Sunday, July 08, 2007
PERSPECTIVE
“Tonight we’re going to rest and just let things take their course.”
These words were the first I heard upon waking, on the futon, in New York City. I was unsure at first; it had been a long three weeks. Airports, taxis, bedrooms, couches, check-out times, calling cards. We live in a world of technology now. You are always connected yet if you dip your face too far into the shimmering pool it’s easy to lose sight of where you were to begin with.
----
I am in Dallas and GiGi is my hotel clerk. She is swiping my card through the electronic reader, trying to encode my room number onto the magnetic stripe. It is taking a while. The machine is faulty or she’s just doing it wrong. She has a warm glow that makes me feel like it’s the latter. If she was an old hand at this, she’d be doing it all so mechanically. She wouldn’t be asking what my apartment looked like from behind those bangs and mustard highlighted, shoulder-length hair. She has never been to New York. It takes a second before I realize that GiGi is probably over 40. She dresses and makes herself up to look much younger. For a second I stare at the nametag, golden plastic, pinned to her standard-issue blue polo shirt. I wonder who she goes home to, who loves her. Sometimes you think too much, I think, as she hands me the keycard finally.
----
In Vancouver and I am now seventeen again. Maybe it’s the air—fresh, mountainous and crisp—maybe it’s the unfamiliarity of a new city, especially one so far away from my Southern upbringing. I can see the mountains far off. They call one Whistler. The buildings remind me of any American city; everything is close. The SkyTrain glides past with the slightest sound, polite almost, and stops at Nanaimo Station to disgorge neighborhood types. This is the neighborhood: stoic Asian men in grease-stained shirts walking back to their flats after a hot day in the kitchen; teenage boys in Polo shirts and saggy jeans with their earphones still in as they gab with their friends walking down the station stairs; girls of all ages, little girls holding their older brothers’ hands, teenage girls in skimpy outfits smoking Players and cursing, girls in their twenties with glasses and books looking down as they walk the sidewalk and turn the corner. Here comes a punk girl with pink hair and piercings in her lip. I approach her.
“Do you like Jawbreaker?”
She doesn’t even seem startled by this approach.
“Yeah.”
“Where do I find records like that?”
“There’s a record store on Hastings and Cordova.”
“Ok, thanks.”
She shrugs slightly and walks off, down the street crowded with duplexes, off into the evening. Sky is prettier up north. The sky streaks salmon like that is where the fish from Alaska go long after they are caught and gutted to ship back to the lower 48. They rise to heaven and turn their bellies to the ground for us all to bask in. We were made of something better, they cry silently, defiantly.
I climb the stairs and go back downtown.
----
I am London. I walk down the Finchley Road and why am I not? I am just as good as any of you. Everyone is coming to London. Everyone has. The Romans wanted you and they left. The Asians came and you gave them hell but they remained, stoic, standing in their doorways and watching the traffic move past. You have invented civilization, I think as I walk, but you decided on a design where everything feels trapped. The buildings cling to the curves, the roofs all line up, monotonous. The sky hangs over like a slate placed neatly over the city.
The Poles are here now and what of them? The labor is cheap. The jobs are plentiful for those who will take anything. Who will be the new guests in 20 years?
Jenn and Adam went to dinner at a cozy Italian spot off Frognal Lane. I am stiff in the heart. I would prefer to tell all of this to Gabe back in the flat, over cans of Tennant’s. But he is asleep, softly purring into the stiff pillows. Our room faces a quaint little street. Upon moving in we shared a cigarette by the picture window. I don’t remember what we said to each other, but it wasn’t much.
----
Atlanta and we are keeping vigil for the mouse. He has been ripping our chip bags up and crapping all over the counters. I opened the freezer and found a frozen mouse turd on the ice cube tray. “How the fuck is this even possible?” I bellowed.
We set traps. The mouse licks them clean without injury and retreats to his cove. We curse him loudly. I suggest Coors Light sponsor our hunt. We discuss the option of renting cats.
