Entry 8
By Steven Paul Lansky
©2005 All Rights Reserved

"Don't Wear Sandals #4: The Film "

I walked in front of the empty stage in Bryant Park after the outdoor reading of the New Yorker Festival was over. In the lee of the chill wind, at the far side two of the poet/speakers, women, stood speaking with a much younger woman in an attractive skirt, with shoulder bobbed sandy hair, clear blue eyes, black leggings, shoes that weren’t good for walking, and soft features. She was easy on the eyes. One of them asked what I needed, or something. I said I was just trying to get in the lee of the cloth blowing in the breeze at the back of the stage. There was a murmur of approval, a nod; and the younger woman said they show films on that cloth in the summer. The other two echoed, questioned, and the three circled this idea gently. In that moment I thought about saying, I’m Steve Lansky and I’ve come a long way on the train from Cincinnati to hear the poetry and I have a poem, Gogol’s Ear that I’ve sent in to The New Yorker without a cover letter and it’s been several months and I’m a media representative from OxMag, in Oxford, Ohio, at Miami University. And I realized it was too much ground to cover and I wanted to invite all of them to have breakfast with me tomorrow at the Algonquin Hotel where I was staying, but it was more than I could pull out of my depths, and the young woman did a pirouette, her eyes bright, flashing, and I watched the union men pulling cable and I walked away letting my white linen jacket blow in the breeze. I felt like I was in a sailboat race and I had tacked to go to the other side of the sound. I wanted to be alone with my ideas, knowing that I didn’t know the sound, that I know the lakes well enough to chart a wise course, but here in Manhattan , on a cool breezy Sunday in May I was on unfamiliar territory. I didn’t know what to do. I walked into the park and found a rose bush in full bloom, stuck my nose into the scarlet fragrant blossom; there, I had stopped to smell the roses.

On Saturday I had walked and ridden the subway down to Greenwich Village and walked all the way back. My twenty-year-old hiking boots were falling apart from the heavy use. Perhaps it had been a mistake to wear such heavy shoes for a city trip. I was looking for a sandal shop to get some real leather sandals that would be great on unpaved areas for the future. Some part of me believes that someday I’ll migrate to India and live in the country in a sprawling commune and I need to plan for such a time. But, for years I’ve resisted sandals because of the line in that Bob Dylan song, “don’t wear sandals, the pump don’t work cause the vandals took the handle.” So, before heading for MacDougal and Bleeker, I’d had all my laundry done by the hotel service, and lost my clip on sunglasses. I found out about the sandal place from the front desk. I kept calling asking for different things and getting different voices, and because they were filming a movie in the lobby of the hotel that weekend, I figured it was all a screen test for me, or something like that, and that the desk clerk was a comedian doing different accents. OK, by now you know that I was confused, overwhelmed, and awash in the city that never sleeps. I had been taken in by the beauty and splendor of the credit card. But, as I walked in Manhattan, I learned that I had to counter my instinct, whatever direction I thought MacDougal and Bleeker were, it was really one hundred eighty degrees from there that I had to walk.

When I found the subway, I bought a three-day pass for seventeen dollars, which I only used one time. As I got on the train, the driver, a black man with sunglasses, workboots and a loud voice shouted that I was getting on the wrong train. At first I was confused because I didn’t tell him where I was going, but he knew I was getting on the wrong train. Then I told him, Prince Street and he insisted that the train didn’t stop there. I insisted back because I had read the map on the wall of the station and he finally let me ride. When the train came to Prince Street there were workers everywhere laying tile and cutting concrete. Through the window of the screeching train I saw the dusty blue jeaned workmen in heavy leather boots walking around wires. Station after station seemed to be under construction. I had been fooled by my desire to go where I thought I was going. The driver had been correct. Well, duh. When I got off the train, I walked up to street level with literally no idea where I was on Manhattan Island.

