Monday, September 08, 2003
"New York is cold, but I like where I'm living.." (L. Cohen)
Joe & I went down to Chinatown yesterday afternoon. It was a beautiful, perfect September afternoon. To get there, we walked through the Lower East Side, down by the Williamsburg Bridge, down streets I don't walk down very often: Elizabeth, Clinton, Ludlow, Rivington.
There's this AIDS hospital on Rivington, a little further west from where we were walking yesterday. I've been there twice with this chorus I sometimes sing with. I remember that the first time I went, I expected the patients to be like AIDS patients are in the movies & in theater: upper class, flamboyently gay, mostly white, with an appreciation for show tunes and artistic talent. Seriously. I thought they would be like the cast for a musical, or something. But, they are very sickly looking & very thin men. They are, of course, of all colors, mostly middle-aged, and they mostly seem poor.
It's funny that I didn't even realize what I expected until I got there. It's like that Gwendolyn Brooks poem, "The Lovers of the Poor" (http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?45442B7C000C070C0E75) where she criticizes the ladies who want to donate money to the poor for being repulsed by (or at least afraid of) the people they are trying to help. It's a very interesting poem, and I admit there's something of that in me -- probably in everyone. I want to help people by donating my time & energy, but I don't want to have see any of the ugliness. I don't want to be uncomfortable. I don't say this out of guilt, just honesty.
So, anyway, we walked through the LES & down toward the Manhattan Bridge, which has these amazing marble sculptures on its entrance and benches to sit on cut into the marble. It's really, really lovely -- statues of Greek or Roman-looking figures, gorgoyles, flowers that look like they are floating on a pond. We sat down on one of the benches and discussed the wedding we'd been to the night before, which we'd been discussing the entire day. His cousin Mindy got really wasted drunk at the wedding and peed on herself on the way home. His other cousin Scott had a fit but then proceeded to get completely wasted himself in the hotel afterward.
Oh, Mindy! She's only 23 (almost 24) and she has this beautiful brown mole on her face, right to the left of her nose. And, she was carrying this sheer black scarf, which she wrapped around her neck and then around her arms, and which she used to keep herself warm when it got a little chilly. Mindy had so much fun on the dance floor. She just danced & danced. She requested "Shoop" by Salt 'n Pepper. She smoked a hundred cigarettes. She has this great, gleeful laugh.
Mindy & Joe's sister are one month apart. Apparently, their mothers had a contest of who could get pregnant first. The four kids grew up together. Their moms are twin sisters, and their dads used to be friends. Now, Mindy & Scott's parents are divorced, and Joe's father is no longer friends with their father. Scott is an obnoxious, disrespectful, loud, inconsiderate drunk. Mindy is a troubled, sad, charming, beautiful drunk. It's very sad. They're both in danger of destroying themselves. Apparently, Mindy has attempted suicide, and Scott is just verbally violent. Everytime he opens his mouth, he shouts obscenities and puts people down. He's so angry. The closest thing I've heard to anything nice coming out of his mouth is when he quotes from movies. And, he thinks in extremes. I asked him to move the bottles of beer from the sink to the ice bucket so that I could brush my teeth, and he said, "I know I'm a total loser. There are too many beers in there right now, but I'll move them soon. I know where you're coming from," but he didn't move them!
Oh, but I'm not doing a good job describing all this. I'm not giving enough information to make it interesting and complex. I really do want to write about it, though.
So, yes, yesterday... I want to get to the part about Chinatown, which is right off the Manhattan Bridge. We found the bus ticket booth, where you can get a ticket to Boston for $10 each way (!!!), so Joe & I are going to go up there sometime on a Saturday for the day. There's also a bus to Washington, D.C. for about the same price. We walked past these wholesale restaurant supply stores, and I went into one because, well, I get really excited about kitchen supplies. This 9 or 10 year old girl (or boy?) approached me as soon as I entered the store & asked me if she could help me. Isn't she too young to be a clerk? She was quite androgynous, but I think her haircut gave her away. It was one of those just-past-the-ear, cute, pixie cuts, which looked pretty girly.
