Things fall together
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The ceiling on the tomb of Ramses VI – who reigned around three thousand years ago, and was buried near Tutankhamen in the Valley of Kings – shows the sun being swallowed by Nuit, goddess of the night, and re-emerging from her womb as Khepri.
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• • •
Le G. At night, after hours, the chairs start dancing and get so excited, they jump on the tabletops by themselves. But next morning, someone has to coax them down, because really, they’re afraid of heights.
If you get there at eight, and the staff’s still setting up the place, you lend a hand. Funny though how Marnie, alone among that crew, and otherwise so open of affect, looks daggers at you if you offer to help.
What a wild world. Here are the sheep, masses of us, shorn and shivering. And the shearers give us a bit of our own fluff, enough for a sad kind of Gogolian overcoat, and we the sheeple melt with gratitude, gambol about proudly displaying our riches. Is there for honest nakedness? Who will stand up on their hind legs for it? Are sheep fierce in their dreams? And whom do we count, jumping over what, when sleep eludes us?
New drawings for a Forest City Ratner project, Atlantic Yards, in Brooklyn, a vast complex with sixteen enormous highrises designed by Gehry. These plans differ slightly from the drawings Gehry “leaked” last year, the ones that stunned local residents with their sheer, stupendous scale. Nor is the current version necessarily representative of the way the final project will look, says FCR. Yet this is the old game again. The doctor proposes taking the leg off at the hip and ultimately the patient is grateful only to be losing the limb at mid-thigh.
And what, what the hell does the name Forest City Ratner mean? What forest? A forest of City?
• • • EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 776
Instead of soap, body wash.
• • •
In your rear view mirror, a Sikh in brown pants, beige jacket and a fiery red turban quicksteps across Ninth Avenue as the light turns in favor of the advancing cars. In his right hand, he holds a takeout cup filled with, well, if you had to guess, tea.
10:30 a.m. You’re legal. Roll up the windows, affix The Club to the steering wheel, pat the Gray Ghost on the dashboard, grab your backpack, lock the doors and splitsville!
• • •
Taken to task by Dick Cheney for his differing interpretation of “democracy,” Vladimir Putin, Tsar of all the Russias, rejoinders: “Comrade wolf knows whom to eat, he eats without listening, and he’s clearly not going to listen to anyone.”
Change the national bird to the bald wolf.
• • •
Ishkabibble!
What did Delaware? She wore her brand New Jersey…
Late a.m. Escalator down at Penn to the New Jersey Transit tracks and the train to Princeton Junction. Off toward your annual perambulation-conversation with Cousin Jane. Down a gray womblike tunnel with caulk oozed out between some of the
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joints. Always freaky on an escalator when the handrail moves faster than the stairs and you have to adjust your grip since you can’t walk down – there’s someone immobile ahead – and it’s too narrow to go round him. When you left for the subterranean world, the Dow was way down for the second day running and the Euro aimed to hit $1.30 this coming weekend. April might be the cruelest month, but May, well May could mean anything.
In the train car everyone surrounding you, literally everyone, is talking on a cell phone or else staring at the device in their palm, waiting. Except the fellow in the seat in front of you whose property keeps making its way into your purview. First a packet of his gum arrives, somehow over the top of his seat back. Then a magazine slithers to your feet, drawn by gravity through the crack between the vertical and horizontal elements of his seat. You’ve only just retrieved and returned his ‘zine when, as if on cue, his cell phone goes off. If you possessed a cell phone, you’d have to take up smoking as an accompaniment, and on the street, in those places plastered with signs depicting a cigarette in a red circle with a red bar across it, refine the art of talking while chewing gum. The young woman in the seat behind you has this down pat. Just before ringing off, she threatens her interlocutor: “I’ll see you soon!”
A twinge in your ears as the tunnel changes pressure on the drums, then whamo, out like a shot into the marshes – parallel with the highway – flying above disused railbeds turned to impromptu canals in last night’s downpour, and there’s the peeling once-white water tower like a golfball atop its tee: SECAUCUS. Here a Hasid gets off and you watch him in silhouette, his beard smoke-like against the gray sky, hat pushed back with the air of a gunslinger ambling down the platform. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a mountain chain called the Secaucases? Then the people who lived here – does anyone? – could be, would be known as Secaucasians.
Moving again. Out the windows to your left, the lizard skeleton of the Pulaski skyway spanning the mighty Hackensack. Out to your right, cranes operate amidst mountains of refuse. Wotta dump! And it is here, not far north at any rate, that your Darton progenitors transplanted themselves from Olde England. Jane might know the dates more accurately, but it’s not impossible that they, the grandparents, Alice and Arthur, arrived approximately a hundred years ago. This could even be to the anniversary. Sure, why not? EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 778
Poster: Booker for Mayor. C’est vrai. He’s already won. Whitewashed warehouse, its upper reaches emblazoned Father & Son Moving & Storage in Civil War-poster lettering. Though that name applies to you and Jack, it never got painted on the side of a building. Much less the side of a van, which makes you think his big move to Rutland, VT in the winter of ‘65 and your umpteenth trip north together on the Taconic Parkway, the VW bus loaded with stuff from his 12th Street apartment. Around midnight in the midst of a blizzard, you watched as the left front wheel spun off into the ditch and an instant later, the van gently nosed down on your side and came to a stop. Not much gas left in the tank, and for twenty, maybe twenty-five minutes, the two of you sat there in the whiteout, growing colder and contemplating the point at which you’d have to start burning the furniture. Ah, but then came headlamps, and a Good Samaritan drove you to a motel.
Blue gaps among the gray, white-edged clouds. Fence topped in ribbon wire whizzing past. Late capitalist pastoral. Motorman’s making up for lost time. Trees and limbs down in profusion. If anyone ever owned a car, it’s rusting here. E-lizabeth! Fat magic marker letters on a bench back: LAKEWOOD BORIQUA DE CORAZON. New, light gray apartment blocks, nearly finished, wires hanging out, still unfixtured. Homes for the future to be sick in. Dumpsters beyond numbering. An awning quaintly stuck above the door of an industrial building maybe three blocks long: AMERI-VAC. Sure, why not? Linden! As opposed to Unter den… Hard to tell if those downed trees way back there were Lindens.
On the platform, drunk, a man with effusive face corpuscles takes a long slug of Colt 45. He sports a once-fly leather jacket, sits cross-legged. The catbird seat. Philosophy. He notices you noticing him. Nods, then smiles. Back in the city, you’re ponying up the big bucks to hang onto your teeth. He’s given up on that. Less resistance. With an upraised can, he toasts you.
Two stories up the trestle runs through Rahway. You look down on an intersection, the white painted pedestrian crossings designated by pattern that’s a stylized brick walkway. On the outskirts, some of the dumpsters stand expectantly on their rollers, more or less straight up. Others keeled on their sides.
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mph faster than the black Denali out there that must be doing sixty plus on the good clean, lightly-trafficked blacktop. Metro Park and a lot of folks get off. Glimpse of a poster: two hands held like those of a loving couple. “Our Community Bank,” reads the tag line. Indus American Bank, in Iselin. What a lot, what a lot of the world you do not know. Next stop Metuchen! Across the skydome, a higher ratio of blue to white. A few gray clouds hang in for dramatic effect. Tiny, tiny up there, a bird.
a brother town. Woods now screen the houses from the tracks. Over a river and into New Brunswick. Jeez, from here, the church, park, a row of peaked brick buildings – it’s almost America. Then zoom, past a medical complex – Robert Wood Johnson something – of staggering proportions, all done up in brick tones of disposable new urbanism. Ah, train halts inexplicably. Gravel, rust, blighted trees struggling. A rail siding. Low well-kept building: Dephi Automotive Systems. GM. Vanished pensions. Whirlpool eats Maytag and spits out dryer fuzz. Forward motion. WOW! shrieks the next bright strip mall sign: Work Out World – Feel Great!
