Category: Essays

https://www.goodsportmagazine.com/1-million-closest-friends-philadelphias-long-awaited-super-bowl-parade/

Half an hour after Eagles center Jason Kelce, dressed in a green and purple costume that could be described as ‘intergalactic sultan,’ wrapped up his lengthy, fiery, and profanity-fueled speech from the famous steps in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the buzz still had not worn off. “That was amazing, he dropped like five F-bombs,” gushed one of the nearly one million fans who had attended the Eagles’ Super Bowl parade on Thursday.

Kelce’s speech, in which he reminded the crowd of every player who had been criticized in the media, characterized the team and city as “hungry dogs,” and screamed until his voice was hoarse, capped a celebration for Philadelphia that had also been long, loud, and soaked in beer.

For many of the fans that lined Broad Street and filled City Center all afternoon, that celebration had started early. It was 7:30 when a man in an Eagles beanie opened a bottle of Hennessy on a bus from New York City. Within fifteen minuets, the bottle was being passed between rows as he scrolled through his favorite Instagram memes mocking Tom Brady and the Patriots. He offered me a swig from the bottle, and although I enjoy Hennessy as much as anyone, 7:30 was a little early for cognac.

The celebration hardly slowed down from there. As the bus moved through downtown Philadelphia at 8, three hours before the parade was scheduled to begin, Wentz and Foles and Dawkins and Ertz jerseys were already flowing towards the route. Within minutes of stepping off the bus, I had heard several “F*** Tom Brady” and “E-A-G-L-E-S” chants, the most common of a limited and repetitive but impassioned and stirring repertoire that largely entertained an entire city for the day. I was tired of hearing “Fly, Eagles Fly” before noon, but I couldn’t help but appreciate its power as hundreds of thousands of Philadelphians provided one last rendition after Kelce’s speech.

But what stands out from the day isn’t the incessant chanting, the truly impressive commitment to day drinking, the overwhelming civic pride, or the size of the crowd, estimated at 700,000 though reports earlier in the week had projected up to 3 million. Most striking was the contrast from Sunday night’s celebrations in the city, celebrations that involved overturned cars, kids dancing on top of moving cars, shirtless men in dog masks, and fans falling off of awnings and greased light poles. Thursday’s parade had all the energy and brashness intrinsic to Philadelphia sports fandom without the police scanner absurdity and imminent violence of Sunday.

Children, toddlers really, yelled “Dilly Dilly” over and over without a second glance from their parents. One fan, not satisfied with one win over the Patriots, suggested a plan for their next meeting: “They cheat, then you cheat. But you cheat better.” Strangers in a coffee shop couldn’t stay away from age-old football debates about the best quarterbacks and defensive backs of all time, even in what is technically the off season. One man suggested that Joe Montana is the best ever, but a police officer at the next table argued for Tom Brady, though the concession must have pained him. State troopers parked in the middle of the street used their megaphones to scream “Go Birds” at anyone walking past. White guys with giant Eagles flags carried speakers booming Meek Mill and sparked impromptu group dancing on the sidewalks, that could be heard for blocks, a situation that’s hard to imagine on any other day in Philadelphia. A fan from Richmond, Virginia had made the drive to the city the night before, and noted that the roads were crowded with Eagles fans. “Even at the rest stops I saw Eagles signs,” he said.

In a reminder that the Super Bowl champions were celebrating with group of fiercely proud and often brazen Philadelphians, Kelce’s speech ended with a collective shouting of “We’re from Philly, F****** Philly, No one likes us, We don’t care.” But besides a half-hearted booing of Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf, the rest of the day had been exuberant and, naturally, triumphant. The same police officer debating the game’s greatest quarterbacks reflected on the day: “The city was peaceful, man. I think I gave out 1,000 high fives.”

My dorm room is 94 square feet. It is the smallest room on my floor. It is the smallest room in my whole building. I can’t open my door all the way because it is blocked by my chair. My desk only fits in one corner of the room, so I can’t move my chair. I have to walk into my room sideways. If my backpack is too full, I have to take it off to fit through the door. If I eat too much at Chipotle, it’s not a guarantee that I’ll fit. There is no floor space for my refrigerator, so it is on top of my dresser. I can reach my desk from my bed; I don’t have to get up to grab cereal in the morning.

94 square feet doesn’t always sound that small. There are rooms in my building that are 100 square feet. 103 square feet. 110. They’re all small. The thing about 94 square feet is that it’s cozy in the strangest ways possible. It takes about a minute for the room to absorb the scent of anything I eat. One bowl of pasta and it’s tomato sauce for the next twelve hours. One unfinished cup of coffee and I’m living in a Starbucks for the next day. Usually, that’s not a problem. Maybe I don’t eat a lot of food that stinks up my room. Maybe that means my tastes are too bland. Oh well. I like to tell people that it’s the only benefit of my tiny room. No one believes me, but when your room is too small for the door to open, it’s important to look for the positives.

It’s not all positives, though. There’s no moderating the temperature in a room that’s not ten feet wide. I put my fan on its lowest setting and I can still feel it regardless of where I sit. I thought I would need two fans to make it through August and September. My second fan was stolen off the street on move-in day. I’m still grateful for whoever was kind enough to take it off my hands. It was a tower fan with a broken base. There would be nowhere to put it in my room and there’s a good chance it might blow all of my belongings off of my shelves. One fan is more than enough. If it gets too stuffy, I can crack open my window. Ten minutes later, I’ll be freezing and have to slam the window shut again. It doesn’t take long to ventilate River 203.

I can handle that. It’s almost spring, so it’s not too hot. A little cold draft never bothered me. What I can’t handle are the acoustics. Acoustics might be the wrong word. The problem is really that my room is too small to hold sound. I like to play music at all times, and I like to play it loudly. The problem with a room that’s the size of closets in some homes is that the definition of loud changes very quickly. In my last dorm room, I didn’t have a speaker. I had to play music from my laptop. The sound quality was awful, but, at full volume, it was enough to fill the room. It got the job done when I needed to play something loud to get some work done or to play something loud on a Saturday night. I didn’t mind the lack of quality; volume is really all I care about. Maybe that’s because I wasn’t listening to classical music. It wasn’t even pop or country or indie. It was always rap, the louder and faster the better. It was Migos and Rick Ross and 2 Chainz, stuff where the sound quality really isn’t the point. If it was anything else, my neighbors would stick their heads in the door and ask why the fuck I would be plying anything else. Somehow, those neighbors were louder than me. They had speaker systems and fewer worries about the study habits of the rest of the floor. From nine in the morning to three the next morning the music was heavy and loud. It started at eight in the morning if someone had an 8:40 that day.