Teeming masses. It was like a third world country. I remember corrugated steels shacks, traffic crammed together in lane after lane as if the street were wide and replaced itself the way sharks teeth do, in row after row, rolling into place if one were pulled away. There were millions of people in my view. A throng of street vendors and hawkers and men in all varieties of dress and race. I stood in the wind shadow of a vendor who was roasting sausages on a stick and decided to buy one and try to take in where I was a little at a time. Then I had another. The sky above was a startling blue and I was sweating under the straps of my rucksack. I watched a man approach who looked like a native. He was bearded, bespectacled and wearing outdoor safari like clothes. A sort of balding cross between Salman Rushdie and the late Allen Ginsberg. I asked him if he would guide me. He said no, and told me to just try to conform. I mulled this for what seemed like hours. Try to conform. Try to conform. A rugged mantra. For a man with a scruffy beard, and graying hair in a ponytail halfway down my back I was radically non-conforming in this New York City. Then I walked in his shadow for a block or two and soon found empty streets. I could not believe how people just vanished as I moved. Ten minutes of crowd, maybe twenty, then the millions of immigrants were left behind and I was in a trendy area where there were open-air restaurants with painted women, men in tuxes, and crimson roses on every table. The wall murals and artwork of blue and red and yellow and orange filled my gaping view. There were sports cars, German, Italian, Japanese, and cell phones and creases in black trousers, suspenders, bright flowers on jackets, green bottles of wine, mahogany bars, and I wanted to stop, to linger, and I felt invited until I saw tattoos, and heavy make-up on a sexy barmaid who leaned provocatively over the bar twisting her leg. I asked her for directions and her voice was crass and mean. Mean people looked the best. Then I walked past a bicycle rental place where I saw a heavy, shiny, black-framed, three-wheeled rickshaw. By this time my shoe was coming apart. Strips of leather were peeling out of the inside and blisters were beginning where the skin was rubbing raw. I asked everywhere for a leather shop or a sandal shop. There was a place run by an Asian man, I think Chinese, who was young and fit and offered to glue the leather into place. But the glue would need time to dry, and I was walking. I declined, kept walking. Now I was thinking about Rushdie’s story about the rickshaw wallah and imagined the Chinese man would be the rickshaw wallah, if I was casting a film version, and the woman with the tattoos would be the thief’s widow. All these attractive people would make a great film. Then I was scouting locations. Each time I walked in an entry way looking for a leather shop, I smelled leather, looked at boots, belts, and purses, but didn’t find sandals, just different shades of heavy leathers and I noticed mirrors, and entries that part of the view would work for some idea of a film, because there was a film back at the hotel, and to complete it there must be a camera on me. And now, writing this I know I needed sleep, I was headed for a crash, but I was in New York, Manhattan, and the city never slows for a minute, certainly not for me in my Panama hat and white linen blazer and white chinos and heavy, painful boots.

Then somehow, I was out of the crowded gallery, restaurant, shop district and into an area where there was a park with fenced in basketball and squash courts and the level of exertion in these closed spaces was impossible to believe. Kinetic movement, frenetic, of all colors, green and reddish pavement, white and black nets, I cannot even recall what the games were or how it seemed other than the sense of being overwhelmed yet another time over by the sweat and shouting, and intensity. I had never seen this America before, this teeming racing activity, shouting itself louder and louder. Then I found MacDougal Street and saw some women planting flowers. There was a space off the side of a side street where there were pretty petunias around a small tree with black painted little fencing to keep dogs out. I kneeled on the sidewalk and prayed for a moment. Then I moved on and asked a man at an outdoor café for directions to a sandal place. And I thought for a moment that I could be filming an advertisement of how to find the place . . . stop and speak Deutsche to the ladies planting, say a prayer at a tree, ask a man reading D. H. Lawrence at a café with a tattooed face for directions, then buy a small loaf of warm bread at a bakery kitty corner from the next light, and duck your head, turn ninety-degrees, and there you are. And I found the sandal place. I took off my painful shoes, had my feet measured and sketched, then learned I’d have to come back in a couple of days for a fitting and the whole mission was necessarily wasted. When could I ever come back?

So, I walked out of there and walked all the way back to the hotel. On the way I toured delicatessens and food stores where wealthy people could get anything they ever wanted to eat. And I watched a man giving a comedic walking tour of the area, and became an object of the tour. My movie continued. I talked to street people some. I asked a man who was collecting for the homeless if he had heard of a man who had fourteen wives and over thirty children. (I think I was imagining I would be such a man someday, but this is not rational.) And I went into a Florsheim store to see what they had. Footwear occupied my thoughts like nothing else. I went to a drugstore and bought nail scissors so I could trim my toenails and cut the blistered skin. As I arrived back at the hotel, they were filming around the entrance and there were full plastic bottles of Poland Spring water by the curb, just lying in the street. I ignored them, stoically sticking to my role, the man who doesn’t know he’s being filmed, but really does. (Or did I?) Back in the hotel I took off the boots, tore out the bits of leather that were impossibly torn, and cleaned my blisters. That night I hardly slept, but lay in bed, tossing and turning. When the maid came, I just bowed to her and thanked her, but did not let her in. There was also the thing with the candy. There was a jar of hard candy twists in cellophane. I know I heard them popping and cracking magically. I flipped coins on the bed. In the room was a painting of Napoleon and for a moment I believed that the waiter with the accent who brought the blue glass Saratoga Water bottles that I sent away, for a more auspicious occasion was himself Napoleon. And I believed I was being recruited for the Bolshoi ballet and I did many sit-ups and exercises in the room on the floor.

