This blog is closed. Which is pretty miraculous because I've never closed any of my blogs. I've just left them to become cobwebby ghost towns. Dare we call this progress?
If you think I'm going to stop writing, you don't know me very well, now do you?
The future belongs to Bright and Beautiful. Thank you for visiting.
In the bar. In the bar. I’m so happy to be home. In the bar. Waiting for someone.
A song comes on the radio and the bartender -- gray-haired and athletic and a billion times cooler than I, than anyone, can ever dream of being -- rushes over to a gaggle of yammering waitresses to tell them something. They ignore him, absorbed in the gossip of the night, pouring Yuengling from the tap, readjusting their ponytails.
He looks at me, by myself.
“Do you want to hear a story?”
“Of course I want to hear a story.”
“These girls don’t care.”
“I know.”
“Alright. So, I’m seventeen years old and I’m totally screwed up. Just coming out of the army and I’m on my way home. And I’m hunkered down in a seat on the A-train, way uptown somewhere, feeling miserable in my uniform. And while I’m sitting there, these three Puerto Rican women get on the train. And I say women, but honestly, they were probably about 19. And suddenly they stand up in front of me, and they start singing ‘Soldier Boy’ in three part harmony like they’ve rehearsed it every da yof their lives. So every time I hear this song...”
He smiles and points up at the speaker on the ceiling. The Shirelles sing sweet and low over the din.
“Every time I hear it, I’m happy,” he says.
He pauses. Wipes the counter in front of me.
“I will never forget that until the moment I die. Never underestimate how you can impact someone’s life.”
He leaves me, pours someone’s drink at the other end. If that’s not a welcome home gift, I have no idea what is.
I'm taking a little break from both New York City and this blog. I will return.
On a tiny stage in a tiny auditorium filled with a straggling handful of waterlogged hipster boys and the occasional tweedy-elbowed New Yorker type, we watched Jeremy Blake talk about the latest installment of his animated series of "digital paintings," Winchester. Inspired by the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California and its emotionally disturbed proprietress, the piece is a kind of moving tableau of colors and images. Bleating colors slid, liquid and slow, across the screen while other, weirder images pushed through and around them — guns, skulls, animals, silhouettes of Marlboro-man types in cowboy hats taking aim. It was one of the coolest pieces of art I've ever seen, and I say that as someone who usually hates contemporary art, who finds it bleak and depressing, and who goes to the Whitney Biennial mostly to see famous people and laugh at stuff — the rock sitting in an empty room, the bubble gum stuck to the canvas that sold for $2 million. But this was something.
Something, too, was the artist himself. Affable and handsome — lanky and dark-haired, with that distinctive gravity around his eyes — he seemed glamorous, like someone who had earned the right to call himself an artist. I know nothing of the art world, but I've nursed enough teen-and-matinee idol crushes to know star power when I see it. How all those crazy old rich folks and anorexic models and fabulously-attired gallery owners must have swooned over him! He talked with his hands, gestured up to the screen, referred to himself chummily in the third person as "Jerry." It was hard not to fall in love with him — even my friend, a guy, admitted as much. Seeing Winchester that night was so memorable, so very New York. It is a story I trot out to anyone who will listen: The good looking artist on the verge of megastardom and the weird, beautiful movie about the tourist trap on a bad-weather night in Queens.
So how, then, did I miss it. And I did miss it. Until this week, when I was leafing through my roommate's Vanity Fair.
In July, Jeremy Blake took the A train to Rockaway Beach, took off his clothes, and walked out into the ocean. Five days later, they pulled his body out of the water thirty miles away, near Sea Girt, New Jersey. His girlfriend, video game designer Theresa Duncan — she was there that night in Queens; I vividly remember her — had taken her own life a week before. Before their deaths, the couple had alienated most of their friends on two coasts, thinking they were being stalked and harassed by Scientologists. Ready-made intrigue, right? Of course, the bloggers and feature writers and message board ghoulies went straight to work trying to figure out if there were "signs," if it was conspiracy, if Beck (I'm not kidding.) was somehow involved. Mostly, though, the most convincing theory is that Duncan was mentally ill, and that Jeremy Blake was so wrapped up in — and convinced by — her delusions, that he spiraled downward with her.
