The Holy City


I have seen New York.
Not the state, but the city. I don't think I even came near the country, arriving up through New Jersey and breaching through the Lincoln Tunnel. All I got from Jersey was a well beaten highway carving its way through modest rock faces, each crawling with brilliant green early summer foliage and houses offset to balance out on the uneven surfaces. After six hours of scenery, this didn't catch me, any of the way through, not like the distant gray island I saw that early Friday afternoon over the waters of the Hudson, looming on the surface of the dark river like the legendary serrated back of the Kraken, a massive beast easily mistaken for land, but throbbing with hidden life. The Kraken would lure unwittingly and lost sailors to it's shores and supposed safety, only to rise up and swallow them whole before they could realize their folly.
A gray, jagged island, with determined peaks at random points, and two towering structures at the tip which still crowned the city that summer in 1999. This sprawling centuries old temple of brick, concrete, glass, and steel that reigns in the mouth of a massive waterway long conceived as the front door of America to the rest of the world. It is awe inspiring, no matter what you suppose yourself to be as you approach it.
It humbles you.
It is far bigger than you will ever be.
I was along for the ride. One of my roommates, Marcus, just happened to have a father who happened to repair furniture and happened to have a store which he happened to share with an interior designer named Susan who happened to have two daughters that happened to be living in New York City who happened to have a need for some furniture they had happened to have left in our hometown of Kinston, N.C., and Susan happened to know no one save for Marcus who happened to be young and strong enough to lug this stuff around and she just happened to mention he might want help and he just happened to think of me. It was all happenstance. Every bit of it. Random in every form of design.
Marcus wandered into my room one pleasant May afternoon, a haven of movie posters, sci-fi toys, and Christmas lights, wearing one of his twenty wife beaters and some loose jeans. He was a large guy, mostly quiet, built, but not muscular, with permanently tousled hair and a round, slack face. Barefoot. He was always barefoot. And we often joked that it took him forty minutes to find and put on his shoes.
Because it did.
'I'm going to help Susan move some furniture to New York City for her daughters,'� he said, 'You wanna help?'�
Susan. New York. Daughters. I didn't even think past those three details. Susan was hot, so it stood to reason her daughters were as well. And I had never been to New York. Neither of us were attending classes at East Carolina University that summer, just working menial jobs and living off of what we could scrounge. Certainly, the bustling metropolis of Greenville could do without out presence for a couple of days. And, furthermore, my current girlfriend was in France for some sculpture class or other, and was going to be there for the next two months. So for all intensive purposes, I was free.
'Hell, yeah!'�
New York City. In every age of humankind there is a place, a great wondrous place populated by untold masses and seen by all as the epicenter of life and possibility. An awesome place, larger than anything else in the world, on any scale. Immeasurable in its vastness of meaning. Babylon. Athens. Rome. London. Cities that become more than cities, but the focus of the desires of the human race in all of its varied glories. Cities whose names mean more than a geographical destination. Places where anything, quite literally anything, can and will happen. And for the better part of a century or more, that place was New York.
I had the chance to become part of it. For an iota of an instant of its existence and its calling to the world I would be there.
There is nothing nearly as grand in North Carolina as the concept of New York. As far as I know, there has never been a mass, near global desire to see vast fields of tobacco or soybeans. I was born in Kinston, and raised in Deep Run N.C., and that really isn't saying much at all as far as cultural centers go. Deep Run consists of a few stop signs and a volunteer fire department, and Kinston hasn't really been an exciting hub of activity since the prostitution industry collapsed around the beginning of World War II. In fact, all the towns of eastern North Carolina could be seen as winding down, their children fleeing in droves to bigger cities with the hopes of finding more reliable employment and more secured lives. I was no different, going from high school in Deep Run straight on to Greenville and ECU for college. Kinston wasn't even a stop on the way; a flailing town with numerous, vacant factories where miles of fabrics once spun out all over the world, and the main vein of life is the point where 70 breaks in past the city limits for a few miles before suddenly realizing its mistake and jumping safely back across the Neuse to go on towards New Bern. Kinston was a dead end
'It'll only be for three days, and we'll be moving furniture on the first. Up some stairs. But not much. She said after that we were free to do what we want?'�
'Does that include her daughters?'�
Marcus grinned. Few things gather the full conscience attention of college guys at the start of the summer. We were no different.
