Part 1: Lychees and a Sock
The weather is perfect, unbelievable. The summer solstice has bent
away, and the days are supposed to be shrinking, but it is bright, standing on this square of
concrete sidewalk. The trees are green. Green-green, dead-serious
green, veins of green, supersaturated chlorophyll watermarks against a light, intimate sky. A breeze is pushing me over gently, and the sun is whisking away lonely wisps of humidity. I am on the outskirts of campus -- on Howe street -- with a
guitar slung over my back, walking towards, through, and away, from Yale.
It was never the plan to say goodbye in such a trivial way. James
and I, we had just whiled away two hours in his art-deco-infested sublet. I brazenly wrestled the
pictures and video of our triumphant guitar set last night from his computer,
while he talked to his mum, awkward-as-a-white-elephant headphones in his
ears. We are in the kitchen of a house. A house
with mason jars, instead of glasses. A house with two bathrooms, both warily
functional, exactly across from each other. The house speaks to us. It
whispers, "You might have wire-rim glasses, but you'll never feel
comfortable here." Whilst the ghosts of the tenants engage us, James and
I, both of us, we just sit there, present, visceral.
“Do you like fruit?” I ask.
“Of course,” he responds.
“You can have this. I want you to keep it.”
“There’s an entire mango in here? Thanks mate! Are you sure you
don’t want it?”
“Nope. That’s a present from me to you.”
Not much of a present for our friendship, or even for two nights
in a real room, with a real sheet, a wake-up
call in the morning, unabashed use of his computer, and a cozened generosity for my
professional time-wasting activities. No, the fruit in the bag, just an over-ripe mango and a branch of lychees -- round and globular, hardened and
ready for any-length fingernails to pierce with pleasure -- was not adequate for
our goodbye. Not even.
So I prepared a speech.
“Thanks so much for being my friend. For having the generosity to
have me, a tyro, with literally no knowledge of music, teach you, the 17-year
master, how to play guitar. Because you didn’t need to ask me. But you did. And out of it came the greatest memory of this summer – and also a new friendship that,
while maybe I wouldn’t have valued a year ago, and definitely not three years
ago, now means so much. It was a good way to go out. I’m glad we became friends.”
At 7:25 p.m., we stood awkwardly,
wedged between the arc of the front door and the staircase. (Poor design. I
blame the hipsters.) I got out the first two lines – “Thanks for playing guitar
with me. I’m really glad we played together” -- before he immediately
volunteered a response: “Shared accountability, remember,” -- more inside
joke than sentimental farewell. And, with that sweet, irreverent remark, an air of finality hit both of us; it hung in the air. I didn’t push back. Instead, we grasped in an ever-so-sloppy
handshake, and then I turned and left into the beautiful day.
My heels struck pavement, my stride was purposeful, my gait long,
tall, and designed-by-force. I was ready for my last tour through this school,
head swirling with the soft memories of my last interaction ever. Then:
"Hey, Peter!"
I look across the street. It's my KASY wife. Shoot. It's not like
I don't like her, or anything; I actually do -- whenever we've hung out, she's
been accommodating, energetic, beatific -- but we haven't seen each other
much through the year. She's an acquaintance, and now, she's going to fall into
place as my last conversation at Yale. This wasn't supposed to happen! Where's
my script? The sunset, the cherry-black horse galloping into the distance, the
tumbleweed?
"You're leaving! Oh man -- this is my friend, by the
way."
I shake hands. I am woefully unprepared to meet someone new, not
now, not after I have already put Yale and its vicissitudes behind me. Our
conversation peters out, drips slowly onto the cement, the latent discomfort
and patent unfamiliarity staining our skin, turning us egregious. After 30
seconds, I make the move to exit gracefully, without, of course, any semblance
of grace.
"Ok, I'll see you...uh, again! Soon! Keep in touch!"
And I'm off! The journey is back on track, and I'm planning my
route through Yale: I turn right and head towards Chapel Street; then,
feeling regret already poisoning my thoughts, double back and walk through the
pathway between Branford and Jonathan Edwards. I decide to go even further
north to High Street gate, so that I can let some of the magic of Old Campus
linger.
I walk through the gate. Should I be crying right now? Not
bawling, tears hanging off my chin, but maybe a little misty-eyed solemnity, a
rapid-fire sequence of blinking to hide these grown-man emotions? Crying seems
appropriate. Apropos, I think, to make-up for my lack of emotion during
graduation, when the end was still hazy, wobbly, un-finalized and not very
present, not with a summer in New York so close. Yes, tears should be
shed, preferably while I keep walking through Old Campus, even if these high
school students -- what program are they here for? -- wearing their tags of
identification around their small, skinny necks will see me. Tears would work
well here. It would be memorable. It would be quite a Capstone. Emotions.