The woman in the seat behind you gets a cell call. She has a sore throat you hear her say, but since you can’t see her, your mind takes the ball and runs with it. She sounds almost unbearably sultry. “Thanks,” she says. “Perfect.” Then, “Bye-bye.” You try to harmonize your breath with hers, separated by three feet of air plus a seat back. Fences now, white ones, horses – and a gravel road straight along the rail line. Through the scrim of trees, a macmansion’s on the rise, raw joists and roof frame. The clouds haven’t so much dispersed as gravitated into larger clusters. Sky’s polarized. Through the upper branches and the haze of leaves you can see wide swaths of blue. Delphi. Yes, Delphi brake parts. Long ago, before Alice and Arthur booked passage to these shores, Delphi was a place where vapors came up through the ground and a woman, drunk on their wisdom, told the fates of empires.
Past the Good Friends Chinese Restaurant, the train comes to a halt. You think about getting up on the pretext of looking at the sign in order to check out the gravel- voiced woman behind you. But then you hear Princeton Junction! This is it. She’s wearing a blue short-sleeved top. Thin. Pony tail. Sharpish features. That’s it. That’s all.
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you into Princeton. Lightning through the manicured burbs. Ahoy. Five minutes or less to Cousin Jane. George Washington schlepped here. Even fit a battle close by. But far as we know, he never made it to Delphi.
• • •
On the way home, you sit facing backward. Oblique, out the window, the trees pour past. Liquid.
More Atlantic Yards nonsense in the Times. Front page photo of a scale model for twenty two-acres turned over to Forest City Ratner. Now it hits you that Brooklyn was a great world city sans a skyline. Steeples were its main vertical element – its urban profile seemed closer to Greater London than Manhattan. The Williamsburg Savings Bank tower didn’t really count. Always felt less like a corporate ego thing than a public gnomon. Pride took a different form in Brooklyn than in some other cities, which, in part, made it a creature unto itself. Then came Metro Tech in the early ‘90s and the Slope got slippery. And now this. What a shame. Backed by the Empire State Development Corporation – a real gang of pirates – the project will invoke eminent domain to dislodge holdout property owners. Then leveling and sixteen high-rises, bam bam ba-lam. A Forest of city grows in Brooklyn. Would that the crash comes first.
• • •
Buzzy from coffee, Le G. conversation and generalized anxiety, you conflate the headlines of two adjacent fliers on the bulletin board in your lobby. One is for a food co-op, the other advertises a concert against the war. Synapses snapping, unable to hold any ball of words for long, you read: Chelsea Vegetables for Peace.
• • • EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 781
Heavy duty stuff. Resonating bigger now than when Jane told you yesterday: the news her husband has been offered a shot at Alito’s old job heading the Third Circuit Appeals Court. Accordingly, he tripped down to DC, accompanied by Jane. But the Darton edge runs strong in her and she refused to shake the presidential hand, much less set foot in the White House. Will her spousal non-compliance militate against her husband’s selection? No simple life.
Expedition to Shue Swamp and Bayville on the Sound. Along Glen Cove Road, a good crop of winecap mushrooms sprouting in the woodchips by a newly landscaped mini-macmansion. Victor spotted ‘em while you were driving, doing a good forty-five. He’s king of the foragers. Leah’s quite accomplished too. Their eight-year-old, Maya. can recognize any number of edible plants.
At the swamp, plenty of ramp and mustard garlic. Also jewelweed for curing or balming all manner of stings. Gwen heard the train whistle and, along with Katie, the three of you scrambled up the embankment, laid five pennies on the tracks, then backed off a little down the slope. The train slowed as it came closer, sounded the horn again – the engineer must’ve spotted you bending over the rail. Might’ve thought: What’s he doing? But then there’s a young girl with him and a non-threatening gal who’s probably his wife, and they’re all waving hi… and so the LIRR Oyster Bay train rumbled on through, the diesel’s first set of wheels passing over Abe Lincoln and succeeding ones making the coins dance up and off the rails and into the gravel, leaving copper imprints of the Lincoln Memorial on the track. Watch out, don’t grab the pennies up too quick – they’re piping hot from friction. Squashed to knife-edged irregular ellipses. Some of them flew a foot or so but you find all five scattered in the gravel of the railbed. And a sixth – slightly oxidized. Must be one of your old ones from how many years, how many visits ago? Half-sliding down the embankment you spot find a pitted old spike that’ll serve as a paper weight given a coat of satin polyurethane.
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her penny, the Memorial smooshed almost beyond recognition, but distorted now into a kind of classical perspective. “Looks like the Parthenon,” she says, and she’s right. As you walk on, round the swamp, she tells you a bit of what she remembers from forty something years back when she went on holiday with her parents to the Black Sea – visited the Danube delta. Of course – makes all the sense it the world. But in your imagination the Danube never had a delta until now.
Drive out to the beach, where Victor discovers a whole line of sea rocket growing just above the high tide ridge and a small clump of radish leaves. Near the playground, under some trees, poor man’s pepper. Hail Victor! You’ll feast on winecaps and – bring on the garlic – a host of sautéed greens tonight.
Mon. a.m. New England flooded out in a general way. Rain here this morning too, at times torrential. You move the Gray Ghost from 25th Street to 21st Street near Le G. so it’s legal until Thursday. When you cut the engine, you notice two maple seed key pods pushed to the left and right margins of the windshield by the wiper blades. Stuck there by adhesion for now, it’ll take a day’s drying out to dislodge them. And then, who knows where they’ll blow, whirling like little Da Vinci choppers. Already you’ve transported them a third of a mile from where they fell.
Recalled the taste of the winecaps Katie sautéed in vermouth last night. Didn’t cook the greens, just tore them up and added to the salad. Sea Rocket was the big hit. Rain drumming on your tin roof and safety glass windshield – two distinct sounds. The tree up ahead to the right looks like a honey locust in its adolescence. Its lower branches have taken a beating from truck tops, but its middle and upper reaches seem to be faring well. Tough life being a street tree in Manhattan, even poshest Chelsea.
Crane your head round and you’ll see that the tree just behind you, a couple of stories tall, camo bark like a sycamore, looks sick as a dog, despite or perhaps because of the abundant, gaily-colored plantings at its base. To judge by its unhappy complement of ragged, perforated leaves it is a sycamore, but its leaves are so distorted by whatever depredation that at first they look rounded like a tulip poplar’s. No leaves EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 783
at all on the distal twigs. Stupidly you hope that the rain does it some good. Don’t know much about trees, but your common sense tells you lack of water isn’t the problem.
You were hasty turning pages and the paper’s thin. Between one thing and another, you skipped a spread in your book. Leave it blank or go back? Question’s already answered, even now, you’re filling in the blanks. Fog on the windscreen, but no mistaking the bop of his walk – here comes Tom.
• • •
As the day progresses, a mixed bag. Queasy, heavy of heart and constricted of throat, generally sickish, yet part of you feels like tap dancing. Waking thoughts semi- delirious. Into your head pops: Aren’t You Glad You Use Dial? Don’t You Wish Everybody Did?
