Skyscrapers, Like Fjords

It’s midday in the jungle. On the corner I get stared down by New York City’s finest scum, an intimidating sonofabitch, probably looking for a down payment on his first house. This in a town where real estate averages a thousand bucks per square feet.

“Now listen, man, I know you got some change,” he says, gritting his teeth, clenching his fists. I keep walking, stepping up the pace, eyes glued to the pavement. “Don’t ignore me, asshole!” He is hollering behind me now, hung up on his lot in life. “I’m part of this shit, too!”

Yessirree, folks. The operative word here is: SHIT.

The Big Apple, of course, has excelled in shit, shitt-o! and scheiße ever since its inception nearly four-hundred years ago. Case in point: In 1609, one Mr. Peter Minuit, then director of the Dutch West India Trading Co., traded about 24 dollars worth of worthless beads to local Injuns for this here entire island of Manhattan. A very shitty thing to do. This, consequently, put Manhattan on its current path of crapdom.

Being harassed on the streets in the middle of the day—on a Tuesday!—is an extension of the same old shit that has continued for almost half a millennium. Have the Injuns, who were screwed over so long ago, now reincarnated themselves as bums on the city streets to fuck with decent law-abiding citizens, who are just trying to make decent law-abiding lives for themselves? I don’t blame the Indians, of course. Or the bums. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a pickle for a pickle—that sorta thing.

I DO blame Mr. Minuit for buying this damned island in the first place, on which I now find myself working five, six, seven days a week, 50 weeks a year, in a dead-end job with dead-end pay, the ever-inevitable Death as my only happy release. Why couldn’t the fucker have bought one of the islands in the Caribbean? At least there I’d have the beach.

Mention beach and I bring you the topic of sun. Whopper of a fireball in the sky right now. 98 degrees of pure Fahrenheit. To be continued at 104 degrees by mid-afternoon. There aren’t enough fire hydrants to go around for the kids trapped on this island, boiled alive in this melting pot.

Too many days like this and the ice caps are bound to thaw out. To which I say, let the floodwaters rise and Manhattan be swallowed by a monster of a wave in one big gulp of antifreeze-green saltwater.

Thus, as our famous last scene, the perfect ending to the day: Me in a dingy, revving up the motor, coasting down Sixth Avenue in a sea of genuine Gotham City sewage—and the tall skyscrapers, like fjords of concrete and steel.