Did you ever see the man with the yellow balloon?
He used to walk around Lower Manhattan,
mostly with his head down, brow
quizzically grooved, usually in crowds.
I first saw him outside Port Authority in 2002.
Across 8th Ave, I saw the yellow balloon.
It bobbed like a bee above one tall flower.
I told Jeff and he didn’t believe me
but then Jeff and I saw him in the East Village,
E. 5th between Aves A and B;
we saw the whole dude;
he was wearing a khaki trench,
carrying a briefcase, minding his business.
A tallish guy, white, bald, maybe fifty.
Above his head the yellow balloon floated.
It was a helium balloon. A few inches of twine,
and a blue-and-orange headband
kept it from floating away. This alone
– a yellow balloon leashed to a Mets or Knicks
colored headband – would have been enough
never to forget, but that wasn’t even it;
there was a scrap of foil taped or glued
around the yellow balloon’s nozzle.
The guy had pinched up threads
so the foil looked screwable.
It was a fricking comic strip light bulb.
Dude was walking along E. 5th like that.
The rubber light bulb jittered and jerked in the wind,
shaking a yellow mood into the twilight.
I christened him “The Man with the Yellow Balloon.”
Jeff dubbed him “Dr. Light Bulb.”
We sat, as one did in 2002, at Sophies, a bar,
drinking $2 cans of Pabst.
Jeff had been in New York four years, but I,
I was a year older; his idea was Dr. Light Bulb
was a piece of one-man performance art
invented by Dr. Light Bulb himself, a unique soul
who lived with his mom in Queens.
Or Dr. Light Bulb had a street job
advertising tax services or a comedy club.
He stood on a corner for hours on end,
emitting a yellow beep of visual noise,
and his briefcase was full of pink and green fliers
that no human being has ever wanted.
He’d just finished his shift, so he was like
a waiter still wearing a necktie.
“Not bad,” I said. “Not bad.” I tilted my head
at a 22-year-old slant, and sucked on my cigarette,
a recent addition to my poet costume.
No, the man with the yellow balloon
was neither of those: he was loftier by far.
He was a twisted, silly, Gatsbian son of God.
His freaky idea hung above him like a yellow womb
and a whole person came out of it,
born into the street’s eyes ceaselessly.
The man sowed a merry confusion,
and the memories of the yellow balloon
he spread in minds were like apple seeds.
Yes, I said, and that’s not even mentioning
the “tongues of fire” thing. I stared up into the smoke
that clings to ceilings above 22-year-old poets.
I liked the yellow balloon better than Jeff.
Perhaps I liked it better than anyone.
When you’re newly in love with someone
you like near everything about them.
And I was so in love with New York City
I even liked its hot rank air
its subway entrances exhaled. I liked its pigeons
on the zigzag of every fire escape,
and the hundreds of strangers’ faces,
appearing and gone, and having such a face.
I stopped, back then, for any act of break dancing.
Like these things, the yellow balloon-bulb
struck me hard as a New York thing;
It sprung, ghostly as a mushroom,
out of the city’s anonymity,
out of the namelessness of one’s own face.
Anyway, after that night with Jeff
I carried the balloon around, front of my brain,
like a tiny flame in a pan. It amazed me.
I was amazed it was even intelligible.
A 20th century symbol of sudden knowledge,
(light -> Edison’s light bulb -> comic strip -> speech)
and here it was, worn out into the city
as a foil-nozzled yellow balloon.
It was like a symbol of a symbol.
Somehow it was not only possible, but real.
Anyway, I started looking out for the balloon.
Biking to my new job, in a joy of wind, trout leaping
in my thighs (on account of some new poem in my head),
I threaded Jeff’s yellow hand-me-down Peugeot
west on Houston through a traffic of cabs.
At red lights, I looked for a blip of yellow.
I looked for it above the masses of heads, jittering, sensitive
to the wind as a licked thumb.
I looked for it up the avenues, bopping others.
It was ok if I didn’t get to see it.
Other people, I thought, were getting to see it.
And I’d imagine them having seen it,
and it flashing upon their “inward eye”
before they slept, the sort of bright dot
a city day can disappear around.
I asked the people I talked to if they’d seen him,
if they’d seen the man with the yellow balloon.
I asked Jack the comedian. He said he had.
Down on Delancey by the Happiness Deli.
What was he doing? “Buying your mom a sandwich,”
said Jack. Jack had gotten an apartment
with Toby the Sex Addict, a hulking blond farm boy
who’d played minor league hockey
and now taught hockey lessons in Chelsea.
Jack had been in a month-to-month deal,
one of those plywood-room-in-an-industrial-space
situations that used to be what you thought of
when someone said he lived in Williamsburg.
