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WORLD'S FAIR
by Mike DeCapiteAt 6:30 a.m. I landed at Kennedy, walked into the sunny morning and got a cab. The driver wore a turban and a long beard. I told him the Metropolitan exit of the BQE.
Stuck in slow-moving traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway, sunlight lay on the greasy blue vinyl of the cab seat, the scratched plexiglass, graffitied signs, yellow schoolbuses, green overpass girders, each rivet with its shadow. The blue sky stroked with clouds and contrails. All the trees are bare, but the rampside forsythia’s ready to bloom any minute—maybe on this ride. Up front, a yellow prayer flag in Arabic swings from the rearview mirror and the driver’s quietly singing his morning prayers. A truck rolls alongside us: NOAH’S KOSHER FOODS. My driver gets a cellphone call and interrupts himself to answer it. I have the thought I’m back in the world and the truck pulls ahead and the near distance opens on the giant skeletal globe left over from the World’s Fair.
New York is so much the world and so much itself that these kinds of metaphors are not only unavoidable but imperative. New York is always describing itself, summing itself up, talking to itself, and New Yorkers, and visitors there, are helpless but to do the same.You come back East and you’re struck by the brown of the landscape, the trees and vistas of bricks, and how populous it is, and industrial, the smoke against the sky. The future doesn’t exist. Life is serious here. You understand right away.
Sitting in an alcove in Pete’s Candy Store tonight, yakking and drinking and smoking and laughing with Greg and Jim Krane and Jim Mason and Amy and Ted and Kit and others, I felt again like I did last night, on 22nd Street, which was: in the pocket. And also, strangely and then not, I felt connected to my grandmother Carrie, dead almost thirty years. I felt connected with my past, alive in the present, at home in myself.
The Greenoint Y is across from the 94th Precinct house, police cars parked at angles to the curb. I’ve showered and I’m waiting on Anais to come with the van. Women walk by speaking Polish. Two cops are chatting on the stoop. Two civilians argue around a fire hydrant. I love this moment, I could stand here all day, but where the hell’s Anais? Around the corner’s an OTB. And then she drives up.
After a day like my primal image of New York—grey above, yellow at the horizon, maybe rain, maybe not—I’m sitting with a Dewar’s rocks in the Vermeer light of the Mare Chiaro bar on Mulberry Street, sawdust on the small-checkered tile floor, looking at the smoke-brown lace curtains and smoke-brown pressed-tin ceiling, an ashtray on every formica-top table and the Everly Brothers on the jukebox, the air sharp with cigar smoke, days after the start of the city’s ban on smoking in bars, smoking a cigarette. People say New York has changed, but the tenement facades preside over fluid streets, secreting gargoyles and cherubim two stories up, and fire-escape shadows lead the eye to rust stains on pavement, and there’s still pigeon shit and feathers in the sidewalk gratings, and the guys at the next table are doing business with cellphones, and Tony’s around, somewhat stooped, with his semi-retired talons, his fierce eyes tending toward the horizon, his mountain-village beak and cardigan and cigar, and the walls are still painted twenty coats of two shades of glossy brown, the light sockets painted over, and the white Christmas lights are lit and there’s a green plastic watering can beside a potted plant that prevails in the smoke, and “Summer Wind” starts up for the 250th time this week and the banister leads upstairs to the dim and motionless past, and the painted woodgrain catches late-afternoon light, and the silver-painted radiator is a museum of shadows, and a numbers guy blows in announcing the day’s last digit from Aqueduct—“A bagel.”—no winners, and Tony pours and pushes him a drink at the bar, and Chinatown’s one street over but that’s a whole other story, nevermind the bright-sky dusk expanding over the rooftops in all directions and the transpicuous dusk of the streets and churchyards and airshafts and stairwells, and I could cry for the truth of every detail, in and of itself, and life is good.
I kissed Kelly goodbye at the top of the subway stairs with a white bunch of tulips and made a payphone call.
A 300-pound guy in sweatpants walks into the bathroom singing a song that’s just ended. “And then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like I love you.”
New