Unborn

Unborn

I was never born. I was nearly born, but never took a breath outside of my mother's womb. When I emerged from her, reaching beyond the tunnel-ended light, I careened toward a light that blazed with the luminescence of a quadrillion white dwarf stars and continued to fall until my eyes opened and I hovered over what I now know was unmitigated grief. Though I was not equipped at that time with the tools to process the tragedy I was witnessing, I have since learned to understand this single, solitary moment of what should have been my life. Ever since the day I was not born, I have been here, left with just one experience upon which to base an eternity of rumination.

Always the know-it-all, his precociousness was not new to a single person who was familiar with him. Of course, it didn’t take long for perfect strangers to arrive at the same conclusion. From correcting his fourth-grade teacher’s grammar, to questioning the validity of the scientific method as inefficient and restrictive to innovation in seventh grade, to reducing the complete works of Hemingway to a first-person one-act monologue as a physics major in his junior year at university, he was incorrigibly obnoxious.

I cannot leave. I cannot live. I cannot escape the never-ending presence of one moment in time. I am without a sturdy tense.

Sports, economics, and midTwentieth-Century abstract expressionism all coalesced into magnificently eloquent diatribes that would both fascinate and infuriate his interlocutors. Nobody could argue because his words were packed more densely than a Britannica and, besides, he was always right. He wasn’t “always right,” in that disparaging, “he would never admit he was wrong,” way. He was, actually, always right. People could check his facts and challenge his computations—and they did—but he was never, ever, wrong. He could convince communists that free markets were more efficient and Yankees fans that Babe Ruth was better with the Red Sox.

As that first and only moment froze below me, I floated from the room and encountered many others—others who also lacked life. Staring down the corridor, I saw other creatures like me as they passed further up, embracing then joining the bright light: making it brighter and brighter still. Each time I approached the ever-brightening light, it moved away. As I sped toward it, its retreat was equally emphatic.

Worse than that, he was a total stud. He turned the old cliché, “Every girl wants to be with him and every guy wants to be him,” on its tired ear. Indeed, every guy and girl wanted to be with him. It had nothing to do with being gay or straight; it was an attraction to what Kant would have described as the sublime: innately, indescribably, and unassailably beautiful. He was a specimen of Davidic perfection. From the sandy blonde and wavy full collection of locks upon his head to his massive sized-thirteen feet, every part of his body was flawless. Not too thin to be a pitcher, not too wide to be a quarterback, not too short to be a forward, not too dense to be a swimmer, and between academic bowl titles, he was a four-season athlete in a three-season division. Despite his athletic success, the wisdom of coaches eluded him and the camaraderie of teammates was ephemeral. Teams could neither win without him nor celebrate with him.

I wandered down corridors over the bustle of doctors and nurses, over waiting rooms and chapels, and watched the living pray for those who would inevitably race by into the light. I watched the desperate, the bereaved, the hopeless,the relieved. Without voice and without form, I could only muster the power of observation. I was but a receptor of the boundless lives of others, caught up with them in silent powerlessness.

There was nothing he couldn’t do, except make friends. Most of the time, even his parents didn’t want to be around him. In fact, the only reason that anybody endured him was to have sex with him, which he ungrudgingly did with anybody who paid him any attention. Thus it seemed, to the eternal confusion of his parents, that, because of the constant stream of new people in and out of his bedroom, he was the most popular kid in school. Truly, he was well known; one might say “famous.” If he was popular, it was that sad kind of “I know who he is and I can’t stand to be in his presence” brand of popular. He neither noticed nor cared about his infamy. His parents were thankful that he had (what they figured were many) friends; it excused their callous coldness toward him.

I learned that there were places, over certain beds in certain rooms, where souls like mine would linger before being absorbed into the light. I learned to communicate with these passers-by, those who would acknowledge me and who were not frightened by me. As they lingered on the edge of death, I lingered differently. Having never lived, I was not dead. Having never died, I was a wholly frightening being to most who I encountered. I was a monster.

Incessantly impertinent and ridiculously proper, he was driven by a force that nobody could identify. Perhaps, some theorized, he was an alien placed on Earth to collect information about its inhabitants; his creators made him too perfect to be an effective spy. Others drew parallels to Jesus, who was himself a know-it-all, often speaking in riddles and annoying monologues; perhaps he was the new Son of God. Still others postulated that he was part of a government conspiracy, cloned from the remnants of the world’s smartest—yet most socially inept—figures: Einstein, Hitler, Jefferson.Once exposed to him, people just wanted to forget him so that they could feel better about themselves. In rooms of greats, ides of jealousy always fell upon him.

I met a spirit lingering over an old man's body. The spirit spoke to me with a tenderness that was new, one that acknowledged that I was but a breath away from past humanity. He spoke and I listened. For the first time since the day I wasn't born, I was treated with humanity.

Nobody ever told him “No.” The best anybody could muster was feigned apathy or indignant acquiescence. When, after graduating with his PhD in Experimental Nuclear and Particle Physics from MIT—he delivered a brilliant dissertation on Dark Energy that outshone previous research by decades— he decided to join the Peace Corps, nobody gave it a second thought.

