Riddling City

We’re walking down an unreal afternoon anyway to get a beer and dissolve the concrete craziness back into human watercolor graffiti as if the buildings would sprout and grow leaves and flower and drop colored pieces of themselves all over the late afternoon late August sidewalks.

“What’s brown and sticky?” she riddles me, but it’s no good. My brain is flat and blank and steams like summer asphalt.

“I don’t know.”

“Try and guess.”

So I cast the imaginative light spell. All this dumb geometry – something somewhere must have something meaningful to say. Behind the buildings’ stone faces lies a thoughtful parallax.

Or not. The newspaper building slumps like piles of gray papers.

City and cities and cities and City City City. Shenzhen Chicago London Rome. Alexandria Babylon Uruk Ur. In crooked mudbrick alleys, through narrow packed-dirt streets ancient crowds in colorful robes and rags press. Past market stalls crowds ebb and flow where scents of spice, beer, goats, cheese, shouts of boys, goats, hawkers fill the air and a thief or a madwoman, a witch anyway with twisted mouth and flashing eyes bites her lip and draws back deeper into shadows while through a second story window a thoughtful face studies the energetic scene.

Still the newspaper building slumps like a pile of old newspapers with blank windows for headlines and that fake print they use in publishing: “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.” As I walk along the pavement my feet sink ankle deep in concrete, that’s how heavy I am.

My thinking is tent towns, my thoughts are squatters’ shacks, words paper wrappers wind-whipped from mouths and blown around corners they, slivers, scraps, half settle in dust tangles, scraps, remainders, trash, here and there, wherever winds are blowing city trash. Pigeons make nests with them. Pigeons make nests with them and they look at me quizzically as if I have something meaningful to say and I do, but to them it is always the same half-mad half-finished sentence: “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.”

I think of Harold Lloyd teetering crazily on I-beams of half-finished skyscrapers high above the city as …

… in the middle of the intersection, shuffling about in the middle of the intersection, staring straight up and teetering on the brink of the dangerously insane, Jay the Crazy Guy is walking in crazy circles.

“Just walk by. Don’t make eye contact.” A bus could come by any second.

“It’s Jay the Crazy Guy.”

“Just walk by,” because who wants to talk to the crazy guy? If a bus comes by, slam! Crazy Jay pudding. But when we enter the street he stops, looks at us quizzically, and reports:

“I’m picking up smoke.”

“They’re burning the fields.”

“Don’t talk to him, he’s crazy,” my elbow says to her ribs.

“It don’t smell like no fields burning,” Jay twists mini logic pretzels and throws his nose back up into the air.

Beginning with wattles, beginning with clay, and always ending … where? Every answer is a kind of sadness, the bodies, the buildings, the books, the bodies the books the buildings … Every answer a kind of sadness.

At a booth in McMenniman’s the server serves us two pints of beer while outside the window Burnside street continues, the buildings, the bodies, the books …

City city. Salesmen made up with confident half-smiles, confidence a diamond stud in the ear, their tongues are green, eyelids blue, with rouge on their cheeks out into the city twilight they roll their powerful cars. Down back-ramps of parking-garages out into the night, out under the stars. Tall buildings crowd to the balcony to see, daughters of wealth, tall buildings with their hair done, with half a dozen lights on – bright points high up in their firmament – where janitors are emptying wastebaskets into wastebaskets. Daughters of wealth become starry night sky and breathless bride endlessly virgin and starry stage set, too. Wastebasket into wastebasket, down backramps, down service elevators, through the building, stairwell, veins. These and these are the heiresses, salesmen pay their court, deposit wastebasket into wastebasket, blood and kidneys, intestines and bile, who push out powerful machines, down and out the back door, push out under the stars to woo, to wastebasket, to alleys, into blood, into basket, into blue-green dumpster, blood under night sky, moon under buildings, everybody see! and starlight touching every bright surface, car gloss, excrement, babies, dead prayers, blood and city trash, under a purple sky we will dance the red-green dance tonight.

“Are you going to drink that beer or not?” she says.

“Certainly I’m going to drink this beer. Of course I’m going to drink this beer.”

