RUDIMENTS, pt. 123
Making Cars
I tell myself things, you know,
like pep-talk stuff. To no avail.
It's almost funny it's all so useless.
'Stay loose.' That's one. It's a good,
one, and better than most, because
it works real well for writing too.
That's really all you need, that kind
of nerve, the nerve to stay loose, let
it all sag and go wherever. That's not
so easy to do: most people are incredibly
tight about themselves, all gawked up
and coiled. New York City was full of
that. The most extreme cases had
blown a fuse and were simply shot.
There tightness had done them in.
I'd find them most often at 'Dave's.'
-
This is very difficult to explain, fifty
years on - because, for one thing,
Dave's is long gone, and the people
inhabiting the location are as well.
That's my main contingent here, of
whom I'm writing these words, loosely
as I can. (A note here, interjected,
about writing loosely - it means no
consequence, I don't care of it offends
or whether the reader goes along. That's
the idea of 'confessional' looseness, as
it were. It straight from wherever and
it can be painful too - painful for me,
for sure, as the writer, because I've lost
everyone, all these people, and am just
left here alone, a soiled remnant, of
another world entire. That keeps me real
sad, and elegantly understated too. And
I think that's the key. Getting something
across as 'elegantly understated' is a real
gift - these are annals of a lost world).
-
Dave's was at the southeast corner of
Broadway and Canal Street. Right there,
250 years ago, the location had been a major
crossroads of early Manhattan. It was, at
first a marshy waterway, long ago, with
something there called the 'Kissing Bridge,'
which was a wooden bridge over a part of
the marsh, and romantic in aspect enough,
for strollers and lovers, to have gotten that
name. It was also there that one of NYCity's
Tea-Water Springs was (there used to be
five or six), where people would go with
their buckets and things to get clear, cold
fresh water from ancient, perfect NYCity
bedrock springs, the surface water long
before having been fouled up with detritus,
sewage, animal much and dead animals too,
rendering it mostly undrinkable by 1790.
(You can look any of this up, I won't go
on, it's just common knowledge to me).
Dead animal carcasses, and foul'd animal
water were one of NYCity's biggest
problems, along with sewers and lack
of clean water. Pigs were let to roam
freely, acting as scavengers everywhere,
but also acting as polluters as they
'cleaned' too. Weird balancing act.
Another clean water location, as well,
had been down a little, along the old
Bowery, when it was just a wooded and
farm lane, on Peter Stuyvesant's farmland,
and called The Bower. In Chinatown, now,
deep in, it was where Confucius Plaza is.
-
So, two hundred years later, same spot,
Dave's goes up. There had once been a
canal cut across the island, east to west
and vice-versa, for some water management,
and when that was later subsumed and
done away with, and urbanized and built
upon, it simply became Canal Street, one
of NYC's heavier-traveled and constantly
clogged thoroughfares, leading now to the
Holland Tunnel on one end (Nothing to do
with wooden shoes, and it doesn't bring
you to Holland at the other end. John
Holland invented the submarine in those
NY waters), and, at the east end, the
Brooklyn and other bridges that fan
out from there. It's as much of a real
mess as anything. In the middle of all
this, at Canal and Broadway, was
Dave's. It never closed, was open
all the time, and everyone with
nowhere else to go just went there.
There were serving windows to
the street - so people sidled up
there, along the sidewalks and
such - and, just inside, wooden
alcoves for the bad weather, where
the window people could sit. Inside
it was basically a huge diner, every
sort of plain old diner food, big-stuff
right on down to ten-cent coffee.
people would go in there and, I
swear, never come out. It acted as a
church, confessional, morgue and
waiting room for every sort of
NY indigent you'd ever imagine.
The blind, the bent, the crooked,
the peg-legged, the maimed and
the murderous, all kept their seats
there. The design motif was old,
wood, wide, and dark green, an
ancient, heavy, dark green I could
never replicate if I tried a hundred
years. There were bums and homeless
people in there at all times. Taxi guys,
whores, hookers and bronco-busters too,
just in off the street or just in from
their cloud-ride from Houston. Dave's
accepted everyone. It was huge, and
always active. When they took it
away (it's now some guttural, huge
Chinatown haul of Asian foods and
goods), I swear there was a gut-wrenching
sound from the soul-bottom of old
New York City itself - the screams
and the wailing of every war, Depression,
loss and grievance that ever there existed.
A good part of New York City died the
day they took Dave's away - I figure it
to have been abut 1984 perhaps.
-
I know nothing ever stays the same
and all things change, but trying telling
that to someone in need. Try explaining
that downward to some Starbucks creep
with a four-dollar coffee in their sticky
hand. It leaves no blood-stain, they say,
when you put it down on a table top.
Neither did Dave's. But for ten cents
you lived, and didn't just posture.
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