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the awful truth
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The buildings rise above the streets like a slot canyon. Seen from above, in fitful dreams in restless sleep at nights, disembodied from the corpse in the sheets in the Village, soaring over Times Square, the people are like pools of oil: spilling out of cabs and subways, converging into a surging mass of bodies.
The camera swings from the neck and bounces off the chest. The Chinese food dangles off the handebars. The brakes squeal. The bums beg. The lights change. A door slams.
A dog shits on the sidewalk, and looks at you sadly, and asks you, What is this, on which I am shitting? It rubs its rear paws against the cement, miming the grass-kickup, and only scratches its toenails; winces in pain. Is dragged along. Spends the rest of the day not asleep, but not moving. His big wet eyes are trained on the door. He is waiting for the two minutes of attention, the hour of indifference, the night of blissful sleep perhaps at the foot of the bed. Or perhaps on the floor. The next day will be exactly the same.
Some dogs get walked twice.
Some people have cats that they never let out of the apartment.
You’re born. In dreams, in regressions with your imaginary therapist twelve years into your life, you remember a mother, brothers, sisters. Your whole life is an apartment.
Your whole life is an apartment. You are a cat.
Seen from above, in beautiful dreams of flying, the Statue of Liberty is a little sister with a newspaper cone – she has a wreath of twigs in her hair and she carries her schoolbooks. How small and approachable.
Not huge, daunting, magnificent, shrouded in mystery when seen from the ferry on one hell of a rainy day.
You were alone on the ferry.
The statue used to be copper-colored. The toils of time make her turn the sickly green we see today. The same color that tinges the skin of the dead, when it stretches over the skeleton and dries like jerky.
The buildings rise above the streets like a slot canyon. Seen from above, the water rises with a giant swell, coming from the east. It washes up over the river, crushes through all those bastards of the Upper East, the dirty sluts and pimps and scamps and also fakeries from Harlem, it crushes the yellow-skinned motherfuckers in Chinatown, it drowns the shit out of all the poor starving artists in the East Village.
It surges on. It rushes through Times Square. A million switches short-circuited.
Motherfucking veejays and fans at MTV trapped their glass bubble like fish in an aquarium.
Tourists from Kansas. This is their trip. They stop for pictures. They clutch their children. This’ll make a great story, they think.
A million cabbies, bike-cabbies, horse-cabbies. They stop their whistling to be washed over, and whirling around they wish for more weight in their vehicles. They practice their whistle.
The water rushes on. It flows quick with a current through the streets. It dances, it jives, it picks up grooves of the neighborhood. Latin music still blares from a twelfth-floor. The West Village. Fuckin’ Morningside Heights.
Jersey. Jersey’s next.
The building’s don’t help. The buildings are like the walls of a slot canyon. If the skyline were low perhaps the water would rush out, maybe through and over, like when you sink your stomach into the water in the bathtub. Over and out.
The buildings are like slot canyons.
The water is trapped. It becomes forceful, a projectile, a deadly mass of water which is coming at you. Carrying a million cabs with it.
The city is inescapable. It is inescapable, unforgettable, unspeakable, incurable, indomitable. Unbelievable.
Individual.
The mind of the individual. The sole of the individual.
Even when you see two people on the street, walking and talking, they’re not together.
Those people fucking. In the window, see? Two up, three to the left. With the lights on?
They’re alone.
Everyone is alone in their head. No one can see in your mind.
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061110
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the awful truth
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When it rains I like to walk to Columbia and sit on the big steps, at the foot of the statue. Watch all the students running to class, afraid to get a little wet.
These rich douchebags from Whereeverthefuck, Kansas, with a bazillion dollars because their dad’s the one shmuck in the town that knows
more than milking. And they come up here to the city and they stay out of the park at night and they don’t talk to people who talk to themselves but they can’t escape the rain.
And the rain here is vicious. It is rough, dirty and talks trash just like all the homeboys on the street. It lands in your hair and you feel the crackhead’s spit from ten years ago, washed down the drain and evaporated a million times over. You feel it sink into your scalp, and you get a little wild-eyed, a little crazy, you think of yourself in Force Ones with holes in the toes, begging for change. Whistling outside a door. Waiting ten minutes.
Shuffling away.
Returning on the hour.
Eighty percent of the human body is water, right?
What’s the point.
These men on the streets in front of the Met in the pouring rain, doing The Twirl. The art students take pictures with extra-long exposure to capture the droplets of water spiraling off the umbrella. This will be discussed in length in class on Monday. They’re all shooting for A’s.
Like that A’ll mean shit in an art gallery.
You’ll end up on the corner in Union Square, charging fifty bucks for something that took you four months.
And nobody wants it.
I don’t know who the statue is. I’ve never bothered to look. It’s become the kind of thing where I make I point to not look. I walk up the steps, averting my eyes. Watching my feet. I look into the man’s face. We greet. I never look at the nametag.
His name is Methuselah.
Because he is always here.
He is here in the snow, in the rain, when it’s so hot outside everyone’s inside, with ice packs on their testicles. Legs spread to the fan. On the TV is VH1. You’re watching two dozen has-beens discussing the one-hit-wonders of the 80’s.
What did you do today?
I sit at the base of the statue, the name against my back, and I look out over the campus. I cup my cigarettes in my hand. After a few drags the rain seeps through. They become unsmokable. I’ve got a collection going at my left heel. Three or four.
These buildings were built almost a hundred years ago. Alexander Hamilton went to Columbia. In portraits of the first president, he is wearing the big curly wig.
The ghosts come out in the rain. I see them floating around, ethereal spirits so inspired to seek Truth and Knowledge that they return to their Alma Mater in the eternal afterlife to study.
A guy in a pea-coat and loafers stands and tongues a girl in a white scarf and big furry boots. Campus Walk is otherwise empty.
My space is invaded.
I descend down the steps, feeling the rain on my skin. I have my hand on my cell phone. My cigarettes are probably ruined.
Cigarettes?
The Indians. We give them smallpox, you know, thyphoid, whatever, and a million machetes to the spinal cord, and they give us tobacco.
The Mexican brown. You hold it up and say, I got the brown shit.
You sell it to high school kids and laugh about it.
Later you feel bad. You give the twenty bucks to the homeless guy you see every night on the corner by your appartment.
He buys some beer.
You watch him, hours later from the roof, piss-drunk, urinate on the wall and fall asleep on his arm.
You could spit on him all night and he'd never know.
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061111
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