The message from my parents is of generic stock — we miss you, get a job, call us when you get a chance (or job). They have been peripheral figures in my life ever since I left for New York. At least that's how I try to think of them, especially after not only reading about the Oedipal Complex, but having the dream (only once) that I killed my father. It's not that I am afraid that I may kill him or fuck my mother. It's not even that I want to disown them; rather, I want to egress from the past, from them, from every definition that is supposed to define someone with my background. I certainly don't want to go back to Baltimore. It is a city of animated ruins. An imperious boredom haunts the day. The summer is hot and humid, filled with days spent indoors and suffocating in the recirculated air. When it rains, it pours. The winter is plagued by dead trees and ashen skies, various shades of death amidst people in various stages of dying. There is some snow, but rarely enough to properly coat the jaundiced grass for more than a day or two.
My father, a militant Chicagoan, never tried to instill in me any sense of pride based on the history of the city or Maryland, let alone the South. My mother was not from there, either; she was a bookish girl from New England, who happened to capture my father's eye because she was reading Saul Bellows while waiting for a train. They took the train together that day, even if my father was supposed to be going in the other direction.
This is really the only sentimental story they seem to have about their relationship. They are a rather detached lot. She's detached because of books; he's detached because of medicine. Still, he does feel as though he has to constantly remind me where he came from, that he rose out of Chicago to have all of the things that his friends in Bridgeport and Hyde Park can only dream about — as most of them came back after being shipped off to Vietnam to work the same jobs their fathers had worked.
Faxo's message is succinct, polite, and inviting. He informs me that he has just returned from Japan, which means his sleep schedule is essentially backwards. Still, he is willing to meet with me anytime before two.
As I take down his address, I hear Vinati stirring. She is suddenly supine, though her eyes remain closed. “Did he actually call you back?” she asks. “Or is this some other lead you haven't told me about?” She is strangely coherent and lucid for someone just regaining consciousness.
“No, it's actually Faxo,” I respond as I look back to her. “He told me I can stop by anytime before two.” I am clearly too ecstatic for her at such an early hour. She groans. “So how ya' feeling this morning?”
“My muscles are sore,” she laughs as she pulls the sheets over her face. She quickly reappears. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
For the life of me I don't know how to respond to this without sounding corny, so I just smile, walk over to the bed, and bend down to kiss her. She turns her head away and ducks beneath the sheets again. “I can't,” she laughs. “My breath is terrible.” My head hovers above hers until she reemerges. She laughs again. “You aren't going to take no for an answer, are you?”
“Not when I know you can't give it.”
13
The Jefferson stop on the L train is, as of the mid-June of 2007, probably the premier spot to live in the city, provided one is both a recent graduate and desperately trying to mirror the bohemian image of generations past. It is one of the many regions of Brooklyn that will soon be home to an affluent population who will, paradoxically, lament the neighborhood's blunted edge. As of now, however, it is still too dangerous for a lot of people. Rapes happen. Stabbings happen. There is still a belief that white skin is logically antecedent to wealth, that the rapes and the robberies (typically concomitant with the stabbings) are romantic in the sense that they are revolutionary or grounded in the desire to fight against a power structure that is unjust at its very core; but the sad truth of the matter is that these are crimes, that these crimes are performed by sad people, that these crimes affect sad people, that there is no glory in fighting against the powerful by victimizing the powerless who happen to have that one very discernible resemblance to the majority of those in power.
Still, there are the nascent signs of gentrification sprouting up. Some factories have been converted into lofts. The ten-story condo buildings that look like something out of an aquarium, however, have yet to appear. Consequently, it is fairly safe to say that the domestic immigrants here are not the disguised trust-funders one finds on Avenue A or even Bedford; they, like the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans who have been here for at least two generations, work menial jobs, forage through the generic sections of the grocery store aisles, and feel a strong resentment for the participants of the eastern migration — only for them it's kind of like hating the mirror.
While no small percentage of this group comes to Brooklyn with the vain hope of beginning a career in the arts, there are those who, like earlier generations of immigrants, have come not so much to find fame as much as a decent job. True, many are attracted to fairly illustrious career paths, but they gravitate to this particular city because many other places in this country can offer little more than a cubicle job that cannot provide such things as health care, a living wage, or even dignity. Here you end up meeting quiet types from Iowa and Michigan, Montana and Idaho, engaged in a form of wage slavery that is more clement than the form of it they would have endured had they stayed home. They are the people who consider paying off student loans to be more important than going to trendy clubs and restaurants featured in those magazines dedicated to culture and the arts — with the exception of literature and poetry, as people are far too busy trying to be cultured to bother with books.
The problem, of course, is that these new immigrants don't only attract their own kind. They attract their wealthy counterparts. Soon a section of the grocery store becomes devoted entirely to cheese. A record shop that specializes in Tahitian punk rock opens up next door to the coffee shop with an obscure and irrelevant adjective as a name (Erudite, Fulgent, Glaborous). The bodega stops carrying Night Flight and begins purveying six packs of microbrews from Vermont. Their delis start offering sandwiches with avocado and sprouts. A designer opens up a boutique filled with hideous dresses that each cost what the previous lessee paid each month in rent. Cabs appear. Then cops. Then bars. Then bistros.
But by this point most of the first wave of young, white immigrants will have already moved on. Unlike the people who have lived in the neighborhood for more than a few years, they do not have rent-stabilized apartments, nor do they have a serious connection to the area. They will move to another location that appears to be beyond the reach of developers and condo shoppers. But soon the migration of the hip and the wealthy will once again encroach upon their homes, and, once again, they will be forced to move out. And when they come into a new neighborhood they will once again be welcomed with hostility, as they are seen as the precursors to a rapid rise in the cost of living (which, unfortunately, they are); and they will not come to know their neighbors because they will feel intimidated and guilty; and no one on the block will go out of their way to discover the reason for their appearance because they assume it to be out of anything but necessity; and the two will call the process integration and gentrification because they see a difference in their skin tone and their language as opposed to their parallel in wages; and the melting pot will never really exist, perhaps it never can exist, because there will never be an alkahest, just weak solvents created by either corporations or the empty words for which politicians and talking heads feign such reverence; there will continue to be different colored solutes, partially dissolved, who maintain their individuality through commodities, antiquated archetypes, and an intense aversion to anything that infringes upon their autonomy as a demographic to be exploited by people who could give a shit whether you're black, brown, white, red, or yellow — the only thing that matters is the green.