South East of Sodom

The Big Apple in the Fall is a special place. Crisp days and late, cool night's. The Rangers back at MSG. Colorful, leaf-lined streets and pretty auburn haired girls who smell like cinnamon hanging out in the parks. Their trendy Fall fashion leaving just the right amount to the imagination. Go to the right bar in Midtown on the right night and you might get lucky with a stray Rockette. It's all very Woody Allen-esque, including the typical amount of perversion and sexual deviancy.

Yes, I think I'll just become a poet. Living the life of a Flâneur. Baudelaire's flâneur is a particular character, who traverses the streets of the city as an observer of contemporary life; 'a person who walks the city in order to experience it' (Baudelaire 1863). His version of the flâneur (sometimes translated to the English word dandy) bears clear traces of notions and events taking place in 19th Century Europe.

Baudelaire's flâneur is:

-Male

-No visible means of income

-Urban, contemporary, stylish

-Part of the crowd yet apart from the crowd

-Aloof and unreadable, blasé

-Strolling observer, wanders with no specific purpose but to drink in the sights and sounds of the emerging city.

I could get used to this lifestyle.

But just South and East of this modern, idyllic Sodom is another place. A place where debris meets the sea and that old school grungy, 'FUCK YOU' New York attitude still exists. No matter how gentrified and hipsterized it gets. If you listen carefully you can still hear the punk rock playing. The detritus of society.

You hear the agonized howl of a creature of a different genus from the water and sanity’s edge. Junkies, wino’s and desperate madmen.

The water here is not turquoise and clear, but murky brown and smelly. Keep your eyes and mouth closed when duckdiving sets. Gray gulls hover overhead, cawing mockingly, under massive Boeing's landing or taking off at JFK, to and from far flung destinations, dumping chemtrails on unsuspecting beach goers just out of reach. 

Beaches strewn with broken glass, cigarette butts and hypodermic needles.

I miss Joey Ramone and Debbie Harry and Patti Smith. If you can’t rock ‘n’ roll don’t fucken come — Quiksilver’s old slogan long never known amongst the great unwashed. 

And once in a while, in Autumn, it explodes. June is too soon, September you remember and October might be over, — is what my old man told me.

In front of the 90th Street Jetty, anonymous rippers snarl at strangers. One must prove their worth to avoid a gnashing of teeth amongst the old guard. All these faces look the same in thick rubber hoods, androgenous and white with darting, nervous eyes. No certainty, no diversity. Some bob around in hoods, not paddling for a single wave like helpless seals, whilst a select few catch all the bomb sets. Big, fast lefts. Bubbling, grinding cauldrons that regurgitate their brown, foamy guts on the inside.

I miss refreshing $2, 24oz Coors Banquet tins between marathon sessions, basking in the hazy Indian Summer sun. Heavy, round shore break tubes in front of even more heavily tattooed Coney Island Rockabilly pin-up girls in ‘50s style bathing suits and 6 foot nubian princesses with lush afro’s, skin like hot, dank moonless night, slender limbs and voluptuous everywhere else. They tan their mounds or sway in the light offshore breeze to music too groovy to be heard anywhere else. The loved and loathed, the pretty and the damned.

I miss the rattle and hum and the A train across the boulevard, hurtling like everyone here towards the end of the line.

I wish I was back at Rockaway beach, urban decay and fun A-frame peaks. 

And as things fell apart, nobody paid much attention.—Joel van Wyk