First Night in New York
Cities are very much like the universe. Someone pitches a tent with a big bang, then another beside, and more until there is a camp; the construction rolls out in all directions on the compass, like ripples in the water after the stone was dropped. The tents become shacks and cabins, mud to log to stone to brick to steel; some dilapidate like stars imploding their masses, evacuated of the life that once sprang from the gaseous innards.
When the forebearers emigrated from their inner city haunts, from their ramshackle flats and condensed milk-fed lifestyles, they took to the outskirts of the city, their dreams and resorts. Broad clean streats, smooth as silk under the radial tires, lush green lawns, fresh and trim, each with a tree that only recently had begun to grow, two-car, three-car, four-car garage, aluminum siding on two-storey homes to protect the family from the elements and 6′ high wooden fences and shrubs to protect the families from each other, doors and window trims awash in the dullest beige, canary, tan and olive hues. Heading for a white picket fence but never quite getting there. Water sprinklers hissing in staccato and air conditioners gurgling in low torque.
They had fled the rush of the city for the illusive antiquity of new country. And they were short-sighted. It’s the people that make the city and when they left, they brought the city with them.
The suburbs is where Freddy grew up. But that is not where he grew.
New York is a great human cycle. This can best be noticed at night, in bed, with the covers across you, with the window opened wide enough to allow the perpetual din entrance to your sanctum, from the cumbersome air sparkling with floating ash, through the blackened mesh of the window screen and into the dark and barely decorated room; the hum of humanity rolls over the body.
First comes the rumble of a garbage truck as it winds around potholes and late-night jaywalkers, grinding to a pressing stop before a line of garbage five yards long, the hollers of the filthy men and the stretching of plastic being grappled by large mitted hands; the nadir of its existence, of garbage’s existence, is in mid-air, as it flies without wings, propelled only by the strength of a unionized worker. It graces an arc off the curb until gravity finds the bag and drags it down into the mouth of the compactor, cracking and smashing amidst its neighboring contents. A button is pressed (or lever pulled) and the hydraulic hiss covers up the abduction of the garbage into the mechanical belly of the truck, taken for granted.
After the garbage truck departs, there is a calm that replaces it. The emptiness in the air is palpable, like a door opening between two temperatures. It is quiet…
Until another city vehicle arrives on the scene of the missing refuse, this time a street cleaner, smashing its hard brushes against concrete and asphalt, spraying a painfully forced mist of water, or chemicals mixed with that great soluble, upon its victimized landscape; the driver weaves his cleaner around parked cars, hugs the tightest corners, spinning on the edge of a right angle with more ease than a Democrat has cheating on his wife, or a Republican has stealing an election.
As quickly as it happened upon the spot, it is gone, and the barometric pressure wavers as the spray it left behind begins to evaporate into the air and drip down into the gutters of the city. And it is quiet again.
The street cleaner is only an interlude, though, between the first act of the garbage truck and the much louder, more climactic second act of the siren. Not the siren of Greek myth; this siren is in no way attractive. But like those nautical temptresses, this siren is first heard through a weary fog. And it is inescapable.
It bounds down the darkened corridors of late-night traffic, reflecting off the city’s many structures of brick and glass, refracting through the screens of open windows and quickly filling the air of the sleeper’s den. The noise bullies through anything that would stand before it; there is no way to contain Pandora’s screams.
The eyes have lids to blind the seer from a vision but the ears cannot be closed; they have no defense from the punch and rising wail of an emergency vehicle. Yes, even the deaf can be envied. As the ambulance or police cruiser or fire engine passes and the crescendo peaks, no other sound can be heard; the only thoughts one may have are “Someone is in trouble” or “I hope my ears don’t start bleeding.”
As the insufferable noise departs the immediate vicinity, it takes all decibels of attention along for the ride, leaving only their memory (which too will eventually fade into the subconscious).
There is a serenity here as the eardrums re-accustom themselves to the vacuum the siren left behind; the sound of traffic over there, a car horn on a perpendicular avenue, the featherweight waves of pedestrian conversations, click-clack in high heel shoes, laughter; a car door closing, the ignition of its engine, last year’s model humming under last year’s hood; gentlemen exiting a gentlemen’s club, clip-clop stepping down the sidewalk; a wetback struggling to finish his day and return to his family in a different borough, hauling an over-sized trash bag to the curb, returning inside for the second, the third, another and another, until he can finally “call it a night.”
But it already is a night and, in the distance, a few blocks away, comes the night cycle anew, another garbage truck rumbling down the street with a belly full of waste and a goal of civil sanitation.
On the occasion of Freddy’s first night in New York, at the age of eighteen, he whipped the bed cover’s away, leapt from his slumber, closed the window and crawled back towards the sleep that was the gift of his tolling day of travel.
He was more akin to suburban crickets and rustling A-C’s.
