TWO-BIT PHILOSOPHY ON VANDAM STREET

261. TWO-BIT PHILOSOPHY ON VANDAM STREET (nyc, 1968):

It was peculiar to its time and place - windswept waters near the road covered by leftover cars with fins and carousel-trucks still wet with kids and mothers - the simple sort of things one finds at carnivals and flea-markets at the broken edges of both marshes and minds - all those flaky neighborhood kids coming out with broom handles and bats to play stickball at the back of the alley where the old factory trucks still slumping slowly lost the air in their tires and the right to ride : anyway those three vagrants who lived there had always lived there and nothing for them had changed - cardboard to pressed board and a shopping cart to boot - just like the exotic animal that was shipped from New Zealand but never made it to the zoo from Paris to New York it came - all those outlandish ideas of eccentric men tumbled over the years ('we are free we are slaves God is dead God is enraged it's all up to you it's all pre-ordained' - listen up and take your pick) - over the years nearly all of Manhattan's weird streets accumulated myth and legend one over the other with personalities and activities arrayed from the likes of Barnum and Lincoln and everyone in between and since - playwrights authors robbers and thieves cheats and swindlers whores and preachers scribblers artists dramatists painters builders charlatans liars explorers men of science pimps hookers whores doctors and kings too in every walk of life there's trouble and joy whether an amble trot or run they come the came and they stayed and because of them then the city was as it was (is) and grew to be what it is (was) - a bifurcated mix right now of crap and garbage and trite death with all its junk - and we read the past with its glories and stories FOR THAT IS SIMPLE ALL WE GET and that was the time and place : from it one at a time the individual basis of hat we are each doing 'I make my reality you make yours and I make mine again' as multi-layered and cantilevered as a ziggurat from some biblical fantasy rolling at a trot over the bounding landscape and WE inhabit it ? do we ? at a risk to ourselves : the speaking man says 'I don't know any of that for you see I was born here and really don't know anything else unlike many other people I talk with who seem to know it all or think they do and who are always from somewhere else with far-flung journeys which bring them here whether it's business or theater or education or whatever and then they never seem to leave and I often wonder the multi-layered effect of this city is composed of how much of original people born here and raised here and how much by deft outsiders who adopt in and make stay - and where do these natives go I wonder when they leave their parents' nests and how do they find other places - it is easy or difficult for them is it expensive or not and do they take the parents' places over as death and illness wear them out to death and how much beneath all that old bedrock of once-New York is flavored by the constant and ongoing old blood of people who've been here over family generations and who have influenced the sense of place that comes with all that for you an outsider can only bring with them whatever they've taken from the outside which eventually changes the flavor of New York as New Yorkers seem to have only their own hard way of doing things certain and peculiar to themselves but it's simply all we get - one step from cannibals and killers as we are' and I listened hard with nothing but disinterest - the kind New Yorkers get - for really how much of this is one person supposed to take ? it's all over before you even listen anyway - all those Hannah Arendts of the base-philosophy of the little-man - the gentleman Jim of the tidy-sum slum going about his business and carrying out orders with nary a doubt nor a second-look in : down by the wharf I was watching the rats scurry - they jumped from tire to tire and each tire piled up in a heap had some water pooled in the bottom and each rat in turn found its own secure way of tasting the film to see what the logic within tasted like.