Things fall together
February 10 – 42nd Street & Broadway – Midafternoon
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- Bu sahifa navigatsiya:
- Water
- May 9, Noontime
- June 22 – 23rd Street Near Ninth Avenue
- August 18 – Midmorning
- September 5 – 23rd Street Eighth Avenue – Midafternoon
- September 7 – Le Gamin Chelsea – Early Morning
- September 9 – Midmorning
- September 11 – Le Gamin SoHo – Early Morning
- September 23 – Uptown 1 – Morning Rush Hour
- September 26 – MacDougal Street – Early Morning
- October 21 – Little Park at the Corner of Houston Street Sixth Avenue – Morning
- October 31 – 23rd Street Eighth Avenue
- November 4 – Le Gamin Chelsea – Early Morning
- November 11 – Greenwich Avenue Between 10th Charles Streets
- November 16 – Downtown 1 – Early Evening
- December 10 – Le Gamin SoHo
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1997
Subway platform. A man with a million dollar arm balls up a paper bag and wings it at the rat, foraging in the tracks. Struck on its flank, the rat starts, sits up, doesn’t run. No more flying objects comes his way, so he goes about his business.
Walk east from Frank’s house, reeling as ever from his tales. The last of the great New York Jewish Irishmen – he turns eighty-two in May. Another Gemini. Whenever Frank introduces you, it’s as his “Last Official Student.” You carry two books on loan: the Collected Poems of Philip Larkin, and a tiny clothbound New Century Library edition of Samuel Butler’s Erewohn. For your girls, a half-dozen of his currant scones. Frank keeps experimenting and this is the best batch yet. Since his wife Gloria died, you try get down here fairly often. ‘94 that was, Year of the Four Deaths: Katie’s father Franklin, Gloria, Ellen – a close friend and far too young. Then in December, your mother, Bea.
On the corner you stop to wait for the light – pull out the Larkin, open it anyplace, read the poem on the recto page:
If I were called in
To construct a religion I should make use of water.
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes; EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 18
My liturgy would employ
Images of sousing, A furious devout drench,
And I should raise in the east
A glass of water Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.
You ford Hudson Street, then turn right to cross Horatio. Midway, the lettering on a manhole cover catches your eye: NYC SEWER SYSTEM – MADE IN INDIA. Double take. Read it again. All caps, three inches high. No, not Indiana. A new ingredient in the melting pot: cast steel from the other side of the world.
You shift your eyes to the awning ahead: MYERS OF KESWICK – pronounced “kezik.” A little bell tinkles above the doorway as you enter. Here, if you’re a homesick Brit, you can fill your shopping basket with Marmite, Shrewsberry cakes, tinned mulligatawny soup, boxes of Ty-phoo tea, and blends of Heinz ketchup and baked beans of a subtly different blend than their American cousins. But it’s pasties for supper you’ve come for, and there they are, cooling behind display case glass: chicken and mushroom, curried lamb, shepherd’s, pork and apple, steak and kidney. Made on the premises. Addictive too – it’s the lard.
There is, in fact, an actual Myer, Peter Myer that is, rubicund face, slightly flaccid cheeks, small, sharp nose. His dark hair’s going gray, thinning a bit, and he wears it combed straight back off his forehead. Always in the shop, but he never waits on customers – that post belongs to a young woman – Mr. Myer is either in the kitchen or seated at a table at the back, sipping tea, immersed in ledger books and order forms, or else he reads the newspaper, a raccoon-sized ginger cat wending between his legs. Now and again, he’ll look up to survey the scene – a neutral glance, neither wary nor welcoming. There’s something about him that’s altogether perfect.
The customer ahead of you turns to leave. You’re next. A pork and apple (Katie’s favorite) and two chicken and mushroom pies (one each for you and Gwen). EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 19
eyes, skin light brown – Antilles in her bloodline somewhere.
She gathers your order. You scan the teapots on the high shelf behind the counter: a caricature Churchill makes the V-for-Victory sign, his middle finger’s the spout. John Bull sits, Hogarthian, astride a hogshead, eponymous dog at his feet. Beneath these china giants, a row of tiny metal double-decker busses, bright red. Lying to your right stacked on the marble counter, copies of the Sun and Mirror. Something’s up with the Royals – there’s Di looking at you sidelong from beneath her hatbrim.
The clerk folds down the top of the white paper sack till it’s snug then slips it into a plastic bag printed with the Union Jack. You give her Andrew Jackson and the old brass cash register actually sings out kaching! She hands you your change.
You’d like to say something British-sounding in taking your leave. Your usual “have a good one” belongs to New York – to another world. So you hesitate, and in the moment, she fills the void. “How d’ya kill a circus?” What?
“How d’ya kill a circus?” She steps back, hands on apron’d hips. You’ve never been good at riddles so you don’t really try, just put on a face that makes it seem you’re giving it a serious ponder. OK, how?
A glint comes into her eye. “Go for the juggler.” You smile. She must have wanted to try that out all day. She’s pretty, so you feel oddly like you’ve won a prize. Unlatch the front door – space out for a moment staring at the rack of bawdy postcards – pull it open. For whom the bell tinkles?
The fast way home is to cross Horatio and cut diagonally across the ball field toward Eighth Avenue. But this time you detour a few paces out of your way to confirm that you were not hallucinating. The manhole cover indeed claims it was MADE IN INDIA. In’ja.
