Dana Herrault_ Writing the City

Copyright © 2022 Dana Herrault.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner without the written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

creak

stucco

twenty

groceries in minutes

come as you are

trash machine.

locked

plastic wrap

never mind

big guns

kudzu

milk and cereal

chit chat

hats

q: quanitites

r: rats

author’s note

dedication

Thank you to 497 DeKalb Ave.

creak

The table is from my childhood. One leg doesn’t work as well as it used to. If you press down, the leg creaks under the pressure. The four of us used to sit around this table every night for dinner. Now it’s just me and you. As silence fills the empty room, I push down on the table just for the creak to fill the void.

stucco

Grey stucco, yellow stucco, white stucco. That is the view from my window. The only clue that the world exists beyond is the triangle of sky made by the gaps in between stucco forms. The sliver of blue is so small, my thumb could cover it. The sounds of honking and squealing penetrate the stucco fortress reminding me I’m not alone. The grey stucco was applied neatly, its control joints create a pattern easily memorized. Evenly spaced vertical lines are intercepted by the rhythm of two close together horizontal lines, a large gap, and then two more. The yellow stucco has been smooshed on in uneven layers. Its haphazard application leaves traces of the human hand. The two stuccos are separated by an inch or two, held apart by a rusted pole. The gap between them is covered by a metal sheet, ensuring rainwater will run onto the yellow stucco and not the grey. The white stucco is farther away. Its control joints align with three floors of balconies that litter its façade. The rusty metal balconies contrast with the cleanliness of the white stucco. The dark windows don’t reveal which quality is evident on the interior. The dark windows don’t reveal the person on the inside who is also trapped in the sea of stucco.

1. Building Confidence for Life

2. Stolen Court, Stolen Rights

3. No Money or Drugs

4. Come As You Are

5. Raise a Chalice to The Life

6. Groceries in Minutes

7. What are you made of?

8. Holy Water

9. Spotlight Kids, where every child is a star

10. Keep your green juice, I’ve got Botox

11. In Pursuit of Magic 12. Scan to unlock the glow

13. Your nonguilty pleasure awaits

14. Something good is worth finding 15. Do a little good today!

16. Autonomous communities are beautiful

17. Covid is a Hoax

18. All beer drivers “Please” do not drop kegs on sidewalk

19. Maybe you are doing enough?

20. Senior discount 10% on Tuesdays

groceries in minutes

A dairy cow is viable for 2,600,000 minutes until its milk production drops below standards. A dairy farmer works on an average of 550 minutes per day to feed, clean, and administer medication to 1,000 cows. Each cow gets milked three times a day, ten minutes each time. The milk is refrigerated, pasteurized, and packaged within 1,400 minutes. To transport the milk, truck drivers work 660 minutes after 600 consecutive minutes off duty. Grocery store employees work 2,400 minutes a week to stock the shelves. You spend 65 minutes in the grocery store, taking two of those minutes to select the kind of milk you like. It takes you twenty minutes to check out and find your car in the parking lot, the milk perspiring all the way. It takes 30 minutes for you to drive home with your air conditioner blasting and the milk to end up in your refrigerator. You rush to drink it all before the expiration in 420 minutes. When you throw away the carton and take out the trash, it sits on the curb for 800 minutes. The trash man picks it up on Wednesdays and drives 55 minutes to the landfill. The carton takes 2,600,000 minutes to decompose, lost in a heap of the city’s waste. Groceries in minutes.

come as you are

Come As You Are. Are you sure? I need to shower. The bags under my eyes are deep. My hair is tangled and I’m a little tipsy. Come As You Are. You don’t want me to spill my heart to you the way milk pours off the counter. You don’t want me to dance like I do when the beat moves through me. You don’t want me to laugh like I do when it’s 3 am and I haven’t slept for days. Come As You Are. You don’t want to share stories with the homeless person outside your door. You don’t want to shop with people that look different from you and can’t afford the clothes you wear. You don’t want to talk to the person with opposing political views or someone that challenges your beliefs. You don’t want to eat with the immigrant whose culture and language you don’t understand. You don’t want to pray with the person whose God is different from yours. Come As You Are. But only if they’re the same as you? If they’re from the same neighborhood and enjoy the same privileges and rights. The people with the same kind of problems? What to wear to a night out? Where to eat despite the groceries in your fridge? You don’t want the broken-hearted people. You don’t want the people lost and struggling. Come As You Are. Do you really mean it? Do I?