For all the theorizing, though, I'm surprised that no one has pointed this out: that Jeremy Blake's art was steeped in paranoia, and that his most famous work — Winchester — is basically an allegory of mental illness, and a woman's mental illness at that. When he talked about Winchester, he talked a lot about the Winchester Mystery House as a metaphor for Manifest Destiny, which I understand, and which makes perfect sense if you've seen the piece. But to me, there was another, much stronger theme at work there.
Sara Winchester, the heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune, believed that she was being haunted by the spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles. On the advice of a psychic medium, she began to expand her home to give those spirits free reign, to confuse the bad ones, and nurture the good ones. The house was under construction for 38 continuous years and lacked a master building plan, so stairs, hallways, entire wings sprung up in completely random fashion. Doors open to nowhere. Staircases dead end. In other words, the only blueprint for the Winchester mansion was Sara's mental illness. The house itself is not a monument to ghost hunting (as the A&E special will tell you) or Manifest Destiny (as Jeremy Blake and lots of art journals told you), but a real-world manifestation of a brain gone haywire. Poor Sarah's synapses, like those staircases, never got where they needed to go. And because she had money and power, no builder was about to disagree with her, or with the plans that she hastily sketched everywhere, even on table cloths.
To me, that, more than anything else, is closer to the core of what Winchester is about, a woman's creeping, mounting fear and paranoia, and more, about the intense power of personal demons and how they manifest themselves in the rational world, whether as crippling illness, or a crazy ass house, or too many Benadryl caplets with a vodka chaser, or a 27-page manifesto about how the Scientologists are out to get you. When I saw Winchester and all its sprawling, running colors, its boogie man sound effects, that's what I saw. Of course, that's probably too personal, too intimate an interpretation of anything that bothers to call itself great art.
Still, I can't help but wonder about Jeremy Blake and his ghosts, whether they were enough to make themselves outward and real — the actual signs of illness, not just malaise or eccentricity — to stand on Rockaway beach, scribble a one-sentence farewell on the back of a business card, and let the waves decide from there.
The Dude and I arrive at the same time, so he pulls out his key and let's me in, which is nice of him. He smiles. Calls me Dudette. This is the thing we do.
He sees me. He says, "Hey Dudette!" and I say, "Hey, how are you?" and then we talk about the weather. We have this exact exchange roughly twice a month.
In the vestibule, he spins around.
"Say, what do you do for a living, anyway?"
I tell him that I'm an editor and he gets all impressed for a minute and then says, "You must make a great salary because I saw you getting out of an incredible limo not too long ago."
For a minute, I have no idea what he's talking about. The salary or the limo. And then I remember.
About a month before, I was dropped off in front of my building by a black car on an entirely miserable night (not the worst night, but a bad one; we've already discussed the mechanics of worst nights and worser ones) in which I just tried so hard to be anything but a weeping ball of upsettedness and I succeeded with aplomb. For about two hours. Or five glasses of chardonnay, depending on how we're counting.
The instant I got out of the car, the chardonnay and the sadness made themselves simultaneously known, and all I wanted to do was die in a corner, clutching the Raggedy Ann doll that my Mom sewed for my fourth birthday. By the time I got all the way back upstairs, I was sobbing and vomiting at the same time, and I didn't stop doing either for the next three hours.
Amazing, really, considering how utterly composed I was twenty minutes previous. At least, though, I shattered to bits behind the hastily-locked bathroom door and not at the bar. Speaking of worser (and worser) nights, I've done that too. In the presence of multi-platinum-selling rock stars. So really, all in all, the five-chardonnay night was arguably well-played by comparison.
