"The walls were decorated with a New York subway map and a Buddhist bead necklace."

New York's Little Bhutan consists of one apartment building on University Avenue in the Bronx, named for the old Bronx campus of NYU where my Uncle Lenny went to college, not far from my grandparents' old building.

I usually don't post topical reports or link to the news, but this one gets to me. Notice the link to one of the residents' blogs.

Outdoor Shakespeare, Eavesdropper's Heaven, Walker's Paradise

1. From the Times review of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare on the Sound, in Connecticut: “The audience’s enthusiasm is particularly infectious when children are present, excitedly feeding off the bouncy moments of comedy. I overheard one thrilled youngster burbling happily about having run into Puck while going on an ice cream run. Perhaps a lifelong theater lover was born in that moment.” Sweet!

2. John and Danielle are on vacation in New York. Maybe they'll get some good eavesdropping.

3. My current neighborhood in Austin has a walkability score of 45 out of 100 –- “car-dependent.” Alas, I agree. My previous Austin address gets a 77 – “very walkable.” Yeah, by American standards, I guess. The street on which I grew up in the Bronx only gets a 78, probably because of low socio-economic standing, but anyone who thinks it’s a mere one point more than any street is Austin is effing crazy; it was a 98 if you ask me. The street on which I lived in Greenwich Village from 1977 to 1979 (scroll down to Ann’s second comment) gets 100 out of 100 – “walker’s paradise.” Extremely true; from that corner you could walk between the worlds. (h/t JAC)

“Most of our isolation is self-chosen.”

A quotation from the French theologian Henri Nouwen.

Do you realize that this June’s the __th anniversary of my high school graduation? I’ll say it aloud: 40th. I intend to be continually stunned by numbers like this –- and even higher ones! -- for the next many, many years.

I went to a public high school for the gifted, and had a terrible time emotionally. It wasn’t the school’s fault or the teachers’ or my classmates’ or mine, either, it was just deep teenage blues, augmented by historical turmoil -- assassinations of father-figures, a trend for freakouts and literature-induced alienation -- that I took too much to heart. A high school made up almost exclusively of hippies and dorks, and I couldn’t tell whether I was both or neither. Adolescent males either act out or withdraw, and I was bred for the latter.

I've been staying away from that school for forty years. Never sent them my address, never got any reunion announcements.

But last week someone forwarded me a document, a file of capsule biographies my classmates have been submitting. About a hundred, out of a class of 980. I figured it was the most popular ones, or the nerdiest ones, who wrote them.

My instant reaction was, I'm not going to do that.

These people's careers have been pretty intimidating. One of us is now the director of theoretical physics at MIT. About half of the graduates who sent in their bios seem to be doctors or professors. One woman led the world’s foremost study on twins separated at birth. Another is the principal of an elementary school in Chinatown/Little Italy which she turned into one of New York City’s prize success stories, and where Bush and Giuliani held their press conference after 9/11. Many have made small or large fortunes in business. One sent in a genial report about how he wandered aimlessly through his twenties, following the Maharishi and so forth, and, by happenstance, ended up on the ground floor of the computer industry, helped develop “a bunch of new types of tech products including digital photography, advertiser supported email, healthcare information systems, information security technologies, advanced decision support methodologies and virtual world media services,” and now pursues photography. One of us is a jazz musician who played with Miles Davis in the 70s. Another had his picture on the cover of Bass Player magazine. You get the idea.

Well, that’s okay, I can mask envy with pride, but what bothered me was that so many of them wrote things like, “My lovely wife of thirty years and I have been living in Boston since I became partner at Smith, Jones...” “I met X, the love of my life, in Drama Club when he was a junior and I was a sophomore…”

How did they do it? Did they study hard for marriage they way they did for math tests? They’ve gotten all A’s in life. (One of them, in his bio, recounts how he got a 90 in his first high school test and the girl next to him, who’d gotten 100, sympathetically asked him what had gone wrong.) (I did okay, I got an A-minus average by showing up.)

When I read those bios, feelings of inferiority overwhelmed in a way I’d thought I’d outgrown. I wasn’t one of these people; I didn’t belong; they were more fortunate than me; they didn’t know I existed. I recognized lots of their names –- they were people I hadn’t dared speak to back then, because if they were male they were too hip, and if they were female they were too pretty, and in both cases too popular, too urban-mature.