Before he joined the light, he taught me to speak. He gave me words. Through his acknowledgment, he gave me form. With words and form, he gave me thought. With words and thought, I learned. My observation became knowledge.

I was but a camera.

Those who spared him a second thought could never fathom what drove him. A hint to his drive might have been discerned by a careful reading of his dissertation introduction, had anybody bothered to study it. Jumping over the literary flourish and directly into scientific facts, many missed that he presented a critical method—a replacement for science itself—which indicated he had touched the origins of the universe. The ends and the means of science were too precise, he argued. The corralling of facts and figures to bring order out of chaos was not to understand the universe. Rather, science had brought humanity to the brink of impertinence, threatening to leave the power of the soul, expressed in Kantian constructions of beauty, denuded. The statistics and postulates in the body of his paper were but a joke: three hundred pages of what not to   do.

Only one member of his committee even commented on the Introduction, and that with the red words writ large upon the final page: “self indulgent.”

When the old man left, I sought another then another then another: emerging from the bodies of women and children, some of whom seemed far too young to be passing by. All of these "souls," as I came to understand they were, passed by in the same moment in which I was frozen. They spoke of time as though it were something that passed, but I could only measure the passage of souls through my emerging consciousness and toward the ever-increasing and increasingly elusive light.

I resided in the corridors of an immitigable and haunting presence, creating and consuming snapshots of the same scene from countless perspectives.

“Go,” was the admonition from his family.

“Go,” was the scream from his academic peers.

“Go,” was the collective sigh of the civilized world.

Perhaps, they thought, he could be of some good to people who could not understand what he was saying and thus could overlook his ridiculous genius. Perhaps some work in the mundane would teach him humility: build a school; dig a trench; exist in the basics of humanity.

From these passers-by, I learned in fleeting lessons about life and death. I learned that some were ready to fill the light; I learned that some were not. I learned the words to describe these things. I learned to understand, though I could not feel. I learned that, because I had no soul, I would not feel. I gained the voice to ease the transition for those who had no choice in the matter.

Within a week of arriving in North Central Africa, he contracted malaria. Within two weeks, he was back in the United States, in a hospital room fighting for his life. His perfect constitution was as ill-suited as America’s in that part of the world. The malaria so weakened his immune system that a secondary viral infection, something like a meningitis attacked his brain. In order to quell the swelling, doctors induced a medical coma from which they later could not resurrect him.

He was human, after all.

---

Briarpatch

Briarpatch

Call me Doctor.

I know, you aren’t supposed to know my name because it shatters the “universality of  the anonymous.” In a thorny world where we have adopted the compulsion to name everything, you’ve made it all this way without knowing who anybody in this whole damn book is. Must have driven you crazy, wondering, “Is that the same guy in those six stories?” and “How dare he talk that way about women,” and “That is the worst, most offensive black dialect I have heard since Joel Chandler Harris.” But Lawdy be, you don’ been throw’d in that briar patch, so you may’s well stick it out sin’ you already don in her’.

I’d been watching him since I got there for my shift, the night shift. I’m the overnight guard at the CoMA, the Columbia Museum of Art in beautiful downtown Columbia, South Carolina: state capital and home to the Mighty Gamecocks. Yes, that South Carolina, the one where John C. Calhoun himself declared laws that came from Washington could be nullified, setting the moral justification for Southern secession and ultimately for Northern aggression. The South Carolina where the first shots of the Civil War were fired over Fort Sumter. The South Carolina of the great Governor Ernest Hollings and resilient Senator Strom Thurmond, one white politician that liked black men and one that loved black women.

This is also the South Carolina where I grew up, oh, just a couple miles from here in one of the first suburbs the city ever grew. The South Carolina where my daddy was in prison when I was born and my momma died giving birth to me. The South Carolina where my granddaddy was lynched for talking to a white girl and the only family I ever really had was my Untee, who raised me until I was thirteen when she died—ran over by a damned train in one of the gruesomest accidents ever to occur in Waverly. It’s the South Carolina that gave me Booker T Washington High School and taught me to read out of books rescued from the trash heaps outside of Dreher High School. The South Carolina that needed a trustworthy soul to keep its most treasured art collection safe from harm at night—from ghosts—when nobody else was around.

This is the South Carolina where, at the age of ten, I found a nearly dead baby blackbird and brought it so far back to life that six weeks later it flew off my outstretched palm, free and high among the angels: where I earned and adopted my name “Doctor.” Born without a birth certificate, this name became as real to me as my original name, “Junior,” which never made a lick of sense.

Glorious, proud, and all-around awful place. South Carolina. Home.

 “Stop!” I shouted as he listed again forward toward the clear wall of glass that separated the main gallery from what we call the “eight”—the atrium—of the museum. Donated space from the original hospital building with which it still shared a foundation, the atrium had eight walls, each leading to another gallery area. He had ferociously (and hilariously) hit the wall once with a clamorous reverberating thud, apparently not seeing it there, and in his dazed stupor was about to re-acquaint his face with the same unpierceable barrier. “Man,” I thought, “he is about to break his damn neck.”

