Ram, the Indian business man
MANHATTAN — I met an Indian man named Ram late at night in Union Square one chaotic evening. He has an office set up in an empty subway car with blacked-out windows, hurtling darkly under the city.
Ram has a four cellphones which all work in the subway. Mobile phones generally don’t work underground, but he is a man of commerce with important business so his always works.
“I never answer my phone,” he told me. “Important people never answer their own phones.”
His four lines from three area codes and two country codes are for calling other people. No one calls Ram, he calls them.
He makes no plans — nothing he shares anyway. He has no past and leaves no shadows. I don’t know his whole name, only Ram. He uses no last name, speaks many languages and deals only in foreign currency and domestic weapons.
“Americans make the best weapons,” he admitted over 24 year-old-scotch sipped from dirty glasses sitting on wooden rifle crates stamped with Cyrillic markings. “The Americans may make the best, but the Chinese make the most and make a reasonable facsimile for a much better price.”
“The Swiss have more guns than anyone, plenty of money and no one thinks twice about large transactions in cash between people who keep secrets,” Ram said to a contact calling from Davos. “Fuck the Dutch and the Canadians, they can deal with the Germans for all I fucking care.”
Ram has contemporaries and associates of many stripes for many reasons, none of which concerns anyone. His main concern is business and his personal dealings.
Ram has a strange sense of elegance and style.
Ram has the unique ability to be a Ghost of Union Square but also appear other places, generally in the company of non-English speaking Asian women who are intoxicated on rare blends of sake reserved for deities and royalty. He is neither.
Ram runs a banana plantation in Brazil and a coffee farm high in the misty peaks of Jamaica.
He is in contact with people from all over the world, including Basel, Switzerland. Some say he has a doppelganger in every major city on the planet, and a few minor cities as well. I heard Ram drank home-made moonshine with Franklin D. Roosevelt in FDR’s last days in Georgia. Yes, it was during Prohibition. Ram had a strong distribution business at that time, which doesn’t make sense given it was 70 years ago. He grimly shakes his head with a look of disdain after I asked about that.
He is a business man of questionable origin who retains the ability to seal any deal, negotiate anything without ever revealing who he is or his real intentions.
7th Avenue green tide
I miss the 7th Avenue green tide and the usual 36-block double rush at top speed; spinning a 79-inch gear on a brutal steel bike with no brakes, just to the edge of control.
New York City is organized chaos seemingly on a crash course with itself, moments from a catastrophic implosion under its own weight, weakened by its own vibration and energy … a calm city of solace as well as a violent, ripping hurricane of a place, waging and defending from a fevered attack. It’s a city stronger than anywhere else, faster and more nimble; tougher, meaner and more eloquent. A city where the same people who help you up when you fall will push you right back down – and somehow it’s all fine.
I miss feeling oddly alone jammed shoulder to shoulder with 300 strangers, all pretending to ignore each other while listening and watching.
People of all stripes and reasons everywhere, but oddly nowhere at the same time. Everyone is chasing a dream or carrying the burden of survival, even if the dream is to do nothing and survival means leaching parents’ wealth. The locals know where to get a good $5 lunch from the best street cart in town and $500 jeans from a guy in Brooklyn for the best deal around.
I miss feeling as if I’m in familiar company and among friends jammed shoulder to shoulder with 300 strangers, pretending to listen to each other while ignoring and looking inward.
The sidewalks and cafes of New York City, as well as the streets, subways, high rises and brownstones have all sorts of people whose lives intersect as part of a larger fabric, made into a larger garment, on a rack in a large store where people from all over the world shop.
I miss knowing anything can happen at any time for any odd reason — or none at all, for good or ill.
No one is waiting for me
Chloe waits patiently at her perch for Brendan to come home, she keeps her vigil watching over the front of the house. I don’t think she waits like this for me.
Still others wait for the ride home, or maybe to work. Maybe they’re just going anywhere their whims take them and they don’t mind the wait — maybe they like it. Sometimes waiting gives one the time to make a game plan, or to relax and recharge for a moment. Waiting isn’t always bad.
Looking down the tracks for the train, waiting. Some people pace about nervously, others lean over the edge of the platform looking for the lights and distant illuminated number of the subway. Some people read, others chant. 59th Street and Lexington Avenue stop.
While others are just waiting for bats to fly from under a bridge, dinner or maybe a package to arrive. Some are possibly waiting for a plane to arrive start a new adventure. We’re all waiting for something, but no one is waiting for me.
Brendan waiting for a package to arrive by FedEx.
Waiting for the different buses that circulate to and from the Kel-Lac bus station in San Antonio.
