4th Avenue Scene

A few years ago I was gassing up the car on 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, soon after we moved to Park Slope. A car was pulling up to the intersection in an ordinary, leisurely way when another came up fast behind it, pulled around and stopped just in front with a screech. Immediately its driver began a furious harangue:

“You fucking cocksucker! You motherfucker! You fuck with me? You fuck with me? I’m about to fuck with you, motherfucker!” he shouted, his head and torso straining out the window. “I’m going to fuck you up you little fucking pussy, you fucking maricón!”

He punctuated his insults by spasmodically slapping the outside of his door and banging on the horn.

“I fucking kill you! Fucking little bitch! Look at you now bitch! Look at you now!” Honk! Honk! “I should climb out of my fucking car and kill you, cocksucker!” Slap! “Bitch!” Honk! Slap! “You cut me off?! You cut me off?! I cut you off, bitch, how you like that?! How you like that?!” He indicated the front of his car with a jab of his outstretched hand, like: Look. I cut you off. “You don’t fucking cut me off, bitch! I fucking cut you off! Faggot!”

Through it all the driver of the other car, a meek young man in glasses, sat impassively, staring at his abuser.

“You wanna fuck with me, you little piece of shit?! You wanna fuck with me? I fuck with you!” Honk! Honk! “Little fucking bitch. You happy now? Bitch.” Honk! Slap! “You fucking happy now?”

Here there was the briefest pause.

“You fuck with me again I kill you.”

And then the angry driver took off in a U-turn, tires squealing, and drove back up the avenue. The light had turned green and red and green and red again by now, so the other driver had to wait. And wait. Alone.

Something fell from the windowsill into the tub, one of Jackie’s toys or something. Probably the wind picked up.

A minute later there was an awful crack outside the living room. I went to the window. It looked like a normal summer evening—pedestrians, joggers and cyclists, all oblivious, lost in thought. Yet the wind was moving strangely, in little eddies. You could see it in the way the leaves rustled and the trash blew. I looked to my left and found that a tree had split about halfway up and fallen over parked cars and into the avenue. Passersby turned to calmly photograph the scene. Cars honked as they navigated around the branches. Finally the police arrived, then some kind of city truck. We settled back onto the couch as the chainsaws started up.

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Or what I imagined someone might wear to a party.

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"If Kenten is involved in something that sleazy and high-risk, why would he initiate a meeting and attract attention?"

Robert Moses Beach

We set up on a little patch above the surf, in front of a young, attractive family, a couple and their little girl. They looked European, Italian maybe. They spoke English to each other but you could swear you heard an accent. Tedious dance music played from their little black-and-red boom box. Several times, the man lifted it, shook it, blew on it. She sunbathed. Sometimes she’d lift her head to watch her daughter with a frown. Sometimes he’d rush up and scold the girl for not playing nice with Jackie, though Jackie didn’t care. The woman sat up to eat potato chips, deliberately placing one at a time on her tongue. She had eyebrows like Kate Winslet. Her husband picked up the boom box and blew.

A gust tore their parasol from its base and rammed it into an elderly couple in beach chairs behind them. Profuse apologies, expressions of concern. The man retrieved it, tried to reinstall it in the wind, thought better of it and folded it up.

When it was time to leave he took the little girl into the water and submerged her, holding her by the waist. She wailed as he carried her back up the beach. They shrouded her in towels and set her down. Before long she was quiet, relaxed, possibly asleep. The man picked up the boom box and shook, and blew. Finally they gathered up their things, the woman took the wrapped-up girl into her arms, and they walked off to the parking lot.

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They were all hooked into dispatch

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on the front step as we pulled into the driveway.

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"I'm sorry," he said again

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The city would usually request a third page because the twenty reminders that

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we're safeguarded, existing policies that bore down unfairly

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Although the unicorns feared the crawlers,

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"The only member of his whole family who survived the war,"

We went to hang out in Central Park, a class reunion of sorts for Sara’s high school. It was a radiant, beautiful goddamned day. A little girl there had a sheet of paper with boxes numbered one to a hundred. Jackie counted them to thirty. Nearby, a fat man and a skinny man kicked a soccer ball back and forth, the skinny man much more skilled. A pale woman sunbathed in a bikini and a leg cast. A portly couple sat picnicking, she reading aloud from a hardcover novel as he picked off a grape. We laid out our blue sheet. A couple times, I lay back on it and closed my eyes. For about a minute. Bliss seeping into me.

While Sara talked to her friends Jackie wanted to go play on a big, flat rock, on the other side of the wire-fenced path. Just to be on the rock instead of the grass, I suppose. She said she wanted to climb the rock, but there was nothing to climb. It just rose very slightly higher than the ground, like many other rocks in this contrived landscape. She must like the change in the surface, the fact it feels different underfoot. She’d just learned the word texture.

There were weird round metal disks embedded into the rock, about three inches in diameter. Some bewildering numbers were stamped on them, and also these words: project marker. Jackie lost interest in the rock and went to pick leaves off a tree. After a while I put her on my shoulder and headed back.

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standard macho-money guise.

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a reality just as important as "real life."

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and showed no sign of weariness

I like the storms that occur at the end of the afternoon, this time of year; that make commuters loiter on subway landings, waiting for a break.

Did I dream about China last night?

A lot of technology that we think is about communicating more, or communicating better, is really about communicating less. The telephone took the place of calling in person; phone conversations are shorter. Emails are short, often terse, versions of letters. Our texts and tweets are shorter still. And now that we maintain contact with the rest of the world via the “like” button, our communications are entirely wordless.

What’s the next step?

We walked through the Coney Island station, Jackie on my shoulders. Above the bustle and the dirt. It was crowded on the sidewalk, too. With big people. Big kids. Big couples holding hands.

A lady with a haunted look panhandled listlessly outside Nathan’s. She might have been pregnant. Or her belly was horribly distended, like a Biafran child’s.

I peered at the go-kart track and wondered if Jackie was old enough to ride with me. Probably not. The sun shone so bright, you could barely see.

We got to the Boardwalk and everything seemed alright. People were having fun. But there was something funny in the air.

I spotted a large man, a biker type, with sunglasses and a goatee. He was clutching some kind of children’s plastic toy—an airplane, or a car, or a water gun maybe. It was made of that bright, brittle, translucent plastic. That material that can only be a toy. I believe it was pink.

Suddenly he threw it to the floor and crushed it under his heel. All the while looking straight ahead, tight-faced, seething. His woman ran up to him and swatted him on the shoulder, like he was a misbehaving boy.

“How could you do that?” she cried. “How could you do that?”

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Then catch myself. It's messing with my mind too much.