“Winter’s a head stuck in a pillowcase,” I said, so he kissed me like The Lovers, wanderfooting through the city park with cadres of other writers and actors, lushed, loused, brain-slammed, (or drunk), a-hoot on hooch, kicking off our shoes to scrape the socks on the walkway pavement, tossing shoes from friend to friend until we put them back on knowing that they won’t fit, all this idiot young-mongering and beautiful youth-blooming tumbling our steps together (so who knows which is which) at one point all climbing over bicycles to play a rousing game frisbee in the park — Anti-reality amigos standing / singing on benches the national anthem backwards in search of hidden messages, as meaning isn’t dictated by gravity, time, or meaning, is as directionless as space — why, there could be whole catalogs of films, albums, and the like put out and published in reverse but so anyway we drop a few prepositions and what comes out instead is “Brave the home, free the land,” which we take as a battle call, marching off in spirals through skyscrapers, colonial houses, and streets as I hop in the taxi with Sam and we start to walk home, crunching through the snow, making an impression in the ground that looks like we’d just taken a bunch of snow-angels out back and had them — unfortunately — shot.
I drive a taxi that’s retrofit with giant mechanical legs — modified from old crane dumping ships that were spinning ‘round and ‘round in circles without a trash island to go to until someone had the idea — that’re some two stories tall. Walking taxis are a danger to everybody, which is why their days are numbered, why scientists are working to find a practical solution; they’re all set to be decommissioned soon, but it’s not like the cabs are the only problem the city’s got, what, with the elevators being infected with gardens, and to see young children running into elevators to pick berries, too, those giant eyeballs, too, owls traveling up and down the buildings of the city to hoot out the midnight hour at every floor, sociologists studying sociologist tenement houses, seagulls swimming laps in the indoor pool at the Y, economic engines refusing to recognize other engines — I don’t pick up any drunks, because what sort of drunk could stand the sway? Or maybe they’d just say, “Quit walkin’ straight.”
My name is Elsie.
There aren’t many female cabbies; and if you got in my cab, you wouldn’t know, since I intend to keep the illusion that way. It’s a cheap moustache, and the hair doesn’t get any more extravagant than a bun under the hat. When I was thirteen, we all had mushrooms — hair-cut mushrooms — and there was nothing wrong with a half-blind aunt being confused then, so why not now?
The only time I came close is when I was driving a regular cab, someone else cut me off, I zoomed ahead in front of them, blocked their passage, got out and started yelling at them but I had forgotten to take off the high heels, but since this is New York, I think I got away clean.
There’s a problem with sleeplessness in the city. It hit at the end of February. “Insomnia is just another name for someone who can’t fall asleep in the correct time zone,” Sam says. I agree.
The sleeplessness first hit Sam and I when we were taking an evening stroll through Central Park and I turned to him and said, “I feel like I’m about to step on a minefield of madeleines,” and time — for lack of a better word — exploded, and we got the impression that we were at the streets we’d just visited, racing around corners, that we could feel the maps growing up out of us, a fungusing of maps. Time exploded, and we were left with its lack, timelessness, one in a series of ever-expanding selves, spreading throughout the city like a rosevine — this sudden expansion of vision, these paths, where it is now the 1700’s and I’m racing through the streets and then it is the year 3000 and I am racing through the streets it is where I am, I’ll say, I am disarming future dictators not through romance but through realism and it is now the 1500’s and I am Kilimanjaro I am Death Valley I am McKinley I am Lake Azul I am Vinsoa Masif I am Laguna del Carbon I am the Caspian Sea I am Everest I am the feet resting on the window sill on a summer day with a book a few inches back in the seat of a lap I am seeing the sun rise on a planet that is not mine I am twelve sitting at the edge of my parents’ bed watching David Letterman for the first time (“Come on, Clint Eastwood — you and me. Let’s go!”), I am hearing streams of music cross-cutting the other, I am hearing Sam complain about all the things George is asking him to research and I am stealing movie