Quiet Williamsburg

It had rained just long enough to soak through my shirt and shoes. The cuffs of my pants had wicked rain up to the middle of my calves and my hair was slicked back. A drop of rain had fallen on the end of my cigarette and I flicked it at the building where Artists and Fleas had been on North 6th Street. It was closed. A large sign announced that prime retail space was now available. Condos rose in the distant end of the street where it meets the water and a group of eight Spanish kids sat on the damp sidewalk singing, drunk and high. I was coming to Galapagos, but now even that was closed; they'd taken to calling it Public Assembly.

I met my short, fat, gay, Indian companion just inside the main entry. He said I looked like a greaser. I snapped and pointed at him. We went down the black hall and turned right, toward the second, smaller music space. I paid and was going inside when I heard my companion arguing with the woman at the door. "He's not Indian like that," I said. "He got a discount on his college tuition." A blank look from the door woman. "You guys do anything like that?" They didn't.

It was a gala evening at Public Assembly for bands with woman drummers. There was no band playing as we arrived, but the MC, a woman wearing stiletto heels, the shortest skirt, and what amounted to a bra was at the microphone repeating over a bassline, "The pizza, the pizza, the pizza's warm and cheesy." She was clapping her hands over her head, hoping we'd all join in. I bought whiskey.

My companion pointed out a tall, rangy man who looked like a baseball player leaning over a short hipster girl. They drank Tecate and he was laughing. "You know I saw that guy outside before?" my companion said. "Talking to that same lady. He said he was watching porn today, two sisters doing themselves. He knew they probably were really sisters but he couldn't stop watching. She laughed and laughed." "She probably thought he was being somehow ironic." I said. "He wasn't," my companion said. "Why can't it be easy?" he continued, looking at them. He and his husband had separated and were trying not talking. "He hasn't written or called. Not once. Isn't he curious? Doesn't he want to know what I'm up to? Is he waiting for me to call? Doesn't he want to hear about my day?" I bought more whiskey.

The band we'd come to see was called Antimagic. A two person band with standing half drum kits facing each other. A woman on the left and a man on the right. The woman also played bass, the man guitar. Their sound is driving, loud, and haunting like something coming at you in a dream and you can't run away from it. All movement in the crowd stopped, heads transfixed. They had almost no patter and when their set was over they simply bowed and left.

We listened to two more bands, drank whiskey and Tecate, the most ironic of beers. In between one of the last sets the MC mounted the stage again expounding on the beautiful night, how we all were beautiful, how we all were just, here, you know? And that was beautiful. And how it was all, right now. All of it. You guys know what I'm talking about?

My companion and I went outside and smoked cigarettes during a metal set. He didn't want to leave yet, there was one more band after. He was going to get his full admission's experience. Half an hour later we were back inside. The crowd had thinned and there was no wait to buy whiskey. The last band was setting up. I caught the MC slouched in a chair, ruin of a woman, her twenty two year old breasts sagging in her bra like an old Polish woman having a cigarette in August. She was trying to eat an enormous cheeseburger. Two bites in she threw it to the ground.

The ballplayer was standing next to us at the bar, the short hipster girl had left. "Hey! I seen that girl's cooch before," he said, indicating the singer of the band. She was wearing a tiny skirt and a loose tank top. She wore sunglasses and had closely cropped hair. "She was bending over and wasn't wearin no panties. She didn't care!" The band started playing. It was loud and complicated. The singer jumped off stage and ran through the front of the crowd. She fell on the floor and jerked around. The drum kit was enormous, like Rush.

I thought about the deteriorating evening, my companion's marriage, and this neighborhood. You walk down the streets and the cars have become more expensive. European languages are heard more often than not in the shops. Bland condominium buildings rise along the parks and the river. The holdouts still hold out, though. Some coffee shops and record stores and bars. There is a sense of resentment among the group of people who refuse to call themselves hipsters. Graffiti outside the Bedford subway stop welcomes you to Condoburg. But the hipsters have arrived. Their art and music can be seen and heard in Iowa and Nebraska. This is the natural progression of the gentrification of a neighborhood. It's the price one pays for becoming popular. It may have started ten years ago with some sort of utopian idea of an artist's collective making a home in the lofts. The French students in sixty eight said that beneath the cobblestones is the beach. We strip away the hard edges of the city and create unending youth. The core of young kids moving here to do art and lots of drugs still exists. Joan Didion wrote about that type of kid in sixty eight as well in San Francisco. But where she saw mere anarchy, I know that beneath the cobblestones lies only level, even concrete.

