D O G P O E T

The Times had a decent article about Sunday’s march, which is mostly a blur to me now of signs, crowds, skin, costumes, cops, heat, and noise. Unlike the jubilant nature of the anti-war marches I had attended in San Francisco, the mood of this march felt cautious, which is to be expected, considering what New York has been through. Or maybe I’m just projecting again, viewing the crowds around me with the watchful hesitation I felt all morning.

When we reached Madison Square Garden, site of the GOP Convention, protesters pushed themselves up against the barricades surrounding the building, chanting and waving their signs at the scores of police clad in riot gear. Helicopters hovered overhead, the chop of their propellers echoing down off the buildings lining Seventh Avenue. One man, thin, sweat running down his pale face, pushed his way to the front of the crowd and began yelling at the cops there; “Officers have been killed in Iraq! You should be joining us! You should be JOINING US!” He was a moment from snapping; everyone, including the other protesters, watched him warily. Everyone lingered, drawn cautiously to the most obvious point of conflict. Before we had reached the site, the avenue had been packed, shoulder to shoulder with protesters, but beyond the next corner the crowds thinned out. It was as though everyone there both wanted and feared for something to happen. I couldn’t look away from the cops and the plastic cords bunched together, hanging from their belts. I watched for signs that they might push into the crowd. I had been arrested at a protest once, many years ago in high school during the Contra War. I had been clubbed in the stomach and thrown in the back of a truck with one of those plastic cords wrapped tight around my wrists, and I didn’t care to relive the futility of that experience.

Every since then I’ve had mixed feelings about protests. I’m not always convinced that being at one matters in the grand scheme, and I have to set aside the ridicule and irreverence that rises within me when surrounded by crowds of idealists, waving their signs and chanting, “The people, united, will never be defeated!” But I don’t buy that anymore, and every time I hear it I question the chanters’ grip on reality. But the same urge that drove me to New York drives me to protests; not wanting to wonder “what if I had gone?” and instead, going and seeing for myself, and if nothing else being counted as one more body. Below the derision, there is still a spark of admiration I feel for the idealists and their tireless efforts, so different from my own defensive apathy.

Later, after a restless nap I dressed and walked down to a video/music/book store on Broadway called Kim’s, where I wanted to sign up for a rental membership. And I wandered around the store and downstairs through their aisles of dvd’s, waiting for someone to come back to the membership counter but nobody ever did. I smiled a bit at the categories under which the store had organized the CD’s. There were the typical Jazz, Hip Hop, and Electronica sections, but the rock/pop section was divided between “Establishment”; musicians who had signed contracts before 1990, and “Indie”; musicians who had signed after. Several shelves in the dvd section were reserved for the Criterion Collection (”For Connoisseurs of Fine Cinema”). The categories were both hilarious and somehow comforting to me, after so many years of wandering the obnoxiously bright aisles of Blockbuster.

Nobody ever came back to the membership counter, and the signs posted there were written precisely for keeping newbies like myself from pestering the employees at the main counter. My human interaction quota had been passed long before at the march, so I left, consoling myself with the fact that my dvd’s from Netflix would be arriving soon. I stopped back at the apartment for my laptop, and gave in to the eclair that was calling my name from the Hungarian Pastry Shop. I sat at a table back in the dimly-lit recesses and drank coffee cut with milk. I have yet to go anywhere in New York where they offer cream freely; milk seems to be the staple, but that’s probably better for me, considering the spectacular pastry that I devoured slowly, each delicate bite melting on my tongue. I’d take a bite and push the plate away, read a bit more of the script a friend had emailed me, then take another bite. I ate the whole thing in this way, stretching it out over an hour as couples and friends chatted together at the surrounding tables.

From time to time I’d glance up, startled to see a giant calico cat walking casually around the tables, hopping up on a chair and soliciting pets from a young woman sitting with her laptop. She lowered the screen a bit to murmur across the table at the cat, who sat with her eyes blinking slowly on the seat of the chair. Did you know that virtually all calico cats are female? I didn’t know that until I worked at the animal shelter for awhile. Next to the cat, at the young woman’s table, a man sat with his own laptop, his back to me. I could see his screen, and a snatch of writing visible from several feet away, the words in giant font read “The effects of globalization changes our…”

I stuffed a dollar in their tip jar on my way out, and it was dusk and the enormous cathedral at the end of my street rose up, its walls glowing dimly in the receding light.

And later I sat on a bench under the canopy of trees lining Riverside Drive as the sun slipped lower in the sky, talking on my cell to friends back in California, who told me my voice sounded good, that I sounded happy. And the evening was warm and it was summer and I sat in my t-shirt and jeans, the headband of my baseball cap damp with sweat, and a woman with an elderly collie shuffled by, and the collie gave me a sideways look, a look that said, “I have secrets that nobody will ever know.” And the woman smiled down at me because, like most dog owners, she liked that I paid attention to her collie. And when I hung up the phone I got to my feet and wandered back up 112th St, the lights of the apartments lit up and the air still and warm. And I was reluctant to unlock the door to my building and climb the stairs to my desk, where I sat and wrote this without thinking too much about it, since sometimes that’s the only way I can get things done.

