CHAPTER 4
People who claim the Bible has no significance in contemporary cities have not spent much time in NYC. Here you can witness all manner of sins, find commandments (given and broken) written on stone, learn of generations and genealogy, experience plagues, see miracles and mayhem.
People of biblical importance or insignificance populate this great City. Their names pepper the language of private worship and public business, in all their forms. Speech, writing, advertising, broadcasting, gestures, and graffiti. Poly-lingualism flourishes! When you enter New York City, you have come upon the modern Tower of Babel.
To absorb the flavors of its languages is the equivalent of working all your life in a spice factory.
125th Street: Giselle Parking Garage, Watkins Health Foods, Fata Hair Braiding, Melba’s 125, Mobay Uptown, St Nicholas Deli, Kass Repair, Fishers of Men, Jimbo’s Hamburger Palace, Coen’s Optical.
East Village: La MaMa, Do Kham Tibet Emorium, Built by Wendy, Tim Dark Hair, Veronique Maternity, Dixon Place, Jin Soon Foot Spa, KGB Bar.
Meatpacking District: Miguel Saco Restorations, Faicco Pork Store, Ujamma Black Theater, Daniel Scuderi Antiques, St Mark’s Comics, Nanette Lepore Women’s Wear, Arnold Hatters, Pappadrakas Good Eats.
Battery Park: Jumbo Philatelic, Fong’s Sewing Machine, Gabes House of Flowers, Goldsil Coin, Annie’s Dollies, Xiao Hong Yu Novelties.
Midtown: Ethan Fiks Guitar Studio, Pescatore Seafood Co., Toga Bike Shop, Biba Schutz Gemologist, Azi Uniforms, Sam Oliveri Newsstand, Cha Cha’s House of Ill Repute, Aldik’s Santa Displays, Le Du’s Wines.
Morningside Heights: Ajo Lumber, Cool Matt’s Sex Shop, Winston Heating Oil, A. Singh Discount Mart, Petqua Ny Aquatics, B Driefus Electronics and Radio, African Condiments & Specialties, The Clay Hand Gallery, Marx & Engels Paints.
In this metropolis of voices and cultures, East meets West, North meets South, the Russian trades with the Pole, Arab sells to Jew, White buys from Black, Indian meets Pakistani for lunch. Commerce transcends ancient hatred, rivalry, cheats, and land-grabs. While the great City enjoys streets paved with gold, there shall be no war, strife, or enmity among tribes, races, or ethnicities. This is, after all, the United States of America.
The stoplight at East 61st Street and 3rd Avenue blinks red, not quite given up but mortally wounded. The toes of my black high-tops hang over the curb. I’m among thirty pedestrians at this curbside starting block, and more stack up behind us as seconds tick like pile drivers for the disruption this snafu has caused our lives. The eight-inch drop from the curb feels like an abyss. Drivers honk their horns to demonstrate their freedom and protest the inconvenience. They’re protected from the real world behind safety glass and steel, even as they represent the modern day oxen. Traffic streaming off the nearby Queensboro Bridge gets funneled onto three streets, and here it inches forward at the pace of a beast. Gleaming bumpers kiss front to rear down the street, two streets, three streets. A single patrolman, who doesn’t look old enough to shave, tries to manage our intersection. His hands wheel and his whistle shrills, body in the gesticulation of a cartoon character. These are an affront to the reality of traffic movement, somewhere between little and none. A cool breeze comes up from south 3rd Ave, and with it there floats lightweight trash. An opaque hotdog wrapper grabs the cop’s ankle like it’s an angry poodle, the corners shivering with hate.
Even on this spring day, the air feels thick, made thicker by the choking exhaust fumes of so many cars. I check my watch. Ten fifty-three. The big dogs are safely back home. With a last pat on Chief’s head and a rub through his soft Labby fur, I calculated four hours before I needed to be at Amsterdam Avenue to give the small dogs their turn. That pink-bellied threesome gets a full hour, from anytime after two (never before). Sometimes I wait till three, like I’ll do today because plans have changed. Peter’s studio was on my mind as I walked the big dogs, until that bag lady’s stench led my thoughts to Karen K again. Now I think that if I can get across the park in twenty minutes and execute my plan, make my play, I can still get back to Pete’s for an hour or so.
