Lyrics Part 2: Flip-flops on Fifth Avenue

Rufus Wainwright's Poses is an album I've always liked more than loved. Love is his first album and most of Want One (an album I'm continuously impressed with, even though most people can't stomach the monster). But Poses, though intermittingly brilliant, always felt sheek and clean, trendy but hollow. Everyone loves the title track, but I always felt it was trying too hard to be the ballad "Foolish Love". That was until I came to New York.

Though a shopping spot for the rich and famous on Upper East Side, in Chelsea, where Rufus lived when he made the album and where I work, fifth avenue is just busy. Constantly busy, constantly loud, poor fifth avenue never gets much of a rest. And cleaning seems more like a futile atempt at a joke than a serious task. It is New York in every sense.


I did go from wanting to be someone
Now I'm drunk and wearing flip-flops on Fifth Avenue
Once you've fallen from classical virtue
Won't have a soul for to wake up and hold you

For some reason these lines, no matter how pompous (classical virtue?) they may sound, seem perfectly normal because I've walked the streets and seen the circus that crowds around each day. He may sound very alone in these words but for personal experience that is an impossibility. The sadest part about the song is the crowd the passes by unnoticed, like a ghost that he doesn't want to bring up. There are many drunks out on fifth avenue at any part of the day, and he is upset because he is just another face in the crowd.

Yesterday I walked up fifth avenue to where it intersected broadway, and then followed the trail to Time Square, the ulitmate hell of New Yorkers because it's filled with tourists, lights, and more tourists. During my 4 month stay here I've only gone through it twice and both times were with people wanting to see it, because it's an experience that everone should have. But never have I've been drawn there during my daily routine. No good bars are there. No cheap food.



But my uncle was in town, and he treated me to a dinner atop the Marriot Marquis, a rotating restaurant 47 floors above midtown skyline. The food was quite good, if nothing life changing, but the view as we rotated for two and half hours was like nothing I've ever experienced. The Chrysler building seemed chest high. The tall apartment buildings of the upper west side sunk below us. It felt just like the silent movie "Metropolis", where the world ceases to exists at streetlevel, and an extra deminsion opens up to human possibilities.

The wine was great, very great, perfectly honed to what I was eating and feeling, and after I had left I could still feel its chaotic pulse around me. I immediately called my parents, and related all of the nights stories, my uncles first trips to New York with my dad and other family business. I was having such a wonderful trip that I decided to extenuate it, maybe to flex my tightened stomach that had put away a circular piece of cheescake. 30 blocks up, five avenues over, my sodden mind predicted an hour long commute home in which time I would have talked to my parents and Abby and have gotten a good bit of exercise.

Towards the end of the parental exchange when I foolishly told her I was walking solo along fifth avenue, my mother became very scared for me, and offered to reimburse my home account if I'd just quickly get in a cab and get off the street, to which I scoffed and joked about getting mugged on the brightly lit, crowd infested, fifth avenue.

Right after I made the remark I felt something tap my right elbow and heard a thud on the pavement. A large plastic salad container lay open with the contents sprayed around. I looked up and two large black men stood in front of me, one of them screaming and the other one on his knees scooping the discarded remnants of the salad with his barehands back into the plastic container.

In between his screaming, "fuckhead" "asshole" "bastard", I cooly told my parents that I needed to go, and that I loved them. I pulled out my wallet and gave the frantic guy all the money I had, six dollars.

"It was fucking 12 dollars you bastard."

I said I was sorry and just kept walking.

Now it seems rather strange that I handled the entire encounter with such calm, never freaking out to the possibility that two large men could destroy me over a grilled chiken salad. And looking back I attribute it to the wonderful red wine and the small bit of New York nonchalance that graces everything that goes on in the city. Exactly right after it happend I told myself that it was not soely my fault, having just been an elbow on a street does not mean that I am attempting to knock passerby's salads onto the pavement.

I only looked back once. The man who'd lost the salad still stood upright and gave the one finger goodbye, but the other man was still hunched over trying to retrieve every last bit of the salad. And I suddenly felt shame. I had eaten 47 floors above the street and this man was now eating off of it. The bums of fifth avenue are plenty. Rufus Wainwright felt the shame of the street. To be anyone else is the hard part.