Tag Archives: Brooklyn

Art on the installment plan

She can’t open the window more than a few centimeters, for if she does, the squirrel that prowls the fire escape will collapse its skull, creep into her kitchen, and steal one of her bananas. She doesn’t know for a fact that the felonious squirrel likes bananas, but she never would have guessed that it liked tomatoes either, and over the summer it stole several of them right out of the fruit bowl.

Why can’t she give this squirrel a banana? She has a whole bunch of them. Who is she, Donald Trump? Would she also withhold milk from a crying baby?


 The Japanese shoguns had the unusual distinction of being perhaps the only major rulers ever to eradicate firearms. In 1587, the shogun declared that all non-samurai were required to hand over weapons—both guns and swords—to the government, which had announced it was going to use the metal in the construction of an enormous statue of Buddha. (Facts & Details)

She wonders if disarmament would work in the United States if artists promised a statue of Jesus to the owners of assault rifles.


Facebook: where people go to announce the death of their cats.


It’s been weeks since she effectively made her way out of bed. Yesterday he bellyflopped onto the mattress beside her and then diverted her with his repertoire of comical swimming strokes, as if the bed were a pool or an ocean and not a queen-sized black hole of ruminating despair. “I’m sorry,” he said, getting to his feet after he’d shown her his butterfly. “I’m being codependent.”


They bought a print from an artist down the street. The artist told them that a middle-school janitor had bought the original painting. The man had poked his head into the artist’s studio one day to inquire about the price of the oil portrait in the window. “Three thousand dollars,” the artist told him. “Damn,” said the janitor, and departed. Thirty minutes later he was back. “I’ll give you two hundred dollars for it every month for the next fifteen months,” he said. The artist agreed. Fifteen months later, the janitor took the portrait home. He occasionally texts the artist a photograph of himself hanging out at home with his arm around the painting.

The Rat Queen of Park Slope

For three days last week M and I were responsible for a small, helpless animal named Betty. Even if Betty had been the most self-sufficient of puppies, able to feed and water herself in the wild, she still would not have survived long under our care because we didn’t trust her with keys to our Brooklyn apartment. Thus a few times a day we had to escort her down two flights of stairs and up the street to the local dog park.

Our local dog park resembles nothing if not a prison yard. It’s surrounded by chain-linked fencing and filled with gravel three inches deep. You have to breach two security gates to enter and exit. But the dogs go bonkers for their gravel oasis. In this park they call their own, they can race back and forth with frenetic impunity. They can indulge in impotent orgies while their owners play on smartphones and pretend their pets aren’t indiscriminately humping one another. To a farm dog, the dog park would seem restrictive and dusty and depressing. To a city dog, the dog park is a blissful reservoir of freedom from the 400-square-foot apartment where he spends 99% of his time.

I get the sense that dog people typically bond by talking to each other about their dogs. How much they weigh. How much they like to eat socks. How they’re getting a bath later yes you are aren’t you cutie yes you are. But at our local dog park, nobody was interested in discussing the coddled, yapping creatures lunging at our ankles. Our neighbors wanted to talk about the rats.

Here is the nightmarish gossip that initiated me into dog park society: A few weeks ago the dog park’s rat situation was so bad that a rat emerged in broad daylight to bite a dog on the leg, prompting public health officials to shut down the park temporarily. A subsequent inspection of the park and the neighboring children’s playground yielded the discovery of 125 bordering rat burrows. Sensibly, the rats had dug their vast empire along the perimeter of a promised land brimming with their favorite foods: dog shit, garbage, and the Cheddar Bunny crumbs that frequently get stuck to toddlers’ faces.

One acerbic older woman whom the other dog park regulars barely seemed to tolerate blamed yuppies for the rat infestation. “Park Slope didn’t have a problem with rats until the yuppies arrived and started eating brunch all over the place.” She said she’d gotten in trouble at the playground recently for shrieking about rats and scaring the children. She also said that the authorities had managed to eradicate 100 of the 125 local rat burrows by setting traps and clearing the brush that served as the rats’ cover, but then the city had gone ahead and planted some new shrubs immediately outside the dog park gates, which was just stupid.

While the woman shared these facts, Betty was happily plunging her adorable puppy face into a mound of rat feces. We shooed her away in a panic, but minutes later, while being chased by a horny pug, Betty dove headfirst into the same pile, effectively atomizing the feces so we humans felt an urgent need to step away, shielding our mouths and noses from the hantaviral shitstorm.

On later visits to the dog park, we found that everyone there had something negative to say about the rats. We were encouraged to gaze over the fenceline so we could see into the dark apertures of the remaining burrows. We were encouraged to become students of the city’s anti-rat poster campaign warning against not cleaning up after your dog. We were told that the bubonic plague is alive and well.

Naturally, I was horrified by what I was learning about my idyllic neighborhood. It was like finding out that your long-term boyfriend has an STD that will eventually chew off your privates while you’re unconscious. Rats are gross. Rats are pests. Rats have collapsible rib cages and unplated skulls that allow them to squeeze between the bars of birdcages and devour pet canaries. But something about the unquestioned flood of rat criticism made me want to step in and defend the little monsters. Many of the harsh things that the dog park people were saying about rats could just as easily be applied to humans, or to dogs for that matter. Looking around the park, I saw a whole bunch of stocky, inbred, social, ravenous animals that mindlessly shat and pissed and served as vectors for disease. One could argue that the main difference was that they wore collars. (And used smartphones, haha.)

