OK, SUNDAY FUNNIES.
Introduction.
I wrote this for the Shouts and Murmurs feature of the New Yorker Magazine. They read it, and told me that Shouts and Murmurs were "humorous" fiction pieces. I've sent many many things to the New Yorker, and been rejected many times, but that was the first time they had actually been rude to me in a rejection. In fact, I think the problem was that whoever the ASSHOLE who read it and rejected it was, knew very little about mid-western, California thinking or humor. Probably some brat brought up on 57th street who had not moved more than three or four blocks in his entire life His, or her, range of humor lay within a 12 block radius. Idiots are born and reared and well educated in NYC, and even get good and influencial jobs sometimes. What they don't know about is the Redwood Mafia. Old hippies who have a serious ax to grind with non pot-smokers in NYC. They're coming for you. They know where you live, you New Yorker Columbia fuck. Enjoy your last few days on Earth.*
BRAVE NEW CITY OF THE FUTURE
By
Douglas C. Ferrin
I’ve been living in Eureka –
that’s in Cali – but I always have considered myself a New Yorker. I’ve been to NYC four times; this trip will
make five. That’s in fifteen years mind
you. You could say I’m bi-coastal.
That’s a long flight from Arcata/Eureka to NYC – oh,
about fourteen hours on a good day. Once
there were rumors of a non-stop but it turned out that that was just talk. So on the jump from Eureka to San Fran, there
were only two of us in the eight seat Cessna and the other guy pretended to be
asleep. I know he was pretending because
I saw him crack open his right eye and I saw his eyeball dart around too.
So when I got on the plane from San Fran to Houston, I
was sure ready for some good chat with my neighbor. He had the window and I had an aisle
seat. And boy what a grump he was. He was mumbling when he said it, but I’m
pretty sure he told Jesus Christ Himself to shut the bleep up. Talk about trying to get blood from a turnip.
The food was crummy but I didn’t care because I was going
to be in New York in a few hours.
Well it was night by the time I landed and I got a cab to
my Soho hotel; I closed my eyes for the whole drive because I wanted to see the
city at first in broad day light. It had
been nine years since my last stay and I wanted to see this “Brave New City of
the Future”, as everyone kept calling it, in its boldest brightest colors. Once in my room, I closed the curtains,
ordered in Chinese and watched the tube until I fell asleep. In the morning I went down to the coffee shop
in my hotel and had the continental breakfast with eggs and bacon. I sat at the bar so as not to look out the
windows. Then finally it was time.
I was almost shaking in anticipation. I opened the café door, fully opened my eyes
– and a good thing because the guy with the jackhammer was three feet from the
door and I would have lost a toe maybe a foot if I hadn’t been looking where I
was going. Now I really was shaking but
mostly from the gripping fear that often follows the relief – that: “thank God
I still have my toe, or my life or whatever” feeling – of still being in one
piece. So I scooted out of the way of
the door and of the three guys working.
One of them was working anyway, the guy with the jackhammer. The other two drank coffee. I stood next to the building at the inside
edge of the sidewalk. I looked up. I looked around. I know it made me look like a tourist but I
did it anyway. My mouth fell open. Soho hadn’t changed at all. Where, I asked myself, was the big geodesic
dome covering the city? I’d seen it on
the cover of a Scientific America at the dentist office just a few weeks
ago. And the monorails? When the guy with the jackhammer stopped
jackhammering and lifted his goggles to hoot at a girl, I said, “Hey. Where’s the dome?”
“The what?” he said, wiping the back of his wrist across
his forehead, but still looking at the girl.
“Hey Baby, don’t be that way,” he called.
“You know,” I said, “Isn’t there supposed to be a big
dome covering the city and all the monorails?”
Still distracted by the girl, the guy said, “Huh?”
I repeated my question.
The girl had gone into a shop.
The workman frowned thoughtfully, looked up, shook his head and said,
“Yeah I dunno. Maybe.”
“Hey, maybe you’re digging a hole for it now!” I
exclaimed, the idea just having occurred to me.
“Yeah, I dunno what it’s for. I’m union,” he said. “I don’t think so though,” he continued after
a pause. Nodding toward the coffee
drinkers he said, “Think these guys are with Water.”
“Well,” I said.
The jackhammer guy put his goggles over his eyes again, said, “Sorry
man,” then once again shattered the relentless noise of the city.
I felt lost. I
mean I knew where I was. Like I said, I
consider myself a New Yorker, but maybe I had been expecting too much; after
all I hadn’t actually read the
science magazine – I’d been called into Dr. Soman’s office just as I was
picking it up - but it had looked so real.
I’d read other things too: about the friendly new face of the city; how
people were more relaxed because there was less crime; how businesses were trying
to have a kinder “interface” with the public, as one article had put it.
Well, being in Soho already, I hopped over to Mary Boone
Gallery. The same gaunt, effete looking
fellow in the expensive suit who I had first seen maybe thirty years ago sat at
the same little table outside the door to the gallery. After thirty years, he still wouldn’t look at
me, even after my big west coast, “Hi, howya doin?” I went into the gallery but the walls were
empty. A guy who looked like an action
painter from the sixties was up on a cherry picker moving lights around. “Hey there,” I said. He didn’t answer, but he did glance down at
me. “Any good shows in town?” I asked.
