This Rogue’s Town . . .

"Thank you for your kind attention, however erratic it may be"
-Alfred Hitchcock

I’ll be joining Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman(1) next Monday.  Namaste

(1) that’s a firm.  a really really big one to boot. 

The muse bit me last night.  She left no teeth marks.  I’m alright. 

Manu Chao played Prospect Park, his first NYC appearance since 2001, pursuant (it is alleged) to a boycott of all stateside performances for the duration of the current administration.  Perchance mere hint or allegation, but Perry Farell prevailed on him to do otherwise . . . we are as imperfect a nation as they come, after all . . . and to hit up a few other stops along the way.  Berkeley, San Diego, Denver, Chicago.  All but one solid, respectable blue states, not that it makes any difference these days. 

I didn’t have tickets.  I didn’t really need them.  I’m tall.  We (really I + they) occupied a knoll overlooking the stage where Manu, an already diminutive man compressed even further by the distance and then distinguishable only by a green jacket and a red basque beret played an hour and a half set on a refreshingly mosquito-free night in Park Slope. 

Mano Negra flowed seemlessly into Clandestino and Proxima Estacion . . . Esperanza.  That I can no longer distinguish which tracks belong on which album signifies . . . really nothing.  We (again, they + I) sang along to "Welcome to Tijuano", plodded our way through a reconceived "Merry Blues", and stood in utter confusion any time our host addressed the crowd in his French-accented Galician Spanish.  "Pinocchio" came with no syncopated horn section, neither did "El Dorado" come with its customary cry of "Chaccinha no Brooklyn!" or something album-worthy. 

This performance will likely not be reduced to digital recording, at least not on the open market.  No matter, I haven’t even bought a CD in three years.  I seem to have had a few dozen made for me recently, but nothing to pop into the old mothballed discman, like I would back when I’d stroll (not bike) the Hudson listening to "Bixo de Coco" and "Mr. Bobby". 

My first year in New York. I had just returned from Thailand.  I had needed to get away after a year.  As far as I could find a free bed.  I swam in cave waters no doubt contaminated with guano.  I lived in a house on stilts. I hitchiked on the back of a motorcycle in the middle of the night in Surat Thani province.  I feasted on Dairy Queen at the Bangkok Airport because I hadn’t seen one in years. CNN Worldbeat was doing a profile on him.  He looked like he was having fun. The "world" (code I discoverd for "brown people") beats, the fusion, the subversiveness, all a part of a universe permeated with poverty, hope, capoiera, futbol, rai, and negritude.

I came back.  I was tired.  I was alone.  I visited Virgin Mega.  I took a stroll. It was late Augsut, when the Twin Towers still stood gleaming in spite of themselves on the late summer sun. Two weeks later they’d be gone.  This posits nothing in the collective heartache we’ve had to embrace out here, but it gives more import to the ordinary instance of simply walking down the street, unwares of the hot pursuit of history and its agonies. 

I’d pick up Clandestino later that year.  That trip to Egypt when I’d last see my grandmother.  Countless question from my brother’s expat friends if I was okay.  If I’d run into "any trouble". I would talk to them about missing posters of all ages and ethnicities.  Likely gone forever.  It seemed improbable that one in my living situation with my name and my origin could simply slip through the cracks; they’d need only follow me around with a camera on any given day to see how unremarkably my life usually pans out.  If they wanted they could even join me in some particularly tortured reading of Welty.  Might make things more interesting for me. 

I don’t speak Spanish.  I did not know what a Desaparicido was. 

He’d release his concert album in the fall, I’d begun law school. I would break out furiously from Top Five, sometimes across the way to Washington Square, sometimes round the corner to Thompson Street, and listen feverishly to "Machine Gun", "King Kong Five", and "The Monkey" and dream about those places like Genova, and Mockba, and Barcelona that get to hear stuff like this first hand and really be a part of it, not a mere detached observer, up to his eyeballs in case law, out of his depth in law school, and wondering why they hell he keeps listening to music he could only 20% decipher. 

Three or four years passed without an album, three or four years of law school and the bar, and now the post-bar, and the pre-whatever-the-hell-it-is-I’m-supposed-to-do-with-a-law-degree-and-three-bar-admissions.  Three or four years hence, were now I bike to work down on Wall Street, only to be shuttled to a court appearance in Queens, then back across the bridge by bike to Prospect Park. 

