by Jane Borden
There it was again. I’ve been away for so long that my life is now understood in relation to children’s books. This is preferable, I allow, to living somewhere with fewer points of reference. If I’d moved instead to Malaysia, my friends and family would be forced to tell their children, “You know, the place where all your toys are made.” And then it would be my fault their kids didn’t believe in Santa.
And anyway, my life here does resemble a kid’s tale. For example, I live beside hipsters scruffy enough to belong in Where the Wild Things Are. I just devised a lunch out of a leftover burrito half, a frozen veggie burger without a bun, a handful of carrots dipped in mustard, and some stale crackers with jelly, which means, like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, I will eat anything (and everything). Also, without warrant, I retain the delusion that I can achieve my dreams.
If I had to compare my decade in New York to just one classic, though, it would be P. D. Eastman’s Are You My Mother?, about a confused baby bird who asks everything it sees, including a dog, a cow, and a power shovel, the titular question. The day I returned from visiting Lyssa and my goddaughter, I packed everything I owned—excluding of course the dowry box in my parents’ basement—and moved from my seventh New York apartment, in Greenpoint, to my eighth, in Gowanus. I can’t seem to find the right nest.
This behavior is bothersome, largely because moving in New York is a major hassle, particularly when the friend-of-a-friend mover you hired, and with whom you confirmed, fails to arrive, and his phone is suddenly out of service, and the new tenant is arriving in a matter of hours. Also, by the way, you contracted debilitating tendonitis in both shoulders, so you can’t lift anything heavier than a bottle of water, which is why you’re already out $100 from hiring someone to help you pack. This was not the ideal time for you to move, but when a friend tipped you off to a $1,000-a-month one-bedroom, and you’d recently been asked by the local police to deliver the license-plate number of your current downstairs neighbor who was using and selling heroin, you imagined that even if opportunity did knock twice, you might not hear it over the sirens.
I’m not telling you what to do, but if I were in that situation, after waiting for an hour, I would purchase a box of Entenmann’s brownie bites and a party-size bag of Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos, stress eat for thirty minutes, and then call the first random number I found on a “Moving?” poster taped to a streetlamp.
Five minutes later, Arnaldo Sanchez stood in my living room counting furniture. He lived in the neighborhood. He wore an Urban Express T-shirt.
“You work for them?” I asked, pointing to the logo.
“Used to,” he answered, “but I’m starting my own business.”
I was pretty sure he didn’t have a truck.
“I wish you’d called yesterday,” he continued, “because I would’ve had the truck, but this afternoon it’s in Long Island.”
Yeah, right.
“But I can handle this in my van,” he said.
“A moving van?” I asked.
“A minivan,” he said. “Don’t worry; it’ll only take two trips. What? You gotta be somewhere?”
“Yeah, but not until 8:00 p.m.”
“Aw, you’ll be unpacked by then. Two trips—guaranteed. No doubt, no doubt.”
I, in fact, had serious doubts. There was a bed, a sofa, a loveseat, a dresser, a bookshelf, two desks, a vanity, five chairs, more than a dozen boxes, and as many tote bags. But he offered me a $300 flat fee (the guy who’d bailed: $550), and I can appreciate a hustle, so we shook on the deal and he told me he’d be back in fifteen with his “men.”
An hour later, he arrived with one other guy, his brother, Georgie. There was definitely no truck in Long Island.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Georgie said, when he noticed me staring at his red, swollen, and wandering left eye. “I’ve got surgery tomorrow.”
“Oh dear,” I responded with concern. “Can you see?”
“Kind of,” he said. “I mean, with the other one; I can’t see nothin’ out of this.”
I reached for the brownies and stuffed one in my mouth without even microwaving it. Then, imagining they might like to stress eat too, I asked, “Y’all want one?”
“I just ate,” Arnaldo replied.
“I have diabetes,” Georgie said. “That’s why I can’t see.”
OK: So a diabetic blind man would carry me and all of my belongings across Brooklyn? While I sat doing nothing—like a colonial crossing a mountain range on a sherpa’s back? Well, not exactly like that; as I quickly discovered, Georgie also had a bad back.
