Brooklyn Owes the Charmer

A piece of island cooling in the sea

In the natural world, things change.  In a New York neighborhood, it’s complicated.  The past is preserved, upward mobility is projected, and if you’ve lived a couple of lifetimes there, you become part of the story, too.  The Historical Society protects the architecture, our brains, imprecisely, download our memories, and, if a neighborhood comes alive, it transforms.  I probably have more trouble letting go of the past than most, which has everything to do with why I am writing this now.  Ditmas Park began as summer houses for Manhattan robber barons at the turn of the century, but it began for me in in the summer of 1993, a neighborhood I first knew from the Brooklyn scenes of Sophie’s Choice.  In the film, Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline are shacking up at 101 Rugby Road, a Queen Anne curiosity that had been the home of a Civil War officer and member of the New York state legislature who was rumored to be the descendant of the English philosopher Francis Bacon.  ''Old sycamore trees and maples shaded the sidewalks at the edge of the park, and the dappled sunlight aglow on the gently sloping meadow of the Parade Grounds gave the setting a serene, almost pastoral quality,'' wrote William Styron in his novel, set in 1947, a description that would be accurate today.  “And so,” wrote Styron at the end of the novel, “ended my voyage of discovery in a place as strange as Brooklyn.”  I thought my discovery of a place as strange as Brooklyn ended a long time ago, too, but I moved back to Ditmas Park in June, after I survived Covid and a breakup with a painter and thought 2021 wasn’t too late to start anew.  Ditmas Park goes way back and it has hooks in the present.  Walk by 1445 Albermale and locals will tell you that this crumbling mansion, now owned by Michelle Williams, was where George Washington stashed his mistress.  But wait, it wasn’t built in 1905?  Does a sale to the Brooklyn Bridge come with?

There are some facts I can verify because I was there.  1993 was Bill Clinton’s first year as President and Kurt Cobain’s last full year on earth.  I was a sophomore in college—the demo rock critics, who were all older than me, were trying to reach.  Except I was listening to more Mahler or Miles or Mingus than Mudhoney.  It’s hard to imagine it now, but in my part of the world, overt ambition was frowned upon.  There was no social media for everyone to broadcast their egos, so indifference was a platform of its own.   I went to Sarah Lawrence, a college that officially didn’t have grades, though the registrar kept them in a secret file for grad school applications.  It was uncool to look at them, and even more uncool to care.  I was reading Kant and Hegel and Joyce and Mann and Proust and graduated in the same class as Maggie Haberman, but I do not recall her, even though we were among around 1,600 students on a 36-acre campus.  Imagine going back in time for this conversation:

“She will be the Times reporter with access to Donald Trump.” 

“And why is that important?” 

I spent most of my sophomore year in New York City, where I was in a relationship with Rifat, a graduate student in sociology at NYU living with her family in a vague section of Flatbush, a liminal stretch between Kennsington and Ditmas Park. She was 5 foot 1 with a haunting beauty and sarcasm, worlds beyond me in sophistication.    She had a private entrance, and for months I never met her parents, Bengali Muslims, who, I assumed, would not have approved of me.  When we walked down Lake Michigan on my first trip to Chicago, she said, unimpressed, “Bodies of water are inherently attractive.”  It was ok, with the Louis Sullivan buildings, but hardly Nepal.  She spoke a few languages fluently, had traveled across continents, and made me feel like I hadn’t done anything but masturbate and live in Dallas.  Her younger brother was 12 at the time: Reihan Salam, now the president of the Manhattan Institute, an influential conservative think tank.  Chris Goffard, a fellow Voice intern and now a Pulitzer-winning staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, recalled, “I believe he was having his sister open an atlas at random so he could recite populations from memory…this while I was still learning my continents in college.”  I would see him from time to time on TV, arguing with liberals on Real Time with Bill Maher.  I’m a liberal, too, but when I saw this particular conservative pundit, I still saw that adorable and hilarious prodigy.  When he was 3, Rifat told a relative in Bangladesh, “In America, cats meow backwards.”  Little Reihan said, “Woem.” 

When I met with him in Park Slope, we were trying to understand our adult selves as we were pitching our flags in King’s County.  We age, we acquire an identity, along with divergent political views.  Yet in our lunch, and I was overwhelmed by his kindness.  It was like a family reunion of sorts.  When he was starting out, he would write humor pieces for Slate and elsewhere that would remind me of that kid.  Now he’s responsible for the careers of young policy analysts and can’t do that anymore.  Ah, adulthood. 

I didn’t know what responsible adulthood would look like in 1993, but I did aspire to something.  I thought of the Voice offices at 36 Cooper Square as my extended college campus, every writer and editor a potential mentor.  No internet, no smart phones, nothing to do but read, write, drink coffee, drink, and talk to someone worthwhile.  That was where I came in.  The Voice wasn’t what it used to be, but what else was new?  It never occurred to me that it was mortal.  It would be like imagining New York itself shutting down, and that nearly happened before and would nearly happen again.  People in the 90s were complaining the Voice wasn’t as good as the 80s, which wasn’t as good as the 70s, an amazing time for movies, crime, loft scene jazz, CBGBs, and the Voice.  The Voice had a library with bound volumes of their entire history, and I imagined how cool 1975 was if you weren’t getting mugged.   There were surely some who thought it was all downhill after Norman Mailer ended his column, first over a copyediting error, then after changing his mind about Waiting for Godot.  That golden age ended in 1956.    

