Things fall together
September 3 – Le G. – Early Morning
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- September 5 – Le G. – Early Morning
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- October 16 – 50th Street Eighth Avenue – Early Morning
- November 6 – Uptown C Train – Midafternoon
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- December 6 – Le G. – Midmorning
- December 8 – Le G. – Evening
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- December 19 – Downtown C Train Approaching West 4th Street – Early Evening
- December 21 – Late Afternoon – Dr. Johnson’s Office
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September 3 – Le G. – Early Morning
Newspaper accounts of the plans to close Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island resonate with nostalgia and a hint of pride at the sheer volume of crap the city has generated. Visible from space, domical like an ancient volcano, Fresh Kills spreads three thousand acres – four times the area of Central Park. What’s the plan now that the time’s run out? Ship the garbage by barge to a railhead across the Hudson where the township’s glad to take it off our hands for a price, thence dispersed to points west and south. Fill up them old mineshafts in the coal fields. Who knows, maybe some disused ICBM silos too. Twentyfour seven, the trucks rumble west along Canal Street, dump their loads, then turn around for more.
In the movies life is beautiful, but in Gotham, it’s the real estate that’s drop dead gorgeous. “Welcome,” the Post headline reads, “to the Skyscraper Bazaar.” Every charismatic commercial building, every “marquee” and “postcard” property, Rockefeller Center, Lever House, CityGroup, the WTC, is changing partners, waltzing
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the next market uptick and wannabees hot to get in on the top floor.
But the tune’s turning frenetic, the tempo racing ahead of the steps. Says realtor Mary Ann Tighe, “We’ve entered a place where no one knows where we’re going.”
By first boat of the day out to the Statue of Liberty with Gwen. The instant the gangplank dropped, the two of you raced all the way to the crown ahead of everyone, looked up the arm at the great torch, and out over the harbor. Now you explore the museum at the base, searching for the Emma Lazarus plaque. Got to be here somewhere.
“Look!” she says, points out over the mezzanine balustrade. She has spotted the original torch, copper strips woven and riveted together, rising from the center of the atrium. Together you read the placard, a headline from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, October 15, 1887, price 10 cents:
LIBERTY’S LIGHT A LURE TO DEATH – THOUSANDS OF BIRDS, BLINDED AND KILLED BY THE FLAME IN THE STATUE’S HAND – THIRTEEN HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVE PERISH IN A SINGLE NIGHT.
The accompanying exhibit note, a facsimile of the cover, renders the scene so graphically that nothing remains to be imagined. The massacre is observed from what is literally, a bird’s eye view.
Downstairs, on the way out, you ask a Federal Park Service guard what became of the Lazarus plaque. “Oh, it’s there all right,” he says. “It’s just not that obvious.” Your retrace your steps and find it exactly where he told you it would be. No wonder you missed it, it’s very small really, no larger than a cafeteria tray, mounted above eye level and illuminated only by lightspill from the surrounding displays. Trading lines with Gwen you recite the poem. Midway through, as you say “yearning to breathe free,” you feel your throat clutch. With each word spoken aloud, the cadence and full emotional charge of these lines – once so affirming of a hope long since nullified – threatens to overwhelm you.
Gwen seems not to notice that you can hardly vocalize, continues on in a calm, clear voice. When you’ve finished, she examines the adjacent cases full of scale models, EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 88
again, trying to imagine how you could have rendered it so gigantic in memory. In your mind it seemed to take up a whole wall of the pedestal’s stone interior, writ so large no one could fail to see it. Only now, as you write this do you realize how you could have gotten the scale so wrong. Once long ago, you had a souvenir model of Liberty – Lord knows what became of her – the poem stamped on her plastic base. In the intervening years, you seamlessly expanded the lines of type into something monumental. On the statuette, the poem had covered the entire wall. Once the genie’s out of the bottle, no dose of reality can fit it back in.
Upstate to the Catskills for a weekend reading. Dinner at Patricia and Peter’s house. In the gloaming, light spills lambent from the kitchen onto the lawn. Gwen blows bubbles which land on the grass and somehow come to rest without popping – a backyard prairie topped with iridescent spheres. “Look!” she cries, “Utopia for ants!”
cutting a swath through the crowd. Slip along in his jetstream. Top landing and almost out into the street, fast fella gets stalled behind slow fella who, if there were roses within nose range, would be stopping to smell them. Slow fella hits the open air, begins whistling: Oh, what a beautiful morning! Fast fella strides into overdrive and swings around, shooting sidelong daggers, then paum! slams into big gal coming the other way. She’s solid too, poitrine like the prow of a man o’ war, Venus of Willendorf thighs. “Excuse me,” fast fella says through gritted teeth, breath half knocked out of him. Big gal plants herself, deliberate syllables. “You ought to watch where you’re going.”