I loved it. I could play what I wanted, when I wanted, at whatever volume I wanted. My roommate started the year with different musical tastes. He was all about Top 50 Raggaeton and whatever Pop was at the top of the charts. By winter break, I couldn’t make him take Big Sean off repeat. By the end of the year, he had opinions about rap. He was almost always wrong, but he was hooked. The neighbors and I constantly reminded him that he didn’t know what he was talking about and there were one or two debates that turned into arguments that turned into days where he lost music privileges. Still, it was a good time to be loud and play anything without thinking. My room was 210 square feet. That meant space for noise and music that could spill into the hall and penetrate the walls and take up space.

94 square feet means less space for music. My phone only needs half volume to fill the room. A third of the volume on my laptop speakers is too much. Music starts spilling out the door and into the halls and the lounge and the bathrooms and the janitor’s closet that used to be part of my room before anyone decided 94 square feet was a reasonable living space. It feels ridiculous to play anything loud when I’m never more than a step away from the source of the sound. Really, that’s not much of a problem. It even makes sense in a way. It’s probably better for studying. It’s definitely better for writing. It’s made me transition to the “Chill Vibes” Spotify playlist. I’ve experimented with the “Beach Vibes” playlist. I’m ashamed to say I’ve even tried “Hot Country” and “Country Hits.” That was unthinkable a year ago. There was no reason to scroll past the “Hip-Hop” tab, and I usually didn’t fool around with anything but my own playlists. I stuck with what I knew and what I liked and what I could play really, really loud.

Yet less space for music means that things have changed. I’ve started to think about what I play when I want to play something loud. 94 square feet means my laptop is less than five feet from my door. That means it’s ten feet from the door of my floormates across the hall. Honestly, it’s probably more like 8 feet. If I play something loud, he or she can hear it. He or she because I don’t know who lives next door to me or across the hall from me or on the other half of my floor. I’m sure they’re nice people, and I should probably meet them at some point. Maybe they even have diverse taste in music. Maybe they wouldn’t mind a little bit of Lil Uzi Vert or ASAP Ferg in their lives on a Saturday afternoon. They might be happy to hear some throwback T-Pain verses on Friday night. But for some reason, I hesitate to play their songs at a volume that anyone might hear. Two semesters ago, I wanted everyone to know what I was listening to. That was expected. Now, I worry about what my floormates think of my music. Floormates I don’t even know, some who I might see only one more time over the course of the school year.

Sometimes I still get carried away. I might be finishing up Spanish homework and be halfway through Future’s “Dirty Sprite 2.” A couple taps on the volume key and songs get louder and louder. I’ve heard people on my floor play the album. “Rich Sex” was playing from the room at the end of my hall last weekend. It was playing louder than anything I’ve played this year. No one is going to knock on my door or call the RA and file a noise complaint. I can still play what I want as loud as I want. But I always turn it down. I don’t even make it to 50% volume. It’s sad. Rap is always better when it’s loud.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. I’m not sure why I feel like I need to turn my music down, why I worry about what my floormates think about what I’m playing. It’s not even that I’m playing stuff that’s not quality. I listened to some horrible, horrible music last year. Rick Ross released two unlistenable albums that I played all the way through more than once. There are a couple Rae Sremmurd songs that I promise you can’t make it all the way through that I somehow thought were ideal study songs. There aren’t many French Montana songs that deserve the replay I gave them. Now, I think about every song I play. I’ve found myself skipping song after song, looking for the perfect song that someone walking by my door wouldn’t find weird or too soft or too gross. Just the right song for someone else’s approval.

There are a couple songs I can’t help but think about. There was a rare moment last month when I had finished up all the work I needed to do. My job applications with upcoming deadlines were prepared. My cover letters were done, and I had called my mom just to say hello. A model son. My class work was done for Monday and Tuesday, a rarity for a Saturday. I was feeling good and I had half an hour to kill before meeting friends for dinner. I popped open my laptop and looked for something to play. I hadn’t heard “3500” in a couple days. It’s off Travi$ Scott’s album “Rodeo” and it features Future and 2 Chainz. It’s everything I love about rap.

The production is from Metro Boomin and Zaytoven, two Atlanta producers who seem to be making every song people want to listen to. They’re on top of the rap world and every beat they make is thriving. This one is all synth and a heavy, plodding baseline. It’s a true trap sound, straight out of Atlanta where both producers are from. It’s a sound that’s taking over rap at the moment and one that has carried every artist on the song. Yet somehow it has just enough bounce to be ah hit. That’s largely a credit to Future Travi$ Scott. Future has made a career out of taking low-key beats and turning out monster hits with his rapid, auto-tuned, and aggressive flow. His lyrics are often strangely profound when they are intelligible. In this case, his verse is the opener and he skips the profundity in favor of referencing his status as one of the most famous rappers alive. “Ain’t nobody triller than me, Ain’t nobody triller than Scott, Ain’t nobody, trill man, I’m takin’ they spot, These n***** is scared.”

Travis Scott follows with one of the catchiest hooks in recent memory. Scott is arguably the artist who has blurred the line most between rapping and singing, between R&B and hip hop, with his highly edited and sing-song verses that leave you wondering if you’re listening to a rapper or a really, really choppy singer. It’s a style that’s been around since T-Pain broke onto the scene and since Kanye West released “808s and Heartbreak” in 2008, but it’s never been more popular, visible, or utterly pervasive. It’s a style that makes it hard to delineate genres and to identify who can actually rap and who just has a good producer, but it sounds smooth. The exact lyrics aren’t important, but the key thing here is that the hook is about a coat that costs $3,500. That’s where the title comes from and essentially, that’s the idea it’s built on.

That’s part of the reason I love the song. It’s about Travi$ Scott showing off his coat. It’s about him shouting out the people who stuck with them, “Still down with the same dogs, man, they never loved us.” It’s about 2 Chainz saying “My bathtub the size of swimming pools.” At the same time, it’s about not really about anything. Those themes are the same ones all three rappers use in all of their songs. Wealth, drugs, women, absurd purchases, status, and fame. That’s what it’s always about. Future’s verse is vulgar and simple and aggressive, but somehow it makes me feel good. So the lyrics shouldn’t really matter. It’s about a feeling. It’s about the beat and the sound. It’s about a vibe. And the “3500” vibe should always feel good

But on that one listen last month, I couldn’t even finish his two minutes before I had to change the song. Travi$ offers a shoutout to the size of his girl’s butt, saying “I got a young ‘Yonce with an Iggy on her.” I pounded the volume button immediately, hoping my neighbors hadn’t heard that. It was a line I had hear fifty times before. I might have heard it twenty more times since. It’s sexist, sure, and objectifying. That’s the case with almost every rap song made today. It’s part of the deal. It’s something that’s bothered me before, but there are more egregious examples than this one. I’ve heard the song in headphones since then, and I didn’t have a thought about the line. But this time it felt too loud, too vulgar. I had to pause and realize that my volume wasn’t nearly loud enough to be heard by anyone on my floor before I could restart the song. Paused and restarted and quieted, it didn’t sound the same and it didn’t feel quite so good.

