Dust Trap Manna

I was fashionably miserable sitting outside Café Palermo and could barely see the luke green, miserable sky for the undulating mist of garbage. My jaded tongue told me I was drinking burnt milk, though I'd paid for a triple latte.

A man walked by, gaited to a Paleolithic cadence and carrying a broken floor lamp with the shade freely swinging, like a dead duck’s head. He looked at me, then the sidewalk, like I was trespassing on his front lawn. Then he fell and worshipped the ground like it was the face of God, always half-watching my hand. He'd come out of character for some change. His name was New York Moses, and I’d heard of him.

He was an institution in the City, always giving portions of his gain to friends of his ilk. He wore a long bathrobe and bore his staff, reciting the Ten Commandments as they applied to passersby, and often for that coveted jingle of pocket change. It was a good racket. Somewhere in Central Park was his home, Union Square his Gulf, and Bedford his Paris. But he rarely came to Little Italy or Chinatown.

I got up and followed him.

New York Moses took me through the crowded streets and to the courthouse, where a nation of birds darted, like missiles, through giant columns. A collusion of pretzel and hotdog smells waved in and out of the air mixed with a swill of ten grades of industrial strength urine.

Moses breathed two lungs full. “Aaaahhh. Piss and ambition,” he said and waved his staff, instantly parting the crowd in two. “Damn the torpedoes!" We walked on.

A woman came out of the crowd, not affected by the parting, and walked right between us. Her clothes, hair, makeup, eye shadow hues, were a taste of the Midwest. She strode through like a stray prop amid inert, nomadic slouchers and men defeated by gravity.

“Anyway. This blows, I’m outta here,” I said, grossly averse to spending opportunities on my diversion any longer.

“Patience!” said Moses, losing his own. “We’re halfway there.”

We were going somewhere? I lifted my collar and glanced around, like James Dean. We’d traveled twenty blocks so far, and if he seemed to have a destination and counted me his companion, I decided to stay the course. We steered into a pub and lathered our faces with yeasty black stuff. It was McSoreley's, a pub that only allowed women in the last decade. They have two kinds of beer, light and dark, and saltines in a bowl for food. You could starve in a place like that, or get drunk fast.

My thorax shivered with beer and I remembered Dad’s camper—when we took that Grapes-of-Wrathian slog across God’s country. It was the summer of ’80 or ’81, with a puppy, two siblings, and some stale Cheezeballs. For a month down the humid Southern highways, in near passing-out heat; the smells of Gaines Burgers, puke and number’s one and two burned in our heads—and the heat was so unbearable. So unbearable that we’d fight for the window whenever Stepmom drained the ashtray of air conditioner dew and flung it out, misting our faces with a tint of smokey spearmint gum. Briefly sated, we’d fall back on hot mounds of clothes and sleeping bags to a kind of half-sleep.

“Aaaahhh!” Moses vented, blowing foam through his tattered tussocks. He slammed the stein on the bar like he’d done a day’s work and we left, walking up 5th Avenue toward 14th Street, then Union Square. The sun peeped and beamed down on the chewing gum spotted sidewalk. We came to a fat woman trenching between slabs of sidewalk with her fingernail. The fifty feet she’d cleared looked like a circuit board, or a maze for mites. It took years to bore. I handed her my bag of pretzels from McSoreley’s. Moses reached out, parried my arm with his staff, and, clenching my wrist, shook the bag loose into a trashcan.

“What’s the matter with you?” he said, “Never let your right hand see what your left is doing. Otherwise, ten people’ll try and steal it from her.” He smiled back at the trenching lady as she retrieved her prize.

These outbursts fortified my diversion that day. Moses fascinated me. Rarely were my classmates so interesting, or fun, or so attached to what they believed. They bolted out the door, like they all had pressing affairs, but never did. Moses hung around. He allayed a certain disquiet in my soul, and gleaning the streets with him brought a metrical peace and liberty, like I woke up and the dullness was gone. He had no words or ruminations for it. He just supplicated the earth like a bovine, rising daily to his low deployment with fatigue in his eyes and a wobbly staff. He’s an infomercial of dearth and compliance to circumstance, listing his head down below the sneering world.

But this he had over me. He'd pass easier into the hereafter with what little material he'd attached to himself. Much will wrest off of me when I pass, but he’ll slip fluidly into Abraham’s bosom. My crustaceous skin is a heap of barnacles, and now that I think of it, I wish he’d wave that floor lamp and part the dead out before too much of me is transferred to it’s mass. Sometimes I think I'm in a Hefty bag, and God holds the drawstrings, and they're stretching thin.

Moses and I walked down the windy helices to the Brooklyn L and boarded. Next stop, Bedford. Paris. “Buy me a tea at the Verb,” he said, and like a Bohemian playwright, added, “and I’ll bid thee adieu.”

I’d out-followed my welcome. Fair enough. We went into the dark, cavernous café, where, again, his undulations parted a sea of tackle box-faced rabble. A half-eaten, triple-decker PBJ on a glass plate made an inviting table for the Moses.

“Dust trap manna,” he said, handing me his staff. I brought his tea and set it down with five bucks, then turned to the door. Moses grabbed my arm, and I spun around like the kid in the Mean Joe commercial.

“We all snuggle up to quality of life like a heat lamp, thinking it’ll never dim,” he said. “And when it does, everything’s the pits. No Aaron or Hur to hold you up, two-by-two, however you go, it’s like this—we all have an avarice.”

“Do you have a commandment?” I said.

"Oh, yeah." Moses pondered. My sudden question made him cocksure, like a sage. “The one with the parents,” he said. He held out both hands, open. “It’s like all ten in one.”

I bore my confusion loudly, but lost out to the sandwich. Moses crossed his legs, dangled a blackened sandal and sipped his tea with a smile.

The L was packed. I squeezed back for a jumpseat, but they were all gone. The train descended below the river and I thought about the man. Compared to the price I paid to urge out a smile from some people, his was the better value. I go to Union Square more often, now. My right hand, as if with a mind of it’s own, leaves perfectly uneaten food in the trash. It's been acting strange lately.

Copywright 2003, Steve Sheppard