Thursday afternoon, and I was on a crowded 4/5 train with Brian.
We were talking about evening plans when I heard a voice behind me say, "I'm sick. I'm sick."
I turned and saw the rustle of bodies shifting to make way. A woman was moving through the crowded train. Oh my! "Brian!" I said, "It's that girl. The American flag sweater girl."
How long had it been? At least two years. Probably more. I had seen that same poor girl on the subway platform at Bowling Green singing and laughing and talking to no one. She had looked so fresh-faced and innocent, possessed by demons.
"She looks worse now," I said. She was dressed sloppily and wore a washer-woman kerchief on her head. Her escaping blonde curls were in disarray.
She kept repeating, "I'm sick, I'm sick," pleadingly, to no one in particular.
I said, "Years have past and she's at it again. You think she's off her meds? Why can't the poor girl stay on her meds?"
The evening plans were to go to an opening in SoHo where my friend Anna works. I was chatting with some of her friends when an East Coast/West Coast debate picked up. One girl was from L.A. She missed home. The fellow I'd been talking to (I think his name was Tom) had grown up in East New York, had recently visited L.A., and disliked it immensely. He said, "It's like God scooped up a city, shook it up in his hands, and spilled it out all over the place."
I said I too had just been there, and had spent a lot of time reconciling New York and L.A. The city's sprawling nature bothered me as well, that you had to drive everywhere, but we both agreed we loved that you could buy hard liquor in the Rite-Aid.
I said maybe what I loved most about New York City was how crowded and bizarre and filthy it is. I thought about my crazy American flag sweater girl, about seeing her again three years later, I thought about the subway, splayed, branching, running like veins, spilling people out neighborhood by neighborhood. How different poor, ravaged, East New York was from tony, galleried SoHo, but a fluid 30 minutes underground would get me there, crushed up against people of a hundred different nationalities, so many different types, the stock broker, the court reporter, the plumber, the reality show housewife, the greasy hipster, the aspiring actor, the American flag girl, the tranny bum....
Anna was closing up the gallery, and we exited to the street, started walking up Wooster. Tom and I continued trying to say what about New York kept us so intoxicated. As we ambled north, we passed a mound of black garbage bags piled expectantly on loading platform — not an uncommon sight. Except the garbage bags began to move.
The bags shifted and swayed, and we saw in the gold shine of street-light-lit night in the inky darkness that in the middle of the pile was a person, a tiny person dressed in garbage bags, crowned by them. She wore a garbage bag on her head like a full headdress, like an enormous fall. Garbage bags on her arms and torso. As she shifted, it was like a ballet of garbage bags. Her emergence, her unfurling of garbage bag arms and head while sitting in, surrounded by, piles of huddled other bags, black paunch pillows of filth and refuse, the unwanted, the tossed-away, now animated, living, breathing, moving — How magnificent! How beautiful!
I said, "This is it! This is why I love New York City! This garbage bag woman. Her existence is the love poem to New York City I have never been able to write."
"—It's a man," my friend Anna cut in.
"What? No. I think it's a woman."
"No. It's a man. I know it is. I see him every day. He's always there, sitting in that pile of garbage bags, wearing a garbage bag on his head. It's a man."
"Oh." I shrugged. "Still. He's kind of like a poem. I wish I had my camera."