Paradise A Memory
By Denise DiFulco
Everywhere you look there are
bouquets of light. Bursts of red, yellow, green and blue 360 degrees around.
You and your best friend are sitting in lawn chairs, Coke cans in hand, Mets on
the radio, taking it all in. It’s the best show in the world, best seats in the
house. Or on the house. Because that’s where you are, on the roof of his
parents’ place in Canarsie, watching the night sky fade behind neon showers.
It’s
July 4th, 1988. And as you sit there watching the horizon bloom into
full color, you’re not thinking a year ahead, let alone five or ten or twenty.
You’re not thinking that in less than a decade your friend’s parents will move
out to Long Island, like most everyone else from the neighborhood, and that the
neat little yard out front will become overgrown with weeds and trash. You’re
not thinking that terrorists will have taken their first crack at toppling the
Twin Towers, and that you’ll spend a frantic day wondering if your uncle, who
was working at a construction site downtown, made it out alive. You’re
certainly not thinking that the current U.S. attorney, that Giuliani guy who
brought down the Five Families, will become mayor and ban fireworks for good so
that no one will ever score a ticket to this spectacular show again.
No.
At this moment you’ve got your eyes to the sky, thinking how beautiful your
city looks lit up in a Technicolor dream. At this moment, it seems bigger and
better than anything your dad could have imagined back when he was a kid living
in Flatbush, playing stickball in dirt lots and following the Dodgers like
religion. Hearing him tell it, Brooklyn never was better. But times change.
Brooklyn isn’t what it was for your dad. Just like it won’t be what it was for
you.
But
you don’t know that yet.
Instead
you roll your eyes every time he mourns the old days—his Golden Days—when a kid could walk the streets at night and a
subway ride cost only a nickel. You cringe when he complains about the graffiti
that now seems to have crept onto the city buses. It’s an ominous sign, he
says. What was once confined to Manhattan and the Bronx is infiltrating your
good neighborhood. You don’t tell him it is your friends, the kids from your
good neighborhood who are tagging up the B78 with their Sharpie markers and
etching the Plexiglas windows with X-ACTO knives.
It
is you, the child, who is protecting the adult. Because from the time you are very little, you watch your parents’
world fade like an old photograph. When you are seven, you go shopping with
your mother once a week on Avenue N in Old Mill Basin, stopping first at the
vegetable store, then the fish market, then the pork store. You slide your feet
along sawdust and hay scattered on the floors of the little shops, marvel at
the old cash registers with their mother-of-pearl buttons, press your nose
against the freshly rolled pepperoni stacked just at your height. Sometimes
your mom takes you into the men’s barbershop across the street for a haircut
even though you are a girl. You cry and protest loudly, yet Tony succeeds in
making you laugh by playing peek-a-boo with a cape. He puts a booster across
the chair arms, and you climb up like it’s the jungle gym at the park. A few
snips straight across your bangs, and the ordeal is over. Eyes red and cheeks
still wet with tears, you wait by the front counter eagerly while your mom
pays. Tony pretends not to know why you’re standing there, and after a few
moments of intentionally, though playfully making you suffer, he pulls out a
box of lollipops.
You,
as always, take one that is striped green, white and orange.
Ironically,
when a supermarket opens on Ralph Avenue less than a mile away, the little
shops close in the order your mother used to visit. First the vegetable store,
then the fish store. The pork store, miraculously, hangs on. You think it’s
because of the way the strapping butchers in their bloodstained aprons flirt
heavily and openly with the housewives coming to market. Even your mother puts
on lipstick and checks her hair before she walks through the door.
But
so much else, so much of the Brooklyn your parents remember has long
disappeared. When your dad takes you to Coney Island—the one and only time—it
is dirty and desolate. You ride the creaky old Cyclone, and as the car is
cranked up the lift chain you count how many trestle joints have separated.
There are that many. The visit lasts only a half hour. And as you’re leaving,
you notice some guys dancing on cardboard boxes they’ve sliced open and laid flat
on the sidewalk into a makeshift dance floor. They’re waving their arms and
spinning on their heads in time to a thumping bass that blares from a radio the
size of a small car. “C’mon,” your dad says, nudging you. “We’re going to get
mugged. You’ve got to keep moving.” And still you stand there, mesmerized.
No,
this is no longer his Brooklyn.
This,
you realize, is yours.
