I'm working construction in NYC. Greenwich Village at NY University. There is a power plant inside of it, we are expanding it. I'm torching beams, rigging and welding together and assembling massive ducts that are snaking through impossible passages.

I'm living uptown on 173rd street so every morning, I get on the A train and take it down to west fourth street. I've got to say that it is the best commute to work I think I will ever get.

Usually I drive my truck out of new York on the GW Bridge, down the NJ turnpike to any specific power plant or refinery. That could be the powerhouse at Ridgefield Park which is like ten minutes away from my apartment or all the way to down to the Salem nuke plant, which is a two and a half hour drive. I haven't made it down that far, but our local covers it, so one of these days I'll get called down there and have to live out of a motel. Which won't be that bad at all, time on the road is time away from the normal pace of things and you get time to read, write, drink and miss your girl.

It's funny how these things are good for us, working hard and being way from your girl for awhile, it makes you realize that she is your girl for a reason and that you.

I have it good now and I'll have it good for another month or so, then the job will be over and I'll go back in the list and wait for my hall to call me back out to work. That's the cycle of things, work for a little while, maybe six weeks, eight weeks, a year, who knows...then get laid off and collect unemployment for a little while and then the phone rings and the hall sends you out to another job and it's some guys you've worked with before and some you've never seen before. Some of them are your friends, almost family, some of them will steal your shit when you aren't around or beat you up in the parking lot for whatever seems like a good reason at the time. It doesn't really matter either way, the jobs are never too long and there is never a problem finding people to the bar with you during those fat times.

Typically when I get off of work I'm in the industrial wastelands of NJ, now inexplicably, I'm working out of the NYC local as a guest and I am getting off of work in arguably the most beautiful and welcoming neighborhood of New York. It seems like a gift from a God I can't say I ever believed in.

Hey buddy, now that I know you're up there, I'm gonna start doing what I can for you too.
Everyday when I get off of work I go walking around th neighborhood looking for bars and places to get coffee and little French restaurants and Italian places to get pizza and I look close at all the buildings and neon signs and everyday I walk past the Blue Note and I think of Miles Davis.

Motherfucker, when I die hundred of years from now, I want you to bury me in Greenwich Village.

Cane Quad Invacare Silver

A very old white man was standing on the subway platform when our train came to a grinding halt. He had a broken nose with a guard over it, two black eyes and a bandage wrapped around his head. He wore a large tan trench coat that was soaked from the rain, a quad cane with four feet held him up, he was sad look at when he came to our already jam packed train.

Everybody cleared a little space for him and he shuffled on though there wasn't much room at all to shuffle. There was an audible mutter of pain...ehhhh errr, then, in the midst of all of us filthy sardines in this filthy sardine can he said very weakly in a quivering voice, "is there any place for me to hold on?"

Everybody made way and the old man gripped onto the pole. His knuckles were bright red, his hands spider webbed with purple veins. He seemed like he was gonna topple over. Then the doors to the subway closed and the train started to move and he actually did kinda topple over, luckily for him it was a rush hour train and he was caught like somebody stage diving.

In response to this, a black man, a real linebacker type but dressed in a nice wool suit stood up and graciously offered his seat. He was a true gentleman, we can all learn something from this type of thing.

"No thank you, I'm fine standing."

"Please I insist."

"I said, no thank you, nigger." The old man said.

Yuck. The black guy kept standing there and he didn't get pissed or anything, instead, what happened collectively was that we all looked at the broken old man and we looked at his broken nose and his black eyes and his bandaged head and we thought, gee that looks about right.

And that was that.

The next train stop was the connection to NJ transit and Long Island Rail so most of the train cleared out, including The gentleman black linebacker in the beautiful suit and I was left there headed uptown with the old man and a few scattered Spanish people who were from my neighborhood.

I took a seat and the old man took a seat. I heard just about every bone crack in his body. He really seemed to be in a lot of pan. I watched from my side of the train with some reserved interest. He was quite a character. He looked like Wiley coyote if Wiley coyote was all bandaged up and old and human and maybe Jewish, not sure.

He opened up a paper bag and took out a sandwich, it smelled like shit. It was a shit sandwich.

I pretty much assumed that the reason he had said that to the gentleman linebacker was because he was hoping to be killed on the spot by a massive blow to the head, it didn't seem like all of this pain associated with living was really worth it on the MTA uptown.

