NY, pt 1

And I’m off to Ellis Island. Mayakovsky is right here with me, partly because the lingua france during my night in Frankfurt was Russian, probably because I packed “My discovery of America” for the trip.

From what  I can glimpse of the plane through the tiny portholes of the bridge, it’s a monstrosity. I’ve never flown 747 before. the surreal twilight and organic shape of the nose make me feel as if I’m boarding a trained whale, heading for the bottom. The English inside the beast teaches me that there is a place called Fort Lauderdale and I that I feel I never ever want to go there. the German reminds me painfully of the my hard, drunken effort trying to keep the Syrian, Bulgarian and Russian from slipping silent away for German to unintelligibly.

Nobody has ever written a good paragraph about flying, and nobody ever will.

I arrive in Brooklyn around noon, and align myself with the locals by doing some mundane things. Exchange money, sim card, maps, power converter, I spend about 2 hours around Fulton street before I realize the only white people I saw were 2 beat cops. Even if it’s not a law, it’s still segregation. But everything clicks into place: I get a warm welcome by friends I’ve never met before, well trodden conversation paths make us travel together and the last musician I see that night plays until his century old banjo is covered in blood. One band-aid later and he’s back at it. God I love the music here.