Over the traffic cop’s uniform blues and fitted cap, he wears a reflective chartreuse safety vest. He looks overheated under the sun and the crucible of engine exhaust. The car horns blare again, always begun by one asshole, until there’s the practical bedlam of a Stravinsky opus. It’s illegal to blow your car horn in Manhattan, a good law because one only needs to imagine how society would disintegrate if people used the horn for every emotional fury as they inched their way across the island. The traffic cop looks for the violators, though they are well back from the intersection, hidden somewhere behind the hundred-count windshields reflecting blue sky and gray skyscrapers.
“Come’on gumshoe,” someone caws from the crowd. Like the car horns, this gets a crescendo of replies. “Yeah!” and “Jeez-Louise!” and “This is just like Philadelphia!” (even though it’s not). Part of me wants to turn and explain that “gumshoe” is a nickname special to detectives, not greenhorn traffic boys. This is a bother and provocation I don’t want to pursue. My backpack hangs from my right hand; my thumb is hitched over the pocket holding my wallet. My other hand slaps beats against my thigh. I have to find a florist. I have to hope for fast delivery. I must wave my credit card like Dillinger.
This traffic snarl is the cop’s fault. He’s given the avenue cars more time than a regular light, and people, the crosswalkers, are pissed. We’re now a ten-wide gang piled up ten deep. Facing us across the intersection is a like-minded group. We’re not yet a mob. How these two walls of pent up impatience will mesh without bodily injury is a mystery of city life. The cop’s whistle blasts a double shrill to halt 3rd Ave traffic, but the oxen are slow to discipline, and a two-handed flourish shows his frustration and anger, until finally the crossing is clear. Our turn. The cop is waving us through when, arbitrarily, every light turns green.
To be silly is to make something happen, often enough. Sometimes silly is all we have. My move from Chicago wasn’t silly, because I had a choice and options: stay and (maybe) thrive; move and take the greater risk for its greater reward, in my life and for my art. So far, each has made a “happening.” To flush out Karen K, I have to “pull a silly.”
She once wrote, “The love of roses in modern society is a misnomer, given their rarity to Renaissance people, who knew of the flower’s difficulty to grow well. And so its beauty, when cultivated to bloom, sent poets to weep verse from their ink quills, forced a gentlemen to make noticed his love for wife (or mistress), and enticed women into dangerous acts to procure them by the armload.”
Of all the still lifes painted by Florence’s tint pioneers, and Impressionism’s erotic effulgence, Karen Kosek celebrated the rose in sculpture: wood carvings of the 1590s, steel blooms of the 1950s (“the rust most closely resembles a petal’s texture”); Eco’s Italian porcelain bouquet, and Lindermann’s rose-petal ice cream cones (handed out to children at the 1937 Reich’s Exhibition in Düsseldorf).
The Peruvian Jorge Echeandia’s “7 Roses of Whycuff” was her declared favorite. Sculpted in coal, the material’s depth of refraction make you believe (not fool you) that the roses are breathing, or caught in a breeze, or in the act of blooming. It is said the impression changes with each viewing. She praised the Peruvian’s audacious craftsmanship in making this effect from coal (not since replicated). She also celebrated Echeandia (partly) because his sculpture went unfinished, and would remain so. Evidently, he suffered a heart attack when, trying to complete the planned eighth and ninth roses, the sculpture cracked along a fissure he hadn’t noticed, from the vase’s lip to base, taking away a third of its mass, and two of its roses. I think the story of Echeandia’s death is apocryphal, although the broken sculpture is fact.
I learn that nine florists exist on Amsterdam Avenue between 87th to 65th Streets. Eight of them turn me away when I make my request. I hadn’t thought finding black roses would be so difficult (it turns out not to be), but more difficult
is asking the florist to let me crack the vase in such a way, and send the package wrapped in black tissue. Two florists call me a “creep.” One asks if I “even know the symbolism” and blah, blah, blah. The ninth barely bats an eye, and I get my gift wrapped for delivery, which I pay extra to do that immediately.
The yellow and green delivery van pulls up to The Parkview at 12:43. I stand behind the park wall and witness Henry accept the wrapped flowers from a guy dressed in a jump suit that matches the van’s colors. When the van pulls away, Henry takes the flowers to his podium, extracts the card (!) that I wrote, reads it, and then looks left and right down the block. I duck behind the wall.
When I raise my head after a safe interval, Henry is tearing open (!!) the paper wrapping. He takes out each flower and places it on the podium. Then he upends the vase, looks at its base, runs his big hand inside, and turns it over and around and around. Convinced it’s not a bomb (this is my only explanation for his actions), he replaces the flowers in the vase and wraps them up (not as nicely as the florist had, in my opinion). I expect him to take the flowers inside, where he’ll phone upstairs, or better yet, deliver them tout de suite to Karen K. But he doesn’t do this. Instead, he turns around, opens a large square box, a concrete pillar box with an iron lid – a garbage container – into which he dumps Karen’s flowers and my card. I can almost hear the breaking vase, as it must do, when it hits the bottom of the container. I unmistakably hear the metal top clatter when Henry drops that. He claps his hands, brushing off any leftover residue.
