Except for development along the Brooklyn and Queens shores, things don’t change much on the river. It’s not unusual for a tug boat to pass the ferry pulling a barge upstream past the East River Generating Station and the United Nations Headquarters complex in Manhattan’s Turtle Bay neighborhood. My daughter—because the UN is in view, I will call her Olga Maximovna—waves at the boat. Who knows if anyone waves back. But I tell her that the skipper, no doubt bearded and well-seasoned by the salty air, has raised a tin mug of boiled coffee to her, in kind. And like clock work, as we’re just about at the 34th Street landing—and NYU’s Langone Medical Center—the ferry must give way to the good ship Red Hook, the Department of Environmental Protection’s newly commissioned sludge vessel, dedicated to transporting over two million gallons of river sludge per day—but to where? “To Who Knows Where, Olya,” I tell Olga Maximovna, addressing my daughter in the affectionate diminutive.

We take the ferry to Langone’s Rusk Institute for Rehabilitation Medicine, which is literally right across the river from where we live, for Olga Maximovna’s physical therapy sessions. But I tell her that one day, when all the therapy is finished and she can walk all by herself, we will take this same ferry to 34th Street and walk up, in the opposite direction, to the United Nations, and take the tour. After all, the ferry isn’t just for going to see the doctor. “And this time, Olya, Mommy will join us!” I always tell her how much her mother admires the design of the building—the so-called International style and it’s charmingly dated interior--even the tin ashtrays scattered throughout the facility from the cafeterias to the General Assembly Hall, where, in 1960, then Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe on his desk in response to a speech critical of the Soviet Union (not that it didn’t deserve it), and probably rattling more than a few ashtrays in the bargain. But I add that she’s got to hurry and finish with her therapy for good, because they’re renovating the whole complex, and I’m sure the ashtrays were already the first to go. Her mother is even wistful about the ashtrays. So am I. “But, ashtrays or not, you, Olga Maximovna, must bang your shoe, one you just walked through the door wearing, in the General Assembly room.” I address my daughter formally to underscore the significance I assign to this objective.

One day while crossing the river to the Manhattan side, I tell Olga Maximovna about the U.N.’s art collection, comprising gifts of goodwill from member countries. There are, among others, the tapestry of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, displayed at the entrance to the Security Council chamber; the Sword into Plowshares statue from Italy; the Japanese Peace Ball, rung but twice a year: on the first day of Spring and on every opening day in September of the annual sessions of the General Assembly; a magnificent stained glass window by Marc Chagall with its many symbols representing love and peace; a pair of Léger murals installed in the General Assembly Hall; and, of course, the Gun Tied in a Knot sculpture out in front of the complex. All these things and more, I tell Olga Maximovna, I want her to see, so she better hurry up with the therapy and learn to walk already.

Another day on the river, I tell Olga Maximovna about my own first trip to the United Nations when I was in junior high school. Then, in 1980, I had to take a bus from Newport, Rhode Island, with my classmates because I didn’t live in Brooklyn yet. I tell her about walking through the halls, seeing the art, and learning about the organization’s history and how, on the way back to Newport, the bus driver, who had been listening to Howard Cosell announce a football game, pulled over to the side of the road and made a serious announcement. Though we were children, he addressed us formally: “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please. They killed John Lennon of The Beatles. John Lennon is dead.” I tell her how he had let the second sentence—“John Lennon is dead”—just hang there so that it would sink into our 12-year-old heads. And how it really didn’t sink in. Maybe we had heard of The Beatles, but we didn’t know John Lennon from Adam. The driver, clearly distraught, shook his head and slapped an overhead luggage compartment in disappointment as he went back to his seat to resume the trip home to Newport. I tell Olga Maximovna that while I was too young to understand the significance that the bus driver had assigned to the death of John Lennon, I did see how sad Madame C—, our French teacher, looked when she heard the news—and how her mouth opened slightly and just stayed that way as she turned to Mr. C—, her husband - but not Monsieur C—, who taught social studies.

Looking upriver on another ferry ride, I tell Olga Maximovna how one year, before I had even met her mother, I had marched up the streets just a few blocks from where she gets her therapy to protest the impending war in Iraq. Thousands and thousands of people were holding signs and shouting in protest against the war as they made their way uptown to the United Nations Headquarters, before being turned away by police. I told her about how cold it was, but how it sometimes felt warmer because of all the people marching side by side, and how, somewhere in the big crowd, her mother was there, too, even though we didn’t know each other then. Nothing so dramatic as Roger LaPorte, the young seminary student who, in 1965, had set himself on fire at the United Nations to protest the Vietnam War—but he didn’t stop the war either. Speaking to Olga Maximovna then, I used the term “self-immolation” rather than “set himself on fire,” figuring that there was less of a chance of the former haunting her young dreams than the latter.

To change the subject, I tell her that the United Nations is located in a neighborhood called Turtle Bay, but that there are no turtles there. It was named that in the 17th century because it was a safe place to land and to build ships. Maybe there were turtles there back then, but it is no longer a safe place for them to lay their eggs.

During the Civil War, I tell Olga Maximovna, after the first Conscription Act was passed, the Army set up an enrollment center there, and men had to sign up to go to fight their brothers. On July 13, 1863, an angry mob burned the office to the ground and rioted all through Turtle Bay, destroying entire blocks—maybe that’s when the turtles had left. The riots went on for three days before troops managed to put down the mob, which had burned and looted much of the city. I assure Olga Maximovna that her mother and father had only chanted slogans as we marched through Turtle Bay about 150 years later.