I attended my first Manu Chao concert dressed for court. I had fun.  Perhaps we (I + they) had fun too. I really can’t speak for they. 

I left during the second encore.  Mala Vida.  Notsomuch a second encore as a protracted coda to the evening’s performance.  Machine Gun became Mala Vida became Bongo Bong which I can only guess would become Minha Galera.  All throughout, he implored (in English) "the next station is hope".  Indeed it is, although it bears mentioning that Esperanza is also a metro stop in Madrid, on which reality has also been visited in the form of shrapnel.

For me, el proxima esaction es 7th Avenue on the F Train to head back to the Island with my bike.  It was late and I would not chance the potholes of Flatbush Avenue in the dark.  As the F ascended near Smith Street, I caught a sweep of the Bay: the Verrazanno, Statue of Liberty, Lower Manhattan, a tiny sliver of Jersey, and what is improperly called "South Brooklyn".  Over here is a bridge, where I ran my first marathon, over there a statue in whose shape a snowglobe my mother once bought for me, to my left a skyline where three thousand lives were ended in nearly an hour, beyond that a vast expanse of flatness where mine (for better or for worse) would begin, and down below the tremulous rumble of a city that need never pause to clear its throat.

I might’ve been exhausted. After all, I had biked twelve miles on a work day, after all after all.  But I wasn’t tired.  And I might’ve been by myself, but I wasn’t alone. 

And it might’ve been made even more perfect if it had been the anniversary of the day I moved to New York. 

Which it turned out it was. 

***You Should Rule Jupiter***

Huge and hot, Jupiter is a quickly turning planet with short days and intense gravity.

You are perfect to rule Jupiter, because you are both dominant and kind. You have great strength and confidence, but you never abuse your power.

You are always right.  Even if you make mistakes, you compensate for them… before anyone knows it.

Headstrong and ambitious, you always have a goal in mind. You are optimistic and believe thing things will always work out.

What Planet Should You Rule?
http://www.blogthings.com/whatplanetshouldyourulequiz/

I found myself on the wrong side of 4:00am the other day at work.  While this fact in and of itself shouldn’t raise nary an eyebrow, I need only remind everyone that I work for a bloody GOVERNMENT AGENCY.  You know, one of those places where people aren’t supposed to work past 4:00pm let alone twelve hours hence.  Though, I guess as a normative matter they shouldn’t.  Point is, as Bernie Mac once said, "When Brothas break . . . they BREAK!"

We’ve been visited by an unbearable heatwave in New York.  For this, having to spend nearly every waking hour in my meatlocker of an office seemed a drastic improvement over my still un-air conditioned digs.  I bought me a window unit last weekend, still sitting on my floor obstructing my way to the bike, itself obstructing the way to my door.  From the folks upstairs, moving out in a hurry.  Quite unlike my former neighbors, formally evicted.  The walls of their apartment decorated in graffiti. 

I love you Susan Lynn

Guess that explained all the moaning.

In any event, it’s been a peculiar adjustment to the life of a bona fide government technocrat.  I can call myself that now because I went to school for this.  Twice.  Quite brutally and notoriously at that.  Though I’ve only been at it this piece for a month, there’s a decided lack of urgency to any of what I do.  Perhaps it’s not the urgency that’s evasive, but the complete lack of . . . methodology. 

Now, don’t get me wrong: I find methodology terribly overrated.  It’s the thing of reptiles and praying mantises.  Me? I’m happily winging my way through this overwhelming mess my life has become.  No room for method.  But at least when I was at the firm-BIG LAW-if you will-there was at least a framework, a structure of conduct, norms, and assumptions with which you were expected to adapt to or perish . . . or go home crying.  Here, it seems as though the only survival instinct available is to read the minds of people who owe their employment to the incident of them being from Staten Island. 

I mean, have any of you ever even been to Staten Island? Honestly . . .

And then the physical environs.  Where Midtown is a grid of steel, concrete, modernism, and its successors, Wall Street is a meandering labrynth of gargoyles, friezes, and ghosts.  Alexander Hamilton lies interred across the street from my office.  We’re near the tip of Manhattan, Broadway by the Bull, the end of the world where the lions weep, Africa sleeping atop the sphinx, the precipe between the center of the universe and the world it controls, steamship terminals converted into bank branches, you get the picture. 

