Four years ago

Here's a half-hearted attempt to recapture what was lost when Microsoft ate my last attempt to write an unwriteable story. It's just a clatch of images, but sufficient time has elapsed so that I remember nothing other than a clatch of images.

So this is what I remember from November 27, 2001: Casa del Sol, the abandoned tenement turned almost-adverse-possession squat on Cypress in Mott Haven/Hunt's Point, Laura's former home, eventually taken over by young crusty punks after the RNC last year but shut down after the FDNY and NYPD set it on fire December 2004; crazy guy named Bueno, crazy guy named Bernard, an angel named Lisa, a saint named Harry; stumbling off the 6 train looking for the Cherry Tree Garden; chopping up logs in the South Bronx with a dull ax and moving all the mulch in a wheelbarrow; a single toilet bowl in the center of an otherwise empty room, water flowing in a stream from the ceiling, a bare bulb next to it; Culebra the cat and her kitten Unguento; a kitchen sink rendered useless when a crazy guy accidentally boiled a chicken in candle wax and poured the wax down the drain in an attempt to save the chicken; no electricity but an old European payphone and candelabras; a dried elephant's leg used as a wastebasket/umbrella holder/hat; six floors of abandoned belongings, suitcases full of porn, 26 tuxedos, Naked Color Spectacular; dozens of rooms with nothing but drafts, rooms shuttered in plywood, rooms with homemade stoves and vents; a four-seater bicycle car in the vestibule; a "gallery space" with no illumination; a day-long fast; an abstinence from water; Sam's silver fixed gear with brahma bars; a dusk to dawn Navajo tipi ceremony led by two Arizonans named Keith and Melvin; a tipi no bigger than a bedroom seating 52 with a blazing fire in the middle of it and a tiny hole at the apex for the smoke to escape; two concentric circles of 26 each; starting in the inner circle but hating the heat; moving into the outer circle and losing my shirt and freezing next to Laura; watching a heat blister the size of a baby corn bubbling up on Aresh’s bicep as he endured the fire; kneeling until kneeling was no longer possible but being bitched out by Keith for being unable to overcome physical pain and instead all of us sitting sidesaddle like weak women; 52 wingnuts in a tipi projecting their own misfired visions of Native American religiosity onto actual Native American religiosity; 52 fools taking turns saying what was on each of their minds while a troubled man beat a drum filled with water; pulverized peyote by the fistful, spooned out of Skippy jars with a tablespoon, the powder reaching under your teeth, into your throat, up your nose, gumming your mouth, difficult to swallow, impossible to disgorge, clouding your judgment, echoing the water drum, protracting that strung out woman across the fire’s rendition of “What the World Needs Now” between four and six in the morning; politely bypassing every opportunity to chant or say prayers; watching the Latin American guy heave and vomit next to the fire, which we learned then was a sacred symbol of “ancestors,” watching the same guy later reach dazedly for an ember only to be swatted away by the huge Jamaican man tending the fire and reprimanded by Melvin—in his own defense the Latin American man saying, “It ‘twas a FEE-ling”; Lawrence, dirty old white man with white beard and white hair, laughing at Keith’s militarism, hooting at Keith’s declarations of patriotism and his support for the war in Afghanistan in which his daughter was fighting; Keith screaming at Lawrence and implying the whole history of European-on-Native American violence; Keith screaming at us and implicating all of us in the same history; a break at 3 a.m. standing swaying in the garden with Aresh sprinting around the block for energy and yelling “Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!”; Melvin leaving the tipi during a lull to pray aloud outside, his voice pitching, breaking, howling some kind of high lonesome toward the Bruckner traffic, trafficking in redemption, begging forgiveness for the 52 idiots crying in the tipi and all the people they’d ruined; all of us sending prayers to unreal things, me included, overcoming skepticism to see the unstoppable momentum of faith, nothing but faith, faith naked and blinding, faith as a speech-act that invokes itself and makes itself true; Lawrence laughing in spite, Lawrence and Keith again fighting; Lawrence standing up in tree pose, saying nothing, holding the pose, then leaping out of the circle for a derisive dance around the sacred fire, and plunging through the oilskin hatch and guffawing in the garden and 52 suddenly depressed idiots feeling then that all the collective goodness we thought we thought we believed in were illusions masking unstoppable isolation; the night continuing into pre-dawn twilight, into dawn, into day; breaking the fast with venison and corn palmed out from pewter bowls; drinking water for the first time in twenty-four hours and consequently feeling as if flying; mouthing prayers, thinking prayers, trying so damn hard just for one moment in a lifetime of moments to live prayers; thinking the unthinkable thought of leaving the tipi; drawing out the ceremony until seven; then a processional around the fire and through the oilskin hatch; a giddy processional outside around the tipi; racing with Laura into the building, up past the sixth floor, onto the rooftop, past the skylight Amy ruined a pair of secondhand overalls attempting to caulk, leaning on elbows against the sloped tar of the roof berm and watching Aresh contort and flex and turn cartwheels and yelp with pleasure and watching the slow Thanksgiving boats pass under Hell’s Gate and the parade of shining cars on the Bruckner hurrying to feasts and families, seeing New York in slanting light from Yankee Stadium to the Gowanus to office canyonlands to wake waves lapping on the Jersey shore, shivering from the unexpected generosity of a late November sun, thinking this is it this is it this is it, this is the closest I’ll ever be to transcendence; the unmanageable urge to hold everything in my arms, in my mouth, streaked in the fibers of my muscles, laced into my eyelashes, balanced on the bunched up tips of my fingers; leaning over the edge of the roof and monitoring the bustle in the triangular wedge of urban agriculture below; returning to the garden, sampling a root roast, beaming, hugging, and finally taking a reluctant leave to the 6 train again, first stopping by Laura sleeping in a wheelbarrow to pat her feet goodbye, heading to the Lower East Side, to Rivington Street, to a 24-hour bagel store to search for Cynthia from D.C. but instead finding her outside on a bench facing an empty basketball court littered with potato chip bags, taking her back to the apartment; and finally, sleeping the deepest sleep ever slept in a filthy sleeping bag on a borrowed bed in a tiny room in a shared apartment in a noisy neighborhood in a wild city in overfilled with love.