I decided to do some research. I was prepared to dazzle the dog park people with a recitation of rat facts that were both positive and fun. I was going to change hearts and minds, and make a real difference in interspecies relations in my neighborhood. But Betty peed on our rug one too many times and our dog-sitting adventure came to an end. And I think loitering in a dog park without a dog is probably the same level of creepy as loitering in a playground without a child. Fortunately I still have you people. Here is what I learned about our rat friends, primarily from Jerry Langton’s Rat: How the World’s Most Notorious Rodent Clawed Its Way to the Top:

  1. Rats have friendships with each other and if a member of their clan is disabled, they are just as likely to feed him as eat him.
  2. Rats are neophobics, meaning they’re scared of new things, the exception being new environments. If you give a rat an island to take over, as humans have been doing for many centuries, the rat will explore every inch of that island, and then it will swim for three days so it can reach the next island, and explore that one too.
  3. Rats love scrambled eggs!
  4. Rats can’t belch or vomit. They can actually die from drinking carbonated beverages. Exterminators have attempted to use Pepsi as rat poison but the soda usually goes flat by the time the rats are brave enough to enjoy it.
  5. Rats are omnivores just like us! (With the exception of Pepsi products.)
  6. Rats are shy and they struggle with obesity.
  7. These things exist, and I’d like to be a part of them somehow: American Fancy Rat and Mouse Association, Rodent Control Academy, New York City Rodent Complaint Form.
  8. Rats only bite babies when they’re sleeping because the babies smell like food, which sounds like Mommy’s fault to me.
  9. I once knew a drug dealer who kept two rats as pets and those rats were a lot cleaner than he was.
  10. Rats have superior digestive systems. They can poop up to 200 times a day. Amazing!
  11. In the Middle Ages, rats were cheap and efficient torture devices. A rat would be secured to someone’s abdomen, then a hot object would be brandished over the rodent until it got so frightened that it began to burrow into flesh.
  12. Rats used to provide humans with hours of entertainment by getting violently slaughtered by bloodthirsty dogs in basement arenas.
  13. Rats have figured out an ingenious way to heat their burrows in winter by using their own fermented urine!
  14. The world’s most popular lab rat was named after one of my ancestors.
  15. Rats love to reside in thatched roofs, which is part of the reason that medieval people had such a plague problem, and also why 10% of people in Mozambique can expect to be nibbled by a rat while they’re sleeping.
  16. In 1664 the Lord Mayor of London decided that cats and dogs were causing the plague, so he had them all killed, removing the rat’s only nemeses. The rat population boomed. Dopey mayor!
  17. Rats always build an emergency rear exit into their burrows. If there’s an earthquake, they wisely flee en masse through these “bolt holes” because they fear the roof caving in. But sometimes what they think is an earthquake is actually a jackhammer at a construction site and there are the rats anyway, swarming up from the earth and comically surrounding people in hard hats.
  18. Rats can develop an immunity to rat poison.
  19. Rats can sometimes be so playful with each other that their tails become tangled together. Then they can continue playing as a team without interruption until they all die of starvation. Silly!

If these fun facts don’t win over even the most passionate of rat haters, I don’t know what will.

The alternative to learning to love the rats is continuing to despise and destroy the rats. I also understand that impulse. Personally I would like to see a sky full of hawks. They would dive through the air right and left, taking out the bad rats but leaving the friendly ones. Unfortunately many of the smaller dog species in the dog park could get mixed up in the carnage. But they would be martyrs and we would honor them accordingly.

I could also volunteer to lead the rats away, maybe into New Jersey, using my iPhone playlist. This is the least I can do for my beloved neighborhood. I wouldn’t even ask to be paid! Though I might attempt to lure the cutest children on the playground into our photo studio later. So I can make money they can be safe from the rats.

Going to see the moon

She’d been alive for over three decades, but had never witnessed a lunar eclipse. She wasn’t sure why not. Maybe because they always happened at night, when she was more likely to feel shattered, celestially undeserving, or too strange to go outside, where she might meet a strangeness more sublime than her own. So she’d just look at the moon’s picture in the paper the next day and tell herself that life wasn’t passing her by. But on the night in question, the Sunday night of the blood moon, she had this person with her, and except for his dubious beliefs about UFOs and the U.S. government, he seemed to feel pretty much the same way that she did about the sky.

They decided to watch the moon from the park. To get to the park, they had to walk half a mile uphill. The incline made the sidewalk resemble a ramp to the moon, or maybe her legs were just tired and any route, including the one from her bedroom to her bathroom, would resemble a ramp to the moon. Already the eclipse was happening. Only 221,752 miles until they reached their destination. They hurried along as much as they could while shuttling three flavors of ice cream between them on little plastic spoons. They kept losing the moon behind buildings, light-polluted clouds, and nebulous treetops, but then they’d reach an intersection and there it would be, shining.

A festive atmosphere encircled the park. Someone played guitar on a front stoop across the street from a playground. An adolescent boy had set up a flimsy telescope on the sidewalk and was busy making adjustments to his lens. A steady stream of couples entered the park gates holding hands. They followed suit behind. It made them both happy to see other people out late at night for reasons unrelated to the consumption of alcohol. They were part of a community event. They hoped the community event was not the end of the world.

They settled on a grassy bank and waited for the clouds to clear. At first she was reluctant to lie down. They hadn’t brought a blanket with them and most people had a bad habit of not cleaning up after their dogs when they urinated in public. But then she remembered that she was in nature and nature does not make you dirty. And the sky was not a television set, even though the number of people currently watching it was comparable to the viewership of the final episode of Lost.

They lay down and waited for the moon’s face to blush. They had hoped for contemplative silence, but a nearby woman was reading aloud from her cell phone about the prospect of life on other planets. She was not just reciting a paragraph here and there to titillate her male companion; she was regurgitating the entire Internet. So they moved further down the bank, where they were annoyed to discover that they could still hear the woman’s impromptu audiobook. In some ways the annoyance was comforting. She frequently experienced annoyance, thus the feeling was familiar, unlike the stellar bodies overhead. Her gripe with the sky had always been that it never seemed very interested in her. There was probably a good reason for this.