trash machine

Dear Corb,

I am sorry to be the one to tell you this, the skyscrapers you are so fond of have become machines of trash production destroying the planet every 8-5pm. Every day, new throngs of people enter the skyscrapers on Wall Street. By 8:01 the first piece of trash falls into the bin beside someone’s desk. Tea bags, broken pencils, containers from the street vendors begin to pile up. By 12 o’clock, unused meeting notes and broken staplers are discarded on each floor. By 1 o’clock, various food leftovers, empty Coke bottles, and pizza boxes from the 60th floor office party are added to the mix. Around 3 o’clock, janitors add dust and dirt carried in by hundreds of shoes. Around 4 o’clock, each personal desk trash is marshalled into one large black plastic bag and carted away by an intern to the trash chute. All 80 floors of trash bags fall the length of the building to pile on top of each other. By 5 o’clock, the bags are hauled out to the sidewalk and stacked into skyscrapers of their own. Their contents reach out to pedestrians, exposing the guts of the towers to the world. By 7 o’clock, puddles of leaking remnants create obstacles for pedestrians. By 8 o’clock, the odor is enough to assault someone. Sometime overnight, the black plastic bags are whisked away, and the sidewalks are washed to erase any memory of their existence. The next day new throngs of people enter their skyscrapers on Wall Street. By 8:01 the first piece of trash falls into the bin beside someone’s desk. Make sure to watch your step at 5 o’clock.

Best, Dana

locked

The lock takes its name from the action we place upon it. To lock is the act of sliding our fingers over a small metal surface, slick with thousands of hands, the curves of its profile crafted for our thumb and forefinger to delicately hold. To lock is the motion of twisting with the minimal effort of wiping ones brow and finalizing this action with a quiet click, barely audible over one’s own breathe. To lock is the maneuver of quickly tugging on the handle to ensure the lock was put properly in place and sigh of relief after, knowing one is safe. To lock is the act hiding yourself behind closed doors. To lock is to claim a piece of property is your own and protect all the things you store there. To lock is to not trust one’s neighbor. To lock is to exert control on the animals you keep on your property as you stow them away in their crates. To lock is to store your hard earned money away from the needy. To lock is to keep one from sleeping in your car at night. To lock is to close your shop up at night away from prying hands. To lock is to imprison 2.4 million people in America for societal breaches. If you listen closely one can hear the locks clicking together in one synchronous chime.

plastic wrap

The plastic wrapped boxes known as suburban houses are spaced evenly apart, alternating between light blue, muted green, and soft yellow, and strung together by a thread of grey. The boxes are assembled and arranged by machines, reminiscent of the copy and paste command on the computer. Kindred spirits to the cookies cut out around Christmas time. Each top is lifted to a ridge with a slope for optimal performance. Openings are punched in the boxes to allow for the same passage of light. The light indicates when things are supposed to happen within. A triangular extrusion is fastened over the largest opening for protection when entering the box. The boxes are filled with indistinguishable bodies but for their size. Two large and two small bodies maneuver around their confines. The air inside the box flows in and out but remains the same, made comfortable for the bodies inside. Each box opens at the same time to expel a large body to pay for the box. The two small bodies leave shortly afterward to prepare to pay for their own boxes. The remaining body resupplies the box. When all the bodies return, all the boxes light up, glowing like candles on a cake. Each with bodies gathered in protection of its plastic. The lights are blown out by one breath of God, and the boxes go quiet. The only thing creaking is the reproduction of more bodies for more boxes. The boxes ensuring their survival.

never mind

It is 2:56 p.m.

I’m sitting on a red blanket in the grass.

The sun is shining.

The wind blows, yellow leaves trickle to the ground.

Two girls sit and giggle over lunch.

A girl in a brown shirt, eats her sandwich, something falls from it.

A shirtless man put his shirt on and walks away.

The girl in a brown shirt, finished her sandwich.

Never mind she just took a bite.

Two people on a bench, they don’t know each other.

Man carrying his dog.

Man being pulled by his dog.