I watched him with a pity for all of the weakness in humanity I cannot hope to understand.

"Does this train stop at 168th street?"

"Yeah," I said.

"That's my stop." He said looking at the floor.

When the brakes began to squeal he tried to sit up but couldn't, he was all weak and broken. I saw an IV under his coat sleeve.

So I helped him up and when the train stopped he thanked me and shuffled off the train and thanked me again.

I sat back down and waited for my stop, and the lovers were speaking low in Spanish down the train and I wished that they knew me and I knew them and also that I knew Spanish.

Garbage

I liked being a garbageman. There were a lot of agreeable things about it. For instance, you hang off the back of the garbage truck like a train conductor and all of the children chased behind the garbage truck on their bicycles calling your name and waving to you. Sometimes we throw some of the better garbage candy to them and they scream with glee.

Women watch longingly from the windows as we roll by, they are supposed to be watching their soap operas but when we pass on our chariot of steel mechanized thunder, like a wayward armor plated dinosaur all they can do is watch us over the back of their couches longingly, wishing that their husbands were not businessmen with soft hands but rather salt of the earth hero garbage men, wet with trash juice.

The dogs too watch with a certain admiral respect. Sure they chase after mailmen, after telephone line repairmen, after ladies pushing baby carriages, joggers and even the little kids on the bicycles, but those mutts know to allow us by without so much as a mutter. Not even two steps in our direction. They are well aware what we will do to them.

That's correct. We are not your average men, we are more than that, we have enough self respect to know that we are not like everyone else, that a certain power is afforded to us and that we much levee it against the mounds of insurmountable trash that will consume this township if we are not always ready to descend on it with fiery determination that neither maggots or garbage juice will deter.

The wind is in your hair and the sun is shining down on you and you feel very much alive. Sure, garbage juice is all over your boots and your gloves, but you grow to love it.

Like a fisherman who's hands perpetually smell like fish, who washes up but can never fully wash it off, you become proud of your trade and when you go to Burgerland for lunch and the girl behind the register says to her coworker what's that smell, did something die inside the floor under neath the grease trap, you can say with pride, it's me, I'm not ashamed, I stink like foul refuge and I'm proud of it.

They slide you your burger and you eat it at the nearest table and if the workers there are glancing over and talking about you it is a natural thing to comment in a loud booming voice, I haven't washed my hands all week!

Feared and respected and sometimes misunderstood, so is the life of a garbage man. It's hard for you to drive down the street in your own personal vehicle and you feel yourself wanting to pull over at every pile of bulk junk stacked against telephone poles on the fringes of crab grass lawns. Broken TVs. And old bicycles Bent horribly. Bed frames and Easter baskets, cabinet doors electronics with exposed fuses lamps that have been in the rain for two nights consequativly, rugs and scrap wood full of nails and a bird cage painted bright pink, these are the things you have to pass by and fight your hands from pulling the wheel to the curb and loading it all into the bed of the pickup. It gets to be that you just can't turn it off.

You are a garbageman, you can't turn it off.

And yeah, sometimes if it is convenient and your on your way kinda past the dump anyway, it feels good to pack the bed of your pickup truck solid with discarded treasures and to drive them across town, into the pines behind the high school and to throw the trash over the tailgate into the mountain of never ending debris.

The moon is up and the animals who call that wasteland their home are cooing and squeaking to you from the darkness, ever grateful for you who has been so kind as to add more material for them to construct their kingdom.

You always can nod solemnly at their legion of watchful eyes and say inwardly, don't worry little critters, humanity has plenty of trash to share with you out of the kindness of our hearts. See you tomorrow night. Have fun. Be well.

Then, you can cruise through town with your six pack of beer and you can pull into the Marina and call it home like you always do. It's easier to call someplace home when you are exhausted when you get there.

Or Something Like That

Accidentally, all I have left is good scotch that I don’t want to drink. I’m not sure what happened to the junk whiskey and the gin, like a bucket of water dumped over a dirty floor, running down the cracks in the floor boards.

I’m still alive. I’m trying to decide if I’m going to pay my parking ticket today or tomorrow. I’m leaning towards tomorrow. I was down there, in the pines and the sugar sand, falling around the beach. I kept thinking that my truck was going to explode. It didn’t. Now, I’m pretty sure I’m gonna pay my parking ticket tomorrow.