“You know what we forgot to do before we left for the park?” she said, squirming to alight on her reverential mode. “Drop acid.”

The moon was slowly being consumed by an anti-moon. For the astronomically ignorant, an eclipse could only be interpreted as a harbinger of end-times. And yet there she was reaping all the palliative benefits of modern science, cognizant that the blood moon did not pose an actual threat to life and limb, and she was still feeling anxious about the darkening mass over Brooklyn. Not because she expected the Seven Horsemen of the Apocalypse to trot across the baseball field, but because life on Earth had felt so ominous lately, and here was one more glaring symbol of their impending doom.

But for her, even the doom was impersonal. In a way, she longed for the doom. In a way, her separation from the doom was what made her so anxious. When had she disassociated from the future, and her respective role in it? When had she become subhuman? Was it at the same time she’d become sublunar? She felt foreign to this universe blooming all around her. If aliens descended, she would have nothing to say to them, and vice versa. Her orifices weren’t worthy of their implants.

It would be difficult to eclipse the self-pity of that statement.

They lay under a popular flight path. Every so often a plane would pass over, wingtips flashing red, and she’d trace its dark underbelly across the sky and think, “What is that flying object? I can’t seem to identify it.” He joked about bringing a laser pen to the park and scrawling it across the moon, just to be obnoxious. When the moon was finally overtaken by its evil, ginger twin, spectators clapped halfheartedly and all the dogs in Brooklyn began to bark. Why did staring up at the night sky make her miss her father? No wonder she avoided stargazing. He belonged to that particular universe, and she did not.

On the walk home they encountered two men standing on a street corner, trying to locate the blood moon behind cloud cover and a church steeple. One of the men quickly lost patience with this activity. “Whatever,” he said petulantly, then they both turned their backs on the park and descended the hill. She was appalled. “That man just whatever’ed the moon,” she said. “Who does he think he is?”

They took their time getting home. He said he wanted to absorb as much of the moon’s female energy as possible in hopes of reading her mind. They stalked a caravan of wailing fire engines to an apartment complex that was not on fire, only bathed in red emergency lights. She tried not to be disappointed. A fire was the blood that would bring her back to earth. That night she got her period several days before it was expected. Maybe the sky had a tracking device on her after all.

She knew exactly which people were going to post blurry iPhone shots of the expanding universe on their Instagram accounts. They wanted other folks to know that they’d seen the moon. It was important to broadcast their primitive lunar connection. She was also pleased that she’d finally taken the moon’s picture. Only later did she feel the need to publish it.

On building street cred in Brooklyn

At the Brooklyn street fair they buy a pina colada in a magenta cup shaped like a naked lady. For three more dollars the booth attendant will serve their rum in a coconut, but they decide to stick with what they know. The attendant generously ladles clear alcohol from a dirty white bucket at his feet, and they wonder if the pina colada is safe to drink. Will they go blind? “My vision is already starting to blur,” he says, looking up at a cluster of Mylar balloons shaped like animals. “More for me,” she says.

A man lures them down a side street by promising them free bicycle helmets. Their lack of bicycle helmets has been a source of domestic contention for weeks. She doesn’t object to wearing a helmet, but she doesn’t want to have to shop for one. He likes to spend money on things, and also not get head injuries. Free helmets would end their stalemate once and for all. They join a line that goes halfway around the block. The Department of Transportation staff administering the line contains some of the most amiable people she’s ever met in her life. When it’s finally her turn to be fitted for a helmet, a man in a NYDOT t-shirt rubs sanitizer into his hands, then unspools his measuring tape around her cranium. His touch conveys the same gentle authority as a skilled physician’s. Her head is sized medium.

They return to the main thoroughfare of the festival wearing their helmets, then they put them in the backpack. She also puts the empty naked lady cup in the backpack, so she can wash it out for later use. They pass vast kingdoms of bouncy castles, beer vendors and impromptu beer gardens, arepa stands. They pass a booth that promotes its Biggie Smalls merchandise with a cardboard cutout of a little blond girl. They eat warm slices of pizza. They eat cronuts. They eat turkey drumsticks. They find a fleet of vintage buses that the Transit Museum has wheeled out for the kids. They board a city bus from 1982. So far her favorite part of the street festival is being on the parked bus, just sitting, resting.

Their friends arrive with a small white dog. Suddenly she sees small white dogs everywhere. Half of the Mylar balloons are small white dogs. Every other woman’s purse contains a small white dog. She wonders if the pina colada’s hooch is affecting her too. They pass a band playing classic rock. He’s a little tipsy. “Please don’t yell ‘Free Bird,'” she thinks. “Free Bird!” he yells. She considers getting a small white dog just so she can name it Free Bird and constantly call for it in crowded public spaces.

M and K drop by the festival. K brings her own Tupperware of homemade food, and everyone else feels bad for spending $20+ on street meat when K is so resourceful. They pass a lady with an albino python wrapped around her neck. M gives them a wide berth. “Wouldn’t it be weird,” she says, “if women acted around snakes the way they act around puppies and babies, and sort of threw themselves at them, reflexively cooing and trying to hold their slithery bodies?” “Yes,” they all respond.

Every once in a while a mysterious hole will open up in the street’s teeming river of people. She will suddenly realize that she is no longer being jostled from all directions, and she’ll look around for an explanation. But none of the holes make sense, except for the one around the python.

