High Pockets

Herman Melville lived at 111 Fourth Avenue. You could, somewhat inaccurately, put it that way. That is the address of the building which replaced his house. The house is gone and an apartment building is there now. A co-op, really.

I don't know what immediately succeeded the house. But in 1920 the site was filled by a large, more or less white building, which contained what must have been an impressive men's custom tailoring operation. That was the building that became an apartment co-op. The conversion to co-ops happened in 1980. Although there are only twelve or fourteen floors, the building is tall. Each floor has very high ceilings. The apartments are expensive.

The plaque next to the building's entrance goes on at some length about the International Tailoring Company, the building's original occupant. "From the early to mid-20^th century," the plaque says, "the company's 'tailors to the trade' made suits, topcoats, tuxedos, and other clothing sold by merchant tailors across the U.S. and abroad."

There were likely very few, if any, of those "tailors to the trade" who knew anything about the subject in the last two lines of the plaque. They provide minimal information. They are brief but austerely moving. They say: "Herman Melville lived in a townhouse on this site from 1847 to 1850. He began writing Moby Dick while living here."

I had passed that building many times without reading the plaque. It is on my route to the Cooper Station Post office. There is so much on the plaque about the architect of the building and the original tenants and the co-op conversion that I just never bothered to read to the end. Once I did, I would stop when I passed that spot and think about Melville for a moment. A little like lighting a candle. Mentally.

When I told High Pockets about where Melville had started the writing of Moby-Dick he grew quiet and reflective and didn't say anything for a rather long time. We were sitting on a stone ledge on the top of Mount Greylock in Massachusetts. "He must have thought he could get away from something if he moved up here to the Berkshires," he said. "It's not a very good place to become a farmer. Mountains and all. And not an obvious place to finish a book about whales either." The two of us sat silently turning that over for a while.

I had just met High Pockets. We had started talking because my five-year-old son had picked him up. My wife and I had been telling the boy for months not to talk to strangers. Mostly he didn't. But this day he had forgotten. He was exploring the little recreation area at the top of the mountain. There was a small refreshment building and a water fountain and some views of massive distances and intriguing perspectives, colored blue with mist, shaded green by thousands of trees. Some of the trees were brown and dying around the tops and looked as if they were afflicted with the first stages of a blight but the overall effect was still green. High Pockets had said hello and our son had been captivated by the tall, Lincolnesque man with sunken cheeks and unkempt hair. "You can call me High Pockets," the tall man said. And we all did. I never learned any other name for him.

"My wife died," High Pockets said when I asked him about his journey. I expressed sympathy. "It took me a while to recover from that. My friends said I had to do something. They didn't have any suggestions really." High Pockets had picked up a stick and was drawing circles in the dirt at our feet. "I've always been a hiker, you know. Some of my friends took up hunting. I couldn't abide that. Fishing was a little better but not much. So I decided I would hike the Appalachian Trail. All the way from Georgia. I've been talking to people all along...