In owning this house for the past year it has started to become like a living extension of myself. Short on brains, but with doors like eyelids, people moving through it as buzzing nerve endings, the circulatory system of water in the pipes. I pay attention to small noises, the clues of our inner workings. The scuff of a visitor’s foot on the steps, a pooling of light in the backyard from an uncurtained window, the muffled underwater murk of a radio playing.

It is 3.30 in the morning and a noise has woken me up. Ting! Ting! Ting! I tune my ears in the dark, play an aural 20 questions.
Is it coming from inside my apartment? No.
Is it coming from inside the building? No.
It is a metallic noise. Is it coming from the grocery store behind the house? No.
Is it coming from the neighbor’s? No, it’s closer than that.
Is it, maybe, the steady beat of rain, falling on a drainpipe? No, because now the sound is becoming more complex, there is the steady metallic ting, but also richer noise, more depth, different rhythms.

The noise is coming from the back of my house. The noise is coming from my own fire escape. Someone is playing my house like a drum, they are playing my fire escape like a percussive instrument, some solo instrumentalist, in the middle of the night, is on my fire escape, beating his music out against the flats, the spindles, the handrails. I am too awed to be pissed.

I am helping to clean up the park after the event. It’s cold out, the light is graying, I am concentrating on scraping up confetti, banana peels, stickers, with my hand in a clammy wet rubber glove.

“You’re not wearing wings today?”

I had not seen him walk up, and now he is standing next to me. He has recognized me from another event, and with that phrase he is telling me I have been regarded, I have been noticed, remembered, and found worthy of re-approach. I look into his handsome face and here is an opening, here is a doorway, here is an open socket, and I have the plug in my hands to complete the circuit. I drop it. I drop it, partly out of sheer ineptitude, partly out of an absolute disinterest, at this exact time, to surmount my ineptitude. The moment passes, he walks away.

I killed another mouse in my kitchen. His body is in the garbage, under the sink. I have been thinking about it for several days, very aware of the presence of the corpse. Every time I open the cabinet door, put something else into the can, I think of his tiny curled body. I think of it starting to decay. I think of whatever vermin is on his body multiplying, feeding on the other detritus, of maggots erupting through his grey fur. Today my dread has reached its tipping point, and I am taking the sack out of the can, very aware of how the garbage realigns and shifts itself as I do this. The movement surfs a piece of paper to the top, my eye catches on an advertisement, “Sale on Charisma ends soon!”

And so today I need to go to the corner store and get a croissant for breakfast. And I thank the man behind the counter for allowing me to give him a dollar for it, but really I am thanking him for his gentle charm, for giving me his complete attention for just a brief while, for looking me straight in the eye in a way that I underdstand and am ready to receive. He gives me his full face, with its lovely round, deep brown eyes, a grin splits his face, and I hope he has a wife that loves him very much, a son that has taken his name, a daughter to dance on his feet.

A pigeon has fallen out of the nest above my door. When I leave the house in the morning, I notice a rustling near the lavender and rosemary pots at the top of the high stoop. The grounded bird is trying to secret himself, wobbling backwards into the winter bare sprigs. It’s clear that he is ill, his movements are rusty, his feathers are disarrayed. He will die soon, he is shitting out his last hours here on my steps, dragging his own feet through white and green smears. I look down at his greasy head, his red eyes, and I think for a minute to put him out of his discomfort. But no, I can’t be bothered, I don't feel empathy, I feel a vague, edgy disgust. I’ll leave him there for the cold to take him, or a neighborhood cat. When I return home at night, he is gone.

This is simply the most evocative awe-inspiring thing I have seen since...well since that man next to me on the subway smiled suddenly and he had one of those insanely fetching gaps between his two front teeth and in his enormous happiness I could see an entire world dancing just inches away from my face. Oh, that was only yesterday. Still. If you are not visiting my friend over at her Cabinet of Distractions, well, you should. She is might squared and dense like a flourless chocolate cake.

I am approaching an anniversary of sorts. The anniversary of a season of cracking, of fissures. Of buying rolls of duct tape to wind around my ribs, to keep me upright, to keep the hemorrhaging in my chest contained. Of walking through an actual blizzard to get the news, stomping down the snow quieted streets with grim and stupid determination, to receive what I knew was coming. It would take me months to write this, and even longer to release it. And so, here.

