Sancho's Eyes

For a year I have been trying to write about him. For a year I have passed him every day, I have said hello, I have shared cigarettes, bits of conversation thrown like baseballs back and forth across the wall. Sancho.

The grit of the mouth showing the teeth then curling itself into a tunnel.

San – cho.

I first saw him several months after I began work. It was a day in the Spring, a day when the winter reaches back, when its attempted snow turns into a mist, a day when there is no sky between the buildings, the skyscrapers stand beheaded at the thirtieth floor, there is only grey – grey and the persistent threat of condensation.

So.

By the wall were analysts. There were clerks accountants mailmen doormen receptionists secretaries salesmen programmers phone guys computer guys facilities people real estate people – it was an hour before lunch and everybody had gathered outside of the Berlin Wall to smoke.

It felt like the 30’s and it smelt like Aachen.

Standing in the thick of the cigarette smoke I had suddenly the urge to sit on a suitcase, to check the platform, the train, the train… any minute now.

But there was no train. We knew it all too well.
We smoked.

We.

To shrug it all off, to circumcise the ‘we’, I had wondered off.

I had walked straight up to the wall.
I peaked in.

Then I walked right through it.


There was a small square, and that is where I saw him. This square, it was different, the city sounds vanished here, there was a small waterfall, there was a small café – and, there was Sancho.

He was sitting on his chair, a chair I have come to call his because I have never seen anyone else sitting on it. In fact, I have never seen Sancho anywhere except on that chair – smiling, his hair combed to the side, a disproportionally heavy mustache, a lightbulb of a belly, thighs dangling amused and one inch off the ground.

“Hey,” I said, dusting the wall cement off my shoulders and legs.

He gave me a nod, smiled, and coughed voraciously.

He re-inhaled on his cigarette.

“The things those suckers do to you,” I smirked and reached for my pack.

“Tell me about it,” he said. “My lungs must look like my pants,” he said and flapped the parts of his slacks that were loose below the knees.

I couldn’t help but laugh. “I like that,” I said.

“No kidding.”

And so we began to talk. He had an easy manner, a gift to say things when there were things to be said and to share a silence when the city required it. He seemed to have watched me during my first few months there, and knew more about me than I had ever imagined possible.

“Your father, for instance,” he said once. “When you had immigrated, he had taken to smoking Virginia Slims, do you remember?”

His words were a bucket of ants into my collar and I straightened up. “Of course,” I said.

“You thought it was an immigrant mistake, him smoking the lady brands all that time.”

I gulped at my own cigarette. I nodded carefully. I remembered the endless car rides home, him dropping me off wearily at the entrance then driving back to his own apartment, the red interior of the Buick permanently ashed in menthol, the rolled down windows, the same Abba tape rolling ceaselessly back and forth in the cassette player.

Sancho was quiet for a while and let me think. Then with the dutiful coldness of a surgeon he said: “He just missed your mother,” and left it at that.

And it made sense. During our first few months in the country that brand was all that my mother smoked. For my father, the two years after the divorce were the years of Virginia Slims and Abba and Modern Talking and Bonny M. My mother, on the other hand, filled our kitchen with cartons of Marlboro’s, the house played classical music only, the stove cooked only all things Italian and English had become the international language of choice.

“You have a point,” I said after a while.

And so it began. Each day I would come out just a bit before lunch and squeeze between the cinderblocks into the hidden place behind the wall. Me and Sancho would talk, smoke, we would look at the buildings the way most look at the stars, and he would carefully tell me which is a windmill and which is a skyscraper.

And coming back up to work, I could hardly sit at my desk.

The day when I had met Sancho also marked my first escape to the library.

I began going there every day.

At first I would only walk near the shelves. Walking between them gave me a sudden sense of peace, the sort of peace one feels at a cemetery, knowing suddenly that he is not alone. There was Borges, Bulgakov, Burgess, Burroughs, Carver, (I am moving along the shelves now), Celine, Cervantes, Cortazar there was London, Maugham, Murakami… I would stop by each, drop into their world, and then drop out.

