Things fall together
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- June 12 – Le G.
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Just after the starting gun for the Belmont stakes, War Emblem brushes against another horse, stumbles and throws his jockey. Somewhere, a Saudi prince watches as the Triple Crown runs through his fingers like sand. A horse named Sarava, a 70-1 shot takes the cup.
The streets of Chelsea – who knows about the rest Manhattan, or the city as a whole? – give off that abandoned feel. Just listless, not Sunday Morning Velvets lazy. Sure, it’s been thirty-five years since that groove was cut. Thirty-five years too, give or EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 281
Times’s under the bridge? Many thousands gone.
Is it too early to say that Manhattan no longer believes in itself as the source of all impossible energies against all impossible odds? Even Yossi, the wiry, Yemeni-looking Israeli dancer of the ready smile and brilliant teeth, can’t pretend his heart’s not elsewhere, even as he brings your coffee. Perhaps it’s just that in this overcast light, this tentative spring, we are permitting the disappointment to read on our faces. Lately the New York smile has had so forced a look, as though an autonomic reaction to a needle prick, independent of what is felt deeper down. Numerous women appear all the more beautiful for the diminished rigor of the tensed facial muscles. But Kimsey, whose teeshirt reads: the rapture, the rapture, the rapture, tries to hard to maintain her perkiness and consequently doesn’t wear the mood as well.
You think about Two Roads, Meg’s play about the great South Florida hurricane of 1935 and how the barometer, interpreted this way and that, becomes a mute, yet eloquent character in the drama. Are you turning into a barometer? Sloughing off your coat of individualism to become a response mechanism for the collective atmospheric pressure? This morning feels so similar to the vibe last September 3, Labor Day. Except that then, you took the feeling personally, and now it’s not about you any more. It’s about what happens.
A woman whose name you don’t remember – an ex-parent at PS11 who pulled her son Luke out a couple of years ago – stops outside of Gamin when she spots you through the window. She’s pushing a huge empty black shopping cart and heading south on Ninth. You rush out. Bear hugs. It’s been months, maybe a year. She’s your height, but twice your breadth. For whatever reason there’s always been some sort of simpatico between you. You fall into talking schools. She’s hoping Bloomberg will wrest some power from the principals. Luke, a year older than Gwen, is heading for the Museum School having not made the cut at School of the Future. Disappointed, since she’d thought all his years in the accelerated program would have counted for something. Hopes for the best though, believing as she does that God arranges things in ways we can’t anticipate – imagines Luke saying, years from now: “That teacher at the Museum School changed my life.”
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He’s off to camp after graduating from fifth grade. Loaded with books. She’s investing in a computer for him, and when he comes back, Luke will find his room set up with a new desk and “ready for business.”
Like you, she has all her eggs in one basket – Luke’s an only child too. You know a little about what it is to be the steward, in partnership with Katie, of a fast-growing girl, moving inexorably toward adolescence and beyond. How would you cope as the single mother of a lad already taller than you, and approaching a cusp of his own?
“This is when it get serious,” she says. • • •
Long years since finishing Divided…, Scott sends you a tidbit you somehow missed in your research: xeroxed pages from The Best, Worst and Most Unusual: Noteworthy Achievements, Events, Feats and Blunders of Every Conceivable Kind. Published in 1976, the book cites the World Trade Center as the “World’s Worst Office Building.” How strangely now, these words from the Bicentennial year play in the mind.
“Besides blighting the skyline and affronting the eye, the World Trade Center is also a wretched place to work. ‘When I approach the building, I just don’t want to go in there,’ says one employee. Says another, ‘Sometimes I just walk out, intending to get out for an hour for lunch, and can’t make myself come back.’
The Center’s horrors are many – inexplicably sealed mail chutes, hopelessly snarled telephone lines, centrally controlled office lighting that can be controlled after hours only by means of a written request submitted at least a day in advance – but the building’s denizens reserve a special place in their spleens for the elevators. Plummeting downward so fast that their walls shake audibly, they break down frequently, spilling over with humanity during rush hours. ‘Sometimes I feel like a lemming – or a salmon swimming upstream,’ says one New York State employee… ‘If I can’t leave at 4:45 I wait until a quarter past five or I walk downstairs rather than be squeezed into the elevator.’ A woman whose office is on the eighty-second floor describes the noontime trip to the cafeteria: ‘I have to take a local elevator to the seventy-eighth floor, then and express to the first floor, then an express to the forty- fourth, then an escalator to the forty third, where I get a lousy meal.’
