Brooklyn Bridge

 Manhattan and Brooklyn are connected by threads of traffic and steel.  But Manhattan is more important.  Manhattan’s frail island is where everyone thinks they are going to when they go to New York. Dramatic dreams take place in front of great museums or on smalls streets filled with bars in the West Village.  The map of New York is not a map at all but a list of events, each one validating the giant.  But none of it is real.  New York is a city of miracles, floating delicately between the Hudson and the East Rivers, filled within the tiny squares of well-organized blocks are great stories of artists and writers and singers and dancers, gangsters who loved and lost and shot guns in Manhattan. 

            When I was young and lived in Jersey I had the same kinds of dreams.  I saved up and would come in by the Path to shows where all the bitches wore belly shirts and, though my friends got laid, I’d get too fucked up and wind up asleep on the train or puking in a garbage can or maybe the streets.  Those streets.  On those nights I’d just walk around until that morning grey permeated through the streets.  The city was my mother and the weaker I was the more she seemed to embrace me.  I could hardly walk, and the harder the streets were the more I loved them, because every one has life.  It’ll never get suckled out, not by all of New York’s children, and I knew her.  So the move here was inevitable.  Like the fucking idiot I am I didn’t even save up.  I had $20 in my pocket when I came and I thought that would be enough, at least to buy some food.              ‘What does money matter’ I thought, ‘when my name will tumble down through the East Village like Bob Dylan’s does.  What will money matter when Manhattan is in love with me?’ 

            I see them every day: the midwest, west, east, southern dreamers come to New York and realize that New York has lived passed their dreams and a newfangled glass building is being built in the place of that old tenement building where the writer wrote until four every morning for five years.  The dedication made him famous more than the writing did. 

            But they come with tattoos and the big glasses and the plaid shirts they their bags down in a leaking apartment whose monthly rent is more expensive than they are.  How could they have known how little New York cares for its own dreams much less their’s and the little dreamer is exiled to Brooklyn where they rent a flat with seven roommates.