I had forgotten that I saw The Dude that night, but in the vestibule, talking to him, I remembered. He was the first person I saw after I got out of the car and even through the iron-curtain-style duel haze of intoxication and misery, I took note of this, because I was so happy to see him.
The Dude is nuts. And fried out of his skull most of the time. But he's sweet to me. And sometimes that's all you really want.
I tell him that I remember the car, but withhold further comment about the night, the whole raging tide of its terribleness. There are some things The Dude doesn't need to know.
"I didn't pay for the car," I say. "I leave that stuff to my rich friends."
"Well," he says, "You sure looked fantastic getting out if it."
In an instant, everything about that night shifts in my head. I say goodnight. He continues up the stairs. I pickup my mail. I wonder who else was fooled, and if I will ever count myself among them.
Always remember that the worst night of your life is always an instant away, that things can shift, beyond your grasp, and you will stand on the platform of the F train at 12:39 am and you won’t even notice until it’s too late, until you are up to your neck in it.
Nothing happens. That’s the thing.
The train takes 25 minutes and it’s just barely late night and you have just come through that terrible crossover at 14th St., the tunnel that doesn’t end and where you always see vermin of some variety or other, no matter when you’re there and who you’re with. You’re alone this time.
The light is dim in that station and there are no other tracks, just you and the dripping tile wall and you lean against the pillar and cross one boot over the other and the shear act of waiting will almost kill you, because you have become accustomed to prompt trains, to schedules that tick.
The platform swarms with people because of the long wait between trains, the thing that isn’t supposed to happen underground, crowds in small spaces. You have had just enough wine to make everything bleary and to make your stomach flip at the taste of it, the memory of other, worse (or better) nights come vaulting back.
A boy with a guitar and a quiet face plays Peter Gabriel songs and his voice shatters you to bits and sounds so haunted that it hurts maybe him or maybe you.
The tough guy next to you plays it cool, earphones on, fists jammed into the pockets of his sweatshirt, and suddenly he pulls out his wallet, rifles through a wad of ones. He ambles over to the boy with the guitar, slow, maybe looking like he’s going somewhere else, and drops a single into his case. He ambles back to his spot. It never happened.
The only $1 bill you can find in your wallet — a George Costanza wallet, one of your friends calls it — taped up and so soft from the years of being passed hand to hand, city to city, that it feels fake. Monopoly money.
You do the same walk as the tough guy, one lumbering foot in front of the other, and your bag has made you lopsided so you can’t bend to place it in his case. You just let go, watch it flutter downward, rest with the others. There’s no wind to take it elsewhere.
He smiles between the lyrics, a nod. You return it, or you try to, but you aren’t sure if the gesture makes it all the way out, if it got choked, shut down, somewhere before it met the backsides of your eyes.
There are animals that hideout when they die, that crawl into holes and slink off into the woods, but I don’t think birds do the same. You see them on sidewalks and on the grass, tumbled out of the sky, their feathers folded neat and still. Or maybe this is just what happens to the sick or hurt ones, the birds that can’t make it all the way back to the nest, to private, familiar places.
I see one on the sidewalk in front of the bank, tiny, just a baby. It is perfect, like a cat’s toy, with pale yellow feathers. It is tipped forward onto its sliver of a beak, fallen flat on its face, a stance that seems appropriate for a much larger creature and speaks of deadness, of the permanent loss of equilibrium.
I want to pick it up, to see if it’s real, or maybe to see if I am, to test the little legs with a fingertip, but I don’t. Birds carry disease, sayeth my mother’s voice and yours, an eternal chorus of mother’s voices and hands, slapping other, littler hands away.
Later, I walk by the spot and someone, something, has stomped the bird into a flattened splatter of blood and feathery fuzz and pale bone, and I wonder what it was. The thing that can claim the flattening, the decision to do it, as a part of their day.