“Stop,” I shouted again as I grabbed his shoulder and swung him around to face me.

 I could tell through all the blood that he had the face of a very pretty boy. That deep gash over his eye was sure to leave a scar. “I’ll come up with a good story for it,” he said later while we waited in the emergency room at Memorial Hospital.

I wanted to suggest that the truth would make a fantastic yarn: “Attacked by wall.” He didn’t acknowledge the humor of the understated joke.

“Maybe I will have been attacked by a mysterious flock of sonar-deficient birds as I walked out of the USC library on Good Friday.” We both laughed at the sheer absurdity of that one. That we could laugh later about the day’s events brought us into a special communion; as if the day’s events hadn’t.

I noticed he had two more scars in the area, one nestled in the outer corner of each eyebrow, reaching out toward his ears. He was, apparently, prone to accident.

I had never seen anybody walk so ponderously through the museum which, by most critical accounts, is one of the worst most indecently Orientalist collections in America. Judging from the layout and flow of the collection, art and culture began in Rome during Jesus’ lifetime and migrated directly to the shores of America through England and France to land in the new center of Western utopian perfection: the great state of South Carolina. The rest of the world was a backdrop for this social and cultural ascension. Of course, one might guess from the collection, the Chinese gave us sushi and paper birds. But, I’m no art expert—not like he appeared to be. I’m just here to keep it safe, for whatever good that may do for the pride of the good people of my home state and city.

He told me that he usually enjoyed modern stuff, Picasso and Jasper Johns and some guy called Dada, but we don’t have any of that. This day, he said, he was in awe of works that were touched by the hands of men that lived a millennium before. We were breathing, he said, the air of culture that created in a different type of world: there was what he called “presence of life and death together.” His words rang true. He huffed for clean breath as he seemed to be kissing sculptors and painters in his mind.

He spoke later as though he were possessed, as though breathing the air that emanated from this art consumed him with a different soul. This same trance-like state that he slipped in and out of during the previous several hours was what had distracted him as he walked into that crystal clear glass wall and busted open his forehead.

“You all right, son?”

“Yes,” he answered in that, what-the-hell-are-you-talking-about tone that I could tell he employed often. “Yes, why?”

I know that my jaw was agape and my eyes were as round as saucers as I gawked at the rush of red that streamed down his cheek and onto the ground by his feet. “Um,” I answered, feeling a little queeezy on his behalf.

Reading my face, he lifted his hand to his forehead and rotated his fingertips before his eyes to reveal the blood, lots and lots of it. He grabbed the back of his neck with the same hand and smeared more blood on his white shirt collar.

“Which way is the bathroom?” He looked clammy and sweaty. He looked like his knees could give way at anytime. He and I were developing an audience. I pointed toward the glass door, hinged next to the greasy face-plant marker on the immediately adjacent glass wall. Realizing that I may have doomed him to a third run-in with the unforgiving glass, I ran in front of him and opened the door and pointed again.

“That way.” I was teetering between laughter and solemnity, but retained my composure as I know my cheeks were twitching.

After graduating from high school, I spent a year as a student at the University of South Carolina where I eventually quit because I became—suddenly and unexpectedly—a father. We settled back into Waverly and grew a family from the ground up. We had all the parts we needed: God, marriage, child, love. I can’t say it happened in that order, but the parts were there and we made a good go of it.

She became the nanny of a sweet white child whose progressive parents allowed our children to be cared for as siblings. I went to work as the custodian of the church where those same progressive parents were pastor and first lady. I worked at that church for thirty five years, eventually they made me deacon. We had two more beautiful children, Doc Junior and Isaiah, and she eventually opened a nursery that she ran out of our house.

When Reverend and Missus retired to Florida, my tightly wound world unraveled. The church leadership changed in ways I prefer not to dwell on—grudgin’ and gossipin’ ain’t what Christians do—and I left too. No pension and stiff joints left me with practical expenses. I still needed to work. Reverend made a call to his friend at the CoMA and I’ve been well taken care of here since then. If I work another thirteen years, I’ll get retirement. All three of my children went to college; none are Gamecocks.

I checked in with the manager on my walkie talkie and alerted her about the accident. She giggled after I confirmed that none of the art was damaged and then she told me to keep an eye on him. I followed him into the bathroom where he was holding an increasingly red wet paper towel up to his forehead. He pulled it down and moved his face closer to the mirror so he could diagnose the severity of the gash. He was still flush and dazed; he started when he saw my reflection enter behind him.

“You ok? Need to sit down?”

“I think I’m ok.” He turned around, rag still up to his head, blood still trickling down toward his chest. The gushing had abated. He looked at my name badge.

“Doctor?”

“Yes.”

“You work here?”

“Yes.”

“Doctor?”

“Yes, that’s my name.”

“Your name?”