Melancholy. The end of childhood.
But of course, I am nowhere near crying. Not in the same block, or
borough, or continent. My neurons are not obeying my commands for
sentimentality. It isn't as if this is some romantic comedy, where I just broke
up with this school and its now nearly 20 billion dollar endowment. Plus, I am
facing a more immediate problem. It is the problem of throwing away my sock.
Oh, you hadn't heard? Well, see, back on Chapel Street, I attained
a splinter in my right shoe. I thought it was poetic. An extended metaphor for
my stay at Yale: overall superb, but a little niggling and nagging, a prickle,
a mini-crisis. I relished the thought at becoming a literal walking
metaphor.
But 10 steps in, I had enough. It hurt too much. I stopped, peeled
back the sock, and tried to locate the source of my discomfort, but I couldn’t
see it. So I slipped my shoe over my toes, and then over my heel, and started
walking, sock in hand. Which was equally metaphorical, now that I think about
it. Slightly unbalanced. Comfortable, successful, but imperceptibly uneven,
slightly awry, askew.
My sock could go into my guitar backpack! I would carry it as an
emblem of Yale. It would sit in my room for a week, and then I would go to the
old shop downtown and frame it underneath the saltiest old glass I could find,
append a label saying, "The Last Sock of Yale," and place it in
safekeeping in an attic until I bought my own place, at which point this trophy
would come back in blazing fashion, mounted above a fireplace, an
instant-conversation starter. Hey what's so special about that sock?; Well,
Mr. President, let me tell you, that sock has been through thick and thin with
me. Why, back when I was at Yale...
I throw the sock away in a trash can on Old Campus.
My last image of Yale is slightly galling. I walk through Phelps
Gate to strengthen the poetic resonance of walking through Phelps Gate four
years ago on FOOT, but I don't stop. Instead, once I have passed through, I
look over my shoulder back to Old Campus, taking in the mass of green leaves
that are blurry, not very distinct -- it could be a park in South Los Angeles,
for all I know. Worse, the view is impeded by the silhouettes of three high
school students talking at the corner. Dammit! Don't you know this is the last
time I'm leaving Yale? Give me my three seconds with this institution, you
ungracious, naive f**ks! But instead of saying anything, I keep walking.
I attempt to compromise. Now on Chapel Street, after passing Asian
tourists in garish colors and non-branded clothing, I look back. All I see,
sticking out over the trees of the New Haven Green, is the oddly shaped,
dilapidated, Russian-looking bulb of a roof cap over Phelps Gate. I give up.
There will be no poetic last image of Yale. I'll have to come back sometime and
replicate this journey, maybe at my 5-year reunion, with a Jessica-Alba-like
girlfriend by my side. Yes, that's what will happen. I will take the walk from
Howe Street to Phelps Gate all over again, except this time, she's going to
carry my guitar case. And hold my sock. And feed me lychees. Yes! I can't wait.
Part 3: I must pee.
In Grand Central I see someone. I have seen him before. I saw him
yesterday. He was wearing Beats by Dr. Dre around his neck, was headed towards
Payne Whitney, was tall and black and cool, just like he is today, like he is
right now, walking in front of me, step by step, to the main concourse of Grand
Central, while at the same time I walk up the stairs, planning in my head this
completely conscious plan to walk faster than him, my strides more purposeful,
more powerful, to make up for my lack of height and coolness, so that when I am
next to him, slightly in front of him, in a good position to speak to him, I
will turn my head around.
“You play basketball for Yale, right?”
I expect him to say, “What?”; “Huh?”; or toss me a blank stare.
That's when I’ll lambaste myself for not being loud enough, confident enough,
and then I'll repeat my words, slower, louder, a little bit shakier. But
-- oh my! -- he hears me.
“Yea.”
“I’ve seen you play. I go to school there. You’re good.”
