The closed city

Imagine a city that you want to love, a city haunted by past glory. The jazz and blues musicians to whom it owes so much now adorn the mural you can't miss, approaching downtown from the south. Of course, the irony of this artwork escapes many residents, and is lost on the suburbanites and tourists, for whom the shiny new district was built. These types have little use for history; for them it's better as an ornament, a fleeting, intoxicated thought, a forgettable instance of lives steeped in ledger-line. Bright lanterns, restaurant facades, designed in Los Angeles, fabricated in Shanghai, the glassy arena for sports teams who never came, stringent dress codes, drinks priced for the gilded 'atmosphere', security guards and police now circulating among the crowds, now scowling about the perimeter — you might as well be in any other city in the gaudy country. Only a fool would be proud of these monuments and imagine the city's ancestors were smiling upon them. There is no torch to pass for the flame has been long extinguished. It is the same city in name only, and those who know it can visit the museums only to their irritation. The judgment is clear: not just the abandoned schools, factories, shops, and houses, but the whole city is empty, condemned, disinherited. Strangled by freeways and their bric-a-brac parade, the streets have fallen into disrepair. Once graced with basketball games, impromptu concerts, and neighborly banter, they are silent like a funeral procession. In a strange reversal, the openly corrupt politicians did well by the majority of the citizens, while those who replaced them maintain the facade of honesty, and do poorly thereby, but they deal with tamer creatures now and few notice the difference. There is a small protest today, and a few shows tonight, yes, but they are published on the digital news feed and forgotten tomorrow. In the former case, a noble harmony emerged; in those days, the city enjoyed generous benefactors and a sense of decency and happiness prevailed, despite occasional shootouts between mobsters. You can be sure the bores capitalized on those incidents. Such times, lighter, gayer, simpler and more forgiving, when the spirit of the laws reigned triumphant, the spirit of a corrupt people, who were not preoccupied with the letter because they knew their own corruption, were doomed by a country of petty men, beancounters, and misers. The latter have had the pretense of virtue, of course, but never the real thing, which they could not fathom. So they misjudged themselves and their people. So the most open city in the land of philistines, its festive polling places, public banquets, liquor-smuggling tunnels, and dime-a-dozen speakeasies, was closed, and there is no anticipating that it shall be reopened soon, or ever again. Today's youth are soulful at a glance alone, and the more they chatter in coffeehouses about the city's 'potential', the less you retain any hope, the more you shall consider yourself a wanderer, and dream of other cities you might call home, once the debts are paid and the company of a few solid friends will suffice. Your memories will linger, both what was and might have been, but the ancestors have blessed the coming journey and their heirs now await you at distant ports.

Looks

Last night, I'm smoking a cigarette on a sidewalk in Westport and overhear two young men seeking a lighter. I turn, anticipating their request, and the one on my right, Zoo York hoodie and earnest face, strikes up a conversation. “Just got off work.” “Me too.” “Oh yeah—where do you work?” The usual questions, but they don't bore me, because I have the cigarette, its distracting pleasure and future alibi for my departure. Then, he asks, “Well what do you really want to do? I doubt you're the kind of guy who wants to work service jobs the rest of his life. You look like a painter.” I forget the alibi as we're discussing books; he likes Vonnegut and Daniel Quinn—“Don't judge.” I'm still marveling, like a painter?, and hate to say it, but he looks like a service employee who just got off work. At work, in a stocking cap and ugly frame for my face, I'm all strange glasses and stranger mustache, and look odd to most of the shiny clientele. In high school terms, a loser or reject. The short Asian man who parks his Maserati out front, and tips us 10 on the way in, 10 on the way out, looks like Jay Gatsby to me. The bevy of women who climb out of elegant coupe, four of them!, in shoulderless pastel dresses, together look like Easter eggs, separately, like former homecoming queen candidates. My sixth-grade math teacher looked like a plump pigeon, and one of my classmates, a fellow member of the traveling basketball team, looked like a small bear. This young woman who approached me outside the restaurant on a cold night at work, she didn't quite look like a punk, not quite a hipster. While she smoked a cigarette and I had the desire to do likewise, I learned she grew up in Collins, 45 minutes from the small town I once called home, so there was plenty to discuss, although we didn't exchange names and it was too abrupt to trade numbers. Another one of my coworkers, a handsome man whom you'll always find chatting up plastic-looking women, younger or older—he has an elaborate scheme of classification for them: pumas, lionesses, cougars, sabertooths, and so on—looks like Clark Kent from the Mediterranean, and it's rarely too abrupt for him to ask for their numbers. But it was tonight: “Only two girls flirted with me. Y'know, Valentine's Day, they're with dates.” Here is a man who looks like he would listen to Garth Brooks, but listens to Nickelback, and when I drive his Hummer to the garage, the streets look like a battlefield and I feel entitled to run over anything that gets in my way. Of course, by offering this excuse—“collateral damage”, and everything seems to be in my way. The group of young black kids mobbing outside the movie theater and the police cars, lights flashing, and officers on horseback—the scene looks like a game of cat-and-mouse to me. But to my coworkers it looks like youthful nonsense, they greedily await pepper spray and arrests, and to the patrons at this upscale establishment, grimacing and asking for the latest updates, it looks like trouble and they urge us to be careful, probably fearing more for the safety of their vehicles. Politely, when I get the chance, I tell them how I see it, and to a surprising lot of them, it makes sense, as you can see from their nodding glances and smiles.

Detroit

The triumphant notes
did not hold, but their memory
returns, disfigured, like an awful vendetta,
extorting us
to hushed whispers, then silence.
Heirs of gamblers,
foster-children of the god
unknown, we were born
for the long fall
and zip our coats accordingly.
In vain, you will have gnashed
your teeth over debts
of the fathers we disowned—
we will not repay.

Why shudder before tattered flags,
or empty train stations?—
the plague did not spare
fair Pericles, and barbarians vaulted
the walls of Rome. Our libraries,
stocked with folly, were torched;
their scant wisdom dispersed
to the heavens. Purple robes fray,
scepters grow weary, and your finest
parades will deliver the punchline—
may the joke not be lost,
or the devil take you!

Fortune will have her way;
yet will you promenade
through the rubble
to our campfires, flickering
in the distance. Together
we shall raise a toast—
to the tottering ages
and splendor that remains.

The work of labor

The pavement seeps
into my bones, but I grin
through the stupor.

Knowing better, confident to
pace the red brick and
bear it, I gaze on vacant streets,
illegible sidewalks. Yet I am cursed
by mobs.

Disperse the ingrates, the ignoble
bastards! Before they run
riot, before you cower,
weak-kneed, into
the mounting drifts!
Leisure and love affairs
do not await, nor long island ice teas,
only this balding oaf, with
bad teeth.

At his door, I wait until
we bite our lips, until the city
is stirred to submission, pallor-faced,
and our trails are erased
no sooner than we lay them,
without mercy. And the torch I saw
yesterday, on the western horizon?
Extinguished. The chalice I
raised to her, in good spirits?
Empty.

I hope he leaves
a decent tip.