I looked to Arnaldo: “Are you sure this is doable?” Georgie answered for him, “I’m fine!” Arnaldo shrugged his shoulders, stuck his fingers out in what was neither a peace nor victory sign, and said “two trips.”
TRIP ONE OF FOUR, DEPARTURE
TIME: 2:30 p.m.
On top of the van, tied with a just purchased 99-cents-store rope:
two mattresses and one three-seat couch
In the driver’s seat: Arnaldo
Stuffed into the console between the two front seats: me
In the bodega buying tea: Georgie
“What’s taking him so long?” Arnaldo asked the steering wheel.
“Beats me,” I said, and tried to straighten my neck against the felt ceiling. Another few minutes passed, and Georgie appeared with two large plastic bottles of Snapple.
“What the hell!” Arnaldo demanded.
“I was looking for the kind you like; they didn’t have it,” he said.
“It took you that long to pick something else?”
“I was checking all the bottles! I couldn’t see!” Georgie yelped. “And you shouldn’t curse in front of Jane.”
So began my day with the Sanchez brothers, the younger of whom, you’ve likely gathered, is Georgie. Actually, they’re several years apart; Arnaldo, in his late forties, is one of the first of the eleven siblings, and Georgie, early thirties, is one of the last. Georgie had recently divorced and moved back from Florida to the house on Java Street where they grew up.
We passed a fancy boutique wine shop on Franklin Street called Dandelion. “The neighborhood is really changing,” Georgie said.
“Yeah,” I replied, shaking my head, expecting them to bemoan the influx of twentysomething hipsters with serial-killer mustaches, who think they can put their pants on their arms and call it fashion.
“I think it’s great,” Arnaldo said. “Everything is so clean now; Greenpoint used to be filthy. Do you know how much my father paid for our building in the seventies?”
“Seventeen thousand dollars,” Georgie said.
“Guess what somebody offered our mother earlier this year,” Arnaldo taunted, turning away from the road to look at me with raised eyebrows and a half smile.
“What?” I responded.
“Guess!” he demanded.
“A million dollars!” Georgie squealed.
“A million dollars,” Arnaldo repeated. “But you know what she said? ‘No.’ ”
“Wow,” I said, wishing the offer had been made to me. I shifted on the console, testing the neck-craned-backward position, and eventually landing on left-ear-against-ceiling.
“Georgie! Jane’s not comfortable. Do something.”
“What am I supposed to do?” he shot back.
“Get her that blanket! Never mind, I’ll do it.” Arnaldo threw his right arm behind me and pulled a comforter from the mass of chairs, bags, and boxes. It was covered in cartoon characters unidentifiable.
“Thanks,” I said, taking the blanket and folding it behind my shoulders. I leaned back to rest against a box, and the console broke beneath me with an audible crunch.
“What was that?” Arnaldo asked, perturbed. I explained, and he shifted his countenance, saying, “Don’t worry about it.” Good thing Georgie hadn’t done it.
Then we pulled onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and were quickly lulled into silence. I love that about the highway.
I can be in the middle of a sentence, pull onto an on-ramp, and suddenly I’m drooling: “I remember where I hid the cure for cancer! It’s in the …” [on-ramp] “… bloll-dribble-blal.”
Any thoughts or concerns dominating my brain disappear into the motion of wheels spinning on pavement, and my subconscious is able to step in. You know how people have big ideas in the shower? That’s what the BQE is like for me: a cleansing bath (except it’s filthy).
This was the most of the highway I’d ever seen on one drive. My old apartment was in the most northwestern corner of Brooklyn. If Manhattan’s streets are lines of latitude, I was at Thirty-Sixth, Midtown. My new apartment is so deep into South Brooklyn that, if we’re sticking to this latitudinal analogy, I’d be in the middle of the bay, halfway to Staten Island, beyond even the Statue of Liberty, which I could currently see through my window, sitting in the water, a big copper doll.