I say it with an air of nonchalance, a hint of wryness, a smidgen
of thoughtfulness, top it off with a half-smirk-half-genuine smile, and turn
forward and keep walking. But not before he smiles and gives a little chuckle
and says Thanks. Or maybe he doesn't say anything at all,
it doesn't matter either way -- what matters is that I have just
sounded both purposeful and casual, have come from a place of inner strength,
have demonstrated by insuperable ability to connect with the diversity of human
beings on this planet, me being cultured and self-conscious and a denizen for
the general good. While I am on top of the fucking world, I think back to our
interaction — this, I guess you could call it, exercise in humanity — and
imagine that in 30 years, when this Yale basketball player is living in a
comfortable home in North Carolina, recounting stories of his playing days to
his grandchildren, he'll drift deep into thought and think about that 30-point
game he had, where he guarded the other team's best player, and realize that
the accolades he received afterwards — "You showed em, champ"';
"That's what I wanted to see, sport" — those compliments paled in
comparison to that random interaction he had that gauzy night in Grand Central,
when that vagabond-looking kid who turned out to be from Yale — at
least he said he was — told him, “You’re good.” And while he might
have forgotten me already, in actuality our interaction has just been filed in
his long-term memory, packaged for the right moment when—
I am being gnawed inside out. A rat with molars the size of
Triscuit crackers. I am outside of Grand Central. It feels like a cramp, but
worse, actually not a cramp at all, more like a pinball machine recruiting my
kidneys, pulling back on the release lever to send them flying, flailing into
multi-colored bumpers and scraping through stainless steel roller-coasters.
Fuck. I expected some discomfort, having not eaten for 8 hours, but I have gone
tremendous distances in the time-space continuum without eating before—heck,
like last night, when I was rolling in the waves in my boxers
collecting bio-luminescent jellyfish—
I continue to walk. But when the pain should be plateauing it is
instead growing tentacles. I start to walk more furiously, with more
conviction, following my memory, tracing my way back to a deli a couple blocks
ahead where, 3 months ago, Joey and Sam and I bought Naked Juice at 1 a.m.
while waiting for the train back into New Haven. Oh no. It doesn't have a
bathroom. There’s no bathroom in the damn place. I can feel it. And I see the
McDonald’s sign next door, but it's not lit up. I'm a block away. The
McDonald's doesn't look open. How can it not be open, it makes no business
sense, it's so close to Grand Central, there needs to be a
24-hour McDonald's here, it is so essential to the functioning of
this city that there be legitimate fast-food, big-box fries and burgers,
especially since Chipotle is further up and less midnight-snack-friendly, and
yet the McDonald's sign I am approaching is unlit and unloved—
It is open. I walk in, look up at the second floor, maybe 20 feet
away in sheer distance, and realize I must make it up to the second floor. The
second floor is my home base. The bathroom my nirvana. Need. To. Reach. The.
Second. Floor.
The menagerie of people eating burgers and fries see me walk past
them. I see a worker and two doors, "Gentleman" on the right-hand
door. I know she can see me—
“You can’t use this. I’m going to clean it right now.”
“Please, I’ll be quick, I promise.”
I slouch a little. My mouth bends downwards, imperceptibly. I am
an adorable puppy dog, eager and unwitting.
“Ok, go.”
The inside is disgusting. Fuck. The floor is covered with water.
The puddle threatens to subsume the entire floor. I cannot tell if it is
leaking from the urinal, if somebody has thrown up clear liquid that will soon
putrefy, if the ceiling has been dripping. All I know is that my yellow shoes
have holes. Holes that are gaping, growing larger with every step, inviting for
all sorts of floor-level microbes. But I must pee. There is water everywhere,
but my bladder needs to empty itself. I will pee. Things will get worse, but
then they will get better.