It is the end of this relationship. Not the final weeks or days, but the final minutes, the final seconds. And so I ask the question: “What do I look like to you?” And I see the panic and confusion on his face, I have seen him look trapped like that before. “It’s not a trick question,” I say “I’ll just never be able to ask it again.”

His head is thrown back against the chair. He is exhausted. He has given up. He is unshaven, there are purple marks from sleep loss under his eyes. His clothing is disheveled. He looks like shit. He looks like the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

And I watch him talk, watch him give me the adjectives for what I look like to him. And it’s true, I did not mean it to be a test. But in all of what he did say, there is the thing he did not, and the absence of that is a profound mortifying grounding gut wrench. He did not say, “You are beautiful.”

And so there is only one thing left to do. I leave.

It is snowing, just a little. I tilt my head back to get a better look. Tiny white dots are floating down, barely discernable against low flat clouds, their wrinkled bellies lit up from sky glow. It looks so peaceful, surrounded by deep evening, but I am abusing the inside of my head with a torrent of loud music. The Beastie Boys, “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” vulgar confrontational power chords and a salacious slow rolling bass drum pound and you know all I can think about is my next run. Running is my love affair, this dark pavement is my lover. He is hard on me, threatens to take me apart joint by joint, and I promise I will let him. In the dark here we will split me apart, and I will stretch my legs, open my stride, to encompass as much as fast as hard as I can. Neither one of us comes first, we are even in this, this nighttime sidewalk, this spangle of bouncing headlights, this harsh of winter air will take me all the way home.

Brooklyn is on a terminal moraine. That’s the land mass formed when a retreating glacier leaves its dump of rocks and gravel at its furthest southern point, its terminus. And the grim fact of living on a terminal moraine, in a neighborhood with the word “hill” in it, is that I can’t avoid going up and downhill when I go for a run. Every run starts at the bottom of a long slow hill, and continual upgrade that lasts one mile.

So to keep my heart rate down for the first mile I go slowly, tiny steps, taking the incline one small bite at a time, chewing thoroughly, trying to keep the pace down to 6mph. My body tells me it was made for sprinting, for long jumping, for high jumping, and to go slow is something closely akin to torture. At this pace I don’t even pick up my arms, just let them dangle at my side as I noodle down the pavement, barely shifting one foot in front of the other.

But on the way back sometimes I play a game. It’s the Can You Get Home in 7 Minutes Game. This game means I am running the last mile home in something approaching 9mph, and if you have never tried this, well, you should. At 9 mph I am picking my feet up high, to make sure no upheaved concrete grabs me, no uneven stones cause a stumble. I am picking my feet up so high I am no longer running on pavement, I am running in the air, I am even with the tree canopy, if I stretch my hands out they will brush the winter dead branch ends on one side, on the other they will trail the brick top story of this rowhouse.

I am not stopping at the end of the block, I am flying through the intersections with a quick left right left look, neck arched for the fastest peripheral view I barely have time for. It’s reckless to stream through eight lanes of screaming traffic but I am no longer a body, I am a collection of electric points, I am a constellation of stars, I am the tiny bright pinpricks in the black velvet sky and part of me anticipates, even welcomes the idea that I could be hit with one of the huge pieces of metal hurtling down this street, for if I were I would truly fly, the impact of my body would star your windshield, I would be cracked open like a glorious constellation, the shine and glory I hold inside me would explode over this street like fireworks and I would be gone before I ever knew I had to come back to this earth, this asphalt, this terminus.

Today I am drinking milky sweet tea and standing in a square of winter sun. I am watching a pair of mourning doves puffed into the cold and balanced on the fire escape. I am trying to sew words to a man, serge them with a smell, pin them to a dark turning of a pair of spoons in the kitchen drawer.

It is time to go to work, to do one of the things that makes me who I am. But first, just a little more time in the light, here, it is so brilliant.

