2001-11-25


Babylon Revisted, Again

Saturday morning and the tops of the skyscrapers are obscured by a mist which mutes the colors of the city. I find the effect to be most beautiful as it reminds me of the grey scenes of the early 1950s, of the height of the bop revolution, of Monk standing outside Minton's, steam billowing off his brow in constant manufacture of impossible rhythms.

I stare at a poloroid photo taken in Teddy's Soho loft sometime in May '92, (or so I'm told). Somehow I seem airbrushed into this merry scene, balancing Teddy's cat around my neck like Gunther the Great. My hair looks like the Crab Nebula with its endless filaments and wild tendrils which, in this frozen photographic moment, seem just as remote; the remanents of a supernova.

We head out to walk the streets of the Village. We are not alone as my peripheral vision flashes with ghosts and apparitions. The Physical Graffiti building(Bron-y-aur plays in my head) on 8th with it's extra floor, Dylan's old house on MacDougal where Weberman used to take his class to rumage through Bob's garbage and Washington Square Park, where I'd panhandle for the bums who were planted, guitar-less, among the shrubs. I almost walk right past the Limelight, where in 1989-90, wide-eyed in velvet jeans, hair in pigtails, and with a handful of Brooklyn Bombers, we attended raves and nearly missed the last Metro North train that would take us back to our highschool in suburbia.

The walking has stirred our hunger. I look in my wallet. Twenty-four hours in Gotham and I'm already broke. Just enough for a bagel, coffee and a ticket on the Metro North back heading back to suburbia.

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