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I’ve lived in New York for two weeks, barely enough time for first impressions. But the conversations I’ve had with the people I’ve met, some fellow bloggers, some Columbia students in other programs, have each lasted for hours. Yesterday a retired blogger met up with me for lunch at Tom’s Diner, which is, from what I’ve been told, both the exterior of the Seinfeld restaurant and the inspiration for the Suzanne Vega tune. I don’t recommend their food. But later we grabbed coffee across the street and sat at a table outside on Broadway and W 113th, under the scaffolding that surrounded the building. And as we talked the rain broke through the heat and fell in waves across the sidewalk, and we were outside but dry, and this made me happy.

I’m sitting now in the Reading Room at the Public Library on 42nd St, cool air washing over me, the ceiling above me painted with rose-tinged clouds. Orientation for the writing program begins tomorrow and lasts two days, and then classes start on Tuesday, just after Labor Day. I’m anxious to get started, to have the focus and the access to the school’s facilities. But I’m glad that I arrived when I did, in time to get settled, in time to see brief snatches of the city before school work takes over. Something tells me that I will look back on these two weeks with fondness, the weeks I spent in New York with each day free, taking the subway, buying things for the apartment to make it my home, meeting people and having conversations that lasted for hours, each of them a tiny spark guiding me through the city.

Aw, shucks, I love you again, New York.

More to follow.

Okay, I thought about it some more.

I’m living in New York. I’m going to a good school on a scholarship. Nevermind what I said.

Except that the grocery stores still kinda suck.

I was going to write about how the shine faded a bit on my twelve-day love affair with New York today, and how even though I paid off all my debts two-and-a-half years ago the mistakes I made before I got sober are still haunting my credit report, and therefore Citibank is now treating me like an irresponsible twelve-year old, and how Verizon made me pay a ridiculously high deposit just so that I could have the privilege of signing a two-year contract for one of their dumb cell phones, and that the cell phone reception in my apartment still sucks so I had to get a landline which I didn’t want because I’m going to be a poor grad student and how the grocery stores in my neighborhood are overpriced and how for some reason all my friends are operating under the impression that Columbia is paying for everything, including my apartment, which is funny except when I have to correct them with the truth, and how the neighborhood is full of fresh-faced undergraduates and their parents milling about, getting in the way and how the West End pub was packed with business school students (I’m guessing business school from the clothes and haircuts, though that’s small of me) and how it’s hot and sticky and the Republicans are in town and everyone’s mildly freaked out and how my stepsister is getting married in a month and I’ve never owned a suit in my life and I don’t know where to grow up and get one and join society but I decided not to because it was boring to say all that. Much less for you to read it.

And honestly everything will be better once I can find a good barber to compulsively harass visit every two weeks and once I get my student ID at orientation next Wednesday which will let me use the gym. And the library. But at the moment the gym is my priority. A good haircut and a good workout are the cheapest, most reliable forms of therapy I know. And then I can go to the library and read or something. Maybe even write, since that is what I’m supposed to be doing here.

So in the meantime I made some sugar-free chocolate fudge pudding with a dollop of Cool Whip and I turned on the Blue Room and tried to chill out.

But I’m still taking recommendations for barbers.

I saw my first New York cockroach on the corner of West 73rd and Amsterdam. This was better than seeing one, say, in my kitchen.

I saw my first New York rat clambering over the tracks of the 110th Street station, late at night. Followed a couple minutes later by my first New York mouse. (They’re much smaller).

The next day a water main broke on my street. The 1/9 trains still ran, but slowed to a crawl through the 110th Street station. I stood on the platform and watched a river of muddy water, swirling with tiny oil slicks, flow over those same tracks towards downtown. The construction crew tore up the entire southbound lanes of Broadway at 112th to replace the water main. They worked all day and all night under high-wattage movie set-style lights. People stood along the edge and watched them work. In the morning the construction workers were gone; the street paved over.

At Gray’s Papaya I saw a cop wearing a yarmulke.

I bought a seagrass rug for my apartment and now it smells like someone dumped a five pound bag of catnip all over my floor. I’m hoping that the smell will fade.

Rob very generously drove me out to the Ikea in Patterson, New Jersey, where I bought a couple hundred dollars worth of housewares, the least essential being these ice cube trays that I had to own:

We of course had to eat at Ikea’s cafeteria, though we skipped the meatballs and talked over chicken breasts at a window overlooking the highway. It was a little like eating at an airport, but cheaper.

