GOLDEN

it was new. just new -- but also old, although not in the sense that anything bore an apparent age relative to the things anywhere else. and the change of scenery hadn't done anything for the pressure in my temples -- although it could have been that the similar climate meant similar airborne allergens. suffice it to say that, thankfully, i didn't feel at the center of anything that morning, the world nor much less. but the walk from williamsburg to downtown brooklyn was pleasant. alone (and, in my solitude, far from the center of the world), i was able to walk my cup from oslo across north portland and not at all regret gambling my hope for a couple more hours of dryness against running the steps at fort greene park. (at the time, i was still hopeful of visiting prospect park and archipelago.) unfortunately, after i'd happily given a cold shoulder to brooklyn heights and turned to walk myself down under the manhattan bridge overpass -- and even after ditching my empty oslo cup and taking the time to put another three dollars toward the progress of my headache -- the melville house bookstore wasn't going to be open until noon. and unfortunately too it wasn't going to take very long to take pictures of the building used for the exterior shots of the humphrey loft. (at the time i was still hopeful that some of the lies of television might still turn out to be true.) it was nice that the powerHouse store wasn't far (and that the man who came down from the offices to find something on the tables was showing so much of his chest -- of his chest hair), but even two times around everything wasn't good for much more than fifteen minutes, and so i ultimately had to give in and let the japanese tour group follow me and my tenugui (my imperturbability, my sweat soaked calm amidst the melee) to brooklyn roasting company for killing the last hour. and there, the faggots sitting like straight people, the alien baby about to make its way out of the middle of my forehead, the faggots talking straight about mitt romney's failure to commit to his heart of hearts and all of the other fucking people we married were, for better or for worse, a fitting prelude to my finding melville house still closed at fifteen past twelve. back in spain maybe, but not here. unacceptable. today, i was the center of the world, and the center was on its way back to manhattan. and it was a shame, because before i left i would have bought that new edition of "jacob's room" from the art of the novella series.

but up onto the manhattan bridge overpass and onto the bridge, which i took slowly because my sweat rag wasn't going to absorb much more, and my slowness gave me more time to contemplate why the cyclists in the bike lane got to be completely shaded and the pedestrians had to take the full force of the sun. we did, however, have the better view of the growing freedom tower and that time to wonder about the post-traumatic stress that would soon enough be recollected at ground zero from the rest of the slowly approaching island. or that's what we should have been contemplating, she told us later when we met at her office. the bridge sent me to chinatown, so of course i looked for vietnamese, and it was just as i was being unable to eat my second sandwich that she sent me the message asking if i had made it to the museum. i hadn't, of course, even made it into the bookstore, and i told her so, so she told me just to find her at work, since i apparently wasn't far. and that's what i did, through what she later told me was the demur of that diffuse but still lingering trauma, to the beautiful office where they stood at their workstations barefooted to end modern slavery and where i waited over coffee and my criticism of monocle next to my purse full of bánh mì. she noted the smell when she tried its weight later, but the shop boys in soho didn't seem to have a problem when asked after where it was from. and what's more, if i hadn't had the leftover sandwich halves on me, i wouldn't have had anything to offer to share with my new boyfriend on the train back under the water. too bad he lived in the east village and got off before i could make my proposition and do it for him. spurr. that was the name of the brand of his jeans, i told her. and she said she was okay with them as long as they weren't from uniqlo or zara, but i was happy for the distraction because i hadn't been as productive as i would have liked. hopefully, whoever found my charged up metrocard had made it to the whitney in my place.

and then there was tim; and it didn't matter about the book store or the museum or the metrocard (or the new one that i would lose later that i made after the shower so that i could make another meeting in manhattan). let's call him tim, anyway, the man of the night and of that one hour in the lobby of the ace hotel. portland was burning, and everyone had gathered to toast having escaped the flames. except for tim, who went to boarding school in massachusetts with a girl from beaverton and who had taken his new book on oregon wine country to his analyst that afternoon. tim was headed west. and on his way from his analyst to his mom's place on 76th and 5th he had stopped at the ace to pick up the torch we were passing. the other celebrants could have done without (although this wasn't obvious to tim), and he probably should have offered to pay for all of our eight dollar cans of beer, but i was won over by his infuriatingly brazen naivety. an arts district, tim, just means that gay people used to live there, i told him, and he took it in stride -- or in ignorance -- and asked me, then so how was gresham? it's true that dj huggy nonsense was doing his best to make sure that no one could hear, but i'm sure that tim said gresham, and i was all the more ingratiated by his persistence through the noise. it could only have been better had it been lady dottie. better for me. it was bad, apparently, for the others, who told me that the musk of the midwest had been wafting even stronger over the hotel lobby than it had been from the sandwich purse. but then the party stopped for the full moon, which was rising over what looked to be a corner of madrid somewhere on broadway. and the center shifted. but it was still me. and since tim took the torch without paying for drinks, someone was going to be responsible for buying me all the birthday rum in the world at the venezuelan place back in brooklyn.