April 19
the elevator. Then he shakes his head as if to change the subject he brought up. But
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 20
Gwen’s hardly a shy child and there’s nothing overtly menacing him. If anything he looks like a cherub dressed up in a suit – usually three-piece – silk tie and fedora: white hair, pink cheeks clean shaven, talcum-powder sweet like he just came from the barbershop. Yet it used to be that whenever the elevator stopped at 18 and Mr. Litwin got on, she would hide behind your leg and bury her face in your coat. It had to be his clumsy attempts at friendliness she found importuning. He’d reach out to try and chuck under her chin and say – too loud and deadpan to register as a joke – “why don’t you come live with me?”
It wasn’t as if you saw him every day, and at most once a month with Gwen, but so awkward were these chance encounters that you took it upon yourself to somehow turn the dynamic around. “This isn’t going to be easy,” you said. “But next time, the minute he gets into the elevator, before he can open his mouth, you say Hello, Mr.
now to take what you said on faith. At the next opportunity she gave it a shot, and – wonder of wonders – he stepped back as if struck by voltage. And thus began their first conversation – an exchange of pleasantries that lasted all the way to the lobby. Listening to them, you indulged in a Father Knows Best moment, the sweeter for its rarity.
These days Gwen throws her arms around Mr. Litwin when she sees him, walking slowly to or from temple, getting his mail, or riding the elevator. He gives her Hanukah gelt, of course, and birthday money – always a $20 bill, and there’s no deterring him. And once or twice when you’ve run into him on Eighth Avenue, he’s bought a lottery ticket to share with her. Their birthdays are a day apart, she’s July 14th, he’s the 15th, so he must figure there’s a winner in that combination somewhere.
This morning, Saturday, early. Gwen’s still asleep, you’re off to the café. Mr. Litwin gets on the elevator, dapper as ever, dressed for synagogue. You trade hellos. And then he asks: “What’s today?”
You look at your watch and tell him the 19th, but it’s a rhetorical question. “Tomorrow,” he says, “April 20th. They renamed Lodz as a birthday present for Hitler. “Two hundred fifty thousand Poles, Germans and Jews. The Germans and Jews were the richest – they owned the factories and mills.” EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 21
He’s voluble today, more so than usual. You hold the lobby door open for him, slow your pace down to his totter. Past the sycamores lining the block between 25th and 24th Streets. Past the shoe man, Chicken Delight, Shangrila. Past Bassry’s stand. At the corner of 23rd, he stops.
“What was it like? You already know. If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. What was it like? I went up to the top of the Empire State Building. I jumped off. I got up and walked away. Do you believe me? May 1st the Nazis tried to escape, but the Americans had cut the rail lines. May 2nd we were liberated. Soon we’ll all be gone. Twenty-six years old. Sixty-six pounds.”
The traffic signal flashes walk. “Be well,” he says. “Be well,” you reply. “I pray to God.” He starts across the street. Then it comes back to you. Not long after you first moved in, when you were maybe thirteen, Bea whispered – as though transmitting a dangerous knowledge – something you’d completely managed to blank out in the intervening years: “Mr. Litwin was in Auschwitz.” You were born in 1950.
“Happy holidays,” you call after him, but the traffic drowns you out. He’s already crossing Eighth Avenue toward the synagogue.
Someone taps your shoulder. It’s Bassry, shining a plum for Gwen. “How are you, my brother?” Fine. And you? Bassry’s smile widens, he glances heavenward, spreads his arms a bit as though to catch or release some invisible object. “Good, thank God.”
Much of the morning spent talking with a really fascinating woman, Nancy Topf, a potential writing student via Paul. She wants to find a coach who can help her with a book about “dynamic anatomy,” a method she’s evolved in the course of twenty-five years practicing body work, treating mostly dance and sports injuries. Not your average student. Former Cunningham dancer. Uses visualization techniques in the service of realignment. Big emphasis on the action of the psoas, a complex, deep-seated abdominal muscle. All news to you.
She pulls out drawings from scores of workshops she’s led. Large sheets of newsprint, bold renderings of the figure, interwoven with energy spirals, loops, EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 22
real deal. When you shake hands in parting, you feel like your arm’s been electrified. She’d be big fun to work with and you get a sense already that she feels the same about you.
along in a tunnel under less than optimal conditions, her words on the page conjure images that trigger subtle shifts in how you’re sitting, the positions of your pelvis, legs and spine. Weird and powerful sensations. As though the eye could be internalized, transformed into an agent of touch.
Sign taped inside window of an electronics shop on Fifth Avenue and 27th Street: YES! WE SPEAK ANDORRAN!
Frank’s birthday. Eighty-two, kineahora, as Bea used to say. The route down Ninth Avenue from Le Gamin to his townhouse takes you past a whole anthropology of urban orders. Across 21st Street on the west side, the resolutely banal facade of the General Theological Seminary masks a quad straight out of Oxford, utterly invisible to the passerby. Then the Robert Fulton Houses: three enormous slabs thrown up in the ‘60s, and oriented so that the playgrounds and basketball courts between them lie in near-perpetual shadow. One foggy day, as you approached from the east, the buildings emerged from the mist like a trio of cruise ships berthed side by side – for an instant it seemed the shore had moved a quarter mile inland. It’s the rare occasion though that atmospherics conspire to lend them that kind of romance.
