Forty-first Street Riffs

My friend Moe calls these Miles Davis days—when the gray promise of an impending storm swallows up the city in sulky thoughtfulness. It’s late, much later than I’d like, and I’m heading home. It hasn’t rained yet, but the air around me feels thick, full, round. It lurks—like his horn—somewhere in that middle register. And the feeling of something unspoken is unmistakable.

“I’ll play it first, and tell you what it is later…”

There is a trumpet player at the corner of 41st and Broadway. He’s no Miles, but he has a way of always playing my thoughts. His song swoops around me as I ascend from the musty underground into the biting winter night, and strikes me right at that achey part—the part that’s 24, and equal parts ambitious and unsure. The part that knows exactly why it is that she is in this city, and yet still wonders how she got here.

I slow down a bit and empty the day’s change into his open case—what’s left of the morning’s bus fare, my lunch, the large coffee that pulled me through the mid-afternoon slump. Our dark eyes meet as the coins slip from my hands, and as I walk away, he interrupts his tune to play me a thank you:

“Love-ly…never, ever change…”

I’m not quite sure how I look tonight, but I smile to myself as the strains follow me down the street, filling the empty night with song. Forty-first feels like a secret compared to the brash street carnival just one block over. It’s dark. It’s empty. It’s the behind-the-scenes. It’s all stage doors, service entrances, and scaffolding. It’s dancers, waiters, and stagehands taking cigarette breaks as they wait impatiently for their break. I love this street. It’s the kind of New York I sometimes crave—the man behind the curtain, the grit behind the magic.

I take my time here.

I wind through a handful of teenage girls in leggings and ankle boots, milling about the entrance to the lime green Nederlander. Their chatter reminds me of my own adolescent trips into the city. Trips made when I was giggly and 12, and when New York was synonymous only with entertainment. It was Broadway and the ballet, Times Square and giant stuffed animals at FAO Schwartz. It was all wizards back then...

Further down, my father’s four-foot face smiles at me from the row of buses parked along the street. It’s his evening news smile. It’s his Monday through Friday at 6 and 11 smile, which is different from his Sunday morning smile and his dinner table smile and his thanks for baking me a pie smile. His success looks over me, my own personal Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, as I click-click-navigate the slush and subway grates in the heels that he himself told me were far too impractical for winter in this city. And I’m amused by the drivers who whistle and call out and wink, completely unaware that the eyes and smile and body that they’re so hungrily leering at, once came from the very man they drive around all day advertising. I’m glad to see him there, smiling that silly smile. It’s a reminder that my blood, my genes, my name has already made it in this city. That my path is there, somewhere, beneath the slush and cigarette butts. “Hi, Papa...” I hear myself whisper into my scarf.

I think more on this two-block walk than at any other point in my day. I try to capture the moments—I try to swallow it all. There’s much more that I could add to this—the hotel that looks like the marzipan candies in the Florentine candy store, the peeling Annie Leibowitz photographs papering the walls, that strange urge that I get each night to steal an orange from the tiny bodega displays (I haven’t…yet)—but perhaps it’s best if I stop here.

I’m just capturing moments, for now. I’m still not sure what the ending is. But that’s no bother. After all, the thing that I love most about jazz is that it doesn’t resolve.

I too will play it first—I’ll tell you what it is later.