The bridge

Yesterday was a really beau­ti­ful day in New York, hit­ting that near-perfect bal­ance of sunny warmth and early-autumn nip-in-the-air, so my wife Claire figured that the after­noon would be a good one for a nature walk or some such thing. I had to go to Manhattan in the early part of the day to inter­view the dir­ect­or Olivier Assayas; the plan was that Claire would meet me at Lincoln Center and we’d head up to Fort Tryon Park. By the time we got there it would be a bit on the late side for a vis­it to the Cloisters, so we’d trek around the park itself. But on the A train uptown, I had a sud­den inspiration.

“You know what might be cool? We could walk across the George Washington Bridge into Fort Lee. I could show you the place where the first house I lived in used to be. I haven’t seen it in years. And I bet the Hudson’s gonna look beau­ti­ful.” Claire, being an agree­able, adven­tur­ous, and spon­tan­eous sort, said let’s go for it, and so we got out at 175^th Street and walked out of the bus ter­min­al there to the bridge itself. 

The day was still gor­geous as it approached four; a wind was kick­ing up a little. The view off of the bridge was spec­tac­u­lar through­out. Back when I was a kid, I used to be ter­ribly, mor­bidly afraid of heights, to the extent that a walk across such a struc­ture would have been incon­ceiv­able; indeed, fam­ily drives across the bridge, with my emin­ently reli­able fath­er at the wheel, gen­er­ally filled me with a kind of mute hor­ror grow­ing up. But I had, after many years, finally grown up and out, more or less, of this neur­os­is. Enough so that I not only could do this, but that I could enjoy doing it; not quite enough, though, that I could feel quite as com­fort­able stand­ing so close to the rail­ing that sep­ar­ates the pave­ment from obli­vi­on as Claire did. 

We made the longish, or so it seemed, way across. I groused about the douchebag bicyc­lists who could­n’t keep to their side of the walk­way and seemed to act as if they owned the whole thing regard­less. Claire pro­tested that they wer­en’t actu­ally doing any­thing offens­ive. I con­tin­ued to main­tain a gen­er­ally poor atti­tude about it.

“I’m kind of sur­prised that there’s not some kind of mini-shrine some­where out here, some flowers or some­thing,” Claire said.

I had for­got­ten, when I sug­ges­ted this walk, the news that had come out earli­er in the week, about the poor Rutgers kid who’d killed him­self by jump­ing from this bridge after an online humi­li­ation. As it happened, shortly after I was reminded of it, we passed by one of the manned secur­ity check­points of the bridge and I thought about what a kind of lousy job the guy tend­ing it had, and gave him what I meant as a sym­path­et­ic nod. 

“I guess if someone had, it might have got­ten blown away or some­thing. I don’t ima­gine that it would be per­mit­ted,” I said to Claire.

On the oth­er side of the bridge, I tried to fig­ure out the best way to get to where I wanted to show Claire. We bickered a little about street cross­ing; I made some remark wherein I balked about being spoken to like a third-grader. Eventually we got to the hilly nook of Sylvan Road and Hudson Terrace, close to the dead end I was look­ing for. We came upon an astro-turfed run­ning track and went through the gate of its fence. It was the back of Fort Lee High School; I saw Lemoine Avenue a bit ahead. A hand­ful of yards later, there we were:

I got out my cell phone and called my moth­er. “You’re nev­er going to guess where we are,” I said, and sure enough, she did not.

“What was the deal with that show that was here, that winter pageant or whatever it was, where Daddy was dressed up as a snow­man and he was singing and these oth­er kids were throw­ing snow­balls at him, and I got really upset and cried because I did­n’t know it was part of an act?” I asked her.

“I don’t know what the show was and I don’t remem­ber the song,” she said. “I think it was a Sinatra song. And you know Mary, you remem­ber her, who I went to Florida with last year? She sang a duet with him in that show, too. You really remem­ber that?”

“Vividly.”

“Because you were only about two years old then.”

“Well that really must be my first memory, or some­thing like that. How traumatic.”

