“You’re…you’re a fucking asshole” She told me again as I got in the cab. I stared directly at her eyeglasses to let her know that I knew. Her glasses were dark and I could not see her eyes. I drove away and by the time I turned the corner and went out of view she had still not gone into a car.

My next stop was the storage center in Brooklyn where I would unload the furniture I had. I always felt more as ease in the outer boroughs because the streets are wider and reprisal for inconveniencing the public is less ostentatious. The girl whose items I was moving rode in the truck with me, her name was Tia, she was very beautiful and I struggled for a way to reveal without being obvious, that I was of a higher class than the average mover. I tried to lure her into asking me questions but everything I said seemed calculated in my ears.

“The thing about moving is you pass a lot of stuff, like buildings and colleges, there’s a lot of colleges in New York, I remember college.” I groped. “What are you…oh, this is a great song, on the radio.”

“Don’t you get tired moving stuff by yourself?” She asked with a sort of obligatory disinterest.

“Not when you have the strength of 2 men and do cocaine in the morning.” I told her. She sighed and looked at a passing cemetery. I didn’t care, her looks made up for her total lack of a sense of humor. When we drove by a crowd of Hasidic Jews she stared as she had never seen them. I gauged her surprise and said.

“Oh yeah, you’ve never seen the Hasidic Jews before? You have to get out of Manhattan more.” She looked toward me with dread to see if I was in the early stages of inviting her somewhere. I saw her anxiety and trailed off in what I figured was a vague populist complaint about traffic. Eventually I just told her that this was not my real job and that I was only helping out a friend on the side for some extra cash. In the end I think she was less impressed with a guy who had to moonlight as a mover than just a regular mover.

When we arrived at the storage facility Tia went in to rent a locker for her stuff. I waited outside and started to unload the back of the truck. The furniture was really too much for one man to be handling safely so I searched an employee to help me with a dresser. I found a stout young woman behind a counter. She was not really working so much as she was looking at her fingernails and dancing to the radio. Being that she was a girl I asked only if she might hold open the rear door of the truck while I pulled the dresser out.

“Uhm-uh, no, um, uh uh, no I ain’t doing that” She told me and went back to dancing. A top forty pop song came on and she announced that it was her favorite. I remember thinking that her life was going to be either really easy or really hard. A guy was walking across the parking lot and I stopped him with the request for help. He looked gnarled around head and body but he looked like he’d lifted a lot of things in his day. He gladly obliged and when I told him afterward that I owed him one he replied by saying.

“Uh-uh, no sir, no that’s what we on this earth for, now god bless you.” He walked away and I really did feel like I owed him one at that point. I like it better when I tell someone that they are owed one and they agree that they are owed and settle for a future reciprocation. We both know that we’ll never meet again to reconcile the debt but at least I don’t feel like I’m in the karmic red.

Tia came out from the office and gave me a check for the cost of labor but she stiffed me on the tip. Had she been married instead of just committed to a boyfriend I might have protested, but I didn’t want to blow any future shot I had. She then left abruptly before I could think of something clever for her to remember me by. I unloaded the rest of the truck by myself and got ready to leave. The diesel engine took a minute to warm up and as I sat there I saw the young girl employee who had earlier refused to help me. She was still just dancing to the little radio, still doing what she was on this earth for.

Granger Greenbaum is a Brooklyn artist whose writing can be found at imminentbystander

It was on that doomed flight, 3034 out of La Guardia to the indie hotspot Indianapolis, that we became instant friends (“Could you move so that my…uh”–pointing to chubby gofer with the band–“could, uh, sit with me?”) During the course of our intimate time together, I learned things about Mr. Barker. He travels with a bag of mini-treats (Hershey bars, Mounds, and I believe, a Mr. Goodbar); he drinks bottled water; he is strangely soft-spoken and polite. (“Oh, you want your assigned seat…uh, that’s cool”). He is also slightly claustrophobic.

