Entries Tagged 'spiritual' ↓

This letter was originally mailed to Paul Auster in about 2000 when he was collecting stories on his NPR radio show Other True Tales.

Some of these stories were made into the book True Tales of American Life (First published under the title I Thought My Father Was God, and Other True Tales from NPR’s National Story Project 2001)

The story was originally accepted and then cut at the last minute from the book due to space.

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Paul Auster,

This is a great Experiment. I heard about it on the radio and decided to get this down and send it out.

This is all absolutely true. The pictures included are part of my story.

A while back when I was going through my things and preparing for a move, I came across a drawing that looked as though it had been done when I was four or five years old. The drawing is not dated.

The drawing illustrates a red three story building at an intersection with sidewalks. The building is surrounded by defunct cars, tires, and machine parts. A fence surrounds the lots around the building. There is a traffic light, and a neighboring building across the street where the angle of the intersection is slightly obtuse.

What has intrigued me endlessly about this particular drawing is that it accurately depicts an apartment in Brooklyn in which I would eventually live nearly 16 years later.

The similar real world location is at 14 Bayard Street in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. It is directly across from McCarren Park on the south side, and has not changed a great deal since I lived there a decade ago. The building is a lonely three story building with red asbestos tile. There is a chimney on the right side of the roof exactly like the drawing. The building is surrounded by junked cars, tires and garbage, just as in the drawing. A fence surrounds the lots like the drawing. There is a traffic light out on the corner with sidewalks like the drawing. The angle of the intersection is very similar, and there is another apartment building placed exactly as it is in the drawing. If you take the elements apart they are almost too accurate to be inconsequential.

The only difference I can find is that the door on the building is in the center, while the real 14 Bayard Street, has its doorway on the left side. Interestingly, if you look at the drawing even closer it seems as though I started to draw a structure on the left side, similar to the stoop overhang and which the real building currently has.

It’s so close however, that when I first came across it I recognized the drawing immediately as where I was living. It was also the first apartment I ever had in Brooklyn and was really my first introduction to an “urban” environment.

Now this could have been only a coincidence of course, and a bizarre stretch of the imagination, only it happened a few years later with another place in which I lived.

This time I clearly made the drawing in the late 1980’s while I was actually living on Bayard Street.

The second drawing depicts a suspension bridge stretching away into the distance over a river. The structure of the bridge looks as though it is built in many latticed levels. The aspect ratio of the drawing is easily 2:1, so it almost looks like it is in Cinemascope.

In 1995 I moved  into a unique sublet on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. One dominant feature of the apartment was its marvelous view of the river and the Willaimsburg Bridge. Again, I again came across this drawing after I lived in the space.

One curious aspect of the bridge drawing is that it seems to depict a huge fire, or plume of smoke, emanating out of Brooklyn. I haven’t been able to identify this smoke with any real occurrence. There was a train crash on the bridge one summer close to the spot in the drawing, and once one of the towers caught on fire, but nothing that large and on the distant horizon. The frame of the window is similarly rectangular, although not 2:1, and the element of the latticework of the bridge, makes it resemble the Williamsburg closely. I’ve often thought that this smoke in the picture might illustrate a calamity to come, but fortunately for everyone, I will be moving from this location in less than a month.

I find it very curious that I seem to consistently be making a record of the places I have lived before I have lived in them.

If anything else it encourages me to keep drawing.

Regards,

X. F. Pine

P.S. On a side note (you should hold onto your hat if you are wearing one), one of the very first exterior shots in the movie Smoke shows the Willamsburg Bridge from the Brooklyn side. If you look closely in the back, beyond the bridge, I believe you can see the apartment window where I am currently writing this letter. The building is definitely visible.

So there!

Best,

- XFP

4-1

I must rip all the bushes and branches from the grotto, with long swoops of a scythe. The bricks from the garden must be removed to make way for the pathway. The trellis is now visible by the entrance. It holds the vines and the brush high above your head as you enter. By the end of the days work, the pathway is cut perfectly to the yard. This will be a place to retreat for he summer. A table and chair are needed.

4-3

The bridge is filled with nameless faces from the past. Persons whose faces you can only remember through a picture. Their names evoke a lost distant place and memory.  Most of us are traveling in one direction. I see JD approaching from the opposite way down the causeway. We barely acknowledge each other in passing. She wears a thick red jacket which is much to heavy for the warming weather. I realize, that upon reaching the center of the bridge I must return to the side which I came from.