There’s 15 strollers on the grass.

Baby cries mingle with bus honk.

A new stroller joined.

16 strollers.

Two new strollers join.

Never mind they’re just passing through.

Strollers leave.

13 strollers.

Child wanders from stroller.

Mom rotates seat in a stroller.

One dad with a stroller.

never mind

1 stroller joins.

1 walks by.

Mom folds blanket, dad watches.

11 strollers.

Wind blows, leaves falls, grass moves.

2 strollers arrive.

Nannies.

Bench is empty.

Crinkle of chip bag behind me. Never mind its Sour Patch Kids.

Dad throws yellow ball to yellow dog. Dad with dog meets mom with stroller.

9 strollers.

1 sprinkler.

1 siren.

Man in dress clothes sits in sun.

Never mind he moved to the shade.

big guns

Four guns sit idle, awaiting the next brave soul to grasp their wood-colored handle, hold it to their cheek to aim, and fire. Only the true hunter will hit the target, a wild, untamable beast a few feet away, showing once and for all that man is the master of nature. For only two tokens, the power is yours. The power stripped away from the boss at your 9-5 job. The power stripped away from your mom grounding you until you fold your laundry. For only two tokens, you can travel to the depths of the jungle, something you couldn’t otherwise afford. The cavern is filled with creatures you could only dream of seeing in the wild. And the experience is exoticized by the twirling vines, dark crevices, and funky script spelling “jungle safari” written above your head. For two tokens, you can impress the girl you met on Tinder. You can explain the workings of the gun and flex your forearm while you pull the trigger. For two tokens, you are unstoppable. You are Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in Jumanji. You are George of the Jungle. When all the blanks have been fired, you leave feeling two tokens lighter and slightly dismayed by your performance. The girl next to you smiles hesitantly, and you think she’s still impressed. Encouraged, you turn around, the recent failure fading quickly from memory as the jingle of two more tokens alerts you to opportunities waiting to be seized.

The mall is carried in the phones of every city dweller. The Amazon App summarizes the conglomerate of mall storefronts into a fivesentence concluding paragraph, eradicating the need to ever leave your house. The meandering path through endless aisles is turned into a linear procession of rhythmic fingertip swipes. What used to take a day to traverse is scanned in moments. The clatter of footsteps across marble flooring is replaced by the tapping of fingernails on cracked screen protectors. The symphony of collective movements turns into a solo performance at one’s leisure. Social interaction is boiled down to delivery instructions carefully typed for clarity to ensure the two-day delivery promise isn’t impeded. Shopping bags carried in tired arms are made obsolete by cardboard boxes hauled in metal carts on the pavement. The limits of your strength are no longer a hinderance for consumption. The option of one white shirt turns into thousands, pushing the limits of what was already a limitless activity. The mall invades the city through pants pockets. The mobility of the mall becomes a creeping kudzu vine, cutting off the existing urban fabric from the sun. The pixels of the screen becomes a new urban grid existing only in the realm of our minds. And urban planners become App builders, combining pixels for us to navigate. The only visible physical trace of shopping is the navy-blue trucks and navy-blue clad workers that whisk through the streets (with any luck you might witness the moment of delivery). Their vitality contrasts the boarded-up storefronts, abandoned to the wind.

cereal and milk

Milk and cereal, each the others quick demise. Two disparate entities meant for a destiny of death. One is a liquid from an animal, the other is crystallized sugars processed into a puff. They are combined in a ritualistic manner. The cereal is always poured into the bowl first with a cacophony of clattering. The milk is poured second so that the mixture fills the bowl to the ¾ mark. As the two come into contact, the sugar immediately leaches from the cereal blending with the milk to make a sweet sip. Seconds later, the milk becomes unrecognizable due to its change in color. In return, the milk seeps into the pores of the cereal, unbinding its ingredients. The puffy cereal begins to soften, perfectly balanced with its crunchy origins. There are only a few seconds left to eat the cereal before it is too soft for pleasure. As time passes, the untouched puffs begin to enlarge, fully absorbing the milk. The cereal continues to swallow the milk and the two become one in a soggy declaration of love. The puffs soon begin to disintegrate, the milk and cereal holding on to their last vestiges of autonomy. When they can hold on no longer, they unite in a milk-logged, puffy mush-mound. The milk and the cereal have consumed each other in their desperate attempt for survival, making the trash can or a strong stomach the only viable option for their future.