posters with Truffaut I am bleeding one item into the next I am collecting oral histories I am watching buskers sing opera in Porter Square play Paganini in the District of Columbia or saxophones in the tunnels of Central Park I am Katya I am Horatio I am that hackish Thursday Next I am Stanislaus I am running barefoot through Milano five years old chanting “The Lemon Tree” I am being held by Caravaggio I am being held by Escher I am a painting in a museum looking out at the crowd and saying, “No, a little to the left — keep going …,” I am turning the faucet on to get a small cup of water into my hands to bring my cat who is sleeping on my bed and who when waking doesn’t go for the water but the damp tips of the fingers with the dry scrape of her tongue I am the parent waking up to see the child in bed fleeing a nightmare; to think, at this moment, I am the solution to a nightmare I am arranging my pills for today I am learning to swim for the first time I am learning to sail for the first time I am giving LF’s “HER” a run for its money I am watching a puppy think it can hunt a bird cawing at the top of a Redwood I am the camera pivoting with the porter as Grace Kelley calls down to stop Cary Grant from leaving the building I am whiting the tops of buildings in my city to save the planet I am watching the American Petroleum Institute I am watching the crime stats in my city I am waiting for Vladimir and Estragon I am watching a commercial for War Bonds I am an unclean room I am planting trees to combat CO2 emissions I am a spotless room I am walking by foot to the local library I am Buster Ezell and the Sacred Harp Singers crackling their way onto acetate I am Calliope I am Thalia I am Melpomene I am Terpsichore I am a Warwickshire Shithouse I am Koudelka I am Cartier-Bresson I am Walker Evans I am Robert Frank I am a bored CCTV I am the race of neurologists I am the suitcase of unpublished Hank Williams songs Dylan owns I am all go white all go white all go white I am the flesh around the eyes that stays the same no matter what the age I am the cities of the world I am the countries of the world I am the eyes of the world I am infinite context I am exhausted. I collapse into Sam’s arms and he into mine.
This led to apologies and conciliations: you try and sleep, I’ll say one night. Thank you for carrying me home. Same to you. I’m going to go take a walk, okay? Okay, he says. I’m sorry I sleep so poorly. You can kick my ass for it when I wake up.
But then taking turns ceased to work and we were both started to feel the buffer of the day and night whirring away at us until we felt as flat as rugs but still rattling with energy and the hiss of coffee falling from the machine hitting the boiler plate with the pot taken away and we tried a shot of cognac and then warm milk and then just for laughs we mixed milk with ginger ale which is something you should never never never never never never never never never ever attempt and we went to the doctor and he gave us sleeping pills which didn’t work so we went to a specialist and after poking and prodding at us with the lines growing in emergency rooms and in the hallways and waiting areas outside of his office he took to just holding our eyes shut with his fingers saying, “How about now?” which — while inventive — wasn’t what the patient ordered.
However: winter. The plump-fingered gangster of American weather. Walking in danger of agitating a beehive of snowflakes. That’s where I was, and no one could sleep.
After flicks and spits and threatening looks, there was a day of massive snowfall. First time since I’ve moved here that I’ve seen the streets emptied of people — all the cars taken away like they were props — and cross country skiers heading through Time Square, snow mounds on every street corner, twice as tall as my head; I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen this New York before — and when I run into a coffee shop, it’s filled with post-protest protesters, filling up on coffee and coffee steam, rattling off statistics to each other about worldwide oil production, the amount we important, for whom, how much GDP each country has invested in each, and so on.
I started a snowball fight in Central Park with strangers, then ran, soaking wet — after all the dodging and diving and rolling about — into Lincoln Center Cinemas, threw my clothes all over the seats, ‘til I was down to a tank-top and my underwear, then watched Russian Ark. Thankfully, no one else came in. Not that I would’ve minded, but, still, a girl in her underwear watching an avant-garde film in the middle of the afternoon? File that under, “My, my.”