Airmen on their way to follow-on training after recently graduating basic military training at Lackland Air Force Base. They’re waiting for a pre-dawn flight at San Antonio International Airport. Waiting, sleeping … waiting.
Waiting in a Manhattan Starbucks for the rain to clear and for that friendly face to emerge through the door, through with the city’s cacophony of uncommon speed and commerce slip through with a growl and a whisper. It’s a small city with a large population and everybody is waiting for something. She was busy with her book, punctuating her reading with looks to the street, but, she wasn’t waiting for me.
Dusk falls in Austin, waiting for the bats to fly from Congress Avenue Bridge as they normally do, but not always. Many people wait on the shores of the river, some wait in boats floating below. Still, they’re all waiting.
Ghosts of Union Square
Certain people I only see in Union Square. They seem to vanish once they cross Broadway or 14th Street. Sometimes they disappear into the clutter of Gramercy or the Garment District once they cross 17th Street. Sometimes they emerge from the dark shadows in the first warm day of spring, after hibernating for the cold winter. Sometimes they appear in the orange-hued darkness of night.
I don’t know, they may be real people, but they may not be. Maybe only I can see them, maybe there are more who are only visible to you.
Michele Bayard and his pinhole photos
Dave, never in the same jacket twice
Some people I saw nearly every day, and maybe have some sort of contact like with Dave. Other people I only saw a few times, but from a distance and never had any contact.
The break dancers were good and an odd group of people.
They’re ghosts as well.
The break dancers
There were others who had multiple roles in Union Square, like me. Nick was a bike messenger but also a tattoo artist. He was from Philadelphia, and last I heard, had gone back there. As for me, I may have been a ghost as well, on some days.
I spent my fair share of time in Union Square while working as a bike messenger. One company, Dragonfly Courier, had me start and end my day in Union Square, roughly. The area I covered was surrounded by the square, so I returned there when things were slow.
Like Dave, I was also a photographer there. I mean, I was before NYC and after (I still am now), but it was one of my roles in Union Square. It’s how I met Dave and Mickey and Natasha and Kasha and other people whose names I can’t remember. I met the ghosts with whom I communicate because of photography.
Nick and me, our bikes and newspapers
Natasha, Hoop Girl Extrordinare
Hoop Girl
And then, there are the ones who passed through one dark night and never returned.
Probably Kasha
I have no idea what her name is
T shirts and art late night in Union Square
The girls sold shirts, the guy stunk
Irina
And of course there are the ones who drift about in their own world.
He always had a mouth full of chewing gum
Random guy interrupting Dave and Melissa
He was obnoxious
Strong coffee and high speed
I’ve developed a strong taste for cheap coffee, the sort of rot gut one can buy very cheaply from the stainless steel carts on the street. It tastes like a sweet mix of blood and dirt.
Last winter, while working as a bike messenger – NYC’s finest; the fastest and strongest thing on the street – I kept a stainless steel travel coffee cup in a pocket in my messenger bag. It fit perfectly as if it were designed for the cup.
For $.75 I could refill the cup with the cheap coffee I’ve grown to love. It fueled my legs and lungs, warmed my core and kept me going for a very modest sum of money.
Sitting here now in Starbuck’s with a cup of their Columbian blend, which is a light roast and supposedly a little sweeter, it is very bitter. Almost undrinkable …
Coffee is the fuel of work and ideas and creativity. Coffee is a late night effort to sneak in under a deadline. Coffee is a lazy Sunday morning brunch in summer in a shaded seat on the Upper West Side. Coffee is a 35 mile per hour sprint with traffic on a bike with no brakes carrying extremely urgent packages labeled “triple rush”.
Unconventional Speed
Brooklyn NY
22 hours after my day started, its easing into the final hours, or even minutes. The first predawn light is making its way over the horizon as 6:00 am nears. My day isn’t beginning at this time, its ending and I like it that way. It was a High Speed day in comparison to the near tedium of last two weeks.
Things have been slow in the cycle courier business, at least for Dragon Fly, my current employer. I can hear you scoffing to yourself asking how a guy riding a bike (that doesn’t even coast downhill) can know anything about Speed.
Speed is one of the few American principles that wasn’t perverted by the treacherous whores and thugs who hijacked this once-great nation of ours. It used to be By the People for the People, now it’s By Haluburton and Big Oil for Haluburton and Big Oil – now buy shit at Wal-Mart on a credit card so we can rape you for 30% interest and sell your children into prostitution in a darkened whore house with no door in a forgotten Third World military dictatorship where they only take American Cash. Places where only a fool asks questions or makes eye contact. They know who are already just by looking at you, there is no need for talk. Shut up, sit back and watch NASCAR on that Big Screen TV that you will never pay off – even in 2 years when you throw it away for a new one.
