Everyone who has ever left New York signs their presence with a trace. The trace is the signature of what escapes when you absent yourself, when you’ve ghosted the city but marked your X in all the old familiar places which will now dream your dreams, disrupt your presence, and haunt your comings and goings in a city constructed of watery memory and deferred desire. Exiled by job or love or family or terror or money or choice, we are bounded by rivers whose current cannot be stopped, traced by places that cannot forget; they arrange our loves and direct our ends. We are dreamed by powers we pretend to understand.
New Yorkers in exile retain a mental map of waterways and subway stations, restaurants and museums, skyscrapers and fish markets, ports of entry and departure, uptown/downtown, scurrying rats and leashed dogs, wide striped Manhattan boulevards running side by side in urgent yet opposite directions, the perfect one-block cobblestoned street in Brooklyn where I once met a woman and took her to Cornelia Street Café for poetry where we tried to console Robin who lamented having to close the fabled place, another victim of landlord greed, Jones Beach, where I thought my first girlfriend had drowned in a riptide, the parking lot otherwise known as the Long Island Expressway, Harlem and the Apollo, Sylvia’s and Melba’s, gentrified remains of Mulberry Street, memorialized by the Godfather movies in sepia tones; the streets of TriBeCa, where Pari called each night at three am on her walk back to her building in Battery Park, Saks and St. Patrick’s, cathedrals of commerce and faith, Bill Cunningham buzzing by on a bicycle dressed in his blue French worker’s jacket, perched at Fifth and 59th to chronicle decades of changing fashion on the street, Bergdorf Goodman, the Plaza and FAO Schwartz, Fast Eddies, the Cross Bronx and the Van Wyck, the Scooter calling the Yankee game from the big ballpark in the Bronx, telling his wife Cora he was on his way home to Jersey across the gorgeous George Washington bridge, its ascendent necklace of lights hung high above the Hudson, asking Cora to heat up the lasagna, he’d be home soon, it wouldn’t be long, the Calder mobiles suspended from sloping white walls of the Guggenheim that transfixed me as a child; walks on the Highline above the original Pastis, where fashion models sipped water while Q wolfed her hamburger and hammered out edits to my stories, Jackson Pollock and Edward Hopper at the Whitney, the Queensboro Bridge looming over the East River and FDR Drive, the Lincoln and the Holland tunnels, Lincoln Center’s fountain ablaze in light, a nostalgic PBR at John’s Pizza on Bleeker Street followed by the ritual walk to Rocco’s for Italian pastries, parties on fire escape ladders, fireworks shot from river barges, lovers writhing beside the Garibaldi statue in Washington Square Park, Godard and Truffaut at the IFC, tourists with noses pressed to the glass at Tavern on the Green– the ubiquitous orange Staten Island ferry, the Circle Line from Pier 83 on the Hudson, which I once rode downriver to the twisted steel and smoldering remains of the twin towers, that little Italian place on East 29th where a woman we’ll continue to call Q met me for dinner and we never ate a bite, the clock in the center of Grand Central Terminal where a friend told me he had AIDS, 37-08 Utopia Parkway where Joseph Cornel created magical boxes, the Hippodrome, the boardwalk at Coney Island where Q cried one cold September morning as the wind whipping off the frigid Atlantic tangled her hair, writing memoirs side by side with Pari on laptops perched on the big oak table upstairs at Poets House overlooking the frozen Hudson River dressed in winter white, the doorman of Pari’s building who’d wink when I came to walk her Boston Terrier, dressed in his great coat, hand discreetly closed around his tip, cockroaches in cupboards and the smell of dog shit, a whiff of Chanel in Central Park by the zoo, the Jane Hotel in Greenwich Village, where I used to lodge in a fifty square foot nautical-themed room for $88 a night and which had once housed sailors and one hundred survivors of the wreck of the Titanic in 1912, where I’d prop my feet on the wall and talk upside down to Q, Track 29 at Grand Central where I caught the train north to Poughkeepsie to see my mother before she died, the flooded stairs of subway stations scented with salt water during hurricane season, and the smell of rotting garbage on hot summer days.
