The second answer is: On our birthdays my sisters and I were given pieces of silverware from a prestigious German manufactory that names its models after big cities. My sisters’ models were called Stockholm and Helsinki. Mine was New York.

My destination was clear. At 26, I flew to New York. What followed was a seven-year journey that included a terrible marriage, Byzantine immigration procedures and a divorce. Eventually I found love again. Now settled, I could afford to worry about other things. My frustration over not being able to participate in the political process grew. It was time to become an American citizen.

The long line at the Department of Homeland Security in front of 1 Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan was a condensed version of a city that never fails to astound me. A wrinkled Hispanic mother gently guided her adult son with Down Syndrome. An Asian woman put on lipstick using a compact mirror. A Caucasian businesswoman rolled her eyes while texting compulsively. The line crept toward the checkpoint like a snake cut into pieces, its parts haphazardly reattached.

According to my appointment letter, my citizenship test and interview were scheduled for 12:05 pm. The specificity of the time made me believe this would be a relatively fast procedure. After the first two hours of waiting it became clear this was not the case.

I looked at the 200-odd people around me. We were all so tired. The years leading up to this appointment had been filled with mounds of paperwork repeating the same questions. How many times can you attest that you have never been part of a terrorist organization? At what point do you crack when asked whether you had ever been a member of the Nazi party? How on earth would they find out if you were a habitual drunkard or prostitute? And who had a clear conscience when asked whether she had ever committed an offense?

Except for the flags and the yellowed photos of Peter Jennings and Ivana Trump proudly presenting their citizenship certificates to an apparently cheap camera, the waiting room resembled an ER. Burgundy plastic chairs connected at the joints bounced you along with your pained neighbors.

Announcers called out names through two speakers. They sometimes overlapped and we would hear only muddled syllables. I considered my name’s possible pronunciations. Sab-eyen Heen-leen? Say-been Heyen-lin? Sa-bin Hin-lin?

After five hours of bursts of cursing from my fidgety neighbor, my name was finally called. To my surprise the caller didn’t even forget the e at the end of Sabine.

Smirking from behind a big pile of files, the immigration officer started the routine. Was I a prostitute? A drunkard? A member of the Nazi party? Or of the Greenpoint YMCA? (I had dutifully noted my membership when asked what associations I was part of.) Had I committed any crimes since I mailed these forms? I shook my head.

Had I really been out of the country only once in the last couple of years? I said that when I got remarried we went to Puerto Rico. But that didn’t count.

The officer handed me a form and told me to read a sentence from it. “Alright,” he interrupted me before I could finish. “Now write: ‘I honeymooned in Puerto Rico.’ ” He caught himself. “ ‘Honeymooned’ isn’t a real verb, but write it anyway.” I did and we both chuckled.

Angela, the woman who owns my local laundromat on Greenpoint’s Manhattan Avenue, once told me how she applied for citizenship in 1977, after having spent several years in the U.S. illegally. Back then illegal immigrants could become citizens if they had given birth on American soil. Her officer told her to write, “I love New York.” She still cracks up remembering her response. She wrote, “I ♥ NY.” In fact, Angela ♥s NY so much that she moved her entire family from Nicaragua.

Testing my patience over a five-hour stretch was far more painful than testing my knowledge of American history. Why do we celebrate the 4th of July? What do the stripes on the flag represent? What is the name of the ship that brought the pilgrims to America? Piece of cake. The officer left out the more difficult questions: How many amendments to the Constitution are there? Name those that address voting rights. Who said, “Give me liberty or give me death?”

Four weeks later I was invited to the naturalization ceremony at a courthouse in downtown Brooklyn. To my German eyes, incurably attuned to efficiency and order, the event seemed chaotic and ludicrous.

An exasperated officer was trying to arrange the tide of people flooding the foyer into an orderly line. Many of the 300 soon-to-be citizens had brought their entire extended families. The wobbly line inched to the checkpoint. Trying to stay calm, I reminded myself that this is also why I wanted to be part of this country; whenever you think you know what to expect, you fall right back down the rabbit hole.

In the courtroom the New York narrative continued. The woman in charge was munching on Cheetos and the background echoed with the question, “Where are you from?” In the front row sat the tired, the pregnant, the limping, the old. One at a time, we were called to hand in yet another sheet of questions. Prostitute? Drunkard? Communist? Polygamist?

The hours passed like a dense fog. Eventually, the Cheetos lady explained that when she knocked three times it meant the judge was about to arrive and we were to rise.

We heard three knocks and all rose in unison. False alarm. A child was amusing herself by knocking on wooden pews.

Finally the appropriately named Judge Go arrived. We faced the American flag and recited the Pledge of Allegiance. I had goose bumps.

I grew up believing that gestures and symbols of national pride were a recipe for disaster and that I could only be proud of my own choices and achievements. I chose to move to New York. I traded a rather rigid and homogeneous society for one that is utterly diverse and remarkably flexible. I traded bike rides through parks for an uncomfortable commute in a sticky and crowded subway car. I traded blinders for a 360-degree panoramic view. But most importantly, I survived years of ups and downs in New York. That’s what I’m proud of.

Judge Go interrupted my thoughts. She encouraged us to vote and said that in other countries people walk barefoot for miles to execute that right. She told us that she arrived as a child on a boat from China into the chilly morning mist enveloping the Golden Gate Bridge. For a long time she doubted that she would ever be as successful as the natives. Now she was a judge.

“It is only in America that this can happen,” she said. “Tomorrow you will have a child that can become President of the United States.”

I was giddy on my way home. What was this new hungry citizen to do? My new husband, a Mexican immigrant, had left me a surprise in the fridge: a cupcake from a Polish bakery in Greenpoint adorned with an American flag from a 99-cent store run by Arabs. This is why I came to New York and this is why I wanted to be an American. I took my first bite.