“Yes. Doctor.”

“Doctor what?”

“Just ‘Doctor’ is fine.”

“Doctor Doctor?”

“Just ‘Doctor’.”

“What happened?”

“Junior didn’t make sense to me; I didn’t even know my father.”

“Huh? Why am I bleeding?”

“You walked into that glass wall.”

I walked over to a closet and pulled out the First Aid kit, looking for a bandage.

“Does this happen often?”

“Once, a few months ago, an eight year old boy.” I chuckled as I recollected that one.

“You’re a junior Doctor?”

“No. Just Doctor.”

This finally seemed to placate him. “Can you look at this cut? Will I need stitches, Doctor?”

I grabbed a sterile napkin from the box, took it out of its sealed package and held it up to the cut. This close to him, I could see the tiny lines of age that were graciously emerging from the corners of his eyes. His skin was smooth. His features were soft; he had lived an easy life. I glanced over at his hand which he still kept close to his face, still holding a wet towel, and noticed that they were not the hands of a man who had labored.

The wound stretched about an inch and a half above his left eyebrow and down toward his nose. It was a deep cut. His nose, too, I could tell, had been broken before, and possibly again earlier.

“Probably. How’d you get here? Who’d you come with?”

“I flew here.”

“Huh?”

“On a plane, Doctor.”

“With anyone?”

“No, just me.”

“Wait here.”

I stepped out into the eight and called my boss again and explained that the boy would need to go to the hospital. She told me to take him to Baptist just around the corner. “Don’t admit any guilt,” she suggested. “He’ll probably sue us.”

I verged on responding with indignity—I had breathed this boy’s breath and looked into his eyes— when I felt the ground shake. I did not know at the time that it was an explosion across town at a hall in the convention center. The crater it left on Lincoln Street (named for an obscure confederate major, not the nineteenth Century President) has yet to be repaired. I watched a tiny crack extend from the place in the wall where the greasy face-plant marker had begun my shift. It grew outward like a spider web, capillaries perhaps. Hollow-eyed, expressionless, marble, Roman busts watched with me as the giant glass wall crumbled twenty feet away.

Lawdy lawdy, brer fox, we got us a mess up in herr.

For a moment, I felt glass dust pelt my pant leg through the thick khaki uniform until a warm piercing captured my attention. I looked down to see a four-inch, sickle-shaped chard of glass hanging out of a bright red spot where my knee would normally have been. My pant legs were shredded.

I ran toward the bathroom to check on my patient.

He was sitting cross legged on the floor next to the closet from which I had originally fetched the first-aid kit. I watched his eyes trace my body up from my feet to my head, then back down; his gaze stopped at my knees, his eye level. The bleeding over his eye had stopped, and he continued to hold the wet rag in his left hand.

His drooped jaw betrayed anything that might have otherwise been cool indifference.

“Um, what was that?” He sat silently for thirteen seconds. “Doctor.”

I felt light-headed. Blood pooled at my feet.

I thought about the blackbird that I had saved at the age of ten. How many generations of blackbirds had grown from that single saved seed? I pictured Junior and Isaiah, in Boston and Atlanta, posing for portraits that might one day end up in a gallery like this one. I thought about my wife and the first time I saw her. I thought about the first time I made love to her. I thought about her heart of glass, and how badly I had shattered it when I was young.

The red puddle extending out along the travertine floor below me danced and rippled with the second explosion, this time nearer, much nearer, much much nearer! Blood from the floor splattered our faces. I fell in his direction. He stretched out in my direction to help temper my fall.

For a moment, we both lay on the cold spiney-cracked bathroom floor, fingertips outstretched, prostrate before each other. I must have hit my head pretty hard because when I opened my eyes, I was being dragged by him across the glass, marble, and canvas-riddled floor of the eight. His soft hands held me under the armpits and my unsturdy head drooped toward my chest. Breathing was difficult.

“Doc! Doctor!”

My mind answered, “Yes,” though my mouth did not concur.

“How do we get out of here?”

Limp people and people parts were strewn around us and, was that a jet engine?

“A plane just,” he started as he continued to pull me along the floor. I could only hear him as I half-sat facing the path that our bloody bodies cut through the debris and death. He never finished the sentence, though the circumstantial evidence indicated the obvious: a small plane had just crashed into the main gallery of the CoMA. I smelled diesel and smoke; I heard people screaming. I saw the blue sky through the hole ripped in the ceiling; steel girders dangled precariously downward. I looked back into the galleries as I was dragged toward the stairs which led to the first floor. The art exhibits floating along the floor were on fire; apparently the petroleum was being spread atop the water from burst sprinkler pipes.

Lawd.

I looked at my feet. My toes were exposed. My clothes were tattered. I was soaking wet. I looked down at the fingers of the hands that were dragging me and they were covered with blood. I could not determine if it was his or mine. I fought to rise on my own power, succeeded, and stood for a moment beside him as we speechlessly surveyed the disaster surrounding us. Yes, a plane had crashed into our museum. Everybody that was in the eight, the gallery, and most of the people who were on the grounded vessel of flight were instantly killed. Just forty feet away, in the bathroom, we were spared. The back wall collapsed and landed on me, but he managed to pull me out from under what was mostly drywall.

