Taaffe Place
Passing by Taaffe Place where that tiny basement gay bar used to be with the Hasidic bartenders, where all my friends used to be when all my friends were still here. This block always makes me think of New Year’s Eve 2008 or maybe 2007, right when the rezoning happened, when I went to a dinner party in the Lower East Side, someone I knew in college was having an affair with the man who lived there, a Danish guy with watery eyes and a two story apartment in Manhattan. I think he was some kind of therapist. I had not known it was a dinner party and hadn’t brought anything besides a six pack, but no one was eating anything anyway, just doing lines of coke in cocktail dresses. I had nothing to eat and nothing to say and a dumpy sweatshirt on so I walked between the rooftop looking over Allen Street where I could see the infoshop where I had a Saturday shift and the vegan Chinese restaurant next door that wasn’t very good but where the owner always gave me extra dumplings because I stopped by so often. The restaurant shared a basement with the infoshop and there were rats in it, I knew because I made a lot of noise as I descended down the rickety steps to get the extra toilet paper we stored down there, trying to make sure they got out of my way. I walked between that rooftop view and the philandering Danish husband’s children’s bedroom and sat on their tiny backbreaking Scandinavian chairs tracing the contours of their kid art with my eyes until mercifully someone in the apartment downstairs knocked a candle over and the building caught on fire. I had been leaning over the edge of the roof watching my breath and the dancing lights of the standstill traffic below when a firefighter slammed a ladder on the side of the building and made his way up, screaming that we all needed to get the fuck out right now. I had never seen a firefighter so close up and his helmet looked like it was heavy enough to snap his neck in half. So I left the terrible dinner party and got on the F train to the G train and walked down this block to the gay bar. It took me an hour and in the course of that hour midnight came and went while I was slumped onto the orange plastic seats like I was every other day.
At the gay bar I felt cute in my sweatshirt. Someone I didn’t know but who knew someone I knew had gotten into a fight with her girlfriend and wandered away. She called one of us drunk, said she was across the street at a party and it was really fun, the DJ was really good, so we went across the street but the building we found was only half built. The block was being demolished house by house and new construction was replacing rent stabilized units, but no one wanted to live on Taaffe Place except the people who had always lived there and could no longer. The new building was still half empty and the front door was propped open with a cinder block.
A dead rat decomposed in the entryway, bloated from the poison that was visible in the corners of the hall. There used to be cat colonies all over New York that kept the rat population just barely at bay, reaching a delicate equilibrium. When new construction went up the cats were displaced and the rats took over, mating in the shadows and fist-fighting each other on garbage cans outside first floor windows. 15 years since that initial rezoning in 2007, the rat population has increased by 50% across New York City. I used to work with the guy who figured out the rat census, writing reports in a windowless office off of Herald Square while he seized time back from our employer and spent it crunching rodent numbers. I trust his methodology but there is also anecdotal evidence: In a New York Post article, a Harlem resident reports that the rats have overtaken her neighborhood. We’ve had rats the size of crocs on the sidewalk. An average size 8, just running up and down the street.
But before it all got worse, we stepped over the half melted rat and climbed the half lit stairs, opened the doors to vacant apartments without electricity, tried out each bathroom, peed in the toilets and jiggled the handles and ran the showers, pretending we lived there. We wandered through the dark halls until we reached a door where we could hear a house party dying down. A kid about our age answered the door. The front of his shirt was wet. Have you seen this girl, we asked, she looks like this. We describe her face, or the memory of her face. I looked past him. There was music but no DJ, just a tinny din escaping from laptop speakers. The person at the door was shaking his head but someone else pushed past and yanked him inside from the entryway. Come get your friend, he said, she just walked in here, got in my bed and puked in it. Who is she?
None of us knew her name but I still think of her every time I walk down this street.
Another New York
In the newspaper I read lamentations about a New York that has disappeared. This is an article in a physical copy of the newspaper and I hear those have disappeared too. I am sitting in my bedroom, where I like to perch on the windowsill and watch the birds in the tree outside, stare at the daylight catching the raindrops on the slick leaves, and trace their journey down the lines of the midribs and lateral veins. I sit here for hours and empty my brain, when I have the hours to spare, and say their colors aloud to myself as they spin and dance their way to the sidewalk, to end their short lives stuck to the bottom of a shoe with gum or dog shit. I like to stay in this very spot and smell the smell of cigarettes being smoked on the front stoop of my building. I love the smell of someone smoking cigarettes outside while I am inside. It makes me feel close to them without actually having to be close to them, but I hear that cigarettes are disappearing too.