On still another ferry ride, I tell Olga Maximovna about how Muammar Gaddafi, who they had killed just the day before, once tried to pitch his tent on the grounds of the United Nations, just blocks from where she gets her therapy, but they wouldn’t let him. They wouldn’t let him put it up in Central Park either, or in New Jersey, even. So he had to rent property outside the city from Donald Trump. He always slept in that tent, except, apparently, one night in 1986 when Ronald Reagan bombed his compound in Tripoli. Despite plans by Oliver North to lure Ghaddafi into the compound on the night of the bombing, he wasn’t there. Someone had tipped him off. So they only ended up killing his daughter instead (I regretted telling Olga Maximovna this last detail. Just a year earlier, Nancy Reagan had given a mosaic to the United Nations to celebrate the organization's 40th anniversary. The Golden Rule mosaic was based on a painting by Norman Rockwell. Depicting people of all races, religion, and creeds, the mosaic tells everyone “to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

I go on to tell Olga Maximovna, the murky waters so gray and thick as to appear like the ferry is cutting through something solid, about how in another military operation, President Obama had killed Osama Bin Laden, though unlike Ronald Reagan, he didn’t bomb his compound, instead using specially trained men to sneak into his house and shoot him. That night, everyone in New York was out in the streets celebrating the killing of the man who had ordered that two airplanes be crashed into the World Trade Center (For context, I gestured downriver to the empty piece of the skyline where the Twin Towers once stood before the two planes had crashed into them.). That is, everyone except us. That night, I was struggling to feed Olga Maximovna while her mother was sleeping in the bedroom, herself exhausted from an earlier failed feeding. Still, had the circumstances been different, I’m sure we wouldn’t have joined in the party. “It’s a strange thing to cheer about, don’t you think, Olya?” I ask my skinny, red-haired daughter. It’s not like it made the river any safer for a little girl to go to physical therapy.

Even just a few weeks ago at 34th Street landing while waiting for the ferry to take us back across to the Brooklyn side, I saw that on our part of the East River there was a small Coast Guard boat with a mounted machine gun pointed in our direction, bobbing gently in the wake of the good sludge ship Red Hook. A machine gun pointed in the direction of little Olga Maximovna and the hospital she rides a ferry to twice a week for help learning to walk. Thankfully, she was napping, exhausted from a tough session.

This year’s General Assembly meeting started at the United Nations only this morning. They must have rung the Japanese Peace Bell just a few hours ago, I wonder aloud to the sleeping Olga Maximovna if the tug boat skipper had heard it sounding over the river as he made his way past Turtle Bay, pulling a barge full of who knows what to who knows where among the river folk.

Kevin Kinsella is a writer and critic. Most recently his work has appeared in/on The Believer magazine and Bomb magazine's Web site. He is the translator (from Russian) of Sasha Chernyi's "Poems from Children's Island" (Lightful Press) and Osip Mandelshtam's "Tristia" (Green Integer).

In “Here is New York” E.B. White described three New Yorks: one for those who were born here, one for those who commute here, and one for those who moved here seeking something. I live in the first one and my students in the third. The third, he wrote, is the best: the city as “final destination.” I may give the city “continuity,” but they give it “passion.” I accept its idiosyncrasies as natural, but they see it with “fresh eyes.” Sometimes, though, walking over the bridge can make me feel like both kinds of New Yorkers at once.

To walk over the bridge is to pass faux lanterns, to glimpse rough waters underneath your feet, to follow the weaving path of bolts that look like they were hammered in by hand. On the other side is aspirational Manhattan: corporate headquarters greet you as you step onto concrete. Over the winter the walk was blustery and cold. Hands in pockets, I would hunch against the wind. The bridge fit into this setting: steel gray, pale stone, the water below dark and fierce. Its arches reach up to the sky like trees, but foreshadow the buildings to come. They form two narrow doorways to the city ahead, pointing upward and dangerously high and sharp. A metaphor.

I walked rain or shine. Once I walked across with my umbrella until I realized it wasn’t really raining at all. I noticed that the bridge’s beams were really a pinkish beige like sea shells and it was the water that looked like steel. I put away my umbrella and was overwhelmed with silvery sky, wide, open vistas of air and space. Mid-semester, slumped in their seats, my students were tired of unifying imagery and hot words and endings-that-brought-their-beginnings-to-a-new-place. I told them about walking over the bridge that morning and the awe of the open sky above. “Look up!” I told them. “Look for the big picture. Bring some blue sky into your writing.” I’ll say it again.

They do look. One student wrote that in his essays White used the passing of time in nature to illuminate the passing of generations. A dragonfly still hovers over the rowboat White shares with his son, and he had once shared with his father, in “Once More to the Lake,” so that “there had been no years.” Father and son fish together, but White is not sure who is holding the rod: which father? Which son? White’s city was before me, the same and different, old and new. Who is holding this pen?

Today, the bridge exceeds any lifespan. At 125 years, it is older than my students, older than me, older than White. There will be other students, other eyes. White had nature to show how change happens –to us, through us, despite us. We New Yorkers have a bridge: a mountain of stone rooted in earth and directing our eyes upward, a web of steel reaching backwards and forwards. Right now there is another solid blue, cloudless sky over the bridge. Go look.

Victoria Olsen teaches expository writing at New York University.

“Back” meaning: back on heroin.

Olga, who asked that her and her daughter’s names be changed for this story, came to New York City with her family in 1997, refugees from the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. In the 1990s, more than 200,000 refugees from the former Soviet Union poured into the United States, eager to escape the political and economic upheavals that accompanied the collapse of the country.

That helped inject new life into South Brooklyn’s Russian enclaves, but also triggered a heroin epidemic among New York’s young Russian-Americans.

