Sitting while the
ladies walk and congeal into predetermined clusters of talk. Banter
back-and-forth with an old tinge of jazz and wrapped in rap, a modern imbalance
of nostalgia and real time. A perch like the pigeons, which allows for the
violation of some common understanding, urging one not to stare nor inquire-
seated and defiant in a shameless guise- but only a white girl from the Boston
sub-urban sector in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. Immobile in an alien world, ass
imprinted with a seven-minute cigarette break on the grated escape.
Two stories up the
white cinder-block building, aged with something akin to the beach-chair crew-
an elderly collective of eight regulars, the dark, male senior participants who
rest daily in their beach recliners playing with vices, hounds as they name themselves, parked at the base of the
building on Throop. Wrinkled, beer stained and darker with age, made simply
more beautiful by virtue of interest- both building and man, some edifying paradigm
of the urban design. A rot-iron pedestal, rusting and probably ineffective at
this point, a structure with intent to save lives, or used to drop your trash
into the miniscule and already cracked trash-cans below- some gravity promoted
basketball variation. It is the escape from a stuffy apartment when Matt is
cooking chicken as though he were on television, or Josh is writing and needs
peace, or when the guest needs a cigarette to reflect. It is an excuse to mask
the Brooklyn o-zone and mistake it for fresh air, and it is an excuse to stare
at the habitat so foreign to a suburban visitor- or a child whose ignorance’s
are immediately displayed and marked on her forehead, intensified with every
expression of inquiry.
**
Seated on the
C-line en route to the apartment from Manhattan with a backpack and a sleeping
bag in tow, a visitor waits apprehensively for the Kingston-Throop stop, never
quite sure whether if she took the right train. Eyes wander, but this is not
the Boston she grew up with, it is New York and eye contact is more of a violation
than a passive interaction and the unspoken rule says, “back the fuck off,” and
aggressively returns glares. It is not an assumption, or a grand exaggeration
of the truth from the perspective of a foreigner, or the Bostonian- this is the
reality, because she will keep doing it unintentionally until someone barks.
Saved by the bell and the stop is announced, the train moves to a halt and
everyone waiting files off.
Street level and
things are weird. It is ten o’clock p.m. and there are taxis that look like cop
cars wait on corners where groups of people gather and exchange hands,
cigarettes or looks. The visitor stops to light a cigarette and makes a phone
call to her destination, they tell her to not walk on the left side of Throop
on the way down to the apartment. Saturday Night Fever blasts the bass from
‘souped’ up tin-can cars and fuzz alarms scream, careening around corners to
attend to something. As she walks, condoms are dropped on the sidewalk to make
a bread crumb trail to any door on the block and voices from dark stoops ask
for a butt, or a light, or some warm coinage from the pockets of a poor college
student- impoverished compared to what, and she feels the slap on her own hand.
It was never Kansas, but where ever we
are is not Manhattan, it is not Boston, or Needham, or a cozy campus in Western
Massachusetts.
A block away from
the mock-marble apartment building, a corner store advertises basic junk food,
cigarettes, and eggs. The foreigner goes inside and puts her dinner on the
counter. The cashier laughs while he is ringing up a buck fifty, “You just move
here, girl?” Laughter from both parties- but, no, just visiting friends.
Laughter from his side, because she is serious, “Yeah, I thought so. Sweetness,
you should run on home-“ Handing over the bag of chips, the door, the night and
the absence of the overly grimy florescent lighting of the shop swallowed the ‘Sweetness’
into the streets of an unknown walk. A nighttime world of a neighborhood
tainted by movie scenes of gang boys with their cuts and colors and painted
street-crawlers. Whether or not this is a reality, the apartment sounded ideal,
and she heeded the clerk’s advice as best she could- Boston was a far way away.
Five-fifty Throop
Street is not much of a ‘hood’ by cliché definition, but for the visitor’s
hosts, this was a far cry from the Jewish haven of the Greater Boston suburbs. A
place rich in mural graffiti art, a Biggie memorial down the way, and a series
of cracked out neighbors. It is a place for rich observation for those who hail
from out of town, but it is a realm in which one does not poke their oblivious
and curious heads into other peoples’ business. Staring is not caring, and it
should be assumed that the bark not worse than the bite, the assumption should
always be equivalence and curiosity will kill the cat who looses his head.
But there is a
place where the view is removed enough to go unnoticed, a respite amidst the
chaotic world inside a cramped, low-rent apartment and the sidewalk life. The
fire escape, only a window lift and curtain shift away. Cold and rusted and
intimate, black and blue to such a point that it blends into the nighttime, the
smoky air. The fire escape, where seven minutes of burning time allows for the
perpetuation of some romantic and grungy view of the city, the neighborhood, our
lives- allowing such a screen for the display of the literal ebbs and flows of
the human behavior. The nighttime is unsolved, it is intensified and loud- fast
paced and hazy with cars moving too fast and dominated by the male element. We
hear stories that ward of gentrification and paint an awful picture, however
filled with life the moment may really be; but in the opposing twelve hours- in
the daylight, so familiar and charming, women collect with their children after
church on the Sunday morning stoop steps, dog walkers and shop keepers welcome
the business day or some glaring city sun. The sound is different, the light,
the time and the voice are different and from the looming catwalk of ethereal
power, or maybe more humbly a sanctuary for the foreigner, the lonely, the view
of the real-life ‘show’ is the most beautiful performance in New York. Free of
charge. Protected from the previously established and unalterable notions we
have- she had- safe from the shit and the ash and the hazardous bikes on the
sidewalks, there is a trip to be had in being the voyeur. An unadulterated joy
in peeking in on the everything, anonymously- the escape is the perpetuation of
all urban attributes, and it ignites something in the self-alienated foreigner.
It ignites something in the feel of the borough, the neighborhood, the
community and there is emotion, and there is sight beyond that which we keep to
ourselves on the subway.
**
The same clerk
walks back to his apartment while the visitor smokes with one of her hosts a
couple of stories up. By chance, while several cars pass and other pedestrians
knock shoulders, he looks up and looks until he recognizes her face. He laughs,
nods and proceeds, shaking his head while he walks, well aware of the fact that
the three of them had shared a rare moment of the mutual violation of an
intimate look in. One, a man in meditation following a day of hard work, on his
feet and ringing up useless and seemingly essential trinkets of processed crap.
The other, a long separated pair of friends, reconnecting in their private
space, hanging above the most public of streets- but eyes met, the moment was
enjoyed and the example was set. This was the perch of a passive observer, for
the creative mind too interested in everyone else’s.
In the morning,
the one-night veteran meets the clerk at the corner store to buy pancake mix
and a carton of eggs. He chuckles and calls her champ as she recounts watching
the across the street neighbor from the fire escape putting a cat in a trash
can, which he promptly brought back into his apartment building. He says he’s
seen if before and raps an eloquent anecdote about him and his baby daughter
during their nightly moments of fresh air, together, on their fire escape. Him,
holding her, cherishing her and simultaneously watching a series of cop cars
running after a fleeing buddy, or watching subtle narcotic exchanges from the
limbs of a concrete tree, or singing her to sleep while the homeless jazz-rat
plays his saxophone on the streets below when he thinks no one else is
listening. Nothing but a jovial look and tears in his eyes, the clerk sends her
off, back to her perch, telling her to enjoy the idea of being above violation
or fear, suspended above the crime or the nightly vexations and temptations.
“Run on home, girl, Boston misses you.”
