A Brief Map of Albany, printed and exhibited at Utilities Included residency, April 27, 2019
Move cities one week before the fourth of July, from academic film set to post-industrial postcard. Which pastoral? Sidewalk cracks and potholed streets, the only evident wealth: a marble emblem of Rockefeller and too-many-columned state buildings.
Move from a ten-person commune to a tiny room in a condo bought by an accountant one year older than me, whose leg muscles deteriorated during radiation. In remission, he eats a Price Chopper(1) chicken for dinner and spends evenings on a rowing machine in the bigger room he offers me instead for an additional $150 a month. I acquire a pile of blankets I keep on the small room’s floor as a nest in place of a bed, my clothes in stacks beside it.
The heat suffocates the room the first day, so I walk Albany without direction, wearing cut-off shorts and a torn t-shirt with a baboon bearing teeth. Six blocks away on Central, a man walking with his daughter spits on me and tells me I lost my soul. Four blocks further, a man chain smoking asks me for a cigarette, tells me his name is Bobo, that he wanted to shoot the poor Kentucky kids but didn’t have a gun, so he spent the afternoon cooking for them instead. Two blocks further, a man pacing tells me I look new here, asks where I am moving from, how long I have been in Albany. We walk together. He tells me his turtle died this morning. He bought the turtle, off the street in New York City, for his daughter, but her mother wouldn’t take the turtle, so the turtle became his pet instead. He lost the turtle this morning. We walk together. He asks my name.(2)
On the fourth of July, I spend the afternoon reading in Washington Park. A man sits beside me in the grass and asks my name. We talk for an hour then he asks me to watch the fireworks with him. I tell him I don’t watch the fireworks. But there is a great crowd, a festival. But I don’t like great crowds, I say, which is true. At the condo, my roommate is not home, so I sit reading on the porch which is two blocks from, and overlooks, the Empire Plaza. The fireworks start soon after the sun sets. Mosquitos swarm my face and the lights sound as bombs.(3) I call my grandmother,(4) so she can hear the noise, then read buried in my nest.
Albany boasts being the longest continuously incorporated city. At its onset, breweries and factories grew up around the Hudson River, mansions became brownstones, dirt paths turned cobbled streets turned fresh pavement, and eventually the state capital moved in to shape the center of the city, prosperous.(5) [The state capital permanently moved to Albany in 1797. Sheet concrete on a cement base (pavement) did not arrive in the U.S. until 1870, in New Jersey. Such facts evidence my gaps. ] Italian immigrants filled in the cracks, working factory machines, building markets, and feeding the row houses tucked between mansions. The Great Migration too brought new residents, and by the time Rockefeller drove a flock of diplomats between the Governor’s Mansion and the State Capital, it was a diverse neighborhood(6) whose poverty embarrassed him into drawing blueprints that wanted to demolish twice as many miles of residence and commercial streets than he was ultimately allowed to.(7) The mark of him is a marble platform; two reflecting pools; a State Museum and Archives that Mayor Corning, not Rockefeller, wrote into the plans; four seventies-era towers that look as landing stations for future aliens;(8) boarded-up houses with windows spray-painted red, X; mismatched architectural elements on a nearly impossible to complete new State Building; a monument to Philip Sheridan, who the state recently deemed not significant enough to bother tearing down his likeness;(9) half an artery to an unfinished highway that blocks the city’s view of the river; and some forgotten potholed streets, which boast two sinkholes the first month I live there. When the factories closed, distilleries shrank, and the primary economy of Albany became the state. The state workers moved to the suburbs, mansions split into low rent apartments, and store owners sold to landlords who covered window displays with fake brick so residents fleeing the high costs of New York City, or the rural monotony of upstate, could live in privacy.
Four months after I move in, my roommate sells the condo to buy a bigger condo, and I find a studio off of Grand Street, on Philip Street, next to the Rxcelsior bar, where I have taken to drinking with the poet Tony Dohr. I pile my nest on a lofted platform intended for a bed, overlooking a mural of the New York City skyline—complete with World Trade Towers—that fills the windowless outer wall of my studio. I begin hosting readings and meetings in my space, try to reframe independent living as a community center. I collect chairs, a table, a dresser, at midnights on Mondays from others’ garbage on the side of the road.