Olga’s daughter Tanya got her first taste of heroin with a group of older Russian kids when she was 12, and was soon hooked.

“I felt hopeless,” Olga says. “So many times I was feeling, that’s it, my daughter is a drug addict. I cannot do anything.”

After five years and a string of treatment programs, Tanya broke her heroin addiction–but only after her closest friend overdosed and died. Now she’s 21 and drug-free, with a job and her own apartment.

Heroin, popular, cheap, and easy to find throughout the former Soviet Union after the Afghan War in the 1980s, is still popular among Russian-American teens today.

“There’s a lot of heroin around,” said Anna Snol, a drug counselor who works exclusively with Russian-American addicts at Seafield Services in Brooklyn. “Of course, they mix it–it’s not the only drug that they use. They try to experiment.”

It’s easy to find heroin and other drugs on the streets of New York’s Russian communities, Tanya said. Getting high made her feel “better than anything” at a time when she was struggling to adjust to American life. “It was hard, and I didn’t want to be here,” she said. “Then my friend was doing [heroin], so I wanted to try it.”

Olga agreed that immigration-related hardships likely triggered her daughter’s drug use. “Especially for teenagers–it’s stressful,” she says. “You come over to a new country, new environment, new kids. And the Russian kids stick with each other, and a lot of kids are already on the drugs–they give you some way to relax.”

That’s not an uncommon situation.

“Immigration is one of the major traumas,” said Natalia Zayachkivska, director of Project H.E.L.P., a nonprofit that has long provided drug treatment programs for Russian-speakers. “And that is one of the major contributing factors in substance abuse. Sometimes [immigration] is triggering [substance abuse]. Sometimes people bring their problems with substances when they immigrate, and get sucked in deeper and deeper.”

But drug and alcohol use was also common in the former USSR.

“They’re experienced with alcohol and drugs since they were in Russia,” said psychotherapist Mikhail Shats of the Russian-American Community Coalition. “It’s common–it’s how we cope with stress. It’s the traditional medicine for the Russian soul.”

In the United States, drugs are often easier to find, and parents working long hours to get ahead have trouble supervising their children as strictly as they did at home, Shats said.

“I am an immigrant myself, and I’m still working three jobs,” said Shats, who came to New York from Ukraine almost a decade ago. “I can’t manage my kids. I just can’t–I’m not at home. And the schools are full of drugs.”

The lack of specialized treatment programs for Russian speakers in New York compounds the problem. There’s only a cluster of small for-profit outpatient programs, providing quick-fix detox. That’s a problem, because Russian-Americans cannot always express themselves in English and most are uncomfortable with American-style drug treatment programs that require addicts to talk openly in group therapy sessions.

“We’re traditionally a closed society,” Shats says. “You must keep your secrets in your own closet.”

He points out that this was a necessity for people living in the former Soviet Union–especially for drug addicts, who could be subjected to punishing “treatments” and public humiliation.

Olga and Tanya suffered such cultural disconnects at the mainstream treatment programs Tanya tried. “I couldn’t relate to most of those people,” Tanya recalled.

And because most of Tanya’s programs were conducted in English, she struggled to communicate.

“First of all, language is a big problem for kids who just came–they cannot speak English,” Olga said. “Second of all, we are not so open to talk in front of everyone about our problems. Maybe we’re shy, we try to hide–because it’s a different mentality than American people have.”

In the decade since the heroin epidemic began, little research has been done on Russian-American drug addicts in New York. Data that tracks drug treatment referrals in the city health system can’t isolate Russian participation, as it only identifies clients by race.

“That’s the biggest problem–nobody researches this,” Shats says. “We are not minorities by definition. That’s why no research money is spent on us.”

New York’s Russian-American community has little political power to push for research or more culturally-appropriate addict treatment programs, said Dr. S. Lala Straussner, a professor at New York University’s School of Social Work.

“I think [drug abuse] is vastly underestimated, because [Russian-Americans] don’t have their own power, and there’s no lobby for their services,” she said.

Dr. Straussner conducted a small study of drug abuse trends in Brooklyn’s Russian enclaves in 2004, the only research published on the topic so far. She had hoped to continue her study, but couldn’t find funding.

It’s a frustrating reality Shats understands all too well.

“We try to connect with all possible politicians to address these issues,” he says. “I sent letters to city and state officials, and no one answered.”

Anne Noyes Saini has worked for The New York Times‘ DealBook blog, NPR, and the Cambridge Chronicle (Cambridge, Mass.). Most recently, her stories have been featured in the Christian Science Monitor, City Limits magazine, and Worldpress.org. She completed her master’s degree in journalism at New York University in 2007.

First, though, one has to venture to the more wind-swept precincts of Manhattan, on the far West Side, toward the great glass Oz of the convention center. And then traverse acres of lobby–the building is composed largely of lobbies, it seems, upstairs lobbies and downstairs lobbies and upper upstairs lobbies–and you see that without any strain at all the center is also housing the annual boat show, where patrons may ogle tons of fiberglass surrounding engines that will effortlessly suck up a year’s pay in petrol and just as quickly release it as greenhouse gas. Sort of a two-fer.

When finally you locate the ticket windows assigned to relieving your pocket of seventeen dollars (for the privilege of viewing the wares of other companies whose interest is to similarly lighten your load), your brain might flash you an image of Sam’s Club. It, too, is a commercial enterprise that makes you pay them in order to be able to pay them. A singularly late-twentieth-century concept.