chit chat

Modernist apartments carelessly squeeze into city blocks. The new red brick is squished between hundred-year-old brownstones, raising rent prices with their flat facades. Sleek black metal windows contrast the chipped white wood of their neighbors. The metal is void of plant stains, cat imprints, and grooves indicating the placement of elbows as one gazes out the window. New doors, unused by visiting friends and family, sit flawlessly in their frames. Their utility barren of the existing streets character. People appear out of these doors, bearing little resemblance to the remaining generations sitting across the street. Outside, the sound of Instagram reels drown out the clatter of chess pieces and chit chat. Stoops are no longer places of communion but long egresses on the way to trendy new coffee shops. The new storefronts offer items whose price range reflects their fancy exterior. The mom and pop stores becoming fewer and farther between. Lone islands in a sea of vegan, acai bowl, and brain food branding. Stainless steel, rectilinear railings supplant ornate crafted wrought iron, sterilizing the sidewalk. The new buildings lay site-less foundations deep in the ground, permanently excavating existing histories.

hats

In the Hudson Yards, new buildings are built on top of the existing urban fabric, appearing as if they are standing on its shoulders. The weight of the new is stacked on the strength of the old. The steel and glass walk over the old rooftops, clumsily balancing above them on stilts. Their swaying bodies culminating in a carnival of metal clowns, whose tricks only entertain the few that can afford their tickets. The historic stone wears the glass like a checkered print hat from the latest fashion trends. The hat so tall, one can always find them in a crowd. The hat that no one needs but has in their closet anyway. The hat one buys to appear younger but only draws emphasis to their age. The weathering of the stone tries to hide underneath the brim, its uniqueness under appreciated by many. In recent years, developers have spent $25 billion dollars on the construction of new hats in order to cloak the old in a visage of modernity. They have built more than 18 million square feet of hats, replacing the need for sunscreen as they cast the old in shadow. The tallest of the hats is 1,270 feet tall, with a duckbill extending out 80 feet. The widest of the hats covering city blocks. While the new hats seem nice, it is the old wearers that are proven to stand the test of time.

q : quantities

New York City is 300 sq miles. 8.4 million people live there. There are 24,500 Citi Bikes. There are 78,604 homeless people. There are 241 Starbucks locations. The incarceration rate is 376 per 100,000 people. There are 624 clothing and accessory stores. There are 500,000 public housing residents. There are 1,100 parking garages. There are approximately 500 deaths from gun violence annually. There are 287,000 Uber rides a day. 1.6 million households are on food stamps. There are 25,000 nightclubs. There are an annual average of 50 deaths from subway trains. There are 12,000 miles of sidewalk. 1.4 million people live below the national poverty line. There are 472 Metro stations. There are an estimated 4,000 drug overdoses annually. The are 8,900 scaffolds surrounding buildings. There are 21 people in this classroom. There are 150 words in this assignment. There are 17 more days left of this semester.

r : rats

Disgusting. Rats are one of the few wild animals to live in New York City. They climb through our trash, scouring for our left-over food scraps. They clamber up our cabinets, following the scent of the overabundance of food stocked in our kitchens. They scurry across our pavement, their claws clacking on our hard surfaces. They climb through our sewage pipes, finding passage in our waste system. They live in our subways, burrowing into holes dug into the ground by our workers. They swim in our greasy slime, poured into their habitats by our machines. They hide in our walls, made warm by our fossil fuels. They squeeze through our cracks, their hair getting caught in our decaying infrastructure. Disgusting. Resilient enough to survive in New York City, where no other animal dares to go.

Scene from the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Tim Burton

author’s note

These essays are a collection written while studying in New York City. They are a record of thoughts, feelings, and discoveries about a place. The essays explore narratives of the human existence in the city and social norms we have been taught to learn. While writing about the city, I was simultaneously exploring it visually. The images are photographs taken during this time period, added to the essays to play between written and visual storytelling. I find that both avenues of expression have found an interest in artifacts and remnants of human activities. I hope you have enjoyed their compilation. Thank you for taking the time to read what I have to say.