On the Town
The city makes a strong impression on a boy. Of course, a boy is impressed by everything, all around him and at all times, and never less than strongly; new to the world, the very light burnishes his retinas, like a puppy he would spend his first few days asleep, the folds of his eyelids soldered to his zygomatics, a bundle of skin, only deigning to grace the world with his vision, and not the converse, when the world and a fat starchy nipple are one—in other words, when the world is finally deserving of his vision. And even then—probably better to stay closed. Still we say, “the city makes a strong impression on a boy”—that and other rot. Because small subsets of truth like this make a strong impression on us. Certainly a stronger impression, than would the whole truth and nothing but: everything makes a strong impression on everything.
I first came to New York when I was four years old. Or somewhere around then—when you’re four years old, you might as well be seven, and really, the only thing we can be absolutely sure of is you weren’t two. If you were two you wouldn’t remember it (unless, of course, you’re making all this up anyway, none of this ever happened, no, and you were never four at all!) and if you had been eight, you would have remembered it better. So we split the difference and call it four. In a better system, a better world, we’d define our life by epochs and the general impression they hold for us—I was about yea high… Meterologists tell us the length of a year is determined by the path of the globe as it travels around the sun, but if nobody’d ever told me, I don’t think I would have picked up on that myself, truth be told. Call a spade a spade: the sun is what disappears in autumn and engenders in spring, and we should kill it like vermin in summer and coax it like infants in winter—and never, ever, ever should we look it in the eye…
The important thing is that I had come to New York. It was when I was about yea high, and the city made a strong impression on me. Everything presses in on all sides, and quite strongly, and by the time we’ve matriculated youth and we’re eighteen and ready to die we’ll be about the size of an emaciated rat stuck between four cloying, ever breaching walls, with just enough room to maybe breath, definitely not move our arms, and to not be impressed anymore.
We were all walking around Times Square, Mom, Dad, and me—and when I first saw the teems of people wringing like an old Jew’s hands, I clenched on to my dad like I’d never let go, afraid of getting lost in the crowd. It was a rational fear: at four, and even at seven, I would have been nothing like capable of holding my own in a city like New York, or even so much as the tiny city of Boise, where we were visiting from. First, I had no resources—and second, I just had no street smarts. My one and only recourse would have been to find them again; and if my parents became for any reason indisposed in the time since they lost me, as far as luck goes, I would have been fresh out.
My dad used to have a line about New York traffic—people don’t honk because they think it will work, they do it to let off steam. He might have even said it on that very trip. He often repeated himself. But why stop at honking? Every fucking thing everyone does in this fucking city, whether polite or ornery, is not an expression of the utility of the act itself, but a reflection on the person enacting it. Either they’re angry and they’re letting off steam under the misguided notion that it won’t just make them angrier, or they’re angry, pent-up, and hypodermically frustrated and they’re letting off steam by showing someone a kindness. Or, most often, they’re angry and they’re hoping to cope by showing a kindness, by making a big show of showing a kindness, to someone who’s even angrier—just to piss the other person off more, daring the other person to get mad at them so that they can get all self-righteous and say hey, what a way to treat someone who’s showing you a kindness! and storm off in a huff—and that’s how they’re letting off steam. It’s not just the kids, not just the little boys—this city, and everything else around us is pressing in on us, in and down, always, and a trip to the country or even a full on move to the Caucasus Mountains won’t help a bit. Every single thing we do, is a letting off of steam—every word out of every mouth is nothing but base justification—an excuse to feel self-righteous even among all the muck of the toil and trouble—we’re all enthusiastically building the Tower of Babel together, but each for our own reasons, hence why, when the conversation scatters, and we discover we have been building straight up towards nothing, we also discover we’re all speaking in wildly different tongues, and have been this entire time—an excuse to pat ourselves on the back. And as Louis Pasteur or some other surely quite great engineer or scientist or world-builder has done well to have taught us—steam begets steam.
When you move to New York, and don’t have any real reason for doing so, there’s a certain sense of “putting on airs” to it—of frivolity. All I know is that when I moved here I had this outsizèdly romantic image of New York in my head, but, more importantly, this outsizèdly romantic image of myself. I decided, right out of college, that I was going to be a writer, an artist—and also a great artist, and also the best writer to have ever lived. And New York was a city that I knew a lot of great writers (I would have said a lot of other great writers) had inhabited.
