The resistance of the persistence of memory

I am in New York, at a shitty hotel on 75th Street, where the lights flicker, the water tastes like there’s a dead body in the tank, and you can take either a hot or a cold shower and that’s it. Now I’m supposed to subvert your expectations by telling you that I love it here because it’s so New Yorky or something, but I’m going to subvert any such subversion and say that I wish I was in an Airbnb but they had nothing open in this neighborhood because I booked last minute. It’s actually a crap hotel, though the people are nice, and it’s convenient to where I want to be. On the other hand, I have to go out to the benches on the traffic median on Broadway if I want to smoke.

So I just got back from the bench in the median, feeling quite good about it. 10am, ignoring emails and texts, just smoking in the sun, watching the delivery trucks negotiate for space. A guy in a red work shirt takes a photo of a bag of recycling in the street before moving it to the sidewalk. I have lived here on this bench forever; I am this bench.

• I used to live on 75th and West End. I can almost see the building from the bench. I’m not going to walk by it, I don’t need to. It doesn’t matter where I lived. Every time I come to town I don’t need to do the whole tour: West 75th, West 82nd, West 41st, West 16th, West 15th. West Everywhere. The other day I took a cab that went down East 96th between 2nd Avenue and the river, and so of course there was that whole thing that I didn’t ask for and don’t need.
• I used to smoke weed in the median strips of Park Avenue. They didn’t have benches then. It was 1990, I was going to Hunter College on 67th Street, and we’d buy dime bags at a particular rock in Central Park, then crouch among the shrubbery between the downtown and the uptown side of Park Avenue to smoke. It was enchanting, in its own way, our ceremonial circle of two to six people, hunched on our haunches like gnomes, gleefully passing the pipe. And how funny, when we all stood up, and the forest fell away to our knees, and we emerged like giants, startling passersby.

I used to, I used to. The older you get the more things you used to do. This neighborhood has been squeezed a hundred times already, I’ve milked every drop of my Natural History onto the page. I’ve written about West 75th Street, the conversation with Arianna and Ashley on 76th, babysitting for the conniving little rich boy on 77th, running into Pam El-Okdah while buying cigarettes at the bodega. The same wax figures waiting for me, whether I visit them or not.

It’s lovely today, smoking on a bench, raising my mask when someone walks by. I love not worrying about being arrested for smoking, something I’ve been paranoid about since I got caught up in a sting on Astor Place back in 1994, when Mayor Giuliani sent a special force to the East Village to deal with the high-priority issue of dime bags.

But this is a different city now, isn’t it?

I don’t need to walk by the old place again. This is the place. This desk, at a window overlooking that bench, on the old street I don’t need to walk down today. I am the place.