I was rushing and rushing to get through the first draft of Spy Rock Memories, Part 7, and the story kept getting longer and longer. I mean, I knew exactly when and how it was going to end, but it was taking forever to get there.
It wasn't just that I was determined to finish the draft tonight so that I could get started on editing it tomorrow; I also wanted to get over to the city to meet Aaron for one of our patented late night wanders about town. But by the time Part 7 had finally topped out at around 8,200 words (probably 3,000 of which are going to have to be cut right back out of it), I was already supposed to be on the street corner in the West Village where we were meant to begin our walk. I tore down to the subway, knowing it would take me at least 20 minutes to get there, only to find that the ever-deteriorating MTA (you know, we're a poor country, we can't afford things like reliable public transit anymore the way modern, progressive countries like, say, Turkey can) wouldn't be sending a train my way for another 20 minutes.
26 July 2011
A Hasty Stroll
19 May 2008
Crossing The Border
Yesterday I helped a friend move from Astoria to Jackson Heights (sorry, I can't hear the latter name without thinking of the line from the Car 54, Where Are You? theme that goes, "There's a traffic jam in Harlem that's backed up to Jackson Heights," and if anything shows my age, that should be it). My job entailed picking up a rental truck near my house and navigating it onto the BQE and across Newtown Creek via the mighty Kosciuszko Bridge, the concrete and steel span that leads us out of all that is safe and familiar here in Brooklyn and into the trackless wilds of Queens.
"Queens," my friend Dan opines, and he should know, having spent much of his life there, "is New York City's junk drawer." Not in any disparaging sense, i.e., he's not implying that people, place and things in Queens are actually, you know, junk, just that Queens is the kind of place where you put everything that's too good to throw away but that you don't know what else to do with.
My trip over went pretty smoothly, no thanks to the dilapidated terror ride that is the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (I think someone is having an especially ironic chuckle over including the word "express" in the name of this crumbling edifice). New York City is looking mighty spiffy in many quarters these days, what with all the building and rebuilding that's been going on, but the BQE, despite being a perennial construction site, appears to be the Winchester Mystery House of highway projects, always in upheaval, never completed. That plus the way lanes tend to appear and disappear (or suddenly dwindle in size to half the width of your vehicle) keeps travel on it a constantly invigorating and entertaining experience.
Soon after entering Astoria, I found myself driving down a street lined with hundreds - and I don't think this is even slightly an exaggeration - of Central and South American men who began whistling and gesturing wildly at me. I found this bewildering until I realized they were under the impression that I, being the driver of a truck that looked like it meant serious business, would be in the market for some bargain basement employees to load and unload it.
They all - well, except for the handful who tried the opposite strategy of looking cool and disinterested - seemed so eager and even desperate that I felt truly sorry I didn't have any work to offer them, there already being a full complement of PPMBers waiting at my destination to do the heavy lifting. I found myself searching my mind for any kind of work I could offer them, only to be brought up short by the realization that I have enough trouble finding work for myself to do.
And besides, there were so many of them. What if, I couldn't help wondering, the economy really did get as bad as the alarmists are predicting - or even as bad as it apparently already is in some parts of the country? What would become of these men then? Which in turn led me to wonder, while feeling no less sympathetic toward their plight, if this is any kind of way to run an economy or a country. I suppose similar things must have gone on during the last great wave of immigration around the turn of the 20th century, but it seems so backward and, yes, even a little barbaric today. On the bright side, by the time I made my second pass through the illegal immigrant zone (having taken a wrong turn the first time around), I was pleased to see that at least some of them were actually picking up work, as quite a few trucks and cars were pulling up to negotiate with them. I still felt compelled to put up my hands in a gesture of helplessness while mouthing the words, "No, gracias," especially to those who, having seen me come around the block twice, assumed that I had to be looking for some good workers.
The move itself went swiftly and smoothly, despite it being down three flights and up four others. At the new place, the fourth floor one, there was an elevator, but it being Saturday morning and this being a very large building, there were a few dozen other residents who felt they ought to have a right to use the elevator, too. After waiting about ten minutes for it to show up, we were quickly cramming it with as much stuff as would fit when a, shall we say, rather stout lady emerged puffing and panting from the staircase and immediately launched into a denunciation of yours truly.
"Thanks for holding up the elevator, buddy!" she barked. "You made me miss my ride, now who's gonna pay me $7 for my cab fare?" There was a time when I might have been cowed by this outburst of fury, but apparently New York has begun to rub off on me, because without even waiting for her to finish, I was already firing back: "Whattaya talking about, the elevator just got here this minute, we're waiting here forever for it to show up while somebody screwed around with it up on the fifth floor, you got a problem, go talk to your neighbors up there!"
