“The Oblivio Series is a bi-monthly reading and performance series hosted by Michael Barrish. It has no overarching theme or purpose.”

Since I have no overarching theme or purpose either, the lovely Michael Barrish, friend and neighbor, has invited me to read with him at Bowery Poetry Club this Sunday at 4 o’clock.

I’ll be doing a bad Canadian accent and cursing myself for using too much dialogue.

It would be fun to see you there.

From my dear friend Andrew. Last names changed to protect the Catholic guilty from Google inquisition.

Sunny acts as though everyone who arrives at his bar on Conover Street is a guest at his surprise birthday party. He is lean and a little stooped from a life of leaning into upper-body hugs, and when he looks into your eyes, you feel he forgives everything you’ve ever done. He’s in his sixties, and looks like a Botticelli angel.

Over the bar hangs a portrait of his grandfather. It is the same Italian face, but where Sunny has long grey curls, his are plastered flat from an Edwardian center-parting, and the mouth turns down in the look of a man who has a business to run. A serious matter, photography, in those days.

There’s another picture behind the bar, a cartoon of Sunny and his young Norwegian wife, arms stretched up to catch a blonde creature who flies like Superman against a night sky. It is Oda, their daughter, who became a three-year-old recently and was feted for a week. The caption is “Oda Kom Fra Stjernene”. I think it means “Oda Comes From the Stars.”

Sunny lives in hope that Oda will sleep a few extra hours some day. This week it hasn’t happened, with all the birthday excitement. “My God,” he says, shaking his head, “it’s ex-haus-ting.” But he knows he is a lucky man.

The bar is marked by a sign that says “BAR”. It was added in 1910, fifteen years or so after grandad opened the doors. Inside, the lit-up Schaefer Beer sign is a reminder that this borough was once a brewing capital, back when half the world’s trade was unloaded on the docks here at Red Hook, and this bar served longshoremen and sailors.

The well-loved junk has taken on the patina of four generations. A Gentleman Jim figure stands high in a corner, ready to come out fighting. Below him hangs a pair of ancient, cracked boxing gloves. There are bad frescoes of lighthouses and a painting of a mermaid and a dusty model ship. The orange Choking Victim poster, mandatory in all New York bars and restaurants, predates the striking graphic fishbone you see in the shiny new Smith Street places. Christmas lights are strung from a row of Toby jugs and caricatures. The vinyl booths are patched with duct tape, and the walls, beneath Sunny’s own paintings, are the color of Ambrosia Creamed Rice and flaking. Oda’s Pokemon is propped up on the whisky bottles, near a package of Barilla Orzo with Sunny’s face stuck on the front.

On the first Sunday of the month, Gabriel Cohen, from BookCourt on Court Street a local novelist, organizes a reading at Sunny’s. I go to plenty of readings around New York, but this is the one I look forward to. Readings are better with beer. Readings are better with beer in Red Hook. Gabriel is married to a poet and teacher who helps at the readings by tending the bar. Though I don’t know either of them, they look blessed to be together. She is grace itself. When the star writer arrives to find the place empty but for me, she slips Gabriel a shot of Jameson. It gives him the courage to explain that nobody ever finds Sunny’s easily. There are no subways here, and no street grid. It always takes them half an hour longer than they think.

He’s right. They arrive in twos and threes, filling the front bar. It’s a beautiful crisp Marathon Sunday, and before the reading starts people keep disappearing outside to look at the late afternoon sun on the waterfront. Red Hook is an urban wilderness, where retreating industry left the picked-clean carcasses of civil-war era warehouses. Some streets are still paved with cobbles laid in a circle, and here and there the sidewalks are littered with broken glass and grass that grows knee-high in the cracks. This is where yellow schoolbuses go to sleep, lined up like ducklings. Parked outside is a van with a windshield slogan “AINT SKEERED”. At the end of a Red Hook pier, on Coffey Street or Van Brunt, you feel you’re on the tip of the New World. It’s the most romantic neighborhood in New York.

Gabriel has set up free coffee and Italian pastries from Caputos Court Pastry in the back room. We listen to the readers, and clap, and chat. My friend Jake joins me for a long drunken chat about scientists and cities.

