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My Kind of Town

The streets resemble jaundiced rivers, surging with taxis. At night, they transform to veins, carrying red and white blood cells through the arteries essential for its survival. It never stops; it never slows; it's always pumping and pulsing and flowing, even when it's so full you think it can't support even one more one more person, one more car, one more attitude, it stands in defiance to any challenge.

You get used to grey and black, and learn to appreciate the occasional bits of colour, when you're observant maybe a one-square foot patch of grass; a few petunias planted next to a sign, a plea to keep your dog's natural fertiliser off the flowers; a lonely tree living in the artificial turf, despite the force of man trying to deny nature. Sometimes I think the island is made of concrete; that nothing grows except in a 41- block stretch in the centre where we all pour in daily to nourish our eyes with a reminder that green grows.

Some buildings are so big they need their own water towers, which sit on top of a perch mounted like an advertisement. The sidewalks that border these buildings are washed free of gum and trash and urine, and green or red awnings jut out of perfectly maintained buildings protecting men with Spanish accents who hold the door for well-dressed, skeletal thin women who carry their dogs and arrive in hired cars, the driver's arms full of boxes and bags, brown or grey, from this week's trip to Bendel's or Bergdorf's.

Dark skinned women with gorgeous Caribbean accents push light skinned babies with impatient cries in strollers that cost more than their week's salary. A street vendor sells stolen watches and sunglasses next to the guy who sells stolen toys and books next to the guy who sells fruit next to the small green hut that sells the Times and after 10 pm all the dirty magazines for fetishes I never knew existed until I saw the titles and the pictures on the covers.

Men in suits walk swiftly holding large, important-looking cases filled with papers that mean something to someone somewhere. They look straight ahead, never breaking their stride, never taking a moment to look into the eyes of anyone, never acknowledging the souls that inhabit the city they think they rule. Broadway is never quiet, host to a continual rhythm of cars, people, rollerbladers, bikers, sparrows, pigeons; split in the middle by trees and bushes that try to disguise the grates covering the local and express subway lines with benches at each cross street

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