Before I can stop myself, I’m running out of the bushes and around to the nearest gate, a good clip down the path to the nearest gate, and out I come from hiding, dashing across the street. Before I know it, I am at the door to The Parkview, and I open it. Before I can enter, though, two men block my way. Henry is as wide as the door when he comes through, against me, followed by a man who is his equal in size, but white and bearded and wearing a dark suit and dark shirt and dark tie.
“Stand where you are, please, sir,” the man orders. I look at Henry, who’s mute. But he’s there, and he’s big, and he blocks the door while the bearded guy takes the lead. The man has stepped around Henry and is close to me, but not so close as to be unable to react if I should … what? — throw a punch, I assume he’s thinking. But, no, this is a civil matter, and he’s civil, polite, diplomatic.
“What is your business at The Parkview, sir,” the man asks. I’ve done as he’s commanded, and stand where I am. To be truthful, I’ve backed off, but I stand my ground, and am half squared up, prepared to defend my self. There is, I think, justification for me taking this position. I can sense they know what’s to come. There’s nothing more I can do but explain.
“I sent a package to Ms Kosek, whom I know lives in this building. It held flowers, this package, a sign of my … affection for Ms Kosek. She’s an author whose work I know well. He, Henry, did not deliver the flowers to Ms Kosek. I know this because I watched him from across the street when he threw the flowers into that trash can over there.” I point at the can for clarification, possibly for effect only, because my hands have found it hard to stay at my sides. From their stances, the positions they’ve taken up outside the doors, I realize more is going on here than I first thought. “I think Henry has probably already told you something about me,” I say. “Who, may I ask, are you?”
“Henry has told me everything, sir,” he says, in correction. He’s motionless, except for his eyes, taking me in, moving slowly from my face to my hands, my clothing, my hair, back to my hands. His hands hold steady in front of his belt, four fingers around the opposite wrist, a wrist as thick as my forearm. I have to look up to address him. His eyes peer down the length of his nose, as dark as shotgun barrels. He says, “You say you know Ms Kosek lives in the building, and that you have affection for her work. We know that you actually don’t share acquaintanceship with her. You see, sir, The Parkview does not allow unregistered friends, uninvited guests, or strangers onto the premises. That includes packages sent to residents. And for your information, if it helps you to understand the situation better, I am the house detective. You may call me ‘Sir’.”
“Jesus,” I say. “A private Dick? I didn’t think you guys existed anymore, outside Bogart movies.”
The man ignores this. “Residents of The Parkview live here for the privacy the building offers. They pay for being left alone, if that’s what they choose. You understand.”
“I do. Naturally,” I say in bewilderment, because What is natural about a bag lady living in a luxury apartment building? Instead of this question, I resume a line intended to mollify, convince, persuade. “I wish I could afford the same luxury. Well, I sort of – never mind. You see, I’m not trying to upset Ms. Kosek. I merely sent a package that will make sense only to her. You see, the roses were black and they relate to something she once wrote about –”
“Do you have a job, sir?”
“Excuse me?” I say, incredulous of his tone, so bland and cop-like, Dick-speak, that I don’t feel the true menace behind it. I blurt out, “That has nothing to do with this, and none of your – of course I work! Listen, he – Henry – has tampered with the mail system. Do you examine all mail that comes to this building? I think the postal inspectors would –”
“It’s the middle of the day, sir. Why aren’t you at work?”
“I could be taking lunch. It could be my day off. Your question is irrelevant. Just what are you insinuating? Listen, I’m interested only in inviting Ms. Kosek to accept a gift. You do know she dresses like a bag lady. Could I be upsetting her charade?”
Henry and the Dick glance at each other. No matter. I’m tumbling now. To hear my own voice, the words and sentences, is painful.
The Dick says, “That’s not my business, sir, and therefore it’s certainly not yours. The residents of The Parkview pay for security, peace, the chance to –”
“The package! The flowers! You stole someone’s mail! That’s a federal crime and –”
“The package was delivered by private courier, sir. It’s not U.S. mail. Therefore it falls under the guidelines of The Parkview’s package acceptance procedures, and the wishes of the residents. That package was not a purchase made by Ms Kosek. She did not give notice of its pending arrival. She doesn’t accept anything that she hasn’t already told us to expect and which she has previously made arrangements for its delivery. We know our residents, sir. Their safety and their security, and their rights, all supersede your claims. Good intentions are not recognized. Only the rules and residents’ instructions apply here.”
