Swimming from Sharks Swimming from Sharks Up and down ...

Up and down 40th St. in Sunset Park, ripe diapers were flying from top-story windows and soft-shoeing the pavement with the same regularity as sirens and Mister Softee trucks. It seemed that way to me, at least, as I'd signed on the previous winter to tend to the trash and sidewalks in exchange for $600 rent. I was nostril-deep in profound regret by summer. The chore, while annoying in January, was nauseating in July, made worse by the clear glee of the Puerto Rican ladies hovering by their windows to watch the little white-girl janitor?and by the trash that multiplied in suspicious proportion to my exasperation.

If one night I grunted a little at the piles of sunflower shells girding the garbage cans, the next day would dawn on a mountain range. If I let loose an obscenity at the sight of a diaper on the curb, the next day I would be greeted by three or four diapers and a smell that was part penguin house, part food-court Korean barbecue. The women who lived above me opened a day-care center in my honor; people were buying extra groceries just to make trash. I was a one-woman boon to the economy, and consumer confidence was way up.

On Atlantic Ave., that summer smelled like lamb smoke and hot exhaust, while inside the bar I tended, the world still smelled like Sunset Park. This, thanks to a regular named Sammy, who drank Bud-and-V8 cocktails garnished with fistfuls of peppermint gumdrops. He diapered his drawers a minimum of once per night. Sammy's actions always prompted another regular, Sal, to explain to me why "the Arab wear the baggy genie pants." It was an origin myth, and it ended with Sal's belting, "Because they need a where to shit!"

One day a car burst into flames across the street, and the bar regulars carried their drinks out into the heat to watch it burn. Sal immediately suspected the Arabs, who tend to blow things up because their pants are full of shit. Another regular, Tony, agreed with the assessment?and Tony spoke for the entire nation because he came from the same Italy as Amerigo Vespucci. I watched them leaning in the doorway, lighting cigarettes as the black fumes smoked over the avenue. Then they all came back inside and sang along with "Piano Man" in private, invented languages.

Unlike other cities, where summer heralds a transformation, New York doesn't change?it's itself, only more?a stuck elevator where every gesture is bigger than itself and every stench is amplified?and whatever goosing the city was giving me in February had become full frontal assault by August. I was pinned down, broke. I was meeting the same three people 200 times a day and had no will left to use their patent-pending haircuts to tell them all apart. My aggravation was souring to hatred; I blamed the city for my bad behavior.

I was sending loaded diapers to my landlord in the mail because New York was being a little bitch.

At work I hung against the back bar ignoring Sal and Sammy and Tony, and Cano, who liked to sneer at my tits and hiss, "You got no-thing" before trying to pimp me for $10,000 quickies in his bedroom upstairs. Cano, for what it was worth, blamed the economy for his bad behavior. It was more creative than blaming the heat. I just ignored him and pretended to watch CNN. Late that summer my boyfriend and I took to skinny-dipping at Coney Island. We never planned it?the nights usually just progressed from drinking on the stoop with the sweet crackhead next door to drinking on the southbound W or N to drinking on the beach in the middle of the night and toasting the sharks that muscled and coiled just beneath the calm. No matter how late we arrived, there were people already there; they spread out in drunken little pockets of threes and fours all down the beach. The breeze was perfect?like refrigerator air deep in the stink of summer. Everything smelled like oysters and weed. There was a shitfaced solidarity to the place, as if the same charge had shocked all of us out to the final edges of the city in search of sense or salvation from diapers falling from the sky.

That summer was too desperate for wading. I swam way out and turned to look back at how far I'd gone, the way kids do when they're showing off or sticking it to their parents on the shore. It was placid and black, and the far-off haze of light pollution from Atlantic Ave. and Sunset Park and the Twin Towers and the Empire State was just a dimming halo. I swam out there a lot that August. Twice I left my underwear on the beach for someone else to clean up.