You're supposed to love New York, but I never could, even though I spent formative years 1-3 and 22-24 there. The cold concrete is enough to blast and wilt a sunny California girl, like frost does basil. With more money and brashness I might have enjoyed it, but instead I was a tad disabled--and, as a result, only marginally employable--and the towers fell as soon as I arrived.
But I didn't live in The City. I lived in Brooklyn. Brooklyn I liked. It shares a lot of good qualities with Oakland: The Town vs The City, the teeming diversity, the "land" name. (Of course Oakland is softer--and in all the right places, I would argue. Less harassment, better weather, more vegetarian food.)
I had always liked the idea of Brooklyn, the "No Sleep 'Til..." and the "Tims for my hooligans in..." It was the original habitat of my white-bearded college Yiddish professor, and the place where John Travolta wolfed down two slices of pizza folded lengthwise in Saturday Night Fever.
We lived on a cool row house block in Boerum Hill, which was not yet the glamorous neighborhood it has become, although the clashes of gentrification were already thick in the air. The brownstone whose upstairs we occupied was classic East Coast historic/grimy. We shared it with a sad family and there was no door to shut between their part of the house and ours.We joined the Park Slope Food Coop, where shopping for fine cheese at low prices was a joy, and working the cash register once a month ranged from tolerable to sort of fun. There were ATMs nearby that operated in Yiddish and I was fascinated by the young Hasid mothers with their wigs and babies on their hips, pushing overloaded shopping carts.
The late, great record store Beat Street was on Fulton. It was mecca for Crim. He entered his first dj battles there, and made pals with the staff, Scoob and Finesse and Pebbles. Somehow Beat Street was just a few blocks from our place, as were the new Smith Street restaurants that taunted our brokeness, and the miracle bodega that could produce any grocery item at any hour, and, my own mecca, the community garden.
I learned to garden in Brooklyn, which makes no sense, unless considered from the "Rose in Spanish Harlem" sort of angle, of yearning to grow something in the cracks of the concrete. It wasn't a garden to which anyone was particularly devoted, but that was fine with me, because it meant I could expand my empire of chard and Brandywines one abandoned plot at a time. I nurtured my raised beds with obsessive care; I got the soil so friable it became legend among the neighborhood cats. But the hard truth is that community gardening often sucks, at least in Brooklyn. The Brandywines all got smashed in the night. Gardening made me appreciate private property.
The downstairs teenage neighbor and his friend Jerrell were a Dean Street pair straight out of a Lethem novel: the Jewish kid from the row house, the black kid from Gowanus Projects. The dirty yellow walls of the brownstone were preferable to Gowanus; when a visitor was at the door and no one had ordered pizza, it had to be Jerrell. And he wasn't shy about buzzing that bell for a looong time if his chum didn't appear. We would see the top of his head from our window four floors up and sing our jingle:
It's Jerrell!
It's Jerrell!
Who's ringin the bell?
Well, it's Jerrell!
The song grew lots of verses and variations that I've since forgotten. For hardass Brooklyn kids, both guys were sweethearts. When I brought them to the community garden, they tasted some mint and politely considered it as a gum alternative.
At the end of our stint, Crim worked at Book Court, on Court Street, where Jonathan authors were known to show up and browse, all writerly and unshaven. Court had a great bagel place too. And the pizza. Oh, the Brooklyn pizza: giving so much and asking so little. We survived two sticky summers (one without AC) and one blizzard, which made the streets quiet and magical. I had expected a more chaotic effect from a word like that.
The thing is, you can picture a place as a whole, with a line connecting the Yiddish ATMs to Beat Street (presumably with the Beastie Boys as midpoint). But when you're actually there, the divisions are hardened. I couldn't have lived in Brooklyn for keeps. Still, on a winter's day like this one, I could go for a plain slice.
