It's cold as f*ck in New York.
I walk to the train between 7 and 7:30, AM, and for the walk yesterday (friday) it was 12 degrees, windchill 5-6. For those of you that think windchill or "feels like" is bogus, I'm with you. At the same time though, please, when I say "it was cold as f*ck," commiserate. Don't be like these Chicago dweebs who insist on recounting a story about ten or twenty below. Go away. You either chose to live in that city or were unlucky enough to be born there.
I have been having extreme pain in my back lately, which I believe is due to a mixture of high stress related to the new job (unbelievable, I know) and my own laziness: I haven't been working on my back lately and am paying the price. Last night I took a large quantity of muscle relaxers, cyclobenz, and my, it put me out. I intended this morning to write, drop off some laundry, surround myself with art, grab a few green tea cream puffs, perhaps even make a trip up the Cloisters, but I couldn't get out of bed until around noon. I refer to the experience of this class of drugs, muscle relaxers/relaxants, as "cycling," and when I can't get out of bed in the morning because I'm so laid up by the drowsiness, well, that's when I can't get off the bicycle.
I finally did manage to pry myself out of the nest, though, and skulk into the kitchen to put water on for espresso. My mind was a limp balloon, what with the cycling, and I stumbled and glowered between the stacks of filth my roommates cultivate in our kitchen. After a cup of espresso I could feel the balloon twisting itself into a taut, spry form, a Koons balloon animal, and now I'm writing. The world is strange and life is unusual.
I've been intrigued by the jewel street blocks between Brooklyn and Queens, an area some people call "The Hole" because it's below sea level and lacks a municipal sewer water. It looks almost gothic, and could perhaps be a peripheral neighborhood in a city like Memphis. What is The Hole doing in New York? Narratively just produced an excellent photo essay w/ accompanying narration and there is also a bit here that features some photographs and commentary. The NYTimes features the neighborhood as far back as 2004.
One of my grandfather's was born in 1912 on a train in Pocatello, Idaho. He rode the rails during the Depression, worked on the rails, served with Patton in Europe, and later wound up a successful businessman working on Park Ave in New York. That generation, those people born 1910-1918/20, to me that is one of the most fascinating generations of Americans, those who were adolescents/young adults during the Depression, when this country was still a vast, unknown wilderness, and when many young people had to sort things out for themselves because their parents simply couldn't afford to clothe, house, and feed them. PBS produced a stunning portrait of a few of these peoples in the 90s, which is now on youtube in its entirety. It's about an hour, and comes highly recommended. People talk about feeling about children into their twenties or thirties, well, these people became adults as teenagers. I suppose the feeling I have when thinking of the experiences of these people invokes a kind of test of experience, a risk-it-all-reality that we have lost. Joseph Conrad, in an early Marlow story, has it well put:
I need not tell you what it is to be knocking about in an open boat. I remember nights and days of calm when we pulled, we pulled, and the boat seemed to stand still, as if bewitched within the circle of the sea horizon. I remember the heat, the deluge of rain-squalls that kept us baling for dear life (but filled our water-cask), and I remember sixteen hours on end with a mouth dry as a cinder and a steering-oar over the stern to keep my first command head on to a breaking sea. I did not know how good a man I was till then. I remember the drawn faces, the dejected figures of my two men, and I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires—and expires, too soon—before life itself.
Youth, unabridged, available here.
The MTA, rather than improve and add to extant subway service, has chosen to build an expensive and unnecessary subway under Second Avenue. Once, there was a functional El on Third Ave, which was torn down in the 1950s or 1960s. Wouldn't it be fun if we were still able to ride a train up and down Third Ave? And then we might have a G that once again reached as far as Forest Hills, additional service on the 4/5/6...just think of the possibilities!
Take a ride on the Third Avenue El.
I finished Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and have begun Octavio Paz's Laberinto de la soledad (Labyrinth of Solitude). It's a fascinating book that a fallen white Mexican recommended to me. To compress what could easily balloon into a dissertation-length piece, I'll say the following: Latin America has complex class systems that are often understood racially. By "white Mexican," I mean a person who has a "European" look. In Mexico, a country where most people are a beautiful brown, these European-looking people dominate politics, entertainment, culture. It is a legacy of colonialism and largely the reality in most of Latin America (not to say the US is superior or different). The night of the blizzard that never arrived, I went to my local bar for a drink, and met one of these white Mexicans. We had a few drinks and shot the shit, discussed the women that had destroyed our lives, etc., it was cathartic for me and brought me back to my days in Merida, Acapulco, and DF. He began to reveal details about his background: a fancy prep school in DF, cars, a private university. He moved to New York with a woman, an American girl from Philadelphia (!), and his parents, who disapproved, cut him off. Money and a position was lost. For years they struggled, in love, barely living on a slice of pizza a day, unable to find work (he has no papers and she refused to marry), until they ultimately moved to farthest Brooklyn, Sheepshead Bay, to work in the kitchen of an Uzbek restaurant. They fell out of love, he devastated, she with no remorse, and he found a place and a job waiting tables at a restaurant in Park Slope. Meanwhile, the parents, having heard nothing for some years at this point, hire a private investigator to track him down. I cannot imagine how his mother would react were she to learn he was waiting tables, never mind that he had worked in the kitchen at an Uzbek restaurant in a neighborhood so far from any image of New York she could possibly possess. He avoids the parents, and changes his phone number frequently because he fears not only the authorities (no papers), but his parents and the private investigators. I refer to him as the guero, both to protect his anonymity, and because that is a name I was often called when I lived in Mexico.
I relayed this tale to my Aunt K, who responded with the following:
Wow, Marcel, I love your story of the guero. Has all the murky promise of those Graham Greene tales of fallen South Am RCs. Now you should get busy! As I see it his story could go several different ways:
1. His family is actually allied with some heavy duty drug money, the girlfriend was one of their mules, or something, and she defected by running away with father-hating son. Now private detec on his trail is actually because father is worried he/she got away with potentially destructive info (contacts in US govt?). Detec finds her first, threatens to dispose of her unless she tells him where son is & they both return with her to Mex. So now both detec & ex-gf are going round & about ethnic underworlds of Coney Island, stop laughing, in search of him. Do they find him? Is he an unreliable narrator & there’s something really scary he left out of his story???
OR
2. He’s a classic downward driven anti-hero, abandoning and/or destroying all who get involved with/want some human response from him: first his family, then his girlfriend, finally when detec finds him detec thinks he’s bonding over guero’s new lifestyle, terrible ending for detec, anti-hero wanders off to another continent … there to wreak further, etc
OR
3. There’s a shameful secret in his family, incest, father’s mistress living with them so mother becomes alcoholic/schizo compulsive Mex shopper whatever, and he runs away with what he thinks is innocent & true girlfriend. Story is what & when he finds out girlf’s living a lie also, and discovery robs him of all hope in world, he drifts into Russian émigré bar world. Told from vpoint of detec who becomes saddened/alienated himself as he discovers these various secrets
Of course none of these address his reading habit: maybe he’s a Cortazar hero who won’t engage, but is living off writing about the sordid/disappointing lives/secrets of everyone he comes to know, from family to gfriend to detec, he‘s trying to find an overarching narrative for these 3 tales when he discovers v threatening one to do with owners of bar, and their detached observation of him writing causes final horrific end???
Good luck tomorrow!
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