Fractured
I broke my ankle and can’t smoke.
Or I’m not supposed to. So I sit on the fire escape and put an unlit cigarette in my mouth until the filter gets all mushed up from my saliva. I’ve been using the same cigarette for maybe the last three days and it’s starting to get limp. A confetto or two of tobacco has fallen out. I tap my index finger on the end to try and stuff the rest back in. I take it out of my mouth once in a while and smell it like it’s a Cuban cigar. But it’s a light blue American Spirit. It works.
Sometimes when I go down to sit on the stoop, which I do once a day, the Chinese guy who works at the hot stone massage place under my apartment and speaks little English offers me a cigarette. I should be polite and just take one, but I try to tell him smoking impairs bone-healing. Today he said, “It’s good, though.” He’s right in most ways. Mentally, it would be better for me to smoke. But I’m not even a smoker. It’s just nice to have one once in a while. My mom knows. I told her we all need to do something to cope with the misery of the world. One time, years ago, she found a pack of Parliaments in my desk at her house and laughed. It’s what her grandmother used to smoke, she said.
The first post-op cigarette I was offered was actually a few days ago. I was on the stoop again. Someone was already smoking on the landlord’s stoop next to mine. It was Amanda, a trans woman from the Philippines who’s worked at a fast casual place around the corner for four years. She lives above the restaurant and pays nothing in rent. She insisted I have one. She said it would help. Right again. But I didn’t take one. I’m surprised at my integrity. She asked me how I broke my ankle and I told her I jumped off the side of a lighthouse I was climbing in Long Island trying to impress a girl. Which is true. I think. I asked her how she liked working at the food place. She said she likes it because she gets to flirt with customers. She sends money back to her family in the Philippines. She sees them once a year, at Christmas. She was in Miami first. Started there in 2016.
“Want to see?” I said. She got up, rounded the hand rail that separated us, and sat next to me on the concrete step as I showed her X-rays of my fracture and the picture of me right before I jumped off the wall. She said that’s what I get for going to Long Island.
Everyone has been saying that. Last time I was there was for my grandfather’s funeral. 2019 I think. He had alienated everyone in his life and had Alzheimer’s, so it was just me, my dad, and an old Irish priest who made Italian jokes while presiding over the burial. Honestly, not funny. Pretty sad. Even after the urn made a thud as the undertaker placed it on top of my grandmother’s buried coffin, the priest’s smug smile and tone kept on. Typical, my dad said. He remembered growing up in Bensonhurst and Irish kids at school would make fun of his last name. My mom has a little Irish in her.
I took the train out there this most recent time. When we stopped at the Pinelawn station, I saw a long line of cars for a funeral, maybe 100, making their way through that very same cemetery. Pinelawn Cemetery. Usually you look at a cargo train and think how it seems it’s so long it’ll never stop. I looked out from a train wondering when this line of cars would stop. My grandfather didn’t even get a hearse.
Amanda and I sat together not talking for a couple minutes. We looked at the people passing by. She eventually finished her cigarette and told me she had to go back to work. She offered to bring me some food some time because she was so close. But I said that’s okay and maybe I’d stop in to say hi sometime. It seemed like too much of a commitment to say, “oh, yeah that would be great.” She left her sunglasses on the whole time. I never saw her eyes. I forget the days she told me she works.
It’s Northside Williamsburg, Bedford L stop, so most of the people walking around suck. On one of my “walks” (a hobble around the block on crutches, a blobble), I stopped to rest in front of my building before going in. A guy who looked like he was named Craig was carrying a bouquet of flowers and passed by with his wife. He looked back at me and said, “Tough go, huh, buddy?” And I said, “Yeah, thanks for your sympathy.” I wanted him to think I was being sincere even though I was being sarcastic. We didn’t have that connection where I can be sarcastic and be okay with him knowing I’m being sarcastic. We just weren’t cool like that. You need a certain level of trust with a stranger for that. He said you’re welcome. No art for blocks and blocks. Just guys like this.