It’s an intensely crowded train to midtown and in the chaos I am just looking for a place to rest my eyes. There he is, stylishly dressed, good looking, that’s the place, and so I watch him. But he notices. And I watch as his gaze drops to my ringless hand, then to my face, and now he is eye flirting with me, catching me up with a little upturn of a smile. I’m up for fun this morning, so when a seat opens directly in front of him, I cut through to take it. Whatever he is listening to on his headphones has the same beat as what I am listening to on mine, and we are tapping our feet, head bobbing, to the same rhythm, we are aligning, vibrating like a pair of tuning forks. I am at eye-level and staring at his belt buckle and he knows it and we are making a considerable erotic charge. Now he is reaching into his front pocket…oh god, oh yes…feeling for his metanym…yes…now he is pulling it out…yes, please. It’s a mini shuffle. Oh no!

Coney Island in the winter is Tom Waits. Debauched, depressed, a glass eye in the bottom of a shot of bourbon. Of course I love it. So even though invitations are stacking up in my mail box, tonight is the long train ride to the end of the F train. Tonight is the coldest night of this winter and only one skell is out, crouched at the corner darkness, curled into a question mark by the wind. The neon of Nathan’s is a harsh burn against the night, and the stark fluorescents inside turn it into a desolate Hopper painting. At a table by the wall two teenagers try to impress each other by how unimpressed they are with each other, while I am personally in awe of how much orange cheez and bacon type food product is on these waffle fries.

There is no one on the boardwalk and the old wooden slats thump echo boot heels. To the right is the blackness of the nighttime ocean, above, with no light bleed from the shuttered beer and clam joints, the sky is black enough to pick out stars. The cold front blasting through is palpable enough, but it announces its presence by singing, making the metal of the closed amusement park moan, the brackets and braces static but unquiet. Back to the open air train station where you can pick out the beat of one train pulling in, and another train pulls through and it counterpoints, then blurs, then is gone.

Navy Yard, Brooklyn 12/30/06

Navy Yard, Brooklyn 12/30/06
Originally uploaded by ttractorpull.

Grand Street, LES 1/12/07

Grand Street, LES 1/12/07
Originally uploaded by ttractorpull.

I need this more than I care to admit. Trying to change it up, I run up the stairs from the subway, try to clear my head from the stench of the crazy woman on my train. I head to the bodega, to the man who will say "Good morning, Beautiful" because perhaps that small kindness will redeem me, make me feel whole enough to face the rest of my day.

Parked outside the tiendita is a huge pit bull. He is no house pet, he is un-neutered and his ears are cropped like I have seen the Russians do for illegal dog fighting down in Little Odessa. Many would fear him, and he is fearsome, a solid 100 pounds of muscle. I look at him and he does not stare me down, so reach my hand out to his enormous head. He accepts my pets impassively while I praise him lavishly.

Out of the store with my croissant and coffee and I look at the pit bull again, but this time, he looks back and starts to wag his tail. I pet him again, rub the short fur on his head, and then he breaks, shows his sweetness, leans his whole body against my leg, to soak up affection. I tell him how beautiful he is, and he is beautiful, stregnth and tenderness there by my side, and there is my redemption and there is the start of my day.

More from my old writing pad:

Seven. Age seven, to answer the question. Of when was it clear you were not like other girls. That you played with firetrucks, Erector sets, made model airplanes, skateboarded, dug holes, fought when cornered, fought when not cornered.

I was eschewing pink, girly, weak, vulnerable as much as I could, as fast as I could. My father said he knew by the time I was seven that I was a failure, unworthy of investment. Let us do a neat dip step, let us not speak of causality.

It is brought to my attention, again, how mannish I can be. Again. Forward, aggressive. My shoulders are broad, my stomach is hard. I am loud, charmless. How protective I am of my vulnerabilities, my softness, my gender.

The man on the subway platform knew what I try to hide. Knew when he said something vulgar to me, then yelled it again, and yet again, leaving me a wobbly-legged fawn blinking dumbly and humiliated.

I did not tell a story at Tuesday night's Moth event. The theme was "clean slate." If I had, the opening line would have been:

I have been pulled over while driving a stolen car without a license; I have counterfeited money; I have held packets of meth for my biker-leathered boss; I have made bombs; I have stood stark naked next to a cop while he examined my fake driver's license, but I have only been arrested once.