I was sixteen again, in the worst way. And I wasn’t going to send them my stupid bio, I wasn’t going to be like them, nor was I going to send it in just to be snubbed by them either, look how self-satisfied they all were, everybody doing things perfectly in the same way. I’d send in a sarcastic bio, I’d tell them off, it would be the only one that didn’t comply with their format, and they wouldn’t know what to do with me, they’d ignore me and that would prove I was above them…

I read the bios again, to verify how dull and conventional they were -– and they weren’t. These were fine people, living skillfully and well –- they even wrote well. They liked each other and might be willing to like me. Most of them wouldn’t remember me at all; some might recall my name vaguely; but I wanted to know how their plots had turned out; I wanted to do what I’d never deigned to in high school -- learn from them.

I wasn’t sixteen anymore, thank God.

The most dazzling surprises in my life have occurred when, against all my preconceptions, I could no longer avoid seeing that people sought my friendship, that I had something to contribute to a relationship. That realization has been such discomfiting good news, I haven’t been able to surrender to it until it’s hit me again and again and again.

The lessons we most need to learn are the ones we’ve already learned.

I sent in my little bio, and it’s just like everyone else’s, not cleverer or more iconoclastic, not duller or more humdrum, either. It’s a genre piece. Its life comes from it species, it doesn’t stand out, it doesn’t have a mutant’s conceit. All it might be is an exorcism for the haunted classroom of my past.

Rags, Cupcakes, Carousels

I must have been born in the last decade –- the Fifties –- when you could hear a ragman crying his wares on the streets of New York. And our ragman must have been one of the last to keep to his rounds rather than to be settled into a retirement home by successful offspring, or evaporate into the fumes of the street along with the garbage and gasoline.

What he cried out was, “I cash clothes! I cash clothes! I cash! I take!”

One jabbing note in a ringing nasal tenor that echoed metallically from the fire escapes, repeated down block after city block. He came around in the morning every few weeks -- must have walked a big circuit through the Bronx, spanning the neighborhoods, crossing the ethnic groups, returning to our street periodically. I was less than school age, to be home at that time. In my memory of his voice, the day is sunny, it’s spring, and a streetsweeper has just passed, leaving a neat swirl of gray dust behind him, his broom resting upended in his cart: he too a circler of neighborhoods on some esoteric calendrical orbit.

“I cash clothes! I cash! I take!”

His voice chilled me as delightfully as a ghost story. I rarely caught a glimpse of him -– a gray-haired man with a nose as sharp as his voice –- and even more rarely saw anyone conduct business with him. Sometimes a housewife would rush down and to catch him before he left the block, some old shirts in her hand, and receive what?, some coins, a dollar bill? Maybe the older housewives rushed down to reminisce with him about the Lower East Side in the Depression, their glory days.

I couldn’t fathom what he was doing or why. I asked my mother about it and her answer smacked of the subterranean, of sorcery performed in alleys and sewers: he went around asking people for their old clothes, and he paid them for the clothes, and somehow he earned his living by paying them. She might have hastily added that he resold the clothes –- hastily because she assumed, correctly, that I wouldn’t understand; but buying things from some people in order to sell them to others –- and such cheap things too, things no one I knew wanted –- hardly sounded like a believable way of earning a living. In my experience, parents, aunts, and uncles all earned their livings from the civil service, safe and predictable.

The years of street vendors. There was a knife-sharpener too, another occupation that absolutely stumped me. My mother sharpened her knives once in a blue moon on a little wheel of rough metal that she kept in a kitchen drawer. A man wandered the streets begging for acceptance as a substitute for that?

The ones I understood were the food vendors. The truck from Dugan’s Bakery, from which we only bought flat-topped yellow cupcakes spread with smooth fudgy chocolate. The two competing ice cream companies, Good Humor and Bungalow Bar, in trucks and hand-pushed carts: Good Humor daring us its avant-garde flavors of banana split and strawberry shortcake, but Bungalow Bar kindly offering my favorite, the chocolate malted popsicle. Sometimes, infrequently enough to always be a surprise, a carousel truck came by, with sides and roof of rusty orange wire and a bullhorn playing brain-grinding merry-go-round music, us little kids jumping down the apartment building steps and thronging the driver, quarters in hand. Then there were trucks my parents never bought from, though I pleaded: the seltzer truck with its wood crates full of blue siphon bottles; the dairy delivery man with milk, eggs, butter. My mother had her worldview down pat: seltzer delivery was for other families.

