A throng of doctors enters St. Luke’s Roosevelt every morning at 5 AM. One after the other, lab-coats resplendent under the still-illuminated streetlights and the neon-yellow glow of the parking garage, they walk into the building. There is, it seems, a shift that starts at this ungodly hour, which puts my own frustrations at being awake before dawn into perspective. Nearly. I am, as ever, entirely exhausted. From certain angles I catch glimpses of the sun rising over what I assume to be Astoria (though with my abysmal sense of geography I can’t be sure; it’s just as likely to be somewhere in Brooklyn) and walk uptown in complete silence, watching the ghosts of empty, off-duty taxicabs follow one another down otherwise un-navigated avenues. It’s a bizarre thing, this traveling through Manhattan at extreme hours, as “the city that never sleeps” emerges from a state that resembles just that. The doctors glance at me: sideways, incredulous; with looks that seem to answer my apparent, misguided self-pity saying “I’m saving lives. What the hell are you doing?” I laugh at myself. “Me, sir? Me? I’m going to serve cupcakes.”
The cigarettes start early on these mornings. I light up and watch Columbus Avenue come alive from “my spot” under the awning next to the store, stalling with impunity before my own day begins in a cloud of baked goods and people coming and going and coming and going and coming and coming and coming and coming in indefatigable waves. Most of them are faceless, nameless combatants in the fray, people to whom I’ll utter a word or two—how can I help you today? Will that be all? —but others, the occasional few, have become staples of my day, coming in at the same time every morning, ordering the same things, with a sense of routine that is at once comforting and jarring. I come to depend on their arrival, a mark of welcome consistency, stability, in an environment in which such things are few and far between. In these moments, I cannot help but feel myself a voyeur, having been given an infinitesimally small glance at the daily lives of these people who are otherwise strangers. I’ve been given names, occupations, the occasional introduction to a family member, a friend, a lover, and bits and pieces of minutia that make up ounces of their humanity.
This city, notoriously impersonal, lends itself to this particular flavor of interaction. In my own home, at night, I’m often inclined to peer outside at the building directly across from my own. From my living room I can see solipsistic windows of consciousness, bright lights that shine on people, families, living within inches of each other, never aware of the presence of The Other existing in the same manner right next door. The lights shine and I shamelessly watch as they go through their own routines, unaltered night after night after crystalline night. The city buzzes on and on below, both unaffected by and dependent on the ebb and flow of this little pocket of life. My job exists much in the same way, and when people ask me what I like about what I do, I say to them this: I love being present in the lives of others.
On my side of the counter, people come and go in equally brief flashes of light, illuminating the dark for what feels like moments. As customers enter and exit, occupying their brief stints inside this place that I’ve come to spend more time in than my own home, my coworkers—occasionally, rarely, delightfully, my friends—are also prone to rapid arrivals and departures. A refuge for the misbegotten, for the broken, this place, with its constant, purgatory-like undercurrent of the temporary, attracts those who must be there, whatever their reasons, for what seems a predetermined, predestined amount of time. They are here and then gone and here and gone again, as the seasons, ever punctuated by the decorations adorning the walls, come in and out with the wind. Having been at this place for well over a year, I’ve watched the ethos of the store change utterly as swarms of new hires flood the floor. At several points I’ve tried to get out, but the inward draw, the inertia of it all and more than anything, those who stayed, made me carry on.
Back in suburbia visiting my mother, there are no streetlights. And so my block is completely dark and desolate as I move though space, driving until I reach the house that is directly across from the one that was once my own. The man who lives there, who has lived there for my entire childhood, prepares to move across the country to Arizona to take a job coaching a professional Hockey team. He will leave his wife and five daughters, here in the land of BMW convertibles and perfectly manicured Power-moms with Donna Karan Suits. His garage is open, the neon overhead casting a light on his toned, bulky figure packing up the boxes, boxes, boxes of his life, lining them up perfectly on his driveway. In the morning I wake up, and the garage is empty.
Sometimes, often, I am moved beyond words by the absence of people who exist on the periphery of my life.
Habitually, I keep odd hours. Waiting for the D train at Columbus Circle at a time when most of the world sleeps, I cannot help but stick my head out over the tracks, ever impatiently, waiting for the light of the first subway car to reach my gaze, to take me home. The train station is abandoned with the exception of a man playing Clapton on his guitar on the other side of the platform. I walk the hundred yards over to where he is sitting, give him a dollar and asks if he takes requests. He laughs at me, all disdain and grit, and says no. The tracks are illuminated and shining fluorescent as a starkly empty ghost train bolts by the station. It is meant, now, to discard the unwanted rubble from the ground. It paves the way for newer trains to come though, to take people away to wherever they will go, and hurtles through station after station, as reminder, to those of us on the periphery, of what once was. In a different place, in a different time, its cars were packed and hot as people pushed one another aside to get on.
Eventually, my own train comes. I am alone in my car, which strikes me as devastating. But on this island of the perverse and driven, in a city whose face changes at the speed of light, in a job that ushers us in an out, in an age group that thrives on the ephemeral, on the transient, the sentimentality that overflows from me is a hindrance. I try to train myself to feel less. To let the men I sleep with leave before the sun comes up; to not recoil as I realize that nearly all of the people that enter my life, even the ones whose drunken confessions hit so close to home, are more transient than the night. And I am relatively successful. Still, though, there are times when I am riding up Central Park West in a cab in the wee hours of the morning, smelling like nicotine and whiskey, listening to a new friend spill his guts out to me, when it becomes rather hard. When I realize that, in spite of the fact that people leave as the night turns to morning, in spite of the mendacity of the every day, in spite of the frustrations, in spite of myself, I am moved. And I love it all
As I walk home, I see the lights of the hospital shine on with abandon.
Bunny
9 years ago