Sabine Heinlein is a contributing writer to the Brooklyn Rail and a podcast producer for Artinfo.com. Her feature articles have been published in national German newspapers, including Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She was awarded a Sidney Gross Memorial Award for Investigative Reporting (2007), an Artcroft residency (2008), a Yaddo residency and fellowship (2009) and a NYFA fellowship for nonfiction literature (2009).

Its footprint follows the contour of the lot it occupies. Its Southeast corner forms an obtuse angle splaying the southern and eastern walls in a Piranesi-like vision. It’s a catacomb of storage areas, narrow hallways and workspaces, filled with incendiary materials like wood dust and petroleum based solvents. In 2001 a cabinet-making shop at the back of the building was ravaged by a gas explosion, which blew out windows overlooking the creek, severely burning the hands of one of its workers. The access road surrounding the parked was jammed with fire and rescue trucks, EMTs, police and fire fighters that backed all the way down Manhattan Avenue to DuPont Street. The view from my fire escape was a carnival of bobble-head ovoid black fire hats navigating, white, blue, red, gold and chrome vehicles, flashing red lights crisscrossed by a network of ladders and fire-hose.

The neighborhood is Latina, Black, Guyanese and White. Indigents live at a hotel between Clay and Dupont. Many if not most of the workers in the 1155 building are Polish, but the real concentration of Polish people is further south. There is a small group of Japanese and a long established enclave of artists exiled from Manhattan, growing in numbers as the willingness of dealers and curators to cross the river also grows. Adjacent to 1155 Manhattan Avenue, before the Williamsburg artist‚s renaissance the sculptor William Tucker was making art and the David McKee Gallery was storing it at 99 Commercial Street. Its continues to a sculptors scene.

On December 11, 1992, just a month before I moved into a ground floor studio at 99 Commercial Street, the creek was lifted from its riverbed by an immense low-pressure system. The late Fall Northeaster brought torrential rain. The sloping drive that cuts into the center of the building became a sluiceway. Water raced in from the street meeting head on with the creek surging from the rear of the building. When the day was done nearly two feet of water stood in my studio.

Across the Newtown Creek slough in Long Island City is the nearest subway stop to Commercial Street. The most prominent landmark in the area is the Schwartz Chemical Co. It’s a gorgeously gothic structure with four pitch-black, sleekly erotic stacks. It was originally the Westinghouse Power Station, designed by McKim, Mead and White and built for the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1909. Just up Jackson Avenue is P.S.1/MoMA. The Sculpture Center is another four blocks away and close to Queensboro Plaza where at four in the morning inmates from Rikers are discharged into the city at a local donut shop. 11th Street in Long Island City has one terminus at an on ramp to the upper roadway of the Queensboro Bridge and the other at Jackson Avenue. In Brooklyn its extension is McGuinnes Boulevard. It’s a major truck route from the BQE and is the beginning of my weekly commute to Boston. The link between them and one of several Newtown Creek crossings is a recently renovated drawbridge named the Pulaski Bridge. Built in 1954, when Robert Wagner was the City’s mayor, it looks more like a rise in the road than a bridge.

When I look north up McGuinnes Boulevard toward the bridge it has a snake-like dogleg turn to it. Its four-lane roadway has a pedestrian walk and bicycle path on the Brooklyn bound side. Cyclists like to use its rolling slope and narrow, six-foot wide path, as a speedway. Last year, my girlfriend, riding her Razor scooter across the bridge on the pedestrian path, was struck from behind by a bicyclist. The Filofax that she carried in her backpack broke her fall that landed her flat on her back.

On either side of the slough, about four blocks before the walkway reaches street level, there are switchback stairways that shortcut the distance to the ground. On my way to the 7 train in Long Island City, I walk down Ash Street to get to the Brooklyn side stairway. On its upper landing is an accretion of shit and urine. A Robert Smithson-like earthwork that has slowly migrated from the dark inner corner of the landing left there by people who use it as a public outhouse. When I pass by its lurking mass, I clutch the handrail and pick up my pace to steel myself against the grotesque siren sweetly singing her alluring song, "come closer, come closer."

Up on the bridge, before reaching the bridge operator’s tower, I pass by the place where the walkway briefly juts westward to form a lookout. I’m in too much of a hurry to linger on my way to the subway, but coming home I often stop and watch flotsam pirouette in the eddies of the slough below a spectacular view of mid-town Manhattan.

I don’t remember when I first saw them, it may have been this summer, it doesn’t matter, but on the other side of the tower there are ten, breadbox-sized metal boxes bolted to the iron wall that separates the roadway from the pedestrian bicycle path. In each box is a single transparency that in sequential order picture a pair of crashing down gas storage tanks. Their then owner, Keyspan, contracted their demolition. Walking to the subway the fallen gas tanks reassemble as I read the images in reverse order from right to left. On my return they collapse as the sequence plays forward. It’s a public artwork titled Premonition.

I watched the attacks on the World Trade Center towers from my rooftop, distant but visible, they appeared as an eerily silent piece of smoke and mirrors prestidigitation. The more I think about Premonition the more I like it. As I meditate on its endless loop of forward and backward, loss and retrieval, destruction and resurrection, Premonition is a bittersweet replay of the desire to have the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath go away. It’s like the refusal of guilt after an accident when I endlessly repeat "if only this and if only that".

Western winds whipping the bridge as they carom up the creek from the East River make winter crossings bone-chilling. I move on and the stacks of the Schwartz Chemical building hold me in their thrall as they do their gentle circling dance in rhythm with my walk. I slow and stop to align the four stacks to form a perfect allee. At the moment they line up, the Empire State Building becomes perfectly centered in its sights. If it were not for the fact that the Chemical building was built twenty-five years earlier than the Empire State, one might think that the arrangement was purposeful.