That wasn’t the first time it happened and it wasn’t the last. It’s been happening when I listen to Kendrick Lamar. KDot, for the four years since he released “good kid, m.A.A.d. city,” has been making black music. That might sound strange for a lot of reasons, but it is undeniably accurate. It might sound strange because it doesn’t sound politically correct, because it sounds divisive, or because it could be argued that all rap is black music, regardless of the artist making it. Yet it’s especially accurate for Kendrick. There has been plenty of debate about who black artists like Kendrick, Beyoncé, and others are making their music for and about who has racial, political, and artistic license comment on their works. It’s an important debate. But the case of Kendrick Lamar, they’re shouldn’t be any debate. He’s making black music for black listeners. I could give you five more pages about why that’s true. Instead, I’ll give you the names of five songs from “To Pimp a Butterfly,” released in 2015. “Institutionalized.” “Hood Politics.” “Complexion (A Zulu Love.” “The Blacker the Berry.” If that’s not enough to convince, the album cover shows a couple dozen of Kendrick’s friends from home standing shirtless above a presumably dead white judge in front of the White House. Yes, all of his friends are black. Yes, he’s making black music.

Still, that’s never stopped me from listening. That it’s black music does not mean I can’t listen as a white person and even decide if I think it’s quality music or not. I do think’s it quality. And I do think it has a lot of flaws, sonically and conceptually. But black music means that my opinion isn’t the first one that counts. Still, I think I’m allowed to say that I didn’t love every song on the album. The jazz fusion KDot attempted made for a sound that obscured his verses and plays more like a jazz album than hip-hop coming out of Compton. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing great there. The thing about Kendrick is that I’ve been turning off even the great stuff before it even starts. I can’t point to a line or word or even a specific song that makes me uncomfortable. “King Kunta” and “All Right” are on my playlists that’s in heaviest rotation. People love those song. They’re anthems. I have good memories with those songs. I still skip them every time. I wish I could say it’s because I don’t want to listen to music that’s not for me, that I can intellectualize it. But really, this is just an attempt to justify it. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, and there’s no logic behind it. It’s just a reaction. It’s easy to point to a reason for the reaction. Maybe the lyrics are questionable and maybe the music isn’t meant for me. But that doesn’t explain the reaction, the impulse, the reflex that tells me I can’t blast that song in my 94 square feet.

The last straw came after the “3500” incident. Two of my friends share an apartment in a building on 113^th St. They live on the fifth floor, which the landlord creatively labeled the “Penthouse.” In fact, the apartment just happens to be on the top floor of the building. The interior resembles a penthouse in no way at all. It’s two tiny bedrooms, a kitchen that barely fits the sink, and a dingy bathroom. Not a lot of space, but still more than 94 square feet. It happens to have roof access, which may have convinced the landlord he could call it a penthouse without feeling like a liar. The roof is a nice place for small get-togethers. Ten people maximum. It helps that we can tell people the location is a penthouse. I usually don’t get music privileges. They hate most of what I listen to. I have almost been kicked out of the apartment for playing two Young Thug songs consecutively. This time, I thought I could slip in a couple throwbacks that wouldn’t get me in trouble. The first one I picked was “Kiss Kiss.” It’s the best kind of throwback, one from middle school the middle school years whose lyrics you have to know if you’re going to look cool at the dance. Chris Brown and T-Pain. Timeless stuff. My favorite sting about “Kiss Kiss” is that it has my favorite into to any hip-hop song ever made. T-Pain plays a radio DJ on the fictitious station “Nappy Boy Radio.” He takes a call from a listener, the kind that’s on every rap station in the nation every day:

 

T Pain: “Yo this is Nappy Boy Radio live with your boy T-Pain, we love rap music.
Listen, uh, we got a caller on line one. Caller, what’s your problem?”
Caller: “Hello, I’m on the radio with T-Pain.”
T-Pain: “How’s it going?”
Caller: “It ain’t going good.
My girl ain’t doing her things she used to do and oh….”
T-Pain: “I got just what you need. Brand new Chris Brown, T-Pain.
You heard it here first, Nappy Boy Radio. We love rap music.”

 

It’s truly a thing of beauty. It’s the best kind of intro, slightly absurdist, funny, and so distinctive that you know immediately which song follows. The humorous intro to the hip-hop song is a lost art. It faded at the beginning of the 2010s and has been replaced by producer credits. That’s a tragedy on par with the death of print media and the extinction of the wooly mammoth. YG is the only rapper consistently producing song intros these days, but most of his are about breaking into houses. They don’t fit in the “humorous “category. From the first time I heard the “Kiss Kiss” introduction, I was sold on the song. It’s funny, it’s welcoming, it’s inclusive. The last line, “We love rap music,” is expressed by T-Pain in all of his exuberance. You know his auto-tuned voice is coming, and you know you’re going to want to enjoy the song. It’s an invitation: “Please, listen and enjoy. We all love rap music. That’s why you’re here, that’s why we made this song. That’s why we created a fake radio station called Nappy Boy Radio. You’re welcome.”

But as soon as the intro ended, I muted my laptop. I worried. Worried that it was a strange thing to play. Worried that it was too loud. Worried that I shouldn’t play a song that said “nappy” that many times. Worried that I couldn’t play that at a party if I wanted people to be comfortable. It wasn’t something I had ever thought about before. Sure, there have been times when I’ve had to think about the lyrics of a song. Maybe it’s too much for a party, maybe it speaks to an experience I don’t have or never could have. But I never thought “Kiss Kiss” would be something I was afraid to play, something I didn’t want an anonymous neighbor to think I listened to. I tried to play it again, louder this time, forcing myself to play it through. Again, I turned it off halfway through. I find myself again and again stopping songs halfway through, worried about how they sound to friends or floormates or strangers walking past my door. If only I could call T-Pain at Nappy Boy Radio and get some help.

 

Let’s call this a confession. Not a confession of a guilty pleasure or an unpopular opinion. It’s something much worse: I have a favorite meme. Everyone on the Internet has one, but not everyone on the Internet wants to admit it. I’m here to admit that I have a favorite meme and tell you why it’s my favorite meme and analyze my favorite meme.

—–

If you don’t have a favorite meme, I’ve got one for you. If you don’t think you can have a favorite meme, give me a chance to sell you.

—–

The meme I want to talk about is a rap meme, something so prevalent on certain parts of Twitter and Instagram and Facebook that it’s become hard to avoid, one of those clever little images that pops up every hour on the timeline poking fun at an artist or a new album or, at its most acerbic, white rap fan like me. But my favorite meme is more inclusive and honest and, in its own way, telling.

—–

Pardon me for overthinking something on social media. Someone has to do it.