A couple of blocks further south, across the avenue, the tall, sloping white facade of Covenant House, a once-celebrated youth shelter, now infamous for the liberties its priest-founder took with his charges. Built as the headquarters of the Longshoreman’s union, the windows are round like portholes, the effect part prison-like, part whimsical.
Just to the south, taking up the whole block between 15th and 16th Streets, Eighth to Ninth Avenues, the behemoth Inland Terminal, built by the Port Authority in EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 23
docks large enough to fit a good-sized truck. Used to be a heliport on the west end of the roof too. When you were a teenager, newly moved into Penn South and prey to sliding into detached, timeless lulls between bouts of frenetic activity, you’d stare out your bedroom window and watch the choppers come and go. The terminal’s outlived its industrial era intent – it’s privately owned now. Swank offices upstairs, retail in the ex-loading docks. Converted, so they say, as though real estate were religion, and the building itself had found a truer faith. Long as you’ve got the do-re-mi.
On the cusp of 14th Street now. Gateway to the Meat District. Planted foursquare on the overhang above the entrance to the Old Homestead Steakhouse, the life-size brown and white steer. Village landmark – as close to immemorial as it gets. Never been inside the place, though it’s always fascinated from afar. Jack and Bea, of course, disdained the place, and, in truth, it probably cost more than they could afford. How many coats of paint on that steer, between the fifties and now? Katie’s folks had no such compunction, took her there on a trip in from Long Island. Objectively nothing’s stopped you from going in for years now. Funny though how these things carry over from childhood. A kind of reverse snobbery that’s made certain places feel off-limits even as an adult. You could, for example, walk into Brooks Brothers too – it would be possible under the sun. No one would throw you out. Unlikely they’d even sneer. But it’s not part of your mental geography.
These streets, on the other hand, have worked their way into your molecules. Like most of the city south of 14th Street, all grids are off. Cobbled or paved-over streets trace native trails, cow paths, or some other pre-industrial usage. Sometimes the sequence almost makes sense. In this part of the Village, two named streets, say Horatio and Jane, fall between each numbered street, and then bam! West 4th and West 12th Streets cross one another – the pretence of regularity falls apart.
Disorder in more ways than one. And the Meat District in its marbelized shades of meaning. Until a couple of years ago, in the early hours, this maze of streets and alleys bristled with trucks backed up to loading docks, and harbored a thriving traffic among transvestite prostitutes and their largely bridge and tunnel clients. Back when you drove a cab and the night hadn’t gone well, this is where you’d cruise to try to change your luck. High risk territory, but there’d always be fares at four or five a.m.,
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 24
a fat joint through the money slot in the plexiglas partition. If they’d had a bad night too, or if it was just their thing, they could try to run some trips down. Careful you were, and not easily marked. But one time, when you’d stopped for a light, four transvestite hookers jumped in the back seat, and the fifth, an enormous drag queen, rapped on the front passenger window. So you opened the door and in she got. Somewhere up in Hell’s Kitchen, you don’t remember exactly where, the four in back jumped out, while the one next to you faked rummaging in her bag, then bolted out the door with the money pouch you hadn’t stashed under the seat since there was no way to be cool about it. Off she took at a gallop, one that would have done Native Dancer proud. And Native Dancer never had to run on her hind legs in five inch heels. What was under the seat was your length of galvanized pipe filled with cement, and you went for that, but by the time you ran round the hood of the cab, her lead was just too long.
It was down these Meat streets too, behind prohibition-style sliding peepholes – Natasha sent me – and sometimes literally underground, that the tabernacles of post- Stonewall gay and bisexual S&M flourished: the Anvil, the Hellfire Club, and the ultra- hardcore Mine Shaft, which Midwesterners pronounced as Mind Shaft. What a difference a decade makes. These days, when a meat packager closes, the building is converted to luxury loft-apartments, or its site becomes the footprint of a “luxury” residential tower. Here and there, looking west toward the Hudson River, you can still see a remnant of the High Line, the elevated railroad that once formed the spine of Manhattan’s industrial West Side. Today the spine’s turned skeletal and missing vertebrae. Under pressure from developers, the abandoned steelwork’s pulled down, section by section, heading north. You used to be able to see it, anomalous and familiar, the rusty horizontal band running up Washington Street at the height of a second story, whenever you turned right onto Horatio. Now the view’s clear down to the Hudson.
Up the four brownstone steps and ring Frank’s doorbell. It’ll take him a minute or so – longer if he’s upstairs in the library – to reach the kitchen window, pull it down and drop the key. Shift the bag of danishes to your left hand in anticipation of the catch. There it was again, on the way down here – the mystery writing. A couple of blocks to the northeast where West 4th Street terminates at 13th Street, there’s a vintage EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 25
typical downscale holdout. But the upper floors are sheathed in plywood painted flat gray, over which someone’s caligraphed three gigantic Chinese ideograms so vibrantly red they can be seen for half a mile, all the way from where West 4th angles clockwise ten degrees at Christopher. Been there a year or more.
The window cracks, widens. Frank sticks out his head, then his arm. Here comes the key. Let yourself in. Upstairs. Big hug. He’s looking well, brushy new haircut. Frank sits in his customary chair, you take the leather lounger on which he’s draped a motorized massage unit. Pull the lever, up come your legs. Press “back” and “pulse.” Frank will know about the calligraphy. Sure – it was a backdrop for a Woody Allen movie. Annie translated it. Mandarin. Means I love you.
