right, dear. It isn't as serious as it sounds.” She started to pat Sissy's hand, then thought better of it.
The six of them squeezed into a taxi. Can you guess how humiliating that was for our Sissy, ushered insensitively into a vehicle that she had not snared in her net of meat and gesture? Can you appreciate that she must have felt like a hummingbird stuck in the bubblegum of pedestrianism? Would you invite Thelonius Monk to your house and not let him play your piano? Would you shove an arthritic nanny goat into the ring with El Cordobes? Lord! She sat upon that taxi upholstery in frosty revulsion, like a queen compelled to squat over a ditch latrine; and why not? For she was Sissy Hankshaw, who had carved out an identity for herself in the vast realm of personal idiosyncrasy instead of carving it out of someone else's flesh, as is normally the case; Sissy Hankshaw, who, following a suggestion from nature, had created herself and then paraded her creation before ye gods and planets that whirl above our daily routine; Sissy Hankshaw, who proved that grandiose ambition need not be Faustian, at least not for a woman in motion. Einstein had observed motion and learned that space and time are relative; Sissy had committed herself to motion and learned that one could alter reality by one's perception of it—and it was that discovery, perhaps no less a one than Einstein's, that finally allowed her to smile away humiliation just as a short while earlier she had smiled away fatigue.
The taxi, having no free will, rolled downtown.
23.
NEW YORK CITY. June 21, 1972. Eight-thirty in the evening, according to the position of two mechanical hands on an arbitrary dial. Mars is in the House of Virgo, Jupiter is in the House of Values and Venus is in the House of Pies. The weather: hot hokey puppy poopie with billows of industrial paranoia at 600 feet. Manhattan smells like the litter box for the Kitty of the World. It has twisted its body into the dog-shit asana . Close by but far away, in a world beyond odors, ghosts of the original inhabitants are laughing their feathers off, remembering how they'd stuck the white devils with this doomed piece of real estate for some very chic beads and a box of Dutch Masters. The Big Apple, polished with Rockefeller spit and wiped on the tight pants of a multitude of Puerto Ricans, is ready for the chomps and nibbles of Friday-nighters from everywhere. Junkies are stirring in their warrens, pizzas are primping in their ovens, Wall Street is resting its bloody butthole and the Statue of Liberty wears a frown that won't quit. As City College professors, disgruntled over martinis, talk about dropping out and farming rhubarb in Oregon, neon signs all over town rejoice because it's the shortest night of the year. Headline on the front page of the New York Daily News : THE CHINK SUMS IT UP, SAYS LIFE IS HARD IF YOU THINK IT'S HARD . New York City. In progress. Not a cowgirl in sight.
Taxi cabs are pulling up in front of restaurants and theaters, and one pulls up in front of a remodeled tenement on East Tenth Street, between Third and Second avenues, three blocks west of where young Latins have all but taken away Tompkins Square Park from old Ukrainians and winos of indeterminate age and national origin. This block of East Tenth, freshly painted, maintains some class: behind its barred windows and triple-locked doors with chains à la mode, professional people, some with a creative bent, are holding their own against the constant onslaught of soot, cockroaches and burglars. In this block Hubert Selby, Jr., wrote Last Exit to Brooklyn , and a famous art critic ponders hourly the problem that inherent pictorialism presents to the ongoing mainstream of modernism. The taxi has stopped in front of the building where the wheezy Julian Gitche resides. It discharges its passengers, all too slowly for the taste of Sissy Hankshaw, who holds exhaustion and revulsion at bay only with the aid of the Great Secret
The six of them squeezed into a taxi. Can you guess how humiliating that was for our Sissy, ushered insensitively into a vehicle that she had not snared in her net of meat and gesture? Can you appreciate that she must have felt like a hummingbird stuck in the bubblegum of pedestrianism? Would you invite Thelonius Monk to your house and not let him play your piano? Would you shove an arthritic nanny goat into the ring with El Cordobes? Lord! She sat upon that taxi upholstery in frosty revulsion, like a queen compelled to squat over a ditch latrine; and why not? For she was Sissy Hankshaw, who had carved out an identity for herself in the vast realm of personal idiosyncrasy instead of carving it out of someone else's flesh, as is normally the case; Sissy Hankshaw, who, following a suggestion from nature, had created herself and then paraded her creation before ye gods and planets that whirl above our daily routine; Sissy Hankshaw, who proved that grandiose ambition need not be Faustian, at least not for a woman in motion. Einstein had observed motion and learned that space and time are relative; Sissy had committed herself to motion and learned that one could alter reality by one's perception of it—and it was that discovery, perhaps no less a one than Einstein's, that finally allowed her to smile away humiliation just as a short while earlier she had smiled away fatigue.
The taxi, having no free will, rolled downtown.
23.
NEW YORK CITY. June 21, 1972. Eight-thirty in the evening, according to the position of two mechanical hands on an arbitrary dial. Mars is in the House of Virgo, Jupiter is in the House of Values and Venus is in the House of Pies. The weather: hot hokey puppy poopie with billows of industrial paranoia at 600 feet. Manhattan smells like the litter box for the Kitty of the World. It has twisted its body into the dog-shit asana . Close by but far away, in a world beyond odors, ghosts of the original inhabitants are laughing their feathers off, remembering how they'd stuck the white devils with this doomed piece of real estate for some very chic beads and a box of Dutch Masters. The Big Apple, polished with Rockefeller spit and wiped on the tight pants of a multitude of Puerto Ricans, is ready for the chomps and nibbles of Friday-nighters from everywhere. Junkies are stirring in their warrens, pizzas are primping in their ovens, Wall Street is resting its bloody butthole and the Statue of Liberty wears a frown that won't quit. As City College professors, disgruntled over martinis, talk about dropping out and farming rhubarb in Oregon, neon signs all over town rejoice because it's the shortest night of the year. Headline on the front page of the New York Daily News : THE CHINK SUMS IT UP, SAYS LIFE IS HARD IF YOU THINK IT'S HARD . New York City. In progress. Not a cowgirl in sight.
Taxi cabs are pulling up in front of restaurants and theaters, and one pulls up in front of a remodeled tenement on East Tenth Street, between Third and Second avenues, three blocks west of where young Latins have all but taken away Tompkins Square Park from old Ukrainians and winos of indeterminate age and national origin. This block of East Tenth, freshly painted, maintains some class: behind its barred windows and triple-locked doors with chains à la mode, professional people, some with a creative bent, are holding their own against the constant onslaught of soot, cockroaches and burglars. In this block Hubert Selby, Jr., wrote Last Exit to Brooklyn , and a famous art critic ponders hourly the problem that inherent pictorialism presents to the ongoing mainstream of modernism. The taxi has stopped in front of the building where the wheezy Julian Gitche resides. It discharges its passengers, all too slowly for the taste of Sissy Hankshaw, who holds exhaustion and revulsion at bay only with the aid of the Great Secret
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