Part One:
CITIZEN

Gisela Reiz

HAPPINESS IS THE ROOF were the words I thought I heard of a song playing on 145th and Amsterdam from a grainy boom box at a small African store, little more than a stall. The song sounded catchy and old, like late Motown or seventies soul, yet I hadn't heard it before; I thought I had missed something from my childhood. By the time I heard it again, the next day at the Goodwill on West 25th between Sixth and Seventh Avenues while trying on a white cardigan, there coursed through me a happiness I'd had no hint of in thirteen ill-starred years, a happiness I more habitually associated with being in love. Decades of smashed mirrors tracked me. I had, the day before, found a new home, a room in a long apartment on Riverside Drive in Harlem, its building a grey-painted bastion, a warship with two entrances, the smell of frying chicken and the sound of sports penetrating its thick walls. Happiness is indeed a roof, even though the words of the song go differently. In the sixties and early seventies there were two songs about the roof, by Laura Nyro and Diana Ross, respectively, "Up on the Roof" and "Up the Ladder to the Roof". Those roofs were euphoric places of escape, the crown of buildings, not symbolic of domiciles themselves, which it was assumed, however humble, we had. To measure the distance we have come as a city--all three songs would seem to be about New York--is to recognize that, where once we could climb to our own roof, now, our very relationship to such a roof is in question. The words measure also the path I have traveled, from householder to homeless and, with fragile foothold, back again.

The city I migrated to from Los Angeles as a Barnard student in 1976 is not the one I inhabit now, and the rules and definitions of "bag lady" have changed, encompassing a far wider demographic, one that intermittently includes me, although I am far too lazy to carry bags. It is interesting to note that the German word for "homeless" is "obdachlos" or "dachlos"—roofless— recorded even in cemetery records.

New York City, against gentrification, against unconscionable rents, against all the odds, is still a place where it is possible to jump from one estate to another, from dispossession to what the I Ching, The Book of Changes, calls “possession in great measure,” remembering always that the essence of the I Ching, and of life, is change. I inhabit New York City just as I inhabit the English language. In what other city—and I have lived in six—would I live; in what other language would I write? I know the city’s tenses, its moods, its caesuras—which is to say its commas--its silent cases, and, of course, its periods.

In between home and homelessness were episodes of such heartbreak and shame I cannot stand to think of them without a thick veil of alcohol and Newports. Minus these consolations I dream of them again and again, in different guises, different scenes of guilt and horror, most of all a sadness in which there is no unbearable lightness, only the sightless, hollow void called by Bible Belters 'The Rapture'. It is a term in Christian eschatology which refers to “being caught up” in two opposite senses. In the first, those who are blessed, who have repented and are alive in Christ will be “caught up in the clouds” to meet “the Lord in the air.” Thessalonians 4:17. In the negative sense, the so-called pre-tribulation view, a group of people will be left behind on earth to experience a period of sightless trial, the phenomenon depicted so graphically in the movie The Rapture which introduced me to the term. When I think on the things I have done and left undone, I know I am slated for the Rapture in the second sense.

"Look back but don't stare" is one of my favorite sayings, garnered from Alcoholics Anonymous, where I have made many meetings without, for long, meeting the task of being sober. But it is a great saying, five words of lightness that comfort us over what A.A. also calls "the wreckage of the past." The day I found my room, and the day after, were days of rapture, in the first sense: a resurrection. The real words of the song, by rapper Pharrell Williams, are: “Happiness is the truth.” Amen.