the reds

You know those days when you’ve got the mean reds?

The blues are because you’re getting fat or maybe

it’s been raining too long. You’re sad, that’s all.

But the mean reds are horrible. You’re afraid and you

sweat like hell, but you don’t know what you’re afraid of.

– Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s

I am wandering Chinatown at night, down alleys that would make my mother cringe, streets where the pavement is losing an ongoing battle to the cobblestone underneath. Covering up history in the name of progress seems futile tonight. All my skeletons have names. A thousand bits of foreign produce on the street flagged with cardboard marked in a language I don’t understand. Two steamed pork buns at the usual place, $1.20. I’m walking down Bayard and the guy at the parking lot yells down the street that he likes my hat. He’s Italian. The lot's too close to Little Italy to be anything but mob. Small taro & lychee at the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory, I give the kid my change, back track to the parking lot and talk to Nick about my hat. Are you spoken for, because you must make your boyfriend laugh all the time. Yeah, sure, Nick; I got a man. It would kill him to know I’m talking to you and I make him laugh like a little girl.

I’m kicking cans into TriBeCa, counting pugs in the West Village, nodding at doormen in the Meatpacking District. Balducci’s has moved into the landmark NY Savings Bank on 14th and 8th. It’s a surreal, small gourmet grocery - the prices have to be ridiculous to make the rent but it sure is pretty, all that Jacques Torres chocolate and tangerines on the vine under those old gilt chandeliers. It’s not here, either, what I’m looking for. It’s not the kind of thing I keep on my shopping list, but I’ll know it when I see it. My arches are killing me but I'm down the steps and I keep walking - shop windows, couples, homeless, dogwalkers, kids congregated at the deli. One foot in front of the other in front of the other, because some days this is how I keep going.