Marcus had other friends, bigger, heftier guys than my scrawny and bald six-foot two, that were much more adept at hefting concoctions of wood, steel, and fabric. But we were particularly close at this moment. We had joined forces in the household against our presumptuous Communist third roommate, Chris. But, with roommates, this is a natural cycle. There is, and always will be, two against one.
Marcus had been with Susan to New York before, for much the same reason but not the same scale, and brought back delightful physical accounts of the daughters, Amy and What's-her-face. Amy was a Spanish teacher at some high school around central Manhattan, and What's-her-face was a designer for Calvin Klein and though Marcus knew her name well, she never left much of an impression on me for myself to do the same. For the next two weeks before the trip Marcus bestowed Chris and I with his wisdom of all things metropolitan, partially for my benefit, but mostly just to rub Chris's nose in it. Chris was on a downward swing in our group as friends, eating our food, refusing to do his portion of the cleaning, demanding to use our beds for his frequent and overly exaggerated trysts with his trendy-Goth girlfriend. As soon as he found out we were leaving town for three days, he stupidly mentioned that our beds were his to conquer. So, the evening of our departure we spent two hours piling laundry, books, papers, empty soda cans, toys, comics, movies, and anything else we could get our hands on, including an old guitar for me, on top of our beds. We even took pictures of our efforts, proud of our defenses. We knew he was too lazy to clean them off for any purpose.
We drove from Greenville to Kinston on a Thursday night and loaded Susan's truck; two sofa's, one a hide-a-bed, three lamps, two end-tables, a rocking chair, two recliners, and enough bed-sheets and comforters to make Martha Stewart dizzy. I was crammed in the back seat with all of this fluffy cargo for the trip at 4 the next morning, in a space a foot wide by two foot long, by four foot tall; a tight fit for one as endowed with arms and legs as my self. No leg movement, limited arm movement, and one bathroom stop on the six and a half hours to get there.
That's how I came to New York. In a package.
And I saw that hazy, gray island from over a shoulder I couldn't move, sitting on a portion of my self I could no longer feel.
Through the Lincoln Tunnel, a dark roaring tube of uncomfortable length, and suddenly into the most complex show of civilization I had ever born witness to. Canyons of buildings, disappearing into the horizon at every angle, and I knew that if I walked to as far as my eye could see, the buildings would still roll farther and farther on. Raised in the vast forested realms of rural North Carolina, the largest cities I had ever seen were a limited number of blocks and squat buildings barely breaking the ten story mark. Ten stories is not worth the effort in Manhattan, where buildings are crowded and stacked together in colossal, uneven tiers, each one in direct silent competition with the rest to be the most awesomely overpowering. The accumulated effort of it all is frightening, and I was left wondering why some insignificant windstorm didn't swipe this city down like so many misplaced dominoes, crushing a sea of humanity in the process.
And the people! People were everywhere, more types sizes colors and shapes than I could readily mention. People were standing, walking, jogging, riding bikes, skating, driving, dancing, and sitting in awe-inspiring numbers. Never the same one twice. Few talked and all were rapidly heading to their obscure destinations throughout the deep angular paths of the city. I easily saw several thousand in the short span of time between the Tunnel and arriving eleven blocks later at Amy's apartment.
The absolute joy of unfolding what was left of me from that back seat in the midst of the permanent traffic on Third Ave. was akin to being born again. And I said as much through gritted teeth as I pulled and pushed my way past the folding front seat and into the typhoon of city life. And like the Kraken it appeared to be, the city roared around me as I set foot on its shores, and a stench of a barely contained populated wildness assaulted my nostrils, reminiscent of a host of State Fairs that had swallowed me up in the past. I wavered on the concrete ground on a pair of unsure legs, spat out of the protective womb Dodge King-cab into the midst of the urban wilds and the grandest thing I had ever seen.
We stood and stretched before unloading the cargo strapped down in the truck bed, deflecting the current of pedestrian traffic as we gradually plucked off random light items and placed them near the curb. Out of the stream of people a faint but distinctly unmistakable smell wove out to caress our nostrils much like a cartoon scent, tickling both our noses at the same time and causing us to follow the stream in unrehearsed but perfect unison; nose in the air, eyes closed, hands held out as if to touch it. We turned to each other in a simultaneous moment of revelation.
'It's on the street! You can smoke it on the fucking street!'� Marcus laughed in awe.
