We are Hungry

Al was a fan of the gas pedal. He was a fan of sculpting and back exercises. He was a roast beef kinda guy. His car, one of those 1994 models, the kind you’d expect to find on a news report way too late about a meth lab explosion, had dents in its vital organs and every time I looked around I seemed to notice a new one: a crater black-eyeing around his Gore 2000 sticker, a ding in the clavicle of his side mirrors.

It was one of those days I could barely tell was winter. Al was driving. We were on our way to Columbia and had just passed the knot of the East River and I pointed out geese that were smudging themselves into a far-off skyline. Al nodded, perhaps adjusted. He told me about how he had an uncle who fought in Vietnam who had gotten his ear cut off, but froze it when he returned stateside.

“He had an in. A serious in,” Al said. “College roommate or something. Cryogenics was big back then-- still is now. And he’s got the thing dangling below his rear-view mirror. The man drives Uber.”

I didn’t really know Al, but what I knew was that he and I weren’t similar at all. Al was a friend of my uncle Louie and by proxy my mother; I was with him for two days because I was overnighting in New York to visit Columbia. Al dismissed the school, waved his hand and one-handed the wheel about regality being by-gone. He claimed it was all sad. All of it. That the college system was a foot-in-bear-trap kinda thing and that I was gonna be stuck. Stuck with debt and a job where I couldn’t use my hands. Al found freedom in this-- trusting his hands more than his brain. Al was 38. He knew the city’s steel lungs better than the pigeons and I knew my mother dropped me off with him because she didn’t trust herself not to get lost. I preferred to look at colleges alone, anyways. It made me feel more independent than I actually was.

Al worked in a hotel as general service and as he said, “That means generally anything.” Some days he was a half-shift security guard or a room cleaner or repaired the epileptic elevator buttons. Some days he mopped the floors.

“Regina and Brian.” Al said. I’d been following along somewhat to his workplace drama, and I had heard those names before, but not particularly together. I was really more interested in the swelling steeples of Harlem. “Regina’s been a mess,” he said. “She’s cried into customer food and her makeup has snaked its way into soup bowl bottoms. And  oh man can you believe it, some people are just plain ugly.”

From what I understood, Regina was a nervous woman that worked in the kitchen. She and Al shared Wednesdays. Regina had a sloppy relationship with one of the doormen. She had told Al about it and sobbed and did one of those half-cry heaves where you’re, as Al orated, more prone to rib injury than actual sadness. The problem though was that she was still married. She took her ring off when she worked. I imagined her finger looked naked, preparing salmon fillets, duck, tuna steak without the band.

The car was going too slow. At best, it retched. Al passed a Greek diner and I-know-the-owner’d at me and smiled. “A chronic Greek,” he said. “Constantine.”

“What’s his story.”

“Messed up nose from fighting. He was a real handsome guy. Real good looking. All cool and none of that non-genuine cool. He’s doing well. I eat there sometimes. Best pickled anything you’ll eat anywhere ever.”

Harlem exhaled around us. The buildings seemed saturated and sagged, sneering out into the avenues like an atmospheric desperation to be urban. Brownstones hugged up to modern architectural squiggles and all their neons hung half-hinged. Al had lived in New York for most of his life--Shanghai for another bit. He knew my uncle through his travels. Al began talking about the brain and how much blood it holds. How he’s concerned his might jump right out of his head one day. He said he thought his brain was unsatisfied. Hungry. He began scratching his dashboard. He focused a bit too much on one spot and it looked as if he sheared off the top layer of plastic.

I had stayed in Al’s apartment the night before and learned he lived with his grandmother, Carol. The woman was ancient. Like one of those zoo tortoises who bats their eye once a day. Like a stooping red-wood about to be cut down to supply a whole school district with paper. She was stuffed full. Al left me alone in his apartment while he went out to get pre-gamed for Shabbat. This included chasing down nicotine with vodka shots and lilting down to throw up into storm drains to purge and de-bone himself of sin. He liked to get all warm-and-fuzzy-brained before Carol went on Shabbat diatribes about how nobody sings like Johnny Cash anymore (That Beautiful Bastard) or about how her Ulna and Radius have conspired against her and now she has arthritis. It was all so surreal. I was sitting in the kitchen nursing a glass of lemon water when she sat down and had me replace her zinc-air batteries in her hearing aids. She told me she had lost her hearing from living next to the highways her whole life, the highways shoved into their part of town to discriminate against the Hungarian Jews in hopes they would move away.

And Al continued to say last week he drove the hotel’s vehicle-- a Lexus-- to JFK to pick up a Saudi Prince that was to stay in their most expensive high rise. Al functioned instead of the valet service and because it was a high profile client The Manager came with him. And although Al was not much of a looker and The Manager was not much of a driver, they decided that Al would drive to JFK and The Manager would drive back. Al said first impressions matter. The Saudi Prince never showed up though, and their dining hall was hollow and stark and he never rescheduled because he forgot it snowed in New York. He hated the snow.

We passed another church and people were leaking out from mass, a thin drip. They were clutching down on their hats and crumpling into their coats. It was cold. It was windy. And it was all very sacred. The closer to Columbia we inched the better I felt my posture get and I promised Al it was all a coincidence. The roofs all homogenized into corrugated iron or brick and it was only getting colder. The apartments pew’d upwards into a crowned building that looked like it could seat Congress. I saw the occasional kid tugging along their parent, the occasional parent toting along their kid. It was hard not to look into their faces and try to discern how smart they were. All the quantitative things stacked above their head. It felt hopeless. I just wanted to give it a sedative and lie down for a while, watch it wheeze itself out of existence from my oaky backyard

In 5 minutes Al will let me off at an entrance to Columbia.  He will give me a note to hand to my mother and a handshake. Real firm. He will say,” Beartraps only work on bears,” say, “They were built that way.” I will thank him for letting me stay with him.

“Take care, Al.”

“Anytime,” he will say. “But, be careful. This place feels like a religion. Some higher learning crap. And you know what we do? We don’t get sucked in, we spit religion.”

“What does that mean?”  

“It means I could never go to college. I think too much.” This will sound like another one of Al’s aphorisms, but, “Sometimes you just can’t think about things too much. And tell your mom why won’t you that I want to see one of her paintings or sculptures or whatever before I wheeze out. They hold the kind of imagination I don’t.”  Al will leave me with that and then leave me.

And I will walk onto the campus and imagine something holding more, more ideas, more of the conceptual stuff, than Al. I will come to realize Al was all the qualitative and not the quantitative, what colleges like, how maybe he had a point of how people are all caught up in the fuss of numbers. I will imagine my mother sculpting in our living room after I am gone. It is quiet. Her books of Picasso, Monet, and Rothko butterflied, the lips of their hardback covers lolling about. She has 10, 20 year-old newspaper sprawled on the floor, the corners of which crinkle as she walks. There is slow-moving rhythm to how she works, take the thumb: carving out the cheekbone crescents, cleaving up to the eye sockets, down to divorcing the nostril windows, curving the skull to fit the brain.