A suited young woman clicks past, double-takes big gal in her stretch pants, widens her eyes.
Fast fella, blatantly insincere. “Sorry.” No good comes from this. You shift lanes and fall in behind slow fella who’s moving so glacially you can still hear what’s going on back there.
Big gal: “Sorry, shit – I’ll bust your head.” EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 89
Fast fella: “Oh yeah? What are you gonna do, sit on me?”
He’ll pay for that. You can almost feel big gal going for his tie knot with one hand, drawing back the other arm, palm open wide. Street warrior asana. But you’ll never know the next of it, for the wormhole’s already closed behind you. Parallel universes on the same block. All you have is where you are and what’s up ahead: slow fella warbling Some Enchanted Evening. Eight o’ five, a.m. You resist the temptation to rush past him. Slacken your pace, deepen your breathing. By the time you reach the awning of Paul’s building near the corner of Ninth Avenue, he’s made it through most of Impossible Dream.
A middle-aged man, tall and thin, wearing globally anonymous sportswear leans back against the doors. He coughs repeatedly, eventually bringing up a substantial wad of sputum which he plants directly on the floor between his feet. Using the sole of one white Pony running shoe he spreads the phlegm with slow circular motions. A few moments later he draws a handkerchief out of his back pocket and with great fastidiousness, blows his nose.
So camouflaged by the gray macadam, you nearly tread on it in the crosswalk. Flattened to an almost two dimensional oval, yet still hirsute and endowed with its unmistakable worm-like tail. There it is: the proverbial rat’s ass no one gives a rap about.
• • •
5 p.m. Gwen’s busy with homework. You’re burned out with writing. Already it’s pitch dark. You reach across your desk for the first book that meets your grasp. The Burnt Pages. John Ash. Read from “Forgetting”:
but that’s how I like it: there is no other way to go on. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 90
December 6 – Le G. – Midmorning
Symbols aplenty in the naked city, so who knows which ones truly signify? But here’s a puzzlement, a glitch in the accustomed seasonal order. And though she hasn’t asked about it, or perhaps even noticed, your own internal Gwen wonders: Daddy what does it mean?
Immediately after Thanksgiving, Christmas tree sellers from up north, Alaska, Canada and Vermont, descend on the city and set up their stands on the sidewalks near particular intersections, such as the one at 22nd Street diagonally across Ninth Avenue from Le Gamin. Year after year, the same folks work the same locations, park their pickup trucks converted into campers and nail two by fours into racks to lean the trees against. To draw attention, some inflate gaily colored Santas or Elves and affix them with ropes or guy wires to the roofs of their trucks. At nightfall, illuminated from within, these guardians of the crossroads gladden the heart, serve as beacons to armies of chilled pedestrians trudging wearily home. That’s how it’s been.
Recently though, at least in your neighborhood, a malady has afflicted the whole pantheon of blow-up folk deities: they appear to be suffering a collective deflationary crisis. The first incident you observed took place on 24th Street and Eighth Avenue in front of the Rite Aid drugstore, where a red and green elf, trimmed in yellow was stricken with pneumatic failure and crumpled within seconds into a flaccid heap. Then yesterday, at a larger stand visible from your seat at Table 4, a full-scale Santa precipitously lost air pressure and sagged into the street, disrupting traffic. With near heroic energy, one of the fir-purveyors clambered up onto the camper’s roof and inserted a hose into Santa’s valve while a compatriot on the ground revved up the air compressor.
As Santa reinflated, the fellow on the truck positioned himself at his back, squeezing and palpating to prevent air pockets from forming in his folds. Soon, Santa began to reassume his accustomed shape, swaying amiably to and fro, and the man responded by spreading his arms across the giant’s vast red torso. The taughter his skin drew, the more animated Santa’s movements became, until he appeared to abandon himself to the throes of some exquisite sensation, twisting and pulling evermore
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post, containing, as best he could, the giant’s wilder gestures.
