Talking Times Square

There are few better cures for depression than taking a stroll down Times Square, especially during the daytime. The sights and sounds of the place soon divert the mind to thoughts unlike any that are likely to pop up anywhere else.

Like exactly how many cups of noodles one would have to sell to bankroll the twenty square foot billboard that advertises Cup Noodles brand cups of noodles at [above] that famous juncture where 7th and Broadway merge or diverge, depending on how you look at it. It is the largest billboard in a sea of billboards.

Or the extent to which the Times Square 2004 reflects or fails to reflect the spirit that produced Simon & Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence, which is being played by an appropriately registered street quartet three blocks up from the MTV studios. Bleecker Street is another issue entirely, though related.

For a moment one marvels at the speed and determination with which a man in a wheelchair cuts through the bidirectional foot traffic for which this area is so famous and so frustrating. Then one looks down and sees two feet attached to this infirm person eschewing his chair's slightly askew chrome footrests and paddling madly in tandem on the pavement.

And finally, one can contemplate, hopefully without bitterness, the sheer marketing brilliance of the federal government establishing a multi-floor DEA museum only blocks away from Madame Tussaud's. And this when Clinton took flak in this city for using his office in Harlem as a positive public relations vehicle. At least it was a relatively inexpensive public relations vehicle.

Coming to the Island

Soon after I arrived on the island, children in the backseats of SUVs began gesturing at the tail end of my car. I waved them on and kept the windows up, preserving the coolness, the smoke, the pulsing anticipatory thump of bass that led me forward to her through the misty night by rhythms through ground. When the traffic slowed, just as the signs had predicted it would, a bob-haired housewife waved franctially from her high driver’s seat perch. I flicked the switch and the glass that separated me from her voice disappeared.

THERE’S SOMETHING COMING OUT OF YOUR MUFFLAH, MISTA!

Although I’m sure my brow furrowed for a minute, I smiled and waved her on, still wondering if I’d heard right, and resumed my former posture.

When I finally stopped at an empty house a block from the seashore, I inspected the situation as my car cooled.

There it was. It ran five feet beyond the bumper when you straightened it all out, as it had become a little clumped and clotted with the sand, grease, and grit of a 100 mile jaunt down a dirty coastline. Maybe it’s your muffler lining. Sometimes that stuff has like fibers and stuff in it. But there it was, jet black, with long streaks of gray interspersed, a five foot ponytail of human hair that had undergone a natural—random—human graying process, been dragged wet along a bad stretch of interstate, and, by, hanging on to dear life to somewhere inside of my muffler, had lived to tell the tale. I spread out its cords in my fingers and inspected it. It was metallic? Maybe slightly synthetic. More like human hair after it’s spent the three straight months of mornings in chlorinated pools. But it was wet now, and when I bent it, it curled and it gave, still anchored somewhere near the heart of my car.

Well that’s a woman’s hair there alright! Now, how in the world… Do you suppose?... That a woman’s hair got stuck in there!? He turned, a perfect mix of certainty and confusion, to his wife, who could do little, in her drunken state, to ease his perplexity.

When I pulled it—hard (by this time I was bracing my thigh against my bumper and pushing off with my outside foot)—it finally gave from somewhere deep inside. It gave, haltingly at first before, conquered, yielding, it came in generous loops that I circled around my arm like in Boy Scouts.

For thirty minutes the locals eyed me with suspicion as I looped the growing, blackening strand around my arm and shoulder.

Amanda

Amanda always wondered what it would be like to drink a whole glass of honeysuckle juice. To squeeze each bud clean into a glass, one after the other, while the sweet nectar accumulated and beckoned.

There is a honeysuckle bush near where she runs now, close to the school, not too far from the lab on the ocean that she walks to each morning for work. But, she feels, she can’t hardly kneel down right on the path like that, for like an hour, harvesting honeysuckles. It’s probably wrong to pick them, anyway, if you think about it, at least not before they’re ripe, but then how could you tell if they were ripe or not? That’s something you should know.

You should harvest them in greedy handfuls and draw the nectar in the privacy of your car, Mandy. That’s what you should do. Go back for more if you need to, and you probably will need to, but just go when no one’s looking so that no one can ask you what you’re doing with protected honeysuckles in the middle of a nature conservation compound. And if they ask, say that you’re doing an experiment on honeysuckle nectar, that you work for the lab. Point to it. Technically, you’re telling the truth.

It reminds you of when you had Meetu and all those other girls over for a camping sleepover, when mom bought snacks for eight and you guys all stayed outside in the backyard on a ten-by-ten blue nylon square and talked about boys. When you slept in nets and bugs spray to keep the insects off, and made rings and necklaces out of the abdomens of lightning bugs to pass the time. Meetu ran around the yard all night in circles screaming Banzai. When you kissed her as a joke that night, she had put honeysuckles in her braids. You didn’t care whether they were ripe.