I gritted my teeth in a tight grin of glee, 'I love this town!'�
It was ultimately decided to unload Amy's stuff first, for she had more of it, and three stories of stairs to climb. Narrow stairs. Stairs that would not conceivably allow the passage of an overlarge hide-a-bed sofa. It couldn't even fit between the banister and the wall. Marcus and I heaved it, he a level higher up than I, up and over the banisters in a careful act of weight, balance, and the pure-steel force of human will. Up and up, tilt, pull, tilt, pull, grunt, gasp, curse, tilt again till the third floor and Amy's door where the ceiling was lower than normal and the accursed object actually became uncontestedly stuck. It was too big and homely to dwell in the tiny apartment of a high-school teacher in east Manhattan. But Amy demanded its presence, and Marcus and I literally tore that hulking monstrosity to pieces and carried them one at a time through her metal front door, to rebuild it, slightly diminished and not as sound, in her living room where it would never leave again.
We were rewarded with warm Fresca.
What sane, life-loving person drinks Fresca? And warm at that. I'd had just as soon downed a large glass of hot-dog water.
It turned out Amy wasn't as interesting as I had hoped. A full two heads shorter than myself, she wouldn't consider a male a male lest he was from Spain, and I'm inarguably Scotch-Irish right down to my red goatee and roaring temper. No hard feelings though, and for all intensive purposes, the Spanish could have her. Short, dumpy, dull, presumptuous, and callous; when she smiled she looked like she was in great pain. Nothing like her six-foot blonde, trim, and smugly friendly mother. I quickly realized that Marcus was following through with this whole endeavor for the benefit of the beautiful Susan, and that he would have helped her move furniture to the deepest level of Hell just to be around her.
What's-her-face arrived after the moving ordeal was over, looking as picturesque as her mother, but with a coldness that arrived in the room before she did and a harbor for the family lust over Spanish men. Tall, blond, and confident, she was a spoiled and sinister little twit straight through to what one could consider that raisin she called a soul. She never spoke directly to us. What's-her-face's apartment was more spacious, looking like a left over abode from the 1920's with twelve foot ceilings and everything in one giant room, save for the pull-chain toilet and claw foot tub. It lurked on a side street easier to unload furniture onto (Susan had had an altercation with the police on Third Ave in which the officer used a string of words that were most unprofessional, but quickly resulted in Susan moving that massive Dodge truck around the block.).
What's-her-face's back window opened up level with the back roof of the sushi shop the place was built over, a tar splattered balcony with periodic exhaust chimneys and air conditioning units rising from the soft muck. The week before she had had a party and some super model, of which she was obviously annoyed we didn't recognize his name, clambered down one story to the enclosed courtyard below and stole one of the two picnic tables. She was still laughing about it, and had decided not to ask her mother to bring up the lawn furniture because of its procurement.
On the whole, What's-her-face had less stuff to move, a lamp and a regular couch to be exact, but a group of guys on the stoop across the street offered to help us out anyway. One took the lamp, and three more helped us lug the couch up to the second story, the friendliest one hanging around to talk of matters mutual, meteorological, and minute. Come to find out, he was from Kinston.
Susan slipped him a twenty when the others weren't looking.
We went back to Amy's tiny, pristine apartment, had an actual New York pizza for supper, predominant with long slices of onions, to the accompaniment of any and all Ricky Martin CD's that the trollish little woman had on her shelf. And then, when the love of all things Latin was blissfully over, we tried to sleep amongst the ceaseless sounds of motors and car-horns that preside over a New York City night.
It was the last time we saw Amy, we didn't witness What's-her-face again till the next night for less than a minute, and we didn't see Susan till Sunday morning when it was time to leave. They went on a hunt for their cherished Spaniards, a romp which took them to numerous parties and locals around the city, in atmospheres far too posh for a couple of simple white boys from down south. But, we wouldn't have enjoyed such company in the first place, and that was an unspoken and mutually understood conclusion.

We woke Saturday morning to an empty apartment and a note to wander about at our leisure with two numbers in case of emergencies. So, we locked the door and roamed the City. I in my frayed camouflage army jacket and notoriously gaudy Hawaiian shirt, with torn jeans, scuffed combat boots, and a stretch of blue fabric laden with Superman symbols tied firmly over my week's worth of hair growth which I had not yet got around to shaving. And a camera, of course. Marcus wore a wife beater and some loose jeans. And his shoes, once he found them.
