Rubble and the Sparkler: A
Brooklyn Story
by
Sarah Xerar Murphy
In
Memory of Joe and Pilar
My happiest childhood memories are of rubble, the
first of them anyway. That joyful childhood play among the hillocks formed from
the brick and beams of broken buildings down by the water near where the East
River meets the Upper Bay, at the foot of Atlantic Avenue where soon the Belt
Parkway will rise from the wreckage to run beside the warehouses of Furman
Street to layer below the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. Out there looking to find
the well-remembered brown woolly bear caterpillars and some other skinnier
green ones I can neither see nor name, but which must have enjoyed the green
leaves of equally nameless weeds or musky ailanthus shoots, even as the woolly
bears moved across the dirt and brick, and me so close to them, my eyes low
enough still to the ground that as I look down the smell that still calls me to
childhood is that of the brick itself, slightly damp, only slightly acrid,
still comforting. Even as I see myself looking up and across the avenue, Sunday
afternoon it must have been, to the one old seaman’s bar with the sawdust on
the floor, where my brother and I will soon be welcomed, the earliest customers
arriving just after the blue laws allow the bars to open delighting in us as will
often be the case in those days, even while the newer already slightly dangerous
smell of alcohol will mix in with the sawdust as I look up at the soft curve of
the underside of a barstool the place a symphony of yellows and ochres almost
tropical in memory.
The same alcohol smell that will
take for us take on a greater danger when unmixed, when that bar too has been reduced
to rubble its beams and sawdust scattered into landfill, with me now staring
through the chain link of an asphalt paved playground built over those same
demolished buildings at the glowing glass brick wall and neon lit window of
another seaman’s bar, Montero’s Bar and Grill there still at the corner of
Hicks and Atlantic even if Brooklyn’s working harbor has nearly disappeared,
the last sailors bar in Brooklyn it’s been called in one or another magazine,
where I am told until very recently Pilar will still hold court by that window,
glass in hand, though Joe will long have passed away, while then I will be wondering
as I’ll swing higher and higher if my mother is just getting Joe to cash a check
he knows she’s not good for or if she’s going to stay the afternoon into the
night in those desperate years after she’d lost her job and the gentle smell of
broken brick will long have disappeared from my life. When whichever man who
held my hand among the woolly bears is either long dead or has not yet returned
from his years sailing out of other ports.
Though I will remember when my
delight in rubble ended. The events of my rubble’s very last day. When rather
than looking down toward plaster crunching beneath my feet or from the top of a
mound toward any water, but wandering enclosed between buildings, moving across
an even field of broken brick and plaster shards in a vacant lot, swinging from
time to time between adult hands, not my mom and dad, but between two men, her
husband and her lover, two of the three most likely to be my father, so that
each time I am in the air I look up toward blue sky and when I land move my
gaze over to examine the remaining fourth wall of whatever building now lies crumbled
at our feet, noting those large pastel rectangles of paint between the broken
brick and beams of floors and ceilings, then among them the brighter squares
and rectangles and ovals, all shapes I had learned to identify even if I won’t
quite understand the origins of those before my eyes, will have no way of knowing
these were the places paintings photos posters had hung, furniture been placed
against the wall, that they told stories of a displacement I had not yet
experienced, as I delighted in this vision of smaller shapes enclosed in larger
ones.Though so far away each outlined room might seem just a bit like a cutaway
picture of a doll’s house in a book of paper dolls like the ones an aunt would
send me to try to make me into a proper girl decades before nonbinary was a
word or gender nonconforming shorthand for an idea we were all well aware of,
while I will continue swinging, the warmth of the hands that hold mine filling
my mind even now with the most peaceful of visions, no thoughts of broken
lives, even if I have long learned to wonder at the optimistic illusions of
those years when both the building and the destruction of the world around us,
when I will awake each morning to the the boomshush of the piledriver will be
deemed for the good of all in an ever growing more generous world when affordable
housing could still occupy prime real estate so that even later it would not
have occurred to me to ask such questions as where did the people go, thinking
I am sure if I thought at all that just like the paper dolls in those books
they would be living in an unchanging happily ever after, while right then
swinging my head for side to side as I swing forward and back from those hands
my eyes will fixate on other more brightly coloured three dimensional rectangles
awaiting my eyes, over on a rickety table up against another broken brick wall.
Lit up by the already orange sun of
this hot July afternoon that deepens the shadows between the objects on the
table or shards on the ground, as we approach the table laden with fireworks
bootlegged in from New Jersey because all such things will already be illegal
in the City of New York, displaying roman candles and parachutes in which we
have no interest, have no desire at all to send them into the air on our narrow
streets, but instead have come for the firecrackers mostly in blue boxes or
red, torpedoes and cherry bombs, the smallest orange yellow ladyfingers, the
M-80s and Black Cats, names still know even if I can’t make any images
correspond, don’t know for sure any of the names of the larger tubes of
newsprint and carboard wrapped gunpowder that come in strings, the print on the
paper like the boxes red, yellow or blue, with the smell of gunpowder something
I already know will delight me when later they will be thrown from a childish
hand amid gentle adult laughter. And the sparklers too, we are there for the
sparklers, always the sparklers, those metal rods in their windowed boxes still
for me the most important, the adults letting us look, letting us choose, even
as they laugh expansive at the irony of it all, their laughter ready to teach
me that concept, given that small stand mounted on the rubble of torn down
buildings whose location everyone in all the neighbourhoods all around knows,
will be put up each year there in the vacant lot directly behind the Butler
Street police station. So that someone might even comment on how even the
police themselves will likely come out of their station to buy their own more
elaborate fireworks to set off in their neighbourhoods a subway and a ferry
ride away—it will be a couple of decades before a bridge over the Narrows will
be built—out on Staten Island.
