Older Than Dirt

I am sitting on a raised square planter, with a beech tree in it, on the sidewalk, on the corner of West 24th Street and 9th Avenue, outside the building that houses the office and residence of the parenting coordinator (mediator) that Mia and I have been “working with.” It is after dark at 7pm on the Monday night after turning back the clocks, and I am looking at the Empire State Building off to the northeast. It is lit up red, and then yellow above that and the zeppelin-mooring tower at the top is red, with an intense strobing red light at the very apex. I hear a jet, high, very high in the sky, but no dirigibles.

I’m wondering if the layer-cake color scheme has any significance - it varies from night to night and season to season, and I’ve even heard that it has been lit in the national colors of visiting dignitaries. I’m considering it this night in terms of a giant art deco phallus – only men would have conceived of it and gone to the trouble of building it. Tonight it looks like the colored (and black licorice-flavored) condom that I bought once out of a vending machine in a men’s room at a seedy truck-stop somewhere in either Ohio or Indiana, I can’t be sure which. I remember that the advertising stickers on the vending machine made some pretty spectacular claims as to the performance characteristics of the products it dispensed and I remember half believing them and wondering, with the typical insecurity of youth, if extra large, which was the only size available, was in fact the right size.

I try but I can’t remember exactly who I was with that night or who I had in mind when I purchased that condom; it remains steeped in fuzzy forgetfulness, shrouded by the indigo curtains of time, but I can narrow it down to a dozen or so possibilities from among the crowd of the Dawson Street days. I remember only that it was a Friday night, we were so young, we were probably intoxicated, we had a borrowed car and we had absolutely nothing better to do other than driving around, listening to incredibly loud music and messing up a perfectly good country.

I remember that we were heading north towards Cleveland, but with no clear destination in mind when we left Pittsburgh. Somehow our path veered west through the panhandle of West Virginia, then south until the tributary road we were on, pulled inexorably downhill by gravity, merged with the mighty current of Interstate 70, just east of Columbus, Ohio. Heading west, we gathered speed, bounced across the Indiana border, circled Indianapolis and then started to tire and become low on cash. So we started back, no longer exchanging the bravado of what we’d do when we got to Los Angeles, and somewhere along the way lay the truck-stop with the colored condoms. We bought postcards and mailed them to ourselves: Dear Mark, Wish you were here. Love, Mark.

It is warm out tonight, in the upper 60’s and I am comfortable in shirtsleeves. I bask in remembered innocence. The city air smells of dusty sycamore leaves and the last grass clippings of the season and I am wondering when the last time was that I had need of a condom. I finally realize that it predates this century and I feel very old. My knees, which must have been eavesdropping on my contemplation, crack and pop as I stand, as if to confirm it: “yeah buddy, you’re older than dirt.”