The Kids Have Gone Crazy
This bachelor life is killing me. It' 1:43 a.m. and I'm too hungry to sleep. I am sitting down to a meal of the only food in the apartment: a plate of lettuce, a bowl of plain yoghurt with one dollop of blueberry jam (all-natural) and one dollop of apricot jam (all-natural), and three tofu ice cream sandwiches. And I'm excited about this meal.
I will play Scrabulous with friends flung about the country, from Kansas to California, secretly glowing from a 185-point word I threw down the other day ("shrunken").
This morning I finally resolved to call the police to tell them that someone must have died in the apartment across the hall. The smell is that bad. It floods my apartment when I open the door. You can smell it in the elevator and down the stairs. The only person to have visited me here screamed "Oh God!"
Whenever I press the buzzer to complain, there is no sign of life. But today I heard someone out in the hall, so I cracked my door open. There she was, the culprit. An 85-year-old Jewish woman with perhaps a Russian accent. She waved at me so warmly, smiling hugely, that I could not complain. Instead I went up and shook her hand.
Two of her four cats came to the door, both wearing tuxedoes, like little doormen. (How could four cats smell so incredibly bad?) I asked the woman, Eisenberg, how she was doing. "So-so," she said, then brightened at the sight of the mailman. "Now we can check our mail in five minutes."
She was like a little girl, this woman, bright and smiling. "I worked at Saks Fifth Avenue for 35 years," she said. Then she whispered, "I still get a 30 percent discount, if you need anything."
Then a woman, maybe 50, approached. Who was this, the maid? Please, someone to clean.
But it was clear from their familiarity that they were mother and daughter, though mother-daughter relationships seem to have a complexity that is beyond me.
Eisenberg was standing in the doorway, and her face turned to stone as she glared at her daughter squeezing past.
"Fuck you," said the daughter under her breath.
"Fuck you," said the mother. "Come on in, it's your apartment!"
"Yeah, my apartment," said the daughter.
Eisenberg turned back to me and smiled again: "Have a good one!"
I decided to walk down to my writers group meeting, though it was 50 blocks away. Belly full of Chinese, backpack full of poems, I was lost in thought, but that never lasts long in New York. Approaching me was a group of teenage kids sprinting. I looked for the laughter, but there was none. They circled a kid, threw him on the ground and began kicking him and punching him. His pants came down and his caramel ass was bare to the world. A girl's voice beside me said, "Why are they doing this?"
Fortunately, the punches were, shall we say, pre-female-boxing-era girl punches, and the kicks looked designed to prove a point rather than inflict pain. Still, I wondered what my role as an adult here was. I easily could have stepped in and scattered everyone, but I did nothing. I had no idea what was going on. A few more kids showed up and suddenly one group of ten kids was chasing ten other kids, and I was chasing all 20 to see what happened.
Every block or so, somebody would get thrown down on the ground, roughed up, then they'd sprint another block and it would happen to someone else. Bottles were smashing on the sidewalk. I couldn't keep straight what the sides were; there were no uniforms. Half the kids seemed to be holding guns in the fronts of their pants, but then I realized they were just holding up their baggy jeans. Some of the kids' voices hadn't even changed.
We got to Broadway, and there it happened again in front of a supermarket. This time it was two kids flinging ineffectual punches at each other on the ground, while ten or so kids surrounded them. Bottles were still smashing, though I didn't see them hit anyone. Now there were about 20 people watching from all corners of Broadway. People in a diner watched through the window. A man on his cell phone said, "I don't care what you do, just get here now. We need police. The kids have gone crazy, they're smashing bottles."
A 20-year-old guy appeared on the sidewalk beside me with a baseball bat. He and his friend discussed getting backup.
A plane passed silently, passengers oblivious to this life. I thought of Lou Reed's "Dirty Boulevard." The kid dreaming, "fly fly away."
But what has changed in me,
what longing for life born,
and when, that I no longer
see these scenes from the eyes
of the quiet kid on the sidelines
who once was me, dreading these
moments and these people
and the eternal possibility
of his own humiliation,
or even from the head
of the kid who lay bare-assed
and throttled by five
in front of all the street,
bottles smashing around him,
as in a country of strife,
before his voice had changed?
