Brooklyn Bound…

So, after three years together (more or less), me and the Sinners are headed off to our first gig in NYC proper, this Saturday night (12/1). If you’re not from Boston, you probably don’t understand the logic in not playing one of (arguably) the two biggest music cities in the world when its a four hour ride away. If you are from Boston, you totally understand that NYC might as well be Mars, surrounded by a lake of fire, in an alternate dimension for all the interplay between the two. Still and all, we’ve got some good pals down there, and are lucky enough to have a spot at one of my personal favorite clubs, Magnetic Field in Brooklyn. The place reminds me of a slightly hipper Abbey Lounge, but with two feet firmly planted in soul as opposed to garage (though they do an awful lot of that too). A perfect fit for us, really.

I’ve been thinking a lot about New York lately. I’ve always felt a little stuck, halfway between New England and New York, having spent the first half of my life in New Jersey (Succasunna, about 45 minutes south of the city) and the later half in Rhode Island and Boston. Like most New Englanders, and probably most New Yorkers too, I’ve got peculiar feelings about the place. First and foremost, I’ve been both bothered and comforted by the fact that, in my mind at least, its shrinking.

When I was a kid New York was huge, and endlessly so; I’d take Sunday trips into “town” with Mom and Dad on their one day off from their deli in Jersey, wrapped up in a red snorkel coat and crammed in the back of Mom’s purple Datsun with my little brother. Dad always thought it was super funny to come in thru the Bronx and give us a tour of burning cars, bombed trains and streetcrime, and threaten to “drop us off with a nice family up here” every time we were bad. Dad’s a funny guy. Anyway, my memories of the City as a kid are huge, and mostly food-related (my family being cooks); pretzels, dirty water hot dogs, chestnuts (which I hated, and hate, but always had to have), bialys, lox, matzo ball soup, corned beef on rye, pizza, sno-cones, ice cream…junk mostly, but such GOOD junk, and such a tremendous variety and abundance of it, and more importantly it was junk you could only get there. Special. My parents had a proper deli at home, sure, but nothing tasted the same at home even if it was exactly the same, and they knew it and so did I.

The other thing I remember is that everything seemed ever so slightly bad, but in this really wonderful way that I just wanted more of. I’d have called it ’seedy’ if I’d known that word then. Now, my childhood in NYC was happening in the late 70s and early-mid-80s, so really, things were quite a bit more than slightly bad. But my folks were fearless ex-New Yorkers themselves, living on Bleeker Street in the 60s, and they wanted to make sure I saw everything first hand, for exactly what it was. I remember vividly my Mom’s admonitions to us kids before every trip: keep your eyes to yourself, know where you are, hold my hand, don’t touch anything, don’t talk to anybody. Mom grew up in Park Slope, long before it was nice, and then in a Brooklyn Catholic Girls’ Home, so she knew how to handle herself. The warnings weren’t the scared ramblings of someone who didn’t know better. Still, I remember getting whapped on the back of the head almost incessantly for staring at the freaks and weirdos we’d encounter (I couldn’t then, nor can I now, keep my eyes to myself in a crowd).

I loved crowds in New York, especially the ones that would come out of almost nowhere. I remember being in Manhattan one fall, and turning a corner with my folks and running headlong into a gay pride festival of some kind. The streets went from empty to full of half-naked and/or brightly dressed people instantly, and I got stunned by it. I remember looking up and seeing a man go by with a cart full of tiny, kid-sized plastic “masks” that looked like elephants, tigers, and bears. I yanked on my Mom’s arm and pointed as he went by and desperately wanted one; I remember both my folks laughing and saying, “those aren’t masks for your face”. We went another half block before I saw a phalanx of beautiful boys with the plastic animals covering their privates. I don’t think my eyes stopped being saucers til we were back home in Jersey. Not that I thought they were bad because they were gay (I knew what gay was at a young age, and it was a non issue in my house), but I thought it was just a little bit seedy, in a fascinating way, that boys would run the streets of this crazy city with nothing but an elephant mask over their parts.

