new york
the empire state building. yes, that quintessential of all new york landmarks. this is where my income tax preparer holds office. (go figure why his professional fees are astronomical?) and for the past three years now, every nasty tax season, i have been forced to pay him a not so cordial visit to his 42nd floor suite.
but until now, i have yet to ride up all the way to this iconic building's viewing deck. in fact, during the heat of tax season (which is smack right in the middle of the equally nasty northeastern winter) my tax preparer hands out complimentary viewing tickets to this building's viewing deck. this is his sly way of defusing frequent client temper eruptions. the waiting time in his office is epic. up to half a day. yes, that would be ten to twelve hours, virginia.
and yet, i have been such a notorious holdout. in fact, i can still show you, with glee and gloating, the unused ticket from last year. it is still in the pocket of my musty pea coat lumbering in my closet. that reminds me. dry cleaners tomorrow.
when i went back home recently, one of my friends, ever the internet news savvy guy (read: helplessly nerd), asked me whether i have finally huffed and puffed all the way to the top of lady liberty now that homeland security has finally deemed it safe to open her innards to the slew of tourists again. ditto. same answer as the above.
i have been busting my ass out in this town for almost half a decade now and yet the right reasons to throw myself together with the other tourists in kilometric queues just to see these emblematic landmarks still has to dawn on me. well, you may call me a snob and a half and somehow i can find deep inside me reasons not to go ghetto on ya'll, sista.
everyone, locals or transients, has their own new york postcard image. for most out of towners, it's the troika of empire state, lady liberty and broadway.
for me though, ever raised in gritty cop tv dramas (which are incidentally shot in fake sets in sunny los angeles), i've always associated new york with narrow streets, pre-war gloomy walk ups and fast talking intellectuals, pseudo or the genuine upper west side ilks.
there's no wonder here why one of the very first few landmarks i've hauled my ass to after settling into this town is this fiercely independent bookstore down union square, the strand.
if you are into sleek and spit shiny chain bookstores that offer more square footage for its much more lucrative cafes than actual bookshelves, the strand is not your cup of whatever java or chai. this is a plucky bookstore and one of those few left in this town solid enough to be called an authentic new york institution without sounding phony, postcard phony.
it's selling point, well aside from cheap ass prices, is that somehow it can miraculously offer 18 miles of used, new, out of print and rare books, despite the cramp, not to mention funky smelling, quarters it occupies down lower broadway.
as i've said, no coffee bar here. nor does it boast of the most helpful of staff. oh, the infamous snooty staff of strand, mostly m.a. students whose main goal in their young lives so far in this world is to show you how really unknowledgeable--make that ignorant--you are of what's coolest (i'm not even sure this adjective is cool enough for them, either) in today's publishing world. oh, no one's more hip and intelligent than they are and you better believe that. but you don't go to strand for service or coffee. you go to strand because you love books, great ones that are sold cheap.
ten dollars. that's how fiddling a price i paid for this thick dictionary, still a pristine copy of the very same red leather bound, gilt edged dictionary my fiercely pentecostal protestant mother gave me for my tenth birthday back in the island of bantayan, in cebu, philippines.
barangay binaobao, bantayan island, cebu, philippines
from the old unpainted house, we carted most of our things in huge boxes. hope, bowling green, but mostly marlboro boxes. sweet smelling boxes. mama begged for them from manang karing's mom and pop store.
mama though despised manang karing. she told everybody that bought something from her store that mama was going out with tito fred, manang inday's husband.
mama decided we move in to our new yellow house before the big rain. manang lucing, our laundrywoman who smelled like the boxes, told mama earlier that day that the air smelled like lent already. it was still february.
on the first night in our new house, the rain pelted our thatched roof. the raindrops were as loud as beetles tumbling down the kamachile tree into the roof of our previous house during last year's monsoon.
the morning after, we had a brown water lagoon inside our new house. it filled up the cantilevered area in the living room. some three upturned beetles, still alive, were lounging upon it.
she has not whipped up breakfast yet but mama decided that we unpack the boxes immediately. she started opening the ones with their bottoms wallowing in the brown pool. the sides of these boxes had growing trees of wetness.
in our new house, three rungs of wooden shelves jutted out from the wall under the stairs. the previous tenant of the house had these shelves built for their own sari-sari store. mama decided we would dry some of our wet clothes and books there for the time being.
at the end of the topmost rung, where it was closest to the landing of the first tier of stairs, was a warped image of a byzantine looking woman with a bleeding heart.
mama was not sure whether it was glued there by rubber cement or just got stuck there by the rain. mama climbed toward the image, stepped on the unopened boxes, and started to gouge it out with her short, unmanicured nails. each time she was succesful, an indecently large part of the icon would tear, disfiguring the serene woman's face.
instead of unpacking first the wetter boxes, mother told me instead to open the tallest and driest of all the boxes. it was one of the three that held all our books. she asked me for the squat bibles.
she immediately plunked them in front of the drenched image. but the halo of the woman with two puny angels, each carrying bizarre loads, around her still peered from behind the thick bibles.
mama jumped down from her perch and dug for herself the red dictionary inside the box. she leapt back up, stepping on the now mushy, unopened boxes and slammed the dictionary against the icon. the dictionary's gilt edge glistered and for a moment made me wince.
beside it, she stacked our bibles, the one in our dialect, below the three different english translations. all four of them buried any trace of the woman's saintly aura.
throughout grades five and six, while we were still in that yellow house, i never remembered reading that dictionary. nor any of our bibles.