Past

The grocer calls me sweetheart. It’s nice of him.
I’m often angry. I know exactly how I feel and what I think.
Still, unfortunately, I tend to agree with the most recent Voice of Authority.
A character flaw, a breach. A gentle breach, a gentle breeze; I’m so accommodating, maybe that’s all it is.
But I’m also angry. Every day I’m angry.
At people who want things from me, at people who do nothing, at people who don’t want anything from me, at myself. I’m angry; I travel off and forget that I myself have come along. I don’t escape.
On one of the first days I’m there, a Buddhist monk asks me to write
the word Peace and my name, in a book. It turns out to cost money. In return
I get a little card that says
work smoothly and lifetime peace.
If that’s a promise, it is worth a dollar. I get a little angry, though.
The beggars around the hospital all say variations on “Oh, I’ve just
been discharged, I’m so tired, can you help me out with a little money for
a ticket home?” I know they’re lying. I give one of them a dollar. She gets angry.
I don’t want to be sick. I don’t want to be old. I don’t want to be old
and sick, but we all will be, someday. I don’t want to beg for anything
but I do, all the time.
I’ve got that old song stuck in my mind, Brother, can you spare a dime.
It’s because there’s a woman who says almost exactly that, to everyone walking
by; every day she’s standing in the same place. So sorry to bother you, she too
says. Every day. To everyone walking by.
The young drummer has set up in the subway and is playing there. He’s bold.
Maybe too he has nowhere else to practice.
The poet sits on the sidewalk with a typewriter and composes poems by request.
It costs only a little to buy a poem. Tell him what you want it to be about.
I want it to be about the breeze. About the beggars. I want it to be about why we
beg. That’s what I want in it; I’ll gladly pay a little for that, because I
can’t do it myself.
Once there was a poet who wrote about a raspberry in the freezer. I saw
that raspberry in my mind, and I got cold. I’ve looked for that poem in vain
many times since, but why? The raspberry will never become more powerful than it
already is.
I’m in Brooklyn. Right—the birds are different here. They have
strange colors and sing unfamiliar songs. And the trees are different, even
the plane trees, which are called sycamores here.
Olga is old. She takes care of her fifty-year-old children, she has arthritis and
will go for walks only before noon. Because this here is a dangerous area, she says.
“But not anymore, is it?” I ask, sipping my latte.
I ain’t getting raped in no elevator, she says. I only go out in the mornings.

In the subway there’s a beautiful young woman. Suddenly she shouts,
I know this is a train and not a church!
Then she preaches a sermon. A long sermon. It lasts all the way through
Manhattan on the R train, which stops at every station. We should
be good to each other and love Jesus. I’m tourist-empty. Empty-headed
as a tourist. Oh, Lord!

He rears back on the motorcycle. He’s a badass, all the way down
DeKalb Avenue. But what else is he? That, I don’t know. He must have slept in
a bed last night, as I did; that’s probably right; maybe he dreamed of
a kookaburra; he definitely had to pee when he woke up.
Now you’re smiling into your phone again.
Actually I’d just like to know more about Erik Satie and Cecil Taylor.
But why stop at those two? I’d also like to know more about you. I’d like
to understand you. I’m so naive that I still think that kind of thing is possible.

Across the street from where I’m staying, two people sleep outside all year long.
Human beings. Two.
It’s miserably cold here in the winter. They sleep on the sidewalk, under the overhang
of a school roof. They get up and go to work in the mornings. No one invites them
in, because what if they didn’t leave. But they’re allowed to use the school showers,
and a man came and put comforters over them last winter; that
did happen. Do they live here now? Will it ever be different.

A man stops us in the street and asks if we’ll contribute to the pizza fund,
because he’s hungry. Yesterday it was the chicken fund, he says. We’re
glad to, but the next person who stops us gets nothing. And so it goes.

I get so tired of saying no or shaking my head. Next time I’m
stopped, I hear the woman say feeding the homeless and I pull ten
dollars out of my pocket. I get a sticker and discover that I’ve now
donated to Hare Krishna.
And the homeless, she promises, when I get angry.

The corner grocery has a sign in the window: refugees welcome, it says.
The grocer himself has just gotten out of prison. He’s the local drug dealer. Now he’s
back, bigtime. He’s also a very big man. Oddly enough I’m
afraid of him and don’t buy my milk there.

But back in Denmark, outside the supermarket on Vesterbro Street there’s a bent-over
woman with a lot of bags, a cart, a cup of coffee, and very very unwashed hair. She does have a cup of coffee, though. But she doesn’t say anything to me, doesn’t ask me for anything. I can’t make eye contact, and I don’t say hello.
Why don’t I say hello?

Last winter there was a man sleeping in the middle of the street when I went to the
supermarket one morning. It was very cold. I couldn’t wake him up. “I’ve called an
ambulance,” a woman shouted from her balcony. The ambulance came. He was
only drunk. The paramedics knew how to wake up that kind of person. He came around. He got into the ambulance. Then I went on to get my cigarettes or milk
or whatever it was.

Now it’s me smiling into my phone.

But I’m angry. At whoever is permitting this, because it’s certainly not
me who’s at fault for letting so many people go without any place to
sleep, any food to eat. Is it me? Is it my fault? Yes,
it’s my fault, but it’s also yours. We have the servants that we’ve placed in power.
Yes, government official means public servant.
Yes, I vote in every election.
I don’t vote in New York, but that doesn’t matter.
It’s all connected. It’s all connected, you and I are connected, and we’re connected with the people sleeping in the streets and those who are hungry, no matter what,
we are connected.
I want to be a badass all the way down Vesterbro Street, but I’m
not; I just walk past people. I walk past all kinds of people. I walk past
everything and do nothing. Then I smile into my phone again. And
again and again and again. And walk past.