Mind to Hand Mapping of the Bellevue and Periphery
Link to map: here.
6 Train to 28th Street Stop: Feeder Route Into the “Eye” (Main Lobby) of Bellevue 1:55 PM
Notes: I want to trace the feeder street (E. 28th) into the “Eye” of the Bellevue, mapping the approach on the street which runs perpendicular to the main lobby (from now on referred to as the “Eye”) of the Bellevue. Slicing off of 1st Avenue, heading straight into the Bellevue, what are the ways that people can enter the space of the Bellevue? How can people walk there, what are the differing avenues by which people come upon this space? Through parks, past churches, within closed spaces of vehicles?
I feel like I am chipping away at the Bellevue, attempting to understand it from different angles. Connections are being made but I am unconscious of what they are at this time–I have yet to feel a whole picture come to light–I chip away from different physical angles in the hope of seeing differently.
The Approach: E. 28th Street and Park Avenue
FedEx, StoneyBrook, ConEdison building covered in pink and black tiles. Park South Hotel at 124 E. 28th Street, across from it a parking garage and the parking attendant and others passing by watch me as I jot this down. I wonder why I am doing this, how noting specific buildings is going to help me get a sense for the environment through which people wade in approaching the “Eye” of the Bellevue.
The Approach: Lexington and E. 28th Street
Little Michael Corner Deli and Grocery store at 118 E. 28th Street. AY Kitchen across the street, Haandi Pakistani, Indian and Bangladesh restaurant nearby. In the span of one block, three people are caught talking to themselves. The Bellevue is not far. Ajunta Travel Service, Curry in a Hurry. Little India presents itself to me in a myriad of small, hole-in-the-wall shops and bodegas and I continue searching for some meaning that separates E. 28th street from all the other streets in NYC. How will this street tell me anything different? Why focus here as a “feeder street” into the Bellevue rather than 1st Ave?
The Approach: Between Lexington and 3rd Ave.
Bollywood Corner and Bollywood Grocery next to Coup de Couer. Across the street sits Epiphany School, founded in 1888. On a soiled blue and yellow flag waving in the winds on E. 28th is written, “The Epiphany School: A Tradition in Excellence”. It’s architecture is reminiscent of the Old Psych Ward, angels carved in brown stone leer at me over shields and feathered leaves. Next door there is a Catholic Church, erected around the same time period. I wonder if these are sisters to the Bellevue knowing that education, church and madness are never far apart and note a few dates of interest from Wikipedia:
- 1879: A pavilion for the insane is erected within hospital grounds—an approach considered revolutionary at the time.
- 1883: Bellevue initiates a residency training program that is still the model for surgical training worldwide.
- 1884: The Carnegie Laboratory, the nation’s first pathology and bacteriology laboratory, is founded at Bellevue.
- 1888: The first American nursing school for men is established.
- 1889: Bellevue physicians are first to report that tuberculosis is a preventable disease.
- 1892: Bellevue establishes a dedicated unit for alcoholics.
The church next to the Epiphany School has a cross which is etched into the corner stone of the aged building. The stones are painted sky blue, an odd pairing with the mold and grime-encrusted red stones just above. It is a Roman Catholic Church and the sign outside says, “Our Lady of the Scapular and St. Stephens”. There are tarot card readings next door, Thai NY next to that and a Friends Shoe Repair and Tailor aside the 3rd Avenue Quick Stop. An older woman in tattered clothing slaps a yellow cab with the brunt of her cane asking for change. Awaiting the light, the cabbie calmly practices an air of indifference and she grunts and moves on as the light changes and he drives forward. Again I wonder what it is that I am looking for. A parade of crazy people, remnants of the lasting effects of the Bellevue psych ward? I begin to wonder if it is true that many of the old patients of the Bellevue remain in the vicinity of the site of their incarceration and if it is true, what this means? E. 28th Street is a lens through which the Bellevue will be approached.
The Approach: Between 3rd Ave. and 2nd Ave.
The Rosehill Apartment complex, Chesapeake House across the street. I am in the residential areas now filled with apartment complexes and parks. On my left, the Self Realization Center with its gold leaf signage rises, constructed in 1893, not long before the tuberculosis outbreak where the Bellevue was thrown into overtime. Euro Beauty: Men, Women and Unisex and Aurora’s Bead and Jewelry, Basal Deli and Grocery on the corner of 2nd Ave and E. 28th Street.
The Approach: Between 2nd Ave. and 1st Ave.
Kips Bay Court 500.510.520 sits on the outer edges of 2nd and E. 28th. This is the entrance to the park, a buffer between the Bellevue and the wider NYC. Between Kips Bay and other apartment complexes there is a wide, gray-stoned path, each mass-produced brick interlocking with those around it. The plants lining the path are deadened, the tree branches from the aged trees above rattle against one another. I walk down the path, camera in hand and stop to take a few shots of the apartment complexes and the park. An older woman with orange and brown hair pushing a green laundry cart stops at the sight of my camera. She looks trapped and slightly perturbed and graces the presence of the lower section of my photograph. I finish, lower my camera and she shakes her head as if admonishing me for slyly taking her picture. I want to tell her that it was not her that I was focused on but I do not and instead simply walk past. She is gone and I continue walking down the rolling hill towards the Bellevue.
The Approach: Mount Carmel Plaza and E. 28th Street
The Mt. Carmel Plaza cordons off the section of land directly in front of the Bellevue “Eye”: 344 E. 28th Street. This is property of NYC Housing Authority, a towering 15-20 floors of apartment buildings carved in dark red and black brick. At its base, the barren grounds of tiered garden beds lined with railroad ties sit idly by, a soiled and torn American flag flapping in the winter winds and facing the “Eye” of the Bellevue. I wonder if these gardens are ever used and if so, by whom? I wonder who lives here, watching the Bellevue, being watched by the “Eye”. Are they past or present patients, shuffling through a halfway house on their road to the “real” world or are they simply residents, not unlike any other residents marking the streets of NYC and beyond?
I look up from the barren grounds to the “Eye” beyond. The outer facade is constructed of iron “curtain” and slabs of rectangular, clear glass in a manner quite similar to that of a 50’s office building. Many of the blinds are open to 1st Ave. Inside stand the doctors, the patients, the blood pressure gauges hanging on the walls, the patient chairs wrapped tightly in bright, white butcher paper, the doctor’s and nurse’s tools in stainless steel containers. The blinds on 90% of the facade to the modern wing are open and I wonder if this is an attempt to make Bellevue’s practices transparent and visible?
I look down 1st Ave. and take in the parade of the “Eye”, the Old Psych Ward and the NYU “Ceter,” all sitting next to one another. I look up again at the windows on the “Eye” and take notice that none of them are tinted. Hanging on lampposts just outside the main entrance there are small blue signs with yellow and white writing and an NYPD crests that read, “Bellevue Celebrates Peace Officer Week”.
The “Eye”: Main Lobby, 2:39 PM
I enter the “Eye” and immediately begin searching for a seat from which I can observe the main lobby. Above the Au Bon Pain cafe in the corner, I notice for the first time that etched into the old building are the words, “Waiting Room” and laugh. I mill around, unable to find a seat and find it odd for me to simply stand for the only other people that are seemingly doing this are policemen and food delivery individuals, of which I am neither. I walk over to the the Au Bon Pain and buy a cup of coffee to attempt normalcy and gain legitimacy through finance and consumption. The police officers, one man and one woman are at the entrance to the “brain” of the Bellevue, blocking entrance to the “optic nerve” hallway. I approach and they stare at me. I feign a fake phone call, draw my cell phone from my pocket and begin a fake conversation to gain some sense of legitimacy, talking to this fictional person at great lengths about what section of the C ward they have been admitted to and how I would go about getting there. They both look away and begin talking to one another. I take the opportunity to memorize the Bellevue map as much as possible, the map precariously set between the police officers and the visitor’s desk which is manned by the Bellevue’s private security force. I continue my fake conversation, finding it comical and I think to myself that perhaps I need to be admitted to the psych ward. One more look to the police officers and the visitor’s desk and I walk through the “optic nerve” into the “brain,” searching for my long-sought C ward.
I traverse the “optic nerve”, see the adult emergency room, the stairs to the prayer rooms and the empty mural room straight ahead and turn left towards the secondary lobby. On my right, at a fold-out table, there sits a blond-haired woman dressed in a tight white suit in her late 40’s manning the HIV and blood pressure testing table. I note that in a place so marked by disease and deep, red blood, white seems to be the color most aptly used to deny that any such things exist in this space as if to say, “This is a place of sterility and cleanliness, far from the earth tones of feces or ruby-red blood.” I look up and see a sign that reveals that the C ward is down the hallway to my right. Too nervous to make the turn and feeling completely out of place, I continue straight to known lands, the secondary lobby where I had visited once before.
Secondary Lobby, 2:50 PM
I face the large, tinted, rectangular slabs of windows lined with iron beams and look outside to the blue parking structure, three stories high. I have stopped here and sat on the orange, modern, bean pod chairs to gain a sense of the space and calm my increasing sense of anxiety in roaming the Bellevue aimlessly. I look across the floor, notice the other section of the lobby which I have never visited before opposite the entrance doors and make my way to that location. The space is vast and empty and the 4′ by 4′ black, stone tiles, well-worn on the edges and curving into the grout, reflect the light from outside. In the middle of the entryway, dividing the two spaces of the secondary lobby, there sits a diamond-shaped art piece that rises up to the gray, bumpy ceiling above from the black tiles below. It is an odd piece, covered in shiny stones in a manner which bespeaks of a young child let loose with glitter and a bottle of glue. From the ceiling jut out sliced, cylindrical lights about 1′ in length that shoot countenanced beams to the floor below.
The oddity of this space by far is the shiny black piano which sits in the middle of the large black tile floor. Upon noticing this, the ghastly smell of a homeless person floats my way: stale urine, unwashed clothes and greased, unkempt hair. I look around me and cannot locate from where this smell might have come from for I am nearly alone in this space and I am unnerved. On the piano there is a sign which reads, “The auxiliary to the Bellevue Hospital thanks Pfizer, Inc. for its donation of the piano and furnishings in the hospital building lobby,” and then at the bottom in all caps, “KEEPING THE HUMANITY IN HEALTH CARE.” A piano cord lies loosely on top of the cover. It is well-polished but seemingly rarely used. I wonder who would use it anyway. Someone from the street? A doctor or nurse on their break? No, this piano seems rarely used but far from disrepair. It is blocked off from the rest of the space and the people by steel posts and cloth, guarded from use by physical barriers. I look over to the windows near the FDR expressway and see three NYPD police officers patrolling the street just outside the Bellevue. They look in and I briefly make eye contact with one of them.
