1913issue6online

83 White Space More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began. -Michelle Alexander One summer, not long after I graduated from college, I was an anxious wreck. I had just moved to New York City by myself and lived for a while in a family’ friend’s apartment on the Low- er East Side. I let the tea kettle burn on the stove, began to drink beer at dusk medicinally, and stood in the hallway, squinting into darkness in the middle of the night, trying not to lose it while my best friend told me over the phone about the ghosts she’d seen while dozing at a bar in Montana. Walking around helped, but never on the weekends. Errands run on Saturdays ensured a series of panic attacks inspired by the thick ocean of pedestrians surrounding me on the as yet unfamiliar streets. One day, I put in an application at a big, chain bookstore, and got a job in the cafe. It was easiest to breathe when, after the store closed at midnight, I could walk home through Astor Place toward the Lower East Side as the city cooled. In search of familiarity, I bought a CD by Paul Simon: Songs from the Cape Man. Paul Simon and Derek Walcott wrote the album as a soundtrack for a musical about a Puerto Rican man named Salvador Agron who killed two teenagers in 1959. The musical failed miserably. But the melodies were catching. I fell in love with the album despite the outrageously hokey nature of the songs, perhaps because it was the only CD I had. Just as I was, in that period, hazily grafting together images of the city as I walked it early in the morning and late late at night, the lyrics knit together scenes of the city I was learning to inhabit. Together, Simon and I sang, a funky duo of revelers, crooning our love for a complicated city that we longed to see through pastel colored glasses. Tiffany was my coworker in the cafe. She was younger than me, a Puerto Rican, coffee with cream girl who lived in Washington Heights. She was in her early twenties and spoke lovingly of her one-year-old son. I listened to her talk about her son and covered for her while she texted her mother in the back room

1913issue6online

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