She nodded her head as though we'd just greeted each other with a matter-of-fact "How are you, lovely day today, isn't it?" and heaved her way out on to the sidewalk to yell at some young people who happened to be standing there and looked as though they could have recently been riding in an elevator. We finished our moving in near-record time - the less stuff was left to carry, the more people showed up to help - and while everyone else set out to celebrate a morning's successful work with lunch at a local Indian restaurant, I turned the truck around and headed back to Brooklyn. Nothing against Indian food, which I quite enjoy, nor the company, which I enjoy even more, but there were no legal parking spots for the truck anywhere in sight (at least we'd only been blocking a crosswalk while unloading, not double parking and tying up traffic for blocks as any number of other trucks were doing), and I had, you know, important stuff that needed doing. Stuff whose importance or even nature seems to elude me at the moment, but serious stuff nonetheless.
Thanks to yet more construction work, I had a meandering journey through the backstreets of Queens before finding my way onto the BQE again, during the course of which I stopped to replace the gas we'd used, all 1.9 gallons worth. I know I've generally expressed enthusiasm for higher gasoline prices on the grounds that they'll discourage people from so much needless driving about, but I must admit that paying $4.15 a gallon dampened my ardor just a bit. Then it was down some rathole and up some decrepit roller coaster of a ramp and there I was flying high in the sky with all of Manhattan spread out before me in the dazzling late spring sunshine.
The reason this particular stretch of the highway offers such a spectacular view of the skyline is that the immediate foreground is occupied by a vast cemetery, containing nothing higher than the occasionally overreaching mausoleum. I remembered riding on this same route sometime back in the 1970s, when New York wasn't quite the bejeweled Emerald City we see it as today, and in my yearning-for-the-apocalypse drug-fucked hippie mind seeing the city's spires and towers as extensions of the graveyard, hollow-eyed Brobdingnagian tombstones crowding to the ends of the horizon.
But New York never looked more alive than it did this morning, and $4.15 a gallon gas had done nothing to dissuade everybody and his mother-in-law from piling into the car and onto the upper reaches of the BQE, making my trip a bit stop-and-start, or, on the bright side, affording me greater opportunity to savor the view of what has been called "the most polluted waterway in America."
Midway across Newtown Creek, as at every border crossing, there's a sign, placed by the irrepressible Borough President Marty Markowitz, welcoming you to Brooklyn. Each has a different slogan; the one on the Kosciuszko Bridge reads, "Welcome To Brooklyn: Believe the Hype." Some others include: "Brooklyn: Like No Other Place In The World," "Name It... We Got It," "How Sweet It Is!" and "Brooklyn's In The House!" A little over-the-top, you say? Well, yeah, but basically, it's all true. I'd genuinely enjoyed my trip into Queens - it kind of reminded me of when, as a boy in Detroit, we'd cross the bridge over into Canada for a little bit of foreign adventure and maybe to smuggle back some illegal fireworks - but gee, it was good to be back home.
04 October 2007
"Kafkaesque" Is A Greatly Overused Term, But Still...
A few months ago I accompanied my friend Brian, who'd recently lost his wallet, as he dropped into the DMV's "License X-Press" and walked out with a new driver's license in no more than ten minutes.
Seeking to emulate him, I'd turned up with my own paperwork: a California license to be turned in for a New York one, a passport to buttress claims to my identity, and my Social Security card. Well, half my Social Security card, actually; when I got it in 1963 it came stapled to a government pamphlet extolling the wonders of Social Security, and the idea was that you could detach one half the card to show to prospective employers and keep the other half in a safe place so you'd always have a record of your number.
Well, apparently it's the wrong half when it comes to the DMV: although it clearly displays my number and my signature (albeit in the painful chickenscratchings of 16 year old me), which are the two items the DMV claims it needs, they insisted on having the other half. Which, evidently, disappeared from my possession along with almost everything else I owned at one time or another in the 60s or 70s.
No problem, the cheery examiner assured me: you can simply nip up to 48th Street and get yourself a new Social Security card and probably be back here before we close at 4 pm (it was now about 1:30). Fine, I said; I'd already earmarked the day for dealing with bureaucracy, so might as well take a tour of the federal as well as the state branch thereof.
The entrance to the building on 48th Street was unremarkable, as was the elevator trip to the designated floor. It was only when I exited the elevator and strolled down the corridor that I realized I had blithely wandered into the anteroom of hell.
About 100 people sat disconsolately, some much more so than others, on rows of seats that all faced forward, much like the economy section of a jumbo airliner, only far less comfortable. I figured I'd stand instead, at least for a while, but quickly found that wasn't allowed. The guards were especially insistent that no one loiter near a window, possibly because they were concerned about people throwing themselves out in despair.
Although we were in midtown Manhattan, less than a block from the glitz, glamor, bustle and squalor of Times Square, I wouldn't say my fellow sufferers represented a cross section of New Yorkers. About 90% of the people present were black and/or foreign born, which led me to ponder whether there was some parallel Social Security system located elsewhere for white middle-class people, or whether the aforementioned WMC people are just so together that they never lose their Social Security cards or have a question about their benefits or are simply so rich and carefree that they don't even bother with Social Security.