We took the Hamilton Avenue exit and drove for a few blocks underneath the rising highway, its foundation columns growing taller and taller in the distance.
Arnaldo consulted his GPS at a stoplight next to the New York City DOT Hamilton plant. There’s my landmark, I thought, noting the enormity of the structure, a skyscraping silo topped with an American flag the size of Rhode Island and surrounded by enough fire-engine yellow construction equipment to make my nephews’ heads explode. It looks like a NASA orbital launch pad or something.
Arnaldo took a left and turned up the radio.
“What’s he saying in this song?” I asked. “I keep hearing it in bodegas.”
“You don’t speak Spanish?” Georgie asked, shaking his head.
“Si ves algo, di algo?” I offered, parroting the subway-poster translation of “if you see something, say something.”
“Um,” Arnaldo began to translate lyrics, “he is saying that he wants one more chance, that he really messed it up but he wants her back, that she is his world.”
“Mundo!” I exclaimed. “I heard him say that.” Then the chorus kicked in, something something “stupido.” If you were in Brooklyn in February or March of 2010, you heard this song.
Arnaldo translated again, “He says he feel stupid.”
Georgie laughed.
“What?” Arnaldo asked.
“You think she didn’t know that? That’s the same word, Kokie.”
“Kokie?” I asked. “Who’s Kokie?”
“Oh, sorry,” Georgie said. “That’s what we call him, you know, like a nickname … like ‘Stupido.’ ”
And then we parked. They both agreed that this house was much nicer than the old one, which Kokie said looked condemned. Georgie asked me to turn on the light in the hallway so he could see better, and they lugged everything inside.
When we were back on the BQE, Georgie asked Kokie for a cigarette.
“OK, but wait to smoke,” Kokie said. “You’ll bother Jane.”
“I didn’t mean for right now! I meant for later:” Georgie said.
“It won’t bother me,” I offered.
“You sure?” Georgie asked sheepishly.
I nodded and he lit up. Kokie, who hadn’t heard us, shouted, “What are you doing?!”
“She just said she didn’t care!” Georgie looked at me: “Didn’t you say you don’t care?”
“I don’t care,” I confirmed.
Georgie leaned forward and said to Kokie with deep satisfaction, “See?”
“Also, for the record,” I said, “it doesn’t bother me if you curse.”
This time Kokie looked at Georgie: “See?”
TRIP TWO OF FOUR, 4:10 p.m.
On top of the van: a floor-to-ceiling bookcase and an upholstered loveseat
Falling from the sky: rain
In the driver seat: Kokie
In the passenger seat: Georgie
In the passenger seat with him: me
“Scoot over, Georgie, you’re squishing her!”
“I promise I’m fine,” I said.
“You have a lot of stuff,” Kokie told me. “I didn’t see it all before; that’s why I said two trips. I didn’t see that other desk. I thought some of those boxes were the guy’s moving in.”
“Yeah, well, no matter,” I replied.
“Janie, looks like you’re spending the day with the Sanchez brothers,” Georgie said and laughed.
“But we can get it in three trips,” Kokie added nervously. “No doubt, no doubt. What time is your thing?”
“Eight p.m.,” I said.
“Easy,” he assured me.
We passed the corner of Franklin and Java. “That’s where they shot Doop!” Georgie exclaimed. “Right there. Remember that, Kokie?”
“That was rough.”
“The Dominicans sold drugs out of that bodega—right there—on the corner. They were always at war with the South Side,” Georgie explained. Then he looked at me and asked, “You know that big building we just passed, the Astral?”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “A bunch of my friends live there.”
“Oh, that was the worst,” Kokie joined in.
“There was a different guy selling under each of those arches,” Georgie explained. “You couldn’t even walk down the street.”
“There’s a guy selling under my apartment,” I said.
“Really?” asked Kokie. “Yeah, I guess there’s still some of that left. It’s good you’re leaving. Not for nothin’, but that place is scary.”
Great: I’d spent three years in a building deemed frightening by a man who’s seen gang warfare.