Keep ignoring that we’re in the early stages of World War III.
Speed. I may only be traveling at 25 or 30 but that’s through traffic moving 5 to 10 MPH average, passing between taxis whose opium-addled drivers try to smash messengers for sport. The NYPD will pull you off of your bike or try to ram you off of the street and arrest you for littering as your crumpled body is splayed in a puddle of your own blood.
Slicing both eloquently and violently between and around police cars, ambulances, the big trucks the ghetto trash who drive while smoking crack, drinking 40′s and rapping into borrowed Nextels. Or maybe they’re the suburban kids living on Daddy’s money … smoking crack, drinking 40′s and rapping into borrowed Nextels. Dodging j-walking pedestrians who stumble clumsily into traffic and wonder why they’re slammed by heavy steel driven by crazed savages with Nothing to lose and have no time to waste. I think Bloomberg once said in reference to cyclist and pedestrians being killed on the streets in full view of the money-spewing tourists “New York is a Dangerous City”.
They know nothing of speed.
We in the Courier Business, and many NYC dwellers know about Speed. We have our own brand of unconventional speed. Going fast in fierce conditions that change with each tick of the second hand. You plan to zoom around the cop, between the tourist bus and USPS truck – all at full speed on a bike with no brakes that doesn’t coast, under inhumanly tight and unreasonable deadlines – when you’re suddenly faced with the decision of slamming into the moron with the coffee and headphones who decided to walk into traffic without even thinking of looking or through the moose-sized, bottomless chasm of crushed and broken pavement surrounding a mysterious steel gate in the middle of the street.
That’s nothing. Just a warm up. There are 50 more blocks to go and it’s only going to get faster and weirder.
That is speed. It’s Unconventional Speed and it’s more addicting and more lethal than any substance, any rush. Anything. Last summer two messengers were killed in the same month – I think 4 died total but I’m not sure. There are no telling how many are injured or harassed because no one keeps track.
That is Speed and that’s how we handle things here.
NYPD vs Bloomberg
MANHATTAN, N.Y. — Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the other day a proposed tax or fee on cars and trucks entering Manhattan from 86th Street and south. I might have the streets wrong but it was something like that. The congestion pricing, as it’s known, will be in effect from 6am to 6 pm on weekdays.
The fee, which would be waived for taxis, is $8 for passenger cars and $21 for trucks. I need to check these numbers. Its is based on similar fees charged in London and other progressive cities as a means of controlling congestion, pollution and other problems that arise from cars.
Supposedly, the fee will be enforced electronically by cameras similar to those used for traffic signals. I imagine this bypasses the NYPD and their ineptitude in enforcing traffic laws. Right wing groups of course oppose the idea of anything that reduces the number of cars on the city streets. I have no idea how anyone who lives in NYC can think more cars is a better idea. Nevermind the environmental effects and all of that, from a civic planning point of view, its insane to have cars. Period.
The congestion pricing is awaiting approval from Albany.
Opponents of the fee call it a “tax on the middle class.” That seems a bit like right-wing/Jesus/Big Oil spin to me. Other than delivery trucks and those who need cars and trucks for work (i.e. electricians and plumbers), who actually drives into Manhattan other than wealthy people or the criminal element? A vast minority of don’t New Yorkers drive or even own cars. The taxes the car people pay don’t cover the cost of road maintenance and forget the noise, pollution, congestion and other problems from cars. I’m glad the city has started to turn around a bit and join the 1970′s – far from the days when bikes were prohibited from Midtown and pedestrians were herded dangerously into cattle barriers to get around. Maybe some day NYC will catch up to the progressive cities but probably not in my lifetime.
besides, the FDR Drive will be out of applicable zone for the fee so it’s still possible to drive from Harlem to Brooklyn without paying anything more than the standard tolls.
The mayor also introduced other means to cap the city’s excessive production of carbon dioxide and other green house and smog-producing emissions. I’ll get into his proposals later – he neither invented anything new or found new uses for existing technology. But, coming from a Republican, anything even remotely green and/or sustainable is shocking.
This month is Bike Month in NYC. Part of me is glad they’re trying to get people out on bikes but, I know the reality of riding a bike in NYC. It’s dangerous but nowhere near as dangerous as riding in the average suburb. Cyclists are seen as dangerous criminals by the right wing goon squad, frat boy NYPD. The bike lanes are the most dangerous and debris-strewn part of the street and often have police cars blocking it.