That’s what I said when the sun was coming up, yesterday.

I have a window facing the street and beside it I keep my ampfliers and my guitars my little piano, my drum machinery. My microphones and nests of cables like snakes guarding eggs somewhere underneath. The days I like best are the days that I can keep the window open and so when I record my music I get the sounds of the street there in my songs.

There is something also to be said of the days when you cannot open the window because of storms so severe or air filled to the limit with things other than comfort. On those days it feels perfect to draw the blinds and to sit in the darkness as if we were back in our cave unable to go kill Mastodons.

When I lie you on the hardwood floor and place my foot ever so delicately on your spine, I can feel the knobs of your vertebrae click together like puzzle pieces reunited from through the great beyond to its corresponding prom date. People around me keep throwing their backs out. I've got a strong back from carrying a cross up and down Apocalypse Avenue adorned with a hundred thousand parking tickets.


I have a belt buckle that I wear. It's brass and belonged to my grandfather. He was a welder. So am I. He's dead. I'm not. So I wear it now.

I've taken to wearing my house keys around my neck. It's because of running. You can't really run very far with car keys in your pocket. So if I'm going out running over the bridge into the parks of new jersey I put them around my neck and all of the people out walking hear me coming and get very startled. I sound like a loosed dog barreling up the sidewalk. My keys rattling like a chain collar When they swing around there faces are always full of the best kind of fear.

The crackheads living under the bridge are the only ones I can't seem to frighten. It's because they would like nothing better than to be killed and to not have to suffer through this constant see saw of days and nights living there under the bridge waiting to either get high be murdered get arrested or freeze to death for Christmas.

When I get back to my apartment I always put the keys on the table with my metro cards for the subway. My brass belt buckle. My own hand written sheet music and my loose change.

I'm not the type of person who stands there on the subway platform looking down the track. I don't care when the train gets here. I live uptown.

I lean against the walls of the underground in my neon shoes. My hands are in my grey dress pants. The house keys that hang around my neck will get you into my apartment. I'm drunk, not planning on paying any parking tickets and pretty sure that my truck is going to explode in the middle of darkened nowhere, the pines and the sugar sand on all sides like a wall to crash through.

A WALK

I was going up the hill, for beer. Getting to the liquor store is an uphill battle from there its all down hill.

It was May, the sun was shining and the birds were chirping. They, unlike myself, didn’t have anything better to be doing with their Sunday. Chirping. Chirping. As a matter of fact, that’s why I was even awake. The birds like to sit on our fire escape and sing their god damn song. Here I am, squinting because it’s the first real hard core sunshine that I have seen in a very long time, I’ve got my hand up shading my journey upwards and every step I take its chirp chirp chirp.

Not so bad though, that chirping.

I prefer it over jack hammering and machine gun fire. We get those things here too you know.

All kinds of people were out. There were kids playing soccer in the park. There were young people in love who were sitting on the park benches sucking face. There was even one pair of young people that were in such love that they didn’t notice the homeless guy who was sleeping under their bench while they sucked face. Old women walked dogs while old men walked dogs in great circles around the perimeter of the park. The old people were trying not to let on that they were thinking about death, they weren’t fooling anybody except for the dogs, who kept saying in dog languages, “LET ME OFF THIS LEASH I WANT TO EAT THESE LOUD ASS SPRING TIME BIRDS AND THE YOUNG PARK BENCH LOVERS AND THE CHILDREN AND THE SOCCER BALLS AND SLUMBERING HOMELESS DREAMING BENEATH WOODEN CITY BENCHES!”

Dogs.

There were dogs everywhere.

Everyone it seemed had a dog, which was fine. I like dogs. I like dogs more than people. The people needed distraction and companionship, the dogs were just looking for things to destroy, things to eat, places to shit and piss on. A dog has no hobbies. That’s Ok. I don’t have any hobbies either.

I’d rather not have any hobbies.

Instead, I’m walking up the hill, past the park- towards the promise of beer. Faltering economy. Lack of faith in god. Declining American dreams, not so much wet dreams any longer, just awkward uneasy day dreams of gold bars in the desert being tossed like footballs between desert dwellers. Fortunately, still beer. Not so heavy handed with the milk and honey, but rivers of cheap stomach ache educing beer.