4-4

BB and I wait outside the bar for hours. We joke about the performance we are about to see. Inside, I find myself alone at the end of the dark wooden bar. JD is at the far end of the restaurant wearing glasses. RR appears and shows the barmaid a map or drawing he has done. The barmaid is excited by his appearance. He explains the drawing on the bar right in front of me. JD walks over, glances at the piece of artwork, and walks away.

4-9

Deep within the Scum House is where all the low life from the town live. Walking down the long hallway I am trying to get to the hidden door. I need to get to school. I almost stole a bicycle to get there on time. In the hallway I see the police in their riot gear. Their radios are buzzing. There are circular floating lights. The police have just taken some piece of scum out the door. People are stretching and screaming with vengeance. There has been a fight in the small room where I almost trip over an empty beer bottle. The floor is covered in vomit. Everyone is trying to get out the small door. A man walks up to a spigot to fill a bucket with water. The sound it makes sounds exactly like more vomiting. This causes a bum to appear sick right in front of me. His mouth is about to burst with vomit. His expression is extreme. I manage to dodge out of the way and get out the front door. On the great big green front steps is the rich man’s daughter with her scum boyfriend. She looks at all the confusion with wild innocent eyes. She is from a home very much unlike this. She is here because it confronts her rich daddy’s life.  She wears the thinnest silver chain around her neck possible.

4-10

JD and I meet on the street and we both become very coy. I ask for her number. She giggles with delight. I tell her mine on the condition that she doesn’t send any big friends of hers over to beat me up. She laughs more. We are headed in the same direction laughing.

4-11

Sitting at the table, they bring out the new hat design which perfectly resembles a bowling ball cut down the center. It is also bright, furry and friendly. The finger holes rest right above the forehead. The hats look supremely stupid although it is our job to pretend otherwise. We soon discover the practical problem that the wearer cannot hear anything at all while the product is being worn.

4-13

The convention is taking place across a sunny field from the house of science where our team is staying. Within the large space of the hall are exhibitions featuring gas weapons and torture devices in different colored booths. The fascists are involved in this to some degree. Their streamline human statues of the state stand at either end of the hall. The bronze statues hold spears. Suddenly a revolutionary pulls a machine gun from a black bag he has over his shoulder and begins to destroy one particular display related to historic gas masks. The display is riddled to pieces by bullets. It is then that the seemingly solid statues become mechanized and launch their spears towards the dangerous revolutionary. The spears meet their target perfectly and impale him in an ‘X’ fashion. He is dead within moments and everything has grown silent. All of us on the team realize that we are under complete automatic surveillance all the time. The fascists control everything we do. Later as we are headed back across the field to our quarters we see a tremendous Calvary offensive far in the distance. We think it’s a movie it is so perfect. Before reaching the house of science we meet a little black child who wants to play some more football in the field. He pretends his arm is withered and glowing green, and then it turns out he isn’t pretending. It is all bone and he brags about how it glows in the dark. These are the curious effects of our science. It is then years later and I am standing outside of myself as I have become a religious preacher in a pulpit. I am watching myself repeat the same words over and over tying to get my new profession correct. I have traded in my life of science for one in God.

4-19

I leave the Irish vixen with the dimples on the train and return to the city and its white sculptures.

Grandfather lies in a dreaming state while shadows enter the hospital room and shake him awake. He sees his sons as small children. He will not eat. He speaks in his sleep to ghosts and drops his thin jaw. He is tethered down for his own good. At night they sometimes chain his feet to the bed. He is dreaming and his shut eyes move wildly. He occasionally rises in a state of horror, when his mind surfaces. All the voices he hears are forever in the distance. They are all speaking behind his back, looking towards him sadly. The television becomes a fluttering tedious landmark where consciousness begins and the world ends. The wiring he’s attached to spirals backwards and clashes with his alien gestures and moods. He dreams of fragrant rooms. They pass with iron machines down the hallway. He cannot perceive the final curve, and when it will spin him out, so when he returns from the depths, he whispers to the priest to have everyone there.

More attention should be paid to this man who may soon cease to be. He was gigantically strong once. Now one notices his skull. His recognitions and hearing are perfect inside while outside there is the panic and the heavy smothering air of losing touch. He tries to hold on. It’s so much safer back at home. It’s so much easier to slip away. He has a vision of his wife from fifty years ago. They first met at a swimming pool in Jersey City where he was a lifeguard. He said, “That’s the woman I will marry,” She said, “Who me?” with a marine bathing suit on.

X.F. Pine