Here I am because I said I’d be here.

A day of avoiding news and watching unused credits return to my account. The gentle timing out. A misting rain in this park this morning, making a wide arcs around the other runners. The grass in the ball fields a little overgrown and too green.

The Social Security Place

I love the long, zigzagging hallway, the barren decor. The beige linoleum floor and the outlets saying do not use. Each number called starts with a frightening burst of feedback. I was 987. 

The man on the other side of the window looked so bored I thought he was going to turn me down and send me home. For no reason. Only that it was the only appropriate gesture for someone so radically detached from what he’s doing. He asked me for this, he asked for that. Jackie’s passport. Mine. I sat at the edge of the chair and wondered if this was a mistake. I need to recalibrate my posture, my speech, I thought, to better match his affect. I eased back an inch or two.

“Here’s your receipt,” he said suddenly. “I suggest you keep it. You’ll get the card in seven to ten business days.”

I thanked him, what’s the word. Not warmly. Emphatically. I gathered up my things, the birth certificate, the passports. Trying not to linger. And then I turned around and walked away.

Sometimes outside our window at night someone shouts out something strange and alarming. Like now: “Excuse me! Can I borrow your phone to call my dad?” With the strain of urgency in the voice, maybe fear. But when I get up to look out the window all I see is a solitary figure across the street, a young woman. She stands at the crosswalk for a moment and then turns to walk along the park. Like nothing.

Went to pick up my guitar today. When I was almost there, navigating the vast and bewildering crosswalks of the Atlantic Center, it occurred to me I didn’t have the little ticket Igor gave me when I dropped it off. Insurance, he called it. They couldn’t keep my guitar without giving me a ticket. “What’s the value?” he asked. I said five grand, what the hell. Coulda said one, coulda said ten. He handed me a receipt that said work order and had the estimate total, seven hundred something. At home I put it on my desk and forgot about it.

What if they demand it? What if they won’t give me back my guitar if I don’t produce it? I saw myself protesting furiously. That’s my guitar. Appealing to Igor. You know that’s my guitar. But it’s Guitar Center. All corporate and shit. Owned by God knows who. They do things by the book. No ticky, no guitar. I envisioned the altercation becoming savage, physical. I’m not leaving without my guitar! The security guards upstairs would be summoned down. What seems to be the problem? Sir? Sir? Motherfuckers calling me sir. I’d get my phone out, tremblingly call 911. No, not 911. That’s ridiculous. Clownish. I’m not making a fool of myself. No, I’d call the police. Explain in a measured voice that this place of business had stolen my guitar. 

When I went in Igor didn’t seem to recognize me. But he did. Then he gave me my guitar. I played it a little. Paid him and left.

There was a sort of breach in reality, in the numbness of a walk to the bus on a warm November morning. The car angled at me, forced by another on the other side. Their contact made a dull, plasticky crunch, not the bash of metal you’d expect. It rode up on the curb and past me a few inches away. I yelped. I felt it was my privilege—my duty—to yelp. The outside car, the transgressor, drove on through the roundabout. The inside one drove rapidly around it, cutting it off at the next light. I expected anger, maybe blows. Is that what I wanted? Anger and blows. After a time the cars proceeded to the next stretch of pavement and parked, emergencies on. The driver in front got out. Young guy. The one in back got out. Middle aged mom. She let out her kid and kissed her bye. She let out her dog and held it by the leash. And the two drivers spoke calmly, civilly, exchanging information on their phones.

I thought fuck it, I’ll go to the bar for fifteen minutes before picking up my kid. Johan’s last night. After all. I was so close to not going. I wanted not to go. I’d lined up all the reasons: exhaustion, late work, family. In the end there was a half hour window and I realized I was powerless not to go. I strode there quickly, emphatically. Imagining the scene. Maybe it’d be crowded, I wouldn’t even see him. Maybe he wouldn’t remember my name. All of these were possibilities. But I was going all the same. When I arrived the bar was subdued, just a half dozen people. Some gazing at the Mets on TV. At the far end Johan was chatting with a little group. When I got his attention he came right over and I said is it really your last night, he said yes, we shook hands and embraced. I bought him a shot. Mezcal for him and Jameson’s for me. I told him all the right things, how we’d miss him, how I had to see him one last time. Where was he headed? I asked. Imagining some far-off place, a young, untethered man’s adventure. Chile maybe. Thailand. Spain, Morocco. He said Manhattan. Some stupid-ass Irish bar in Hell’s Kitchen with a fiddly-diddle name. I wished him well. You’ll be missed, I said. He thanked me and we shook hands again and hugged and I threw a few extra dollars on the bar, not enough, and I walked back out.

