The streets exist. People engage and watch where they’re going. There is intersection, more than one way. I get around and I have to move around to do it. I do not observe. I do not take it all in. On any street I walk at a brisk pace. I hate the idea of the man walking around making observations. I am not one of those men. I walk and I get somewhere. I become obsessed with destinations. And often I smile but not too much, because I remember what happened back in the day. A happy couple strolling on the Lower East Side. The girl was murdered. The murderer, also female, told the police or she told the news—I’d come to believe there was little difference between the organizations, I’d come to realize the Constitution wasn’t worth the parchment it was drafted on, the preamble a track-changes suggestion which should’ve been rejected—that she shot the girl because she didn’t like the smile on her face. The girl got shot because she had a smile on her face! So I don’t smile. I don’t stroll. I’m not happy. And if I do smile on the streets, because sometimes the beauty of the city begs you for it, well, I check myself.
I hear my voice. Dum-ta-dum. I’m a legendary sportscaster only hardcore fans remember as a shitty player. I over-drill, burn for my chest, puke for my cuts, I’m the quarterback and the nose tackle crouching in front of my center. But I am also my father’s voice, the morning of my career-ending injury. I won’t make it in the game, I’ll make it on the sidelines. I knot a color man’s tie and hang a look of sadness over my face whenever off-the-field antics threaten the purity of the game.
I walk off the human path, follow purebred paw prints in the snowy park. I search for the underpass where Ed Norton gets beat up by his best friends in 25th Hour.
Poor Ed.
I watch Ed Norton get beat up by Binghamton municipal workers in Rounders.
Poor Ed.
I watch Ed Norton get beat up in Fight Club.
Poor Ed.
The end of Fight Club lied. It suggested I would be two men. I would be the one to burn the buildings down and I would be the one to watch and smile from a building across the street. I would be two men, not one, and I would stand hand-in-hand with my lover and watch the structure crumble. But I don’t get to burn the building down. It’s burned down for me, and for my own good.
I team, brainstorm, I’m not even hungry but it’s time to go to lunch. I ride the elevator down to the lobby and find myself out on Wall Street. I stand in front of the statue of George Washington at Federal Hall. The fingers on George’s hand curl up like he’s waiting to receive the ball back from his catcher. I start walking in circles, through the bordered federal district with street names like John and William, safe passage for the brainy and allegiant. The cobblestone alleys are a mirage of craftsmanship and every few steps there are topical detours, admittance restrictions. I distance myself from commentary, peddle past annoyances. Now I’m getting hungry. Sometimes I’m forced to slow down, zigzag my way forward like marbles moving through the silver edges of a child’s maze. I walk forward, again and again, eyes in front of my feet. I don’t lift my feet too high. I will not stroll. I must not take it all in. I notice less than ten percent of what’s going on. I walk alongside workers who look like me, hometown heroes, lunch pail administrators, as Manhattan’s extras we are box office stars. In their faces I see their parents, so proud the day their kids secured back office positions at the big banks on Wall Street. Some of us are not here, we work on the wrong side of the Hudson where the real money is exchanged, where the wayback-office operations of the city’s set-piece capital clears. None of us are permitted to stand on the steps of the Exchange. Only cops, pigeons and the occasional squirrel make it through the metal barriers. The day’s IPO banner waves like a flag in the wind. I see fearless tyrants, Dutch masters, outrage inspirers, hipless whores with mafia racks, spindly old men in New York Giants baseball caps who travel downtown to discuss market trends and fluctuations with their still-human stockbrokers. They’re retired men with solid pensions and salad-fork manners who spend the cold months on Florida holiday. During the in- between months they have letters to post, nothing better to do. I see uniformed police officers and undercover police officers, orange cones. I see protestors, knocked-down cones. The protestors yell at me, the cops protect me. The protestors are bussed-in, rallying for an impossible state. They wear hooded sweatshirts and Halloween masks, hold up cardboard signs inked with magic slogans. Like everyone else in America, they want something from me. The police stop all of us so that a marching band can cross Broadway. Snare drums beat in the broken rhythms of war, piccolos sputter the basic hymns of the republic. What are they reenacting? Is it Veterans Day? The troop marches across Broadway, a narrow street this far downtown. I watch the puzzled expressions on everyone’s face and make one myself in order to fit in. Sometimes, it’s Christmas. Bulging wreathes in every lobby. It’s a competition to see which bank can hang the biggest swinging wreath, pot the highest number of poinsettias. In the summertime, a homeless man steps to me near Washington’s statue, a homeless man steps to me near the banks on Broadway, a homeless man steps to me in front of Alexander Hamilton’s tombstone.