Such was not the case with the people in attendance today. A few of them, like me, merely needed to replace their cards, usually for the same reason, i.e., the DMV, but almost everyone else had some Major Problem which needed to be talked about at great length, often at considerable volume as well. Bulletproof glass separated all the clerks from the clients, and I can't say that I blame anyone for thinking that necessary. In the two and a half hours or so that I waited, I'm sure at least a couple of clerks would have been strangled, bludgeoned, or otherwise damaged if anybody had been able to get their hands on them.
Not that they deserved it; in fact, considering what they had to deal with, the clerks were remarkably patient and obliging, putting up, for example, with one apparently retarded woman who repeated, "Can I ax you a question?" at least 100 times in the space of a half hour, every question being some variation of, "Can you give me some money right now?""
She was far from the only one trying, against all odds, for a quick loan or advance against their disability checks. It was kind of like watching a horde of dysfunctional children hitting their not especially sympathetic dad up for a boost in their allowances. The other main theme was people trying to get Social Security cards or benefits for their immigrant or convict husbands. It was, as the alternatively tearful and angry women insisted, tremendously important that this be done, but this begged the question of why the husbands themselves couldn't be bothered to come in. One woman, asked to explain this anomaly, indignantly responded, "He's with our dog."
At about hour two, I overheard some bad news: the guy who'd been sitting nearby and was, like me, there for a replacement card, was told that he'd be receiving it in the mail in "about two weeks." So much for rushing back to the DMV today, which by now was about to close anyway. Oh well, I'd waited this long; might as well at least get what I came for. Right about then, a pretty blonde Eastern European girl managed to miss her number being called while she was outside smoking or eating or something, which led to a screaming, crying, cursing contretemps with both security guards as she demanded to be let back into line. All to no avail, to the quiet satisfaction of the 50 or so clients still waiting to be seen, and at least she didn't get tasered, though it looked touch and go there for a bit.
That drama occupied most of the final half hour before I was finally called for my turn. "ID please," I was told, and handed it over; she typed a few vigorous keystrokes before saying, "Oh, you're from Brooklyn. You can't get a card at this office. You've got to go to the Brooklyn office."
I'd seen a sign downstairs cheerily advising, "Hey, Brooklyn, we've opened a brand new Social Security office just for YOU!" But nowhere on it had it said that we had to go to that office, just letting us know in the most friendly of ways, that we could if we wanted to. It wasn't until I was getting on the elevator to leave that I noticed some new signs on this floor that did in fact say, "You MUST go to Brooklyn." Hmm.
Oh well, one day shot; tomorrow I'd go to the Brooklyn office and that would be that. I went to the Social Security website, clicked on "Find your local office," and was directed to a relatively nearby facility not far off Bedford Avenue in the heart of Hipsterville.
Marched in, showed my paperwork and said what I wanted, only to be told, "Oh, for a new card, you've got to go to downtown Brooklyn." Resisting any temptations to ask just what they did do at this office apart from filing their nails while the usual clients sat in mute awful despair, I headed for downtown, only to find that I couldn't get there in time, bringing me to Day Three of my Big Social Security Adventure, today.
I showed up early this time, with not one but two books, prepared to wait as long as it took, only to discover that downtown Brooklyn had a different setup. No chairs, comfortable or uncomfortable, to sit and read while I waited my turn; here I was greeted by a long line of very unhappy people standing behind a metal detector and X-ray machine. Bad enough that it was a long line; it was also a line that wasn't moving. At all. Two guards stood there, apparently waiting for someone or several someones to exit before anyone else would be allowed in.
Assuming that once we got in, we'd then have several hours to wait, just as in Manhattan, I very nearly left, with the intention of coming back even earlier the next day, but before I could, a young man borrowed my pen to fill out his application, which was taking him a very long time, since he showed every sign of being unable to read. I didn't want to leave without my pen, so I stuck around while he got into a lengthy conversation with the guy behind me, who he'd recognized from their recent stay in the Brooklyn House of Detention.
Their chat about charges, outstanding warrants, and "those two crazy niggas" who'd apparently almost killed each other and/or some guards dragged on for so long that our group actually got called to go through the X-ray machine. "Get your belts off, jackets off, everything out of your pockets," the guards barked, leading someone else in line to comment, "Man, this is just like prison." A number of heads nodded in agreement. This was clearly a crowd who knew whereof he spoke.
After that ordeal, it was quite a shock to arrive on the sixth floor to find a nicely carpeted, clean and brightly lighted room where far fewer people waited to be seen than had been lined up behind the security checkpoint downstairs. We still had to wait in line for a while longer, but the man next to me helped the time pass quickly with a lively discussion about which types of weapons would be most effective in shattering the bulletproof glass in the event a guy wanted to take out a few of the clerks.