In the Jay Street station I could smell bleach before I started climbing the stairs out. On the landing halfway there was an MTA employee with a bucket and a mop, cleaning something unspeakable. I walked as far around it as I could and emerged in the pitiless light of downtown Brooklyn, trash blowing down the street.

Google Maps told me to cut down a walkway and across a little urban park, a square hidden away from the streets. There were trees and benches and even a few people sitting. It seemed desolate. Lost and anonymous. A public space you’d find in some Second World city. I asked myself if I liked it or hated it. I liked it.

Dappled sunlight shone on the sloping street, occupied for now by grills and folding tables and kids drawing in chalk. People sat drinking beer, most on the building side but some, like us, by the graveyard. There was a space allotted for music: mic stands, speakers, drums up on the sidewalk.

Right now a duo played: a sax player in a dandyish leopard-skin suit and fancy hat and a guitar player dressed normal. They were pretty good. When they were done I spotted the sax player hovering around the food table as I got a hot dog.

“Mind if I… grab a…?” he said uncertainly.

I said of course, of course. Though nothing was mine to give.

“Nice playing,” I said. And really meant it. You don’t always mean it when you tell someone nice playing. It feels good to say it and mean it.

He made one of those ass-backward acknowledgments, “Thanks much to you” or something. It was a bit weirder though. Like maybe, “What you said I appreciate.” Might have even ended with “my man.”

I stood there for a moment wondering whether he actually understood that I wanted to pay him a compliment. Then he spoke again.

“You just wait for the next band. There’ll be LOTS more people,” he declared, pointing. “And that’s a PROMISE.”

And the next band played and he was in it. And they weren’t quite as good actually. And there were exactly as many people as before.

Music had been promised between two and five and here we were two-ten and they were still tuning up and fucking around, some sitting on folding chairs in the street, 5th Ave revelers strolling by with their grilled corn and mozzarepas. I really didn’t mind. The plunks and blurps from their instruments faded nicely into the hubbub of the fair. I didn’t want the music to start.

A strange, quiet evening when dinner’s too early because Jackie was at the dentist and they brought back Shake Shack. Now golden sunlight streams across the space and birds are chirping and there’s nothing to do, not even a kid to put to bed.

On my morning run I thought of writing a play about the tragedy. Why not after all? As I turned around at the end of the park I thought of a cutely poignant little ending. Then I thought no. Now I’m not sure.

Sunday before last we had dinner in a covid enclosure on the street, a neighborhood Italian on Sixth Ave. We took our time, had dessert. Everyone so nice and friendly. I observed a shadowy figure pacing a living room on the second floor above the restaurant. A drizzle began to fall but not on us.

On our way back we passed another restaurant. Their street tables were bustling. The food looked good. We thought we’d like to try it sometime. Just past its perimeter, where cars again occupied the parking spots, there was something strange. You could feel it before you saw it. A nice SUV parked beneath a tree, dotted with fresh rain. The windshield was smashed in by a pipefitter’s wrench that remained nestled in the breach, radiating a web of cracks across the glass. It seemed staged, theatrical. Like there was a hidden camera capturing our reactions. A performance art installation, maybe. The wrench was just too perfect. Weighty, industrial. Everything else was just so pretty. The dusting of pink blossoms on the cars and street. The lamplit walls and stoops. We scrutinized the wrench for a minute. Peered at the front seat of the car, apparently unaffected. We thought of taking pictures but we didn’t.

I awoke haunted by a dream I couldn’t remember. It was too abstract, or it was about something most dreams are not about. But I know it’s there.

The water main break a block away has diverted traffic and caused a jam all down the street. Honks and shouts rang out all day and into the night.

Create, the application says. The interface.

On the way to get a vaccine on the bus today, a woman got on. It was going to be trouble. Something about you owe me a transfer. You owe me a transfuh. The driver remained placid, staring at the street. You owe me. 

