THE GLORY OF BROOKLYN

The County of Kings

I fell back in love with Brooklyn over the last week. It was my home for 25 years.  Then there was an eight year break when I went back to California.  Then, divine intervention brought me back to Brooklyn, the last place I ever expected to live again. 

The charms of Brooklyn are many, but most evident in the diversity of its beautiful people. 

Working in a wine bar, memories are coming back from other times I worked in bars.  Once in my twenties a friend called and asked me to work the door for a nightclub, but I was in a terrible mood. 

“I’ll do it,” I said, “with the condition that I get to wear a ski mask all night long.” 

My friend reluctantly agreed. 

I opted for a camouflage ski mask, an army jacket and a pair of vintage boxing gloves.  I called myself “El Mistra.”  I was thinking of the artist Chris Burden who did a piece in the seventies called “You’ll Never See My Face in Kansas City,” in which he walked around Kansas City in a ski mask for a week. 

It was a worthwhile experiment.   Every time someone bumped into me in the dark hallways of the club, they screamed.  The friend who had hired me begged me all night to take the ski mask off, but I didn’t want to. 

I thought this was pretty amusing, but the joke was on me.  I was outside, bashing my gloves together, letting people into the club, and my recently ex’ed boyfriend showed up with his new girlfriend, wearing my leather jacket — the one I had given him.  He had no idea the door monster was me, of course.   I confronted him; he and his girlfriend were shocked and horrified and ran away. 

Afterward, of course, I was in an even worse mood, and terrorized clubgoers for the rest of the night. 

I live in the Hasidic neighborhood; the last week has been a time of big festivities for them. I hear them shouting happily over the fence in my back yard.   I’d always heard they were bad neighbors, but isn’t that so much as you are invisible to them; they just don’t engage with people outside their sect.  The other night, coming home from the wine bar, I was parking my Vespa on the street, and a rowdy, filthy white Honda Civic full of Yeshiva boys tried to park in front of me.   I don’t know if they were drunk or just terrible drivers, but at one point the back taillight was touching my thigh.  “Hey, motherfucker!” I shouted.  “You’re hitting me!” 

We both parked.  I was going through a phase with the Vespa where I couldn’t quite get it on the back stand.   The Hasidic boys saw me struggling and meekly asked if I needed help.  I said I did, and all the boys ran over to my Vespa to help me back it onto the stand.  I was so touched.  I thanked them profusely.  “You’re welcome,” they said in shy voices.  Such nice fellows. 

This week I found, observing people working in my wine bar, that the stickers you put on your computer are even more psychologically revealing than the clothes you wear, (and I wrote a whole book about the psychological impact of clothing). 

I saw a girl who was clearly a cat lady, who had a cartoon sticker of a fat cat with the word “Chonky” over it, and another sticker of a cat pawing a wine glass.  I tried to telepathically communicate to her that the only friends she was likely to attract with these stickers were cats and other cat ladies. 

I noticed the computer stickers on an older poet woman:  they were a collection of wings.  I presumed she was contemplating mortality a lot. 

One woman who occasionally comes in with her computer got completely trashed one night and told the chef how lonely she was.  I talked to her about depression for a little while, having suffered from it at great length. 

But it wasn’t until I saw the stickers on her computer that I really got a feeling for just how depressed she really was, and how much she was telegraphing this to the world at large. 

One of her stickers said “Big Feelings Club.”  

That in itself wasn’t depressing - she was, at least, owning her psychological state.  But the rest of the stickers on her computer, which may as well have come from a suicide prevention line, were a bummer on par with children’s leukemia: 

You matter! 

You are enough! 

You can do hard things! 

And then the sticker that really empathically screwdrivered me in the lungs: 

Doin’ Great! 

Nobody that needs a sticker that says “Doin’ Great!” Is doing all that great.  It’s the kind of thing you’d see in a chemotherapy office, or a place where you rehabilitate after losing a leg.  It was the sticker equivalent of sackcloth and ashes.  I wanted to dump all my antidepressants in her Prosecco and spill dishwashing liquid into her computer keyboard to stop her from carrying it around in public.  It is my firm belief that you don’t have to be happy, but you have to seem to be cheerful for the sake of other people.  We’re all in the same lifeboat.  Morale is everyone’s problem. 

 Another woman ran into the wine bar helplessly asking to use one of our phones.   It seems she had been separated from her car by the police, whom she tried to outrun, unsuccessfully.  She had been in holding all day.  She made a call on our co-workers phone, then took a table in the back and promptly fell asleep on it.   After about an hour, an older Eastern European man showed up.  “Your daughter is in back!” I told him, and he shot me a weary look that told me that we both knew she was crazy. “I haven’t seen her in six months,” he told me.  I gave him a glass of red wine, which he proceeded to sit and drink before dealing with his step-daughter. 

I noticed as she left that the cashmere she was wearing had a strange smell about it that suggested a chemical imbalance. I wondered if dogs can smell schizophrenia. I Googled it, and the answer was yes. 

But for the most part, Brooklyn is full of stallions.   Great beauties who are interesting people.  My friend Mo and I got into a conversation with a young dreadlock guy selling joints in the park.  The talk became quickly metaphysical when he told us about the time his dog Knuckles died.   

“I swear to God, I was going to sleep….Knuckles was dead in the next room, but I felt him crawl onto the bed and put his head under my chin.  It was him saying goodbye.”  

I’m putting a sticker on my computer today - it’s the label from a packet of Chinese Firecrackers called BLACK CAT.  It will suggest that I am both pagan and explosive.  

I’ll be dressing like a terrifying pilgrim on Halloween at work - bonnet, apron, white collar.   I found a giant wooden spoon in the kitchen that I am going to beat into my hand and say “Shame!” 

It’s my way of coming to terms with my white roots.  I am the descendent of little Anna Putnam, the hysterical girl in Salem village who accused many women of being witches.  I figure there’s some kind of larger karmic balancing in my being a witch and dressing like a pilgrim.  Pilgrims are evil. 

It’s good to be back in Brooklyn.  I don’t even need to work in a ski mask.  The beauty of the people lifts me up every day.

Theme Song: Jack Black

Artwork: “Sistuh Leslie,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2023