Having built up the courage, I stand and walk back through the optic nerve of the Bellevue, turn left at the hallway entrance to the C ward and walk down. I project an air of confidence and legitimacy and come upon an elevator bank. A white woman with brown hair with highlights, a neatly-pressed red suit, lightly-dusted makeup and a kind face looks over to me and smiles. I smile back and take notice of the name tag she has on her coat lapel. She is a Bellevue employee, ostensibly someone that works in the very ward I am trying to get in to see. I say excuse me and tell her I am lost, that I am looking for the C ward because my friend, whom I call Daniel, was admitted to the psych ward recently and I am here to visit him. She seems to be in her early 60’s, and holds my arm as she speaks to me. “Well, if he was admitted, he is most likely in inpatient,” she says. “That’s not here you see. He’s most likely in building H.” I remember from the map that the H building is in the main hospital as well and includes inpatient care and a number of psych services. She tells me that I need to get a visitor’s pass in the main lobby, the “Eye”, walks with me down the hallway forgoing her elevator which dings in the background. She has taken her time and effort to make sure I am taken care of and know the way. I feel slightly bad and notice that what I have done has directed me away from the very ward I was interested in getting access to. I thank her and remain in the hallway around the corner, waiting for her to leave. I send texts to friends asking if they know of anyone admitted to the Bellevue and get nothing. I know I need someone to visit to get a visitor’s pass and place this firmly in the back of my mind.
I am at a loss of where to go next and see the prayer room sign on the wall in front of me. I climb the stairs, turn to my right and pass a strange art piece lining the wall. It seems to be a 9-11 memory wall and I find it slightly creepy. Opening the main doors to the prayer room corridor, I notice that to my left there is a synagogue. I turn to my right and head towards the Catholic prayer room. I know this space from movies and limited exposure and cross myself as I enter in case anyone else is in the room.
Catholic Prayer Room, 3:10 PM
I am the only one here and I take some pictures of my surroundings. It is completely quiet. Occasionally the elevators open and ding in the background. The occasional muffled chatter of people roll through the hallways, most of it coming from down the long hallway where the HR department is. A woman enters, sits and the benches creak. Her cell phone goes off and she mutters to herself, praying. The elevators ding readily now and I imagine waves of people coming in to pray. No one else enters and no one seems to exit the elevators. Next to the air vent I notice there is peeling paint on the wall next to where the strange combination of white and surgeon green paint meets. It is calm here and quiet, smells of churches and air purified or heavily filtered. I think that perhaps it is the scent of sandalwood and it reminds me of the small, stone church that sat nestled in the woods near my grandmother’s home in California.
This is a good place for me to work and I will return. Another person comes in and I decide to leave. I exit the prayer room and take notice of a bulletin board where people have pinned prayers up. I take a photo, look to the floor and find yet another piece of 9-11 memorial artwork. This too I take a picture of and move on, leaving the hallway, exiting the “optic nerve” and the “eye” and I walk over to E. 26th street.
E. 26th Street, The Back of the Bellevue, 3:35 PM
I walk down E. 26th, past the modern forensics building and along the darkened corridors cast in shadows from the tall buildings flanking it. There is a row of ambulances and two EMT men exit their ambulance and enter a steel grate door to what looks to be the EMT garage/hang-out spot. I ask them how I can get to the blue parking structure from where I am and one of them stops and points out that I need to walk around the bend in the road and I will find it. He is in his late 30’s it seems, carries a burly mustache across his face and is visibly fit but with great care, explains that I need to cross the street and use the sidewalk because cars won’t be able to see me coming around the bend. I thank him and continue on my way, taking pictures of the FDR Expressway, the strange apartment towers and the “Bellevue Sobriety Garden” which sits at the base of the three story, blue parking structure.
Walking behind the Bellevue gives me a different perspective on things. I think back to the late 1700’s/early 1800’s when the hospital was being built. The East River back at that time was reportedly lined with disease-ridden cesspools and bogs and I imagine what the smell must have been like. NYPD trucks sit parked behind the hospital, “NYPD: The Boldest” emblazoned across the sides. This seems to be the EMT trail, men and women dressed the part carousing the back alleyways of the hospital en route to their chariots. As I walk further, I know this is a space of the Bellevue to explore further, see the views of the Empire State building from over the corners of the Old Psych Ward on E. 30th. There is a strange white tent behind the Old Psych Ward. I take pictures and see as I spproach the many signs warning people not to enter, that guards are armed and the premises are fully on camera. As I walk up E. 30th towards 1st Ave, I look through the gates to the entrance to the structure, note the torn pictures and illustrations and weathered wood paneling lining the entrance way. The place is eerie, a modern-looking structure lined with eons of time-now-past. I take more photos and continue walking up E. 30th. Stopping an older black man, I ask him what the building is. He tells me it is where they kept the remains of the World Trade Center victims and the torn pictures and illustrations now make sense. They are the remnants of loved one’s grieving. This spaces around the Old Psych Ward and the Bellevue as a whole are marked by the stench of death.
Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/47478409@N06/sets/72157623441033741/
I wake up at 11:30 PM with an image in my head of the Bellevue as a body. My past obsessions with light photons and their travel through the eye into the brain and manifesting in action resurfaces and grafts itself onto the Bellevue project. I draw it as best as I can which leaves much to be desired.
Bellevue as Body: Attempted Drawing
Link to drawing: here.
Bellevue as Body: The Face
The office building facade, steel “curtain” facing with wide slabs of windows. Steel frames as bone structure.
Bellevue as Body: The Eye
The modern wing of the Bellevue Hospital main lobby is an eye, gathering visual data from the people that enter. People are light photons in this image and as they walk in, they are sent as visual data, as electrical impulses down the “optic nerve” of the Bellevue, that long hallway that connects to the entrance of the old Administration building encased within the new modern wing, the “Eye”. I think to myself how people are electrical impulses, driven by voltage, producing voltage, as if we are batteries, amalgamations of light bundled together. The three white floors of the modern wing are in fact shaped like an eye looking out to the city, to the busy 1st Ave moving by.
Bellevue as Body: The Brain
Beyond the facade of the old administration building and through the curving hallways of the “optic nerve”, one enters the “brain” of the Bellevue, that multi-storied, multi-purpose construction, the hospital apparatus. The photons (people) move in and through the “brain”, moving in and through the collection of buildings. Off to the side of the brain sits the Old Psych Ward, the darkened corner of the “brain” where more than questionable things have occurred.
Bellevue as Body: Action
Through the actions of the “brain” what then occurs? What are the emotions engendered, allowed? I equate emotion with action. The processes of the “Eye”, the “Optic Nerve”, the “Brain” as creating emotions, engendering emotions, denying or promoting particular affective states.
People are seen through the “Eye”. In entering, they are processed continually by the “Body” of the Bellevue. The “Eye”, in effect, not only sees but processes, frames the ways in which people see and move.
This dream stays with me for weeks afterwords. It will greatly inform the way in which I present my final work.
| Note: this should be read in conjunction with Fieldnotes No. 1 and 2 |
I walk down E. 30th to 1st Avenue, take a few pictures from different angles this time. There is an older black man who has walked with me incidentally down E. 30th and now stands next to a forgotten phone booth, its phone dangling from a mangled chrome cord, its plastic walls cracked and soiled. He simply watches me from within the booth while I take pictures, saying and doing nothing. I smile and cross the street.
Even in broad daylight, the building of the old psych ward sends chills down my spine. It is only 8 stories tall, far from the most imposing building in New York City but for some reason never have I felt more uncomfortable near a space than this one. I take in the dead ivy once again, the yellowed windows and cross the street. I am now on the corner of E. 30th and 1st Ave., the corner where the murals are. I look at them closer this time, capture them with photos the best that I can. The dead gardens at their base are photographed as well and I turn the corner and head down E. 30th to the main entrance where I hope to take a clearer photo of the original entryway. After shooting a few distanced photos, I watch cautiously as an NYPD officer exits the gates and walks to the left towards 1st Ave. He pays no attention to me and as he turns the corner to the left, I enter the old Bellevue gates and approach the security booth once again, this time with another security guard whose name I come to find is Santos.
Santos comes out of the security booth as I enter and I ask him if I can just take a picture of the entryway and he says, “Absolutely not”. Santos is a tall man, seemingly in his early to mid 30’s with a piercing in his left ear, a large fake diamond lined with gold dangling from his elongated earlobe. He wears Dolce and Gabana eyeglasses, is around 6′3″ tall (slightly taller than myself), is lanky and slumps his shoulders over his chest, closing off the chest cavity, a physiological move of protection-habituated. His skin is splotched with past and current acne markings. He has picked some and carries the resulting scars, particularly on his right cheek near his lower jaw bone. His arms seem to go on forever. Stringy and out of control, they ride the movements of his skinny legs like young children in a carriage, never seemingly in tune with one another, prone to indifferent swayings this way and that. When he tells me that I cannot take a picture, he says it with a down-turned mouth, a mouth that tells me he would rather not be saying this, that it is his job that forces him to be this way. He walks towards me calmly, as if he is coming out to meet an old friend. Smiling, I say, “But I can go across the street to take one, right?” He smiles and says, “You said it. Nothing I can do ’bout that.” I turn and he continues walking with me, continues saying that he can’t do anything about me taking pictures from across the street and as soon as we hit the sidewalk, his manner changes, his shoulders relax even further. “Couldn’t tell you anything on Bellevue property but I can out here,” he says smiling, his teeth crooked, oddly spaced, the silver from the back of his mouth catching my attention. “This isn’t their property.” He wears a big smile now out of the left side of his mouth. It is a clever defiance that he practices, one that has no way of getting him in trouble and he is eager to talk. I smile and approach him. There is now only three feet between us but it is a comfortable three feet, one that bespeaks of secrecy and sharing. I ask him how long he has worked at the Bellevue and he tells me two years and that he has been working in mental hospital security for five. He repeats everything twice, as if confirming these facts for himself. He tells me that he grew up on the Lower East side for his whole life, tells me about how he and his friends used to walk by the Old Psych Ward when they were young. “There’s some stories. There’s some stories,” he says, reapeating this again and again. I am intrigued but cognizant of the fact that we have just met and am reticent of scaring him off with intrusive questions. I simply listen to what he is willing to say.
