“The Wanderer”
by
Tasha Anderson
We stood on the Brooklyn bridge shivering. The countdown began. 10-9-8. I kept my eyes open in the cold. The skyline of New York City glittered before us. I held my breath. -3-2-1, Happy New Year! The city was still alive and so were we.
Days before, we visited my dad’s neighborhood, Dyker Heights, to see the Christmas decorations. The yards were full of life size animatronic figures: Jesus, Santa and Mary cascading across lawns.
“It all started with Nana!” My dad said wistfully, my mitten tucked into his huge hand. “Really?”
“Charles Atlas, the strong man, lived next door. One day he threw away a string of lights. On Christmas Poppy strung them around the bay window. Nana started painting scenes on the glass-- ice skaters, the nativity-- it became a competition."
I’ve come to think of Brooklyn as America’s holy land. The hometown of countless creators whose work has become synonymous of with American culture. Maybe creativity is the only way to satisfy the soul amidst chaos. An uncertain alchemy of pain and struggle into music, art and comedy. "We didn’t grow up with all these prejudices. Sure, everyone had their cliques, but people were people."
"Wherever you wander, if you’re from Brooklyn and you speak, they can hear you in Brooklyn."
It was where my dad was born and raised. Where he had his first near-death experience. Where he rode a tortoise in his backyard. Where he made a brass cannon and blew off his index finger at thirteen. Brooklyn. Where he built hot rods. Where he worked as a Good Humor ice cream man in Coney Island. Where he earned the nickname, “Yamaha Ed,” after he slid under a semi on his motorcycle. Brooklyn, NY. Where a fifteen-cent token could take you anywhere in the city. "The world was at my feet"
Twenty-one years after Y2K I would fly to JFK to visit him in the ICU. I arrived at my Aunt Barbara’s apartment before midnight. “Coming!” I could hear her rhythmic footsteps over the creaking floorboards. I hadn’t heard her recite her slogan in years,
“My name is Barbara, I come from
Brooklyn, I don’t have a boyfriend, but I get bargains!”
I reached up to hug her, even in her eighties she was taller than me.
The lavender paint was chipped and warped under dozens of masks along the hallway. Her apartment overflowed with toys, costume jewelry and broken instruments. The clutter was closing in on her.
I walked into her studio where she kept a narrow guest bed. My dad's luggage sat there-- a preview of losing him, a memory of losing my mom.
“How does this feel since you’ve been at odds with your dad? This changes it or you puttin' that on hold? I couldn’t resolve anything until after my father died.”
The next morning, I walked to the hospital. “I’ve been NPO for eighteen hours, Doc!”
“The gastroenterologists are doing their best to squeeze you in.” The white coat clutched his clipboard.
“I don’t know why I have to be a squeeze!”
The doctor pulled up a diagram of the upper digestive organs.
“What’s this thing? It looks like a hearing aid.”
“That’s the gallbladder. On the MRI we saw an area here that looks like a mass but it’s ill-defined. The prognosis will be different depending on your diagnosis.”
“I’m worried about missing Easter.” He still sang in the choir. As a boy he would stand on the landing above the dining room and sing. He sang all the songs from The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, The King and I, and Fifties ballads like Jo Stafford’s, “You Belong to Me.” His mother played piano by ear. The dining room closet was full of instruments-- a stand-up bass, drums, trumpet. Family gatherings were all about music. A way to harmonize their lives.
The next endoscopy failed to produce any results. They offered exploratory surgery. They didn’t recommend we fly, but they didn’t tell us not to.
“Take these IVs out! I’m goin' home!” His arms were red and sore.
“They bruised my lip during the procedure too.” He showed me like a child would his mother.
The discharge nurse was born and raised in Brooklyn too. She quickly found out that before his days as the sound man for Dylan and The Band he helped build the stage at Woodstock.
“Oh dear, the mess I can’t even imagine.”
“It was mostly just piles of wet blankets.”
He sang, “I’ll be There” by the Jackson 5 as they wheeled him out of the hospital. He complimented the cabby on his Nigerian pop, "I love that syncopated rhythm!"
He could barely walk, but he was a butterfly on the streets of New York. Fluttering.
His smile ironed out the wrinkles in his lips. He told me the story of when he met Muhammad Ali. How he learned to calculate astrology charts by hand. How in the thirteen minutes between the birth of his twin sisters five planets changed houses. He told me about the course he did on the Tarot, “The subtitle of all tarot studies is: know thyself.”
At five am, I got up and knocked to wake him up. He looked like an ancient baby. Between small sips of coffee that tasted like diesel, he recalled as he often did back to what Monsignor Sheridan would ask him, “Have you made peace with man’s inhumanity to man, to-day?” He wasn’t wearing his dentures. He had no top teeth, just a couple on his bottom jaw.
When he went to the bathroom, I cried at the table. He had made me feel powerless for most of my life and now I was holding him up when I could have blown him over with my breath.
"Don't you think our capacity for pain is directly correlated to our capacity for pleasure, for joy?" He nodded his head as if a part of him was acknowledging again all the ways he had denied himself.
As we waited for our taxi in the pre-dawn light, he started singing “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” The Peter Paul and Mary version. I joined in.
He choked up at, “Every song I sing, I
sing for you.” I started crying.
“I know," he said, "I tear...uh-- every place-- I-- every song I
sing, I sing for you,” he lost his place and repeated the line, looking down at
the sidewalk. I sniffled along while he finished the verse.
“Hold me like you’ll never let me gooo. I’m leaving on a jet plane.” Apart of us both knew he was leaving this life soon too. I knew this moment would loom large, one of tenderness that I would return to, one that would always bring me to tears.
***
“Which temple do you belong to?” an Orthodox man asked while we were at Nicholas Canyon beach watching the surfers and reading from the I-Ching. When one is so close to death do they glow as if they are holy?
“I’m not Jewish, but I am from Brooklyn! There were seven daily Yiddish papers when I was a kid!" The sound of the waves carried on.
A year later he would take his last breath in Los Angeles, his home of fifty years, but he would always be Brooklyn.
