Exercise 1 Kyle

He was supposed to be writing but all he ever did was walk around and look at things. But what was so bad about that? Perhaps that was what he needed most, the rush of external stimuli. Just yesterday, for instance, he’d seen a man in a green three-piece suit with a pony tail and big aviator sunglasses riding a banana board down Third Avenue. There was a story there, he knew. He just hadn’t found it.

Self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s what Angie would call it, of course. Killing yourself in pieces, bit by bit, without acknowledging the fact. She had all sorts of terms for his behavior. In stasis was another one. Scared. And yet he knew somewhere that she was wrong, felt it, was confident that what he was doing, even right there on the corner of Broadway and Grand, was worth something. There were things to be seen, things that needed to be seen and digested in order to be processed. He was looking. And as long as he was looking, he was not running away, which was somehow tied in with this idea of being scared. Scared people ran. He was moving forward. He just wasn’t writing.

He walked up Broadway with his hands in his pockets watching the faces move toward him. There was a rhythm in walking beyond the obvious. In some way it was listening to the mind’s music, finding its unique cadence and stepping to it. You could walk that way, inside the beat, the very beat itself, for hours without missing time. The day before he’d seen the pony-tailed gentleman on the banana-board he’d walked seventy-six blocks without once pausing. The crosswalks had turned for him one after the other and the tourists in Rockefeller Center, the businessmen in Midtown, the dog-walkers throughout that seventy-six block journey had moved in such a way as to make room for his footsteps. For seventy-six blocks he had found that basic pulse of movement, the throb of the city, and he had stepped into it fearlessly. He wouldn’t explain that Angie, that kind of courage, because she couldn’t understand. In truth, he didn’t quite understand it.

On Broadway and Spring he removed his hands from his pockets and approached a hot dog vendor. He stepped into the shade of the yellow-and-red umbrella and nodded at the old man bent over the cart, a small dark-skinned man who had thin wisps of hair growing along his jaw.

“Yes?” the man said.

“I’ll take a hot dog, ketchup and mustard?”

He watched the little man’s hands move with a learned grace over the metal bins and compartments. In his hand was a pronged fork, with which he speared the little doughy bun and pried it open. He held a small white napkin around the bun to avoid contact. The tank with the hot dogs lifted steam into the air. The dogs bobbed in the gray water like miniature logs, felled trees awaiting the pulp mill. The man poked a dog and slid it from the prongs. He reached for the red squeeze bottle of generic ketchup, squirting a line with flourish, his arm high up in the air and then swooping low, masterful, a conductor. So, too with the mustard, four delicate raised lines of red and yellow – two of each, a back and forth motion applied with precision.

The block ahead was lined with sidewalk vendors hawking homemade arts and crafts to the bumbling tourists who rolled off the double-decker, open-topped buses to feel their own imagined throb of city life firsthand. He slowed now, tasting the salt of all that meat and lined sauce, pushing the rest into his cheek, wiping the little napkin across his mouth. A dollar could still buy you a meal in the city. Despite it all, despite everything that was going on, this still held true. And fifty-cents still bought you a coffee.

Ahead, an old black man was selling paintings of dogs, cats, the odd bunny and gerbil. The paintings were glossy, they were in plastic sleeves that wrinkled and refracted the sunlight, they were clipped to the edges of his table with binder-clasps. More tables sold scarves and hats, others sold belts, leather products. A girl with a tattoo of a dagger on her cheek sat behind a table upon which sat foam-and-plastic baseball caps done over in graffiti that said things like “Garlic-3,” “DubbTron,” “Vek.” He smiled but looked down at his feet, watched his shoes maneuver through the crowd.

At the far end of the line of sellers a man stood beside a table with elastic bands. The man smoked a cigarette. He was so skinny it looked like it hurt. The elastics were arranged neatly in rows. They were of varied size, and he found himself stopping to look down on them. A hand-drawn sign read: “Vintage Rubber Bracelets: $5.”

“What are these?” he asked the skinny smoking man.

“You want to buy some, yeah? These things are hot.”

“These are just rubber bands,” he said.

“Exactly, my man,” the vendor said. He dropped the cigarette to the sidewalk and stepped on it.

“But I could just go buy a bag of them.” He both wanted to understand and didn’t. It was an impressive feat, revealing a measure of nerve he’d perhaps never seen matched among these vendors. But he was sickened by it at the same time.

“You could, my man,” the vendor said. His body leaned in, bony arms crossed across bony chest. “You could, but then they wouldn’t be authentic.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” he said, as if this was such an obvious point that it hardly needed mentioning at all. “You go into that pharmacy, you wouldn’t have bought them here. You know what I’m saying? You got to buy them right here, you want the real thing. Only place in the city. I checked.”

“Are people buying these?”

“Shit yeah, man. These things are hot.”

Would Angie understand that this, too was a story?