This heat, is the hot that is all encompassing, forever touching and licking you salty to saltier. It’s pore awakening, lung breaking, dripping, sticking, shrilling things like: “Don’t even look at me” sort of scorch. “Even your balls call it getting too close.” Ceiling fan spinning overhead mixing tepid air hot, just whirling the atmosphere dizzy. Sexy barely there outfits on bikes, shinny reflective surfaces wet your vision. Walkers, snail through the city streets being slowed by the gum stretching along relentlessly a pink string growing blacker with every slumbrous step, collecting all manner of memories with them.
It was a bright Saturday morning and there I was, a corduroyed butterball, warbling away in the back seat, my lazy eye lost in the middle distance of incipient stardom. Dad and I drove along Tecumseh Road to Ajax Lumber, parking next to the totem pole. Then it dawned on me: I was being kidnapped, sold into slavery or worse, sent to Mémé’s house in Vanier. That pole was the port-key, one touch of its bogus eagle-beak and a life of incessant embroidery, rosary recitations and unilingual servitude awaited me. Hell’s demons had nothing on grandma and Peanut, her Chihuahua.
Sunday sings a sleepy song. Southern exposure shoots shards of hot white flood-like brightness, blinding the portraits hung on Victorian plum walls. No dark shadows lurking, pure crisp lines dancing undisturbed over last night’s array of tossed lingerie and slightly sipped flutes of champagne whose sparkles fizzled their final pop hours ago. Dormant pools in finely cut crystal becomes alive. Refractions set ablaze a spectrum of color on a skin-toned landscape. It’s a tango, imprisoning a prism of color over flesh barely covered by slippery satin sheets. We ponder the method of this muse that shakes us awake, squinting.
Death passed me by that morning, sped right past the Market knocking the generator into my wheel and tossing me into the traffic on Front Street. Or so I was told, because all I recall was the unearthly clatter, then nothing—no darkness, no light, just nothing at all till I found myself coming back to my senses and already walking around. And so I doubt now I’ll even notice death when it finally does come, just the last thing that happens before, like the last thing you remember before falling asleep, except this time you won’t be waking up.
Believe it or not, but when you grow up in New Jersey, there comes a point when New York City loses its allure and becomes just another place for school trips, birthday parties, or maybe a family outing to the Museum of Natural History in your father’s nicotine-stained Oldsmobile.
