New York at Twilight:

By Kirpal Gordon

New York at Twilight: Selected Tales of Gotham’s Weird & Eerie is a collection of intersecting short stories that take place during the twilight hour amidst the city’s many neighborhoods and ethnicities. Part comedy of human foible, part tribute to the city and its citizens, part tour guide to its haunts and history, New York at Twilight celebrates the Big Apple at its weirdest and eeriest throughout the decades from the 1960s to the present. Among its hilarious, allegorical, surreal, character-driven plots: an upstate commuter ends up buried under the floorboards in the house of the archer of death; after choosing X as her Confirmation name in honor of recently deceased Malcolm X, a young Irish Catholic maiden makes a life-changing pilgrimage to the RKO move palace in Flushing; a famous fictional New York character comes alive and writes his author an email from the Hudson River; an incarcerated Puerto Rican hears the moon call him to a new vocation in a prison on Staten Island; a Greek college student from Astoria seeking the sexual revolution of the Seventies discovers in the West Village why there is evil in the world; in the East Village a yoga teacher and translator of Kabir with a bottle of white-out has a Kabir-like experience during the 1977 summer blackout; a woman in the Bronx in 2022 coaxes her husband into a becoming a walrus thanks to the music of the Beatles; a Gotham reporter gets more than she bargains for when she meets a magus of twilight’s blue hour in midtown; a light-skinned West Indian black man undergoes a trial by fire in his Chinatown loft in 1991 as Rodney King gets beaten up by the LAPD on TV; while dangling over Newtown Creek in a rental car on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a downtown diva phones the Empire State Building with a confession of love; a young couple share a hallucination and a cosmic reckoning while hiking their Financial District neighborhood under the influence of magic mushrooms; and a man hit by a car in Central Park discovers a portal to other worlds. Jim Cohn, Director of the Museum of American Poetics, called the collection, "These 13 tales––with a nod to Salinger’s depictions of youth alienation and innocence, but also echoing traditions out of Kerouac, Burroughs, Pound, Whitman, and Poe––are each tied together by strangely healing moments of sacred awareness as his parade of erotic, confused, and consciousness-seeking characters search for the luminous promise of their being.” Carrie Schneider, author of American Yoga, wrote, “While somehow becoming everything from a patently uninnocent Catholic girl busting out of All in the Family Queens to a variously privileged sex addict ordering in from his luxury Manhattan loft, Kirpal Gordon maps a Vedic history of New York that forever changes the topography---not to mention your view of the Empire State Building. Serving language too beautiful for words, Gordon reminds us why we read and write. If you're wondering where the beat has gone, it’s here, now, in this groundbreaking collection.” John Kruth, author of Rhapsody in Black: A Biography of Roy Orbison, wrote, “The greatest compliment a reader can give an author is the wish that the story would never end which is what I continuously experienced while reading New York at Twilight. Each tale could have morphed into a novel or a major feature film. Gordon skillfully crafts scrumptious muffalettas of luminosity and economy that one can’t help but crave more. His literary riffs, mesmerizing metaphors and uncanny plot twists remind me of the solos of heavyweight jazzmen like Coltrane or Rollins, blowing well-ruminated ideas that seem to flow spontaneously in the moment of creation from the primeval fun house of his mind.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kirpal Gordon
• Release date: Jul 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301623389

Book preview

K I R P A L G O R D O N _______________________

NEW YORK AT TWILIGHT:

Selected Tales of Gotham’s

Weird & Eerie

Freeport, NY 2013

Copyright 2013 by

Kirpal Gordon

Smashwords Edition

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Regarding Kirpal Gordon’s fiction:

Nothing escapes his witty, raw, sensual, and refined story of the continuity of human mystery. He takes the reader into meditative wonder.

Ann Fitzgerald, Marymount Manhattan College

He weaves beautifully between reality and imagination so that each magnifies and explains each other. The language is direct and precise yet has an unearthly sense to it. I can see the streets of New York from many different points of view.

Hubert Selby, Jr., author, Last Exit to Brooklyn

He’s a consummate postmodern trickster… leading us to laugh at what we think we know, and to humble ourselves to a world that will always be much larger than we can imagine.

Stephen-Paul Martin, author, Changing the Subject

He deftly pulls us into the worlds and mythologies his characters inhabit: an unsettling geography of time, gender, drugs, space … a quirky, entertaining atlas that is his vision and gift to us.

Paul Lauter, President, American Studies Association, Trinity College

In his stories there’s so much movement that everything seems suddenly motionless and perfected. It’s as if Borges were telling us that these stories take place in the kingdom of metaphor, where there is no time for stories.

Norman Dubie, author, The Mercy Seat: Collected & New Poems 1967-2001

"I noticed while reading the stories in New York at Twilight a subtle momentum building as each tale contributed to a shimmering resonance that stayed with me and a defined chiaroscuro projecting me deeper into a seemingly imaginative world of a mystifying labyrinth. I took a deep breath and continued penetrating the maze and soon realized this was not an impenetrable twilight zone, nor was I lost in a dense web, to the contrary, stepping back I saw it was a landscape grounded in reality, slices of life, albeit some unusual portions, but each thought provoking and entertaining—a delicious combination."