End of rush hour #1 toward the periodontist. Train car full of jocund folks in sports and business wear. What they got to laugh about?
course, there’s only one border that’s insecure to the point of newsworthy. Change for the #7. Asian guy, could be Korean or Chinese, sits across from you. White MTA hard hat in his lap. Stenciled to its side: Think Safety.
Up the stairs at Fifth Avenue. On the mezzanine, a pair of newsdealers, both women, wave folded tabloids in the faces of the softly lowing herd before and around you. The vendor directly in your path looks Latina, but her accent’s from where? “Gill morning, lady. Gill morning, gentleman.” She fans a copy of the News toward you, swinging it down like the arm of a toll gate. Whatever look you shoot her must be your E-Z pass, because she raises the bar and trades you a half-smile in exchange for an incremental softening of your demeanor.
It’s been raining cats and dogs. Along the front of the Library, under the gaze of the guardian lions, a score of men in bright red windbreakers kneel chopping with their EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 784
spades at the muddy soil and planting to beat the band, liberal muck clinging to the valleys of their workboot soles. Massively red against the green backdrop, a flatbed truck loaded with plants sits parked on the sidewalk surrounded by orange traffic cones. Skillfully painted on the truck cab’s door: FRANK BULFAMENTE & SONS, NEW ROCHELLE, NY.
Cross Fifth on the diagonal. Beneath a scaffold, plastered to waterlogged plywood hoardings, multiple posters for Neil Young’s new album: Living With War. Are there only two modes of living? One’s children as victims, or raise them to be murderers of other people’s children who’ve done them no wrong?
• • •
Downstairs post-periodontist, after a sound probing, having heard the bad news about your deep pockets. Outside the entryway, a huge, white Denali, no one inside, its lights flashing like a squadcar on meth. Across the street, a Metropolitan Lumber Co. truck is parked, making a delivery. Painted on the truck’s flank, an anthropomorphized claw hammer, and his companion, a length of four by four. Both wear rueful grins and wave spindly arms in greeting. On their “feet,” identical pairs of bulbous shoes. Spookily, the four by four resembles, grain and all, a caricature of trade center tower.
You’re still reeling from sticker shock. The periodontist wants $1850 – per quadrant! – for trimming down your middle-aged gums, giving them what he calls “a manicure.” Sure, why not? In a world where hammers smile, why shouldn’t gums have cuticles and dentists charge whatever they can get for their labor. The guy’s a pro. clearly, knows his stuff. Comes recommended by the sainted Dr. Cooper. But jeez, his whole office stinks of greed.
Got to let this roll around in your mind a bit, particularly the warning “if you do nothing,” that you might develop endocarditis, for which you’re at more than average risk, given a funky mitral valve. But fuck it, at those prices, you’re going to have to count on your immune system to get you through. Up the umbrella and out from under the awning. As you pass the Denali, its alarm starts to shriek.
• • •
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From the look of it on the TV news, half of New England is washing away. Will the tides float it back to Olde England? You’ve taken refuge from the deluge at a Burger King on 41st Street. On the counter in front of you , a little stand-up promo card for the Whoperettes – the word spelled out in marquee lights – its central image a woman in Ziegfieldesque drag, whose costume, apart from a silky two-piece tap ensemble, white heels and gloves, consists of draped onion rings, several of which, clustered together, form a kind of domical chapeau. Downstage left – if the card were a theatre – another chorus girl in elbow-length gloves wears a skirt that is literally a grilled burger. She’s flanked by a hoofer draped in half-melted slices of American cheese. To her right, yet a fourth chorine high kicks – but what food is she wearing? Bright red, marbled and inchoate in shape – it can’t be bacon. Actually, on close inspection, it resembles extremely ravaged muscle tissue. Could that be what a heart valve looks like when it’s owner has consumed the other three Whoperettes? Eros and Thanatos, together again at Burger King!
• • •
Almost home. Rain’s abated to a drizzle. Down comes your brolly. “Let the other guy yawn at the meeting,” says the headline of the ad above the subway entrance that – what was it, four years ago? – got plowed down by an SUV. Nice ad. Goes with getting your nails done by someone a little poorer than you who came from the other side of the world for your cuticles only. Nail salons, eyebrow threading, drugstores and bizarre Chelsea Boy apparel – that’s local retail in a nutshell.
Black as the day is long. We walked toward the mountains across a vast field of white puppies. See, that’s the language that pops into your head, even wide awake – ever more hallucinogenic.
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Two days and then the Da Vinci Code comes to a theater near yo. Closest they can get these days to a saturation ad campaign – as big or bigger than Kong was. A worried Amélie and lumpy Forest Gump stare out from a thousand billboards ‘n’ posters crowned with the exhortation: “Be Part of the Phenomenon.” Can one not?
After the 19th, will it become obligatory to conclude any casual exchange with “Have an Opus Dei”? Ixnay, ixnay!
Mid-a.m. On the corner of 24th and Eighth, a few feet away from Abdul’s coffee cart, a middle-aged, paunchy guy stands transfixed, riveted to the spot by a prolonged series of violent, wrenching sneezes. A black Lincoln Towncar has pulled up by the stand and the driver, himself gray haired and heavy-set, calls out “God bless you!” through the rolled-down window each time the fellow on the sidewalk sneezes. The tenor of the blesser’s voice oddly matches the sneezer’s preceding hachoo!
This goes on long enough to develop into a kind of call and response between impromptu compatriots – a near rhyme cycle that one suspects might go on forever. At last the sneezer recovers himself sufficiently to continue on his way, offering a sniffled “Thank you” to his well-wisher who responds with a final benison before opening his door, stepping out and queuing up before Abdul’s cart. You don’t wait to find out if the limo driver is a jelly donut or French cruller man, but you’d bet good money he takes his coffee light and sweet.
• • •
Against this tricky, ugly, green-yellow gray sky, the gilded dome and spire atop the lantern crown of the New York Life building appears as magical as a pineapple from the heavenly Jerusalem. Fifteen stories below, a third of the way to the ground, the clock says 10:28. Brother, you’re running late. Brother can you spare the time?
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2:00 p.m. You’d entered this building an hour ago in near deluge, now exit out through the same door into a shocking burst of sun. Rows of puckered billboards on the plywood hoardings drying out. White numerals against solid black: 6 + 6 + 06 and beneath the numerals the legend: Now You’ve Been Warned.
Hmmm. Numerology is big these days. Every man a Kabbalist. Signifiers abound. Let’s see: 9 plus 11 equals 20. Add 01 and that equals 21 which divides into 3 x 7, the sum of which is 10. Not very dramatic. On the other hand, if you add the 2 from 2001, you get the famed and dreaded 23. Whooooo! Spooky. Surely the Avinciday
• • •
On the cover of El Times, a big pic of General Hayden, nominee to head the mother of all spy rings. Taken from Hayden’s left side, the shot frames a background of the Senate committee room jammed to the gills with press photographers. The general’s olive drab uniform is covered with an astonishing panoply of fruit salad and scrambled eggs, given which, the headline poses a timeless Times classic of cognitive dissonance: “CIA Choice Says He’s Independent of the Pentagon.”
Hayden’s been caught in motion, his hands slightly blurred, half raised before him, like he’s trying to use the gesture to emphasize the headline’s point. But so huge is the non sequitur between the image and the words above it that you break out laughing drawing a raised eyebrow from Marnie behind the counter. Surely your eyes are not the only ones that draw in an implied set of wires leading from the general’s wrists to a puppeteer judiciously cropped out above.