Bagels for breakfast from a testy deli owner who demanded my money before I could even say what I wanted; looked at the Con-Ed building with bland interest as we ate the largest bagels in history. Touched the Empire State Building and got a massive sense of vertigo clinging to its stone side and looking straight up to its impossible reaches. Susan had warned us that only tourists look up in New York, to keep our heads down and our eyes on the pavement. But, how could we see anything that way. We were there to see the sights. Otherwise, why come at all?
Numerous street vendors down to Greenwich Village, then back up to Times Square which was under some kind of construction and boasted 'Annie Get Your Gun'� with Annette Benning and the umpteenth showing of 'Beauty and the Beast'� which no one loitered around. There was a sword store underneath and a little to the right of the home of the New Year's ball and that giant product-pushing T.V. We went in, for giggles, and there on the rack was a replica of the sword from the Conan movies, two films I had loved since I was seven, the wide blade, three foot blade mesmerizingly dazzling in the rare rays of pure sunlight that bless the depths of the chasmful city. Ornamented with a host of wave-like swirls, two snarling lions emerging as the hilt, and heavy just to look at, it hung on two wooden hooks, an item I never dreamed to look upon in my life, and with a more than reasonable price of $130 stuck to its surface.
I must own that sword.
I picked it up.
'Don't touch! Don't touch!'�
The short and sure Indian man behind the counter five feet away had leapt the distance between us in less than a second and was very close to my person, visually contemplating the idea of pulling me apart limb from limb. I believed him.
Gently placing the sword on its hooks I extended my other arm palm down as a good, slow comforting gesture of a reasonable boy from the south. 'It's cool man,'� I said, 'I was gonna buy it.'�
Business whipped back in his face. 'I don't sell displays. He'll get you one out of the back.'� He snapped his pudgy fingers at someone over my shoulder then was back the five feet to the counter as if he had never noticed me. I turned around and a long white box was placed in my hands. I didn't even look at the guy, but snapped open the top flap and pulled the blade out just enough to admire intricately carved pommel and hilt. It was as cool as refrigerated steel and smelled of oil.
$130. Next in line.
Times Square is small no matter which way you cross it. Merely a tight triangle cut deep down into the city. It's sad really, and apart from the seven-story billowing poster for the Matrix, was quite disappointing on the whole. We went down the Ave of the Americas, bought a hot-dog or three from vendor in front of the Radio City Music Hall, our drink cans sporting faces from the recently released Star Wars Episode I film which Marcus and myself couldn't decide if we really liked or merely liked. Past the Rockefeller Center which always graced the intro to Saturday Night Live and where, of all the people in the whole of the world, Ricky Martin had just wrapped up a street performance in front of a gaggle of fans who didn't know any better. We didn't see Amy. But we didn't look real hard for her either.
There are television monitors bolted obscenely to the pillars in St. Patrick's Cathedral.
Down to Madison Avenue, which had an oddly familiar side-street that I soon realized was the corner where Hank Azaria was almost tread upon by Godzilla in the 1996 flop of a film. Being fans of giant lizards, we followed Godzilla's path of destruction with my sword boxed up and slung over my shoulder, two more quiet streets to stand beside Grand Central Station, hidden in the shadow of the Pan-Am building, and which was strangely empty for such a renowned hub of traffic. Grand Central has beautiful detailed carvings all around its summit of men, animals and wavy things, and it made me shake my head in abandon when I heard several years later that there was an interest in tearing it down and replacing it with another tower of glass. Somewhere on Lexington, deep into the City, the street had been barricaded off for a large street vendor sale that had attracted quite a packed crowd. Marcus was bent on purchasing a knock-off Rolex, so we waded in, and while he looked at watches the Goddess of New York appeared to me from the midst of the throng.

How do you know when you've seen a Goddess and not some mere mortal?
When everything ceases in the world but you. When one minute your part of a massive living organism, each part functioning in order; the ecstatic sales pitches from the booths, the haggling customer, the steady murmur of shuffling bodies and confined steps, the roar of conversations of a thousand different topics, and it stops.
They stop. Everything stops.
Except for you.
You can't even hear your heart beat because it simply doesn't, and you can't move of your own will because it would take a thousand years of sheer effort just to blink. And you know that something is not right, for everything has just stopped and the man beside you buying the $80 dollar knock-off Rolex is holding his money in the air and the dark skinned guy holding the obvious rip-off is just grinning at it but not moving, the people on the other side of the booth talking of something not related to cheap watches are staring into space, one with her mouth opened and the other with her lips pursed out, and the swarm of human beings ceases and becomes so still it blurs together so that around you are merely fixed shadowy shapes in a tightly packed jagged landscape and from between a bearded man caught in conversation with his girlfriend and the dazed looking guy in the toboggan She walks right out in a blare of silent Glory.