We carried each other down the stairs, listening to the increasingly loud mini-combustions behind us and the sound of sirens approaching from the outside. Three times, we stopped to check the vitals of corpses along our path. Three times we kept going, knowing that there was nothing we could do. Finally, I gained my composure enough to grab and shout into my walkie talkie. The only return sound was a low-hummed static.

Finally arriving at the shattered glass front door, we were both grabbled and ushered out of the building, where we sat on the stoop as a rush of firemen and paramedics flew in. We were seized by uniformed attendants who led us into the back of an ambulance. I held what should have been my hands in front of what should have been my face.

I was gone.

“Doctor,” I heard him say sheepishly as he wiped his bloody-again forehead with his shirtsleeve. Some time had passed; how much I was not sure. It certainly was long enough for him to have thought I wouldn’t wake up.

“Yes?” I responded, visibly scaring him. The look of shock on his face was as though he had seen a ghost.

He sat beside me and grimaced down in my direction as I lay still on the gurney, listening to the whir of the siren.

“Doctor. I thought…” he repeated, this time through sobs. The crimson flowing from his forehead converged with his tears as they streamed down in my direction and onto my chest.

“Tell me,” I said through labored breath, “what do you think of our fine museum?”

“I have seen better,” he answered with utter seriousness. When he realized that I was going to be alright, he launched into an unsolicited and passionate diatribe about art. He spoke of the now-obliterated space in a way that made me want to die for never appreciating the connections that were my nightly companions for the past six years. He trailed off, as the hysteria abated.

We were not the only people in triage at Memorial; we watched a steady stream of gruesomely mangled people flow in. From the hospital lobby where we lay, we could see the black smoke streaming into the clear sky as the ruddy, coral sun struggled to set. The burning cloud lingered in sight and seemed to float in our direction, carried by warm late-Spring wind.

We were among the least badly hurt. It was at the hospital that we learned about the first explosion—the one that was strong enough to bring down the glass wall in our museum before the plane even crashed into us—across town.

Baptist Hospital, which still shared some administrative offices with the museum building, was, itself, badly damaged by a third explosion which occurred after we had already been loaded into the ambulance and were en route to Memorial. It was completely unrelated to the first. Neither of the explosions was ever proven to be related to the plane crash.

It turns out that the first explosion was the opening salvo of something greater, something making Columbia strangely akin to the coastal relic Fort Sumter, marking a turn in the devices and mobilization of a new and de-centered anti-Federal armed and angry resistance. It was technically an assassination: a brazen and shocking attack on an election victory celebration. It was a violent answer to the failures of mob democracy and soulless capitalism.

“You alright son?”

“Yes, Doctor. You alright?”

“Yes.”

“You think I’ll need stitches for this cut?”

“Probably, but I’m no expert.” I paused. “Hey, how you going to get home?”

“Fly, I guess.”

En wid dat he skip out des ez lively as a cricket in de embers.

---

Black Ice

Black Ice

A few weeks ago,

     A couple of weeks before Christmas,

Seven weeks ago, 

          November

     Truly, the week before Thanksgiving.

You slipped on black ice.

     Unexpectedly counter-prostrate,

You tarried stilly,

          Coma-like

     Teeth tight ,eyes clenched, and face contorted.

You watched for seers,

     Afraid to give detractors, friends, fans

Opportunity

          Burdensome

     To revel—or worse—worry after. 

And there you've remained,

     Throughout the season of joy and thanks,

Nursing vertebrae.

          Back broken

     Two months now, on your ass, self-pitied.

Damn patch of black ice:

      Existent in lore, retold gospel,

An unfroze fiction,

          Wrecklessness

     An excuse concocted to mask fear. 

Amblers wouldn't stop.

     Autumn ended and winter arrived:

Red leaves and snowflakes

          Life’s residue

     Gathered in your gloomed, hollowed outline.

Your trail, unrivaled,

     You feared you had peaked, you'd pinnacled.

The best year ever:

     Rapturous

You'd linger always liminally. 

It was your own foot

     That you—distracted—stumbled over.

Fear is natural,

         Gravity

     Gravity works on everybody. 

Even if still sore,

     Still, or still scared, or still embarrassed,

You need to get up.

          Comfort me

     Thank God for the rest, for the stillness.

Think of what you've seen:

     Straight walkers, runners, stumblers stumbling.

Your periphery:

          Nothing stopped

    Coated in nature’s humility. 

Favor the aching

     On your tailbone, slow your pace a bit.

Leave the black ice funk:

          Humbler now

     Walk it off, don't forget, watch those steps. 

   

I need you to watch our steps.

          I need you.  