• • •
Life in the preemptive lane.
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You can see a host of camera flashes popping on the observation deck of the Empire State even as its superstructure becomes engulfed in gray mist, a towering white cloud in the background. Deluge again. Sturm und Drang. Pressure change. Bottles, nail brush and pumice blow off your bathroom windowsill. You hear them kathunk, bang and rattle into the tub.
Check online. The Wunderground weather map makes the storm look pretty localized, but there are bits of green signifying light precipitation strewn across Pennsylvania. A cluster of rain pixels over the type for Allentown makes it read Alientown. 15:04 EDT.
• • •
You do not call Cousin Jane to tell her how your conversation last week about her husband’s possible ascent – !? – to the head of the 3rd Circuit triggered memories – ah, that’s a slip since you hadn’t been born yet – well, if not memories than flashes of historical outsight – into the Wannsee Conference in ‘42 where Reinhard Heydrich called together Germany’s senior jurists and civil servants in a beautiful old lakeside villa near Berlin to have them devise a legal and organizational framework for the annihilation of Europe’s eleven million Jews.
Before it became a matter of requisitioning cattle cars, adjusting timetables and track switching, mass murder must first be set in motion on little wheels of law. Ahead of everything else, clearing the rails like a thousand tiny cow-catchers, the protocols advance. Before the weight can come down, protections must be lifted.
• • •
The second recorded South China Sea “supertyphoon” – Category 4 – named Chanchu (“Pearl” in Cantonese) made two landfalls in the Philippines, then hit eastern Guangdong.
Newsflash. Lightning flash. This to the south as you write – arching across the sky out of Jersey, seemingly into Lower Manhattan. Now rain again as the skies to the EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 789
west lighten oddly and those over Brooklyn grow pink. Fuckin’ A. This whole day has been like a big Tesla experiment combined with a Reich cloud-busting festival gone devilishly awry. Energy, energy, where does it want to go?
Silverstein’s 7WTC nearly invisible against a background identical in texture and hue. You really can’t see the building, just know it’s there. Sure it is. Another lightning bolt, this one the traditional tree-rooted kind over the WFC. Now over Wall Street. And closer, atop the Chelsea Hotel, just a few hundred feet away as the crane flies, chimneytops covered in lush ivy and rooftrees like Babylon’s gardens come home alive, even downstairs, along Eighth Avenue between 24th and 25th, the greenest sycamore canopy you’ve ever known.
But yes, Guangdong. And Chanchu, which might’ve gone Cat. 5 and veered toward Hong Kong, but instead struck Shantou at 45mph and moved northeast into Fujian weakening some, then switching direction again, out to sea, presumably to wind itself down. Along the way, Chanchu killed forty one in the Philippines, twenty one in the PRC. Chinese sailors rescued sixty Vietnamese fisherman, but twenty-eight drowned and another hundred and fifty are missing, somewhere at sea.
• • •
If the Senate finds the U.S.-Mexico border vexing, they should check out the Durand Line. The “line drawn on water,” bridged by the Khyber Pass. Good luck to all who hold their borders dear. This is the age of breach and insurge. Just like, minus the levee, that big lake ends up in your back yard. And front yard.
Oh what’ll it take to keep those Pashtuns south of the Rio Grande?
Trip by the café. Packed inside. Stand on the corner and talk with Tom, Gary, Eric as long as you can. Sick as a dog. Let it all go. Drink water only. Back home to bed as if poleaxes.
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a.m. It’s going to be what it is. Shaky on your pins. Manhattan as a monstrous reanimated corpse.
• • •
Clubs clubs clubs. Everybody’s talkin’. Of course the Bush twins need someplace to dance, preferably on ruins. But if not Fallujah, why not Bungalow 8, just a jog north and west from your own tranquil aerie? Practically in the river, B8 at 515 West 27th Street is la boîte préféré, where Jenna, Babs and their Texas posse coma-tatus go to get crunk or die. So hey, it’s not La Pont d’Avignon, but that was never wide enough for one Hummer to pass another, coming or going.
A dead body found at Seventh and 19th early Sunday, though where exactly the young fellow was beaten to death remains a matter of conjecture. Tom relates this news as the two of you talk, him on his way to Le G. for iced mocha and you hanging out on a stoop waiting for the car to go legal. Tom gets the skinny from all the local supers, a legacy from the old days when he used to walk Lucy around the neighborhood before the arthritis confined her to a narrow ambit of 23rd Street.
For a minute you imagine the pair of you as minor Runyan characters, speculating on where the next floating crap game will be held. The kids from Baruch Middle School performed Guys and Dolls the other night, so the tunes are still present in your head and you come close to breaking into song: “Call it hell, call it heaven, it’s a probable twelve to seven that the guy was just done in by club thugs.”
Gwen, despite her gifts for music and drama, worked behind the scenes. You glimpsed her occasionally during blackouts, a slight, strong figure, darting this way and that, moving sets and props about.
A derelict squats, back against the wall at the northeast edge of FIT, smoking and coughing. His coughs sound like sobs.
On the phone with Wolfgang yesterday, he said something about the EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 791
atmospheric pressure being unusually high the day you got sick. Amazing what different folks pay attention to, what we use to signify.
• • •
BLD: Big Liminal Day.
Is it all the same to the clam? You’ve eaten clams to whom things made a difference. Another question: Is it all the same to you?
Katie makes a date for the three of you to go out with Mark and Bruce to Deli Masters in early June. Farthest Queens. At the intersection of Pastrami and Utopia.
• • •
CHELSEA CARNAGE screameth the Post. You knew no good was up to itself last night when the choppers with their laser-bright spotlights swept round the neighborhood skies like an occupation army of techno-vultures. ‘Course you had it wrong – assumed the helicopters came courtesy of a drug killing in the Fulton or Elliot houses. Instead it’s “Crazed Bouncer Blasts Lounge Club Patrons.” If the front page is to be even minimally believed, said bouncer opened up on some disgruntled patrons with a 9mm. Killed one on the spot, wounded several others, one of whom is “fighting for his life” at St. V.’s.
The house specialty at the club, Opus 22, is purportedly the Opus Bellini, a combination of white peach purée and champagne. And for a lagniappe, a hot lead chaser. 22nd and Eleventh. Have to ride by there one time to see what kind of face Opus 22 puts up to the world.
• • •
Did transitional seasons used to be this windy when you were coming up in the EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 792
big city? T’other day they tested out new handling techniques for an inflatable veteran of many a Thanksgiving parade. Every now and again, those gusts have been taking America’s most beloved icons precipitously into lampposts sending the parts thereof raining onto spectators with various unhappy results. You’ve noticed the tendency for several years now, but lately those passing weather conversations invariably turn to wind. Some kind post-Katrina thing? “Many New Yorkers,” according to the Times, are affeared of the hurricane season to come. There’s no disaster can match the ones in the mind. Once you’re convinced the other shoe’s gonna drop, it could be any size, color or style. All god’s chillun got shoes.
Reps. and Senate, both in their separate ways and means, caught immigrante delicto – committing offenses against those whose only crime is wanting to work here.