Trying to clear last year's writings off my carry-around pad:

I watched him out the cab's rear window. Watched him walk away down the dark street, watched him as he dropped a coin into a homeless guy's paper cup, leaned over to say something, and I knew he was using the way he could be gentle with troubling people.

I passed him on the street once too, while I was on the bus. Saw him stopped at the light, straddling his bike, one foot on a pedal, waiting for traffic to clear, with a backpack snugged to his shoulders earnest as a boy scout.

He could be so joyous, he would laugh and gleefully rocket his sturdy body around the room, his mirth huge, uncontainable.

I missed him, somehow. Missed something, something precious flew right past me. And now he doesn't miss me. The silence tells me. I delete him from my cellphone.

The hours between 5am and 7am, I call the Pancake Hours. They are the hours that I will flip myself over, now curled on my left hip, now curled on my right, over and over, restless, too awake.

I try to find ways to soothe myself back to sleep. Throw my leg over a pillow, run a lazy hand over it, like a lover. Put my hands along the top of the bed, where the heat from the register flows up. Turn on the BBC, and maybe those modulated voices will softly send me back to sleep.

I can’t blame being awake on the dawn, because a winter 5am is well before my windows start to lighten. I killed the mouse that was creeping and crinkling on my kitchen counters in the night. I am awake already for the mosque’s first call to prayer. I am awake already when the elementary school teacher upstairs’ feet hit the floor, her shower goes on, she eventually clatters down the hard wooden stairs and slams the front door.

This morning I awoke to rain, some mechanical noises from the grocery store behind my windows. Awoke angry, because I was dreaming and I did not want to stop. I was dreaming someone was touching my collarbone and it was so, so sweet. I awoke before I could find out who it was, return his touch, draw him in. It is now hours later but I still feel the loss of it.

I am not allowed to take pictures when I go running. Running is for the deliberate reintroduction of my heart to my lungs, slowly, painfully slowly, and stopping or slowing is not allowed. But I can't help but see, frame things up in my head, and a daylight run reveals so many different things. On this corner the brilliant blue sky is split with a black church steeple, the steeple itself split by the intensely rusting access hatch, a streaked orange and vermilion square. Here the heiroglyphics of chicken bones tells a story of distracted distain. Here a white styrofoam takeout box is splayed open and stomped flat, like a pair of discarded wings. I have gone too fast again, too happy to have an unbridled desire, so now I must run farther, run down this long ugly street, kicking through the shattered glass of Saturday night before the final turn towards home.

In this city of constant hustle and go-go many people don’t stop to pick up lost pennies, nickels, small change that falls to the sidewalk. But I do. The dime that has been kicked to the corner, the penny with its lucky side down, it doesn’t belong to me, it doesn’t belong to anyone. I call it god’s money, it belongs to god. So I pick it up, put it in a special place in my bag, and my rule is, I have to give what belongs to god to the next person who asks me for money.

So this morning I know who I am giving it to right away as she enters my train car, yanking the door open, lurching in. Her sway might be from the movement of the train, might be from chemical substances. The way her face is moving as she asks for a handout, I am guessing she has had a stroke. She is getting a worse reception than I usually see. Perhaps because she is not amusing, perhaps because her story is not compelling. When she gets closer to me I figure out why. She has soiled herself, and the smell is assaultive.

She is so out of it, so lacking the perpetual panhandler 360 degree sense of impending reward, she doesn’t even notice me digging in my bag for god’s money. I walk up to her with it, look her in the face. Her eyes are rolling, unfocused and I make sure that I don’t just drop the change into her hand. I press it into her palm, feel the warmth of her skin, the worn smoothness. I also feel the rot, how her internal piers have rotted away, how little there is to hold her up, how her moorings have thinned and snapped and now she is free sailing inside her own skull, inside her own flesh.

My money, god’s money, will make no difference to her in this day. When she leaves the subway car my pity and my helplessness well up and constrict my chest. I struggle to maintain my commuter face, clench my jaw, but I see my reflection in the black train window, I see my eyes getting wet.

This street is corrupted. It is broken, with gouts of water flowing over cracked asphalt. The repair vehicles stake their claim, spangling the walls with white and yellow warning lights, irritating oncoming traffic into squeeze and weave, spurt and brake. Waiting for the signal to change I keep well away, jigging left right left right over the stream running against the curb.

