Hot Town (Summer 1967)

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A form of memory

• Forms of memory, or memory forms, emerge from a purposeful blend of memoir, creative nonfiction, and autofiction. The aim is to sculpt, out of the lived material of a life, artful form; to represent the life’s spiritual and bodily truth and at the same time serve the aim of art to seek truth beyond a single, ephemeral appearance in the world. Memory forms may be long or short, even to the brevity of vignette, such as here.

In the rain in Tompkins Square Park. 1967. (James Jowers/George Eastman Museum/Flickr — Library of Congress/Indicommons, “no known restrictions.”)

Play the YouTube audio stream to listen before you read, or while you read if you can. (You can choose to read only — yes, read! — but the music is important. It is the atmosphere circulating around the earth of the words, the oxygen giving them breath. The writing is born of the music, like the first cells from the soup of creation.)

The high sun beat down hard on the Rockaway guys’ sweat-beaded torsos, their quick crossing arms smacking tight-gloved hands, on the side lean…