New York

It poured nearly every day the month I arrived in New York and the streets had only a few hours to stink yellow again before the flood. I did a lot of walking and there was a sense of renewal watching the gutters sift beneath into those places never discussed. You could imagine the sewers as the body – the girdle keeping it intact really – and you could hear her intestinal rumble late at night as I went home to my crappy bunk bed and the sun coming up by the Hudson River – that filthy bidet – a blow-out to the senses, a pause from her contractions, a spiritual wafting listening to the splish-splash of things becoming fresh.

New York.

There was never any word of it though. Never a whisper loud enough to out-hum the computers systems or the lights buzzing on 42nd street, the waiters clanging through bottles of San Pelligrino – natural and sparkling, the Wall Streetians gone North to Soho restaurants to deflate at the end of the day, announcing themselves and cackling with their tongues out, whistling and applauding, conducting and waiting to urinate in their chipchoppy heels and opaque laughter, like the infectious cues for the Mexican underworld: – the kitchen staff freshly gathered below ground in their smocks and aprons, and set to fire up the grills. Rain from above; men from the south; all drain into the sewers of New York. They bring renewal and shrimp cocktails up the metal doors beneath the concrete. Many of the customers not even speaking, it seemed from where I looked – ME – deafened at the job, just wagging their tongues automatically at each other like dikes in a porn show. Or I’d interrupt a table: “the Chilean Sea Bass is a pan-seared filet served with a yellow pepper coulis, a potato puree, and baby winter greens.”

After work, it was never enough, not the smell of acid piss on every wall or all the oil scuffed if I could from the headrests of every cum laden cab. Alone at night, I learned to hallucinate – to reach for the stars like a boomerang always drawn back to the lights of Manhattan. I’d sniff the ivory as high as you could see. The moon itself was less important than the hope of what it could light up. It was New Fucking York; I wanted it in me and through; in me and through. I couldn’t bear the peripheral aromas, ME, centered at Dean and Deluca’s or taking refuge at the MOMA, justified-me in the couture, I wanted to gorge and devour, the best hussy in New York alone at dawn after the stockbrokers and their Tanqueraysodas had ruined everything, Me, the last pulse in a concrete asshole.