Bottom line: I've got a piece of paper that says I "should" be getting my new Social Security card in about two weeks, which means I can then go through the whole driver's license rigamarole again, and maybe, just maybe, I'll have a new driver's license in time for my planned trip to Florida at the end of the month. No driver's license, no trip, as my old one expires halfway through the trip, and unfortunately, the subway doesn't go to Gainesville. However, it's out of my hands now, and into the hands of those who may or may not make the right things happen. At least I've got a more comfortable chair to do the rest of my waiting in.
And I don't have to go through a metal detector to get to it.
All Across The USA: Coast To Coast In 4.5 Days
The plan was to blog my way across America, but unreliable internet access, unexpectedly long drive times, and a lack of sleep put paid to that.
The only entry I even got started on was titled The Streets Of Laramie, and recounted how I discovered that I'd never actually set foot in Laramie, Wyoming, despite having crisscrossed that state numerous times over the years.
In fact, there were a couple times that I fully planned on stopping there, and once where I even put on my blinker for the exit before changing my mind at the last minute and pushing on to the next town, but ultimately I passed the place by so many times that I forgot it was even on Interstate 80 (the semi-boring coast-to-coast freeway that passes through what has got to be one of the least picturesque sectors of what is otherwise an extremely picturesque state).
I'd somehow got it into my head that Laramie was off somewhere to the north, probably up in the vicinity of where Casper actually is. I'm fairly sure I've never visited Casper, either, but I could be wrong about that. Many of my Wyoming crossings were done in the rather bleary and drug-imbued 1970s.
But this was definitely my first time in Laramie, and it's my new favorite town in Wyoming, not that there was a profusion of contenders for that crown. I used to think it was Cheyenne, but on reflection, realized that I didn't care very much for Cheyenne after all, being infatuated mainly with the name and the fact that it was the closest thing to a genuine urban agglomeration between Salt Lake City and Omaha (okay, maybe Lincoln).
Maybe it's just that I once bought a pair of cowboy boots in Cheyenne that hurt my feet for several years afterward, and if you ask why I didn't simply stop wearing them, it's just that I figured that people from Cheyenne were sure to know more about cowboy boots than I did, that it was most likely my feet that were the problem rather than the boots, and that eventually they (my feet, that is) would adjust themselves.
Didn't happen, however, nor did my appreciation for Cheyenne ever increase, so even though I was running behind schedule on my cross-country hejira, I opted to stop in Laramie this time, mindful, too, of the time when I resisted all portents, including dire warnings from the I Ching, and pushed on past Laramie into the teeth of a winter gale and ended up nose down in a snowdrift at the bottom of a 30-foot cliff.
No snowdrifts this time (though there had been a light dusting a day or two earlier on the higher peaks), but there had been, I found the following morning, some horrendous wind gusts over the 8,640 foot pass that separates Cheyenne from Laramie, and considering how susceptible my rented 12 foot Penske truck was to wind - especially since I'd managed to ignore instructions and pack most of the heavy stuff on one side - chances are I would have ended up over another cliff only this time without the soft snow landing.
So downtown Laramie had a lot of bars, none of which I ventured near, but it also had Grounds, an excellent little cafe catering to hipsters, students, and the occasional punk rocker, offering wireless internet access and staying open till midnight, something you don't that often find in such allegedly cosmopolitan centers as London or SF/Berkeley. Not having arrived in town until after 11 pm, however, I didn't have time to finish a blog post, but I did manage to get a pretty decent meal, again something hard to find at that hour in those aforementioned faux-cities.
I'd hoped to have six days to cross America, allowing me plenty of time for sightseeing and visiting folks along the way, but the packing and - especially - the throwing out of many years' worth of accumulated junk took much longer than expected, so by the time I pulled out of Berkeley, I was a day and a half late, and a visit to my mother's house and the recycling center in El Cerrito (two separate locations, let it be noted) lopped another couple hours off my first day's travel.
So I only made it as far as Elko, Nevada when I'd been hoping for the Utah state line, and from then on it was a game of catch-up all the way. I considered skipping my visit to Hanny, my internet buddy in Lincoln, Nebraska, but fortunately I decided not to, and we had a pleasant walk through downtown and the state capitol, topped off by a pretty darn good Mexican dinner. Yeah, it put me another couple hours behind, but was well worth it.
And just what was the hurry? Well, I'd recruited a posse of van unloaders - Oliver, P Smith and JoeIII - who were expecting to meet me at 10 am Saturday morning, and if I missed that time slot, they'd all be off to the afternoon Steinways show at the mall - yes, at the mall, in Urban Outfitters, if you must know - and I'd be faced with trying to carry things that weighed considerably more than me up three flights of narrow, sagging stairs, and, face it, it wasn't going to happen. Half my furniture would have ended up on the street.