In fact, when he checked out for a few hours with his iPod plugged in, I had the opportunity to study his sleeping form, and I could see why the girls are all in favor of this talented lad. Peering through the elongated armhole of his gaping jersey with the words “KillerKillerKiller” running across it, I spied a bolt of tattooed lightning traveling up his pale torso and yes, it would make anyone like him. Also, he explained later that the jersey, part of his fashion line, was printed without pause so that it might be “a little ambiguous so that it doesn’t, like, send a message.” Clearly a former English major (four-syllable words are our exclusive domain).

In fact, I came away (well, he actually left first–the band de-boarded after four hours to book a charter while the rest of us mopes waited until the flight was cancelled over three hours after that) with a very positive feeling for Mr. Barker, which makes me wonder why debbieschlussel.com used Travis as a “case study” to illustrate Neal Pollack’s new high-concept book Alternadad, which chastises young dads for wanting to be cool friends of their offspring. Mr. Travis, from what I read in the bloids, could never be accused of that.

Which brings me to my second, connected topic:

Manchildren in the Promised Land

I was Indianapolis-bound not to hear cutting edge ska-goth music, but to attend a conference on the French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. My paper entailed a comparison between Levinas and ultra-hip Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Dr. Agamben made news recently when he was forced to give up an invitation to lecture in America because he refused to give his biometrics to the Bush government; he also recently referred to living in America as living in a concentration camp so I guess he really didn’t want to come anyway.

My paper was a dispassionate and scholarly examination of the sort of individual who might emerge from the ideas of both these philosophes, and what sort of community these individuals would construct. All this is far too difficult and specialized a matter to go into here, but I can easily communicate a portion of the argument through the discussion of a few popular movies. One might ask the question: what kind of male individual is most necessary to the coming community? A thoughtful and kind father, or a goofy druggy brother? Well, no contest, it’s the brother. Preferably, a Wilson brother. For instance, in The Family Stone there is a perfectly good kind thoughtful father, but it is the goofy druggy (and drinkie) brother, played by Luke, who finally beds Sarah Jessica Parker after getting her high, so that his good boring brother can marry Claire Danes–and isn’t that really what we all want? On the other hand, in You, Me and Dupree the uptight couple needs the goofy druggy input of Owen to set things right. I could go on but I think I’ve proved my point.

Which gets me back to that dear manchild, Mr. Barker…

Travels with Travis: Coda

After Travis left the plane I plundered his candy stash–it was a matter of survival (I had eaten two pounds of pretzels and needed a balance). As I hunted around his seat, my hand hit something hard and smooth. His iPod! I extricated it from the candy wrappers under which it was buried. Black. Mysterious. I turned it in my hand with excitement and desire. But when I looked up my other travel companion, some dude at the window seat with a Blackberry habit that was not under control, I saw him looking at me with interest. I suppose he thought I might keep it. Well, now I couldn’t. So I handed it to a flight attendant who flew down the staircase to the tarmac and released it to its rightful owner who mouthed a polite “thank you” as I knew he would. I believe he said “thank you so, uh, so much, man” which is just what I would have expected, knowing him as I do. And he gave her a pair of signed sticks. Those sticks should be mine, man.

Afterward
I realize that in the last issue of The New Yorker some woman did a piece about sitting next to some famous guy on an airplane. But she didn’t name names. Who’s the real reporter?

I am the first member of the night tour reporting in for duty and a quick call to the dispatchers’ office solves the mystery of the empty firehouse.

Earlier in the day the entire house B-14, E-60, L-17 and my company L-17-2 had responded to and were still operating at a fire in the railroad yards, so we of the night tour will be traveling there to relieve the day tour.

Shortly after 1800 hours, the division messenger van arrives at quarters; we climb aboard and are driven to the fire scene.

While en route, I realize I’m not the junior man for a change, that dubious honor goes to Russell.

