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April Morning Fire Escape
by Mike DeCapiteA mourning dove woke me up. His cooing was so loud I thought he was in the room. I opened my eyes and located him on the window ledge, and then he was gone in the bright day.
I get up to make tea. The sentinels of dawn are at their posts. They’ve been there for hours, in their housecoats, windows open, looking out. They see to it the sun clears the BQE at the end of the street. I don’t know why it takes two of them—maybe they don’t know about each other.
I open the bars and climb out on the fire escape. There are heads of Mercury projecting, I learn, from the ball-and-dart arches above my windows, and the putty’s dirty around the frames. There’s a big white rooster in the pigeon coop across the way. There’s a painted plate that once showed the name of the fire escape’ manufacturer. Rust has seeped through the crackled paint of the catwalks and stairs and scrollwork, which may once have been tan or beige but are now faded to an indeterminate hue. You can’t tell the color of anything in daylight this bright.
I like the view from the middle of the air. The mysterious thrill of a streetlight fixture seen too close, in dreamlike proximity or scale. The way the some convergence of shadows on a window ledge makes it a place, or the relationship between the leaves and a liquor-store sign seems to define an area. There’s a Mexican-restaurant sign in San Francisco, down near the bottom of 24th Street—sign slightly too big for its height from the sidewalk, nestled in pendant leaves. I wanted to be up there...in the sign, somehow, or in the air in its vicinity...to inhabit it in some way... And I’ve always been curious about those windows that you see coming off the 59th Street Bridge, above First Avenue. They’re painted the same blue as the building, like a Louise Nevelson sculpture. They seem private...unobserved, untended...like an open secret... I see these places as places to live. "I want to live on that ledge," or "How long could I go unnoticed living in a guard box on the Manhattan Bridge?"
I know I’m supposed to have something to say, but I’m happiest when I’m just a recording device. I don’t have anything to say. I write from an impulse to catalogue, to inventory. The frustration of not being a visual artist, I guess. It’s exhausting that everything should mean something. The human curse. I can tell myself I’m just out harvesting details, but something in me needs to arrange them so they mean something. Maybe the real impulse is a frustration at not being God, who, after all, is pretty hands-off. It’s not His expectations that are so tiresome but our own. It’s probably my greatest disappointment, not being God. Having to be something, rather than everything. Having to be somewhere, rather than everywhere. Climbing back in, I notice how much louder it is out there, even with nothing going on. It’s the roar of forever.
I take the L to Sixth Avenue. White bars of light on the subway stairs, sunlight reaching along the tiled wall from above. You come up from the subway, everything is white. Then it all goes back to what it’s supposed to be: sprays of greenwhite blossoms down 14th Street, the street and pavement dry, the curbs and manhole covers wet.
At the Y, the treadmills face the street. I watch the raised letters on the Salvation Army sign, the lowering of their shadows. The few bare branches of a little curbside crabapple which bounce above the panel of pebbled glass have sprouted leaves in the last few days. I cool off walking around the indoor track. Down below, twenty heavyset old women are ranked down the nearest lane of the swimming pool, squiggly black lines at the bottom and white snakes of light slithering on the surface. The women are doing their Saturday morning water exercises in their swim caps, their enormous breasts bouncing in the water. Sometimes, life is really great.
"It’s nice, not too hot," says a voice in the steam. "Not too hot." An old man is in the showers, bent like a lamppost—his cock and balls so discolored and soft and distended that they look like an old pussy—soaping his parts as best he can, careful of his balance, a vestige of white hair plastered to his crown, his eyes bright and steady and patient, as though he’s looking out of a mask.
Before meeting Will for lunch, I mill around Sixth Avenue, considering laddered shadows of fire escapes on yellow brick and the white round blossom petals in curbside puddles and between the pavement sections and around the free-newspaper boxes. I buy a field guide to New York City trees and stand around like some flyblown eccentric looking up at the blossoms and incipient leaves, studying bark, trying to match them to the pictures in the book. For a week I’ve been nagged by the white-blossomed trees in my corner of Williamsburg, on Havemeyer between South 3rd and Metropolitan, and here they are again on 14th Street, on 17th, all over. They don’t have any leaves yet, so it’s hard to match them in the book. But I find an entry that’s close, the Callery pear. I pull a branch down, I’m examining the blossoms, people squeezing by, jackhammers all around. I’m not sure, I go back to the book. It says, "Where to look for Callery Pears: Williamsburg, along Havemeyer St. from Metropolitan to South 3rd."