I didn’t notice when the ragman stopped coming around. And the delivery trucks disappeared gradually, probably into my college years, though there's been a mild fizzy trickle of retro seltzer delivery in recent years, staking out a route for customers who’ve heard of such things from their grandparents. Oh, no, there's one that delivers to Marin County -- and wouldn't you know it, seltzer delivery helps the environment!

Right now, I’d like a Dugan’s cupcake and a Bungalow Bar chocolate malted popsicle, melting all down my fingers.

My Bully

It was an age when stereotypes walked the earth. There were kids called Four Eyes, and rough kids and fatsos, there were boys who spoke with lisps and boys who wet their beds, there were dumb kids and walking encyclopedias. Anyone could be summarized in a phrase, and every neighborhood had the same population of simple phrases, with different faces attached. The fat kids seemed in our imagination –- and I have to call it imagination although we saw them every day –- not just large or overweight but balloonlike, globular, as if they belonged to a different species, and in the animated feature that was our street life they came complete with pendulous drooling lips and silly pompous voices.

I was a skinny malink. Whatever a malink was, I was informed in the most authoritative tones that I was it. My malinkhood, not to mention my protruding ribs and twiglike forearms, were proof that I could be made fun of with impunity. But everyone made fun of everyone else with impunity, and I was among the swiftest and most skillful in jeering at fat boys and running away, or calling out, “Thufferin’ Thuccotash,” when Stewie Silverman -– Thtewie Thilverman -- lisped.

My bully hadn’t achieved true circularity yet; he was large and pudgy on a realistic scale; but his older brother was a foremost blimp who, somehow in conjunction with that, had tremendous amounts of schoolwork that prevented him from going outside to play. My bully never spoke about his brother but they were inseparably joined in my mind. My bully’s name was William Goldschmitt, and you could tell he was on his way to alien-species roundness because he was never called Billy like a normal boy, always William.

The Goldschmitts lived in the apartment directly over ours, my family on the ground floor and his on the second: we were friends by propinquity. The strange thing was what good friends we were when he wasn’t beating me up. We walked down the street together for fifteen-cent slices of pizza, chatting enthusiastically about dinosaurs and astronauts, stamp collections and Jerry Lewis movies, despite the fact that when I was in company with my other friends, my normal friends, we shouted, “Pizza Boy!” at him because he ate three slices at a sitting. (He was eight years old, me six.) Often I ran upstairs to play board games with him. William always got the new games a few weeks before anyone else –-or maybe it was just a few days, those extra-inning days of street running and ball chasing, days as full as weeks -– because his grandfather owned a hobby shop, a little place stocked with model kits, pink rubber balls, lanyard material, chemistry sets, erector sets, terrariums, baby blocks, rhythm band instruments, and books in boys’ and girls’ mystery adventure series, as well as the games we lusted after. It was William who first possessed a copy of The Game of Life, by Milton Bradley; we must have played it a dozen times before it was available for purchase by the unconnected. To fuel the action we drank glasses of iced tea, dark moss-brown and zinging with artificial sweetener, from the Tupperware pitcher William’s mother kept in the fridge, a practice my mother sneered at as being pretentious and genteel.

The times I didn’t want to be near William were the times he came upon me in the lobby of the apartment building, where I couldn’t outrace him and no parents were around. I don’t remember what reasons he claimed for attacking me; I don’t think he even used a pretext, like my looking at him funny or anything. He just came in swinging and kept up till I was crying, which was never very long. I was going to use the word “merciless” in that last sentence but in fact it wasn’t merciless at all: he stopped as soon as I sobbed, “I give.” The rules were never spoken but they were followed. Another rule was that the little space in the corner of the vestibule, where the open front door made a triangle with the walls, was my safety zone: if I could dash into there, he wouldn’t come in after me, although if I ever felt like leaving that tiny triangle of floor space, he was waiting right there with his fists still clenched. Once or twice he broke the rule and pounded me within the safety zone, but some inner voice stopped him and he respected the rule from then on.

I couldn’t understand why someone would want to hurt someone else for no reason. For a reason, yes, that was part of the code; but I was just walking through the lobby doing nothing! In our friendly hours -– which could follow the unfriendly ones with no interval -– I asked him why he punched me. “Don’t you ever feel like fighting someone?” he asked -- a question to which I still don’t know my true answer. Then he directed me to the next board game, the next glass of iced tea.