I wanted to live here no matter how uncomfortably, and uncomfortable it was, for a while there—but despite a constitutionally low tolerance for pain, no amount of discomfort could have disrupted my sheer tyranny of will. When I was still living at home I remember my mother, developed an interest in jogging—around the time unhappily that I was in middle school. Unhappily because it meant I still had eighteen-minus-however-old-I-was more years before I could be done with this vicarious “interest” of hers; the practical effect of which was that our whole family suddenly found itself participating in such abominations as 10Ks and fun runs, often hosted by a king’s ransom of motley local mainstays like the somehow-still-operative local radio station and the somehow-still-operative local news channel, that no one had respectively listened to or watched since the advent of the internet some several decades back, and the local grocery chain and one or two local gyms, and of course by the city, and of course by the state, and by any number of other irrelevant and penny-pinching organizations, each additional share of funding lightening the load of the last. They would always throw these events on the day of some big holiday, all of which take place in the most putrified dead of winter, ask me how I know. The event would kick off at a cool and ungodly six, seven, or five AM. For my part, they were fun walks, and instead of 10Ks I’d duck under the ropes and finish up with a two-to-three “K” stroll through downtown Boise instead. But I digress.
Whenever my mother, whose genes I share, remember, decides to take an interest in something—that something is finished. She kills it with her adamancy, her unrelenting grip, like Lenny and his puppies from Of Mice and Men. (Perhaps you will also recall that by novel’s end, Lenny had still not markedly improved himself in the manner of fondling his puppies.) What she lacks in effort she makes up for with expense, none of which is spared in her quest to procure every necessary and unnecessary accoutrement associated with her new interest, in this case, jogging. She got top-of-the-line new shoes, and since all of us were to jog with her, she got top-of-the-line new shoes for us all. None of us were consulted; she already knew our sizes. She bought a small studded rubber ball which she could roll around with her feet and massage the kinks out after one of her trademark one-mile, twenty-minute-pace gruellers, and also a narrow rod with lots of slightly bigger rods encasing and jangling around on it which she could lie down on and do the same for her back. She bought a pair of weights that wrapped around her hands, meant for runners to train their forearms. I believe she wore them only once, having discovered her newly purchased stats-keeping GPS-enabled runner’s watch was weight enough. Her wardrobe was absolutely rejiggered, as the stretchy and heft-absorbing workout clothes that used to constitute her unchanging uniform before were replaced by stretchy, heft-absorbent workout clothes in brand-new neon colors… Suddenly our kitchen pantry was stocked with weird brand-new gold-and-crimson packages of “energy bars” and “energy chews” and electrolytes, the runner’s friend, were the word of the day.
My mother in sum lived breathed and ate jogging—which would have been fine on its own, if only she didn’t make me do it too! She could have even just made the others do it, Dad and my brothers, it wouldn’t have bothered me… And by the bye, did my mother’s mile time ever squeak past the twelve- or thirteen-minute mark, no, decidedly not. Her real talent was always going to be where she spent the most of her energy, which is to say, in thinking about jogging, never actually in jogging itself. There’s probably some economic theorem that says as much: “the sectors that will develop the most are the sectors where you devote the most resources.” My mother was a persnickety planner. But after she was all done—after she had arrived at that veil beyond which no planning could any longer obtain, the execution of all these her plans was a matter of mere indifference. I don’t even think she liked jogging. Ah, but alas—that wasn’t the point.
Besides the more or less superficial, relatively, provisions my mother diligently procured at this time—shoes for the feet, electrolytes for the soul—shorts for the upper leg and tights for the middle and lower—this for that particular concern and that for this one—she also saw to the subtler and more tertiary concerns of the whole body. Regimens were self-administered and empty swatches of schedule were duly booked up: like with vinyasa yoga, which centered her whole body so that her whole body might be centered while running (she did have this atrocious habit of running with her ass out, neck forward, like a velociraptor, albeit a wizened and ultimately slow one). “Vinyasa stands in opposition to hatha,” I’m reading on one website. And so it does. But the reason I bring it up is that vinyasa, led her to Pilates, and, God smite me, Pilates must have been the death of me at that age…
My mother is an unnoticeable person in general but for some reason or another, her vinyasa instructor, sage, swami, or maestro singled her out one day and advised her that she was actually a better fit for Pilates; and my mother—never one to take on trust, the words of a sage—called the swami’s bluff, and signed up for a whole new regimen. Truth be told, I think she’d been looking for a little guidance of just this sort, and it was a good excuse to belittle and subsume herself, finally, into someone else’s care.
