End of September

Sleeping fitfully, as usual. Even the quiet of nighttime here isn’t quiet; the usual drunken shouting walk home of a group of friends, at what I guessed was 2am, although it could have been later, was the first aural parade to march into my dreams. That was followed by a collection of trucks crashing over the metal plates in the highway known as Second Avenue. They came and went at regular intervals with the traffic. Around 7am, the neighbors I can see through the window were having a spirited discussion about something that was only loud enough to wake me up, rather than to inform me. They left finally – to where? Golf? An outing? I thought they were all gone, they I looked up to see a dark figure skittering past, and disappearing darkly like a bug back into a corner of the apartment that I could not see. I’ve spotted a woman there, tall and blond, a contrast to her stocky male companion, who I only mostly see from the back, as he slumps in a kitchen chair, partially blocked by a statue of the Buddha.

My new downstairs neighbors seem to be another set of this pairing – tall blond woman, and shorter, dark haired man. I nearly ran into her as she was coming out with some old game boxes – FSU monopoly, as in Florida State University, I’m guessing – for recycling. This building is a little, or a lot, like Dorm 2.0, as they say over here for anything new, as though sticking software development numbers on something makes it especially modern. Everyone lands here right after college, drawn no doubt to the cheapish rent, decent location, and lively world of wooden paneled bars that show college football, right next door to an assortment of restaurants that deliver food, or offer brunches with unlimited mimosas for an extra 15 dollars. You can literally drink yourself into oblivion, crawl up to bed around the corner, and be out on the streets again by twelve to ease the hangover with some badly prepared eggs, made by the mostly Hispanic chefs and kitchen staff who swing down on the 4 or 5 train from the Bronx to keep all these scions of suburbia well watered and fed.

During the week, they all scurry off to their banking jobs, looking sharp in button downs and blouses, so they don’t mind so much that the street is rattled with explosions from the subway construction. Generally, they seem so determined to be urban and grown-up, one step away from the fixed opinions of their parents, that they don’t notice much, and they find it hard to negotiate the streets when they walk either with a cell phone into which they are tapping important messages, or with their friends three abreast. My street also contains the NY Republican Club; an ugly room that you can peek into as you pass, decorated outside with the youngish, shortish haired, white male symbols of a viewpoint, who clutch highball glasses, smoke, and inspect the passersby without catching anyone’s eye. Park Avenue is a few aerobic steps away, containing a collection of family parcels of blond haired and extremely clean children, being herded off to school, sometimes by mothers who stand in groups of three discussing outings, or playgroups, or gossip, sometimes by fathers looking slightly harried at this impediment to a direct route to the office, sometimes by nannies who mostly say nothing. The other day I walked by a doorman helping a very good looking older man open his umbrella to step out from the safety of the awning into the rain. Our eyes met for a moment; perhaps he was aware of both the continuity of his good looks, as well as the delightful staging of master/servant his unwieldy umbrella had produced. I believe I looked away first. And as I walked further away, I wondered what we would have to say to each other, if a situation for conversation ever did arise. The superficial similarities of possible shared schooling, or cultural capital, would no longer be enough, I thought, if they ever were. The economic distances were now too great, the choices made by our families and ourselves too divergent.

And as I walked by the funeral home where my grandmother was given her final send-off, I wondered, yet again, why so much seemed to have conspired to land me here, in a place that seemed at once both completely familiar and completely alien.  Each sensation of complacency and isolation followed the other, in an odd swirling dance, the way the leaves falling from the trees would have moved if there were any breeze. 

New York's a Ghost Town in the Summer

New York is a ghost town in the summer. And it’s always a ghost town to me. Yes, there are the parts swarming with tourists, the horses looking for understanding as they pull at their sharp silver metal bits, the implacable wish fulfillment of the folks from the towns driving the whip as the carriage pulls out into traffic. The kids pulling on arms to see the zoo. The catalog-dressed families, neat and rigid, taking pictures not too far away from the hotel. The children climbing the statues – the statues where I played, where I made sure my son played. I’m up there still, and so is he, bumping his head on the Alice in Wonderland statue. There are the benches where I didn’t sit because you didn’t sit there. There’s the plate glass of the restaurant I used to eat at, the façade of the department store I used to be brought to for new, crisp clothes, idling in between the cosmetic counters while adult purchases of creams were made. The myriad samples that came out with a word. I’ve never gotten so many, but that world is dead. I can’t recreate it, but it swirls around me. That corner where I waited in the rain for the friend that never came, the window of the bar that invited me to look in, like an abyss, a time machine that clicked with every part of my memory, and shook me through. The deep earthquake of the perfectly fitting piece.

