EDWARD GAUVIN

What would you have me say from five minutes and a handshake? My meeting with the mayor did not especially deepen my insight into him. His Honor held open office hours in the basement of a church. The affiliated hospital was across the street, its neon cross glowing over a deserted entrance, a gilded portrait of Our Lord between the elevators. I went because the year I’ve lived in Newark has been spent in woeful ignorance of the local political climate, though the latter largely describes my whole life, apart from a brief Nader fling in 2000. I inhabit a 20^th floor studio in a decaying Mies van der Rohe monolith (one of two facing each other across a lawn and reminiscent of Detroit’s Lafayette Park) in what was once Newark’s Little Italy, and from my eyrie survey with sovereign aloofness the downtown skyline. Since I moved in, two neighboring buildings have been demolished—one a Westinghouse factory—with no new construction announced. I took the Light Rail to the main station and crossed into the largely Lusophone Ironbound. The travel agencies, the shops that advertised check cashing, phone cards, and international parcels were closed, the churrascarias slow on a Tuesday night; a few people still sat in clusters in the bakeries. Off the main drag houses with old siding crowded narrow alleys. Snow from two days ago lay banked against the curb, and in a fenced lot moonlight glinted from the cars. » Read the rest of this entry «

With apologies to Y: The Last Man.