We don’t sleep on the sidewalk, per say, but there is waiting in darkness and reclining on one. Heat seeps through the subway grate and warms my ankles. By virtue of this, and our proximity to the front of the line, we have a prime spot.
At dawn, the light crowns only the tops of the buildings—like paint poised on a brush—then seeps downward but never touches the ground, illuminating Lafayette Street, shallow downtown canyon, only by insinuation. Our patch stays shady all day.
We take Starbuck and pee breaks. We lounge on A_____’s fleece blanket. I leaf through the fall fashion issue of Vogue, gigantic, a four-pounder, while she finishes the last 20 pages of Anna Karenina. We chat with the guy next to us, who is starting his a theater company in Asbury Park. We look up at the sky. We stretch our legs. We wait.
The theater hands out the tickets at 1 pm, and all morning, we have heard horror stories of the previous day’s rush, how people who arrived at dawn still didn’t get tickets. After a certain sensible hour, tough-looking women in t-shirts patrol the line, recite the rules over and over.
No leaving the line, except to go to the bathroom. No food breaks. No letting your friends join. If your friends join, they get sent home. Two tickets per person.
They use hand-held clickers, a quick motion of the thumb, to count off the line. They’re deciding how many of us will not get in. Finally, they call the cutoff. It is blocks behind us. We become smug about our success, our bravery, the hardcoreness of our hardcoreness. I have waited in lines, but seldom slept on sidewalks. There was some business in Exeter, New Hampshire in the rain a few years ago, the standby line for the musical Chicago when I was 15, a thing with wristbands in Times Square once, an exhausting day in front of the windows at MTV, but generally I am not a waiter in (or on, as New Yorkers say) lines. It is far, far better when the magic comes to you, when you roll up 20 minutes after the opening band ends in great shoes and take stock of the crowd like, “Look at all these sorry bitches who got here six hours early while I was at home eating a burrito and painting my toenails.”
For this, though, an event in Central Park, a New York Thing of Notable Magnitude, it is wait or don’t get in. So we wait. And unlike those people who arrived at eight in the morning, at nine, those people who took a gamble and slept an extra twenty minutes, we are in the door. The paper feels good in my hands. We are the haves.
I leave W______ and L_____ on Bleecker St. clutching a box of cupcakes each. I have my own box, too, neatly folded up, for the fridge. Over the course of the week, I will split them into quarters and eat them piece by piece, making them last. I cannot eat a whole one for their suffocating sweetness, their sticky waves of buttercream.
There is no line at midnight, only the few smart tourists and neighborhood stragglers, but they’re still bringing out tray after tray, new vanillas with minty green, blue, pink frosting. I plan to buy nothing and cave immediately when I see them because this is my tendency. It is not the taste (There are better in New York.) or the sinfulness (There are guiltier, more worthwhile pleasures.) but the prettiness I cannot resist, the color-coordinated sprinkles.
Back on the street, we say our goodbyes. There are hugs. Promises to call soon, to chat. Wishes for a safe flight, a good walk back to the hotel. W______ smiles her smile; I am sad to see her leave.
I am halfway home, by the church, when the rain descends in a sheet like on a movie set — Casablanca rain. It pelts in fat, forceful drops and I can barely pull my umbrella out in time, so I duck against the building, pray for the wind, the overhang of the eaves, to protect my cupcakes and me for an instant longer. The water moves sideways, blows at my back and soaks my legs.
It is not the rain, but the speed of it, the transformation from a too-balmy night in October, in five seconds, into something else. A deluge. A way to end things properly.
We sneak in a bottle of wine without realizing that we’re sneaking it in. They tell us that food and drink are OK, over and over again. People come with picnic hampers. All kinds of shit.
The usher girls get crazy about the rules. If they see you taking a picture—even before the show starts — they make you get out of your seat, come out to the aisle, delete it in front of them. A_____ pushes the shutter on her camera to focus but never takes the picture. An usher girl goes ballistic.
“Ma’am, no pictures! You need to delete it right now.”