When we got around the front of the build­ing and into the park­ing lot on the oth­er side everything seemed to open up for me, and I recalled where everything else was, and had been. I poin­ted out to Claire the three houses on North Hudson that the ini­tial own­ers had just refused to sell back when the developers came; one of them belonged to the fam­ily of a woman who’s still my mom’s closest friend; I don’t know who owns it now, but I chuckled grate­fully at the fam­ily’s cussed­ness. The house where my grand­par­ents on my mother­’s side lived, along with my moth­er and aunt and uncle, and where I and my fath­er also lived for a few months after I was born, is long gone; a super­mar­ket stands where it stood. “This used to be a Food Emporium; and then I guess it got taken over by the A&P,” I said to Claire as we went inside.

“It got taken over by a Pathmark first,” some guy arran­ging carts who had over­heard us com­men­ted. Always with the cor­rec­tions. In any event, accord­ing to the cal­cu­la­tions of my mother­’s broth­er, check­out aisle eight of the mar­ket was the exact spot of the front porch of the house was. The front porch where I’d sit with my grand­fath­er, who was con­fined to a wheel­chair because of MS, and eat the black­ber­ries that I’d picked in the field across the street, the field that had been paved over for the erec­tion of the town’s first A&P, which was now a bank. So to check­out aisle eight we went. And stood, and were not par­tic­u­larly inspired. And we left and headed for Main Street. Everything seemed so much smal­ler than it had when I was a kid. And I thought of some­thing that happened some years later, after my fam­ily had moved from Fort Lee to Cliffside Park, and then from Cliffside Park to Dumont.

When my fath­er had been a kid, his fam­ily moved to Spain for sev­er­al years, because his fath­er had a work pro­ject over there. Among the things my dad had brought back with him was a beau­ti­ful brown fringed suede jack­et that he had, of course, grown out of in his adult­hood. I had coveted this jack­et, and when I was eight, even though it was still a bit too big for me, I had decided to wear it to school on the first day the weath­er war­ran­ted. And so, on an early fall day not unlike the one I’m writ­ing this on, I proudly, goo­fily put it on, and walked over to Seltzer School. On the line in the park­ing lot where the third graders assembled to enter home­room, one of the many fel­low stu­dents with whom I was not friendly—because I was awk­ward, bois­ter­ous, book­wormy, not very good at sports; in a word, “weird”—came up to me and said, “Hey Glen Campbell. Nice jack­et.” And he pulled a couple of the fringes off of it. 

And a couple of this kid’s friends thought they’d try it too. And I thought to protest a bit, and a teach­er over­look­ing the line thought to make a per­func­tory admon­i­tion that this activ­ity ought to be knocked off, but the fix, as it were, was in. By the end of the day about a third of the jack­et’s fringes would have been removed, and the jack­et hung back in the closet, where it would stay until it would be lost in anoth­er move. 

Walking back over the bridge into Manhattan, Claire’s phone rang; it was her mom, and she figured she’d take it. I took out my Blackberry, got on Twitter, and re-engaged in a rather silly argu­ment with someone who seemed to think he was going to talk me out of lik­ing a highly-praised movie that he hap­pens to think poorly of. He seemed to mis­con­strue a Groucho Marx line I threw at him—the one about buy­ing back an introduction—and that, it appeared, ended that. I got irrit­ated with myself, with the noise I and we will­ingly sub­ject ourselves to, with a bunch of oth­er things, and I took the pic­ture that’s at the top of this post and sent it to my Twitter feed and wrote some­thing to the effect of “Stop yelling at me while I’m try­ing to walk over the George Washington Bridge.” Again, not think­ing, not remem­ber­ing. One of my Twitter fol­low­ers wrote back: “Don’t jump.” Gallows humor, we used to call it.

I don’t think the inter­net killed Tyler Clementi, because ran­dom, vicious cruelty was around long before there was an inter­net, and may well out­live the inter­net. But on the oth­er hand, if your first reac­tion to Tyler Clementi’s death is to reflex­ively defend the inter­net, maybe we should­n’t have lunch any­time soon. 

Coming off of the ramp from the bridge on the Manhattan side, Claire looked behind at me (we had to walk single file now, to make room for the pre­cious bikers) and motioned that I ought to be care­ful, indic­at­ing a woman who was stand­ing near the entry to the ramp, crouched over. I put my Blackberry away and caught up to Claire, tak­ing a place by her side and walk­ing her away. “When I first caught sight of her I thought she might have been hunched over cry­ing or some­thing,” Claire explained. “But then I saw she was shoot­ing up.” The real world.