Closed Captioned

For years I exercised at the Y... mostly nights when it was underpopulated.  There's an older woman... maybe 90-something now...  although she seems much younger.  I'd seen her for years, just before closing, dressed in street clothes, on a seated stretching machine... usurping this sole piece of equipment.  Maybe she showered there--- I'd noticed people that slipped in and out for various hygiene rituals; I avoid locker rooms.  But perhaps at home they must share a bath... they don't clean... I don't know... but back to the woman... her name is Lois or Gloria-- for a time she had a male companion who waited for her on a bench, with a newspaper... at 11 PM... but he must have died. 

She often tried for some reason to speak to me... as though we were old friends... would offer her 'place' on the little machine... once gave me Carnegie Hall tickets she wasn’t using (she is a habitual concert-attender)... and I think I didn’t go… it was useless trying to explain I was working… impossible to converse… she's absolutely stone deaf-- has a sort of shortened language, like verbal stenography... with gestures.  Otherwise she spoke to no one... only me... as though we shared something; she'd look at me with this sort of anticipation-- the way children look at their new teacher at the beginning of a term-- with innocence and trust, as though she has something to do with their fate. It was uncomfortable. What had I done?  What did she believe? Once or twice I'd say something and she'd muster some total non-sequitur, some bizarre inane remark to assure me there was no conversational understanding whatsoever.  

When my fiancee was deported, years back, I briefly began to swim at the Y... laps, ovals... crawl then back-stroke, staring at the ceiling, weeping, unseen.  There is a swim-culture among older women-- I absorbed this and it stopped me... but no Lois or Gloria in a bathing suit.  Just the street clothes with the oversized track shoes the way older women cater to awkward feet.  

During the pandemic nearly every night, like grief therapy... I ran the upper Central Park loop, most of the time counter-clockwise, finished up on the reservoir.  I'd soliloquize, weep, talk to Alan wherever he was... When I looked east on the final lap, she’d be there, at 90th Street, perched on the stairs, watching the sun set behind the El Dorado across the water... among a small crowd mostly with phones, taking pictures… but she just looking… hands in pockets... alone. She’d wave.  I must have logged 500 sunsets by now… she, too. Most old people stayed home from fear, but she was out there… winter, summer… like a human landmark… like a mother, like a ghost.   I kept my distance... waving distance.  Masks make lip-reading impossible— not that she ever did much of that, either.

On Thursday I wrecked my finger... the sort of injury that will most likely heal but it was a random kind of bad luck thing.  To distract myself I circled the park as usual, wearing a new splint and ran into another night-time Y exerciser on his bike.  We walked together until way past dark... and just as we parted company, there was Lois-- on my block this time-- giving me that raised-eyebrow childlike look... I tried to introduce the two; they had zero mutual recognition and there was obviously no dialogue... she making those broken-word non-sequitur comments and gestures... just an odd intersection of three. He's a writer; I sketched her verbally for him, like a Dickens character.  Twain. Maybe she'd been on the reservoir, late... dawdling on her way home to no one or nothing.  

I worked at my gallery job today… still fucked up about my damn finger… went to Chelsea afterward to see a (great) show that was closing… stopped in Tribeca downtown, then remembered some friend sent a ticket to his show at Damrosch Park… (the injury sidelined my fragile 'plan'...) so I’m on a 1 train and realize it’s 8 PM… passing Columbus Circle… I get off, walk toward Lincoln Center.. there are lines, people waiting… but they usher me right in.. and suddenly that woman… Lois or Gloria...is yelling my name… jumps the line… says she’s with me… and sure enough my ticket is for 2… they have these reserved ‘pods’ of 2 seats… so I take her in… I’m alone.. and she wants to move up… she can’t hear... she’s telling me about the performance (?) … and the music starts… it’s completely my friend’s gig… she has no clue.. she’s deaf as a stone… sitting there… WATCHING the music, gesturing to me… it’s insane… was apparently on line for something that didn’t exist... But the night is beautiful… I'd played there a couple of times… the sunset, the buildings… guests at the Mandarin Oriental leaning on their windowsills, people on balconies… acoustics are crazy… sound carries… and a woman selling merchandise comes over to greet me… Lois gestures that she can’t hear a thing… waves her away… but keeps looking at me as though she’s waiting for a dialogue… something...

Anyway, after two musical pieces I started to think I was hallucinating… I'd been up fretting (the emotional kind, lol) all Friday night.  Or dreaming... she was like a human hawk sitting there… like a shadow… like a symbol.  It started to freak me out.  I’m reading Álvaro Mutis… contemporary women on ships sleep with Napoleonic colonels… ghosts… so I left.. took a crosstown bus and I guess she stayed in my pod-seat.  