She arrives at her street fair emotional threshold about forty-five minutes before they’re able to wade through enough humanity to reach their locked bicycles. She puts on her new helmet just as the good DOT doctor instructed. “No part of the helmet should touch your ears,” he said as he fitted her. “This isn’t Virginia.” She was taken aback by his comment because she’d never told him that she was from Virginia. Perhaps he was a phrenologist and had used her scalp to glean geographical data. “If I were from Virginia,” he told her, “I would never leave.” Yes, cities can be overwhelming, and no, one can’t always trust the turkey legs being grilled on the curb, but a person can make an eddy for herself in any urban river, just as long as she keeps her head protected, and her Virginia street smarts (aka Biggie t-shirt) about her.

Adventures in Medicaid 1 & 2

1

Google Maps leads her to a haunted house that’s recently been through a tornado. This can’t possibly be the doctor’s office. The patient calls the number. “No, you’re in the right place,” says the receptionist. “We’re in the basement.” The patient opens the iron gate and the hinges fall off in fragments. A small piece of paper is taped to the exterior of the Brooklyn brownstone. “OB-GYN THIS WAY.”

The waiting room is reassuring. It feels vaguely medical, perhaps due to all the fashion magazines. But it is not somewhere that the patient wants to remain for two hours. Two hours later the doctor summons her into a cramped, dusty office. The walls are mostly comprised of narrow closets. The patient wonders what’s in those closets. The patient suspects it might be human skeletons. The doctor tells the patient that she can’t trust her own boyfriend not to give her AIDS. The doctor tells the patient that if she wants to have viable offspring she should probably get pregnant by mid-afternoon. Then the doctor leads her into a dimly lit exam room. It’s a challenge to navigate the exam room without knocking into the rusty metal tables that hold the doctor’s instruments. The patient drops her bra on the tile floor. When she retrieves her undergarment, she must disentangle it from a sizable hairball of diverse DNA.

“Now what have we here?” says the doctor during her vaginal safari. “Is this your uterus?” She pokes around with animated perplexity. “No, I think this is your uterus. Unless your uterus is anteverted.”

“It’s not,” says the patient.

“Then what on earth could this be? Oh! Maybe it’s my finger. You’re skinny so I could be feeling my finger.” The patient wonders if her vagina is so cavernous that fingers can be misplaced in it. “I’m going to send you to diagnostics for an ultrasound.”

“Do I have cancer?” asks the patient.

“It’s probably just my finger,” says the doctor. “But you can never be too sure.”

2

The patient takes the F train to Brighton Beach. The air smells like Atlantic Ocean and dryer exhaust. After a fifteen-minute walk, the patient locates the psychiatrist’s office. It has a steep, sharply pointed roof and the patient wonders if a witch lives there. The sign on the window says, “ATTN PATIENTS THIS OFFICE NOT CONTAIN NARCOTIC DRUGS.” The Russian receptionists are friendly as can be. The patient fills out her paperwork and takes a seat. The patient deduces from a chorus of grumbles that the other three people in the waiting room have been there for over an hour. More patients arrive every few minutes. Each time someone enters or exits the office, the two exterior doors slam shut violently. When the patient hears this sound, all of her muscles seize up and she feels that something bad is about to happen. The psychiatric traffic continues to increase.

One man has clearly lost command over his grey beard and his overall personal hygiene. His mind seems to be in mutiny as well. He paces back and forth in the waiting room, demanding to see the doctor. “I’ve been here for fifteen hours!” he shouts. He has been there for five minutes. He’d taken the patient’s chair while she was in the restroom. A heavily tattooed woman enters the office wearing a swimsuit and cover-up. She looks as if she’s been tanning all day, every day, buttressed by a bank of mirrors, since April.

“I’m a walk-in,” she says over the counter. “How long is the wait?”

“An hour,” says the receptionist. “There are four patients ahead of you.”

“Do you think they’d let me go ahead of them?” says the woman. “I’ve got my baby with me.”

“You can ask them,” says the receptionist. The woman turns to face the crowded room like an actress under the glow of a spotlight that can only adore her.

“Would it be all right with everyone if I go first?” she says. “I’ve got my baby with me.” A couple maternal-looking Russian ladies shrug their shoulders. “Thank you so much!” gushes the woman. “I’ll only be with the doctor for like two minutes. In and out.” She leaves the office. The doors explode in her wake. Through the window, the patient sees the woman and her partner smoking cigarettes over a baby stroller. Her partner has a teardrop tattoo under one eye, indicating that he probably killed someone in jail. The patient is annoyed.

A lady in a floral housedress sits down next to her. A lap dog pants erratically in the folds of her skirt. The lady soon starts up a conversation with the receptionist at the opposite end of the room. “Are you going to watch the Republican debates tonight?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” says the receptionist shyly in her heavy Russian accent.

“Donald Trump might be a little obnoxious,” says the lady in the housedress, stroking her unstable dog, “but look at all he’s accomplished. He must be doing something right to have made all that money. You have to be pretty smart and resilient to come back from so many bankruptcies.” The patient texts her boyfriend furiously.

The tattooed beach bunny and her partner return to the waiting room with the child they made together. After ramming the stroller into a table from several different angles, causing In Style magazines to rain down upon the rug, the family settles in the corner. The woman turns to the patient and asks her point-blank if she can go ahead of her. The patient seems to be the final barrier between the woman and her shameless line jumping. The patient huffily consents. Shortly thereafter a receptionist summons the woman into the doctor’s office, where the woman remains for 20 minutes.

During this interlude the baby wakes up and the father removes him from the stroller. He sings and coos to his son with an exemplary amount of tenderness. And the baby is hands-down the cutest baby the patient has ever seen. The new parents are probably feeling overwhelmed, but they’re doing the best they can, and it’s understandable that they’d need to get their meds an hour before everyone else. The patient regrets being such a raging bitch about the line jumping.