Shadow of a seagull on a white stuccoed wall. Great city, are you conscious of yourself? Down on the corner, a police action. They are busting Sunday morning in his aspect as a black man, laughing.
East Sixty-Ninth Street. Deep ritz. From opposite directions they advance towards one another. She’s young and comely, dressed to the nines, the breeze off Central Park blowing back her gold-blonde hair. He’s harassed, closing-in-on-middle- aged – his body language agitated as White Man in an R. Crumb cartoon. At the end of one lightly tanned arm she swings a little black Prada bag. He grasps a dozen leashes tethering him to a carnival assemblage of dogs whose owners leave home early, head downtown to where the schist rises near enough to the surface to support the fortress towers of banks and brokerage houses. Someone’s got to walk ‘em. And it’s a living – sort of.
He’s lost control. The dogs have won the day. Total victory. Ecstatic, barking and leaping, they wind him into a late June maypole. En passant she turns her head, tilts her chin, widens eyes and shoots him a smile. “Hands full?”
His jaw drops, his gaze follows her locomotion down the street. One, two, three, four beats. “Oh Christ, I wish.” EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 26
• • •
Midafternoon, 68th Street and Park Avenue. Another MADE IN INDIA manhole cover. East side, west side, all around the town. Well you didn’t think they just made one of ‘em, did you?
Your path leads you northwest up Broadway toward Union Square. The sun’s at your back and as you walk over the subway gratings, you see a flash of green. Look down to discover a trail of underground flora beneath your feet – a canopy of magnificent weeds. Somehow, ailanthus trees, dozens of them, have rooted in the coffers of the subway vents, in a soil composed of soot, cigarette butts and gum wrappers. Occasionally, a shoot pokes through the grating and gets trodden down. But
the light.
even his best. One of Manhattan’s most exquisitely proportioned buildings. On a day like today, it’s easy to imagine yourself at the top of its spire, observing the bias cut of Broadway as it angles against the grid. Broadway was already a trail when Europeans arrived, and before that, long before even the schist was laid down, it ran as a river valley of dolomite.
Still walking up past Union Square, your toe hits a little upraised faultline on the pavement and you stumble in a kind dup-da-dup that flashes you back into the bassline of an old pop song: The sidewalks in the street; The concrete and the clay beneath my feet; Begins to crumble; But love will never die… Who sang that? Don’t remember. It’ll come back. What year? ‘67, ‘66? No, had to be ‘65. By ‘66 songs already had a harder-edged sound, the culture gearing up inexorably for the years of ideology and confrontation to come. But ‘65 still had a sense of open field to it, a lighter touch.
That spring you’d failed Algebra and had to make it up at summerschool: Washington Irving High, just a block over on Irving Place, where a bust of Mr. Tales of EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 27
have cared less who the bronze geezer was. What you did care about swung past in a diaphanous frock one lunchbreak while you were shooting the breeze out front with a fellow dragoon, a crazy bass player named Mark. All at once, a gust of wind rippled fabric against her form. Mark turned in mid-sentence and literally fell to his knees, hands clasped before him. Thanked God. You didn’t genuflect, just witnessed dumbly, embodied in a passing girl, the essential feminine power within the city – a principle masked by its outer armor. Reginald Marsh painted women in dresses like that, their bodies all rolling, vibrant flesh, whereas this girl was an urban willow-child, long hair, loose and straight down her back. Mais plus ça change, plus c’est la même robe.
• • •
Subway to Times Square. Hot enough to fry proverbial eggs on the concrete and the clay, but there’s not a dress to be seen – strictly business suits, hiphop and whitefolks’ sportswear, rigid lines or slack ones, no flow of fabric offered to the god of passing breeze. Reginald Marsh, Damon Runyan, they’ve all cleared out for good.
Some gear in the cosmic clock must’ve slipped because for once you’re early. At three, Dr. Cooper’s going to fill the immense crater in that lower right molar, but you’ve half an hour to kill. Walk west and come around to 44th Street.
Right here, into the ‘70s, this now-shuttered row of theaters served up three action flicks back-to-back for a buck. Crappy prints and sprung seats, but at that price, who’s complaining? Steve McQueen in Bullit, Sinatra’s Tony Rome, Van Peebles (the Elder) as Sweet Sweetback, Pam Grier’s Coffy, and the two Lee’s: Christopher played Dracula and Bruce, the Dragon. And on the street and in a score of bars, a cornucopia of live bodies – all styles – to stay, or to travel.
It’s strange, quaint even, that given all the other ways you veered from the straight and narrow, you never hocked yourself or rented another. To be sure, a little push one way or the other could’ve tipped it – all states being possible and separated more by membranes than walls. Once, at seventeen, looking fourteen, hair down past your shoulders, you waited at West 4th Street, half dozing on your feet, for a late-night subway home. Someone grabbed you from behind, pinned your arms and pushed
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 28
fifty maybe, very drunk. Determined, he came at you again. You cocked your fist back and he stepped back, widened eyes and cackle-laughed: “I’m goin’ up to Times Square and buy me a white boy – just like you!” The A train came then and the both of you got on it – you still shaking.