I ask him if he ever works the night shift and he tells me he tries not to, that the place is creepy as hell. I ask him if he ever hears stories from those that do and he tells me there are tons, tells me that the 9th floor is completely off limits to everyone, that they shut it down when there were too many voices and people were hearing regular tappings on the windows when there weren’t any birds outside. He tells me that when the voices became too loud on the 9th floor, they shut it down and totally forbade anyone to go there. He continues and tells me that pictures are totally forbidden inside and outside on Bellevue property, that the Bellevue is a landmark building and mentions Bloomberg and says that he never wants to be on that man’s bad side. It is odd in the way that he mentions Bloomberg, as if the man himself has forbade photographs, and we laugh. This interests me: the security guards cannot take pictures inside or out nor can the public. They are taught to look for cameras from the male homeless people that now inhabit the old psych ward, are taught to be on the lookout for flashes and confiscate any cameras they encounter. Santos talks about how many people want to expose the Bellevue, that they want to document the dirtiness and the violence. He says that it can’t be exposed, that it is highly protected by the government. He tells me that there are so many stories to tell and that it is his job to stop people from telling them as much as possible. In addition to the private security firm that is employed by the Bellevue, the NYPD has officers specifically assigned to the hospital. These policemen (and they are all men from what I gather) watch the private security guards and reinforce the laws of Bellevue. The inside of the Bellevue is guarded and watched over by the Bellevue Hospital police (separate from the NYPD and the private security firm from what I could gather) and the orderlies inside. Something begins to unfold. As fear-inducing as the old psych ward of the Bellevue is, it becomes apparent that the Bellevue is fearful of outsiders, fearful of exposure with too many bad stories locked within. The building has become a composite of its historically-insane inhabitants, a collection of the traces of its psychiatric patients. The Bellevue is afraid and I think about this for a while, try to discern what this means for a building to be afraid. I then imagine the old psych ward as an old man, veined hands and lonely. It is the old man that has lost touch with reality, the man that was always an asshole to his kids and perhaps drank too much. It is an old man that has withdrawn and recoils at the approach of anyone or anything that threatens to disrupt his stagnant, habituated lifestyle. I imagine this building as deeply unhappy, its walls resounding with the voices and cries of its past patients in pain and insane laughter.
Santos tells me that beneath the nine floors there are two sub-basements, the bottom sub-basement being what they still refer to as the “chambers”. These rooms still have all the original equipment including the tables where they administered drug treatments (many experimental) from when the psych ward closed in 1984 and its inhabitants were moved to the Southern section of the hospital. Everything remains exactly as it was when the psych ward closed. All remains. This fascinates me. What does it mean that nothing has changed in 26 years, that the original equipment lies untouched? What are they preserving? Is it mere laziness or is it something else? Are they afraid and if so, of what? What lies dormant in the stagnation of the old Bellevue psych ward?
I ask Santos about the murals outside on the corner of 1st Ave and 30th street. Cracked and sordid, these were painted by the psych patients themselves he tells me. There are gardens in front of them, still with the stakes in the ground and dying plants at their base. Santos tells me that these too are from the psych patients. 26 years and nothing has changed, not even the landscaping? I air my doubts and sense of surprise but he reassures me, laughing and pointing to the bushes near the original intake entryway of the old psych ward. “Ha. It’s all the same man. Just like it was. Nothin’s changed.” Why remain the same for so long? Stagnant and fearful. Highly patrolled, largely protected.
I look up at the ivy walls again, ask him if the ivy grows back in Spring and he tells me it does. I say, “Good, cause this dead stuff just adds to the creepiness.” He laughs and says, “It is such a creepy place. You should come back at night and see it.” He clicks his fingers as if remembering something and says that he wishes a certain lady was around but she just took off. I ask what her name is but he can’t recall. “She’s an African lady,” he says. “Man, I wish she was here ’cause she can tell you some stories. She could tell you stories for days.” I ask him if it would be okay for me to leave my number with him so that he could text me when she was around and he agrees. I say text and not call intentionally, thinking a text is less intrusive, doesn’t take up his minutes in calling a stranger. He agrees and we walk back through the Bellevue gates, enter the security guard booth. He calmly hands me a pen and sets a piece of paper on the table. The air is comfortable, the company loose and trusting. I notice a log book with lots of red and black scribbles but I don’t want to seem intrusive. I write my name and number, thank him and he walks me out to the gates. Santos is a man willing to share what he has seen and experienced but obviously feels bound by his job. On multiple occasions, he tells me unprompted that he wishes he could take me inside but he would lose his job and as if to prove this says, “Here. Come with me. I can’t take you inside but I can show you this.” He takes me to the entrance of the psych ward and pushes a bush to the side with his arm to reveal a plaque on the wall covered in algae and soil. “I don’t read Roman numerals very well but believe me, its old.” We laugh and he releases the bush and it flies back to hide the plaque once again. He apologizes for not being able to let me in but I reassure him time and time again that I completely understand and tell him that I have been looking for a legitimate way to get inside. I ask him if they allow volunteers at the men’s homeless shelter. They do not. Everything is highly regulated and restricted. I tell him I will probably see him around and he tells me good luck.
Questions: The rooms are exactly the same. What is this stagnant nature about? Why remain the same when so much bad existed there? How have the past bodies imprinted themselves in the walls? The lines between bodies and buildings are becoming blurred. There have been serious rumblings from real estate developers of the old psych ward being turned into a fancy hotel and conference rooms. What does it mean to simply cover up the layered histories of the psych ward? What does it mean for the sordid conditions of the psych ward to be repainted and repaved for some of the wealthiest individuals in New York City? What happens to the voices of the ninth floor? Are they sealed within new drywall, muted by pink insulation or do they remain unscathed, haunting the new inhabitants that have paid millions of dollars for a top-floor penthouse overlooking the East River? Where do such voices, such spirits, the remnants of past inhabitants and workers go?
1st Avenue and East 27th Street: 12:40-1:10 PM, Main Lobby
I leave Santos and quickly enter the main lobby to jot down remaining thoughts and insights from our conversation and my observations which takes me 30 minutes.
1st Avenue and East 27th Street: 1:10-1:34 PM, Main Lobby
I buy lunch at the Au Bon Pain and begin eating lunch near the manikins wearing red. Above me in the three curved floors of the modern wing, I see a circled “C” on each floor indicative of the psych ward, one in orange and one in blue. I make a note to find out what these colors denote next time.
The building is not passive. It communicates with bodies just as bodies communicate with it. I am coming to terms with this, realizing that this is the challenge that I face and know that Michelle Murphy’s book, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty will be indispensable to the process of building my case. I realize too that few people believe the onus of an investigation can be placed on what is taken to be an inanimate object by many such as a building, that ethnographies are by their very nature studies of human beings. I have no doubt that buildings, being assemblages of human being’s ideas and energies, are worthy of any investigation that would normally be reserved for a flesh and bones human being. To offer an exploration of the flesh and bones of buildings and the indivisible co-existence between human beings and buildings is my challenge. I think as I sit there on that marble bench that at no time are people not physically touching the building whether walking, sitting, or leaning. People, once inside the building, are in constant communication with the forced boundaries of the structure.
An older Hispanic woman (perhaps in her 50’s) has an amputated leg and rolls herself in a wheel chair with a small boy to her left. She is slightly overweight, is dressed in a light floral top with short sleeves and a longer dark blue skirt made of heavy cotton, and carries joy in her facial expressions, crow’s feet showing at the corners of her eyes. She says, “Mira, mira,” to the child and points skyward to the translucent ceiling above. The child looks upwards and giggles. She pulls him closer in a warm embrace as I notice from behind her on her left, a young girl most likely in her teens comes up on crutches, both legs bandaged from the knees down. She speaks to the older woman and they both laugh. She is related somehow, a daughter or granddaughter perhaps. I watch as the girl moves past them and sits down hard on the marble benches a few feet down from where I am sitting and I wonder if they are recovering from a car accident. They have come to the hospital through pain and suffering of some sort but the older woman and boy seem joyous, the girl despondent in a common teenage way but seemingly happy. There is a multiplicity of emotion experienced within these walls.
I look up and notice that the modern wing is shaped like an eye pointing outwards to 1st Avenue. People can and do look over the glass walls of each floor to the lobby to where I sit below. I notice a man strapped down to a bed being pushed by two medics. He is a black man in his late 30’s and he peers down at me from the 2nd floor, C orange. “A psych patient?” I wonder and take further notice of the multiple black straps lining his torso and legs.
I look around and notice as I am sitting in a dynamic space where visitors and patients can view each other through the glass of each floor of the modern wing. It is a space of being watched and watching within a space of the Bellevue which is shaped like an eye.
1:29: Recording Made of Main Lobby
Audio Clip (Main Lobby): http://chirb.it/dz22Kd
The unnerving sound of a child crying from behind me can be heard. It seems to come from the walls themselves but I eventually look up to see an open window in the old administration building. The glass barriers on each floor are at least five feet high–someone would need to struggle to jump over. A white marble carving to my left of a man and a woman huddling with children sits poised precariously on a small slab of salmon and black marble. The scene depicted sends chills down my spine with the accompanying sound of the bloodcurdling screams of the child either in serious pain or scared out of its wits. A man in medical scrubs sits down next to me on the left with lunch and starts to eat. An older man in a fur-lined black jacket and well-pressed khaki pants sits down to my right and simply looks straight ahead. Two Chinese men in their early 30’s stand next to each other, silver cell phones in their right hands, bags of food with yellow smiley faces in their left. I make a note to study the presence of food deliverers at some later time and decide to leave.
Side Notes:
Treat 28th street as a feeder street into the eye of the Bellevue.
Spend next week on one of the C floors looking down.
Try to come again when Santos is working.
Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/47478409@N06/sets/72157623382715999/
Research:
Weekends at Bellevue Review: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/from-bellevues-psychiatric-er-a-doctors-memoir/
“Checkout Time At the Asylum” (NY Mag): http://nymag.com/news/features/52176/index1.html
- -In 1975, Saul Bellow memorialized him as Von Humboldt Fleisher in the novel Humboldt’s Gift: “To me, Bellevue was like the Bowery,” Bellow wrote. “It gave negative testimony. Brutal Wall Street stood for power, and the Bowery, so near it, was the accusing symbol of weakness. And so with Bellevue, where the poor and busted went … And poets like drunkards and misfits or psychopaths, like the wretched, poor or rich, sank into weakness—was that it? From Bellevue he phoned me … He yelled, ‘Charlie, you know where I am, don’t you? … This isn’t literature. This is life.’ ”
- Bellevue, he says, was “always a zoo. Never enough rooms, never enough space for people to be waiting—and the people who were waiting were not exactly calmly sitting around until they could be interviewed.” When patients came up the 29th Street ramp to the first-floor admitting area, “the majority were probably brought in by the police, since severely mentally ill people don’t have the insight to know they’re severely mentally ill. So usually you’d have cops all over the place in the psych ER.” Adding, literally, to the boiling-point atmosphere was the fact that the hospital had very spotty air-conditioning—a particular problem since summer heat waves exponentially increased the kind of behavior that tended to land patients in Bellevue in the first place.