You
soon learn those moves are called breaking and the music is hip hop. The radio
is called a boom box, and before long those clunky, behemoths will appear on
the shoulders of young men walking just about everywhere. It’s part of the
whole graffiti culture. Kids come to school with notebooks filled not with
their homework assignments, but with their graffiti tags and illustrations, master
plans to bomb handball walls and subway cars in the dark of the night. It’s
beautiful, you think. You sketch out your own alphabet. Play around with
different tags. Only once, after school in a forgotten hallway, do you dare to
put yours on a wall.
Instead
you wear your hair big, peg your pants, embrace neon. You learn to pop and wave
and shuffle. You watch as the other kids continue to carve up bus windows. At
least one a day whips out a stack of “Hello, My Name Is” stickers and slaps
their tag on every solid surface around the neighborhood. Even you cringe when
you notice they’re now bombing garage doors of people’s homes.
But
you will defend that neighborhood to anyone. You will defend Brooklyn to
anyone. Even though every September when you return to school, more of your
friends are missing. They don’t always tell you they are leaving, but you can
guess where they’ve gone: Long Island, Staten Island, New Jersey, Florida.
Many
of them miss the Mets winning the World Series in 1986. Your neighborhood is 12
miles by highway from Shea Stadium, but at the moment of the last out, when
Jesse Orosco hurls his glove into the air and falls to his knees, it’s like
you’re in the stands. The whole borough is delirious in a collective ovation.
The streets around your house are filled with hundreds of people shouting,
honking horns, shooting fireworks. Guys are driving by in their Camaros
streaming toilet paper out the windows. It’s a scene that is being repeated all
over the borough. All over the city. And all you can think is, Where else in the world?
You
have the same thought sitting on your best friend’s roof watching all manner of
pyrotechnics, hundreds at a time, explode in every direction.
Where else in the world?
And
not too long after that, it’s time to find out. You go away to a private
college in upstate New York, where the big hair, the pegged jeans and the
hip-hop music just don’t play. You want to be back with your people. You want
to come home. But you don’t. Instead you stay. You straighten your hair, wear
plaid flannel shirts and listen to Seattle rock bands. You lose your accent.
One morning, while waiting for class to begin, you spot a headline on page A1
of The New York Times: “Boy, 15, Is
Fatally Stabbed at School in Brooklyn.” Upon reading the first sentence of the
story, you scream so loud as to alarm your classmates.
It
happened at your high school. In your good neighborhood.
Your
Brooklyn, too, has begun to fade.
The
1993 World Trade Center bombers will see to that. Mayor Giuliani and his clean
up of New York will see to that. Everyone who has moved away, all the
family-owned shops that have closed—that will seal it.
After
college, you’ll leave to see more of the world. Though you swear up and down
you’ll return, you’ll never come home to stay. And deep inside, you’ll hate
yourself for it. You’ll hate knowing this isn’t your Brooklyn anymore. It will
belong to someone else. Not only because time did its dirty work, not only
because the city succumbed to its inevitable life cycle, but mostly because you
gave it away.
One
day years later you’ll drive down Avenue N with your own kids in a car with New
Jersey plates, pointing out where the vegetable store and the fish store used
to be. You’ll laugh out loud realizing the pork store has expanded. But the
barber shop? Where is it? Those guys were so old even when you were little.
And
then you’ll spot it, a block down from where it used to be, the old twirling
pole set outside a new storefront.
You’ll
loop around three times before finding a parking space like your mother so
often did, and you’ll walk inside. The new place will be different, but the
faces the same: Tony, Frank, Rosario. The moment you walk in, Tony will
recognize you and welcome you with a huge smile.
He’ll
ask about your dad and talk about how he used to come in as a boy with his own
father. “You remember my grandfather?” you’ll say. “Of course. He was sucha
gooda man.” And that will lead into a conversation about the original
neighborhood fifty years earlier, before they built all the houses and the
stores. Back when the roads weren’t even paved. And you’ll try hard the whole
time to hide how emotional you’ve become. Suddenly you’ll feel like you’re
five, again. Ten. Thirteen.
And
then it will really hit you: You’ll return to this moment on the rooftop, soda
can sweating in hand, the smell of gunpowder and smoke heavy in the air. And
you’ll know how your dad felt. You’ll taste it in your mouth.
You’ll
excuse yourself to leave, promising to visit, again. It won’t be so long the
next time. And as you turn to walk out the door, you’ll realize Tony has called
your kids back. He is pulling out a box from under the cash register and
offering it to them.
They’ll
dig inside, remembering to say “thank you,” and run toward you waving their
loot.
They
are holding lollipops.
Striped.
Green,
white and orange as ever.
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