Lest you stand there dumbstruck by the possibilities of this notion, here comes a tide of leather-clad humanity to sweep you down the stairs and into the carpeted hall that for one weekend becomes a temple dedicated to the worship of internal combustion, in all its two-wheeled manifestations. And there are many, many.

The staff that belongs to the machines only recently unloaded from the semis parked end to end up 35th Street and down Twelfth Avenue look on with worried smiles as men and women throw legs over shining gas tanks and pull up 490 pounds of dry weight to balance it precariously between two feet. One dropped bike can mean a broken side mirror or a cracked fairing, and everything translates quickly into numbers. This is surely evidenced by the endless rows of tables full of aftermarket parts from small companies, clip-on handlebars and exhaust systems and foot pegs, saddlebags and custom seats (raising the question of why Moto Guzzi doesn’t just affix comfortable seats to their products in the first place).

One would have liked to see what Breughel would have done with the three fellows sitting by the refreshment carts, together yet alone in their silence, dourly dispatching soft pretzels and Cokes as if they were peasant reivers at lunchtime, downing their warm ale and cold mutton.

Around the corner from them one finds a contemporary example of the painter’s art, an airbrushed scene from Easy Rider, over which hover the disembodied faces of Che, Hendrix, and Jim Morrison. The wondering viewer can tease out only one possible theme: early, violent death.

Such is exuberantly celebrated in other items for sale: miles of patches showing skeletons riding motorcycles or skulls with flags, proclaiming adherence to either American nationalism or the credo of Ride Fast, Die Young; perhaps they are the same thing. The uneasy thoughts raised here are quelled farther down the aisles, where one encounters pleasantries like massaging insoles, ear plugs, wheel chocks, jackets, helmets, boots, and gloves, sunglasses, cleaning products, shining products, insurance, custom paint jobs, tires, bumper stickers, jewelry. The longing eyes of those manning the tables follow the streams of people who wander past, nearly empty plastic shopping sacks flapping from their hands. (These provided courtesy of Progressive, #1 in Motorcycle Insurance, to all comers at the entrance.) By the end, hundreds of bags will leave the show containing only glossy brochures of the 2008 model lines of the major manufacturers, no doubt because that seventeen dollars was a serious hit on the finances of many motorcyclists, who are squarely located in what was once called the working class. They have come here to dream, and dreams are free. As are brochures.

Those to whom “free” is not a concern, however, might be found at the BMW display. This is good, since a K 1200 R sportbike costs as much as many new cars. (Still, these are liberals, one feels certain; the conservatives buy American iron, and are thus to be found walking among the Harleys and Victorys.) Stand and watch a moment: like metal filings to a magnet, the literally well-heeled (see those handsome Italian loafers!) gravitate to the impressive and rugged German engineering, the bikes with the reputation for attracting riders who really ride; BMW Motorrad has cornered the market on long-distance touring and those specialists who think it amusing to ride hundreds of miles in a day, and through the night, during the aptly named Iron Butt Rally. BMW’s large, one almost wants to say gigantic, or maybe wide as a truck, enduro bike is the choice of those who dream of crossing Tibet on two wheels, or winning the Paris-Dakar.

This being the world, or a world within the world, things soon appear to fracture. The colors refracted from the crystal of a unified idea of “motorcycling” dance alone. The sensual Italian Ducatis draw to them the thrill- and the status-seeker; technology majors stare at the cutaway of a Buell, whose gas tank is not actually where you think, in that bubble that touches your stomach as you lean down and lean over to take a curve; it’s still there, but now subtly translucent plastic, as if to say “fooled ya,” and the gas is in the frame.

The factions here, as in all our worlds, are really political, financial, finally social, and in this, perhaps, ultimately biological. Here on the floor of the Javits Center is represented the tribal history of man.

Ten years ago the show was half this size, and half this complexity. Now there are so many things to buy, so many things to understand about what we build and why.

The select few have become the overwhelming many. In this, the motorcycle show reflects what is beginning to scare the visitor: a planet teeming with too many of us, and too much of the stuff we need to buy in order to differentiate ourselves because we sense we are about to disappear into the squeezing hordes. When spring does arrive, we will go out for a ride, and we will be too numerous to feel our solitariness, that which draws us together again. And next January, the motorcycle show will be bigger than ever.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson’s first book, The Perfect Vehicle, was about motorcycles. She never managed to actually live in Manhattan: she only got to look at it from both sides, Hoboken and Brooklyn, before decamping to upstate.

And I had to get up and shower, leaving her in my room and I took the loofa with me because I scrub the dead skin off my body every Saturday. My father says that as a Puerto Rican he only showers once a week, on Saturday, so that’s when I scrub; my arms, back, neck, tween my breasts, above my torso. I head into the bathroom head down, rolling and bobbing. She does not smoke one of her Newports, afraid of getting hit with a lecture, afraid the plan might crash and burn.

When I come out, I feel that wierdness of being half naked. My closet is full of clothing that I am not allowed to wear, and I really can’t remember what it’s doing there, except that I have a sister at the time, and she has a job on Riverdale Avenue. I open the closet door to unwrap my body and dress behind it as if it were a screen protecting Micki and me from each other because we spend so much time together that I am uptight.

I get into my draws, top, bottom and kicks; and put a rubberband in my hair. We get outside and Micki does not light a cigarette. With stupid written across my forhead I decide to go to her crib from my crib. We go through ‘C-ROCK,’ which is like dope for delinquents. All the thugs around have climbed it and jumped off it’s erection. Diving into the river across the street from my flat has killed a few, but how many more birds or people has the Metro North taken? Obviously not nearly enough lives, if you believe in learning the hard way; with a beating.