A huge four-prop Air Force cargo plane skimmed the West Chelsea rooftops this a.m. around 9:15, flying pretty close to due south. An airlift to some hitherto unknown and stricken population in Lower Manhattan, Staten Island or Brooklyn? A few minutes later as you were buying bananas from Kesban, more near-deafening turbine shrieks. You looked overhead but couldn’t locate the source. Like last Friday night, when, walking to pick up Gwen from a rehearsal, the reports from fireworks out of eyeshot on the Jersey waterfront caused Chelsea strollers, even those in the Flatiron and Gramercy to turn first this way, then that, to see the source of the invisible barrage.
Sebastian Smith, an eyewitness to the Chechen war, tells of a Sufi Zikr ceremony, where men dance circles within circles, and a Russian bomber screams low overhead, buzzing their village. “Yet no one even looks up. The whooping grows louder.”
• • •
The No-stick Gospels. • • •
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out mosaic, it strikes you funny what you saw on the staircase at the Grand Street subway stop yesterday: a wide Asian woman, d’un certain age, wearing a bright red teeshirt imprinted in gold letters: CALL ME WHEN YOU GET A LIFE.
• • •
Down to Bowling Green to see Michael K. at his office in the old Standard Oil building at 26 Broadway. Something amusing in the idea of the Modern Library Association having its digs in what was once the corporate HQ the country’s first billion dollar corporation. There, high up in the lobby, John D.’s name, cut in marble. Outside again, as you walk toward Chinatown, there’s a moment when, if you stop and turn back, you get a sightline on the structure’s step-pyramid tower, and surrounding the central lantern, a quartet of blazing urns – symbolic beacons to guide those arriving by sea – rendered in motionless stone.
• • •
On Mott, just north of Grand Street, a gut renovation of an old tenement building rising over a storefront hair salon. On the second floor above the scaffolding, two guys work with chisels and hammers to knock out the bricks of a newly built section about shoulder high. Ah, plans have changed. Instead of four windows across, there are to be two wider bays, so this separation must go. At first it looks like the men are painstakingly trying to preserve the bricks by inserting their chisels into the mortar between them, tapping and levering the brick up. But then one fellow hammers hard against a whole row of bricks to loosen them. Before long, the job is down to thigh level, and with every hammerstrike, the unsupported section shakes. They could, theoretically, drop the whole section over on its side and bust it up lying down. Wait and see what happens. Scan the street. The sounds of hammering stop. You look up to see the men sitting in the embrasures, taking a break – one drinking from a bottle of mineral water. Move on.
All over Little Italy, and in other parts of the city too, one sees molded fiberglass EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 794
pizza men standing outside storefronts – the paisano equivalent of cigar store Indians. Often they hold a menu in one hand and sign a thumbs-up with the other. An eye wink too, beneath a toque keeling raffishly to one side. But New York streets are not just about fast food, they’re fast pedestrian lanes – folks move like stock cars and often carry hard and heavy objects. Consequently, the pizza guys get pretty dinged up in the course of their lifetimes. The one you just passed, at the corner of Broom was missing most of his outthrust hand, nor was the wound neat – torn threads of fiberglass protrude, waving in the breeze.
Suddenly tired, you pause to contemplate the world and sit down on a standpipe. But you didn’t pick a fortuitous spot since not six feet away, a dark blue van from CC rentals pulls up half on the sidewalk, half off, and sits there idling. The silver lining amidst the cloud of exhaust it generates is the knockout young blonde at the wheel. Jeeze lady, you’re gassin’ me! Time to leave anyway.
Pass by a – what is it, Queen Anne-style? – brick building at Mulberry and Houston. Look upward to the corner plinth from which a gilded Puck spreads his mischief to the street below. Bea used to work in there once, before you were born, maybe sixty years ago when she was a secretary and SoHo wasn’t born yet either, this area of downtown was just an industrial agglomeration with ill-defined borders. What floor was her office on? Superior Printing Inks. The plant itself was over near the river, a block from where you and Katie once lived on West 12th just west of Greenwich, not far from the Gansevoort furnace where Reich’s books went 451 Fahrenheit. What ink were they printed on? Odds are, Superior.
Find a number 6 subway stop and move on uptown. Across the packed car, a young man talking with a soft-voiced woman, neither of whom can you see. His voice rises above the rumble redolent with contempt: “Tha’s stoopid!”
Escalator up at 42nd Street. On the landing just below street level you pass a line of about two zillion people filling out forms, hopeful of finding employment at Cipriani’s. Ah, this must be the kitchen entrance. How many of these folks are “legal”?
Cross on a diagonal past the Grand Hyatt. Underneath its glossy skin, lurks the bone structure of the old Hotel Commodore (Vanderbilt) where once, thirty-eight years ago, you got busted trying to crash a Hubert Humphrey campaign luncheon disguised (fairly credibly) as a Young Democrat. The action you and your fellow Crazies were
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 795
planning would’ve featured nude radicals in Uncle Sam masks and flying paper airplanes that unfolded into leaflets headlined “Stop the War on Vietnam Now!” Your little cohort had been set up though, infiltrated from within. So down the stairs from the ballroom you were trundled, handcuffed and frogmarched along with several of your mates, out the grand entrance, into the paddy wagon and thence to midtown south for booking. But that’s a memory for, and of, another time.
You’ve traveled through every state in the emotional union – some more’n once. On the cusp of your 56th, a previously unimaginable thought: your life has been a strange success.
• • •
Over to the Frying Pan with Uwe to scope it out as a potential site for one of his performances. A spritz of rain earlier and now just a fine, white afternoon mist permeating the city like a salt glaze. Everything sticks to everything – your fingertip to the button that presumably gets the traffic light to change on the West Side Highway so the chickens can cross to the other side. Never believed that button was anything more than psychological – more likely the whole system’s on an automatic timer.
Empire State building shrouded in bright fog. Hindenberg, schmindenberg – oy, the humidity.
Tricks tricks everywhere. The slate easel on the sidewalk outside the café advertises MUSHROOM SOUP. Some slippage of mind’s eye causes you to read the first word as HIROSHIMA. You sit on the wicker bench, where someone’s tied a dog up that doesn’t mind being petterd and play a silly game: try to imagine the number of people slain by American air power since, say, 1944 – the year we began dropping bombs in earnest. Would one count the Germans napalmed in St-Malo? The Japanese
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 796
soldiers incinerated in Okinawa? No, best keep the criterion narrow: civilian deaths from bombs.
You start adding what you know of Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima, Tokyo, Nagasaki, Hanoi, Hue, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Mekong Delta, Cambodia, Panama, Iraq in ’91, Afghanistan, Iraq again. It’s dizzying, beyond belief. And now this latest massacre in Haditha claws its way out of the bag. This was not remote, not a high altitude mishap – nothing collateral about this damage. The killing was done by boots on the ground.
Gotta move on. The exhaust from the café’s air conditioner, mounted above the door, is blowing your way. Downright infernal. The dog doesn’t seem to mind.
• • •
7 p.m. Out and across the avenue to Kyung’s to buy a beer for dinner. Katie’s made watercress soup and there’s leftover “speedy lasagne” from last night with which a St. Pauli goes well. Remind yourself to get the mail, it’s Saturday – Memorial Day weekend. Traffic sparse and lazy, apart from an ambulance that takes the corner of 25th blooping like an electronic chicken and heads west. Bunch o’ junk in the mailbox except a new bank card and an letter from the publishers of Divided…. Not a royalty check. So what could they possibly have to communicate? You’re alone in the elevator, so you open it. Inside, a handwritten note on a small sheet of paper folded in half:
Dear Mr. Darton,
I have read and re-read ‘Divided We Stand.’ It is prophetic. Is the follow-up in progress? Sincerely,
(Mrs.)