The singer announced that this would be the last song. I found the MC sitting in another chair on the opposite wall. She was holding a Virginia Slim in her fingers, trying to find her mouth, eyes closed, hair fallen in wisps out of its do. The ballplayer barked out a laugh. "We're all just animals, man," he said. "Look at us, we're standing here just trying to get another look at this girl's snatch."

The Refractive Period

Psumner finished the last quarter of his beer in one pull and went to the bar. Everyone needed a drink. Chuck and Amanda were playing pool when he came back.

"What you need to do is get your dick wet," said Chuck. "Clear your head right up."

"Yeah," said Psumner, frowning, "really get some skanky on there."

"Let a girl park your Cadillac in her garage for a while."

"It's nice to hear how boys think about these things," said Amanda, watching Chuck clear the table.

"Only people whose names rhyme with fuck can say things like that seriously," said Psumner. His beer was about half gone. He told himself to slow it down. "I don't think his name is even Charles. I think his parents just called him Chuck. They knew something about him."

"A circus gypsy named me," said Chuck, all Texan deadpan. "Said she saw my future. Eh, you know where I heard that line? About the Cadillac?"

"A Romanian gypsy," said Amanda. "They're always from some country they don't have anymore."

"A porno," said Chuck, and he delivered the line, deep voiced and slow, making it a question. "But seriously, dude, maybe pull an Asian."

Ruminative Psumner. He finished his beer and bought another even though it wasn't his turn. He wasn't paying attention to this conversation or had any of the previous ones that night. He responded automatically with what he thought were funny things to say. Kept those bastards off his back. Buck up, they seemed to want to say. He didn't want it.

Chuck let Amanda break the next game, and when she didn't sink any of the balls, Chuck stepped in and began cleaning house again. Psumner said he was going to smoke a cigarette.

"Maybe I'll buy Sumner a shot," he heard Amanda say to Chuck. "Maybe he wants one of those."


Psumner left the bar and walked down Third Avenue to Fourteenth Street where he cut over to Union Square. Phantom vibrations coming from his phone in the back right pocket of his jeans. He pulled it out to check almost twice a block: nothing. The Virgin Megastore was closing. They were even selling the shelves. It was depressing. Another vibration from his pocket. Amanda had written. Some guys were milling around the entrance of Virgin.

"Say dude," one of the guys said to Psumner. "You like hip-hop?"

"Do you like Jesus?" he responded. Combative Psumner.

"Motherfuckah, don't blaspheme!"

"What does that even mean?"

Psumner turned away and descended into the subway. He was upset about Virgin. It had been a touchstone of his in this city. It was loud and obnoxious and you could never tell where the movie was playing they were blaring over the PA system. But he always bought DVDs from them and sometimes a quaint CD. He was a man of habit and this part of his habit was being taken away from him. Plus, there's something to be said for physical browsing. He could never get the hang of strolling through Amazon. He rode the train out to Brooklyn and found he'd lost his headphones.


Psumner bought six Modelo Especials from the deli near his apartment. He drank one in his room and looked at the internet. He drank most of another, slowly. Beer was beginning to make his mouth sweet and his head thick. Naked Psumner. Nearing bed time. It was very late. He picked up his phone and called a car service. He'd only just pulled on his pants and had opened a beer when he heard a horn outside.

He told the driver the address in Manhattan and sat back. This was the right move. This was John Cusack. His heart was beating in his throat and his head had cleared. They listened to Arabic news driving down the empty streets.


Psumner stepped out of the car and looked up at her apartment building. He found her window and tried to discern if there was any light peeking out from the sides of the curtains. There was no way of knowing. What do you do? Tacky to ring the buzzer, her roommate might be home. It was late. Only cigarette butts on the sidewalk to throw at the window. And he only had his keys in his pocket. Risky. He smoked a cigarette. He texted her hello. No response. He called, no answer. But that didn't mean anything.

Or it did. It meant she didn't want to speak with him. She didn't want to see him. She wasn't home. She was asleep. She was out. Who would she be out with? She was ignoring him. He looked at the front door of the building. She was opening the door in front of him the first time he'd come over. He'd trailed the back of his fingers up the back of her thigh. Best to ring the bell. He stopped. What humiliation was waiting in the intercom? This is Psumner's flaw. Proud Psumner.

