Cubop City Blues Read Free Page A

who left him for a young thin boy with sad eyes and unwashed hair, whose absence surrounded him with the scent of solitude. What he wouldn’t give to drink that champagne, to have that woman pink and naked before him!

CITY SONG
    A city is like a novel. It spreads outward from a starting point, which is where you happen to find yourself when the lights go on: a street late at night, a coffee shop where the night owls are fueling their insomnia, a park where you talk to a mockingbird and the mockingbird talks back, a bar where a man gets shot. Then the city, your city, moves in the direction that is most accessible, away from one moment to the next.
    A valleyed city will spread through the valley floor until it runs out of room. It will creep up the hillsides, along natural or artificial terraces, creating tree-lined enclaves for the rich or favelas for the poor. A riparian city will grow along one bank of the river or away from it, depending on the lay. Occasionally it will jump across the water to the other shore, but only if there’s a settlement already there and at least one bridge between them that allows for easy travel back and forth. If there is no bridge, one will eventually be built. Ferry travel is slow and boats are subject to the whims of water.
    A port city will hug the port, then naturally flow away from it, either along the water’s edge or in layers toward the interior, where the food-growing regions lie. In one city the center has moved as the city has grown, leaving behind a series of depressed neighborhoods that once were thriving, barren buildings, meager services, people chewing cud waiting for the machine to start again, and all but empty streets like a backwater. In another city the center stays put. A place like that is fickle and it is only a matter of time before decadence consumes it and all growth stops. That’s when the populace begin to move away, in small groups, over time, either to another city where commerce still holds and money still flows, or into the country where they’ll be able to relearn the techniques for planting that their families abandoned generations ago, grow their food, and avoid the defeat of a place that crumbles around them even as they try to keep it together, fixing this, patching that, shoring up a balcony, unclogging a sewer pipe.
    Some cities live and some cities die; some grow over the ruins of themselves, bearing no relationship to the original other than a dim historical connection and a convenient geographical locus. Ancient and modern Athens. Ancient and modern Rome. Tenochtitlán and Mexico City. Constantinople and Istanbul. Some will disappear altogether, destroyed by war—Troy, Carthage—or by nature—Chichén Itzá, Palenque. All, however, are driven inexorably by chaos toward decay. On this decay and through it, people live and thrive and die.
    Cubop City is all of the above. It is the Dutch and their goats, the English and their teas, Spaniards with their rotten stews, Jews and their lox, Russians and their vodka, Blacks and their kingdom in disguise, poets and plumbers living together, dancers and dentists, actors and accountants and acupuncturists. It is an island between two rivers, a garland around a bay, a glop of concrete on the sand. Cubop City is walking words and static silence and drums and saints and demons with penises like flaming hoses stalking the pretty girls by the school door. It is some skinny lady doing drugs in a bathroom downtown. It is the long nose of the marketplace and the short nose of the church. Cubop City rises out of the stone, rises out of the sea. It grows underground upside down and shoots a million needles into the rapturous sky. Cubop City is that sassy girl slithering onto you like a snake, the man who holds the devil in his hand. Watch his victim dropping to the ground. Watch the pool of blood. Cubop City is blood, a man in a blue bathrobe, a woman who talks to the dead, she knows