My part of Greenpoint is a backwater. With the exception of 1155 Manhattan Avenue, buildings are three or four stories high. There’s a wide-open sky and weekends are country quiet. A patch of the sidewalk just in front of the doorway to my apartment building is splattered with pink, yellow, and green pastel-colored pigeon shit, the unwitting act of my downstairs neighbor who feeds them cat food she thinks is being consumed by the local strays. The breezes are predominately westerly. When they shift to the east, mercifully only rarely, the sickeningly sweet smell of the Star Candle factory drifts through the neighborhood just faintly covering the sulfurous odor emanating from the still further east sewage processing plant. There is a whiff of change in the air. From Dupont to Quay along West Street, a new Battery Park City-like development is awaiting final approval from city agencies. With the spectacular view of mid-town Manhattan and the prospect of easy commutes via water taxi, real estate developers are drooling.

I was out on the front stoop today, where I have to smoke now that the super of my building has declared the fire escape off limits, on account of he found a few cigarette butts on the pavement underneath. There’s a whole funny story about this, actually, considering my roommate begins tearing his hair out at the slightest hint of cigarette smoke wafting into the room, which I take to be a sign, along with some door banging and a general mannered shortness, that I’m beginning to get on my roommate’s nerves, what with my having stayed on his couch for three months.

The superindendent of the building wears a ponytail and the slack, Giottofied Jesus-Christ expression you find only on the faces of the terminally dumb and bullying. You can find him find digging through the trash on any given day, making sure there are no recyclable bottles in there, since, according to him, any cop could happen to stroll by, poke his nightstick in among the banana peels and give our super a whopping ticket.

This super, who hated me from day one, who in some sense considers me the milk bottle poking out of his perfect pile of trash, has made it his personal mission to regulate my every move, which includes a rule about no smoking on the fire escape. So, imagine me, Peter Krause, (Managing Editor at Muze.com) scrunched in the windowframe as I have been for three months, trying to occupy some negative zone between outside and inside, between super and roommate, smoking furtively, lips expelling smoke as far into the night air as possible, a heavy, cold wind whipping in from off the ocean, knocking over the coffee can I use as an ashtray. Consider the consequences of this freak action, Muze. There I am, sore from scrunching up, panicking, trying to pick all those cigarette butts off the fire escape grating like a child furtively gluing his mom’s favorite vase back together, knowing that when the morning came, I’d see all the butts that fell through, like the bodies of little pets, laying on the inaccessible back porch below.

There I was today out on the front stoop, as per the new house rules, enjoying a cigarette, sort of contemplating why I didn’t get the job at Muze, when one of the older ladies who lives in my building came up with one of those two-wheeled grocery carts. It felt awfully good to help her carry that cart up the stairs, though when I attempted to introduce myself, she began speaking in Polish and got a little nervous and she started pointing at all the apartment numbers, saying, “One, three, I don’t know… I don’t know,” me saying, “No, no, my name is Greg, I just wanted to introduce myself…”

It was then that I came upstairs and decided to write this letter to you.

Muze, you provide content for online booksellers and informational retail kiosks. You needed an editor knowledgeable in Science Fiction and Mysteries, someone who had hands-on retail experience, an eye for detail, and a sharp, clear writing style. I was not that editor. But we had good times at that interview, didn’t we? I mouthed on and on about the “really terrific” 19th century SF I’d been reading, aced the test you gave me, the one where I cited Poppy Z. Brite as being an exemplar of the Splatterpunk genre. Remember when you said, “we sort of work in isolation here, and you’d pretty much be left alone to research books without a lot of interference?” Remember how my eyes lit up? There was something strange going on for me there, Muze. I was sort of thinking, I am unqualified to do anything but this job. But I was also thinking, this is why I moved to New York, to find just this sort of job. I walked out of that interview feeling happy and desperate, thinking, without a doubt I had nailed this job. That feeling was compounded when I heard you had started calling my references.

Now Muze, I don’t know what sort of super-intelligent beast you’ve put in my place, but let me assure you that the sum total of happiness in this world has been diminished because of the actions you have taken. Perhaps he or she is qualified enough for your position, even, qualified to walk on water or do financial writing or become the lead editor at a prestigious magazine, fielding mind-boggling queries as to the beneficial nature of nepotism or how online dating is revolutionizing romance in the 21st century, on top of knowing everything there is to know about Science Fiction and Mysteries. Muze, your beast, this place-taker, will leave you soon, send you scurrying for some new person. All will be unhappiness in your world, and in mine, too. Perhaps even the place taker will understand in time, hopping ever upward on his or her way to glory, what unhappiness is.

In the meantime, Muze, it’s interesting to begin to feel that hackneyed emotion that all recent New Yorkers express after a few months in town, namely, that they feel invisible, friendless, and much less worthwhile than when they walked in. A new wind could soundlessly sweep me off the planet. My mother in Kalamazoo, a handful of friends in Chicago, would make calls at first, inquiring about my newfound invisibility. Then, after a short while, the silence would be absolute. I know this especially, since my research in science fiction has taken me as close as Mars, as in the books of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian trilogy, and as far away as the outer edges of the cosmos, as in the case of Nebula- and Hugo-award winning author Pohl Anderson, where the life of the Earth, not to mention a single human being, can be measured in the proverbial blink of an eye.

Best,

Greg Purcell

** If you want to hire this man, or just interview him,

Next Wednesday, Mars will be closer to the Earth than it has been in 60,000 years. Already it’s the brightest object in the night sky. I assume by then I will be no closer to having a job. That’s not so bad, really — by next Wednesday, I will have only been living in New York for a week. People born in this city have been waiting to work here for months in some cases.

Back in Chicago, my sister attributes the nearness of Mars to the strange and terrible dreams she’s been having. She says there’s an extra gravitational pull on her brain that’s making her crazy at night. The night before I got on the train she told me she had a dream in which murderers were repeatedly stabbing our mother in the chest. My sister was powerless to stop them, she said, and she grabbed my arm and made her eyes distressingly soulful in the way she does whenever she wants to emphasize something unaccountably but deeply personal. Now, my sister’s an extraordinarily sensitive kid, far more sensitive than I am, and I’m inclined to take her weird astronomicism with a grain of salt. Still, I have to admit that odd dreams have been rearing their heads everywhere these days. For instance, my friend Matt had a dream a few nights ago that I doused myself with the contents of a gas canister, and that, when he protested, I laughed and began drinking straight from the spout.