“I didn’t take a picture,” says A_____, confused.
“Then what was that light I saw?”
“Um, I don’t know. It’s like, the red eye thing.”
Finally, the usher lets up, but she harasses other people in our section, bids a well-dressed woman in front of us to come out to aisle, to dutifully delete the photos of the empty stage.
The noises of nighttime Central Park close in, the rustle of leaves and the crowd and the faraway whoosh of traffic. We are perched in one of the back sections behind the platinum superstar paying ticket holders who paid hundreds and hundreds for a single seat or who know someone in the cast. We just slept on a sidewalk.
The whole wine thing is not really about wine. It’s about the glass container. So box wine, in other words, would have been wholly OK. So we hide it between our knees and pour close to the ground into gigantic red safety cups, because that’s how A_____ rolls. By the time the show starts, I’m already buzzed. By the time Jonathan Groff sings “I Got Life,” in his bad wig and weirdly fitting jeans (not unpleasant, just weird), I am solidly drunk.
I have been intoxicated during Broadway musicals on two previous occasions, once during the Trevor Nunn revival of Oklahoma! and once during The Fully Monty, both of which starred the now-cinematically-somewhat-famous Patrick Wilson. I have tried for years to draw some sort of logical connection there, but I still can’t think of one. I do know, however, that it’s sort of fun to be drunk at the theater, to have the show slide by in a strictly nonintellectual sort of way. (To get drunk during, say, A Long Day’s Journey into Night, given this particular fact, is probably unwise.) A_____ and I finish the bottle. By the time the cast takes its bows, we are amazingly appreciative.
On the way out of the park, A_____ and I decide that we need ice cream. The trees throw shadows across the paths. Even in the droves, buried three and six deep, Central Park at night still feels forbidden. We spill onto 79th Street and the city lights flood back, haloed, brighter than ever, and maybe it’s the drink and maybe it’s something else.
I am late for work so I have missed the rush hour platform, the squish and shove and wedge, finally, into the train. There is almost no one around and that sensation settles, the one that happens when you see things and no one else is around, and all you want is to look up, see a face, and say, “Did you see that?” Just to reaffirm that the tree didn’t fall in the forest, that you needn’t make an appointment with your shrink.
I see it on the ground, tiny, smaller than the tip of my index finger. A shiny surface mounted on a plastic backing. It is a picture of Jesus, the Sacred Heart, one hand, two fingers raised. There are holes in the side of the picture that go all the way through.
I think, Oh shit. Someone’s trying to tell me something again.
It must be a broken piece of a rosary, something that one of those Subway Jesus Crazy People was handing out to the unwashed masses, nudging them with particular eagerness toward the girls in the head scarves, tossing them in handfuls, a shower of aspirin-sized Lord-and-Saviors.
I imagine damnation if I toss it aside, or worse if I kick it onto the tracks. I imagine a booming male voice saying, “You will live to regret that, my strayed daughter.” And still I don’t want to toss it, really, because I’m not an atheist, try as I might. Try as this city has so sorely tried to make me believe nothing, to fully grasp that there’s nothing beyond this, beyond right now, that we’re snuffed out like so many gasping little candles when it’s done. Or maybe, like all of us, I just feel guilty.
I put it in my purse.
That’s when I see the second one, a few feet away. It is square instead of round, and I can tell without crouching that the picture of Jesus is slightly different, more red than blue, more sunlit and earthbound than mine, which is all clouds and inclement heavenly weather. I think about picking that one up too, about saving the scattered Jesuses from death on the tracks, but the train comes. Let someone else be saved, do the saving. Just before the door closes, I see a third Jesus, and, a few feet away, a fourth. I give up. I have done my daily devotion.
Months later, I am on the subway again, half-entranced by a book when I see a man sitting opposite me, and he is wearing them. A cavalcade of my junior-sized Jesuses. They are in a bracelet, strung one next to the other. It catches on his hairy arm. It is then and only then that I see the whole story, the part that happened before I entered the scene, only in my story it is a woman.
