I'm standing on the beach. My feet are evenly spreading their weight on the sand waiting for the next wave to crash and push the water a few centimeters over my ankles. I look up and the ocean purges a wave out of it that sprints towards me. The five inches of murky salt water rush over the tops of my feet and the expanse of water flows like an opened Brooklyn fire hydrant on the hottest day of summer.
The water keeps rushing forward and embracing all life around it until there's a brief pause, a halt, a deep breath, and the frightened water returns to the one that birthed it. As it tries to pull me down, it also buries my feet with sand. I'm sinking. The water disappears as fast as it arrived except now my feet are gone.
Then all I want is the water to come back, to feel the rush of the water of the world coming at me.
I've found out that this is probably why I haven't written in almost a month. I've started to create a divide between my old life and my new life. There's an obvious separation between my life in California and the one I now inhabit in New York that doesn't need to be explained in the spatial void or cloud or ether that is the internet.
My mum came to visit me this past week and she was promptly informed by all of my friends that I had been speaking of her for a week before she arrived. Everyone knew she was coming. I was excited to be able to show her, display to her, this new life that I'm living. We wandered my neighborhood, the financial district and new WTC, I took her to the Brooklyn flea market for the artisanal inventions and convections next to a view of the Manhattan skyline, we spent an entire evening drinking, eating, and visiting with friends at my "local hangout", and her favorite night was the one where we ingested everything savory and sweet at the restaurant I work at where all of my fellow employees declared her "fuckin' awesome." The whole experience was, in a way, me proclaiming that I have separated myself from everything California. People ask me all the time whether I'm going to go back there and my response always sways between "Probably at some point" and "Not unless I can't help it."
That must be why I have such reservations about certain people visiting me while I'm here. I didn't realize it until my mum and I were sitting on the Brooklyn waterfront and I was starting to get upset and yell that I didn't want Kyle to come visit me in New York. I didn't want him to come here and I didn't want to have him stay with me and I didn't want to see him, goddamnit. All this after speaking of him and holding him on the same level as my own family. After mentioning that I love him because I grew up with him in my most formative years so I had no choice.
But I don't want the life I ran away from to come back to me. The exact thing I was fleeing, the exact thing that made me hate the nonexistent life that I had would be right back in my life. It'd force its way into a place, mentally and physically, that is sacred now. Maybe I was recognizing the disgust I had with where my life had been. Maybe I was scared of the emotions, the hate, the anger, the complete sadness, that surrounded that part of my life. Maybe all I've done is force those feelings away because there really was nothing fundamentally wrong with my life then...it was just a cage with a rusty lock that I finally picked through. I was yelling at my mum that I didn't want my past life to be let into the one I have now. I just wanted it gone. I wanted it intangible.
So this brings me to where I am now. I've mentioned this occurrence of yelling at my mum and I've also previously (in another post) mentioned how I've created a divide between my summer travel lives and my "normal" lives.
Beau moves to New York next week. That fiery, honey-dipped, funk rock, Alabama host of mine from my road trip. It's a great wonder of life this couchsurfing experience I've had over the past three years. One of my best friends is someone who "surfed" my couch in Lafayette. I've had a live fish thrown in my freezer, danced salsa on a roof in a rainstorm, seen a timeline of love in photo form, followed a tornado, ridden a motorcycle through the streets of Barcelona at midnight, all while couchsurfing. Some of the most significant experiences of my life have happened while I've been couchsurfing. Probably most of them. Birmingham was one of them. We all know that I didn't mean to end up in New York. I didn't mean to and was probably trying to avoid the effort of it all until I was having an argument about it with Beau on his porch and he intellectually cornered me - or, rather, saw me bullshitting my way through the talk - and asked, "You do know that you can do everything you want - everything you've mentioned just now - in New York, right?"
Right. And after my dumbfounded pause and stutter, I thought: There's no point in arguing anymore. Might as well go for it all, no?