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Many workers have complained of psychosomatic ailments that are directly traceable to the Center – one Manhattan physician has treated five such patients. Leonard Levin, a staff member of the New York Racing Board, whose office is in the Center, says, ‘There is one wonderful thing about the World Trade Center, It feels sooooooooo good when you get home at night!’”
• • •
Comes the news yesterday of the remains of twelve people discovered in the ruined Deutche Bank building just south of where Tower 2 stood. Sealed since September 11, the huge vertical warren of toxicity is only now being explored, and cleaned out. You try to imagine the cost. The conditions.
• • •
For the past few days you’ve been possessed of a great desire to walk atop the High Line with Gwen. It would be an adventure and a half seeing the city from up there, the old track bed sprouting with spring greenery.
T.’s got his office in a converted industrial building, which abuts the line just to the west. You’ve seen, from the window near the stairway on the sixth floor, how easy it would be, from the equivalent window on the third floor, to drop a few feet down, or perhaps clamber up from the second. You begin to cook up a vision how you’ll put elastic bands around Gwen’s and your pants legs to keep the ticks off and how careful you’ll have to be of the broken glass and other hazards as you walk up north toward where the tracks bend toward the Hudson.
Which prompted you, when you went for a meeting this morning at T.’s, to do a recon of possible safe egresses, only to find that the second floor window has a grate over it and the third floor is entirely tenanted by one company which keeps the stairwell door locked. No doubt you could contact the Save the High Line people and arrange to go up yourself, but they’d never allow Gwen to accompany you, and in any case the enterprise would lose its transgressive edge. But you’re not going to give up just yet. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 284
• • •
Katie laughs aloud reading from her Terry Pratchett book. What cracked her up? His definition of the civilized world as one “that can support historians.”
You’d arranged to meet Rob M. here at 9:30 before taking off to tour the ex-WTC site. Rob reviewed Divided… twice for his Boston paper, once when it first came out – citing the section on the trade center as a prefabricated ruin – and then again after the towers fell. You’ve emailed back and forth occasionally since then, and agreed to get together for a walkabout whenever he found time to take a day off and fly down. And now, here he is – early even, it’s only 9:15 – eager to talk, gather information toward his article for a “major magazine,” and the problem is you find, in the instant, that you can’t do it. Can’t possibly face going downtown this morning. But he is cool with that.
So you schmooze a while in your protected zone, then walk him over to the Strand. Once inside, Rob heads off to graze one section of the pasture, you another. Into the stacks you press – and get lucky. There on the shelf, side by side, as though they’ve been waiting for you to arrive and claim them, stand twin copies of Barthes’s
yet, unlike your own well-marked paperback. Then downstairs to look for a review copy of After the World Trade Center. If it’s there, it’ll be half price, which beats the one third discount you get from the publisher. Look first under S for Sorkin, then Z for Zukin and finally, just in case, under A for After, but no dice. Instead, Shahid Ali’s book, Rooms are Never Finished, posthumous and just published, practically leaps off the shelf and into your hands. The only copy. You let the covers fall open, then focus your eyes where they’ve landed – recto page 59, “Barcelona Airport”:
Are you carrying anything that could Be dangerous for the other passengers?
O just my heart first terrorist (a flame dies by dawn in every shade) EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 285
Crescent-lit it fits the profile
on your screen…
Where to find After? The fellow at the information desk looks it up on his computer, then disappears into the STAFF ONLY section, and returns holding the sole available copy. You walk upstairs, reconnoiter with Rob, who, when he visits the Strand, usually buys so many books he has to ship them up to Boston. Amidst the tables full of variously eager and indifferent volumes, you resume your conversation, in order to wind it down for now, pledging to continue it in the future. You part company, one home to write this, and the other to the place where today, particularly today, you just can’t make yourself be present.
You used to imagine Le Gamin as your outpost. More and more you see it as a trading post. Here you sit, in the manner of a pasha, and every day, the stories of the world, like so many spices and fine-wrought goods come, by straight or circuitous rout, to you.