On Monday, I had a dream that I was recruited by the mob to hold up a bank. Our approach was through the roof, and our means of access was dynamite. Something went wrong, however. The job was botched, a bank employee exploded — and, to make a long story short, I eventually found myself in dutch with my employers for screwing up and in trouble with the law for having robbed the bank in the first place. I was unmoored in the way one can only be in a dream. When one of my bosses found me, however, I did not fold under the pressure. Quite the opposite — I eviscerated him. With only the slightest sense of panic, and mere minutes before I woke up, breathing hard, to my last morning in the Midwest, I sliced my mobster friend apart as one would a frog in a seventh-grade biology class. The act of killing — of taking absolute control — was in this case so momentous that it had to be prolonged.

Oddly, I feel optimistic about these murderous dreams, and I attribute them less to the gravitational pull of Mars than to the love my friends and family have for me and to the imaginative New York that exists in the dreams of all Midwesterners. In my interpretation of these dreams, gasoline is the combustible stuff of life, my mother is alive and well in her Michigan home, and I am her murderer only in as much as I am making her nervous about moving here. And though the mobsters of New York may never chase me down, they may still, I hope, be susceptible to the explorations of my scalpel. Everyone who comes to New York feels extraordinary for being here, I guess. Perhaps even the natives feel extraordinary about it, and have dreams in which they douse themselves in gasoline and get chased by mobsters on a daily basis. I suspect not, however.

All of this is pretty sophistic. Still, if given a choice between Mars and New York as the source of unusual dreams, I’m inclined to choose New York. Especially for the jobless. We sleep later.

Thick, guttural laugher floats up from the street into our bedroom.

Krea-Krac! Krea-Krac!

Blearily, I grope the nightstand for my glasses. The bedside clock tells me it’s just past midnight.

Krea-Krac! Krea-Krac! Krea-Krac!

When I was a boy and it was time for bed, my father had a favorite ritual. He would stand up, a lumbering giant swaying over my brother and me, and slowly unbuckle his belt. With a mock ferocity and a deep-throated growling, he would fold the strap in half and crack the leather.

Krea-Krac!

My brother and I would scream with laugher and sprint upstairs, the snapping of the belt chasing us into bed and under the covers.

Krea-Krac! Krea-Krac!

Dream-drunk as I am, I cannot help by wonder if my father is standing outside my window, snapping his belt as if I’m a seven year-old again.

“What-is-that?” Anne says, rolling over and pushing herself over on my shoulder.

“I think it’s my dad.”

“What? What?” Her voice is full of sleep and mounting irritation.

“It’s nothing. Go to sleep.”

Krea-Krac! Krea-Krac! Krea-Krac!

“That’s nothing?” She says, mounting over me. She pads over to the window, determined to find the source of the sound.

“It’s nothing,” I repeat, curling up in her body-warmed section of the bed. “It’s nothing.”

The snapping repeats three more time. More laughter, this time punctured by a man’s sharp retort in that most melodious of all languages, Polish. Not knowing any, however, even after five years of living in Greenpoint, isn’t an impediment to understanding what was just said (and drunken slurs are universal no matter what the language). It must be a fight, I think, a spill-over from the bar on the corner. Every month of so, there will be some sound and fury on the street, a preamble that dissolves into a free round before blows are exchanged or a black-and-white has to show up.

“Colin.”

Anne’s voice is urgent and stripped of sleep.

“Colin, they’re belt-whipping him.”

I throw off the covers and cross the room to where Anne is standing at the window, her usage of the collective pronoun making me slightly queasy. Greenpoint is hardly a hot-zone of criminal violence, being known better for three things: pierogis, $50 Social Security Cards, and pierogis. As such, I can’t imagine what’s actually happening.

“Look,” she says, pointing. “Look.”

Outside across the street is a man – a man? A boy, probably around fourteen, wearing the red and white jersey and splayed up against the back of a parked car, looking like a suspect on a late-night airing of Cops. He’s surrounded by a group of other boys, a little under a dozen, all equally young and, from their staggering and swaying, all equally drunk, stoned, hopped up, etc.

The kid up against the car is getting cracked in the ass with a belt by one of the other boys. There’s cheering and hooting and chanting of what are probably numbers in Polish. Standing there, Anne sums up the scene with grace and aplomb.

“What the fuck?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s a, uh, I dunno–maybe.I dunno.”

The belt is getting passed around now, like a brown-bagged Smirnoff until apparently everyone gets a shot. In between cracks of the belt, the boy grabs his ass and hops around, trying his best not to whimper or cry. One of the bigger kids shoves him roughly up against the car where he dutifully takes up his former position as another member of the group eagerly winds up for his turn.

“Is it – ” Anne starts.

“I don’t know. A gang initiation?”

“A gang initiation?” Incredulous.

“Sure. Like a PG-rated version of a scene out of Herbert Asbury. The Gangs of Greenpoint.”

“And that’s how they bring in new members? By spanking them? That’s pretty lame.”

“Sure.”

“I mean, that’s really lame.”

I really hate to call it a gang. Even three stories up and across the street, I can tell that more than half of them still have baby-fat. Let’s call it a gaggle. The gaggle seems to be wrapping up the initiation with a rousing chorus (in English, oddly enough) of “You’re a man, now,” from each of the boys. The newly “made man,” one hand clenched tight to his rear, is making the rounds, hugging each new “brother,” looking elated that’s he’s past the test.

There’s more hooting, more cheering, more embracing, and the boys start peeling off, exchanging convoluted handshakes and high-fives with the new member, who is leaning heavily on the largest of the boys, still clutching at his soon-to-be-swollen ass, or, as the Poles say, his dupa.

