on a thursday

To his credit, he didn't even hesitate in response to my idea. "I know a few places that are great for that," he said. "Rocky can get us there, easily." It sounded perfect to me, so a little after 1 am, he arrived at my door with a spare helmet and soon we were speeding down empty roads to the bridge. The only place still open at that hour was the strip club, illuminating the filth and back alleys of Long Island City, red lights on steal beams, the awning lit like a hotel. We parked on a side street nearby and went the rest of the way on foot: up the stairs, halfway across the bridge, to the spot where the moon challenged the largest billboard, stuck between both islands. The bridge supports crisscrossed forever above us, the towers on either side of the water distant and dark.

I climbed over the railing and threaded my fingers through the fence. "You ready?"
"I don't have anything to scream about," he said, suddenly shy.
"Just scream for fun. Ready? On the count of three. One-two-THREE!" We opened our mouths and screamed. Loud. The cars rushed past us. Our voices were lost in their onslaught. We were anonymous.

It wasn't enough. "Let's do it again!" I said right away. "One-TWO-THREE" We screamed again. And then again.
"Do you feel any better?" he asked, catching his breath.
I thought about it. "No."
So we kept screaming. I opened my mouth wide and stared at the inky water below and thought about why I was there and screamed and screamed again. Then we started shouting out names.
"FRED!!! YOUR SOUP IS READY!!!"
"ANNA BANANA!"
"ALICE! WHERE ARE YOU??!!!!"
"MRS. POTTS!!!!!!!"
"Who is Mrs. Potts?" he asked, turning to look at me.
"She's the tea kettle in Beauty and the Beast." I started laughing.
"FRANK!!!! WHAT ARE YOU DOING??!!!!!! NEW YORK IS THAT WAY!!!!!"

My hands were black from the soot on the fence and I had some of it on my face. "Let's do it again. Ready?" We screamed and screamed. We screamed towards Manhattan, we screamed to Brooklyn. We screamed at poor Roosevelt Island that never did anything to us. We screamed until we ran out of air and our throats were hoarse. The traffic passed behind us, passive, swallowing our sounds. We were colossal and invisible.

On the way back to the bike, both of us filthy and talking louder than normal, he asked me again. "So do you feel better?"
"We should do this all the time," I said.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

automath

One summer spent in New York with my car (my LA sweetheart) has yielded this conclusion: Having a car unjustly towed by the NYPD, and having its window smashed and stereo stolen by a garden variety Brooklyn thug feels exactly the same. It costs about the same too. Conversely, the resulting misery is inversely proportional to the sweeping lights of joy experienced when the last concrete building outside the city fades away and all the adventures of the countryside spill out onto the road. So it was worth it I think as I send my car back to its winter hideaway in my parents' driveway in Massachusetts. Despite the price.
Read more

the water

     I found Kelvin on the roof of the yurt, a round, home-made structure in the woods behind the house.      “Hi,” I said, approaching.      He peered over the edge to look down at me. “Oh, hi.”      “Alexandra sent me here to help you get the shingles on the roof before it starts to rain.”      Straightening a little, he studied the sky in his slow way. The trees in the hills below were only just starting to change color, and far off in the distance, down beyond the forest, we could see the grey cloud waiting its turn to break up the blue above us. It smelled too like it would rain soon. “Oh. Ok. Come on up,” he said.      Kelvin and Lee had built the yurt together the previous month. Tall and octagonal, with weathered wood walls and a high ceiling, it was tucked away between the trees and almost ready to be inhabited by artists or wanderers. They had raided the junkyards on Martha’s Vineyard for the windows, so each face of the octagon had a different shaped glass cut into
Read more

february 2019

“I have died many times,” Lanie said to me, listing offhand just a few of the experienced that changed her.   These were “before and after” moments, moments after which she grieved for the person she thought she would be, for the life she thought she would have, for the person she once was.   She had to “die” and then emerge as someone else. “That’s part of growing older,” she said to me.  Looking at Lanie, at this person whom I admire and respect so much, but whom I met only after the events that currently shaped her and brought her to my life, it was comforting somehow in my grief. So many different layers of grief.   It was difficult to see where one ended and the next began.   How to peel it apart to determine the provenance of this darkness versus that one.     We’ve had a rough time of it lately, I would say, thinking first of my friend whose simplicity of life choices I had found myself relying upon as a kind of barometer, until that simplicity blew up in her face and t
Read more