Dear Empire State Building
by Kirpal Gordon
You’ll probably think me a flaky female, but I'm writing to tell you, now that you're no longer the tallest building in my world, you're so much sexier. Stuck in traffic crossing the Kosciusko Bridge last night, I looked up at you, beyond those acres of cemetery that announce the borough of death, and beheld your early evening grandeur just before I drove into the guard rail.
Flakey? It doesn't matter. I've known you for a long time, but I never saw you the way I did last night. You looked great in silver and green with your antenna trimmed in red. Against that violet summer sky, I don't know; you looked vulnerable.
I don't mind telling you I've had an awful lot against you from the very beginning. Sometimes it wasn't even you but what you represented. Like in toddler days, when Mom took me shopping at Macy's---I was terrified to look all the way up at your pinnacle. Mom said you were just a mean old office building that cast cold shadows, but I knew, with the conviction that comes from imprinting hundreds of comic books, you were sinister---space people built you. They were living inside you in luxurious secret apartments in dimensions we can’t see and the humans who worked above the hundredth floor were slaves fed to the Empire People.
Then we moved. New York was a bad influence on kids, my dad said. I grew real homesick. I put a poster of you on my wall. Mom made me take it down. She didn't understand. But then I went to college and met Gina Maginetti from the Bronx. We immediately became vegen Marxists, moved in together and took jobs as secretaries for a prophylactics firm on your 102nd floor. The company managers kept trying to take us out to Beefsteak Charlie's, as if a little red meat would make us feel less desperate about Western Civilization. We just felt disappointed by day. By night, after we punched out of you, and our real lives as divas began. We ended up calling you The Man.
It was a difficult time in history, I'll say that. I had problems with my boyfriend, too. I guess it wasn't his fault but working that high up in the air made me feel like a worker ant, neuter and anonymous. Then Gina started hanging with the wrong crowd, you know, those creeps who float back and forth between you and Madison Square Garden. Your radio antenna became a hypodermic, poor Gina on the corner with King Kong on her back, waiting for her a chest of medicine. We were fired.
After that, I stopped looking at you. I went for the Chrysler which helped me out of my spiritual crisis. I decided the Chrysler was the real New York: style and grace, above obsessions with size. So I had an affair with a janitor there. I had my own entrance. We would meet in one of the private suites he had to clean. We made it overlooking Central Park, the United Nations, the 59th Street Bridge. I never glanced west at your lovely profile in the sunset. You were big and bad and Numero Uno and I was still scared.
Sometimes I had dreams. I would get into your express elevator and you would take me all the way to the top. I’d wake up falling. Why am I writing you this? To say that I always knew I wanted you. I had a lot of growing up to do first. I stopped working office temp jobs. I combined my day and night. Like the Chrysler, I dressed with more sophistication and pretended Deco was the real spirit of New York. I got a loan, got out of midtown, started my own company. Then I made a fatal mistake. I moved my offices so that I would never see you again.
The rent was raised, the company neared bankruptcy and my New York boyfriend tried to sue me for psychological damages when I started to see another guy. Gina wrote from Vermont to say she channeled a being named Roy who told her the Big Apple was possessed. I knew I had to get out for awhile. I rented a car, packed all my stuff and took off. I didn’t know where I was going but it would have to be to a green and simple place.
I cried when I looked over at the skyline from the Brookyln-Queens Expressway. As I crossed the Kosciusko, the traffic came to a halt. That’s when I saw you, as if for the first time, surrounded by early evening lights, alone but not lonely, an angel of a skyscraper. Maybe every phallic thing in the world should get bested or outdistanced for, no longer having to carry the weight of being the tallest building in creation, you glowed with your own voice. I suddenly recognized it’s been you all along. That’s when I smacked into the guard rail.
I knew something had changed in me because while I waited for the tow-truck, commuters threatening my life and honking their horns, I felt calm. I guess you could say I’ve lost my own competitiveness and regained my senses as well. That’s probably why you struck me as so beautiful. I know now that I can take all of you.
Stand tall,
A New York Woman Who Loves You