I didn't make it a point to decide I wanted to live in New York until my phone buzzed after arriving in Asheville, NC, with an invitation to live with Eleni in Brooklyn. At that point it seemed idiotic to not come here where I really do have every option available to me.
So...now it's happening again. Two separate lives are about to get thrown together. I don't have a choice with this one either. I don't have the option of, while yelling at my mum, realize I'm taking out my emotions towards someone else on her and deciding that I'll just tell the other person to not come to New York. This is separate. I guess I have mixed feelings about it but mostly it reminds me of how easy it is to have this mix, this convergence of lives. I like them separate. I like having a little box of parts of my life that I can keep hidden and away from the brains of everyone else in my life. Not only is my "travel life" about to crash into my "real life" but it's also a part of my "previous life" (all these stupid lives!) that's about to become the present.
Now, I feel like I'm rambling.
Kaitlin, get ready for a big mix up.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
This is Brooklyn
Brooklyn defined itself for me tonight.
I've been struggling with a way to describe it to those of you that have never been here. Brooklyn is an odd place. It's not necessarily where you go when you visit NYC but it also isn't a place you forget to go to like the Bronx. The Bronx is one of those mysterious places you always hear about but which you never venture to simply because you're not sure what to expect once you get there. Is it Yankee Stadium or is it sketchy? I still haven't been there...
My night tonight was Brooklyn, nothing more, and certainly nothing less.
I finished work in the financial district of Manhattan, two blocks from the World Trade Center...or what it has become. A mecca of tourist wanderers poring over various colored maps frustrating Wall Street traders who can't pretend that the world below Canal and east of Battery Park City holds more precedence over that of the screens of their iPhones and blackberries (blackberrys?). I spent two and a half hours at Vino Vino, a wine bar in TriBeCa, soothing my palate with a soft California pinot noir since that is what seems to relax me, Matt, and Eleni the most. Since we can't get California out of our system, we might as well ingest and insert some of it into our blood. An Israeli couchsurfer of mine joined in on the wine frolic and similarly cooled to a calm Santa Cruz beach afternoon.
I let Eleni convince me to go to Williamsburg (hipster Brooklyn) for a taco and one last drink at her staple bar - Night of Joy. It doesn't take more than 30 seconds of just saying the word "taco" for me to agree to an evening jaunt in New York's hipster haven where I find it hard to distinguish one male from another since they all seem to sport the same 1920's mustache and plaid shirts. Simmer midtown Sacramento with a sprinkle of New York City for 20 minutes and - voila! - you may now inhale Williamsburg to your heart's finest pleasure.
So, we were in Williamsburg. After getting over my surprise at having to explain (again) what Mexican food consisted of (because, honestly, who doesn't know what a quesadilla is? Green enchiladas? Come on!) to my Israeli couchsurfer, Shachar, we started walking towards Night of Joy which just happened to house - if but for a few hours - Eleni's "friend." While we were practicing our ability to scan for creepers while walking under the highway overpass, we spotted one tiny storefront fluorescently illuminated and what appeared to be a sign on the makeshift bar that read "Welcome." What more blatantly caught our Catholic-school-girl-who-is-used-to-corny-religiousness eyes were the twirling, blow-up crosses flying from the ceiling fan.
We walked into a small room, looking as if it were being renovated complete with dry paint rollers, fist symbols haphazardly placed on the walls, and a ladder as the center pedestal of the four white walls and psychedelically orange tiled floor. Nathan and Michael were holding up the bar...or what seemed to be one. They yelled at us to come on in and placed a beer in front of each of us and asked if we wanted a shot of rum to go with it. It seemed like a bad idea...for about 5 seconds. And then I realized, "Well, what the hell? I'm either all in or I should leave." So, I took both. I was given Nathan's stool to sit on, Eleni got the ladder to perch upon, and Shachar got the stool that had previously been turned upside-down on top of this "bar." We asked if it was a bar. They told us it was the Sacco & Vanzetti Cultural Center. Google those names.