In New York, whatever I was looking for was looking for me too; the eye by which I saw the city was the same eye by which the city saw me, keeping close watch on all my comings and goings.
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I once wrote a poem called “New York, New York,” a “concrete poem” in the form of a skyscraper. The narrator laments the loss of his New York childhood and adolescence: the Camel billboard in Times Square where white cigarette smoke curled sexily into the night air; the grand ballroom of the Waldorf where he held hands with a pretty girl from his high school chorus, who leaned against him on the risers, singing; the Horn and Hardart automat on 42nd Street where his father fed quarters into gleaming stainless-steel showcases of pies and cakes, coffee, and hot chocolate, causing magical little glass doors to open onto their desire. The poem was published in an online literary journal, where it received several favorable comments, including one from Q who remarked, “The Horn and Hardart may never come back, but O, Gary, won’t you come back to us?”
I’d left the first time to attend college in the Midwest. I married a classmate. We set out for grad school in Colorado, then Missouri, eventually settling in Ohio, where I landed a tenured position in philosophy. By 2010 there’d been nearly thirty years of Ohio, which seemed more than enough. My mother lingered in a Fishkill nursing home downstream from the Mid-Hudson bridge in New York. I wanted to go home. My spouse was not sure this was a good idea. The marriage landed in the hands of lawyers.
My father had died of an enlarged heart many years before, at Vassar Hospital. From his fifth-floor hospital window he could see the mast of tall ships sailing down the river. My sister followed him to the grave When I read that comment on my poem it occurred to me that I could go home now.
Q was a fellow writer. Married, she lived in Brooklyn, with her two young children. I barely knew her, yet she’d activated what French theorist Roland Barthes calls “a cultural code.” In my case it was a code imprinted in childhood as #lostnewyork, a city I no longer knew except through its portals: waterways, bridges, and tunnels, a river running through me made of words, women, and desire.
Some months after Q commented on my poem, I found myself in Brooklyn. The apartment was thick with writers, agents, editors, publicists, reporters, and a few stranded poets.
I didn’t want to be there. After so many years out of the game, I found the party unbearable. Some of the writers were people that I knew, others I knew only by reputation. The agents, editors, and assistant editors were all unknown to me. They looked ridiculously young. Q and I had become “first readers” for each other, exchanging emails and manuscripts. Emails became texts, then phone calls. Q joked that I could come to the party as her plus one if I promised to behave. I told her that was unlikely. Unlikely to come, or unlikely to behave? she texted. Both, I said. The writer couple throwing the party were celebrating their recent wedding. I’d brought a bottle of Veuve Clicquot with me from Ohio. At the door someone took it and placed in a refrigerator with a dozen or more just like it.
The party was wall to wall. If a bomb had gone off, most of literary Brooklyn would have been wiped out. The bed where I’d dumped my coat was piled high with hipster gear; wooden shelves and floors filthy with books. I had the urge to flee. Q pulled me back into conversation, which was no longer about writing. Petite, she wore a tiny black skirt, black boots above her knees. We pressed against a wall. She cocked her hip and said there was a dive bar near her apartment in Park Slope. Her husband was at a surgeon’s convention in Las Vegas. She was nervous.
Exiles recognize each other by several indicators: They are no longer at home anywhere; everything and everyone seems transitional; alone in a crowd they arrive late and leave early; they keep themselves ahead of all partings.
We escaped to the bar. More talk, some tears. Her phone rang. His name lit up the screen. She jumped off the bar stool. Her face was flushed. He was twenty-five hundred miles away and she was shaking. I asked what’s the matter? “How much for a tip,” she said, nervously, “what’s twenty five percent for three hours, I’ll have to give her a check, can you help me, tell me how much? I have to go. I have to go, now. Please.” She walked fast. It took me a minute to realize she was talking about the babysitter.
“Slow down,” I said. But she kept walking. I watched her go.