One month after I move in, while my bandmate(10) is inside my apartment playing banjo, a man sits on the stoop with me to tell me he oversees the neighborhood, that he will protect me if I have his children. He tells me I am too old not to have children. He tells me we have not met before, but he knows my name. He tells me my name, and he spells it correctly. Later that night someone slashes my bandmate’s bike tires. Later that week, I ask the man if he slashed my friend’s tires. He says no. I accept this, don’t see him again. He, the last man to approach me in this way. A face adopts, becomes its place. I tell my bandmate we should name our band “Raggedy Aim and Andy.” He says this is not the right feeling. Nostalgic or commercial, not radical. I still like it. I call my solo project “Raggedy Aim and Aimee.”(11) I write six songs. It seems I’ve found a voice, proper body, settled face. There are gaps, still, a becoming.
In the early seventies, economic downturns and negative aftermath of the marble disruption brought many of the brownstones in the Mansions District,(12) just downhill of the State Museum, into the hands of banks. Young radicals bought the Land Bank properties around the Albany Free School(13) and spent years collecting cheap materials and sharing labor to restore the homes. My neighbor, Marci, spent her twenties cooking for wealthy men on Yacht trips. She spent her thirties teaching elementary school across the country. She returned to Albany and joined this coalition, restoring two homes on Elm Street, building behind one a garden where she hosts fundraisers for the unlikely-to-win mayoral candidates each term, and under the other, a professional-grade kitchen. Never having had children, she adopts and houses two Keny’s, (a father and son, both mural artists), a dog, and Tim, who knows my bandmate, who I meet on the stoop in early October, when he hears banjo through my storefront window and sits to show me books he has downloaded on his phone. He takes to texting me excerpts of cyclical, nonsense poems. Months before we mutually recognize one another’s faces, passing on the road, and then we are friends, and then he brings me into a circle and a history of the neighborhood that settles over me.
Six months after I move into the Mansions District, the poet Tony Dohr, the essayist Alexis Bhagat, and I share our first dinner at Lex’s apartment on Grand Street. I tell them about a childhood dream to have pet ducks in a blow-up pool in a basement, a dream derived from a false memory of my mother telling me that as a child on her father’s farm in Ontario, she kept pet ducks in a toy pool in her basement. We google videos of ducks in the basement and spend twenty minutes watching a twelve-year-old Duck perform America’s Funniest Home Video-style stunts in her basement. Tony tells me about turtles abandoned in a building he property manages. I agree to adopt them. I accidentally take on a seven-foot-tank and five full-grown, aquatic turtles. For seven months, until I find an adequate home, which I later realize may actually be a breeding farm, I spend three hours a week cleaning water for the Baroness, Louise, Frida, Francesca, and Isabella.(14) I spend each night after dinner watching them scrape grime off one another’s backs and sunbathe in a tower, one on top the other, fall asleep to the sound of their filter (like a river).
I spent my last second of July in Cambridge swallowing misoprotyl and bleeding out fetal cells in the bathtub, reading Miranda July and letting the hot water rush pain off my abdomen, took sleeping pills and slept in the damp, stained basin, woke to a text from an old roommate, Brett, inviting me to a neighborhood dance party, which we went to and danced alone in proximity. We stole American flags off porches and kissed between a hula hoop in someone else’s garage. We spent nine months together. After separation, I applied to any publishing job away. I measured age, then, by such proximity: names of loves marking ticks off a timeline. Left for place to overcome person.
In childhood, I conceived of the Green Lanterns as the greatest superheroes, as the corps fought not by what they were given but by what they could imagine.(15) A literary loss of sanity: Mongul destroys Coast City, and Hal Jordan risks his ring to recreate his home. It’s not a single person but the place, defined by land, by buildings, by each inhabitant, that Hal loves, that he recreates out of green light to return to, to live inside of. It’s problematic to love by geography, but to love a city rather than a person mimics the feeling of loving a duck or turtle or cat rather than a dog or child, the need not for possession but to care for something separate from oneself. To love for their survival, happiness, rather than their response to my engagement. Love once revolved around mirrors. I wanted it un-reflected, un-confined. By love I meant not sentimentality but respect and wishes. By city, then, I meant collections, a larger scope, a quiet connectivity, spirituality.