August 28, 2010 - Bicycle ride

I went to go buy a new keyboard and turned it into 50 miles on the bike. When I crossed over the Triborough I was overcome with panic. I think it's a sign. I mean that literally: They put up a new sign that invited people to call the city rather than committing suicide. It promised hope.

That threw me. It made me wonder about all the people jumping off the bridge. And the fact that you wouldn't even have to jump. You'd just put one leg over the railing. Like getting on a bike.

Normally I switch straight back to Manhattan but I decided to go up, until I was mid-Bronx. The street numbers here are ridiculous. Up to 140th, 150th, 200th St. With other streets in between; there's no particular grid as there is in Manhattan, just a steady increase in digits as you drift northerly.

Poor neighborhoods smell a certain way. Boric acid and old street food and cooking grease. Diapers in the sun. The ethnicity doesn't matter. It's just poor.

There was a place called The Baller's Club. Later I found a strip club next to a barbecue joint at the top of a hill, right above Roberto Clemente State Park. I checked my phone and found myself and felt less despair; the last of the panic faded.

Throughout the city the parks were filled with people singing on assembled stages, sponsored by radio stations. I passed three or four of these. Crowds, cars doubleparked, paratransit vans blocking the flow.

I would say I was lost but I had no particular route. After crossing over to Inwood at 207th St. I found a little scene, restaurants with outdoor seating and milling people carrying sporting goods. Then I discovered what I thought was a middle passage to the greenway along the Hudson. A difficult path. A warm day. For a mile, maybe more, there were people scattered. They stood in the middle of the woods alone, or by the water. A man holding a little bag appeared to be putting his pants back on, or maybe he was just enjoying the sunshine. They looked at me guiltily as I biked past. Or perhaps just with interest.

A mile later I found that this park had no exit. I rode back, walking my bike over the stretches that were just heavy railway gravel so as not to fall. People out for a stroll. Water glinting through the trees. I thought about the railway tracks of my childhood, the way you'd find artifacts of adult life--beer bottles, condom and food wrappers. You might poke them with a stick and interrogate them and try to understand them but just as likely you'd absorb them into your world; beer bottles could be perched on the rails (the trains hadn't been running for years) and you could throw stones at them from ten feet away to see if you could break them. They weren't litter; they didn't have a context; there was no imagining who had left them there, or any sense that they had been left. Like the tracks themselves and the cars going by. Given my last name I was keenly aware of Henry Ford but had no sense that cars had been invented, were built and created.

I come back to one memory often. I was eleven or so. I was walking along the tracks, maybe coming back from the video rental store. It was dark and fall and I saw a person huddling in the bushes, doing something. Needle drugs? Near the projects. But neither the concept of needle drugs nor the concept of projects really registered. All I saw was the silhouette and as a kid I didn't see it as anything strange, just something vivid. In my head whoever it was, no matter whether it happened or not, he or she is curled up exactly like the infant Jesus in his mother's arms.

When I was twelve I fell in love with a rich (well, upper-middle) girl and I woke up early one morning to find where she lived. I walked three or four miles, passed her house, and then lacking anything to do about it I came home. The police stopped me by the woods. I told them I was out for a walk. They said okay. I was maybe thirteen. I didn't have a lot of supervision for various reasons. And I walked home and turned the key in the door. At some point in my life I must have been given a key to my own house, but I don't remember.

Lunch at the Pakistani Tea House.