People too. Deborah Harry at Table 18. Chelsea Clinton over at 13 . Not to mention Ethan Hawke who’s said to have been a regular for years, though you wouldn’t know him from Adam. Nor any of the others either. Someone always has to point celebrities out to you. Michael Stipe you recognized, more as an exercise in phrenology than anything else. Who next? Idi Amin? Bin Laden? T’aint funny, McGee.
for Mario, Roberto and Tomás, and any of the fellows who work with them behind the counter at the grill, the chopping board and sink. Lots of other stories, but that one entered through the airwaves from thousands of miles away. Another story is that you are learning, flooded as you are by stories, to let a few roll off you, duck-like, even as you float amidst them, even as they form the medium that carries your nurturance.
• • • EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 286
On the corner of 25th and Eighth, workmen begin reconstructing the subway entrance on your corner trashed one night last December by the sudden and unexpected arrival of four thousand pounds of SUV. Whenever you use that acronym, Gwen comes to mind and how she loves to sing the lyrics Ken A. appropriated from an old Quaker song for his comicstrip “Road Kill Bill.” Bill is a furry-tailed mammal, a squirrel probably, who contrary to his name, never dies, no matter how often he’s run over. Every time Bill scrapes himself off the tarmac, a bandolier of tiremarks printed across his body, he attempts to Socratically engage his assailant, a monstrous white fella named Anger Man. But to no effect. Anger Man just rolls up the windows, cranks the AC, and flattens Bill again, chanting his war cry all the while:
Tis a gift to be free Tis a gift to drive a Chevy SUV With a four-wheel drive and a stereo DVD…
While you’re musing one of the workmen jacks into a lightpole’s electrical supply and, wielding a drill whose bit is of nearly satyric proportions, proceeds to bore holes in what remains of the concrete form to which the entrance frame and railings will ultimately be affixed. Into the holes he bores, another workman inserts lengths of rebar, spiral-turned steel rods.
Downtown a couple of miles yawns the great Bathtub you couldn’t bring yourself to see up close, and here, not twenty feet from the winding path that leads to your building’s door, a sensibly-scaled, graspable and comforting restoration takes shape. Will the new subway entrance resemble the old one? Will they fake it in grand New Urbanist tradition, like the bishop’s crook lamp posts on the new-minted streets of Battery Park City? Or will they perform an act that screams: Today!
Once, you pointed out to Gwen variations in the cast iron ornaments – some sort of Titan’s heads – that adorn the railing round The Dakota. Some of them are original, and others, too badly corroded to support the property values, have been replaced with EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 287
the same – both new and ancient Titans painted shiny black. But the old ornaments wear a biography of weathering and chipped undercoats that telegraphs their particularity. And their visages look fiercer, truly chthonic. For now, until they’ve been through what the others have, the fresh-faced ornaments come off like poseurs. And now that she can see it, Gwen points out the difference each time you walk by. And she, who can never fathom which direction she is walking in – though she’s traversed the city’s paths for nearly ten years – nonetheless unfailingly recalls what you only mentioned once, and in passing: this is the spot where John Lennon was shot.
• • •
This p.m. comes an email from Rob: Hello!
Thanks so much for taking the time to meet with me. I like your office a great deal. It reminds me of Paris. I could imagine sitting around there a lot.
I had a very interesting walk. First and foremost, it’s a hole in the ground, of course. I had a good time talking to tourists who had never been to New York before. I can't imagine what they were getting from the experience, since I can't imagine that the visit would be meaningful unless you knew what you were seeing. Personally, I found it very startling, since my brain had difficulty encompassing the void and kept trying to infill the space with what I remember from my last visit there. I think it is time to remove the viewing platform and the screens that block the view of the scene. There is no conceivable argument now that gawkers would be unseemly.
I had an interesting conversation with a guy from Nebraska who had problems with building anything there because the land was “sacred.” I pointed out that it was pretty sacred to the native people who probably wouldn't have appreciated the towers on their site, and he asked if I was some kind of commie.
It is pretty clear from looking at the site that rebuilding the towers would be absurd. It occurs to me that the area is much improved by the absence of the towers. I also think it would be absurd to make it a park, which would make World Financial Center look like some kind of Corbusian nightmare. I also hope that the eventual plan
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the WTC or the WFC would be a mistake.
