The Horns of My Dilema

From my journal:

6/27/2007 6:41 AM

When we came home the other day in the mail was our lottery number for the Mitchell-Lama buildings on Queens Boulevard and 60^th Street. The Number is 1! Apparently there are vacancies and in the next few months we will probably be moving in. It costs a pittance and the fees are about half our current rent per month. Linda and I walked around there yesterday and the place is a classic towers and gardens development of big buildings with balconies on a well-manicured campus. A bit sterile and off the beaten path, but for a rent reduction of about 50%, we’ve got to consider it. I feel most sorry for Mason who has made friends and goes out and plays here in the neighborhood. Chandler is pitching a bitch.

6/28/2007 4:33 AM

I tried, but couldn’t get back to sleep this morning. Yesterday was the kids’ last day of school for the year. Good grades and good kids. Chandler came home jokingly bewailing her next class assignment, “nerds, nerds and more nerds.” Mason went with his friends from school and hit Burger King and then hung out at the park playing soccer. Lennox went to the zoo with school and Linda went with them. It was a good day.

As I walk around Sunnyside Gardens, which was recently landmarked by the City Council, I was struck by how much I really love the neighborhood. It is living like this that I came back to New York for. Trees, stores, livable scale, neighbors are all in a pleasant neighborhood. Sigh. Of course to turn our noses up at the savings that living in the Mitchell Lama co-op would offer would be foolish. So what I have is a battle of my two basic flaws or strengths.

 

I am an esthete of some sort. I like the way things look and the style and livability matter a lot to me. How I feel in a particular place, how it pleases me aesthetically really, really matter. This is both because I think of myself as a man with my own, uncompromising philosophy of style: good living is something that validates my specialness. And finding the beauty tucked away in a crowded immigrant neighborhood is the exact type of aesthetic ur-elitism that I link to my identity.

I am also frugal. Actually it is a strong sub-current of my personality. I think it is both genetic and learned from my salty New England mom. I don’t like to waste things. As I’ve stretched into middle age I’ve noticed that I behave I a lot like depression era seniors: rubber bands, paper clips, and other expendables get saved because I might have to actually buy them later. I am an ant in the ant/grasshopper continuum.

Now these are not exact analogies, but I think that this comparison works: my inner Martha Stewart is in a life and death struggle with my inner Susie Ormond. They are locked in a Canadian Cage Match-Up, fighting to the death. GRRRR. 47 years old and I’ve got blond bimbos fighting it out for my soul. I thought I outgrew this whole lust thing with puberty. Susie Ormond, played by Jessica Simpson, fights tooth and nail to defeat Paris Hilton as Martha Stewart for my eternal soul, and the future happiness of my family.

Will the tag-team of Ormond and Simpson win and cast me into the perdition of the towers of doom, where my monthly expense will be cut in half, though my elitist sense of self will wither and die? Or will it be the paroled Paris Hilton with her ex-con partner Stewart, with their ineffable sense of style (perhaps seasoned by time in stir), that will win out and cost me thousands of dollars a month to maintain a haughtier image of myself? Oh, the fates are cruel, my life decided by an all blonde-ambition WWF tag-team fight to the death in (and for) my soul.

So these are the horns of the dilemma that I live on now. Fortunately I alone am not responsible for this decision, and I will lean heavily on Linda and the kids to make the choice (though it ain’t lookin’ good for the doyen of style and hotel heiress and their frivolous ways).

Please, good readers, if you are out there, weigh in on this one: let me know what you would do. Send me an email, or leave a comment here.

Bike Dreams (part IV)

Part 4

On a cold clear evening, After his last month-long Metrocard expired, when the paper said that it was going to stay dry Kiko took the bike home, riding up First Avenue, over the Queensboro bridge and then following Queens Boulevard out to Jamaica Ave and then on to Sutphin where he found his way home to the house he had a space carved out of the basement garage.  He locked the bike in the yard and slept well after the long ride.  It took him a bit longer than the train, but he had seen things he had never known about Queens.  He had saved two dollars and had made it in about an hour and a half.  It was dark at 8:30 when he got home and unwrapped the uneaten pasta from the hot salad bar at work and at a version of Rigatoni with meat sauce that he had made before dawn three days ago. 