This mouse is fast. I watch him dart from the bookshelf to the TV stand one night, as I sit in the easy chair drunk off of 19 beers. I have respect for the mouse. He is nimble. I won’t kill you, I promise silently. There but for the grace of God go I.
You need to stop shitting in the freezer, I add, in my head. I’m not speaking to the mouse out loud. I doubt he understands my language.
----
Los Angeles and boy howdy, how LA can you get? Not very much, apparently. I sit in the living room of a tidy stucco apartment in the hills and watch Lakers games. The remote control still has the factory plastic covering. I drink from a handle of Stolichnaya, mixing it with Pepsi. Down the street are a Mexican bakery and a Polish deli. Looking out the window I see the green grass of the foot of the hillside. The hill goes almost 90 degrees upward, emerald green and wavy in the breeze and towering over the neighborhood. At the peak are a cluster of cell phone transmitters.
I walk three blocks down the hill and there, laid before me, is an eight-lane freeway. I pop into a convenience store and microwave a burrito. Someone bumps into me and because of the movies, because of what I was taught all my life, I expect a gun to be pulled. I expect my brains to be splattered all over the white tile floor. Instead, the man laughs. His neck is covered in tattoos.
“Burritos, man! Right on!”
I nod. He leaves.
I walk back outside and stand under a streetlight, next to a large green sign directing freeway traffic to Glendale. It is very quiet but for the swish of passing traffic.
How can such a solitary place feel so unsafe? LA, you are truly an American city. More so than New York.
----
It’s the third day in town and we are all just sick of each other. The girls go off to shop, leaving Adam and I on the Rue Montparnasse with our hands in our pockets. We haven’t much to say. How odd that 72 hours ago we were in Windsor, tickets to Calais in our pockets, snug in the booth of a Pizza Hut and laughing over beers. Now we can’t look each other in the face.
We say we’ll take some time apart, spend a few hours here and there and meet back under the Arc at four. It is a bright blue spring day and I relish some freedom and being out on my own. Within an hour three sets of French citizens have laughed at my feeble attempts to converse: two cops, one 11-year-old, one middle aged bank teller. I hobble back to the Arc and sit in the sun’s rays waiting for some familiar faces. They arrive and it feels like the clouds have parted in my heart.
Eight hours later and we are back in old familiar Camden, sitting on the curb munching crappy pizza slices and tuning out the blaring house music streaming from the bar next door.
A car barrels up the high street and sideswipes about six parked cars. Its headlights are dim and it weaves erratically towards the stop light one block north. We smile at each other and take more bites from the pizza. A thoroughly drunken English couple approach us and inform that the proprietors of the pizza shop tend to piss on their hands before baking their wares.
It’s good to be back, even if this place is still so foreign it hurts some times.
----
On a beach in Goa, my father and I are walking about a mile of shoreline. It’s morning on a weekday and no one is out, save for a few street kids playing in the shallow surf, oblivious to anything. Every meter or so we see a condom wrapper or an empty whiskey bottle lying shipwrecked in the dark, wet sand.
It’s so quiet as we walk along. This is the day that I learned to stop fearing the future and to start embracing the present. This is the morning I will remember when everyone I love is gone and I am truly alone in this world. I always expected it to be some carousing night in the bright heat of a city, but it was here, on this sparse and unremarkable beach, under the wan light of a weekday morning, in one of the most solemn spots in the most crowded country on the planet.
----
Sitting in New York. Last night it was like old times. Six of us were there. I hugged the old piano, in its new apartment. It was the only remnant of the old place that was left. The rest went to the trash or Goodwill, I suppose.
Life is surging so fast these days. Everyone is getting caught in the rip tide of adulthood. When will we next be in the same room together? There’s so much I want to say to all of them. But we’ll just accept it, act as if this reunion could happen any day. I’ll sip my beer and keep my lips tightly pressed in a smile. But.
Time is slipping away every damn second. I am spiraling out of everyone’s orbit. I’m caught in the waves, keeping the memories as others write new ones. That’s my job. That’s okay by me.