I complained to my father: “William always beats me up.” Contrary to my hopes, my father did not beat up Williams’ father, an insurance man of dismal mien. “Hit harder,” my dad said, and looked back down at some printed matter.

I even asked William himself what I should do. “How come it’s so easy for you to beat me up?” I asked.

He explained his secret technique: don’t just punch once or twice, conduct a relentless rapid-fire barrage, punch after punch to the same spot on the belly, until the opponent –- me – is overwhelmed.

Next time we found ourselves in the vestibule together, I tried it, but I was so intent on keeping out of range that my fists couldn’t reach the target area and landed harmlessly on his arms. He stuck to his plan as always, and I gave up on schedule, believing I was incapable of mastering the technique.

As usually happens, at some point he stopped bullying me without ever saying so. Maybe it was when my family moved to the fourth floor, a larger apartment in a different precinct of the building. Ringing his doorbell now required travel with a purpose; it was no longer what I automatically did when I went out into the hall to look for a playmate. Then William advanced to junior high school -- not our district one, but a private school his mother genteelly drove him to –- and when we crossed paths he didn’t bother to say hello.

One time, William got into a fight with the son of a friend of his parents, and the boy broke Williams’ arm. William’s parents sued their friends, winning hospital costs plus emotional damages.

Years later, William’s older brother became a tax lawyer, and the neighborhood whispered that he’d lost a lot of weight and become a racquetball nut. I don’t know what William became, because by the time he was old enough to become anything I was out of there myself.

Now I’m coming to the ending, and it’s not going to be what I planned when I wrote the beginning. I’ve thought of an alternate ending, so I’m going to give you both, the theatrical version and the director’s cut. The theatrical version is that I think of William with insistent bitterness, and if I came across him lying in the gutter I’d piss on him and remind him why. In that version, William is my negative mascot, and while I love peace and have spent years meditating, practicing serenity, studying forgiveness, and I know that anytime I hurt someone it hurts me worse, I want to keep one symbolic enemy, a mental demon I won’t come across in real life, so I’ll stay grounded and not think I’m some kind of spiritual person.

The director’s cut? It’s just this: William became a good story and now we’re through. His story visited me after a lot of years and made me smile, and as it passes out of my mind, perhaps for as many more years as I have left, I see it off with a grateful wave. If I ran into him again I’d be happy to see him, and not need a reason. I wonder if he’s fatter now, or thinner, and the unknown answer pleases me.

He was always a story, and now he’s more so.

Another Babka Bites the Dust

It's not that I miss the old culture all that much -- let a hundred trendy restaurants invade the Lower East Side, I say, who needs the knishes and the dry goods stores? It's become such a cliche to lament the passing of some commercial semi-institution from bygone generations and to rail at the uncultured rich young vampires who move in. Yes, populations change, new immigrants replace the old, and demographic patterns shift. Otherwise New York [substitute the name of your own place] would become an ethnological museum.

What moves me about this very short New York Times article is not the disappearance of an old bakery or even of my parents' and grandparents' historical environment -- in which they were mostly miserable -- but the emotions of the reporter, which come through so strongly through his journalistic prose. It's not every day that a Times writer gets to tell the world how overjoyed his family was when their father brought home a cake after a day's work at the hosiery shop. The telling is better than the cake.

And let's face it, though I've never been to Gertel's, I'm one of those "grandchildren…of striving sewing machine operators." On both sides.

Driving, Joking, Growing

Yesterday I was sitting in the car waiting to make a left turn onto my street, watching the stream of traffic approach in the other direction. The traffic moved at a uniform pace except for one car that wove in and out in order to get to the front and pull away. What a fool, I thought, where is he rushing to? He had to be a skillful driver in order to use that style, and he probably enjoyed getting the better of the other drivers, whom he must have considered pathetically conformist, but didn’t he see that his style of driving was dangerous to himself and others?

Then I realized: that’s exactly how I drive.

I learned to drive in the Bronx and it shows. Many more people drive like that there than here. It’s a video game: you try to get to the finish line first, not by speeding but by superior handling in close quarters. Some people have joked about my driving, or even expressed concern. It’s puzzled me how they could mistake good driving for bad. Yesterday I understood when I saw my own actions from the viewpoint of an observer.

I have other patterns that have been more harmful to me than aggressive driving (no traffic accidents, thank God), and I learned them in the Bronx too. One is a practice I’ve been painfully unlearning over many years, the practice of yelling and cursing. I think I’ve finally got that one unlearned after it caused more damage than I want to tell you about.