Here is a museum piece, unintended for usage in the real world.  Reality relying too much on trifling concerns like structure, deadlines, and accountability.  The difference between getting on the ballot in Queens and staying on the ballot.  Notwithstanding the fact that you may not be registered to vote, or active, or even still living.  Mere triviality, right? But of course, I suppose that’s were your friendly Board of Elections staff attorney comes in. 

And it’s gotten late again, I see . . . 

***You are 80% Scorpio***

How Scorpio Are You?
http://www.blogthings.com/howscorpioareyouquiz/

I awoke this morning . . . though I suppose "awoke" is much too strident of a term, perhaps "inverse collapsed" would have more aptly described it . . . with the lights in my apartment still on, my skin slightly redolent of insect repellent and various parts of my body itching and welted from what turned out to be a losing all-night duel with an especially peckish mosquito.  Alas there was no chance to sleep in.  We had to get ourselves on a Queens-bound 7 Train.  Millets Point/Shea Stadium.  Yes, we’ve seen this movie before.  To wit:

I’ve learned not to underestiminate the vector value of a little bit of desperation; it’s gotten me up earlier than I need be on so many Saturday mornings like this.  And today, it propelled me clear across Queens to Shea Stadium, around the Unisphere, and all-the-way to Homeplate at a pace of 6:10 per mile.  It’s been like this for awhile, as you know, and it’s alot of desperation, anger, sorrow, and love to effectively revive, engage, and dispose of before most people have even gotten up in the morning.  If I’ve been able to do that, then I know I can do this November and if I can do this November, I have no doubt that I can do anything and I won’t need the Board of Law Examiners to tell me otherwise.
-"Correr es mi destino", 7/30/2005

I’m not in the habit of self-referencing my own posts, but this one, perhaps more than any other I’ve written here in Rogue’s Town, bears revisiting.  Last year’s Run to Home Plate marked the beginning of a new stage in my life-much as I deplore the division of life into "stages"-I had tentatively titled the "Time of Legends".  All that stood in the way between me and a three forty-five finish in the Marathon was my own vaunted sense of self-sabotage.  At which point, I would expect my no less-vaunted and ever-vectorial sense of desperation to kick in and carry me along to that still nebulous and ever-elusive place called "my goals in life". 

We haven’t gotten there yet, suffice it to say.  But we’re making good time. 

Those of you keeping score ’round these parts know what followed from this post.  My mother’s diagnosis.  Her "last months".  Her subsequent seeming recovery.  My protracted job search.  Her panic attacks.  My Marathon.  My 3:28 finish time.  The wall I hit somewhere crossing the Queensboro.  Her panic attacks.  My failing the bar on the first try.  The fact that, in spite of everything, she said the right things.  "You can do it, you just need to hustle".  Her son, however, does not hustle, he runs.  For long distances at that.  Oftentimes not very elegantly, but he finishes what he starts.  Sometimes faster than he thinks.  Sometimes unawares as to why or how.  Sometimes In under three and a half hours.  When he was supposed to finish in 3:45.  The vector value of a little desperation.  And the three months that followed.  Bar exam, winter edition and all the psychosis it entailed.  A passing performance (to be revealed at another time), and a good ten-pound weight gain for good measure.  It matters if you run.  Really, it does. 

And then another diagnosis.  And an emergency hospitalization.  And my Dad unable to tell me on the phone through his own tears.  And forms that needed to be signed.  Wills.  Partnership agreements.  Corporations.  A matter of months.  "I want to die" she said repeatedly one night.  Jeff said I would do the right thing at the right time.  He said he would check in with me on Monday.  He was hit by an intoxicated Corvette driver later that night.  He is on Roosevelt Island now, where he will stay until he can leave.

Life provides no textbook on precisely how and when to love, nor are their internships or work-study programs to teach the tools of the craft.  One need only ride that endless vector of desperation to find out.  Some, it turns out, need to stay on board longer than others do.  It doesn’t speak to any personal shortcoming on their part.  Just a matter of perspective and will, each of which come at a very steep price.  And, quite frankly, it really doesn’t matter at the end of the day if you passed the bar exam in three jurisdictions. 

I know it.  Because I did. 

Though, frankly, it does matter in New York that you score an 85 on the MPRE.  And we still have that prove.  However, unsinister the Professional Responsiblity wing of the National Conference of Bar exams may seem at first blush.  Iowans, they all are.  Loose Meat and Magic Mountains, you betcha.  I’d be lying if I said I knew what to do now, that I felt completely within my depth.  But I do know that I’ve become old hat at revival, engagement, and disposition.  Even on just a few hours of sleep, with the lights still on and my skin still itchy. 

