Henry Street, LES 12/29/06

This train is half-empty and I am happy to sit, but not so happy when I realize someone has spilled sweet coffee all over the floor and it has now dried into a tacky glue sticking my boots to the floor. I pick my head up from this distraction and there he is again: the Oddly Beautiful Boy. He is sitting across the aisle from me, only one person between us. I have never been so close to him before. His eyes are closed, as always, his hands folded into his lap and I can see that he is maybe 25 years old, tops. I feel like a vampire, sucking at his beauty, watching him dozing, looking at the bump of his nose, the curve of his mouth, the angle of his jaw. I realize I have seen him maybe five or six times in the past year, about every other month, and he is at an age where a change of job, love interest, apartment is imminent and would change his commute. I may never see him again. “You have an amazing, beautiful face. Whenever I see you on the train it is a delight,” would be what I would tell him, if I dared, but I don’t dare, even though I do not want anything at all from him, and now here is my stop and it is time to go to work.

After work, on the evening F train back to Brooklyn now I am drained from the day. I am distractedly aiming my eyes towards a youngish man sitting adjacent. But really I am thinking about the urban cowboy across the way with his ridiculous palomino suede cowboy boots and ostentatious cowboy hat, there is a crashing landslide of music cascading in my head, I am anticipating dinner at a charming bistro with a friend. The youngish man has hair as shiny and rough as a bale of straw, and it is falling into his eyes as he looks down into the book in his lap. Suddenly he jerks his head, flips his hair out of his eyes and as he does so his eyes flash around towards me. I am caught looking, our eyes meet, his are enormous and the palest blue of winter sky and for a moment I am pinned, my heart beating. Then he drops his head back to his reading, and the next station is mine and I leave him and the cowboy with the doors sliding closed behind me.

Port Authority Bus Terminal on Christmas morning is over bright. High harsh lighting, saturated fierce colors, a blizzard of advertising. People are moving about with their packages, their bundles, their wheelie-carts, some because they are going somewhere, some because they live here in this echoing cavern. Blinky holiday lights, shops not yet open, an unfathomable fading poster of Angelina Jolie wearing a tight T-shirt with the silhouette of a machine gun on it.

I am heading west with two good bottles of wine. West to my friend’s hundred year old farmhouse, her little parcel of acreage elbowed between the cliffs along the river and the foothills of the mountain range. The area is now overgrown with squat ugly mushroom houses, but hers still has the original barn, elegant and sagging ridgepole, darkened hayloft with scabs of empty wasp nests on weathering boards.

The bus lets me off and I walk down the long drive to enter at the back. The front door is too formal for me, it is for company, and here I am family. Here is bustle and warmth and the children dart through, in a cape, in a party dress, in a tutu, zig-zag through the chairs and dash out. There are toasts and more toasts and someone’s holiday tradition of serving waffles. I eat mine buttered, hot and topped with thick slices of ham.

Later there is a fire that pops and sparks that test the flue, talk of Traveling, tea with milk and an apple tart, small tokens of affection are exchanged. I am made a gift of half a dozen fresh eggs, so precious, and when I leave I am very conscious of their need to be protected. It is a cold night and raining, and I am back in the glare and harsh of public transportation, waiting for the dollar van to take me across the George Washington Bridge, walking the long chill hall to the A train, transferring again underground in Brooklyn, then, finally, home to my simple bed with its clean white sheets, in the room with its red walls, in the house with the moon that creeps through the windows.

One of the best Christmas gifts ever. A half dozen fresh eggs, given by a friend, whose chickens scratch and cluck in a little hamlet up the Hudson River valley. I carried the eggs carefully, a rainy night, the Washington Heights bus station, an hour on the subway with boozy men, cranky children, and finally home.

This morning I am sitting on my bed looking out the back window. The sky is low with rain and fog. The bottle-washing machine behind the grocery store is sending up sheets of steam. I am holding in my hand one perfect egg, soft boiled. It is peeled of its brown shell and it is sending up its own curls of steam. Next to me is a tall glass of café au lait, also steaming, and what a way to begin this first day after Christmas.

(And another gift: this blog got its very first gay porn spam today. Huzzah! I was starting to feel inconsequential.)

If I pass you when I am out running you will hear "clack, clack, clack" with every step. That is the sound of the celphone, housekey, inhaler banging against each other in the pocket in the back of my jersey. I don't hear this. I hear the Yeah Yeah Yeah's screaming "as a boyfriend you suck, as a boyfriend you suck, as a boyfriend you suck" or the Pixies slicing up eyeballs in the song that made me fall in love with them because who wouldn't fall in love with a bunch of post-punks who know their seminal works of Dada or Nine Inch Nails and the buzz-saw mechanism of anger and self loathing.

