Beneath my window, children are screaming. Their howls are petty and mindless and seem mainly to be lamentations over an insufficiency at inflicting pain.
Wells Tower
Wells Tower's stories have appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney's and Harper's, and he was awarded the Plimpton Discovery Prize from the Paris Review. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is his first book.
My father calls, recounting a hike he took with a friend who jumped into a pool so cold that he opened his jaw wide with the shock of it, and it was stuck like that until our cousin, a veterinarian, could work the hinge back into operation. That was a startled man.
Monday
Today is the first really clement day of the year, and there is an accident outside my window on Norman Avenue. A white minivan has T-boned a motorcycle. An ample spill of gasoline pours from the capsized bike into the storm drain. The onlookers wear short sleeves, lured here, perhaps, by the fragrance of spilled fuel which, a close cousin of lighter fluid, is a fragrance of summer.
A shopkeeper tows trash cans into the street to form a perimeter around the fallen bike. The injured motorcyclist sits on the curb in his leathers, not badly hurt. Fire trucks arrive, and the firemen swarm the scene with hooks and axes, as thought there is no problem that cannot be made more manageable for being chopped into small bits.
Assorted neighborhood blowhards and doorway denizens, full of opinions about vehicles and traffic safety, ply the firemen with their interpretation of the events. The First Responders slide an orange litter under the motorcycle man and load him onto a cushioned gurney, its sheet a perfect, glowing white. The patient's head is strapped to the gurney with a piece of gauze taken from a plastic packet. He will spend hours in the hospital on this gentle day at winter's end. The firemen remove the capsized bike by scrumming around it, ten of them perhaps, carrying it off like ants ferrying away a beetle's corpse. The firemen depart, and the afternoon is surrendered to the quotidian street sounds of horns and sidewalk chatter. The day now resumes, and the people on the street mill around with the air of mild bereavement that overcomes us on leaving the theater, the sensation that life of an unspecial variety must now resume its course.
Tuesday
Oh, I do not have children, and I am very sorry future daughter or son of mine, but at this particular moment, I am not anxious to have them. Unborn children, let me say that I have no general objection to small people as a class. It's simply that there is an abundance of uncompelling ambassadors of your kind here on Norman Avenue. Beneath my window, children are screaming. Their howls are petty and mindless and seem mainly to be lamentations over an insufficiency at inflicting pain. "I HATE YOU!" is what I hear again and again, as the children endeavor to push one another into traffic. Ultimately, the weeping starts and an angry parent lugs the children indoors. My cat sits in the windowsill and takes in the spectacle.
That evening, I go out and have drinks with a guy I know. He is also unmarried, also childless. He has had many drinks before our meeting, and after he has had several more, he leans into the table and poses this question to me, "If phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny, is it not also true that reproductive reluctance among our friends here in the 21st century recapitulates the species' mounting knowledge of its own untenability?"
Wednesday
Coffee, oatmeal, shower, work, which I give up on early to have an evening of media. Here is a superb film: Let the Right One In. It is the tale of a twelve year old boy who falls in love with a vampire who ultimately helps him negotiate some bully perils. There is much gore and sorrow in the film, though in my opinion the most heartbreaking moment is a scene of the child in a swimming pool, treading water at the feet of a bully whom he wrongly believes to be his friend. What is so heartbreaking about it is the way the child opens his mouth to let the pool water flow into his cheeks, to savor its voluptuous mouth feel before expelling it gently over his chin. I remember marveling at swimming pools as a child, that sensation of greed and wealth at having all of that water--clean, faintly sweet, somehow more special and valuable for all its chemical additives--at my body's disposal, the thrill of glorying in it. The boy avoids the worst of the bullying, but his smiling, vulnerable gulping puts a pained knot in my chest to recall it, now many hours after the credits have rolled.
Later in the evening, I watch a talk show. It is an interview with Christina Applegate, a famous low tart of American yore. The host is saying something like, "A lot of people come on this show to say nothing at all, but you have a real story here, don't you? You had an illness you were dealing with."
And Ms. Applegate looks sort of freaked out. "Yes, I had breast cancer last year." She, the former blonde starlet over whom a generation of American teenagers wrung themselves callused, explains that she underwent a double mastectomy, and there is a smattering of applause, and she and the host talk very earnestly, applauding her surgery as a triumph of substance, of rising to life's true strife, over the stupidity and insubstantiality of celebrity. But the electric silence in the studio is not reverential silence honoring her struggle. Rather, it contemplates a more dire question: What becomes of an actress much of whose fame had to do with her breasts after those breasts are removed? Ms. Applegate looks as purely frightened as anyone I've ever seen.
