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July 29, 2002 mfinley.com
All
along, we had used New York as a flail to goad Jon to get into the trip. New
York is such a potent symbol for disaffected people. It is the planetary nexus
of nihilism, which is the altar Jon worships at, it is Alphaville, a landscape
of cruelty and indifference. But, as the touchpoint for arriving immigrants, it
is also the capital of new hopes, new dreams, new ideas. All the movies and cop
shows that have been filmed there, all the nightclubs and fads, from the Cotton
Club to Studio 54. Your parents might be preternaturally square, but dammit, New
York is still New York. That had to rouse him from his slumber of indifference.
We were counting on it to do so. We
stayed in Yonkers with Rachel's grad school mate Eileen and her partner
Elizabeth. They live on a surprisingly rustic estate in a shambling old duplex,
enveloped by gardens, high over the Hudson River. The three days we were in the
city were beastlily hot, so that we slept with fans trained on our perspiring
bodies. Worst of all, when we traipsed into the city by train or by bus, we
looked and felt like tourists who had washed up on Long Island Sound. That was
why I declined to meet with my agent when we were there. I did not want to meet
her wearing a tropical shirt and straw hat, and with my neck and shoulders still
lobster red from the sun of Cape Cod. Our chief mistake was going to the Empire State Building observation deck, which I had visited before. They lead you downstairs to one of those endless rope lines to buy tickets. Then they lead you to another rope line to take you from floor 1 to 86. Then a final rope line to get you the remaining six floors up. A vendor sold water to the desiccated crowd for $3.75 a bottle (let's hear the Milwaukee Whistle here, what we out-of-towners do when something in the big city costs more than it does at the local Pump 'n' Munch!) Dehydrated and abused, by the time we reached the pinnacle we wanted to hurl cinder blocks onto the traffic below. Of course, from the deck the city lay out like a patient etherized on a
table, only it was a lot more lively than that.
I was able to show Jon the locations of things in Midtown we had walked
around all morning -- Central Park, the Chrysler Building, Rockefeller Center,
Grand Central Station, St. Patrick's Cathedral. Finally, of course, we looked south, to the Battery, where the holes from the
World Trade Center were. We took a Circle Line cruise of the south end of the island. The "captain," a tour guide who reminded me of Paul Lynde in the center square, vacillated between telling us sardonic tales of the tour business and patriotic editorials about September 11. "Some call it Ground Zero, but I call it Ground Hero." As if anyone cared what the hell he called anything. "I don’t like to toot my own horn," he said. "But I don’t mind tooting the horn of the many fine men and women I work with. On the day of the attack, we transported over a million Manhattan office workers to New Jersey and Brooklyn, for free. Unlike our competitors to starboard, New York Waterways, which tried to charge people money." We craned toward the evil tour boat on our left, and entertained hateful thoughts. Finally we walked to the site itself. I was leery about taking part in some ghoulish dog and pony show, but it was nothing like that. First, the site is much larger than you expect it to be; it is closer to four city blocks than one, a square a half mile across. The buildings facing the WTC area are all shrouded in construction plastic, hung there because the buildings have been emptied for repair, but the effect is that of an immense, flapping, four-sided funeral shroud. People come to the site from all directions and enter a 2-block long queue, and they come from a variety of tourist activities -- shopping, sight-seeing, eating. They enter the queue garrulous and chatty, and then the hole comes into view and the chat subsides. Before they walk a few more steps, everyone is silent, as they behold the immense crater that has been hollowed out of the city. And the most astounding thing is that the skyscrapers standing around the plaza, which would be the tallest buildings in everyone's home towns, thrusting up 30, 40, 50 stories -- they were less than half the height of the towers that used to be here, but now, in all this space and emptiness, exist only in our minds. Our trip did not end there. We visited the next day with good friends in Pittsburgh, and with Rachel's brother the next night in Chicago. But New York, despite the mountains we climbed and the vistas we gazed out on, was the high point. And I will never forget the quiet surrounding the hole. Copyright (c) 2002 by Michael Finley Like the essay? Click
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