Patchin Place Post Office on West Tenth is a block from Patchin Place cul-de-sac, formerly Bohemia central and home to literary curios e.e cummings and Djuna Barnes.
P.P.p.o. is usually a breeze-through but last visit I joined a long line rendered nearly unendurable by the unsavory customer queued just in front.
Now I’m post-office-patient.
I honed p.o. skills in India where outgoing packages must be tailor-stitched in muslin and sealed with wax.
Entering the post office, the customer interrupts a work-a-day coffee klatch; employees sip metal cups of hot milky Joe and give a rare sideways glance towards the swollen queue.
Once at the window, the customer must be vigilant, observing that purchased stamps are applied to the package, not slipped off for resale while the muslin bundle travels home tucked under an employee’s arm.
Incoming packages only leave the premises in exchange for sweaty palmed-off bakshish.
Or by a storm-and-seize operation through the back door while startled workers stare cups-tipped mid-sip.
Package in hand, the recipient finds it’s been previously opened, its contents ABC: already bitten and chewed.
In NYC, I can relax; no need to stand with elbows wide, tips pointy to defend against queue jumping wingmen. No need to wait for my change coin by coin until it tallies up.
But this visit taxes me. The agitated fellow just in front wears a Vegetarian Society of New York t-shirt. But his continuous hacking of thick mucus along his throat while spewing a snide commentary on postal mismanagement confirms to this here vegetarian, he ain’t no such society member. I hardly picture him gathering a basketful of berries in countryside utopia, or handing out tofu samples at the farmer’s market.
He turns to me for support. He assumes we’ll riff, that I’ll join his bombastic vitriol.
I look at him benignly; let him assume that English is not my first language, that I don’t speak pissed-off crazy. As I look, I wonder why his far-to-the side parting and 80s far-from-fashion glasses seem so unnervingly familiar. Do I actually know this man?
As the postal workers come into view and this madman prepares to step up for help, he shifts his package and I read his name off the return address.
Bernard Goetz.
Bernard Goetz!
In 1984 Bernie Goetz pulled a gun in a NYC subway car and shot down four threatening teenagers leaving one of them paralyzed. He carried a gun because he was sick of the homeless people, the drug addicts, the thugs.
In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell suggests Bernie couldn’t help it. He was a doomed victim of his environment, the crime infected graffiti afflicted subway. Bernie fought back like a gun-toting rat because he was down a “rat hole.”
Malcolm, darling, daily we all went down the rat hole. But we didn’t slip so far down to mistake it for Alice's rabbit hole, leaving our minds at the turnstile with our token.
Didn’t query, “Do cats eat bats?”
Didn’t pick up bottles that said DRINK ME.
Cakes that said EAT ME.
Or guns that said SHOOT ME.
We were commuters not criminals.
Yeah, some gonzos championed Bernie as a vigilante angel.
My mom said it then.
She still says it today.
Two wrongs don’t make a right.
I’m not saying I want to hurt Bernard Goetz, to put him out of his phlegm rattled misery.
But I wish I had a pistol.
I’d take aim, pull the trigger and let fly a tiny flag.
BANG!
I’d demand he remove his Vegetarian Society shirt.
I'd offer him a Kleenex.
Then I’d peel the stamps off his package, carry it out front and give it to a homeless stranger.
Seemed when a man shot junk into his arm, thousands of tiny gyroscopes chugged through his veins like Pac Men.
Gangly H users, their eyes dialled so far past white to be as good as shut, stepped into moving traffic.
Not from the green but from well in between.
They surfed a swath of tarmac across Houston, Broadway, or Avenue B. Torsos torqued, and fingers licked the road as a squall of speeding cars pitched them into death’s screeching jaws.
I’d seen hundreds of heroin-happy Daze and Nightz of the Living Dead marching straight to Hades but I never saw one stumble or fall.
Never witnessed a traffic-trapped pie-eyed pedestrian bludgeoned by the grill.
High as kites, but well below ground, their feet riveted to subway flooring as their bony frames performed the awkward dance of a wooden child’s toy, collapsing and re-straightening on its tiny platform from the press of a button beneath it.
The train heaved and halted to a poor man’s orchestra of metal greased against summer soot. The soloist bobbed unceasingly.
He gonna bend but he ain’t gonna fall,
a fellow passenger announced.