Although we are both 24 years of age, he’s still a proby with only five months on the job compared to my almost two years.

Arriving at the scene we discover that most of the companies had already “taken up” and those that remain are in the last stages of overhauling.

The van pulls up alongside our day tour guys who are taking a break, they’re drinking coffee and eating cups of New England clam chowder alongside the Salvation Army canteen truck that supplied this hot chow; they are filthy, exhausted, wet, cold and very happy to see us.

After recounting to us where the various tools and ladders used during the operation are located, they climb into the messenger van and wave good-bye.

Jonnie is a senior man with almost twenty years on the job; he is also a fantastic human being who has taught me a great deal, not only about fire but also about life in the eighteen months that I have had the honor of knowing him.

He had worked the day tour on a mutual and now he’s continuing on duty with us.

Having responded into the fire on the initial alarm, he tells us of the large three-story warehouse that had gone to a third alarm before being brought under control.

About this time, the chief in charge issues two orders.

1) Restore electrical power to the yard.

2) All remaining companies are to take up.

Only the second order reaches us.

Before we can take up we must gather together and return to the rig all of our equipment.

Tom and I retrieve some tools from the far side of the warehouse and return them to the rig.

From there we start walking back to the warehouse with the intention of lowering our thirty-five foot aluminum extension ladder and replacing it on the truck.

As we approach; to our great delight we spy Jonnie, Russell and a member from an adjoining firehouse who’s working with us tonight on overtime, already in the process of lowering the ladder.

I say great delight because the thirty-five footer is the largest portable ladder in the fire department inventory and rising or lowering it is a bitch.

Tom and I stop spontaneously several yards away to watch the guys perform this difficult task.

In order to lower an extended ladder you must first push it away from the building it’s resting against until the ladder is perpendicular to the ground.

Then while two members hold it steady the third pulls on the rope lanyard to extend the top section a bit further thus releasing the locking mechanism and allowing the top section to retract.

On the ground is Jonnie on one side and Russell on the other each grasping the ladder.

Up on the buildings loading dock the OT guy pushes it as far upright as possible before letting go of the ladder and grabbing hold of the rope lanyard.

They are poetry in motion right up to the moment the ladder becomes electrified by the eleven thousand volt overhead power line and our world turns to shit.

We watch frozen in place as Russell and Jonnie, their muscles contracted by the electricity that locks their hands to the aluminum ladder, stand fully erect and shake violently as the juice courses through their bodies and into the ground.

In what seemed like minutes but in reality could not have been more than several seconds, the fireman on the dock with great bravery and presence of mind uses the rope lanyard to pull the ladder clear of the power line.

Freed from the current holding them to the ladder Russell and Jonnie collapse straight down like puppets whose strings have been cut.

We run over, Tom to Russell me to Jonnie.

Neither of them has a pulse nor is breathing, we start CPR.

Urgent radio transmissions are sent requesting immediate assistance as someone joins me in working on Jonnie.

Fuck, five months ago, Jonnie and I were dancing alongside each other at my wedding, now he is lying dead in the dirt and I’m kneeling by his head trying to breathe life back into him.

Trying, but because I had failed to establish a good airway instead of supplying air to his lungs, I fill his stomach with it.

You can only load a stomach with air to a certain point before it must come back out and back out it came, filling my mouth with clam chowder puke.

I spit it out, turn his head, clear his mouth and resume, this time with a good airway.

In response to our urgent calls for assistance Rescue Company 3 arrives on the scene and immediately I hear a commanding voice order, “Load ‘em aboard, we ain’t waiting for an ambulance, we’re going now!”

As we continue with CPR while packed together in the back of Rescue, I am vaguely aware of a wild ride as we speed towards Lincoln hospital.

Upon arriving, we scramble from the rear of the rig down to the sidewalk where medical teams are awaiting us.

They take over the resuscitation attempt but I attach myself to the stretcher and don’t let go until we are inside the emergency room.