He had added the kim chee and bean paste that Mrs. Choi did to her own to give it some flavor and after the ride home it was great.  The Mexicans and the Koreans marveled at how the blandest food sold the best to the Americans that all of their children and grandchildren would end up being.  Kim chee, Bean Paste, jarred jalapeños, or rarely, fresh chiles were liberally added to the food that was more than two days old that everyone brought home from work to eat.  Spices were the one thing, like broken English, that united the Latinos and Koreans across the Pacific in New York.  Everyone added tons of fiery hot flavor to the bland fare as a way of expressing some sort of superiority over the bland English speakers for whom they all worked like sled dogs. 

He fell right asleep after he showered and the alarm had trouble rousing him, though he woke at 3:15 every morning, whether he went to work or not.  He didn’t realize how much the ride had taken out of him yesterday, but he was now late.  He thought about putting the bike on the train, but instead wolfed down the rest of the pasta with some extra jalapeños cold and got on the road at 4 exactly.  There was no traffic and the red lights didn’t matter, he was on it.  The basket was empty on the way to work and he just pedaled as hard as he could from the get go.  There were some hills on Queens Boulevard and he pushed himself up them at a good pace and tore down the other side at daring speeds. 

Squeaking along on my bike story

Part 3

He got there at about 5 or so Monday through Friday and started cutting and prepping the salad bar. That means that he had to get on the F-Train at Sutphin Boulevard at before 4 for the hour-plus long ride in. The Newspapers, in English or Spanish, that he could buy (and read) had no-where near enough words to occupy him for that long ride, even if he read every word about the antics of his hometown team in their latest losing season (they even lost to Club America with their playeras that have the big yellow BIMBO across the chest!). The fare and the paper cost him two and a half hours and four dollars and fifty cents each and every day. That was the pay for his first hour at work, gone, just getting there. While it was more than he could make in a day at home, on the days that someone needed him to work, it would still be better spend on the kids.

Kiko el Proxímo, his first son’s first bike had cost less than that, though it was used. He treasured the picture of little Kiko with the matt blue bike with pink showing through the scratches like white toothy smile scratched into his wide brown face. When he had left Kikito was three and took seriously the responsibility of being the man of the house after Dad had gone north. The bike was proof positive that he had done an excellent job for the years his father was away. He had fabricated a basket of coat-hangers for the front of his bike like the picture of Dad that had been sent home. When he was six he could ride the mile into town to get harina de maiz for his mother and carry it back in the basket like his father’s in New York.

When the days got longer in that first April he asked Mrs. Choi if he could take the bike home. He had been fixing it and buying things to keep the ratty Wall Mart bike funcional for the entire winter. When the bike shop above Canal asked for more than $10 to fix something Mrs. Choi did the calculations and paid Kiko an extra hour or two to fabricate something out of common hardware and packaging materials that would work at the cost of time and friction. She was apoplectic when she learned how much the tires he had worn out delivering thousands of dollars of food a week would cost to replace. After the third flat she relented and let him buy and replace them with tires so knobby that they looked like the pre-911 skyline. To her thicker was better, though Kiko knew the friction slowed him down for the first few hundred delivieries.

More Bike (and a bicycle story)

I went for a nice interboro bike ride yesterday but just before I got home an older man on a little girl’s bike popped out from behind a van peddaling as fast as he could. We collided head on. He went over the bars and looked like a scarecrow with bad teeth and a good haircut. I couldn’t break out of my clipless pedals and went slowly over to my left.

My wrist is sprained and I wish that I wasn’t still angry at flaco. I did not scream or threaten him, though an ugly part of me wishes that I had. I am hoping that it is not broken, though it does hurt.

