The Secret of the Ooze

The light had not yet turned green, but a large group of pedestrians scooted across the street, undaunted by a speeding car that looked, from my position, like it was certainly going to kill them all. Andy, my friend, who just moved to Cambridge from Jamaica Plain and hosted me on his couch for a couple of days, walked backwards in mock-tour-guide fashion and said, “Boston pedestrians are notoriously the most aggressive pedestrians in the world.” He paused, then added, as though alluding to some sort of mythical, universal undercurrent humming in every Bostonians’ subconscious: “One thing about Boston drivers is that none of them want to get charged with vehicular homicide.” I nodded as we hurried across the street.

(Portrait of a Boston pedestrian: a man called “Bubba” paying little mind to incoming traffic.)

Andy lives in a part of Cambridge that looks like the setting of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Weird, ornate architecture, eerily empty streets, and a lot of colorful tubes that look like they are pumping some sort of mysterious ooze, the chemical properties of which the locals all know but only talk about in hushed tones in front of visiting folk like me. Exhibits A & B, just blocks from his house:

These buildings are a part of MIT, which along with Harvard and to some extent also BU and Emerson and BC, Andy explained to me, seem to made up a sort of metonymic identity of Boston, the consummate college town. The identity that outsiders like me plainly observe and then jot notes about in a notebook on the train ride home; the identity that insiders describe to their visiting friends with a sort of cynicism, but they continue to describe it just the same. “The Athens of the west,” as Andy heard it described a few nights before on television by a mayoral candidate.

I had been to Boston once before, during an awful March snowstorm. I was 20 and staying with two friends in their house in Allston, a neighborhood infamously populated with a lot of young people. All told, I left Allston only once during my three or four day visit; this occurance does not seem uncommon. My friend who lived there used to describe Allston as “Sesame Street.” Andy’s friend describes it as being “like the suburbs, if everyone’s parents went away for the weekend and never came back.” Things are stagnant in Allston, but visiting this time, having spent the last month of my life living in weird, suburban post-graduate exile, it was exactly where I wanted to be, navigating through labrynthine basements that –when you’re drunk enough, but also sometimes when you’re not — all seem connected like capilaries pumping you through the inner workings of a neighborhood alive with a whole mess of strange things.

(A hot dog from Spike’s in Allston.)

In a cafe, during an aftenoon whose defining activity was “evesdropping,” I listened to two men chat about neuroscience and read Adam Gopnik’s terrific piece about Michael Ignatieff in last week’s New Yorker. “Loving a country is an act of the imagination,” Ignatieff says, and Gopnik adds, “though he insists that this does not make it unreal.” I think this is true about loving cities too.

I thought of DC in that moment — a city which I have loved, spurned, called my home, left, felt nostalgia for and, after a month and a half of exile and long-distance apartment-hunting, a city to which I am preparing to make a bizarrely emotional return that feels, so unexpectedly, like a homecoming. I thought of two friends who came to visit me there for a couple of days in July right before I moved. The places I took them, the things I said while walking backwards like a tour guide, the narratives that I, as a resident, keep afloat. Why am I trying to move back to DC in the first place?, I asked myself a lot this past month. Why this city and not another one? How am I connected to other people that live there? By everything, and by nothing, I think — by leaps of a collective imagination.

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