We hit traffic, a wreck at the three-way intersection of Franklin, Calyer, and Banker. Two smashed cars had been pushed into the center of the fork in the road; a plainclothes cop directed traffic.
“Shit,” Kokie said. “Get down, Jane.”
“What?”
“We can’t have three people up here. They love to give tickets. Georgie, grab that blanket.”
What, you’ve never hidden between a Puerto Rican man’s lap and a blanket covered in cartoon dogs carrying balloons? The van slowed, and I heard Kokie say, “What’s up, Ramone!” Ramone said something back, and then Kokie drove off, shouting behind him out the window, “Tell your mother, ‘Hey’!”
I sat up. “You knew that guy?”
“Oh man,” Georgie said. “Was that Ramone? He’s still around?”
“Yeah. He’s a cop, I guess,” Kokie replied.
“I used to go sledding with that guy,” Georgie recalled. He looked at me to see if I was still interested in his memories after face planting into his kneecaps. I was.
“The trash cans had aluminum lids,” he continued. “When it snowed, we’d steal them for sleds. You should’ve seen it in the blizzard of ’77; everything was covered. Everything was white.”
Georgie said he was sad about his marriage but glad to be home. He’d missed New York. Florida didn’t have seasons: “It’s not right.”
“Y’all have roots here,” I said.
“Yeah.” He nodded his head. “I guess so. What about you?”
“Enh, I’m more of a weed.”
We accelerated into the expressway on-ramp.
“I can’t believe you put that all on the roof,” Georgie said.
“Nah, I knew it would fit,” Kokie replied with confidence.
Georgie poked his head out of the window to assess our top tier. The loveseat was essentially balancing on the bookshelf, its feet strategically placed inside the shelves. Georgie refenestrated himself and said, with a face misty from rain, “I’m worried about the wind.”
“What are you talking about, wind?” Kokie asked.
“If we speed up! It might blow off!” Georgie said.
“I know what I’m doing.”
Now Georgie’s entire torso was through the window.
KOKIE: Why are you …? Get back in the car!
GEORGIE: I think we should go slow.
KOKIE: I’m gonna go slow.
GEORGIE: I’m just saying …
; KOKIE: All right, already!
And then I was drooling again. Like one of the Astral addicts.
I wasn’t concerned about the furniture getting wet or falling off; I didn’t care about the boxes in the back. It’s all junk other people left behind. As I’ve told you before, it’s trash. My laptop, a box of journals, a painting my mother gave me of angels, and the green-leaf Herend dish: that’s what would be in my hobo knapsack. The rest was only brought along because I had a big apartment to fill. I’ll probably toss most of it whenever I eventually leave Gowanus, after I’ve devoured this neighborhood and sucked on locustlike to the next. I could have left it on the street if I hadn’t found a mover a few hours earlier. That I can chuck it at will is its best quality. It is valuable for having no value.
Investing in permanence is discouraged when movement is the only constant in life. New Yorkers have too many worries to also bother with insuring a car, mowing a lawn, replacing a roof, and keeping a lavender upholstered loveseat dry. I mean, really, it was barely raining.
This economy of impermanence governs every transaction in city life. Even if I plan to stay in a coffee shop, I’ll order my drink “to go,” in case I change my mind midlatte. My favorite way to dine out is to grab an appetizer at one place and then hit somewhere else for the entrée. I can’t even put down roots at a restaurant. I can’t sit still.
And I have trouble making memories. No moment is more important than another unless a substantial amount of time passes between the two, but of course, in New York, that never happens. No experience is able to plant itself in my mind before the next arrives and knocks it out of the way. It’s not possible to dwell, which I find attractive. However, I am forced to document my life obsessively, in notes and on film, while it’s happening—at the bar, during the concert, in the moving van—because otherwise it would be as if I hadn’t lived it. As if we weren’t once again driving on that section of the BQE in South Brooklyn that runs along the water.
Doll sighting in the bay.
Rising highway.
Orbital launcher.
On with the lights.
Lug it all up.
TRIP THREE OF FOUR,
5:50 p.m.
