I walked across the bridge today. Or more accurately, I walked to the middle of the bridge and turned back. I don’t want to go into the city anymore. I just want to stay here in Brooklyn where everyone is sad like me. “Losing my edge” is playing on my iPod. “I hear that everybody you know, is more relevant than everyone that I know.“ It’s a funny lyric. I haven’t always been this sad, but I’ve always been this thin. It helped me blend in immediately when I moved here three years ago from Glen Ridge, New Jersey.
Glen Ridge is the 38th best place to live in New Jersey, mainly because of all the gaslights. 665 out of the remaining 3,000 operational gaslights in the United States are in Glen Ridge. The year we graduated high school they made this T.V. movie about a book about a new story from the ‘80s where bunch of jocks assaulted a mentally handicapped girl. That gay girl from Roseanne played the assaulted student. Not her, the other one. 1999 was also the year Sopranos debuted; it was a strange year for New Jersey.
North Brooklyn doesn’t have any gaslights. There is an orange glow outside my window at night, but that’s from the sodium vapor in the streetlights. I associate that faded honey tint with memories of the ‘70s. It’s like someone melted a cough drop and poured it over all of Williamsburg. I wasn’t alive in the ‘70s, but that is when those light bulbs were introduced, so it kind of makes sense. It’s probably because of something I saw on TV.
It’s like how whenever I see little kids on a city playground, I flashback nostalgically to my youth, even though I grew up in suburban New Jersey. To this day, I have never played on anything so urban, gritty, and chic. It’s because of Sesame Street—I’ve unwittingly appropriated those images as my own personal memories. I pilfered mental mementos of concrete, sprinklers, and ethnically-diverse friends.
I embezzled recollections of doing double-dutch. I stole my metropolitan youth the way the hipsters purloined Brooklyn: inadvertently, belying our naivety and with equal parts shortsightedness and enthusiasm. The kind of myopia even the strongest black frames couldn’t fix. But it’s like that old Myron Cohen punch line: “Everybody’s gotta be someplace.”
I first met Chase in the Laundromat across the street from our building. I didn’t find out until a week later that she lived one floor below me. It was three years ago, a week after I moved here. I came back from my coffee run and she was in mid-fold—of my laundry.
She needed my dryer because the others were full or broken. That was a pretty extraordinary thing to me, folding a stranger’s clothing. Potentially creepy, but given the context, pretty sweet—miraculous for Brooklyn. She said someone did it for her once, and ever since she’d been kind of waiting for the opportunity.
The Laundromat is pretty run-down. The neighborhood is pretty run-down, but that’s what they like about it—“they” being everyone, old and new residents. Those who are searching for themselves in the authenticity of other peoples’ lives and those who are straining to keep what they inherited from somebody else long ago—too long now, to remember it. And time marches on.
They’re talking about re-zoning everything and building a bunch of condos in those factories by the water. But that’ll never happen. “Who the hell wants to live in an old warehouse?” I ask Josh as he cleans the espresso machine. I like working with him because he always cleans the machine.
“You do!” He shouts over the steam noise. “Well, so do you,” I tell him. “Yeah, but that’ll never happen because I’m poor.” It’s annoying when people say that. Josh is not poor. Josh has an air-conditioned bedroom in Westchester at his disposal. I tell him this. “No, they rented it out, the whole attic, to some French girl” he rebuts as he changes the CD in the Café stereo to one of his mixes, which will be heavy on the new Bright Eyes. Let me tell you something, nobody wants to drink a medium chai latte to the sound of an unwell post-teen shrieking “I want a lover, I don’t have to love!”
I want to ask him why the girl moved all the way from France to live in a Pleasantville attic, but he stops me. “Look at this, it’s amazing.” Josh says, scratching his beard as he stares at the milk he just poured. It wanders without regard through the iced coffee like a smoky, dairy lava lamp. The wooden floor of the café creaks under our feet.
I like Josh, and believe it or not, he isn’t stoned. This is the price you pay for being a painter in the modern world, I guess. The woman waiting for coffee however, is not a painter, in fact, she is a UPS delivery person. “Hey jackass, let’s go, my truck is running.” She pays and leaves. A twenty-something blond man holds the door for her on his way in—he smiles at me.
Josh leans over the counter to slap the guy five. “This is Myer. He’s my new roomie.” Oh course it is, I think. Of course, your name is fucking Myer. You sure it’s not Oscar, or Julian, or Hugo? It’s not his fault though, that I’m in a bad mood, so I wave hello. Myer extends his hand for me to shake it. “You’re watch is three hours slow,” he tells me. “No it’s not,” I respond, “it’s just set to a different time zone.”
Josh has seven roommates and each one’s jeans are successively tighter than the next. They are all students at CUNY, except for one who flunked out—or as he likes to say “is taking the semester off to write”. There is nothing wrong with tight jeans. There is nothing wrong with going to CUNY. I don’ t even think it’s the worst thing in the world for a 19 year-old to flunk a semester of college. Everybody comes here for something. None of this bothered me before, but I fell out of love with Brooklyn and I just can’t seem to dump her.
