I woke up to the smell of Satan. I left a small bag of chicken that had gone bad out on the counter, intending to take it outside. I forgot to take it outside. I forgot it was there. Around 8am I wake up to a foulness I can compare to nothing else. Rancid chicken exudes the smell of Satan. The chicken had gone completely into Satan’s anus, spewing a stench one could only imagine coming from that orifice. It filled the entire apartment — the smell, that is. Not Satan’s anus. How could an anus “fill” an apartment, after all? It could ENGULF and CONSUME but an orifice does not necessarily have a capacity to FILL. But then what do I know of Satan’s anus? Perhaps its capacity to fill large spaces is one of its uniquely evil skills.

Whatever the case re: Satan’s anus I got up and placed the chicken in a Ziploc bag. This seemed to contain the swelling putridity, which disippated quickly after I opened all windows and turned on all fans full blast. Or maybe I just passed out from the nausea and have no concept of the time that had passed.

I woke up later and detected no smell of Satan, but soon started to detect its evil effluvium again, seeping through the Ziploc bag as well as the three other bags in which I had wrapped it. Maggots, I imagined, would nibble through the bags, causing the rancid meat to fall to the floor like vomit from  Regan MacNeil in “The Exorcist”.

I had time. When it comes to primal animal behaviors I do not know maggots from marmosets. But as a fellow creature on this shared earth I was comfortable with my instaincts that maggots cannot work that fast. It’s not like they are in a hurry, like there is a league of maggots comprised of countless teams, all of these teams competing against each other to eat through chicken legs and the plastic bags containing them to break a national record of the Maggot League.

I got the bag out of the apartment and walked it a few blocks to a city garbage can on a street corner. It was three days until garbage collection at my building and I did not welcome the eminently likely scenario of this stench of rancid chicken filling the air outside.

I think that is illegal, dumping pesonal trash in a city garbage can. I’ll rot in jail with the maggots.

…

Today I met Jeff. Jeff’s brother is Richard. Richard is a very famous photographer, a claim I verified with a quick search on that global computer network which connects millions of computers making trillions of bits of information available at the tips of one’s fingers. This photographer’s clients include presidents, A-List celebrities and models, and who knows what all. A portrait/fashion photographer, I met his brother on Amsterdam Avenue today as I took pictures of the infamous Parc Lincoln, that desperate SRO shithole I lived in for about a year in 1990 and 1991.  

Sitting in a wheelchair on the west side of Amsterdam I heard him shout “Can I ask you something? Are you a photographer?” I responded in the affirmative, but not before completeing my desired set of photos of the top 2 floors of the Parc Lincoln. One of those top two south-facing windows looked onto my first view of New York in the first room I ever had to myself. Room 1422. I’m uncertain now if I was on the top floor or the one below. I counted 14 floors in the building, but assuming they skipped the 13th floor (as many high rises do) I was probably on the second-to-top floor. I think I’d remember being on the top floor.

He asked why I was taking pictures of that building.

“I used to live there.””Why’d you move out?””Hah. Have you ever been inside?” He winced, seeming to know what I meant. I continued “I used to wake up with cockroaches crawling over my face and into my mouth. Pigeons came through the windows, and peopel threw their garbage into the roof right outside my room. It’s the worst shithole I’ve ever been in.”

“You look like you know what you’re doing, my friend. You have command over your camera.”

And this fellow, laid up in a wheelchair and getting some fresh air to escape the rehab center in which he found himself, seemed to know the photography business inhabited by his brother. He told me to look him up, contact him, and to “Tell him we’ve been friends for 4 or 5 years, he’ll help you out, he’ll do anything for you.”

He really seemed genuine. Seeing no risk I handed him my web site business card, which seemed to interest him. We shook hands and I went along my way, mixing thoughts of this fresh encounter with memories of the Parc Lincoln, 25 years ago.

Earlier I made an incidental but completely unintentional pass by the building where I lost my virginity. It was strange how it creeped up on me, approaching Riverside Drive on 72nd Street and suddenly drawn back in time to those days I walked this path several times a week. Not certain which precise building it was all I had to do was look through the grates of the front door of one old house and see that shockingly familiar staircase, which started out straight but turned about 45 to the west as it reached the 2nd floor — just like I remembered it.

This chance encounter merited a knowing, somewhat nostalgic smile. Nostalgia for me does not suggest that I wish for the past to return, or for the places and people I’ve known to be forever available in the way I knew them best. It’s just a reminder that my past is always with me, shaping who I am today and who I will change into going forward. Things change, but the past stays the same. Or does it? Is the past not malleable, is it not susceptible to being crafted to suit one’s self-image, as a sort of self-defense or self-healing? Or is this crafting of one’s past simply a patina of lies, of fabrications that are completely known to you for not being true but that you liturgically repeat as fact?

I was watching “The Man in the High Castle” yesterday. One of the characcters is a dealer in antiquities from early 20th Century America. The series, if you’re not familiar, is set in a North America where the Nazis and the Japanese won World War II, dividing the continent almost in 2 save for a “neutral zone” in the middle. This antiquities dealer sold, among other things, a Zippo lighter that had been once used by Franklin Roosevelt. He had two of this same lighter, and asked a colleague if he could tell the difference between the two. At a glance there was no difference. The dealer said “This one, used by FDR, possesses ‘historicity’.” The dealer and his colleague concurred: That’s a bunch of bullshit. A lighter is a lighter. But the dealer assured his partner that ignoramuses with money will buy any object if you tell them it was present at some historic even or handled by a former president or pope.

Human beings, however, have historicity. This was not the dealer’s point in the High Tower series. It is mine. We accumulate internal strata and external indentations from the people who enter and leave our lives. We are not Zippo lighters but if we were the stories we could tell…

I took a picture of the building. There were cactii on the windowsill.

…

My real mission today was to give the vaunted last phone booths of Manhattan a personal visit. Like so much of CityBridge’s Links project I see these booths and just ask “Why?” It’s something that perks the attention of an insignificant part of the population, and serves as a deadly unclever press release. As part of the deal for getting their monopoly franchise CityBridge promised to maintain the last 4 outdoor traditional landline phone booths, which are all on West End Avenue. Local calls from these phones are free, though there is now way of knowing that without having a specific interest in these booths or CityBridge’s contractual obligations to the city. They replaced the phone booths with Canadian models (I’ll have to double check that but I think that’s what I read). How hard was it really to find U.S. style models? Maybe that’s more difficult than I realize but these folks certainly have the resources to build phone booths themselves if they couldn’t afford list price and shipping for refurbished booths on eBay or wherever.

The booth
s are all on West End Avenue but when I got to 72nd Street I thought I would check in on the 79th Street Boat Basin, where some really old booths were hiding in the parking lot last time I was there. I didn’t make it that far. The place was closed. Oh well. That’s how I unwittingly ended up passing the abovementioned building of quasi-nostalgic yore. Wandered through Riverside Park, though, where I learned that one can purchase a memorial plaque for placement on a park bench, similar to Central Park. I didn’t think any other park besides Central Park offered that.

Gotta pee. Gotta go home. or somewhere.