Why is the image that sticks
today the gang that won,
as they backpedaled home
to the east side, unable
to keep their feet on the ground,
bursting out of their skins
with it, exultant arms to the sky,
and why is the feeling that,
while I have experienced
a lot in this long life,
I have not felt it all,
a feeling like jealousy.
I will play Scrabulous with friends flung about the country, from Kansas to California, secretly glowing from a 185-point word I threw down the other day ("shrunken").
This morning I finally resolved to call the police to tell them that someone must have died in the apartment across the hall. The smell is that bad. It floods my apartment when I open the door. You can smell it in the elevator and down the stairs. The only person to have visited me here screamed "Oh God!"
Whenever I press the buzzer to complain, there is no sign of life. But today I heard someone out in the hall, so I cracked my door open. There she was, the culprit. An 85-year-old Jewish woman with perhaps a Russian accent. She waved at me so warmly, smiling hugely, that I could not complain. Instead I went up and shook her hand.
Two of her four cats came to the door, both wearing tuxedoes, like little doormen. (How could four cats smell so incredibly bad?) I asked the woman, Eisenberg, how she was doing. "So-so," she said, then brightened at the sight of the mailman. "Now we can check our mail in five minutes."
She was like a little girl, this woman, bright and smiling. "I worked at Saks Fifth Avenue for 35 years," she said. Then she whispered, "I still get a 30 percent discount, if you need anything."
Then a woman, maybe 50, approached. Who was this, the maid? Please, someone to clean.
But it was clear from their familiarity that they were mother and daughter, though mother-daughter relationships seem to have a complexity that is beyond me.
Eisenberg was standing in the doorway, and her face turned to stone as she glared at her daughter squeezing past.
"Fuck you," said the daughter under her breath.
"Fuck you," said the mother. "Come on in, it's your apartment!"
"Yeah, my apartment," said the daughter.
Eisenberg turned back to me and smiled again: "Have a good one!"
I decided to walk down to my writers group meeting, though it was 50 blocks away. Belly full of Chinese, backpack full of poems, I was lost in thought, but that never lasts long in New York. Approaching me was a group of teenage kids sprinting. I looked for the laughter, but there was none. They circled a kid, threw him on the ground and began kicking him and punching him. His pants came down and his caramel ass was bare to the world. A girl's voice beside me said, "Why are they doing this?"
Fortunately, the punches were, shall we say, pre-female-boxing-era girl punches, and the kicks looked designed to prove a point rather than inflict pain. Still, I wondered what my role as an adult here was. I easily could have stepped in and scattered everyone, but I did nothing. I had no idea what was going on. A few more kids showed up and suddenly one group of ten kids was chasing ten other kids, and I was chasing all 20 to see what happened.
Every block or so, somebody would get thrown down on the ground, roughed up, then they'd sprint another block and it would happen to someone else. Bottles were smashing on the sidewalk. I couldn't keep straight what the sides were; there were no uniforms. Half the kids seemed to be holding guns in the fronts of their pants, but then I realized they were just holding up their baggy jeans. Some of the kids' voices hadn't even changed.
We got to Broadway, and there it happened again in front of a supermarket. This time it was two kids flinging ineffectual punches at each other on the ground, while ten or so kids surrounded them. Bottles were still smashing, though I didn't see them hit anyone. Now there were about 20 people watching from all corners of Broadway. People in a diner watched through the window. A man on his cell phone said, "I don't care what you do, just get here now. We need police. The kids have gone crazy, they're smashing bottles."
A 20-year-old guy appeared on the sidewalk beside me with a baseball bat. He and his friend discussed getting backup.
A plane passed silently, passengers oblivious to this life. I thought of Lou Reed's "Dirty Boulevard." The kid dreaming, "fly fly away."
But what has changed in me,
what longing for life born,
and when, that I no longer
see these scenes from the eyes
of the quiet kid on the sidelines
who once was me, dreading these
moments and these people
and the eternal possibility
of his own humiliation,
or even from the head
of the kid who lay bare-assed
and throttled by five
in front of all the street,
bottles smashing around him,
as in a country of strife,
before his voice had changed?
Why is the image that sticks
today the gang that won,
as they backpedaled home
to the east side, unable
to keep their feet on the ground,
bursting out of their skins
with it, exultant arms to the sky,
and why is the feeling that,
while I have experienced
a lot in this long life,
I have not felt it all,
a feeling like jealousy.
posted by Thon at 10:40 PM
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