What a peculiar jungle New York is now. Maybe King Kong scared off all the lions. You can still find the claw marks---they're clearly marked and roped off---but whatever made them are extinct. The pecking order is off, unnatural, fucked-up, hopelessly illiterate to the story it desperately wants to tell. Whatever joke is going on here has an audience that's desperately willing to clap on cue for it, but they don't know how to laugh. The comedian seems bitter about it. Flags hanging off the hotels don't shiver from any local roars. I just can't bring myself to accept that these timid creatures strutting along the avenues turned this place into such a trophy case. Can't wrap my head around it quite yet. THIS culture, whatever it is/means, tearing off the manes of lions for their toilet seats.
But my heart is as complicated as mini-golf. Ask anybody. Stop giving me that dirty look and look up at that Puerto Rican kid in the wife-beater smoking on the fire escape above us, or that pebbly path of taxi tail lights paving North up Broadway, or those paper airplanes inseminating the gray clouds over the brownstones, or the subway rumbling that grate under our sneakers, or the jammed ambulance in traffic reminding me it's hard to move without a path.
Maybe Van Gogh painted this number left-handed. Beats me. This is her hometown. Is my job to help burn it down? I start chewing on a match on my way to see the Statue of Liberty. Peek down a street and see what's left of the towers. Every block or so somebody's hauling a camera wiping their brow. Tourists loitering near the site, sipping Starbucks, leaning over some stairs. Why is everybody just standing around? No camera flashes. Conversation's still popping. But they just seem like they wanna be NEAR this place. And it makes everything more fuzzy for me on the one hand, and this strangeness more vivid.
So I'm here to meet her parents. Well, we all have in common we're crazy about the same girl. That's a beginning. That's a production right there, she lives on Broadway after all.
Some pleasant intros:
"Hey, your daughter's my private petting-zoo. Appreciate it."
"Hey, nice to meet you. If we get married I'll take her name. Seriously. Mine sucks."
"Hey, we've toured all the sewers of each other's parents lives and swapped plenty of photos and souvenirs about why their relationships didn't pan out and basically decided we were sufficiently fucked up to qualify as a couple. So, gee, thanks."
"Hi, despite the fact I resemble a caveman I'm angelic."
Brass tacks: Both our dads had either been on or dragged by the wagon of an addiction for their adult lives and remained high-functioning enough that their wagon was invisible to most. We admired and cherished the cloaking device they possessed and simultaneously feared it. Both of us loved our dads in an odd way, we never had the power to forgive that which they craved to be forgiven for. We could never hold it against them in the first place. We got it, pretty early. Reducing them to their dirty headlines wasn't ever gonna happen. We loved the whole story and reread it over and over. Besides, we couldn't understand how these other wackos were hacking their lives WITHOUT mainlining junk. Far more terrifying to grapple with. By comparison, booze seemed pretty tame. Which gave us that curious badge of gray. We were witnesses and kindling for their addictions. She got the phone calls, I went to secure the goods from the store.
He walked into her mother's apartment, where she and I were staying, and shook my hand. He was blinking a lot. He was taller than me. His daughter was watching us. His shirt was tucked in. He didn't shake hands like an asshole. I saw her in his face. Did he know she had my favorite face? Did he know that I owed him for it? Did he pick up that we were both shy and maybe his daughter dug this about us? Was this all right to admit?
"I've heard a lot about you. Do I look like you imagined I'd look?"
He hadn't let go of my hand yet and I smiled. It was more a question that would run through your head than one you'd ask. Which I liked immediately.
"I'd imagined you looked like David Letterman. That's what I was, uh, forewarned."
Why did you say FOREWARNED, Brin? WHY? When is the last time you have EVER used that fucking word?
"So?" he asked, equal measure amused and impatient.
"You DO look like David Letterman."
"Hmmm."
And we both looked over at the girl and then back at each other and let our hands return to our sides. Eye contact felt like air-hockey with him...
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