I did have an interesting experience on the subway that illustrated a point you made. Two Arabs got on the subway car carrying briefcases. This elderly woman sitting near where they sat down scurried to the other end of the car and sat down next to me. I pointed out to her that if these guys were carrying bombs, it didn’t matter where she was in the train. She then denied that she had moved at all.
As feared, I had some trouble getting through security at the airport going back to Boston. Paying cash, no luggage, and carrying a briefcase full of info about the WTC set off all the profiling bells, and I had to explain myself to the pleasant machine gun wielding national guardsmen. Thank god I had the book you signed, since it confirmed that I was weird as opposed to dangerous.
Thanks again. I’m sure I’ll be in touch. June 14
If the great breadth of the U.S. is the heartland, how does that square with New York City as the heart of this land. Or is it one part heart, one part brain, not to say mind? For David Rockefeller, the financial district was the “heart pump of the capital blood of the free world,” but does it function like that organ-muscle in other, even deeper ways as well? And did Lower Manhattan ever serve the role that David claimed?
Rob M. says that in his travels he’s observed that anguish over, even interest in, or connection to the “events” of 9/11 are pretty much limited to the northeast. You haven’t ventured outside the city physically or psychically enough to read the mood, but you can feel for sure that this city is heart-sick. How or will this sorrow make its way out and across the latitudes and oceans too?
Rob asked you, not rhetorically, what could really shock America as a whole. Without even thinking you replied: Take away their SUVs. As soon as it was out in the air, it sounded glib and facile. But the more you think about it, the more you realize it’s probably true.
Up out of the café betimes and across through the flower district to visit Kelly McD in the rain. She sits opposite you, remarks on the warmth of your hands, EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 289
who recommended Kelly, and Kelly helped free your lungs from the grip of the trade towers. Somehow too, she finds ways, not just to bring the energies of your mind and body into the same room together, but also to demonstrate that what seems wide-split lies closer together than you imagine.
She walks slowly round you, supine on the table, palpates each spot before placing the needle, tells you she expects this will be a difficult fall. Here, in her small office on East 28th Street, she will map the topography, chart the ripples through her clients’ bodies, of last fall’s great battery.
The state you go into lying there, quilled like a porcupine, a lamp heating your abdomen, is deeper than sleep, and when she opens the door and you awake, your head reasserts its attempt at domination. In the few moments before you entirely untransify, Kelly plies you with sage counsel. You strain to hear what she is saying. She’s talking normally. It’s just that her words have a lot of layers to penetrate. You’ll keep coming back, hoping to get your arms around the underlying problem. But you suspect that ultimately, this cure would work better in a different geography. For you, there are triggers all around. This burg is a psychic minefield. Living in New York City is like an alcoholic working in a bar.
Out onto the street. This sure is one reluctant spring. It pours. It shivers. Hey now, hey now, hey now. New Yorkers walking fast as chickens, playing chicken with our umbrellas. A ragtag team of men fling the dusty, jagged contents of gray Rubbermaid garbage cans into the hopper of a compacting truck. None of them wears a mask. The flanks of the truck are airbrushed Avanti Demolition Company. Fast forward. No rewind.
Walking toward home, you flash on how a young retarded man from a group home in Chelsea makes it a practice to step into the café on his way to wherever he goes weekday mornings and shout “hi” at the waitstaff. Sometimes when he’s in a hurry, he’ll crack the door, stick his head in and voice his greeting in the upper range of a tenor – bright-eyed and all smiles.
This morning, he came all the way inside, then noticed through the window the WALK light on Ninth flashing its imminent change to red. So Kimsey’s reply was lost as he bolted out and across the street. You’ve noted this more than once, how the EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 290
behavior of those who imagine ourselves normal. Has it not been said, in Arabic: Ajila min Shetan – hurrying is for Satan?
Inscrutable dance of the other. June 16
First Day – a.m. Hallowed ground, how so? There are no oil reserves beneath Lower Manhattan. No known oil reserves there at all.
Early p.m. Pick up Katie and Gwen at Quaker meeting. Some Friend, clever with design, has created a lapel button whose graphic brings the twin towers close enough together to function as the upright stroke of a peace symbol. Buy two.
