MacArthur Park
ANDREW DURBIN
Nightboat Books
New York
© 2017, 2018 by Andrew Durbin
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-937658-69-4
ebook ISBN: 978-1-937658-70-0
Cover art: Thomas Eggerer, Fence Romance, 2009 acrylic and oil on canvas, 177 × 204 cm | 69 2/3 × 80 1/3 in Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York
“Untitled” by Rene Ricard © 1985, 2017. Used by permission of the Literary Estate of Rene Ricard, Raymond Foye, Executor.
“Drunken Americans” from Shadow Train by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1980, 1981 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., for the author. All rights reserved.
Cataloging-in-publication data is available from the Library of Congress
Distributed by the University Press of New England
One Court Street
Lenanon, NH 03766
Nightboat Books
New York
For Jacolby Satterwhite and Stewart Uoo
CONTENTSPart OneChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6Part TwoChapter 7Chapter 8Chapter 9Chapter 10Chapter 11Chapter 12Chapter 13Chapter 14Part ThreeChapter 15Chapter 16Chapter 17Chapter 18Part FourChapter 19AcknowledgmentsAbout Nightboat Books
… She was inside a story … parts of which felt like stories she’d lived through before: the expression of a face she couldn’t quite place, a word or phrase spoken by someone she forgot a moment later, a detail of a room, a stick of furniture, the pattern of a curtain, the color of wallpaper, part of a doorway: it was not a story, really, not a narrative at any rate that moved from A to B to C, but rather a shower of moments, all out of order, trying to cohere in some manner, trying to show her something: some lesson, or crystallization of many things she had missed the logical connectives of: that she was herself outside this “I” the story seemed to be about …
—Gary Indiana, Depraved Indifference
For awhile, I hadn’t actually been writing but doing a transcription that fell in the deep space between drawing and landscaping.
—Renee Gladman, Calamities
Two years after Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New York City, Klaus Biesenbach, the director of MoMA PS1, posted to his popular Instagram account an image of the Statue of Liberty overrun by a tidal wave from the film The Day After Tomorrow, with the caption: “2 years ago #Sandy hit making clear how vulnerable the city is.” One of his followers commented: “Great screenshot from The Day After Tomorrow. Funny people believe it’s real.”
Biesenbach countered: “I picked the picture because pictures from movies often seem more ‘real’ than documents.” Then he wrote: “The days after the hurricane felt very much like in this movie.” And finally: “I will post a pic a day this week, but felt it was good to start with a constructed image as we all didn’t know what was really happening the day/night of [the hurricane] until the floods and fires took their devastating toll.” Several other users criticized his choice of image for the start of his series. He responded that the film still was a reminder that fiction can be made real: “I was evacuated from Rockaway Beach (in the midst of planting trees) and went to the city and spent Sunday/Monday indoors until the storm was over, watching TV and the news until the electricity [blacked] out. What did you do?”
Housesat in the West Village for Chris H., an art collector whom I had been assisting part-time, my first job in the city after college. In advance of the storm, he’d gone to his second home (the smallest of three) in Connecticut with his husband, a landlord of skyscrapers, and asked me to watch their apartment for them while they held out in storm-free Greenwich. On the eleventh floor of a building at the edge of evacuation zone C, his place would be safer than mine, he argued over email, which was in zone B, in Brooklyn. (After the storm, the city would redraw these borders, increasing the number of vulnerable neighborhoods with a new, six-tiered zoning system that would mark the sites of disaster without devising any new response to protect them.) “We’ll pay for groceries,” he wrote. Subject: “Mine during big storm.”
Picked up groceries (tortillas, two chicken breasts, a can of black beans) and a few frozen dinners at the scuttled Whole Foods in Union Square, weed from a scattershot and severely nervous dealer in the East Village, and kept awake through the hurricane as the wind gathered speed and the waters of the Hudson, the East River, and the Atlantic surged over the boroughs, into Battery Park and the tunnels between Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan. As the harbor inundated the Financial District, I rolled a joint and watched, through a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke, CNN’s chatty cluster of pundits fret amongst themselves in a split-screen alongside unedited storm footage until the power plant by the East River exploded in a concussive burst of intense white light in the east-facing window of the apartment. New York, or at least my part of New York, went dark, full dark, a dark you could brag about, if you had someone to talk to. I was alone.
I stood up, and with requisite paranoia wondered aloud if it had been a bomb, since any blast in see-something-say-something New York had to be an attack by someone seeking to take advantage of the storm of the century. What would the tv be saying if the tv weren’t dead? I knew I’d smoked too much, though in my mind’s eye rows of Manhattan skyscrapers were suddenly imploding amid plumes of smoke swirling devilishly in the hurricane wind, end-of-days-like to a soundtrack of death wails. But out the window, there was no evidence of distant fires against the darkened skyline of the Village, no scream of sirens, nor any telling signs of some enlarging crisis, though the uneasy, creeping sense of one lingered in the nippy air.
The city fell silent in the blackout. I tried to check the news on my phone, but it had died while I was stoned on CNN’s rolling coverage of the end of the world. I slid the windowpane up and stuck my head out above Fifth Avenue, into the throttled calm of what I took to be Sandy’s lopsided eye as it squatted overhead. A blast of salty, cold air shot through the apartment. Candles, flashlights, and whatever else was available to whomever was awake, lit the windows of nearby apartment buildings. Far below, NYU students emerged from a dormitory across the street to play in the drizzle. They ran about, enthralled with the novelty of this dent in the city’s armor, rapt with dumb