-
After 54 years, the facility looked and felt outmoded. There were treatment rooms still filled with bathtubs covered with canvas sheets that left just enough room for a patient’s head to stick out; the huge basins, which were once thought to calm the manic, had lain unused for decades, museum relics of a less enlightened time.
- As for the actual rather than the figurative Bellevue, it’s now a more modern hospital, in a different building, in a new era. It seems unlikely that anybody would be sorry to see the words “Psychiatric Hospital” chipped off the northern entrance of its old quarters. And while the EDC’s plan to turn Bellevue into the latest in luxe accommodations has occasioned a certain number of jokes about the Sid Vicious Suite (yes, he’s an alum) and the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Casualty Atrium, those memories aren’t likely to have much traction. After all, nobody is more expert at eradicating swaths of urban history with great dispatch and little sentimentality than a real-estate developer.
Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”: http://sprayberry.tripod.com/poems/howl.txt
Eggs, Well Done
March 1, 2010
She was there again, leaning with each arm draped over the carved wood door frame and the puce and lime green wallpapered walls. Achromatic hair tied tightly into a nest of black steel hair pins, each roll well-placed, a manicured perm of transcendence. Her face, crumpled and crimped, lights up the room with its fiercely-driven marks of amethyst and henna. Her eyes of steel gray are half open, glinting in the overhead diner lights and she looks forward and meets my eyes. I imagine her sanguine lips meeting mine, our teeth clattering in the lawless pursuit of pent up passion now released. Her milky breasts will falter and strain against the worn fabric of her over-sized brassiere and we will throw caution to the wind as our hips pop and diner customers run wildly out the door, hands over their mouths. The rolls of our flesh will intertwine and for that timeless moment, our bodies will become enmeshed in olfactory inquisitions of Dove roll-on deodorant, Old Spice cologne and baby powder. We will laugh as our teeth fall out to the grimy tiles below and we gum each other into eternity. Her figure is perfectly imperfect, her every move sensually slow and wizened. Our endless times alone will come to pass and all the singular moments of watching cars out the window and sleeping and eating alone will melt away in the presence of two. Her warm fingers will trace my body, along my jaw line, on the edges of my cheek and ear. In her ears I will whisper notes of longing and long-awaited love and she will quiver. Fully embraced, the world will cease to exist and time, for all of its menacing faces, will simply cease. The eternal through embrace, the eternal through love. She puts her arms to her side, still watching me, and takes uneven steps using the backs of the booths for balance as she approaches. “The hunt is on,” I tell myself and with a swig of OJ, I take my pills in anticipation for what is to come.
Fear. It rolls across my chest as I visit the old section of the psychiatric ward, now covered in the bare vines of ivy. Fogged yellow windows, the remnants of unused medical equipment can be seen through the grated window panes, and the red brick building towers seven stories high into the darkening skies of winter. The barren vines wind their way across the face of a building that bespeaks of pain and anguish, the tall rusted gates with lamps adorning the tops keep onlookers at a safe distance and the inhabitants or inmates safely within. At the base of the building on the corner of 28th and 1st Avenue, pixalated murals of joyous cartoon figures (now barely visible) adorn the chipped walls. They deeply disturb me, seem far out of place. On the gate hangs a sign: “Intake and Vacancy Control Entrance”. It points to a darkened corridor with a rather large black man standing guard in a fur-lined winter jacket. He eyes me as I pass. I nod but he does nothing.
I continue walking down 1st Avenue and enter the side entrance on 28th street and approach the security guard holding my camera. “There are no pictures here,” he says. “You can’t take them here–you need to go over there.” He points to the other side of the street. I say okay and say, “I just have one question: is the psych ward still here?” I point up sweeping my hand over the image of the worn building. He tells me it has closed, tells me that it has moved. “To Rikers?” I ask. He says he doesn’t know and I move on and continue taking pictures from across the street and down 28th which is in the midst of renovation. I know that what he says is untrue, that what has actually happened is that the pysch ward was simply moved inside and that this building has now become a homeless shelter.
I feel I am chipping away at an emotional puzzle, slowly letting the environment inform me of its pasts and presents. There is an air of strict control matched with a realization that bad things have occurred here, things which over the Bellevue’s long history have leaked out to the press and city inspectors, much of which I am now just coming to read. I walk back towards the main entrance of the Bellevue and enter.
1st Avenue and East 27th Street: 6:00 PM, Main Lobby
Audio Clip: http://chirb.it/hfOGM2
Vacuous. Empty space abounds in the space where the modern wing has been grafted on to the original architecture of the Bellevue. Sweeping architecture, half circles sweep above me and slam into the old architecture of the original administration building of the Bellevue. The expanse of the space is grand, off-white columns jut downwards into the black, white and salmon marble. Light pink brick on the walls tinged with black. The roof is made of glass panels with beige, metal pole framing. The old exists fully encapsulated by the modern facade, a relic of time’s passed. Au Bon Pain cafe in the corner, heavy metal chairs, steel circular tables–there are six of them, each with three chairs and they sit off to the side, lonely in this great expanse of space. A policeman stands guard at the entrance to the old administration building and looks bored but vigilant. I ask him about the old psych ward next door, confirms that that was its initial purpose but that now it serves as a homeless shelter. “Where is the psych ward now?” I ask, feigning deference to his badge. “Here,” he states curtly, pointing up to the original Bellevue architecture behind him. I thank him and move on. He is busy and I am merely a spectator to this space of suffering.
I look up to the bright halogen lights that shoot across the poles lining the roof. It is as if I am in a museum, strategic lighting accentuating the modern architecture of steel and glass while framing the old Bellevue with a sense of controlled preservation. I walk over, order a coffee and strategically place myself at a table on the side, away from the open space. This is the place I will come to observe this particular space of the Bellevue.
Voices bounce off of the marble floors, reverberate in the hollows and seem lost, empty souls roaming the halls of empty space. I record the sounds of the marbled halls as people far and near discuss their work schedules, doctors, nurses and interns on their breaks. Invalids sweep into the main lobby from the cold and damp 1st Avenue limping, wearing the tattered clothing of better days unseen. Some seem crazy, talking to themselves in overzealous bouts of frustration. Others are merely quiet, perhaps subdued. Wheelchairs, canes, limps, pain, quiet voices. Signs on the glass lining each floor read in all capital letters “FLU” for no apparent reason. A banner on the old administration building underneath the oxidized green lanterns reads “Bellevue Goes Red for Health” and two white manikins wearing red dresses stand on either side. A marble bench in front has patient’s family members and friends sitting on the bench, seemingly unaware of the strange scene behind them.
This is an easy place to sit as a visitor. Interns sit next to me discussing their night shift which I gather is about to begin. Whether a patient awaiting admittance or friends or family members of those who have been admitted, this is a space of waiting. Not a space of joy or laughter, it is subdued, a space of suffering, a space interpolated between the known and the unknown, the past and the ever-enfolding present of architectural traces. I stand and walk down the hallways towards the Psychiatric Evaluation Services Building, building C2.
Moving from Main Lobby to Secondary Lobby on 27th Street, 6:30 PM
Catholic church, synagogue, prayer rooms for every religion imaginable just down the hall. People wait here for long periods of time, enough to need churches. I move down the hallway as a spectator of other people’s pain and joy. I am uncomfortable, feel as though I do not have a right to be here. This is a space where people come for comfort from their ailments and admittance is granted to only those that suffer. Suffering and the employment of lessening suffering is the connection to the building, the reason that people from all five boroughs of New York City and beyond make their way to the Bellevue Hospital. It is the reason people come here and the reason people stay. I work my way down the forest green hallways spotted with white tiles and come upon the secondary lobby on 27th street. Mentally, I am still mapping out the territory, learning the crooks and crannies and hidden recesses of the Bellevue.
Secondary Lobby on 27th Street, 6:30 PM
Audio Clip: http://chirb.it/0F1DJg
Another common sitting area, this one with darker tiles, gray stony pillars beige in color. The lighting is painfully florescent, the ceiling lower. Strange white bean pod seats adorn the ground with orange cushions. Sitting diagonally from one another, primary red flower pots with dead plants in them spot the floor and seem to fit nicely into their drab surroundings. People sit and talk in hushed tones, voices from the hallways echo against the marble floors. I cannot understand what they are saying nor can I locate them visually. Behind me, large rectangular windows framed with brown metal open out to a drop-off area and a primary blue parking garage not far off to the left.
“MRI”, “Parking”, “Pharmacy” signs line the hallways. I am nervous and anxious, as if a nurse or doctor is about to come out and give me the bad news about a non-existent relative that has been treated at the Bellevue. The air is tinged with stale food and another Au Bon Pain cafe, bright yellow in color, is over in the corner. I smile and find it comical that “pain” is the last word in the restaurant’s name, regardless of its obvious meaning in French. Police walkie-talkies can be heard but I see no policemen. Cell phones ring, the sound of a man rolling a garbage bin down the hallway comes closer but stops. He is a janitor and stops to talk to a woman that is lost, then continues. There is a humming in the background, the crinkling of paper bags. The sound of music is distant, people walk by talking, I am encapsulated in a cave of inaudible murmurs and stale air. My head hurts. The light is dim. I exit.
Questions that arise:
What does it mean for the Bellevue to be a space of suffering? What of joy, happiness, boredom? What else is felt within this space?
How does one unfold the history of a space through observation alone? What can be told about the nooks and crannies of the Bellevue? Can one extrapolate a history of the space from the mossy grooves of a worn brick wall? What do broken, yellowed windows and wrought iron gates say?
What does it mean to keep people’s stories out of this exploration? Can I tell the Bellevue’s story as a physical space without interviewing people and asking them how the space affects them? Is it appropriate to observe people and at times, place my readings of their emotions on them? What then happens to their agency and if it is lost, does that really matter?
