I Totally Meant to Do That (28 page)

So began my day with the Sanchez brothers, the younger of whom, you’ve likely gathered, is Georgie. Actually, they’re several years apart; Arnaldo, in his late forties, is one of the first of the eleven siblings, and Georgie, early thirties, is one of the last. Georgie had recently divorced and moved back from Florida to the house on Java Street where they grew up.

We passed a fancy boutique wine shop on Franklin Street called Dandelion. “The neighborhood is really changing,” Georgie said.

“Yeah,” I replied, shaking my head, expecting them to bemoan the influx of twentysomething hipsters with serial-killer mustaches, who think they can put their pants on their arms and call it fashion.

“I think it’s great,” Arnaldo said. “Everything is so clean now; Greenpoint used to be filthy. Do you know how much my father paid for our building in the seventies?”

“Seventeen thousand dollars,” Georgie said.

“Guess what somebody offered our mother earlier this year,” Arnaldo taunted, turning away from the road to look at me with raised eyebrows and a half smile.

“What?” I responded.

“Guess!” he demanded.

“A million dollars!” Georgie squealed.

“A
million dollars
,” Arnaldo repeated. “But you know what she said? ‘No.’ ”

“Wow,” I said, wishing the offer had been made to me. I shifted on the console, testing the neck-craned-backward position, and eventually landing on left-ear-against-ceiling.

“Georgie! Jane’s not comfortable. Do something.”

“What am I supposed to do?” he shot back.

“Get her that blanket! Never mind, I’ll do it.” Arnaldo threw his right arm behind me and pulled a comforter from the mass of chairs, bags, and boxes. It was covered in cartoon characters unidentifiable.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the blanket and folding it behind my shoulders. I leaned back to rest against a box, and the console broke beneath me with an audible crunch.

“What was that?” Arnaldo asked, perturbed. I explained, and he shifted his countenance, saying, “Don’t worry about it.” Good thing Georgie hadn’t done it.

Then we pulled onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and were quickly lulled into silence. I love that about the highway. I can be in the middle of a sentence, pull onto an on-ramp, and suddenly I’m drooling: “I remember where I hid the cure for cancer! It’s in the …” [
on-ramp
] “… bloll-dribble-blal.”

Any thoughts or concerns dominating my brain disappear into the motion of wheels spinning on pavement, and my subconscious is able to step in. You know how people have big ideas in the shower? That’s what the BQE is like for me: a cleansing bath (except it’s filthy).

This was the most of the highway I’d ever seen on one drive. My old apartment was in the most northwestern corner of Brooklyn. If Manhattan’s streets are lines of latitude, I was at Thirty-Sixth, Midtown. My new apartment is so deep into South Brooklyn that, if we’re sticking to this latitudinal analogy, I’d be in the middle of the bay, halfway to Staten Island, beyond even the Statue of Liberty, which I could currently see through my window, sitting in the water, a big copper doll.

We took the Hamilton Avenue exit and drove for a few blocks
underneath the rising highway, its foundation columns growing taller and taller in the distance.

Arnaldo consulted his GPS at a stoplight next to the New York City DOT Hamilton plant.
There’s my landmark
, I thought, noting the enormity of the structure, a skyscraping silo topped with an American flag the size of Rhode Island and surrounded by enough fire-engine yellow construction equipment to make my nephews’ heads explode. It looks like a NASA orbital launch pad or something.

Arnaldo took a left and turned up the radio.

“What’s he saying in this song?” I asked. “I keep hearing it in bodegas.”

“You don’t speak Spanish?” Georgie asked, shaking his head.

“Si ves algo, di algo?”
I offered, parroting the subway-poster translation of “if you see something, say something.”

“Um,” Arnaldo began to translate lyrics, “he is saying that he wants one more chance, that he really messed it up but he wants her back, that she is his world.”

“Mundo!”
I exclaimed. “I heard him say that.” Then the chorus kicked in, something something
“stupido.”
If you were in Brooklyn in February or March of 2010, you heard this song.

Arnaldo translated again, “He says he feel stupid.”

