At the Trump Tower, where I have the Public Garden completely to myself. This building was always a tourist attraction but of late, and for obvious reasons, it has become even more of a place to see before you die. Still, on this Saturday afternoon I find that not one tourist or curiosity seeker has made it up here. It could be on account of the escalator being shut off. I had to walk up the last flight. I would assume that for ADA compliance I could have found an elevator to this floor.

Looking up I see the Trump Tower to my left, 9 West 57th Street to my right, windows looking toward buildings across the street. I think a Coach leather goods store occupies the ground floor of one of the buildings I can see. 9 West (almost said “9 Wet”) is where I had my first real job in New York, working as a temporary word processor operator for Avon. I “went perm” as I think they said repeatedly and portentously in “Haiku Tunnel”, a movie about the futility of office work that I think put “Office Space” to shame.

Oh look, two tourists opened the door to this Public Garden, and promptly turned around, letting the door close behind them.

For as much money as I have coming back from taxes I could take the rest of the year off — as if I’ve done a fucking thing so far this year. I was planning to spend the money solely on rent and food but I think I might indulge myself with a new set of Bose noise cancelling headphones. My old ones fell to pieces and I was unable to repair them on the first try, though I could give it another go. Those were the over-ear airline pilot headphones, but from what I’ve heard and read the earbud style model does an even better job of cancelling noise. And this spot, the Public Garden of the Trump Tower, is the perfect location for such headphones because there is a continuous droning noise from I don’t know what, a giant fan blowing air for mysterious reasons.

There is a lot of wealth looking down at me. Those fans are blowing the exhaust of that wealth, or else funneling it an air supply. None of the Trump Tower windows open, meaning the structure is a natural vacuum. No air gets in, no air leaves, and residents eventually implode from the force of the vacuum. Thus a giant fan was procured by the Trump organization and implemented in such a way that residents did not suffocate and experience eyeballs popping from their skull sockets. That was a complaint from early occupants of this esteemed address, which underwent significant structural repairs after the giant fan was installed. Local complained that the air was being funneled away from the poor and syphoned to the rich, whose needs for the commodity were no greater than anyone else’s. The fan was so loud, however, that the complaints were never heard. As a charitable move the Trump company gave noise cancelling headphones to the needy.

I think I will go to the Bose store at the Time-Warner Center and try a set of those cancelling buds, partly to hear the silence but also because I have an an unexplored fetish for sticking other people’s earwax into my canal. Combining earwax from multiple skulls produces a substance which is predictably viscous but not so predictably a fetishist’s wet dream. It’s in the category of snot, a fetish for which I never would have imagined there is a thriving community of partakers.

I actually have no such fetishes. Just making shit up here. The eyeballs popping from the sockets of early Trump Tower occupants is another fabrication. I bet you believed it for a second, at least as far as the air supply being taken from the poor and funneled to the rich.

I do not get a sense that residents of this building fall into the Unbelievably Rich category. Those folks don’t live in New York, they just purchase its empty pied a terres and dwell far from the riff raff of common cities. Trump Tower residents, as I’ve read in the past, appreciate the secretive ways there are to exit and enter the building. Michael Jackson used to stay here on that account. Andrew Lloyd Weber had a three-level place here, or so I read soon after moving here in 1990. I think one would get tired of living here. It’s a trophy residence. If Trump gets elected I wonder if the place would be targeted in any way. Thinking of it now I wonder how I would get out of here if a bomb went off in the lobby or a coordinated series of missiles and airplanes crashed into the structure. This Public Garden is connected to the main structure but does not appear that it would necessarily go down with the rest of the tower. But that’s assuming the main tower pancaked down, like the Twin Towers. This building would probably come down slightly to one side or the other, north or south, but I’m just pulling this out of my ass based on a story someone told me about her 9/11 experience. She and countless others were running away from the Towers when a bunch of police instructed them to change direction and run the other way. They did this because someone had told them the Tower was about to fall and that it was going to come down sideways, in the direction that the plane which hit it had been flying. So she and all those other people turned around like a herd of cattle being rustled, running the other way until the Tower came down straight, and everybody stopped running. Some must have been thinking “This is it”, and they waited to be crushed. Others might have known immediately what just happened. Marina (who told me this tale) said that she hated to use such a word to describe that moment but in the seconds during which it happened she said it was a “relief” when that Tower came down — not that it came down, of course, but that it pancaked, killing as few as possible.

Small miracle.

Well it is getting cold up here and my batteries are running out. Time to shop for asspensive earphones.