We continued to read each other’s work for a while, but I didn’t leave Ohio until years later. Q disappeared. The last time I saw her was at a reading in the East Village. She looked so frightened. We didn’t speak. She’s published quite a bit since then, but I no longer read her work. We’ve moved on. Carried off by strong currents we hadn’t the strength to swim against. Survival seems everything. “We all have reasons for moving,” says the poet Mark Strand, in one of my favorite poems. “I move to keep things whole.”
My mother’s condition worsened. She lost her ability to walk. Her personality was intact. She entertained the nurses by telling embarrassing stories about me as a child. How I wouldn’t let her out of my sight, waiting outside the bathroom door until she was done; how surprised she’d been when I walked into kindergarten on the first day of school without even waving goodbye! How I was the prettiest baby at the hospital. “Mom, please,” I’d beg, and her response was always the same: “Well, everyone said so.” Stories of how she dressed me in a wool coat with matching gray cap and took me for walks in our south Yonkers neighborhood, which was perched on a hill high above the Hudson, where we’d be surrounded by strangers who wanted a peek at the beautiful little boy walking beside her.
One story she never told was the day a neighbor stopped us on our daily walk to express condolences to my mother for her loss. The memory stuck. Years later, in high school, I realized the neighbor spoke of my dead brother. I don’t remember what my mother said to that woman on the street. She may have smiled sweetly and thanked her. We would have been holding hands. She’d have squeezed my hand and said, “Let’s keep walking.”
From my mother’s street you can see the Statue of Liberty. The proud arm upraised, torch, flowing robe, the shape of the island. You cannot see her face, turned toward the harbor to welcome immigrants. Chains at her feet are broken, and her right foot is ahead of her left. She’s on the move.
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Motor out in a small boat, cut the engine and pay attention. You may drift lazily to shore. A puff of wind, you move with it. A gust, and you’re moving in the opposite direction. The Hudson’s movements are fierce and unpredictable.
The Hudson River is a tidal estuary, technically not a river at all. To understand, you must go out on the water and feel the changing tides, governed by moon and sun not men. Let the tides carry you. It doesn’t take long to understand that you are not in charge.
Because it is an estuary, at its mouth the Hudson contains both salt water and fresh, which churn in a volatile mix near the Battery, the southernmost point in its 315-mile journey to the Atlantic. Upstream at Spuyten Duyvil, where Manhattan meets the Bronx, the river is a “spouting devil” of wild currents.
The Hudson is restless, vast, and strong. Yet its origins are humble: a small lake halfway up the southwestern slope of Mount Marcy that the Native Americans called Lake Tear of the Clouds. Henry Hudson never made it here when he sailed northward in 1609–passing beds of oysters, coves of wild celery and rice, turtles and crabs nestled in lush marches, and game of every kind, including herons and Bonaparte gulls–though the river and the nuptial bay bear his name.
For years, raw sewage spewed into the Hudson. Toward the end of the last century environmentalists led a heroic effort to save and restore the river, led by Riverkeeper Alex Matthiessen, Bobby Kennedy, Jr., and a horde of enthusiastic supporters, including my sister Jeanne, who was employed in Garrison by Riverkeeper as a fundraiser. Before them there was Pete Seeger and the Hudson River sloop Clearwater, a citizen’s movement for the Hudson that started in 1966. At the time, I was a boy growing up on the river on the edge of the Bronx, oblivious to its threatened existence but grateful for its pervasive presence.
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Lulu was my first girlfriend. On the last day of ninth grade, she walked up to me on the basketball court where I had spent so many hours practicing, running sprints, shooting free throws. Talking to friends, I never saw her coming. I still can’t remember all the best things she said, but I had the impression that I had been selected. She asked me to dance and introduced me to the mysteries of girlhood. She smelled of Ivory soap and peach shampoo.
We rode the bus together on a school field trip. The windows were down. The breeze grazed my cheek and lifted strands of Lulu’s hair straight up. She reached to fix her hair and told me to stop looking at her like that, though I never did. We arrived at our destination on Central Park West.
