Roof

The 4-1-7 is peeling off, the stairs are royal blue and stained and they keep going, there are a couple littered soda cups. The door at the top leads into a loft, the kind you see in movies, bigger than that. It's the kind of place that looks beautiful to people who don't realize how dirty it is, and the people who do realize think it's perfect. People cycle in and out, you can tell, and no one's cleaned their rooms properly for the next guest.

There's a keg and next to it a donation jar. Who makes his party guests pay for a keg no one asked him to buy? If you want people to buy their own beer tell them to buy their own beer, they won't mind. What they will mind is the fine print under the promise of free beer. I fill my cup full, pay nothing, drink half, top it off, and walk around.

I know no one. Guys with jeans I wish I could wear, girls I wish I could date, tattoos for which I will never have the commitment. The space is open and vast, the kitchen looks like the cover of a book about cool kitchens. There is a basketball hoop over the front door and there's actually enough room to play. The walls are slapped with once-vibrant paints: cyan, yellow, magenta, Kelly green. One bathroom had a wallpaper fashioned out of magazine clippings. Another had white walls covered with the writings of a thousand occupants, a filthy mug of various Sharpies on the sink where the toothbrushes should be. "MAKE YOUR MARK" a little sign tells me.

Ah, yes. But of course. Remember the days our parents talked about? Remember the best minds of our generation and so forth? Remember when alternative really meant something? A used chef's knife out on the cutting board. Half-finished art projects and dirty laundry. Look, we have made ourselves a new Bohemia, and it is 417 Sullivan Street! This whole place is a half-finished art project.

I hear something about a roof. I fill my beer and go looking. The stairs are in a hallway jutting out from another hallway. They are dark, and narrow, and the railing doesn't go up the entire way. A cinder block props the door open and I smell fresh cigarette smoke. There is a girl standing on the ledge, watching the city.

"Wow," I say, and stand next to her.

"Yeah."

"People are smoking inside, you know."

"Have you been inside?" she asks me and we laugh.

You can see most everything. The neighborhood, the next neighborhood, more steeples than you can shake a stick at. The skyscrapers, the lights, the life. It must be one of the best views in the city, and it wraps all the way around us. Sometimes it looks like a cutout, the skyline, that cityscape. But here, on this tattered roof, you realize that it's all around you, all the time, every day. And I don't know if it's the rush of the view, the rush of the ledge, the rush of a pretty girl, or a few beers on an empty stomach, but life feels good. And some people trying to live the lives they want to live, it doesn't seem so bad.