I Met a Landsman on Ludlow Street
I’m at the crossroads tonight-
where Chinatown meets Dimes Square,
where the old lower east side and hipsterdom
converge, a block between two movie houses,
one hosting a premiere for Invisible Beauty,
the other shuttered for 5o years.
My husband and I are having dinner
with my son and his fiancé but it’s too early
to buzz their apartment so we join the crowd
outside the Metrograph, watch leggy arrivals
step from limos—accompanied by the scent
of perfume.
We walk north and smell ocean. A clean
fish scent from a nearby warehouse.
We stride from jasmine to skipjack —
orange roughy to orange blossom,
reminded of Leo Carax’s film, Lovers
on the Bridge, where music segues
like scent —
careens from Bowie to Straus
and back again. Just as we return
to the Metrograph, we meet a tuxedoed
young man, working at the movie house,
dressed for the evening’s event. I imagine
he’s a film lover, so I gesture to the boarded-up
Lowes Canal Street Theater,
tell him how I wish I could see the terracotta
gargoyles and sea creatures, sit among
the flickering ghosts. He looks around,
makes sure no one hears, tells me there’s a way.
Get a crowbar. Open that grate — and you’re in.
He’s done it. Many times.
Grew up here, on this block.
Points out his name in white graffiti, Ben Merck,
near the roof of the movie palace, still there
from his teenage years. We have history on the block
too, I tell him—where neon pink now announces vegan
leathergoods, a building once owned by my family.
Up the street, the empty Grand Street Dairy,
where my husband met my parents for the first time
and, after he ordered honeymoon instead of honeydew,
we announced our wedding plans.
When Ben was growing up on the block, he tells me,
everyone was in the schmata business.
He lived with his grandmother, an Auschwitz
survivor. Where was she from? I ask.
Lodz. Of course, Lodz —my grandfather’s city,
where our family was in the schmata business.
Lodz— where I wept at a rooftop bar, swifts darting
through the sunset over Posnanski’s textile factory.
Time to let my son know we’ve arrived. Dinner
in the middle of Canal Street — the part closed to traffic,
our feet planted on the white dividing line.
Hors d’oeuvres and glassfuls of sherry.
So wound up — who would imagine I would meet
a landsman on Ludlow Street today?
After dinner, we walk our son the half-block home,
call an Uber. Our car pulls away slowly,
the street still crowded, now post-screening.
Invisible Beauty. I roll down my window, call out
to my friend in the tux—
I loved meeting you,
Ben Merck.