I fully expected that posse or no posse, my ridiculously big desk was never going to make the stairway cut, but with the aid of three strong men and an inch to spare (after I took the drawers out and removed the apartment door), it practically glided into place. In fact, I'm typing on it now. Whether it will ever leave this apartment again is rather another question. The wood matches the floors quite nicely in terms of color, though not in terms of sagginess: in the entire apartment there's hardly more than a few feet of level flooring, and given the number of creaks and other strange noises I keep hearing, I wouldn't be at all surprised if this whole house collapses at some point. It shakes just like a California earthquake whenever a large truck passes by or someone slams the door downstairs. At least I'm on the top floor, so there's not quite so much of it to fall on me.
I had another pleasant rendezvous en route, with Pete Repellent and his lovely partner Simple (formerly Simple81), outside a mini-mall Starbucks in Portage, Indiana, where Pete also insisted on buying me not only a coffee, but my dinner as well. The two of them, the punk rock counterparts to George Burns and Gracie Allen or Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, then provided me with a full-on cavalcade of comic bickering as I dined. Only two people who are truly devoted to each other can be that hilariously vicious.
Then it was back in the Penske saddle for one last marathon day that took me from the Indiana-Ohio state line back home to Brooklyn in about 13 or 14 hours. Northern Ohio looked far prettier than I ever remembered it being (it's still no Michigan, however), and Pennsylvania looked to be even more spectacular, especially at the higher altitudes, where the autumn leaves were approaching their peak. Unfortunately, a rather fearsome storm - the first hint of rain or even clouds all the way across - blew in on me, followed closely by a dramatically sudden nightfall, and I spent the rest of the way - and a rather long way it is, too - across Pennsylvania trying to navigate curves and dodge speeding semis. At one point we reached "the highest point on Interstate 80 east of the Mississippi," some 2800 feet, I believe it was, and were warned of a steep descent ahead. What they didn't tell me was that we'd be going downhill for the next 280 miles, something which I suspect is a physical impossibility, but which nonetheless seemed very much like reality.
The road didn't flatten out until halfway across New Jersey, but now I could see the lights of New York City ahead, and though I'd originally planned to stay outside of town and drive in early in the morning, I thought why waste the money on a motel when I was no more than an hour or two from home?
In principle, anyway; as it turned out I took the wrong exit in Newark and spent a nervous half hour or two blundering through ghetto streets at midnight with pretty much everything I owned metaphorically strapped across my back. After bouncing over some of the worst back roads and collapsing bridges this side of the Third World, I finally made it to the Holland Tunnel - thankfully there was no three-mile-long line like the last time I used the tunnel - only to be told by less than welcoming tolltaker: "No trucks!"
I tried protesting that I'd checked on the internet and that trucks were supposed to be allowed now, though they had indeed been banned for several years after 9/11. I was told to go to the Lincoln Tunnel, without being offered an explanation about why - assuming I was a terrorist with an enormous bomb rather than a bemused middle aged man with a truckload of household goods - it would be preferable for me to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel instead of the Holland.
Oh well; at least the Lincoln Tunnel wasn't far off, and there were signs clearly delineating the route to it. Signs which promptly disappeared, leaving me driving aimlessly but ever more frustratedly through the streets of downtown Hoboken, at one point getting caught up in the proliferation of drunken 20-something car and foot traffic in what is apparently a rather happening nightlife scene, and at another point getting stuck on some long drive along the river that offered no exits and took me nearly as far north as the George Washington Bridge, which I would have crossed except that the radio was warning of one to two hour delays going into the city.
So, finally found the Lincoln Tunnel, got charged double toll even though my (relatively) small truck had been paying the equivalent of auto tolls all across the country, and quickly found myself tied up in the jampacked streets of Chelsea and then the Village. At one point, owing to some spectacularly bad luck and/or judgment, I found myself trying to navigate through what was barely one lane of traffic on Bleecker at MacDougal, which, trust me, is not the most ideal route at 1:30 in the morning when the frat boys, rappers, drunken NYUers, and every other yahoo within 50 miles of the five boroughs is staggering and/or attempting to drive, albeit to no particular destination.
Enough complaining; I eventually made it to Brooklyn, found a parking place right outside my building, and the rest is history. I haven't even unpacked half my stuff, and I still haven't found a way to stop some of my furniture from sliding into the middle of the room, but the cable TV and the internet are working, my desk is in operation and looking every bit as messy as it did in its last home, and one of these days I might even plug in the refrigerator and go grocery shopping. I'm already thinking of moving again, maybe - if necessary - out of the immediate neighborhood this time, but for now I'm home, and quite happy and content to be so.
20 September 2007
Goodbye, California
I haven't really lived here in ten years, but I've always kept this small room, more of a storeroom than a living space, really, but it's still provided me with a base in Berkeley, something I'm now on the verge of finally giving up.
