Enzo outside of Deer Park

Enzo lopes down the streets and avenues, especially looking at the restaurants and delis, for future reference. Which he knows is amusing, in a way, his memory doesn’t work that like that. Nor does his evaluator: white linens with stemmed glassware are attractive, wood worked panel in the background is attractive. Enzo likes the turn of the century turn of the door step stone outside, and likes what it says about the chef’s abilities. He will recall all of this except the address.

If Enzo feels left out of something, there is the cosmos that is Manhattan to consider. So much to be excluded from! And so sumptuous a carte! The city, despite the past mayoral and cultural purges, is pornographic in its availability. Each bistro is a darkening passage to other, more exciting life. He could wear so many new watches, stride confidently in moss green huraches to the cool marble lobby of this and that condo.

And in the heating linen of a today’s work clothes, Enzo knows that it is flat dissatisfaction that brings him to this pitch of frustration. He’s lost himself in that fun house of windows that confuse. Each outlook is so like another in its desirability, and Enzo is so desperate in his craving for the new, he slams headlong into another clear panel of perspective. But what harm, to want the black leather purse with gold for his wife, to want to select the raciest, most red remote controlled cars for his children? Enzo also knows that it is not the objects, but the matrix of capability that is missing. The one that can buy a new watch and huraches can afford a house here and there, too. That one can move smoothly across the marble atria into metro-fusion cafes and dine without thought of tomorrow, a lily of an urbane and fashionable field.

Like so many of the New York stories which need the telling of need where there is no need, Enzo’s petty wrestling with desire would seem inconsequential if there were not an entire religion founded on his very dilemma. Enzo knows this, and knows too his self awareness is very nearly meaningless. There are others in Manhattan worse off in innumerable ways, this is plain. Yet, how can his empathy develop when he cannot clearly perceive that the endless fantasy built around him is unattainable? What does he care if others lack when he lacks so profoundly? This mind which Enzo assumes he owns holds desires that he knows are undesirable.

Enzo wants a hotdog with sautéed onions, and Enzo wants water. He wants to walk quickly and see the green median between the faces of the Park Avenue canyon. To watch again as the architectural ages meet in the sky and watch the surprise take place, which never fails, in Enzo’s mind. Enzo wonders today, if there is too much room in that mind.