Like this other guy I heard today when I was sitting out there. First, he passed by alone. He picked up the phone and said, “Hey, dude… yeah good…. Great!” I wondered what made him change his mind to emphasize that he was doing great today instead of good. He passed going the other way with his girlfriend this time. He was on the phone and she was walking while looking at her phone. He was saying to his friend how “finance is where all the action is. You get to make deals and see profits and stuff.” I guess he was great because he likes his new position in finance. I resent him and I’m jealous.
My savior was this guy with a red t-shirt, low pants, and smooth strut who was cutting the little hairs on his almost-bald head with a pair of kitchen scissors as he walked. No mirror, nothing. Just pure confidence. I laughed and tried to make eye contact with the twenty-something kid walking behind him to appreciate the scene with him. But he had headphones on and wasn’t noticing anything.
I learned a long time ago that most people who live off the Bedford Ave. L stop don’t actually live in New York. What I mean is, you know how James Taylor goes to Carolina in his mind? Everyone off the Bedford L stop goes to Vail, Charlotte, Denver, and LA in their minds. And on their weekends. Most of the time, though, they go to their phones. Everyone here looks down when they walk. Sensory deprivation. Headphones + phone = can’t hear or see. Some even have headphones + phone + mask. No hear, see, or smell. No community. No connection. Are you even living? If your attention is on what’s on your phone, should we even consider that you exist where your body is if you’re only experiencing a minority of the things physically around you with your senses? It’s textbook street phenomenology. Eddie Husserl from Bedstuy.
Everything everywhere all at once is a good way to say no one is anywhere at any time because the phone is a timeless, placeless place, and that’s where people spend the most time. And the definition of “spending time” somewhere isn’t where your body is anymore, it’s where your attention is. If you’re watching a movie on the train on your phone, you’re not on the train. And if the “time” in spending “time” is now “attention,” then “spending time” is actually “spending attention” which is true because when we’re on our phones we’re literally giving away our personal currency, which is attention/privacy/data, to corporations. How about we start buying time? You got the funds?
I wonder if anyone I see cares about the history around them. Like, I was watching Serpico (1973), starring Al Pacino, the other day. And I found out that the building the real Serpico got shot and killed in is a ten minute walk from me. I’ve got to take a walk down there. Would be cool. I told this to my dad and he said that Uncle Sal, my great-uncle, a NYPD cop, knew Serpico. What did he think of him? “He said he was a ‘creep,’” my dad said. So Uncle Sal was on the take, just like the rest of them. Not surprised. I remember shaking hands with Joe Gambino, Carlo’s son, at a family wake in Bensonhurst when I was a kid. Same nose as his dad. My dad doesn’t know I smoke sometimes.
John, my neighborhood friend who owns a restaurant on my block, passed by with his two kids. “What happened, man?” “Broke my ankle. Had surgery yesterday.” “If you want to hang in our back garden and put your foot up, feel free.” “Thanks, man.”
I get up to take a stroll. I slow down. I notice that the fences in front of a lot of the houses on my block are really old, like pre-War. I notice that a house across from me has new siding. I nod at the parking garage attendant, who’s never acknowledged me even though when I walk out of the house I always look across the street and try to clock him and hope he clocks me. I notice how fast people walk. I used to cover a block in a minute. Now I don’t even cover a full block. Then this morning I saw an Instagram reel about how slowing down is the easiest way to regulate the nervous system. I scrolled past it quickly.
I feel like by the time I finish writing this I’ll smoke the cigarette. It’s laying on my stomach right now. I’m wearing the same outfit I wore the day I fell from the lighthouse. The khaki shorts and a white and orange striped short-sleeve button down shirt but the stripes go vertical. I’ve been thinking about that the reason vertical striped shirts are better than horizontal is because vertical draws the viewer’s eyes down the whole body. It’s sexual. Horizontal lines stonewall the viewer’s attention. You never get to the crotch.