Considering all the awful things I've said about Berkeley in recent years, people could hardly be blamed for wondering why I'd want to maintain any ties to the place, but my reasons were twofold: most of my family is located nearby, and I had way too many things - the accumulated possessions of a California existence that dates back to 1968 - to consider shipping them over to England during the years I was living there. Most of the stuff has mainly sentimental value, but it's value nonetheless, even if it wasn't quite enough to convince me to lay out the thousands it would have cost to bring everything to London.
But now that I've got a new home base in Brooklyn, the time has come to pack up all these memories and move them out to the Right Coast. I flew out here on Monday night, not expecting any great drama to arise around this; if anything, I was annoyed at having to leave New York for a couple weeks at one of my favorite times of year. But as the plane crossed into California airspace, I was seized with sudden spasms of regret and fear: was I doing the right thing after all? Was California really as bad as I'd made it out to be? It certainly didn't look that way from 30,000 feet, with the lights of the cities splayed across the darkened land like so many jewels on velvet (sorry, I know it's a cliché, but it really does look like that).
It became painfully apparent that I couldn't casually cut my ties to the place where I'd had some kind of home or connection for nearly 40 years and not expect to deal with some rather intense feelings. I remembered how I first came here, young, scared, dead broke and wanted by the law, and immediately felt safe and at home. I recognized that despite my best efforts to screw things up, California had been very good to me, providing me with the opportunity to make my fortune and pursue my dreams. Basically, my life had been pretty crap before I got to California, and while there were plenty of crap intervals afterward as well, most of them were of my own making.
For the first day I even toyed with the idea of abandoning this whole Brooklyn thing, settling back into my little room in downtown Berkeley, and living here in quiet obscurity for the rest of my life. I could certainly afford it; the rent here is ridiculously low, with all utilities, even high-speed internet, thrown in. It might not be much of a life, granted; we're talking about a 9'x12' room that's so cramped I have to sleep in a loft up near the ceiling and can reach almost everything without getting out of my single chair. And not much light gets in through the windows, the stairways and common areas haven't been decorated (or, it sometimes seems, cleaned) since the 1970s, and the house in general is a classic example of Berkeley's rent control turning what might be a perfectly normal house into a time capsule hippie hovel.
Still, it's been a comfortable place to hang out, or perhaps more accurately, hide out from the world. I first took this room when my original Berkeley room, a bit larger and in the house next door, was devoured by the monster that became Lookout Records. I and two employees/partners ran the label out of that slightly larger room until the Green Day explosion of 1994-95, when the number of employees expanded to the point where there was no longer room for me to sleep there. When I got this new room in January of 1994, I grabbed a handful of blankets, took them next door and threw them on the floor, followed by myself, and slept for something like 29 hours.
Now, in two or three days if everything goes to plan, I'll be loading the last of this room's contents into a truck and setting off across the country. Normally I'd be looking forward to a transcontinental drive, but I'm kind of already dreading what it will feel like to wave goodbye to California for the last time.
Well, not necessarily the last time; I can always come back, I keep telling myself, if things don't work out in New York. And of course I'll still visit family and friends here as often as possible. But not having a specific place to come back to is going to make that a very different experience. Once upon a time, I would have thought nothing about moving thousands of miles away - in 1970 alone I did it three or four times - but perhaps I'm finally getting too old for this sort of shenanigans.
I try reminding myself that even if I were to stay in California, I wouldn't want to keep living in this room or this neighborhood. Downtown Berkeley was no prize when I first moved here (next door, into what would become the Lookout office) in 1990, and it's been going downhill ever since. Even if there were anywhere to go at night, I no longer feel all that safe on the streets, and the crime stats - almost double the rate of street crime compared with New York City - would seem to indicate I'm not just being paranoid. Today's Berkeley Daily Planet had a story about how a gunman strolled into a cafe directly across the street from the UC campus and robbed six students of their laptops; in New York I've grown used to seeing people sitting out on the sidewalks at two in the morning typing away on their computers without a care in the world.
So I guess I'm going to go, and if my recent experience in leaving other places - specifically Laytonville and London - is any indication, it'll be fine, and you won't catch me looking back or turning into a pillar of salt. But right at this moment, surrounded by the wreckage and detritus of my past waiting to be put into boxes and be carted off to a new home, I'm feeling just a teensy bit anxious. Give me a couple days, though, and I should be cruising up over the Sierra Nevada singing, in the words of Joe King, goodbye, California, it's really been nice, and getting ready for the rest of my life to begin.
11 August 2007
On The Town
A couple nights out this week, both low key, both strangely, quietly satisfying. Well, actually, I've been out most nights, but I'm not counting movies (Die Hard and the previously mentioned Chuck and Larry), just events where live music was involved.
