Crossing Manhattan

To: Retort
It appeared online in The Living Issue: Creative
Non-fiction.


Crossing Manhattan
Gloria Frym
October 6, 2001



     The smell is first.  It invades the car, a town car driven by a
Pakistani who claims he's Indian, who used to make his living picking
up businessmen from the World Trade Center.
     "No sir," he keeps punctuating with sir every few words. "No
sir," I'm not Pakistani, I'm Indian.  I'm Indian, you know," a true
servant, unaware of how irritating faux servility can be to Americans.
He'd pulled up just after we tried to hail a cab in midtown late
afternoon.
     "Yes, sir, that is so.  Pay what you like, I haven't had a fare
all day.  I was in Ohio, two days ago, sir."
     "Ohio?"
     "Yes, sir, I had to pick someone up and take him to a car that
had broken down in the countryside."
     "How long to drive there, to Ohio?"
     "Oh, about six and one half hours, sir.  Not bad."
     "How much was the fare?"
     "Oh, it came, sir, to $550."

     There is a mesh pocket on the back of the passenger seat stuffed
with magazines.  Something to read on the car trip, I guess.
     As we move past the East Village, the smell comes first, invading
the car, windows shut.
     We drive through an emptied Chinatown, an emptied Fulton St. Fish
market, and by then the smell crowds the car.
     This driver is very talkative, unlike the cabby earlier in the
day, with a sign posted clearly and unequivocally in back of his seat:

          Driver Does Not Talk.
          Has No Voice Box.
          He had a Laryngectomy.
          Thank You.

His license reveals recent Russian heritage.  No doubt if he talked it
would be difficult for most passengers to understand him.  The Cold
War with his native country now over, his president our new best
friend, he doesn't have to talk.

     We drive and the smell saturates the car.  The driver is
interested in what we think.  Especially about the financial scandal.
He hasn't had a fare all day, he slept in his car on September 11, not
able to return to his home in Queens.
     "And I had nothing to eat either."
     This because there was no place to leave the car?  Which he
leases and which he was about to let go until yesterday when someone
wanted to do as we were doing, go to the site.
     "I can take you very close to Ground Zero," he says, "closer,
sir, than most cabbies.  I think you will be very pleased with my
work."
     And closer we got.  Windows down now.
     I attempt to explain puts and calls to him, since he is very
interested in the flurry of margin selling of airline stock in the
days preceding September 11.  This only makes him more impressed and
servile.  Now I am Miss to my companion's Sir.

     The smell:  my companion has a muted sense of smell, he wants to
know, he can't grok it.
     Burning rubber, burning metal, burning electrical wires, burning
hair, burning flesh all at once.  Acrid and highly polluted air.
Beyond anything one has ever smelled in New York.  Surely the Jews
were forced to smell what issued from the terrible exhausts of the
ovens, and the ones who made it over here should never have to smell
this. It is a smell that no one, having smelled it, will ever forget.
The perfume of the Metropolitan Opera goers later does not ameliorate
this smell.  The pleasure of Placido Domingo's rich tenor does not
distract this smell.  Sound could not stop this smell.  Beauty could
not make a dent in it.  It stayed in my nostrils for days, forever
blazoned in some corner of the synaptical attic of the brain.  All I
have to do is inhale and it freshens.

     The driver, by the time we crawl past the Fulton Street Fish
Market, is silent.   There is traffic, he is concentrating, he is
diligent to a fault, earnestly driving into the cordoned off ruins,
which are vaguely visible from certain intersections.  We settle for
the block of the closed American Stock Exchange, Rector Street near
West Broadway. A single glimpse of the center, the skeleton of one
building, My god, I gasp.  A gasp I repeat two or three times.  There
are National Guardsmen in camouflage fatigues directing traffic.  Not
many people, tourists.  The sun is almost down.  A U-Haul is parked
below the barrier, a single Victorian red upholstered chair next to
the open doors, boxes, a woman in the van being handed objects by a
man who is being handed objects from the lobby of a building where she
lived.
     The driver stops, wants to know if he can pick us up afterwards.
How long will you be?  A while, we say.  No matter.  Give me a time,
I'll be back for you, sir.
     We get out and walk to the corner of a street that seems to serve
as an artery for huge trucks hauling out debris.  They sound like
tanks in a war.   Exhaust mixes with the burning air.
     A quiet stream of tourists marches single file down a small
street perpendicular to the barriers, hoping to get closer on foot
than a car is allowed.  A bicyclist speeds by, stopped by two
policeman.
     The center of the ruins up the block foreshortened in the
distance.  It is a horrible sight, though less shocking than I expect.
Yet one doesn't really want to linger.  One doesn't want to gawk.  We
are through looking, there is no life, no stores open, nothing but the
clean-up crew.  A bombed out sight, an eery chill from the water.
     We wait for the Pakistani to return.  My companion has left his
sweater in the backseat.  He had given the driver $20.  The driver
returns, his silver town car slowly pulls up and stops for us exactly
where he left us off.  It is dusk.  The smell.  The smell.
     We are happy to see him.  But depressed and silent.
     We drive north along FDR Drive, past the bridges, under the
bridges, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, they blur--to the east,
the water, the ships, the boroughs like little towns in a model,
scaled down for the eye.
     "Do the ferries still cross from Brooklyn?" I ask my companion
who lives in New Jersey.  He doesn't think so.
     Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face! said Whitman.
     "I had a customer from out of town.  I took him back and forth
for several days.  I believe he was very pleased with my service,
Sir."
     Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! stand up, beautiful hills of
Brooklyn!
     Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers
     Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution!
     Sound out, voices of young men! loudly and musically call me by my
          nighest name!
     Live, old life! play the part that looks back on the actor or actress!
     Play the old role, the role that is great or small according as
one makes it!

     "I have no card, but you can call me any time.  Just give me a
half hour margin."
     He tears a piece of paper from a book, writes his name and number
on it, hands it to my companion.
     "Any time."
     Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
     Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
     Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the
bright flow, I
          was refresh'd. . . .
     Look'd at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of
my head
          in the sunlit water,
     Look'd on the haze on the hills southward and south-westward,
     Look'd on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet,
     Look'd toward the lower bay to notice the vessels arriving,
     .....
     The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sunset,
     The scallop-edged waves in the twilight. . . .
     Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm'd
          Manhattan?

     We ask about the machine on his dashboard.  It is some kind of
computer that registers pick-ups.
     "I am third in line for a job.  I put in at 1 o'clock, there are
130 town cars.  I haven't had a job all day, but I am third in line."

                         # # #

 Gloria Frym is a poet and fiction writer whose most recent books are
Homeless at Home (Creative Arts Books, 2001) and Distance No Object
(City Lights Books, 1999).  She as been core faculty in the Poetics
Program at New College of San Francisco since 1987.  She was born in
Brooklyn.