Happ New Year from Hdee and His Friends Yeah. Up on the roof, waiting for the fireworks to begin in warm winter rain, a moment ago I stepped from the elevator into the black air of an almost New Year and need a minute to catch my breath at the spread of city open to my eye. I can't go to the edge; I never could. The old fear of height still troubles me, the sensation that nothing can be under me if I am surrounded by mist and rain and all of the dark night air we breathe. Even a glimpse at the treetops in the park, with its slick crisscrossing roads that plunge into the jumbled panorama of East Side , hysterical tonight with its own incandescence, gives me the willies. I feel as if I were standing on the deck of a showboat of a cloud as it drifts down some dark river, waiting for it to bang into some other building's fifteenth floor. How can these old people hunch the railing, hoisting their plastic glasses of champagne from under dripping umbrellas, as if they drank the rain as they laugh their analyses of the weather? Maybe now, like me, they have nothing to lose. I moved in three weeks ago; this is my first trip to the roof. I don't want to die tonight, the first fatality of 2020! There's too much of me I left in pieces last year, oh, the whole last Year : But I'm up here to distract myself, temporarily, from what I don't want or can't have in the way of love. . . . That must be the Bridge, tied in its strings of blue lights, and I can seePark the skating rink, like a scoured mirror below, where some madman waves a red lantern; he must be drunk. I have only sipped a speck of Drambuie, which I didn't carry in my Coca-Cola glass up to these festivities. This is the first New Year's I've spent alone in twenty, twenty-two years. I never could go to the edge; but I did. Out there in the dark: my Girl, the woman I Like So Much, as she did me, or none too well; the places we lived; the apartment I once half-owned; the thousands of books I had to leave behind (though I am to be granted library privileges) and the black and white cat I really miss. My wife's with her friends tonight somewhere in the Town ; friends of mine out there, too, though I don't know where. It's just like me to move in the middle of a telephone company strike. Thus, no calls from anyone—and I don't even have a telephone yet, so who could call? Damp but trying to smile, I eye the revelers. Two young men and their enormous girlfriends have joined us, really large women who carry balloons, all ready to froth in merry champagne. We check our watches to the screams from swarms of apartment windows to the west as the sky lights up with the first furious bombardment of colored shells. I can see that red lantern swinging toward the rockets—aha! So it wasn't a drunk, but the fireworks engineer preparing to blow the year's last sky to smithereens for our delight! I like to follow the tiny spurts of flame from the launching pad in their heavenward trajectory as much as I like the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, which give proof to the night that I am still here, hands jammed in the pockets of my sodden raincoat, face dripping with rain, hat soaked, wondering if the skinny guy in the army jacket behind me (who looks just like I did in the sixties) is mumbling his way into a combat flashback and ready to hurl me over the edge of the roof and into kingdom come. I guess not yet. We've survived the first blasts of spinning green, corkscrews of spangled flame, buds of fireballs spewed in arching gold sprays, the whistling fire-fish that curl and howl as they flare, falling to ash. Screaming its head off, the New York New Year enters. I feel sad that beautiful things must die, even shadows made of smoke and flame, whatever I thought I had made out of my life— music, poems, books, kisses, a little useless fame. The army guy behind me grumbles at the haze of rocket smoke that coils around the trees, then tumbles up into the air toward Harlem. That bump and thud and bump sound everywhere, more clouds smacking each other head-on. The flashes of the explosions are close enough to touch if you wanted to burn your fingers on the sky, and the glare rocks our shadows back against the brick, as if chaos snapped our pictures in the dark. I smile for my portrait, curious at the New Year, smelling the acrid smoke of the one we've just destroyed. Then I squeeze into the tiny elevator car with the others, anonymous, reconciled to be so, back to my little apartment and the waiting glass of amber drink I'll raise, only half in jest, to my new life.