Watching our backs, we cross the street and take a quarter block up hill, then down the steps and walk past all the commercials. At the end, getting ready to jump off the platform, onto rocks of the tracks–it makes my adrenaline rush and I feel quickly that I am ‘double zero 35771105am’ and not a wise ass, like my eee-con teacher says at City-As -School.

Micki and I will probably smoke a blunt of that cancer curing marijuana in a white owl cigar skin, maybe a DutchMaster. The coast is clear except for the people attending gym at John F. Kennedy High School outside on their football field.

We don’t see the authorities and keep moving, first quickly, then just strolling. Finally we arrive at place behind the sky blue letter C- framed in white and large for all to note, representing for Columbia University. Here is a nice safe place where we settle down, a place you cannot hear the train ah-coming and everything is peacefull.

Carrying my chair, beach bag and small cooler the few
final yards to my usual spot, I was almost past the part I dreaded.

It was the trek from the parking lot at Riis Park in the Rockaways, to my little beach at the start of neighboring Breezy Point.

To get there, I had to walk past the families bar-b-queing on patches of dried grass beneath the trees alongside the black tar parking lot, past the bathrooms and concession stand that never opened these days, past the lifeguards, and the wood jetties, and past the crowds of sunbathers who opted for the convenience of the closest beach.

It may have been only a seven-minute walk but my anticipation of the quiet relaxation that was so imminent made the walk seem longer.

Unlike many city dwellers who signed up for shares in the Hamptons or Fire Island, this out-of-the-way beach on the Rockaway peninsula was my ultimate salvation. Having grown up in Belle Harbor, about 20 blocks and a fifteen minute walk away, this beach had special meaning to me. Like the pull of the
tide, I felt myself drawn to it. Only now I made the commute every weekend from Park Slope, Brooklyn, to Exit 11S on the Belt Parkway — “The Rockaways.”

I never leave my apartment later than 9:30 a.m. in order to
avoid beach traffic, keeping the half-hour car ride bearable.
As a kid, the proximity of the beach was something I took for granted, just a short walk or a two minute bike ride on my pink Raleigh. It was like a private club for the residents since parking was prohibited on the streets in Belle Harbor during the summer months. If you didn’t have a driveway, you were out of luck.

In this small beach community, everyone knew each
other and you went to the beach at the end of your block. My landmarks for various beaches were the distinct houses that stood directly behind the beach wall at the end of each block. Back then, you could actually pay to have someone store your beach chairs and set them up for you at the choice spots near the shoreline, awaiting your arrival. Neighbors assembled on the
weekends, forming large semicircles of chairs where the gossip flowed as freely as the snacks and soft drinks available from their well-stocked coolers.

The only times I ventured into Riis Park, against my mother’s warnings, was when my girlfriends and I, seeking some excitement, took the short walk to the chain link fence that separated Riis Park from the private domain of neighboring Neponsit and Belle Harbor. Crawling through the hole in the
fence that gave us access, we were out to sneak glimpses of the nude sunbathers that paraded around that section of the public beach.

It never took long before some older guy with a big belly rolled over on his towel and sent us, grossed out and giggling, scrambling back to the safety and homogeneity of our family-oriented beach.

So it was part instinct and part accident that landed me years later on this particular beach at the end of Riis Park. I came back to what was familiar. But things were different now.

I was part of the masses.

I required parking.

But situating myself among the hoards of beach-goers was just not possible for me. I needed space. I needed someplace quiet to read. I just kept walking until I found it.

Year after year, the same core of beach worshippers showed up at what became my adopted beach. I suppose we all shared the same love of the sea and surf but also a similar disdain for the crowds and noise. They were mostly fellow Brooklynites who ventured over the Marine Park Bridge into what was technically part of Queens.

My landmark was Jim, an eccentric ex-commodities trader who was always there by the time I arrived by 10:00 am. He got there much earlier, judging by the number of empty coffee cups
that surrounded his blanket. His bony body was greased down with oil and already tan at the start of the season. He was an odd duck, who went for dunks in the ocean clutching his SPF #2 tanning oil, dressed in his skimpy, colorful Speedo swimsuit and thick gold chain glistening around his neck.

Jim and I rarely spoke except to greet each other at the beginning and end of each beach day.

“I was gettin’ nervous!” he yelled to me from the shoreline in his
distinctive Brooklyn accent, when he saw me approach for my first weekend of the summer. He held his arms over his head making fists in the air, feeling triumphant for experiencing such a glorious day while the sun gleamed off his body.

I laughed at his intensity as I waved a greeting and moved on to
my spot.

I wouldn’t have known much about Jim if it hadn’t been for Carole, another regular. She was a school teacher from Starrett City, divorced with grown kids, and a talker. We introduced ourselves about three years back when we realized we would be seeing each other every weekend here at the beach. She filled me in on others I hadn’t felt inclined to talk to and ask what I
considered to be prying questions.

Carole didn’t have this problem.

She had the scoop on Jim and just about anyone else that frequented our beach more than twice.

There was always a bit of drama with Carole. During one of our
conversations the previous summer she said, “See that guy over there?” she nodded in the direction of a slightly overweight, silver-haired man with a hairy chest wearing cotton swimming trunks. “I dated him a couple of times and now he won’t leave me alone. I’m going to have to set him straight. I mean, it’s more annoying than scary but it’s time, you know?”

I watched my reflection in her large, plastic sunglasses, nodding my head as she spoke.

Every summer Carole updated me on her social endeavors, her e-mail dating, stock trading, and her countdown towards her retirement from her teaching profession. This summer I had to do a double take as she walked towards me—I barely recognized her without the thirty pounds she dropped over the winter. She was a new woman in her two-piece suit and long layered hair she had grown into a Farah Fawcett look. There would be no stopping her now.