—–

My favorite meme is of the brick wall variety. It comes from a template that plays on a popular stock image that shows a young man, eyes wide in a mix of shock and frustration, hands thrown in the air in annoyance and surrender, mouth agape, befuddled. He stands in front of a brick wall, addressing it with those hands and that mouth and those stunned eyes, ready to abandon the argument he seems to be having with the dark red barrier of bricks in front of him. It’s a meme that started out as something generic, ripe for jokes about conversations with intractable parents, intolerable significant others, and supporters of an inimical political position. Recently, however, its usage has been sharpened as it has moved from Meme Twitter to Rap Twitter and Black Twitter, two overlapping regions that are simultaneously each their own online sovereignties.

—–

If you’re on Rap Twitter or Black Twitter, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you’re not, you’re going to have to trust that they are very, very real places worth paying attention to, even if you don’t think you fit the demographics.

—–

Without Rap Twitter and Black Twitter, the brick wall meme genre would be stuck, static and unevolved, in its former state. Passed through the trials of Rap Twitter, it is now a valuable tool for visually expressing how stubborn and simple your counterpart in an online rap argument is. If that doesn’t sound like a strong case for a valuable tool, just hold on. The bets version of this meme is successfully plain and clean. It bears that stock image, man dumbfounded in front of wall, on its lower half, with white space above for black text that reads something like this: “Trying to convince the Internet you can like Uzi, Kodak, Drake, and Cole at the same time.”

—–

If you find it hard to believe that someone could feel strongly about this combination of photo and sentence on the Internet, hold on for one more paragraph.

—–

This meme is really a call for inclusion in rap, and end to the rapidly expanding trend of animosity between fans of lyricists and fans of Southern trappers, between sing-song pop rap and grittier West Coast music, between the rock and punk and trap-influence new generation and the artists deriving their sound from the old guard. For many, to be a fan of rap in 2016 would be to choose between “Uzi, Kodak, Drake and Cole.” A purist can only buy new releases from one of those artists; to support more than one would be the first step on the dark and terrifying road of selling out. “Uzi” is Lil Uzi Vert, a green-dreadlocked Philadelphia native and hyperactive performer who synthesizes rapid flows and a punk-pop sound into what has been called a “catchy melodic soup.” “Kodak” is Kodak black, a currently incarcerated nineteen year old from outside Miami whose unrefined style and classic rag-to-riches rap tale has made him a rallying cry for fans who favor youth and raw delivery and personality and narrative over perfect musicality or complexity. Drake is the mononym megastar, the worldwide sensation who built his career on technical and lyrical skill but also his slowed down pop ballads that blurred the line between rapping and singing. “Cole” is J Cole, the rap snob’s choice, an introverted and intellectual North Carolina native whose last album went double platinum without a single feature or particularly noisy single.

To like all four of these artists is rap social suicide. The argument goes that no fan with any taste or sophistication could love J Cole’s poetic calls for self-love in “Love Yourz” and his deeply autobiographical tales of lost virginity in “Wet Dreamz” and still possess the mental capacity to blast Kodak Black’s “Skrt” or “Vibin in This Bih” when they come on the radio. It would take an especially uncultured listener to respect Drake’s crooning vocals in “Controlla,” “Marvin’s Room” and “Too Good” and still want to celebrate as Uzi jumps around stage, genuinely screaming the choppy “All My Chains” or the irresistible “Baby Are You Home.”

—–

I’m not trying to tell you that the meme has solved rap arguments for us, and I’m not going to tell you you can’t make an argument against each of these rappers that my precious meme happens to mention. I could spend an hour on why J Cole is vastly overrated and should stop making his fans spend $10 on an album so he can complain for an hour and a half. I could tell you why I would trade all of those artists for Future and why if you have me five songs to play on a desert island for eternity, they would all be from Dirty Sprite 2. But that’s not what matters. What matters is that rap fans are in a fragmented world, where artists are dug into boxes and their fans are pitted against each other just to yell at each other in all caps on Twitter. A world of where on bad Hot New Hip Hop rating can condemn a song and a world where literal “One Listen Reviews” and a stream of “Classic or Trash” tweets determine and album’s sales and its legacy. A world so absurd that someone could have a favorite rap meme. I’m just asking you to put yourself in the meme. Ask yourself if it’s better to be the man or the wall. To ask yourself if it’s worth dismissing “LUV is Rage,” one of the happiest mixtapes of the decade or “Lil Big Pac,” one of the brashest and most raw records of the year just because they don’t fit into a certain category. Don’t be the brick wall.

 

My closest friend was recently sentenced to four years in Midtown Manhattan. I remember where we were when he told me. I was sitting on a hard gym floor and he snuck in behind me, craving to seem just the right amount of eager. Eager to tell a friend the news, not too eager to flaunt it. The sentence was for two years at ninety thousand dollars per year. I smiled and shook his hand. He asked if I wanted to join him, if I wanted a similar sentence. Maybe we could live together. I shook my head and patted him on the back. I hoped he wouldn’t drag me down with him. I’m glad he didn’t sell me out for a shorter sentence. He’s a great friend. Trustworthy and consistent. But I’m glad we won’t be sharing the same cell.

—-

Everything they tell you about New York is a lie, even at it’s worst. All the great religious texts teach that lying is wrong. The God of Judaism is absent whenever a lie is told. The Fourth Buddhist Precept demands that one refrain from “incorrect speech.”

The Christian God detests “lying lips.” To tell a lie is to commit the Seventh Greater Sin of Islam. Taoism leaves space for an ethical lie. One of its basic moral rules is that one still ought not lie.

—-

They’ll tell you the subway is hot and cramped. They’ll tell you that’s the worst part about it. On your commute to work, it might get a little muggy if you’re in a car without air conditioning. Sure, the air conditioning breaks every other day, but you can just unbutton your top button or fan yourself. It really won’t be that bad. Maybe you’ll have to stand because the train gets crowded in the morning. It’s good for your legs. You might be uncomfortably close to a total stranger who is sweatier than you are and only getting sweatier. No worries. It’s only a forty-minute commute from your place in Brooklyn to the office on 72^nd Street. It’s really not all that bad. Bring a book or watch another episode on your iPad. It’s just a little hot and kind of crowded.

