(the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls)

It's 6.22am and the phone is ringing. That's all you need to hear, right? Then it's like the horror movie when everyone yells "Don't go in the basement!"

But I have been awake since 5am, rolling and wrestling with the sheets, since the first call to prayer from the mosque around the corner, since the first lightening of dawn. And the night before I came home to an electrical problem from tenant #1 and a plumbing problem from tenant #4, and the bleating phone could hold more urgent situations. So even though the caller has set up to have their phone number unidentifiable, I pick it up.

It is a man's voice, and one I do not recognize. He says four words and I hang up. Those words were not meant for me. They do not mean what they purport to mean. In this situation, this is nothing I want to hear, in another situation, it could be everything I want to hear. I sit on the edge of the bed, the phone hanging from my hand, his words, the emotional charge not yet dissipated, still stuck to the damp morning air.

I love you, baby.

You are sitting there, in your car or on a train, and suddenly you are rolling backwards. But it's not you moving, it's the car next to you going forward, giving you the feeling of sliding away, smoothly, with no effort at all.

He has a fresh sunburn and he is drunk, like he has spent the day, beer after beer, outside in ferocious sun. He lurches towards me on the train platform, his eyes glassy, unblinking and a heart-piercing blue.

The music in my ears sings "I dream a highway back to you..." I close my eyes, lift my chin, pretend the light coming through my eyelids is the light of dawn and not the blare of subway overheads.

I am sleeping with the phone near my head. I am not aware that it is there, until I am awoken by its angry, insistent buzzing. It is 2.39 in the morning, a time when phone calls are for danger, despair. I look at the originating number, and there is no name attached to it so I don’t answer, flop my head back down on my pillow with an irritated groan.

It’s not a wrong number. Whoever it is means to reach me, and the phone goes off again to signify a new voice mail has been left. Who has this urgency, this desperation? I run through a list of who I would want it to be, whose dark night of the soul I would be willing to listen to, who I would accept with compassion, whose confession I would welcome, who I could treat with grace and generosity.

I gird myself. I pick up the phone. I dial in to get the message. It’s not him.

(oh! Who is it? I am astonished...it is from someone I went out with once, weeks ago, who houdini'ed themselves until this. My empathy evaporates.)

I volunteered to work at the Manhattan Half-Marathon. I wanted to be one of those smiling faces at the end of the race, the one that cheers, hands you a towel, water, your medal, whatever. The race does not fit into my own training schedule, but I thought it was a nice way to participate anyway.

So they say to get there at 5AM and I do. I roll out of bed at 4.30, pull on a pair of holey jeans, my cowboy boots, layers of t-shirts, and head out. There are not a whole lot of us there as they are doling out assignments and when they ask for three women to escort the top female atheletes, well, there are only three of us. So, I think this is kind of cool, I get to make sure the winners get to their press conference, the award ceremony, TV interviews, OK!

No. That's not quite it. We are assisting US Anti-Doping Agency. Our job is to maintain visual contact with the atheletes from the second they cross the finish line to dropping them off at the testing station. We are to tag along, keep behind them at photo ops, watch what people give them, monitor their behavior. Even though as a civilian I find this a little odd, I get assigned to the winner of the women's race, and I am a sort of geeked.

So here she comes, over the finish line, "Catherine the Great" the woman who is running 13.1 miles in just over one hour. I flash my pass at her, she nods her head, and I start shadowing her. She does an immediate live TV interview, and then needs to go to the media room for more photos and print reporters. She gets her clean track suit with her sponsors' logo on it, the media room is a half-mile away, through the park.

Then, it starts to rain. No, it starts to pour. So what does she do? You know. She takes off running! And because I am charged with keeping her in eyesight at all times, I take off running after her. Holy crap! I am running with a world class athelete, an Olympian, a woman I have seen go right past me at the NYC Marathon, and here I am right at her heels. It is beyond any crazy fantasy I have ever had that I would be running with this champion and part of me is so thrilled to be near her incredible physical prowess and part of me is laughing my ass off, because here I am, sprinting half a mile with the fastest woman in New York, with a clipboard and in cowboy boots!

(and there is more to this story, more for later)

Something has died in the back yard. In the wrecked concrete rubble that is the palette for a future garden, something is lying motionless on a bed of dead weeds against the back wall. It is gray and white, either fur or feathers, a rat or a pigeon, I can’t tell. But I know it is dead, there is a veil of flies on it, an undulating lace of black wings that rises occasionally then settles back down.

I go for my long run on Sunday, a time when I can do this one simple thing, fight gravity, friction, my own limitations. As my head spins away, my weight settles into my hips for the long slog, I watch the light change on the faces of the buildings downtown. It’s my own Rothko Chapel, now a brilliant reflection that stabs my eye, now a muted glimmer as the day fades. The clocktower, that landmark in my vista, has been sold to developers to turn into fancy condos. Now it has a grid of blue scaffolding over its face, its own veil of flies.

