The Colossus of New York

DOWNTOWN

JUMPING ROPE, punching the air and shadowboxing especially. The prizefighters warm up for the big bout. So much on the line. The mirror in the corner counsels, Keep your fists up and your head down. Then the bell rings and it’s out of apartments, out of workplace personas, into streets, into nighttime guises. Twilight is a mask factory.

HAPPY HOUR descends, this low fog. It’s ladies’ night or discounted jello shots or two for one. The bar-tender supervises distribution of watered-down stash, picks up bits of conversation. Other people empty her drop by drop. Solitary drinkers share cautionary tales through posture. He collects coasters from all over the world. This one he’s got in spades. This is the beer to have when you’re having more than one. Sitting at the bar waiting to be picked up like in the movies. Or merely saved. Eyes slide from stool to stool, fingers running across rows of books. Browse this library shelf, linger over spines even as you are browsed in turn, examined, checked out. Certainly there are a few volumes yet unread. Pull the next personality out of your back pocket. Maybe this one will work. He overhears his words coming out of someone else’s mouth and wishes his complaints were not so common. Pace yourself. Things are just getting started.

THEY TUMBLE down museum steps after taking in this season’s big exhibit. She feels so much more comfortable parroting critics with a bona fide ticket stub in her pocket. When they went into the art house movie it was light out. Reckoning the surcharges on matinees. What do you feel like doing. Dunno. Everybody else knows where the hot new restaurants are. They don’t get out as much as they used to. Haunted by the beady little eyes of the baby-sitter. Depending on what’s going on in the rest of the world, for whole minutes he’s the worst waiter in the whole world. Protocols for dealing with complainers are taped up by the kitchen door. Think saliva. Seething over appetizers, they save it up for home so they don’t fight in the restaurant. It’s nice to have an activity or hobby you can share with your spouse. These two have decided on spite and it has brought them closer together. Unlikely as it is, for once they’re the well-adjusted couple at the table for four. Eyes roll when he orders off the menu. That looks good. They eat here once a month but something about this meal makes them realize things haven’t worked out for a while now and they’ll never return. Countdown to symptoms of food poisoning. Would you like dessert. We have a wide assortment of bitters.

THIS MUST BE the place. It’s not. This particular street address does not exist. In another city perhaps but not this one or maybe in the future but not now. Then defectors open the door and it begins. He swears he’s been here before. Doesn’t know a single soul. Lost in the cocktail party. Who to talk to. Anyone. Drain the melted ice again. Go to the bar, hit the bathroom: by the time you return the party will have aligned in your favor. No such luck. Planting this rumor is harder than it first looked. Gardeners advise patience, things take root or don’t. Given the choice between two parties that guy over there will always make the wrong decision. Case in point. No prying a certain type from the hors d’oeuvres table. For the last half hour she has been trying to gain converts to grudges but no luck. What does she see in him. He’s so transparent. Old enough to be his daughter. For half a minute they inhabit the dream city that lured them from their hometowns but then discover nothing solid beneath their feet and down they go. Quicksand occurs most frequently in movies, then come parties. Mark my words: when they finally teach coffee-table books to walk and talk, the market will fall out of the trophy wife and boy toy business.

HIPSTERS SEEK refuge in church, Our Lady of Perpetual Subculture. There is some discussion as to whether or not they are still cool but then they are calmed by the obscure location and the arrival of their kind. Keep the address to yourself, let the rabble find it for themselves. Wow, this crappy performance art is really making me feel not so terrible about my various emotional issues. He has to duck out early to get back to his bad art. Three cheers for your rich interior life, may it serve you well come rent day. Beer before liquor never sicker. This one’s on me. Somehow he ends up buying every round. Hour by hour the customers change, grow humps horns scales. The little noises they make: her boyfriend’s out of town, his college roommate is in town, my friend’s band is playing downtown. He made too many plans with too many people and things will not turn out okay. She’s a little worried because at midnight the new legislation goes into effect and the draconian Save the Drama for Your Mama laws are really going to cramp her style. Hit the town. It hits back.

THE NEWSPAPER write-up contains bad directions to the hot new spot. Suddenly they’re on empty streets in unreckoned neighborhoods and must go deeper into darkness before safety. Corners and alleys out of metropolitan fable, bricked-up doorways, newspapers stuntdoubling for tumbleweeds. Streetlights gallow. Footsteps of roving thugs. They ask, Can you hear me. They ask, Is that you beside me or is this the end of it all. Then music enters deep tissues, they see the lights and the mob, but that was real fear and what if word gets out that they’re still capable of fear after all these years. Count on one thing, count on this: night keeps its mouth shut. Nightclub doors are shut. This is Rent-A-Bouncer’s most popular model. They never blink. New satanic advances make it possible for them to actually appraise the souls of aspiring clubgoers. Seen a certain way, the velvet rope kinda smiles. A delegation of corpses staggers by on structurally unsound heels. She read an article where it said formaldehyde is in this season. Simple economics: if they only admit the beautiful people, who will pay the cover charge.