Further into the more congested section of Chinatown, we found that there were these restaurants with big fishtanks in the window, and we spent, like, 15 minutes staring at the fish at one of them. There was this enormous lobster with claws the thickness of my arms. And, there was this huge crab with barnacles growing on its shell. This guy walked by & looked at the fish & he said he wouldn't want to eat the crab because of the barnacles. He said the crab must have lived at the bottom of the ocean for a very long time for those barnacles to grow, so the meat must be very tough & that maybe the crab was just for show. In the upper left corner tank, there were these fish that were almost completely flat, but very tall from bottom to top, and pretty long (maybe 8-10 inches). They would sometimes get pushed onto their sides by a current, even in that small tank. And, they more or less stared out from the glass. If you put your finger to the glass, they would gravitate towards it, and they would follow your finger if you moved it. The weirdest thing, though, was their lips. They had almost human lips, very thick, and tiny little teeth, two at the bottom, and two at the top. It was such a strange feeling to stare at their faces like that. You couldn't help but be attracted to how alive they were. It made me happy to watch them. It sort of calmed me, and it made me feel better because I was very emotionally "zapped" from the weekend with Scott and with all the drama.
Oh, and on the way out of Chinatown, we saw these boys hitting baseballs in a cement yard. We watched one of the boys pitch several pitches that were too high or just clearly out of the strike zone. This one boy was swinging at balls pitched to his shoulder, and Joe said the pitcher needed to release the ball later. I asked if he wanted to tell the kid, and he said it was like a fever or an itch. He wanted so badly to coach the boys, to just give them a few pointers, because baseball is one of his realms. But, he didn't. That would have been breaking a taboo.
Right now, I am at work listening to "The Joshua Tree" by U2. I remember listening to this on tape on the walk from the bus stop when I was in middle school. I remember walking past the manicured lawns down to my street, which wasn't so nice, to my house, where the lawn always needed to be cut. I was very paranoid about our lawn because my grandma made a comment once when she rode in the car with my father to drop us off after we spent the weekend with him. She probably wanted to see what the house looked like since the divorce. She said, "It's a shame how people just don't take care of their homes anymore like they used to." I was devastated & embarrassed & I designated myself as the household groundskeeper. I mowed the lawn and trimmed the bushes in the planter, and I resented the fact that if I didn't do it, nobody would.
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Joe & I went down to Chinatown yesterday afternoon. It was a beautiful, perfect September afternoon. To get there, we walked through the Lower East Side, down by the Williamsburg Bridge, down streets I don't walk down very often: Elizabeth, Clinton, Ludlow, Rivington.
There's this AIDS hospital on Rivington, a little further west from where we were walking yesterday. I've been there twice with this chorus I sometimes sing with. I remember that the first time I went, I expected the patients to be like AIDS patients are in the movies & in theater: upper class, flamboyently gay, mostly white, with an appreciation for show tunes and artistic talent. Seriously. I thought they would be like the cast for a musical, or something. But, they are very sickly looking & very thin men. They are, of course, of all colors, mostly middle-aged, and they mostly seem poor.
It's funny that I didn't even realize what I expected until I got there. It's like that Gwendolyn Brooks poem, "The Lovers of the Poor" (http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?45442B7C000C070C0E75) where she criticizes the ladies who want to donate money to the poor for being repulsed by (or at least afraid of) the people they are trying to help. It's a very interesting poem, and I admit there's something of that in me -- probably in everyone. I want to help people by donating my time & energy, but I don't want to have see any of the ugliness. I don't want to be uncomfortable. I don't say this out of guilt, just honesty.
So, anyway, we walked through the LES & down toward the Manhattan Bridge, which has these amazing marble sculptures on its entrance and benches to sit on cut into the marble. It's really, really lovely -- statues of Greek or Roman-looking figures, gorgoyles, flowers that look like they are floating on a pond. We sat down on one of the benches and discussed the wedding we'd been to the night before, which we'd been discussing the entire day. His cousin Mindy got really wasted drunk at the wedding and peed on herself on the way home. His other cousin Scott had a fit but then proceeded to get completely wasted himself in the hotel afterward.
Oh, Mindy! She's only 23 (almost 24) and she has this beautiful brown mole on her face, right to the left of her nose. And, she was carrying this sheer black scarf, which she wrapped around her neck and then around her arms, and which she used to keep herself warm when it got a little chilly. Mindy had so much fun on the dance floor. She just danced & danced. She requested "Shoop" by Salt 'n Pepper. She smoked a hundred cigarettes. She has this great, gleeful laugh.
