Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Flap, Like Little Pages

The cool kind of ghosts you just don’t see any more are making demonstrations in Battery Park and panhandling their way up to the various midtown eateries that include, in no uncertain order, The On Oray, The Morning Star, Gilbert’s Glee, The Barnet, The Silver Spoon and Half A Moonstruck. Once at these eateries it is customary for the braver ghosts to do the ordering and lead by, er, example. So, for instance, these leader ghosts will request toppings and coffee, red cheese and bagels, strudel-strada, cham, milk-toast and blue westers. While the other ghosts – what you might call (if you were cruelly-minded that way) the laggers – lag behind and mumble something easy from the countertop menus. The spoons.

On Broadway somewhere – or maybe not Broadway – that Tom Verlaine of Television fame is in a deli eatery, holding the bathroom door open for some fella who, he knows, recognises him because he gives him half a wink. Coming out of the toilet too. Uh oh, thinks Tom, as he blows into his bucket of clam coffee and steps out onto the street, down into a bench. But to no damn avail. Because there he is soon, with his can I shake your hand bit and all that garbage about going back home and regretting not asking the mighty Tom Verlaine of Television fame to shake him firmly by the hand. So that’s what Tom does, he shakes him firmly by the hand. He should have wrung him by the neck.

Later, outside a brownstone building near the gay tattoo parlour, there’s a count of the steps and a quick glance up to a mysterious apartment window. That’s the one, I’m sure he lived there. Later still, down Jones Street, he missteps, stops in fact, while freewheelin’ his way into his private collection. He’s got his girl with him this time and she, she holds on to him for a while. It is, just so you know, a glorious picture.