There is no present here; there is only the so-called voice of the past, which doesn’t seem to whisper as much as it turns my head to look while a shadow moves past and goes. And then we are back in the present, and I might as well be on another planet, because nothing is recognizable and there’s no place for me. I stare at the present and it ignores me, doesn’t turn my head to look at anything, except the hawk swirling above 79^th Street, making neat circles between the buildings, going up but only so high. It’s me, equally unable to escape, as to explain why I stay.

It’s a place that only makes sense when it reminds me of the past. When they play the right music, the dancers on their skates look like they’ve been doing it since the 70s. It’s the last time anything here was normal for me, and that’s definitely the wrong word. But the tragedy of it all, the colors, the dancers and dangers moved together to the same beat, a giant heaving mess when a woman stopped me to ask “where did I get my shoes?” in rhythmic tones of respect, no fear, a shared appreciation for glittery things uptown and down. When I lean over the fence, my heartbeat slows and I take a deep breath. There is a reason to survive. The smile of the man moving his hips perfectly to the beat makes me want to dance. I can’t help wondering if the woman in her polo dress with her button-down husband and neat baby with its own stroller feels like this is her time. I turn away.

Then there are the places that remind me of somewhere else, the cafes with dogs so reminiscent of other cafes with other dogs. Not so much litter. Not so much of anything that really fits, and a crowded insistent retention of place that doesn’t remind me of any café I ever sat in. The dogs grab for each other and food, and their owners stand in the middle of the path, and the coffee drinkers look miserable, and then my head is turned again, and it’s the past, and I’m walking through the Sheep Meadow, before it was protected with its chain link fence, and I’m walking with dogs who are gone, and people who are vanished into the world, even if we’re Facebook friends. Friends with a name – from then – and I’ve been so many places and things I don’t know what we would say to each other if we did meet. Would he remember the giant pyramid of beer cans in his room at the top of the town house, his housekeeper reminding him to eat. We were 15. He drank. I smoked. He probably still drinks. I’ve joined him.

Restaurants, bars, funeral homes, department stores, apartment buildings. Parks and statues, cabs and horses, windows and doors. The last two pretend to open, the past a sheeted wall between me and the interior. Every granite façade is a link, every architect’s dream another haunted house. And around the swirl of ghosts, the actual reality of the city crumbles. It’s a soulless wreck, potential and promise reduced to two colors that don’t match. There are no bells here, except the one that tolls “I told you so”, no lengthening shadows except those of the passersby who refuse to relinquish any part of their sidewalk territory. Perhaps it’s because I am invisible, just like the sights I see before me that no one else can share. Soulless and empty, a series of fragments held together by the dead. Then they turn me again, and I’m a puppet in their hands, and all I see is the past. I keep thinking there must be a message, some idea that links it all together, but in the rush for the train, for the bus, for the sticky green pieces of paper that are slowly being electronically dripped into an account I can’t touch, I can’t hear it. Just when I think there is something there, I’ve been thrust along with the crowd, I’ve been awakened by the alarm clock, the explosion, the siren, the garbage truck. There is no room here for reflection, in this linear conveyor belt, where stepping out of step invokes annoyance and pity, pity for the ignorance of the rules of the game. It’s a carnival, with a grimacing clown pushing you into the tent, repeating “play play play” until they break your will or your mind.

It’s a graveyard of unfixed stones, every nameless plot fed into a massive machine that drives people who think they’ll avoid it. I won’t forget the names, the stories, and the past they escaped, even if it’s threatening to swallow me up. I won’t forget, I call out, and they smile at me, the placating rictus of the night nurse.

“Play the game” is all I hear. “You won” or “you lost” over and over again, but for no reason that makes any sense. I try to figure it out, and it begins again. “Play the game.” I know the rules, but I don’t like them, even the ones in my favor, although most of them aren’t. I always knew that the winners cheated, I watched them do it, I watched them teach me how.

America is the end of the world, the last place. It’s cursed, no doubt by those from whom it was stolen. Or maybe it’s just New York, but when I think of Cleveland or Baltimore, I’m not that convinced. I’m old enough to remember the Connecticut shore as countryside, and old enough to have seen it destroyed, miles and miles of derelict factories and tarmac covered parking lots where the bright spot is a suburban mini-city of insurance companies. It’s death, it’s been killed, and it’s another graveyard. America the Beautiful. We’re told to keep saying it in Orwellian fashion, because it’s going going gone, and the lie is all we’ve got now. The pain caused by thinking it through is enough reason for most people to either stop, or draw back confusedly, like a horse from smoke, or a loud horn. The more you fight it, the bigger the pain gets, and it’s a thread out that I’m clinging to, like in the myth, volume down to zero on the constant “play the game, you’re crazy if you don’t.”