Thirty years on and it’s a different Times Square, and today pretty much every marginal enterprise along the Deuce from Sixth to Tenth Avenue is closed or being gutted in anticipation of brand name stores and tourist megabucks. The “legitimate” theaters, renovated and revived, now cater to well-heeled out-of-towners. Shrinking fast, the last preserves of the three-man virtuoso pickpocket team and the sidewalk chess hustler. Still anchoring the south end of the X, though for who knows how long, a one-third-scale British Airways Concorde perched atop a low-rise roof. From atop his pedestal just north of 46th Street, a bronze George M. Cohan still offers Broadway his immemorial regards.
You’ve seen the picture, the iconic moment of war’s end: the sailor, anonymous, dipping an unknown nurse in a victory embrace. But that was back before your day, when Crossroads of the World must have really meant something. When your ex’s father came here in the ‘30s, it was on a steamer out of Hamburg. The minute he stepped off the gangplank, he set about discovering the place that went with the image he’d been dreaming of for years. Asked the first stranger he met how to get to “Teema Squara.” Eventually he found it. You never asked him if it lived up to what he’d seen in his head and it’s too late now.
That’s it. Unit 4+2. The concrete and the clay. Odd name for a band. By tomorrow it’ll be cleared from your front-line memory again. But the beat’s stuck there for good.
Graffito on subway wall: GHANDI WUZ RITE. September 4 Nancy’s churning out the pages like there’s no tomorrow. She comes up every couple of weeks to meet you at Le Gamin, shows you what she’s done. When she said she wanted to write a book, she wasn’t fooling around. Hit the language like it was the EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 29
feel physical, like your give and take’s a martial art. Officially a non-writer, she’s your most engaged student. Today you have to restrain yourself from jumping out of your seat. Nancy’s invented a dialogue among a teacher, a student and a host of body parts, bones, muscles. Only a few months in and she’s found the mode to animate her narrative.
• • •
You learn of the death, two days ago, in Vienna, of Viktor Frankl.
September 5 – 23rd Street & Eighth Avenue – Midafternoon
“Hey Bongla Dosh! Bongla Dosh!” he shouts, screeches his bike up to the curbside fruit stand. Abu looks up from making change, smiles his Mona Lisa smile. The messenger’s another regular customer. Coke-bottle glasses with heavy black frames, a huge-torsoed man maxing out a red stretch teeshirt. Still straddling his machine, he begins to fill a plastic bag with tangerines.
Abu works the westernmost of the twin, umbrella-covered carts. Bassry, boss and owner, mans the one across the avenue. Kesban, whose truck makes the early morning Hunt’s point runs, floats between the two. Apart from Sundays and major holidays – or those rare occasions when bad weather cuts sidewalk business to a trickle – the tandem stands anchor the crossroads, from sunrise until dusk, vending fresh fruit and vegetables à bon marché to the tides of souls passing through.
When you stop at Abu’s cart alone or with Katie, he’ll pull a ripe banana off a bunch for Gwen – even if he’s in the midst of making change for one of the fierce old matriarchs of the Co-op. When Gwenny’s with you, she’ll “surprise” Abu – sneak up and tap him in the small of the back, then scamper out of view when he turns round. Eventually, she’ll let herself be caught, and then the banana goes directly to her. Of the trio, Abu remains the mystery man, the reserved one. Partly, you suppose, because he’s a hired hand, not a partner. Nor is his English up to Bassry and Kesban’s – he hasn’t been here as long as they have – so you find yourself communicating primarily through
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 30
and drawn. How are you doing? you asked, and he tapped his heart and shook his head.
When it’s Bassry or Kesban you encounter, they’ll make a quick circuit of the stand, mix plums with grapes and cherries, palm an organic mango or basket of strawberries and hand her a small, knotted bagful of fruit. If Gwen’s in school, or at home, they make you her bag man. You tried, the first few times, to pay for the bounty they bestow on your child. But Kesban responded with a look, half insulted, half grief- stricken, and Bassry’s smile distorted into a glare – so you learned to keep your money in your pocket and simply offer your thanks.
Why in hell write all this? Some bloke in a city. He feels his age – the big five-oh drawing closer like an ambivalent friend. You laugh aloud and folks at a far table glance this way. That’s it, the title for your memoir: The Good, The Bad and the Middle- Aged. September 9 – Midmorning A daydream – a trance vision really – facing south toward Lower Manhattan as you work out on the Nordic Track. With each pull on the handgrips you draw the trade towers closer toward you, or perhaps it’s you that skis toward them. Somehow in the process, you enlarge until you’re huge – their scale – close enough to work your way between them and drape your arms around their shoulders. They smell of panic. You want to comfort them, allay their distress. I’m here now, you say. Come on, let’s go. I’ll
September 11 – Le Gamin SoHo – Early Morning
High finance meets café society. Of the trio, the odd man out is the fellow in the suit: Steve, of J. P. Morgan. Built too large for the banquette or the toy-sized tables, Steve nonetheless appears completely at ease. Everything is as it should be. When his glasses slide down his handsome nose, they provide an opportunity for him to raise an arm, reveal an exquisitely simple cufflink. And his tan, frighteningly even, carrot-hued. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 31
By contrast, his companions exhibit a nearly Hasidic pallor. Wraithlike, bodies lost within black garments, clothes that seem more like shrouds, their shoulders drawn forward as if encircling too-vulnerable hearts: Patti, New York’s proto-punk rocker, and friend Oliver. The subject is investment, or, as Steve puts it, “the financial future.”