But no one has whistled for a little while. The last time someone did, I had a little bit of a blow-up, and it got picked up in a few hyper-local dailies. Someone had whistled and because of that — then and there — I decided to take on every single thing that happened to me on the street: if someone says nice legs, I’d tell them the gangrene isn’t showing yet; if some Governmental type oggled me on the subway, I’d lean over and whisper Anita Hill, or and what’s hilarious is the oggling from people I’d never expect in the first place — really? a cab driver with a fondness for old LIFE magazine photographs is what you’ve been looking for all along, unemployed Civil War re-enactor? Are you sure you don’t want to think a little about that? Do both the Doctor and the window-washer have to try on their James Bond face, and both fail horrifically? And what of the overtures someone makes when they say, “I can take you away from this place” which forces you to say things like, “That’s nice, but I’d just like a table and a meal” or the fact that you’d think there’d be enough — is courtesy the right word? Well, whatever it is — to curb the endless cue-to-cue tide of schmaltzballs and pancake-mind man-whores trying to wash over you time and time again. Can’t they just say to themselves, “I can be an asshole to someone else. Let’s give this one a break?”
Which doesn’t mean I don’t want. What’s wrong with wanting, anyway? Absolutely nothing.
Sometimes I dream about calling my friend with the large, silly, floppy hats and bug-eyed sunglasses and running away to the woods, maybe in Northern Chile, maybe in France. Sometimes I’m on the rooftop of her apartment with a growing collection of pistachios — pistacccchiooooos — around my feet and Abbey Road playing on a speaker we’d lugged a few flights up — of course, I’m always running to the woods — cat-tails will bend in shock as I pass — shoes breaking off my feet like debris off a rocket into the air — scarf a jagged edge of purple crab-walking its way up into the air — up into the air with the rest of the troubles and the worries as I run into a ringing blur of the private smile of freedom.
After the film, I run out and the voices are hawking Christmas trees and saxophonists are honking their mating calls to other saxophones before they migrate south for the winter and then I spot a piece of graffiti skittering across the walls. It’s a crab bearing the head of three parrots, squawking, Same song! Hyper dog! Same song! Hyper dog! Pickney! And it flows up the walls of the city, shifting colors and shapes, then disappears.
And on the way home, I see more. Giant men of shadows cramping themselves into the corners of the walls, their insides filled to the brim with stars. A rat with a beret playing the djembe drums. An old record player made of fruit, other fruit dancing around it, fingers in the universally acknowledged boogy-woogy position. Block after block on the way home — on the street and in the subway — there it is: a living art. What could have set this in motion?
This is what’s at the back of my mind when I come home. Sam’s at the kitchen table pouring over the Times for maybe a minute before I drag him by the hand out the door. We go dancing at Prospero’s and I grab his Pep Guardiola-like beard all over the place and he laughs.
On the way home, though, he sees them, shouts, “Look up!”
We ran into the Park to escape the growing graffiti monsters as flying foxes filled the skies overhead. Children’s handprint turkeys gobbled across the stone cobbles.
We ducked our heads and ran ‘til the windwork unlatched itself, opened up and what was once still now ran with us — the trees, mailboxes, street lamps, all the objects — all toward the Park as the grafitti grew in size up the size of the sides of the nearby buildings, peering down, and it was like everything was exploding all over again. Fire hydrant explodes and out comes the paint, quiet, ebony-colored turtles floated after unwitting cricket players in the park, Sam looking over at the buildings shifting in a circular motion around the edge of the trees. The miniature hands raising themselves out of the waves in the detail-deleting blasts of intermittent sunlight, the wind, hurricangelic afterwhaps of the wind, and later Sam swears to me he sees one building grabs a passing cloud, shout, “I got one!” but my eyes are caught in a Spanish Armada’s worth of color racks square sheets of the air like a jingling piece of eye-thunder you get for a penny in the store , the kind of thing that reminds you: blinking is an act of joy.
