Fly Over This by Ryan Elliott Smith

Author:Ryan Elliott Smith [Smith, Ryan Elliott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tortoise Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

NOT ORIGINALLY FROM NEW YORK OR: THE MISUNDERSTANDINGS

Okay look, I’m willing to admit to you that I’m not originally from New York (I’m aware of what that says to you all about me), but when I got off the train and started asking people if anybody had heard of a bar called Mitzvah, because a guy that used to be my alive friend told me that he was going to meet me there in celebration of my recent move to Manhattan, I nevertheless feel okay telling you that I got more than my fair share of shitty looks on 77th and Lexington (or Lex to the newly, enthusiastically initiated, like me).

I was there alone, on the corner, a warm and noisy wind pushing up from the 4/5/6 train grate I was walking over blowing softly up my pant leg, thinking about how it must be considerably harder for some people to avoid smelling like urine than I would have originally thought and how if you find yourself frequently falling asleep on public transportation, then I have to tell you that your life has likely gone completely off the rails.

I suddenly stopped and felt ridiculous (or not at all like some masculine version of Marilyn Monroe) and was shaking my head, because I had just gotten my then still-alive friend’s admittedly pretty decent pun (however, his heart attack – brought on by thick, cholesterol-lined arterial walls—and, also, the fight that brought it on, had not yet happened).

I had already spent the whole time on the train on the way there trying to look up where this Mitzvah might be located on my smartphone that had no signal, which didn’t occur to me to be a problem since I’m originally from a small town in Illinois (a fact about my past from which you should not draw any neat or major conclusions as I do not feel I am somehow wholly representative of someone from there). This small town I’m speaking of (LaSalle) is located about an hour and a half outside a recently even more violent Chicago (sadly, groups of teenagers are beating the hell out of random folks on the Magnificent Mile there now, and in the middle of the day no less, but I don’t relay these kinds of things to New Yorkers. Chicago doesn’t need that). Chicago is a place where the trains run above the ground in what I would say is a more uncivilized manner (think north of 125th Street in Manhattan and the outer boroughs). These neighborhoods by and large seem over-determined to be “vibrant” – a word I repeat here since it seems to be some euphemism used by fuckface real estate guys to describe neighborhoods these same assholes were saying I should avoid upon my moving to NYC and that are chronically, albeit reluctantly I’m sure, embracing their largely economically bummed-out (depressed) status. Like the El in Chicago, these elevated rails seem to hover over these neighborhoods in New York that hang from the tracks there like gaunt torsos, decaying and pulling from their iron ribs and steel spines.

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