And that's how the night was.
The three of us slumped in this white, open prison of anarchy and dreams. Eleni and I, who have shared almost 10 years of questionable life experiences, and Shachar, our Israeli couchsurfer who held his own in a debate about whether Jesus had really spent 40 days in the desert with the two of us Bible-blooded girls from Sacramento who hail St. Francis High School as one of the biggest defining periods of their lives directly before spotting flying crosses on Lorimer and Meeker streets in Brooklyn, New York. We sat in a circle...well, Michael stood behind his "bar" that turned out to actually be the front room of his home. Eleni and I were sneaky enough - and, let's face it, cute enough - to be allowed to take a peek at what was behind the bar and a semi-closed, similarly white door, and found it to be a home inspired by Ikea catalogues. We spent over an hour comparing Michael to Woody Allen and hearing his story about how he actually met his doppelganger after throwing explosives out his window during the filming of one of Woody's films on the Upper West Side back when explosives in New York actually made people giggle instead of cringe. We watched Nathan take shot after shot and then inwardly drooled at his West Virginia accent that, once we acknowledged, he quickly tried to transform into the typical Queens one...which attracts about 1/10th of the ladies. He was instantly advised to stick with West Virginia. Eleni pretended to be interested in the do-it-yourself, 80's craft book. I helped choose lounge-appropriate records. I'm not even sure what Shachar was doing since I was completely immersed in the fact that I felt I was in another world. One far below Brooklyn. We had walked off the stage of our life's performance to rest our bodies before ultimately having to return from behind the curtains. Time stopped in the Sacco & Vanzetti Cultural Center.
We even looked through a hole in the wall to see "Take me to your leader" literally flashing before our eyes. When we peeked around the corner to see where it was being projected we saw nothing. Just Michael's bed. The flashing light was coming from somewhere. But Eleni was still perched like a treasure beneath the spinning blow-up crosses proclaiming "I love Jesus" and various versions of the same idea.
All of a sudden it seemed like it was time to enter the stage - the same way we came in - and press ourselves into the world again. We were sent off with encouragements to stop by anytime we "needed it", whether it be in a day or a year.
We crossed the street to Night of Joy and it was as if we had been refreshed. God had refilled our fuel tanks of life.
I left soon after arriving there. My "normal" life of work at 9:30am was calling along with the reminder that I had 14-hour days for the next three days. As I was waiting for the B48 bus that takes me almost to my dirty, cement doorstep, a young guy came up to me and started speaking to me...although it was in horribly broken English.
"How are you?"
"Good, thank you."
"How old are you?"
"How old am I?"
"No, how old are you?"
(Ignoring him)
"How old are you?"
(Bus pulls up - I jump in and sit down a few seats behind the driver where he can easily see me)
Then the foreign guy starts knocking on the window. The bus doesn't pull away. The foreign man starts banging on the window. The middle-aged, Brooklyn-specific woman tells me that someone is trying to talk to me. As I look up at her, the driver asks if I want to speak with the man outside.
"I don't even know who he is."
The woman looks surprised: "Oh, that's creepy."
The driver: "You don't know him? Well, let's show him what he deserves. Let's leave him here. You're in good hands, sweetie. Don't worry."
He shut the doors instantly and pulled away.
After a few more minutes of the motherly, but feisty, woman and the driver simultaneously arguing and agreeing that the encounter "just isn't cool", the driver believed it was time to share his poem. He had written a poem in college, some 30 years before this moment, that he had kept memorized in his mind. It was about New York. He recited it for the whole bus to hear as he drove and picked passengers up and dropped them off to their homes. It wasn't lyrically-eloquent but its emotion and verve were enough to make you remember the moment even when you feel as if you've had enough of this city and its quirks.