For long stretches, Patti sits silent, withdrawn. Occasionally she lifts her bowl of café au lait and takes a deep draught, turns sideways to gaze out the window. Oliver wears a goatee and a cap that reads Snohomish Police Department. But his grunge look’s a cover: he’s asking questions, and from the way the big man nods, they’re good ones. You reimmerse yourself in your book, and by the time you glance over at them again, the energy of the group has shifted – the couple’s listening intently as Steve lays out his vision. The fingers of one hand pressed together and palm flat, his forearm traverses the marble table top, slicing something. Where have you seen that gesture before? Ratners – vanished Ratners. “How much you want?” They’d hold the knife over a length of strudel – move the blade sideways until you gave them the nod.
Little by little, grape by lemon by banana, a new morsel of the Kesban and Bassry tale. She lives in Queens with her husband and two kids, a boy and girl. Bassry’s children are back in Egypt where he returns from late December to mid-May every year. He’s counting the days until he goes home for good. Two years more in New York, he says, until he has secured his daughters’ future. Both of them go to private school, “a school with computers,” where they study English. And he must save money for their dowries. The elder is six now, the younger three, and his wife is pregnant again. From his apron pocket, Bassry produces a little photo album and there they are in situ, the furnishings of the Alexandria apartment western-suburban, an odd contrast with his wife’s traditional clothes. Bassry says he will welcome whatever child comes, but it’s clear how keen he is on a boy.
Bassry’s day begins before sunup and finishes around eight in the evening, Monday through Friday. Saturdays, he teaches karate to a doctor and his son. He learned martial arts in the Egyptian Special Forces, shows you a snapshot of his younger self in ghi, aloft in a flying kick, high as the heads of his mates watching in the background. Bassry’s a man of enormous energies, handsome too, but there are days EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 32
“I can’t feel my body.”
Kesban parks her truck at the meters on Eighth Avenue. If the back door’s rolled open, that means she’s inside arranging boxes. In which case you lift Gwen up onto the tailgate to get her hug. Then Gwen jumps off and into your arms, a trick which always makes Kesban nervous, but you’ve never missed yet and don’t intend to. When Kesban’s working the stand, Gwen runs up to her beneath the umbrella. Either way, there’s always an embrace and a nuzzle, Gwen’s small head pressed into Kesban’s neck. “I love you, I love you,” Kesban says. And then, solemn, almost stern: “Be a good girl. Listen to your mommy and daddy.”
By degrees Kesban’s look’s been morphing. First her straight brown hair took on a coppery, almost Pre-Raphaelite hue, which suits her skin – then a wave. Next, silver bracelets appeared on her upper arm, and, visible beneath her apron, evermore fashionably-cut jeans. For Gwen’s last birthday, Kesban gave her a denim jumper dress with a zipper up the front. And a bag of cherries. When Kesban goes home to visit her mother in Ankara, a postcard comes – sometimes after she’s already returned to New York – addressed to Gwen. The one that made Gwen avid to see Turkey showed a landscape of white limestone pools filled with bathers set against a brilliant blue sky.
Today, dusk falling, you hurry out to teach Writing X. Just before you take the subway stairs at 23rd Street, ever alert to the sound of an approaching train, you pause to shake hands with Bassry. His fingers are blunt, his palms large enough to encompass a peach, touch-read it for bruises and ripeness. He presses his left hand over yours in a sandwich, then lays it over his heart. “Peace my brother,” he says.
Packed subway. Two men in suits constellate around the same pole, engaged in as asymmetrical a conversation as you could want. One fellow’s grand scale, straddles his briefcase as though it were an inferior sort of horse, peppers his underling with questions about the company website. The subordinate seems to shrink with every volley. Next stop’s yours. Time to start fighting you way toward the door. Your back’s to them now, but above the roar, you hear boss man fire off the million dollar question: “What I want to know is, do we have the wrong Provider?” EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 33
September 26 – MacDougal Street – Early Morning
Kelly green bandanna tied round her head, skin dark as Café Reggio’s espresso. Olive-drab standard-issue trousers ride low on hips so ample, they’ve stretched the elastic band of her gray sweatshirt into submission. She drives a huge rusting white Sanitation truck – persimmon-colored Barney mascot, leaking stuffing out its seams, crucified to the radiator – backward up MacDougal street. Every thirty feet or so she brakes and hops out of the cab. With one work-gloved hand, she grabs a big blue recycling drum sitting curbside, drags it to the truck, and flips it over so the cans and bottles spill into the maw of the hopper. With the other hand she pats the drum’s bottom, firm and gentle as burping a baby. Then two moves in rapid succession: she pulls down the lever that starts the mechanical jaws and spins the empty bin back up onto the curb.
economy and style in one smooth algorithm, the way Wally Backman and Keith Hernandez once handled the double play. Except this woman’s a team of her own. One foot on the step beneath the cab, then up she swings and inside – shift to reverse, up comes the clutch, accelerator down, eye on the mirror – all energy homing in on that next patch of blue.
Undomiciled – who can say? Certainly all his art supplies are packed in a shopping cart. Whenever you pass of a weekday morning you glimpse him through the fence as he draws and paints, unrolls more heavy paper. Birds with extraordinary detailed plumage, felines amidst bougainvillea forests, immense orange carp. He uses the chess tables as both display surface and workbench. He’s bundled up these days in a parka with a tight-laced hood. A white cardboard sign propped up on a bench, caligraphed in black: Mirikitani, Imperial Greater Art Department Chief Director, born June 15, 1920.