“This is too much,” I say. “We need to move.”
And so we do. There’s a NYPD car at the street corner parked outside a food joint. Two officers inside. I run up to it.
“Officers! Officers! There’s trouble.”
“Just trouble?” said the first. “I don’t see how that’s an arrestable offense.”
“Plus, I’m only impersonating a police officer.”
The first cop turned.”You’re what?”
Sam grabs me by the arm and drags me away.
“We need to get out of here.”
And we run down the streets, the frame folding its clarity into a joyful blur, and we’re staying two steps ahead of the swarm.
“Here,” Sam said. “This house.”
He pushes the door in, and lacking any hinges, it falls over. He gives an apologetic look and they press inward. “This is a house made or colors and birds,” he says, “where thunder has its blunders, and rosebed mindscapes blossom and ash under the clock.”
We pass into the house, and a neighborhood cat comes up the steps, arches its head over the last to stare.
*
Over the next few nights, we spot rams with giant eyeballs for heads, a group getting on at one subway stop but by the time they all try and get off the next one their faces have been painted over white and so stumble into each other, the walls, and the doors before they even open; we gather at the roofs to watch them maraud the empty streets below; we hear word of hydro-boulevards slicing across the city — they’re there for scuba-divers, swimmers, fish-enthusiasts, looking down on someone jerking on the string to stop the M1 so they can get off and head to work, trees suck the leaves back to their branches then spit them out again …
We did our best to appreciate the particulars of the city as best we could — students at Fordham mixing with straight-backed, white-haired gentlemen enjoying the systematic examination and folding of the morning paper; a young woman carrying a tiny Chihuahua in her arms, whispering to it; a restaurauntee all in stained white carrying interlocked chairs over his back to set them up and pose them for the morning crowd; an elderly Japanese man in a wheelchair with flowers across his lap being wheeled through the streets and quietly ogling images: a stack of logs, the water on the flowers at the corner shops, ending the evenings with a show at UCB, a stack of records, a cheap bottle of wine, and the phrase, “Come here.”
Sam makes his way into the house. Blossom and ash under the clock. I follow. It’s two in the morning. This will be written down at some point, by either me or him, how he’ll go to the answering machine, where it’ll say, “One new message, recorded at 1:34 A.M.,” and for a second there’ll be silence, but then he’ll hear a piano play, mine, the store piano over the speakerphone that I spent an afternoon by myself finding, the chords blowing out the speakers on his machine in tiny spikes of distortion. The whole thing last thirty seconds, but to our tired-blasted minds, it’s a lilt, a flower, a goodnight lullaby that breaks tiny little dams scattered across our brains that send us off, nobody able to do anything but imagine, how on the way up the stairs to the door when the mouths broke apart and mentioned something about plums, sweet and cold — here we come, Williams! — one rabidly playing cartographer to the other’s face, the dimples, freckles, and sinks of the eyes, unlocking the door — in we go — slowly filling up —
“You know I’ve been buying you laughing gas cigarettes, right?”
“Yeah. I replaced them with some others. Just used the box.”
“Then what on earth have you been — “
And for the rest of the night, the next-door neighbor kept going over to his front door, opening it, sticking his head into the hallway and saying, “Hello? … Hello?” as the rest of the evening was filled with sonar pings behind the bridge of the ear, croupades, a gallery of face-to-face moments, leaning over the edge of the bed — thud thud go the head; to hug the mast resting over the shoulder and slowly proceed, an attack of the hips; to suck on the pulse like an ice cube; the arcing, outstretched body, each and every tip, a representative of the Bad Sex Award giving chase, saying, Have you told her that her privates remind you of the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg and you shout back, What does that even mean? … Me saying, I will hereby judge you by the Udden-Wentworth scale. He saying, Wait , wait, wait, wait, wait —
Or — putting all this another way: I will be the Argos to your heart, we say, though masters we have none.
(How we called it spring.)