The three of you walk west to Au Bon Pain on Fifth and 15th for lunch before Gwen’s piano lesson. You’re about to sit down to soup when it strikes you to double back to the Amalgamated a block east on Union Square West to get more cash. The soup’s too hot anyway.
Half of New York’s crammed into the airless chamber where you wait on line for the sole working machine, shuffling forward amidst an effusion of discarded receipts. Perform the beeping ritual, pocket the bread. Scope a fast panorama outside to make sure no one marked you, head back toward the restaurant. Not far along 15th, a black backpack lies on the sidewalk. Refuse strewn around. Keep walking. Single minded. Algorithmic. Soup, then piano lesson, then…. Midway down the block, reverse again to confirm what you saw but didn’t see. Backpack’s ripped open. Ripped off? This time take your time. Survey and record:
4 athletic shoes, all well-worn, one pair Fila, the other Riddel 2 folding umbrellas 1 toothbrush 1 almost full bottle of Slice
Several dozen dark brown, lozenge-shaped tablets, everywhere, underfoot 1 pair of gray, patterned Perry Ellis underpants EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 291
1 light gray plastic ID card issued by the New York State Department of Correctional Services to Melvin Lewis, a “black male,” born 8/13/80, height: 6’2”, release date 3/25/02, after which this card was “valid for 60 days.”
Also scattered across the sidewalk, some facing up, eight photographs, black and white five by sevens, well shot and professionally printed. Several show a man who’s likely Melvin together with various other people posed on the street in front of the enamel sign for a subway entrance you’ve seen a thousand times – on the northwest corner of Waverly and Sixth nearly flush up against the side wall of the Twin Brothers restaurant. In one shot, Melvin and a companion sit on milk crates. Melvin’s arm drapes around the shoulder of older white, alkie-looking fellow. Melvin wears a knit skull cap and toasts the camera with a 20 oz. can of Budweiser. A cigarette hangs from his buddy’s hand. The photos, the ID card and the toothbrush are all smeared with a brown substance.
You walk back toward the restaurant. There’s Katie, down the street. You’ve been gone so long she’s come out to look for you. You wave and she turns, goes back inside. Over your now-tepid soup, you explain why, aside from the wait at the bank, it took you so long to return. You and Katie debate what to do. Should you leave the stuff where it is in case Melvin comes looking for it? Problem is, Waverly and Sixth seems his usual spot – or it was – and Union Square is a good half mile from there. So the likelihood of him homing in on it here seems remote at best.
What would you want a stranger to do if you were Melvin? Impossible to say. The card’s expired. The umbrellas aren’t worth a search and everything else is pretty much spoiled. Yet even in their distressed condition, the pictures seem worth saving. Best go back and gather them up and on Monday, call the Department of Corrections. Tell them, if they have any further contact with Melvin Lewis or he with them, that you’re holding his pictures for him. You’ll also look him up in the phone book, but that seems a pro forma exercise. Polish off you corn chowder, now officially gelatinous, Katie and Gwen having long finished theirs. Send Gwen to get some napkins and ask the cashier for a plastic bag. Gwen is vastly intrigued by your discovery, wants to go back with you. At the site, she follows you about holding the plastic bag open as you use the napkins to gather up the photos and the ID card. Not so easy to pick up the photos with a napkin. So you use your foot to push them across a seam in the sidewalk,
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underneath. Gwen speculates on the nature of the occurrence: perhaps this stuff belonged to two people, since there are two umbrellas. You tie the plastic bag and put it in her backpack.
Katie waits on the corner. Westward ho. You stop into Kid’s Gap and buy Gwen a navy blue hooded sweatshirt. Despite the detours, you arrive at her lesson right on time.
You and K. sit in the Seminary garden until the rain forces you indoors. Wait on the bench outside Andrejika’s studio and listen to the sounds from within. They are working on a calypso. Gwen’s tone is lovely, at first you think it’s Andrejika playing. But then you catch a slight waver in the beat, a recovery, and Andrejika nearly shout “Yes! Yes, that’s it, da-dah-dah!”
Next to last lesson before you break for summer. “Syncopation,” says Andrejika, “it’s tough, but she’s getting it.”
Bloom’s day.
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