Heartbreak Is Where I Lived in Brooklyn
by
Brett Busang
When
I moved away from Manhattan, I felt as if a kind outlanderish life had
begun. I would no longer take the subway
Uptown, but through warrens of interconnected property-lines, landmarks I could
only guess at, and people who were as polymorphous as the Manhattanites I came
to know well enough to sort out the good and bad. (How might I do that in Brooklyn? Was the same antennae – and prejudice –
available there? Or would it have to be
re-tuned and/or re-calibrated?) I would
not feel as connected with the media – an historical curiosity for people of
The Digital Age – by which my daily experience was converted into the soundbites
that seemed much too fast for it. I
would grieve over a lost identity that would crop up as I settled in. “Where’d you come from?” someone would ask. “Across the river,” I’d say. “Yeah.
A lotta you people are coming over here now. What’s a matter? Got too hard?” “Yes,” I would say. “It did.”
I
would never again cross the Harlem River at 155th Street for a game
at Yankee Stadium. I would fail to show
up at the only place that had possibly served Duke Ellington – who had lived in
an apartment building much like mine – three blocks away. I would cease to grumble about my Dominican
overlords, who not only set the pace of living, but were so cavalierly violent
that, like Mafiosi, they liked to kill people when they were garishly
overdressed. And could get away in
style. I would miss lower Fifth Avenue,
which reminded me of a Childe Hassam painting, which must have reminded Hassam
– if he squinted vociferously enough – of Paris. And the taverns that were etched in cut
glass. Would Brooklyn have any? The ballfields all over Central Park,
something Robert Moses did to consolidate a reputation that was never big
enough for him. How many would I find
across the river? I would not be greeted
by a doorman who was on to the masquerade as much as I – and which prompted a
tip, come Christmas, I could ill afford.
The Viennese splendor that had, whether by design or no, protected so
many emigres from Hitler’s Germany would never, from 72nd Street,
call to me again. Manhattan was about
the vaulting ambition whose Doppelganger
had a second face, which strutted and smiled.
And which I had loved from the very moment I took in Upper
Broadway. Anchored by an Ansonia which
had been much-abused and marched toward a glorious epiphany at 110th
Street, which had tamped it down, it was one of the world’s great perspectives,
to rival the Unter der Linden, The Champs Elysees, and the great Golden Mile. In a tawdrier sort of way, of course.
Brooklyn
was the best minor league city in all the boroughs. The Dodgers had been there and were not
forgiven for having relinquished Brooklyn at a time when they were
winning. (Perhaps they wouldn’t have
been forgiven for any reason at all.)
Rather than let their victories be absorbed by a population that had
craved them for so very long, they flew away.
Sandy Koufax could have pitched in Brooklyn, but, because of a quirk of
history, he would not. And the park that
had hosted one of the most eccentric musical outfits that had ever bloated
cheeks or farted out of a trombone would be demolished almost
straightaway. Nobody in Los Angeles
would remember that The Dodgers had been lopped off from a longer presentation:
The Trolley Dodgers, which people did a lot of back in the day. No, Brooklyn has never gotten over it, though,
when all of its eyewitnesses will have died out, the notion of impending losses
and fly-by-night success will have become psychologically ingrained. People will hesitate before they buy
something. They will circle an area
rather than go right in. They won’t
speak to strangers because any stranger might eventually break their hearts.
I
would, as I grew into my new identity, see that heartbreak was Brooklyn’s alma
mater, its self-regulating mythology, its God Almighty. I had never seen a heroin addict until I
roamed Crown Heights, which had produced so much when production was peaking,
but had these human relics to offer should anybody care to take them. (All sorts of “manufactories” had taken root
here before and after the Civil War.
Knox the Hatter’s sprawling parallelogram was tricked out in the rubble
that was more reminiscent of the Warsaw Ghetto than South Brooklyn, NY – or
anyplace whose viability had been bowed, but not broken. Knox the Hatter was one of those iconic
businesses whose profile seems, in period photographs, so well-established that
any sort of decay or degradation seems out of synch with our values. If something is good, it lasts. If it lasts, it doesn’t falter. Yet here it was, a rule-book that had been
tossed aside, a life lesson run aground, a doomed prophecy whose afterlife,
here in Brooklyn, was its immortality.)
