April 23, 2010
My body thinks it's 4:30 am, but it's awake anyway, despite staying up as late as I could manage reading R. Boswell's American Made Love , and after a long walk around the Lower East Side, and, most importantly, a fabulous dinner at the Congee Kitchen on Allen Street, just a few blocks from our hotel on the edge of Chinatown. Snow pea leaves with garlic in rice sauce, sliced conch with shrimp-stuffed fried tofu, barbecue pork ribs with shrimp paste...and my wife's new discovery, a litchi-nut martini. (Actually three litchi nut martinis, with said long walk separating the second and third...I stuck to Tsing Tao, and a Maker's Mark nightcap...) Yet I awoke hungry. Damn. Somewhere nearby, I know, is a bagel...
Maybe it's a writer thing, but cities bring out the voyeur in me. We rode the Air Train in from the Newark airport, and then the subway from Penn Station, and walked through the teeming rush-hour crowds in Chinatown. And as always when visiting Manhattan I was mesmerized by the sheer variety of humanity--the ages, colors, languages, cultures and (especially) styles, conscious and otherwise, of the milling hoards. I take it all in one of two ways: either I succumb the the simple gap-mouthed astonishment with which one might watch, say, a migrating cloud of songbirds ( oh my effing god look at them all), or I begin focusing on individuals. The aging train rider in his sweat-stained work clothes, balding and weary, his shy-blue shirt unbuttoned at the top to reveal a thick white cascade of chest hair spilling nearly to his belly, his mouth a frozen scowl...or the young male wannabe outside a club, eying the doorman like a kitten watching a bulldog, wondering how to get by him, his pants fitting snugger than his skin, his leather jacket half unzipped, his black shoes reflecting the streetlight, his hair an exquisite coif, helmet-tough with "product"...or the doorman himself, weary and patient, wide as a refrigerator, tall as a street sign, in a T-shirt so snug one sleeve has begun to split at his bicep, aware of everything yet making no eye contact, languid and immobile yet ready to pounce... or the old, old woman with the ankle-length coat and the startling flowered hat, one hand clutching a plastic bag of fruit, the other a cane with a fat rubber tip that bounces on the sidewalk as she moves more quickly than anyone through the crowd... or the short-skirted woman with the ten-inch heels and the artfully placed holes in her stockings... or the young Chinese couple cuddled on a bench watching balding, middle-aged men play small-field soccer under a bank of yellow lights... or the gray-bearded wino sitting against the wall laughing while a young girl with big round glasses and a pink pea coat theatrically tosses his discarded bottle in the trash, fixing him with a stern and thoughtless glare of accusation...
I want to follow them home. I want to slip on a magic ring and become invisible, and trail them like a dime novel gumshoe, to the restaurants, to their flats, to the gym where they got those biceps, to the club that will let them in, to wherever it is that, at the end of the day, their street-selves become their own selves. I want to see that transformation, to hear the sigh of relief at the chock of the dead bolt, to hear what they say to whoever stayed up waiting for them, or didn't. I want to see the streets--even to see me--through their eyes. I want what they had for dinner and what they wished it had been. I want to know what's in their pockets and wallets and purses. I want to know what they think about when they wake up in the morning. And then, in a wink, I'm watching the bird-cloud again, admiring its heedless choreography, wondering where it's headed, where it came from. Then it's time again to eat...
(Oh and what is it, anyway, with the women and their shoes here? How in god's name do they walk in them? Indeed it is a wide and mysterious world.)