Then last night I watched my Fight Club dvd so that I could see all of Edward Norton’s Ikea furniture (”what kind of dining set defines me as a person?”) blown out from his highrise apartment onto the sidewalk below. Just for some perspective.

Another very generous friend bought me an Airport Express station from the Apple store as a housewarming present, and I have been deliriously happy with it, hooking up my ethernet, speakers, and printer to it so that I can access all of them wirelessly. It gave me a profound sense of satisfaction, for example, to sit at my desk and print out a letter across the room. I’d tell you who this generous friend was but then you’d ask him for an Express station, too, and that would be obnoxious of you.

Saw some damn hot men at my first Crystal Meth Anonymous meeting. And therefore stayed sober another day.

And today I ventured down to the world-famous Strand “Eight Miles of Books” Bookstore. I was on a mission, armed with the syllabus of one of the four classes I am taking this semester: “The Short Novel”. Good thing they’re short, because I’m supposed to read twelve of them. Twelve novels in one semester, and that’s just one of my classes.

The Strand, which sells new, used, and rare books, is large, dark, and rather confusing, especially if you’re on a mission. Some of the fiction was alphabetized by author, some of it wasn’t. Some novels were piled on tables marked “Special Discount”, or were in groups like the “Modern Library” editions. Everywhere you looked, in fact, books were piled in precarious arrangements. Even the landing on the stairs to the basement was piled with books (photography books; they had the Peter Hujar book that I own for sale). Walking through the Strand took a certain amount of tact and dexterity. There simply isn’t enough room for everyone and the aisles are narrow. So if you’re even remotely polite, you must constantly shuffle from one side of the aisle to the other, letting others pass by while you scan the towering bookcases for the titles in question.

Nearly every store in this city that I’ve been to is the same; the grocery stores in my neighborhood, for example, have aisles that are too narrow for more than one shopping cart at a time. They have these cute little carts which I’ve only seen used in other cities by children; you know, the kind they push around after their parents, with signs that read “I’m Shopping, Too!”

In the end I found five of the twelve short novels, not too bad for an hour’s work, and all of them half-priced. If I were really cheap, or smart, I’d just go to the library. But then I’d miss a venerable city institution like the Strand. I even bought a t-shirt since it was only seven bucks. And I’ll be dorky and wear it here in the city and everyone will know that I’m from out of town. Jennie says the Strand is owned by the mafia, which explains why they can afford to have eight miles of books in the Village.

For those of you curious about my reading list, here it is. I’ve actually not read any of them. Yet.

Taras Bulba by Gogol
Hadji Murad by Tolstoy
Daisy Miller by Henry James
The Life and Death of Harriet Frean by May Sinclair
The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West
The Old Maid by Edith Wharton
Turbott Wolfe by William Plomer
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates
When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka

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On impulse I decided last week to see the top of the Empire State Building. Joe Gallagher, who used to live here, told me “The first thing you have to do when you get to New York is go to the top of the Empire State Building and look for your apartment.” He was adamant about this and has nice blue eyes so I promised him that I would.

That afternoon the sky was a little overcast but I didn’t think much about it at the time, since I was trying to be spontaneous. I followed the signs to the basement, where I stood in line under bright fluorescent lights as my blood sugar plummeted. In my effort to be spontaneous I had skipped breakfast. So the minutes ticked by as I shuffled along in line with the tourists, while all around us young people tried to pitch the rented audio tour, their voices droning through memorized speeches, mimicking enthusiasm for their product. One boy actually said that we would “see more with the audio tour”. I puzzled over that one but my mental faculties were becoming more compromised with each passing moment, so I gave up.

That morning an angry zit had sprung up on the back of my neck, causing me additional stress. I was sure that the young couple behind me in line were poking each other with their elbows and whispering “ewwwwwww.”

After an hour in line I finally made it up to the ticket counter, where I paid twelve dollars just to get to the observation deck. The woman took my money, punched out a ticket, and then stamped it with something and gave it back to me. As I turned away towards the elevators I glanced down at the ticket. In black ink there was a smiley face, except that it was frowning, and next to it the words “Zero Visibility”.

I couldn’t see my apartment through the clouds. After the ticket counter it took another half an hour or so through more lines and two separate elevator rides to reach the top, and by then I had severe tunnel vision. I stood on the deck, my hands gripping the iron safety bars for support, and peered over the edge. My balls tightened and I fought the urge to look away. A pigeon, it wings flapping, landed on the ledge on the other side of the bars, and for some reason this terrified me. For a moment I was the pigeon, mere inches from an 86-floor-drop. I kept forcing myself to stare down at the faraway streets, toy taxicabs streaming uptown, and imagined what it would be like to fall from such a height. At that moment I would have preferred death by any other means. My testicles kept jumping around nervously and I turned around and took the elevator back down. Being spontaneous is not something I do wisely, or well.