The
crack addiction that flourished so mightily in the Upper Manhattan I had known
for some years seemed to stop at the river’s edge, where a confluence of some
sort produced a slower sort of addiction.
Addicts became the display-units that signaled, as signage generally
does, a place’s character. I was
guiltily fascinated to the point of examining one of these relics, whose
joy-ride had stopped so abruptly that legs and arms were jumbled, clothing that
had been mismatched for so long blended together, and whose face, which was
remarkably pristine, drooled, with some semblance of propriety, a symmetrical
stream. The eyes were open, as if the
death for which they possibly yearned had already occurred. A forehead on which no addiction had been
imprinted glistened with clammy beads.
And the hair was perfectly braided, possibly because that was the first
thing passerby would see. I have not mentioned the sex of this person, which
was not particularly relevant, even if it was impossible to ignore. She looked like somebody who had done well
in a hard class, if only for a halcyon moment.
I could imagine her hair flying this way and that as the body underneath
it cheered some forgotten football squad along.
While the face was pristine, its contours were harder-edged than they
should have been. Whatever bloom had
given it a jolt of electricity had dimmed with the streetlights that were
throwing purple and lavender around.
There was daylight enough to assure me of a passage through a memento mori that functioned as
something that that could be underfoot for a while. Yet there wouldn’t be much of it and I
wouldn’t tempt fate by sticking around too long. Though concerned with her vulnerability, I
did nothing about it. Rather, I kept
moving along, which, in the sort of place I was in, ensured that I would do
more. Which is what you settle for when
you’re looking out for yourself.
I
first lived in a neighborhood Spike Lee had conquered so completely that a
store that sold memorabilia from his movies had cropped up there. It was the sort of neighborhood that lends
itself to the plunging perspectives New Yorkers demand from their outer
boroughs. You know you’re in Brooklyn
when you can look beyond the East River toward a destination. Brooklyn is
where you start out, not where you’re supposed to land. You came to Brooklyn to lick your
wounds. Or stayed there if they’d, at
long last, defeated you.
I
was assigned a room that was more of an alcove.
The kitchen was so close that, even when my roommates wanted to spare
me, I heard every hesitation.
“I
am the rosy-fingered dawn and so I greet you,” was one of the things I said.
And
the racket became believably robust.
They
were Tom and Alicia, plain-sounding names that were accumulating in areas that
had teemed with first-time Americans.
Fort Greene had, however, been prosperous, which made for a population
that could choose to live where it wanted and chose to live here. We were on the third floor of a brownstone
that, like its neighbors, had been hastily and insensitively converted. The carpet that squished underfoot as all
the floors went by you changed colors at every landing. Old locks dangled from doorways that looked
even more vulnerable with them rather than without them. Wallpaper curled and buckled picturesquely,
though painted walls would, I suspected, win out over time – which, in a place
like ours, was measured in decades rather than months or years. The single-family brownstones stood on
blocks that were like stage-sets for a Henry James novel. Our block was where people started out. Or came to live after a life that had been
lived only too well. (The poet Marianne
Moore had settled, while commuting, at night, to Ebbets Field, across the
street. I didn’t know which apartment
she had lived in, but, when I studied the façade, I could choose – as we can do
when we have more latitude than we may want – the window, or windows, that were
its public face.)
As life got better, you moved to a
place where you wanted to live rather than anywhere that would take you.
Would
I ever do that? I would rather not say.
I’d
fled an apartment situation in Queens and felt like the survivor who wakes up
to sunlight on the sill, the faces of friends, and a possible future. I had not liked Queens very much. It had an insularity that was born of a
paradoxical segregation: in this case, it was the Jewish middle class, which
had stumbled on to a perfect formula: go somewhere, fill it up, and don’t let
anybody else in. I was tolerated because
of a lower status that would never want to buy a house there – or never
could. In pursuit of exercise, I threw a
baseball I had possibly found or stolen against shallow stairways that would
flip it right back. Yet no one was ever
hit and no windows were broken. In these
practice sessions, my eccentricity was established beyond a shadow of a doubt,
which worked to my advantage. “What’s a
grown man doing with a ball?” said the lady who owned the building and occupied
the ground floor apartment. “Let him
be,” said a neighbor. “It’s all he’s
got.”