I open the stall door, and, shit, I realize I have a guitar slung
over my shoulder. It is tilted at a 30 degree angle, an angle prohibitive to me
entering the stall without having to lean and rock and squeeze in, then turn
facing forward again, so that I become literally stuck in the stall, my guitar
jammed on both sides. To make things worse, the door of the stall falls into
me, presses against the profile of my body, and I almost want to cry mercy and
give up, curl into the fetal position, but that means having to grovel in the
floor water, the dirty, dirty water of unknown origin, so instead I use my
right knee, turned outwards, to push the door away so that the only point of
contact between me and the door is the bottom of my knee, an area which I can
never touch again, at least not until I wash these pair of green pants, or at
least disinfect them, maybe even dry clean them, the bottom of my knee having
been in contact with the stall. My guitar is still brushing, pushing against
the side of the bathroom stall. The McDonald's stall. The only stall next to
Grand Central open at 10 p.m. at night, with an estimated usage every day of
500. Or 1,000. Or 10,000. I don't know, it's a large number, this bathroom in so
much use it necessitates the existence of leaks here and there, custodial
problems, structural problems, problems that frustrate the management here,
problems that might even be bigger than a huge fucking puddle underneath and
around the urinal. These 10,000 people — regular people, homeless people, the
poor, the inheritance-rich, drag queens, tourists from Norway, yoga
instructors, child pornographers — fuck, all these people with their own
rituals, own habits of peeing and ass-wiping and cleaning after themselves, who
knows if it's the poor that are most tidy and the rich the most brazenly
sloven, it's all invisible traces; who knows how many people have done
fucked-up, non-acceptable things here, this being, for all intensive purposes,
a public bathroom and all, even if the sign says "For Paying Customers
Only" — who has defecated here and left stains, peed accidentally on the
walls, smeared their feces over the front door—
No time to think like this. I move forward and inch toward the
toilet, but look down and see the floor water sitting on the tiles, lazy and
surreal. I can’t come in further, so I unzip and aim. My stream is strong and
true, a catapult arc into the basin, beautiful, like a Super Soaker pumped
until the pressure pushes back on the plastic pump. I am releasing, emptying
out, unburdening a thousand problems, petty and serious, all ejected rudely, my
kidneys already sighing, relaxing, until, oh shit, I start running out of
steam, stream. I am losing power. I can only watch from my spectator seats as
the arc decreases in amplitude, as the landing spot goes from the middle of the
basin to the edge, to off the edge, now completely missing everything. I
strain, I push, I lean, but it ends pathetically, the last few drops shaken
into the puddle on the floor. Which, surprisingly, does not look any larger.
The worker, mop and bucket in hand, I can't look at when I walk
out. I'm flying down the aisle, because, shit, what if she goes in and thinks I
did it — she'd call management downstairs, press that secret intercom button
they have for communicating during times like these, and a worker, or maybe the
paying customers, would bar me from leaving, force me to clean my mess up, not
only my mess but the entire stall, the walls, the sink, the bottom and sides of
the urinal units, and while I was doing it I'd leave my guitar outside the
door, where it would be stolen — you should have kept a better eye on
it — and sold for crack. Oh I knew it, I shouldn't have bought that
green tea for $4.99, a gallon's worth, the big bottle just to meet the Asian
grocer's credit car minimum, finished the entire frothing thing before I left,
thought it would be good to stay hydrated. I didn't even want to finish it,
dammit, it was a sunk cost. It was refreshing though. Fuck fuck fuck — no,
everything is alright. Normal. The worker will not seek injunction. She knows
it is not me. She is just harried and stressed and the least bit sad, in the
global sense, used to these injustices now. I table my pity and guilt for a
later time and walk down the stairs. Done. Free.
Oh, shit. On the streets I feel good, better, strong enough to
forage for a place to eat, until I realize I forgot to wash my hands. Good god,
with all that contact, shit microbes are probably crawling over my clothes
right now, my skin, slowly making their way into my orifices, the small cut on
my left hand, through the holes in my body and into my blood stream, create a
million mouths that will devour my tissue, reproduce and birth maggots they
will have to cut from the outside, through the skin, but only when they are mature,
wriggling, ready to get out, otherwise they will burst inside my veins, which
wouldn't be pleasant at all, no, no...fuck. I need to wash my hands. I need a
bathroom. (August 2nd, 2011)
Part 4: A delicious pita-hot-dog.
“How much is that? The sausage?” I ask.
“This?” the dark man says.
“Yes.”
“$6.”
“That’s really expensive.”
“You get this pita, tomatoes, lettuce.”
I look around. I watch the tourists in front of me take their
steaming hot dogs.
“Oh, ok.”
The Indian stand manager is skillful. A cut lengthwise, a hot iron
to brand the meat to the grill—
“Hot sauce, white sauce, barbecue sauce?”
“Um…just white sauce, please.”
He flips the pita around. Opens a slushy bag of 20 hot dogs. Takes
another customer’s order. Removes my pita from the hot plate and layers the
sausage, the droopy tan-brown lettuce, the watery tomatoes over each other.
“Hot sauce, barbeque sauce, white sauce?”
“No, no. Nothing. Thanks.”
I give him my $20, and he hands me a $10. Then he hands me two
$1s. Then he reaches in his pockets and finds two more $1 bills. The man behind
me says, “Actually, can I get what he got?”
I have nowhere to eat this. I refuse to cradle this into the
subway; a ritual needs to be evoked, reminiscent of our prehistoric ancestor's
worship of fire, charcoal fingerprints and animal rawhide and all. So I walk 50
feet away, just to prove to those waiting in line that I indeed had somewhere
to go, and consider if I want to slide in-between the two vagabonds on the
shoe-shining chairs.
