Things I have learned living in New York (installment 2)

No matter the ungodly hour at which one walks around, there are always harder-working, better people up and about as well.

Often, I'll get on the first train into Grand Centrnal (the 5:22)...or will stay at the Library until 2 or so; and generally when I do, I'll feel good and sorry for myself (Why am I awakeeeeeeeeeeeeee? This suckkkkks. Etc.). But then I'll catch the eye of one of the Doctors walking out of Roosevelt, or some suit-type sitting next to me on the train. And invariably their look will say "what the *hell* is the matter with *you?* You have no reason to have that look on your face--man up."

It's hard, then, not to realize that if one wants to do anything remotely meaningful in the world, one has to sweat every once in awhile--which is a good lesson if there ever was one.

This tends to be helpful in mustering up ambition, and curtailing pity-parties.
Good stuff, all around.

Things I have learned living in New York

1a) It is deceptively (and unnecessarily) hard to eat a bagel and walk at the same time. Invariably, one ends up with cream-cheese all over their faces.
At best.
It's often not a pretty sight.

1b) Bagels, in spite of their messiness, bring out the best in people. Once at Hot and Crusty (facial mess abounding) I was approached by a lovely young man with the coolest fucking journal I'd ever seen in my life--it was yellow and ornate, an was clearly handmade.

We had a conversation that went like this:

Me: Oh my God that Journal's amazing.
Him: Thanks! I got it in India over the summer. Check it--the pages are made out of leaves!
Me: Oh my GOD that's incredible. I'm so jealous.
Him: Do you write?
Me: Not well, but yes.
Him: Oh, well then. I actually happen to have an extra one in my bag. Take it.
Me: No that's ridiculous I absolutely...
Him: Just take it, and have a nice day.

...and the son of a bitch just walked the fuck away.

Sometimes, I have hope.

Not as good.

Grace

The newborn baby in your arms
Cries quietly as the subway car rattles
Back and forth,
Purposed and unyielding.

As the door shuts closed
You see a rat: black with
Anger and perseverance
Pick up a half eaten egg roll and scamper away.

The train begins again
To shake and screech
Deep underneath centuries and centuries of
Ebbing and flowing, shaking and screeching.

You check your watch,
And stroke your daughter’s head.

She’s crying into your still-tender breasts--
You lean into her baby-soft head, and sigh.
As the train pulls up to 191st street
You close your eyes and begin to hum.

From the next car a man walks in with a guitar
And plays an old Clapton song that’s always brought you to tears.
Misty eyed and dizzy, you give him a dollar
And ask him if he takes requests.

“This is New York, Lady. Of course not.”

You pick up your phone,
Dial the numbers that you have had etched into your memory
Since you were 26,
Let it ring two and a half times
--just like you’ve done three times this week--
and snap the screen shut
like a thin beak grasping for worms.

You turn your head to the man with the guitar
Now singing Lenard Cohen
Now opening the subway door
And lean your lips down
To your baby’s glistening head.

I shouldn't.

Messages to Two.

I would love to, yes. But I don't trust you as far as I could throw you when you used to weigh 280 lbs; which isn't far at all. We haven't, no, in about a month and I'm going a bit crazy. It would certainly be nice... you know.
I just wish you didn't suck so much.

Also: I've found a replacement for you. With someone that thinks they are, but isn't half of what you were. I think I've outgrown the need; I should have by now--I'm 22. I'm trying.

Shine

A neon yellow light shines out
And out through your garage.
I've driven back from towns and bars,
And think about
Your fractured home.
You’re packing bags and pulling strings
And dusting off the ghosts
of Sundays past and morning sex
and things you used to hold.

“It’s impossible,” you once told me“ to be lonely in a place like New York.”

This time tomorrow, you’ll be gone
I realize as I stand
Outside my car and watch you put
old catcher’s mitts in bags.
You’ll leave Michelle, who’s only four.
And Leigh, who just turned two.
I think of this, and shake my head
And wonder what they’ll do.

Yours is the only light on for miles, miles…years and years.

“It’s very late” you say to me
And smile through the dark.
“It is, I know,” I smile back
and watch you eye the stars.
It seems like you’ve been here in this
Garage for weeks on end.
You’ve been here since I left at noon
And now the moon shines in.