Ann D’Angelo.
clinging to their former strength of purpose. At the top right of the note, an address in Howard Beach.
Wow. You cant say it to Mrs. D’Angelo, but loud in your head: Alright! Fuckin’ EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 797
A! You wrote it for eight million. Now one of them has written back. • • •
Some day, maybe you’ll elaborate on the idea that drama is natural selection as applied to narrative – narrative being, lord help you – the DNA of culture. Four adults sitting around a dinner table. Out of all that talk, maybe one phrase, a fragment of a story, maybe an intonation sticks in the kid’s mind. She takes it in, weaves it, perhaps unconsciously, into her language fabric. She’ll use it, or something like it, somewhere, sometime, giving it a shot at survival for another day, another conversation.
What is it that will have caught her ear, cause her to pluck this particularity out of all that verbal wash? Your chips are on one quality: drama. Some kind of intended, or unwitting tension that torques up into a culmination and release.
Another May 30th. Many happy returns, Monsieur Self. 56 = 7 cycles of 8 revolutions round the sun or vice versa. Ça roule toward 8 x 8. Infinity times infinity stood on end. Crazy.
Still got some of your hair and most of your teeth. • • •
8:35 p.m. Contrail bored through a high, diaphanous cloud. Lovely forms in the tealing sky, but something morbid, forensic about it too, as if the plane is a bullet and the cloud living flesh.
• • •
Hadith, collected words and deeds attributed to Mohammed. Haditha, a town in Al Anbar province, Iraq, where a massacre of civilians by U.S. Marines took place on November 19, 2005. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 798
how did these (few) Marines miscarry their “code,” rather what is the chain of relationships that caused them to be there in the first place?
6:55 p.m. Eighth Avenue is a parking lot, all the way downtown and north as far as the eye can see. Has been for at least an hour. Could be something wrong in the Lincoln tunnel? Up comes the thought as, through the almost lyrical ambience of carhorns, you wake up from a nap. Naw, comes the other side of the dialogue, the city’s just busted.
A siren shrills above the brass section, like a soprano’s obbligato. Wotta cliché. A police car, it turns out, trying to change lanes, forge ahead through the impossible sea of metal. When did police cars go to that pitch, or have we really reached the point where each machine possesses an autonomous organ of expression. Ah, surely we’ll have chords of horns now, organ-like – surges of ‘em.
Seal singes it and it’s true: We’re never gonna survive unless we get a little bit crazy. But all around you, dropping like flies in hallways, elevators, living rooms, your little corner of the café, not to mention la kalle out there, the thump of psychic casualties. This is worse somehow, if on a quieter level, than you remember the self-destruction, the nihilistic ripping apart of former solidarities, friendships even, in the aftermath of the Movement. Now, our own mindbodies turn into so many self-insurgent IEDs. And just how woo woo are you, boo boo? Occasionally you imagine that something beside Gaia is fucking with the weather. Freak clouds, freaky Helios, a supercell holding steady over Central Park and it’s bone dry a few blocks away on Madison.
Out your window you see the impossible fronts, sometimes slicing across the bay, not quite north south, but following the avenue grid. The writing’s not on the wall no more, it’s in the sky, if only you could read it. Lord, can I get a codex?
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 799
At Ba Gua early this a.m. your job is to spend a good ten minutes getting shoved around by two mos’ substantial boyz. The idea of the exercise is to feel which side the most force is coming from and use your footwork to spin away from the thrust, rather than get pushed straight back and up, off your root. You’re to take no more than one step backward, then turn – let them chase you. Try not to get cornered. Make your steps tactical. If, as you step quickly round in response to their pushing, you allow the centrifugal force raise your arms, there’s a good chance you’d catch one of them with a chop, backed up by all the force of a rooted whirling body. Objectively scary, you want to make yourself bigger on top, stiffen up, resist. But these guys are too massive for that. You’ve got to drop the breathing, let the waist stay loose.
OK, now it’s your turn to tag team with Stephen and push Marshall around. Pretty rigorous shit. Marshall’s deft in his turns, presents his side to give you less surface. Plus he’s powerfully-built, an experienced martial artist. But he anticipates the strike, spins even before you shove, which could be bad for him with a partner of equal or greater body mass and skill.
Some time during the play, Stephen – who’s got a couple of inches on you in height, and maybe twenty pounds of solid muscle into the bargain becomes acutely aware of an old shoulder injury. Who’d have thunk it to look at him, the way he moves and carries himself? So severe is his distress that Tom breaks away from instructing another group to do a laying on of hands, or more accurately, a major adjustment.
It’s evening now, almost twelve hours on, and you feel fine. Nary a sore muscle anywhere. What a strange demonstration cum epiphany. Footwork, bro, the fine line between using the energy coming at you to spin out of harm’s way, or resisting it and landing up on your ass.
Another atmosphere blew in a half hour or so ago. Now it’s clear above the streets of the Upper West Side where you’re heading to pick up Gwen from Penny’s. A breeze, steady from the east. Curbside, outside a café, a honey locust, fully-leafed, its branches wrapped in tiny golden lights. All colors vivid. Every shape, even the funky brownstone steps of the building stoops look intended that way, as though some master programmer cut them with a laser.
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 800
it flashed by, for mounted to the front grill, a chrome-plated bas relief of a tyrannosaurus rex head in profile, huge, almost lifesize. On the engine’s cab door, some kind of 9/11 motif complete with twin tower silhouettes. KEEP BACK 200 FEET says the sign on the truck’s rear end, and beneath that SEMPER FI. Sure, not a problem. Give these guys their space. Dance of the fossils. [6/6]
Another day of deluge and a cloudcover so low the city feels socked in. All the towers disappeared. Human scale enforced by atmospherics. Under the overhang of the block of shops between 24th and 23rd, a homeless fellow, black. He’s asleep, or appears to be, half standing up, hinged over at the waist, arms folded atop the mushroom cap of his worldly goods sprouting from a grocery cart. Taut-skinned face, high cheekbones, salt and pepper beard pretty much like yours. Absolutely tranquil eyelids.
• • •
5:15 p.m. Still raining. And mist, fine like smoke or HVAC evaporation, blowing in a steady stream past your east window down Eighth.
5:33. Now the mist looks like the vertical folds of a curtain, drawn endlessly aside.
• • •
On an imaginary menu: Eel with special powers. • • •
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 801
epidemic. Is it them, their spines gone individually awry, or a symptom of some esoteric, more global change in gravity? Too much invisible heavy lifting going on?
• • •
So strangely numb is the mass consciousness that the stocks could’ve crashed, California split off and sunk into the sea, all manner of catastrophe struck and there’d hardly be a ripple of genuine attention paid. This is what happens when the coins of a billion souls and more all turn to stone. Or is it styrofoam? Floating floating, schweben in der luft. It’s a long way down a very deep well.
An awful man murdered by awful means. Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi along with a woman and child and four other occupants of his non-safe house killed by two 500lb bombs, delivered pretty much down his chimney – the house located north of Baghdad in Hibhib, a Sunni neighborhood deemed too dangerous for American troops to risk setting boots in. And why arrest the man when this display of long-distance terminating force proves much more useful? But useful to whom? For what? “Surgical justice” were the words another presumably human being crafted for the President to utter.
immense, framed portrait of Al-Zarqawi’s framed head was paraded like an icon cum trophy. His eyes peacefully shut, the master terrorist looks strangely, unmistakably like Jesus, if he’d lived long enough to look middle-aged.