She is struggling with two babies and only one carriage between them, and the older kid is babbling, distracted, tugging at Mommy’s cuffs and pant legs and whatever can be grabbed while the woman shuffles them all on the subway, the toddler, the baby, the carriage, the diaper bag, the Metrocard, the bottles to keep everyone quiet, pacifiers strapped to little arms. And just as the door opens, the little girl grabs for the first thing she can reach and a little finger hooks around her mother’s bracelet and the elastic snaps and the beads go flying everywhere, pinging against the sides of the car.
The mother rolls her eyes, huffs, says something in Spanish, keeps moving everyone forward, onto the car, pulling little limbs away from the doors. The little girl lets out a wail, distracted for an instant by the flying beads before she is yanked in. The door closes. The Sacred Heart stays, but in pieces, a burst and scatter, only the little bits left behind.
I get home and the hallways are dark. On the second floor I am greeted by a flashlight in the face and a nervous hello. The ConEd man holds a squawking walkie talkie. His bag sits on the floor with tubes sticking out of its sides. It hums.
“I’m investigating a gas leak,” he says.
I imagine Die Hard-style explosions, my clothes shredded and charred to fluttering leaves, floating through the night sky. A gas leak does not explain the apparent lack of electricity and I start to formulate conspiracy theories. A high-level plot to rape and kill us all; the lights are Phase 1. The Distraction. I leave.
I stand on the sidewalk. I consider calling some people. I pace. The people drinking beer at the outdoor tables at The Red Lion give me fish eye stares, like I’m not the one who lives here.
Then I see the Roadie.
The Roadie lives next door in apartment 12 and walks with an old-man stoop, arms too wide, knees jutting everywhere. He clamps baseball caps over his nest of hair, which ends in a frayed, gray ponytail. The t-shirt is key. It is either Chicago or Boston, the bands not the cities. He maybe works at The Red Lion or walks dogs or helps out the super. I hear him arguing with Karen sometimes, the sound muted and wordless, through the wall.
“You can go up,” he says. “It’s safe. It’s just dark.”
I hesitate. Look at my phone, at no one’s number.
“Listen, I’ll walk up with you,” he says.
“Thank you. I would appreciate it.”
Upstairs, the apartments on my floor have emptied. Karen stands with her hands on her big hips, frowning down the stairs. She’s barefoot and wearing flowered pajamas.
Karen refers to The Roadie only as The Dude, and she says it in such a way that you don’t quite believe it’s really his name, but you do believe that he answers to it, that she has THE DUDE programmed into her phone.
“It’s crazy in here! My god. What a disaster. All my food is going bad.”
The woman across the hall introduces herself, says her name is Audrey. I unlock my door and inhale, expecting the acrid, sweet smell of gas, one of my roommates pulling an unexpected Sylvia Plath, sprawled out across the kitchen floor. I remember before I get all the way inside that there’s no one home. They’re both on vacation.
The apartment is dark but not, crammed with shadows and pink and yellow splashes of light from the neon downstairs. Everything seems fine.
I stand in the doorway, craving whatever limited sort of action can crop up in a building with no power on a Tuesday night. I smell the gas now. It comes and goes. Or maybe I imagine it. That’s when Dallas emerges from apartment 12, standing in the doorway too, a glass in one hand. The ice cubes tinkle, nervous and alcoholic.
The thing about Dallas is that he’s young and good looking and a criminal. Our previous roommate -- a delicate-boned photographer from Connecticut -- said he was on the lam, but we mistakenly get his mail sometimes and the Corrections Department return addresses suggest otherwise. I’m guessing his criminality is related to the use of controlled substances because he’s definitely been using some on this particular night.
He says, “Duuuuude, I feel like that guy in Team America: World Police right now.”
“Yeah, exactly,” I say. I’ve never seen it.