Which,
in terms of recreational fodder, was absolutely correct. Forest Hills wasn’t far away, but it was for
elite players. My tennis racket had
fallen victim, while I lived in Upper Manhattan, to other practice sessions
that would unravel its strings, which I never would replace. Baseball, carrying with it what might have
been had I been able to scramble after grounders that ordinarily shot right
past me, would eventually make me Brooklyn-perfect. Like that guy in The House of Blue Leaves – who also lived in Queens – I was too old
to be a fresh talent. As far as baseball
was concerned, I was the village elder who, instead of spinning tall tales,
chose to enact his decrepitude in hopeful catches and pointlessly energetic
throws.
I
would continue to play baseball in Brooklyn, which seemed to welcome it even as
it didn’t care much for a guy who was over the hill as only the vigorously
superannuated can be.
I
went to Manhattan to visit my girlfriend, who lived on Central Park West, near
where the jogger was eventually assaulted (and about which crime a future
president waxed eloquently stupid), and liked this arrangement far better than
the one we’d had when we lived together.
It re-captured our original courtship, which had taken place down South,
though it wasn’t the leisurely thing that was supposed to happen in such a
place. Indeed. It was so recklessly hurried that, by the
time we began to live together, we didn’t really know each other well
enough. Fortunately, that is the case
with millions of other couples, who generally notice it when it’s much too late
and, possibly, more agreeable because of it.
We’d
just been in Brooklyn, for a series of short plays I’d written and wanted
others to perform. When these others had
not shown the superior insight that would have displaced me, I volunteered for
the job. They were eventually performed
in one of the smallest spaces that had ever endured more than a solo artist who
was way down on his or her luck. The
stage virtually fell into the audience’s lap, which held it there with a
surprising tenacity. When the lights
went down, we were already in our places.
And, when they were cranked up, we began. The high-water mark – which wasn’t
consciously sought – came when, as a man who had beaten up his date and was
becoming, as he recited all of the indignities he had suffered at the hands of
bosses and friends, I raged at a god who had never understood me and flailed
out, one last time, at this date, who had poured hot coffee into my lap. Which prompted me to fall into somebody
else’s. (On that particular evening, I
had, as prop-master, ordered coffee that was not yet lukewarm. And hadn’t had much time, between a to-go
establishment and the stage, to cool off.) Rather than get upset, however, the audience
member into whose lap I had spilled kissed me on the lips with an audible
smack, as if to stage a retaliatory assault right there, and let me climb off
of her. The applause that followed was the
loudest and most exquisitely partisan I would ever hear in that space. And, according to a Brooklyn ethic I already
understood, it was not for me, but for an audience member who had turned a
potential fiasco into something rich and strange.
The
theater happened to be in the same neighborhood where Ebbets Field had
stood. I knew it had been replaced by
apartments blocks and had steeled myself to the horror I would feel as I
contemplated those perfect stones being pulled away, seats being popped out and
tossed aside, and Monongahela Valley steel crumpling between the jaws of an
earth-mover. Yet, to this unassuming
spot, they’d all come: Zack Wheat, who got into the Hall of Fame; Pee Wee Reese
whom I had known, when I was a child, as an announcer. He had a Kentucky drawl that was lit up with
the sense of a great world being partially filled up by him. And he was one of those small and dapper
fellows who seem to have gone the way of chain-smoking and baggy uniforms. It was Reese who had put his arms around
Jackie Robinson, quashing cries that can no longer be uttered, even if they are
thought aloud.
I
went over to the site before, and sometimes, after, rehearsal. Or, when the performances – which would peter
out after a short second week – started, I’d mosey over there at night, when
the neighborhood’s synergy would wind down, and look at a place that was more
valuable to my imagination than the eyesight that couldn’t quite cue it
up. And there it was: a something that
had sprung from the nothing Walter O’Malley had dictated from on high. There the impermanence of all dynasties shone
in a streetlight that was possibly too dim for all the space it had to
cover. And here was the heart-break that
was inseparable from a minuscule triumph whereby a fallen actor would slam into
somebody, hoped that a vengeful boyfriend wouldn’t hear about it, and was applauded
for it instead.
This
was the Brooklyn I would get to know, over the next several years, which gave
and took away; which made me feel, by turns, comfortable and alienated; and
would, because a lousy day might as well succeed another lousy one, break my
heart again and again.
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