For a moment it seemed that Santa might tear himself free and soar heavenward, but gradually his paroxysms subsided and at last he stood upright, trembling gently in the breeze. Satisfied that Santa had calmed at last, the man who had revivified him climbed down and returned to the more mundane give-and-take of street-level trade. For a quarter hour perhaps, all seemed well. But then, some latent fissure must have abruptly ruptured, for within seconds Santa lay supine, sprawled over the roof of the camper, one arm flung over his head in a pose very like that of the voluptuous dreamer of Fusili’s “Nightmare.”
Some twenty-four hours gone and Santa still lies where he fell, his slack material secured to the roof with bungee cords. Countless mortals file past, most oblivious to Santa’s calamity, alive only to the bower of firs arrayed on either side of them, and the pungent fragrance of forest, come to the city for the short, happy season in which nature ends its cycle, in order, one day, to bloom again.
Santa’s back up! Incarnate and glowing from within – Father Christmas lives! December 12 A silly warm day pushes the mercury up the tube into the high forties. Fierce, freak winds, gusting to 50 mph, send the tree sellers atop their trucks to deflate and batten down their at-risk Santas and Elves. Then they tie the trees securely to their stands.
The caprices of the wind are a great mystery. Along some streets it rips awnings down, on other streets one hardly feels it. At certain intersections it causes pedestrians to jackknife forward and walk more or less in place until it abates. When it comes at you from the side, you must lean precipitously into it, somehow maintaining balance. Occasionally, a strong tailwind will push a car stopping for the red into the crosswalk. Yet just down the block, calm prevails. Overhead, in the visible patches of sky, the clouds race past like a special effect designed to convey the passage of geologic time. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 92
atmosphere exchanging for another.
How do you know you live in today’s city and not in one of the many Manhattans of the past? Because as you walk, you navigate a labyrinth of scaffolds. For the past several years, they’ve been multiplying exponentially. But then, so many circumstances warrant them: construction of new buildings, renovation of old buildings. A plethora of conversions too: slum to condo, school to condo, commercial and industrial to residential, industrial to office or gallery space. Not to mention new windows, HVAC, brickface maintenance (tucking and pointing, sandblasting) terra cotta restoration, all manner of facade and cornice work. In short, every form of makeover possible in a real estate culture bent on looking hot at any price. And though they signify a forward-looking purpose, scaffolds often serve to make desolate whole sectors of pedestrian life. They block out light, turn sidewalks into improvised prison yards, necessitate ramps and detours, truncate sightlines.
Scaffolding material itself consists of nothing more than simple steel components bolted together – essentially a big kid’s Erector set. Made from standardized pieces, they can be assembled or taken apart very rapidly. The uprights rest on blocks of wood that compensate for variations in the street grade, and the tunnels formed are roofed over with planking. If the building is a posh one, the scaffold might feature a cutaway to accommodate the presence of a venerable tree.
The side facing the street is usually fronted with a wall of plywood four by eights upon which advertisements get wheatpasted – sometimes literally overnight – in defiance of the timelessly ineffectual injunction to POST NO BILLS. Unless, of course, the scaffold surrounds corporate emblem on the rise. In that case security guards will preserve the scaffold as a marquee for the developer’s message. Testifying to the greatness of the coming edifice, the rhetoric will, most likely, include that most savagely abused of words: luxury. Almost as invariably, the scaffold’s sidekick, the dumpster, stands waiting, Sancho Panza-like at the curb. Or if the project’s a large one, a herd of dumpsters in varying degree. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 93
Thus scaffolds blossom in as many variations as there are worksites. Some extend the whole length or width of a block, in deference to a large-scale project. On other streets it seems that every second townhouse or tenement is undergoing renovation, so one passes through a kind of Manichean universe of light and dark spaces, alternatively bright and gloomy, enclosed and exposed.
And when it’s raining, what to do? There’s not sufficient room for two people to pass one another without tilting their umbrellas to the side or collapsing them. If, like the person approaching, you proceed under the assumption that you possess exclusive air rights to the tunnel, the chances are you’ll bump bumbershoots and go on your way convinced of the rudeness of the other. But because the roofs of the scaffolds leak like sieves in any sort of downpour, it isn’t wise to dispense with your umbrella altogether, but rather lower it to half staff for at least partial coverage.
Occasionally a scaffold will appear to have simply been abandoned. When Gwen started pre-K, and for several years thereafter, the front of the school lay swathed in a matrix of bars and hoardings. If any work was being done, you neither saw nor heard it. Waiting with Eric B. at schoolday’s end for Gwen and Becky to emerge, you shared a running joke: if only you’d had the good sense to go into the scaffolding business – a day to put it up and then, like clockwork, every day afterward – ka-ching!