Princess

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FEAST

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One Cent in Manhattan

ONE CENT IN MANHATTAN

Designed—I’m not sure why or how or even when—as a complimentary badge, you leave a single shiny penny face up on the table after you’ve received excellent restaurant service. In Chelsea,

good service is hard to come by, so seeing this penny left on the table next to yours made me grin in the promise of the experience you were about to have. I was a server for a while in college and would

have preferred a twenty-five-percent gratuity over the symbolism. I have a feeling that this server, probably an aspiring actor, would have preferred the same. The checks here are big: the penny could easily have been thirty-five bucks for the three people who had just left aswe were being “sat.” Maybe they left it on the credit card receipt. You can do that nowadays, have it both ways: symbol and substance.

“I am such a B-list celebrity…” he trailed off into a huff and a sigh, “So B list.”

You smiled, “B plus.”

Y’all sighed in a raspy C major.

Every detail derives its musical sense from the concrete totality of the piece which, in turn, consists of the life relationship of the details and never of a mere enforcement of a musical scheme—

Adorno, On Popular Music

Sitting outside on the patio of a Chelsea café across from a friend whose up-and-coming presence in - the New York acting scene has not yet peaked nor approached plateau, you preferred guiding the topic to the feta crumb sitting on his cheek. You had met each other through a mutual acquaintance (and this specific fact rather escapes you) sometime longer ago than thirty-six hours and shorter ago than two years. As you started to reach across the table to flick the crumb, a neighboring table of loud and preppy thirty-something pretty boys simultaneously leaned inward as if to build a teepee—perhaps a steeple—with their heads. “Don’t anybody dare look,” you imagined them saying as one coyly caught your eye and looked away self-consciously.

“Oh my God, it’s him,” you actually heard, not imagined.

You grinned, recapturing the glance of the same boy who could not bear the thought of not seeing what he was dared to not look at. The teepee—steeple—-was dismantled as each of the four boys leaned back and reached for something: a glass of merlot, an ultra-light beer, an ultra-light cigarette, the waiter’s ass. They school-girlishly giggled.

One one-hundredth of a dollar. Almost useless, it doesn’t even buy a gumball anymore. I usually throw pennies away when I receive them, something for the bums outside 7-11 to pick up instead of begging me to ignore them. I usually don’t even keep quarters. Change jingling in my pocket only weighs me down.

You were, after all, with a B-list celebrity. You were intrigued. From a supporting role on Broadway to a series of dandruff -shampoo commercials

the relations between the evil and the cure, between dirt and a given product, are very diff erent in each case—Barthes, Mythologies, “Soap-Powders and Detergents.”

in which his head was immortalized into two hemispheres (one of which was tingling while the other was poorly lathered and tingle-less), he was certainly best known for his recurring role on a trendy situation dramedy set in the City. He also had a bit role in a play-come-movie from which he said he still received royalties. The boys at the adjacent table cooed.

Your acquaintance ate his feta-and-spinach focaccia. You paid the check and suggested a walk to the park. Central Park would be “fine,” he interrupted, “but it’s sixty blocks away.” He rolled his eyes as you walked out to catch a cab.

Do you want to walk along? Or walk ahead? Or walk by yourself? One must know what one wants and that one wants –Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Fourth Question of Conscience.”

You smiled at the boys who smiled back. The one who had previously reached for the waiter’s ass made a move toward yours which you handsfreely blocked by unsmiling at him.

Lincoln’s head adorns the penny, the front of it, since 1909. Maybe that’s what good service means: he freed the slaves and saved the Union after all. Plus he was a Republican.

You know many famous people. You know many wealthy people. You know many beautiful, intelligent, and political people. You see them on TV, hear them on the radio, read their words in newspapers and magazines. You can call them when you feel like chatting, you can stop by their homes when you want face time.

The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event—Barthes, Mythologies, “The Face of Garbo.”

You have long since been unimpressed by celebrity and even more unimpressed by people who are impressed by celebrity. This aversion to the idea of celebrity is probably not very different from a native New Yorker

being unimpressed by what is to you—whose personal transportation is as much a badge of freedom as the only way to get around—the gritty and foreign idea of sewer-routed mass transit.

I examined the back of a penny I found on the ground because I’d never really looked at one so closely; it says “E Pluribus Unum,” which means, “Out of many, one.” What a fantastic idea, rife with symbolism, that one penny becomes a badge of a whole people. Intrinsically, not so valuable, but the richness of meaning is overwhelming.

The image that is read, I mean the image at the moment of recognition, bears to the highest degree the stamp of the critical, dangerous impulse that lies at the source of all reading—Benjamin, The Arcades Project, “Theoretics of Knowledge, Theory of Progress.”

So, you walked through the park, past the softball fields, under the carved stone archways, through the well-trodden pathways. You talked about the impending Broadway actors’ strike which, though he wasn’t actually working at the time, he supported. You discussed a political albatross which was strangling the new mayor: the homeless. You talked about the fourth of July in Manhattan, his new SoHo apartment, the Brooklyn Bridge, and his new shoes. You talked about everything except Fossy, Chicago, Sex and the City, and dandruff . Finally ducking into an Upper East Side bar as the sky turned yellow with dusk, you noticed that people were looking at you as much as they were staring at him.