—-

The subway is hot and it is crowded. A lot of places are hot and crowded. Your local bus is hot and crowded. Some movie theaters are hot and crowded. Invite too many people to Thanksgiving dinner and kitchen will be hot and crowded. And people will be eating your food. You’ve been in a hot and crowded classroom. Chances are if you have a place of worship you it’s often hot and crowded. You temple or church or pagoda is the worst kind of hot and crowded, the type where you can’t move without drawing glares and whispers and promises of punishment from your parents. Mortified that you cannot bear to sweat for the sake of a higher power. But the subway is special. It’s not merely hot and crowded. That’s not enough. It’s hot and crowded and you must sit with your eyes on your feet. You must accept your fate once you have found a seat. No matter who sits on either side of you, no matter how close they sit, no matter how firmly their thighs continue to bump into yours as the train shifts, no matter how loud they shout on their cellphone, not matter how many bags they stack on your feet, you cannot move. In the pipeline of people underneath the city, this great city of culture and commerce and power and freedom and opportunity and individuality, you cannot move your legs or your arms. You are not allowed to move your eyes or your feet. You must clasp your hands in your lap and bow your head, praying to the exalted gods of the MTA that you don’t miss the express. You must stand when others stand, only to cram yourself through a door not wide enough for two people as quickly as possible. You must contort your body, hanging onto a pole to dodge passengers spring away from the heat and the crowd. Then you must sit again, hands clasped, head bowed, now praying to the conductor to shut the doors and fix the air conditioning. But they told you it was just hot and crowded.

—-

No city is free of lies. South Bend, Washington is not a city. It is a town, in the most generous sense of the word. It’s maybe closer to a village. The population is eighteen hundred. More of a hamlet than a village. People in South Bend have lied before and they will lie again. But they won’t lie about their hamlet. There are no buses. They can’t tell you the subway is crowded but you’ll get used to it. There is one traffic light. They won’t say you’ll love your commute. There are two grocery stores, a Chinese restaurant, and a Mexican place. They won’t say they have the best food in the area. The town survives on fishing and welding. They won’t tell you you’ll love your job. Some people love to fish for halibut and salmon in sub-freezing temperatures. You might not. So they won’t tell you it won’t be too bad, life on a boat isn’t that bad. It snows, a lot.

They’ll tell you the city stinks when it rains. There are not a lot of good things they can say about winter in South Bend, so they won’t tell you you’ll enjoy it. They’ll tell you it’s going to be a wet snow that lasts all afternoon and sticks all night into the morning and you might slip when you step off your front step. A lot of people in South Bend go to church on Sundays. They might tell you you’re welcome to tag along. They won’t tell you it will be a fun hour and a half. They won’t tell you that you should go.

—-

They’ll tell you it can be expensive to eat in New York. But the city has the best restaurants in the world, they’ll tell you. If you budget well, it won’t be a problem. Just make a small tithe to New York’s best restaurants. The most diverse cuisine you could ever wish for. You’ll taste things you’ve never tasted. There’s nowhere else in the world where you can eat like you’ll eat in New York. Every meal is a new experience. It’s an experience of a new culture. The food will open your mind. Italian. Mediterranean. Middle Eastern. Jewish delis. The pizza you see in movies. Sushi. Chinese. Authentic Mexican. Come to New York for the food, they’ll tell you. You’ll be a fanatic. You’ll make pilgrimages to Queens for the tacos and you’ll journey to Chinatown for dim sum. You’ll worship at the altar of halal.

—–

They don’t tell you that the best food in the world means you’ll be out of money after one week of eating out. The groceries aren’t cheap either. That mystic deliciousness of halal will get old very quickly when you have to eat it for lunch and dinner four nights in a row. It’s only five dollars for a whole meal. Just a small bill in the donation plate for the temple’s ministry to the poor. That five seems so small, so insignificant until it needs to last two meals. All that halal grease and white sauce and rice and red sauce seems so insignificant until you’re cradling your stomach in your hands the next morning, your belly just a little infant swaddled in your scratchy sheets and crying out for mercy and redemption for its sins of lamb of rice.

—-

It’s the city that never sleeps, they’ll say. You can be up all day and all night every day. You can party any night of the week until six in the morning. You can grab a bite to eat any hour of the night. Someone’s working in every office building every single second of the day. Every artist you know will play a show in the city this year. A concert every weekend for fifty-two straight weeks. The city never sleeps so you’ll never need to sleep. You can work 75 hours per week and still get in at least 20 hours at the bars. Just make sure you juice cleanse every two months.

—-

 

Eventually you’ll start to question the apologists and the forgivers and the fanatics. You’ll realize they’ve lied to you and you’ll have to ask why. Hopefully you’re near the end of your sentence before this happens. That way, you can escape before your next sentence starts and before you have to find a realtor to help you look for another cell you can’t really afford. You need that cell just so you can spend less time on the subway. Everyone had told you it really wasn’t that hot and didn’t get all that crowded. And you’ll ask yourself why you bought in, why you believed what they told you. New York City is still growing. New pilgrims every year. It might gain eight hundred thousand people in the next thirty years. Everyone else must know something you don’t. They have it right, and everyone else is wrong. The food really isn’t that expensive. The subway isn’t really that hot. They didn’t lie to you. You just don’t get life in the city. You’re missing some mystical sensibility, some connection to the city that is greater than you. You just don’t understand. They’ve dove to the depths of the city and come up anew, refreshed with a new purpose and a new desire to stay in New York as long as they can. Maybe they’ll even raise a family in the city. It has some of the best schools, you know. And there are actually plenty of parks for kids and dogs and parents to run around. You should really give it a try, they’ll tell you. Just give Central Park a try. Really, the city is so rewarding.

—-

They’ll tell you the city isn’t really that loud. The noise is all just part of the charm. That’s what people always said about that one lady in the choir who thought Sunday mornings were her chance to impress the opera scouts. The stained glass shook with every high note she tried to hit. But she was such a sweet old lady. So much charm. Things wouldn’t be the same if she weren’t there every week singing her lungs out for the heavens, all for the greater glory of her higher power. It had nothing to do with her failed pop career. It was holy noise. Just like all of New York’s noise. It’s all port of the feeling. That siren that wakes you up every morning should make you feel at home. The train bouncing past your door and into your apartment at three in the morning shouldn’t even be a problem anymore. The house music from the club beneath your friend’s Midtown cell is just a reminder that you should be out on a Tuesday night and not in bed by midnight. The city never sleeps and neither should you. Native Americans used sleep deprivation as part of the visual quests that were integral to their experiences of their own religious systems. A three-night bender across the clubs in Meatpacking is just a vision quest if you try hard enough.

—-

Who knows what you might see. Native Americans sought spiritually empowering dream visions. They don’t tell you what kind of visions you’ll see at a Ne York Club, but they won’t be of the spiritually empowering variety. They might be of the variety you should bring up in confession. They’ll tell you you’ll have the time of your life with the prettiest people you’ve ever seen. They don’t tell you about fifty dollar cover just to get in the door. Or the two hour wait in ten degree rain just for the privilege. Or the beer bottles thrown across the bar. Or those times when the bathroom line can’t move because every stall is occupied by someone vomiting up that night’s fun. Those are the vision quests they don’t tell you about. Surely there were Native Americans who didn’t survive their vision quests. Those must be the quests they didn’t like to talk about. New Yorkers won’t tell you about all those friends who didn’t survive their Meatpacking vision quests.