Can a man have so many delusions? Yes. I had so many thens that I cannot believe it, myself. It’s kind of a testament to the ability of the mind to twist and turn in the thin air. Ever since Tink’s where the stone in the soup had touched me, I was aware that I was destined to come to New York City. I heard a Cincinnati adman and radio broadcaster in my head lead me to the Algonquin Hotel. I felt guided by the stars and I would not be disappointed. This was the real deal.

Saturday night I had gone out to the Bob Dylan tribute. I must tell about seeing Tracy Chapman perform. Yes, I must tell. I had left with enough time to walk there but had been afraid to ask directions. I felt that people in New York were as likely to misdirect me as direct me. Yes, I felt that. So, I hiked at night up and down the streets. I think I hiked on Broadway for awhile. I was looking for The Town Hall. After being cursed out by some drunks who called me a “high roller” and seemed ready to mug me, or worse, I found a yellow taxi. The driver, a very dark skinned black man with a shock of gray hair, spoke English with a thick French accent and located the place in a matter of minutes. I drove a hard bargain with a scalper, since the show had started. He lost his service charge! I thought I was so street. I went in to the balcony and then listened marveling to the lectures on the poetry of Bob Dylan. The crowd laughed as if they were getting in-jokes that I missed. A great big theater full of people who were fascinated with Dylan. I cried a little. Then at intermission I moved to the first floor and got a great seat. Tracy Chapman’s hair was longer than pictured on her old album covers, and she looked young and beautiful and sang with such grace. There were other musicians that I didn’t identify, a man and a woman, both with made-up faces, but they seemed to hang in the air and the moment lasted longer than it could have in reality, but I was out of touch with reality.

Afterward I walked to Times Square and watched it at night for awhile before returning to the Algonquin, with the doorman who looked like the man in the New Yorker Magazine and the tiny bright elevator and the twelve flights of stairs that I liked to walk down. And somehow my disorientation in New York carried me through all this. When I look up at the skyscrapers, they really scrape something gaseous up there, higher than me, and I think that New York is really underwater, because this island called Manhattan could never possibly support the weight of all this concrete, steel, wood, iron, plastic and glass. I walked around the Empire State building at 34th Street and 5th Avenue. You know, something funny that I think about sometimes. I live on Middleton Avenue in Clifton in Cincinnati, Ohio near Bryant Street. The poetry was in Bryant Park. When I lived in Palo Alto, California, in the seventies I lived on Bryant Street there. It was in downtown. But, even more weird is this thought I think sometimes. In Cincinnati, the streets all start at the Ohio River. Each of the downtown streets running roughly east to west is a tenth of a mile apart. Kind of like Manhattan from the tip. So, in Manhattan, I think 34th Street is three point four miles from the end of the island. And where I live in Cincinnati is the thirty-five hundred block of Middleton. Roughly, it’s three point five miles from the Ohio River. In Cincinnati, Vine Street divides the city east from west. Middleton is half a mile from Vine Street, and therefore the equivalent of 5th Avenue in New York City. So, if my apartment (on the first floor of a red brick house with a big tile porch and stone steps down to a sloping yard) were in New York City, it would be right behind the Empire State building. Now, I might not have this exactly right, but it’s the thought that counts. And if that ain’t weird thinking, I’m not Steven Paul Lansky. I think that location in real estate is important. Anyway, I think New York City is really Atlantis. It’s underwater. All those tunnels to get there . . . well, you already know I’m a bit confused, but if NYC is underwater, it would explain why it’s what it is. Huh? Well, when I was walking around there, it just didn’t seem real or possible. Maybe that’s why I think it might be Atlantis. To me, New York is the lost city. The dream city. The city that is just imaginary.

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