The Museum of Natural History is an exquisite neo-Romanesque exercise in pink brownstone and granite, with a sweeping stone staircase and an over scaled Beaux-Arts monument to Theodore Roosevelt. I wasn’t impressed by the monument, or its disturbing racial history. My eye was drawn to the 650 black-cherry window frames. Rusticated brownstone corner towers rose one hundred fifty feet into the air.
We walked through the tall doors and into a vast Roman basilica, where we were greeted by a skeleton of a rearing Barosaurus defending her young from an Allosaurus. I felt the ancient hospitality of dinosaurs, about whom I had read obsessively as a child. We spoke in whispers, as if in church. I held Lulu’s hand as we tilted back our heads in admiration of the golden ceiling, unable to keep from looking up, the surest sign of out of towners.
Having entered that museum for the first time, I knew I would want to return again and again, and that each time I visited there would be another mystery, another diorama, another new exhibit, all there for me. I was grateful to see it with Lulu. This is the first time I had experienced that strange pleasure of seeing beauty in the presence of someone I loved.
We made it to the middle of our junior year. The breakup came in the breezeway of her parents’ house. Breezeway is a funny word, I’ve always thought.
The absence of one’s lover puts us perpetually in the same place—I can never again walk into the lobby of the Museum of Natural History in the same way. Something is always missing.
Missing, it seems, is what I do best. This absence is felt in only one direction, however—in the one who stays, not the one who leaves. The other is present for me as an aching absence much like the Hudson when I’ve been away too long, a long, twisting corkscrew in my heart.
Lulu is gone. The museum and I remain, right where she left us.
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Sooner or later, New York City rears up and kicks you in the head.
I wake in lower Manhattan one morning, thinking: Move the car.
It’s almost seven. Pari’s five-year-old son has climbed into my bed, which is normally the nanny’s bed, except when I’m in town from Ohio. The bed is next to the floor to ceiling plate glass facing the Hudson, and beyond it, New Jersey. Looking slightly left, the Statue of Liberty. The boy is five years old. His little sister, asleep in her crib, is one. His mother joins us in the narrow bed. Feeling her close beside me, I have no desire to get up. Her building is right next to Poet’s House, 10 River Terrace, in Battery Park, where we first met.
The child says something to me. He laughs. Pari looks at me with a mix of concern and annoyance. I realize I’ve stepped out of the moment and re-entered the lost world of the newly divorced, wading through dark waves of worry for the future and perpetual regret for the past. I entered this bleak world despite the first light streaming through the tall windows of the apartment, a swimmable distance from the Statue of Liberty. I’m flooded with grim thoughts of my divorce, to be made final at 8:30 that very morning in an Ohio courtroom.
I sold my thin gold wedding band, my watch, and high school class ring to get enough money together for this trip. My residence and employment remain in Ohio, but that means nothing. Everything I want is in this room. Betwixt and between, in this liminal space between two positions, I’m a New Yorker in exile; though I lie in bed in lower Manhattan, my life is elsewhere. I hesitate and miss, again.
When I finally reach my car, parked on Warren between Greenwich and Broadway—when I reach where my car had been parked for two nights over the weekend—it’s vanished.
The sign lists the Tow Pound’s location as West Side Highway at 33rd Street. Exiting a cab at West 33rd I see a sign. Pedestrian Crossing to Tow Pound at West 39th Street. I have a six-block walk.
I smell the Hudson’s salt water as a light breeze blows through the open spaces of the enormous garage. But before I can retrieve my car, I must negotiate a New York rite of passage: the blue uniformed “traffic violations” bureaucracy.
I queue up with my fellow malefactors. A parade of horror, lost keys, stolen cars, escalating fees, endless paperwork. Dante himself could not plead his case in this level of hell. Each time someone receives bad news, there is a Greek Chorus of boos. This too, is New York. An instant community of the suffering and damned. A ship of fools.
$185. There’s an $85 fine, but I can pay it later. That’s $270. With the divorce and the expense of the trip, money is tight. I decide to leave Pari to drive up to see my mom. She’s been expecting me for three days.