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 34
Early morning, the week before election day, you wait for the invariably jammed downtown local. Surprise! There’s Ruth Messinger, Manhattan Borough President and last best Democratic hope for mayor, orange suit peeking out from beneath black raincoat, leaning against a column and reading the New York Times. Her aides, four or five of them, all youngish men, pace the platform like expectant dads waiting outside a maternity ward in a 1950s sitcom. Despite their dark suits, they carry themselves like boys. If she wins, will they pass out chocolate cigars? Apart from anxiety, this entourage generates very little presence at all. No flashy campaign buttons, just blue lapel stickers that read, discretely, RUTH.
You approach the candidate. “Hi, Ruth. Good luck.” “Thank you.” She smiles – extends her hand in a friendly way. Her aides warily converge. They seem surprised that someone recognized her. Ruth looks immensely tired, eyes bloodshoot, pancaked cheeks the color of fading pumpkin.
You head down the platform, away from the incessant electronic beeping, the tide of human transience pouring through the turnstiles. As the train pulls in, you look back. Ruth’s still leaning against the column, reading the Times. Her aides continue to pace. These are not the guys you’d want taking point for you if you were running against Giuliani – or even, for that matter, shouldering your way onto a jammed downtown local.
• • •
Midday at the Chelsea Gamin. Young idiots do lunch, one male, one female. Excited talk about the male’s idea for a genex entertainment/financial news cable show. Awesome! Music videos intercut with Jakob Dylan’s investment strategies. “I hear you and I’m way ahead of you!” she shouts.
“Don’t tell anyone! If anyone steals this, I’m screwed!” he yells. “This could be –”
Magnanimously, he picks up the tab over her disingenuous protests. “One day maybe we’ll work together,” she barks, the swing of her shearling coat upending a water glass. Icewater pools, crests, and drips over the edge of the table. The check and dollar bills gets soggy. Out the door. No tip. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 35
• • •
Eighth Avenue between 21st and 22nd Streets, west side. Early Afternoon. You walk past a lot fenced off with chain link and topped with ribbonwire. The site’s been vacant for nearly two years since they knocked down a row of three burned-out, abandoned, hundred year-old tenements. Some effort being made to maintain the rubble in pristine condition. Persons unknown, probably agents of the developer, have been carting away the trash that routinely gets heaved over the fence by night.
Weaving south along the sidewalk, the man pilots a train of four recalcitrant shopping carts spilling over with empty cans and bottles. His garments consist of a large black plastic bag inventively knotted, and for footwear, a weave of rags, spiraling like puttees up his red-brown legs. Alternately pushing and hauling, he raps: “I ain’t got time for no bitches; gotta keep my mind on my motherfuckin’ riches.”
• • •
Twilight. From nearly every townhouse in the neighborhood, from 20th to 22nd Street between Eighth and Tenth Avenues, an unearthly glow. On the brownstone steps perch jack o’ lanterns, not a few carved to a Martha Stewartesque intricacy. These are the “safe houses” for the neighborhood celebrants – children of lawyers, brokers, Italian journalists, Brazilian actors, parents on welfare, health care workers, filmmakers, specialty bakers, Soca musicians, economists, epidemiologists, plasterers – who tonight have turned to bats, cats, witches, space aliens, pirates, goblins all. These kids will find nothing toxic in the Snickers plucked from Count Dracula’s bottomless bowl. No pins have been pushed into the organic apples Mommy Witch dispenses from her doorstep.
It’s already dark thanks to daylight savings time and taperecorded screams vibrate the still-temperate air. The trees sway, alive with the play of ghosts: ragged- edged muslin wrapped round grapefruits, hung from the low boughs of a pear tree. Light pours from the sanctuary of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, command center of All Hallows ‘een. Foursquare at the gate, a hunchbacked monster doles out orange flyers listing the addresses of participating houseowners, with suggestions for the most
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 36
sides of their mouths, and dads sprouting devils’ horns. “Trick or treat,” the kids yell at each waystation, their grins illuminated by fluorescent fangs. Reeling in delight as they criss-cross the street, they climb and descend the brownstone steps, rapturous as their bags grow heavier with loot, dizzy with triumph on their once-a-year mission against fear.
Post headline: RUDI SWEEPS. Ruth Messinger has the classic witchy face, but yesterday New York City voters went and re-elected a real-life ghoul.
But truly, at the mythic level Giuliani more resembles our home-grown King Pentheus, sworn enemy of the Bacchae. Where are you, Brother Dionysius?
Broadway at 22nd Street, mid-afternoon, yet already getting dark – the street broken vertically into light and dark masses. You push your pace into overdrive to get round a slim fella, well-dressed, white, middle-aged and talking urgently into his cell phone. “It gets so dark after five o’clock… They’re never going to find their way up that road… Tell them to start earlier – for their own sakes…”
Bea’s birthday. She’d have been eighty-eight, like the keys on her Steinway – the one her granddaughter now plays.
“One day,” said Albert Ayler, “everything will be as it should be.”
welcomed customers in nineteen languages. And then the boast: “Open 19 Hours.” The immemorial real estate tale: Landlord Shoots the Rent to the Stratosphere. No Multiple of Shwarmas Can Close the Gap.
