Category Archives: NYC

NYC, Stories

Borden Avenue, 7:18pm

hurlPost-work run down Borden Avenue. Almost done, tiring. I slow down near the ballfields across the street from the Hess station and Mt. Zion. On the field stand two off-the-boat Irish. They’re flaked with sheetrock dust from their day’s work. One stands near home plate, the other near the mound. Both of them have a hurling stick gripped in their hands, and they’re using them to lob a racquetball-sized sphere back and forth.

We had a hurling stick in our house when I was a kid. My dad brought it back from Ardee after he buried my grandfather. Hurling is Irish field hockey, basically. According to my dad, it was a deadly game, much like the brutish Gaelic football my grandfather used to play. Players would line the bottoms of their sticks with blunt metal strips held in place with nails, both to keep the wood from chipping against the turf and so the stick would do maximum damage in close-quarter scrums.

The hurling stick sat in a toy chest in the garage along with a Keith Hernandez Louisville slugger, cracked Wiffle Ball bats, and other blunt instruments, waiting to be unsheathed whenever me and my brothers made up some new game. These games would inevitably break down as we debated the rules, and the hurling stick would be used to avenge some slight, real or imagined. Crying and punishment would ensue, followed by parental threats to take that damn hurling stick away from us, resulting in more crying. No, mom, no, don’t take it away, we’ll be good.

I blamed the stick. It was such a perfectly designed implement of mayhem, it practically begged to be slammed against your brother’s calf. It surely was infused with some dark magic, the spirit that pervaded the sport for which it was intended.

And yet here I see these two men, surely exhausted from a day of work yet using their hurleys to relax, to lightly toss a little ball back and forth, back and forth, violence nowhere to be seen. I stop and look on for a moment while the sun sets behind me, and I feel I’m seeing some spell being snapped, some war being won.

Death In Queens, NYC

Niches

Fresh Pond Crematory

Death is never far in Queens, the borough of graves, but it creeps closer in certain places than others. One such place is Mount Olivet Crescent, a slip of a street that wends its way up a hill in Maspeth and down another in Middle Village. The Crescent is bordered on one side by its namesake cemetery, a lush expanse of granite mausoleums, angels, and obelisks cut in half by the busy thoroughfare of Eliot Avenue. A few ramshackle flower shops hang on for dear life, squeezed on all sides by vinyl-sided one-family houses and a sore thumb of a chrome-plated apartment complex. The Crescent comes to rest near an enormous sign pointing the way to the parking lot for the Hess-Miller Funeral Home, host to more than a few wakes for family members of mine.

At the Crescent’s summit, the Fresh Pond Crematory looms over it all, a cream-colored slab with a circular driveway paved in brick, ideal for the approach of hearses. Built in 1884, the exterior resembles a crossbreed between federal mint and Gilded Age prison. Cremation was rare enough in those days that a Brooklyn Eagle reporter made the long trip to Fresh Pond after hearing the mere rumor a wealthy German businessman was to be cremated there. The reporter soon found himself in an Abbott and Costello-esque exchange with one of the attendants, who impatiently explained he could cremate no one until the oven was complete.

The reporter eventually got what he wanted: a graphic description of exactly what cremation does to the human body. (“The total weight of the ashes of a full grown man would only be six or seven pounds.”) He also received a defense of the practice from the attendant, based largely on the overcrowded state of the city’s cemeteries and some other concerns about corpses that haunted the Victorian mind.

Oh, cremation is what we must all come to, and it has a great many advantages when you look at it in the right light. You can’t wake up after burial and find yourself choking to death with six feet of earth over you and your coffin nailed down, and medical students can’t snatch your bones and monkey with them in their dissecting rooms. You can have your cemeteries all the same, and set these urns in them and plant flowers about the urns; that will be all right and nobody will be hurt. This thing has to come.

The crematory has grown considerably since those days, when nearby residents were worried about the smell such a facility might produce. A towering smokestack now announces its true purpose, as do the large copper letters over the main entrance, dripping green with its name. Beneath, in smaller, more polished type, is the announcement AMERICAN COLUMBARIUM CO., INC.

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NYC, Pointless Nostalgia

Seizures

As the subway doors unlatch, someone shoves me in the back, hard. This is more than the usual L train jostle. It is especially aggressive even for the Union Square stop, where the “I’m ignoring your humanity to make my commute slightly easier” brush-by is standard operating procedure. This move must have sinister purpose behind it, I assume. And so I pivot from my 7:30 am perch on the overhead bar and turn to face my aggressor. I have nothing planned other than a dirty look. I do this all the time even though it’s a move with no upside whatsoever. At best, I will get to see the face of someone who regards me as little more than an insect. At worst, I will find myself in a fistfight.

When I turn, I see the man who shoved me. Shaved head, black windbreaker scuffed with sheetrock dust and eggshell paint. He has the lumbering gait of a drunk launching himself from one parking meter to the next on the long walk home. He may very well be drunk, for all I can tell. This wouldn’t be the first guy I’ve seen stewed to the gills at this early hour on the subway. Then he careens into a woman much smaller than him, his shoulder stooping to her height. It doesn’t look intentional. He’s fighting something, and losing. His knees buckle beneath him, and his head begins to twitch and jerk.

“He’s having a seizure!” a woman yells. It sounds like dialogue from a script that doesn’t trust its director to explain things visually. I almost laugh, and yet I understand the urge to yell out something the second it hits your brain at a weird moment like this one. The crowd parts around the man, and the sudden lack of bodies speeds his descent. However, he has enough control of his facilities to lower himself, first sitting, then prone as he continues to shake.

The train remains paused. Not to address the man’s condition, but to let out the large crowd of people who depart at Union Square. Some of those who remain stare, while others look away, embarrassed. No one is quite sure what to do. We’re all spooked, myself included. But I’m spooked for a different reason. This all feels too familiar to me.

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