There on top of the hill, was a yellow dog that was just wandering around, leash less. It was sniffing here and there casually. Presently stationed at a big blue mailbox. just going SNIFF SNIFF SNIFF. Then, milled away from the mailbox and walked to a tree recently exploded with new green leaves. A woman was leaning against a wrought iron fence, looking right at the yellow dog.

I approached.

The dog sniffed.

The woman just stood there staring at the dog.

“Can you believe this dog...” She said when I was within distance.

“Huh?”

“This dog sure is taking it’s sweet time.”

“Yeah I guess.” I said.

She huffed, snickered, adjusted her weight to the other foot.

“Your dog?” I asked.

“No. It’s not my dog. Why?”

“Not your dog?”

“Not my dog.”

“So, you got nothing better to do on a Sunday than to stand around and watch for stray dogs to take shits?”

“THAT’S NOT WHAT I’M DOING!”

“Ok.” I walked farther up the hill.

"YOU WERE DOING IT TOO!"


Up there at the liquor store, the clerk was leaning against a great wall of bottles lined up behind the register. I felt bad because the bottles were beginning to get a coating of dust on them. I took a 12 pack out of the fridge and walked it to the counter. He came to the register and started to ring it up.

"I'll take a bottle of Self Destruction, too." I said. "You're dustiest variety."

He started to bag everything up.

Then, the cat came slithering out. It was all beat up and scarred and missing a lot of fur from fights. It leapt up on the counter and watched me with it's horrible eyes. I rubbed under it's chin and it started to purr. It was a lot like me.

"Nice cat." I said.

"It's a stray. It won't go. We've tried for years."

"What's it's name."

"Doesn't have one."

"I'll take it, then." I said.

And that is how I got rid of the horrible chirping birds on my fire escape.

SOME PIANO IN THE DARKNESS

Somebody in the building was playing piano. I could hear them every night as I came in and walked up the stairs but I never could figure out who it was. Little trickles of notes echoing through the stairwell and down the hallway and I would take the gentlest steps in my shoes so that I could trace it better but I traced absolutely nothing. Sometimes I would stand there, hold my breath and listen close, it was coming from above. That much was certain.

Not that I had a large investigation staged, or that I put my ear to each door as I came to it, or that I interrogated the other tenants- it was just sometimes as I came home I would hear those little notes and I would wonder...is that a beautiful naked woman playing the piano in my building?

What door was she behind? Would she be receptive if I bought myself a trumpet or saxophone or stand up bass? Should I just start knocking?

It would inevitably stop just as I became more inclined to really search it out and I would usually shrug and take my keys out of my pocket and go back into the cage that was my own living quarters. The standard modern stockade against the elements.

TV. Radio. A well stocked shelf of liquor and a cabinet ravaged by mice who’ve consumed the oatmeal and pasta and rice and crackers and extra toilet paper for their nests.

I don’t own a gun. I keep a baseball bat beside my bed in hopes that when the killers come to get me, they will kindly come in through the front door and not the window to my bedroom. As chances have it I will hear them coming down the hallway but will not hear them through the window, as I sleep on my good ear.

The other is deaf.

That adds to my confusion with the piano. The ghost notes on summer nights. I can hear them, but I can't tell what direction they are really coming from.

Lying in bed and hearing the slow drip of piano keys in the darkness, are you real, and are you playing my song?

A few non linear fragments at a time? Not really melodic. Not really tied together. Perhaps that's what really kept me thinking about it.

It didn’t help me sleep at all.





Then, I did find out.

They came for it that following spring. This was after a winter without anyone playing me anything and I thought for sure that my beautiful naked woman at the piano had gone off to greener pastures.

I was walking into the building and a man said, “Sir, please wait one moment, we’re using the stairs...”

Here came two men, holding up the bottom of a small upright piano, descending down the stairs backwards. They were telling the men in the front of the piano, “Take it easy...”

“Easy...”

“Slow down...”

When they got to ground level I stood there looking at them and they all looked at me.

“Where did that piano come from?”

“Upstairs.”

“I can see that.”

“Nobody ever has a piano on the ground floor.” One of the men said.

“What apartment?”

“20.”

