Sitting in the office, obsessively refreshing the workstream. Empty, empty, empty. Trying to waste time. The same old, bank balances, stock quotes, tired pointless shit. Even the news God forbid. And now this. Walking up and down the hallways, the tight-lipped smile at those you don’t know, the hey and knowing look to those you do. I go to the fridge in the kitchen area and take a Diet Pepsi from the rows upon rows of them. Like in a corner store you have to reach in back for the cold ones. Downstairs right by the door workmen are jackhammering, little chips of sidewalk fly past the flimsy safety tape to sully the pants and skirts of passersby.

Took the train from a different station, 15th Street. As I descended onto the platform I wondered how much of a different scene it was. People getting high and fucking maybe. It did feel different though. It seemed like you’d be less likely to get pushed in front of a train by the mentally ill. But these things can be deceiving.

Felt out of sorts most of the day as is often the case with Mondays. And this despite episodes of good fortune, such as finding that the obstruction in the vacuum cleaner hose was near the nozzle and easy to remove. You have to grab what you can get in this life.

In the early afternoon it poured for no apparent reason, and stopped. One of those summer storms when the rain comes in silvery strands and nothing gets wet.

We went to the Red Hook pool where the lifeguards sit across from each other in their tall chairs and fiddle with their whistles and signal to each other in some made-up sign language, or maybe it’s real sign language, I don’t know. City pools might be the last place on earth where everyone follows the rules. No phones, no hats. Only bottled water to drink. They wouldn’t know if it was full of vodka, I thought when I walked by the locker room guard with mine.

The Entreprise - 60

At night more than ever I sought oblivion. At the time I would have called it freedom. 

Pam had a late-summer roof party and I got wasted and went to McDonald’s and got on the bus back uptown, drifted off and woke up at 120th and Adam Clayton Boulevard. Walking back down in the streetlights and the moonlight was like a dream of old New York. Beautiful buildings seemingly intact, preserved not by renovation but by some benign force. Walls bathed in yellow glow. Street life here and there, people on stoops, on the sidewalk in little groups.

Before long the steam pipes hissed and gurgled to signal the changing of the seasons. Alan said he got a deal on a new office space downtown by the river. We assumed this really meant the end. A skeleton crew to guide the enterprise into a quiet, thrifty failure in a cramped space in a bad part of town. Except it wasn’t a bad part of town when you think about it. The top of Tribeca, on the corner of Greenwich and Canal. In any other city the blocks and blocks of warehouses and secondhand shops would mean you got lost on the wrong side of the tracks. Here it was where movie stars renovated industrial spaces into massive homes. The kind of real estate that rich people buy even though it’s in a weird old building that was configured for button sewing or shoe manufacture. They pay whatever for it, they put up with the raw walls and haphazardly situated columns. The hideously high ceilings. The rich have the alchemical ability to transform these very drawbacks and inconveniences into symbols of status and privilege. Look at my gigantic loft with the renovated period flooring. The floor above us was the home of a jeweler. I recognized the name of my ophthalmologist on the buzzer in the lobby. He occupied the floor below us with his young family. Our space too was vast. Everyone got a desk by a window. There was a kitchen and a separate room with a mattress on the floor should anyone have a need for one reason or another. Andre set to work repairing ethernet cables and setting up the modem. Almost like we had a purpose.

Each morning I walked west down Canal from the station. Through Chinatown, past the watercolor calligraphers, the shops of knockoffs. The street was intimate; a distinct, self-sustaining community. A woman swept dust out of her store and returned the dustpan and broom to a store a few doors down. Businesses on top of each other and you don’t know what to buy or who to buy it from but hang around a while and someone’ll sell you something. Shops with “electronics” and “audio” in their names appeared to have nothing but fake shoes and bags.

Mostly we hung out and went out for long, drinky lunches, the Argentine place down Greenwich or the Ear Bar most of the time, somewhere else if we got bored. If Alan wasn’t around we’d play guitar and sing. Erupt in mad fits of cursing. But it probably wouldn’t have mattered if he was around. One day I made a point to remember this time forever, to realize life would never be the same again, so weird and wonderful. It was hard, maybe impossible, to grasp it in the moment. But there’d come a day I’d look back and know.

Time stretched out in my early morning dreams to the point that I was sure I was oversleeping by hours; it had to be past noon. But I opened my eyes and it was seven something. When I opened them again it was a little past nine.

It was a day of mundane tasks: head shaving, box opening, taking out the trash. The take a book leave a book. I perused the titles and opened up an anthology by school kids called “Growing Up in Park Slope.” In the middle of the page was a sort of prose poem about Grandma having a stroke. I superstitiously thought of reading something else before closing the book, something happy, but I didn’t. I left Raggedy Ann and Andy and Grisham and something else, taking nothing.

We didn’t talk too long about it. S. thinks a woman can’t win in America. Maybe but we have to try. 

How I love to watch the Tour de France, not for the racing but the scenery, the nothing restaurants in the middle of little towns, the glorious mountains and waterfalls, people perched on steep hills, almost tumbling into the road that’s painted with riders’ names, a family of five wearing polka dot jerseys, the details.

Just as we left the roof the first drops were falling and it rained hard and stopped again for the fireworks, as though on schedule. The explosions were near and far but always obstructed by buildings and trees. Our next door neighbor or the one next to that set off some bottle rockets, whistling and popping and nothing. Tentative, spectral silhouettes suddenly appeared on roofs where you never saw people before, and then they went away again.

I switched to the crowded A heading back from work, at Canal. I could tell from the platform already that there was a weird situation inside the car, a space not properly occupied by bodies. When I entered I saw it was a Citibike with two teens sitting on it, one on the front wheel, one straddling the seat, the one on the wheel younger, maybe fifteen. They smelled of smoke like they’d just been getting high. I brushed by the younger one to the left with a little difficulty and stood in the little space that was left between them and the end of the car, the seats occupied and a couple other people standing.

It was hard to ignore the inappropriateness of this massive object, the heavy, clumsy Citibike, in this context. It could only have been found or stolen by these guys—there’s no other reason for it to be here. Yet I watched everyone ignore it, so I did too. Then I perceived the young kid trying to get my attention. I pulled a wired earbud out of my right ear, warily, and nodded at him.

“Are you listening to me?” he asked.

I nodded.

“If you want, I can make your earbuds wireless,” he declared, making a snip-snip gesture with his fingers. “Just cut ‘em off.”

I shook my head and smiled. “Nah, I’m good,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

At this point I expected I don’t know what. Laughter. From him, from both of them—derisive laughter. It was funny after all. Here I am, the only person left in the world wearing dumbass wired earbuds. The kid says, lemme help you out. I can make ‘em wireless. Snip snip. It was funny what he said and I waited for him to laugh. He did not.

“OK,” he said airily, and looked away. As though he’d I dunno, just offered me a stick of gum. Nothing in his demeanor indicated that he was the least bit insincere. His friend didn’t react, or wasn’t paying attention. At the next stop the older kid threw an empty plastic bottle out onto the platform just as the doors were closing. It just missed a woman walking by and clattered around on the concrete. A small insolent gesture. The younger kid didn’t seem to watch or care.

At Jay Street I said excuse me as I got back out and that was all, I was out on the platform with everybody else, just switching to another train.