“Tonight we’re going to rest and just let things take their course.”These words were the first I heard upon waking, on the futon, in New York City. I was unsure at first; it had been a long three weeks. Airports, taxis, bedrooms, couches, check-out times, calling cards. We live in a world of technology now. You are always connected yet if you dip your face too far into the shimmering pool it’s easy to lose sight of where you were to begin with.
----
I am in Dallas and GiGi is my hotel clerk. She is swiping my card through the electronic reader, trying to encode my room number onto the magnetic stripe. It is taking a while. The machine is faulty or she’s just doing it wrong. She has a warm glow that makes me feel like it’s the latter. If she was an old hand at this, she’d be doing it all so mechanically. She wouldn’t be asking what my apartment looked like from behind those bangs and mustard highlighted, shoulder-length hair. She has never been to New York. It takes a second before I realize that GiGi is probably over 40. She dresses and makes herself up to look much younger. For a second I stare at the nametag, golden plastic, pinned to her standard-issue blue polo shirt. I wonder who she goes home to, who loves her. Sometimes you think too much, I think, as she hands me the keycard finally.
----
In Vancouver and I am now seventeen again. Maybe it’s the air—fresh, mountainous and crisp—maybe it’s the unfamiliarity of a new city, especially one so far away from my Southern upbringing. I can see the mountains far off. They call one Whistler. The buildings remind me of any American city; everything is close. The SkyTrain glides past with the slightest sound, polite almost, and stops at Nanaimo Station to disgorge neighborhood types. This is the neighborhood: stoic Asian men in grease-stained shirts walking back to their flats after a hot day in the kitchen; teenage boys in Polo shirts and saggy jeans with their earphones still in as they gab with their friends walking down the station stairs; girls of all ages, little girls holding their older brothers’ hands, teenage girls in skimpy outfits smoking Players and cursing, girls in their twenties with glasses and books looking down as they walk the sidewalk and turn the corner. Here comes a punk girl with pink hair and piercings in her lip. I approach her.
“Do you like Jawbreaker?”
She doesn’t even seem startled by this approach.
“Yeah.”
“Where do I find records like that?”
“There’s a record store on Hastings and Cordova.”
“Ok, thanks.”
She shrugs slightly and walks off, down the street crowded with duplexes, off into the evening. Sky is prettier up north. The sky streaks salmon like that is where the fish from Alaska go long after they are caught and gutted to ship back to the lower 48. They rise to heaven and turn their bellies to the ground for us all to bask in. We were made of something better, they cry silently, defiantly.
I climb the stairs and go back downtown.
----
I am London. I walk down the Finchley Road and why am I not? I am just as good as any of you. Everyone is coming to London. Everyone has. The Romans wanted you and they left. The Asians came and you gave them hell but they remained, stoic, standing in their doorways and watching the traffic move past. You have invented civilization, I think as I walk, but you decided on a design where everything feels trapped. The buildings cling to the curves, the roofs all line up, monotonous. The sky hangs over like a slate placed neatly over the city.
The Poles are here now and what of them? The labor is cheap. The jobs are plentiful for those who will take anything. Who will be the new guests in 20 years?
Jenn and Adam went to dinner at a cozy Italian spot off Frognal Lane. I am stiff in the heart. I would prefer to tell all of this to Gabe back in the flat, over cans of Tennant’s. But he is asleep, softly purring into the stiff pillows. Our room faces a quaint little street. Upon moving in we shared a cigarette by the picture window. I don’t remember what we said to each other, but it wasn’t much.
----
Atlanta and we are keeping vigil for the mouse. He has been ripping our chip bags up and crapping all over the counters. I opened the freezer and found a frozen mouse turd on the ice cube tray. “How the fuck is this even possible?” I bellowed.
We set traps. The mouse licks them clean without injury and retreats to his cove. We curse him loudly. I suggest Coors Light sponsor our hunt. We discuss the option of renting cats.