I wasn’t always in the mood for conversation, but with Carole, sometimes there wasn’t a choice. “You look terrific!” I told her. “I barely recognized you.”

“Oh yeah, I decided it was time to eat healthy,” she looked around as she spoke and her dangling, earrings jangled softly. “It’s a new me.” I congratulated her further and began to inch toward my towel, longing to collapse into my beach chair and bury myself in my Philip Roth novel.

Instantly, drowning me in thoughts of that horrific day downtown in August of 2000 when I attempted to swim a mile in the Hudson River.

The New York City Swims people e-mailed a friendly reminder to sign up for this summer’s swim, 8/4/02, from the South Cove in Battery Park City to Pier 25 for Gotham’s fluvial freaks. For its aquatic acrobats. For its Spitz-ian marks. For its river rats. For its Hudson heroes.

Of which I was almost one…if just for one day.

The swim began around noon on a typical August day. Hot, but not the core-melting heat that would dissolve the neurons in the average citizen’s brain telling them that jumping into the greasy West Side river was not a respectable way to kill a lazy summer afternoon. My fiancée Kim and I had nobody to blame but those damned Kenyans…or, more precisely, a composite of every fat, sweaty, all-vital-signs-appear-tapped-out jogger in ill-fitting mesh shorts who toils in the dark shadows on the November evening of the New York City Marathon.

It is a scientific fact that 95% of marathon attendees (no matter how many Bud drafts are breast-stroking through their veins, no matter how sculpted out of cheese logs their abs appear to be, no matter how epic the struggle was to get off the sofa and go to a diner for three-eggs-over-easy-side-of-crispy-bacon instead of having them delivered while catching the marathon, be it New York City or My Two Dads, on the tube), will declare at some point “I’d like to run one. I think I could do it.” These thoughts of glory are often announced late in the day when the one-timers in their odd shapes, sizes and skill levels keep pushing on through the pain, blood and vomit to cross the finish line, mainly to be able to drop in conversation forevermore, “I ran the New York City Marathon.”

I, however, will never run the New York City Marathon.

Kim, however, suggested that we should partake in a sporty activity that was “Marathon-like”: challenging, attempted by only a handful and a foolish attempt at stretching the limits of one’s corporeal plane in the physical universe so later we could tell people at rooftop keg parties, “Lots of people run the marathon, we swam the Hudson River.”

The day started ominously: I was the only one not wearing a Speedo. The Speedo (AKA: banana wrap, marble bag, device for quickly discerning who is a Jew or a Gentile) appeared to be mandatory, or at least, strongly recommended by swimmers who knew what they were doing. I, however, went with the less aerodynamic but more sartorially agreeable, tent-sized Old Navy beachcomber shorts. They looked good and did a workmanlike job of covering my love handles (AKA: side-saddles, waist mumps, Homer Simpsons) and accompanying stretch marks (AKA: flesh graffiti, racing stripes, Tony the Tigers).

Unfortunately, the rust-colored, floral-patterned trunks could do little to disguise my underdeveloped pectorals (AKA: man boobs, bitch tits, Meat Loafs), but that was all right, because I wanted them to know that I was a novice, a one-timer, a guy with a need for a story at cocktail hour.

It took about five seconds for the realization to kick in: I was a novice. A one-timer. A guy with a need for a story at cocktail hour.

I was in way over my head, which meant I’d soon be swimming with the fishes in the Mafioso boneyard.

The organizers of the swim began by shouting, “Welcome to the inaugural Park to Park One Miler. The conditions are very severe today! It is choppy and fast. Stay away from the water wall and get into the current. You must wear the neon green swim caps we gave you and not your own so we can easily spot you in case of emergency. Everybody make your way to the jumping off point, watch out for jetsam and flotsam. Have a great swim!”

I puy my fate in the reflective powers of a neon green swim cap.

Laughter ensued as the heroin-chic-meets I-log-five-miles-a-day-at-the Health-&-Racket-pool-crowd all knew one another and seemed to view the one-mile “sprint” as a lark, a burst of spontaneous energy before they got back on their mountain bikes and rode to Philadelphia.

As I apprehensively waddled to the edge like a seven year-old riding the Zipper for the first time, I wondered: How is it all the professional NYC Swims folks have avoided direct contact with sunlight? Are my goggles going to stay on? Does this suit make me look fat? What the hell is jetsam?

“It’s not to late to turn back,” Kim half-joked.

“It’ll all be over soon. Good luck.”

We jumped into the Hudson.

I made my way to the back of the pack. And promptly gulped down a pint of Atlantic run-off. I cleared my throat and began bobbing. Up and down. Up and down. Hey this isn’t so hard…

“On your mark, get set, go!”

And I was off. Or moving forward. At the very least, I was swimming. In the Hudson. I was doing it.

For awhile.

I passed the .5-mile mark, where millionaires prove their masculinity by purchasing cavernous yachts and parking them in full-view of all. I heard a few claps and some faint shouts of encouragement from the mainland. Peaceful, positive reinforcement, immediately shattered by the little man in the red kayak.

“Get out from the wall!”

“Get in the current!”

“Are you OK?”

Along the swim route, kayaks provided a barrier, and aided swimmers if they got in trouble. They also encouraged swimmers to get away from the wall, to get into the current, to ensure they were OK, and then to direct boats to come pick up swimmers who completed the .5-mile Cove to Cove route.

I panicked.

I tried rolling over for a calming backstroke.

No go.

