Aerialist extraordinaire Philippe Petit is well-represented in TJ’s house. Petit of course tight-roped across the Twin Towers for 40-odd minutes in 1974, an insuperable act of bravado that absolutely blew our wee minds at the time (we may have even burned a hole through the page of the Guinness Book of World Records with Petit on it after staring at it so much), and was the focus of the brilliant Man on Wire film from 2008, which I believe made its TV debut on Sundance Channel last night.
With Little G’s recent obsession with skyscrapers–the Burj, the Empire State, the Chrysler–we picked up the children’s book The Man Who Walked Between the Towers for him for his birthday last month. It’s got gorgeous illustrations of the city and the Towers (I mean, look at that pic below), and handles the elephant in the room–Sept. 11, of course–with abundant grace.
Finally, we’ve been reading Colum McCann’s novel Let the Great World Spin, which looks at New York City on that muggy day in 1974 through the eyes of several New Yorkers, including a prostitute, an Irish monk in the Bronx, a rich lady grieving the loss of her son in Vietnam, and a teen who subway surfs and snaps photos of graffitti in the tunnels. The common thread, if you will, between the characters is Petit’s highwire act in lower Manhattan that day.
Curiously, Petit is not mentioned by name.
McCann is no newcomer to the novelling world. A creative writing professor at Hunter College, he won the 2009 National Book Award for Let the Great World Spin.
The guy can spin prose. Of the Metropolitan Hospital you see while cruising up/down the FDR, he writes:
A row of smokers stood out in front of Metropolitan Hospital on Ninety-Eighth and First Avenue. Each looked like his last cigarette, ashen and ready to fall. Through the swinging doors, the receiving room was full to capacity. Another cloud of smoke inside. Patches of blood on the floor. Junkies strung out along the benches. It was the type of hospital that looked like it needed a hospital.
Here’s a peek at a support group of women who’ve lost their sons in Vietnam. Claire is a rich Park Avenue lady. The rest of the members are blue-collar broads.
“Marcia” sees Petit on the highwire as she rides the Staten Island Ferry to Manhattan that summer day.
–It’s a guy, says Marcia, on a tightrope. I mean, I didn’t know it right away, I didn’t figure it out just like that, but what it is, there’s a guy on a tightrope.
–Where?
–Shh, shh, says Janet.
–Up there. Between the towers. A million miles up. We could just about see him.
–What’s he doing?
–Tightroping!
–A funambulist.
–What?
–Oh, my God.
–Does he fall?
–Shh.
–Oh, don’t tell me he falls.
–Shh!
–Please don’t tell me he falls.
–Shh, already, says Janet to Jacqueline.
–So I tapped the shoulder of this young guy beside me. One of those ponytailed ones. And he’s like, What, lady? Like he’s real annoyed that I disturbed his little standing sleep or dream or whatever it is he’s doing at the front of the boat. And I said, Look. And he said, What?
–Mercy.
–And I pointed it out, the little flyman, and then he said a bad word, you’ll excuse me, Claire, in your house, I’m sorry, but he said, Fuck.
And Claire wants to say: Well, I’d say fuck too, if I were me. I’d say it backward and forward and around the block, fuck this and fuck that and fuck it all once, twice, three times. But all she does is smile at Marcia and give her what she hopes is a nod that understands that it’s absolutely no problem to say fuck, on Park Avenue, on a Wednesday, at a coffee morning, in fact it’s probably the best thing to say, given the circumstances, maybe they should all say it in unison, make a singsong out of it.
–And then, says Marcia, everyone around us started looking up and before I knew it even the captain of the ferry was out and he had binoculars with him and he said, That guy’s on a tightrope.
–For real?
–Now you can only imagine. The whole deck, full of people. Their early commute. Shoulder to shoulder. And someone’s walking a tightrope. Between those buildings. the World Towery thingymajigs.
–Trade.
–Center.
[Previous TRAINJOTTING READERS, including A Fraction of the Whole and The Deportees, can be found here.]