The bar is only open on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday nights, and a few unpredictable Sundays. A long-time Red Hook resident told me that just a few years ago, Sunny asked people to pay what they felt like for their drinks, though that has stopped now that the neighborhood is changing—wealthy people give less. He is still generous with free shots and beers. It’s his living room.

    “Would you like a candle?” says Sunny as it gets dark, and the way he says it makes clear that he is not offering a tealight in a glass as much as warmth, light, and sustenance to a traveler who has come a great distance, from the other side of the BQE. “And these people came all the way from France,” he marvels, waving at a new knot of friends at the bar. They’re here to support a marathon runner. He hugs them and tells them how honored he is that they would visit his bar, and in his excitement, his own Brooklyn accent slips into theirs.

UPDATE: Thanks to Gabriel for the corrections!

Amy works for American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that defends the dignity and worth of every individual. They organized the Eyes Wide Open exhibition that came to town during the Republican National Convention.

Eyes Wide Open showed a pair of boots for each American soldier who died in Iraq or Afghanistan. Most were bought from army surplus, though a few were donated by bereaved families. Pairs were added almost daily as the exhibition travelled around the country in the summer and fall. Each was tagged with a name.

Unfilled shoes are haunting. Think of the pile of dusty shoes in the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, each standing for for a person who was discarded. Naming the dead, too, is a powerful act—so powerful that we set up tribunals to give genocide victims back their names. It took Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial to reclaim real young men from Robert MacNamara’s efficient talk of “bodycounts”. We cannot imagine not having a name. We cannot imagine ourselves in bodybags or in mass graves, but we can imagine putting on a shoe.

In Bryant Park last August, almost a thousand pairs of tagged boots were laid out. Amy helped with security. Feelings were high that week as the town filled up with Republicans and protesters, and talk of September 11th flew again. A mother of a dead soldier walked past the exhibition—she hadn’t known it was on—and burst into tears in an attendant’s arms. She came back the next morning for a private viewing.

One young man, deep in the corridors of shoes, searched and found a name that meant something to him. He sat on the ground with his head in his hands and wept. Amy tried to give him some privacy by shielding the passage, but a small mob threaded around her, drawn by the sound of his grief. Five or six of them stood over him with cameras and clicked away. The young man kept sobbing, head bowed. She didn’t know if he saw the photographers, or their flashes.

They weren’t even professionals, she said—no press passes, just little digicams, clicking away, pleased to have got their Moment and chatting about it afterwards.
   “Photo bloggers,” I told her. Everything was recorded that week.
Amy, who lives mainly in an offline world, was bewildered. Why wouldn’t they respect this guy’s grief? Had we become so incapabable of experiencing anything directly that we must suck on other people’s feelings just to get a Moment?

Oh yes.

Ruskin taught people to draw, not so that they would become artists but so they would learn to see. The new snapparazzi hasn’t learned that yet, focused as they are on toys and speed. I doubt they would get in a grieving man’s face without a gadget that miniaturized him. If a tenth of the people with shiny new megapixel cameras took the time to see and feel without their digital extensions, we would start to see art beyond people taking pictures of their own reflections. Emotional vampires, trying to see if they exist.

Caitriona called at 8 o’clock. She was hiding out from the Trick or Treaters. So was I. Nearly fifteen years into our friendship, we were happy to discover yet another shared neurosis over which to bond. She’d been pulling the pregnancy card to send her American husband to the door all day. He couldn’t understand her reluctance, but I got it immediately: a grumpy, guilty, oh-shit reflex at an unexpected doorbell, a dislike of big celebrations, and the lack of a clue about what kids expected in a new neighborhood.

I wasn’t always such a grump about Hallowe’en. As a child I studied Judy Blume books intently as primers on how Americans lived. The climax of Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great was the Most Original Hallowe’en Costume competition, for which ten-year-old Sheila had prepared for weeks. She went as a flenser, smug in the belief that among the fairy princesses and superheroes no one else would dress up as a person who stripped blubber from whales. She wore rubber boots, a raincoat, a sou’wester, and a sign around her neck that said FLENSER. She had a bucket and some kind of knife, as far as I remember. She thought the prize was hers. But in one of the great tragic reversals in literature, the competition was won by some bozo dressed as a fried egg. A fried egg!