And She really does glow. She radiates. Not light, but so much overwhelming life in Her every movement that She practically reflects off of the frozen elements of clay around Her, each one caught up in an eternity of a second on a typical Saturday morning.
She simply walks through and there is always room for Her, gracious room, a pathway that is simply there for Her in that instant when She chooses to descend. Her dress is as luminously black as the farthest distance between stars and it drapes her every divine movement with a fluid life of its own.
She notices you, Her luminosity pulls your eyes to Hers and She looks right into them stronger than anything humanly possible so that all you can see are those two brilliant spheres set into the most perfectly formed concept of soft and living human-like features, so blue they could be portals to an eternity of the most celestial summer sky. She looks at you, from beneath hair like golden strands of pure sunlight, pulled back and contained from the marvel of her slim neck and shoulders by a force you cannot see, a force powerful enough to grasp intricate strands of raw solar energy and form it into a concisely rolled twist on the back of Her head. She graces you, so that there is absolutely nothing in all of existence but Her face and those eyes lost in a sea of bleak shapes. And those eyes See you. Not the cruddy matter you wear and give to the world as yourself, but what is inside, what makes us, each and everyone one us, part of an eternal transcendent existence beyond anything anyone could even hope to understand.
And She smiles at you.
Just for you.
A smile as glorious as the first sunrise on a pair of new lovers, with lips as full and red as the happiest moment of your life. She smiles at you with that celestial visage and the blood within your mortal shell cries out in reply.
She holds your gaze, caressing your vision, smiling as bright as a thousand miracles, and sliding the essence of your being across an eternity of jagged humps of humanity until She passes between a tall laughing woman and a taller man with a beret peering over the crowd.
And the man beside you gets his watch merrily as the dealer gets his wad of greasy bills in much the same fashion. The woman with her mouth open laughs, while the other finishes her unheard anecdote with a comically serious pursed face. Sudden movement spins the air around you as people weave about in mad patterns of possible destinations. The smell of amassed living bodies in motion makes the nostrils sing with the startled inhalation of stopped breath. She is gone, and the roar of raw humanity explodes in your head loud enough to make you stagger.

Marcus grabbed my shoulder. 'What's wrong with you, man.'�
I hadn't known it, but my mouth was wide open. I could feel my eyes bulging from their sockets at the area in the crowd where the tall laughing woman and beret sporting man had went their own ways in this continuing moment of life, and had left the view open to the complete disappearance of my deity. Marcus held a metallic blue knock-off Swiss watch and examined me with concern.
'I just saw a Goddess,'� I gasped. I barely breathed it amidst the rumbling of these amassed people and Marcus heard every syllable. It was apparent from the look on his face, that the composure of my own and the gravity of my barely audible words were the only proof he would ever need in so great a claim.
'Where?'�
We searched the crowd for five minutes, my eyes unashamedly tearing in hot, turbulent joy, and I often had to blink them clear as I wove through an obscure and blurring chaos of t-shirts, business suits, and sun-dresses. Booths of cheap jewelry, watches, a menagerie of hats, toys, oriental massage tables with cheerfully beckoning tiny shriveled women, each merely part of a mist of human life I meticulously picked through.
But even before I took the first step I knew I would never see Her again.
Though I could have instantly consigned myself to search for Her forever in this city. As easily as breathing, cast down everything in my life, everything I had deemed worthwhile and sane, and live in this city and walk amongst its people and nod my head in southern friendliness at head after head after head after head after head until I saw those eyes again. To see Her smile at me once more.
And that's when I knew it. That's when I saw the ritual of it. I saw what ensnares people, even those thousands of miles away, what hooks into their hearts every time they hear the prayer in the name of New York. I saw, in physical form, that Desire which embodies one of the most complicated temples to human life ever built. Not the gross, physical desire that assaults the human senses for members of their own species, but a radiant power composed of the untold dreams and myths of this space, this typhoon of human civilization. It was Glorious.
But, I knew, I knew with a certainty as solid as my own existence that I would never look upon such a sight again, no matter how many of its streets I walked down or how many of its mornings I searched for it. I saw the passion of the city, and knew it would grind me down to my soul to try to chase it, to grasp it with my meager hands. It would trap me and confine me, as broken and insecure as the hide-a-bed in Amy's apartment.
