Gość: By Bryan Charles
IP: 213.17.168.*
16.01.03, 12:46
I live in Greenpoint, which is in north Brooklyn, just below Queens.
Greenpoint is mostly a Polish neighborhood. There are Hispanic families,
too, and Italian, but mostly Polish. The Polish people pretty much keep to
themselves. They eat at the Polish restaurants and shop at the Polish record
stores. A lot of them, a lot of the men, walk the streets roaring drunk, at
all hours of the day and night. It's not uncommon to see little gangs of men
stumbling arm and arm, slurring in their native tongue, at nine or ten in
the morning. Public urination is also prevalent. Little pools of fresh urine
everywhere.
There is a park near my apartment called McCarren Park. During the summer,
the neighborhood drunks go here to pass out in the grass. There could be a
family barbecue going on, with hot dogs and kids running around, and some
guy with no shoes on and a big cut on his forehead sleeping in the dirt a
foot away. This gang of drunks has a leader. I see him about three or four
times a week and whenever I see him, he is screaming in someone's face,
gesticulating wildly. One time I saw him scream into a cop's face and put
his arms up like he was ready to brawl. Then he turned around and started
screaming at a deli owner. Still another time, I watched him wander into the
street and lay down in the middle of traffic and close his eyes. There is a
picture of this somewhere, taken by my friend Derek Brosch. People were
honking, but he just lay there, spread eagle, right up under the wheels of a
car. He is very obviously troubled.
Past McCarren Park is Williamsburg. Williamsburg is a neighborhood on the
rise, or at least that's what I hear all the time. To me, it looks like it's
already risen. One of my friends who has lived in New York all his life told
me that Williamsburg was once the kind of neighborhood that he and his
buddies from Bensonhurst didn't even want to drive through. It was bad, he
told me. Now there are coffee shops and used book stores and Thai
restaurants and artist-types with horn-rimmed glasses walking around. A
thriving cafe community on Bedford Avenue, cell phones and iBooks. Thrift
stores but not the kind where poor people shop. Rents are skyrocketing.
Most of the guys in Williamsburg, the white, arty guys, look like real
pussies, like you could knock them down with a feather. A lot of black
turtlenecks and pasty faces. Expensive leather jackets. Red corduroy
trousers. Random facial hair. What happened to real men? Some of the girls
are cute, but nothing really special. A lot of them have extreme bangs and
wear eccentric coats, garish fake fur, brightly-colored New Balance
sneakers. Some of the Williamsburg people talk in loud voices. I overhear
conversations, either between two people or one person on a cell phone,
about them and their friends. "Yeah, James is playing a show with his noise
band at this new collective." "Did you hear? Jane is showing her found-art
collages at a warehouse space on 6th Street." Sometimes I am relieved to be
walking out of Williamsburg and into Greenpoint on my way home from the
Bedford Avenue subway stop. The relief I feel is the result of several
warring factors: a staunchly and peculiarly Midwestern hatred of puffery and
pretension, insecurity about these Midwestern values, a certain jealousy I
feel for these people, many of whom quite clearly hail from privileged
backgrounds. I have asked myself more than once, "Would you rather deal with
someone talking heatedly into a cell phone about the movie Magnolia, or the
screaming man, blind drunk, pissing himself? These are the hard questions of
life.
I am the new face of gentrification. I hope the Polish people don't hate me.