There I stand against a wall out of their way but in a position to observe everything that occurs.

Just as they were in the rail yard, Jonnie and Russell are still side-by-side here in the emergency room, a separate team working on each.

Their turnout coats, boots and clothes are rapidly cut away and discarded, everything humanly possible is being done to save them, but it is not to be.

They are eventually pronounced dead and as the medics move away from them I observe where the electricity had exited their bodies; it must have had something to do with the steel tips of their boots because all twenty of their toes are horribly burned and burst open.

Someone leads me to a chair in the waiting room. I cry. Time stops.

Its hours later and I am back in the firehouse, how I got there I still don’t know, when someone asks if I have called my wife and if not to do so immediately.

She’s crying when she answers the phone.

You see the radio and TV have been broadcasting for hours that two firemen from Ladder 17-2 had been killed in the line of duty.

Since she has not heard from me she was convinced that I was one of those killed and that this was the dreaded notification call from the department to inform her of my death!

As I hang up the phone, a thought hits me, if instead of going to the far side of the building to gather tools, Tom and I had first gone to lower the ladder we would have been the ones killed.

The only reason I can think of for us still being alive is… it wasn’t our turn!

“Bob, please get me some food.” Patricia pleaded from the kitchen to the living room.

“There’s plenty of food,” Bob answered as he played with the bunny ears antenna on top of the TV.

Patricia opened the refrigerator and eyed the contents for the fifth time in the last five minutes.

“There’s no food-food, only junk. I want ice cream, I want bacon, I want mayonnaise!”

Bob disregarded Patricia’s request and continued to shake the ice around in the spaghetti pot chilling his six Rheingold beer bottles. He took the dish towel off his tee shirt’s shoulder to wipe his hands, and he definitely heard Patricia’s next statement, “Get off your bony ass and go get me food!”

Bob ignored this too, until the boxer he bet $20 on hit the canvas with a thud. It was Friday Night at the Fights and unfortunately, Bob’s man was down. Bob had just settled in – first round, first beer. After the boxer was counted out, the telecast went to a commercial and the Gillette parrot squawked, “Look sharp, be sharp, feel sharp!” Bob, disappointed, but now available for chores, went to his near due pregnant wife and gave her head a hug.

“Get off my friggin head. You know I hate head locks.”

Bob, hurt, kissed Patricia on the cheek.

“Patty, what do you need?” he said.

When Bob returned from the store, he put his five remaining beers back in the fridge, washed the pot and boiled water for spaghetti.

Grabbing a black frying pan he made two huge bacon sandwiches with extra mayo on Wonder bread. After serving Patty both sandwiches, he took a beer and joined her at the kitchen table.

“So, we’re decided on baby names, right? Marc Anthony if he’s a boy, and Alison Leigh if she’s a girl.” Bob said.

“You are so full of shit. The girl’s name is fine. When you name the boy, Marc Anthony, be sure you walk carefully over my dead body, cause that’s the only way that stupid guinea name will ever appear on my son’s birth certificate.”

Bob was hurt again.

“Oh cut the crap and get that stupid puss off your face.” she said.

“So what name do you want?” Bob said.

“Rory.”

“Huh?”

“R-O-R-Y, Rory.” Patty said.

“Like Calhoun, the movie cowboy?” Bob said.

“Yep. It’s an old Gaelic name meaning Red King,” she said.

“Red? You’re loony. Our hair is black. It’s a girly name and you’re guaranteeing he’ll get the shit kicked out of him,” Bob said.

Bob & Patty began a game of mum. The only sound in the room was the bubbling boiling water. After an endless silence, Bob broke the ice.

“It’ll be Rory over my dead body.”

“I’ll alert the press,” she said.

“Give me an alternative,” Bob said.

“Nope.”

“Then I’ll give you one, Thomas,” he said.

“That’s imaginative. I thought we agreed no fathers’s names?”