AND THEY SAID his shirt was loud. Pantomime desires. One by one the gang goes off on adventures. On waking next afternoon they’ll compare notes. Design flaws of the rich and famous. Knock politely on the bathroom door. People are up to no good in there. It’s very suspicious. Watch out: it is the nightly running of the anorexic assistants. They squeeze by easily. Everybody’s looking so good, everybody’s so well put together, I just want to say, Keep up the good work, troops. The DJ has scrutinized evolution and knows the back door into reptilian brain-stem. The beat cries mutiny, recruits limbs and hips, strips this vessel of volition. Apparently this song is very popular. Lewd dances trigger responses. Still the wallflower after all these years. To be able to just dance up to somebody and start doing that, whatever that’s called. Akimbo things banish drinks to the floor. Elbows heels hands and heads. Beware the lumbering man-child at ten o’clock — they tend to wave their arms when they dance. She looks down at her hips. Not half bad.

IT’S A FULL MOON. Lunar effects are readily observable in emergency rooms and ATM vestibules. People need more money. If only they could withdraw common sense. Friends put friends up to ill-advised behavior. Talking to that woman, putting up dukes, stealing furnishings. She has been following him for twenty blocks and he still hasn’t noticed. The streets at this hour are low comedy. They chant, Girl Fight, Girl Fight. Why does the crazy person pick on him, is it that obvious. Recognize them from high school and flee. Past the jazz joint humid from solos, past the local bar with the earnest singersongwriter. After this gig she’ll have enough for a new rhyming dictionary, top of the line, the one with the word that rhymes with “orange.” Bumping into the shop clerk after hours in this new context. Worlds collide. There’s a cop. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Now he’s going to have to explain how he got this scar an average of 3.5 times a week for the rest of his life. If the victims all got together they could trace back their misfortunes to this cursed payphone. It’s the only one for miles in working condition and everything people say on it turns out bad. Urgent telegram from the Ministry of Unhappy Thoughts: Been Thinking Stop No Good Will Come From This Stop. Like the moon, you’re only good and visible a few days a month. Exerting influence, pulling up whitecaps. The rest of the time falling away, cut up into parts and nobody knows where you are. It’s so cold. Just a few more blocks, dear.

MAINTAIN the illusion tonight will be different, wheel in the extra generators if you have to. Plenty of seats in the predictable cafés, no waiting, what’ll you have. The menu never changes. Things are pretty much status quo with the sexual-tension friend. Make a note to ramp up machinations for next week. Boys Night Out collides with Girls Night Out over some confusion as to who has the right of way. Perhaps you recognize him from such bungled seductions as Your Front Stoop and Darkened Hallway at the Christmas Party. She has convinced herself she has no secret plan for this encounter. Waiting for the opening in conversation to reveal the true purpose of this meeting. When it comes to romance, he never met a lesson he didn’t learn. No, she’s never cheated on him but if you put it that way it almost sounds like a dare. Two drinks past the point of being able to suffer chance encounters with vague acquaintances, relatives, people from work. They will report back. One by one we are becoming unrecognizable.

BUT WAIT, there’s more. Under the big top. In tiny rooms of polite talk, in cattlecar taverns, in cavernous clubs, citizens line up for the same amusements, the rigged games and the broken rides. I like your fez. Still plenty of time to suck up, air grievances, expose character flaws. The most important person in the room possesses a gravitational field and cocktail napkins waft toward him. Aim for the soft underbelly, that’s their vulnerable point. Anybody got a mint. She must be sleeping on the job because everybody’s acting as if they see her for who she truly is. Folks get by on their favorite props, old jokes, some cleavage, Anecdote 7. Test-run Anecdote 7, twice as efficient as Anecdote 6 and only half as long. They applaud his wit. Not a third of the way to the punchline it’s clear the joke is going to bomb. From their reaction that word is no longer used in polite company. Did you know that smiling politely burns up the same amount of calories as speaking your mind. He confesses his love when the room momentarily clears. Everybody returns as she is about to make her response. They used to be married and now divvy up the room like they once divvied up friends. Dare you to cross this line. Some rub wedding rings with thumbs when that creature comes into view. He studies her posture as she talks to that dashing stranger. Something is setting off alarms. Smoke, no doubt. Ten bucks says they go home together. Suddenly realizing that you’re talking awfully close. Everybody else seems to have left and what does that mean. Somebody stole your coat.