I was not meant for this city.
Lo, but I was tempted. I was almost a disciple.
But I recognized this temptation, and knew that I would always be content just to have seen it, just to witness the true soul of New York as it wound its way between my fellow human beings.

I carted that sword over more blocks of Manhattan than I care to remember. Countless crosswalks and waiting for traffic and continuous hot-dog vendors.
There must be a veritable Hot-Dog Empire in New York.
Side streets calm of traffic and shaded pleasantly by thirty story or more monoliths built for the aspirations of men and women I would never meet. With facades carved with the complexity of generation upon generation of architectural style, stone to glass, ornamented to angular, and each one as worthy an achievement as the other. Each one as Holy.
Mile after mile of concrete and civilization and the drowning overwhelmingness of millions of ordered, separate lives on millions of ordered, separate courses. I saw them in their offices and apartments, level upon level of them stacked to the heavens on a generous portion of rock that must groan continuously from the weight of them all, and rumble as a Kraken who has feasted upon to many curious souls. I was joyous for them, but I wanted no part of it.
But, what was limiting me? What was keeping me from clamboring up the rocky shores of this man-made island and finding a home and name for myself among its many niches and towers? I came from a region of obscure opportunities, where the ways of life of the past century were ebbing away to the progress of a Nation. There was nothing for me in Deep Run. There was nothing for me in Kinston. And, even when I was through with school, there would be little for me in Greenville. Even the hopes of my education were waning as I was marching steadily towards a degree I had no concept of what to do with. Why go back? Why roam once again the streets of deserted stores and collapsing warehouses, the miles of unkempt farmlands, the major retail chains wiped across the landscape, killing off individual businesses and herding the overcrowded unemployment population into lower paying and higher demanding positions.
Why subjugate myself to Chris again?
The answer was simple. Because it was my world. It was what I knew, it was what I lived in and understood. To throw it all down and flee into the face of something I couldn't understand was close to madness the more I thought on it. Drop myself off at the corner of Modern Society and Right Now and I would never see myself again. I would become something else, which was a disturbing thought, because I really liked who I was.
They don't allow swords on the premises of the United Nations. I had figured as much, though it also seemed kind of silly at that time. As if someone genuinely expected a man to walk into the United Nations Building with a four-foot broad sword and start carving off heads of diplomats left and right. Now we know no weapon is too big or too small, just so long as it is a weapon and readily available.
They also don't allow baby strollers.
Block after block. Deli's every thirty feet or more. Block after block. Busy people with little patience shooting past you every few feet. Block after block. Plywood corridors boarding construction areas, slathered with coatings of the exact same poster enticing with some band or fashion show, or condemning the latest action of government that was worth condemning. I took one of them and slid it into my pocket, a picture of a child amassed by a swarm of war toys, an Uncle Sam hat perched on his head and his mother towering over him. 'If you can't play nice with your toys,'� she said down to him, 'you shouldn't have them at all.'� Block after block. Admired a statue of Ghandi in an area of which I didn't know where we were. Block after block. Meet the coolest eight-year old kid the Bronx had ever produced.
Block after block. It wasn't long before we were surpassed with heady exhaustion. Marcus and I tried random payphones, calling each of the two numbers we had been given, but no one bothered to answer until well after six o'clock. They were at the apartment farthest from us, naturally, but would meet us at the one closest to our position near the Con-Edison building in a matter of moments.
I took one of those moments to purchase a liter of Captain Morgan's Silver Label Spiced rum. And the main reason I bought it was because it was a liter. I had never seen metric liquor before.
What's-her-face appeared long enough to let us in to her place, where we got righteously drunk on the roof of the sushi shop outside her window. Politely drunk, not the 'woo-woo'� drunk of the average college males, but the philosophically deep drunk of two men after a day of awesome sights and experiences. Marcus had found some fencing swords on the table of a random blind street vendor. He had asked the price for one and the man quoted it, steep but acceptable, but Marcus took both of the gold foils. I felt horrible until I realized the man hadn't counted the bills after he took them quickly from Marcus's hand.
