11:02:49 PM
From: "Philip R. Banks" &#lt;[email protected]&#gt; To: [email protected] Subject: What do I look like tonight? Well it isn't night here yet, but I'll do some extrapolating. I'll look tired, but mildly happy - having just got in from seeing a movie. I usually look happy after that, not so much from the movie (Which this week is Jumanji, a definite no brainer) but more from having spent time with friends and the fun of travelling home through the darkened city. There is always something I like about travelling on a nearly empty bus through the city at night. It is sorta soothing as the bus shudders and jerks around clambering up the small mountain I live. (Although it really is more a hill.) So that is how I will look. | |
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It seems like no matter where I've lived in my life, I've always taken the bus to the end of the line to get home. When I was living in Laos, I remember always being the first kid to get on the schoolbus in the morning, and the last to get off at night. I also remember getting the shit kicked outta me by the rest of the kids, one of them a Laotian fatso name Krisna (he may have been Thai). God if I ever find that shithead I'll kill him. He's one of the guys always calling me "Beautiful people," or "Khoun Ngam" in Lao.
In Tampa, the bus to school was always empty when I got on, and empty when I got off, but crowded as hell inbetween. Today, I take a bus to work in the morning, but the distance is so short (a mile or 2) that I never really think of it as a real busride, or even a "trip." To me, a busride is inconsequential if it doesn't pass through valleys and streams, past rice paddies and beaches and all those wrinkles in time that turned the suburbs of Tampa into some kind of mysterious paradise. Now, being at the end of the line is something I will make a high priority when I choose my next apartment in this city. I lived in Northern Manhattan for a year, so far up on the island (216th Street) that most people assumed I was in the Bronx. "You can smell the Bronx from here. You can taste it," I would tell people. But it isn't the Bronx." My apartment was at 5057 Broadway, 5 or 6 blocks north of the 207th Street subway station, and 4 blocks south of Indian Road and Something Field (can't think of the name right now, and don't feel like getting up to find it). There are caves up there. The caves of Manhattan. Definitely not spelunking territory, but I found them fascinating nevertheless. They are located near the exact spot at which legend says Captain John Minuit purchased the island of Manhattan from some Indians, paying for the land with some cheap jewelry and trinkets. There's a bronze plaque on that spot, and the last time I saw it it was so heavily painted over with graffiti that the text was just about impossible to read. In fact, I remember thinking that if one tried to gain any historical information from this plaque, the missing and obscured letters might contribute to a very warped interpretation of the Minuit legend. Anyway, I discovered the caves up there while a friend of mine was visiting from Florida. I showed him the mercilessly vandalized plaque, and he walked up toward the wooded area that separated this part of Fort Tryon Park from the Cloisters and some of the most beautiful parks in all of New York. I followed him, having never been up there myself, and discovered small areas set aside for campfires and other gatherings. But it was not exactly summer camp. Dozens of horseflies buzzed atop a pile of what I think might have been human feces. Beercans and scotch bottles were everywhere, and an enormous amount of finely shattered glass obscured the soil on which we stood. Looking up into the wooded area, the garbage reached into the hillside, so thick that the ground was invisible no matter where we walked. Turning back, that's when I saw an area I hadn't been able to see from where I'd been earlier, and this is where the caves were located. I only noticed them because there were people standing near them, and when they saw me looking at them they turned and hid themselves inside. My friend Mike didn't see them at all, having taken only a few steps across this sea of trash in the midst of which I'd suddenly found myself stranded. Until that moment there had been no other people around us, and seeing these mysterious figures vanish into a cave which I never knew existed alarmed me immensely. I wanted to go in, and I wanted to see who they were and what they were doing, but my friend had disappeared up a dirt trail, and I didn't want him to get lost. And somehow the desire to enter the cave and make contact with strangers did not overtake me, as these desires sometimes do. I learned later that the cave was home to a group of people who practiced Santaria. In the past, the cave had been like a hotel for homeless people and the drugged-out. A friend of mine from the neighborhood told me that the Parks Commission had at some time filled the caves with concrete to deal with the problem, and for years they were pretty much deserted. He also told me that it was Santaria people who occupied it at the time (this was 1992). Well, this is all very interesting, but I think I need to sleep. Goodnight.
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