I remember the night I pulled into Brooklyn. Three days before I had slung a couple of big trunks on top of my car in Texas, but was then forced to drop them off in Oklahoma with my mother because they were cutting my gas mileage in half. I remember driving across the country with my friend Carmen in the middle of August with no air conditioner. To battle the heat, Carmen decided not to talk or move. I wondered if she had died.
We stayed in fleebag hotels in Arkansas and Tennessee. Then on Aug. 15, we hit the heavy traffic going from Washington, D.C. into New York. And there was the sign that told us where we were going. It was only about 200 miles or so. I didn’t think it could be done. I never really thought it was possible to actually drive to New York. I thought you had to click your heels or something. We drove into the dead of night, over the Goethals Bridge, the cantilever bridge spanning the Arthur Kill into Staten Island, and from the top of the span, you could see the World Trade Center already, some 10 miles off to the north. And that’s when it occured to me that things were always going to be bigger and time was always going to move a little faster from now on. And that my life would have a little more urgency. That it had a shape. A beginning and an end, and I had only so much time to make of it.
I sped across Staten Island and up across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn, onto the frenetic and dilapidated Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, dodging trucks and taxis as if we were engaged in some kind of bullfight, racing with them and wondering if my first night in New York might be my last on Earth, but not caring, because the entire freeway offered me the ever-looming spectacle of those green-orange lights of Manhattan. The closest thing to Oz I would ever encounter before or since, and the most beautiful view of which is under the Brooklyn Promenade near Brooklyn Heights, where the city both rises and its reflection plunges into New York harbor. Carmen and I thought we were lost, but we were not. Our last exit to Brooklyn, as the name of the book goes, was right before Queens, on McGuinness Boulevard, where my roommate Ben told me to turn off. I crawled into the very dark and pungent neighborhood of Greenpoint, the northernmost neighborhood in Brooklyn, tucked into the armpit of Long Island City, Queens where the two boroughs snuggle together on Newtown Creek. A neighborhood with a huge Polish population, living in clapboard houses and their sausages dangling in every other window. I slunk in the dark with my soon-to-be-towed Pontiac LeMans to the street with the yellow building I where I would live my first month in New York. There was no door buzzer. Only a stretch of copper wire dangling from the top floor of this industrial building — a building that was unairconditioned, that was deathly hot, and that was situated right next door to a sewage treatment plant, but where Ben had managed to find a cheap loft for us. I yanked the cord, heard a crash from up above, and Ben’s head popped out. “Welcome to New York,” he said.
Twelve years ago today.
(Originally posted Aug. 15, 2007)
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