I wrote a short story once about a guy who lived in New York City for a few months. It wasn’t just about him. There were other people too, other people close to the main guy by virtue of their being students. Did I mention my guy was a student? He was. From a school most people in Kentucky had never heard of – Cornell University. It wasn’t that Cornell was a bad school that nobody wanted to hear about, it was that the people in Kentucky were so far south and Cornell was so far north and probably something to do with the Civil War too, which Kentucky never chose a side in so now it’s always wondering whether to build more factories or grow more tobacco. You might be wondering why Kentucky is so important in all this. I’ll tell you. The guy I wrote the story about was from Kentucky, this kid named Mason. He always had to repeat his name twice when introducing himself so people were sure he didn’t say Jason or sometimes people thought he said silly things like Nation or Mashon, which was totally ridiculous because almost nobody was ever named Nation or Mashon, at which point the main character of the particular story I am acquainting you with, Mason, would say: Well I knew a kid named Kicker, and I think the name Nation would be really cool because maybe people would think of Carry Nation, who went around busting up saloons with a big hatchet during prohibition. That’s exactly what he would say. I can tell you this because I know that character very well. I don’t know all my characters well – for instance, there’s this other character named Phillip with two l’s who occasionally appears in the story, but I couldn’t tell you what he would say because I made him a very unpredictable character where one minute he can be talking like a gutter in the biggest rainstorm you’ve ever seen and the next minute the words dry up and the conversation is as arid as a desert. He would either say something or he wouldn’t, and that’s all I know about that.
Getting back to the story. I wrote it some time ago. It’s certainly not my proudest work. I was almost an aerospace engineer, you see, and I like when stories are clear, when they shoot through the mind like a rocket and land somewhere in the cerebellum and stick and plant a flag there. This story isn’t like that. This story is a mess. It’s beautiful but has no outline. Very un-aerodynamic. It would not pass the test for flight. Several species of birds on planet Earth have this problem too. And they aren’t all that bad, especially after this one important actor told everyone how cuddly penguins could be in the arctic. Everyone thought that was very cute, that hour and a half of watching penguins cuddle. Maybe my story’s a bit like that. A bit like a collection of people and places you might have seen and would like to have around you again. You’ll see.
So far what do we know? I’ve told you the name of the main character, Mason; where he’s from, Kentucky; where he goes to school, Cornell; and that he’s studying for a few months in New York City. What else do you need to know? Probably nothing. But just for fun, let’s add a few details – that’s where some people think the real story is, you know, but I tend to think those people are writers who get paid by the word. Like Charles Dickens did. Sometimes you hear old people say “That hurts like Dickens!” meaning: nobody really liked all those details in the first place. In fact, some people were even injured by them. But. A few details: Mason and all his friends, who you will soon meet, were studying either architecture or art. Mason was studying architecture. In those days, architects like school teachers were overworked and underpaid. The difference between the two professions was that school teachers had unions, so they weren’t fired very often. Architects didn’t have unions so when the economy turned sour in the early part of the twenty-first century many architects lost their jobs and became teachers. Job security.
Knowing this, you might get the sense that these students are brave: at the end of my story, their educa-fun will end and they will be launched into the void. But let’s not be too generous. Most of the characters in my story are cowards. They are not scared because few of them have ever had to deal with the future and so they never think about it. If they did, they would pee their pants. This happens to several of the characters in the story, but for different reasons.
It’s late, my friends, and even though the city in my story never sleeps, I do. Let’s end the introduction there and begin the story.
Chapter 1 : The City
Mason arrived in the City with plenty on his mind. His mother was sick – pigs were sneezing in peoples’ faces that year and giving them all sorts of funny diseases – his grandmother was beginning to knit an afghan, his father was growing a beard, his brother was deciding his career path – he couldn’t decide whether to be a professional wrestler or the President of the United States – and Mason was hungry.
But first he needed to feed the Taxi Driver who had driven him to the corner of This Street and That Avenue, where his dorm was located. To feed the Taxi Driver, he slid a plastic rectangle into a machine that allowed the Taxi Driver to steal some of the electronic food in Mason’s electronic food account. Mason’s electronic food account was linked, more by faith than by any serious machinery, to a pile of physical food held in a vault somewhere in Kentucky in what was called a Bank. We don’t have this system anymore because the Banks sometimes gave food accounts to people who didn’t deserve them and these people proceeded to eat themselves into comas. They called this system credit. And there was always somebody being cheated by it.