The bathroom was where I began going to write. To really write. Speaking to Sancho every day of the workweek had got me thinking. There is a lot a man misses when living inside himself for two decades and now that I had a guide, there were things that needed to be jotted down.

I ended up picking the rightmost stall. Out of the three it was the only one with a working door. There were also signs that at least somebody was there. There were things written all over. Things like: “Hide the knives!!!” or “New York City is my toilet.” Seeing things like that made me feel good. It made me feel like I was somewhere where things happened, where something was going on.

Most of what is here was written in that stall, my pants down, staring at the black and peeling paint of the door in front of me, just so we have that clear.

Anyway.

Months passed. I would talk to Sancho before lunch, and camp in the library bathroom during the day. Life became simple. It became increasingly simple because I would simply talk to Sancho and the rest would find itself written.

Still, something was amiss. More and more I began to wonder about this small and round man, where he came from, what he did. I had never seen him out of his chair, yet except for his moustache his face was always shaven fresh. His shirt was white, his pants ironed. If he did have a job, he certainly did not attend it.

The thought made me take to him even more.

And so I began to look into his eyes. A peak at first, and then more and more. Nearly a full year passed before I could look at them fully.

It was during one of the warmer days of the following winter and we were both sitting at a table that had become ours, him in his chair, and me in mine. He was telling me of his home town, a provincial city outside of Valencia, he was telling me of men who carry flour over their backs, women who can break grapes into wine with a snap of their toes, but I was distracted. I would be changing jobs soon, I knew, and the knowledge of leaving had made me look at my surroundings all the more intensely.

For a moment Sancho became silent and looked at me.

“Something’s on your mind,” he said.

I nodded. I looked up also, I looked up and for the first time, for the first time in all of our conversations our eyes met – equally, in a sudden and mysterious symmetry.

They were ancient. I read them then, I read them in a way I had been unable to read them before and saw, with an unexpectedly settling horror that they spoke in hieroglyphs.

There it was, within each perfect circle, symbols – pictographs imported from a cleaner time, a time when men seemed to have gotten it right, when the world communicated not in assignments but in these collages of simplicity, combinations of image thought sound feeling sentiment, three strokes in one, five strokes intersecting in another and the message was conveyed.

Simple.

And Sancho looked away.

Something began to change. The small square we sat in suddenly grew more and more silent, there was only the perpetual gushing of the waterfall, the sky was growing into twilight, above us were office windows, some lit, some turned dark for the weekend.

There also came a smell. At first of tulips, then of something moist and heavy, something close to the smell of firewood that has been forgotten in the rain.

I saw then than Sancho’s eyes were wet. He seemed to be crying, but silently, without drops.

“You don’t have to worry about it,” he said suddenly, seemingly sensing my discomfort. “You live for long enough and even your eyes begin to smell.”

“I know,” I replied instantly, although I understood nothing.

We sat together for some time after that. Neither of us said anything. About an hour must have passed before the city re-occupied the square with its domestic scents – that is, no scents at all.

It was dark.

“I’ll see you Monday?” I said casually, standing up from my chair.

Sancho gave me a nod. His face seemed narrower, his skin malleable.

“Monday,” he said.

It would be the last time I would see him.

                                                                *    *    *

In two weeks I will be changing my job. I walk by the wall every day. I have never returned to the square but each morning I look in, seemingly like a lab student checking the barometer pressure. The square remains empty.

Some days I stand and keep my hand on the cold surface of the cinderblock. On others I drop by the library.

Without Sancho, I have taken to wearing sunglasses. It alarms people less then, I’ve learned, when I come to a Cathedral or a skyscraper to touch it.

Perhaps, I often think, Sancho was only a doorman from a nearby building. Or an analyst awaiting retirement.

Perhaps I was only an analyst myself, awaiting my time.

Still, few days pass, that when I unchain my donkey from a nearby lamppost in the evening, that I do not think of Sancho, the short man so round in his wisdom, that I do not remember the strange and beautiful odor of his eyes.

But I do not worry.

The wall, it has certainly seen stranger things.