This piece moves from the notion that physical spaces literally and figuratively frame the possibilities of particular emotions to be felt. Within this physical structure then, do people have the agency to feel the ways in which they want to feel or is the array of possible emotions drawn into the architecture of the building itself?
Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/47478409@N06/sets/72157623335347155/show/with/4367244613/
Fieldnotes No. 1 (2/10/10): Initial Sketch of Care, Control, and Vision: Medical Structures of Sentiment (Bellevue Hospital)
February 20, 2010
Note: These are fieldnotes from the Bellevue Hospital project I am currently involved in through which I am exploring the ways in which the physical spaces of the Bellevue carve out, allow for, produce, engender, transmit, perform, disallow, and inhibit particular affective states in those that enter it.
__________
I approach the space of Bellevue Hospital having never seen it. All I know of it is what I have heard from others that have spoken of relatives admitted involuntarily to the psychiatric ward within. I imagine a darkened space with winding corridors, the type of ward featured in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, Kesey slumped in the corner high on peyote and wildly scratching away at his notepads. There are nurses in crisp, white uniforms in this image, most having severe features, most having the look of having given up a part of their humanity in an attempt to maintain sanity and keep distance between themselves and their patients. The doctors are apparitions in this imagining, existing only in the dimly-lit rooms where sturdy, worn machinery lies seemingly unused and a humming can be heard throughout the hallways, perhaps the occasional cry of a patient now-realizing where they have been placed resounds.
The history of the Bellevue, constructed in 1736, lies silent within the aged walls, travels through the rusted pipes, oxidized copper ornamentals and worn down tiles, and slams up against the newly-renovated modern wing which has been grafted onto the aged original buildings of the Bellevue. Within the old and new, there is a dormant history reenacted every day with a new face, new people performing the duties of the hospital, the duties of care and control. “What relationships have coursed through this physical building?” I think to myself. “What power structures between nurses and patients, doctors and nurses, families and the institution, and perhaps most importantly, between the patients and the building itself course through the aged organizational structures?”
I begin to think of the space of the cubicle that I have written previously about (see here), the affective states such a historical space engenders, produces, and performs and I mentally transpose this space on to one of the imagined holding cells for mental patients: four walls, bright white, well-lit from far overhead, the light hidden behind a steel mesh cage to avoid breakage, and a steel bed in the corner with well-pressed, white linen. This is only what I imagine as I have never been inside. To this project I bring such imaginings and I am cognizant of their presence but unaware of how they may inflect my research.
I wonder what it would mean to study a space with humans as the ornaments to the physical structure of the hospital. What it means to think of the emotional capabilities of us as human beings as directly informed, honed, and limited by the physical structures we exist within. I begin to wonder too if, when we remain for long periods of time within one physical structure, the organizational structure embeds itself within our facial expressions, rears its head though our views of life and the world around us, lingers under our fingernails, and importantly, informs what we deem to be emotionally available to feel.
Leading questions: what affective states does an organizational space such as Bellevue Hospital allow for, produce, engender, transmit, perform, disallow, and inhibit? What if we begin to imagine, as others have, the physical space as a living being, a ruin of past lives, emotions and experiences which hold traces of such things within its very walls, floors, facades, lighting, and fabric? Do human beings have agency when encapsulated within an organizational space or does their vision become limited not only by what the space allows us to see given the particular positioning of walls and lighting but also by what movement is allowed within the spaces of the hospital (i.e. If I want to walk down the hall, there are particular boundaries to that desire)?
Beginning approach: A reflexive study of three, three-hour sessions of observation per week from particular sites around and within Bellevue Hospital: the Southwest public gardens, the main public lobby and the public eating area. The structure of the Bellevue will be noted, historically researched, photographed, and drawn from the inside and out. Observations of the affective states the physical structure engenders within myself will be noted. Observations of other’s actions, visible emotions, and movements while visiting the hospital will be noted. All will remain anonymous. A feel for the place and people will be noted and an essence of the place will be allowed to percolate up through time spent observing.
Photos of the first trip to Bellevue (a grounding): http://www.flickr.com/photos/47478409@N06/sets/72157623412143184/detail/
Imag-ine
February 12, 2010
Roberto desires something fantastical, a drawing that will transport him elsewhere, a painting that will cause him to inwardly traverse the knotted realm of neural fibers and wooded pathways of his mind, perhaps a film that will insist upon furthering the edicts by which he currently lives his life by. He has none of these things, simply looks out the window to the snowy street below, one older man ambling through the carved-out pathways of soiled snow having been shoveled carelessly to the side. Worn and torn knit hat, gold-rimmed glasses, a cardigan pulled too tightly over his overbearing frame, and a scarf, just long enough to wrap itself around his neck once: Roberto sees these things from three stories up, wants more than the meaningless details of a person’s costume seen from afar. The man’s speed is carefully mediated, each step seemingly a debate between mind, foot and earth as to where to step, in what manner to lay foot to ground. Roberto notices his cane, the elongated mahogany fibers spotted with rings of oxidized copper, the curvature of the handle, the wood sliding seamlessly into the man’s furrowed palms.
Roberto thinks of the much-mediated distance between himself and this stranger. As if trapped within a bubble of solitude, it is from afar and encased behind a pane of glass that Roberto observes the world. The strangers he watches carousing the sidewalks are the peopled fancies of his mind, the creative whimsies of his non-personal existence. This is a safe distance, far from potential pain, far from unwanted conversations. It is a distance which, when destroyed, has the potential for utter disruption from the normalcy of life’s mechanical operations.
The man has walked ten steps by now, stops to rest and arches his back, his shaking palm placed gently along the grooves of his lower back. He looks up to the sky. The gulls fly by. One cries into the frigid air. The sun is warm against his body now, his back has settled. He begins to walk again.
“What distances must we forego to be admitted to the personal sanctuaries of another human’s life?” Roberto thinks to himself. He knows the well-mediated distance, the distance imposed through personal defenses. But he imagines two bodies and perhaps they are shaking hands. He thinks of the physical distance which still, even though embraced, exists between those two palms. The physical distance that cannot be closed, the space between the atoms which only lends itself to further inquiries of deeper spaces unbridged. Roberto takes these spaces or distances as metaphors for the representation of distanced existence, the glassy windows which from behind we view the world and ourselves.
The man has walked farther now but remains in sight. His steps are more steady, his placement of foot to ground more pronounced. The light filters through the clouds and worn tree branches casting shadows along his aged body. He knows this man no better than himself and like a dream, takes his representations of this man to be a vector of his own subconscious, his readings of the man’s existence that of a dream analyst catalyzing imagery for the meaning of the here and now, now past. Through the partitions of this window, Roberto views the apparitions of a world of people unknown.
Grander significance erupts from no where but the recesses of his muddled mind and fervent imagination and he awaits his next image.
Capsule Hotel: Kotoyo
February 9, 2010
**This should be read as a pairing with Capsule Hotel: Sumi and other Capsule Hotel entries
Kotoyo holds the mop firmly in her hand. “The animals,” she thinks to herself as she absorbs the semen-stained sheets, the used condoms, the empty poppers. With a gloved hand and a grimace, she removes the evidence, attempts to bring the capsule back to a sterile state which is what her job’s end-goal truly is: utter neutrality and sterility.
For years she had worked the cramped halls and washed out stalls of the Green Plaza Shinjuku, had watched as the elite businessmen and women that had missed their commuter trains out of the city were replaced by vacancies, then semi-vagrants, then the long-term residents who stayed for months on end because the rents were cheaper than regular apartments and occasionally the rich, white, teenage tourists that prowled the streets of Tokyo looking for an “authentic” Japanese experience. Kotoyo was the unknown constant in all of their lives, the woman that weaved in and out of their lived experiences, readying their living spaces for the next day. In essence, she was the keeper of time within the capsule hotel, making sure day in and day out that time, at least within the hotel, had not moved and that in a city besieged by entropy, the Green Plaza Shinjuku remained static.
She walks around the corner, sees a forlorn boy sitting on the edge of his cubicle. It is not the first time that she has seen someone with such a look nor will it be the last. Many young Japanese men and women have traveled from pristine and spacious landscapes beset by utter poverty in the hopes that here in Tokyo, life would be easier, that they could attain what they see on the television. Most found what this boy and others had found: a dirty, fast-paced metropolis that shoved its inhabitants into smaller and smaller spaces and charged them more and more money, a city that seemed utterly indifferent to the quality of life of its citizens. Kotoyo slaps the mop to the ground, begins to weave it though the crooks and crannies of the tiled floor below and watches the boy as he slumps to the ground and his knees nearly give way. He rolls off down the hallway, dirty towel in hand, to begin another day in the Tokyo grind.
Sounds erupt from inside the steely capsules. She had become accustomed to the coughs, the wheezing, the snorts and farts but hears a woman crying and this, she knows, she will never get used to. She mops harder, tries to drown the sound out with the scraping of the metal now worn through the dirtied fibers of the mop on the hallway tiles. She can hear it still, remembers when she was just a girl and had traveled up from Akitakata near Hiroshima after her mother had died of cancer and her father was in need of hospitalization. Her plan had been to come to Tokyo, find a job and send money back to her father’s brother who would give her father the necessary care to ease the pain of his prostate cancer. She had planned to do this within the month but things hadn’t gone according to plan. That month had turned into six and she barely had enough to buy food and shelter for herself, let alone send money back to her father. She had found the Green Plaza, had been able to rent one of the capsules for cheap if she worked there, and soon after quit her job selling clothing at a run-down department store to mop the halls clean of transient decay. It was a few months later that she received a letter informing her that her father had passed away. It was then that she had cried within the capsule, heard the reverberations of her pain along plastic corridors and cement partitions.
Kotoyo continues her daily routine, finishes mopping the corners of the hallways and pulls out the disinfectant spray. She walks calmly down the hallway, her rubber sneakers squeaking on the newly polished floors, reaches the communal sinks and with a sweeping left to right movement, coats the sinks with an even coat of cleanliness. She hears the bacteria whimpering, imagines them writhing with pain and she smiles faintly. This is the favorite moment of her job.
She thinks of the time that has passed, the different inhabitants that have marked the years. She has traversed the social standings of servant to caretaker, from the lowly worker under the careful watch of the wealthy business elite to the nice old lady that cleans people’s sheets to the tourists and long-term renters. She has become many things to many people and in so doing, has largely lost what it means to be anything to herself.
Toilet brush in hand now, she begins to scrub away the feces of yesterday hoping to attain once again that pristine, white ceramic bowl that brings her comfort, lathers her with ease. “One day soon,” she thinks to herself, “I will go home.”
