Posted 48 minutes ago
At Sea in Brooklyn (some thoughts on place)
A week ago was my one year anniversary with New York City. You remember it, a year ago? That day a bunch of people thought the world would end? No one I knew, probably, but yes.
I ride in the backseat of a car from Newark with two large bags and a very scared dog in a carrier. What a port that Harlem apartment felt like in the storm of everything else. I come into a room that has a mattress and borrowed blankets. I am too scared to spend more money that I don’t have yet, so I eat a lot peanut butter and Easy Mac. When I’m not on job interviews, I stay at home or go on walks because they are absolutely free. I wait a month to buy any furniture, and when I do, I assemble every piece myself, and feel prouder than I have about anything else in the entire world, it seems.
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The hurricane beats against our windows. Casey, Amy, and I watch Father of the Bride and drink our canned peaches cocktails and the rain begins to run through our walls, coming through seams, bubbling under the paint. We tape everything plastic around the edges and hope for the best.I go to sleep at 4am, my bed pushed into the center of the room, the dog barking at the leaky windows.
In the morning, the company I work for sends a towncar to pick me up so I can open the place. The sun glistens off the East River until we got to Midtown and I spend the rest of my day inside an unmarked office.
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A lot of time underground on trains: I go from one work to another, to an apartment, to sleep, to another work. I repeat. The world seems too continuous, but at the same time, segmented into chunks with bits of underground in between.
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I realize that going to this wedding in Vermont (New Hampshire? No Vermont. No, it will be a surprise) with my father next month will be the first time I’ve been out of New York since I took a bus to see Lydia in Boston. In December.
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In February, I move islands. Walking across the westward pointing street with a bedframe that will spend some time in my old room in place of me, wind comes off the water and pushes against it like a light, wooden sail. It is hard to hold onto.
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I plan my first trip to California in more than a year. It is good, but complicated in a way that Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin predicted three years ago (or something).
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A seventy-two year old letter, read out loud in a tall and old rehearsal room that has a color of paint named after it:
“There is a wonderful deep, wet fog outside, and the house creaks like a ship under way… At sea, Gypsy! That little phrase makes my heart leap high; why should I have ever been fool enough to want to be anywhere else? My happiest memories are of the sea, and so are my cruelest… I was lonely, I loved, I was lonely, I loved; the alternation is familiar. But as I sit here now, in this ramshackle ship’s parlor, I dare believe just that… I am, oh believe me, these few days before the New Year, where I belong: at sea in Brooklyn.”
— George Davis, in a letter to Gypsy Rose Lee
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I start working on a musical in which one of the songs Isaac has written features a subway ride so full of, well, subway that the character transports to a dream work behind his eyelids. I relate.
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After months of refusals to even consider getting a bike, after returning a borrowed David Byrne book because it was largely about bikes, which I have exactly no interest in, there is enough silence from all the bike-happy people in various cities who are a part of my life that I think, maybe I’ll get a bike. It feels completely, organically like my own idea.
I think on the ways in which I am still, and may always be, a tiny child.
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A company with a boat in it. Not in its membership, but in its title (though maybe someday).
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Eben and I ride our bikes down to Coney Island. It is hot and full of carnival food and theme park, so we confine ourselves largely to the space between the boardwalk and the ocean. I have been to a beach in New York once before, but it was late at night, empty, and November, so this is something altogether different.
The sand runs way out to the water, people sit overtanned and overtired on neon towels on top of it. And this thing clicks in my brain that has no right to, that doesn’t make sense. Even though this isn’t someplace I go or will go frequently, even though these aren’t the summer versions of the masses of people I pass through every day, something makes sense to me about New York in a well-rooted way that says more about where I come from than where I am, or at least, proves them to be equally important.
Oh, I think. This place, these people. Sprawling as they are, they are anchored in something. Because, you see, they have a beach.
Finally, these are terms I can understand.
