Debris
My father is visiting New York for the weekend. I meet him at the Inter Continental hotel, an ostentatious hub for international businessmen. The doorman looked skeptical of my leopard print scarf, purple tank top, and shorts as I stepped into the lobby on 48th and Lexington. Men and women in suits sit straight, prepped in leather chairs, propping laptops. A row of rounded backs and white hair face the bar at the West end, each right hand wrapped around a highball. The doorman takes me into an elevator that plays a galvanizing Bach and holds his head straight as we travel to the 13th floor. Signaling my exit with his arm, he holds the door open to a hallway shamelessly adorned in gold trimmed tables, art frames, and candleholders; the carpet, a weave of gold flower vines and black… opulence unrefined.
This weekend, I am also house sitting for a friend two blocks from the hotel so we stopped to walk the dog before transferring my father’s bags from the hotel to my apartment in Queens.
My father: “Sure is a lot of garbage here.” I reigned the dog away from accumulated mounds of trash as we pass each apartment, bar, restaurant, and shop. Impressions of New York do not seem to deviate: it’s dirty and for most, the sheer amount of trash makes it inescapable in smell and as obstacle.
Unlike the residential neighborhood I grew up in near Seattle, the city streets of Minneapolis, or the suburban neighborhood of my father, where garbage is contained in alleys, backyards, and two-car garages, NY trash can only accumulate in the open, whether in bags on the street, in gutters, sewers, cavernous subway stations, or the East River.
I tried to keep the dog from sniffing a homeless man as my father looked down and up, between the trash on the street and the people he tried to avoid, and then remarks, “There are a lot of people too.”
When we arrived at my apartment, I stepped into the kitchen. I tried to ignore the cockroach that slipped under the microwave. When I flicked on the lights, another came out from the sink, and another from under a soap dish. I grabbed the pile of coffee filters and started beating them out like a flame, yelling to my father from the bathroom, “Don’t come in here!”
“Are you changing?”
“Um…no…just…hold on…” I slammed another that fell into the silverware drawer and then stomped another out with my flip-flop. Truthfully, I usually thwart the cockroach affair with traps and exterminators, having only to clear out one or two a week…this way, I won’t see them when they aren’t there or imagine their sharp movements in my sleep. Of course, the first night my father is in the apartment, I come home to wage a full-on attack against at least 15.
Looking under the sink before my dad could enter the kitchen, I saw another crawl inside the trash. I quickly tied up the bag and ran, arm extended, to the chute at the end of the hall. It is a freeing act: tying up the knot at the end of a 10 pound bag, opening the door and pushing it through the 1′x 1′ hole. I hear it cartwheel against the metal siding. Sometimes the contents will thrash and spill. I think briefly of this release and wipe my hands, though unable to fully eradicate the residue of city living.
The cockroaches have hidden lives between the walls, a habitat that depends on the grime, proximity, and the density, allowing them to carry food and secrets from room to room, apartment to apartment, and building to building. When I returned, my father was peering out over the rows of windows, the lawn of my backyard: “All these people,” he said, “with no space.”
“I know,” I said, “and when you hear them, you know that they are there.” I open my windows to the quotidian air of discontent: nagging wives, the tension of work-a-day blue-collar men, children that protest their bedtime.
Disposition is irrelevant; it is the sheer numbers that have made New York a forum for displays of such personal desperation, frustration, or grief. Everything is too close: bodies and hands graze unintentionally on the subway, they see into bedrooms, and watch from peepholes. There is always someone close enough to invade your earshot, your olfactory senses, or slide into your seat.
Unlike the safety of suburban streets and the distance between homes, there is nothing to keep the garbage from mingling or spilling over, the same as there is no way to insulate against the soiled lives of others. “To air dirty laundry” is an apt metaphor, but also to be taken literally in the city, where the proximity makes the stains visible: undergarments and pants that hang from clotheslines; garbage, human waste, and decay cannot be concealed or contained, not unlike the muted altercations, where couples belie their contentment on the subway.
At breakfast the next morning, my father confirms, as we look out onto the street from a café: “I am starting to wish I could see my yard.” People are swarming in mass, cups of coffee spilling, strollers absorbing sidewalk bumps, traffic and sirens, the white noise of rush hour pervades.
My father considers his own verdant view and rooted garden, the steady stream of his private fountain and bird feeder, large potted plants, and the occasional raccoon that gets trapped behind the pool gates.
“Don’t you ever get sick of them?” he asks me.
“No,” I told him, considering the smells, the fears, the failures, the sweet smell of decay…the debris of humanity colliding, calling from the night window.