• • •
6:30 p.m. Gwen’s piano recital. Or rather a recital given by Gwen’s piano teacher’s students. A roomful of expectant parents, relatives and friends flanked by EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 802
highly polished pianos. West 58th Street. Spitting distance from Petrosian’s caviar, the Europa Café, Carnegie Hall, and Patelson’s Music House round the back.
Genteel. In one corner of the room, an orchid sprouts from a planter shaped in the form of a vertical, stylized horn of plenty. Of thirteen performers, Gwen will play twelfth. Two Schumann Kinderscenen and a Chopin mazurska. For now, the horrifying images on Fox News fade to gray. The Bushes of the world should get down on their knees and thank whatever god they pray to for the likes of Ludwig van. Without beauty to soothe us, we’d have torn them limb from limb eons ago.
On the #1 subway platform at 23rd Street, a poster so jampacked with incoherently designed type it takes several minutes of staring at it to figure out exactly what it’s advertising. Turns out to be a program called V-Day which is, apparently, two weeksworth of events around the issue of violence against women. There’s a photographic image too, next to the impenetrable blocks of type. It’s a forearm and hand of a young woman of indeterminate race, smooth skinned, held vertically. Her forth and fifth fingers wrap around a pink apple – pink?! – held aloft as a symbol of New York? – while her index and middle finger form a V-sign. Dominating the typographic field, words in boldface gothic caps: UNTIL THE VIOLENCE STOPS: NYC.
Even if it made sense to distinguish violence committed against women from violence as a whole, wouldn’t it be loverly if the poster’s slogan wasn’t gibberish? Apart from the names of a few luminary participants: Dave Eggers, Howard Zinn, Marisa Tome, the smaller type resists any sort of visual parsing. So you look more closely at the arm which looks distinctly unreal, like it’s modeled of resin. And the apple, well, it’s pink and altogether artificial or worse yet, transgenic. What sorts of un or semi-conscious messages are running wild here?
In your day as a designer, less than a generation ago, a photo of a “real” arm holding a “real” apple would have lent the ad some political cred. An image as obviously cooked up as this one would have undermined the message. But today one EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 803
has to ask, what is effective for whom? Traditionally too, type was laid out to be legible in proportion to its importance in the overall design. Now the prevailing ethos is every graphic element for itself and God against all.
Pasted up just to the right of this poster, a different one carries its own set of “issues.” Foregrounded against a dark and presumably sinister background, a portrait of a pretty young blonde, framed to show a bit of cleavage. Nearly obscured behind her, a dark haired, plainer woman’s face hovers in the tenebrous middle ground. Stacked up like a verse, down the poster’s right side, these lines:
Beneath which, in larger type HEX – the E backwards. And smaller, below: Thursdays at 10 pm. BBC America.
Fucking bizarre this pairing of posters – though it has to be random, don’t it? And the twin tabloids, the News and Post this morning, playing catchup with the TV showing full front page Zarqawi death heads.
It’s taken almost all morning for you to imagine how wondrous it is, not that Zarqawi was killed remotely via a combination of tipoff and technology, but that so conveniently intact a head was found inside a house pulverized by a thousand pounds of high explosives. Now that’s surgical! Or again, like the young woman’s arm, something from Madame Toussaud’s house of effigies. Yesterday, the
Times captioned the ubiquitous deathshead picture as “the body of Zarqawi.” Since when, even in the era of gray journalism, does a head qualify as a body? But these are little speed bumps. Just call the road smooth. Pay no attention to the rattling of your teeth
• • •
A “No Dumping” sign posted above a row of garbage cans on Mosco street threatens not only a $1.500 (sic) fine, but that violators will be “caused with bad luck.”
As opposed to “cursed with power,” like the gal in the HEX poster. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 804
“A big hole, sir,” was how Sgt. Maj. Garm Rimpley, aged 46, of Penrose, CO, described the bomb crater forty feet in diameter and nearly as deep. Sgt. Rimpley arrived on the scene an hour and a half after the birth of said crater. Thus he did not see the brick house, surrounded by a palm grove, in which Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi was purportedly hiding.
Noting that “concrete blocks, walls, a fence, tin cans, palm trees, a washing machine: everything at the Hibhib scene was shredded or blown to pieces,” the Times declared it “puzzling… given the destruction and condition of the other bodies, how Mr. Zarqawi’s head and upper body – shown on televisions across the world – could have remained largely intact.” Scattered amidst the ruins, the reporter noted “a rose- patterned dress, a pair of women’s underwear, a leopard-print nightgown, a child’s shoe.”
As you read this story on your laptop, the righthand third of the screen suddenly animated, filled up with a surge of upward-billowing blue-gray smoke. Could this be, you thought for an instant, an actual video of the “taking out” of the infamous beheader? What incredible resolution and such a steady camera! But then the roiling clouds parted and faded to solid blue, and the type came up: KRAKATOA: VOLCANO OF DESTRUCTION. T OMORROW
, J UNE
11, 9 PM E
/ P ON
T HE
D ISCOVERY C HANNEL
.
• • •
Freaky and wonderful yesterday as you walked up Pearl Street with Michael K., him praising Orogene to the stars when there, on the sidewalk beneath the Brooklyn Bridge entrance ramp, you spotted a tangle of something golden, picked it up, and found yourself holding a wreath of gilt-sprayed fabric laurel leaves wound to wire. Who knows, a theater prop? Immaculate, no schmutz, though the ground around where it lay was filthy.
The thing must’ve fallen, but from where? Into your backpack it went. A golden moment. Why do you think of this now? Golden light, far whiter than the crown EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 805
flashing hot off the windows of the giant garment center building on Seventh between 25th and 26th. Hard to know what time is on these long, suspended pre-solstice evenings. Must be getting on toward sunset. Stark peaked shadows of rooftop water tanks against the brown red brick of the interceding lower buildings. Intensifying gold, so brilliant that the afterimage burns white-green pinholes in your page as you write this.
Look back at the light reflecting off the windows. No, its unbelievable – a first in all these years you’ve witnessed sunsets from this vantage – but there it is: a golden cross, four floors high, nine windows wide. That’s it, pop. Now you’ve seen everything. Close your eyes. All you see against the black of your inner lids is a flashing hot spot, flares, like crooked arms angling off it. Now it looks more like a scarab. Shrinks and fades. Check your building. The cross has refracted, No, reformed a few stories lower down into a perfect arch. Inverted U.
Off beyond and to the left, a cloud passes behind the peak of a tall residential tower on Sixth. Another first. A building with a word balloon. But the wind is fast and the cloud blows south before you can fill it in, and you look back toward the golden arch which turns, in the instant, to a shamrock, then a kind of protean nugget, sinking like the sun itself, invisible, hidden behind a host of towers 180º out in the opposite sky.
Now the gold has split into a cardinal four, like the indentations on a the face of a die. Down to two windows now, more copper than gold, and a siren wails and fade. The light disperses across the lower floors, wipes slowly from left to right. A breeze in the west window. Close your book before it’s gone.
humans, and it is wrong to think of them as nonsentient. That a stream should dry up in times of disorder is an ordinary, natural reaction.