That was how he met Toby, who was 25,
which seemed old to us. Toby was trying
to discover himself as a painter,
but the only paintings we ever saw him do
were watercolors of unsuspecting women
at the bar on Ludlow that used to be the piano store.
Toby’s brother was a manager; that’s how Toby got in.
We got in to keep an eye on Toby.
He would set up shop at a corner table,
and Jack and I would giggle like schoolchildren
watching as he walked up to women, ages 21-50,
holding his hideous portraits: “This is you.”
And yet he always found a taker.
Furious coupling noises plagued Jack’s every dawn.
He wore bags under his eyes.
Anyway, Toby thought the yellow balloon
sounded “beautiful,” even if he hadn’t seen it,
and for a night he added it to the air
above the heads of his smeared women.
And I have no idea why I include any of that,
but it was New York; it was the fall of 2002.
I asked Mal the boy genius poet
if he’d seen the yellow balloon; he was twenty
and lived across town with a mouthful of cavities
and a gorgeous collection of cigarette butts
a wheezing printer and papers everywhere in a crumbling
second story cave above a bar.
Mal hadn’t seen him, but was intrigued;
“Was the man wearing sunglasses?”
When I said he wasn’t, Mal was impressed.
How many times, one wonders, were calls
of “Eh Einstein, what’s the big idea?”
or “Eh buddy got any bright ideas?”
lobbed in his direction? Daily, it had to be daily.
And did he go out into the world daily?
Weekly? With Mal it dawned on me
that the balloon wasn’t the same balloon – a soft explosion
that should have happened earlier.
It had to be a new balloon each day.
It was the same headband, in all likelihood,
but it was a fresh yellow balloon, a new string.
Did he own a helium tank? Was it the same scrap of foil?
(Maybe he had a ball of foil and peeled,
each day, a scrap of foil off it, and wrapped
the fresh hope of a new balloon?)
My explanations grew only more elaborate.
Because there would come a point
where each yellow balloon would pucker
inward like a dying pear. After a day
of being buffeted, each balloon would droop.
Towed along, it would broadcast that a man
had an idea that didn’t pan out.
Or maybe the man never let it get to that.
Maybe he cut the string, and with his hand visoring his eyes,
watched his yellow balloons, like released fish,
one at a time, rise between buildings.
I wanted to find the man and talk to him.
I wanted to know who he was and why.
I told all this to Jade the playwright
(she wasn’t yet Jade the novelist)
in her darkened first floor bedroom/office/living room;
she wrinkled the corners of her eyes
sucked her Camel, loosed a cumulus.
“No you don’t,” she said. “That dude’s the last dude
you want to have a conversation with.”
How’d she know? Because she’d seen him around,
thought he might be useful in a play,
like he or someone like him might walk by or something,
be a topic of conversation or something.
So she’d asked Ellen about him; Ellen was 33.
She’d bartended at Mars Bar, amazingly,
since she was 20; the whole Lower East Side
was in love with her. Jeff was; Jack was;
I pretended I wasn’t. Ellen was an expert
in the whack-jobs Bowery east to Ave D.
(They are already near entirely gone.)
Apparently the man has been, off and on,
walking around in a yellow balloon for a decade.
And for a decade, when asked,
he’s had basically the same reply.
He claims he’s looking for his next big idea.
He has a logic: in the way it’s easier to do something
once you’ve lied and said you’ve already done it
by ambulating in a foil-nozzled yellow balloon
“the light bulb is able to come on.”
He says this all with a straight face, a stern
Eastern European sort of mien, then smiles.
He’s an artist, he says, and an ethno-sociologist
and a professor of (the destruction of)
metaphysics. He dabbles in film photography. He has
a card. And money, surprisingly. He talks offhandedly
about his gallerist; his gallerist this, his gallerist that;
he doesn’t have a gallerist. He has a seat
at the bar at Max Fish, and his yellow balloon
wiggles under the ceiling fan. He waits.
In time, he finds takers, doe-eyed whimsical types,
with hair dyed silver or pink,
who love the idea of themselves acting
like transfixed two-year-olds at the sight of a damn balloon.
Ellen got it from Norman who got it from
blind Steve that the Yellow Balloon Man
squatted his way into a deed on Ave C
(this was back in the ’80s). He sold big.
Now he takes the train in from Jersey.
He fashions himself as…hmmm…a success.
More than that. He situates himself as a master,
spin-doctors the cracks in his face by reference
to Warhol’s Factory, as if he was there.
Maybe he was. Who cares. His yellow balloon
ain’t art. It’s the farthest thing from it.
It grows, like a tailed sperm, out of a lowness.
It grows, over and over, of those urges.
– 2006, 2011, 2019