But clear away a rock and you’ll stumble over a root. Over the past months several incidents have brought home to me an awareness of how I use words not only as a defense but as a weapon. I use wit to wound others, sometimes people I’m close to, sometimes strangers. I’m a witty, incisive, verbally adept guy, it’s my great strength, and I’ve resisted any effort to restrict my use of it. Undoubtedly it compensates for strengths I’ve felt I don’t have. (Whether I actually don’t have them is another issue.) Sometimes I’m with someone and I’m so taken with my own insight that I blurt out something hurtful. Or I write something and I’m so intoxicated with my clever inspiration that I don’t see the nastiness behind it. (Oh, I’m not completely blind to the nastiness, even as I’m indulging it, but I permit myself to be carried away in the rejoicing over power.) I throw a spear of criticism and try to shield myself with the fact that it’s comic. There was an incident twenty-odd years ago when I alienated a friend by amusingly telling him how ridiculous his profession was. A small case, but telling.

I’ve been agonizing because I haven’t known how to excise that malignant part of me without destroying who I am. Am I supposed to go the rest of my life without wit, without comic perceptiveness? It would feel like being lobotomized. Not to mention that I’m a writer. Witty insight is the scalpel I use on the world; should I turn it against myself?

This is something I’m in the middle of thinking about so I don’t have a final answer. All I understand at the moment is that I need to be more aware of the harmful effects on others of some of the things I say, and I have to be aware before I say them, not just after. The saving grace is that I don’t do it frequently. (But when I do, it undoes many good things.) If I can isolate my laser on those few occurrences and cut them away, I can be as witty and insightful as I want when it doesn’t hurt others.

They say you should become friends with your shadow. That’s a metaphor I’ve never understood how to put in practice in literal living. It sounds nice to say and hard to do. My idea now is that I need to use words and insight on a higher level to unlearn the misuse of them on a lower. At least I can feel secure that words and wit really are my friends in a way that yelling never was.

My solution has always been more thought, more thought. I have a feeling that’s only part right.

Sadly, these women formed part of my earliest feminine ideal.

Listening to their gum-chewing trash talk, I'm summoned back by scents of trodden-thin grass and linden-seed-littered pavement, fumes from groaning buses, subway-platform newspaper wind, and the ozone from sparks on the subway rail. I see a mob of teenagers pushing onto a city bus, waving cardboard passes in the stuporous driver's face and shoving their books into the kidneys of anyone close by. I see myself walking to Mother Cabrini High School for a driver's ed lesson as girls in white uniform blouses crowd the second-floor window: "That boy's coming into the building!"



I'll drive you down the Bruckner Expressway, girls, there's a moon over the 241st Street station. We'll stop for a black-and-white shake at Carvel and maybe a slice of pizza at Gloria's, and you'll talk about the perfume sale at Alexander's and your classmate who's making out with the science teacher. You haven't changed a bit.

Daily Photos

When I want to see what Austin, Texas looks like, I can step outside my door -- or if it's too hot to do that, I can simply click to Austin Daily Photo, a site run by Alice of Like a Tea-Tray in the Sky. Alice is an Englishwoman who somehow found herself here, and like so many of us transplants, she loves it. Her photos contain a lot of her obsession -- overhead wires -- and lots of sunlight glaring off of buildings and cars. It's hard to show visually what's so wonderfully special about Austin, since it's not a particularly pretty town. But there's a wacky, eclectic, welcoming spirit here that's not found in many other places. You can feel it even just driving along. Many times I drive down South Congress Avenue or even the Mo-Pac Expressway and think, "God, I'm lucky to live here."

A very nice thing about having discovered Austin Daily Photo is that I've discovered all the world's Daily Photo sites at once, on a sidebar. You can click city after city from Accra, Ghana to Zaltbommel, Netherlands and see what's going on. London, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Venice, Blomfontein, Brasov, Doha, Seguin...

And what's the most thrilling, unpredictable, exotic, psychotic of the cities on the city blog list? You guessed it. Nowhere else comes close. Just looking at New York Daily Photo and Joe's NYC I can hear it, smell it, touch it, be seized by it, the fever, the ferocity, the desperate wishing and prowling, the mingling and mangling, the hallucinatory grime and gleam. Good God what a place. Every few steps in that city you could take a photo and capture a phenomenon you wouldn't find anywhere else. What it must have been like to grow up there, to live there for a quarter-century or so. What luck.