Good Luck

My friend here in NYC reads my blog from time to time, reads them all in a single sitting. I think he just checks to make sure I haven't told some unfavorable story that casts dispersions his way. He was telling me about my writing as people will do, telling me about the errors I make in grammar and punctuation and other ways, and I was surprised to find he thinks I rewrite my pieces. "Hell, man, I don't have time for that," I told him. "What do you do, edit as you go?" "No, I don't edit at all," I said. "Everybody edits as they go along," he spat as if he had now proven that I was lying. I guess I do edit as I type if a red line pops up under a word, but otherwise, it is a furious speed rush just to process images and get text on the page.

Like this morning. I woke late and went downstairs and walked a block to get some good coffee and a croissant to bring back to the room and consume as I looked through yesterday's images and cooked up a few. Now it is late and it is New York and I am need to get out. There will be no editing here (except the red line came up under "croisant").

Too many things happened yesterday to recount, but if I don't, where will they go? They will be forgotten, I am certain, and cease to exist but as spiritual archeology that I carry around in my unconscious. And I know that counts, that it is what shapes the person, but I don't want any of it to slip away into that. What to do? We can't keep everything, I guess.

I'll tell you this--The Whitney has gotten their last $15 out of me. I am tired of going there to see some horrible amateur video display that is "conceptual." I guess I don't appreciate conceptual. And so I spend my time on the fifth floor looking at the same paintings I've seen over and over again loving only a few of them like the Bellows' painting of Dempsey knocking Firpa through the ropes and of course the giant Hopper painting of his naked wife standing before the unseen open window in her bedroom.

The Hopper in Paris exhibit was nothing worth seeing, a handful of student painting from his one trip to Europe in 1910. They don't reveal much other than he developed quite a bit after that. Even Sarabeth's, the restaurant in the basement that I've always loved, is falling apart. The Whitney looks beat, and the restaurant isn't excepted. Dirty cushions, stained floors and walls. No, I am done with the Whitney.

I feel much the same about the Chelsea galleries. I go to see what is being sold, but I am never excited. Yesterday in a big photo gallery, I heard an agent talking to the owner about showing his client's art. The boy is well connected, he said, name dropping (part of that Hilton crowd) and suggesting that these are the people who will buy the works. It is sure to be picked up by such and such. . . . Of course, that is how it works, I know, and maybe that is why so much of it looks just like that, like some indulgence.

Stepping into an elevator in one of the big buildings holding galleries on every floor, a woman got in behind me.

"Which floor," the elevator operator asked.

"I'm following him," said the woman. I looked around.

"You're following me?"

She grinned slightly and nodded her head uncertainly as if she were asking permission.

I was unprepared, of course, but sure, it would be alright. So awkwardly, I asked if she wanted to go here and there, and she would humbly say yes. We would go in and look at something that I usually was not interested in and she looked equally uninspired. On the third floor, I stumbled across Michael Mazzeo's gallery. I love his ambrotypes and was excited, but the door was closed to within an inch or two, held open by a stop. Disappointed, I was ready to leave, but my companion opened the door and walked in. I held the door in my hand, but did not cross the threshold. She came back. "C'mon, he's making photographs," she said. A shock ran through me. "No, no, we can't go in, come on, come on." She hesitated as if I was wrong, and I was certain Mazzeo would come charging us like a madman, but finally she gave in.

As we walked from gallery to gallery, there was nothing to do but ask her about herself, and slowly, through the galleries and across the city blocks, from Chelsea to the West Village, she told told it in a funny English that was something other than the schoolbook stuff they teach in school.

She was from South Korea and had come to NYC for ten days on her own. She was a physical therapist for a shipbuilding company. The company had thousands and thousands of employees, almost all men, but she had a good job, she said, and made a decent living. Her parents were very tradition bound having grown up poor and only coming into some money in the last few years, so she did not tell them she was coming to America. She told them she was going to Seol, which she did, but she did not stop there.

She had come to see a man. They had been lovers for a few years, but four months ago, he told her that he would not see her any more. He was a supervisor for the company, she said, a Canadian. It hurt her badly, his leaving, but she did not want to cry and she had kept it all inside. For four months, she smiled, patting the air beside her, loneliness had been her friend. But one day, he had written to her. He said he missed her and that he still loved her, and her heart began to beat again. "Everything that I had not felt for months, I began to feel now, and I could not stand it."

"Is that why you came to New York," I asked her, "to see him?"

"Yes."

But when she got here, she could not remember his telephone number. "It had been four months since I'd called him," she said, so she went to stay with her aunt and uncle who live in Long Island. "But," she said, when she was making and international call, I suddenly remembered it and I called him."

"And so did you talk to him?" I asked. This story was unfolding piece by piece, you must understand, and was not told all at once. I was having to piece the story together.

"Yes," she answered. "I go to his apartment and stay with him."

For two nights she stayed "in a very big apartment on the Upper West Side. He has a lot of money and a balcony that overlooks the park. But this morning, he was very cold to me. He told me that he could not see me any more, that he had a new girlfriend and what he had done was wrong."

I was very tired now, having been on my feet all day. I was hot and sweaty and wanted to go to my room and shower and relax and get ready for dinner, but what was I going to do? My new friend seemed small and wounded, but something else, too.

"You want to sit down and have a beer?"

"Yes," she said.

"Not here. Let's go to the village."

"You are a very brave girl," I told her. "You are very strong." We were sitting in a beautiful cafe under the trees and quietude that is so surprising once you get into the streets that make no sense, that wind and twist and mix you up until you are not certain where you are.

"Excuse me," she said, "but I must make a phone call." And she called him. I sat across the cafe table listening to one side of the conversation searching her voice for clues of intimacy, of pain, but I couldn't tell.

"I must go get my bag from his apartment. He says he is going out to dinner soon and he leaves tomorrow." Of course all my loyalties were with her. The story seemed so old, so typical. He was selfish, I knew, and had loved her for a while, maybe, but never fully. He felt a passion and and emotion, I told myself, but he never thought about her more than he thought about himself. I could see the opposite was not true. She was in love in some old fashioned way that we do not see any more, not here, not selfless love, consuming love. We are selfish now, I told her. It is the great American trait, but it is everywhere now, all over the world. We exported it and now everyone everywhere has access to it. Of course, I knew that I was only partially right, that greed and selfishness are innate things in humans, but I also thought that we had institutionalized it and made it an official part of the culture.

Then came the dangerous part. I asked for the check and could see the sudden onslaught of sadness and of fear come back to her.

"Thank you," she said. "I needed a friend to talk to. It has helped. It was difficult walking around the city with this inside of me. Now I feel better."

And it was true, but now the other was returning.

We walked to the subway stop and I told her I would go halfway with her and then change trains. She sat in silence and I watched her shrink, watched her fall into herself as she tried to hold on.

"Are you OK," I asked?

"It is getting bad," she said. "I am starting to get very sad." Her eyes were swelling with tears. I sat down and took her hand and could feel the fear and sadness in it. There was nothing to say. I just sat as the train rocked and bumped along from stop to stop. The next stop was mine. We hugged a moment and then looked at one another. I stood up and waved my hand. Neither of us spoke. She was gone.



"Good luck," I whispered standing on the platform alone. Yes,good luck.