Dan the Vampire

There’s an Italian guy here in the city who has me stored in his phone as Dan the Vampire.

It’s two am, and I’m sitting at 42nd street waiting 13 fucking minutes for the A. There’s a Latin dude on the bench next to me watching videos without headphones and another dude further down slumped and sleeping. The MTA cat is mopping and singing. We just chatted a bit.

And now a guy has just showed up in a bright, oversized coat and he’s pacing too close and it’s sketch.

Heading home from for drinks at some old dives on the northern edge of Tribeca with D. and some women he knows from Boston.

We were upstairs at Nancy’s, which is a small mezzanine with a tin-stamped ceiling not even tall enough for me to stand up. The place is from another era, and suddenly I had this notion that I’m 160 years old.

Maybe because earlier in the night D had called me a timeless citizen of the world, maybe because I have lived so many different days. Either way, it comforted me. It’s nice to feel I’ve lived tens of thousands of days more, and aren’t yet feeling it.

If I had one thing to wish, besides witnessing our species distant and inevitable end, it would be to have been around for the old years.

To have lived through the development of industrial society and to have seen the expansion - and concurrent collapse - of human consciousness. To see how we got smarter but also more alienated from ourselves at the same time.

I like to imagine that I wandered with Whitman, got high with Burroughs, and big talked with Baldwin in the park.

I walked 12 miles today. First with a dairy guy from western Kansas, then with my other mother who I haven’t seen in 7 years, visiting some spots twice in entirely different contexts.

I saw Washington Square as she was waking up, and then again in full Friday night unfurl.

I was at Stonewall with someone who didn’t care, and again with someone who knew intimately how it changed her life, and mine.

I clocked the townhouse where Sam Clemens lived at 14 W 10th, then after dark found 277 W 10th, where I stayed when I first visited New York as a boy.

It was a day of memories. A flood of things I haven’t thought about in years. A reminder to sometimes pull out of the present, and of the sweet sadness of looking back at all that is already gone.

This day was a thousand times longer than some I’ve lived, full of ideas and feelings and… lasagna.

But much of my life has been lost to the mist. My other mother mentioned a sushi dinner celebrating my birthday we had in SF. I have no recollection of this at all… As if I really were an ancient.

And I do feel eternal. Old and young at the same time. Maybe I will age quickly all at once, but for now, I am stronger than I pretend to be, and weaker. My refusal to play along has been a disaster for me in many ways, but a miracle too.

The fine edge on my spirit is not yet dulled.

Still, there’s something disturbing about aging that I am only really starting to understand. So it does me good to quietly pretend to have lived longer than most. Certainly there are many who’ve achieved more and some who’ve lived more richly, but I wouldn’t trade my meandering path for anything.

Occasionally, I see other ancients out here wandering around. Some times they see me back. Who knows, perhaps our days really have been longer, our ages somehow far greater, as if we’d been shot into space and then returned.

At some point I turned to D. and said, “I think I’m going to start pretending to be 160 years old.” He laughed, and promised to play along. So we’ll see if and how this character mutation takes hold.

And if you meet a strange person in Manhattan, claiming to be older than is reasonable, perhaps you also will play along. Because who are any of us to say how long we’ve actually been here?

Thanks for reading,

DF

Written on the 42nd St. platform late night and edited on the M14, Saturday afternoon.