“It’s not after my father; it’s my brother’s name, too,” Bob said.

“You mean Stone Face? We’re going to name him after Stone Face?”

> “That’s my compromise and you’ll get to name the next boy.”

Patty swallowed a large bite of mayo with a little bit of bacon and bread attached to it. She chewed slowly then wiped her mouth and said, “OK.”

Two weeks later, Patricia gave birth to an eight pound boy.

When the nurse let Bob into the recovery room and he saw Patty cradling the baby, Bob started to cry.

“Oh stop you’re blabbering and give me a kiss.”

“How do you feel?” Bob said.

“Not too swift.”

“How’s Tommy?” Bob said.

“Doctor said he’s fine. Isn’t he beautiful?”

Bob picked up the wrinkled red-faced boy. He thought the baby’s head looked like a grapefruit. A gorgeous grapefruit. Bob held the baby for a long time then turned him over to Patty.

“I have to fill out the birth certificate. I was thinking about Robert as a middle name,” Bob said.

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“You picked the first name, now I pick the middle name.”

“No, no, no, you get to name the next boy.” Bob said. “No, I get to name the next boy’s first name and you get to name the next boy’s second name.”

“But…”

“No buts. I get to pick Tommy’s middle name, and his middle name will be R-O-R-Y, Rory.”

That night, Bob temporarily parked his anger, and rode a cab into Manhattan to his old neighborhood and celebrated his first son by dancing on the bar in Loftus Tavern on 85th Street and York Avenue.

Three weeks later, the boy was christened Thomas Rory in the back chapel of St. Sebastian’s Church. Bob wore a sour face throughout the ceremony.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1955, Bob & Patty told their families they were expecting a second child. Throughout the pregnancy, Patty kept Bob in the dark. He begged for information, and whined for hints. Late in the pregnancy, Bob tried to bribe Patty by hiding candy bars around the apartment, promising to give up the locations only if she told him the name. Patty never cracked. Bob prayed for a girl.

On June 20th, Patty gave birth to a nine pound baby boy. Bob dropped Tommy off with his mother and went directly to the hospital. The room was lit low and the baby was sleeping in Patty’s arms. Patty appeared to be sedated and gave Bob a little wave. Bob quietly went to her bedside and leaned over and gave them both kisses. Patty gently held Bob’s arm keeping him close. She tilted her head signaling him to lean in so she could whisper something in his ear. Bob pressed his ear to Patty’s dry lips.

“Rory, his name is Rory,” she said loudly.

Bob backed away from the bed. “That’s nuts, we’ve already got a Rory.”

“Middle names don’t count. Rory it is. You promised.” Patty said.

Bob knew he was had. In desperation, he blurted, “His middle name is Robert.”

“Who cares?” she answered.

Patty gave Bob a victorious smile and squeezed her Rory tight.

In 2002, in order to help his mother and siblings by becoming more useful, or less of a burden, Suen agreed to enter the monastery his great uncle Mai Chourn founded in 1986 near Fordham Road, in the Bronx, for the handful of Khmer Rouge refugees landing in New York. (Most went to Lowell, Massachusetts, and Long Beach, California.) Cambodian males often use the wat, or realm of temples, to regroup, study and decide what to do next, and when Suen returns home next summer, he hopes to open a small hotel and a large restaurant in Phnom Penh.

The wat is not a lifetime commitment. So Cambodia, where I lived for three years while Suen arrived in America, has been for me. Still, when I can, I seek things Cambodian, which is why I sought the wat, and how I met Suen.

From the wat, we were headed to Battambang II, a grocery near Poe Park, to do Suen’s shopping. To prepare himself for exposure to the Valentine’s Day blizzard that had begun the night before, Suen tweaked his inner robe, re-wrapped his upper robe, swung the cotton outer robe under and over his arms, and then tugged upward on some thick orange socks and downward on a bright orange beanie. Suen’s cloth was cavalierly agleam, pure hunting-vest orange. A final body-length mackintosh on top of all this had the effect of making him look like a fluorescent freshwater turtle, his orange-topped round head poised to disappear at first danger.