I watch you: broken, tired and scared, and look up my driveway, to my door.

“Goodnight” I say, and turn back in
“Good luck with where you go.”
“Hey thanks,” you sigh and look around
“I’ll miss this place, you know.”
“It’s just that she and I are not
The same as we once were.
We’ve tried and tried, but nothing comes.
But man: I do love her.”


I understand. I swear. I do. My home is fractured too.


A tear, a frown, come from your face.
I leave you to your work .
And go back in from whence I came:
My house, and all its hurt.
Your voice rings now from in my head:
I listen to you move.
You’re looking for an artifact
From years, years gone too soon.

Without a word—with just a glance
I turn around and go.
Now’s not the time for words or hands
We know
We know
We know.

I climb my stairs, walk past the man
I’ve loved for seven years.
He’s sleeping on the couch again
What for? They sprint: the years.

None of this is mine or yours or ours; everything in this town is as flimsy as your cardboard.

I walk upstairs and shut the light
And start to go to bed.
Before I do, I turn and walk
Towards you, I see your head
Through my window I watch and stare
At you as you turn in.
The light shuts off, the darkness comes
I stop. I smell the wind.

Your door slams shut with anger, loss
Or fear of something new.
It’s quiet now, here on our street
That brought me once to you.

Also...from ages ago:

At 2 AM I leave the library. Finding it to be a gorgeous night (morning?) I walk up Broadway to 86th street in complete silence, staring down vacant streets, watching the intermittent flash of yellow as taxis occasionally pass me, seeing perhaps three people in 30 city blocks. It’s a truly bizarre experience, this walking through Manhattan at night, finding the “city that never sleeps” very much in a state that resembles just t hat. I used to think that it was impossible to be lonely in New York because of the people, the bustle, the neon… but now it is 2 AM and I’ve decided that this may very well be the loneliest place in the world. Because somehow urban desolation—the storefronts with metal encasings that resemble muzzles, the unlit brownstones, the empty ghosts of cabs that follow one after another down otherwise un-traveled avenues—is so much more profound than it is in places that are less populated.
And walking down Broadway in the wee hours of the morning, one cannot help but feel t hat they are the last surviving person in a world that has abruptly stopped spinning on its axis.
By 2:45 I am at my car in Riverdale and by 3:06 I am back at the house that used to be my home but is decidedly no longer. There are no street lights in suburbia, and so my block is completely dark and desolate as I drive down the street, until I reach the house that is directly across from my own. The man who lives there is preparing to move across the country to Arizona to take a job coaching a professional Hockey team, leaving his wife and five daughters her in the land of BMW convertibles and perfectly manicured Power-moms with Donna Karan Suits. As it has been every night for the past week, his garage is open, the bright yellow light emanating, illuminating -his toned, bulky figure packing up the boxes, boxes, boxes` of his life, lining them up perfectly on his driveway.

What I do instead of the things I am actually supposed to be doing.

The first flight out of LaGuardia leaves at 5:50 AM. Jeremy is going out to LA for good this time, which finds me in a car driving up the FDR with him and Daren as the sun comes up slowly over Park Slope. Daren had offered to drive weeks ago; but since sleep and I have always been strange bed fellows, I offered to come along, in spite of the Godless hour at which we had to leave. The highway, now, is almost completely abandoned and as we get into Queens we see perhaps one car drive past us in twenty minutes. There’s a strange, thick fog that’s unique to New York springtime that covers the Van Wick Expressway as we drive into blinking red lights that loom somewhere in the distance. None of us say a word the entire trip, but sit, comfortable in our silence listening to Joni Mitchell sing about loss and love with abandon.
It is the end of an era, and we are all working on very little sleep.
I, myself, spent the greater part of evenings past sitting in an all night café on 1st and Broadway, drawing and watching as the ghosts of empty taxi cabs flashed yellow, flowing one after the other down otherwise un-traveled Avenues, and lonely people, illuminated by gaudy fluorescent lights sat with books, computers and half finished cups of coffee as if to distract themselves from the night.

Yeah. I didn't finish that one. Perhaps I will, eventually.

Sweet. New and exciting ways to procrastinate.