I stumbled out to Fifth Avenue, where the lunchtime crowds were pouring from every direction. I walked in a daze past dozens of restaurants and deli’s until I came to rest before a sidewalk vendor, who sold me the worst falafel sandwich ever. I took a seat under the trees outside the New York Public Library, spilling hot sauce all over my jeans when I unwrapped the sandwich. Between the sauce and the view from the Empire State, my crotch hadn’t seen this much action in, well, awhile. It left a large, dark stain which I blotted ineffectually with paper napkins.

I had asked for a Coke and wound up with a grape soda, and I sipped this as my jeans slowly dried, and the taste reminded me of when I was a boy, biking alone to the nearby Como Zoo in Minnesota, where I would buy corn dogs and grape soda with my allowance, walking alone to see the strangely-named, pungent-smelling wombat curled asleep in the sun that stretched over his small concrete enclosure.

Twenty years had passed but I was still that boy, wandering alone, exploring places, sitting with his lunch and watching the people stream past, chatting together, the warm afternoon sun on their bare arms. I waited quietly for my mind to clear and my jeans to dry, and then I climbed the steps into the beautiful library, making my way to the Reading Room, which I had never seen, where I took a seat at one of the long tables.

The tables, with their low, gleaming lamps, were full of people working quietly on laptops or flipping idly through newspapers. One woman at my table closed her eyes as the man next to her scanned a fold-out map of the city, his lips pressed together. Distant sounds of a concert in Bryant Park echoed throughout the enormous hall, punctuated by whispers and the rustling of paper. I sat there for a half an hour, till my blood temperature came even with the room around me. I left, somewhat reluctantly.

Hmmm….Empire State Building: $12. New York Public Library: Free. I learned a valuable lesson that day.

But the most important lesson about New York, which I’m still learning, is that you need to eat first.

You could argue that drinking a Diet Coke with a slize of pizza this size is a lost cause. But every little bit helps.

Besides, I’m doing it for your benefit, to provide a sense of scale to the monstrosities they sell at Koronet Pizza, a neighborhood joint a mere two blocks from my new apartment. I’m in so much fucking trouble. I have eaten more falafel sandwiches, Gray’s Papaya hotdogs, and pizza slices in one week than I’ve consumed in one year. And all this without a current gym membership. And don’t get me started on the mocha eclairs around the other corner at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. I slip into daydreams about the eclairs.

Until I moved into W 112th St I could pretend that I was eating like this because I was couch-surfing. But now I’ve been here two days and my only excuse is that the avocados on my kitchen counter aren’t ripe enough yet to make a nice salad.

But I think the real reason I’m eating like this is because I can. Unlike my lovely San Francisco apartment, tucked away on a hill, my new apartment is in the city that never sleeps. I am around the corner from, well, nearly everything one could want; pizza parlours, deli’s, banks, bookstores, mediocre grocery stores, the 1/9 train, a hospital, a post office, an Ivy League campus, an enormous cathedral, 24 hour drug stores, bars, coffee shops, newstands, a farmer’s market, sidewalk vendors, a public library, hair salons, an art supply store, dozens of restaurants, Riverside Park, hardware stores, and various construction sites where some of the most beautiful men in the world work.

But one must make compromises. My first night in my new home, one of the construction crews began putting up scaffolding on the building next door, right outside my window, at around 6 pm. At eight pm I called Jennie.

“What time do they stop?” I asked her.

“They never stop.”

I thought she was kidding. But she wasn’t. At around midnight I went around the corner to the 24 hour drug store and bought ear plugs. Around one-thirty in the morning, when I was finally ready to take a break from unpacking and get some sleep, the workers were gone. Since then it’s been quiet. But I’m holding on to the ear plugs, for when the other shoe drops.

The worst part about eating all those slices of pizza, though, is that Louie’s not here to eat the crusts.

My stuff is currently in Indiana. Go Hoosiers.

I was unlocking the front door to my apartment building when I noticed a sign stuck to the door with electrical tape: “Air Conditioner for Sale: I am leaving New York today. $100″. When I got up to my apartment I dumped my bag from University Housewares (dish drainer, silverware bin, citrus cleaner; “I Love NY” was printed on the bag) on my bare floor, and called the number.

“Yeah, I’m right outside, I just put it in my truck”.

Went outside. Cute bald-headed, brown-skinned straight boy, just graduated from the Social Work program and about to move to Ethiopia to work for Unicef. He held the door for me as I carried the AC back to my apartment and plugged it in. I talked him down a bit to the cash I had in my wallet, and we shook hands and wished each other well. I think the humidity and the perspiration on his upper lip made him cuter.

So I don’t know what everyone’s talking about. Delivering stuff in New York is a breeze.