Lollipops & Cheese

Sunday nights are guest bartender nights in Long Island City. And a piece of advice for anyone interested:

Don’t do it.

I enter and instantly feel the moist scent of cleaning detergent. That is the good part. Here’s the bad: that’s all there is.

Frank comes from around the bar and introduces himself. He’s big, he has the body of a failed boxer, the temper of a jukebox – put enough in and he will play. Or so it seems.

“A little quiet, you know,” he smirks.

“I know,” I say. I smile. I introduce myself. For Frank’s sake, I stick to the first initial.

“Everybody’s home today, fucking long weekend, it’s all family time man.”

I tell him I’m used to it, no worries there. I think about giving him my resume, my long and fake list of central European long weekends and getting used to it, but – he does not ask. I keep it to myself. A look around the bar and keeping-to-myself seems like the thing to do.

Frank shows me around. The bar. The ice sinks, the cleaning sinks. Below the liquors are the beers, above the liquors are the lights. He has them on too bright, but I keep quiet. He shows me around apologetically, the way I have noticed people show their homes. I like him for that. We go down the back steps to the beer cooler, the booze reserves, the ice box.

It amazes me instantly how all bars, all empty bars in particular, are the same. I remember the old bar, the only bar where I worked some three or five times. The cellar was my home there, a place where I could hear the people without them eating me, a place where I could kick around the broken glass and think things over. Things really do make the most sense in the most unexpected places.


Some two hours later I’m behind the counter. A few of the regulars are in their seats, they hold their spots with an uncanny defense, this amazes me also – one look at them and they shuffle around over the stools. How much this instantly bring me back to the Midnight Gambler, that small little boat in international waters where housewives grab onto their seats at the low-limit blackjack tables, these Newport-churning princesses with the defensive tempers of eastern-front partisans. But that is a story for another time.

And so the regulars. There won’t be any fancy cocktails, that is obvious, and so I relax. It will be Johny on the rocks, back-to-back shots before facing the wife the kids the steps up to the evening news the frying pan the shower curtain… I project, but hey – I can’t help it.

Everything about this bar reminds me of the old one. The owner’s name is the same. The wooden finish is the same. The static of the Christmas lights in the window is the same. The manner of the regulars is the same. Two huddle at the end of the bar and chat. Three or four sit in a monk-like silence in front of their drinks. The rest, which tallies to about two, make it their Christ-governed destiny to fill me in on exactly who-drinks-what, what-goes-where, who-did-who, and so on. Just the sound of their voices puts Mary right up on the stool, Mary the sixty year-old self proclaimed accountant of the old bar, the part time exhibitionist of mismatched lingerie, her thick framed glasses, leaning back on the stool… standing at this bar here and now I can nearly feel her nasal monotone yelping for a refill.

I try to shake it off. I lean on the bar, try not to stand too close to the regulars, to keep quiet and listen. Several times I ask them a question, ask them about who they are, what they do, but I come off too aggressive, they retreat. And so I stay where I am. I clean the same glass several times, readjust the coasters, look at the television on the right, look at the television on the left, look concerned with the score, shoot the shit, refill the ice and soon enough, help to close. In this cold city filled to the brink with starving servers, I end up the only loony to make it.

Outside in the cold I hear my syllable and turn around. It’s Frank. I come back to the door.
“I like you,” he says. We shake hands, mine leaves with a twenty and I dip it in my pocket.
“I like you too,” I say.
We agree on the same time and the same place, knowing both that it won’t happen. We shake hands again, I smile, he laughs, and I make my way. At the end of the block I see a cab indecisively turning a corner and I make it mine.

The twenty gets me into the city. The man is from Haiti, half of the fare pays for his questions about my origin, the other for a collective struggle to cross the bridge. When the money runs out I mark it as my cue.
“This is good,” I yell from the backseat. “I’ll walk.”
The cab stops, he flips back in his seat and looks at me.

“Friend man, it’s fucking freezing, you crazy?”
“Yes.”
I close the door, the cab does not move, he is expecting me to change my mind, I cross the street while the light is still green, not that it matters. The streets are filled with nothing. It’s only me, me and the friend man.