Roving Hotel: Steven
February 2, 2010
**This should be read as a pairing with Roving Hotel: Alfonso
Steven’s b
ody aches from sitting all day. He had told his team leader time and time again that his chair was not ergonomically-correct and was going to cause long-term damage to his spine if it wasn’t changed. She had listened and the chair had been ordered but it wasn’t fast enough for him for he could feel his spine beginning to pinch at the tailbone.
He enters the station at World Trade Center. It’s 9:00 PM and Steven sees that the E train has just arrived. He runs, his cashmere coattails trailing behind him and his wingtips click on the dirty cement platform. Once in, it is a race to get a good seat. He sees a woman searching as well and swoops in to grab the seat before she can get there. She is displeased and to avoid her darkened glances he opens up a newspaper and pretends to read. She is made invisible.
The train is moving now. Steven places the paper in his bag, reaches up his well-manicured, white hand and runs his slender, soft fingers through his well-combed, blond hair that he has swept back and to the side not unlike his father used to. A strand of hair falls on the right side of his face and he gently takes it and weaves it back into place. With his left hand he loosens his silk tie, flips open the top button of his shirt. He is loose now, letting go and relaxing. Steven pulls his right leg up, places it squarely across his left knee. His hands are now folded on top of the other on his lap. He averts any gazes from the other passengers for the moment, stares out the subway window into the black and white flicker of the subway reel. West 4th Street stop. Students from NYU get on, most likely headed into the depths of Queens where the rent is affordable.
Comfortable now, he looks around. There are not many people in the subway car. He looks to his left and at the far end of the car he sees a man, probably in his late 40’s, unkempt and dirty, most likely homeless. Steven thinks he is a Mexican or Puerto Rican, one of the two but doesn’t see the difference. He didn’t smell anything before but now he is sensing a disgusting array of soiled sheets and urine. He reaches into his coat pocket, feels the soft fibers brushing against the hairs on the back of his hand and grabs his glasses, places them neatly on his nose and around his ears. Through frame-less spectacles he watches as the man curls himself tighter into a ball in his dirtied sleeping bag and plastic bags. “Like an animal,” Steven thinks to himself and is revolted yet fascinated to observe his epitome of laziness. He thinks to himself how nice it would be to sleep all day, beg for money from complete strangers, treat the subway as your personal hotel and never have to deal with a boss or responsibility. He doesn’t think he could handle not being able to bathe regularly.
42nd Street stop. An older Puerto Rican woman gets on, looks over at the man and shakes her head, moving clear down to the other side of the car. Steven has four more stops before he gets off. A police officer crosses cars while it is moving, the doors slide gracefully open and slam shut. The homeless man jumps but falls back asleep. Like a breath of fresh air, Steven welcomes the cop’s presence and the justice he will reign down upon this man. He pays $90 a month to ride the subway and sees no reason why he should have to smell this man or all the others like him that just use the cars for a place to sleep. The cop grabs his baton and nudges the man with it in the ribs. He starts but then falls back asleep. Steven thinks he is most likely drunk and swears he can smell some type of booze coming from his direction. The cop nudges him again, this time continually. “You need to wake up,” he tells him. “You can’t sleep in here.” The man wakes up and with tired eyes he looks up at him and agrees. “Collect your stuff and exit the car please,” he says and he obeys, wrapping his things back up in the plastic bags from whence they came, tying his sleeping bag into a manageable ball. The constant movement releases all the odors which were once before contained and Steven scowls, tries to stop breathing through his nose. The cop sits to the side, watching. The 7th Avenue stop is next. Steven shifts in his seat, his suit pants sliding across the subway benches, ice skating on a field of plastic. The homeless man stands, looks over and for a moment, locks eyes with Steven. Steven sees his tired, brown eyes, his ragged, dark beard, his hands that are toughened over with calluses and scars. He sees his hair, tousled and worn, his pants ripped, his shirt torn. The train stops, the man leaves and Steven breathes deep as the cop exits and his comfort level is restored. “Glad for the NYPD,” he thinks to himself and looks up to the stop map. Two more. He’s almost home.
Photo Courtesy of Downtown Express
Capsule Hotel: Sumi
February 1, 2010
**This should be read as a pairing with Capsule Hotel: Ebisu
Sumi wakes to find that the screen on the edge of her capsule has been lifted and a small white boy named Mark is looking in curiously. It was becoming a daily ritual for the boy, an exercise in naturalist tendencies and Sumi felt like a rhino on the plains of Kenya, the ones she saw on the small television screen above her bed. She yells ‘Dette!’ and kicks at the boy with her sore feet and aching legs. The boy scatters, looks on from a distance and disappears down the yellowed hallway. There is no use in trying to go back to bed she knows and moves her body forward down the cylinder enclosure towards the entrance where she will sit and listen to the crowded capsules birth their occupants into the morning air.
She had come from poverty, a house with poorly maintained infrastructure that blurred the lines between nature and clean, demarcated living space. Her father, Akio, was a farmer who grew rice in the terraces left untouched by the major agricultural companies that had taken over Japan. He still worked by hand, refused to use mechanization to increase productivity and as a result, produced little more than what was needed for their subsistence. Her mother, Cho, was a weaver and made mats and Fedoras out of the dried rice stalks which rarely sold but kept her occupied throughout most of Sumi’s childhood. Sumi had come to Tokyo with only a few yen in her pockets and an idealistic dream of becoming the next big Japanese pop star. Years later, she found herself working at a department store selling shoes and suits to well-groomed men and expensively-clad women and was disappointed only temporarily that she had not achieved her dream of stardom. She was proud to have a steady job, enough money to pay for a place to live even if it was pretty small and enough to eat and send some home to her ailing parents. It wasn’t much but her life in Tokyo was far better than it ever had been back home.
Sumi’s legs are dangling now over the edge and she looks to her left where the long-faced Ebisu is sitting, face ground into the tiled floor below. She never understood how he could be so depressed all the time. She knew his daily routine like the back of her hand. He would wake screaming often, sit dazed at the edge of his capsule, pouring over the dirty tiles on the floor and then would lean back temporarily watching some trashy television before he would get up and as if in a daze, walk down the hallways without looking anyone else in the eye. He was a strange character, one completely internal to himself and she often felt like reaching over to shake him from his waking reveries, letting him know that it wasn’t as bad as he made it out to be, that there were many positive aspects of their lives in Tokyo. Instead she watched him, day in and day out and was grateful that the vision of life that she had carved out for herself nourished her soul and allowed her to give freely to those around her. She watches as Ebisu jumps from the edge of the capsule, dirty towel in hand and slowly walks towards the communal baths. She feels sorry for him but has her own life to worry about.
Sumi slides her legs out completely, turns around and steps down to the floor below. It is cold against the soles of her feet and she arches them to keep them from touching as best she can. Others are waking now and she greets those that sit on the edges of their capsules with cheery and heartfelt sentiments. Like a ray of radiant sunshine she walks the hallways of clouded gazes and warped visions and bids sordid specters to return to their darkened recesses if only for her temporary presence. Sumi has begun another day and makes her way valiantly to the mossy communal baths of the capsule hotel.
Roving Hotel: Alfonso
January 5, 2010
It was 6:00 p.m. The night had turned to frost. Another day, another unsuccessful attempt at getting work. The E train pulls into Jamaica Center, slows to a halt, bumping gently into the black and yellow bumpers at the end of the platform. Alfonso grabs his army-green backpack, throws the right black handle over his left shoulder, collects his two plastic bags with The Strand written across them in red and white, one with his toiletries, another with his blankets.
Alfonso had come to America seeking work, promised the glory of a land where the rich or well-to-do were lazy and would pay someone such as himself a large sum of money to do odd jobs. What he found were decent jobs in construction with long hours but good pay, nice people, many of whom were from places near to his hometown of Linares, Mexico, and affordable housing near the construction sites. New York City, for its reputation for being cold and heartless, was far from it for Alfonso and he was able to not only make enough money to live comfortably but was sending a large sum of money back home to his wife, Yesenia, and two children, Amada and Sol.
Deep in Queens, he and his fellow expats would build new condos and apartment complexes for the influx of white kids moving in from all across the country and Manhattan, where the prices that were traditionally astronomical had only gotten worse. They would spend days throwing up walls and stucco, nailing 2 x 4’s, running electrical wiring. It was meant to be fast, cheap and shoddy but Alfonso and the others would take their time to make sure that while they were fast, they were also thorough. He couldn’t imagine living in one of these places and wanted to make it at least livable if it couldn’t be hospitable due to mindless design and anti-human, pro-money sentiments.
The jobs had come one after the other and the boom of the 90’s and 00’s kept he and his compatriots in work from 8 in the morning till sometimes as late as 8 at night. But the idiots on Wall Street had thought it their right to play with the hearts, minds and money of those looking for a better life, a house, maybe a new car or small business. The loans had flowed freely to anyone, irrespective of their income or ability to pay them back. That bubble had burst and burst fast. From sometimes working 2-3 jobs a day, Alfonso and his friends soon found themselves working one job 5 days a week if they were lucky but more often 3-4 days a week. But the economic strains ran deep and the cranes stopped lifting, the buildings stopped growing, and Alfonso soon found himself competing with people he had at one time worked with for even the most menial of jobs. He had gone from building apartment complexes to washing dishes in the back of some Italian restaurant in the dregs of Queens and while it was still a job, here they didn’t provide affordable housing nor did they pay well enough for Alfonso to send money back home to his family. He spent the days which had now turned cold in the onset of winter working hard at the job he did have and trying to help his friends who had not been as lucky as he to find some type of work in the restaurant or somewhere else nearby. But his job was long and at the end of the day he was tired, his hands were worn and slowly, he began to sleep more and help others less not because he didn’t want to but simply because there were no jobs and he was tired. His savings rapidly dwindled.
The doors open and Alfonso steps in, moves to the far corner where there is a single seat near the end of the train. The cabin is warm and he pulls his jacket up tight against his neck, places his plastic bags underneath the seat and sets his backpack on his lap. “Please stand clear of the closing doors.” The intercom sounds. He pulls a scarf out of his bag, lays it across his forehead to block the dim yellow light of the subway car and settles down for a long sleep.
