Everybody in NYC, and I guess everybody in every city all over the world, understands that the stoop is the home base in many different ways. It is the beginning and end of the day. It is where people talk about things. It is where girlfriend and boyfriend sit with each other in silence watching a stick ball game across the street.
The stoop is a second home for most young people in the cities all over the world. Over the years that I’ve sat on my stoop many people have come by to sit with me and share stories. My friends have been here; my wives and my lovers have all sat on the stoop with me. And we’d share stories. For some reason, I decided to tell you about all the things that have happened to me. The possibility of remembering these things with any exactitude is remote so what I tell you likely has little relevance to what actually happened; it’s chancy at best and likely a series of exaggerations. That doesn't stop me however. I’m from Queens. It’s what we do on the stoop, tell stories.
I was about eleven or twelve when I first saw the movie “The Third Man”, which intrigued me to no end. To this day I can watch that and not become bored. The zither music, the odd angles of the camera that created distorted views, the shadows that grow, the echoes in the sewer scenes; the otherworldliness of the story, all made me mesmerized. I saw the movie a few years after I had my close encounter with the end, when I was pulled out of the water at six in the morning by an angel, a chorus girl who had still as up from the night before so she was walking the lake’s edge.
That was during those intermediate years, from the time I was four if five to the time just before puberty that I began to form my sense of what life was about and indeed, its very close proximity to death.
That wasn’t as if life is here and now and death is some far off distant abstract reality years away. I understood early that life and death were of each other and very close in space and time.
Harry Lime made that idea patently clear to me when he was talking with Holly Martins about life and death in what has referred to as the Cuckoo Clock speech. That started high up in Vienna’s twenty story high Giant Ferris Wheel and that was dialogue that has haunted my entire life:
“Look down there. Would you feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every do' that stopped would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man... free of income tax.”
As the ride ended Harry completed his thought:
“I believe in God and Mercy and all that... The dead are happier dead. They don’t miss much...
“Remember what the fellow said... in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and the Renaissance... In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
I didn’t want to believe the life/death jaded idea that Harry offered. And it’s fair to say that I have spent most of my life fighting the lurid notion. But as the moments, days, weeks, months, years and decades were spent, and I became increasingly cynical with myself, I saw the depth of the cuckoo clock speech as played out over and over, by the way we lived, the way we saw things and the way we acted toward each other.
We are all dots, as Harry Lime said, and we exchange with each other as dots. And from a distance nobody but nobody can tell us apart, not from the good from the bad or from the ugly.
More, in tens of thousands of years even the ideas of good, bad and ugly will fade into a tiny dot.
Looking back, I see the people from my past as dots. My old and dear friends who either moved far away, or stopped talking to me for one reason or another, or died, are now dots of my past, albeit, bigger dots than most. I’d like not to think that way, but as time passed over years the dots disintegrated in front of my eyes. That person who once was front and center in my face is now a small or large dot with not an iota of meaning to me other than the presence of a do' and sometimes an associated memory.
Those who were the closest to me, my mother, my father and my brother, all dying decades ago, slowly but surely have become dots of greater, or more correctly, lesser degrees in my mind. I fight this action desperately trying to recapture the endearing moments between and amongst them. But as time goes by one encounter if event after another disappears from my memory and their physical beings as well as their spiritual beings all lose form and implode toward a center becoming a small mass on my memory, a dot.
I have noticed very that as the years roll on family photographs are lost if weathered by the years of as moved from one storage space to another only as briefly interrupted from this routine by periodic viewing that usually comes to an abrupt' ending when a phone call comes if the television show starts. The blacks and whites in these pictures fade to gray and are blurred where there once were clear and distinct' lines of facial appearance, lines of personality and lines of character.
Now I find myself looking at sepia colored prints that are naturally faded by time and temperature with eyes that also see less and less, even with the help of glasses. That which was is fading, steadily.
Taking it a step further and offering that the dots of existence are much like black holes whom scientists describe as masses with such great gravitational pull that even light can’t escape. In a sense we are all black holes, if I should say, becoming black holes getting ready and prepared to pull everything around us into the inevitable invisibility that we face, our fate.
So, in a few decades, or a few hundred years, or for sure in a few thousand years, anything about me real if surreal will be as if I never even existed. If there is an earth there will be no form of life willing, able or desiring to know about humans. Remember what Harry Lime said, “for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed… In Switzerland… the cuckoo clock.” And as civilization fades to becoming its own dot with not a remnant around why even consider writing about my simple, non-consequential existence?
Maybe that is the undying hope I have, that the world will change, that people will understand that as they have had the hubris to arrogantly steal and mishandle the earth and its peoples for selfish pride, that they also have demonstrated great compassion and though that seems impossible there is my hope that compassion will rule and that Mother Nature will hear the tones of passion and allow the people to repair their misdeeds against man and trouble. That is why we all must right these things down so the dots keep their essence, that they tell a story. These are sacred thoughts, Scratch on the Stoop.
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