be affectionate and cuddle but despite the spark still being there, neither of us ever tried to take things further. Perhaps we were both afraid of ruining a perfectly good friendship that was destined to last forever.
I got to know and understand Valerie on a much deeper level as we shared the most intimate details of our lives and struggle to survive in this world. I discovered that she became overloaded very easily. I could be in the middle of a sentence about something important and she’d cut me off saying, “I can’t hear anymore right now.” I’d always tell her it was okay because I understood. Having limited input thresholds is a common trait among those who’ve broken free from a dysfunctional childhood, and forever carrying the inner burden of trying to process what happened to them.
Late one night as we stood by her bed preparing to sleep I asked, “Do you think I’m ever gonna get any recognition as a writer?”
She stared deeply into my blue eyes and said, “Unless the universe is a cosmic joke.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“It means that for someone to have a dream and be as passionate and driven about it as you, if nothing ever came of it, the universe would have to be a cosmic joke.”
I stroked her cheek and we lay down together.
During 1976, I took Valerie to the movies and we watched Taxi Driver, an experience that really hit home as I was driving cabs at night like the main character. Every criminal and drug fiend in the film instantly reminded us of someone we both knew from the old days.
PART II – The Hand of Fate Points South