—-

No, they lied to you. You just can’t figure out why. You would never do that. You’ll find yourself back on the subway. You might be on the 3. Or the Q. Or the 1. You’ll probably be on the shuttle from Grand Central with the inside of its cars all plastered from floor to ceiling with movie propaganda that wraps itself from the front of the train to the back of the train. Every head around you will be bowed, some eyes closed, some eyes staring at the ground, at nothing. All hands will be clasped. You will bow your head and clasp your hands. And you will tell your friend that the subway isn’t usually very loud or hot or crowded.

 

 

Stories about scars are almost always great. There’s usually something painful and gory and gross and crazy and there’s always proof of the story. You can see it and touch it and get really close to it and ask if it hurt and how much and wonder if it will ever heal. So here’s a story about one of my scars. I went to Mardi Gras with three friends. I came back with a skinny red scar that sliced from above my right eyebrow around my eye down onto the top of my cheekbone. Mardi Gras officially ends with a celebration of Fat Tuesday, but the big night is Saturday. Saturday has the biggest parade, Endymion, and it’s the longest night on Bourbon Street, if one night there can be said to be any longer than another one.

I’ll skip what happened between the time we left our apartment and when we returned. Mardi Gras is too much to explain. In that way, I was lucky to end up with that scar. People wanted to hear about how it happened and I didn’t have to try to sum up New Orleans in a two-minute conversation on the way to class. We got back to the apartment with one bedroom and it was my turn to take the side of the air mattress closest to the wall. I was tired. So I dove for the air mattress. The side of he air mattress closest to the wall was also closest to the only chair in the apartment. I overshot the mattress and went face first into the edge of one of the chair’s wooden legs. I hit it hard enough to end up with the cut and a bruise around it. Think Scar from Lion King. It made for a fun story for a few weeks, but I was glad when it healed and I didn’t have to apologize for disappointing people who wanted a better story to go with it.

The point is that scars are overrated. You can come back from Mardi Gras with an incredible scar, but you might not have the story to match. I need to say that because the scars I want to talk about aren’t the ones from the movies, the showy scars on the face of the villain in the superhero movie, the scars that show you probably made a few bad decisions and got yourself into knife fight and didn’t win. Those are the overrated scars. You can do some stupid shit and end up with a scar that looks interesting. Like trying to dive onto an air mattress when there’s not a lot of room for error.

The only scars that aren’t overrated are the ones you really earn. To earn a thing is rare. To really earn it and make it and feel it and know it and know that no one else can claim it. It doesn’t happen often. Maybe it never happens for some people. It’s rare for me. Things can take labor and time and energy and everything you’ve got and not really be earned.

Those are the important scars, the ones you earn. I didn’t earn that scar on my face. It just happened to me. I think the only scars I’ve earned are on my hands. There are scars on my hands that I didn’t earn. A scratch during a basketball game that is still red. A scratch on my right palm. Two cuts on the back of my left hands that never healed quite right. I ended up with those from tripping and falling. There’s no story to go with those. Stuff happened, and now I’ve got a couple little marks on my hands.

Yet one or two of the scars on my hands were earned. Think about hands. They’re something we can’t hide, something always out in the open, always visible. Still, you can fake a lot about your hands. You can fake your handshake. If you want people to think you’re confident squeeze as hard as you can. If you want to seem gentle, skip the vice grip.

My hands are ugly, but I didn’t really earn the ugliest part of my hands. There are a few ugly scars that just happened to me. The ones on the back of my left hand are probably the ugliest. When it gets really cold they turn red and then purple and then blue and they’re somewhere short of attractive. But there are some things on my hands that I really earned. Those rare things earned fully and without regret. Things I knew might happen but that I was ready for. There’s a knotty white line on my right middle finger where the spiky cartilage of a stiff-snout skate left its mark as a I tried to drag it out from under a pile of twenty more unwanted fish. A diamond-shaped patch of discolored skin on my left hand where a halibut’s tooth got caught as I tried to toss it back into the Gulf of Alaska. When you agree to spend a month on a commercial fishing boat in Kodiak, Alaska you expect to earn some things. The scars are one of them. There aren’t many fisherman working out of Kodiak with nice looking hands. One of first stories I heard about fisherman was about one of my captain’s employees who loved to build up callouses by soaking his hands in saltwater. When he didn’t have to fish, he would do it anyway, just for fun sometimes. He liked to do it on airplanes and then peel the callouses, half an inch thick, off of his palms just to see what the person lucky enough to sit next to him would say. So I thought I might earn some ugly hands. Certainly some stronger hands, some tougher hands.

The problem about spending a month on a fishing boat is that you earn things you don’t expect and some things you never wanted. You earn trust. It’s an absolute trust, but maybe it’s too much trust. You earn the trust of people who you really don’t want to trust you because it means they’re going to tell you things you don’t want to hear. Your captain will tell you how he became allergic to chemicals by falling into a vat in a chemical plant when he was a kid and how he has to wear a gas mask if he goes anywhere besides his boat or his cabin in the woods. He’ll ask you what you think about his conspiracy theories and alien theories and you won’t know what to say because you just want him to stop trusting you so much. The trust isn’t all bad. The captain’s wife spends a week on board and cooks the shrimp and salmon and crab you catch as soon as it comes out of the Gulf and it’s the best meal you’ve ever had.

It’s trust that comes out of nowhere and all at once, though maybe you should have seen it coming. You start to earn it when your friend who you see for one week every year, one easy summer vacation week at a beach in Florida, calls and asks you to fish with him for a month in Alaska. He won’t do it unless you do it and he needs the money. His parents run the fleet and own the boat and know the captain and will make sure you’re safe and will put you with the best crew and pay you well. You earn it in six more moments. In one of these moments, it’s going to be too much trust.

You earn it on the first day on the boat. It’s called the Mar Pacfico, and it looks old. It’s a rusty one hundred and seventy nine tons and it’s ninety-one feet long. There is one bunkroom for four crewmembers and the other two crewmembers have been fishing since they were teenagers. John is technically homeless and was living in a shelter before this trip because no other company in Alaska will hire him to work on their boats. He’s the best net repair man your captain has ever seen but he’s called you and your friend stupid and soft five times before you’ve caught a single fish. Oscar, one of the engineers helping you repair the boar before the first halibut run, asks you and your friend why you’re doing this and you’re not sure expect for the money and to help out your friend. Oscar says he hates John and he’s crazy and that you can die on these boats and you should probably go home now. You shrug it off and look at your friend and hope this works.

