It’s concentric circles of intersecting and loping streets, overhangs of deciduous leaves, blossom trees like rooted sentries in the Blackrock neighborhood. The southern face of Bridgeport wears itself freshly. The outermost street is lined with green steel lights, and as you wind along, they make a stairway halfway up the sky. My favorite professor grew up here, where my daughter does now. The red and white striped smokestack paints false recollections of an industrious time, the days of PT. Barnum and Bailey being long gone. “The Greatest Show on Earth.” My dad, visiting, noted that this year it was closing. The candy cane fumes on and on, above in uncharted territory.
On Easter weekend, we followed marks, little cardboard signs with arrows and an address. We followed it and lost it and surprisingly came upon it, the estate sale. It was mostly prints of paintings, maritime, Modernists and Impressionists, some hackneyed adventure Westerns, and art books, Cezanne’s Watercolors, Renoir, and some other leatherbounds and paperbacks. In these, you could see multiple overlapping Venn diagrams emerge in the topics of the titles. There were gardening books, the art of cooking and gourmet cuisine books; spiritual and religious guides, musings and treatises, East to West, the full body of God, as one, as trinity, as all, pantheism, Zoroastrianism, Augustine’s Confession and Spinoza On Ethics. And twopenny mysteries, Doyle, Agatha Christie mostly. The owner stared into the distance, sitting at a pupil’s desk at the front of the garage between its divided open doors, with a marker-drawn sign saying, “Signed Prints $5” as my family and other small-time day adventurers in spring day-wear pilfered his belongings. $1 for any book. $5 to $10 for prints.
I bought the only literary books there. The Awakening, for my wife, and The Night of the Iguana and Of Human Bondage for me.
That week I started my new copywriting job in the Bronx. I read half of Tennessee William’s play before landing at Harlem 125th Street. Below the lifted green track, the station is a dreamy remnant inside, charming as an old fashioned Western stop. But there is no peace in that place. There is screaming and honking, trash littered at each step like the feet of a ruler. Congregations buying and selling cigarettes, 8:15 joints smoked furiously, homeless men lounging on steps and scratching themselves. Other types stationed like tour-guides on the corners, making passes at passers-by and catching eyes defiantly. On the way home, a man and a woman were separated mid-fight. The woman yelling, “You never paid for shit,” and the man, screaming over and over, “Don’t anyone ever tell me to suck a dick!”
At the landing, we stood among the rooftops and I refused a man a dollar. He came to me urgently, “Brother, brother, brother…” I finished The Night of the Iguana on the way home, and in the next week, I read Of Human Bondage. The homeless man was a fixture. Over the days, I gave him two dollars; he turned down a slice of pizza from 2 Bros’ Pizza. And I’ve picked up a similarity in the man’s books.
The Reverend from William’s one-act worked himself into such hysterics he could not escape his bonds. He was fated into sensual pleasures in young sirens and tortured by shame: caught in the act of jerking it. Philip, pleasured himself in pain, tortured himself in pleasure. The Reverend unloosed himself with a simple come-down and disappeared into the oppressive mist, leaving the charitable sketch-artist all alone. Her old father finished his poem and died. But Philip, he escaped nihilism into a meaningful pattern, as old as time. At the end of it all, outside, they lived for nothing; inside the personal weaving, was the beauty of life. It’s the best bildungsroman I’ve read.
My professor loved to teach Bible as literature. There was a chiastic structure in everything. God was systematically breaking down Abraham’s preservation, in life and lineage. Poor Isaac, got caught up in his old man’s value system and nearly got himself filicided. He also said just after he dies, he just wants to know if he was right in the way he lived his life, before he no longer exists.
And I keep thinking about the owner there. The only thing he said was a string of ‘okay’s to a friend offering to drive him to events at the nursing home.
The day of estate sale was beautiful. I was held in some kind of check by my mom, dad and sister, with all their entirely factual preconceptions of me. The sky had broken its colorless mold of winter and I was staring up into it. I’ve had a hard time knowing how to act here among the new coworkers, asking me about myself. My voice sounds hollow. I often misspeak after a pregnant pause. This neighborhood in the Bronx is the new DUMBO, they say. Its jammed with trendy restaurants and pop-up shops between dilapidated pawn and antique stores. The owners stand on the outside smoking cigarettes, waiting for the Clocktower and other studio developments to take over.
My coworker lamented they took out the History Channel billboard that’d been there since she was six-years-old. Now, it’s an FM radio ad, which is probably taking its last lap too. The turnover of thoughts and ideas and their mediums is faster than ever. There are two men with a fruit stand, mostly oranges, lemons, and limes, at the end of the street. One faces the cars cruising and careening onto a speedy overpass. The other picks at his guitar. My first day, I saw petals blown off by the breeze fall on them like heavy snow. It was like nothing I’d seen.
My dad prides himself on being a listener of tales. This is his truth. He led the son down a story — the landing was they were selling the place after all these years. On the market now. Nowhere to put all this stuff. “Did he own an art store?” my dad prodded. “No, but he was always buying collections when art stores were going out of business…And he was an artist too.” Only a few feet away, the man didn’t register a reaction. But before we left, someone bought a signed print. The print was hanging directly above him, nailed to the white New England wood: A line drawing like constellations of Jesus in thorns, with geometric squares for cheeks and a blank look in his prismic eyes. Was he still thinking on this Good Friday, what really, the hell, is going on here?
paul fey | creative writer 