City city! In morning kissed with a blush pink sunrise, lithe the beautiful steel-glass structures, athletic stars on a concrete mat, city gymnasts who foil the asphalt, leap up into the air skyward, ever skyward. They gather their children inside them who cry “We’ll ride these life-sling elevators high, oh my darling!” then vivo in vitro, corpuscles in concrete and steel swim the blood-vein slipstreams into office, into cubicle, where cell by cell they each secrete the psycho-chemical language, distribute the culture, the money, the trash, and become the material function of dreams. Here walk the strong-loined makers, the movers and shakers, here stride the confident movers and doers past reception on 3^rd floors, through foyers on 17^th floors, past flowers in Oriental vases on 25^th floors, past corridor art on 38^th floors, on 53^rd floors on waiting room sofas, on armchairs, on desks of office assistants supine in bureau, all pink skin and consummate smile, right-hand assistants with gloss-fine bodies whose powerful thighs whisper “Every marketing decision is Life or Death” when in offices sperm meets seed and speaks the unconfounded language: “This deal, this deal means everything!”

“If you don’t drink that beer, I’m going to drink it for you.”

Oh city city, mind-material consummation, knower of the world and badge of being, dream text, proof solid of each human and the whole of humanity, crawling with bodies of nervous insects, thought-termites who chew the world and vomit out knowing, bodies and buildings and books, all knowing, who in the dead of night weep praying “to escape the language, catch the light that flashes skyward, leap from beam to I-beam to space where language fulfills its dream of ever knowing never being” almost, and folded in mental-material secretions we imagine we overcome, we humans, humanity. In our city cities we mistake our lovely loving detritus, imagine our buildings are future pointing, suppose we’ve escaped the delicious scandal, mind in material, who can do no other but work it work it work it into something besides what it is, city city, our blessing, forgiveness, forgetful building, sweet distracting Holy Ziggurat! into you we escape, sweet business of building, to you we turn our minds and hands as crane our necks and cry out loud: “Let’s hoist this brilliant termite mound heavenward!”

“Hey.”

“What?”

“Where’s my beer?”

“I drank it.”

So we walked home beside the sea of traffic, cars and busses and motorbikes and cars and traffic like a circular steel tide, we walked beside faces abstracted behind steel and glass, in their cars like mermaids and mermen peering through window and sheet metal foam, windowglass-cursed, sad-eyed, half-blind. The city shore washed in traffic, concrete scraped with steel, glass scrubbed with carbon monoxide, asphalt massaged under vinyl and millions and millions of tons of mechanical elbow grease squeezing, whose soul is pressed and scraped and rubbed and caught on a billion bright surfaces, panes of glass, angles of steel, in windows on third floors, caught on chrome bumpers, on bottles, on candy wrappers, street lights, sandwich foil, fenders of buses, whose soul is reflected from hubcaps, sunglasses, wristwatches, eyes, is caught and thrown back and thrown back and thrown back, is lost in a million reflections …

“…” I said.

“I smell smoke,” she said.

“You do? Me too.”

“What could be burning?” she wondered. “Everything is concrete.”

On the corner across from the freeway on-ramp in a small gap, an oversight of concrete, grew a bush. Behind the bush a small patch of ground was smoking.

“Why is the ground smoking?”

A ring of smoke was seeping up through the dirt. I kicked around with my toe, but the smoke was coming from deep inside.

“How can the ground be smoking?”

“I don’t know. It’s smoking though.”

“A smoke ring, even. The earth is blowing smoke rings.”

“How can …?”

“It happens all the time this season of the year,” the policeman said. “Farmers outside town burn the stubble from their fields. A coal or a hot ash carried on the wind falls and works its way down into the loam and smolders.”

He smiled at us.

“I’ll call the fire department.”

And he did. He liked us. Why shouldn’t he? We weren’t walking in crazy circles. We didn’t smell smoke when there was no smoke to smell. We walked back home alongside the traffic flowing endlessly into evening.

“A stick,” I said. “What’s brown and sticky? A stick.”

“That’s right,” she said. “What’s brown and sticky and covered with mud?”

Here we go round again and the buildings never grow flowers to drop on autumn sidewalks, they just stand there and grow old. Which is almost the same thing.