So said Liu Zheng seven hundred-odd years back. • • •
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 806
• • •
Conservation of will. • • •
Ba Gua moves: Shepherd leads the way Sparrow hawk dives through the forest Horse shakes the bell
Here’s an odd question: What about opening up a channel under the Battery Park City landfill and letting the Bathtub fill up with water according to the action of the tides? Might the lateral pressure of the water act to keep the slurry walls from caving inward? How long would it take for the organic life of the Hudson to claim a place in this trapezoidal pond, that, from a bird’s eye view looks a bit like an awkwardly angled O. Could there be fishing and rowboating on Lake Zero? And for those who cannot do without a representation of the “footprints,” why not two islands, square ones where the towers once stood, left inviolate except for saw grass, sunning turtles and nesting gulls. What do you say, ye planners, ye dreamers and schemers great and small? Could the trade center at last make peace with the harbor’s ebb and flow?
Back this past Monday, the Poetry Walk, across the Brooklyn Bridge. High cumulus over Manhattan and Jersey with what looked like parallel strings of mozzarella running perpendicular. Weirder and weirder these skies. Either they are EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 807
being seriously and systematically tampered-with, or else Gaia herself has flipped the script on us. Or both.
Sure, there are always anomalies. Freaky snows, freaky flares. You remember cabdriving one June night back in the late seventies and how the temperature plunged so deep you got out of the car at Bedford and Carmine just in time to start shivering in your teeshirt and felt the first hailstones on your head and shoulders before diving back in. Your cab was “light” so you pulled over and turned off the engine and listened, eyes closed, to the 3 a.m. rattle that no one not awake and experiencing it would really quite believe.
But now, every day brings an anomaly. Often several. The only thing consistent is anomaly. Even, now, though it’s not so dramatic as a tropical depression that goes where no hurricane has gone before, you look out your window and see at least four distinctly different types of clouds in the placid near-twilight, as though the sky was rummaging through its wardrobe and couldn’t figure out what to wear. Hence a bit of this, a bit of that. Is Liu Zheng right or is it the other way around? Are we adapting our moods to the atmosphere? Or is it a reciprocal thing, a dialogue where no one speaking really listens, or cares about whether the conversation makes sense.
Weird too how the real estate value of tenement-high buildings, especially at intersections – buildings that at five or so stories look like an ancient dwarf race among the blank Aryan towers – has increased with the proliferation of cellphones. Because, ironically, their rooves are at just the right height. Thus, around the perimeters of these former tar beaches, the wireless relay transponders line up. Cranes routinely lower them down, to stand just behind the elaborate pressed-tin cornices manufactured in an age attempting to gild every visual space with a populux surface. So odd, the transponders look in that context, unapologetically functional sentinels sending off who knows what frequencies hither and yon, all so that Jane can speed dial Jim and say “I’m here at 24th Street” (when really she’s on 23rd) and it’ll be just like there’s two tin cans and a string between them.
A workmen’s scaffold hangs on its pulleyed ropes from the water tower of the big beige building on 23rd Street and Eighth. The evening feels suspended as if its shift is done and it’s reluctant to go home. Even the beacons downtown seem reticent about flashing. No, this is too much: On either side of Silverstein’s slab you see a ghost tower
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 808
of the WTC. No, they’re not there, you know they aren’t – but you can’t not see them either. Really, it’s just sky, with some pastel purplish horizontal clouds. But the sky looks fake. A tacky backdrop. You know it’s a trick. The trick is always one jump ahead, almost winking at you: See, if you were just a little faster you could catch me out. Look again. No ghosts anymore. Just sky.
To the west, where the sun glows copper on the windows, above the buildings, the clouds behave like imps again. There’s one that looks like a sombrero made of ice floes with a hole shot through its crown. Above which, the finest, most tenuous slices of pink-white prosciutto. Is this a mockery. Or is the mockery within us and we can’t see around it? What would Lovecraft say?
Katie calls from the living room: “I’ve never seen clouds like this before. Oh, wow!” If this is a new code of actuality, will you some day learn to read it? Will these disfigured forms, given time, assume a beauty, or at any rate an order, that you can’t fathom now? Or maybe what will drop away is your need for it to matter.
Silver now, a subtle glaze over all the buildings. And here it is: 8:31 according to certain bedroom clocks. Ides of June. It be.
• • •
Of course New York City isn’t the world. But there’s a terrible vibe here despite the fact that lots of individuals are decent to one another, respectful, considerate, courteous. Never have you had the sense that so much of humanity is headed down the wrong path – rather multiple paths, all misguided. And so little will or incentive to imagine a way to steer another way. So intractable, murky, beyond anyone’s ken or control: the sense of “we” so insubstantial.
Hanging vertically and in full view of passersby through the window of Pita Pan, the Coptic Egyptian-owned falafel restaurant on Eighth between 23rd and 24th, a slightly dingy American flag, the star quadrant at the upper left. Its grayed colors are no mystery since old glory came to live here almost five years ago, soon after 9/11.
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 809
Beneath the flag, in fact obscuring its bottom few inches, a counter for stacking used trays with a garbage receptacle built in underneath.
Six feet or so to the left of the flag, over the second booth, a framed picture, a familiar icon of ancient Egypt, with two large pyramids in the background. The caption reads: “The Sphinx Seen from the Front.”
Reacting to the “judicial murders” of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, Joseph Roth referred to America, meaning the U.S., as “the land of unlimited inhumanity.”
Solstice. One sign of our particular mode of fascism is the incremental, but ultimately catastrophic failure of the imagination. Evidence of this failure can be seen everywhere – in art, politics, writing, architecture – a hundred thousand manifestations. And it affects so-called progressives as much as those on the right, though their social reactions assume different forms. Overall, public and individual minds are torn between foggy delusions and extreme literalism.
Jessamyn lives up in the country, and she knows from the elements. You write her about what’s outside the window:
“Just took a picture of the sky looking east. Weird to the max. I haven’t seen a ‘normal’ pattern of clouds over New York for months, if not longer. The shapes appear less like weather as we know (knew?) it and more resemble a series of hairdos or confections dreamed up by a schizophrenic. Creative, sure, but utterly incoherent. Or perhaps the shade of Philip Johnson has sprung from Dis and talked Zeus into letting him design the sky.”
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 810
Amazing how we Americans retain our innocence in the face of our manifest obscenity. How do we manage it? And what a lot of energy it must take.
• • •
Begin summer peregrinations in Maine. You’ll be at Bea G.’s house in West Brooksville later today. Through the windows of Moody’s diner, the dense, almost sequin-like leaves of a poplar stand shimmer in the wind. A sustained burst of immense, silent applause.
Do business with men when the wind is in the northwest. Said Poor Richard.
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” Said James Baldwin.
Talking with Gwen this morning about your radical days – when you were a bolder fellow. Realizing that your game has become in some ways stronger, yet an evermore internal one. Have a baby and they’ve got you by the short hairs. You look both ways before crossing the street, pick your battles and turn politically risk-averse in a hurry. Sure, it makes sense. When you’re raising a child, the last thing you want is to do time, get killed or disappeared. But she’ll be fourteen in no time at all. Not quite adult, but pretty nearly formed. Not a kid any more. So you’ll get back your nightlife. And maybe a wider field of agency in other ways too.
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 811
According to David Bowker, a State Department Deputy Attorney, the idea of the prison at Guantánamo Bay as it’s presently used, is to “find the legal equivalent of outer space.” This, Bowker says, was the phase use by a member of the Bush administration “working group” charged with inventing a “lawless universe” for detainees in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
• • •
What are senses for but to be deceived?
world. A gesture of almost supernatural elegance. Witnessed on the telly over a posh waterfront bar in Castine, ME.
Castine / Castellane – wil ever the twain meet?
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