If you
would permit me to use an analogy for a moment, I would compare New York City
to your house, your home. Midtown is the kitchen where the real business of the
day is conducted, there’s your ma sitting at the kitchen table paying the
bills. Wall St is your Dad sitting on the couch yelling at the TV with a
betting slip in his hand. The Upper East Side a far off room where your very
elderly Granny sits dozing in the window. The Lower East Side a teenager’s bedroom
filled with rock posters and semen stains. Park Slope where your older sister
sits and pouts all day long wishing she wasn’t surrounded by such worthless
peasants and along a little path from the kitchen, at the bottom of the garden
is a little potting shed where your dad’s older brother Tony sits fiddling with
an old valve radio in his comfortable cardigan and talks about the Korean War.
This is Maspeth, Queens.
It is
the 1950’s in Maspeth, Queens. The streets are clean and tidy, the modest
houses, families, shops and restaurants are clean and tidy, the bank manager
knows your name, the flag is flying, no one is going to steal your bike and if
it was they’d know who took it, Italian food is food and Chinese food is ethnic
food. It is a fine, fine place.
I’ve
been slandering Maspeth for years now, like every other self-respecting
Brooklyner, without ever having visited the place. Actually I was there for a
while; you see, several summers ago I ran around with a crazy ex-ballerina in
her very early 20’s. Contrary to the popular saying I aged about 5 years during
the 6 week fling. It was the summer of the blonde ballerina and also the summer
of gin. My roommates and I would go through 3 bottles of Gordon’s a week. The
ballerina introduced me to snorting pharmaceuticals which disagreed with me and
we’d sit in her spartan kitchen melting in the heat, swatting away the flies,
completely at loss for anything to say to one another. We’d walk to the first
bar in Williamsburg and she would try to make friends with the junk yard dogs
she met along the way. In an attempt, I suppose, to make myself seem as young,
vital and crazy as she I hurled the tops of fire hydrants down the road and
we’d watch the sparks fly before they’d smash to a stop against a store front
or a car wheel. We watched Gummo together and it reminded me of the crazy
stories she told me about the fucked up things she used to do with her friends
upstate, the friends that wanted to come downstate to kick my ass for going out
with their friend who was much too young for me.
I sat
and thought that when I was her age I had just moved to Belfast and was
chugging 3 litre bottles of Wild and White with Gordy and Ciaran Kennedy, I had
not yet met the civilizing influences of Deirdre or Clive and since that time
had completed Art College, bummed around Belfast for a few years, moved to
Colorado for six years, got married, moved to New York, got separated and I had
done all this spartan kitchen thing before and couldn’t really face all those
hangovers again. Well I knew all that but it was exciting anyway and much of it
was a lot of fun. And as I sat there so tired, so, so tired in the miserable
heat in the shabby outskirts of Maspeth with nothing around to eat but bad
pizza and Chinese food I could hardly disagree with the general consensus that
Maspeth was a shit hole. If I’d just walked around a little bit more I would
have seen the cute, varied little neighborhood, untouched by modern development
(except sadly riven in twain by the Long Island Expressway) and the lucky
people who live there, the cemeteries, the disused railroad lines and old
factories. Except for that one corner of Flushing and Metropolitan which will
always be Gummo.