I met a seer,/Passing the hues and objects of the World,/The fields of art and learning, pleasure, sense,/To glean eidolons.—Whitman, “Eidolons.”

Though you didn’t have B-list celebrity in which to bask, you did have the mystery of anonymity on your side. Your celebrity by association was far richer. Indeed, you caught more glances, smiles, and embarrassed

looks than it seemed he did. “Oh there’s that guy from,” you imagined them trailing off . “Who’s he with? A writer? His agent? A model?”

His first glance found him—Mann, Death in Venice.

Lincoln died for the Union, martyred forever as the second father of our nation.

O powerful western fallen star!/ O shades of night—O moody, tearful night!/O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the star!/ O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O

helpless soul of me!/ O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.—Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

You ended your tour of the Upper East Side. You returned to your hotel and he to his new apartment. He had to meet the movers and prepare for an audition in the morning. You would see him soon, you knew.

With another friend, you stepped out onto Forty-Second Street in Midtown. You were totally and luxuriously dressed down: shorts, flip flops, a ballcap, and some shades which, in a moment of silliness, you

had paid five hundred thirteen dollars for. You were going to a cookout at one of his buddy’s midtown lofts.

Being a bit shy, you insist that you are not presented according to your vocation, but to your avocation. So you were introduced around with the air of usual vagueness that you insist upon (“ he is a student”

is how this friend introduces you; for other of your friends you are “a poet”). An especially catty member of the group winked at you as if you were in some special two-person fraternity: “You’re an actor,

aren’t you?”

The singularity of ‘vocation’ is never better displayed than when it is contradicted—but not denied, far from it—by a prosaic incarnation: this is an old trick of all hagiographies—Barthes,

Mythologies, “The Writer on Holiday.”

“No.”

“You look awfully familiar.”

“Nope, just a student from Central Florida. I write a little.” You could sense tension beginning to build. You flashed your bright white teeth and blinked nervously—almost flutteringly. You breathed in deeply through your nose.

And all he gets is a penny?! Perhaps this is because there are so many of them. The U.S. Mint says that there are billions of pennies in circulation. Technically, the government calls them “cents.” They cost more to make than they are worth, about two-point-four cents worth of materials in each one.

As a circle began to form—you sensed an impending steeple—your friend intervened on your behalf: “Who him? Oh, he’s nobody!” Such a seeming insult never felt so good. The circle crumbled and one of them

whispered something about Abercrombie and Fitch to his friend. A faceless source was definitely heard: “Well, I know he’s somebody. I just don’t know why these people have to be so bitchy.”

Even the youngest child carries a shiny penny. It is not too much to have: one cent. And then, when there are more cents, sense. A sense of history caught up in the future with the hope of raising up a new American to carry on this mantle.

After a few Grey-Goose Cape Codders (don’t forget the lime, please), the tension from the previous whispers and nudges was released. The usual questions about your visit were piled high, much more densely than

you could answer. “Yes, I was at that party.” “No, I wouldn’t be going there this time up.” You finally excused yourself for a bit as you found a mostly empty couch being held down by an extravagantly handsome and broodingly quiet guy. You sat and basked in each others’ awkward snobbiness until your friend came and introduced you. You shook hands. Your friend raised his eyebrows as he turned his back to your sofa mate and mouthed with silent exaggerated words to you that the guy on the couch was the weekend anchor of a local TV news show. In Manhattan, that’s really something, you thought, grudgingly wallowing in your unmitigated bitchiness.

Productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities

with the products of men’s hands.—Marx and Engels, Capital.

“Great party, lots of nice folks. Can I get you a drink?” It was as if he were reading off the teleprompter.

“No thanks,” you answered. “We’re just getting ready to go. Nice to meet you though.” It is obvious, in retrospect, that your status as co-celebrities (even though yours wasn’t actually a celebrity—but that he considered you “somebody” also) warranted the comment and invitation. “Maybe we’ll see you out later.”

“I hope so.” You were the gracious recipient of the anchorman’s smile. He loosely and flirtingly bit his lower lip.

On the other side of the penny, opposite the head, on the side with the “E Pluribus Unum,” is an engraving of the Lincoln Memorial. So gracious in detail, the statue of Lincoln at the center of the building is visible. Odd that they would stamp a picture of a memorial on a memorial.

Knowing that a system which takes over the signs of another systemin order to make them its signifiers is a system of connotation, we may say immediately that the literal image is denoted

and the symbolic image is connoted.—Barthes, Image-Music-Text, “Rhetoric of the Image.”

You left with your friend after giving thankful nods and hurried handshakes to your host and his other acquaintances who re-encircled you at the exit. The doorman in the lobby tipped his hat to you as you sauntered into electrified Manhattan. In a city of ten million residents are twenty-million eyes, twenty-million ears, and ten-million each of noses and mouths. There are one-hundred million fingers with which to feel and touch. There are billions of lights and scents and tastes and sounds swirling from the gut of the island. The Manhattan gaze is hypersensual, and it is not difficult to confuse these sense perceptions. Seeing is not so different from hearing or smelling, or even saying—taste your words.

