Sam Farhi
Editor’s Note of Introduction
We are excited to present this new section, Place & Process, to explore individual writers’ connections with the places that have informed their writing. The following is an original piece by Sam Farhi about Ithaca, NY. Farhi‘s debut novel, The Sapsuckers, is also set in Ithaca and is sure to be one of the defining texts connected with this literary town.
—Hardy Griffin, for the editors
First there’s the mall, then the winding highway we’ve almost died on a few times either walking or speeding in a weed-filled souped-up Honda, off of which is the red-bricked middle school which felt like hell, over its football field is the orange-bricked sister school, Ithaca High, that contains fodder for books of tragedy, raw heartbreak and a few spots of real levity, leading to the wide street of North Cayuga where children strapped with plump backpacks have to walk with the stretched bodies of tall alien older boys and girls laughing over jokes that could be about them for all they know, but eventually they hit Triangle Park and see their parents’ friends playing with their terriers and if they look for it, in the corner of their eye is the rusted tee shirt of a derelict who lives there at night, his backpack once a thousand dollar item from the Outdoor Store stuffed with clothes and essentials, attached by leash to a pockmarked dog who is his most loyal friend, as were the backstabbers and a particular “whore” once were, he swears, that got him here.
The derelict dips his hands in the stream and even the dirt leaves him, crystallizes and flows down the creek connected to a cove of shale and ultimately a waterfall that has been dulled over millions of years, in it is a few of the alien high schoolers who left early (they never have to walk with the hordes of bottled hormones, they’re freer they say but they’re virgins) and pack their bowls as this beautiful gorge is where no one goes, which is perfect for them and two stragglers from the Rainbow Gathering, trying to figure out how to fix their Mini-DV camera (this is all in the early aughts) to film another porno for the public-sex fetish site even though through tubes and wires and packets and however a network works, there’s a sophomore across town Googling “Ithaca blowjob” “Ithaca sex” “Ithaca college sex” and finding nothing over and over and over again.
And this is my home, a place I return to every morning, in Baltimore at 5 AM, in a dark closet we put a desk in. And when you say gorge, this is the place I think of, the wide rock right before the waterfall at the Lynn Street entrance, where for moments I felt what the world offers: desperation, loss, real love.
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