“Futhiscrp,” he mumbled.
“CRAP!,” he said, having burned himself on a hot bulb. He sucked the side of his hand, then saw me
still standing there. “Go to Chelsea,”
he said.
“Chelsea?”
“Everybody moved to Chelsea after 9/11. Check it out.”
He didn’t have a gallery guide so I went to the subway to
see how to get to Chelsea. The subway to
Chelsea appeared to be one of those proximity things, like the Vatican subway
stop in Rome that lets you off when St. Peter’s is still somewhere beyond the
curve of the earth. “Bleep it,” I said
and took a cab.
I couldn’t believe there could be art in the concrete
chunks that passed for buildings in Chelsea.
And yet, when I went into one of them, there must have been a hundred
galleries. In that building alone mind
you. I’m serious. I started on the ninth floor and went to
every gallery on the top three floors.
By the sixth floor I was parched and feeling faint. I soldiered on for another floor but then I
had to sit in the only chair in a white room the size of a college field house
with one painting on each wall. I put my
head in my hands but it didn’t do any good because every time I rubbed my eyes
or even closed them I could see sun-spot-like images that had burned themselves
onto my retinas of twig horses and busted old radios and kitchen stuff on shiny
wood floors and brutalized mannequins. I
staggered back out to the street and asked a man in a suit if there were any
coffee shops around.
“Go to the Village,” he said. “It’s better there.”
Suffering from severe Museum Fatigue, as I call it,
tired, hungry, thirsty and sad, I walked east for a mile until I finally saw a
cab. I think he saw me too but I’ll
never know. After an indeterminate time
one stopped for me. “Where to?” asked
the cabby as I got in. “I wanna go home,” I said, closing the door.
“Yeah? Where’s
that?”
“Arcata, Eureka… you know.”
“Wellll….” he said.
“Uh… what street’s that on?”
“I don’t care,” I said.
“Just head uptown. Up the middle
of town, please.”
“Yeaaaaa, OK.
Fifth Avenue OK?” he said. He was
looking at me in the mirror; I nodded and off we went. I had him let me out somewhere in the 40s
outside of one of those old Chock full ‘o Nuts diners, except it wasn’t Chock
full ‘o Nuts anymore, but it looked the same.
It was already late afternoon. I
had the place to myself so I took a table near the window. “Whattl it be?” the sixtyish waitress with
craggy skin asked.
“A new lease on life,” I said. “A functional childhood and a new look at the
future.”
“I hear ya’,” she said and laughed but I wasn’t trying to
be funny.
“I’ll have coffee and three Coney Islands,” I said. “And a big water.”
“You got it.”
And actually
the peace and aloneness and the coffee and hot dogs were almost as good as a
new lease on life (I knew I’d never get the functional childhood). I sat in the warmth and silence of the diner
looking at the noise outside – people in suits and skirts and with strollers,
all but power-walking, the cars reflecting the orange late afternoon sun off
chrome and mirrors so I had to squint sometimes. Tired but somewhat refreshed, I almost
started to feel at home. I walked up to
57th St., and went in to some book shops. The air was getting chilly and the sun was going
down as I entered a building with galleries.
There weren’t as many as there used to be because everyone had gone to
Chelsea and some of my favorites had gone bankrupt, I was told by pretty girls
behind big wood desks, and some of the owners had died, but I saw a couple of
good shows anyway.
I walked up to Central Park and saw the trendy shops for
children and people who like Apple gadgets and crossed to where the carriages
give rides. Someone on a bike advised me
to “Watch where the bleep [I] was bleeping going,” which actually made me
smile. I had saved the apple slices from
the airplane lunch I had bought the day before – they were in plastic wrap and
still in my pocket and they had that old-lunch pail kind of smell. I asked a driver if I could give them to his
horse and he said OK. The horse gulped
them down, almost taking off my hand and slobbering it with its huge lips. It breathed out, warm appley horsey air right
in my face, then it rubbed its nose on
my shoulder and I patted its warm, steaming, acrid smelling neck.
I headed uptown: I wanted to see that big Rembrandt
painting where he thought he looked like a Chinese Emperor at the Frick
Museum. Someone somewhere that day had
told me that further uptown Harlem was jumping.
I didn’t really care, but it was interesting. Across from the Frick, I breathed deeply and
looked down at the darkening park and the crowd and rumble and all the movement
and the middle-aged lady reading down below the balustrade on a bench, deeply
absorbed in her book. I hadn’t been to
Times Square yet, which someone somewhere that day had told me was now a Disney
park. Nevertheless I decided things
hadn’t changed much at all. Not
really. That made me happy.
THE END
* I am making perhaps the very wrong assumption that most people reading this have some sense of West Coast humor and don't need the specifics mapped out for them. For example, when our protagonist claims there were rumors once of a non-stop flight from Arcata to NYC, he clearly places an excessive degree of importance in his tiny home town and its little airport. Let me know if you need more help, or if for some reason some joke escapes you, like they certainly did for the New Yorker Columbia Fuck who rejected it from the magazine: the man or woman who will be dead by next WASP Wednesday, a Redwood spike with a banana slug strapped to it's blunt tip, driven through his or her spleen..
©2013
Douglas C. Ferrin
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