Thursday
On this day, a morning of mizzling rain, I am struck by the unremarkable, bitter thought that to live in New York is to accept a constitution of ugliness and rancor. Its advocates include: a whey faced man on McGuinness Boulevard flagrantly tossing onto the sidewalk the oil spangled tissue from his pizza slice; the Japanese man prowling the locker room at the YMCA, a dark tumbleweed of public hair carefully arrange to blowse over the band of his underpants (a display of mating plumage? A special Far Eastern method of intimate drying?); the surprisingly well rendered graffito of a male genital on the Nassau G train subway platform (has this already been widely observed: the likeness between the convergent lobes of the glans and the convergent gill plates of a fish's throat?) The fat policeman on the 14th St C train platform, interrogating a toothless man for no apparent purpose beyond the pleasure of sadism. He questions and mocks the man with a kind of helpless cruelty, seems unable to resist an opportunity to wield his power in the way that the full fed glutton, gut creaking with surfeit, cannot resist another handful of peanuts. The incident at the Teleon Café on 40th Street and 8th, in which a woman rises to use the restroom. She tries the door--locked--and is answered by a thundering fist from within. A freighted hush settles on the dining room. Soon the toilet's occupant emerges. He is tall, imperious, balding. He goes to a table of working folk and asks them if it was one of their party who dared interrupt his ablutions. He seems prepared to subject the entire room to an inquisition, possibly violence. He stalks out. The man is perhaps 35, and wears a hearing aid. I am glad.
But later in the afternoon, the city revisits the day's themes--venery, stridency, deafness--and offers this wondrous new arrangement: an elderly, white whiskered man in the grand 42nd Street branch of the New York Public Library, eighty five years old if he is a day, wearing a hearing aid, studying a volume of poetry, open to a piece entitled, "Boi, Let Me Lick Your Pussy."
Friday
It is a great challenge to buy bagged ice cubes in my neighborhood, but I prefer them. No sense of guilt at returning unfilled trays to the freezer. Nor does the ice assume the latent freezer aromas that leave one sniffing and grimacing at one's beverage. I go first to the store up the street, run by a trio of handsome Polish women about whom there is something grim and pleasureless but also capable and lovely. Theirs is the cleanest shop on the block. But they have no ice. I venture, very grudgingly, into the bodega beneath my apartment, a terrible store, run by a Puerto Rican man. It is an establishment containing bare shelves, a few dusty cans of tuna fish and a grouchy cat. No ice there. So I go down the block, to another shop, run by Pakistanis. They do have ice, but while I am waiting in line, the counterman enters into contretemps with a red faced man who is smoking in his store. This customer is familiar to him. "Cigarette outside!" the counterman says.
"Fuck you! You are asshole!" the smoker retorts.
"No you are fucking asshole!" says the counterman.
Ultimately, the smoker leaves, only to perch on an upended milk crate in front of the store, his personal throne. He is out there night and day, and I have seen this little sketch played out several times in recent months. "How does this work with you guys?" I ask him. "He comes in here and yells at you. You yell back, yet he's always here."
The counterman laughs. "He is okay. I have known him three years. Sometime he always drink, but he is not bad."
Down the street, a new deli is opening. It is called Brooklyn Standard and it has very chic design and promises to sell free trade coffee and sustainable groceries and artisanal such and such. They will have ice and few public contretemps, I am guessing. I am also guessing that to the long term residents of this neighborhood, Brooklyn Standard will seem a more noxious presence than legions of cussing smoking men and ice that tastes of dirty freezers.
Saturday
Nothing to report today, merely much time in my apartment, and the realization that the nicks and scratches inflicted on me by my murderous cat have left me looking like a meth addict.
My father calls, recounting a hike he took with a friend who jumped into a pool so cold that he opened his jaw wide with the shock of it, and it was stuck like that until our cousin, a veterinarian, could work the hinge back into operation. That was a startled man.
A delivery order for sushi. A question: does the pink, micro-Seurat stippling on the shrimp indicate that the shrimp is genuine? Or is there is there a poor soul in the Third World somewhere who applies Zip-A-Tone stipples to whitefish to earn his daily bread?
Sunday
Today, I take the time to catch up on correspondence. A sample:
Air New Zealand
Contact Centre
Private Bag 93537
Takapuna
North Shore City 0740
Dear Air New Zealand:
Oh, Air New Zealand. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I haven't written until now, so many months after we did that business together. But I miss you. I really do, and not just because I'm sort of getting itchy to fly you again. Probably this August. But let's don't stress. We'll talk about the future later. Here is what I really want to say: you're the best. You are tops. Only now am I starting to understand why there is not an Annual Airline Quality Derby among international carriers. It is because you are so much better than every other airline in the world that if another airline was somehow bullied into going toe-to-toe with you in one of these so-called Quality Derbies, that rival airline would probably go ahead and commit a screaming nosedive into, say, the Sydney Opera House, costing mucho bucks and countless lives, rather than be shamed by your superior quality.
Why are you so superior in my book? Because when I flew to Melbourne on you last December, I left my aviator shades on you. I left my cellular phone on you, too. Then, flying home a week later, I asked a member of your service corps if they'd seen these items, and blammo! The items were laid on me within about twenty minutes of my initial query. I don't think anyone had worn the shades in my absence. Sure, they were a little greasy, but probably that was my grease. My cell phone bill was a little higher after that trip, so I guess there's a possibility that someone had perpetrated some calls or satellite uplinks on it, but guess what: I don't care.
Yours,
Wells Tower
Tuesday, 7 April, 2009
In My week
- Charlotte Grimshaw
- Susan Hill
- Ed Hollis
- Ali Sethi
- Wells Tower
- Con Coughlin
- Dirk Wittenborn
- Kathleen Kent
- Daniel Everett
- Mark Crick
- Glyn Maxwell
- Rabih Alameddine
- Nicholas Hogg
- Charles Boyle
- Mohammed Hanif
- Sarah Hall
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