The Medium is the Massage—Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage.

Times Square’s lights obscured the black sky and the sidewalk bustle obscured the lights. The smells intoxicated you. You turned your ballcap around so the bill faced backwards and put on your happy-to-be-walking face. You became part of the bustle, the not-so-distant lights sparkled .

For a time, during World War II, the penny was made of lead. They weren’t actually lead, but a tin alloy that fundamentally changed the coloration of the coin from the familiar copper to a sheen more silver. Something about needing the copper for munitions to fight the Nazis. Lead pennies, they called them. Like the women who gave up nylon stockings by painting lines on the back of their legs, and the rationed butter exchanged for stuff called “oleo” that made all meals stateside taste “a little odd,” as my grandmother described it, there was a sense that sacrifice was necessary. We’ll save our cents in order to save our way of life. What are pennies, anyhow?

“What’s it like?” your friend asked. “Why does everybody stare at you?” Your engorged senses perceived the same. You embarrassedly feigned nonrecognition of the source of his inquiry. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, whoever ‘they’ are must be staring at you,” you deflected.

It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights,

gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up.—Foucault, Discipline and Punish.

New York is a voyeur’s paradise. Scopophilia reigns. People watch New York City and expect New York City to return the glance. Diners and cafes that line busy thoroughfares (every thoroughfare in Manhattan is busy) have huge plate-glass windows through which walkers and eaters alike can and are intended to be seen. Storefronts exclaim that it is as exciting to be a shopper as to be seen shopping, and finally to be shopping and see those that see you shopping. Aspiring actors, writers, scholars, restaurateurs, and clothing designers all make their way to this place in search of the gaze that was so instantaneously and indelicately turned on you. People go to museums and theatres and universities to be seen seeing the arts that the city has to offer. This city with twenty-million eyes looks out in order to be looked upon. This jealous and needy gazing framework pervades the city: power is disseminated not merely by conveying the gaze upon objects, but with the expectation that the gaze will be returned in a mutual sharing of celebrity, power, beauty: sublimity. You disrupted this equilibrium.

So with Lincoln looking on, presumably from every pocket, America defeated the Nazis and the Japanese and the Fascists. The slaves that we might have become to totalitarian hatred remained theory, speculative reason for thanksgiving and an emerging Military-Industrial complex.

This driving force of American imperialism has since been augmented by Media and Entertainment. We produce and consume for the entire world: food, software, ideas, Hollywood. Hundreds of trillions of pennies spread across the earth in the name of freedom and in the name of money itself: market, capitalist, economy. Because the Union was saved and our American Christ was slain, there is always hope.

According therefore, as this produce, or what is purchased with it, bears a greater or smaller proportion to the number of those who are to consume it, the nation will be better or worse supplied with all the necessaries and conveniencies for which it has occasion—Smith, Wealth of Nations.

You did not know the protocol. What your admirers wanted in return for their candid on-the-spot interviews and ultra-sensual stares was an acknowledgment that—by virtue of being in your presence—they had value despite their own existences in the mundane. You should have indulged them and empowered them by acknowledging that “Yes, I am somebody.”

If you could be somebody in a city with twenty-million eyes, then they could  be somebody in a city of twenty-million eyes. If you could be an actor or a model or a writer or a politician, then they could be too—even if it was by mistake. By becoming the object of the gaze of this city, you allowed the

city—the home of your admirers—to be its own subject, to be empowered.

Society absorbs via the apparatus whatever it needs in order to reproduce itself.—Brecht, The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre.

The final day of your visit, you ambled down Fifth Avenue, again on the Upper East Side. Your friends circled and played, lagged behind and caught up. They jeered and cut up with each other. They would look and point in windows, up at the tops of buildings, down at homeless people mumbling to themselves in building entrance ways, at crazy New York City cabbies, and at you.

But flanerie itself had been more complicated, existing as a kind of deadpan parody of the scientific method, a reduction ad absurdum of disinterested observation, practices as an end in itself.—Jean, Surrealist Games.

You continued on intently, going wherever it was that you were going. You carried a Barney’s of New York bag, your hair was perfectly spiked, your pale-yellow Lacoste collar was turned up, your jeans sat just where you liked them on your hips. New York people continued to do their thing—to look and watch. You looked back as if to say “Yes, I can be famous if you want me to be.” You slapped a smart smile on your face and took off your shades: “I, too, can look.”

I don’t know which one of the two of us is writing this page.—Borges, “Borges y Yo.”

Perhaps, then, a penny isn’t just so bad for good service. Without the penny, and without what the penny represents, what would thirty five dollars be? Would it even matter how good the service was?

Without the penny and what the penny represents, what would any of us have? A bunch of Deutschmarks, I guess.

Manhattan blushed.

Manhattan blushed.— You, One Cent in Manhattan.

Manhattan blushed.