In particular Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Red Hook, and Prospect Park
Clean PathsWatching, walking, in Prospect Park, under the airplanes.
My Life with Cat and Dog, a StoryRebecca Dravos' first contribution to Ftrain. A story of pet ownership and potential love, or at least lust, frustrated by circumstances.
How We're CopingWith things all aflutter, and no good protest songs, we need to do something. Also, God tells us to protest.
Misc. DialoguesI was entering the York St. station at 10 tonight, and as I swiped my card through the turnstile, a young woman, standing next to her boyfriend, said something to me—I wasn't sure what. I mumbled an apology and went through, down the long hall, only to hear her yell out “Why won't you wait?”
I tilted my head back and said, to the ceiling, “Because I'm going the train.” The hallway carried my voice back to her. Her feet slapped the concrete as she ran to catch up.
“I wanted to talk to you,” she said. I looked down and over—small, brunette, in her early 20s.
“What's there to talk about?” I asked.
“Why are you so serious? You're not living!” she said. “You need to live! What's your name?”
“I don't give my name to strangers,” I said, smiling. Suddenly I was sweating in the still, hot air, and I wanted to read the Times folded into my bag.
“Oh! Well, my name is...Sabine.” Making it up. Her boyfriend crept behind her, ashamed at her gregariousness, and was now hiding behind one of the station's large columns.
“You're smiling now,” she said. “You need to have fun.”
“Do you talk to a lot of strangers?” I asked.
“When I've had that many margaritas,” she said. “You look really mellow in that green shirt. Really cool! To be honest, I've never spoken to a stranger like this before. You know what's crazy? That at 5'2“ I can intimidate someone as big as you!”
Her boyfriend now came out from behind his pillar, and took her hand. He had short, fuzzy hair. “Come on, what's your name?” she asked me.
“Andrew Womack,” I said, and the train came. She shook my hand and said, “you need to live!” and got on another car. I sat down to read my magazine. I'd been coming from a rehearsal, with my friend Steve, of our 12-minute miniature musical about a squirrel (myself) and a rat (Steve) who live in Prospect Park. The first performance will be at How to Kick People, this Wednesday. We'd made solid progress, working out the musical cues, and the script was in reasonable shape, in need of smoothing, but basically sound.
I got off the train and went to my girlfriend's place. Half-gangsters lurked outside her building, surly men in v-neck T-shirts and do-rags. Hello, I said, how you doing? The man closest to the door grunted, and I nodded. My girlfriend has a badly broken foot, and is housebound. She can't walk without crutches, or protest the RNC. We spoke sad and light.
We'd been to the emergency room at Long Island College Hospital on Saturday, sitting in the waiting room on Hicks and Amity and looking out over the East River. My girlfriend wore a huge fuzzy yellow slipper (Steve Madden) over her swollen foot. While we waited it rained, until half of Hicks St. was flooded, and then the doctors took her, to make sense of the fractures. I read a book as people milled through. One man held blood-soaked paper towels to his forehead; some limped slightly; one man read the Spanish edition of The Watchtower.
Tonight, she wanted to do some work, and I left to walk the 15 minutes home, taking Court St. instead of Smith, because at night Smith turns into depressing, empty, dead lots, and I was in no mood. Hospitals, squirrels, strangers. A few blocks down the street, a man came up behind me, loudly thanking an invisible Jesus for his life. I counted three steps and then I heard, “big dude. Big dude. Big dude!” And then he was to my right. He asked if I could give him a moment of my time, but before I said a word, he told me that his wife had thrown him out and called the cops. He had no socks (hiking up his pants to show me), and no home, and he needed three dollars for some unspecified purpose. I gave him a half-handful of change, maybe a dollar. “What's your name, big man?”
I told him my real name. His name was Todd, he said, and some motherfuckers on the streets wouldn't tell you their real names. But he was keeping things real because I was straight up. He put out his rough, swollen hand, and I shook it.
He went over to ask a middle-aged couple for money, and the man he asked said, “I helped you out last week.” I thought, Todd is not a store or a bank. He does not know his own story, and his name keeps changing.
Todd caught up with me, and said, some people are motherfuckers. I know this, I said. He asked me for another dollar. I said no, and he said, I can't fuck with you no more, Paul, and told me I was a good man, and I told him to take care and watch out for himself.
There's another guy, who has no hand, just a few miniature, nubby fingers that come from a stump. He rides a bicycle at night, and begs from me every chance he gets. I have often been generous, but the last time he asked me for money, I didn't have any. I watched as he pulled the bike over, reached into his pocket, and pulled out his cell phone. I saw from the shades cast on his cheek that it had a color screen, and was much nicer than my own.
I don't know what the woman wanted, waiting for the train. The sockless junkie is another story, because I know he felt a real pleasure at the cascade of pocket change into his palm, relief imminent. I don't have room to criticize, because when I write, I make my living asking strangers for their approval, and their change.