I roll south on the West Side Highway toward Battery Park. There’s still time to play with Pari’s kids, talk to her, see what we’re doing for lunch.
But where to park? I gun the car around Pari’s building, and park opposite the Irish potato famine memorial, on the wrong side of the street. It’s dicey, but I figure what the hell, I can move it later. Maybe I’ll get lucky. I miss Pari and the kids. A car in Manhattan is almost always a bad idea. Garages abound, with exorbitant fees.
I text Pari. She says meet me at the Chase Bank, corner of Greenwich and Murray. Where I find her talking to a Chase representative in a small cubicle. New disappointment from her derelict, fraudulent hedge fund manager sumbitch no account soon to be ex-husband, who has squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars on hookers and blow. Her accounts are frozen. The baby sits in her stroller sucking a water bottle. She manages to get the cap off the bottle and pours the water down her dress. She giggles.
Pari sighs and sends me for cigarettes.
We sit in the shaded playground behind her building watching the kids eat pizza. I play hide and seek with them, then tell Pari I must go check on my car. She nods and says good idea. I take her Boston Terrier with me.
There’s a big orange ticket on the windshield of my car. At least it’s still there. Another thirty minutes and it would have been back on the Ship of Fools in the Tow Pound. Yellow chalk marks from my previous infraction are etched on the passenger side window.
I lift Iverson into the front seat. He has the smashed-in face of a pugilist, a face that can take a punch. I toss the ticket in the glove compartment with the other one, crank the radio, search TriBeCa for a space. As if. Twenty minute later I pull into a parking garage near Pari’s building. I retrieve the ticket from the glove compartment and read the tiny print. $115.
What the fuck are you looking at, I say to Iverson. He yawns and licks his balls.
I find Pari. She’s put the baby down to sleep. The boy is in his room, reading. This will be difficult. “Look,” I say. “I gotta go up to my mom’s house.” “I know,” she says. I pull her into a hug. “I’ll come down for the weekend,” I say. “Without the car,” I add. She laughs and says OK.
I don’t tell her about the second ticket. I suspect she already knows. She knows everything. I hug her. She’s clammy with sweat. Her tiny feet are wet from wading in the swimming pool with the kids. We are divorce friends with a pain connection. There is no hiding anything. I kiss her goodbye, grateful for her. Leaving hurts like hell. I am always leaving New York and women.
My car was in the parking garage for less than thirty minutes. Twenty more bucks. So that’s $395 for parking related stupidity– one morning in New York. The city always finds a way to beat you up when you’re already beat up. It searches for your invisible weakness and probes like a dentist tapping teeth, creating an illness specific to your symptoms.
I follow the Henry Hudson Parkway north, paying the $4 toll. $389. The 79th Street marina. Riverside Drive. Riverdale. Top down, I feel the breeze off the Hudson. Passing quickly through the Bronx, then Yonkers, I follow the majestic river upstream to see my mom, and later in the week, into the high peaks, to Lake Tear of the Clouds, source of the Muhheakantuck, the river that “flows both ways,” this river that runs through me. Next week the Hudson will be over my right shoulder as I drive back down the Henry Hudson Parkway, back to Battery Park and Pari.
In my mother’s tiny room hangs a picture of her mother, Flora. The little flower. She had been a Monaco, in the hills of Abruzzi, in Italia. Tragedy: the men of her family, struck dead. Five women remained: a stricken mother and mother-in-law, and three young girls. At sixteen my grandmother came by boat to America, steaming into New York Harbor with the clothes on her back and the names of relatives pinned to her cotton shirt.
She married a man from Abruzzi named Federico DeFrancesco. As a young man he had helped build the Bear Mountain Bridge, the loveliest of the bridges spanning the Hudson River. My wiry grandfather, short of stature and asthmatic, with thinning red hair and pale green eyes, had once hung above the mighty Hudson.
Federico DeFrancesco, bridge-maker, rescued by FDR and the New Deal, saved enough money to become a greengrocer with two stores in New Rochelle. He sat with me one day in the small kitchen of his Yonkers apartment in Stanley Avenue and taught me to play cards. I was four years old. He scratched his back with a long knife and waited for me to cut the cards. It is my only real memory of him. His asthma was severe. Forced to surrender the business, he died young and penniless. My grandmother returned to work as a seamstress. She later moved in with us, to help make ends meet.