Anyway, lots of other flashes of things come to mind that reinforced my childhood notion of NY as an endless source of all things tantalizingly gigantic and bad. A lot of stories filtered back to me secondhand, from the nights my folks would hire a sitter, dress up and head into town for a date. Somebody threw a bottle rocket at my Mom on New Years’ Eve in Time Square; a guy tried to beat up my Dad because he heard him say something bad about Mr. T in a bar. My uncle, who still lived in the city, won $100 off my Dad in a backroom poker game, only to have my Dad win it back, along with an ante of some dirty magazines (which I later snooped and found in their bottom dresser drawer). My folks saw famous people everywhere, and my Mom got picked up by both Louis Gosset AND Ray Charles; when I later saw the film Ray and Jaime Foxx re-enacted the “wrist thing”, I knew Mom hadn’t been lying back when I was six. Once a year, they’d take a rare weekend off to go to the Restaurant Show at the Javitz, and they’d always get the best room they could afford at the Helmsley. I never got to stay there but I was fascinated by this palatial, mythical hotel that was so beautiful but run by the most evil of Wicked Witches.

What my trips to town and my parents’ stories didn’t put in my head, the nightly news did. When I was a teenager and we left NJ for quiet little Kingston, RI, one of the first things I noticed was there were no murders on the news. Not a single shooting even, and sometimes not even a fire. Car accidents made the news when nobody even died. Growing up on 5, 7 and 11, this was another world of impossible peacefulness (later to become impossible boredom as I got older). But when I was little, I loved the evening news. I loved the New York Police especially, and later, the Guardian Angels. I thought there must be nothing cooler on earth than to be in charge of keeping the peace in such a sprawling, insane place. When Bernie Goetz happened, my folks, who were tired of the city’s crime rate flooding across the river and into north Jersey, jumped in with both feet. They had FREE BERNIE t-shirts they wore and distributed in their store (something I think they may regret in retrospect, along with their ELECT TRUMP ‘80 bumpersticker campaign). New York was like a big, romantic war-zone, pre-war Berlin with bagels, sushi and drag queens. What could be better? Or bigger?

So I’ve been a little sad, over the past few years, to feel my big, bad New York shrinking. It’d be easy to blame a whole lot of things–Guiliani, 9/11, Bloomberg and wherever he put all the squeegee guys–but that’s trite. I think, most pedestrian of all, its just age. A few weeks ago, me and some bandmates took a trip down to the Cavestomp Garage Fest in Brooklyn, and my friend Georgia and I bought Metrocards and tromped all over Manhattan and Brooklyn. And whereas the subway maps used to look labarynthine, now they just look logical. Brooklyn used to seem like a huge, barren wasteland overshadowed only by the sprawling dunes of Queens, but now it seems, well, kinda nice. Bed Stuy, Harlem, Alphabet City, the Bowery, Times Square–all those places that had an almost mythical magnitude and badness, have lost some of that, the attractive scariness, and the larger-than-lifeness. Which is not to say that I’ve lived in Boston so long that I’m going to go skipping through East New York with a basket of daisies; its still a city, and its still New York. And at the same time, the city is actually nicer now than it was then–cleaner, safer, all that.

But I think, as I come into my 30s, me and New York are balancing out. Its gotten nicer, cleaner, and more manageable (if not, as some would say, a little more boring–I say try Kingston RI). Meanwhile, I’ve been some places and seen stuff; I’ve been robbed, had some shitty apartments, done drugs, fired a gun, been homeless, had a fistfight, worked in a beer n’ a beating bar, witnessed crime, almost died a few times, had my heart broken. I’m catching up to New York and its catching up to the nice little me I used to be. So while I’m sad to see some of the mythical beast go down, I’m also a little comforted by it. I felt as happy walking around Manhattan a few weeks ago as I’ve been in a long time, and not just in a wide-eyed wonder kind of way, but in a way that tweedy, wooly Boston has never really given me. So who knows what’ll happen.

All I know is, I’m really psyched for Saturday. And I hope the boys in the elephant masks show up.