Month: October 2010

There is a hollowness that takes you over, somewhere between the second and third cup of coffee, and three hours before your coworkers are going to start showing up "early" for work.  It is not caffine jitters, those don’t start until around ten, usually about the same time as the butterflies that accompany the beginning of recording the live show.  It is not the lurch that time seems to exist in catching up to you all at once, when you step outside the cave, and see that the sun now dominates what was black when you entered the building.  I’ve learned, in the past few weeks, to embrace this hollowness, not to run from it.  It is the center of my  morning now, this shelled-out calm before the storm.  It fuels what tranquility I can muster – seperates me from the frustrations and the chaos which ensues every time we go through this. 

The cycles of  the last day of the week have become the launching of a ship, from dry dock to foamy waves, from darkness to brightened skylights.  Sound checks, color matching, timesynching, stream buffering  – they are the rigging, anchor chains, and bare ribs covered in plank that are my Friday mornings.

Fridays are a dream state, for most of the day, for me.  Waking up to make a 5am call is pretty brutal, when you have to work a normal day after the rush and the yelling and caffine are all echoes of another time and place. I’m apparently on the call sheet now, which is cool, but, I still don’t get a copy of the call sheet.  Today’s call was postponed by 30 minutes, since we don’t have to film any music today.  I stood on a dark city street with nothing but the wind and a cup of coffee growing cold faster than I could drink it.  I looked around, as I often do, for something to squirrel away, for writing, or in photo form.

Over the Western horizon where the Hudson lay, the clouds seemed to be illuminated from the street level.  I assumed perhaps some club in JC had rented searchlights or something for an opening, and carelessly left them on.  I actually chuckled a moment, realizing that if the place was in NY, it was probably just last call, but I don’t know what time bars close in Jersey anymore.  As the time went by, and the clouds began to thin, it became apparent to me that the illumination was not coming from below.  It was the moon, trying desperately to shine through what seemed to be very stubborn clouds.

She was only visible for about ten minutes, creating silver daylight where no sun yet shone.  By the time all the people with the call sheet started showing, she was hidden again – secret.  Maybe the moon was trying to make up for the fact that I didn’t get a call sheet.  

Of all these marathon Fridays (which, oh gods below, I heard may be going on in perpituity for at least another year), today has been my favorite.  I had my secret moment with the city, and with the goddess of the sky.  I am sure there are hundreds of other people across the city, whose lives are more tuned to the dead windows of time in the City who allegedly never sleeps, but certainly passes out on the bar stool before the bouncer kicks them out, who shared that same moment I did.  It is part of why I love it here – so little is owned by you alone, but, at the same time, so many things that people never even notice, which create such a feeling of wonder…

I can tell you with certainty, while I might not be alone in my moment with the moon, nobody else had the exact same vantage point that I did, on a windy street, alone, in the dark of morning.

My escape was a most wretched experience, though I was grateful for the slack and sallow faces of my fellow refugees as we boarded, to help contrast the sharp horrors still festering in the back of my mind.  Every time I blinked, the experiences of the day waited expectantly, ready to claw away at my inner eyes with their gibbering and little black mandibles. I found a seat in a near empty compartment – a luxury, I hoped, which would easy some of the weariness from my frame as I left behind the madness. I would have slept, but I was terrified of what my unconscious might unleash on my already fragile mind, if unfettered by Morpheus.  Instead, to prevent myself from drowsing, I shifted my focus to my traveling companion, hoping to distract the overbright images of my imagination with a flood of external sensory information.

Across the compartment sat a portly gentleman, in a ruffled grey suit, reading the paper.  Most of my companion’s upper body was occluded from my visual questing by the newsprint.  The seams of the sleeves of his jacket had several times been mended by a clumsy hand, and the suit and his shirt were in dire need of dry-cleaning. The cloth of the suit was so soiled it exuded a nearly slimelike quality, and his shirt, which may have once been white, had yellowed to an unhealthy ivory. He wore neither rings nor a wristwatch, but had carefully manicured fingernails, which were the only well-kept thing about his appearance.  Many times, while reading, he would shift to a one-handed grip on his broadsheet and run one of his palms over his stained pants legs, as if the slime might be wiped away in the motion.

I noted as he did this that the gentleman was suffering from some sort of acute psoriasis, or the aftereffects of a bad burn, perhaps by chemicals.  His pasty skin was red and inflamed in places, and large flakes of dried skin were plastered to his wounds by some sort of fishy-smelling ointment. It was only after noting his hands that I realized the odor of the man’s medicinals had rather permeated the compartment, as the odor from burnt toast might – gradually, but once realized, impossible to banish.

I tried vainly to figure out a way I might politely start conversation, drawing him away from his paper, so that I might further inquire about the state of his injuries and his treatment.  Failing any inspiration, I hit upon a solution to more than one problem – I opened the window to the compartment.  The rush of air considerably lessened the stale fishy scent, and the man’s newspaper was quite disturbed in the process.  I had expected a comment or retort, but my traveling companion simply readjusted the pages which had blown around him, and settled back into his seat, continuing to read.

I wondered what had him so engrossed – what was in the paper that was of such interest? Vainly, I tried to scan the headlines from across the compartment, but found myself unable to do so – the lettering was foreign to me.  It looked almost Arabic, but with much sharper corners and lines, in lieu of the graceful curves and dots I was more familiar with.  At last, I had hit upon a simple way to interrupt, without being overly forward or rude.

I pardoned myself to the gentleman, and inquired about the language that his broadsheet was set in.

With a gurgling grunt, the gentleman in the grey suit put down his paper.  If his hands were the ruin of a burn or accident, his face and neck were surely more central to whatever event had rendered them so.

The gentleman had a thick brow, and broad cheekbones, well padded by jowly cheeks flecked with patches of scaly scar tissue.  His head, as well as his face, were completely hairless, and his skin had an uncomfortable greenish tint to it.  His lips were overlarge, and liver-like, but did not completely cover the mishmash of teeth, which, judging by what protruded from between his lips, were all in crooked disarray.  His eyes were bulbous and bulging, as if they were twice too big for the eyelids which seemed strain to breaking, simply performing their duties, and preventing his orbs from freeing themselves from the orbit of his skull.

The most startling aspect of my companion’s visage was his nose, or what was left of it.  It seemed that whatever process had led to his skin condition, which permeated the landscape of his curious features, had claimed nearly all the flesh of his nose.  There was a white sliver of bone visible in the vacuous hole where his nostrils should have been.  The flesh surrounding the area was scabrous, and the skin so thin you could see the forest of thin capillaries radiating from where his cheeks ended and the hole began.  With the paper removed, I noted, for the first time, that the gentleman’s breathing was a bit labored, and though he inhaled through his mouth, he clearly exhaled through his nose, causing a nearly imperceptible whistle from somewhere far within his sinuses.

He looked at me curiously as I stared, like a fish noting people beyond the glass of it’s aquarium for the first time, and grunted again in his peculiar phlegmy manner, eclipsing his face once again with his paper. It was only the train made its stop at Heartsdale, that I realized that I had not escaped at all, but was simply trapped in an extension of the horrors I thought I had left behind on the White Plains.