Back in Williamsburg, Our Lady of Driggs Avenue, a willow tree, is coming back to life. She hangs over the bus stop, pale green against the blue sky. I recognize her suddenly as someone I care about, someone who’s been good to me all along and required nothing in return. I spent twelve years away and here she is. It’s something, when you think about it, to take what the world hands you without the ability to move from one spot or complain. There’s a magnolia tree in full bloom in someone’s backyard, and a wandering limb of forsythia, just one, a lit fuse leading into a tangle of dry brown sticks.
For days on end it’s grey. Havemeyer is a corridor of white blossoms, which only add to the solemnity of a dark morning. A week ago the branches were bare, and you could see all the nests—bird and squirrel—exposed to the sky. Then the blossoms appeared, from that world beyond time where things come from: pear blossoms above the 99-cent store, the video store, the Verizon truck, the dirty red-white-and-blue bunting that flaps over C-Town. Even now there’s more green mixed with the white. Already they’re beginning to fall...they don’t last long on this side of the veil...the dimension of time. Next time you look they’ll be a certainty of baby leaves.
R
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E in red neon, a pair of sneakers hanging from the moon. Sitting on the bench outside the Atlas coffee shop at Havemeyer and Grand in the lukewarm night, the lighted blossoms emitting their peppery fragrance and the video sign blinking and people happening by and gathered outside the Iglesia Adventista 7MO Dia and the 99-cent store still open and cars sliding up to the traffic light, I feel like the fair is in town. In the crosswalk box, a white man walking. In the restaurant window behind him, his counterpart walking the other way. The changing traffic light reflected on parked cars, on the payphone box, all night. It’s all taking place quietly, as though the sound were absorbed by the blossoms or we don’t quite trust it’s spring.A cab rolls up, window down. Cicada sound of its receipt-dispenser. Nothing’s right anymore, nothing’s much good. Maybe it never was. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. Hank Williams told me this twenty-five years ago. Did I think it was just a funny song, or that he was just singing about himself? At least I know I’m better off on my own. There’s the dread, which mostly comes up when I’m between places, or it stays in the corners, or under the stove. But there are also these moments, now and then, the moments of forgetting myself.
Spring thunder, one a.m. All these bare-bulb windows hanging this way and that in the rain. A yellow, a pink, two blues. In the morning, the lights are still on in two rooms across the street. My first though is Man, am I glad I no longer live in rooms where the light stays on all night.
El Canario Barber Shop, Jack’s Cancellation Shoes, splashes and bursts of white, recent ones, as I move south on Havemeyer. Up the stairs to the J platform, past second-floor windows, weather-dirty awnings. Evelyn’s Party Supplies & Tuxedo Rental. The building behind me has a carved wooden cornice, and last fall there was a bird’s nest inside one of its busted modillions. The nest is gone—here comes the train.
I make my way through the moving cars—opening doors to the external racket and stepping over the relatively motionless linkages—and stand at the front, looking out through the acid-looped glass. The rails are open ahead, lying in metal reflection of the sky from their brown roadbed of ties and girders, splitting neighborhoods, shearing past tenements. A third-floor room piled with bales of insulation and bed frames, trophies in the window of a tap studio, the silver sealant painted on tar rooftops, the spinning ventilator crowns. Ninety percent of what I see I don’t know what I’m looking at. I don’t have the words. The various systems and workings and the authorities which preside over them, architectural elements, birds and trees, the parts or functions of the carriage I’m riding in or the trestles which support me. To go through the world in this kind of ignorance—the sheer volume of it—must have some kind of negative psychological effect, no? Up above the streetworld are tarbuckets, bottles, balls, shoes, cups, leaves, the sky in puddles. We head into a curve with a pigeon flying ahead of the train...
The old Maimonides cemetery—with a Star of David above the stone entrance gate at Autumn Avenue—is triple-fenced and barbed and razorwired like a prison, though that can’t keep the spring out, or the birds that are working the grass. In the near distance, a dark sky has breathed light into a single white-blossomed tree, like God choosing a servant. I walk along the iron pikes, past the next cemetery, looking in. FATHER...MOTHER. Then up the crumbling, rusted stairs to the platform, and the train rolls in. ZAMOR...FURMAN...WING.