Harry Burrus, author, Layers: New and Selected Poems

His characters move whole upon the page, possessing a life of their own, skirting the fringes of sanity and safety. For Gordon no place would be safe. His situations and people may be on the edge of any usual or accepted form of life, but he makes them so credible we’re led to wonder if everyone doesn’t possess a touch of madness, if he or she were able to plumb thoughts and experiences as Gordon does. He makes the unusual both believable and conceivable, the outré something that could happen to any of us, and in that trait he enmeshes us in perceptions that dig far beneath the apparent.

Laurel Speer, Remar

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Grateful acknowledgement to the following magazines in print and online: Apparatus, Asylum, Bakunin, Bicycle Review, Central Park, Coydog Review, Danse Macabre, Espirit, Global Tapestry Journal (England), Groundswell, Gypsy, Heaven Bone, Literary Gazette, Luciole Press, Napalm Health Spa, Open Road Review (India), Poetry East, Red Fez, Slipstream, Sol: English Writing in Mexico and Taking Giant Steps Blog; and to Armory Plays, Inc. (This Ain’t No Ball Game), Heaven Bone Press (Dear Empire State Building), Pegasus Press (A Further Being) and Scopcraeft Press (Deadpan Parables), collections no longer in print, where earlier versions of these stories first appeared.

Gordon, Kirpal, 1952-

New York at Twilight:

Selected Tales of Gotham’s Weird & Eerie

Printed in The United States of America.

Cover design by Joe Tully © 2013.

www.joetully.com

Back cover author photo by Sarah McDaniel © 2013.

Book design by Norman Ball

www.normanball.com

First Edition

Giant Steps Press

Freeport, NY

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for

Claire Daly

A Love Supreme

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Contents

Weird

The Magus of the Blue Hour

A Ghost in His Own Skin

Lustrum at the Flushing RKO

The Zeitgeist of Love

You’re Blooming Everywhere

St. Philibert’s Feast Day

Bridge: Venus Rising

Eerie

Petals of Pushpema

Television Jones

Have You Heard the Word Is Love?

Hers at Last

Loving You Properly

Erasing the Separation

Biography

Booklist

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Weird

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The Magus of the Blue Hour

I’m out the door; I’m on my way.

Not that I go to galleries, but Z calls and says, I need moral support, X, ‘cause it’s my first opening on 57th Street where money talks, and this new company’s gonna hand out free Mai Tais even though my work’s got nothing to do with Mai Tais, merely the bait for this corpo-sponsor to hook my prospects on their rum and to see you there would help me feel more legit, so I’m thinking, Bring on the Mai Tais.

I need escape; I need a couple of hours off.

With a September cold coming on, a little rum will help me weather that storm while I finish the last in a series of articles which asks, If civilization is annihilating the wild, what does that do to the wilderness within us?, so I’m thinking, Central Park’s two blocks away and scary as hell after dark, maybe wilding around there with a Mai Tai high on will bring the wilderness out of me.

I coat check my shawl; I grab a Mai Tai.

I love Z’s show, Nothing Is as It Seams, ten photo montages of a man and a woman approaching one another, each succeeding montage creating a larger frame of reference which changes the context and the meaning of the images, and as I’m thinking, Such a knowing eye to this town’s mating rituals, how predator and prey are captive to the play, I’m happy for Z, who flutter-waves me over, kvells at my compliments, introduces me to this photographer named Y and leaves me standing there alone with him.

My jaw drops; my pulse quickens.

Y’s working that shaygetz vibe—rugged face, longish mane, dimpled chin, loose corduroy jacket, safari shirt, top buttons opened, dark chest hair spilling out—and big deal, such an outdoorsy specimen and not a bad choice for the last male chromosomes on earth even with that hint of the hustler in his smile, and so what?, I’m attracted, and yes, he can rattle my tea kettle, bubbalah, so I’m thinking, But can he talk?

"You’re a reporter; you write for The Voiceless."

Well, yes, I say sheepishly but Y jumps right in and confides, "I’ve been thinking about who you might be, Madame X, based on your first article’s first sentence which noted that human beings are embarked on a wave of mass extinction that’s wiping out half of the planet’s ten million species of plants, animals and fish so Mother Nature might, like pulling a tick out of her armpit, simply exterminate us to save what’s left of life on Earth, and I agree with you that we’re acting flight-or-fight reptilian and refusing our role as eco-steward homo faber mammals but I wonder, If Mother Nature can be so carefree, why can’t we?, and so I keep returning to your conclusion which I find incredibly erotic, that our consciousness is not separate from the life around us and the sounds we utter in orgasm might be the echoes of the species we’ve made extinct," he says, and I’m thinking, He’s quoting me verbatim.

He loves my work; he’s as cool as he is hot.

Pardon me, Ms. X, but I need a minute to pull myself together because you’re standing so close to me and you look so much like how you read, that is, breathtakingly beautiful, so let me calm down and get you another Mai Tai, Y says like a total charm boat and a real man, spontaneous and unafraid to share his feelings, and I’m definitely getting a buzz on and for the first time this evening I’m glad I’m wearing bling and mascara, big black heels and a little black dress from the back of the closet, and as he takes my red plastic cup, he accidentally brushes his hand against my chest so my foolish nipples give