Wonders of Modern Commuting, Part 1:

At around 8:25 every day, Mr. Impatient’s train pulls up to the Greenpoint platform. Mr. Impatient is a G(1) train conductor who is always in a very big hurry to get the train where it’s going. I have yet to get a glimpse of him, but I can hear him, and from the anxiously annoyed tone in his flat-sounding voice and the rapidly issued discourteous commands he fires off, I picture a white guy in his 30’s or 40’s with a perpetually aggravated frown clouding his face, most likely accompanied by a furrowed brow(2)and set jaw.

Mr. Impatient always sounds most frustrated with passengers at our stop (PPP syndrome?(3)) , who can never board fast enough for his urgent schedule, and he seems to derive insatiable pleasure from closing the subway doors on us. Immediately after the train docks, Mr. Impatient makes his agenda known: You, the passenger, are expendable in his mission of getting the train down that line. Matter of fact, he’d just as soon leave you standing on the platform all day. The passenger knows all this from Mr. Impatient’s quickly uttered announcement, issued immediately after the subway doors open, “Please use all available doors, stand clear!” This announcement is both a warning and justification; Mr. Impatient is really saying, “You fucking idiots are bunching up at the same spots again, and it’s driving me crazy! I warn you every single day to spread out, use the other entrances, and get your miserable asses inside quickly, but you never listen. That’s why I’m going to try and catch you damned Polacks between the doors, and hopefully the train will leave with your head hanging out to be smeared against the wall, creating some nice graffiti of my own.” The doors themselves are actually only open for no more than three or four seconds.

Every passenger knows better than to believe his promise that “There’s another G train directly behind us,” since the undependable G seldom frequents platforms in less than ten-minute intervals. When everyone has been squeezed out or in, and the train pulls away from the platform leaving less agile passengers glaring after it with balled fists, Mr. Impatient whips us onward to the next stop like a jockey in a mule race(4).

In my somewhat short experience of riding subways, I’ve found most subway conductors to be even-tempered and laid-back. When arriving at a platform they announce the approaching stop, and when docking their trains they allow ample time for passengers to disembark and board. They indicate where any transfers may be made, and will sometimes even take on the role of tour guides, passing along informational tidbits about various public attractions to be found at particular stops. Not so with our Mr. Impatient. I don’t really think the malicious bastard cares about keeping his train on schedule anymore. After years of frustration, he’s now waging a personal vendetta against all passengers, who he sees as inferior and lowly cattle standing blindly in the path of his accomplishment.

But I beat that dirty fucker on Monday. It was 8:24, and I was jogging down Manhattan Avenue towards the India Street subway entrance, avoiding alcoholic zombies, leaping over leashes of Spaniels and Labradors, and dodging sidewalk poo-poo landmines (or DDDs(5)) . As I tumbled down the stairs with Metrocard in hand, I saw the G rumbling into its dock. “Just in time!” I thought, proudly striding up to the turnstile. But to my horror, my swipe was rejected: INSUFFICIENT FARE.

I panicked, then ran to throw myself at the mercy of the booth worker. “One token please!” I begged, shoving two dollar bills under the glass. With a piteous look in his eye that seemed to say, “You poor, poor sap, you’ll never make it with Him at the controls,” the token clerk issued my fare and change. Plunging my rounded key to freedom into the slot I burst forth onto the platform, only to hear the terrible bong-bong of the doors, and Mr. Impatient’s malicious order, “Stand clear!”

I say you nay, Archdemon! You shall not prevail! Sprinting forward at lightning speed, I weaved in and out of disembarking passengers like an Olympic slalom champion. I reached the doors just as Mr. Impatient brought his finger down on the close button, and with a desperate leap, threw myself at them. By the grace of some miracle, I made it through, but my backpack was held fast between the doors. I was stuck, and felt that I’d now participate in the attainment of Mr. Impatient’s ultimate revenge when my backpack straps would catch on a passing girder, and I’d be sucked outside like an astronaut through an airlock, to be zapped to a crisp on the third rail. But my fellow passengers, comrades in the battle against Mr. Impatient, forced the jaws open and dragged me inside the carriage in the nick of time. Realizing my salvation and victory, I smiled thankfully at my brothers as we moved off down the track. Grinning up at the overhead speaker, the mechanical embodiment of Mr. Impatient, I shook my fist and said under my breath, “Not this time, oh, clever foe. You lose.”

1 The Ghetto train 2 From the Old English: furh 3 Prejudice against Polish People 4 See Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. 5 Dog-Doo Deployments

I looked at apartments in lovely Carroll Gardens, where I saw plenty of “my people” on the sidewalks and supping well in restaurants that rivaled some of those in the City. But the space-price ratio proved difficult. Same with the Heights, the Slope and the Burg.

When a friend told us of a vacancy in her building on Russell Street, in Greenpoint, I agreed to check it out, primarily to avoid offending her. Acquaintances on the Upper East Side referred to the area as “Gunpoint,” and I’d heard sordid rumors of a G Train Rapist. A co-worker told me he’d been punched by a drunken Polish guy on the steps of the subway. There was a sewage treatment plant nearby. I had concerns.

But our Greenpoint friend had nothing but raves for her new digs. She too had moved from Manhattan, and I may be taking liberties when I say that she shared my general “aesthetic.” If she liked it, how bad could it be?

After several challenging telephone conversations with Frank, the Polish grandfather who owned and lived in the building with his wife, two grown kids, their children, and various indeterminate relations, we agreed on a time for a viewing. As I made my way from the West Village, I figured we might be in for some exercise. But what’s a little extra walking to a girl who’s always described herself as “outdoorsy?” This logistical pitfall was easily transformed into a health-enhancing bonus.