The whole description impressed me deeply, especially the genius of the fried egg. It hadn’t occurred to me you could be anything other than a witch or a ghost. We did have Hallowe’en in Limerick, but like much of early eighties Ireland, it was half-arsed and pinched. There were four choices of masks at the Five Star checkout: a clown, a monster, a witch, or a ghost. The cheap plastic squashed our noses flat and usually cracked by the time we got them home. At school one year we made witches hats out of greyish paper. Some ambitious kids stuck their heads through a bin bag or an old sheet, but most didn’t bother to dress up at all. We didn’t decorate our houses or carve pumpkins (though we did bob for apples).

The biggest thrill was the barm brack ring. Barm brack was the sweet currant bread my father loved and ate year round, spread with butter. We had no interest in it until the Hallowe’en barm brack came on sale in October, containing a gold ring wrapped in greaseproof paper. We wanted it desperately, though I don’t know why. If you got the ring it meant you were going to get married, which wasn’t that exciting. Every year, Dad said that only people who were loyal to barm brack should have a chance at the ring. At the very least, only people who were willing to eat the slice of boring old curranty bread should get the ring. But we were desperate, and eventually he let us paw through slice after slice until one of us got the little ring, which was about as substantial as a Coke ring-pull.

At eleven, through my private brand of Voice of America, I became infected by longing for Judy Blume’s New Jersey Hallowe’en, which seemed so much more…wholehearted.

I was also worried about being cool back then, so I projected this fantasy onto my sisters and her friends, who were small enough to fall in line. I had the idea that real Trick or Treating meant some kind of performance—this being the Trick part, I thought—so that October I spent weeks drilling seven or eight small girls in a large repertoire, including “My Irish Molly”, which held the RTE Radio One playlist hostage at that time. The girls ranged in age from three to seven, so they thought this was terrific fun. They sang “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” and “We’re in the Money” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear”. There were dance steps, and actions, and I found a tambourine.

There were no street lights where we lived, so I led my little band from door to door by flashlight. The neighbors stood in the cold as the small girls arranged themselve in height order and launched into their performance with great, unIrish verve. At the end of each song the neighbors would try to drop mini Mars Bars and small apples into the swag bag I’d brought. With a smile I suspected was dazzling I explained that, no, we intended to delight them further. Claire got out her tin whistle. Trapped in the porch light drizzle, our neighbors were resigned and cheerful.
    “Aren’t ye very good. Aren’t ye great girls altogether.”
But the true warmth in their smiles came when we stopped, collected our tribute, and shuffled triumphantly to the next house through the dark puddles.

Dear God, if someone made me stand through a twenty-minute recital by talentless toddlers tonight, I’d put razors in their apples.

It seems unlikely in any case. Brooklyn Trick or Treating is industrialized. I live near—but not in—Park Slope, a stroller-yuppies’ ghetto, and today they thronged the streets and the park with their sprogs. It was a golden fall afternoon; warm enough to be early September but for the lovely autumn leaves. Costumed parents followed their costumed kiddies, cameras clicking.

The real action was on Seventh Avenue, where the stores are. In Park Slope (and maybe everywhere, for all I know) the stores give out candy too. At four o’clock I couldn’t get into Aveda, as kids streamed in with their bags open.
“Trick or Treat. Trick or Treat. Trick or Treat.” After several blocks of collecting they hardly had the energy to drone the request, and their store-bought swag bags already bulged. In front of the lipstick stand, extra staff stood ready to drop in Tootsie Rolls. “Say thank you!” I wanted to bark, but the kids were already on the way to the next store and more had come to take their place. On the side streets, people sat on stoops under fake cobwebs and handed out candy from plastic pumpkins. The kids barely stopped,like marathon runners at a water station. Ungrateful little shits.