It was on Stanley Avenue that my brother died. Not far from the broad river I had seen as a child, high up on Park Hill on walks with my mother. On a clear day one could see where it merged with the Atlantic, in New York harbor. The river still runs, north and south, carrying all things off, beckoning to me like a lover.
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I had promised to spend the 4th of July with Pari back in the city but got talked into attending a family gathering at my brother’s house in Poughkeepsie. The Hudson is in the news up here. Four people were killed on the river when they rammed their boat into a dock. They were drunk, of course. The river swallowed them, then gave them back.
The light is changing. Fireworks are scheduled to be shot from five barges on the Hudson. Pari will watch from her roof in Battery Park without me. I say goodbye to my brother and drive ten miles south to the nursing home to watch the fireworks on TV with my mother, but she’s asleep. I watch with the sound turned off. The sky is bright with fire. The sparks make their long descent and fall harmless into the Hudson’s dark water.
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This river. This impossible city. I finally moved back in 2014 to teach at Fordham University in the Bronx. The next year I met a woman who grew up on the Tennessee River in Chattanooga. Resea told me she’d once lived on a houseboat. I smiled and told her I understood. We married. My life feels settled. She’s become my first reader and best friend. This writing falls down the arm of a grateful man.
Home in New York at last, I still orient my life to the crazy flow of its greatest river. But the neighborhood where I would visit Pari over a decade ago is a place I haven’t the heart to visit. Pari got colon cancer and died a year ago, just forty-eight. Her kids now live with her ex. The Poet’s House, next door to her apartment, where we first met and wrote together, flooded, and is still closed for repairs. Upriver in Greenwich Village, just across from the Jane Hotel is an apartment where I stayed with my ex-wife in the autumn of the last year of our marriage. A short walk from there is the restaurant in the meatpacking district where I dined with Q, my first reader, pleading with her not to become essential to me, though she did, and I lost her too. The river courses through the Bronx to Yonkers, the city of my birth, and miles beyond that, where the river widens into a deep bay, is Peekskill, where I fell in love at fifteen with Lulu, who selected me for no other reason than because a pretty girl can. Just kids, we ate pizza on the river by the train station and tried to see the future. Farther upstream, closer to its source, Poughkeepsie, where my mother finally died in 2019 at the age of ninety-three, twenty-five years a widow, six years of them in her tiny room in the nursing home, another place I’ve avoided. Across the Mid-Hudson Bridge to Ulster County, the little house in the Catskills where I held my sister in my arms as she died, childless, of ovarian cancer, calling me by the name of my dead brother, whom she last saw in a Yonkers funeral home when she was six.
When I think of those I have loved, and those who have loved me, among them those whom I’ve accompanied to the graveside, I am reminded of those characters in Greek mythology who are shades, who have been alive and yet somehow live on, whose souls were ferried twice across the River Styx. Having passed through the waters of the womb at birth, which are the waters of love, and journeyed so far from one another, can one drop be lost or somehow missed, or must all love converge somewhere, somehow, in the river that runs through us all, and carries us to the other shore?
Each time I pass through Grand Central Terminal in New York City I am met by ghosts. I feel them pass through me in the great hall. Whether they mean to haunt me, or are afraid of me, I cannot tell.
Gary Percesepe is the author of eleven books, including Moratorium: Collected Stories, named by Kirkus Reviewone of the top 100 Indie books of 2022. Excerpts from his memoir-in-progress have been published recently in The Sun, Sunday Salon, and Solstice. Percesepe’s work has appeared in Brevity, The Galway Review, Greensboro Review, Story Quarterly, N + 1, Salon, Wigleaf, PANK, New Ohio Review, Westchester Review, Maine Review, Short Story America, The Millions, Antioch Review, and other places. He lives in Hawai’i on the island of Maui with his family.