Though that evening irony will
encounter its own darkness. Certainly the adults will say so even if I do not
recognize it. When we will all come outside to stand in the little hollow
formed by our stoopless house where it meets the stoop next door on which our
next door neighbours will sit as will many along the block in that dusk of what
must have been The Fourth itself, I know that because I’d been changed out of
my usual shorts or tomboy blue jeans and helped into a brittle white dress
whose skirt will stick out around me, organza I think you call that fabric,
organza or crepe, with a pink or maybe baby blue satin sash, all of it made of
some desperately new artificial material, rayon or an even newer nylon or
polyester I don’t know, as we will all stand and hold our sparklers out with
delight, us kids thinking them more a miracle of sorts than an irony, how the
flames and sparks we knew not to let fall on us as we will create bonfires in
the back yard where in those late forties to fifties years the burning of
Hitler will turn to the burning of Stalin, our violent childish fantasies of
bombers and warrior heroism—one of the men around us had been a tail gunner in
the war—moving with the politics of the times, while what will amaze us in
those sparklers is that we will be able to pass our hands through the sparks’ precise
and repeated shapes again and again as the sparklers will continue their
ordered burning without feeling more than the kindest prickle along our skins,
me there with my mom and my brother and for a last and only time on that Fourth
with all three of the men who might have fathered me, a ménage a aquatre more
than a trois really, I think they will all know of their roles in my mother’s
life though only two of them will hang out and drink together with my mother,
meeting as they did in Monteros, the two walking together with me and my
brother amid the rubble or staging jousts with us, me on one’s shoulders my
brother on the other’s, while the third will only drink sauerkraut juice for
his ulcer and make us café con leche in an old fashioned coffee sleeve thinking
it weak enough for my brother and me to drink, and take me with him into
Manhattan on the squealing and shaking curves of the old BMT subway line to
Rector Street and the electric shops with their transparent vacuum tubes filled
with complicated wire filaments, their bins full of resistors and condensers so
much brighter in color than the tubes of the fire crackers or the lights in the
tunnel, or take me to his electrical shop right by Monteros.While so delighted
I am this time not in rubble or in caterpillars, or even in radio parts, but in
light, that I stop letting sparks fall onto my hand or even drawing shapes with
my sparkler but begin to spin and to spin the way we’d all learned to do to
make ourselves stagger around dizzy and delighted, laughing now my sparkler
held in one of my hands my arms held out at shoulder height, only to find as I
spin faster and faster, the sounds of fire crackers exploding around me the
lights of sparklers bouncing off the surrounding intact buildings, feeling no
danger I will bring my hands in toward my waist as I’d seen dancers and figure
skaters do, only to touch my side and set my dress alight. Irony again in safety
disastrously betrayed. That in the easy tickling of sparks against skin, none
of us will ever think about the red hot metal at the sparkler’s core. And its effects
on woven plaster as it melds the new white dress I already hated to my side.
Only the flame will be quelled. My
rubble filled luck will hold. A hand again like the hands that have held on to
mine will quickly press into my side. Another pass over a blanket to make sure
the fire is out. Hands from among the ones that have let me swing between them.
Or picked up a caterpillar to show it to me. Or stood behind me to hold my
shoulder as we peer at the lights of a subway tunnel through the door of the
first car. Because I won’t ever know which of them it will be. Who quickly
moves to quench the flame. Who gets the butter—that is what will be used
then—to cover the wound and ease my pain. But I do know that childhood’s happy
rubble filled memories will end then. In the small damage to my own flesh. An
image I will always carry with me. How my side will look as I stare at it
before the dress is cut away, rubble too of sorts, the surrounding charred
cloth, the uneven edges to the wound, the oozing yellowed flesh, the mottled
pink and burgundy at its centre. While within months all three of those men
will be gone, one, a journalist,having deliberately drunk himself to death in a
hotel room in South Africa while covering the Passbook Riots of 1952; the
electrician out of our lives after kicking in my mother’s head; the other gone
to sea. And it will be years before that one returns. To become my dad.
Encountered again amid the flotsam and jetsam of Monteros to end the years of
darkness. When the edgily dangerous smell of alcohol and sawdust will have
overwhelmed us, no longer tempered by the sawdust and Sunday afternoon light,
when as my mother drinks in the front Joe or Pilar will guide us through Monteros
crowded bar to its back room to feed us along with their own children, Pepe who
runs the bar now, and Pepita of the envied black pigtails. The years of
darkness and the odor of Cutty Sark spilled down an old copper sink tempered by
the taste of paella in the back of a bar.
Only
they will surprise at the strangest of times upon occasion, those happy sunlit
rubble memories when I can still smell the calming damp of broken brick. So
that when I see the rubble of broken buildings on my tablet screen or on my
television, along with the children from all over the world who wander in it, I
will find myself wanting to send such calming visions to them. Wishing they
could be made real. That always the explosions might be so distant they will be
no louder than firecrackers, the bodies in the rubble no more than
caterpillars, and that always there will be a hand to grab theirs or to put out
the flames. That they could pass into their future like a hand through a
sparkler. Never encountering its core.
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