I decide to become the third vagabond in what is now a line of
vagabonds, two being just a conspiracy. We are now a consortium! A unwitting,
pigheaded team of faux-shoe-shiners, brilliant under the bitumen night. I look
at them. They don't look back. I would feel slighted, except that I look in my
hands and a soul-affirming glow settles on me--
Food!
--which immediately strips my mind bare. I am seized by a need to
unwrap, smell, taste, gorge, usurp my damned physiological urges--
It’s hot. Too hot.
I am woefully unprepared – and untrained – to eat a
pita-hot-dog. The foil is trapping and exaggerating the heat, and these
napkins are no buffer against this scorching mini-oven. How unprepared of me.
The tip of the sausage, gray-pink, throbbing, is radioactive, goading me from
its nest of lettuce and pita. My hand peels and exposes, peels and exposes,
until I have a window in which I can take a bite. It is a Chihuahua bite. Not a
munch; a squeak. I peel back the foil and take bigger bites but my fingertips,
trying to acquiesce to an ever decreasing amount of napkin space, are being
cauterized, stroked over coal embers. I try to take a bigger bite but steam
attacks the top of my mouth, I bring my head back, and when I do, the lettuce –
the sole big piece he gave me, the thick, watery bit – it falls to the ground.
And stays there, looking back up at me.
Pick it up. And eat it.
But that's dirty.
But it hasn't been three seconds yet.
You're not starving. People survive on only drinking water for
days.
It's going to be delicious.
You. Just. Graduated. From Yale.
I look away from the lettuce and continue to nibble, the liquid
from the sublimated juices pooling at the bottom of the tin foil, creating a
lava lake of steaming meat juice a tilt away from dripping onto my clothes. The
pita is coming apart. It is dissolving in its own gore, disintegrating and
capitulating. The tin foil is rolled back so far, fragile and teething and
splitting at the ends, I desperately want to use my free hand to lift the mess
and direct it into my mouth, but to do so would be to break the quarantine on
my McDonalds bathroom hands. Though who knows how fast microbes can climb
upwards--from hand to elbow to shoulder back down and around to my mouth and my
food, though the salient question is not if the journey matters but if the
destination is too treacherous a location for our microscopic
friends. It is hot tin foil. If you're nano-meters wide, it would be like the
fucking Sahara desert.
But I take no chances. Forging ahead, I tailgate my food, dipping
my head into the foil and using my teeth to pull out what I can, while
profusely apologizing to my lips, besmirched and muddy with flavor.
I have now eaten enough to forget how hungry and weak I am.
Instead, I realize the tourists, mainly, but also the native New Yorkers, are
looking at me, standing as the off-center third pigeon in a line of homeless
pigeons, gawking and protecting my large piece of lettuce brazenly resting on
the ground, as they eye me in that slight, imperturbable New York way, where
the angle of their head reveals their accommodating level of disdain. This is
the new purgatory I am facing: status, rank, position on a totem pole of class,
my only honest indicator my oily, dripping hands and the piece of lettuce in
front of me. What’s he doing there? This looks quite odd. If I
ever see him again, you bet this will be my first impression. I
imagine their eyes narrowed, and widened, opening up space for their thoughts
to promulgate as the stimulus of my existence meanders past.
Oh, stop it. You’ll never see them again. They can’t even see you,
their foot velocity and the glimmer of these black poles this way. And as for
this meat juice holding its own on the verticals of your mouth, well, just
ignore it.
I think to myself: No need to wipe yet. To dirty my sleeves, or
color, really, highlight the uniqueness of the situation. When I eventually
have to wipe this grease off, I will pretend to be sneezing, or looking down at
my feet at an interesting off-colored pebble, or maybe I’ll just be forward and
display my uncleanliness to the whole world. Yes, that. I will look someone
passing in the eye and say it: I am wiping the grease off my chin!
My napkin is hostage until I finish all my motes of food. My body
is now back in its search for relevancy. I have almost finished; my
anti-Oedipus has become stronger; I will soon be more than the sum of my
pita-dog-yellow-shoe parts. I will survive! I have also just finished my food.
A trash can in front of me begs for the manifold tin foil, the
soaked napkin, my microbes, shedding themselves in ecstasy. I make sure
to wipe my face. I pick up some broken tin foil. I look at the lettuce, and,
standing up as straight as I can, the guitar case now vertical against my
convex back, I give it a solemn salute. Then I walk through the doors to Grand
Central station.