The big apple is bitten open in the hottest months, forgotten by the city’s young and rejected by the richest of mice, rats and men. The galas, the garden parties, the select instances that make up for no real pleasure in the sun are something expected: events, eventual(s) that fill up kitchen-wall calendars and the hand-held horrors that have replaced real life. Instances, as a young middle-class New Yorker are my own: I bloody my hands on their small pleasures, soft purrs un-kitten-like in my throat.
The first I attend, at the hand of my father’s strange connections, is a celebration of life of a man hatful and hated, a small cocktail party with fat shrimp and glasses slippery with champagne. Performing my waitress skills, I slip my fingers out from under the glass bodices, practicing roulette on their round bottoms, crystal and crystalline as the too-blue pool where I learned to float. The men are older, of course, than their companions, an aggrieved given, their golden statues far less than lovely. Their women are pulled tight not only in outfits, but also in the skin that once crowded their eyes: the most empty of crows faces, on simple stilts as wonderful as pressed, dried, flower stems, shorted worth. I search for other empty stares, avoiding companion and am approached by a fat, too stout woman with the bluest of eyes. Her husband follows, wrinkled, wrought with age, his ears curled at the bottoms like subpar conch shells (pulsing, pink, a sea inside), his face a polka canvas invented by sun. He is filled with stories that light him, only slightly, like a quarter moon, and leave me agitated, breathless, burnt by this undead man.
“I hear you are a traveler,” he says, meeting my eyes with his own. “I too like to travel. My first honeymoon, with my first wife was in Mayorca. As circumstance had it, I ended up with another woman and was making my way back to the hotel one night. I never realized the truth alive in the New York statement, the city that never sleeps. Everything was closed, even the front of my hotel, sleeping. So I thought I would make my way down to where our suite was—on the bottom of a mountain-side—slipping into the room to find my wife. But, I realized on the way down, just how steep it was, and found myself understanding that if I didn’t jump, falling would rip out my insides. So I took the plunge and ended up at the bottom, passed out, with broken teeth. Somehow, I managed to drag myself to the hotel, where I passed out again. Luckily, there was a hotel doctor.”
Maybe my eyes do not do justice to my thoughts. At that moment, lacking an understanding for his story’s point, thoroughly disgusted at this uncertain creature, I find myself fixated again on the champagne, small bubbles that resemble a child’s bated, underwater breath, small moments of life at effort to escape glass and the gummy smiles of the wealthy. His wife takes his hand, holding tight to the disappointing child inside of him, as I balance a cup on my thumb almost hoping for a shattering, at, on, within this man. Thinking of him toothless makes me smile wide, a man gurgling cherry red at the bottom of a mountain that taught him his time is torrid, soft storms always await.
The second I attend is milder but more beautiful. It is situated in the Pierre, atop a winding staircase that serves Upper Class weddings and debutant balls. There is no room for angels here. The men and women, simple, single, slighted by each other, suck soft water from tall wine glasses, like wide-mouthed bass afraid of a drowning. Amazing Grace is sung from these gurgling throats in a church-choir unison and again, the men resemble babes, bald, broken, tears spilling down their faces in giant, dramatic outpours, united mourning. They are celebrating recovery, but not recovered. They are celebrating over-coming mountains far taller than Mayorcan cliffs, finding the right footing or being forced into treatment centers with literally nutty names (such as Hazelton, the cool companion of even famous singers and their yelping young). They speak of “group” as an inside story, the certain circles where they beat out their demons, embracing drought. They are engaged only in an awesome overcoming, aided but never aged, ogled and ornate in their costume both inside and out.
These are the people who have crossed over, not in the Ghost Whisperer sense of touching death, not by seeing lights, blurred at night or true at sunrise. These are people who have hit rock bottom at best, belleyed hell.