I rolled over to maybe dog paddle a bit and get my bearings. My sea legs. My untapped source of physicality that would push me on through flotsam – does flotsam literally mean brown, shit-like or actual shit remnants, because if so, I had failed the instruction to avoid the flotsam — swim, you idiot. Swim, damnit. Swim like you got a pair. Swim like…OK I’m done.

I stagnated to a crawl and crawled to a stagnate. I couldn’t locate the current. I was too close to the wall. I heard yelling in my neon-green capped ears. I interpreted them to be voices of extreme distress.

Was I drowning? Was I going under? Did I really want to die covered in flotsam or jetsam or raw sewage or whatever waste product war paint dotted my body?

“Could I rest on your kayak for just a second…?”

You slow down, the boat is summoned.

The kayaker now reassuringly said, “You’re OK. Boat’ll be here in just a minute.”

Determination ran through my head.

You were the one who kept yelling was I OK, I was fine. Let me get back at it. I’m even with the end of the wall. Pier 25 is in my sights. There’s nobody left out here except for a really old guy on his back and a pregnant waif and if they can make it, I can make it. I just need to find the current. I am OK, goddamnit. I’m three-quarters of the way home. I just have to push on like those Kenyans, no like those fat guys, like this fat guy. I’m a fat guy. I can do this thing. I can swim a mile in the Hudson River. I can swim…

“You need help getting on the boat?”

“You bet’cha.”

I rode back to shore with an adolescent girl who will probably conquer the 28.5-mile marathon swim around the entirety of Manhattan, and a portly, balding Englishman who chuckled his arse off and explained how he’d lost a bet. I assumed it started the night before with something along the lines of “Slag off, ya’ feckers. I put a night’s worth of Boddingtons I can swim a feckin’ mile in the Hudson. How many ‘ours we got? Five, fine pour me another feckin’ ale.”

Me, I cursed the river and wallowed in fulfilling embarrassment of a job poorly done. It didn’t get any better at Pier 25 when I exited the boat and the volunteer said, “Hey you deserve a gift basket. At least you tried.” I might have well been in the Special Olympics with bright orange floaties on my elbows, “Hey, everyone’s a winner, give me a hug.”

But that isn’t fair to the Special Olympics.

Those swimmers would’ve finished.

A few hours and a few beers later, I snapped out of my funk. Kim and I compared waterlogged details. She, of course, finished (and got a snazzy frosted glass trophy for finishing third in the women’s 25-29 age group), but claims she only made it because she thought I was ahead of her. This may or may not be true, but the important thing is that she finished.

And I didn’t.

And I am never going to run the New York City marathon.

I opened the e-mail and toyed with the idea of getting back in the pool to train for the Park to Park One Miler. Conquer the salty beast that taunts me whenever I stroll through Battery Park City. Lick both jetsam and flotsam literally and figuratively. Maybe even pack myself into a Speedo. I know what I should do…start slow and swim the .5-mile Cove to Cove route.

Nah, I already crossed that finish line.

Ask me about it sometime.

This whole neighborhood, along the western spine of Manhatan, has always been mysterious to me, with its deserted steamship offices that look like flaking venetian facades, and its imperturbable warehouses where no one can ever go in or out. A few blocks east are skyscrapers, but between those skyscrapers and the waterfront lie empty lots where my imagination has more than enough room to turn frightened. Emily parked the car, and we heeled our shoes cautiously on the tractionless ice.

The fire had been a week a ago. It had been so close to zero the night of the blaze, and ever since, that the water from the fire hoses had frozen. Sheets of white ice hung down the collapsed timbers, which were charred black and leaning diagonally against each other. Looking at the warehouse was like staring into an unfinished cathedral of snow. Smoke continued to pour up, apparently from the warehouse basement where the fire was still alive, incredibly enough, in all this ice.

The smoke burned the eyes so that we didn’t get any closer to the ruins than across the street. The smoke floated up between the webs of ice and out of the roof and across the street to our side, to some railroad tracks lifted on a raised plaform, with iron railings, behind which were stalled maroon-brown freight cars. Everything began to swim together in a delicate chalky light that was uncanny, no matter where I looked. The bones of ice, the boxcars, the ruined warehouse, the half-moon. It was like an overhead shot in a wonderful suspense movie when something horrible is about to happen; the filigree of the train railings had a trembling clarity, a rib of aquamarine seen through the smoke, as though in a grisaille painting.

But these comparisons with art only understate the rareness of the spectacle. We all realized we might never see its like again. Emily began taking pictures. The watchmen from the fire department returned, and Emily, who is good at striking up conversations with policean or museum guards, left us and started talking with them.

Kay and I were shivering; it was too much of a good thing. I wanted to get in the warm car and go to the party. I signaled to Emily with a yank of my head (she ignored me, of course); then I headed for her fire-engine-red Volkswagen to wait by the hood. At this farther distance and angle, the warehouse did not look so special. What if the poetry had already drained from the scene? It was a matter of getting that grey green to line up with the white again.

I was debating whether to clatter back to a closer vantage point, when Emily wandered over to us, explaining as she opened her car door: “I just wanted to find out if the night watchmen felt too jaded to enjoy it.”

“Were they?”

“I said to them, “I find this very beautiful – do you?” and one guy said, “It’s tremendous! I can’t get enough of looking at it.”

We were pleased with his answer, suddenly feeling warm affection, probably condescending, for the watchman who shared our aesthetic excitement. So, apparently everyone thought this was an extraordinary sight. The knowledge of its universal appeal reassured me, even as it spoiled the pleasure slightly.

In any case, we were probably the only people at the party we were going to who had seen it.