It had been December 1st that Alfonso had gone to his landlord to explain that he was unable to pay that month’s rent. He had talked to his boss, asked to be paid early for that month but his boss had declined, said the business was hurting too and didn’t have the extra cash to be paying people early. Alfonso’s landlord had said he needed the money, that if Alfonso couldn’t give it to him, he would get it from someone else. Thirty days later, Alfonso was homeless, tried going to friends but they too had been run out of their places and the few that hadn’t already had six or more people staying with them. The restaurant would fold one month later after being open for 25 years and Alfonso would be out of a job. The “hotel ambulante” or “roving hotel” of the E train was his only realistic hope, the shelters being filled with violence and drug-use, things Alfonso was not used to and had always warned his children about.
Jackson Heights/Roosevelt Ave. and the train comes to a halt. Alfonso removes the scarf. Some white kids in their teens get on, give him a look of disgust and move to the other end of the car. An older black woman gets on, sits near him but gives him sideways glances to make sure he knows he is being watched. He knows he must smell. It’s been over a week that he has gone without bathing and his clothes are soiled from the constant walking and accumulation of dirt that happens over time. A cop gets on, the NYPD, that blue force of steel that so often made his life more difficult than it already was. She’s a kid, no more than 25 and she walks over, cocky, one finger of her right hand tucked under her belt. She asks Alfonso where he is going, Alfonso says World Trade Center, the last stop on the E train. Next thing he knows, the cop is pulling him up and pushing him out of the subway car with her nightstick. “Find another place to sleep,” she says and the doors close. She is gone. Alfonso is used to this by now as are most that have chosen to make the subway their roving hotel and he waits on the platform for the next train.
He will find work soon he hopes but in the meantime will continue looking, continue visiting the soup kitchens, friends, the churches. Wall Street had its best year yet he had read in the discarded papers as they haggle over million dollar bonuses and bail-outs to the tune of billions of dollars.
The next train arrives, he enters and settles in for another fitful night of sleep.
Capsule Hotel: Ebisu
January 4, 2010
*Note: this should be read after reading “Askew,” the post from January 2nd, 2010.
Ebisu screams and rises up in bed, slamming his head against the cubicle ceiling and lies back down. Another nightmare where he is being pushed by an unseen force off of the Toshimbo Cliffs and there’s nothing he can do to stop it. He shakes his head, tries to forget and gently turns over to his right, looks at the beige plastic wall not inches from his face. His knee grazes the slippery confines of his sleeping cube, reminds him that he is no longer in Yamagata. He is in Tokyo and inhabits cube number 505 in one of Tokyo’s many capsule hotels in the dregs of the failing metropolis where the gap between rich and poor grows exponentially and people like Ebisu fall through the cracks.
The wall doesn’t comfort him. He lies on his back, reaches his right hand over a few inches and turns on the yellow light near his head, the switch covered in the oils from past inhabitant’s hands. He can adjust it only a few inches to the right or left and the light shines directly into his eyes either way so he closes his eyes. The light pushes through his eyelids, makes him see red, and he takes himself far away to the mountains near his home, the face of his wife expecting him to come back soon with riches from the big city as he had promised, his little boy, now 6, playing with his kite along the river who will run towards him upon his return. They will embrace and he will smile once again. Happiness. Somewhere but not here.
The old man from Tainai three cubes down is coughing again. Everyone says he has tuberculosis, the new kind that is resistant to the drugs doctors have and people shun him, tell him to leave in whispered tones and angry looks. But he doesn’t have anywhere else to go. Like most of the people here, he had come to the big city looking for work, promised by the papers and friends in Tokyo that work was there awaiting his arrival. But things had changed and changed quickly. People were out of work, the once-rich were now poor and jobless and things were no better in the countryside. People still flocked to the city in search for a better life. Most ended up here, in the capsule hotels, where their living spaces were constrained to 30 square feet of a plastic cubicle, one of hundreds, all exactly the same.
Ebisu can’t get back to sleep. He edges his body down towards the entrance to his cube until his legs are sticking out and folds them over the edge where they dangle in the doorway to his downstairs neighbor’s home. He pulls his torso up and to the right at a diagonal so as not to hit his head again, lifts the cheesecloth at the entrance to his cube and leans forward, head and chest exposed to the chilly, thin corridor lined with cubes. There’s an art form to exiting these things that is learned only after time. He will sit here for a few minutes to wake up before chancing the communal bathrooms.
Aneko, an older, gray-haired woman who came from a fishing family in Imizu, is crying again. Her sobbing fills the plastic corridors, the corridors that smell like bleach and forced sterility. A new man at the end of the corridor leans out, lights a cigarette and looks over to Ebisu, nods his head. Ebisu nods back, knows the man is in the early stages of coming to accept his new living situation, knows that no matter how hard one tries, there are more bad days than good. After a while, one wears it in one’s forehead, across one’s eyes, in one’s slow-moving gait and countenanced forms of a hazy apparition. The smoke trails along the old man’s cheekbones and rises in a straight line to the ceiling above, now brown with tar stains and mold from the showers down the corridor.
Ebisu leans back, lets his legs dangle freely, reaches his hand over to the TV set and grabs his headphones. He used to care that they were covered in past inhabitant’s earwax, used to hold the headphones near his ears so that they wouldn’t touch. Now he pushes them into his ears tightly, has come to own the earwax of past and present, feels that if he can leave a bit of his own earwax on these things, he will in some way own at least these, that even if he leaves, some new inhabitant will be forced to reckon with the remnants of his existence in this cube, along this corridor, within this hungry city filled with wandering ghosts.
The TV buzzes in his ear, the picture is fuzzy and the sound is no better. These capsule hotels used to be the overnight hotels for the wealthy businessmen and women that missed their last trains home. They used to be well-maintained, the TVs used to be top-of-the-line, the headphones were replaced daily, the sheets were washed constantly. Now things went untouched, unimproved. Poverty, or the presence of the poor, has a way of breeding indifference in landlords.
Ebisu shuts it off, throws the headphones to the right and edges his way out, jumps to the cold tiles below. In a stooper, he walks past the sleeping inhabitants of dreams gone awry, listens to the constant buzzing of the florescent lighting overhead, passes the smoking old man, the crying old woman, the man with TB. Passes so many others, some long-time inhabitants, others merely transients working their way through the musty alleyways of Tokyo. He turns the corner, sees the communal bath, the other naked men wrinkled and worn soothing their pains in the warm waters, filmy with the oils of the cubicle colony. Ebisu takes his clothes off, joins the men as naked as the day he was born, lets the pungent steam enter his nose, roll across his mind. He is elsewhere now, in a big space filled with nature, his family, a semblance of happiness. A young man across the bath begins to cough, the woman’s sobs from the corridor intensify. He is nowhere but here.
Askew
January 2, 2010
Eddie opens the New York Times as per his daily routine, cup of coffee in hand, wipes his glasses off on his shirt. His eyes trail down to the story at the bottom of the page, “For Some of Japan’s Jobless, New Homes Just 5 Feet Wide,” accompanied by a sepia photo of a miserable-looking young Japanese man sitting on the edge of what looks to be a morgue cabin marked “505″. Eddie begins to read and gets an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach as if he is reading the dystopia novel 1984 but knows that he is not, that this is real, that people really live like this. The article outlines the impoverished existence of the inhabitants of the “capsule hotels” of Tokyo, 6.5′ x 5′ spaces that resemble coffins far more than homes. Each space is furnished with a light, a small TV with earphones, coat hooks, a thin blanket and a hard pillow of rice husks. Noises reverberate along the corridors of cubicles stacked one on top of the other, fresh linen and access to the use of a communal bath and sauna are the only things which slightly resemble saving graces in this plastic hell. The spaces used to be used as overnight beds for salarymen who had missed the last train home. But that was decades ago and it had now turned into the last refuge for those looking to find work in a collapsing economy. For these cubes, each inhabitant pays roughly $640 per month. Eddie shakes his head, puts down his coffee. His stomach is now in knots, he imagines himself coming home to a plastic cube, barely big enough to move in, inserting himself into the capsule and pulling the ragged, widely-used blanket up to his chin. He imagines the fuzzy buzz of the small television in his ears in the overused headphones lined with the earwax of past inhabitants, the smells of sterility coming from the daily-bleached corridors, the lingering smell of cigarette smoke that one must wade through on the way to the communal bathrooms where mold grows in thin grooves along the white tiles of the shower stalls. Everything from the bathroom stalls to the lockers are slightly too small, his clothes are stuffed tightly into miniscule spaces and every time he wakes to go out into the streets of Tokyo, he imagines he must roll his shirts along the edges of the metal lockers to rid them of their creases. He imagines that the cubicle rests itself upon his brow eventually, seeps into his eyes, that his vision begins to fail and he begins to think of the world as limited as that of his living space. Eddie shutters and turns the page.
New York section and he reads of day laborers who have recently found themselves homeless as the US economy continues to collapse, reads about Carlos Ruano who was kicked out of his house for not being able to pay rent and spent the nights riding the E train. So many people have begun riding the E train overnight that it has been called the “hotel ambulante” or “roving hotel” by other day laborers. Eddie can’t believe it, can’t imagine what it must be like to ride those trains through the underground with the noise and the stench the constant movement all night long. Can’t imagine what it must be like to piece together a sordid mattress if one is so lucky, a few scraps of food, some clothing in the mean and freezing streets of New York City after coming to this country on a hope and a dream that somehow life would be better here, that this was the land of opportunity, that people could make it here if they just worked hard enough.
Eddie turns to the next section, sees the decadence on page after page of the Arts and Leisure section, reads about the opening of the Bizet’s “Carmen” at the Metropolitan Opera, the Travel section about the most posh places in Cairo and just heaves. He throws the paper to the side, is so sick of it all. “This is not right,” he tells himself. Over and over again he asks himself how things can be in the state that they are in, that in the same paper with not four pages separation one can read of homeless laborers riding the trains all night long because they are homeless or people across the world living in cubicles no bigger than coffins and then read about the inane trials and tribulations of the rich and famous who discuss the rawness and daring of Bizet’s opera,”Carmen”. Eddie was furious and it boiled up inside of him like raw steel. Everything was off, askew, twisted and fucked up and backwards. Things were not fucking right.
50 Degrees, Cold and Cloudy
December 28, 2009
Truly these are troubled times
When the nearest one can get to one’s brethren
Is a ten-foot pole’s length,
And the most one can talk about
With one’s nearest neighbor
Is the goddamn weather.
New York: Silent Entropy
December 28, 2009
Rock talk
To the concrete walls of New York City
The homeless appear as moles in the tunnels
And the hawkish CEOs of glim-gleam towers
Wait to pick them off
One brandished train tube at a time.
Rock talk
To the glistening rubber of overpriced name-brand boots
On the bitsy feet of Candy, Marsha, or Marlene
That tritz trounce the pavement
And just gliiide.