The clack-clacks are all for safe returns, the cellphone for emergencies, the inhaler for dire emergencies, the key to get back into the house. The music is to amp everything up, an urgent beat to drive my footsteps. The confluence of the two, safety and power, allow me to loosen my brain and make an image and word sluice that I keep trying to capture, that I am falling in love with, that I want to share.

It's time to go for a run now, and if I were meeting a lover I could hardly be more thrilled, even though a daylight run does take some of the magic from it. I am not a fleet invisible ghost, I am a real slogging woman, and there are tangles of garbage, listing weeds, cracked sidewalks all fractured in the wind tears in my eyes.

I have become a deleter. The phone number is removed from the cellphone, not in anger, not to be cruel, but to spare myself the pain of seeing the name, of having to scroll past the person who never calls, of feeling the void of that little line of text. That wonderful series of emails are all torched because I know I will re-read them, feel the place where they started to drop off, get fainter, the cleave starting, and I will grieve all over again. So I delete, delete, delete.

In preparation for Thanksgiving I dig around on the high shelves for things I don’t normally use, spices, devices, nutmeg, springform pans, tucked away for their only occasional use. I am surprised at how much weird foodstuffs I find, things that don’t really belong there. Some of it was clearly for someone else’s taste and I am a little embarrassed it’s there in the first place. If someone looked in my stores, I would be chagrinned at what is still there from some former boyfriend: canned chili; baked beans; tinned tuna; mayonnaise.

Then there are the things that I have that are clearly for making for and with someone else, dreams of intimate evenings of food and talk and love and those cause a different kind of pain. I love to cook for people, to make an offering of pleasure and sustenance, and in my cabinets there is basmati rice, quince paste, polenta, and I am not even sure who I was trying to impress, who I wanted to love me, who I wanted to make love to, with the steel-cut oatmeal, the box is still sealed, pristine.

So this week, a week when I am home from work and have the inclination to cook, I am deleting the failed relationships from my cabinets. By eating them. Tonight: farfalle a la vodka with capers and artichoke hearts. Sorrow can actually be pretty tasty.

The seat on this train is warm from someone else's body. There are beer cans rolling around on the floor at ten a.m. A young woman is well asleep, her hair is still wet from her morning shower, head tilted back against the wall, her jaw relaxing until I can see daylight between her lips. She is too young to be so tired.

I am remembering joy, daylight, merriment and I am drunk enough so that I can't stop my body from telling its truth. My hand shoots out to touch his freshly shorn head, the hand attracted to that field of velvet bristle as sure as humming bees to a field of clover.

And now I am standing on a traffic island where the cars hurtle towards me before veering off around the park. I am waiting for the light to change, for the bookstore to open, for the street to be crossed. Again I am drunk on joy and daylight, but I will keep my hands in my pockets and only hum to music in my head.

Kids were one of the best parts of the day. So I was prepared with pounds of candy. Oftentimes we were moving too fast to stop, I was dropping candy into little outstretched hands and then we whirled away. I was at the forefront of the group when we hit Lincoln Center, we were not yet an overwhelming force, and I think that's why these two tiny little girls, maybe 3 and four years old, were bold enough to approach me. I put a piece of candy into each of their hands, but one of them is practically dazed, the very definition of wide-eyed, she wants more from me, she wants to show me the pocket in her fuzzy lavender jacket, she wants me to hug her. And so I clasp her to me, and her sister in turn, and if there is a god he should strike me down now so I can go out in joy.

Or no, perhaps later. At the end of the night, I am tired and on my way to find a cab when I pass a restaurant that is closed for a private party. It's an extended family party, the 6-to-12 year olds are hanging out front, bored with the adults and they flag me down, hey, hey! They want to touch my wings, want to hug me, and I drop to my knees on the sidewalk, to make myself the right size for the smallest one. I hold my arms out open to them and all I can think is: joy multiplies.

On Thursday night I tried my gear on. I was concerned mostly about warmth, and of course fit and style. 18 layers of everything go on, and I decide the only real way to know if it is warm enough, is to, well, go outside. So I walked to the liquor store, and it was hard not to grin my ass off, and when they asked me what I wanted, I played it straight and got a liter of gin. They held the door for me on the way out.

(This does not look so odd when there are 500 of you. When there is one, at night, waiting for the light on the corner of Washington and Atlantic...)

I don't own a lot of stuff, don't buy a lot of stuff, don't consider shopping a passtime. But every once in a while I get an enormous urge to own something, something just strikes me, and I have learned that if I don't follow that urge, I'll be sorry later. When I saw those wings in the store, I was beyond smitten. I already had my costume for the event completed, but when I saw the wings, it all went out the window. Wings, yes. That just makes so much sense.

