Read an Excerpt
Excerpt from My Camino
Let there be light, etc.
A decentered art world oozed across the bridge into Brooklyn, pooling in the area now known as DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) to make a new center of culture. A movement that would eventually spawn galleries and cafés, corporate offices in revitalized factories, real estate developments that capitalized on and even trumpeted the area’s once-famous squalor. Photographs of stone low-rises crowded with immigrants, open sewers, street urchins sleeping on subway grates, all became part of the come-on: the black Moschino thong underneath the business suit, mystique with a tang of blood, the whole rags-to-riches creation myth fluffing the asking price.
You’ve seen the brochure, the one with Brooklyn Bridge at the end of every elegant, tenement-lined street, the perspective and scale hinting tiny town, something doll’s house and cozy in the heart of the heartless metropolis.
That’s the place but not the place.
Our (not my) story begins before that time, on the night the bright star (IT) aligned for the very first time between the masts of the bridges, back when DUMBO was a no-go, a district of warehouses and pot-holed asphalt, deserted by all but predators and their victims.
IT appeared above our humble crib, bringing the tide that caused many boats to rise.
Into the manger entered a stranger.
Ask Jesus if God-the-Father’s love is all-devouring?
Ask Joseph?
Ask the Virgin Mary?
Then He Peoples It.
This is the story of Floss and Budsy and me, the Apostle John.
Floss and Budsy—not Beatrix Potter bunnies, but flesh and blood, man and woman, woman and man, and even a little something in between.
First He Budsy
Budsy: red-haired, white-skinned, weak-chinned, his sad face redeemed by a too-long nose that turned savagely left at the tip, like someone had grabbed it and given it a god-awful twist. His sad face doubly redeemed by eyes, blue-white as a malamute’s, which he hid behind John Lennon shades.
Budsy: much given to silences, who I met back in the day when I paid rent by driving a food truck between Manhattan construction projects, twelve-hour days shilling danishes (Vienna bread as it’s known in Copenhagen), heroes, and Joe Timbuktu (heavily-salted) coffee.
Budsy, master-electrician, reduced by rapacious recession to pulling wire through the walls of a midtown mansion. Genius child among tribal mick carpenters, guinea drywallers and decorators, none of whom loved him because he never wanted to reminisce about the old country (some rain-soaked bog town in County Despair) and because, after only two years in the new world, his accent had gone south before turning east for regions of the mid-Atlantic. Ambiguous identity is not much valued by guild members. Among new immigrants it’s a cardinal sin— that is until it matures across generations into something more venial, eventually revealing itself as the essential tool of assimilation.
Budsy: hell-bent on reinvention and devoid of iron filings that align with geographical sentimental. Moody Budsy whose smiles were always genuine, but whose habitual frame of mind was black cumulus and paranormal. There were days he would bend the fork of your thinking if you came within five feet of him.
Back in the days when we first met: every morning for six weeks, around 10—never before, always just after the foreman sounded his air horn— he appeared under the awning of my dented silver truck (Baby Bilbao with the opalescent hue) to buy Fresca and a slice of walnut loaf, which he consumed barbarically—mouth like a garbage compressor, spit-smacky sounds and crumbs avalanching into his lap—where he sat all alone on the stoop of that brownstone.
The one day he stayed to talk.
No ‘hey, hello.’ No ‘wassup?’
High-minded Budsy. He wanted my take on the sculptures of Maurizio Cattelan. And why? He had spied with his little eye a copy of Art Forum on my dashboard.
Floss’s Place
We said we’d meet at 6 at Floss’s pad, 23rd Street.
It was the evening of the NIGHT of NIGHTS; the night the star (IT) came to settle and shine, twirl like the winning drop-kicked goal between the uprights of the bridge, those metal posts made of moonbeams, gleaming in the reflected light of nearby Manhattan. It was the night when midnight drag-raced into the wee hours, when hard work conspired with luck to make the world roll over.