Georgie laughed.

“What?” Arnaldo asked.

“You think she didn’t know that? That’s the same word, Kokie.”

“Kokie?” I asked. “Who’s Kokie?”

“Oh, sorry,” Georgie said. “That’s what we call him, you know, like a nickname … like ‘Stupido.’ ”

And then we parked. They both agreed that this house was much nicer than the old one, which Kokie said looked condemned. Georgie asked me to turn on the light in the hallway so he could see better, and they lugged everything inside.

When we were back on the BQE, Georgie asked Kokie for a cigarette.

“OK, but wait to smoke,” Kokie said. “You’ll bother Jane.”

“I didn’t mean for right now! I meant for later:” Georgie said.

“It won’t bother me,” I offered.

“You sure?” Georgie asked sheepishly.

I nodded and he lit up. Kokie, who hadn’t heard us, shouted, “What are you doing?!”

“She just said she didn’t care!” Georgie looked at me: “Didn’t you say you don’t care?”

“I don’t care,” I confirmed.

Georgie leaned forward and said to Kokie with deep satisfaction, “See?”

“Also, for the record,” I said, “it doesn’t bother me if you curse.”

This time Kokie looked at Georgie: “See?”

“Scoot over, Georgie, you’re squishing her!”

“I promise I’m fine,” I said.

“You have a lot of stuff,” Kokie told me. “I didn’t see it all before; that’s why I said two trips. I didn’t see that other desk. I thought some of those boxes were the guy’s moving in.”

“Yeah, well, no matter,” I replied.

“Janie, looks like you’re spending the day with the Sanchez brothers,” Georgie said and laughed.

“But we can get it in three trips,” Kokie added nervously. “No doubt, no doubt. What time is your thing?”

“Eight p.m.,” I said.

“
Easy
,” he assured me.

We passed the corner of Franklin and Java. “That’s where they shot Doop!” Georgie exclaimed. “Right there. Remember that, Kokie?”

“That was rough.”

“The Dominicans sold drugs out of that bodega—right there—on the corner. They were always at war with the South Side,” Georgie explained. Then he looked at me and asked, “You know that big building we just passed, the Astral?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “A bunch of my friends live there.”

“Oh, that was the worst,” Kokie joined in.

“There was a different guy selling under each of those arches,” Georgie explained. “You couldn’t even walk down the street.”

“There’s a guy selling under my apartment,” I said.

“Really?” asked Kokie. “Yeah, I guess there’s still some of that left. It’s good you’re leaving. Not for nothin’, but that place is scary.”

Great: I’d spent three years in a building deemed frightening by a man who’s seen gang warfare.

We hit traffic, a wreck at the three-way intersection of Franklin, Calyer, and Banker. Two smashed cars had been pushed into the center of the fork in the road; a plainclothes cop directed traffic.

“Shit,” Kokie said. “Get down, Jane.”

“What?”

“We can’t have three people up here. They
love
to give tickets. Georgie, grab that blanket.”

What, you’ve never hidden between a Puerto Rican man’s lap and a blanket covered in cartoon dogs carrying balloons? The van slowed, and I heard Kokie say, “What’s up, Ramone!” Ramone said something back, and then Kokie drove off, shouting behind him out the window, “Tell your mother, ‘Hey’!”

I sat up. “You knew that guy?”

“Oh man,” Georgie said. “Was that Ramone? He’s still around?”

“Yeah. He’s a cop, I guess,” Kokie replied.

“I used to go sledding with that guy,” Georgie recalled. He looked at me to see if I was still interested in his memories after face planting into his kneecaps. I was.

“The trash cans had aluminum lids,” he continued. “When it snowed, we’d steal them for sleds. You should’ve seen it in the blizzard of ’77;
everything
was covered. Everything was white.”

Georgie said he was sad about his marriage but glad to be home. He’d missed New York. Florida didn’t have seasons: “It’s not right.”

“Y’all have roots here,” I said.

“Yeah.” He nodded his head. “I guess so. What about you?”

“Enh, I’m more of a weed.”

