What does this Smell Like? -- Part I

I woke up this morning in a kind of haze… but honestly, it’s not about this morning and the things I did last night. Sappy sentimentalism has been coursing through the veins for months. Long walks, bridge walks visits to the places I first visited on my first visits to this place I always wanted to live in… I have lost my memory of how it all used to smell.

I have this vague memory of the tingly excitement I would feel as I got off of the bus, train or plane and the dove head first off the deep end into this place. I recall a tradition where I would immediately hit a bodega, buy a beer in a bag and drink it seripticiaously as I walked through midtown thinking whoa, mudda fucka, I’m walking the streets of the greatest place on earth, drinking a beer on the streets where nobody gives a rats ass about me OR the fact that I am doing this or that, god bless the 80's.

My first trip here was a twelfth grade Urban Geography field trip… I carried about 60 spliffs across the border and triped on ‘cids the whole way down. I got an 80 on my notes and saw “West Side Story” while tripping and holding my first Ultravox album in my arms, waiting to puke on the Eddison’s roof while looking at the wooden rockets that hold the water that bathe us and feeds our thirst.

That was high school… Art School brought me here at least 5 more times between 1980 and 1984…

What did it smell like?

It did not smell like the aroma of Seattle brewed coffee… It did not smell like garlically pesto… It smelt like a great big pile of lubrication, lubrication, grease that makes things go. It smelt like garbage, great big pile of garbage… it smelt like the sweat of COOL people doing COOL things. It smelt like the big ol’ place I knew I’d someday come to help myself to the ultimate newness, freshness and excitement. I needed to vindicate the urges some folks in my life have always told me to avoid.

We’re four months away from my fifth annivesrary… although I have completely enjoyed integrating myself into the greatest place on Earth… I have also mourned the loss of the excitement I used to feel when I came… this being the Zenith of all places, I wonder if I’ll ever know that feeling again, I mean, I’m not going to London, Paris or Ho Chi Min city thinking, well this, that, there will be the place I will define myself.

I got it, I have it… I read my books on the V and wish these mother fuckers would stop holding the door open so that I could get to work. I walk the streets of the West and East Villages, Williamsburg, Cobble Hill, Coney Island, Clinton Hill and Greenpoint; as I am walking home a citizen, rather than, as an excited tourist.

It’s good… It’s bad… I miss the way it used to all smell.