New York, December Twenty-First
2022; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 130; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/sew.2022.0000
ISSN1934-421X
Autores Tópico(s)Urbanization and City Planning
ResumoNew York, December Twenty-First Cally Fiedorek (bio) He had tattoos up and down his arms that this morning, getting up, in the seconds before pride attached itself seemed very stupid to him. Aces, shamrocks. Lurid glyphs. A crouching panther on his shoulder—’cause why not. A pinup girl he might’ve gotten on a naval ship in Polynesia, when he’d hardly ever left the tristate. Some Latin phrases—Honoris et Virtus et Something-or-other, which . . . honor? Virtue? Whose? His? At least he’d stopped himself before that stephanie forever bit. Rudy turned on Broadway. He was due to open at the bar. There was Christmas crap in windows, bells ringing, not for him though. ’Twas the season to be robbed, dumped, jumped, kicked out of love. Threatened eviction by his landlady, a Russian ogress in Bulgari shades, paid for with a blind old tenant’s stolen disability checks. It was the season to be sick with drink, and bursting with regrets, no less real and wretched for how fictional the world seemed. This [End Page 73] pasteboard town, its codes and quotas, loudly ticking clocks. . . . Maybe that was it. Maybe the city was the problem. New York. He was sick of it. He was fed up with the myth of it. Everybody always telling him how great it was. Helluva town, New York! So vibrant. Culture! He remembered some talking head in a PBS doc they’d shown in school once, some total virgin in a bow tie and suspenders losing his shit over Walt Whitman. The Bridge, ooh. Central Park! The Park was the least Manhattan could do to hold you back from murderous despair. To him it was all fin de siècle. Like Rome before the sack. Weimar Berlin. Glitter and doom, not even—Pret and doom. It was scaffolding and pigeonshit and when he’d walked just now into the soup ’n’ sandwich place near Macy’s to get his egg and cheese, no bacon—you had to try and be healthy, some days, keep the death away—he was spooked by every face he saw in there: the bearded ladies, their piehole eyes, and he knew for sure that God had pulled the pin. Never had the city felt so jagged to him. So tuneless, so uncharmed. Seemed to know itself so little. Doggy daycare, Lotto shops, gleaming plazas out of Dallas. It’s not that it was ugly—though there was plenty of that—it’s that he didn’t even know what he was looking at no more. What was it? Whose idea was it? Rudy opened the metal gates. Just the sight of Liffey’s in the daytime with no one in it gave him major deep-in-childhood creeps. It was filthy in here. It stank like rum and dirty pants. He opened the register and changed the kegs and filled the ice and put the TVs on. There was memorabilia caked to the rafters. It could bury you alive. They wouldn’t find you ’til the spring. Corncob pipes and top hats from Tammany Hall times, and Jimmy Coonan’s holster, and Dean Martin’s fedora, and a workman’s helmet from Ground Zero, and keepsakes left behind on loan by soldiers shipping out to France, Korea, Vietnam. Hankies and harmonicas [End Page 74] like collateral to doom. On the wall were signed glamour shots of random-ass celebrities, and pictures of his dad—he owned the place—with Bono and The Edge, and with Connie Chung, for some reason, and one photo Rudy liked of his cousins once removed, known hatchet men for the IRA: deep in the seventies, groovy-shirted, muttonchopped, smoking away on some farty-looking mustard couch in County Clare, with murder in their eyes. All this New Yawk-Irish crap, the stuff that pinned his world to space, and today he didn’t know whether to barf or cry or tear it down. It was all just so . . . so over. It was junk. Finito. A bum replacement for a life. She had a life. Allison. She was moving west to go to law school out in Colorado, and he was not...
Referência(s)