When it’s finally the patient’s turn with the doctor, she’s already established a tentatively low opinion of him based on the fluctuating sea of poor mental health that constitutes his waiting room. She sits down in a stained leather armchair and tries not to read the names on the medical charts stacked messily across his desk. The office is relatively quiet, and the doctor seems sane enough. He begins her evaluation. First some easy questions: age, marital status, history of drug abuse. Then he begins alternating the easy questions with bizarre questions, as if trying to throw her off.

“What do you think of homosexuality?” he says. “Is the money in your wallet sequentially arranged?” Meanwhile the patient can hear a new male voice through the office door. The voice seems to be berating the receptionists about something. They ask him to please settle down. He becomes louder and more belligerent. The doctor seems utterly disinterested in all the waiting room drama. The patient wishes that he would hurry up and fill out her prescriptions so the angry man and his pathological brethren in the waiting room can have their turn and stop freaking the fuck out. The exterior doors begin slamming again. The patient’s nerves are popping like blown fuses. She imagines guns, cops, homicidal rampages. “If you found a stamped envelope on the street,” asks the doctor, “what would you do with it?”

At the end of his interrogation, the doctor peers closely at the patient. “I don’t think you have […],” he says. “I think you have generalized anxiety disorder.”

In the interest of concluding this interview with maximum grace and celerity, the patient does not respond, “Who the fuck wouldn’t develop generalized anxiety disorder after spending an hour in your medical establishment?” She takes the prescriptions, shakes the doctor’s placid hand, and departs through the waiting room, trying not to think about all the eyes burning through her back, especially the dog’s.

“Generalized anxiety disorder my ass,” the patient thinks, while wondering if any psychiatric patients are following her to the Neptune Avenue F station. She sprints up the stairs to the Manhattan-bound platform. After a few stops her crowded train car empties out. “What the hell does he know?” the patient thinks as she slowly inches away from a woman on her plastic bench because she thinks that the woman doesn’t want her to sit so close to her now that there’s more space, but the patient also doesn’t want to hurt the woman’s feelings by making her think that she doesn’t want to sit so close to her. Even though it’s been driving the patient up the goddamn wall that the two of them are still sitting so close together.

“That appointment was horseshit,” the patient thinks as she walks down 7th Avenue behind a cluster of people that includes a teenage boy wearing headphones. The boy disregards a red pedestrian light and steps out in front of a car. “Watch out!” she screams. The driver of the car lays on his horn. The boy does not get hit. “I should have done more,” the patient thinks. “I should have leapt forward and pulled the boy out of harm’s way. I should have thrown myself into traffic and used my body as an organic barrier. The boy could have been killed and it would have been my fault.” The patient stops at the next intersection and a man taps her on the shoulder.

“You just saved that kid’s life,” he says. “He should’ve at least said thank you.”

“Oh no,” the patient sputters. “I didn’t do anything. I think he just heard the car horn.” The patient walks the rest of the way home worrying that she’d mishandled the exchange with the man. He’d just been trying to make a point about the boy’s ingratitude, not her heroics. So it had been narcissistic of her to steer his observation back toward herself.

“What a charlatan,” she thinks, mouth dry and hands twitching. “That psychiatrist needs to go back to medical school.”

Scenes from Park Slope

They attend their first summer concert in Prospect Park. They’re smug about already possessing the yuppie picnic essentials: blanket, cooler, baguette, rosé, lawn sports. But she doesn’t remember that she packed her paddle ball set until the concert is over and dark has descended on the Brooklyn leisure class. No matter. She’s determined to play anyway. “But you won’t be able to see the ball,” says her companion. “Of course I will,” she says. They take to their feet with their paddles. He hits the ball, which is dark blue. She swats toward where the ball might be. The ball lands in the grass and disappears forever. “Told you so,” says her companion. Nearby picnickers catch her attention. They are playing the Italian game of bocce with glow-in-the-dark balls. It’s as if these picnickers came to the park just to taunt her with their lawn sport superiority. She realizes that she now lives in a world where owning a paddle ball set is not enough to illustrate her status as a Park Slope elite. She must now acquire a paddle ball set that glows. A paddle ball set that overcomes the natural limits imposed by night and day, good and evil, pinot noir and rosé. She must own a paddle ball set that makes a mockery of the seasons and rejects the rotation of the earth. She will paddle at midnight, in winter, underwater. Suddenly the Cheeto stains on her picnic blanket seem all the more glaring.

“Yes,” says the bagel shop owner, “we do sell gluten-free bagels.”

She feels that people take her career more seriously now that she lives in Park Slope. Professional writers abound in her zip code. There are few public benches in her neighborhood not occupied by middle-aged men with MacBooks in their laps, staring at her as she passes, willing her to do something story-worthy. (She never does.) A new acquaintance who might have considered her a hack when she lived in Bed-Stuy, now thinks she’s Margaret Atwood by virtue of her new address. “So tell me about your craft,” he says. “Like, what is your typical morning like?” “Well,” she says, “I wake up, make some coffee, then surf the internet for an hour or three.” “God,” he says, “it’s so fascinating what you do.” She badly wants to prove herself worthy of his delirious respect while she answers his questions about word count and creative process, but she’s not used to being treated like a professional and it makes her self-conscious. She wonders how long it will take her to start identifying as a Park Slope Writer and not a Murder Avenue, basement-dwelling amateur. For now, however, she can only enumerate her bathroom breaks to her number one fan while secretly battling a sea of cognitive dissonance.