I finished that race today in 6:34.  Around Shea Stadium, the Unisphere, and back to Homeplate. I’ve still got a little while to go.  But I’ve earned me a spot in the 2007 NYC Marathon.  This is indeed the Time of Legends and I’m still here.  We’re still here.  Yes, you and I.   And I’m happy to have the company, though quite frankly I’d appreciate if you’d pick up the pace.  I’m still riding that vector, and I’m learning it doesn’t slow down for anybody. 

***You Are Best Described By…***

Impression, Sunrise
By Claude Monet

What Famous Work of Art Are You?
http://www.blogthings.com/whatfamousworkofartareyouquiz/

Jeff has been moved to Roosevelt Island, where neither bridge nor tunnel cross save for the F train, when it stops, and The Tram, when it chooses to work.  In a city where trestled masterpieces criscross the East River like so many castiron Rialtos . . . Rialti? . . . Roosevelt Island occupies a transitory deadzone between the Queensboro and the Triboro.  Between tall-masted Mannahatta, low-slung Astoria (without power for over a week now), and the slowly crystallized Long Island City, a blocky, Stalinist solution to that most capitalist of quandries: finding decent multi-bedroom rents in New York City. 

The F train was running on the V line, overshooting the island, necessitating a detour via Roosevelt Ave/Jackson Heights.  Right president.  Wrong station.  The Tram is not functioning, or at least I’ve decided it won’t, so as to rule it out at an option.  A tram, high up in the sky, with nothing but the river to break the fall.  Who needs it? Not I.  Jeff will remain here until he can leave. 

I’ve long wondered who lives out here, presuming the views to be phenomenal, which indeed they are.  Just as I imagine/remember the opening credits of Diff’rent Strokes, which panned briefly across the skyline of East Uptown, to be.  And then what was so errant about that first "e" to have to replace with an apostrophe?

Jeff has been speaking for a few weeks now, in spite of the trach in his throat. 

"What street are we at?"

"Street? Jeff, I don’t know what the streets are called out here"

It’s true, I don’t.  We’re at One Main Street, on an Island with seemingly only one road and no commercial functions.  How awful would it be to come along this way and not even get a river view?

"No . . . what street in Manhattan?"

"Um . . . I dunno . . . I mean, maybe we’re parrallel to Sutton Place? Beekman Place? We’re just south . . . south? . . . of the Queensboro Bridge.  59th Street, so maybe we’re at 56th, 57th? Where do you think that is, Jeff? Beekman Place?"

"I guess"

Jeff has developed pneumonia.  No fever.  But he has an infection in his chest, just like he did those first weeks in the ICU, which he was not awake to remember.  The nurses don’t follow up with him.  To get to his hospital ward, you pass through an assortment of indigent enfeebled, bereft of various limbs through various transgressions.  All Jeff did was step outside his door on a Friday night. 

"Jeff, when you’re well enough to walk we should get everyone together and have a weenie roast out on the promenade.  We’ll bust out the bag of Kingsford and . . .

. . . good god, did I just say weenie roast?

"Weenie roast?", exclaimed his mother, "oh yah, it looks lovely outside."

But I meant it.  I haven’t been to a bona fide cookout in a while, let alone hosted one.  It’s been years since my parents switched to propane.  Something so reminiscent of childhood, though, the smell of processed meat grilling in some forest preserve somewhere.  Old School.  Maybe Daniel Wright Woods.  None of those around here.  Just Roosevelt Island, somehow squeezed in the middle of the center of the universe, with no way to get to it but underground, and up in the sky.  A peculiar little refuge from a city of ghosts. Jeff will remain here until he can leave. 

And until then, these visits will continue.  F train from Herald Square.  To a stop where many get on but at which hardly anyone ever seems to leave.  The station an aesthetic cross between the D.C. Metro and the one in Montreal.  A couple of hundred feet below the 14th mile where I hit my wall.  Where Jeff will remain until he can leave.  This, I suppose, will take some getting used to. 

***You Passed 8th Grade Spanish***

Congratulations, you got 7/8 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Spanish?
http://www.blogthings.com/couldyoupass8thgradespanishquiz/

(1) BTW, guess who’s coming to Prospect Park August 7th?!!!