“You know, without him they’d be no New York Post.”
“Thank God for him,” I say.
He holds an empty cup and sheaves of loose leaf. I know this guy, I mean I know his character, pitching the same poem to everybody. His touch is feathery. The slimed feather of an oil suffering bird.
“I’m working on lunch here. Working on lunch. Poet of the pavement. Call me Pavement Poe.”
Poe wears black pants with ripped knees, another layer of pants. His shower shoes have no tongues. I bet his homestead, before the hatred, had cats and rugs. There’s this account over here, and that account, and the other account for later, the account for way later, and they are depleted one by one until there are no more accounts. When the accounts are gone, unseal the envelopes. There’s a bunch of 20s in a manila envelope, with the return address of a company that fired you. Those 20s get spent. Then the coffee canisters. There’s all this change saved up, that change is processed in a drugstore coin counter, a 9½ cent fee every dollar is assessed. The change is gone, solid objects disappear, and that’s when perishables start to go. If the teeth grinded down during nights of bankrupt insomnia could be redistributed, those shavings would divine a mountain range of stress, bullying the Rockies, shadowing the Smokies. Poe is climbing this mountain, putting one foot in front of the other.
“Who’s working on lunch? Pavement Poe. How close is he going to get to lunch?’
I find Poe annoying, but not as bad as the clipboard-carrying students saving soybeans and dolphins.
“You look like you shuffle papers,” Poe says.
“That’s exactly what I do.”
“You know what Saint Matthew did? He threw down his papers and shuffled over to the Lord. What would you do if Jesus pointed at you?”
“I’d probably be like, who, me? This guy?”
“You know what Saint Matthew did?”
“Yeah, you told me.”
“Of course I’m thinking of ‘The Calling of Saint Matthew’, the masterpiece by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, depicting the moment at which Jesus Christ inspires Matthew, the tax collector, to follow him. It was completed in 1600 for the Contarelli Chapel in the church of the French congregation, San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, where it remains today.”
A tourist hands me her camera. I move a few steps back, bend down, hold the camera up to my eye. I feel exposed without my natural vision. Through the lens I can see the family. They are trying not to smile, standing at the temporary ruins, but Poe and I know they want to.
“Come on, big smiles!” I say. “It’s okay to smile, you’re in New York City!”
They can’t help it, they’re on vacation, they must smile, especially when Poe says “sushi!”
Poe doesn’t steal their camera. When they disappear into the crowd he gets back to his pitch. “Now you know my credo is to believe. My credo…you know credo means to believe,” he explains, rustling his poetry papers, “…my credo is we should believe. Now listen to it right here. You see that? My credo? Believe.”
“Got it. You gotta believe.”
He raises his cup. I open my wallet. Gripping it tightly I remove two singles and drop them into Poe’s cup. In my mind I see the shadowy outline of a future daughter, asking me to buy her Mister Softee.
“God bless you, brother,” Poe says.
“What about a poem?” I ask, but he’s already walking away and he disappears into the crowd.
I’m approached by a tourist from the American interior. Like every other man I see the first thing I notice are his shoes, white New Balance sneakers. He’s wearing shorts, too, it must be summer, motherhood and apple pie. He is thin with a full head of white hair and small dark eyes. His face is a strange kind of white, curdled 2% milk, an interracial palm.
“I don’t usually talk to strangers, but it’s very spiritual down here,” he says.
“Oh, yeah. It’s the spiritual gift that keeps on giving. A holy annuity.”
“Did you know this church was for 9/11 first responders.”
“I did. I think we read the same Time article.”
“Can I offer you a piece of advice? I saw you give that beggar your money. You know my wife and I went to Italy last summer.”
“That’s beautiful,” I say. “Did you go to Rome?”
“We did.”
“Did you see ‘The Calling of Saint Matthew’? The masterpiece by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, depicting the moment at which Jesus Christ inspires Matthew, the tax collector, to follow him. It was completed in 1600 for the Contarelli Chapel in the church of the French congregation, San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, where it remains today.”
“We saw several masterpieces. The crowds were a mess. But we learned many things. We learned Michelangelo, the other one, didn’t even wish to build the Sistine Chapel. It was work. It was a work order. You’re not helping that man by giving him money, he’s just going to buy drugs.”
“Maybe he needs drugs,” I say.
“Michelangelo didn’t need drugs.”
“Poe wasn’t Michelangelo,” I say. “He was homeless.”
“Michelangelo was homeless.”
“Really?”
“No,” the man says. “I don’t think so.”
Stuart Ross is a writer living in Chicago. His novel Jenny in Corona is available from Tortoise Books.