The Roadie, Karen, and Dallas have all lived together in apartment 12 since before we moved in and there is apparently nothing romantic and everything personal between the three of them. Once, Karen locked Dallas out (on purpose; He called her a bitch and a hypocrite for criticizing his drinking) and then he vomited on the landing. There was another guy living there too until March when he died in his sleep. We learned about his existence from the coroner who wheeled him out.
The door to apartment 12 is open. Candles flicker in placid unison on a table, indicating that the problem is not, in fact, a gas leak. Dallas says, “Take it easy. Go watch some TV or something,” before disappearing into a back room.
During the blackout of 2003, I had no friends as well as no power, and at 2:00 in the morning, in the crawl space that passed for my bed, I turned on the radio. The DJ took calls from listeners, and said things like, “Yeah. We’re just waiting it out,” while the world swam black and lifeless out my single window. The air in the apartment grew stuffy and still as the hours passed; the window was stoppered by a gigantic, silent air conditioner. I watched the roaches scuttle across the floor, caught in the flashlight beam, and I sobbed, face first into my pillow, when the DJ played “New York State of Mind”. I had lived here for two weeks.
Later, I heard stories of stoop parties, of bars that handed out free beer, of Brooklyn all candle-lit and warm, everyone hanging out. A fantastic time in someone else’s city.
I am alone again this time, but better. The trouble is self-contained, one little building and that building is mine. Karen offers me a flashlight. I have one, but I take it anyway. I lock the door. I point the beam around the room, zoom in on the corners. Various battery-powered electronics, yanked out of my purse, flipped open, glow a ghostly blue for an instant before I think better of it, put them away. I am out of options -- powerless. I hit a light switch, forgetting, then put it back in the off position.
I know how it will end, how I will be jolted awake at 3:00 am by the low buzz of things I never notice until they are switched off and then back on again, the steady blink of my alarm clock, the time all wrong.
In Brooklyn they show movies on Tuesday nights in the summer in a swimming pool.
The pool is a gigantic pool. A WPA pool. A pool that was built out of concrete to serve 6,000 swimmers but which served exactly no one after 1984 when it was closed for "renovations" and never reopened. Until lately. Until some big corporations stepped in and realized that people would want to do things in a pool other than swim.
Because the whole notion of the thing is sort of indi and Brooklyn likes the indi. Or maybe the corporations just think that Brooklyn likes the indi.
The pool is drained. There is no water. I should probably say that. And there is a screen at one end and lots of chipped blue concrete on which to sit on a blanket. Or on a sarong from Ipanema, which is what my friend brought for us to sit on.
I would not go so far as to say that this pool has been "restored" but I have seen photos and I would think that some basic cleanup has happened. The painting over of graffiti for example. Which some people see not as cleanup but as desecration. Do your own math on that one.
The movie is Bonnie and Clyde, which none of us have seen and which all of us love by the time it is through. Even though it seems unlikely that Bonnie would have so very many great outfits while she was on a cross-country crime spree.
And all the while I cannot help but look at the sky because there is so much more of it in Brooklyn and my eye fixes on a particularly bright star, but I cross my fingers. It has a certain color. And a steadiness of light. A planet. I have no idea if these things are true about planets but I am happy to believe them if it is Venus hovering above the screen above the pool in Brooklyn on a Tuesday night in summer.
I have read about the meteor showers in August. I think I have even seen them once or twice. At the beach with Corinne when we were teenagers. We just thought there were lots of shooting stars. But I read and was disappointed because you cannot see these things near so many city lights, so many things to bleat them out and turn the sky a sooty gray. So I did not have my hopes up for the annual August meteor showers that are apparently viewable anywhere and everywhere except under city lights.
But halfway through the movie, when Bonnie and Clyde were being shot up for the fourth time, I saw one. A single bright streak right above the screen, unmistakable. And gone an instant later. A dart shot through the gray. And somehow it was so much sweeter with just one.
on In a Bar