Aleph is for the Alist unfurling up the stairs, each entried step a dark scrawl of angular socialites and their squat, loopy machers being checked off by the door…reformed representations of oldtime Division Street fabricants here with their brotherly cousins, a host of warehouse winners grew up in Midwood now officed in the Army Terminal, Brooklyn, sitting on a pile of home furnishings both used and likenew, the repentant scion of Bowery pushcart poets and their whorish, redheaded Pomeranian landladies I’m talking sixfloor walkup ugly, with socialist leanings escorted by their daughters become correctly cold Yorkville obgyns, explain that — their own daughters, married into the Battery’s recharged investment bankers, corporate moguls in from a Siburbia beyond Connecticut and with kinder of their own lately heiresses doing the dos, jetting the charity circuit, balancing balls — selfmade menschs in every racket and trade that can be legally listed, so far I’ve written over five grand in new business and I don’t even read, can’t even spell; them and the women who made them, they slowly slacken their pace to meet the press just assembled in a row on both sides up the stairs, always upward, Uppermost and then what, you expect a brass ring, take your coat…journalists pent behind cordons like pedigreed livestock who talk, who ask too many questions, too many of the wrong ones, at least, squawky without answer: who are you, who do you think you aren’t…they’ve come in hordes, to barren the buffet, to drink the fountains dry and then the mooned pool, skinnydip, eclipsing in their spectacle what’s hung high from lunettes — entering under a raft of tautblown, entablatured banners proclaiming an exhibition, an eternal exhibition, it’s said, of the way it was, sentiment, nostalgia, Ostalgie if you must from that language itself an exhibit (besides which, we’re kitsched in the East after all—82nd & Fifth), a Museum of an Extinct Race, of a not quite Unconditional Surrender…gevalt, it’s okay, only richtig, go ahead and admit it, of their old lives just skinshed in this very pilgrimage Uptown, up from the overhauled system, the redone 6 Train if they’ll take it, anything green…or trekked on over from the West Side across the darkling Park upon the wings of the crosstown bus, M86 be its name blessed forever and ever — pulled up in their commissions and liveries, not as guests anymore but as hosts, not as visitors of late but at home, masters of ceremony and the attention attendant, making their last adjustments after stepping to sidewalk’s sopping carpet, a remnant of a God’s tongue gotten for a good price right off the floor, off the rack (one woman mortified at how her husband’s schlock satin pants they have too many pleats and break only down by the heel, that and his shirt it’s pleated, too, or maybe just wrinkled, showing a full two inches of cuff, is how crazy, how far we’ve come), them tugging, pinching pulling, a flush wind, hair askew, blown big and unstyled, these gusts of dress exposing scandal, toupees with their yarmulkes still pinned go flying like demons through air. A sweep of light stains the night, swirling carbon arc searches…all turn their heads to the judgment descending, a buzz, a whirr, the noise of skykashering knives: Shade lands on the roof ’s helipad; nothing can begin without him, he’s a sponsor of the evening, the guest of honor and the honored host both, as reelected Head of the Sanhedrin, turned out for the occasion in a slimmingly fitted white tux, frilly lapels baby blue, a matching blue & white kippah atop, alternating colors seamed to its quadrants; it’s trimmed so heavily in platitudinal platinum, it’s amazing he can still keep his head high.