MORE NIGHTMARISH, please. If you insist. This is exactly the sort of behavior her therapist warned her against. He dresses like his friends so they won’t suspect he’s unlike them. To preempt rejection she dresses to exaggerate her difference when the true enemy is not the world’s disdain but its indifference. He is surely the next item in a dreary procession and cannot be seen for all those previous disappointments. Overexplain your latest career decision. How can he even show his face around town after the latest setbacks. People spare a minute or two relishing other people’s setbacks before their own inadequacies distract them again. This is his umpteenth pint but he has a hollow leg or some sort of emptiness in himself and doesn’t feel the least bit tipsy. What they take for her air of mystery is merely a side effect of her medication. Something’s going on under the table. Gargoyles have clambered down from rooftop aeries to replace his friends but he’s not sure if he should do anything because they’re quite funny actually and much more supportive than his real friends. It’s called a tip.

IMPRESS THEM with your selections, jukebox guru. Press the right buttons and she will be brainwashed into the cult of you. Soapbox the better word, for these pamphlets contain his philosophies. Have your songs come on yet. All over town passive-aggressive jukeboxes delay departures. Every selection pulls them this way and that, sad and out to sea unless they outwit the undertow of minor chords. Tonight the song you always despised strides from the jukebox full-bodied and you hear the lyrics for the first time, understand the lyrics for the first time after all these years. This new you with an older soul. Now it’s your favorite. All this time singing the wrong words. Some of them have already decided where this night is going. None of them have commented on her engagement ring so she knocks everybody’s drinks over. Accidentally on purpose. He spills his guts, it was the last sip that sent him over the edge but she has her hands full with her own loneliness, she’s not about to take on his. Reach inside to muzzle the broken part of you that is now talking.

LAST CALL. This is good-night for anyone with a lick of sense. Anyone with a lick of sense is calling it a night. From here on in there are consequences. One more for the road. He pretends he needs convincing. The binge is going swimmingly, thanks for asking. The adjectives that describe the bathrooms are so scarce as to be an endangered species, protected from poaching by government regulation, so use your imagination. So much for the breakfast date. With every passing hour she scratched off another appointment and now her whole day is free. Rumor has it they’re open after hours. Something in the way they say, See you soon, crystallizes that their friendship changed months before and in fact they will not see each other for a long time. It has been arranged: leave separately and meet in ten minutes. No one will notice. Everybody knows. Exchange numbers. The little noises they make: we should hang out sometime, we should get together, we should do a lot of things we’ll never do. Drunken ladies are crammed into taxicabs by quick-witted friends, out of reach of predators. He won’t wake up. This is the last hand. Bet it all on this. Few of them profess to be actors and yet they are naturals for these curbside improvs, the whole clumsy theater of Which way are you going, Do you want to share a cab. They don’t want to go home. Someone is waiting for them. Or no one.

THEY HEAD HOME. Remembering too late that he is insufferable on long cab rides. Now Showing: The Return of the Native. In his cups as he slips into his avenues. Buckle up for safety. Ride with him and sooner or later you will hear him say it: I used to live there. His finger jabs as if to poke a hole into night. I used to live there. On Broadway and Fulton and Riverside and Houston he is goddamned irritating, can’t keep his mouth shut. I used to live there. In crowded movie theaters when it turns out the location scout knows where to get the best fifty-cent hotdog. On long walks, while flipping through random books of photography, while flying overhead on jet planes: I used to live there. When they least expect it he will say it, apropos of nothing he will say it, because if he hasn’t lived there, he will someday. There are always other apartments waiting for him. There is always more city.

HELD FAST by red lights in key spots. At the site of yesterday’s accident there are shreds of metal and tiny cubes of glass. Each time the light changes, tires spread it far and wide until it’s an invisible layer of sorrow across the city. He used to live there on the corner. Who lives in those apartments now, who is using his old phone numbers. Quick math says there’s no way he could afford the apartment he grew up in and now he’s an exile in his own city. What’s there to say as he passes it and all the others, how to communicate this feeling to friends or people who might care. Immensity of the debt. Poverty of citizens. What is there to say as you pass the humble places that helped you in ways you cannot understand, that were there for you on certain nights when you had neither friends nor cabdrivers, only keys. The light changes. Almost home. None too soon.

AFTER ALL THAT worry and the rough seas, night runs aground. Some of them made it to shore after all. He knows a place where they can grab breakfast. Look at the time. Look at me. Look at them holding hands. They talked all night. While everyone else went mad they found each other. Not made for each other but maybe made out of each other. The same substance, the way the city is one substance, every inch of it from one end to the other. Solid. Immutable. Unbreakable. Everybody out. Last stop. Look at the sky. Toward the east side. There’s sunlight in its trademarked colors, sunlight charging broken glass, sunlight over tenements at last, and we’re safe.