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Stories

Kent Avenue, 2002

She must have been hiding. I’m walking up Manhattan, almost home, when she steps onto the sidewalk out from some darkness, wrapped in a camelhair coat.

She walks alongside me and says, “Can I ask you a favor?” Her teeth almost chatter when she says it. It’s near midnight and cold, but not teeth-chattering cold.

I’ve always been an easy mark for panhandlers. If someone wants my spare change or five minutes of my time, they’re probably going to get it. It has occurred to me I will probably die from being too nice to say no. But this feels different. I sense a want, but no hustle.

I stop, but she says, “No, keep walking, please.” So we continue down the block. A few steps later she looks back to where she’d been, a bar with all its rhubarb and glass clinking. She says, “Some creep was following me from the G train. I ducked into that bar for a minute but I couldn’t tell if he was waiting for me. I just need someone to walk me home.”

Her place is around the corner on Kent, so we walk in that direction. Manhattan Avenue and the bar fade behind us and the night becomes quiet. I make some feint stabs at small talk. Each word that leaves my mouth feels dumber than the last, but I don’t know what else to do. Talk, even dumb talk, feels better than silence. Talk will keep away the creeps, I think.

We reach her building. I wait with my back turned to the front door while she fumbles in a purse for her keys. I scan Kent up and down. I see no one. The bodegas are shuttered and the apartments are dark. It’s so quiet, you can hear the drone of cars rumbling on the FDR across the river, echoing against the night.

I imagine armies of silent creeps hiding in shadows, lurching in the darkness like zombies. They will emerge all at once if I take my eyes off of the street for one moment. Strike one creep down and another will climb over his undead corpse to pursue what he thinks is his. I’ve never seen the world like this until now. It occurs to me that she must see it this way quite often. Every night. Every day.

She unlocks her front door and her mouth says “thanks,” but her face doesn’t. There’s still too much worry and anger there, anger that some creep threatened her. Anger that her best hope for getting home safely was to latch onto a random stranger and pray he wasn’t also a creep. She’s not angry with me, she’s just angry. She should be angry. I should be angry.

I want to give her some kind of apology, but I know it won’t make this night any better and I know it won’t change anything. So I wish her good night and I turn and make my own short walk home and I suppose I am safe but in truth she wasn’t and wherever she is now she still isn’t and so none of us are.

Stories

Queensboro Bridge, 2001

After one strange year in Bensonhurst, I have relocated to Greenpoint, along with a roommate. Our new place is an ancient railroad with bad wiring and brittle drop ceilings and no ventilation to speak of. But it is closer to where things are happening, which is enough at my current age.

The new apartment has a little area that could serve as a living room, provided we had a couch, which we do not. Neither of us are in a position to drop big bucks on furniture, but we fall ass-backwards into a couch when my roommate’s uncle informs us he bought one he doesn’t like or can’t use; he apparently dislikes the couch so much, he can’t decide exactly why he doesn’t want it. If we want to come get the couch, it’s ours. I can’t conceive of someone who’d just give away a couch, but if that’s what this man wants to do, who am I to stop him?

We rent a U-Haul, and realize when we pick the truck up that we’ve acquired way more truck than we need. It’s not a van, but a real truck, with a lift gate in the back and an overhang that extends across the cab, and a clearance height notice printed backwards so you can see it in your rearview.

I’ve driven a U-Haul in the city before. The first time came when I relocated post-college. That mission went off without a hitch, apart from the moment when I had to stop short on the Verrazano Bridge and heard all my earthly possessions shift, fall, and crash behind me. I also U-Hauled all of our stuff from one end of Brooklyn to the other when we moved to Greenpoint. That too went well, except for when I went to gas up the truck just before returning it and backed it into some dude’s van. Also on my driving résumé: negotiating band vans through city streets (high school–present), owner of an angry little Passat with manual transmission (1999–present). Therefore, I outrank my roommate in city driving experience. It falls to me to get this truck to his uncle’s apartment in Manhattan and back again.

The key to driving a truck in the city is to remember that you are bigger than pretty much everything else and you should act accordingly. Being timid and safe, pulling half out into traffic or stopping to allow a little sedan to move past you, that’s how pile ups happen.

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NYC, Parental Guidance

Baby’s First Brooklyn Moment

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On Sunday morning, me and the family took a brief trip into Greenpoint to pick up some gardening supplies and to stroll. I lived in Greenpoint for six pre-kid years and I still love it there, though I don’t find many chances to make it back to ye olde neighborhood.

When I called it home, Greenpoint struck me as having the exact amount of artsy-ness that Williamsburg aspired to while being a tad more real, for lack of a better word. For one thing, Greenpoint never needed to “recover” in the way that Williamsburg did, since it had a well-entrenched middle class that never left in bad old days of the 1970s and 1980s. On top of that, it seemed like the artists in Greenpoint actually had jobs and weren’t being held aloft by trust funds. This was provincial prejudice I’m sure, because it still wasn’t hard to find a wealthy dilettante among the populace, someone who seemed to be dabbling in bohemia until Dad’s Law Firm came calling. These folks tended to be the ones most into juvenalia like kickball tournaments and organized games of manhunt, since they had the idle time and total lack of worries necessary to waste in such pointless pursuits.

As I said, we were strolling through Greenpoint, on Nassau Street near Lorimer, where McCarren Park ends. Ahead of us, I saw a twenty-something swinging from scaffolding like it was a jungle gym. At a certain age and in a certain mood, I could have found this kind of thing is cute. In fact, I’m sure I’ve done the same at some point in my life, though I’m also sure I haven’t done so since college. To mid-30s Dad Me, it just struck me as juvenile, embodying the worst aspect of all the dumb infantile things people think of when they now think of Brooklyn. My mind voiced a judgmental Really?, but I said nothing out loud.

My daughter was less guarded. Our corner of Queens holds very few hipsters, and this was not a specimen she’d encountered before. “Why is that GROWN UP swinging like that?” she asked, very loudly. I saw this guy as a kid, because that’s how he was behaving, but to my child, everyone over the age of 10 is a Grown Up, and this was conduct unbecoming a Grown Up. The Swinger abruptly stopped, somewhat embarrassed, and continued on his way, as did we.

“Grown ups shouldn’t be acting like that,” my daughter said, again very loudly and slightly annoyed, as we passed by The Swinger.

“I agree,” I said, and I felt confident that I’d already given her enough information to tell the Real Grown Ups from the fake ones.