Part 2

By fall he was doing all of the deliveries and Santayana never took off the doctor’s gloves that the city man with the clipboard told Mrs. Choi they had to wear while they cut things for the salad bar. It seemed ridiculous to treat the red watermelon like it was un bebé, (Kiko’s first two children had been caught without them, though Simón had first touched a world covered in rubber). “It’ll be cold soon and you’ll be wearing gloves too” he chided as he rubbed lotion onto the white hands that emerged from the rubber gloves after six hours of cutting, stocking, wiping and refilling. They looked like the hands of the body they found in the river when he was six, waxy and white. He only snapped on the condones por las manos when he was fixing his bike to keep the grease off hands that were hard and brown from the handlebars and sun.

It made sense to everybody that Kiko deliver the goods because he could take soup to Murray street by the river, cut up to Leonard Street with a salad, and still get the french fries (before they got soggy) down to John street. They learned this when he and Santayana had left at the same time and Kiko had beaten him back after delivering three meals. Santayana was no slacker, but Kiko was FAST. He had the perfect combination of steering, that perfect snake-like skill, and speed. He could pass cabs with fares on empty avenues if he needed to, though the avenues were rarely un-congested.

Before this happened he had also had to figure out the streets in lower Manhattan, which were so confused they reminded him of the city plan at home, where the livestock had laid out the paths that became the streets where the men who had gone north before him had built houses, strong out of good imported cinderblocks and glass windows that kept the dew out and curtains in. Like his ability to pick the best way through a gridlocked traffic jam he learned the streets that have confused residents for centuries instinctively. He just knew where things were.

A Bicycle Story

It is spring and I’ve been riding my bike about New York and I had an idea for a story. I’ll put the first bit up here, because it is all I’ve written for a while. I’m sorry that I am not telling you all about my life right now, but I’m busy and -I guess- hiding from it.

At 7, after the pans from the salad bar had all been washed, the fruit that didn’t sell thrown out, and the produce that would still be good tomorrow was wrapped in cleaned, bleached and dried square pans readied for 7 tomorrow morning Kiko got up the nerve to ask Mrs. Choi if he could borrow the bike. This was just six weeks ago, but it was in a different lifetime. You see Kiko works on Vesey Street, for an ambitious Korean deli that doubles as a carry out coffee shop.

“Good food cheap and fast” was his life since he made it to New York. At first he was a nervous riding the bike with the wide wire basket in traffic. After his first month he was used to the neighborhood and could calculate the best way to go to three addresses below City Hall and deliver warm food to each. He got so good at judging the width of his basket that he could, -como los negros dicen- “dip” between cars and trucks without slowing down. Once Santayana had seen him swerve down the last block of Broadway, from the Park side to Vesey on his way back to the shop. The traffic was moving, say 15 miles an hour, and Kiko “dipped” from one side to the other in less than a block, cutting between one lane to the next, first between two newspaper trucks, then in front of a cab, staying next to “un coche policial” for the time it takes a Mariachero to sing a sad laugh, before he pedaled hard to pass the undercovers and break through to the west side of Broadway.

“Ño bro, you gonna get killed like that! Tienen una isla por los cuerpos extanjeros en New York. Cuidate!” Santayana warned with mock gravity. “Besides, Mrs. Choi see you back here and she only send you out with more” he continued with an old-timer’s wisdom. His amazement was written on his face though, “but how you do that? You rolled in and out like jarabe tapatio, I could imagine the girl’s skirt following you around the yellow cabs. All you need is some music and a hat, you be ballet folklorico on a bike!”

Kiko liked the attention and felt varonil, manly in a way that he never felt in Manhattan while he delivered clam chowder blanco to rude “norteños en trajes.” There was a way that folks in Manhattan treated him like he was nothing because he didn’t speak ingles, and this work on his workaday masculinity.