Black Forest Cake

When not bothered with car alarms, subway track shovings, phlegm-splattered streets, or with being steamrolled by high-powered, well-dressed residents, I appreciate the city with a renewed vision.

On Sunday I enjoyed the break dancers on the train without worrying about getting kicked in the face by the one who does back flips.  Their music was an unusual underground club mix.  I wondered who the artist was, but didn’t want to push past passengers to ask the dancers.  So I just enjoyed looking at New York characters on the train like a wide-eyed tourist.  Usually I’d be scowling, hyperventilating, crying.

After Trader Joes and Fairways – both madhouses – I went to the train station without the usual threat of impending doom.  A black man sitting on a stool on the downtown side was warming up on the electric guitar.  The rhythmic pattern unfolded into Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven.  He had a nice psychedelic improvisation.  I wanted to run across the tracks to sing in accompaniment.

But you can’t have everything, right?  The conductor announced that the train wouldn’t go all the way up.  The last stop was City College.  We had to get out and wait for the next train.  Of course it was crowded.

My blood sugar tanked.  My euphoria – gone.  It dissipated into annoyance aimed at the woman who didn’t appreciate that people had gotten off at the last stop and that she now had room to move away from me.

Sapped of energy, I took the train past my usual stop to the next one because there’d be no hill.  Exhausted, I became neurotically focused on what might be wrong other than a common need to eat.

The Carrot Top bakery was on the way.  Just maybe, they would sell Black Forest Cake by the slice again.  When they had stopped selling it like this, I thought of having a Black Forest Cake party, an excuse to buy the cake without dealing with the siren call of the whole cake in my refrigerator for me to eat by myself.  What — ho!  They sold it by the slice again.

Turns out the lack of energy I had at the last leg of my trip was in my head.  I skipped home now, cake in hand.  Cake, the succor of sinners, the balm in Gilead, the rotter of *teeth bones.

*A shout out to my friend who referred to teeth as “exposed bone.”  I totally got this idea from her!

House Party at the Dyckman Projects II

 

With their own forces contained, the teenaged girls at the outer rim of the circle anticipated a glorious physical reaction once the break dancers, Zack and Caleb, started their duel at the nucleus.  At the climax of the record, the break dancers were further driven by pheromones coming from the beauties.  Furiously competing, Zack and Caleb writhed, dropping intermittently, bouncing in their own stylized way back up from the floor.  They owned the prowess of athletes.  Zack raised a palm inches from Caleb’s grimace, a hyperbolic traffic cop motion to express his authority to stop the brother, letting him know that he was no competition.  Gripping the burgundy Kangol on his head, Caleb vibrated in his place like a jackhammer his lips flapping  along for the ride.  Along with the essence of pheromones, wafting over the dancer’s heads were synthetic fragrances, Wind Song, spearmint and cherry gum.  “Peace will come this world will rest, once we have to-geth-ernesssss, agggggghhhhhhhhhh!!!”

 

 

A House Party at the Dyckman Projects in 1976

The elevated train at the margin of the housing projects lacerated the track.  Northbound, it rounded the curve, until disappearing, the metal tail lashing flames fading to the stratosphere. From the height of the tracks, a passenger on the train saw electric blue glow around the windows of apartment 12C in the 3rd building of the complex. The faint saxophones and hyper-tribal percussion music grew louder.  The windows swelled and contracted. On the street, parked cars popped up from the concrete, crashing back down in sparks to the beat:  “Watch me now, feel the groove…into something, gonna make you move….”  Dusk colored light covered nine buildings of the complex in magenta, and the energized teenaged organism inside of apartment 12C caused streams of sweat to trickle down the cream colored walls and steam to rise from the floor.  The shades of black, brown, tan and mocha pulsated it would seem as independent rhythmic forces, but they were all part of one throbbing mass.

Subway Car Break Dancing Hate

 

Hey, I’m all for self-empowerment.  I like the mindset of the entrepreneur, especially the young entrepreneurs on the train, the ones selling candy, the comedians, those a capella guys.  At times the entertainment value of these performances leans towards the alternative — hell, I even like that tone deaf guy who bangs on the bongo with the hole in it, and that guy who sings with the two-stringed guitar that he found in the garbage.  And who says you need teeth to be a subway car performer?  The subway car break dancers, they’re the ones that I’m on the fence about.  I’m a very nervous train rider.  I have panic attacks in tight places where I’m confined for a period of time.  When I start thinking that there isn’t enough air in the car, I start hyperventilating.  And most of the cars you can’t walk through, so you’re trapped.

The break dancers, a jaunty bunch who tend to burst in on the scene suddenly, while you’re preparing to read your New Yorker.  On the A line, they generally come in on 59^th Street where the train going uptown is non-stop express all the way to 125^th Street.  So for 66 blocks, over three miles, you’re part of a captive audience.  They engage in lightening speed acrobatics to the chants and yelps of their fellow break dancers, and of course to the accompaniment of the boom box.  That screaming, the sudden movements, the loud music in the tight car — now this is enough to make me take my clothes off and go screaming up and down the aisle – for some reason claustrophobics like me think there will be more air if they take their clothes off.  Yeah, I know it doesn’t make any sense…  My neurosis, it also involves a fear of being kicked in the jaw by the one doing back flips to ‘It’s Just Begun’ by Jimmy Castor.  What am I supposed to do if he breaks my jaw with his flailing foot?  This ain’t Cirque du Soleil, but a rag tag bunch who probably don’t give too much thought about the precision of their movements.  Ah, see – I’ll bet you never thought about that one.  There are people who are amazed at the spectacle of these performers, and some who find them novel.  But I watch through fear-widened eyes.  I strain my head as far back as I can into the wall of the car, take shallow breaths, and pray for the performance to end without anybody getting kicked in the face.