The Bridge

The Bridge There are profane places in Manhattan. Places where the human heart has beaten itself beyond recognition. There's an underground casino off Mott in Chinatown. The cops all know it's there. They’re paid to leave it alone. Common vice, like gambling, is hard to erase so instead it gets just gets pushed to the dark corners. It helps to know where trouble lives so you don’t have to go looking when it starts to spill out into the open. The guy that ran it kept a fish tank next to the blackjack table. Not exotic fish though. Somehow he got hold of some piranha. They were a special attraction to the Wall St guys that thought themselves big fish. The gamblers jonesing for any kind of new action used to bet on the fish, like dog fights. Gambling has always been a losers game. Places like that look to put the hook in you. Inevitably some hoper takes the big bet bait trying to beat back the odds and gets in deep. The kids college money or the mortgage gets sucked out of him each month. One night I saw that casino boss force some late payer’s hand into the tank for a minute. He screamed for a while then in shock and dripping blood became enveloped in a new kind of quiet. It was like he was suddenly seeing his future slowly being eaten alive. Sooner or later every gambler gets devoured by long odds and weakness. But there are sacred places too. The docks on the West side when the night shift longshoreman make their way through the dark. There's a kind of rough holiness, waiting in the tired eyes of the night people as they approach dawn. Or the steam as is rises from the street stand pipes into the frozen air in mid winter. The innocence of the bus station runaways pretending to be hard and brave. The cops and bartenders, the irredeemably lonely and their bought and paid for tenderness. The all nighters all stumbling through the shadows. And among the night people, in the darkest alleys sometimes were the people like me. Trying to recover what became shadowed. Trying catch what can’t be caught. Chasing the light. I used to go down to the Bridge alone at night. From the Brooklyn side it can feel like a great door of some cathedral of night. Beyond it lay the promise of something greater. Something hinted at in the skyscrapers and their shadows. A way across some water wider than the just East River. When I was, once again, sure it was love, I asked a girl to marry me there. There in the dark under the wires. There at the cathedral door of night. She said yes. But she wanted a different kind of life. She wanted the kind of happiness I wasn’t sure of anymore. Then quietly, a little at a time, she wordlessly started saying no. I wanted something else. I wanted to grab hold and tame the piranha that had locked onto my heart. I wanted a way through the cathedral door. And I wanted to get my hands around the kind of light that can't be caught. I wanted to break in to some vault I was sure was waiting under a thousand strangers eyes. Always searching the shadows for some incandescence I could feel underneath. So I bet on myself, throwing myself again and again into the dark tank of those streets. No one will say it but love’s a terrible thing. At it's strongest its meant to burn you down. It’s supposed to. It's a kind of bonfire in your blood making ash of the self concern and ego. Love whispers that it's certain that only it can save you. With its burning. And only once there's nothing left to burn, if you’re lucky or strong, you begin to feel it's light. Her job took her on regular business trips. Eventually the yes whispered under the bridge became an unspoken no. A few days away each month grew until eventually it became forever. She left the ring over the kitchen sink. But I kept going back to the Bridge. WLM