From February, A Memory: Summer in New York
As he stumbles over with a Citi Bike, he tells me he has a gift for me. I tell him the gift of solitude is enough, bestowed unto me by a higher power. Yes, in lower Manhattan if you‘re looking for some solitude on a summer Saturday night, and you can find it, something must be looking out for you. I’m sitting just a few blocks down from the Performing Garage on Wooster Street waiting to get in to a show. I’ve been on the phone with friends and this guy coms up with a big smile on his face. I tell him he has good energy and that surely others could match it better. I’m not the person he should spend time appealing to.
I’ve had a bad day and I need to be alone. He shrugs.
“Company might be just what you need. I have question for you”
I say I have no answers worthy of his time, that he should be on his way. I guess he can tell I’m not afraid and why would I be. I’ve walked this street a thousand times over the last ten years at all times of day and night.
“You are a very intelligent lady.”
I move my hand to my bag and start to give my closing sentiment before I move, but he cuts in:
“Whoa, okay. I see you’re digging in your bag now.”
I stifle the urge to laugh. Words are the only weapon that I have and they serve me. The gentleman caller is off into the night with the Citi Bike. And I am clear on what I need, it’s not an exciting Saturday night. It is something to sink my teeth into. Something to put my pen upon. I guess I’ve given him more than he bargained for as he wheels the bike off down the block.
Surprisingly in SoHo there are lots of mosquitoes so prices aren’t the only thing that gouge me. Slapping the bugs away isn’t the most annoying thing that happened today. A threat is extended to me at work after I do the dilligence of sending someone a reminder for something I know they will forget. Surprise surprise they do forget, but it’s not the forgetting that gets them upset, it’s my reminder. Ultimately it’s unfortunate, but the threat is empty like the lobster tank at my favorite Chinese restarant. Nothing to be done but forget about it until next time.
What else is empty is all these apartments and what is full is the streets. More people than ever in recorded history are unhoused in New York. Full also, perhaps fuller than ever, are the lives of those trying to stay in place. Once two jobs in now three or five, 35 hours is 50.
My dreams are matte black like luxury cars, a full void, but yet I am compact and scrappy. Walking always though so what’s to lose if I walk extra just because and I want a hair cut but none of my time feels worth one and I am always wondering when and how I will settle out the landscape of my life before time erodes it down.
It’s 70 degrees. It was also 70 degrees in October. The mosquitoes won’t die and the snow won’t come, but I don’t know that yet. My shoulders are stiff with seriousness that only winter used to bring but I’ve outgrown jokes and shopping and I’m looking for new ways to blow off steam. Walking with my feet or walking with my pen as I do now. Everyone who passes looks at me like I am invented, writing long hand on some side stoop, not fetch, not giving, not a look of downtown New York. I am exempt from sight seeing. Tourists without enough hands for their shopping bags move and keep moving.
Writing is my favorite processing tool and New York is not processing now, maybe it never was but since COVID there’s a desire to repair stamina with a work force more thread bare and even more desire to be seen. Tourists flock in for a taste of this coastal American dream.
When I used to sit and wait, it would always be after I worked late. Not enough time to run an errand but sometime before I needed to arrive at the show or at the dinner spot. I will never kill time again. I will never kill anything except for mercy or protection.
Once upon a time I’d be more pissed at the interruption and separtely the ignorance. So what he’s got questions? So what culture isn’t the main attraction?
I must look like a relic, but I am so new and so tired somehow like the cobblestones, just one on many worn blocks clinging to the earth laying low, as low as they can go.