Back when a Cuisinart cost as much as a good beater car, my mother’s well appointed kitchen and my parents refusal of my request for a car necessary to get to work and college let me know how I ranked. So I swapped my chattel status strands of pearls, a thin disguise meant to signify the goodness of my family, for a 1962 Cadillac de Ville. I could get into it without taking off my Stetson. Find it in the parking lot by looking down the row for those fins sticking out way beyond the bobbed homogenous rears of modern cars. Start it up late at night, tired from another shift at a crap job, scrappy desperation to get educated and get out of Oklahoma, but wait first, for the smell of dust burning off the tubes as the radio heats up. Drive slowly, am radio scratching out from the Mexican border, fog from the Arkansas River bottom creeping over the wheel wells. A gentle strong thrum from the V8, and we are a long white ghost rolling homeward.

He tattooed my hands with flowers the night we met, and now he knows what is too foolish, too sentimental for me to admit, that I saved them, left and right exactly, where I would see them every day. I'll kiss my hand there where he marked me and remember how I love the word cleave, which means both itself and its opposite, both to cling and to sever.

Yesterday I sat back on my heels and took photographs of a bicycle chained to a street post, slowly dissolving in rust and thievery. I walked through midtown with happy happy music in my ears and watched the easy comraderie of the livery drivers lined up and waiting for their charges, stretching and chatting in the fading light. I saw green leaves brilliantly backlit from spot light that snapped on, exposing the forms and veins as surely as an x-ray.

Today I am deleting old emails. I did not want to let go of this small bit:

I know the green in your eyes, I know the way your smile wraps around your face, I know the hitch in your walk, I know the dust on your windowsills and the gamboling cats in your kitchen.

Home tired last night with a closed dry cleaners and a dead car battery, a certain parking ticket today and another missed doctor's appointment.

Now we begin more soft havoc.

This weekend was the goodbye party for the little house, organized by former tenants and the current tenant who will stay on after the sale is finalized next week. And it is fitting that they did so, and I am so glad they did. The little house never had a party and this one celebrated it and gave it its passage from renovation project to rental by the young spirited college students to its final place as home to a beautiful young family who love it dearly already.

So there was crunking in the dining room, and shots downed in the living room. There was hanging out on the stoop and god knows what up on the roof after I left at 2AM. The tiny back garden was never over full, even with so many people talking, smoking, grilling. I sat on the back wall and looked at the moon through the wands of the fleece vine, like I had so many times previously, marvelling at how different now.

I go out to lunch late. The afternoon foot traffic has dispersed, the sidewalks blank in the searing heat. So the wallet laying stranded in the middle, between the building and the curb looks particularly forlorn. I'll do the right thing by it, in this grubble hustler neighborhood, I won't leave it to chance.

It is the kind of wallet that has a long loop, for hanging around your neck, and I pick it up and stick my hand into it, looking for ID. I can see a wad of money, hear the clink of change, and then it hits me. The smell. Oh. The wallet is soaked in urine.

I've got my hands stuck into the wallet, my hands are covered in a stranger's urine. I can't put the wallet down. In picking it up I made a compact, I undertook a duty. I am repulsed by what is in my hands on one level. But also I am terribly sad. Someone is having a very bad day. A sudden sickness, an overwhelming loss of control, and in the scramble to maintain dignity, to get home, the wallet drops to the ground and an unsure fate.

And I take the wallet back to my office, put my hands back in one more time to pull out wet ID documents, an elderly couple in the buildings around the way, they are in the phone book, and I make the call. So they will not suffer embarassment, I put the wallet in a big envelope and leave it at our front desk for them to pick up. They never have to see me, to see me who knows their shame.

Commuting 8/9/06

There is a woman with a chain of dogwood blossoms around her neck, golden against her dark skin.

The girl sits down next to her boyfriend, looks up into his face and smiles. I can see where her crow's feet will emerge soon, and he kisses her forehead and they settle into their books and their commute.

The man next to me changes the angle of his face and I suspect he is reading my magazine. I am leafing through the New Yorker, looking for the fiction section. When I pause at a spread with cartoons on each page, he laughs, and I ask him which one he likes.

a ten mile run and afterwards, stretching at the bus stop my head is upside down and I am looking down the street at the Empire State Building in the distance, sepia in the smog, the one vague blurry light on top, and it reminds me of you.

Subject Bar, East Village 8/1/06

 
 
 
  

He is standing in the doorway of the train, obdurately. The doors open and people push past him to get off, squeezing past his bulk. Then the oncoming passengers do the same, sidestepping, rotating through the constricted space. Next station, same thing.

His lips are moving and I look to see if he is immersed in music, as I am, trying to pretend away the ferocious heat. No earphones in his ears, so look down at his hands. A rosary. He is praying, with his eyes open, his hands fingering the beads, his mortal self obstructing the other commuters.

This little sin, this little un-compassion, unawareness, reminds me of an old sign I saw to which I mentally filled in some of the missing letters: moral surgery.

Subject Bar

  

Subject Bar

  

Subject Bar

  

Subject Bar