some cities
I'm not going to say I get New York now. There are thousands of ways to "get" New York. But I got one thing about New York, this time, that is different from the last several times I was there.
It's a trash heap. I said before that it was made but that's not true. It's as much of an accretion as anything else around there. It's just a strange nexus point -- as the North Pacific Gyre collects the soda bottles and condoms and grocery bags of hundreds of nations, it hangs out there into the Hudson accumulating the flotsam of half the world and spinning it around and around, compacting it into something you can get out and walk around in. The orderly downtown, the grid, the skyline and the bridges and the subways weaving into the deep stone are just structure, empty and blind. They're only the substrate on which this bright scum, this riot of displaced things, has come to rest and grow and colonise. It's a constant act of creation, things commingling and hybridising. It is by its nature beautiful and filthy, vital and profane.
I went from there to Philadelphia. I took the bus down, which meant it was really a drive through New Jersey, but in the dark this time, and through North Jersey. No nostalgia trip this time, despite being closer to home, until Philly was nearly upon us, but then that skyline came out of the trees and there I was again. Those planes and angles are just burned into my brain, I guess. No matter where I go or where I stay they'll go on looking comfortable and correct.
Rozzle lives up in North Philly, which is a place I never really went to. I took a cab in from the train station, because the other way meant walking around up by Drexel by myself in the dark with a bunch of unwieldy bags, which is a terrific thing to do if you've always wanted to be mugged. As it was the cab driver did a little double-take when I told him where I wanted to go. Roz casually informed me later that night that two people have been shot dead on her street this year, not counting the guy up at the corner who got taken out with a machine gun. Seems he bought a car from a guy some folks were after, and they didn't bother about checking who was in the car before they turned it into scrap metal.
But during the day traipsing around there was fine enough, and there was a bus down to Center City. The corner where it stopped had a corner store and was the preferred hangout for locals, and I am not kidding you when I say that I have never seen that much saliva on any other street corner in my entire life. I think those guys' principal occupation was spitting. Trying not to step in any was a complete lost cause -- it was just a matter of heading for the less tubercular-looking loogies, or the ones that were already frozen. Altho it's hard to imagine a more ignominious thing than falling on your ass after slipping on a frozen loogie.
I went down to South Street, where we used to go on the weekends when we had nothing to do. Walked the whole way down from where the PATCO line stops down to South. It feels longer when you walk it by yourself. Most of the shops I remember are gone, and South Caffe (where they would serve our dumb asses 4 shots of espresso in one cup, for optimal caffeinated terrorising of the populace) has been closed for years. Thrift for AIDS moved down to Bainbridge, and instead South has a trendy "thrift" shop where you can pay $40 to buy a thrashed pair of docs from some loud teenaged girl who's cooler than you. Which maybe South Street always was like, but when I was a loud teenaged girl who was cooler than you I guess it didn't piss me off so much.
So that was Philly, and the good part of that was Roz, who's fantastic, and then I took a bus and a train to the airport and rented a car and came to South Jersey. Which was just a terribly weird drive. Every time I come down that way there's more traffic on the road, and more of the old places are closed down, more weeds growing through the parking lots, drunken lampposts leaning into the trees. I got off the Expressway in Hammonton and got a disappointing cup of coffee at the Wawa and then the woods closed around me, the roads going from four lanes to two and then to no lines painted at all, just wobbly strips of asphalt disappearing into dead leaves at either side. The day-old bread shop, vanished. The car dealership, a cracked patch of concrete and a sagging shack. The cemetery with one more friend in it. A rusted dumpster stands in a weedy clearing outside what was once a doctor's office, and the synagogue's windows are blank and staring, paint flaking from the sign by the road.
But there's the house, there's my old cat lurking around on the front porch. Pulling into the driveway by the winter-cold roses that grow over the split-rail fence, I park where I always parked, like I've never been away. Come up the front steps and into warm yellow light in the early dusk, and a fire in the woodstove and hugs from the folks. Dad wants to show me his stick insect eggs. Mom has a dozen new paintings I have to see. By night the mercury is dropping, the sky lowering and filling with that crisp wet smell, and I wake up to snow that falls all day.