She went on like this a couple stops. I wondered where it all might go. At which point does the driver bark back? The woman seemed volatile, unchained. Would she appeal recklessly to the four or five of us in back, get shouted down? At what point, emotion rising through her limbs, would she flail at the driver?

Instead she quieted down and got off.

Something like a gun or firecrackers went off outside but when I looked out the window everybody was doing normal shit, jogging, crossing the street. Still I heard it: pop-pop-pop.

Someone in the park said hey look, the sun is coming out again and minutes later the wind picked up like crazy. A mylar birthday balloon blew out of the woods onto the sidewalk and hit Jackie, shit that’s not supposed to happen—balloons and plastic bags are like pigeons, they always get out of the way. By the time we got upstairs ropes of rain were pounding down and the sun shone straight through the west side of our apartment and out the east. And of course there was a rainbow. 

9:23. It’s always 9:23.

At seven o’clock from our roof there was the usual commotion down below, claps and honks and sirens, but almost no one else up on top. A neighbor to the right clapped gamely but inaudibly with garden-gloved hands before lying down to fuck around with the vines curling up around his deck. New Jersey glimmered far away. What would the guys from WBGO in Newark say tomorrow morning when my clock radio goes off at 7:30? It’s going to be a hot one.

There’s a part of the block by the hospital where suddenly there’s a sickly-sweet smell, like cough syrup mixed with bleach. It feels like you might get high just walking by, or die a little sooner. I wonder whether it’s the smell of medicine or cleaning supplies or embalming fluid or maybe it’s what they use to flavor the dessert.

On the Roof

The planes flew overhead as usual, maybe a little low on account of the clouds. In the distance the city trembled ever so slightly from all the noise you couldn’t hear.

A few houses down a family was having a barbecue. Dad at the grill. Mom and the little ones up some steps, sitting on a fancy outdoor couch. Look at them, eating at a proper time. With the nice grill and the good outdoor furniture. How much richer they must be than us, I thought. How much better. And then I thought, how could you think a thing like that?

As I drove a nail diagonally through the table, hoping finally to fix that part that’s always breaking off, I became aware of a din across the street. It was a woman screaming. I paused to try to make out what she said.

“You tell her! You tell her! You tell her!” she howled, on the edge of articulation.

Then: “You’re killing me! You’re killing me!”

No one seemed to reply. Or if they did, they did so quietly.

Here I am meekly waiting for the software update that will solve it all. The update that reaches into my soul to save it.

When I run past the Pavilion Theatre in the morning I glance at the green plywood covering the entrance, wondering if any progress has been made. Sometimes the makeshift door is open and you can see straight through to the box office on the left. A worker might stroll in or out. There’s a chair in there too for some reason. Other times it’s closed and days and days go by and nothing.

Outside the Coney Island haunted house the operator, a big guy about forty, leaned on a rail and spoke to a couple of ticket takers, high school guys on summer jobs.

The cars were mostly empty. Here and there a mother and daughter, a father and son, darted around the corner to be plunged into the black portal, grimacing with apprehension.

“Open a checking account and a savings account,” the man said.

The boys nodded.

“Start a credit card. Open a line of credit and buy some shit.”

A few moments passed and a few more empty cars rattled past the gates of the inferno.

“Don’t buy too much shit. You’re establishin’ credit.”

One of the boys murmured something I could not hear.

“One-fifty, one-fifty. One-fifty in checking an’ one-fifty in savings.”

The group fell silent. All the cars were gone now. The stretch of track that ran out front, past the turnstile, glinted in the August sun.

On opening weekend at Coney Island everything was already like it always was. An empty hot dog box and a handful of napkins blowing along the ground ‘cause their owners didn’t give a fuck. A gimpy old man shaped like an S, walking along Stillwell Ave. You can’t imagine where he’s going in but he’s in just the right place. After exiting the men’s room at Nathan’s I observed a man in a gray track suit and ludicrous blue-and-white high-tops as he stood eating curly fries with the tiny little plastic fork. He seemed determined and cheerless, like someone taking nourishment before some kind of travail. The little kids and the trannies and everyone else was out already on this glorious day. I walked over to the edge of the Boardwalk. I watched the waves slam down raucously on the empty beach. At least something wasn’t ready yet.