Pilates, in case you are not aware, is an uber-punctilious method of attending to every joint and fiber of the body in an effort to achieve perfection, yes, perhaps even moral perfection, by way of counter-corrections of the mind, which will be constant, and which hopefully after enough training will fill your mind completely. Like Buddhism it increases awareness, but unlike Buddhism, it keeps it there. The way you sit, the way you stand, the way you hold your shoulders and the way your head sits most naturally atop your neck are all misaligned, and must all be realigned—until everything from the angles at which your toes jut out your feet, to that at which the hairs prick out of your scalp—and especially, the angle of the spine in between, naturally crooked and naturally deformed, like an original sin—is squared into a perfectly straight line. Yes, perfection would be achieved… or so was my mother’s plan. The funny thing is, though, that when so stocked up with calculus, physiology, and geometry, distances and tangles and minor cracks and crags and measurements, your head will have no room left for things like actually operating the body the operation of which you are ever so anxious to maximize the efficiency of. All the same, my mother persisted in her cult-like reeducation at the hands, the stern hands, of her Pilates instructor, a man this time. (Very stern indeed… I believe it was a German who came up with the method initially—a Nazi.) And how my mother’s spine was so much like putty in this good gentleman’s hands! She was so caught up in Pilates, she even began pronouncing the name of the judge under whom Jesus was crucified after the German and not the Roman fashion. “Pontius Pila-tee.” This would have been at “morning prayer” around the kitchen table, and we were probably reading from a passage about the Lord’s hopeful acquittal. Yes, my family used to perform daily “morning prayers,” like something out of a prairie… They always included readings of the liturgy. Whenever it was my turn to read—and I always offered to do so—you’ll soon see why—I would only read every other sentence, effectively cutting “morning prayer” time in half. No one was ever once the wiser. (Whenever it was Mom’s turn, she stumbled through the day’s passage with all the earnest incompetence of that one pupil every teacher can’t help but despise no matter how guilty they feel about it.) She had started trying to point out in the animal kingdom what she could never manage to point out in herself: one time, on a hike, she said of a deer with its legs splayed wildly in mid-stride that it needed to straighten its back.
As I said, she had terrible running form, more catatonic waddle than canter, and you’d think a little cognizance on some of these points would do her good, but no—where she used to run like a velociraptor she now ran like a corpse, with the afterthought jerks and grimaces you’d more commonly associate with rigor mortis. She was so busy trying to remember everything they drilled her with in Pilates class, that she could hardly get a stride going at all. Oh, and how she beat herself up about it! Not about how she could no longer be said to be running—but at how she figured she wasn’t remembering right. But even if she were to have remembered everything her Pilates instructor imparted to her down to the last detail, and for all I know it she probably had—that is, if she studied anything like as diligently as she used to expect me to study, as young as in the fifth grade, keeping me up all night, quizzing me on every detail, nigh every misprint from my school textbooks—I doubt it would have helped. If I have a low tolerance for pain, and I do, I got it from my mother, and hers is, if anything, even lower. But it didn’t matter how uncomfortable clinching and spasming her body like that must have felt; what mattered, to my mother at least, was that she was uncomfortable in the way she preferred, and, more importantly, was uncomfortable in the way prescribed to her by those who are would be in a position to know. In a world so rife with discomfort such that discomfort is unavoidable, one must pick one’s poison. One must choose which discomforts he or she can reasonably live with. Even just one discomfort—be that it may burn with the heat of a thousand others.
And that’s how I feel about living in New York. What machinations brought me here in the first place, I’ve forgotten. All that remains is the will… The will and the torment. Even as year by year the bodice for which I’ve fit myself grows tighter, and tighter—my body, denser and denser, like matter approaching the event horizon, longing for release…
If a cogwheel that turns itself can be considered a perpetual motion machine, even though its perpetual motion will in fact one day be arrested once the sun explodes, taking everything with it, then New York City should rightly be called one too—only better, because unlike the perpetual motion machine of legend, New York actually exists.