On my block the streetlamps were turned off; it was dark... it's late summer.  I feel 'omened' by her, although I suspect my hand will be fine, and maybe she is a kind of angel.  Maybe I was really alone at Damrosch Park.  I kept looking at the stage set-- a kind of wavy cloud-like sort of backdrop.... it looked so absurd against the expanse of evening sky, like a tiny moment in the context of infinity. She'd been annoying me-- just her presence, her childlike 'anticipation' as though she wanted me to look at her.  Coming inside I remembered how I'd get home after working at night when my son was little... and just sit there in his room, inhaling the scent of children... I wondered if anyone had ever sat at her bedside, radiating that mother-love.  Maybe it was mean that she creeped me out and rude that I abandoned her but I am also reminded that finger or no finger, the world at my age is beginning to wind down-- or grow, I'm not sure which-- and suddenly the 500 evenings are like an old deck of cards... plus one, because without a plan, we'd apparently shared another sunset.  

Vacation Vicarious

I'm reading the collected Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Álvaro Mutis, a Colombian poet whose alter-ego is the narrator. Generally I like to read 'cold' books (Jack London, the Scandinavians) in this slice of peak-summer, but Maqroll's tales are jungle-rivery and steaming. Hallucinatory.  I discovered this book by accident in a thrift shop where I also discovered I was lacking even the $1 cost of a priceless literary journey.  The counterman-- an African who seems to broadcast on his phone-mic one side of a perpetual conversation to some fictional recipient-- insisted by gesture I take the book-- way too many in the store, what's $1 to him?  I have thanked him many times over.

In the claustrophobia of air-condition-less nights, to the hum of my neighbor's machines, I remain awake, empathically quasi-feverish, relishing the luxury of a free sauna experience to the book-track of tropical indulgences and terrors.  Mutis has obviously read Dickens and maybe even Proust... I trust him; I believe him.  He is escaping the predatory hauntings of too much education.  Bookery.  I can remember my Fifth-grade teacher, an ancient fragile-skinned hairnetted woman reading us a daily installment of The River Ran East... a perilous Peruvian journey that kept me from missing school even when I was genuinely sick.  As an adult, processing the internet, I was finally able to locate a used copy.  Unfortunately my own son did not enjoy the readings as much as we elementary schoolers of the early 1960's.

Still, there is nothing like a great story in the summer months.  The heft of a book in your bag, the tug of words on a cooled subway car, the hangover of someone else's exotic itinerary in your urban head. Walking across town in the evening, watching the local street population manage their opportunities... the garbage pickers, the lucrative can and bottle industry-- these people work hard for their survival.  In the heat they blend into my imaginary fictions, become characters and heroes... the man in the wool hat and down parka with his cart and bag, face worthy of a Van Gogh portrait... he is woven into the tapestry of today's narrative somehow.  He is a hero.. an actor... Hollywood or 112th Street... no matter.

There is little dialogue interference in my dog-days; I do not use a cell phone-- the street noise and fragments of conversation seep into one of the layers of perception but not as deeply as what I read or dream.  Sometimes I speak silently to my friends who have recently passed-- Alan, Jane... as though they are within some palpable frequency I can still access.  They are 'present'... Alan, when I play guitar at night-- his scent still in my living room, his stage-sweat embedded in my instruments.  And Jane-- last night I watched a film made in Minneapolis... if only you'd stayed in the Midwest, passed up the Studio 54 nights, the limos to Regine's... you might have avoided the animal tragedies, the schizophrenic boy outside your window becoming a man-- calling, keeping you awake... then the cancer, the sentence of suffering.  The loose ending.

Some days I think I should have been a photographer.  I see things-- I frame things.  I'd have been good-- maybe even successful, although the current Maqroll inside of me asks-- 'What the fuck is success?' 

There's a woman who sits on a bench inside the park, uptown, reading Dickens.  This month it's Martin Chuzzlewit.  She edits a very prestigious review; I gifted her a copy of my new book and now I suspect she is terrified of me.  I'm sure she has long-nurtured disdain for local poets and writers... and conversation.  I'm not sure why I am obsessed with knowing what people read-- not too much else interests me lately.  Sometimes in the hot nights I troll my own shelves for undiscovered treasure.  There is enough there for several lifetimes and I will sadly never know all of them.  I watch television-- documentaries and films... with the demon of guilt on my shoulder; I have so much work to do, so much to read...  any scene anywhere with bookshelves both comforts and provokes anxiety.  I squint my eyes at all the home-sets of newscasters and interviewees to see what they've read, how they arrange the volumes behind them.  A few of them are literally 'sets'... like they offer Zoom backdrops somewhere on the internet.  Will it never stop-- the make-up, the plastic surgery, the fakery?

Álvaro, who has probably been the target of assassins, been shot at and jailed... has been dead now for eight years.  I cannot tell him how my first post-pandemic summer has been stamped with his character, how his adventures and philosophy have permeated the hot soup of my malleable July brain syndrome,  how somehow his Gaviero guided me through another itinerant heat-spell and imbedded in the imagery of my dream-scrapbook.  Such is the leap-frogging nature of literature... why we poor writers are compelled to diary and serialize, to chronicle and complain, celebrate and invent... relentlessly, like this heat, which soon enough will disappear... God willing, to return next year, for those among us fortunate enough to be given another 'revolution' of planetary adventure.