“She wrote about black roses,” I say. I need to explain why I’m harmless, not a crank, and not dangerous. “She liked a Peruvian sculptor’s work. He carved coal roses. Seven of them, but there were supposed to be nine. It was her favorite of all artworks. She wrote about what it meant to her, this sculpture. She said, ‘There is no subtlety or aggravation in art that isn’t already within the artist. So, too, in the people that seek art; they are the reflection of what they find.’ She means, I think, that we – that we must –”
But here I stop. I stop because even I don’t know why I’m telling them this, not here, not when the trip was pointless as soon as my hi-tops hit the pavement. Henry, at least, raised an eyebrow halfway through my – my rant. For the first time since I’ve been standing here, I feel the sweat dripping down my back and arms. I sense that my forehead is wet, shiny, the signs of a troubled person. The sweat, my guilt, is pouring out of me.
They think I’m some version of David Chapman, that I’m planning to kill KK when she steps outside, like Chapman assassinated John Lennon, coming home with Yoko from recording what would be his final album. The Dick again trades looks with Henry, not long, but they’ve decided who’s going to do what if they must make a move on me. Perhaps they’re about to strike first. Neither takes his eyes away from me, keeping my hands in view. Their stares define crazy — I’m the nutcase, not Karen K, their house ba
g lady. Through their stares they see a killer, and they wonder if I’ll start quoting “Let it Be” or “Octopus’s Garden” or perhaps another obscure, obtuse quote from Karen Kosek’s work. It’s possible I will. I recall her book very well, and everyone knows at least one Beatles song by heart.
“It’s time to leave, sir,” says the Dick. Henry seconds this with a firm nod. Neither smiles.
Under the circumstances, I leave.
I lean against the Central Park curtain wall again, my body out of sight while my head is chinned over the crenellated rubble. This spot is further down Central Park West, and I think I’ve shaken the Dick’s, and Henry’s, interest in me. I felt their eyes on my back as I walked off the carpeted runner, and all the way down the block, until I was a half-click away.
I can now just see Henry from my position. Often he’s covered for a few seconds by a passing van or a bus. He stands with vanguard poise, looking south and north, back & forth like this, over and over. The Dick is unseen, faded into a back room where, I imagine, he has closed-circuit television monitors trained on all exits, the elevators, and common hallways. I’m happy that I’m not a cat burglar, with all the headaches of figuring out how to break in, and then get out safely with the stolen jewels and the banded packets of cash heisted from wall safes hidden behind portraits of husbands, wives, grandfathers, and beloved daughters lost to disease before they’ve reached puberty.
When Henry turns his head forward I duck below the crown. Creeping away through the bushes, I realize my black rose ploy was a long shot, at best. So I can’t get into Karen K’s mind by bribing the staff or sending a surreptitious gift. I suppose that I should have known better. A dumb mistake I don’t want to repeat. As the dowager had suggested, though, persistence earns the worm. But it’s time for me to get over to Pete’s place, and I follow the path into the park.
The asphalt path, pitted by age and weather with bits crumbling off the edges like stale birthday cake, leads along a serpentine route to the Sheep Meadow. Few paths in the park run straight. Mostly they meander like a dog pulled by its nose. Sometimes you don’t notice how wildly the paths bend, twist, elbow, arc, snake, zigzag, swerve, braid, or kink. Benches line both sides of this path, placed end to end. They’re painted shamrock green, helping the path’s contours to pop off the living canvas.
Then, suddenly, prismatic light catches my eye. Off to the right, in the grass behind the benches, a white flash edged by color has winked at me for attention. I wouldn’t bother to stop, only the colors (scarlet and crimson trimmed in emerald) draw me to a stop. I back up and look across the patchy mud and grass. Litter has strewn from an overloaded canister, marring the triangular patch’s beauty. Paper cups show the bruise of rejection; a Taco Bell bag has been flattened by rain, its bottom torn out by a hungry animal; two Styrofoam plates lie fused with a brown smear. Beyond the trash lies my hidden gem in the new-growth spring grass, its winking prism a signal, a call for rescue. A quick scan for a cop’s presence down the path shows me three toddler-aged children hooked onto their mothers with spiral lanyard cord, red and blue and white, while up the other side four old men walk slowly, but talk with exaggerated gestures and interjections as they teeter-totter in this direction. I rest a palm on the bench riser and leap with lifted legs over the back, but my legs flail as I lose balance at the crest. I land on my ass and feel a watery imprint fastly wet my pants seat. Quickly rising on a swatch of soft earth free of mud, I crab-walk left and right, looking for the same angle reflecting the colored light. I hunch and squat, rubbernecking. There! Past the shredded fast food bag and a crumbled cup, a tuft of grass, the color of radioactivity, rises amid darker lawn.