One morning in second grade, a visual shock: the scaffold had vanished and the quotidian experience of dropping Gwen off and picking her up changed subtly. An ambivalence. With its mediating structure erased, the school seemed oddly naked. That’s always the way it is when a familiar scaffold is removed. Viscerally, you miss it for a few days, but the dubious shelter it afforded is more than compensated for by the restitution of a bit of sky. The dimly remembered building reveals itself – beautified, or at any rate gussied up. Storefront businesses emerge from the glum twilight, their signage no longer obscured. Nor does it take long for your mind to unbuild the structures you can no longer see.
• • •
At the café, you scan the Times, rustle impatiently through their dreadful, slavish coverage of Bush’s coup d’état. Juxtaposed with the ugly news, a full page ad of EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 94
surrounded by its own tiny, meticulously rendered scaffold. What’s the pitch? Joint Reconstruction at the Hospital For Special Surgery.
pickup crew, none of whom wear hard hats and only a few of them the cheapest six-for- a-dollar dust masks. This site features a kind of improvised chute you never noticed before, shaped like a cubist’s idea of an elephant’s trunk and consisting of multiple jumbo plastic garbage bins, their bottoms cut out, telescoped into one another and strung together by chains through their handles. Suspended from whichever floor is being cleared, it acts as a one-way amusement park ride for debris. Billows of dust escape from the joints between bins as the refuse travels downward and a fair cloud roils up when the payload hits home. If you pause beneath the scaffold when the chute’s in action, you can hear a literal musique concrète: distant rumble high above, a galloping crescendo of plaster and lathing, then bada-boom! followed by a coda of soundwaves bouncing round the dumpster’s walls.
Subway car’s packed. You and another fellow lean against adjoining doors. He’s squat, ethnically indeterminate, legs spread, feet splayed. He munches voraciously, hand into mouth, into box, into mouth again. Welling up, the stench of falsely buttered popcorn.
Better breathe through your mouth or else you’ll gag. Shift focus too. Down the end of the car, a slight man, Asian, in a loose white shirt. He doesn’t plant his body against the door to steady himself like a veteran New Yorker, but grasps the curved bar at the edge of the seat row and sways with every shift of the train. He looks about with what seems a mix of wonder and trepidation, as though he was, quite literally, born yesterday, fully grown.
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 95
Minus twenty today if you count the wind chill factor – metallic sky, but too cold to snow. Through the window of one of Dr. Johnson’s treatment rooms – this one painted bilious yellow – you gaze out at the fast-darkening sky, at the cornices of the opposite buildings, then at the bundled-up folks hurrying along St. Nicholas Avenue, and to and fro across 125th. Second visit to your new dentist. First the grim evaluation. Now cleaning is in order.
Busses lumber past, ads running horizontally along their flanks: giant women three times life size, magical creatures at once angular and buxom. In languid odalisques they repose, wearing nothing but their H&M undies. You begin to nod asleep in the timewarp, your mind swooping eagle-like over the landscape of their goosebumps.
Bobbi enters and begins fishing bits of hardware out of the autoclave and snapping them together. You exchange pleasantries. Deliberately you don’t check your watch. It could be ten minutes, or an hour since she called you from the waiting room. Dr. Johnson bounds in, preceded by the double snap of his latex gloves. He pulls down his plastic wraparound magnifying lenses, shoots you full of Novocain, then goes to work with an ultrasonic machine that feels for all the world like a jackhammer. You’re certain he’s destroyed your teeth, pulverized them in some dental analog to an urban renewal clearance, but when he’s finished and you run your tongue around, the enamel surfaces feel smooth, almost new.
shatter on contact. Avoiding faces, you raise your eyes to the stream of advertisements above the windows and doors – “car cards” in transit ad parlance. Nestled amidst Dr. Zizmore’s rainbow hallucinations of flawless skin, and Trollman and Glazer’s promise to be “buen abogados y buen amigos,” an MTA public service message begs the million dollar question: WHAT IF YOU ARE THE SICK PASSENGER? Not a sick passenger,
clear enough. Is it possible that Michel Foucault never died but went underground, into MTA public relations?
IF YOU ARE NOT WELL, YOU WILL NOT BE LEFT ALONE. |