“So, what brings you to Brooklyn?” I ask Myer. “Cheap rent.” “Really? You sure it’s not wallowing in perpetual adolescence?” He asked for it. He could have just said “I’m from Stamford, but I thought it would sound cooler to say my band is ‘Brooklyn-based’.”
I’m in a band, but I’m getting a masters. I’m a clerk, but I sing. I’m a ticket taker, but I’m a native New Yorker. I’m from here, but I’m really going somewhere else. I’m an actor, but I wait tables. I’m a waiter, but I’m in films. Is it bad that I can’t even tell which way sounds better? I’m a college student, but I take photos. I’m an immigrant, but I’m a citizen. I’m a barista, but I paint. Everyone here is something else. I want you to consider me something else. I’m a human, but I’m also a tragedy.
“You’re something else.” Chase told me on the night she was leaving. I just finished telling her my idea about opening up a bike shop in the building next to the café. She was leaving the next day to move back to San Francisco for two years to study Agriculture and Resource Economics at Berkeley. She didn’t think growing vegetables on factory rooftops was a preposterous idea at all.
I didn’t want her to leave. She had distracted me by telling me that the phrase “time marches on“ originated as a slogan for a radio series and newsreel from the 1930s called “The March of Time”. I liked knowing that. I liked knowing someone who knew that.
“I’m leaving”, Josh says. His shift isn’t over for another hour, but whatever. Matt, the owner, isn’t here. We’re the only café on this street, but it doesn’t get busy again until later when people return to North Brooklyn on the subway. Kevin comes in later to help me with that. For now, it’s just the limbo of the afternoon.
“It’s pretty nice in here.” Myer said. I was refilling the milks and didn’t even notice he was still here. “Oh, yeah, it’s been open for about a year. Sorry, I thought you left with Josh.” I said. “Nah, he went to get some supplies, I guess for his art or something?” “Oh, he just means cigarettes. He’s weird like that.” Myer smiled at me again. “You don’t smoke? Whose are those?” He pointed to the yellow cigarette box on the back of the counter. “Not mine.” I said.
“So, what does bring you here to Williamsburg? Myer…” I asked him. Suddenly, I just had to know his last name. “Lemon, I’m Myer Lemon. My parents were a bunch of comedians.” He shakes his head gently loosening his side-part and shrugs, matter-of-factly. “Really?” I ask. I don’t know what else to say. “No,” he answers, “they are lawyers, Jim and Kate Lemon, attorneys at law.”
“I am a lawyer too,” he says. He doesn’t seem that much older than me. “Really?” I have to stop saying that. “I thought lawyers worked on Thursdays?” I leaned on the counter. “Yup, really, I started at the firm eight months ago. But, I’m also a dancer, Amicus Briefs, that’s my stripper name.” I smile; he must have made that joke a thousand times in the last eight months. “I don’t have a stripper name,” I tell him. “You don’t?” “No, but my drag name’s Dick van Dyke.”
The night before she left, Chase lit an American Spirit, smoked two drags and tapped it out on the bridge. “You really should quit,” I told her. Here, she handed me the yellow box. “You keep them until you come out to visit me.”
“Double shot of espresso.” Felix ordered. His name isn’t Felix but I call him that in my mind because he looks kind of like a cat. He’s renovating the apartment across the street. I serve him and he leaves.
Myer looks at me, and smiles. “You’re too cheerful for this place, try to be more ironic.” I tell him. “Oh, I think I’ve got that covered.” He says. “I’m a lawyer but I’m also a priest.” That is probably the most original multi-hyphenate I’ve ever heard, including poet-bowler-clown. Myer continues, “Or well, I’m going to be, but right now I’m working on the application process. I’m taking classes.”
“Is that why you’re so happy?” I ask him. He straightens the straws in the nearby container. “I guess, so why are you so sad?” I look at him, wincing from the intrusion. It was a pretty inappropriate question; this is still conversation number one of our yet-to-be-defined relationship. “I’m sad because my girlfriend doesn’t live here anymore.” I tell him—as long as we’re making personal revelations. He brushes his hair out of his eyes, takes a deep breath and then exhales while considering the refrigerator. “Well, you should go to her then.”
“I thought priests aren’t allowed to say things like that. “ He turned from the refrigerator and looked into my eyes. “I’m not a priest yet.” Josh bursts in through the café door with his sunglasses on his head and cigarettes in his hand. “Hey man, I forgot to ask you—I’m gonna buy some snack mix and it’s really mind-altering. It has like 17 different kinds of nuts. Do you want me to pick some up for you?” Myer smiles at me, and turns toward the door, “I’ll go with you.”
I’m standing over Chase’s grave with nothing to say. What should I say? I’m sorry your car couldn’t protect you from a drunk driver in the other lane? I loved that you had to put on your glasses to answer the phone? My flight leaves in a few hours. I’ve been in California for a week and finally gained the courage to come here today.
“So, I checked out the building for the bike shop last week, and I’m talking to Matt about a loan,” I tell her. I stoop down and placed the yellow box of American Spirits onto her gravestone. “I miss you, Chase, but I have to go.” As I walk out of the cemetery I stop to turn my watch three hours ahead. I’m going back to Brooklyn and I need to be prepared because time, as they say, marches on.