Moments of WeaknessA tiny, ad hoc catalogue of guilty pleasures and poor judgement.
Walk with Friend up Clinton St. and BackI is an intellectual type, when I don't watch myself. Ah well.
Weekend: Court StreetGetting stones thrown at me in Red Hook.
BookstoresTwo bookstores on Court St. in Brooklyn, a dog, and a policeman's beard.
Oyster Shucking ContestA few weeks ago I attended an oyster shucking contest by accident. The Borough President of Brooklyn, Marty Markowitz, was there.
Weather ReportCognition has broken down. There is nothing to describe except warm pressure.
CakeTerrible things done with the human language.
22 ChildrenOne Afternoon
Rear Subway WindowA look out the back of the F train
SpendingWhy I don't have a name.
I Met a Woman at a BarA friend insisted I come out despite my absolute non-desire to go out on a Sunday night, and a pile of work remaining at home. I showed up in sartorial shame, jeans and a button shirt, hair sticking up, full of self-hatred. He introduced me to the woman with whom he'd been talking and slipped away to chat up someone else.
This was a confident, attractive person, small and thin with dark brown hair and an expensive blouse and anime eyes, about 27. I asked her how she met my friend. “We used to go out,” she said. “But you know.”
“Absolutely,” I said.
She smiled and nodded, and said, “I know, right? But what do you do?”
“Not much you can do.”
“No, I meant, what do you do for a living?”
I thought for a moment. “I'm a typographer at Condé Nast,” I said.
“What's that like?”
“I'm in the colon department.”
“Is it a lot of work?”
“I have to verify all the colons in five Condé Nast publications. Mostly I deal with all the colons at Vogue. But I'm getting certified on the em-dash. I do Italian colons, too.”
“You work at Vogue? That's cool.” Her gaze sharpened. “I'm in fashion.”
“How so?”
“I co-manage a vintage shop, on East 6th St. In Williamsburg, but we also have some originals.”
“That sounds great,” I said. I needed urgently to not talk about that, to never have that conversation. A crowd of people clustered around the entrance, sucking down cigarettes, so, grasping, I said: “it's so strange to have bars with clean air.”
“I hated it at first. But it makes it so much easier to cheat, right?” Giggling.
“Really?”
“I don't smell like smoke anymore. So I leave work, go out, meet someone, have a stick of gum, and go back to my place.”
“And at your place?”
“I live with my boyfriend. It was supposed to be open. Ha, right?” She touched my shoulder. “But he works all the time and gets home at 2 in the morning and gets no play and gets pissed off. But I'm like, we made the deal, right? I used to come home and, you know, after a while, I smell like smoke every night, and he gets all...”
“Suspicious.”
“Exactly. But it's so good for my relationship now. We totally get along.”
“Because you can fool around but not smell like smoke.”
“Totally. He never thinks about it.”
“That's very positive.”
She took a sip of her drink. “Hey—are you on Friendster?”
“No. What's that?”
She explained, and I answered that I didn't really use the Internet except for keeping up with the colon community.
“You should get on it,” she said. “I'll give you my URL too, so you can check out the shop if you want.”
“I'd like that,” I said. She handed me a pink card with scalloped edges. “We have a mailing list, maybe if you give me your Vogue email,” she said.
“Oh, I have the hotmail thing, but I don't really check it,” I said. I looked down at the card. “But I'll tell people about your shop.”
“That would be fantastic! We'd love to meet some people, you know.” Having accomplished an objective, and seeing nothing else worth telling me, she looked around wildly, trying to find a clock, but there was none in the bar. “I should probably, uh...” she said.
“Definitely,” I said, and we exchanged brief farewells and nodded so we would not have to touch one another.
Seeing me seated alone, my friend came over. “Hey,” he said. “It's good to see you. She's cool, right? We used to go out.” He put a hand on my back and leaned in conspiratorially. “Do you mind if I cut out of here early?” He motioned his head back to the woman he'd been chatting up, by the door. She was looking at us impatiently. “Conner just got back from Tibet, I haven't seen her in almost a year.”
“Sure,” I said, mentally removing him from my list of friends. He took me over to meet Conner, a slightly thinner version of the first woman I'd met, just as I am a thicker, duller-looking, less engaged version of my (now former) friend. She'd been to both Tibet and Yale, I learned within 18 seconds.
Everyone in the bar looked a little bit like someone else. Maybe we were all imitations of masculine and feminine forms, variations on a theme, or perhaps there was not theme, just a network of comparisons. I thought about this, walking out past the pile of humans, and then suddenly I wanted to punch something, or someone, but instead, as I waited for the train I flicked the pink business card onto the tracks, where it was swallowed by a green-brown puddle.
The Apartment on 9th StWithin its boundaries