How can you hate this untidy bitch?
She is all walls, true. She flings up buildings like army stockades designed for protection against an Indian population long since cheated and departed. She hides the sky. She blocks her rivers from view. (Never perhaps in the history of mankind has a city so neglected the beauty of her waterways or treated them so casually. Were her rivers lovers, they would surely be unfaithful.) She forces you to catch glimpses of herself in quick takes, through chinks in long canyons, here a wedge of water, there a slice of sky, never a panoramic view, always walls enclosing, constricting, yet how can you hate her, this flirtatious bitch with smoky hair?
She’s noisy and vulgar; there are runs in her nylons, and her heels are round (you can put this lady on her back with a kind word or a knowing leer because she’s a sucker for attention, always willing to please, anxious to prove she’s at least as good as most). She sings too fucking loud. Her lipstick is smeared across her face like an obscene challenge. She raises her skirt or drops it with equal abandon, she snarls, she belches, she hustles, she farts, she staggers, she falls, she’s common, vile, treacherous, dangerous, brittle, vulnerable, stupid, obstinate, clever, and cheap, but it is impossible to hate her because when she steps out of the shower smelling of gasoline and sweat and smoke and grass and wine and flowers and food and dust and death (never mind the high-pollution level), she wears that blatant stink like the most expensive perfume. If you were born in a city, and raised in a city, you know the scent and it makes you dizzy. Not the scent of all the half-ass towns, hamlets, and villages that pose as cities and fool no one but their own hick inhabitants. There are half a dozen real cities in the world, and this is one of them, and it’s impossible to hate her when she comes to you with a suppressed female giggle about to burst on her silly face, bubbling up from some secret adolescent well to erupt in merriment on her unpredictable mouth. (If you can’t personalize a city, you have never lived in one. If you can’t get romantic and sentimental about her, you’re a foreigner still learning the language. Try Philadelphia, you’ll love it there.) To know a real city, you’ve got to hold her close or not at all. You’ve got to breathe her.
Take a look at this city.
How can you possibly hate her?
The Sunday comics have been read and the apartment is still.
The man sitting in the easy chair is black, forty-seven years old, wearing an undershirt, denim trousers, and house slippers. He is a slender man, with brown eyes too large for his face, so that he always looks either frightened or astonished. There is a mild breeze blowing in off the fire escape, where the man’s eight-year-old daughter has planted four o’clocks in a cheese box as part of a school project. The balmy feel of the day reminds the man that summer is coming. He frowns. He is suddenly upset, but he does not know quite why. His wife is next door visiting with a neighbor woman, and he feels neglected all at once, and begins wondering why she isn’t preparing lunch for him, why she’s next door gabbing when he’s beginning to get hungry and summer is coming.
He gets out of the easy chair, sees perhaps for the hundredth time that the upholstery is worn in spots, the batting revealed. He sighs heavily. Again, he does not know why he is agitated. He looks down at the linoleum. The pattern has been worn off by the scuffings of years, and he stares at the brownish-red underlay and wonders where the bright colors went. He thinks he will turn on the television set and watch a baseball game, but it is too early yet, the game will not start until later in the day. He does not know what he wants to do with himself. And summer is coming.
He works in a toilet, this man.
He has a little table in a toilet in one of the hotels downtown. There is a white cloth on the table. There is a neat pile of hand towels on the table. There is a comb and a brush on the table. There is a dish in which the man puts four quarters when he begins work, in the hope that the tips he receives from male urinators will be at least as generous. He does not mind the work so much in the wintertime. He waits while his customers urinate, and then he hands them fresh towels, and he brushes off their coats and tries not to appear as if he is waiting for a tip. Most of the men tip him. Some of them do not. He goes home each night with toilet smells in his nostrils, and sometimes he is awakened by the rustling of rats in the empty hours, and the stench is still there, and he goes into the bathroom and puts salt into the palm of his hand and dilutes it with water and sniffs it up into his nose, but the smell will not go away.
In the winter, he does not mind the job too much.
In the summer, in his airless cubicle stinking of the waste of other men, he wonders whether he will spend the rest of his life unfolding towels, extending them to strangers, brushing coats, and waiting hopefully for quarter tips, trying not to look anxious, trying not to show on his face that those quarters are all that stand between him and welfare, all that stand between him and the loss of whatever shred of human dignity he still possesses.
Summer is coming.
He stands bleakly in the middle of the living room and listens to the drip of the water tap in the kitchen.
When his wife comes into the apartment some ten minutes later, he beats her senseless, and then holds her body close to his, and rocks her, keening, keening, rocking her, and still not knowing why he is agitated, or why he has tried to kill the one person on earth he loves.
In the April sunshine four fat men sit at a chess table in the park across the street from the university. All four of the men are wearing dark cardigan sweaters. Two of the men are playing chess, and two of them are kibitzing, but the game has been going on for so many Sundays now that it seems almost as though they are playing four-handed, the players and the kibitzers indistinguishable one from the other.
The white boy who enters the park is seventeen years old. He is grinning happily. He walks with a jaunty stride, and he sucks deep draughts of good spring air into his lungs, and he looks at the girls in their abbreviated skirts, and admires their legs, and feels horny and alive and masculine and strong.
When he comes abreast of the chess table where the old men are in deep concentration, he suddenly whirls and sweeps his hand across the table top, knocking the chessmen to the ground. Grinning, he walks off, and the old men sigh and pick up the pieces and prepare to start the game all over again, though they know the one important move, the crucial move, has been lost to them forever.
The afternoon dawdles.
It is Sunday, the tempo of the city is lackadaisical. Grover Park has been closed to traffic, and cyclists pedal along the winding paths through banks of forsythia and cornelian cherry. A young girl’s laughter carries for blocks. How can you possibly hate this city with her open empty streets stretching from horizon to horizon?
They are sitting on opposite sides of the cafeteria table. The younger one is wearing a turtleneck sweater and blue jeans. The older one is wearing a dark blue suit over a white shirt open at the throat, no tie. They are talking in hushed voices.
“I’m sorry,” the one in the suit says. “But what can I do, huh?”
“Well, yeah, I know,” the younger one answers. “I thought... since it’s so close, you know?”
“Close, Ralphie, but no cigar.”