Internal Emigres.(efforts of New Yorkers to find peace and quiet)(Brief Article)

The two big Caterpillar bulldozers were lifting up the skin of the street on the west side of Union Square and digging out its bones and arteries. The gestures they made, as one machine hoisted a piece of infrastructural detritus and passed it to the metal blade of the other, were tender: They might have been songbirds feeding each other, or teenagers fumbling over a prom corsage. But the sounds and smells were dismal. Motors sang, metal squealed. The machines were wreathed in clouds of blue exhaust discharge, and when the big corroded piece of pipe they were grappling with-Truman-era? McKinley?-was finally lifted up and away, it shed a dandruff of rust and grit.

Five feet from this party for fiends, out of Bosch via Dickens, sat the outdoor cafe of a parkside restaurant. Patrons in sunglasses sipped batidas, answered their pagers, and studied the abdomens of the waitresses, smooth as toothpaste tubes and not much thicker. If they looked in the direction of the struggling metal dinosaurs, they looked above them, to the park's canopy of shivering spring leaves. When I took a table inside, I asked the owner how anyone could sit cheek by jowl with such racket. "They want serenity," he said.

New Yorkers want serenity, and they will have it, despite all distractions. Each can pull a cone of quiet over himself; in the middle of Penn Station during rush hour, or the Sheep Meadow on a Sunday afternoon, or Times Square at intermission, they can walk, sit, or stand and think, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him," or "The jewel is in the eye of the lotus." They need the gift of serenity, for they have much to fend off. Giuliani Time-let us praise it before it ends-drained great sacs of crime and filth from the city. But ordinary urban hassle and overstimulation remain.

The most annoying stimuli are those that occur in confined spaces. Every time you enter a cab nowadays, you are greeted with a recorded announcement reminding you to buckle your seat belt. The announcers are celebrities-tongue-tied athletes, obscure sports broadcasters, DJs on radio stations you have never heard. I find that the announcements do work, and that, like a conditioned laboratory animal, I always snap myself in. But the copy is coy or witless (only Jackie Mason's announcements hold up after the fiftieth hearing), and if the driver is chattering on his cell phone, and has the radio on besides, the riding experience is a glum one.

In the subway there are performers. Nothing can fill up a platform like the Shining Path Marching Band, thumping out Andean folk tunes; the apache doing a tango with a life-sized mannequin; the woman playing "How Great Thou Art" on a musical saw; the youth with an electric guitar singing "All I Have to Do Is Dream" with vowels even more adenoidal than those of the Everly Brothers themselves.

I can make you mieen,

Taste your lips of wieen, ...