The one above me. Then Mr. King came down carrying a cardboard box and a bowling ball bag. He said hello.

“I’m moving.” He said.

“Oh, who plays the piano?”

“Nobody plays the piano.” He said. “I just have it.”

“You never did?”

“No.” He said.

“I used to hear it. I used to hear it all the time.”

“You heard Annie.”

“Annie?”

“I kept it by the window. She used to sleep on it, on top. Then she would walk down and follow the birds on the fire escape and she’d step on the keys. She was a good cat and now she’s in cat heaven.”

"Your cat?"

"My cat." He said. Then he walked out of the building with the piano movers and I was left alone in front of the mailboxes.

I would have never suspected that my beautiful naked woman playing the piano was a house cat named Annie from 20B.

You never know what exists and who will let you know about it.

LIME GREEN

LIME GREEN SHIRT,
LIME GREEN CAR


I was coming home. The bridge mostly clear and mostly without death, explosions, commercial interruption. I was in a good mood. The sun was out. Little blue birds were dive bombing from the blue sky all down onto me as I passed. Street after street I scanned, all the while playing the drums on the steering wheel to a song I enjoyed on the radio. This was in the wake of work. Had there been a bad song on the radio, I would have punched a smoking hole in the radio and thus I would have been in silence.

It's a war. Me vs. the other drivers. In competition for the few spots. To parallel park our rusted machines with whatever lack of grace we can summon through maneuvers horrible. You learn quick where the hydrants are. You pass them as if in dream, they mean nothing.

No spots anywhere.

We are all lunatics for owning cars in this City. Somebody hang us. Somebody fire quad us. Somebody give us free money and take our jobs from us, set those jobs on fire. It's hard enough to survive, but not only do you have to survive, you have to park your car on the street and there are no spots anywhere.

To make matters worse, there was a cop with a steel tape in his hand. He was measuring the distance from the bumper of a red Honda Civic to the hydrant. He was shaking his head in dismay. Regulations stated that a car was not to be within 15 feet of a hydrant. I pulled up next to the cop and waited, rolled the window down in the meantime. "What do you have flatfoot?"

"Flatfoot?"

"Uh huh. Do we have a winner?"

"14 and a half feet. This guy just won himself a parking ticket." He sucked the steel tape in and he pulled his violations pad out. I moved up the street, scanning for brake lights, for pedestrians with keys in their hands. No easy breaks on Broken Glass Avenue. I went up the nearest one way street, the right way and waited there at the light. The best bet is to make loops of the block by the perimeters of the green grass park. It's a good street. If there is such a thing as a good street in this city.

People get knifed there but they never die. They just show off their knife wounds to their children, their co workers, their partners in crime. It's nice to have proof you were alive.

I made it through three traffic lights and came back around to where i had started at the base of the bridge. I came back up my street and scanned for spots. It was almost a hopeless thing. Then, there on the radio, HOPE! My favorite song came on. I turned that thing up. Then I turned it up a little louder still.

I began to play the drums maniac style on the steering wheel. Really feeling it too. Quite a virtuoso when it comes to air drums. I'm coming up fast and looking down a side street, when I bring my head back on the road there's a guy walking right out in front of my car.

"AHHHHHHH!!" He screams as I hit the brakes, screeching and tire tracks on warm asphalt.

He's got on a lime green T-shirt. I don't know how I had missed him. "Are you OK?" I ask, hanging my head out the window. He's down on the ground, scared, shaken. I didn't hit him or anything. Though it was close. Real close.

"I'm fine, I'm fine." He says, getting up. He's mostly bones. Shaved head, khaki shorts. Then I see that he has keys in his hand.

"Hey, are you leaving?"

He doesn't say a word. He just raises his boney arm up and points through my car, to his car, the lime green one on my passenger side.

"That's you! Right on!"

"Yeah..." I notice that his hands shake as they hold the keys.

"That was a real close call! You almost got DESTROYED!"

"Yeah..."

I back up five feet or so, giving him room to get inside his car. A lime green Kia. He starts the thing up. I take the spot. The traffic cop is up there finishing up another ticket.

"I saw you almost kill that guy back there." He said.

"Almost is the keyword." I say.

The building smells like Spanish food when I come up the steps. For dinner I've got tuna fish or spaghetti.