Emerging from the Nassau Avenue subway, I gave wide berth to the drunks loitering by the top of the steps and sallied forth. There were Polish men with blond crew-cuts on their way to work, young blond women pushing strollers, old blond women walking with grocery carts, and one or two strikingly hot blond women heading who knows where. Some of the looks I got would have made you think the circus was in town. Clearly, this was not the best day to go bra-less.

I was pleased to see BMWs, Mercedes and Jaguars parked on the street. And to my carnivorous delight there were meat markets on just about every corner. Not to mention an abundance of flower shops which would surely beckon to my husband on his way home from work.

The building on Russell Street faced Msgnr. McGolrick Park, which is roughly the size and shape of Tompkins Square Park. Nevertheless, I smugly surmised, this was probably a Park even we could afford to live on. The apartment was a third floor walk-up and the doorways were made for skinny people carrying no bags, but it was newly renovated, bright and pleasant, with gleaming hardwood floors. The walls of glass brick were startling at first, but as Frank showed me around, his pride and delight in the place was so palpable (his son and son-in-law had done all of the work themselves), that I decided this quirky decorating device could more accurately be described as wainscoting. The kitchen was not Lilliputian, the real sized double-sided refrigerator even had an ice machine, and you could see lower Manhattan and the top of the Williamsburg Bridge from the kitchen window. There was a living room, dining room, office and a bedroom that had a large bay window facing the park. It was the nicest place I’d seen so far. But it was still Greenpoint. If we were going to sink so low as to actually move here, we wanted a deal. Negotiations ensued. Frank dropped the price. I still felt we were being somewhat ripped off, but in we moved.

For a while I had a very bad attitude. And the succulent cheap pierogies, pork cutlets, goulash, potato pancakes and red cabbage were not enough to cheer me.

When the weather got warmer, the Drunken Polish Guys (as we began calling them) sat on the benches facing our building, drinking vodka out of brown paper bags on Saturday mornings, singing, yelling and from time to time, coming to ineffectual blows. The “meat markets,” it turned out, didn’t sell the finest cuts of grass-fed beef, or organic free-range chickens but sausages, bologna and other smoked, processed meats. The Met Food on the corner with its under-ripe tomatoes and pathetic coffee selection me yearn for the Chelsea Market and Gourmet Garage. The hot summer days were sometimes interrupted by a not-so-refreshing farty breeze. What had my life had come to? I blamed my husband. It was not good for our marriage. I became obsessed with the real estate section of the Sunday Times.

Slowly though, I started to come around. The attitude adjustment began when Frank took care of our cats for a week and was genuinely upset and insulted when I included a check with my thank you note. He wouldn’t accept the money, made me feel silly for offering it, and told me that he enjoyed taking care of our cats, that he loved animals and if he couldn’t care for them, there would always be someone in his family who could. This made me rethink the whole “getting ripped off” thing.

I realized I could lock my bicycle in front of our building without it getting stolen, and those harmless inebriated scamps could be quite chivalrous if they mistakenly zigzagged across your path. I began to see that our neighborhood was a multigenerational family one, where grandparents live in the same buildings with their grandchildren who are respectful and who employ the term “moron” in favor of other, less polite expletives. Taking the G to the E made my uncrowded subway commute thirty-five minutes door to door. I am convinced that our block must be under some type of Polish Mafia surveillance, because even the most expensive cars are never broken into (there is always parking), the crime rate seems nonexistent, and no one has ever asked me for money on the street.

The friendly BQE Discount Wine and Liquor store on Meeker always has a bottle of wine or two open for tasting and the large affordable selection, makes me feel like a savvy connoisseur every time I find an excellent bottle for under $10 (20% off if you buy a case).

I’ve got an awesome new running route that takes me down Driggs, past McCarren Park with it’s running track, baseball diamond, soccer field and tennis courts, through Hipsterville, and across the Williamsburg Bridge. Traffic both automotive and pedestrian is mild on most streets allowing me to ride my bicycle everywhere, creating a sense of being in a small village far, far away. Key Food, Tops and the Garden give good grocery.

Plus, the nice lady at the Grand Slam Laundry greets me by name, the buildings are low, providing a sense of light and space, the majestic Sycamores in McGolrick Park remind me of Europe, and Enid’s, the best bar in the world, is only a few blocks away. This is a quiet neighborhood, but on Halloween, traditionally my least favorite holiday, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, I was psyched to hand out candy.

In Greenpoint, there is a Shih Tzu for every man woman and child. The Polish doughnuts — fried dough, not too sweet, glazed or sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, twisted or round — were also an inducement. The first time I went into the Star Deli and started asking questions about filling, the girl at the counter said, “Jell-O” for each one. Were there different flavors of Jell-O?

“No,” she replied, “just grape Jell-O.”

Trust me, they rock.

I didn’t understand or really care what he was getting at until many years later, when, standing in a crowd at a Pavement show, waiting for the band to come on, I took a good long look around from my usual position near the front of the stage, left side, and saw in the crowd my own face reflected a thousand times. That is, the room was filled largely with young white gentlemen, many of them bespectacled, with vaguely unkempt brown hair, faces either blank or fixed in portraits of smirking cool, seemingly unaware that a band they enjoyed enough to spend twenty dollars to see was at any moment going to take the stage. This was at Irving Plaza, in June of 1999, the first show of a three-night stand. Pavement was touring in support of Terror Twilight, its most highly polished album. It was also rumored, even then, even that night, to be their last, but I was not prepared to accept that. I was having difficulty enough accepting the mere fact of my fandom.

It’s always a bit of a crusher to realize one is not unique – or should I say, when I realize, as I often do, that I am not unique? – but it hit me particularly hard that night, as I stood ensconced in all those me’s. And it hit me the next night, too, at the second show, when I looked around and saw all the same faces. Well, different but the same.