At the end of the recited poem by the MTA bus driver who had put 7 children through school, a man in front of me simply professed his love for what it said about our community (yes, now it's "our" community, since I feel as much a part of it as anyone else on the bus) :
"A 12-year old Puerto Rican girl spoke to Mr. Bloomberg when he was here in Bed-Stuy a few weeks ago. He gave his whole speech and then asked if anyone had anything to say. This little girl stood up and said, 'Yes, Mr. Bloomberg. I may be poor but not in my heart.'"
I've been struggling with a way to describe it to those of you that have never been here. Brooklyn is an odd place. It's not necessarily where you go when you visit NYC but it also isn't a place you forget to go to like the Bronx. The Bronx is one of those mysterious places you always hear about but which you never venture to simply because you're not sure what to expect once you get there. Is it Yankee Stadium or is it sketchy? I still haven't been there...
My night tonight was Brooklyn, nothing more, and certainly nothing less.
I finished work in the financial district of Manhattan, two blocks from the World Trade Center...or what it has become. A mecca of tourist wanderers poring over various colored maps frustrating Wall Street traders who can't pretend that the world below Canal and east of Battery Park City holds more precedence over that of the screens of their iPhones and blackberries (blackberrys?). I spent two and a half hours at Vino Vino, a wine bar in TriBeCa, soothing my palate with a soft California pinot noir since that is what seems to relax me, Matt, and Eleni the most. Since we can't get California out of our system, we might as well ingest and insert some of it into our blood. An Israeli couchsurfer of mine joined in on the wine frolic and similarly cooled to a calm Santa Cruz beach afternoon.
I let Eleni convince me to go to Williamsburg (hipster Brooklyn) for a taco and one last drink at her staple bar - Night of Joy. It doesn't take more than 30 seconds of just saying the word "taco" for me to agree to an evening jaunt in New York's hipster haven where I find it hard to distinguish one male from another since they all seem to sport the same 1920's mustache and plaid shirts. Simmer midtown Sacramento with a sprinkle of New York City for 20 minutes and - voila! - you may now inhale Williamsburg to your heart's finest pleasure.
So, we were in Williamsburg. After getting over my surprise at having to explain (again) what Mexican food consisted of (because, honestly, who doesn't know what a quesadilla is? Green enchiladas? Come on!) to my Israeli couchsurfer, Shachar, we started walking towards Night of Joy which just happened to house - if but for a few hours - Eleni's "friend." While we were practicing our ability to scan for creepers while walking under the highway overpass, we spotted one tiny storefront fluorescently illuminated and what appeared to be a sign on the makeshift bar that read "Welcome." What more blatantly caught our Catholic-school-girl-who-is-used-to-corny-religiousness eyes were the twirling, blow-up crosses flying from the ceiling fan.
We all pretended we weren't staring until Eleni and I instantaneously agreed that it was a good idea to walk over and see what was happening.
We walked into a small room, looking as if it were being renovated complete with dry paint rollers, fist symbols haphazardly placed on the walls, and a ladder as the center pedestal of the four white walls and psychedelically orange tiled floor. Nathan and Michael were holding up the bar...or what seemed to be one. They yelled at us to come on in and placed a beer in front of each of us and asked if we wanted a shot of rum to go with it. It seemed like a bad idea...for about 5 seconds. And then I realized, "Well, what the hell? I'm either all in or I should leave." So, I took both. I was given Nathan's stool to sit on, Eleni got the ladder to perch upon, and Shachar got the stool that had previously been turned upside-down on top of this "bar." We asked if it was a bar. They told us it was the Sacco & Vanzetti Cultural Center. Google those names.
And that's how the night was.
