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For
some time I believed that to really know someone you have to
either live with them for more than the duration of a vacation,
fight with them until one of you gets hit with a small appliance,
or receive a handwritten letter. Barring inopportunity and illegiblity,
I hoped an email would suffice. I don't mean to replace a favorite,
steady mode of communication with paper and pens, the stuff
that got sent to friends left over in English pubs or Seattle
and upstate New York hiding from their families at all. But
in writing this evening, I keep up my day-long work that had
taken me and my blank book (now half full as any good pessimist
is taught optimism) all over this city, reinstating my role
as voyeur watching the voyeurs. It's a kind of survival of the
fittest. . . or the one with the better shoes for going. Being
static too long makes me think of vulnerablity, ripe laziness
like listening to trains and never riding them.
The gray day had me in Chinatown that smells like every Chinatown
to Independence Park where I watched tourists photograph their
families beside the Liberty Bell as if it were Santa Claus (there
were fallen leaves through which to trudge poetically) to Society
Hill where townhouses of doctors and politicians were being
decorated for the impending holiday season. The smell of roast
beef lingered for one whole block.
12th street on the south side cushioned my landing (the "gayborhood"
as it's called). A set of gay boys (salt and pepper shakers
joined like paper dolls) rollerbladed down Spruce singing "go
speed racer go" as I headed into a now-favorite coffeehouse.
The dialogue therein between me and my book sufficed as a friend
at a table for two.
"In the ear shot of middle aged homosexuals, one is bound
to hear the name Richard Gere at least twice." They talked
with pursed lips drawn as tight as their undershorts. And the
women and boys, the women and boys just ignore me. When they
decided which athletic shoe to wear, I could be found pacing
around my livingroom in pajamas reading 'San Francisco Blues'
out loud as if to wake Kerouac from the dead with the unsteady
mantra, my Sunday morning substitution for mass, for God even.
I must have been there for at least two hours before I realized
I watched a shift change and there was a pretty, tall girl behind
the counter smiling at my seriousness. She smiled so long as
she wasn't taking cappuccino orders. I left without saying goodbye
as the customers crested late afternoon. There are no new friends
here.
Instead, the day was made for footsteps "in good shoes,"
to quote a friend of mine named Mark Harris, who I suspect is
often quoted in correspondence around this world. Fame, or so
it seems, might best be counted in how many times one is wise
or foolish enough to make it into print--handwritten or not.
He's in the lead. I just know it.
Going home, I started thinking about an older man, thin and
dry-looking, who sat and read the newspaper drinking his tea
with his skinny legs crossed high, his one foot keeping a succinct
pace the whole time. He would sometimes look up, the foot would
stop and I drew his picture. I imagined him as an inventor of
sorts-- he had the face of a sculptor or a professor. I imagined
a place where maybe there were shredded up pages from plato,
a worn persian rug, and a pair of used wingtips in a corner
sitting still--the toes turned up.
It was on a good note to end retrospectively, wander home completely
and begin a whole new night. It's lonely, but having listened
to sounds and having seen some pictures today, even the quiet
isn't as maddening as usual.
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Natalie
Hope McDonald, Philadelphia, November 1999
Photography by Heather McMonnies, July 1999
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