The Voice could be annoying, but it still felt essential. Before Tinder, there were the personal ads.  Before Craigslist, there was the real estate section.  Before social media, if you had a cultural obsession, it was a place where you could find fellow freaks. The conceit of Desperately Seeking Susan was based on an ad on its back page.  (Seek Rosanna Arquette, get Madonna—that was the Voice.)  I interned for Joe Levy, the music editor, then Richard Goldstein, the widely acknowledged inventor of rock criticism. (Only he would have the right to say, “I invented rock criticism.  What did you ever do?”)  I wrote about American Music Club, a band I adored for endless brooding.   “If I have to be this lonely, I might as well be alone,” was among one of their irresistible lacerations.  I knew the feeling all too well.  Mark Eitzel, its lead singer and songwriter, and I now follow each other on Twitter.  But then, they had just been signed to Island after releasing some much admired albums on indie labels.  Yes, this really was the 90s.  Levy let me have my assignment—my first—but didn’t want me to get my hopes up.

“The people who like this band will like this record and that’s it,” he assured me in an Almost Famous moment.  My blurb would adorn the shrink wrap of their next cassette.  Eitzel would soldier on.

I had, in my small way, arrived.

The jazz clubs and festivals were a significant ad base, so it mattered what Gary Giddins had to say in his Weather Bird column, and, when he took a sabbatical to finish his Bing Crosby biography, two young critics were enlisted to fill in.  One of us ended up on the staff of the Times and took a buyout many years later, way after it seemed astonishing that the paper of record had a jazz critic at all.

“Brooklyn owes the charmer under me,” went the Steely Dan song.  I later learned that Becker and Fagen wrote that about a downstairs neighbor in Park Slope, back when it was a lousy neighborhood. They were young and just out of Bard, dreaming of writing great songs for a great band, and this guy who would sit on the stoop and complain about his life and all that he thought he was owed. What did Brooklyn owe me?  I cursed my fate in an overheated Broadway Lafayette station, waiting for the D, wishing I could live somewhere cool.  I would look in the window at the Tower Records at 4th and Broadway, seeing something already covered in the Voice’s music section.  How could I know that there would be the internet, social media, all the forces that would demote print and make the Voice a piece of nostalgia, a curiosity, sort of like the last Blockbuster Video?   In the year 2022, there is yet again an entity called The Village Voice, published by a billionaire who decimated the LA Weekly.  The Voice survived Rupert Murdoch, but that was in the 80s, when it was one of the most profitable publications in the country.  In 2022, freelancers are at the mercy of the ultra-rich and their whims, and a brand name still evokes a time that is long gone.  When I expressed shock at how little they were paying, I was told that, “sad to say it,” many people were willing to write for free. 

It is the end of September.  I’m at Mimi’s Hummus on Cortelyou, Grub Street’s “absolute best restaurant in Ditmas Park.”  Summer feels like it’s lingering a little too long, and I’m eating a meal fit for a sultan cutting carbs.  They have six outdoor tables, covered by a tarp that only partly works when it rains.  It is across the street from the Hook & Ladder fire station.  The trucks burrow in and out, sirens bleep and sometimes scream while organic groceries beckon in either direction.  I’ve been here for part of a summer and survived two major storms.  Will we survive the Delta variant?  The masks are coming back on now.  The security from the vaccines now feels shaky.  Will New York thrive?  Will a place as strange as Ditmas Park continue its trajectory to becoming something on the scale of Park Slope or Cobble Hill?   Relationships, I have been told, are based on projection.  How do I project my relationship with this hood, with myself and everyone I let in?  Ditmas Park has baggage, it has possibility.  Another movie star could buy another historical landmark, with another spurious origin story.  They could film another movie here.  (They will definitely film more Law & Order SVU episodes, as we who park here well know.)  Somewhere off Cortelyou, there’s a starry-eyed 20-year-old who wants to break into something.  That kid will be driven, ambitious, neurotic, needy, and he will be bonding with people who may or may not stay in the picture.  2022 will become 2047 one way or another.  That kid could be on to something.  If I’m still here, I’ll be as grumpy as Fran Lebowitz.  Someone will film me walking down Argyle Road, reliving my sturm und drang 40s, my aspirational 20.  I’ll look back at the promise of 93, my second act of 2021.  What was Ditmas Park?  Could we ever fathom it?  What world will be left for that 20-year-old?  What lies will we be told about our local landmarks?  Will there be some corner left in this shrinking island for someone to aspire to something?  Those trains that run from Broadway Lafayette to Kings were built in the 70s, and I can’t imagine them ever being replaced.  Does it have character or is it falling apart?  

I’m a regular at Mimi’s Hummus.  They make me a special dish and treat me with utmost kindness.  And there’s no place I’d rather be.  And yet just as I’m enjoying my meal, another siren goes off.  HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME. Brooklyn owes the charmer under me, doesn’t it?   Some people never learn.