Windows placarded from the inside with spreads of the New York Times. Campaign finance. Film adaptations of Brontë novels. New York’s Wealth of Nature. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 37
SoHo chic. October 24th issue, already yellow.
Last night, a small round rat dashed across your feet on Sixth Avenue just north of Broome Street. From the gutter, across the sidewalk, it ran parallel to the stream of water flowing from the carwash, leapt up the steps and into the office. Anxious and self-important like he’s late for work. See White Rabbit? See what coming to Gotham gets ya?
The car is packed so tight, people standing out of reach of a pole or handle steady themselves by pressing their fingers against the ceiling like waiters balancing an enormous tray. Assuming they are tall enough to reach that high. The rest of us hope the density of the other bodies will keep us from losing our balance if the train jolts.
Your back’s to it, so you don’t see the door between cars slide open, but you hear, momentarily the louder roar. Then it slams shut. Someone’s entered. Through the vibrant medium of compressed bodies, it’s possible to feel him moving closer, even before he speaks. I ain’t bathed in three weeks. I’m dirty. I’m smelly. I’m funky. A young woman embracing a pole and pressed against your arm reads, with superhuman concentration, a magazine article about a dynasty of supermodels. I want to buy a bar of
of someone’s bag is carving out your liver. For all you know, your own satchel, which you can neither raise nor lower, may be compromising the reproductive capacity of the suited fellow with whom you are nearly nose to nose. I want to be clean like youalls. I want a house like youalls. That’s the reality. I’m trying to deal with the reality. Ever closer. I want to take a shower. I want to buy a toothbrush and some toothpaste…
Exhibit on The Motive Power of Fire at the Electrokinetics Gallery on Lafayette Street. Exquisitely crafted models of early steam engines – one described by its inventor as An ENGINE for Raising Water (with Power made) by Fire.
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Elemental stuff. Unimaginable the clang and rush that must have accompanied those days, so different from the kudzu spread of nanotechnology. A few years back, when you were teaching a course on technology and social change at Hunter, you stumbled on a great quote. Boswell toured Watt and Boulton’s manufactory in Birmingham in 1776, guided by none other than the Iron Chieftain himself. Said Boulton to the Great Biographer: “I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have – POWER.”
half. This is a very small restaurant. They’ll never fit. And someone’s barricaded themselves in the bathroom. You’re sitting close enough to hear the sink running. He – it must be a he – is washing his hands like there’s no tomorrow. With each modulation in the roar of the faucets, you imagine him scrubbing, rinsing, cupping. His hands must be chapped – it’s winter – but he’s going to keep washing until the cows come home. Now it’s louder – sounds like he’s taking a bath in there, drowning out even the espresso machine which is churning out foam for the French students’ cafés au lait.
Somehow, they’ve all made it inside the café. They’re a jovial lot and thin as rails. They squeeze together, several double up on a chair. Soon they generate miasma of smoke. The first student gets up, tries the bathroom door, rattles it, and receiving no response, shrugs and turns away. Now you get up and peer into the light seeping through the door crack. Just visible, the shadow of a torso moving rhythmically, like he’s davening at the sink, and the sound of the torrent. Sit back down. Occasionally a student walks over to the bathroom door, jiggles the handle. Behind it rushes a virtual Niagara of compulsion, but they are visitors to the city and thus find everything amusing and exotic. They take it all philosophically, return to their table and light up another cigarette.
You, however, are hardcore New York, so you conjure an image of yourself sliding a credit card into the crack to trip the bolt, then rousting the fellow out – raw, dripping hands and all – and heaving him bodily into the street. In your Irish cop persona, you’d stand before the door, barring it. Off with you now, you madman – g’wan!
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 39
oppressive smoke. You bundle up to leave and as you squeeze past the French students, one of them makes eye contact, holds up his camera with a hopeful are. Out you stumble, the sixteen of you, like clowns liberated from a Volkswagen. The students disarrange themselves into two rows on the steps. Looking through the viewfinder, you still can’t believe they all fit inside. Un, deux, trois – ‘fromage!’ Incredible smiles. They thank you and pile back into the café. You head north toward home. And HydroMan – who knows? Will the secret of his identity ever be revealed?
Gwen was not quite three and a half when her grandmother died, so it’s not likely she can access many memories of ‘mama Bea. You haven’t said anything about the approaching two-year anniversary, yet Gwen brings up the subject on her own, says she feels sad about it. Still, she adds, “Mama Bea lives inside our bodies because we remember her.”
“Yes,” you say, “she lives outside of her body.” “So,” says Gwen matter-of-factly, “she’s alive and dead.”
Mind adrift. What brought up such an ancient image? Long ago, when you were maybe seven, you saw a policeman on a motor scooter run head first into a truck on one of the streets below Houston – Greene Street, probably. Hard to say who caused the accident, but the cop went flying up in the air, as though propelled by a trampoline, then came to earth on the Belgian cobbles, quite luckily not headfirst. You remember him half-sitting there, staring at his broken ankle, the foot displaced, as though it belonged to someone else, and his visored hat, upside down on the sidewalk.
18th Century word-concept coined by J.G. Herder: Einfühlen – to feel one’s way into the past, as through a mirror. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 40
Gwen begins a series of tracings: to “make Daddy happy.” Snapshots of herself with Mama Bea. You tape them up on the wall above her dresser. Gwen directs which one goes where.
Is this the Gotham where the fools come from? A: No sir, this is the Gotham that the fools come to. |
