Downtown

“Look, you not gonna get it to sound like that. It only sounds like that on the record cause it was his guitar he keep in his closet every day gettin’ soggy and melding with the temperature of the room. He beat that thing into the way it sounds. It used to sound jes’ like yours: clean and new and straight. Until later and carrying it all over the hills and leavin’ it uncased when he be drunk. You cain’t build a guitar to sound like that. You gotta tear one down.”

That’s what the old man was telling this poor kid on the street, plucking away at old Robert Johnson tunes waiting for some dollar bills to fall down over the quarters he himself had placed in his open guitar case. Sitting on a stoop, unlicensed but proud. It looked like he’d always figured a cop would be the one pushing him along, uprooting him from his fantasy. But this was some old black bastard tearing him down, stained white t-shirt like a drape cloth barely covering his antique belly, face like wet tree bark, yellow eyes full of educational menace. I couldn’t decide which one to root for. The runaway with straggly sideburns busking, trying to live on that thin edge of flaky authenticity, or the old man with no say so in the world except what used to be.

The kid looked hurt. “Well, shit if I ain’t trying!”

You can’t always take something away from things you overhear.

“Close the door, honey,” says the jazz station DJ to some unseen accomplice in the studio. “You’re letting the flies in.” Perched on the second floor of an old building downtown. The studio has doors that open onto a balcony overlooking Decatur Street. That’s how I imagine it anyway. And damned if a fly doesn’t land right on a live mic, catching a breeze from the DJ’s plosive syllables. I can hear the wings rattling over the airwaves, a creature-made sound separate from the mechanical buzzing of broadcast apparatuses. “It’s so hot my eyes are sweating,” the DJ says. Then he must wave the fly off because the sound pulls away, and he laughs and cues a song. Again, I’m torn. I kind of want to hear that annoying little whirr from the bug continue and know that it’s being amplified through a thousand other radios across town, all of us listening in on the biological percussion, but life and its routines can’t be suspended for each and every rarity.

Like the man making up one one-hundredth of a crowd walking against itself down Canal Street. He moves at a slower pace than people with a destination in mind, praying to some unknown god about his troubles, carrying a white plastic bag with a snap handle marked “Patient Belongings.” His face is almost featureless, eroded by the over pouring of a worried mind. He’s another stumbling soul released on his own recognizance, disturbing parents but amusing the children. I’m stuck behind him, in his wake, bobbing. I think don’t have time for this, but maybe I do.

We can’t all have the time for this, to look out, to oversee, to give every person the attention they’re asking for. All the street performers—solo trombonists, tarot card readers, human statues—needing recognition along with their lunch money from their attendant amateur comprehenders of art. The free range unemployables spend their time to and fro with no compunction to keep their limbs or their mumbled memoirs to themselves. Even the regular citizens need their stimulus, too, and crave encounters with subculture and alternative meaning, if only to further define themselves as sane, pleasant, and not adverse to observation.

I guess that’s why they build cities, residential mazes. Let the natives and the newcomers turn corners, bump into each other. A sizeable enough population should suffice to have something for everyone. Advice and admonishment, unsolicited or not, finds its way to us daily. The critics say the city isolates, that the easily obtained anonymity subsumes, like a drug, the motivation to interact. I call bullshit on that. You stand in one spot long enough, someone’s going to notice and step up. They might want to tell you what to think. They might offer you a woman. They might ask you for directions. And if you can’t stand to answer them, to let a little part of you rub off and be taken away back home with someone else, if you can’t be a tore down, nature-warped instrument that’s fit to play on, well, then, you don’t really belong anywhere but in a case, sealed and protected from all our elements.