Tresca was the girlfriend of a buddy of mine who I idolized. He was a big guy, 6'3" or 6'4", athletic, a few years older than I, a drywaller, a witty West Coaster. Greg is the reason I ended up in the Emerald City. Greg ran work in the Bay Area for a drywall company that his cousin owned. He lined up work for me as a laborer during the summer when school was out. The cousin's company was, and still is, based in Seattle. When I made my escape from New York and a floundering marriage, that's where I ended up.
Letter number 17 contains a description of a pre-9/11, pre-1993 basement bombing World Trade Center where (I worked the winter of 1990) as well as a narrative of a trip I made often at this time -- the A train down to West 4th and then a walk through Washington Square Park to St. Mark's Place. I still dream about those blue-painted wooden boxes hidden beneath the stairways on the subway platforms.
I'm not sure if I ever saw Tresca again. She and Greg broke up around the time of this letter.
Winter 1990
Monday night, a quarter past Eight, the telephone tweeters, Ashley picks up, and who should it be? -- Tresca!
I'd almost forgot what the two of you sound like (I lie). It was only after I got off the phone that I realized that your call was something of an anniversary: it's been one year, almost to the day, since I've seen you guys.
Those were some mighty fine days. Somebody ought to write a story about 'em. It'd probably have to be a play though since all the action took place indoors at the mythic #25 Derby. Shit, I'm just glad that I was around at the time. To be honest with you, when I got back to New York last February I was completely clueless, goalless, aimless, hopeless -- history had ended for me; subsequently, I felt very free (excepting financial burdens,which I shirked for as long as was humanly possible), but even though I felt like I had all that freedom the only thing I was capable of was lying in bed and imagining long stretches of sky filling up with cottony clouds -- I was history, a living corpse, my mind blank, and my heart too. (Ashley and I had. moved East in the summer, and the whole autumn I spent daydreaming in my 5th Avenue office cubicle about ways to get back to the West; so once I'd. got back to the Bay Area, that was it -- I was there. Unfortunately, I was still alive, and heaven's for the dead . . . and I got homesick for my wife, and I couldn't keep milking the hospitality of others. I should have died. then. But, like I said, I returned to good old skinned New York and was without plans for the future: I hadn't planned for the future: I had no desire for the future: I was shiftless vacant skinny and my eyes were hallow -- give me the time of day and I would've mumbled back something about the lie of my bones.) Anyway, all this is just a way of saying that those January days the three of us spent together last year were something else -- they were an end to end all my days.
I finally got some work, proofreading at an accounting firm in the World Trade Center. I had been in the World Trade Center before, but never up top. There are 107 floors in that sucker, at least that's how many there are in the north tower, which is the one I work in. the World Trade Center is a huge sprawling commercial mecca on the southwestern tip of Manhattan (you probably know all of this already, but I'm going to belch it out just the same in case you don't); it's made up of a bunch of these squat black ten-story metal malls (they look like big bloated ticks), and then the two towers, one north and one south, that the malls huddle around (the towers are some of largest skyscrapers in the United States, and they're reverentially referred to by New Yorkers as the "Twin Towers"). Anyway, the place I was working, the offices of DELOITTE TOUCHE, is on the 99th floor. When I took my dinner break the other night (I work 2nd shift -- 5 PM to l AM) I went into the cafeteria and looked out the window. Ninety-nine stories up and glancing uptown everything seemed miniature meek and fallible: a landscape sculpted out of wet toilet paper -- even the Empire State Building, shit, it was no better than a toy house. I looked down and saw Broadway; it was broad, sure enough, but its street lights were like little camel-hair pinpricks. I looked up -- straining eyes -- and saw a thin string of lights stretched across the Hudson way to the north and I figured pretty much that it had to be the George Washington Bridge right next to where I live all the way up in Washington Heights, the northern reaches of Manhattan. I sat back down and finished my turkey, bacon,lettuce and tomato sandwich, grabbing an extra hag of chips from the vending machine. I threw my trash away and went and washed my hands in the cafeteria sink. Aw shit, back to work.
That was last night. Today I went downtown to buy some albums and check out the bookstores. It was a great day, temperatures in the high 40s, low 50s -- unseasonably warm. I got off the A train at West 4th Street station and walked my way over to the East Village in the butter sunshine; on my way I stopped off at the public restroom in Washington Square Park (one of the only honest-to-goodness public park restrooms I know of in NYC, a dirty old pagoda of a pisser with a real sense of community and comradeship), and took myself a piss along with a dozen other guys, a packed house. Leaving the pagoda, cutting a diagonal line through the park south to east, I saw two skinny college kids -- no more than 18 or 19: pimply faces and wool topcoats -- sitting on a bench drinking quart bottles of Budweiser, pigeons circling the ground at their feet. Wow! What a nice sight. It made me think that there's still hope for an up-and-coming heroic quality in this country, one free of the all the blandness that go along with the small-mindedness and fearfulness of our pleasure-based technological time-blind war-machine commercialism, and whatever other gobbledeegook that that entails. Yep, they sure did look good sitting there -- one quart bottle already dusted and lying cinched up in a wrinkly brown bag among the pigeons that circled -- it made me wish that I was out there with them. But the clock was calling and the chores had to be expedited: records found; toothpaste, envelopes and oranges bought.
While in the East Village I stopped in at SAINT MARK'S BOOKS, the hipster intellectual's bookshop. The new VILLAGE VOICE was just out, and a young woman with spectacles and a crew cut leaned on the counter by the cash register reading aloud to her workmates certain choice lines from an article about a young NYC homosexual artist dying of AIDS. I listened and browsed the new philosophy releases. Another Georges Bataille book published -- they're pumping 'em out these days like a goat pumps out turds; fine by me though because I think he's A.O.K. Oh, the artsy fartsy intellectual underground! You've got to love it, and respect it, but at the same time you can't help thinking that all its cultish attempts at creativity are just so many tiny soupy little shits hidden away in the icebox for future recall and excessive appreciation. I don't know.
On my way home, waiting on the subway platform for the uptown A -- waiting to see that telltale shine on the shark-colored track made by the headlights of the train coning around the bend signifying that it's time to go home -- I come across a wooden box painted baby robin blue, about four feet in length, tucked away beneath a stairway that leads from the platform up to the street. It had to be old, very old; you could tell because it had 60 coats of paint, probably stretching all the way back to Eisenhower; but I couldn't figure out what it was used for -- whether to house garbage cans or for tools to work on the track, I don't know. Anyway, I wrote down on my left palm what was written in big fat black indelible felt tip on top of that old wooden baby robin blue empty ghost-town subway treasure chest, and it reads as follows:
CRAZY POSSIES INCORPORATED PRIME ROMEO HARMONY INDIA OREO GUESS BABY LUV LOST BOYZ ANGLE ENFORCER
(Do you think that what they meant to write was "Angel" instead of "Angle"? I do. But nonetheless, an "Angle Enforcer" is something pretty neat, mistake or no mistake!)
Well, Tresca, I didn't mean to chew your ear off like that. If I don't see you before you make your move to San Diego, stay in touch -- drop a line and get me your new address. At this stage of the game I'm kind of thinking that I'll be out West sometime in late May or early June depending on my means of transportation. I hope to see you then.
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