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."