I love this city; I just can’t live here.  But then, that has little to do with appreciating a fix that takes you to a place you can believe in, or one that you can’t forget, if only on a Monday.

It is not just the excitement of the city; it is more than that. The lights, the noise, the immediacy that permeates from every crack in the sidewalk; the city, the world, as though taking its final breath. The pulsating waves of fear, hate, euphoria that accompany you on a stroll through a town that is being born, as it is dying in your presence.

A guy I know lives on the fourth floor of a brick building just off Amsterdam Ave. I’d call him a friend, but he shuns relationships, “Too dangerous,” he proclaims. The bottom four floors are dedicated to the needs of the wheel. A tire shop that is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Money their ultimate Nirvana, cajoling and massaging the pennies trapped in the lint belted pockets of those who need their cars more than the fouled air they disregard as being the cause of their wheezing and ruptured eyes. A symbiotic relationship created from an evil design that promotes capitalism, while its eyes are closed.

Sammy lives in one of the four apartments on the fourth floor. There is no elevator, only a vertical shaft filled with metal stair treads and twisted railings. A window on every landing allows the milky light from the courtyard to splash on the graffitied walls.  As the air becomes thinner, muscles beginning to complain, hands grateful for the serpentine rail that lures us towards the roof, Sammy mentions, that I should, not forget who I was.

The roof, a molten mass of gelatinous tar and God only knows what else, comes to life as the sun pumps memory like plasma into its form. Pigeons call us to attention, as they shock the buffered sky with their retreat from humanity in search of a time before, implanted falcons intent on genocide. 

The view, despite the extinct remnants of clothes lines and television antennas no longer able to interpret the echoes of the last words spilled into the universe by the Enterprise, is captivating.

The buildings on the horizon take on the magical appearance of a Gulliver dream; miniature vehicles attempting to flee their gaze. The river twists its way like lazy licorice on a hot day through the brick edifices that support the sky above, with seemingly no effort. The light in the west is slipping into eternity as the manufactured candles of Edison exposes the glass to be the traitor it is, allowing personal freedom to fall prey to prying eyes. Roof tops, and their telescopic eyes capturing glimpses of foreign worlds, dependent upon privacy for survival.

Sammy finds the freedom intoxicating as it reminds him of the regimentation instilled in souls by the justice enacted on Ryker's Island visitors. Eight years he claims is a small price to pay for having stolen sixty pre-emptive years from a strangers fate, and all because life told him it demanded respect. He has come to see that respect is not an all or nothing proposition, designed to be judge, jury, and executioner, in a black and white land dedicated to presumptive segregation.  His hope that guns and knives will, if not be turned to plow shares, may be turned to writing implements, thinking helmets. There are already enough implements of destruction to keep us all safe, until the day they band together and take us with them, to where ever heartless anomalies of the human spirit, go.

We sit on the parapet wall in silence, and watch the sky turn to a kaleidoscope of artificially induced color meant to stimulate the assumption of need, amidst the premonitions of want, and the satisfaction of knowing it only matters to those who care about such things.

We float down the dozens of stairs to the accompaniment of sounds from the park, where horses earn another’s keep by practiced duty and abandonment of ancestral purpose, as it is too painful to remember. Being reminded daily by the troughs pushed into the pavement by newlyweds and those that remain together, despite destiny for more years than they care to remember, leaves even the carriage feeling lonely, is upsetting.

Leaving the captivity of affluence, we wind our way past the blank store windows and doorways, occupied by those whose prospects have become less than being killed by a drop of rain. And yet they smile into a bottle as they search for that perfumed essence that will release the hold it has on them and allow them to disappear, once and for all.

Sammy begins to jabber about the need to stick together, remain back-to-back against the forces that pretend to be light, but hide a deceptive nature under the guise of hope. “Everyone knows hope has left for the other coast where the sun shines on those trapped by the bright lights and the chance of being mauled by a speeding millionaire, who would rather pay than play,” Sammy offers, as he hands me his hope for a different tomorrow, and says, “Be careful, it’s the good stuff.”

Sammy waves to those sitting on the front stoops, winks at those pretending they are blind to their fate and ours, and whispers sweet nothings to the children who skip rope in an attempt to find the rhythm that will allow them to never come down.

We look down our Grand Canyon of concrete and asphalt towards the river where the moving vans are lined up behind the Easter Parade. It is filled with straw hats embellished with artificial flowers, as real ones need care, love, a reason to be appreciated, and there is little of that to be found amongst the twisted blades of fortuitous reeds disguising who they are.

“They are coming,” he says more to himself than to me, as I appear to be distracted, by, myself. 

“Who is coming,” I ask, knowing the answer because I’d seen it before, not today or yesterday, but for the past five thousand years where the top of the hill has become the place to be, because it gives one the ability to look down on your subjects and see if they continue to appreciate what you have done for them; having given them to work the streets. Are they continuing to follow the example that built the mountain top? I dare not ask. 

“Problem is,” Sammy says, as though having read my mind, “there are only so many mountain tops and avalanches have become more prolific as the temperatures of distrust rise, and entrenched denial refutes the reality that the streets are on fire.” I could understand how that would make the climb difficult, if not impossible without a miracle.

“Look,” Sammy points to a shaded window being bared to make room for silk curtains. Walls that once dripped with the Picasso like frescoes painted by leaking sealings and uninhibited crayons, now being replaced with Romanesque grandeur hauled to their new digs by limousines.

“There,” Sammy says, seeing those too hampered by the price of existence, “over there,” he whispers pointing. “They can now afford the happiness they deserve… but unfortunately, not until the present tenant takes on the burden of what has been left by the one waiting on the front stoop, for the keys to his refurbished kingdom.

“Where do they go?” he asks with that redemptive heart of his. I don’t have an answer. I watch too, the merry-go-round of change that leaves some behind, while carrying others to a better future at the expense of an attitude, left behind by a horse who simply no longer cares to fulfill his duty, preferring to become French cuisine or dog food. He and his have quit caring, as there must be room in heaven for those who have enough sense to know heaven is a creation of the will. “Everyone knows, even a horse has enough sense to get out of the artificial light that allows dreams to become someone else’s reality,” or so Sammy believes.

Sammy asks, “If I become gentrified will they put me in a museum, like an Egyptian mummy?” 

How do I respond to a question that can only be answered by an Egyptian mummy, and we all know they only speak to those who refuse to be displaced.