1980

When I go looking for her I carry binoculars, because she’s usually off in the distance and there are many who resemble her. Diana is a Moran tugboat: snub-nosed, roughly a hundred feet long, with a flaking red paint job, and a black smokestack emblazoned with a prominent white “M.” When I was one of her deckhands, in the spring of 2000, she dealt exclusively with garbage. Twenty-four hours a day she picked up barges — each one a 600-ton mosaic of soiled diapers, burnt mattresses, dismembered dolls, shattered TV’s, pianos with missing keys and protruding wire strings — at marine terminals located throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, and ferried them to Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island. The job required a crew of eight — captain, mate, engineer, cook, and four deckhands — to live on board for seven days, then swap with another crew.

Privacy was nonexistent. When one guy sneezed, everyone got a cold. At first it was worth it because I was learning seamanship, a long-held dream of mine. (I also learned that living harmoniously with seven other people on a tugboat was far more challenging than enduring the stench of the surrounding garbage, which invited excretory seagulls and swarms of flies.) But I learned something else on Diana: how one unthinking comment can eventually come to haunt you.

On my first few hitches, the crew was less than charitable. The seasoned veterans seemed to resent my not knowing the routine, or, more likely, they enjoyed it, as they lorded their knowledge over me. The only one who never gave me flak was Maddy, the Puerto Rican cook. She was a stubby woman in her early-thirties, and the crew was savage to her.

When I was off shift I would read a paperback on the stern. The senior deckhand, Dave, who refused to break me in, would snicker. “The answer ain’t in there,” he said once. “Better you grow eyes in the back a’ your head.”

He was rumored to have put Visine in a former deckhand’s food, and had body odor and oral hygiene befitting medieval times. The rest of the crew followed his lead, or at least never intervened. Whenever a new deckhand arrived, he became the object of Dave’s hate. One large, doughy Irishman from Bay Ridge broke down under the hazing. After each shift he’d retire to his rack, press a pillow against his face, and cry until it was time to work again. He was one of five deckhands Diana chewed up during the time I was there.

None of the dropouts were as tough as Maddy, who toiled onward like the tug herself. When she burned our steak, which was often, the crew beaned her with the charred beef. Once, she was allowed to prepare her native arroz con pollo, and it was delicious. But the all-white crew claimed it was inedible “wet-back food,” spat it out, and chanted, “Steak! Steak! Steak!”

She cooked with a frightened expression on her face, as if her next blunder might mean walking the plank. She couldn’t afford to get fired; her family depended on her $80-a-day salary.

After she finished the dishes and cleaned the galley, she’d place a foot on the starboard gunwale and smoke a Newport. Her short legs and arms were thick, and her usual outfit, a purple sweatsuit, was unflattering.

One day I found myself next to her on deck while she took a post-dinner cigarette break. She offered me a butt. I declined but began a conversation.

“Purple’s your color,” I said. It was the only thing I could think of.

“Yeah? I been into Prince since forever.”

A few minutes passed, but the silence wasn’t awkward. She smiled at the sunset over Bayonne. We agreed that New Jersey had the best sunsets, due to all the pollutants. She pointed out that I was squinting, just as she was, and asked me if it was due to the sun, the diesel fumes, or the garbage.

“No,” I said, grinning. “It’s Dave.”

“Same here.” She giggled. We resolved to anonymously buy Dave a toiletry kit filled with all the essentials and an instant friendship was formed.

“Yo, Zach,” she said before we parted. “You the first dude on this boat I ever said could get a cigarette.”

Over the next few hitches, I was gradually accepted as one of the crew. I started spending more time in the wheelhouse than alone on the stern or talking with Maddy. Although I was appalled by the captain’s treatment of her, his vast knowledge of the harbor drew me to him — not only did he know its lore, but seemingly every bump and eddy of the surrounding waters. In time, he spoke freely with me, about everything from his days as a deckhand to his current woman troubles and I grew comfortable with him, maybe too comfortable.

Maddy and I stayed friends, though. Occasionally she put on lipstick and earrings. No one took notice, but I’d flatter her. “Whoa, if Prince saw you, you know he’d bust a move.”

“You corny, man,” she’d respond, her spirits clearly buoyed.

But Maddy had some nasty habits that had begun to bother me. Sometimes she’d swat a fly with her hands, wipe the remains on her apron, and continue to cook. I wondered if this was a mistake, or if she really didn’t know the difference. I started observing her more closely and noticed her doing things like spitting down the sink drain when she thought no one was looking. Eventually, I broached my concern about her uncleanliness with the captain. We were a garbage tug, after all.

He bore down on me. “You see something I should know about?” he said.

I dodged, I hedged (was I completely sure she didn’t wash her hands after killing a fly? And what if she preferred to wash in the head, or five minutes before I entered the galley?), but it was too late. The damage had been done. I would’ve given a week’s salary to retrieve my words.

I pleaded with the captain to let me handle it, but he told me to take the wheel, and clambered down the ladder to the galley. He ripped into Maddy, told her she was fired and, worst of all, said that it was me — “her pal” — who reported her.

After that, I couldn’t face her and began avoiding meals. Finally, she addressed me.

“They treat me like a animal,” she said, “but I know where I stand with them. You got me.”

It was the last time we ever spoke.

Fortunately, she wasn’t fired. But life on Diana got worse. My conscience plagued me to the extent that I started dreaming of Maddy spitting in my food, thinking that it was my penance to eat it anyway. A few weeks later I gave my notice.

Now I sometimes walk along the shoreline, searching the Hudson, looking for my old tug and the figure in purple with a foot on the starboard gunwhale, smoking a cigarette and watching the sunset.