I step over the trash and kneel beside a pair of eyeglasses. One lens is missing, its empty ocular frame bent inward, v-shaped, as if struck by a rock or the flat edge of a knife. The remaining lens points in the direction of the path at a thirty-degree angle. Its tint is red or rose or wine; the colors flow through this narrow spectrum when I move my head. Rose-colored glasses? Why not. A long scratch bites into the alloy of the black metal frame along the right temple, from earpiece to hinge. Both nosepieces and guards bend acutely inward, pinched together to accommodate the narrowest of noses. Of the grass surrounding the glasses, five long blades shoot out through the empty lens ring, now vaguely rhomboid. I must get lower. My knees fold until I’m settled onto the ground, where the spring rains soak through the denim with cold shock from ankles to knees. I bring my face down level with the grass, feeling acutely like a Muslim called to prayer. The audible noise of moisture seeping into soil is an oddly sucking sound, as if the black soil is a lung in desperate tubercular respiration.
Back on the path, where the children and their mothers and the four tottering men have converged behind me, I hear two high-pitched, see-saw voices ask mommy why that man is kneeling in the wet grass. One mother tells the child to look away, that we don’t see vagrants. “What’s a vagrant, mommy?” The old men clear their throats one after the other, perhaps harmonizing for an impromptu barbershop ditty as background music to my unfolding documentary. For this I pull my Leicaflex from the bottom of my backpack.
I slide the camera from its protective silk bag (last Christmas’s present from Belinda) and put it to my right eye while the left stays naked on the glasses. The lens oscillates with pitch variations to find one angle that will feed off the fanned array of reds and a separate, aural, chromium-rich beryl. Wetness seeps around my elbows when I lodge them into the grass to form a bipod. My jacket has pulled up from my waist in back, and a cool breeze prickles across my lumbar. The 50mm Carl Zeiss lens opens a crystal window onto the discarded spectacles. I focus on the glaring tri-color reds and a razor slice emerald edge, painted as a tongue touching the lips of a fair-haired lass.
I shoot nine images before the film runs out. I don’t have a spare roll. This roll was the spare. This sucks. This sucks. Nine isn’t enough. I slip the Leica into its silk bag. From another compartment I grab my hardcover spiral sketchbook, and pull three colored pencils from a pink fish-head pencil holder. My body assumes the pose of a penitent Christian, or a beggar with hat in hand, and now it’s almost certain that I’ll get a cold from the dampness on my legs, arms, and bare head; my Chuck Taylors have sunk into the earth beneath my ass. They squish when I move, as I must to keep the circulation flowing in my feet.
The first sketch I do quickly to catch basic perspective and geometric shapes; colors filled from edge to center with increased pressure to achieve tint distortion. The second sketch absorbs my eye, and I deliver details onto the page with attentive clarity: grass blades cross like waving beachfront palms; polyurethane nose pads yellowed by skin oils; a triangular chip in the tint painted onto a standard lens (which may be the cause of color saturation departure); teeth marks on the plastic earpieces. I hope to use the photos and sketches for a sculpture, pull out the perspective by a ratio of twenty, paint the stone. Spray paint, or airbrush. Metallic, I think. I can also use aluminum casting. Many methods jump through my mind while I decide to make a third sketch, an all-color perspective. My pencil hand works furiously atop the page, fanning the paper, grazing its texture using only the edge of the blunted pencil tip. My hand, robotic, moves methodically.
Light and time invade my focus. I should be with my friend by now. Pete will be waiting. If time were a commodity, I wonder accusingly, I’d be in debtor’s prison. I refuse to waiver from the object, though, not before I finish. The last touches of pencil barely graze the paper.
Then I’m up off my knees and onto my feet. The sketchpad gets secured. The plastic fish gulps the pencils. I police the area once over before I walk away. Stop. Think. You’re moving too quickly. The spectacles are too good. I retrieve them, hold them in my palm for a moment, wondering about their history. Then I crush the frames into a tight ball. When I pass a trash can further into the park, I drop the glasses in and hear a splat at the bottom among shifting garbage.