In my hotel room at 6:54 a.m.
I'm buck naked and sick, fighting with the busted curtain and losing, trying to figure out how to keep the sun out, and that’s when I get caught staring out the window…
There's nothing particularly interesting about the view, I'm just staring at the long since deserted cityscape, at the alleys, the trash strewn gutters, and the highway running north and south in the far distance. I can see a couple cars traversing the back streets at this early hour. They’re all busted up and rusted up sedans driving real slow like they might stop at any moment, like they’re there with a purpose. I wonder what the purpose could possibly be at this hour in this heat, imagine a couple reasons, but they all seem to be inspired by the miasma of B movies I’ve been watching all night long on basic cable.
Then I notice it: this city has some strange, inexplicable fascination with plastic. From my window I can see that there are huge wads of it attached to every other building on this side of town. Hunks of it are stapled, glued or nailed into brick and wood without any reason or pattern I’m capable of discerning.
So I'm just staring out as the minutes slip by, trying to figure out who attached this plastic to the buildings, what purpose they thought the plastic would serve, or if it was purely for decorative effect. I can come up with no plausible answer and remind myself to ask the concierge about this if I ever get the nerve up to venture into the lobby.
In the distance, there's a river/ocean/body of water running along the side of the highway, and though I think I might have driven through this city before, I have no idea what body of water it is. Could be the Atlantic, could be some river, could be the Gulf of Mexico for all I know. I also know if I was truly curious I could probably look it up on Google Maps or World View or whatever it's called, but I guess I prefer my geographical ignorance of this part of the world, so I file it with the mystery of the plastic...
There are lots of Seagulls here: Ring Billed Gulls, Herring Gulls, and Great Black-Backed Gulls (these I did look up on the internet.) "Rats with wings" my Zeyda used to call all of them. My Great Uncle Sam used to say that dead ones made good bait. My Zeyda would then nod at this sentiment, cast his line into the Atlantic while lamenting in Yiddish that there were no dead seagulls around to cut up. It was a little known fact that Flounder loved raw Seagull meat.
There are also a lot of American flags hanging here, all of them waiting for a breeze, any breeze, maybe because it's close to Independence Day, but I don't think so, seems like an American Flag kind of town. And there are parking garages, four on this block alone, most of them empty; and perfectly faded, industrial stenciling on the side of a lot of the buildings calling out to a past long since rusted away:
"CONNECTICUT STEEL."
This is a very tired city. Its streets look tired. Its trees look tired. The sun looks tired just having to do its job and beat down on this city this morning.
Then I think of my favorite Great Uncle Sam again. He now lives emaciated with shriveled up tattoos in a nursing home and couldn't be here this weekend, couldn’t be anywhere, really. I think about how he used to take my brother and me fishing with my Zeyda off the pier at the farthest southern tip of Atlantic City; this was just before they “developed” the land. The Borgata Hotel and Casino now stands where we once used to cast out.
There was nothing out there then, just the disintegrating dock disappearing into the ocean and the trash-strewn beach. I have tried but never found any place quite as beautiful.
They say Uncle Sam still talks about fishing all the time. This makes me happy because it means my memory is not a dream I made up. These days, as I descend deeper and deeper into summer with no way back, I’ve been beginning to wonder...
And then I think of the last time I was in a hotel room like this, at a wedding like this, of someone vaguely related to me I'm supposed to know like this…
It was somewhere in Iowa, I think, on another body of water I can't quite remember either…
And how that hotel room, made to look like someone's idea of a riverboat gambler's paradise…we simply destroyed it with our love and hate within the twenty hours we were there.
And I remember the whole room smelling of her weed, and my family calling again and again trying to get us to come out to lunch, and my brother and father smelling the womb of our lust on us when we finally did emerge. And then there was the envious look as they stared at her, at me: the look of a king and his prodigal suddenly dethroned, the look my mother noticed but tried to ignore as she made polite conversation with her. I wanted to tell my mother not to worry, that she had this affect on every man…
I remember there was the hail storm while driving in from Chicago that almost killed us (she woke to my screams as the window cracked against ice,) and, afterwards, between my complaints about the car rental agency, her stories about her ex-boyfriend, her first love, her first great disaster, her own memories about him she couldn’t quite say like mine now about her I can’t quite remember.
And I remember how she told me I was innocent, it was right after we somehow survived that drive, stripped each other down, crawled into bed and, clutching, got high before telling anyone we had arrived...
Didn’t matter though, somebody spotted us by the talking parakeets; the phone started ringing as soon as we pulled the covers over our head and lit up…
And then I remember how later, years later, she cried when Peter Jennings died, and wouldn’t let me hold her…
…and this cough, and this morning, and all these medicines for my body and my brain after years of none.
And should I start to run at 31?
Finally, I come to, find myself still standing there, transfixed, staring out the window at the plastic. That's when I realize that I have been in this city before…
Yes…I stopped here once before when I was a kid with all these memories ten years in front or behind me.
That day I was on my way north to a job I didn’t want much less know how to do. I was alone and freaked out with anyone I could call long since gone, banished or alienated. For some reason, like a last gasp, a dying swing, I stopped in this city and, for an afternoon, pretended that I went to college here, that I belonged here, that I had a place here, this city was my here…
In a rush I ate slices of pepperoni pizza like I had a class to get to, a carved out future to get to, and, for a moment, I believed it.
It was a future that would one day ignore the breeds of Seagulls you could look up with one click, ignore the bodies of water you, for some superstitious reason, didn’t want to remember, ignore the memories of fishing off docks long since disappeared, ignore the mystery of the plastic you knew you would never know, ignore how her pain and laughter were irreplaceable, and ignore all the tired cities of this world whose fallen beauty won't let you shut the curtain just yet.
New Haven, CT - 7/2/06