On their way to pick up a beautiful, like-new, 8 x 10 rug that retails for $1,500 but one of their Park Slope neighbors is giving away for free, they pass an espresso machine on the sidewalk. Upon scoring the rug, an additional dutch oven from Le Creuset, and a set of twins, an espresso machine is the only thing they need to complete their transformation into average citizens of Park Slope. So she puts the freebie machine into her canvas tote bag and starts fantasizing about iced lattes. Once they’ve collected their rug, they take a different route home to see if they might dumpster-dive some other brownstones. Sure enough, they find a stack of unopened cardboard boxes on the pavement next to a manicured shade tree. The boxes contain pristine cans of illy Italian gourmet espresso with a combined street value of about $300. She is surprised not to encounter a windfall of soy milk in the final blocks home. Maybe tomorrow.

“Yes,” says the girl behind the counter, “of course we serve vegan gelato.”

The Shaman of Broadway

I lie on the sofa in my ruffled bikini, crying. It’s the last weekend of summer 2014. An hour ago my best friend canceled our day trip to Coney Island while I was at the store buying us beach Doritos. Once again my life is in shambles.

I am almost 34 years old. I’ve essentially laid waste to all those years and counting. I’m broke. I miss my dad, who is dead. Cockroaches scale the kitchen cabinets. My boyfriend sometimes wants to kill himself. I sometimes want to kill myself. We take turns hiding each other’s pills. I haven’t slept for two nights because of the fighting. Alcohol is a factor. The only words I’ve produced in six months are sadsack diary entries and advertising copy for septic tank companies. I’ve eaten all the beach Doritos myself. And the beach Cheetos. And the cookies I’d baked for Coney despite knowing they’d inevitably get sand in them. The sky is cloudless but the curtains are drawn and I know my tears are the closest I’ll get to the seashore today.

I recently collaborated on a young adult novel about five teenagers with problems that far eclipse my own. After putting them through the wringer for a bit, I took pity on these disordered kids and in my infinite mercy endowed them with spiritual cores that could withstand every calamity by reshaping pain into gratitude. I felt this was the right thing to do. Helping the youth is its own reward. But I have to make a confession: I’m a phony. I never dreamt of internalizing the abundant life lessons I showered upon my characters. I wrote the book with blinders on, caring for those 16-year-old psyches while neglecting real life’s rampant dysfunction. I gave the kids souls when I was in despair about having lost my own.

On the last day of summer, after I’ve cried all the tears and put on some underwear not made out of Spandex, I have a vague notion of turning my life around. But a concrete strategy eludes me, so for the next two hours I devour inspirational quotes on the Internet. Three or four hundred inspirational quotes later, I’m finally ready to leave the apartment. “It is never too late to be what we might have been” (George Eliot). I intend to wander around, look at things, maybe buy some cheap fruit from Mr. Kiwi.

The Brooklyn sidewalks are riddled with people whose beachy dreams seem equally crushed, but I am staunchly determined to get over myself and fall madly in love with life because “Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have” (Hyman Schachtel). And when an ambulance driver gives me the middle finger because I’m teetering like a drunk astronaut on the curb, I remind myself that “Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling” (Margaret Runbeck). And by the way, who are these enlightened people on the Internet, and have they ever sleep walked down Broadway in the sweltering heat with a death wish and nacho cheese indigestion?

In my aforementioned novel, a spiritual healer materializes out of the New Mexico desert and sets my tormented teens on their path to enlightenment. “This is ridiculous,” I’d muttered to my computer as I brought the shaman into being. “This is so YA. This would never happen in real life, to a real grown-up.”

This intersection looks like a good one to flop myself into. Perhaps I can get run over by something official, like a police car or a fire engine. But no, that’s stinkin’ thinkin’, because “If your compassion does not include you, it’s incomplete” (Jack Kornfield). And I must recognize the beauty in every moment, because “Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them” (Leo Tolstoy). And I need to force myself to “Enjoy the little things, for one day [I] may look back and realize they were the big things” (Robert Brault). The J train screeches on the tracks above me as if its cars are dragging the chains of hell. I take a deep breath and vow to wake up to the wonders of the world.

An elderly lady stands beside me on the curb, patiently waiting to cross the street. She’s loaded down with so many plastic shopping bags I wonder if the cement is going to fracture beneath her. I don’t want to offend her by asking if she needs help because her back is straight and she can’t have more than 70 years on her. I say something plaintive about the traffic light. The preternaturally-preserved woman studies my face for a full count of five before agreeing that yes, this intersection could use a pedestrian signal. I self-consciously overtake her when we cross, but I’m still drawn into her orbit. She walks a few paces behind me, on the same sidewalk, past the same vendors of tube socks and cell phone cases. I want to turn around and confess to her how black my heart is. I sense that she’d be down for this discussion. Maybe we could have it telepathically. The air between us is just that charged.

In my YA novel the shaman makes his grand entrance with a pet coyote. On Broadway I see nothing of the kind. Maybe a mangy dog slipping under a barbed wire fence as if he’s just been kicked.

At the next intersection the elderly woman sidles up to me. “Would you mind doing me a favor?” I’m relieved that she’s making the first move. She lacks a free hand to adjust a strap on her shoulder, but won’t permit me to carry her bags, saying that even though she has three great-grandchildren, she still plays basketball and can run a mile without breaking a sweat. She has no need for my strength. I desperately need hers.

I cannot shake the feeling that this woman is extraordinary. Being enclosed in her energy’s orb is like entering a messianic tent revival. She’s the human embodiment of an inspirational quote. And not one by Donald Trump or Tony Robbins; I mean one by Confucius or Martin Luther King. So I trot along beside her, savoring bits and pieces of her life. As a girl she wanted to be a Freudian psychoanalyst. She became a teacher.