We accelerated into the expressway on-ramp.

“I can’t believe you put that all on the roof,” Georgie said.

“Nah, I knew it would fit,” Kokie replied with confidence.

Georgie poked his head out of the window to assess our top tier. The loveseat was essentially balancing on the bookshelf, its feet strategically placed inside the shelves. Georgie refenestrated
himself and said, with a face misty from rain, “I’m worried about the wind.”

“What are you talking about, wind?” Kokie asked.

“If we speed up! It might blow off!” Georgie said.

“I know what I’m doing.”

Now Georgie’s entire torso was through the window.

And then I was drooling again. Like one of the Astral addicts.

I wasn’t concerned about the furniture getting wet or falling off; I didn’t care about the boxes in the back. It’s all junk other people left behind. As I’ve told you before, it’s trash. My laptop, a box of journals, a painting my mother gave me of angels, and the green-leaf Herend dish: that’s what would be in my hobo knapsack. The rest was only brought along because I had a big apartment to fill. I’ll probably toss most of it whenever I eventually leave Gowanus, after I’ve devoured this neighborhood and sucked on locustlike to the next. I could have left it on the street if I hadn’t found a mover a few hours earlier. That I can chuck it at will is its best quality. It is valuable for having no value.

Investing in permanence is discouraged when movement is the only constant in life. New Yorkers have too many worries to also bother with insuring a car, mowing a lawn, replacing a roof, and keeping a lavender upholstered loveseat dry. I mean, really, it was barely raining.

This economy of impermanence governs every transaction in city life. Even if I plan to stay in a coffee shop, I’ll order my drink “to go,” in case I change my mind midlatte. My favorite way to dine out is to grab an appetizer at one place and then hit somewhere else for the entrée. I can’t even put down roots at a restaurant. I can’t sit still.

And I have trouble making memories. No moment is more important than another unless a substantial amount of time passes between the two, but of course, in New York, that never happens. No experience is able to plant itself in my mind before the next arrives and knocks it out of the way. It’s not possible to dwell, which I find attractive. However, I am forced to document my life obsessively, in notes and on film, while it’s happening—at the bar, during the concert, in the moving van—because otherwise it would be as if I hadn’t lived it. As if we weren’t once again driving on that section of the BQE in South Brooklyn that runs along the water.

Doll sighting in the bay.

Rising highway.

Orbital launcher.

On with the lights.

Lug it all up.

“I don’t think you can make your thing,” Kokie said after hanging up. “Do you
have
to be there?”

“Yes. I’m writing an article about a comedian,” I said. “His show is tonight, and the story’s due tomorrow.”

“You’re a writer?” Georgie asked.

“But it’s already almost six!” Kokie argued. “Where is it?”

“Oh no,” Georgie squealed. “She’s gonna write about us!”

“Manhattan,” I answered.

“Manhattan?!” Kokie exclaimed. “No way you’ll make it—no way.”

Georgie pulled his fingers into air quotes and said, “ ‘My Day with the Sanchez Brothers. By Janie.’ Oh no!”

“We’ll have to get the last load tomorrow morning,” Kokie proclaimed.

Now it was my turn to hustle. “I know we can do it,” I said. “I’ll e-mail the show’s host and ask him to put the comic up last. That’ll buy us an hour. And I can save more time if I don’t have to call a car service—why don’t
you
take me into the city, and I’ll throw in an extra twenty bucks? Plus tip for you both would be three hundred and sixty.”

Kokie pursed his lips and shifted his eyes from side to side, adjusted his rearview mirror, sat up taller in his seat, and finally said, “OK, but we’re stopping for pizza.”

“What,” I asked sarcastically, “those Doritos aren’t enough?”

“That stuff’s terrible!” Georgie said.

Diet advice from the diabetic.

Then he added, “You should really write down that title I gave you, Janie. It’s good.”

I didn’t tell him, but I already had.

We split a pie and got back on the road, so that this time my BQE coma was also induced by carbs. Then we coasted along the section by the water and fell back into our now familiar pattern: