8/25/2008

The rise and the fall and the denouement of the Persian Empire

I was there when Cyrus the Great laid down the foundation stone for the Persian Empire: It was about a year and a half after moving in, actually, when we had the skateboarding boy-king roaming across town with a spray can in his hand and the stylized drawing of a regal crown left in his wake. Regardless of my giving him hell back then for spray-painting the outside of the building, just beneath the window sill, he never really cared for anything and would laugh out loud while pointing it up out on the street: “There´s us up there, man”, he would say every time. “Forever or as long as they don´t re-do the exterior”.

Today, two, three years later and you´d still find me roaming past that thronging avenue if you ever tried: Every Tuesdays and Thursdays there around 8pm, late for the MBA though without a care in the world, walking real slow with the earphones on, naturally, radio tuned to some rock station or another, Liam Gallagher crooning to the words of Champagne Supernova despite my not liking Oasis at all but leaving it be just because, no special reason required for taking it all in, absorbing the night, becoming one with the very city, shivering once or twice, shrugging quite often, shuddering yet never really falling.

If you were here with me tonight, past that ever-present hooker with the thick thighs and the white mock-cowhide ankle-high boots, past the fancy gay nightclubs behind secret façades, past the police cars, past the old apartment buildings with their giant living room windows staring out like flat glass gargoyles, we would stop walking all of a sudden then turn out heads to the ugly building with the fading blue stripes and count maybe four, five floors up, up until the window where Cyrus the Great tattooed his regalia in white on the skin of the night in the big city two, three years ago, and I would mention, all very nonchalantly and laid back and cool and all that, that was the last place I ever got to see you, hoping on a taxi at about 2am on a Monday a lifetime ago.

In writing all this to you, down through the years now, I´ve come to sort of question whether you were ever there at all, and sometimes whether you actually existed in the real world and not only as a figment of my imagination... but then every Tuesdays and Thursdays there around 8pm, late for the MBA though without a care in the world, I´m walking down that thronging avenue real slowly, with the earphones on, naturally, radio tuned to some rock station or another, then I look up against the glare of the lamp posts, and if I squint my eyes hard enough it´s there, I can see it: They have never re-done the exterior, not really, and up against the wall just a few inches underneath the window that was once the bedroom I shared with the Cyrus the skateboarding boy-king, lies the white crown shinning like a diamond in concrete, making real all my yesterdays and nights.

Oasis keeps on singing through my earphones, the words coming through and synching in with the season:

“Wake up the dawn and ask her why /
A dreamer dreams, she never dies /
Wipe that tear away now from your eye /
Slowly walking down the hall /
Faster than a cannonball /
Where were you while we were getting high?

Where were you while we were getting high?


Where were you while we were getting high?



Where were you while we were getting high?”