We arrive at her destination: Fat Albert’s, a discount home goods store I know all too well. My new friend gathers that I’m loath to leave her so we continue talking on the sidewalk. We grew up in the same small town 200 miles away, 40 years apart. She wants to know my birthday. “You’re a Libra,” she says, peering into my diminished, flickering soul. “You need to meditate in order to hold your center, and you need to live near the water.” I haven’t felt my center in years and the only water I’ve known lately has been boiling.

And now I am a sniveling child, inexplicably undone by this woman and the spiritual medicine dispensed by her gaze. She’s not sentimental about the dumb heartache writ large on my face. She tells me that I’m smart and strong, like her. In front of Fat Albert’s, she matter-of-factly reveals the secret to a happy life, and I promptly forget it. Something to do with love. Though I don’t retain a word, I cling to everything she says, everything she is. Before we part I hold her hand in mine. I haven’t felt anything so soft in skin and so formidable in presence since my grandmother’s hand when she was dying. The woman gives me her number and says one of these days I should come over for pie.

Walking home, my heart wells up with the world and its magic. The second I resolved to see beauty again, I was sent this emissary from heaven who’d transformed a filthy square of Broadway sidewalk into a dropped pin on a rainbow. You can’t make this stuff up in Yeah books. I smile at everyone I pass, and they smile back. I’m having the best beach day ever. I glide across the sand dunes in front of Fat Albert’s, breathing in the sky’s salty mist. I pause next to an overflowing trashcan near Mr. Kiwi’s watermelons and feel the ocean’s ecstatic power. My eyes fill with grateful tears. I am alive I am alive I am alive. God bless America.

But no, that is not my eureka moment. That moment comes the next morning after I wake up feeling sad and dyspeptic again and am dismayed to find that yesterday’s blessed burst of enlightenment hadn’t carried over to Day 2 of the rest of my life. “WTF?” (Wistar Murray). I realize that I’ll need to restart the process from scratch, perhaps with a quiet sit or 500 more inspirational quotes. Because it’s hit me that happiness is something you must fight to inhale every second your airways are open. It’s a book you must keep writing and reading on a continuous loop, so the kids inside it won’t lose heart. Naturally the book will never be finished. It will always be in the midst of happening. In fact it’s happening right now, at this urban intersection, while we stand together in our bathing suits and wait for the light to change.

Literal and literary street harassment

Lately the news (aka my Facebook feed) has been broadcasting this video, which draws attention to the problem of street harassment and catcalling. Frankly it’s never bothered me much when a strange man says, “Hello beautiful!” or “Have a nice day!” as I pass him on the sidewalk looking beautiful on a nice day. This seems like pure friendliness on his part, and the comments help challenge my working theory that I’m a ghost. It’s annoying when a strange man tells me to smile, but at the same time the directive makes me question why I’m not walking around smiling all the time because it’s such a nice day and I look so beautiful. Maybe I should be smiling. Maybe this guy trying to contort my face into a different position using only the power of his voice has been to hell and back and is now wise to the ways in which a smile turns a frown upside down and he wants to share this happiness with me and the rest of the babes.

It’s hard for me to distinguish between my sensitivity to street comments and my sensitivity to people in general. I don’t know whether to look someone in the eye when I pass him, to give a little wave, to steal his iPhone, etc. It’s just like how I get nervous standing in line at the post office or visiting the bodega downstairs where I might run into one of my amiable neighbors. Other people are scary. They throw off my equilibrium. Sometimes they even say things out of their mouths, which can be horrific.

When a stranger speaks to me on the street, I don’t know when a response could be construed as flirting and when a lack of response could be construed as rude. It sucks to be put in that position every time you leave the house, but a lot of people for whatever lunatic reason like to stay socially engaged. They like to interact with the transients who enter their communities, especially if those transients seem carved out of marble. I condemn sexual harassment and catcalling, but most of the time people are just saying hi or telling me how wonderful I am. We exchange niceties and continue on our business, no harm done, sometimes with a little glow about us because that social interface went so well. I’d honestly rather live in a world where people notice each other than in a world where we pretend strangers don’t exist and where my beauty isn’t recognized for its cataclysmic power.

My other objection to shutting up everyone on the street is that I, too, am a street harasser. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stared out a coffee shop window and have proceeded to write down graphic details about a stranger’s dress or stride or baleful countenance. I put words into their mouths. I ascribe feelings to them. Sometimes I write explicitly about their butts. I violate the personal privacy of innocent passersby again and again by way of my notebook. You’re going to wear those hot pants outside my coffee shop window? You deserve to be written up. I might even put a baby in you. (But in 25 years that baby will discover that his absentee father is in fact the President of the United States, which is ironic because the baby has been trained as a political assassin.)

No one has the right to take physical or vocal possession of anyone else’s body. But humans are naturally interested in each other. So I think someone should make a video that doesn’t shame men for their interest, but instead tells them what kind of speech is invasive or prurient, and what may genuinely put a smile on two faces. (Kinda like this?) And also teach them that NO ONE IN THE HISTORY OF URBAN LIVING HAS EVER GOTTEN A GIRL’S NUMBER BY HOLLERING AT HER WHEN SHE ALREADY HAS SOMEPLACE SHE NEEDS TO BE. For god’s sake. But, to paraphrase Rabbi Hillel, if we can’t build elaborate fantasy worlds wherein every passing woman is a potential future wife or perhaps a serial arsonist on the run from Johnny Law (according to my notebook), then who will build them for us? Not the Republican Party, that’s for sure.

And now I must adjourn to pace the block where the half-blind men in their 80s hang out on their stoops just waiting for an angel to walk by and make their day.

