The loading dock was where the city ate. Every restaurant and every grocery store and every bodega had a loading dock or a back door or a steel plate in the sidewalk that opened to a basement. At four in the morning the trucks came. The whole city was fed before the city woke up. You never saw it happen. You just opened the refrigerator and the food was there. The loading dock was the mouth of the city and it never closed.

The men on the loading dock worked in the dark. They started before the sun and they finished before lunch and they moved boxes that weighed more than you did and they stacked them on dollies and rolled them down ramps and into basements and up freight elevators and into kitchens where somebody turned those boxes into your dinner. The loading dock was the first link in a chain that ended with you sitting in a restaurant complaining about the service.

I played guitar on the Meatpacking District docks in the seventies. The cobblestones were slick with blood and fat from the slaughterhouses. The loading docks had hooks and rails and men in white coats swinging carcasses like they were dancing with the dead. The smell was something you never forgot. Iron and cold and the inside of an animal. I played on the corner of Gansevoort and Washington and the dock workers came out on their break and they listened and one of them gave me a pork chop wrapped in paper. That is how you get paid on a loading dock. In meat.

Every loading dock had a foreman. The foreman stood on the dock with a clipboard and he checked off every box and every crate and he knew what was supposed to be there and what was not supposed to be there and if something went missing the foreman knew who took it. The clipboard was the law. The foreman was the judge. On the waterfront the loading dock was the only courtroom that ran twenty-four hours a day.

The loading docks are condos now. The Meatpacking District smells like perfume. The cobblestones are still there but they are decorative. Tourists walk on the same stones where men swung beef and they take photographs and they do not know what happened here. The loading dock is a lobby. The freight elevator is a loft. The ramp where they rolled the dollies is a place where somebody parks a stroller. The city eats from warehouses in New Jersey now. The mouth moved to the suburbs. The teeth are gone.

See also: Cobblestone, Manhole Cover