The city was changing around him and had become hollow. He was no longer in charge of his own destiny. Psumner leaned on the bell and the blood rushed in his ears. He could hear no cars. Was that the merest flicker of light at a corner of the curtain? There was no answering crackle at the intercom. Psumner saw only overgrown sidewalks in a ghost city. I'm not ready. I'm not ready. I'm not ready.


Psumner hailed a gypsy cab and told the Nigerian driver his address.

"How much you pay?" the driver asked.

"Like eight bucks?" They laughed and laughed. The driver named an extortionate price and Psumner agreed. He was too tired, and what's the point? They crossed the Manhattan Bridge back into Brooklyn and followed yellowed street corners to his neighborhood past Prospect Park. He and the Nigerian smoked cigarettes, and at a stoplight Psumner saw a tattoo on the driver's neck of two hands clasped in prayer. Fingers pointing up, so angels can land on them.


Back in his room, Psumner thumbed through his Google reader. He sipped the now warm and flat Modelo Especial he'd left on the nightstand. An underground militant revolutionary pop singer was marrying a liquor and movie heir. It's a funny old world. He scanned the pages flickering past, not really reading, but following the text. A grey wall had risen in his mind; thoughts representing the past weeks, surrounding finally any pretense of a public face. If these thoughts were put into words it would sound a repeating phrase, throbbing and hopeless.

Psumner clicked a link in one of the blogs and found himself looking at a product page on The Duluth Trading Company. He blinked, finished his beer, and realized that he dearly wanted a Fire Hose fabric Chore Coat.

Slash Back Blazers

Avery Green finds himself in Chinatown. He'd left The Randolph on Broome Street just before it closed. Green is polite. The Bowery is two blocks away to his left, there's still traffic on it. He turns right. Chinatown is empty and smells like fish and rotting vegetables and his footsteps echo on the buildings across the street. Green knows he's somewhere near City Hall. He turns left.

There is a man on a corner. He's Chinese and overdressed, like Green. He leans on an umbrella. As Green passes, the man falls almost into step with him. They walk for almost a block. Green has his hands casually in his pockets, where he might have a knife. The man reaches in his own jacket pocket and takes out a box of cigarettes with a tiger fighting a dragon on it. He puts a cigarette in his mouth, but doesn't light it. A faint blue Chinese symbol on the cigarette down near the filter.
"Good evening," he says to Green. "Do you have a light?"
They stop, Green reaches for his platinum Dunhill lighter and pulls out long, thick red bead. It sits in his open palm.
"No, I don't seem to. Sorry. This, is a hair bead."
The man looks at Green. "I think I have some matches. Would you like a cigarette?"
"Thanks."

The woman Green had met two days ago at the Farmer's Market by the courthouse in Brooklyn sold essential oils in a stall. She'd been wearing a floor-length denim skirt and wrapped her dreadlocks in a brightly patterned fabric. She wore no makeup on her almond colored skin. Green came with her back to her house in Crown Heights where she made him roti and they drank coconut water. Unwrapped, her dreadlocks fell to the tops of her thighs. Green left the next morning. The bead had been in her hair. His lighter stands brightly polished on the windowsill next to her bed.

Green smokes. The taste is chemical and brackish.
"I was on Nostrand Avenue yesterday," he says. "There was a man outside his deli chopping sugar cane with a machete. He was selling it by the half-meter."
"You can chew it, you know," the man says.
"I don't know what you'd do with it. The man had a machete."
Green tells the man of a mural next to the deli. An angry black woman is being shot by a laser beam from a green and orange devil in the sky. The devil is dressed in a suit very much like Green's, his head is round and bald and he has angry eyes. The same woman is painted further down the wall with a caption: I've got my eye on you, Devil.
"I miss the country," the man says. "In the country you feel demons closer than in the city. That's what my grandmother says, anyway."
"The city's too crowded," laughs Green. "There are no ghosts here."
"Aren't there?" The man tosses away his cigarette and lights another. "My name is Lin."
"I'm Epson Miller." They shake.
His name is not Epson Miller, nor is it Avery Green.

Mr. Lin wishes Green a good night and disappears around a corner. Green continues downtown. He thinks of the loneliness of his life. He knows he can go back to his room at The Pennsylvania Hotel on Thirty Third Street. He turns right and heads toward Tribeca. It is dawn when he reaches the Battery and turns around. It's eight thirty as he walks up Mulberry Street between Kenmare and Spring Street. The sky is an almost electric blue tinged with white behind the red brick buildings. It is a perfect light.

These are the days like Edward Hopper paintings, thinks Green. Everyone in them is a ghost.