Lullaby

The other night I was lying in bed, trying to sleep, because it’s important to sleep at least 18 hours a day, when a punk band started up next door. The apartment buildings on my street are of such a nature that a punk band playing next door is exactly like a punk band playing on top of your eyeballs. Except in the case of this band, the drummer was playing on one eyeball and the lead guitarist was playing on the other eyeball and suddenly I couldn’t coordinate my blinks. What I’m trying to say is that the band wasn’t very good. But I wasn’t too indignant about it because I really didn’t have anything else to do but lie there and listen. Eventually I fell asleep.

I was woken up at 2am by another punk band, this one far superior. They were loud and snotty but technically skilled, and I found myself regretting that no one had invited me to the party next door. Then again, I hadn’t invited anyone to come party with me in my room with the Hulu and the mac and cheese and the regression and the tears, so it was probably karma.

Then the superior punk band started playing a familiar song. This was the last thing I expected to happen, for the night I start recognizing songs that bands play at Brooklyn rooftop house parties is the same night that I’m officially cool, and I’m just not equipped to handle that kind of pressure. But I immediately recognized the song as “Sleeping Aides and Razorblades” by the Exploding Hearts. I fell asleep thinking, “Wow, the Exploding Hearts are right next door. I must have made some respectable life decisions after all.”

Then I woke up and googled The Exploding Hearts, just to confirm that I’d caught the Brooklyn leg of their Summer 2013 tour. I read that in July of 2003, when driving back to Portland from a gig in San Fransisco, the band’s van crashed on Interstate 5 in Oregon, killing three out of four members. They were 23, 21, and 20 years old.

Life is like this too often. You hear music in the night. It brings you a moment of pleasure. And then in the morning you find out that all the musicians are dead.

But I’m reluctant to leave on that note. In a few days the psychotropic drugs will finally kick in and make me regret being so liberal in my sadsack observations. So let’s try to fantasize about what it was to be happy, what it was to hear music, what it was to make it. One book I have about beating depression says that you should store up ten joyful memories that you can access when you get down. Number one: I cruise down the highway in a van with all my best friends. Number two: I win the heart of the girl next door.

 

 

 

Something borrowed

The other day I walked through the rain to my local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, where I would get a card to make this move official. Until you have a library card you can pretend you’re off the grid, but my gypsy days are over because I borrowed a spy film and a copy of Chess for Dummies. But the walk, the rain. The Bed-Stuy streets were basically deserted, so I felt the presence of the approaching man from a block away. Wondered if I should play it coy, keep my eyes lowered until the last second, then say something affable about the lousy weather. Was my neighbor also formulating a plan for our intersection? Maybe he would compliment the bright colors of my umbrella. I’d have to be conversationally flexible in case he had his own agenda. Most likely we’d exchange a few universal words about spring. (Me, privately, to spring: For fuck’s sake, spring!) We’d walk away from each others’ faces feeling either worse or better about ourselves.

Sharing the world with other people is draining. Not draining: the puddles on the sidewalk that the man was fording with his shopping trolley. They were deep and wide and barely navigable by human persons of our sort. As we closed in on each other, I noted that the man’s cart was filled to the brim with folded laundry. But the top of his laundry duffel was loose, open, getting drizzled with rain. I nodded mutely at the man with what I thought was an exemplary amount of neighborly affect. He nodded back, and at that moment a dozen bundles of paired socks dove out of his shopping trolley like lemurs, then became absorbed by the puddles I described earlier as build-up to this lemur analogy (perhaps the most overextended analogy of all time, yet still applicable to at least two thirds of my enterprises).

At first the man didn’t notice that he was dribbling socks behind him like a trail of breadcrumbs that would return him to the laundromat. (Sometimes it’s fun to really commit to making certain things like other things.)

“Sir!” I said. “Your socks!” The man stopped short and turned toward the wake of his shopping trolley with dread that bordered on existential.

“Oh noooo,” he said, surveying the carnage with hands crumpling in slo-mo to his face. “It’s a dreeeaaam.”

When he said it was a dream, I was immediately transported into a storyline where the soiled socks and the cold rain and the library books I coveted and my soggy shoes and my wet hair and Brooklyn-at-large and the seasons distorted beyond recognition were all part of a dream, his dream. The man’s dream made sense of the past ten months, when I wrote a book, got divorced, said goodbye to my Virginia family, moved back to the city, stared through countless windows at countless grey skies, ran back and forth across bridges, shivered, blew clandestine snot rockets, held babies, listened to a million songs, burned to write, wrote little of worth, made my peace with obscurity, washed the stink out of my clothes, neglected most films, most books, most people, lay facedown on the hardwood floor long enough to make my roommates uncomfortable, thought about whales, thought about the sex lives of teenagers, explored bad and worse habits, drank green tea to counteract aforementioned habits, made a profession of having feelings, contemplated dropping out of my profession the second I had something tangible to offer it, discovered rap music, fell in love with Dunkin Donuts, mourned my grandmother (forever), mourned my dad (forever), did a lot of dishes (when you do the dishes, do the dishes, says the Buddha), gave too much leeway to men, briefly inhabited the Pleasure Dome, and then was asked to leave.

Don’t you see, my bloods, that it’s all been a part of this laundry man’s dream? A dream, not a nightmare. Let’s not cast our judgment upon a stranger’s subconscious. His long winter created this fantasy world. Our sleep world where the rain can’t get in. If life is but a dream, my own modest butt is square in the middle. Together we made the dream, a function of this beastly climate. We wear the dream, launder the dream, in an infinite wash cycle until we die clean. Or maybe dirty. The dream tumbles out. Who died? It’s a dream yo the deaths don’t count. Who loves or is ditched for other lovers or feels hurt and want. It’s a dream. It’s a dream and then there are libraries to give expression to it. It’s a dream, it’s a borrowed book, and then it is pure, dry, dry as a desert, dry as sleep.