Every photo is a frame in an ongoing story -- brief flashes of old men conversing at the end of the road, little kids unabashedly picking their noses and staring into the face of the camera, passengers shaking with the lurch of a subway car, unfazed. Old tricks of humanity that never get old. It's funny, seeing the things you can catch in a mere fraction of time, and the people you capture therein.
We happened to know each other from work. I was 19 and full of wonder; she was 30 and a former electrician. A gruff, extroverted individual with a sense of immortality -- a perfect subject for the lens, I thought.
We were headed towards the City Hall observatory on that brisk autumn morning, to see if we could get a picturesque shot of the city. Unfortunately, the top floor happened to be closed for repairs that day.
"Someone jumped off the roof," said a man passing the front desk.
"It's closed for repairs," interjected the receptionist with his polite Polish Buffalonian accent.
But this did not dampen our spirits, and we instead went about town sizing up roofs and billboards to see if we could climb them. My subject tried in vain to unscrew the sixth floor windows of the Adam's Mark hotel with a plastic fork, while I took pictures of the maids chatting in the parking lot. We attempted to gain access to the roof of the Buffalo Athletic Club, pretending we were confused foreigners when they requested a membership card.
We looked skyward for a ladder glinting in the corner of some high-rise building front. The rooftop sanctuary in fact became a quest, a goal. Clearly, this wasn't just a photo shoot -- like Hunter S. Thompson's mission in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," it was the pursuit of the American Dream.
Being as such, I bought a sparkling pink plastic cowboy hat at the dollar store along the way. We used it to scare front desk receptionists, who frequently shot us a dirty look when we imparted our mission.
"Is there something I can help you ladies with?" asked one particularly stiff hotel woman with a pleated skirt and a face to match.
"No, we just wanted to know if we could get on your roof," bellowed my partner in crime, sparkling hat ablaze. I was busy hiding in the corner at the time.
"There's an observatory for that at City Hall," said the receptionist with strained politeness.
We returned to the cold and cluttered street.
"The best thing to do is not to care what anyone else thinks," said my counterpart as she confidently stepped into oncoming traffic.
We passed a construction man who was inspecting a manhole and bellowed to his partner, "Hey Al! No rats in this one!" We passed a cop nibbling at a Slim Jim. Old tricks that never get old.
The cowboy hat became a subject of photographic wonder itself -- peeking out of a dryer at the Laundromat, poised elegantly at the end of a coffee table, lying at the basin of a forgotten cathedral in the slums, like a Dollar Tree country music video gone wrong.
But with each passing venue and each rejected request, there was a growing decision to put the American Dream on hold. We instead took to the outskirts, letting it find us.
We rode a shopping cart to the city limits, watching as buildings wore down to unkempt grass. We rolled freely past deteriorating apartments and broken windows, to the desolate end of the city.
Here lay the underside of the American Dream -- abandoned playgrounds covered in graffiti, ponds that had dried up and filled with dead leaves, overstuffed garbage receptacles belching remnants of a former life.
"Let's go," I said.
We never found a rooftop sanctuary. But we did settle on the top level of an abandoned parking garage. It was a compromising end to a bizarre excursion, but it was somewhere.
"I sure won't look at buildings the same way again," she said with a baritone resolution, watching as the sun slipped down the edge of Lake Erie.
And with that, I snapped the shutter.
Photo: Courtesy of SUNY