Tuesday night saw me rolling up on my bike to the Lost and Found tavern in Greenpoint. I didn't get there till quite late, but it seems to be the kind of place where everything happens quite late, almost ostentatiously oblivious to the fact that some New Yorkers do indeed have jobs or school or similarly boring obligations to contend with on a Wednesday morning.
I hung outside - it was a very nice night - shooting the breeze with Mikey Erg and my old friend Justin "Sully" Sullivan, who to be honest, I barely recognized now that he's acquired a few years/layers of Greenpoint/Williamsburg patina. Which was true the last time I ran into him, a year ago on the G train when we were both coming home from the Rancid show.
Being as out of the loop as I am, I didn't even know that he was the drummer for the Radio Faces, the band I'd come to see; the last time I'd seen Sully playing music was with his old Long Island hardcore outfit, The Insurgent. Anyway, the Radio Faces were good, very good, even, more power-pop than pop-punk, not that there's anything wrong with that. My only objection: their first song, something about a Party at the Bushwick Hotel, went on forever, with the chorus being repeated at least 150 times, well, maybe 50 times. Point being, the song's very good and catchy, but repeating the same verse and chorus over and over doesn't make it any more so. Rather the opposite, in fact.
Every song after that was shorter, hell, the set itself was short, and ended rather strangely, with guitarist Nato still plunking away as though he meant to start another song, while other members of the band began taking down their equipment. I walked part of the way home with Hallie Unlovable, who's leaving on tour this weekend and won't be back until Labor Day.
"Oh my god," I said, that means your New York summer is already over, and it's only the first week of August!"
"Yeah, well, I'm about ready to get out of town," she said, but I still felt wistful, not because I wanted her to stay here if she wanted to be elsewhere, but because if her New York summer was ending, it brought home the point that it wouldn't be much longer before mine was too.
And by Thursday night, it really felt that way, because it was almost - not quite but almost - too chilly to hang outside of Hank's Saloon wearing only a t-shirt. As at the Radio Faces, the crowd was small but devoted. Actually, there were quite a few people there, but I'm only counting the ones I know, insular and parochial bastard than I can be at times.
The occasion was the final show by the Impulse, another power-pop outfit with some of the same strengths (and a similar weakness for the occasional too-long repeating chorus song) as the Radio Faces. Singer/guitarist Adam, formerly of Dirt Bike Annie, the quirky, seminal band that almost single-handedly kept New York City pop-punk alive in the dark ages of the late 90s, is ostensibly retiring from rock and roll in order to move to Florida, take care of his kid, attend university and do similarly adult things.
As exuberant as the music was, there was an autumnal chill to the affair, and I'm not just talking about the weather. The Impulse hadn't been around that long or achieved a whole lot of recognition beyond a moderately-sized group of friends, and maybe because of that, it felt sad to see it ending, especially since Adam is almost the living, breathing epitome of a rock star, so much so that it's almost hard to imagine him ever being anything else.
And yet so the dream ends, at least for now. It wouldn't surprise me to see him suddenly re-emerge from Floridian exile at the head of a far more massive band, but neither would it surprise me if it really is the end for his rock and roll fantasy and the beginning of what will hopefully be an equally satisfying adventure in normal life. I know what it felt like: when you're getting into your late teens and you're still hanging out on the street corner not knowing what you're going to do with yourself when summer ends, and meanwhile seeing your buddies gradually drift away to the service or college or marriage or careers. Like they're all growing up while you don't know if you can or even want to.
I got to this show hell of late, too, and missed Short Attention, but most of the clever, maddening and annoying crew were still there. Grath McGrath was walking around with a lifelike and life-sized stuffed dog under his arm, which I found strangely disconcerting, and Bill Florio, that prince among men, gave me, Crafty Dan and Jackie O. a ride home in his little hybrid car, the first I've ever been in, along the BQE with its mega-spectacular views of lower Manhattan on a night when the lights burned with mad translucent fire.
Here Comes The Rain Again
It was very nearly a precise replay of a few weeks ago: a storm arriving in the predawn hours, rain lashing furiously on the windows, lightning flashing like a strobe light and thunder drowning out all other sound, followed by the gurgling sound of water springing up through the floorboards and turning my entire apartment into a wading pool.
The only differences: this time I knew the storm was coming, so sleep, even before it arrived, was out of the question, and because of that, I had most things up off the floor and - theoretically - out of reach of any possible floods. The other difference: this time the water was almost twice as deep as last time, and reached places I'd never thought of as being in danger.
It was discouraging, let me tell you. It had only been in the last couple days that everything was completely dried out from the first flood, and I was still in the middle of putting stuff away again. If I'd been more diligent in doing so, lots more things would have been soaked this time. The futon sofa, untouched by the previous inundation, soaked up water like a giant sponge, so much so that it took two of us to carry it outside to dry in the sun. Shoes were floating everywhere, along with the rugs, trash cans, storage bins; oh, it was a real laugh riot.