The costumes divided sharply by age, gender, and breeding status. Most people aged zero to three were dressed as bugs, fruit, or furry animals. These were my favorites, only because they see nothing funny about their appearance. Dogged ladybugs and serious bumblebees marched with their bags held up, mouthing “Tweat.” The girls aged four to ten are fairy princesses, with the occasional leavening angel. Of this politically retrograde group, I liked to see the shy, plain ones, to whom it means much more to be a princess for the day. At the same age, the boys are superheroes, mostly, with plenty of masks and lycra and sword-like objects. The characters were unrecognizable to me. The teenage boys did the minimal dress-up necessary to demand candy. Mothers dressed mostly as unthreatening witches; sweet Glindas, or smiling Morticias. Fathers were the most inventive, and were willing to look like dorks. My favorite dressed up as a soccer goal, with a large net stretched across his chest and his head in a white bathing cap painted up like a football.

Those still looking to breed took a different tack. On the Bowery at midnight last night, there were angel trollops, nurse trollops, French Maid trollops, Bush Twins trollops, Marilyn Monroe trollops, Morticia trollops, butterfly trollops, and Paris Hilton trollops. As long as they could do knee-high boots and teeny skirts—and preferably fluffy blonde wigs—the costume was a go. They needed them to beat out fierce competition to catch the attention of the bar-hopping guys, who had all borrowed the costumes of the seven-year-old boys in Park Slope.

Superpowers and trollops: on Hallowe’en, we are more upfront than usual about the drives of evolutionary biology.

Amy, my favorite souvenir from my year of travel, is a great New York walker. A few weeks ago she was threading through the necklace of East River parks in DUMBO and Brooklyn Heights. Each of these parks is modest—a scrap of grass, or a short, concrete esplanade—but their backdrops are fit for a movie kiss: the river spanned by bridges, Manhattan’s skyline, and Liberty, stretching.

Three years ago New Yorkers gathered at these parks to watch the towers fall, and for weeks afterwards we came back to the river to look at the fat, evil billows of smoke that marked our new lack. Messy shrines grew up. Candle grease dripped all over the esplanade. Children’s drawings flapped beside posters searching for people lost forever. Cellophane bouquets dried out in an Indian summer that stretched to December. We tied our kitschy grief to the railings.

I don’t know what happened to those shrines in the end. I suppose the rain and snow arrived eventually, and someone took away what was left. We stopped worrying out loud about anthrax powder on our junk mail and went back to getting by.

So Amy was startled, on her walk, to see a new shrine at the park railings under the Brooklyn Bridge. It looked like a grade-school project, she said—a series of ceramic tiles, with drawings of the bridge and sad-faced people, and little messages. They said things like:

Dear Brooklyn Bridge,

I will miss you. I used to ride my bike across you on Sundays with my Dad. Now I am sad that you are gone.

Love Ella
June 2006

She described a few more. I felt slightly sick.
    “What the hell? Was this some kind of art project?”
    “I don’t know! There was no information about it. Nothing. And I didn’t see anything in the papers.”
    “How did you feel when you saw it?”
    “Creeped out. It’s creepy, isn’t it? Just…horrible.”
    “Holy mother of Jesus.”

Sprayed on the floor of Manhattan Bridge that week was a message “Osama Votes Kerry” (and also, confusingly but probably accurately, “Obama Votes Kerry”). I wondered if this were part of that campaign, whipping air into our fears. Or if it were some DUMBO artist’s thought experiment.
    “What did you do? Did you call 311?” 311 is Mayor Bloomberg’s city hotline, where they’ll answer questions from parking ticket information to emergency preparation. You can report broken water mains, giant rats, corruption, or drunk taxi drivers. We like it.
    “I forgot about 311. I called the Borough Council office instead. I just wanted to find out what it was about. They sent me an email saying they were going to investigate. Then I got a giant voicemail from Marty Markowitz, the borough president. Mawdie Mawkovitz. It was the night before Passover, and the message was full of Yiddish and Hebrew expressions that I guess he figured I’d understand because of my last name. He got more and more upset as the call went on. ‘What kind of meshuggenah people would do such mishegaas?’ By the end it felt like he was calling some crisis line himself. Actually, it was pretty funny.”

It was a second-hand story. I didn’t even see the tiles hanging on the railings. And yet it took hold of me, as it had taken hold of our borough president. The dread and uncertainity of three years ago felt fresh again, and I was gripped with the same morbid excitement. I wanted rush to the bridge and stroke a strand of its steel ropes, and I wanted to run as far from it as I could. Amy and I looked at each other.