You earn it again you pull in a big load of sole. You’re fishing for rock sole and you reel in the nets and they’re seething with red scales and bulging eyes and sole on top of sole on top of sole. There’s a pair of half to salmon sharks in the net, to and you have to pull them off of the boar with ropes and hydraulics, but you’ve got thirty thousand pounds of sole and your friend yells and sticks his arms in the air. John laughs and your friend demands a picture in front of the huge haul and John calls him stupid again but you take the picture anyway. You’ll have five more loads like that one and end up with two hundred and twenty five thousands pounds of fish in three weeks. You’ve been on the boar for five days and you haven’t seen land in three and everyone stinks but it’s probably not too much trust yet.

You earn it again when you work your first twenty-four hour day. Your captain finds a hot spot and the nets go out and in and out and in again and your sweeping fish into the hole for hour after hour. It’s too dark to see the water off the side of the boat but the floodlights are too bright to let you fall sleep on deck. You keep earning it when you climb forty feet up the tower at two in the morning when the wheel with the hydraulic wire breaks. Its you and him in ten degree weather forty feet in the air on a boat tat’s rocking with the waves more than it has on any of the trips. You can’t wear your gloves because the wire is thing and you need to be precise even thought you can’t feel your fingers. The nets need to go out now but the wheel has to be put back and hooked up with a new chain. He’s laying face down on top of metal beam no wider than your foot and you’re hanging onto the ladder with one hand feeding him the wire. It takes twenty minutes and you thought you were going to fall three times and he slips once but you hook up the chain and run the wire and the wheel is fixed and the nets go out.

You earn it again when you’re back home for the summer and you get a call from your friend’s dad. He’s Uncle Wig to you, even if you have no idea how he ended up with the name Wig. He’s never called you in your life because he hates using a cell phone. His office in South Bend, Washington, the base for his company’s Kodiak operations, is a whirlwind of papers and documents and open notebooks and unorganized bookkeeping done by hand and without a computer. He uses a fax machines instead of email and prefers to drive parts from South Bend to Seattle, six hours, instead of trusting a shipping company. His daughter quit the family business because he refused to use a computer for payroll and travel for the crewmembers. He didn’t know how to text and wouldn’t answer his phone and it was too much and she quit. A cell phone call from him is earned and it is rare.

He asks if your friend was acting odd on the boat. Your friend is an odd dude. Most off the stuff he did seemed about right. He dove forty feet off the highest tower on the boat into twenty-degree water in his boxers but that was pretty normal. He drove around Kodiak yelling at random people out the window of the captain’s car asking if they wanted to buy weed from one of our crewmembers. That was pretty strange. Trust. You don’t say any of this and just mention that he seemed a little up and down on the boat. Angry some days, giddy for hours of shitty, shitty fishing. But Wig tells you things have changed. Your friend was arrested yesterday. Picked up sitting on the street in San Francisco in nothing but his boxers. He was visiting a friend his parents didn’t know and he started threatening to kill him. Your aunt is headed out there now to bail him out and get him help. You want to help and say you’ll talk to him. All that trust has to count for something.

The last moment when you earn it, the moment you know you’ve earned some trust but you think it’s too much trust, is at the end of the summer. You check your Snapchat and it’s from your friend. No one told you he was allowed to have his cellphone back but you’re glad to hear from him. You open the Snapchat and it’s your friend’s arm. Unmistakably his arm, short and tan and muscular. You work out together every summer and he can always out lift you easily. He’s short but strong. There’s athletic tape around his wrist but it’s dirty, brown turning to black. Grimy, really. The forearm has two deep gashes. They’re parallel, symmetrical. They’re the same length and the same depth and the same color. They will make for impressive scars. The unhealed skin on your palm from the halibut incident and the dead skin on your finger from the encounter with the skate are nothing. The gashes are deep but clean. They haven’t started to bleed but they are a shiny, smooth red. Gripped in his hand is a can opener, the metal guard broken off and the round blade exposed. It’s just about the right size to make the gash. The Snapchat is ten seconds and you replay it. This is too much trust. You’ve earned it, though.

People will tell you they smoke cigars for a lot of reasons. The buzz. The flavor. The smell. Don’t believe what they say. They’re lying to you. If they want you to think Don’t believe them, either. They think they’re being honest. They’re missing the point. It’s about time. They love the time. Cigars are about time.Don Jaime Partagás y Rabell was born in Spain and moved to Cuba in 1831. He was fifteen. Fourteen years later, he founded his own cigar factory and named it La Flor de Tabacas de Partagás in honor of his family. Partagas still produces some of the world’s finest tobacco and rolls it into more than 10 million cigars each year. They sell Partagas is Havana and Berlin and London and Toronto. It won’t be long before they’re sold in the United States again. Don Jaime was murdered before he was fifty. The factory in his name makes strong cigars. People who know about these things say they are one of the two or three or four strongest cigars in the world. Maybe Don Jaime knew a little something about cigars. Maybe he knew about time.

If you’re a cigar person, the time one lasts is never long enough. It’s a smooth half hour, all warmth and light and aroma and conversation. Otherwise, you’ll spend a long forty-five minutes hoping the tobacco will burn itself out and wondering when you can change your shirt. There’s too much smoke in your eyes and ears and mouth to talk or listen and you wonder how anyone can enjoy this.

Cigars aren’t made quickly. Tobacco plants are kept indoors for ten weeks, but they still need months and months of rain, humidity, and rich soil to grow full enough to make a cigar. The leaves are green when they are harvested but after more months of curing, they are brown and almost dry. The leaves are sorted, bundled, and fermented in casks for two years. Then it’s on to the rollers. It’s been years since the tobacco was planted. Rollers are trained for over a year. There are machine rollers but those ruin a cigar. The rollers cut and wrap and bundle and vein and trim and inspect and finally pack.

A cigar is an ugly thing when it’s done. People say the best cigars burn without dropping an ash. You can see the burned tobacco, grey and dry, hanging on the end of the cigar. It shows you how much you have smoked and how much you have left to smoke. It dangles and it threatens to fall, but it is still there to remind you. It’s used up and it’s dusty and it’s time to mash it on the ground and leave its black soot behind. That’s all that left of that hour. The orange glow is gone and you drank all the whiskey and your friend told you what he thinks. So you called her and maybe you were buzzed because it was the biggest cigar of your life and maybe she thinks cigars are gross and says it’s over and no you can’t see her tonight. You wonder if Don Jaime’s fifty years were worth it and if cigar rolling is a fulfilling job and you open the box and look at the dozen cigars and wonder who would ever want to smoke any of them with you.

 

I have no idea what to do in an airport. When I was eight or nine or ten or even until I was twelve I thought I had it figured out. All it took was a little blue backpack stuffed with a boxy black DVD player and a couple of movies. Maybe three if the flight was more than four hours. Radio and Like Mike were two of my favorites. Any ten-year-old boy old can tell you Shad Moss, formerly Bow Wow, formerly Lil Bow Wow, was underrated in his role as Calvin Cambridge. I still think he deserved an Oscar. On the return leg I could usually talk my Mom into a bag of Twizzlers and I was set.

