The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld Read Online Free PDF Page A

the woods, drenched with rain, about to have sex or just having had sex, men and women, men and men. And one I saw in the New Yorker was of two boys, possibly skateboarders, in bed together. Skaters in bed with each other was definitely not a photographic tableau I’d ever seen in Colorado, but coming out of the East Village, it seemed like no big deal, and I realize that I sort of want to spend the night over at Asa’s. I’m comfortable enough with my own sexuality and any ambiguity therein. I’d done enough soul searching in my teens and twenties to know that while I prefer women, I’m also not 100 percent straight, and so I’m not totally against kissing someone like Asa, because what the hell? I’m in New York, after all—a place that despite all the grime, or maybe because of it, exudes a kind of rugged sensuality, exploration, pansexuality.
    But eventually we crawl back in off the fire escape and hug each other good night—a strong, lingering embrace, during which the desire, but not the warmth, fades. Instead of kissing him, I make him promise to take me surfing.

THE BIRTHPLACE
    A few days after my arrival in New York, I seek out a lesser-known Manhattan tourist destination: Melville’s birthplace at 6 Pearl Street, right across from Battery Park on the southern tip of the island. The actual boarding house was demolished and replaced by a glass high-rise, but a plaque marks the spot (along with a sculptural bust of the prodigiously bearded author), and I’m surprised to find that Melville and I share very nearly the same birth date: he was born late on August 1, 1819; I was born early on August 2, 1973.
    From this site it’s a few blocks over to the South Street Seaport, where Melville reportedly spent time. The Seaport docks hold several large antique sailing vessels, all curated by the South Street Seaport Museum. The Lettie G. Howard is a sleek fishing schooner, 125 feet long, once used to supply the Fulton Fish Market and since restored for use in sailing instruction. And then there’s the Peking: at 377 feet long, with a steel hull the length of a football field and four masts as tall as an eighteen-story building, it’s one of the largest sailing vessels ever built.
    Combined with salt air and pungent fish-market smells, the Lettie G. Howard and the Peking re-create a sense of the city during Melville’s time—” There is now your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs “—when Melville’s contemporary Walt Whitman described it as “mast-hemm’d Manhattan.”
    In the first chapter of Moby-Dick , Melville paints a picture of this old, maritime Manhattan—something that, aside from these museum relics, no longer exists. What hasn’t changed, though, are the “thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.” From Battery Park to the Seaport, hordes of people stand looking out into the bay; these “water gazers” are there every day of the year, regardless of the weather. Having grown up in the West, surrounded by so many miles of open space, I find living in New York City aesthetically and emotionally overwhelming, and like the rest of the water gazers, I gravitate toward the open space of the sea.
    Later in the first chapter, Melville states that “meditation and water are wedded for ever.” In other words, we water gazers, beyond traversing the bounds of the city, are looking to transcend the human condition, to plunge into the deeper mysteries of life and our purpose therein.
    Moby-Dick also braids the personal with the political:
    And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:
    “ Grand Contested Election for the Presidency
    of the United States.
    Whaling Voyage by One