I begin walking. It really is fucking-freezing. It is colder than it has ever been this year. It is colder than Dresden, it is colder than Prague, it is colder than all of that because at least there you could walk into a restaurant and stuff your socks with their napkins but here there is nothing, only a long weekend of offices still lit, corners empty without the coffee carts, diners and Au-Bon-Pain’s with their chains drawn and I keep walking. We’re somewhere on the east side. Of all places – Midtown. Of course.

There is a sense of peace, a nearly haunting sense of invincibility of having the world stop, when even within the belly of this whale, even within the back alleys of this wicked colony, you feel in your feet that all have fallen asleep and no one has yet waken up.

This is the world at pause.

And you walk right through it.

And places. These places that have made you theirs, places that you have made your own. There is a peace with them as well. Here there is Bryant Park. There is the Citicorp building, that three-legged witch of silver and steel. They are just places. And you are just you. And you keep walking, for an instant you want to become the Montag of your memories, you believe that you can incinerate everything, make the city objective, start everything new. But the places don’t move. Like manuscripts, they do not burn. They only shrug. They look at you, they smile at the futility of your self-obsessed fervor. And what can you do? You smile as well, the air becomes white under your nose, and you realize that in a way, you are laughing.


The sun is up when I get to the bridge, the sun is up and I am a slab of numb flesh with my eyes half open. I wish for McDonalds to serve whiskey but I know better.

I go onto the walk and go up and up.

And finally, somewhere
The water below
The sky so cold and clear
I sit down.

I lean my head back. I exhale. Somehow, even in this weather, this cold that can make you feel like an immigrant even in the places you want to call home, this bridge, this string of planks in the air connecting nothing and nothing has come to be the most grounded place there is. And so I relax. Through the frost the sunlight pats my face with the touch of a stepmother – alien, obligatory. But I take it. Yes, life isn’t so bad. If only I could have some napkins to stuff my socks with, if only I had stolen a bit of cognac to sip. Yes – napkins and cognac.

That would certainly hit the spot.

January Spring

Write what you see. You’re outside. Look around. The black sky. The newly designed hotel. The gentle and hygienic bouncers. The secluded smokers. The shit-eating grin of a sale, a white-collar smoking its profit silly. Inside. Screens of manly men chasing each other down. Below. Panel of manly men chasing each others’ drinks. People pile in. Hold your air while you make your way. Bodily functions become a destination. Squeeze, squeeze, excuse me. Squeeze squeeze.

Find your place.

Unzip.

Then onward.

Red bricked aquariums where fish finally breathe. Synch their pulses. One-two, three four five. One-two, three four five. The fish find their place, you find yours.

Eyes open.

You watch them, these ballerinas of the moment. These unrepeatable Elizabeths of their own kingdom, dancing the now, gypsy carnivals of personality so beautiful in their not-thinking you feel yourself wake up just looking at them.

And standing at the grocery counter an hour before sunrise, handing the money with a silence, you feel suddenly, for the first time in just-too-long, like yourself.


To the city of so many quarreling boroughs, to the city that can light a spring into the winter, to the city that dances, to this city that lives without an hour or any goddamn invented point, to this city, this remarkable insomniac of a home -

Thank you.

Some New Year housekeeping.

Today I will invent an ancient culture that opens its drawers on the last day of each year and I will follow in its suit. In truth, I have already begun writing a fable of this strange land, the land of gnomes and their ale, a land of aged Roman cellars in where modern-day Austria crosses over into the Czech hills, a land where among other strange customs the gnomes cast their lanterns – paper maches of unbearable lightness, lanterns of laughter and forgetting – on the very last day of their calendar. But each story has its time and place and perhaps that is a story for the new year. Stories seem to have a way of making friends and also foes out of even the emptiest of auditoriums, most often in a near-comical tragedy not a soul in their seat realizing that they are meant to do quite neither.

And so, in the call of cultural tradition I have opened up my drawers, of course keeping personal tradition in mind – belatedly. I am also considering putting up some dreams, but do not know where. Perhaps they deserve a separate space, and although I do not want to want to make a typist of myself the dreams too need to be organized and catalogued. The black books get murky, words get lost, thoughts and images forgotten.