I lost my touch when I was sixteen, I think. The DVD player broke and I was stuck with my laptop, which meant buying my own movies. Usually books were the better option, but I tended to be too ambitious and with my picks and gave up on reading before the plane was at the gate.

I resent the businesswomen who only need a coffee and a folded newspaper and they’re set for a two hour-layover and a four-hour flight and they’ll step off the plane roll out a perfect presentation for corporate in Chicago. Same for the grandpas and grandmas flying with their grandchildren who can’t sit still long enough for Papa or Grammy to eat the sandwiches they brought from home. Those grandparents will be occupied from the second they check in to the second they touch down, grumbling and coaxing and laughing and doing everything they can to make sure the kids don’t embarrass them and everyone in the security line.

But I’m lost in a terminal. Out-of-sorts. Confused. Off my game. I love a good cab ride. Traffic on the way to the airport doesn’t bother me. Especially in South America. That continent has the most conversational cabbies and it’s not even close. Lima is good for that type of thing, but Buenos Aires is the best. This was my second cab ride to an airport in that city. The first one was to a tiny domestic, and I was too tired to speak. This was to the big one, Ministro Pistarini. The airport code is EZE. No one could ever give me a good reason for that. The traffic in the departure lane piles up at 6 AM and doesn’t slow down until after midnight. The EZE terminal isn’t any worse than LaGuardia or O’Hare or LAX. It’s got a boring exterior by Latin American standards. Jose Marti in Havana is orange. EZE is straightforward, glass, white walls, and concrete. The layout makes sense. It’s well-organized and customs are quick. It took a few minutes to check-in, but I put that on my shaky Spanish. This was a Sunday, and Buenos Aires sets aside Sundays for its hangover. People don’t leave clubs until 6, and they don’t leave their beds until Monday. They certainly don’t fly.

I had enjoyed my last night there. It had only been five weeks, but I wasn’t on their weekend schedule yet. I had only been out until 5:30. I felt like I had a good reason to be tired. I deserved some coffee. It was last shot at South American coffee for a while. So I had two cups. The rolls it came with made my mouth dry. So I ordered a third and finished it quickly. It’s nine hours from Buenos Aires to Miami. It’s another hour from Miami to Tampa. Customs in Miami aren’t slow. They don’t mess around with flights from Cuba and Colombia and Brazil and Venezuela. My flight left EZE at 6 PM. I wasn’t in my bed until 5:30 the next morning.

If you like to read while you wait for your flight, you would have been fine. Fifty pages and eight hours of sleep. If you’re a movie person you could’ve knocked out a rom-com and been asleep before they brought the meal. If you drink three cups of coffee that’s stronger than you’re used to, you’re up for all nine hours wondering why you’re Spanish isn’t better or why you forgot to buy your mom a gift at the market or why you didn’t get that girl’s number at the club or why you left your one warm jacket in your apartment or why you don’t have a job lined up for the rest of the summer. You might have no idea what to do in an airport, but you don’t order three cups of coffee. I think I’ll go back to Like Mike and Twizzlers.

 

I thought I loved her but it turns out she didn’t. “I hate sleeping alone,” she said. So do I, I thought. But I don’t tell everyone. I don’t say it to her. Why would she say that to me? I think she did it on purpose. She said she had had seven shots that night. I didn’t believe her. I had never seen her drink before. That was probably on purpose too. I felt like everything she did was intentional when we were together. I didn’t like that. I mean, everything I did when we were together was intentional. But she knew why that was. She made me die a little death every time she hid something from me. Maybe it wasn’t such a little death. Christ, I knew it wasn’t a little death. It mattered too much to me. She knew it too. She knew everything I knew and she knew that I knew it. I could never tell if she was proud of that knowledge or ashamed of it. She was hiding that too, I guess. Thunder. Snow. Heat. Rain. I want to stay inside. Sunshine. Warmth. I want to go outside. Maybe she knew how to control that. I guess I could ask the doctor about that next time. Can she control the weather? No. But she knows how to control everything else, I would say. Son, you sound crazy. Stop thinking like that. Worry about the flu, instead. It’s an airborne disease, you know. I’m pretty sure mind control is airborne, too. She knows about the air. She has all the information. She knows she has more information than me. That’s impossible, the doctor would say. No one could live if they knew everything.

 

I fall in love with cities easily. Too many of my friends fall in real love too easily. They’re with a partner for a month and get all excited about where things are going. A month later, they’ve broken it off and start aching for the next girl or the last guy or whomever they think they need. I usually think it’s kind of sad. But it might be healthier than how I feel about cities.

Right now, I want to work in Latin America. That’s just because the last two cities I visited were Havana and Buenos Aires. All it’s going to take is a trip to Vancouver and I’ll know the lyrics to “O, Canada” and start eating maple syrup with every meal. I took one day in Paris to decide that it was my favorite city despite the language barrier, coffees that cost six American dollars and restaurants that would not open until ten o’clock.

My friends have loved Jayne and Olivia and Lindsey and Aurienne and Terry and other Olivia and Arthur and Jen. And I’ve loved Cuzco and Managua and Lima and Tampa and New Orleans and Havana and Paris and Buenos Aires. That’s almost every city I’ve seen in my life. Except for London. London didn’t make the list and it never will.

People love to say that London is grey. It’s an old cliché. The sky is grey today. It’s another grey London day. Look how grey the clouds are today. The river looks so grey in the morning.

I hate clichés about cities. They never say enough. Usually it’s the positive ones I hate. New York, the city that never sleeps. Buenos Aires. The Paris of Latin America. That doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t tell you how the city feels. But if you really hate a place, there’s nothing worse than a bad cliché.

London is grey. That doesn’t nearly say it all. London is grey, but it is so much worse than that. It’s a grey that goes on an on an on across a city that takes two hours to cross by subway. “The Tube.” Really, it’s a nice system, but it’s easy to sour on a train that dumps you in rainy neighborhood after rainy neighborhood after a thirty-minute ride crisscrossing the most disjointed city in Europe.

I don’t mind a grey sky. New York is dark for six straight months. Paris is cold and the narrow streets are windy and it’s really not that sunny.

London stopped being grey for about fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes inside a museum. The museum was probably the greyest building in the city. The Tate Modern is a squat, square concrete box on the Thames. It’s a grey building. The Thames always looks grey.

I saw one painting I liked. It was a dead chicken hanging inside of a wooden box. The canvas was painted a bright, bright red. Shocking against its white wall. I stood in front of it for fifteen minutes without moving. It was a Francis Bacon triptych. No title so I couldn’t even look it up after we left the Tate. After two hours in the museum London was still grey. I missed that red for the rest of the trip. London is in a country whose flag has a bold red cross. You would think there would be more red in the city. There’s no grey on the flag. London needs more red and less grey..