It gets so dark so early and even though I am not leaving the office very late, it feels like deep night. I am fumbling with my ipod and the cord gets caught on my coat, I jerk my arm and my bag opens, spilling a bunch of CDs to the sidewalk. They hit the pavement and shatter and I crouch down to pick up shards of plastic, liner notes, scoop them carefully back into my bag. A man steps up from the curb, looks at my predicament and says “Did Carol go this way?”

His graying hair is neatly clipped, he is well-kempt, he is not a streeter, but I don’t think I know him. His eyes are clear and focused, he is definitely talking to me. I take out one of my ear buds so I can hear him better. “You seem to like puppies,” he says and now I am thinking perhaps he is aphasic, there is a hospital right around the corner, there is some suffering here.

Another man walks past us, squeezing by on the narrow sidewalk. He is hunched into the bundle in his arms, a bunch of chrysanthemums wrapped in florist paper. “What nice white melons” says Aphasic Man and I am trying to follow the somersault in his brain that turns the yellow, frilled mums into something smooth and solid and pale. I don’t get to think about this for long because Aphasic Man pulls out a gun.

I see the silver flash and it is shiny enough to be real and big enough to be serious. He fires it, circumscribing an arc over my head. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. I count the reports, so loud they fill my head. Five. Five. What did the gun look like? It did not have an extra clip. He is not re-loading, he is standing in front of me, I can hear him breathing but I can’t pick my head up to look at him. Does he have one shot left? Does he? Is he aiming at me now, feeling the space between here and the thing he is about to do?

All I can think is “I am not ready to die.” Because how pitiful that would be. To die here, unloved on this filthy street. With that odd detachment that happens in extreme circumstances I notice I have not pissed myself, and I am somewhat mollified that my death will have at least that modicum of dignity, even if I have not yet inspired enough love, have not yet given enough away. And, for heavens sake, could I not at least die in Brooklyn?

Then my eyes fly open. I am in my own bed with the light from the avenue striping the walls. I am alone and I am alive.

Don’t let me lie to you. Don’t let me tell you I don’t love it. I do, but it is a love that is asymetrical, unpredictable. Running is unpredictable, the returns are in asymmetry to the effort, I never know what a run will bring, pain and disappointment or a thrilling enveloping rush.

Running Brooklyn streets at night is like shaking a bag full of glass shards, jangly, bright, dangerous. Last night the air traffic pattern to LaGuardia is right overhead and I run towards planes lowering so close I can see their underbellies even in the dark, their lights not the pinpricks of soaring jets but real, fist-sized, defined. A girl steps out from the undercanopy of a tree, she is examining the skis abandoned in the garbage at the curb. They are as tall as her and as I flash by I am confused at what she is holding in her embrace. Someone has chalked the sidewalk “gingle bells” “Merry Christmas” “love you”. I don’t have the light but I have a breath of space and so I sprint across six lanes of pulsing traffic because I simply don’t want to stop, I no longer have feet, I am liquid flowing down this street, I could do this forever.

Someone dared me to post the things I write and put away. Things that are too raw or too private or club-footed monstrosities. And so this, written in May:

For the past month I have been having this pretend relationship with the moon. I pretend it is in love with me, and I certainly am in love with it. I know this is not real, the moon doesn’t talk to me, doesn’t call me on the phone, we don’t have dinner together, we surely don’t have sex.

I have normal days. I don’t act like I am carrying this crazy story inside me. I wake up, I go to work. I see friends, I run errands, I take care of life. But at night, when I am done with all that, I think I might see him in my sky. Or I think I can tell he has been there. For a second the connection feels real, he really has peeked into my window, he really does know I exist, I really do matter.

Then I burn with shame at my fiction. This little story gives me such huge comfort, just for a moment, I am ashamed at how important it is to me. In that minute it is so absurd, so lonely, I am so absurd, so lonely, that I don’t recognize myself.

I get a seat on the train and settle in for a long ride uptown. I am listening to music and reading, I am not interested in taking anything in. The car is slowly filling up and I am sunken into my book, barely aware of the forest of legs, coats, bags. Absorbed, I forget, and suddenly we are at my stop. I am hemmed in and I leap up to make it to the doors before they close. My verticality surprises the man standing in front of me, he does not have time to get out of my way, and our faces veer within inches of each others. On the verge of collision, in a flash I see the fine skin over his cheekbone, a spray of light freckles, the tiny blond hairs gleaming at his hairline. It is so evocative, so precious, I am stunned and I stumble out of the train and into the night.

The run out is a long slog uphill. A brilliant clear night with the moon again so still and close. Everything feels good and on the turn it's downhill all the way home. I shouldn't. I have to. I really shouldn't. I can't help it. Streetlights are making the dark sidewalks glimmer silica, the moon is whole over my shoulder, there is an orange streamer of construction tape and it's my parade and I have to let go, fly down this street, fierce beautiful joy I love to run. I love to run. I love to run.