We didn’t have to wait and watch to find out.
We knew he’d triumph.
We knew about the tiny gyroscopes.
It’s an old story.
Smack gave way to crack, slums became habitable, and slumlords sold to developers.
As the cabbie said, on a late-night ride low and east, “all them shooting galleries closed down”.
I am not saying I miss the addicts, any of them, smack, crack or PCP.
Nuh.
I don’t miss the hooked-on-shit users who broke car windows to swipe grimy Phil Collins cassette tapes.
Who cut cable to abscond with other peoples’ bicycles.
Don’t long for the return of the economic underclass that thrived trading pinched swag for crack vials.
Do not pine an era when personal property was tenuous and insubstantial as purple haze.
Will not champion a decade when one man’s stuff was ready-ripe for swiping, hawking, and reselling in the teeming contraband market on Saint Marks Place.
I don’t dwell on these memories as part of the good of the good old days. They are the bad and the ugly.
I mention it now because yesterday I glimpsed a zombie at 42nd and Sixth. First sighting in decades.
He straddled a bicycle. One hand held a slippery cigarette that moved beyond the reach of his pursuant lips and guided his torso to the horizontal.
For a more sober man, lips and cigarette meet.
Like two lovers in a kiss.
This fellow’s cigarette was followed by a palpable passage of ether, and following this glimpse of nothingness were the pursed lips, and these lips led a sleepy-eyed head, that craned a neck, and tugged a lean torso akimbo over a pair of legs cross-purposed with a bicycle.
Could he inhale that first satisfying drag before his hand stubbed the burning tip to ash against the pavement? Before the button under Bryant Park released and he snapped back to straight?
That was yesterday.
Today on the 2/3 downtown I spy the following:
Is Heroin a Problem for You? Tired of Getting Sick and Wasting Your Money?
Ah, the users ARE here. They sit among us reading advertisements that offer free and confidential services to the exhausted, nauseated spendthrift.
Perhaps it is the new technology, an internal gyroscope GPS guiding upright profligates to bright crosswalks and through smart neighborhoods where community gardens grow from the compost of torched abandoned buildings.
Or maybe it just looks that way and really everything new is old again.
A lovely weekend in the Hamptons.
Beach, bay, and pool side, cityfolk assumed country ways. They Mingled. Pitched-in. Asked questions. Stuck around for answers.
I imagine the city self, slave to the breezy weekender.
A bifurcation.
Kiki and her hostess Stacey Platt on a bluff over a bay, Saturday.
My first trip to the Hamptons was decades back as guest of my Avenue B neighbor, T. He worked summer chef for a wealthy couple at their swank South Hampton manse.
Neighbor T knocked often to share his luscious bakes. He also handed-down some vintage gems including a black Spanish lace shawl (muy flamenco) and a blonde Dusty Springfield wig. The wig played catalyst to a solo downtown-club career.
A Dusty Springfield wig worn back to front. Presto! It’s a Farrah. Whispers Night, Pyramid Club, Avenue A, 1986
Why do I mention the wig, the shawl, and the buttery crusts?
Just to say, neighbor T was gay.
I am not stereotyping.
I met his lovers on the landing.
Our porcelain bathtub lips curled to opposite sides of the same kitchen wall.
Our doors bolted on the same jam.
Imagine my late-night South Hampton surprise when T fell to bended knee and begged a cuppa sugar from my bowl.
T was handsome, fit, clever and capable, everything a girl (and a guy) could want. But I had “never thought of him in that way.”
Gentle “no”s and emphatic “no”s.
Both unhappily received.
Though I managed to beat a hasty retreat, how to sleep whilst T whimpered at my latched door scratching and yowling like a Tom Cat?
Sleep I did and woke to bright salty air to find T asleep under open sky, dew dappled in a teak pool recliner surrounded by a protective ring of long-spent green citronella candles.
Oh T, handsome, genteel, and, even in his grief, beautifully art-directed
His mood was crap the remainder of my visit. Mounting more obstacles to my ever “thinking about him in that way”.
So that’s the ramp up.
New Yorkers behave differently in the Hamptons.
Here’s the query.
Are they more themselves?
Or less?
Kinder?
Gentler?
More “oh yes, we can”?
Kiki phtographed by Sebastian Li, somewhere on Long Island 1986