Farther up four cop cars converge on the corner. The clockers are displaced and they saunter falsely casual, falsely innocent. They will lose business for an hour or possibly an evening, and in retribution for the indignity they yell, jockey, menace the sidewalk. So I take notice of the empty pint bottle of Smirnoff by the gutter. I know to grab it by the neck, swing it against this wall, crack off its body and turn it into a vicious rose blooming from my hand. I know the sound of this, the sudden danger cascade of breaking glass, is sobering and will turn me from a lone easy mark to a hard scarred street scrap.

Tonight is an easy run, head up, chest up, and with an inner eye turned towards rough shank I will eat this pavement like a seven layer cake, dig in my heels, thrust my hands into it up to the elbow, tear it apart and leave it behind me.

I heard a piece about a man who wrote down every fear he had. And he ended up with hundreds of them. I thought that was pretty impressive, so I started my own list, to see how far I could get. The list makes me both laugh and cringe.

1) Fear of passing through this world and never being known.
2) Fear of dying slowly and horribly aware, like asphyxiation or a miserable life.
3) Fear of never being loved unconditionally, of never being able to give my love away.
4) Fear of the take out delivery people thinking I am single and pathetic and depressed so I order two dinners to make them think someone else is here.
5) Fear of the guys who run the corner pharmacy knowing that I fuck, so I buy my shampoo there but condoms elsewhere.
6) Fear of being watched at night, of a face on the other side of the dark window.
7) Fear of looking stupid, saying the wrong thing, of revealing how uncool and anachronistic I am.
8) Fear of discovering I am really a vain selfish ass.
9) Fear of being destitute and desperate, of having nothing of value inside my head, no marketable abilities, of having to be a stripper in the only kind of horrible place that would take me now.
10) Fear of being sent back to prep school, because not graduating from prep school is "why everything in my life turned out wrong."
11) Fear of finding out that I really did graduate from high school so that my fuck-you bravado turns into complete bullshit.
12) Fear of being even less intelligent than I fear I am.
13) Fear of calcifying into a bitter intolerant nasty woman.
14) Fear of being invisible.
15) Fear of being noticed.
16) Fear of having my needs and vulnerabilities cruelly exposed, of being viewed without empathy.
17) Fear of overreaching and being left with nothing, with a pocket full of sand.
18) Fear of my teeth dissolving.
19) Fear of calling for help and no sound coming out.
20) Fear of running into the house for safety and discovering the walls are made of glass.
21) Fear that the retarded guy at the laundromat will be the last man ever to touch my underwear.
22) Fear that I will try to make art in public and it will be as bad as that one thing I saw that one time.
23) Fear that I suck, in general and in specific.
24) Fear that my friends tell me nice things about myself because they are my friends, not because they are objectively true.
25) Fear that I make people uncomfortable by being awkward or smelling bad.

*Slick did her own list over at Conclusion Free, and I must say it kicks my ass from left to right. Bravo!

A kir royale to offset what I know is to come: white quail stuffed with foie gras, apple compote, wild venison served rare, tiny grilled brussel sprouts, sweet onion tatin. By far the better half of a bottle of wine, a warm gateau chocolat, a glass of champagne.

Then we head to the art school, where every year they pipe steam from the generation plant out onto the sculpture yards and into a collection of old steam whistles. At midnight the cords are pulled on a dozen whistles, from ear-piercing shriek to foghorn bellow. The dark sky is filled with clouds of steam and as it cools it precipates onto our upturned faces. The noise is so loud our chests vibrate but that does not stop us from grabbing a rope and pulling, feeling the power on the other end of the cord, the vibration that works itself all the way up your arm. We scream into the mist but can't hear our own voices, only see each others teeth shining in smiles in the half light.

When we have had enough we stumble to the back of the crowd. A family is holding hands, dancing around a tree and hollering "Auld Lang Syne" but there are not enough of them to complete the ring and so we join, grabbing hands, and pull others in too, and we are whirling around and around, forgetting the words and scatting instead, around and around, making joy with strangers in the middle of the night. We twirl ourselves dizzy and what a way to enter the new year, breathless, staggering, grinning.

Henry Street, LES 12/29/06