We fenced, we solved the world's problems of hunger, wealth, and warring religions and we were undeniably Right and True in that steep valley of human achievement. I spoke continuously of the miracle I had witnessed and Marcus was dead set on using our new connection with Amy and What's-her-face to find ourselves apartments and jobs here, and to spend the rest of our days searching for Her. Marcus never questioned my experience, he held it as true as any gospel ever composed, and he was nearly as obsessed with it as I was.
Later that evening a group of women came out into the courtyard a story below us. Stooped, tired women, darkened by shadows from the solitary lamp that crooked its way from the crimson brick wall. We conversed unashamedly as drunks with loose tongues, and the women below were thrilled with our company. They were boarders in a battered woman's shelter that faced a different side of the block we dwelt in and welcomed an unexpected entertainment after the end of their host of grueling days. The same city Marcus and I had reveled in was no where near as kind to these women. But, that beautiful Goddess had promised me nothing as she passed, and it was a profound observation on my part. This was a place for Chances, the majority of which do not end magnificently.
They were a bit dejected at having only one picnic table for the twenty of them with which to sit around and smoke over, and so we explained the gross maneuver perpetrated by What's-her-face and her friends, as well as our own contempt over it and such a breed of people. We laughed about having their place for the night, a great ironic event in which the slummy poor kids had gotten the run of an elite dwelling from a woman who wouldn't have spoken to us in broad daylight. Imagine it; it's like handing over the keys of ones Mercedes to the guy that delivered the sofa. In a dramatic show of courtesy and heroic strength, the two of us lowered that awesomely heavy wooden structure down to the strong waiting hands of those women below and they cackled in glee as they sat around comfortably in that isolated pocket of the city.
We celebrated that night, with full moonlight gradually falling down the steep walls of the city around us. Some of them would dance, someone would tell a story to get us laughing, and Marcus and I would sword fight to their amusement. I shared the bottle with three of the women down there, passing it in a dangerous procedure of hanging off the ledge with Marcus grasping the back of my pants while one of their shadowy figures stood outstretched on top of the table we had lowered.
A middle aged woman, a mother defined by her every darkened movement and the knowing command of her voice, chastised my foolish endeavor even as she smiled in the thin light and put the bottle to her lips. As firmly compact, powerful, and loving as the memory of a hundred mothers; down, beaten, but not conquered by a man who felt compelled to punch her in the face for his own delusions. She had come back to the city where she was born two generations ago, come back to attempt to grasp it again and make it give her what she had never had. I never caught her name, but it turned out she had arrived from Kinston as well.
Drunken nights fade out. That's how they end. And this one was no different, fading in just as customary as one slowly awakens in a place and position they could not conceive of ever finding themselves in.
I awoke comfortably in a lawn-chair on the bristly green plastic turf outside What's-her-face's window, draped in a beach towel with an empty bottle of rum clutched to my chest, a cheap rapier hanging loosely from my left hand, and the fronds of a potted palm playing over my body in the gentle morning breeze. My eyes opened, and I beheld the chrome eagle heads of the Chrysler building surrounding its sharply domed metallic peak, towering higher than the world around me, hazy from distance and as brilliant as divine method with the reflected power of the rising sun and a sky the color of a Goddess's eyes.
And I laughed with all the strength of my being.
It was Good.

Marcus was draped through the windowsill, and it wasn't long before we were up and moving. No hangovers. No baggage from our adventures. Two sane men awakening on the start of another day in the City. Bagels for lunch, then we caught up with Susan at the underground garage, and as rapidly as we were enveloped by apex of civilized design, we were back through the tunnel and on the endless blacktop home.
Later that night, after we got to our notch of an apartment in Greenville to find our beds still safely covered in our junk, Marcus's watch exploded in a neat little spray of cogs and wheels.
We couldn't help but laugh. We had been expecting it and he had paid for the incident just as surely as he has paid for the watch. He placed the remains as gently as shrine on his dusty and crowded shelving network, and that's where it stayed till I moved out a year later.
To those I entreat with this account they chuckle and dismiss my claim, allaying my vision as a supermodel fresh from a shot or a flashback from previous indulgences that we have had in common whilst lost among the wonders of metropolis. And I shrug at their disbelief, for after all it is to be expected. How many people can actually believe in the presence of divinity roaming among the common individual? Marcus did. But he saw it on my face the instant I came back, as telling as stigmata to a devote Catholic. I had seen something wonderful passing through those living canyons of steel and shining on its people absolute brilliance, and I had wanted to be a part of it with every vibrant particle of my being.
I have seen New York.
But, more importantly, I came home again.

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