Neon lights, stadiums, absurd rents, quickly multiplying health food stores, and developers who pop-up faster than Crown Fried Chicken in the 'hood fail to eliminate the grit and sweat of a New York long understood as underground. And in this hectic back and forth, there is little that cannot be seen. So many New Yorks, so much of the time. The rattling is enough to make anyone forget who they are. Forget to take a deep breath and climb to the top and just look out, absorb sights, breathe out.
So New York. Who are YOU? When you woke up this morning, where did you want to be?
I woke up this morning wanting to be by a shore. With industrial waste: cold metal and rock amalgams. Concrete ocean. New York and summer. The collision. It is hot as holy hell out there, and atop the city that considers itself to be atop the world, I take in the scenery. This seems to be the only thing that helps at times when my wires cross, visibility obscured; brainwaves caught in the electronic/wireless communication crossfire. Sometimes I feel like they might make me forget tomorrow. Tomorrow, a silent film; grainy and animated, always black and white, always urgent. I feel like tomorrows are on fire and my job is too keep them from charring. Today my tomorrow comes in clear as day, and it looks just like this moment.
On top of this building that sits on a giant hill in the Bronx everything is quiet. The quietest day this roof has ever seen. It is 95 degrees out tonight. It's the kind of night when people would usually crowd the street until it was morning again, when last century's Freestyle and Hip Hop should be blasting out of every window in a chorus of bass beats and Latinos with Spanglish love songs. There should be teenagers having sex, junkies shooting up, or a lone middle aged man tending to tomato plants on this roof right now. When I look down I should see open fire hydrants, boom boxes that made it through the sell everything you've got for a rock 1980s, bochincheras, dominos, Budweiser cans and Heineken bottles. All I see on one side of the building is the tree surrounded by this week's trash bags, waiting for the 6AM sanitation truck. The view on the other side, Greenstreets triangle whose green spotty lawn is brown because of the raging sunshine of the past week and the lack of rain of the past two months. And when I look down I see my favorite view, still as pristine as ever. The River and the Bridge and elevated train. I wait for the 1 train to pass by, but there have been none in the last half hour. A stretch even for this time of night. I look further up the route and notice a train sitting in between stations, completely still as long as I keep looking. I hear the hot breeze blow an empty plastic bag downhill and toward the river, an urban tumbleweed. I imagine it flowing North and West, up past Yonkers where the real suburbs are, with all their geology, leaf turning, and swimmable lakes. Tumblebag gets away to be quiet. Comes back for the dirty water and gravel grinding, train hissing and police sirens, leaky faucets and sweaty walls; or simply to get wrapped around the wheels of a Mack Truck, only to end up somewhere in Middle America, torn and melted to the interstate. Tonight I do not have to wonder about silence. It surrounds me. And for the first time I find myself completely alone. The thought of catastrophe or apocalypse never manage to cross my mind. I only think of time. I managed to stop it and rearrange everyone completely unconsciously.
It has happened once again.
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