Two Paragraphs

When I think of New York, I’m back at Lincoln Center surrounded by screeching yellow cabs hurdling around street corners and honking at pedestrians, dazed silhouettes against the gray slabs of sheetrock and metal, portrait-stills in the swirling vortex of necrotic fumes, gas, hotdogs, and roasted peanuts wafting across Broadway, almost poetic in this shaken snow-globe of cement. I can nearly glimpse the exploding chandeliers in the Metropolitan Opera beyond the square office buildings, promising something golden and spectacular to the ones lucky enough to escape the pelting rain or oppressive heat--opera or ballet, depending on the season, cool and velvet crimson, submerged in swells of sound, a place to go and dream. And dream I did.

Why my mind conjures up the colliding streets at 66th and Broadway is unclear. I didn’t live or study there, save for one summer of Fordham University classes, nor did I attend as many concerts as a New York musician should. Tourists imagine Times Square with its massive commercial impact, a slap in the face of one’s sensibilities, shoppers fantasize about 5th Avenue’s sleek glass windows and smooth facades, hipsters mourn the high rents of the Village and lost days of soul-brother boozing in the Bowery, but I think of Lincoln Center for no particular reason, maybe just to slight my nameless uptown college and my closet apartment as if they had feelings and could be offended by my trying not to remember them. Few things in Manhattan have feelings; the skyscrapers and turbulent crowds of passersby effectively smother any inner life, a little love-fern starved to death in the desert, strangled by a thorny briar which takes root in the soul and emits, from time to time, a high-pitched scream of rage.