Over some time I have gotten into the habit of writing down my dreams and would recommend for anybody reading this to experiment – for there is no greater clarity than in the pre-sunrise twilight, letting your hand race across with the taste of that just dreamt and the eyes still closed.

Dreams somehow have always been easier for me to write, it seems that in my mind, somewhere in me they happen whereas the present is at best only understood, most often in a lengthy and not a highly attractive way. With the dream, however, even if the most spare and random details are noted, the dream is saved, it becomes a tangible dome I can step back into and recreate fully, or even better – build from. Over the past few months I have been writing down my dreams nearly every day, and this should make for an interesting project.

But that is all ahead. For now, the page is open, the holidays over, the snow on its way. It is all superficial of course - the year rolls over nothing with nothing. Still, I cannot help but feel a childlike bounce in me, a feeling somehow that this year is going to be big, huge – there is so much of something – and the fact that it is unknown makes bouncing all the more irresistible.

And so I smile, the gnomes bounce, the village dances, the caves echo with the clacking of their wooden shoes, the swinging of their caps, the sliding of the mugs, the banging on the tables and the deep
thin
smell
of their ale.

Prost!

ether notes.

                 … it is a land that stretches ceaselessly and goes nowhere, a land where each has his own acre, they can walk for centuries without stepping out of it, for its citizens take pride in their land, they show you their home… I was born here, you see, my grandfather was born in that shed right over there, I broke my arm there… the concept of hiding is unknown… everything is seen, the seen sees back with a merciless and mind-dismantling intensity and we are thirty over the speed limit… someone yawns… someone scans for a station…

                                               … and I resign as anything near a writer if asked to describe the desolation of flatness, the despair of mars-like snow-covered craters and canyons as the twilight drops and the wind whips and flirts with your machine and there is not a tree for lifetimes and awe is not a word but an eighth sense growing like an ear out of your shoulderblades in an amazement and downright mortal fear… if asked to describe the manic joy of sunlight, the chimneyed clouds out of the tips of the Rockies, the clarity of the carless road in the morning and the soporific death it flops over the windshield at night…this land - you are obese in your loneliness, a leafless amnesiac and I bless and kiss your open womb of not knowing…

                                                                                          …and I have nothing, nothing to bring home, an ink stained backseat, a candy I have chewed to keep awake, an upset stomach, I have Paco, the Kum&Go clerk for the night (yes, it is, and it’s a chain, I checked), he danced the Labamba and would not let me leave, man you the second person this month to come in, and so you stay, not for Paco, although he can charm the needles off a porcupine, but you stay because he has the only light bulb that is lit in this state, because you got in the car in an ether gaze for dangerous lunacy and the circus-circus but instead are driving now and its fucking dark and paradise boulevard is mountains away you are the only one awake for miles, you are the only one awake for miles and you are in a Strugatsky novel of craters and the unseen, of mining outposts doing their Flash-Gordon dance and if you walk out they will chew you without looking, you are no longer on earth and you know it, you read over your own caption in the local news – Unidentified Ukrainian Male and Tumbleweed Found, Translator in Demand…

               .. I have Paolo Alto wunderkinds arguing about the perfect candy bar… million-dollar fathers in their homes of tall kitchens and efficiently warm fireplaces, retired satirists playing frisbee, I have a blue-lipped anarchists’ monologue about believing in yourself, a fruitshakers’ compulsive peace, a stoner’s scientific method of why grass is green, a mechanic who crashed his pickup the moment I had snapped the shutter on a cemetery, a wrinkled mother tending a gas station and waiting for her ivy-bound children, an Appalachian pre-war miner walking to see his wife on a Monday morning…

                                                                                                     …they are cliché, they are cheese so real you can smell its grease running into your sleeve, they are stories, they are so much more, the nine billion names of god flipping pancakes and jerking the Nevada slots and chain-smoking their motel salaries and driving back home and asking for directions and someone yawns and another one changes the station and we are thirty over the limit and in fifty more we will somewhere switch…