Mindy & Joe's sister are one month apart. Apparently, their mothers had a contest of who could get pregnant first. The four kids grew up together. Their moms are twin sisters, and their dads used to be friends. Now, Mindy & Scott's parents are divorced, and Joe's father is no longer friends with their father. Scott is an obnoxious, disrespectful, loud, inconsiderate drunk. Mindy is a troubled, sad, charming, beautiful drunk. It's very sad. They're both in danger of destroying themselves. Apparently, Mindy has attempted suicide, and Scott is just verbally violent. Everytime he opens his mouth, he shouts obscenities and puts people down. He's so angry. The closest thing I've heard to anything nice coming out of his mouth is when he quotes from movies. And, he thinks in extremes. I asked him to move the bottles of beer from the sink to the ice bucket so that I could brush my teeth, and he said, "I know I'm a total loser. There are too many beers in there right now, but I'll move them soon. I know where you're coming from," but he didn't move them!
Oh, but I'm not doing a good job describing all this. I'm not giving enough information to make it interesting and complex. I really do want to write about it, though.
So, yes, yesterday... I want to get to the part about Chinatown, which is right off the Manhattan Bridge. We found the bus ticket booth, where you can get a ticket to Boston for $10 each way (!!!), so Joe & I are going to go up there sometime on a Saturday for the day. There's also a bus to Washington, D.C. for about the same price. We walked past these wholesale restaurant supply stores, and I went into one because, well, I get really excited about kitchen supplies. This 9 or 10 year old girl (or boy?) approached me as soon as I entered the store & asked me if she could help me. Isn't she too young to be a clerk? She was quite androgynous, but I think her haircut gave her away. It was one of those just-past-the-ear, cute, pixie cuts, which looked pretty girly.
Further into the more congested section of Chinatown, we found that there were these restaurants with big fishtanks in the window, and we spent, like, 15 minutes staring at the fish at one of them. There was this enormous lobster with claws the thickness of my arms. And, there was this huge crab with barnacles growing on its shell. This guy walked by & looked at the fish & he said he wouldn't want to eat the crab because of the barnacles. He said the crab must have lived at the bottom of the ocean for a very long time for those barnacles to grow, so the meat must be very tough & that maybe the crab was just for show. In the upper left corner tank, there were these fish that were almost completely flat, but very tall from bottom to top, and pretty long (maybe 8-10 inches). They would sometimes get pushed onto their sides by a current, even in that small tank. And, they more or less stared out from the glass. If you put your finger to the glass, they would gravitate towards it, and they would follow your finger if you moved it. The weirdest thing, though, was their lips. They had almost human lips, very thick, and tiny little teeth, two at the bottom, and two at the top. It was such a strange feeling to stare at their faces like that. You couldn't help but be attracted to how alive they were. It made me happy to watch them. It sort of calmed me, and it made me feel better because I was very emotionally "zapped" from the weekend with Scott and with all the drama.
Oh, and on the way out of Chinatown, we saw these boys hitting baseballs in a cement yard. We watched one of the boys pitch several pitches that were too high or just clearly out of the strike zone. This one boy was swinging at balls pitched to his shoulder, and Joe said the pitcher needed to release the ball later. I asked if he wanted to tell the kid, and he said it was like a fever or an itch. He wanted so badly to coach the boys, to just give them a few pointers, because baseball is one of his realms. But, he didn't. That would have been breaking a taboo.
Right now, I am at work listening to "The Joshua Tree" by U2. I remember listening to this on tape on the walk from the bus stop when I was in middle school. I remember walking past the manicured lawns down to my street, which wasn't so nice, to my house, where the lawn always needed to be cut. I was very paranoid about our lawn because my grandma made a comment once when she rode in the car with my father to drop us off after we spent the weekend with him. She probably wanted to see what the house looked like since the divorce. She said, "It's a shame how people just don't take care of their homes anymore like they used to." I was devastated & embarrassed & I designated myself as the household groundskeeper. I mowed the lawn and trimmed the bushes in the planter, and I resented the fact that if I didn't do it, nobody would.