This mouse is fast. I watch him dart from the bookshelf to the TV stand one night, as I sit in the easy chair drunk off of 19 beers. I have respect for the mouse. He is nimble. I won’t kill you, I promise silently. There but for the grace of God go I.
You need to stop shitting in the freezer, I add, in my head. I’m not speaking to the mouse out loud. I doubt he understands my language.
----
Los Angeles and boy howdy, how LA can you get? Not very much, apparently. I sit in the living room of a tidy stucco apartment in the hills and watch Lakers games. The remote control still has the factory plastic covering. I drink from a handle of Stolichnaya, mixing it with Pepsi. Down the street are a Mexican bakery and a Polish deli. Looking out the window I see the green grass of the foot of the hillside. The hill goes almost 90 degrees upward, emerald green and wavy in the breeze and towering over the neighborhood. At the peak are a cluster of cell phone transmitters.
I walk three blocks down the hill and there, laid before me, is an eight-lane freeway. I pop into a convenience store and microwave a burrito. Someone bumps into me and because of the movies, because of what I was taught all my life, I expect a gun to be pulled. I expect my brains to be splattered all over the white tile floor. Instead, the man laughs. His neck is covered in tattoos.
“Burritos, man! Right on!”
I nod. He leaves.
I walk back outside and stand under a streetlight, next to a large green sign directing freeway traffic to Glendale. It is very quiet but for the swish of passing traffic.
How can such a solitary place feel so unsafe? LA, you are truly an American city. More so than New York.
----
It’s the third day in town and we are all just sick of each other. The girls go off to shop, leaving Adam and I on the Rue Montparnasse with our hands in our pockets. We haven’t much to say. How odd that 72 hours ago we were in Windsor, tickets to Calais in our pockets, snug in the booth of a Pizza Hut and laughing over beers. Now we can’t look each other in the face.
We say we’ll take some time apart, spend a few hours here and there and meet back under the Arc at four. It is a bright blue spring day and I relish some freedom and being out on my own. Within an hour three sets of French citizens have laughed at my feeble attempts to converse: two cops, one 11-year-old, one middle aged bank teller. I hobble back to the Arc and sit in the sun’s rays waiting for some familiar faces. They arrive and it feels like the clouds have parted in my heart.
Eight hours later and we are back in old familiar Camden, sitting on the curb munching crappy pizza slices and tuning out the blaring house music streaming from the bar next door.
A car barrels up the high street and sideswipes about six parked cars. Its headlights are dim and it weaves erratically towards the stop light one block north. We smile at each other and take more bites from the pizza. A thoroughly drunken English couple approach us and inform that the proprietors of the pizza shop tend to piss on their hands before baking their wares.
It’s good to be back, even if this place is still so foreign it hurts some times.
----
On a beach in Goa, my father and I are walking about a mile of shoreline. It’s morning on a weekday and no one is out, save for a few street kids playing in the shallow surf, oblivious to anything. Every meter or so we see a condom wrapper or an empty whiskey bottle lying shipwrecked in the dark, wet sand.
It’s so quiet as we walk along. This is the day that I learned to stop fearing the future and to start embracing the present. This is the morning I will remember when everyone I love is gone and I am truly alone in this world. I always expected it to be some carousing night in the bright heat of a city, but it was here, on this sparse and unremarkable beach, under the wan light of a weekday morning, in one of the most solemn spots in the most crowded country on the planet.
----
Sitting in New York. Last night it was like old times. Six of us were there. I hugged the old piano, in its new apartment. It was the only remnant of the old place that was left. The rest went to the trash or Goodwill, I suppose.
Life is surging so fast these days. Everyone is getting caught in the rip tide of adulthood. When will we next be in the same room together? There’s so much I want to say to all of them. But we’ll just accept it, act as if this reunion could happen any day. I’ll sip my beer and keep my lips tightly pressed in a smile. But.
Time is slipping away every damn second. I am spiraling out of everyone’s orbit. I’m caught in the waves, keeping the memories as others write new ones. That’s my job. That’s okay by me.