Sometimes the curtains stir in the wind and close themselves in on me and I am momentarily draped in fabric and I like to feel it on my face for a second. As a child I often hid, from everyone and everything: teachers, parents, my few friends, my many bullies, my incorrect desires, the mailman, the lunch lady, the grinding of my growing bones, sometimes even no one. For a moment I remember that feeling of existing and not, seeing without being seen. I keep the fabric over my face and listen to my neighbors fighting on their way in, the clang of the poorly constructed tin wheelchair ramp trembling under the weight of stomping footsteps. The front door slams and I am confident that it was just a punctuation in another of their many frequent arguments. Over time I have learned to tell the difference between an angry slam like this one and the regular everyday bang the front door makes any time anyone enters or leaves, its whining hinges declaring the ache of company coming and going.
I go back to my looking and watch the cars pass by, one making a sharp turn getting stuck at a red light and blocking a full bus from making its way to what I know is its final stop. It beeps and beeps and beeps in indignation and the car behind it beeps and beeps in impatience and the car that’s stuck at the light beeps and beeps a defense until all I can hear is the horns ringing in my ears. I don’t mind though because I fall asleep to this sound most nights; they really should put another stop sign there. At night I hear the horn of the bus and the sound of my neighbor in the building across the courtyard screaming. I have never seen him but I hear him every night at 12am. He screams in yelps and I can tell he is not afraid, he is just releasing something I know but could not possibly vocalize, maybe about how all our rents were going up or how our shared slumlord landlord would say he was fixing the black mold in the bathroom but would just paint over it, when he bothered to respond at all. Once in a while some weary person trying to get to sleep before or after a long shift would yell at him out the window to shut up but he would just yelp back in response and besides, everyone had grown accustomed to him, our neighbor, him and his familiar screams. Maybe he is battling ceaseless stomach cramps after drinking some expired milk from our grocery store, which was always selling expired things and really it was your fault if you bought them without looking if you lived here long enough, or maybe he was remembering something embarrassing he had done on the dancefloor of the secret gay bar in the back of what was once a Chinese restaurant, but I feel like I would have seen him there, past the thick cigarette smoke that always made me think that this was the place where I would die, in a fire in a mirror paneled room in the back of a crowded abandoned Chinese restaurant, I would have seen him there and we would have locked eyes and I would have immediately known he was the screamer, and I’d tell him, “I fall asleep to you every night.”
One night I got in bed early and I woke up with a start a little after 12:30. I couldn’t get back to sleep so I went to my perch and wondered why I was awake, struggling to reach back into my psyche and unearth whatever nightmare had woken me. In the morning I realized the night had been silent. I moved the next year.
General Pulaski’s Body
Standing on 52nd Street craning my head around the delivery trucks, I’m thinking about how there needs to be a no parking on weekdays sign here, thinking about how I can’t see anything now or when I’m holding my kid’s hand as we cross the street to the park where the other parents talk to each other and to her, my toddler, and go back to whispering about my relationship to my child in a multitude of languages. I tell someone about this and they say wow, Queens really is the world’s borough.
On the BQE, which I’ve just recently learned to drive on, though I have been on it and under it for most of my life, where the people who know New York hang out on the 4th of July for the view of the skyline, unfolding lawn chairs on the side of the highway and drinking warm beer, faces pressed against the fence as the explosions go off over the East River and Calvary Cemetery, the graves packed tightly like rush hour on the subway, no escaping the crush even in death.
On the Kosciuszko Bridge, the new one with its changing lights shining bright over the stink of Newtown Creek, with an unparalleled view of Manhattan and thousands and thousands of graves to the east. The carcass of the old bridge was dragged away last summer, or maybe the summer before that or before that one, it’s hard to remember at this point. Everyone came to see them blow it up, the small, calculated, piecemeal implosions that actually took it apart a profound disappointment. We all just wanted to see something go off like the fireworks or collapse in on itself spectacularly, to be able to say oh yeah well I was there when they took it away, do you even remember what that thing was like? Like you were Jonah but the whale was dead and they had built a highway that passed through its skeleton and you were doomed to sit in its bones.
On the Pulaski Bridge, I look at the Kosciuszko. People who are not from here always confuse these two bridges and people from here pretend that they don’t. If it feels like you’re always looking at or on a bridge in New York, that’s because you probably are. There are over 2,000 bridges in this city. I tell someone about how many bridges there are in New York and they ask me if I knew the Kosciuszko Bridge is named after a trans man. He was a Polish revolutionary war general. That was Pulaski, I let them know. And I’m not sure if he was trans. Everyone thought he was buried at sea but his remains were found in Savannah, I’m not sure why or how he ended up there but they found the body in 2019. The New York Times said that there was one problem, that the skeleton looked very female. The traffic on the Kosciuszko is always so bad, they respond. I tell them they should’ve seen what it was like on the old one.