This is the longest that I've ever been away.
It's a trash heap. I said before that it was made but that's not true. It's as much of an accretion as anything else around there. It's just a strange nexus point -- as the North Pacific Gyre collects the soda bottles and condoms and grocery bags of hundreds of nations, it hangs out there into the Hudson accumulating the flotsam of half the world and spinning it around and around, compacting it into something you can get out and walk around in. The orderly downtown, the grid, the skyline and the bridges and the subways weaving into the deep stone are just structure, empty and blind. They're only the substrate on which this bright scum, this riot of displaced things, has come to rest and grow and colonise. It's a constant act of creation, things commingling and hybridising. It is by its nature beautiful and filthy, vital and profane.
I went from there to Philadelphia. I took the bus down, which meant it was really a drive through New Jersey, but in the dark this time, and through North Jersey. No nostalgia trip this time, despite being closer to home, until Philly was nearly upon us, but then that skyline came out of the trees and there I was again. Those planes and angles are just burned into my brain, I guess. No matter where I go or where I stay they'll go on looking comfortable and correct.
Rozzle lives up in North Philly, which is a place I never really went to. I took a cab in from the train station, because the other way meant walking around up by Drexel by myself in the dark with a bunch of unwieldy bags, which is a terrific thing to do if you've always wanted to be mugged. As it was the cab driver did a little double-take when I told him where I wanted to go. Roz casually informed me later that night that two people have been shot dead on her street this year, not counting the guy up at the corner who got taken out with a machine gun. Seems he bought a car from a guy some folks were after, and they didn't bother about checking who was in the car before they turned it into scrap metal.
But during the day traipsing around there was fine enough, and there was a bus down to Center City. The corner where it stopped had a corner store and was the preferred hangout for locals, and I am not kidding you when I say that I have never seen that much saliva on any other street corner in my entire life. I think those guys' principal occupation was spitting. Trying not to step in any was a complete lost cause -- it was just a matter of heading for the less tubercular-looking loogies, or the ones that were already frozen. Altho it's hard to imagine a more ignominious thing than falling on your ass after slipping on a frozen loogie.
I went down to South Street, where we used to go on the weekends when we had nothing to do. Walked the whole way down from where the PATCO line stops down to South. It feels longer when you walk it by yourself. Most of the shops I remember are gone, and South Caffe (where they would serve our dumb asses 4 shots of espresso in one cup, for optimal caffeinated terrorising of the populace) has been closed for years. Thrift for AIDS moved down to Bainbridge, and instead South has a trendy "thrift" shop where you can pay $40 to buy a thrashed pair of docs from some loud teenaged girl who's cooler than you. Which maybe South Street always was like, but when I was a loud teenaged girl who was cooler than you I guess it didn't piss me off so much.
So that was Philly, and the good part of that was Roz, who's fantastic, and then I took a bus and a train to the airport and rented a car and came to South Jersey. Which was just a terribly weird drive. Every time I come down that way there's more traffic on the road, and more of the old places are closed down, more weeds growing through the parking lots, drunken lampposts leaning into the trees. I got off the Expressway in Hammonton and got a disappointing cup of coffee at the Wawa and then the woods closed around me, the roads going from four lanes to two and then to no lines painted at all, just wobbly strips of asphalt disappearing into dead leaves at either side. The day-old bread shop, vanished. The car dealership, a cracked patch of concrete and a sagging shack. The cemetery with one more friend in it. A rusted dumpster stands in a weedy clearing outside what was once a doctor's office, and the synagogue's windows are blank and staring, paint flaking from the sign by the road.
But there's the house, there's my old cat lurking around on the front porch. Pulling into the driveway by the winter-cold roses that grow over the split-rail fence, I park where I always parked, like I've never been away. Come up the front steps and into warm yellow light in the early dusk, and a fire in the woodstove and hugs from the folks. Dad wants to show me his stick insect eggs. Mom has a dozen new paintings I have to see. By night the mercury is dropping, the sky lowering and filling with that crisp wet smell, and I wake up to snow that falls all day.
This is the longest that I've ever been away.