I took it all in surprisingly good spirits, though, laughing and joking with the neighbors, many of whom had experienced similar or worse disasters. But not the old guy two doors down, who usually whiles away his days on the porch dispensing friendly greetings to everyone who passes by; today he couldn't stop pointing out that his was one of the only completely dry basements on the block.
"Come and look, there's-a no water, come and look," he demanded, which a few of the neighbors found exasperating, dealing as they were with anywhere from six inches to six feet in their own homes. By the end of day I felt more a part of the neighborhood than ever before, being unable to walk more than a handful of feet down the block without someone stopping me to ask if the water had gone down yet or to say, "So, you're moving down the corner house, huh? Bet you'll be glad to get out of the basement!" How the hell does everyone on the block know when and where I'm moving when a few weeks ago I would have told you they probably didn't even know I existed?
I don't know, but I kind of like it. I've never been that big of a neighborhood person before, but I guess I'm becoming one. When I was a kid, I lived in a neighborhood kind of like this, where everybody knew everybody's business, and it used to drive me crazy. Maybe it will again some day, but right now it's cool to feel a part of things.
P.S. Today it's been raining again, not hard enough to flood, but enough so that all the stuff that was drying out isn't drying out anymore. And the temperature has dropped into the 50s, and I've had to wear a jacket for the first time in months. Not cool. Well, not unless you like winter and/or San Francisco, because that's what it feels like.
07 August 2007
Chuck And Larry
Hey, I'm only human, I have character defects like anyone else, and one of mine is that I enjoy Adam Sandler movies.
Actually, I'm not sure this is a true character defect, although it is certainly treated as one by my more cultured friends. Say something favorable about an Adam Sandler pic in their presence, and I'm likely to hear, "Oh, just because you've moved to Williamsburg doesn't mean you have to go all ironic on us."
But there is nothing whatsoever ironic about my delight in the broad, slapdash, hamhanded - yet ultimately loving - swipes at popular culture and society that Sandler specializes in. I know I waxed rhapsodic on here about his last movie, Click, perhaps a little too rhapsodic, because a week later I couldn't even remember what the movie was about (something about a TV remote). But I remember it was good. Or at least pretty good. Didn't make me want to slit my wrists, anyway.
But this new one, I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry, is a whole new order of wonderful. I thought the previews looked pretty funny, but I still wasn't sure I wanted to see it until some prissy queen wrote into the Village Voice complaining that it was "completely homophobic," apparently because the word "faggot" is used a few times (only by very bad or ignorant people who get their comeuppance, of course; Hollywood in 2007 would never dream of releasing a mainstream film that made gays look like anything but cuddly Will and Grace-style pets).
When Miss Thing went on to fulminate, "I've never been more offended by a movie than this one," compared it to gay bashing, and finished up with, "I've never been more let down by the Voice" for giving it a semi-favorable review, there was no longer any doubt in my mind that I had to see it.
Apparently quite a few people felt similarly, because even on a Monday night, with the film on three screens in the Times Square multiplex, every showing was sold out. I was lucky to get a seat at all, and when I did, it was sandwiched in between half a dozen clearly heterosexual couples happily munching on what theaters somehow get away with selling as "nachos" (basically corn chips that you dip in orange-colored Elmer's Glue, it seems).
It was a very mainstream and very straight audience, definitely drawn from (way) uptown and the boroughs, and I realized immediately where much of the antipathy toward Adam Sandler comes from: he appeals to what my downtown and inner Brooklyn friends would consider the "wrong" sort of people, though of course they'd never admit it out loud.
Anyway, the movie is hilariously crass, full of fun, and still manages to make a few good points about tolerance and open-mindedness. The audience may not have been entirely won over to this point of view, as there was still a good deal of ew-ing every time things got a little too gay onscreen, but this stuff takes time. It's not that long ago that the idea of a largely working class and ethnic audience paying money to be entertained by an unabashedly pro-gay comedy would have been nearly unimaginable.
But did I say "pro-gay?" It's not really; more like pro-human, pro-doing or being or feeling whatever the hell you want to do or be or feel. Despite being essentially a straight person's take on things, it'll do more for the cause of tolerance and understanding than every overtly "gay" movie I've ever seen, not least because it treats gay people as just plain people rather than as the special, almost magical creatures Hollywood usually serves up, capable only of being noble yet doomed victims or incredibly witty and stylish professionals whose primary purpose in life is to show clueless straights how to dress, shop, eat and dance.
One more point in favor of Chuck And Larry: it's totally Brooklyn-centric. The accents, the backdrops, the attitudes: I don't think any of the characters ever bothers to set foot in Manhattan. It's loud, trashy and irreverent - the film that is, but yeah, Brooklyn, too - yet shot through with home truths. Take your favorite uptight gay activist to see it ASAP.