Rock talk
To the children of our tomorrow
Heads made of candied gaming goop
And ‘gimmie’ hands that can never be satiated.
Give ‘em poisonous input from all directions
And away they’ll munch.
Rock talk
Toa distant neighbor three inches away
And a squandered celebrity in the face of millions
Bringin’ fame only to the median
Of a fish amongst a school of sharks
In the hub-dub drub of underground passageways
And tribulations.
Rock talk
To myself in the sudden dark
Of an unlit underground chamber
And a nest of dreams a ramblin’
Within this projection system of a mind embraced
The roll keeps running, the film ain’t tarnished yet.
Rock talk
A picture frame of streaming continuals
And melt that rock into a thousand soupy strands
Of digestible truth.
To allow the people to reclaim their ears
And converse.
Rising Change, Tempered Falls
December 28, 2009
The waves remind him of continual change.
Born at sea where moon meets water
They rush towards shore,
Kamikaze waves bent on making one last stand.
White-walled faces arise out of sapphire sea
And then, amongst cousins, face the harsh realities
Of the tempered sand awaiting.
The rise, the fall, the hiss, the backwards crawl
And its over just as it began,
Another time, another wave
Time forever marking one after another,
Change continual,
And there is no need for fear.
Early Pressed Pants and Collars: Soul -1, Corporation +2
December 28, 2009
The stillness of my cubicle unnerving
As the whitewashed walls of human beings
Carouse the parlors of the corporate phallus.
Eyes sunken, lifeless, they peruse the many ways to be marginal
And succeed in all.
Bitty-ritty tick-tocks on my clock
And I stock
Up on the paper clips and file folders that comprise my life
I stack them one on top of the other
Till they touch the ceiling in my 4′x5′ cube
In the hopes that through calamitous confusion
They merge to form a robotic companion named Larry
Who I can speak to about philisophical nonsensical menageries
And attend to meaningful repose and reverical rantings
Amidst piles of instant coffee cups and despoiled sugar packets–
Styrofoam as far as the eye can see.
51 floors of what exactly I do not know
But Larry’s with me in our towers of paper, computers, pens and garbage
And guides me through my day
One cube of a second at a go.
Spirit Assault
December 28, 2009
A.M. comes with the sun and seas of people
Corporate drones march to the hive
In plain, baby-blue shirts and over-sized asses
Heads hung low, briefcases in hand
Unhappiness has become the norm
Plastic smiles and forced laughter coat
A cancer too many
As the machine chug-a-chugs away.
Premature balding on men
Fucked up twisted, junky-chunky knees on women
Stilettos to a painful tomorrow
And a clicking wingtip shoe drives me mad.
Steady, even-paced fury walking
Burning deep drive into souls of push-pin dolls
That some crazed masterful puppet master plays with
In his darkened mahogany offices
Of devils personified.
Money and lucrative personal losses
Breed unspoken discontent and existential yearnings
To know why and what we do
Fro 9-5’s-a-many
And working towards the weekend loses meaning
As we bleed, as our weeks bleed, as our lives bleed
Into the corporate fickle fabric of a never tomorrow.
My fear pushes me forward
As the crowd’s discontented gruntings begin to build
A stop in the flow of ‘progress’
For needless questions
A waste of time
Keep moving,
Keep moving
Just.
Keep.
Moving.
I take a sidelong glance from above my cubicle walls
To observe the madness of the busy bee comrades
And slink back into the recesses of my memory for sustenance.
I can do no more than hide
And wait for the torrential downward blades of skeleton sickles
To cease their slicing
And my soul will arise once the corporate ghosts have perished
In their rat race rave towards nothingness
And I will have survived by an inch.
But that inch will grow.
Nueva York
December 28, 2009
Nueva York ain’t so new
Prissy Manhattanites parade around the pew
Of 5th Avenue Bloomingdales and other such holes
Giving thousands of examples and a hardened credence to the word
Oblivion.
Rick-rick subticks roll underground
The ‘mole people’ homeless keep keen eyes in the darkened moldy abyss
As the silver bullet rips through their hood
And it’s gone just as it has come
Another hour, another ten trains.
Feathered lawyers and top execs spread their wings
In the skies of Manhattan
And watch eagle-eye style as their phallic shadows extend over the city,
As day turns to night,
And they speedily exit through the entrails of their towers into sleek
And shiny corporate cars—nests of solitudonous cash.
From the high to the low
Rains clichéd headaches
Of a city, of a city, of a god-damned city
That ain’t so new
But is sure as hell addictive in its
Topsy-turvy turmoil.
America
December 28, 2009
America. America is an ill-fated apartment
In the downtown slums,
New by years but old if you smell the smells
Of its worn, peeling, white-washed walls and
The black mold beginning to grow in the corner.
America is a long highway
Filled with cracks and potholes
And tar-brushed
Streaks of an over-worn tarmac.
America is a semi-truck rattling its bones
Down your not-so-small-anymore neighborhood street,
Calling out for the children of a younger generation
To come and play with its oil-streaked grill.
America is a fat man walking a fat dog
On a fat street filled with fat burger joints
And a cloggety-cloggety we run.
America is a stained plush carpet from the 1960’s.
Its liberal leanings crying out for peace and justice and such
But the cat’s just shat on it and
No one is willing to clean it up.
America is an overcrowded high school
Filled with over stimulated kids
Wording overplayed songs from the
Overly monotonous radio stations.
America is a cancer ward bursting at the seams
And no one knows why.
America in all its fame and glory…is not.
It has a taste of wine gone sour,
Muddled heathen breath of non-believers,
Personal gods on their hum-drum war paths
Cruising for that one good hit
That’ll give them stories 45 cocktail parties later.
America is a home like the home next to it,
Surrounded by pesticidal
Fields of production glory,
Labeled safe for human consumption
And the puppeteers steer clear.
America is a hope and dream gone contradiction
And a lie gone sour.
Please stand for the pledge of allegiance…
And I sit.
America is that bag lady on the street corner
Being beaten by a gang of teenage boys—
A movie in the making and
Four-star entertainment for the masses.
America is the bling without the substance,
The gleam without the eye,
The cream without the crop—
A window dressing to sustain its citizens
Through a long, drawn-out winter of know-nothing
Do-dads and banana splits.
America is a tattered flag flying
In the dusty shadows
Of a yard-stick highway.
America is a father without a son.
A patriarchal licenser of ‘Do this’ but ‘Don’t do that’.
Liberals expound their theories and say,
‘Let’s discuss’.
America, in its finality, is veneer
Without sincere or dear
And we are no where near
What we supposedly intended to achieve.
America is a history book gone fanatical.
The deathly bony fingers of
Columbus reaching up
To state that he was a great adventurer
And the discoverer of a new land—
New like water, wind, or air—
And the heads begin to bobble.
America is a series of weekends and 8-5’s
Of commemorative holidays for dead bodies we use
To keep the fiction rolling.
America is entertainment in war or peace—
Although the latter seems to have gone on leave.
It is a White House filled with white people
And white walls that, although they are prim and proper,
Are reminiscent of the ones I mentioned earlier.
On a bad politico day, which is often,
One can smell the reek
Of whitey politicians running circles in their hamster wheels
From damn-near half the world away.
America is tiring, exhausting, trying.
For, for this many people to
Believe in this place
Is an act of will beyond comprehension—
And we spin and spin away.
America was my home—a fiction of white picket fences
And wide open spaces (which closed minds helped constrict).
But, my childhood has ended,
The fiction must stop sometime.
And so I walk—
As far from this patriarchal poodle as my broken bones can bear.
For Fathers That Do Not Speak
December 28, 2009
How time has left its mark on you father.
Your splotched skin tells of truths left untold,
Awakening you in the early morning against your will,
Your skin has taken control of your biological clock
And has left you silencing the very thing which wakes you.
An upbringing of overbearing not-tolds
Leaves you with everything to tell,
But no way to voice it.
Your skin one day will pass
And the rest of you will
Unabidingly follow.
The many things left unsaid will seep from your pores
Into the loamy soil about you
And flowers will burst forth color and delight never before seen
On the very energies which you never released.
And slowly, ever so gradually,
These too will pass
And your stony grave will be inscribed
With the skins of so many things left
Unsaid.
Granny Insanity
December 28, 2009
Grandmother’s lost it again
Touting the fly-papered lollipops,
Kindling garbage bin fires
With the heads of her childhood dolls
And cick-cuck cackling at 3:00 in the a.m.
She rides her broomstick high into that dark dream-like dawn
And buzzes the lawns of the neighborhood with a face razor and determination.
She ties her hair to her legs so she doesn’t walk too fast
Likes to keep a snail’s pace,
Smell the roses, taste the lively buds of tree-born ticks,
Smick-smacking lips on little lizard’s heads
Twisting her cockeyed glass eye with her index finger
Till it pops out ‘plop’ into her potato bug soup
And spoons it up, rolls it over her tongue.
Her stockings stretched tightly
Over bony legs of viscous flesh
She applies for modeling positions in the dregs of New York City
Calls herself Marilyn and dons a wig of frizzled bacon.
Thick-rimmed slate glasses adorn her crooked nose
Held together only by the gum of yesteryear
Upside down press-on nails painted orange
Luring butterflies and hummingbirds into her web of nonsequiters.
Grandmother has lost it—completely
My only hope being that time-tested genes have met their fate in her
And found their regeneration in me.
We Forget
December 28, 2009
We forget the many tumbled tides
Of lonely days in darkened hours.
Our semblance to our sisters and brothers
In quickened paces and frenzied gazes.
Our compassion in whords of cold, hard cash
And spin-spun streamings of whirlish devil-makers.
We forget to say I love you to those who care
In a world where truthfully so few do.
Stretching our necks to continually find profit in other ventures
We forget to say I love you to the arms that hold us still,
The eyes that calm our souls.
We forget to say I love you to the warmth of a smile,
A slight nod of the head, angelic gestures of tenderness that sweep our tiredness to another time,
Another place that is not now.
“Why do we forget?” we ask
And we forget that perhaps it is not for us to know.
When we remember, remember well
And for that moment forget that you are
Ever going to forget again.
Water Drips, Timely Tolls
December 28, 2009
Water drips, timely tolls
Bring the weather of a rainy stole
To ask upon my breath
What never speaks
And laughs of loving
Wrap the sheath.
Say not what you think
For it is marked upon your lips, your brow, your very face
And you are upon the brink—
Of a coddled and lasting stink.