On the morning of September 11th I’d sat with my co-workers in the cramped Foosball room, watching the only TV station still broadcasting. They were mostly engineers, and so we calculated. Measuring the scope of a problem is what engineers do, and this was like a Microsoft interview question: 100-plus floors by two, and how many people on each floor, and how many people would be in by 8 in the morning, and how many people might get to the elevators, and what was the capacity of the emergency wards…

As the towers dissolved a few miles south we weren’t yet ready to calculate how many wars would be fought, and how many soldiers would die, and how many jobs would be lost, and marriages broken, and fatherless children born. We didn’t know about the War on Tear yet. We didn’t know that some of us would leave New York for good. We didn’t even know we’d end up walking home over the Brooklyn Bridge that day, following the dazed and filthy refugees who crossed it while we watched TV.

And now I was scrambling all over that twisted interview question again: what would happen if the Brooklyn Bridge were blown up? How many cars, how many subway riders, how many bikers, how many camera-clicking tourists? I thought of my neighbors, mangled and drowning and wondered who I would call if the Brooklyn Bridge were blown up. I thought, shamefully, of my stock portfolio. The election. My job. Conscription. My visa. I remembered the peculiar, warped exhilaration of a calamity shared. That September we had joked about terror sex and terror cocktails and terror Prada shoes. Who would I have terror sex with?

Strange that with all the practice, and the Orange Alerts, my thoughts could get no bigger than this.

We went back to Amy’s apartment and she played Marty Markowitz’s endless message. He was so grateful, Amy, that she had brought this to his attention. He personally guaranteed, Amy, that it would be taken care of. By the end he was keening at a world in which people would do such things, and we were laughing.
    “I feel bad. They were only tiles. Nobody’s hurt. Maybe I should call him back and cheer him up,” she said. “But I’m glad he called. Even though I think he used meshuggenah wrongly.”

Caitriona is visiting with her husband Dan, reuniting my favorite trio. She’s here to cover the protests against the Republican Convention as a stringer for the BBC.

The move from Tehran to DC has been hard for her. She’s been turned down for all health insurance coverage due to her “pre-existing medical condition”—the seven-month-old American, conceived in the Axis of Evil, who squirms in her belly. Here, where doctors pay huge premiums to insure against malpractice claims, it costs ten to fifteen thousand dollars to deliver a baby without fripperies like pain relief. A Caesarian costs fifty grand—and American doctors are quick with the scalpel even on women who aren’t too posh to push. Those are the price tags for healthy births.

Forty million Americans have no health coverage. That’s 3.7 million more than when Bush took office. You can end up paying off an appendectomy for as long as a college loan or a mortgage. Cait has spent her first month back in America walking from hospital to insurance office to birthing center, trying to strike a deal, but there’s no room at the inn.

As she schleps her new belly and her tape recorder in the the New York heat, interviewing Republicans and ukelele-playing protestants, it must hard for her to stay out of the fight for health care and decency. There’s little common about decency.

This morning we were stopped on my block by a tall man who wanted to know if we were going to the rally. We said yes, even though my mouse arm was already numb to the shoulder at the prospect of yet another long day at the office keyboard. My protest has to stay personal and portable.

    “That’s good! Make your voices heard!” he said. His voice still had a trace of the islands. He pointed at my “Run Against Bush” sticker and then at her bump. “You, I can see running. But honey, they’re goin’ to catch you!”
    “She’s much tougher than she looks,” I explained.
We chatted a while, glad to share outrage with a neighbor. Then he said “But I don’t know what’s going on with Kerry. He’s playing dead!”
    “That’s exactly right! He’s just rolling over.”
    “Playing dead. He won’t fight back.” He shakes his head. “But you know, when you’re falling off a cliff, you’ll take anybody’s arm that’ll save you. You can’t look too close at who it is.”

He handed us leaflets and wished us luck with the votes we don’t have.

At the Bastille Day tribute to Serge Gainsbourg, the Loser’s Lounge crew played grainy French TV shows from the early Sixties. Serge was precocious as a dirty old man. In one song after another, he leered at angel-faced Twiggies, and they gazed back full of wide-eyed love. What did they see in him? With pouchy eyes, ears like rashers of bacon, a huge shnozz, and lank hair, he was so ugly that it became another kind of beauty. I’d do him.