Floss had a walk-up just off 9th that smelled like vomit or microwaved buttered popcorn. Other tenants were a mouse she called Meh and cock-a-roaches she referred to as Republicans. She would walk into her bathroom in the middle of the night and flip the switch just to watch them explode from some mysterious center, tap-shoe in all directions across the Victorian tile, like Vera-Ellen in White Christmas.
Let there be light.
And there was.
Floss, Nostalgically
When she first made her move to the City, Floss began her day by sitting on the wide windowsill, knees up under her chin, coffee mug between her feet, a Marlboro red making snap-crackle-pop noises whenever she took a drag. This was back in the day (years and years before the NIGHT of NIGHTS) when Floss was still the factory model; before she ditched her style (and much else) to become the art maven, the powerhouse, the icon of a community dispersed across continents.
She kept only two things from her old style: kohl-eyes, the outer corners finned: she was a Cadi. And her side-parted, blond nappy curls, a near fro, hence her handle: Floss, since kindergarten or at least grade one.
Jar-always-half-full Floss, whose mouth, even when she was resting, bowed upward at the corners.
Her initial nine months in her first and only apartment in the City (for ‘first and only’ read ‘rent control’—a Palestinian signed his sublet over before hightailing it to Boca Raton, his money made, to golf (therefore I am) and to drink (therefore I am not), that zero sum game—) five-foot Floss sat all the long hours of the day and night absorbing the city sounds: the throb and thrum punctuated by horn blare, tire screech and brake squeal. The city’s whale song took her deep into a spiritual ocean where everything was a shade of one shade.
Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.
Life particles teemed all around her, invisible until the whole shoal turned, glittered silver for an instant, became the same shoal with a different shape. At such moments the hairs on the backs of her arms, on her neck and elsewhere stood up. This was electrifying—her being’s essential spark touching the motherlode—vision: self as substantively insubstantial, connected and disconnected, therefore mutable.
Here’s what she thought: the future had sent a search beam to find her, lighting her up with a feeling of destiny. She was grateful. There was no need to broadcast the news. She would not cast her pearls before swine. She kept the memory safe inside her. This was her power source, her copper-top long-life lithium battery.
She was happy in her solitude until she was not. On such blue days, when turning into herself felt like turning against herself, she thought, ‘I am deluded,’ and reached for her bag of hippy lettuce. Soon the city’s theremin was again singing its healing song. I am not one of them, she chanted. I can become anything I want to become.
She had left the nameless borough behind, barrel-bombed it. There was nothing but rubble: siding, brick, buckled wrought iron, shards of statuary, poisoned pressure-treated patio lumber and pesticide-soaked sod. So jagged was her break with the Irish-American tribe that she feared she would be the victim of an honour killing if she ever returned.
Disappearing into Manhattan was the easy part.
She took with her the cuckoo egg laid in her brain at birth—nay, long before (pre-his-stork-ic). That cuckoo’s egg she came to see was not the work of an invader, a parasitic and opportunistic species, but her true nature, her perspective on it warped by the nest that society fashioned ten sizes too small for her. She nurtured it, allowed the oversized fledgling to hatch, let it turf out what in her was partisan; betray the dark and sentimental; out-ledger that fifth column.
Some days she thought she had won only to wake up and smell the sulphurous fume of Great Kills on her skin. The world’s biggest landfill—visible from outer space— the frequent boast. It seemed there were things she could not not remember.
Some memories were just in her, like rebar.
A truck shuddering to a stop below her window always placed her on the yellow ferry as it slammed into the dock at St. George.
But hard work paid dividend, in the end.
Hit send.
Twenty years on and the app of her new life was 95% loaded. She now thought of her early years only as a marker to measure the distance she had come.
She measured it again that afternoon (the afternoon of the NIGHT of NIGHTS) as she listened to Budsy throw up in the bathroom, while they waited for me, the Apostle John, to ascend the stairs and knock three times.
That night, if all went well, if rumors proved true and promises were kept, she would pay off the mortgage on her new life. The seed she had planted would bear its first harvest: an apple to reinstate Eden.
The past would then be hermetically sealed.
Not that she believed this could happen—not in real life, no. But it would fuel the story, the mythology.
