I used to live in New York City
Everything there was dark and dirty
Outside my window was a steeple
With a clock that always said twelve-thirty

— The Mamas and the Papas, “Twelve-Thirty (Young Girls Are Coming To The Canyon)”

Yeah, so, I live in Brooklyn now. For a few hours there, when the moving company‘s truck proceeded through not one but two extremely thorough security checks on the 59th Street Bridge, it didn’t look like I would live in Brooklyn. It looked like I would live in the hall, into which I had moved most of my belongings with the help of the two guys who did manage to get to my apartment on time, Reverend David and Fabian. Or perhaps I would live in jail, convicted of involuntary manslaughter when a Leaning Tower of Nortons collapsed on one of my neighbors. Or maybe, since it had begun to sleet, I would just exit my old domicile via a ninth-story window, kill myself, and end the madness once and for all.

I had one foot over the window jamb in the kitchen when the crew chief, Friar John, and his trusty sidekick Hoodie Sal turned up at last, almost four hours late. I briefly considered burying the same foot in Friar John’s ass, but Friar John is a colossus, and also, once he had a whole team and a truck, he got all of my crap downstairs, into the truck, out to Brooklyn, and into the new place in under four hours — and that’s counting the time it took to pack my appliances, break for smokes, fight cross-town traffic, park a moving van on a street the width of a capillary, broom-hockey it over the ice floe leading up to my new front door, and huck everything up the steps and around various tight corners. Apollo Van Lines, I salute you.

But I can’t lie to you. I had a moment there in the freezing rain, the smell of wet cardboard permeating the apartment, when I looked at the Tetris deployment of boxes and books and taped-up tables and I thought to myself, “So, I live in Brooklyn now. I live — wait, I live in Brooklyn now? But — wait, I can’t live here — I can’t find anything! I don’t know where to get the best cheese and tomato on a roll! Where’s the post office? Where’s the — I don’t — oh my god, I bought a car! Why did I do that? Okay, I have to lie down now.”

I found my sheets, made up my bed, lay down, got seven words into a prayer to Saint Famous Original Ray, and passed out cold for two hours, and when I woke up, I lived in Brooklyn.

Brooklyn didn’t seem too crazy about the idea at first, because Brooklyn kept testing me to see if I would give up and skulk back to Manhattan. With seventy moldering boxes piled up in my apartment, I went out in search of twine, and Brooklyn decided to make twine impossible to find anywhere in my neighborhood. In a different neighborhood for dinner, I found twine no problem. Nice try, Brooklyn.

Still unsure of my mettle, Brooklyn tucked a small ant into my Chinese food. I cut open a steamed dumpling, the ant strolled out, I reached for a napkin to squish it, and the ant told me, “I wouldn’t do that, lady. We got a union.” As the ant picked up a splinter of cabbage and made for the edge of my plate, I bellowed at it, “You tell Brooklyn THIS IS NOT OVER!”

Brooklyn knew. Brooklyn also knew that if it failed in its attempt to pothole me to death on the BQE as I returned from picking up the cats at the kennel in the 212, it would have to let me stay — and I knew it too, and I shot out of the Battery Tunnel and through the toll plaza and onto the roadway, felines yowling and farting in the back seat, hubcaps Busby Berkeleying away from the car on both sides, every knuckle white as a ghost, and as my poor rattling car vanished into The Madeleine L’Engle Memorial Zero-Gravity Pothole, I rolled down the window and yelled out, “If I get to the 6th Avenue exit, I WIN!”

I got to the 6th Avenue exit. I won.

So, now I live in Brooklyn — waaaaay the hell out in Brooklyn, as a matter of fact, which a lot of people don’t understand, even when I explain about the hilariously low rent. But it’s not really about the rent.

See, in my hometown, before the Dunkin Donuts moved in across from the train station, you had two places you could go to get donuts on a Sunday morning. You could go to Trost’s, on the main street, with the stolid fifties chrome sign and the brightly lit glass cases, neat regiments of cakes waiting for frosted lettering — or you could go to Natale’s, at the edge of town, with no parking except on a blind curve and hardly any room to stand inside. Trost’s looked like a Platonic-ideal pneumatic fifties bakery from a charming vintage postcard. Natale’s looked like a front for some sort of illegal activity.

A Trost’s donut tasted, like everything else that came out of Trost’s, like the tax code. A Natale’s donut tasted like Mozart.

My new neighborhood has a Natale’s on every corner, and I really like starchy snacks. I mean, yeah, the rent is a good deal, blah blah — if a butter cookie with sprinkles is an art, and I can tell you that it is if it’s done right, then my new neighborhood is the Louvre.

It’s a lot different from my old neighborhood — it’s a lot quieter, except for the sound of the train going by, which I enjoy. It’s not on the way to anything else, really, not like my old neighborhood, which people sort of went through instead of to. It’s the suburbs, more or less — but I grew up in the suburbs, and I didn’t hate it. I like driving. I like seeing the sky. I like getting caught in the inevitable jams on the BQE and looking at the docks on one side and the geode of Manhattan on the other side, from a distance.

I don’t plan to become one of those reverse-borough-ist types who gets all snitty about Manhattan or anything; I lived there for eight years, and I loved it, and when it’s cold out, you can bet I miss not standing on an elevated platform in the wind and waiting for a train many New Yorkers have never even heard of (and for the record, yes, the M is “a real train” — I know, can you believe it?). But man, the local grocery store is huge. Carts fit three across in the aisles! The tomatoes don’t look like a horror-movie-makeup convention! Checking out takes two seconds! I go every day, even if I don’t need anything, just to admire the ziggurat of barbecue chips. It has a parking lot, people. This is living.

Well, if by “living” you mean “circling the block forty-seven times, waiting for a parking space to open up.” Which I do. Sigh.

February 16, 2004

Share!