The truth is they look well-matched, the baby blondes and Uncle Serge. “Sois belle et tais-toi” (“Shut up and look beautiful”) he sang; harsh but fair advice to most twenty-year-old girls. It’s plain he just wants to bed them, but in return they might learn a thing or two. As for the crush-struck girls, they look hypnotized and flattered, but they will throw him over soon.

In front of the flickering videos the Losers delivered phonetic tributes to Serge. I love all his songs; my date, Peter (who has a touch of Jean-Paul Belmondo about the eyes), knew none except “Je t’Aime”. That one takes me right back to seventeen, when the girls in my class sang it on the bus all the way back from the Kerry Gaeltacht.

On the Bastille Day playlist, most of the songs were lecherous love-letters to the USA. “Bonnie and Clyde.” “New York USA.” “Harley David Son of a Bitch.” “Ford Mustang.” One singer stripped down to a pair of tiny red Speedos by the third verse of “Comic Strip.” In the American mind, Speedos have replaced berets and striped shirts as the national costume of France. His little basketball belly might have been Serge’s own.

The oddest tribute came from a twelve-piece accordion girl band wearing hipster jeans. They all looked new to the instrument: they frowned as they gripped their dozen squeezeboxes and rocked comically. Chord changes were tense for all of us, but it was worth sitting through for the sight alone.

I’d forgotten about them until this morning. It’s a glorious day, one of the perfect ones that will always remind me of September 11th. I took the long route to work, walking from Prospect Heights over the Brooklyn Bridge, and stopped at the little park on Clinton Street to scribble for a while. The park is too paved and manicured to be beautiful, but I love it because the neighbors use it. Old men from Atlantic Avenue spend hours playing dominoes while small girls on pink bikes ride circles around them. Hennaed Italian biddies swap gossip and aches and pains. A brat throws a tantrum, and his mother whines:
“Noah, remember we discussed co-operation? I want you to know that right now this is a choice you’re making, to act and feel this way.”
If that’s what Noah has to put up with, I decided, it seemed like a pretty good choice to roar and stamp.

A man slowed down and nodded, and when I smiled back he got brave enough to sit on my bench. Wherever I go I draw small girls and oddballs (“Because you talk to them!” explains my sister) and so I wasn’t surprised when he asked if I’d mind if he played some music.
“What sort of music?” I said.
“I’m learning the accordion.”
Those aren’t the best words to start a life-long friendship.
“People don’t seem to mind,” he said anxiously. “Sometimes they say it makes it feel like Paris.”

He fixed his music stand, set up his backing CDs, unpacked his shiny red accordion, and launched into “Moon River” and “It Might As Well Be Spring.”

It was lovely. Cobble Hill did feel, improbably, like the Jardins du Luxembourg for an hour or so. The toddlers started dancing and the bench people clapped. Another accordionist introduced himself, and they made arrangements to play together next week.

Ranger Tim, who has sharp instincts for the next big thing, bought a junk-shop accordion a few years ago, though he failed to teach himself to play. His New York apartment was decorated with a record sleeve of a green-eyed vixen hugging a squeezebox. I’d put it down to his polka and knackwurst heritage, but now it looks like he was set to make a hit with the ladeez. First trucker hats, then knitting, now accordion music: is there nothing New Yorkers won’t rehabilitate?

On the Q Train, late last night, there was a man whose white hair was fluffily balding and whose white eyebrows were fluffily sprouting. I couldn’t see much below that, beyond a glimpse of walrus moustache, because he held Ship of Fools so closely that he had to move his head left to right to read. I expected a typewriter’s ‘Ching!’ at the end of each line.

Every page or so, he coughed wetly into the book. It made me queasy.

I wonder how Danny Gregory would draw him, if I described him?

From Ranger Tim, who doesn’t hold with this kind of thing:

“ Vapid New York magazine concepts are now being outsourced to Ireland, in the fashion of Dell call centers.”

At least the publishers don’t go so far as to own one of the creatures.