After feeding the Taxi Driver, Mason treated himself to a home cooked meal at a fun and happy place known as McDonald’s. McDonald was a seven foot tall clown who was loved by some and feared by others. Mason loved him, mostly because the meals he made were inexpensive and also because Mason wasn’t obese yet and didn’t feel the need to blame the condition on someone other than himself.
Mason would soon learn, on a grocery shopping trip with friends Phillip with two l’s and Lorena from Peru, that the City was not as friendly or as cheap as his first experience at McDonald’s had led him to believe. For instance, on the way to an overpriced grocery establishment called ‘The Food Emporium,’ Mason was shoved aside by a man walking up the left side of the side walk. Mason from Kentucky thought everyone kept to their right on sidewalks, just as they do in traffic, so as to avoid such collisions. Apparently this was not the case. Mason began to spot other possible dangers including small ratty dogs straining on their owners’ chains, hell-bent on getting under foot and being smashed so they could run on endless stretches of grass in heaven.
Inside the Emporium, Mason peed his pants. A sign above a pyramid of grapefruit declared: ‘Two for Four Dollars.’ What a deal. Mason would soon learn to do most of his shopping at Trader Joe’s, a grocery whose story, if it were to play out in Sea World, would go thusly: a trainer lets a school of hammer head sharks snatch up choicey food stuffs from all around, allowing the sharks to bump, scratch and tear at each other. He then instructs them, and they reluctantly obey, to form two long lines and wait thirty minutes to pay for what they have gathered. If you make it out alive, you’re set for the week. Not everyone makes it. The first time I went there, I peed my pants.
Two days later, Mason went to school for the first time. School was the second floor of a building in a happy district of the City between Splish and Splash Avenues. Mason peed his pants on the downtown 6 train, which he was sure would be a certain death trap in the case of a fire. But enough about possible death, we’re here to talk about real life.
Mason arrived at studio to find a seven foot tall former model from Norwegia named Winka Dubbeldam placing her coat on a hanger. The hanger bent and broke. Winka would be one of his instructors this semester. Again Mason peed his pants. Winka was a woman built for the City, a tower walking among towers. Mason even fancied that Winka was a woman built by the City. But cities don’t give birth to humans. Humans give birth to cities. Mason forgot about the idea. Which is too bad because, in reality, Winka actually was a skyscraper. Maybe it’s Maybelline.
It remained to be seen whether Mason was built for the City. The only way he could see himself living here was if he had access to a tall tower. Fortunately, on the Wednesday of his fist week there, he found himself in exactly that situation.
A kind alumnus of Cornell by the name of Susie Rodriguez invited all kinds of wonderful people to her apartment for a reception, wonderful people like Kent Kleinmann, Dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell, and Dagmar Richter, Chair of the Department of Architecture. Mason spoke to neither of them. Instead, he was engrossed in a conversation with the instructor of a class called ‘Problems in Architecture’ on the merits of drawing silly things and making them into buildings. Mason thought this practice should not be followed, that it was, to be topical, a ‘problem in architecture.’ The woman agreed, but said she thought it was interesting. And it was interesting, but Mason preferred buildings he could understand, which meant right angles, bright colors and preferably with a McDonalds on the bottom floor.
With a drink in one hand and a bunch of grapes in the other, Mason stepped out on a balcony overlooking a little chunk of the City. He stared at two bright bulbs on the top of some tower. He had no clue what he was looking at, but he did know one thing: looking down at the world didn’t make him want to pee his pants. Unfortunately, when a person walks in the City they must frequently look up, unless of course you are Winka Dubbeldam, Madam Skyscraper.
Though Mason decided to ignore a further analysis of his thoughts, we shan’t overlook them here. Mason, like so many people enrolled in so many places of higher learning on planet Earth, always seem to prefer to look down on the world. They become quite uncomfortable when their invented superiority is questioned. Let us hope that we can have Mason looking up by the end of this story. Let us hope that Mason will look up without peeing his pants. That’s such a messy habit to get into.