101 Abeel. Welcome to the Ministry of Love
“You asked me once, what was in 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in 101 is the worst thing in the world. The worst thing in the world varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.” (O’Brien, 1984, Orwell, III, V.)
On our way south we stop in Rotterdam. Dusty needs a pee and a milk shake; and I’ve found an old illuminated sign on Craigslist from the 1950’s for a hundred and fifty bucks. The lady was using it to promote her mobile karaoke unit, but nobody wants that any more, she says, they just pull it off YouTube. Lost wisdom stays lost in Rotterdam, mouldering under an unnervingly large heap of sneakers. I tiptoe out, shouldering the sign, and cross the brown snow; a ballerina in weather-inappropriate Venetian brogues. To Dusty, who never even considered getting out of the car; this is adult business. She can smell embarrassment and decay a mile off and wants none of it. On our way out of town Google Maps loops us back, and we pass the same welcome sign at the city limits. ‘Rotterdam is a Nice Place to Live’ it grumbles, like a screaming pope.
Talk in the Kingston used bookshop is of an enormous unstoppable marble of gentrification thundering up I-87, flurries of screaming authentics fleeing in its path. Fusty fifteen-year pioneers smelling of used books shake their heads. There goes the neighborhood. And it’s true, property taxes have doubled; the price of a new Volvo every year for the privilege of owning this derelict hovel, black water drooling through the rusty spittoon of its roof. But alone in the freezing rain by the scrapyard on the Rondout in January, bloviators nostalgic for the rusty days of yore can relax and smile; it still feels like an old tramp’s mouth. Something is happening here. But I don’t know what it is.
I think I thought I knew, but it didn’t really matter because after the torrid circumstances of its birth, it immediately slipped sideways into the mire and vanished. I muttered a few words about what it might be to the few who would listen and got on with doing nothing. But now the mud has retreated, a weak sun noses over the horizon and its hulking bulk has resurfaced, like the unsteepled church in the village they flooded to build a reservoir. And we stare at this stranded monster; and it stares back and says ‘so what are we doing?’
Fear Eats the Soul. It does. Like the rats in the cage on Winston’s head, it’ll eat right through your face to be free. With no hands on deck, I move a claw foot tub 65 miles from the garage in Bovina where it has languished for two years, to the storefront on Abeel Street. It takes a wealth of pivoting, one iron foot to another, boomeranging corner to corner to corner. And two sinks from Emma Willard School, tattooed with hands-and-knees names of girls, down under where the sun don’t shine. Lisa, Lola, Frankie, Matilda. And two doors from an old gun shop in Saratoga. Getting sinks through the door at Abeel takes a big Greek guy, eating with his family in Armadillo, who sees you sweating, drops his enchilada, comes out and helps. Turns out he’s a plumber. ‘These are quality’ he says. He should plumb this place. He’s gone before the thought takes shape.
The future is eighty years of history peeled off and snapped like a latex glove. The proctology phase; each wart and fissure cauterized, and shouldn’t that thing be the size of a walnut, not a tangelo? Flaunting our crack-house credentials, Mark Ohe and I spend a pre-electric night on the floor, sharing a bottle of wine, sleeping bags and a half century of dead skin with weird millipedes that ebb and flow between the floorboards like ghost feathers in a malaria dream. Up early, skeeved, we head to the old donut shop for pre-dawn coffee and a poo.
Later we hike Diamond Notch in the Catskills. Three miles in we come upon a clearing by a bridge above a waterfall, realizing in the same instant that each of us has been here before. This is followed by the compound revelation that we were together that day too, twenty one years ago. And so life coalesces, line-by-line, into late, bittersweet Thomas Hardy.
As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
Distinctly yet
Myself and a girlish form benighted
In dry March weather. We climb the road
Beside a chaise. We had just alighted
To ease the sturdy pony’s load
When he sighed and slowed.
What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of
Matters not much, nor to what it led, –
Something that life will not be balked of
Without rude reason till hope is dead,
And feeling fled.
It filled but a minute. But was there ever
A time of such quality, since or before,
In that hill’s story? To one mind never,
Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,
By thousands more.
Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,
And much have they faced there, first and last,
Of the transitory in Earth’s long order;
But what they record in colour and cast
Is – that we two passed.
And to me, though Time’s unflinching rigour,
In mindless rote, has ruled from sight
The substance now, one phantom figure
Remains on the slope, as when that night
Saw us alight.
I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
And I shall traverse old love’s domain
Never again.
•••