It’s a big soundscape of big buildings and screeching sounds, the soundtrack to the stories of success and failure, success and failure, failure, and failure. This is what you did wrong. America, land of the self-help book. If I’d only done this. Next time. Next time. Next time, the song everyone sings when they don’t hear “you won.” “How was your day?” “Good.” “Bad.” “Good.” “Bad.” We’ve gotten over the hump. It’s Monday. It’s Friday. Here, weekends are another excuse to try to win. We’ll get up early. We will run. We will do internships. Children will watch their nannies talk on the cell phone to their own families, their own friends, while they stand there, breathtaking on the verge of understanding the big lie they’ve been born into, heartbreaking as they hold their expensive bear, and look for light in the people rushing for the train, the bus, the cab, again and again. The guy who hands out the free daily paper tries to energize us, fill us with his energy. He gets quieter and quieter. Then a new person comes, and the cycle begins again. No one notices. He’s the newspaper guy. He’s already lost, according to the thin woman with blunt cut blonde hair and strappy flat sandals and a pencil skirt. He doesn’t quite see it the same way, but she’s already pushed past him. Her train is coming in, and today will be the day she wins. She feels it.

Insecurity and feelings of panic are chemically induced illnesses, according to the website. We need to have sympathy for those afflicted by this illness, especially if it’s ourselves. The bright headline that announces “THINGS YOU CAN DO TO WIN OVER DEPRESSION” turns out to be a dismal menu of symptoms, followed by a check that says drugs and doctors at the bottom, with the total, and a Thank You For Coming in neat red script. You went here, you bought it, and even if you try to forget what you did, the cookies in your email, in your computer will remember. You can try to erase it, like the time you looked at that strange website with fleshy close-ups, but your spam has your number. Your personality is writ large in the spam folder. At least someone’s noticed. Even if it was supposed to be your shameful little secret.

If only you’d read the book. The one that told you how to raise your children like a rich man, discipline them like a bitch, diet like a…well, like one of the many people who really are starving. The woman who just walked past me – she won the game, obviously. There’s no one around for blocks that’s as thin as she is. Her eyes bulge out and her doe-like bone structure puts me in mind of the plastic skeleton that hung in my Science classroom. I wonder if her invisible stone will say “I won – for a day.” She’s too short to be a model, and not turned out enough to be a ballerina. Life’s a bitch. Play the game.

We all keep creating our caves of reality, and crying bitter tears when we see the light. Our children shake before they sleep, frightened of the endless loop that awaits. The moments where it seems we are alive, really, break through, and we see beauty, we’re desperate to stay there, clinging on. It’s oxygen, and I take a deep breath, and pray what I feel the rest of the time isn’t really true, as I get ready to submerge again.

It’s not winning I’m worried about, but surviving.

Writers write, right?

Once more into the fray.  Writers write.  That's what someone told me, that's what someone told them, and so we go.  I suppose it's true, although you might argue that even if you...oh never mind.  I just reconsidered what I was about to say.  And isn't that the age-old question?  Should I really...say, do, think, act, eat, drink...whatever it is, perhaps at the minute of self-consciousness, we stop.  Or perhaps we carry on, fuelled by our audience, or lack of one.  There's always that point you reach, especially while writing, where you just get tangled up in yourself.  Sometimes it leads to genius.  Whatever anger or frustration or emotion propelled you there in the first place ignites.  Sometimes...it's just a big tangled mess. 

My big tangled mess has effectively shut me up for too long, so I am mixing my metaphors, grabbing the reins, patting the horse, and riding off once again across the empty prairie of page.  It sounds so romantic that way.  I'll ignore the fact that I've barely had a lucid creative thought since I set foot on these shores, for whatever reason, and pat and coax out of hiding whatever might still be around.  Maybe all those thoughts are on that other dimension, as the singer sang, as my iPhone revealed to me late last night when for some reason I flicked through my photos, and had the odd feeling that the half of the new photo that revealed itself had somehow been waiting for me to find it.  I'm looking again, hang the expense. 

Writers write.  But I'd like to think I am doing this because I have to, not because I need to justify my existence in the face of an extremely uninterested world.  What topics shall I cover?  Oh, the usual ones, political and social ranting, perhaps mixed with obsessions.  You know.  Clever rants, interspersed with whimsy. Or not.  Anyway, there is nothing more dull than writing about what one is going to write about, so I'll stop.

What I do want to consider for a moment, before I stop, and actually do what I am supposed to be doing...wait.  That's an interesting concept.  Why don't I think this is exactly what I am supposed to be doing, exactly why I am here?  Like the Pink Floyd song, where no one tells you to run, I have to wonder if that's part of the problem.  A couple of years ago, I suddenly felt like I'd been let off the leash, and produced something that changed my life in many ways, even if it changed nothing for anyone else.  I'll contemplate permissions now, without getting into the equally sticky and boring area of transgression, and send this off into space, which really has to be better than the bottom of the drawer, under the socks, particularly that one with the hole in it, and return with my thoughts, equally run through, in order to exist.

Writers write.