Recently, Stephen Malkmus’s new band, the Jicks, played at the Warsaw, a relatively new venue only about five blocks from my apartment. Despite the novelty of having one of my favorite musical artists play so near me – Greenpoint, I’ve been told by every friend who’s visited me here, is a pain in the ass to get to – I was fully prepared not to go. I had anticipated the crowd’s sameness and was willing to forego the probability of pleasure in order to escape its diminishing effects. But a friend offered me a free ticket and then another friend signed on to the deal and the next thing I knew we were sitting in my living room, waiting to go to the Warsaw.

I explained my theory – is it worthy of even being called a theory? – on the homogeneity of the average indie rock crowd. And my friend Al said, “It can be tough to take, but it’s especially hard at a Steve Malkmus show, when you realize that, not only are you like everyone else there, you’re also not Steve Malkmus.”

It is often said of a certain kind of male figure: “Women want to be with him, and men want to be him.” This statement could not be truer of Stephen Malkmus. I saw Pavement four times and I’ve seen the Jicks twice now, and if there is a factor that unifies the crowds at these shows even more than whiteness, it’s the outpouring of love and envy Malkmus is able to evoke with the slightest grin or flip of his skater bangs. Although perhaps I am projecting; perhaps I sense that love and envy most strongly in my own head.

Woody Allen wrote, in the About the Author section of his book Side Effects, that “his one regret in life is that he is not someone else.” I understand this completely, and have regretted more than once, more than a dozen times, that I am not Steve Malkmus. Malkmus envy, for me, began on a very basic, fundamental level: with the songs.

The first of his songs that I wished I’d written was “Here,” from Slanted and Enchanted. It had that quality – simplicity – that causes would-be songwriters to go, “Fuck, why didn’t I think of that?” (“Smells Like Teen Spirit,” if you’ll recall, was a thunderingly simple riff, with the same four notes repeated throughout the verses and the chorus.) Most of “Here” (at least the way I learned it) is just A, E and D, a variation on the “Back in Black” chords. But that’s only half of it. There’s the melody, which pretty much makes the song, and the lyrics – particularly that famous first line (“I was dressed for success/But success, it never comes”) – which still have the power, under the right circumstances, to cause to me to doubt every decision I’ve ever made.

A couple years ago, “Here” was described in the New York Times as Malkmus’s “crowning sad-sack song,” but I think that’s doing it a disservice. (The article, in fact, was tinged with condescension, devoting columns of unnecessary ink to the tired concept of Malkmus as an “ironic” “slacker” and ending with the line, “The longing for the genuine, musically or otherwise, calls for brighter corners.”) True, the song is a downer, but it’s also about as exhilarating as recorded music gets in terms of sheer evocative power. The passing decade may have dulled the memories of certain rock critics now busy praising the White Stripes, but it’s all still there, the power and beauty and energy of Pavement. Pick up the Slanted and Enchanted reissue if you don’t believe me. Put on disc one and pretend that you haven’t read a thousand articles about how the Strokes are saving rock and you’ll see what I mean. I like the Strokes well enough, but a dude in a leather jacket with greasy hair singing about fun in the sun will never have the same resonance as the wordless chorus of “In the Mouth a Desert.”

I could go on all day praising my favorite Malkmus tunes and quoting my favorite lines from, say, Brighten the Corners; I could relate at least two memorable anecdotes from my life that had “Grounded,” my all-time favorite Pavement song, as the soundtrack; I could tell you about riding the Lexington Avenue subway with the Jicks record playing on my headphones, on my way to end a weird emotional stand-off I had going with an ex-girlfriend.

Then there’s the period, approximately one month in duration, where I played “Vague Space” every morning as I walked from the subway to my job in the World Trade Center. (The song lasted exactly as long as the walk from the Cortland Street subway platform to the elevator banks.) And then there’s this morning, when I stood alone in my kitchen, guitar strapped on, and played a cover of “Jenny and the Ess-Dog” for no one.

But Malkmus envy is about more than music. It’s about attitude.

For the purposes of writing this, I’ve tried to trace the origins of my fixation on Stephen Malkmus as something other than a songwriting entity, and believe it struck first in late 1997, at a club in Grand Rapids, MI, called the Intersection. It was the first time I’d seen Pavement and also, because I was largely oblivious to much of the band’s press over the years, my first encounter with the Stephen Malkmus persona. It happened like this: The band took the stage to great fanfare before a crowd of mostly young white males. Malkmus, after rubbing his nose and acknowledging his allergies, said something like, “It’s great to be here in central Michigan.” Some kid to my left, distraught by the geographic inaccuracy of the statement, yelled, “It’s Western! Western Michigan!” Malkmus looked the kid in the eye, with apparent borderline disdain, and said casually, “Whatever.”

Yes, I thought, and felt the vague first stirrings of infatuation.

Flash forward to the Irving Plaza shows. There’s a guy in the front row shouting intermittent requests for “Harness Your Hopes.” (This is a B-side from the U.K. “Carrot Rope” single and presumably a cooler song to request than “Cut Your Hair,” Pavement’s one and only near-hit.) Finally, about mid-set, after maybe the fifth or sixth exhortation, Malkmus stares the guy down, flashes the old index-and-thumb okay sign, and says, “Yeah, that’s one of our songs. Congratulations.”

I’m fairly high-strung and in general envy people whose inner monologues I perceive to be smoother than my own (whether they actually are or not), and those kinds of breezily dismissive comments from a person so talented and handsome, so seemingly self-assured, were something I felt irrational glee at having witnessed.

I also noticed during that show Malkmus’s tendency to alter slightly his delivery of certain lyrics, as if to squash potential sing-alongs on purpose. The chorus of “Shady Lane,” for instance, became a staccato “Ev-ry-body. Wants. One.” And the “Range Life” diss of the Smashing Pumpkins which supposedly kept Pavement out of Lollapalooza ’94 became something else entirely: “Out on tour with the Smashing Shitheads/Nature kids, they don’t have no shit in their heads.”