The three of us slumped in this white, open prison of anarchy and dreams. Eleni and I, who have shared almost 10 years of questionable life experiences, and Shachar, our Israeli couchsurfer who held his own in a debate about whether Jesus had really spent 40 days in the desert with the two of us Bible-blooded girls from Sacramento who hail St. Francis High School as one of the biggest defining periods of their lives directly before spotting flying crosses on Lorimer and Meeker streets in Brooklyn, New York. We sat in a circle...well, Michael stood behind his "bar" that turned out to actually be the front room of his home. Eleni and I were sneaky enough - and, let's face it, cute enough - to be allowed to take a peek at what was behind the bar and a semi-closed, similarly white door, and found it to be a home inspired by Ikea catalogues. We spent over an hour comparing Michael to Woody Allen and hearing his story about how he actually met his doppelganger after throwing explosives out his window during the filming of one of Woody's films on the Upper West Side back when explosives in New York actually made people giggle instead of cringe. We watched Nathan take shot after shot and then inwardly drooled at his West Virginia accent that, once we acknowledged, he quickly tried to transform into the typical Queens one...which attracts about 1/10th of the ladies. He was instantly advised to stick with West Virginia. Eleni pretended to be interested in the do-it-yourself, 80's craft book. I helped choose lounge-appropriate records. I'm not even sure what Shachar was doing since I was completely immersed in the fact that I felt I was in another world. One far below Brooklyn. We had walked off the stage of our life's performance to rest our bodies before ultimately having to return from behind the curtains. Time stopped in the Sacco & Vanzetti Cultural Center.
We even looked through a hole in the wall to see "Take me to your leader" literally flashing before our eyes. When we peeked around the corner to see where it was being projected we saw nothing. Just Michael's bed. The flashing light was coming from somewhere. But Eleni was still perched like a treasure beneath the spinning blow-up crosses proclaiming "I love Jesus" and various versions of the same idea.
All of a sudden it seemed like it was time to enter the stage - the same way we came in - and press ourselves into the world again. We were sent off with encouragements to stop by anytime we "needed it", whether it be in a day or a year.
We crossed the street to Night of Joy and it was as if we had been refreshed. God had refilled our fuel tanks of life.
I left soon after arriving there. My "normal" life of work at 9:30am was calling along with the reminder that I had 14-hour days for the next three days. As I was waiting for the B48 bus that takes me almost to my dirty, cement doorstep, a young guy came up to me and started speaking to me...although it was in horribly broken English.
"How are you?"
"Good, thank you."
"How old are you?"
"How old am I?"
"No, how old are you?"
(Ignoring him)
"How old are you?"
(Bus pulls up - I jump in and sit down a few seats behind the driver where he can easily see me)
Then the foreign guy starts knocking on the window. The bus doesn't pull away. The foreign man starts banging on the window. The middle-aged, Brooklyn-specific woman tells me that someone is trying to talk to me. As I look up at her, the driver asks if I want to speak with the man outside.
"I don't even know who he is."
The woman looks surprised: "Oh, that's creepy."
The driver: "You don't know him? Well, let's show him what he deserves. Let's leave him here. You're in good hands, sweetie. Don't worry."
He shut the doors instantly and pulled away.
After a few more minutes of the motherly, but feisty, woman and the driver simultaneously arguing and agreeing that the encounter "just isn't cool", the driver believed it was time to share his poem. He had written a poem in college, some 30 years before this moment, that he had kept memorized in his mind. It was about New York. He recited it for the whole bus to hear as he drove and picked passengers up and dropped them off to their homes. It wasn't lyrically-eloquent but its emotion and verve were enough to make you remember the moment even when you feel as if you've had enough of this city and its quirks.
At the end of the recited poem by the MTA bus driver who had put 7 children through school, a man in front of me simply professed his love for what it said about our community (yes, now it's "our" community, since I feel as much a part of it as anyone else on the bus) :
"A 12-year old Puerto Rican girl spoke to Mr. Bloomberg when he was here in Bed-Stuy a few weeks ago. He gave his whole speech and then asked if anyone had anything to say. This little girl stood up and said, 'Yes, Mr. Bloomberg. I may be poor but not in my heart.'"
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