If the NYPD is going to maintain its usual unchecked harassment of cyclists, will there be mass arrests for “parading without a permit” and “riding out of the bike lane” this month if more people are on bikes? Shouldn’t the judicial system do something to impede the excessively wasteful practice of NYPD harassment? Why is it I’m pulled off of my bike in traffic for maybe thinking of committing a minor traffic infraction that might or might not exist meanwhile a motorist can run a red light, killing pedestrians and that’s OK?
I’ll never understand that.
SO the NYPD wants to add more cars to the streets and reduce the numbers of we dangerous cyclists but the mayor says he wants to reduce the number of cars, traffic and CO2 emissions (I’ll believe when I see it).
Does this mean the NYPD will expand its autonomous, unchecked, reckless harassment of the law-abiding citizenry by not only breaking laws (or selectively enforcing the laws it creates as it goes along) but completely acting counter to no only City Hall but Albany? Will there be a military coup run by the NYPD to turn this former Great City into an autonomous police state?
I know its far fetched and maybe even crazy, but not impossible.
Underground, hurtling darkly for pancakes and the coming spring
MANHATTAN, N.Y. — I rode the 2 train from President Street in Brooklyn into Manhattan – changing to the 4 train at Franklyn Avenue or maybe Atlantic Avenue. At Fulton Street in Manhattan I switched to the A train, getting off at Canal Street.
Screaming and hissing through the gritty tunnels, the color of charcoal and foggy ocean nights, over rats, garbage and stagnant water the trains hurtle at what seems to be break neck speed from station to station. Each trip starts and pauses with a scream and puff of machine-churned air, the color of wandering thoughts and a million traveling souls.
My destination was the Moondance Diner on Grand Street and Avenue of the Americas in SoHo for pancakes and endless black coffee.
Above the train, through the iron and concrete, through a million coats of paint, layers of sediment, dirt, rocks, conduit, utilities, cobble stones and asphalt, the lay the dormant streets carrying the foot prints of commerce and art and science and the monday-through-friday business in the snow and frozen slush. Ice puddled foot prints left over from the last icy howl of winter the other dimple and scar the streets, lined with piles of shoveled snow, ice and frozen slush.
Today the almost warm kiss of spring time sun is melting the snow into streams and puddles of clear melt water. Luckily, the City didn’t dump its usual salt and dirt all over everything. The snow will take a few days to a week to melt but at least it won’t be a gritty few days to a week.
I can deal with that.
Spring will be here soon and this will just be the memory of last winter.
The sun will rise soon
My eyes want to be asleep in this rainy predawn night.
Each blink drags my eye lids laboriously across my tired eyes. Tired eyes that mask a mind not yet asleep, thinking about the day’s events: Tom’s Restaurant with my friend Liz, Tea Lounge, Prospect Park twice.
I can feel the early spring air – warm enough to carry with it humidity and with that, the first sign of the approaching spring:
Crocuses.
The rain is forecast to reveal a warm spring sun later today, this afternoon. And just an hour and a half ago, we changed our clocks forward for this year’s modified Daylight Savings Time.
This winter was more mild than memory reminds – more rain than snow by a long shot. It’s also my first winter working as a bike messenger in NYC.
So far I survived.
My eyes grow tired as my mind slows down for the close of this Saturday. I think it’s time to sleep.
No free coffee refills in the city that never sleeps
MANHATTAN, NY — I’m sitting darkly in the corner of an East Village Dunkin Donuts (2nd Ave, between 9th and 10th Streets) watching the rainy night passers-by on the sidewalk outside. Their thoughts and ideas and memories focused on a distant target or a damp memory of a long-lost time.
I was thinking about coffee as I drank the last stale sip of black mud from the Styrofoam cup.
No refills at Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks, unlike any decent diner at any time. No hemispherical ceramic cups … each one with its own galaxy of mismatching stories. Each cup absorbs the dreams, nightmares and failed plans spoken over it during the course of decades.
Single use. No Big Plans. No dreams forgotten or promises lost. Even Starbucks’ recycled paper cups have beginnings in a tree farm someplace. The recycled paper contained ideas, hand-written death threats, love letters … it was held in human hands.
Styrofoam is a petroleum distillate. It was never held fondly in the hand of an anxious lover or hidden in fear of scorn.
I thought about my preference for Starbuck’s or the gritty sort of coffee one gets late at night in a diner. It’s good for planning big adventures over the ground-earth aftertaste of an unclean carafe. It has tooth to it, you know its coffee. You get a feeling of its organic beginnings – its “roots”, if you will. This kind of coffee is an eagerly invited part of the group … its like trying to escape an avalanche and tastes about the same.