Running loosens something in my head and flash speed makes images zip by like birds that just graze your fingertips. I tried to capture the flow of last night's run, and it went something like this:

I am ferocious. I am proud.
I may not be beautiful, but I own beauty.
I have nine diamonds of disappointment I wear on my leading hand.
They will knock you out and I will steal your front teeth.
They will rattle in a jar I've slung across my hips,
act as percussive to my days here, echoing off
these cracked walls,
this decrepit catwalk,
this relentless restlessness.
You want me to sip you but
I'll probably spit you out into this glitter sick gutter
because I am racing the moon home,
slamming the gate behind me,
slowing my breath, and
imagining how I could be if only.

A terrible commute home. It takes an hour to go 5 stations. There is smoke that makes me gasp for breath and express train after express train barrels by. I am trying to serenely listen to music, but when I finally do get on a train everyone is surly and I am getting brutalized. There is a sharp elbow jammed into my hip, wherever my hand grips for stability it is crushed, feet are mashed without apology.

So now I am late for picking up my clean clothes, the laundry service is only open until 7. Laundry man has locked the front door, but he is still in there, and I exaggerate a begging, desperate face at him through the glass. He relents and lets me in and I feel badly for inconveniencing him and being not particularly grateful, charming or good-humored about it.

Begin to trudge down the street, cold and irritated, then, step all the way to the curb. The Muslim boys are playing football in front of the mosque before evening prayer. Go long! And they rush past me, sprinting away down the sidewalk, past the shuttered shops, to end with a whoop and the satisfying thump of leather ball landing in outstretched hands. I look up for the next arc of the ball and now I can’t help but smile at their play, at this amazing confluence happening here on this dark winter street, at them fluttering past me like dark birds. Now it is good to go home.

No Parking Reserved for Pastor

The devotion to equality is admirable. He should have to look for parking like everyone else.

 
    

I love going out with my best girl buddy. She has a cool job, lives in a cool neighborhood, has cool friends. So yeah, I like to bask in her reflected coolness.

We are planning to hang out in the East Village for drinks, dinner. I'm OK with what's going to happen. What's going to happen is she is six feet tall and blonde. Yes, I hear salivary glands starting up. I'm OK with that.

It's Friday and I'm in dress-down wren-wear: a grey t-shirt, jeans that are neither super-low nor skin tight, nerd-girl glasses. I am a total Mutt to her Jeff, save one thing. I have one weapon in my arsenal against her towering blonditude.

I have red lipstick.

And so I put it on and so I have the confidence to stride down the street with her high-heeled, mini-skirtedness, I can pretend to be chic and glamorous, watch her her swing her hair and flash her enormous smile.

I think I am doing a good job of it. After dinner I reach into my bag for a re-application of lipstick, and that's when who I really am is illuminated. I pull out what feels like my lipstick. It's a pen. Then another pen. Another. We start to giggle. I put my hand back into my bag--this time it will be my lipstick! Another pen. Pen again. I have a clown car of pens, and now we are laughing openly as I pull out more and more, one by one, line them up on the table, twelve in all. The illusion of a crimson-lipped sophisticate fades into the reality of the preponderance of ink, and I am laughing at myself.

Today I am thinking about language, I am being eaten alive by language. By the language of my body--leaning away when what I want is to be closer, moving my shoulder in a way that can be interpreted as the indifference I do not have. By speaking badly--telescoping complex ideas into a short phrase, dense, incomprehensible to anyone who does not know my context, hanging too much weight on each syllable, more than a fragile word or unknowing ear could bear. I make myself stupid.

I am walking through the housing projects that ring my office. Let’s call them by name, here lives a brokenness, warehoused in these grim high-rises, a brokenness more important than how clumsy I am: Vladeck Houses; Smith Houses; Baruch Houses; Lavanburg Homes; Wald Houses; Riis; Gompers; Seward Park; LaGuardia; Rutgers. I am on my way to a homeless shelter for a meeting. When I get there I will wait in the reception area and play with the children there, wiping a nose, combing hair, simple acts that take only a few words, a gentleness of the hands. I feel redeemed, a bit.

There must be a breach in the seal of the windows because the smell of the storm wakes me. It’s 5.30AM and now that I am awake, my stomach is filling with shifting clouds, the thing that happens when I have too much to think about.

The weather front is still moving through quickly, the sky is a low white mottled blanket as I walk to my office. It is strangely warm so the pigeons are not huddled away, they are sitting on the tops of the buildings, studding the roofline with their stolid forms, fast moving clouds behind them.

I did not mean to be condescending in that loud place but I can barely hear, never mind express a complex thought and the noise strips away nuance and I am not good at talking in stand-alone bites. She says she’s lived a lot by age 25 and I say I felt that way too. I wanted to tell her but then I got younger.