Critics of Pavement – and later, Malkmus’s solo work and even the man himself – claimed this alleged detachment was exactly the thing they disliked about the band. But I never quite saw it as detachment, just as I never bought into the myth of Pavement as a group of self-consciously ironic slackers (no band makes it to the Tonight Show by virtue of a half-hearted try). My own interpretation of Malkmus’s sarcasm is that it’s a form of resistance or confrontation: Fuck you if you get it, fuck you if you don’t. Sort of like Kurt Cobain flipping off the world on the inside of the Nevermind album, only more subtle, possibly even more interesting.

Speaking of Kurt Cobain, there’s a bit in Heavier Than Heaven, the recent biography by Charles R. Cross, where Kurt’s walking through the MoMA – this is at the height of his fame and drug addiction – and is approached by a young black fan. “Kurt had been asked for his autograph a hundred times that day,” Cross writes, “but this was the only time he responded with a smile. Kurt told (Amy) Finnerty, ‘No one black has ever said they liked my record before.’”

It seems that Kurt, in addition to numerous other troubles, was plagued by at least a touch of white guilt. (Think, also, of the Incesticide liner notes and his somewhat misguided attack on white corporate America.) So what is it about punk and indie rock that prevents large-scale acceptance across the color lines? Hip-hop, though still largely the domain of black artists, has crossed over so thoroughly that the majority of rap records is now purchased by white suburban teenagers. I’m not suggesting the reverse could ever be true for indie rock, but aren’t there at least a few black people out there who get turned on by songs about Yul Brynner with lyrics that go, “I’ll tie you to a chair/the house music will blare/and turn your ears into a medicinal jelly”? If so, they were not in attendance at the Warsaw on the night of the Jicks show. Instead it was the typical assemblage of unemployed, hopelessly aspiring writer grad students, teetering on the edge of spectacular personal failure. But I suppose I shouldn’t speak for everyone.

The Warsaw, which looks from the outside like just another dingy Greenpoint bar, is actually a terrific place to see a show. Bands play in an adjoining space resembling a large high school gym with a stage at the end, similar to the Bowery Ballroom, only larger. I arrived with friends but the group splintered after the opening band and I wandered through the crowd until I was standing a few feet from the stage. Again I glanced casually around and took stock, but the sameness of the crowd didn’t trouble me as it had in years past, though I admit I briefly tried to force the issue. I was heartened to see some younger faces. Indie rock has evolved considerably since Pavement’s heyday, and I was unsure if the kids had pledged allegiance entirely to Bright Eyes or any of a host of newer bands competing for time on their iPods.

I’d like to report that the intervening years helped put my Malkmus infatuation into perspective as well, but that’s just not the case. The moment he took the stage and began tuning his guitars – what, no more guitar techs? – the old feelings of inadequacy came rushing to the fore. I’ll never have a sound or vision that recognizably my own, I thought, and my hair could never look that cool.

The band was in fine form, far tighter and more confident than the first time I’d seen them, shortly after the record was released. And while the band was tighter, Stephen Malkmus himself seemed far looser and less icy than at three of the four Pavement shows I saw. (The last was the Matador tenth-anniversary show – the band’s final appearance in New York – in September of 1999, and he seemed happier to be up there, maybe because he knew the end was near. Or here.)

Listen to all five Pavement records and the Jicks record back to back and you can trace Malkmus’s prodigious growth, not only as a songwriter, but also a guitar player. The turning point, I think, from indie guy with a penchant for writing beautiful drop-D-tuned melodies, to potential guitar hero, is the solo in “Rattled by the Rush,” which I’ve never bothered trying to figure out because I don’t want to deconstruct, and therefore diminish, its greatness. The flurry of guitar brilliance at the Warsaw reached an obvious zenith during the show’s closing number, which I think is called “One Percent of One.” I swear it lasted twenty minutes, and though I usually hate a monster jam (I once walked out of a Built to Spill show in a near-rage), the sheer fine guitar playing was enough to carry the day.

Photo by Rahav Segev

Not only that, but my crush on Malkmus was eclipsed suddenly by a crush I developed on Joanna Bolme, the Jicks’ bass player. The indie rock trail is littered with foxy female bassists, but Bolme has something that elevates her above, say, Kim Deal or D’arcy Wretsky, and it could either be the way she looks when exhaling cigarette smoke or the bass line from “Church on White.”

The show that night was a holiday benefit, complete with a raffle, and between the end of the set and the encore, Malkmus came out with a piece of paper and announced he was going to read the winning numbers. It seemed perfectly reasonable at first, but as the process wore on – there was an unusually long list of prizes, from T-shirts to DVD’s – and he dutifully recited row after row of digits, I had an odd perception, confirmed moments later by Malkmus himself. “I feel like I revealed myself more just now,” he said, “than any time during the whole show.” Then he threw down the paper and picked up his guitar.

There is a man who looks just like Hemingway who lives on India Street in Brooklyn in a building called the Astral, a dismal place with huge arching windows to remind you of its past glamour as an apartment building for international sailors (Mae West is said to have been born there). He lives right above a woman named Maria who cuts people’s hair in her apartment. This man, who I always call “Hemingway”, spends every day, all day long, looking through the trashcans on India Street for objects that he is interested in. Whenever he finds something that he likes, he puts it into a basket that is tied to a string leading up to his apartment. He then calls up to his son, Aristotle, who sticks his head out from the window, screams back in acknowledgment, and pulls the basket up to the apartment. Both are equally excited by the finds.

One day I went up to Hemingway, as he was carefully sorting out pieces of a broken mirror from a bent-up tin of macaroni and cheese, and I told him how much I liked his beard. I don’t know why I had the urge to do this. Perhaps I felt the need to interrupt his persistent activity, to see if he was capable of being distracted and responding to something other than a piece of trash. He slowly turned towards me and made a sound that was a definite expression of disgust and told me that he didn’t care for his beard that much after all. He said the only reason he keeps it is because a woman down the street pays him eight dollars a week not to shave it off. This left me feeling even more curious than I had been before. So now when I look out the window at Hemingway I think about the woman instead of the trash.