Out on the porch, with the snow already several inches deep, Suen dithered on the matter of his umbrella, and then decided to go without. “When I first got here,” he said, now marching up the slope of 196th Street, “I thought, ‘Those are some big buildings.’ And when I first saw snow, I thought, ‘It’s raining ice.’ Another monk showed me how to make a snowman. We stayed out all day, so long that when I went inside, I found that my blood had turned blue.”

The wind was whipping up the top-most layer of fallen ice, and cars squeaked cautiously down the road. I asked if he found it slippery in his brown tennis shoes.

“Not slippy.”

“Slip-per-ry.”

He plowed ahead in the sand-like snow. From Poe Place, along Valentine Avenue, Suen saw that Battambang II was closed. “Beut!” he said, “but don’t worry. We go to Phnom Penh Nha Trang,” the other Cambodian corner store in New York City. After a quick how-are-you to a school crossing guard, the only other person in reflective gear, we humped up to the banks of the Grand Concourse, just north of Loew’s Paradise Theater. “Chlong!” — “Across!” he commanded. Along the white expanse of the boulevard, Suen’s beanie was the brightest thing around.

“On the way to school one day” –Suen studies English and business basics at the Bronx Community College– “some children asked me if I could teach them Kung Fu. I think they wondered about the way I dress, so I opened my heart to them and told them I was not Chinese.” He was interrupted by the sight of a burnt-out business on Kingsbridge, which made him sad. “This happened yesterday,” he said. “I don’t know why.” At the store, Suen bought some Asian Boy Tapioca Stick noodles, some dried bean skin, some “leaves” (rice paddy herb, water spinach, sweet basil and coriander), a winter melon, two tins of green curry paste, a can of Roland coconut milk, and a jar of mud fish sauce (ingredients: mudfish, rice, salt). He seemed quite pleased.

We turned up Marion Avenue at Planet Earth, a clothing store. Four tied pairs of sneakers hung over an electric wire. Suen’s upper lip had grown glossy, and his spacious cheeks were striated red. Signs at the entrance to building courtyards warned, “Positively no ball playing.” The first house past a giant cinder-block apartment construction project, the one with Cambodian, American and Buddhist flags, and a pointy roof capping a faux turret, is the wat. We took off our shoes.

Inside, the altar fills the entire sitting room bay. It contains a symmetrical array of meditating Buddhas, some illuminated by revolving lights, some protected under seven-headed naga snakes, all framed on either side by golden trees, many-leveled parasols and hanging cloth humanoid ghosts. A pot of ash is spiked with the red remains of joss sticks. Straw mats cover a linoleum tile arrangement, and crepe paper runs the ceiling to the back of the open room, where an anemic old man has taken up residence the last five months. Satiny pink cushions line the wall: the wat is a place for whiling (contemplation).

Whenever Henri Mouhot, the 19th-century French explorer held until recently to have “discovered” Angkor, asked the monks living there how the temples had been built, he tended to get one of four responses, which he dutifully noted in his travel journal. (1) It’s the work of the king of angels, Pra Enn, (2) it’s the work of the giants (“les grands”), (3) we owe these edifices to the famous Leper King, or (4) they made themselves.

Mouhot wrote: “After crossing a swampy plain where we slaughtered some common waterfowl, we entered a beautiful forest that, without a single clearing, extends all the way to the gates of Udong.” I am Mouhot in the jungles of the Bronx.

But there were times where budget cutting ideas may have went a little too far, like the “Save money on haircuts by doing it ourselves”initiative from my Dad around Easter 1966.

Off we went in the 1964 Chevy Impala Station wagon (it was powder blue), it was crowded in the car, and it’s likely I picked on my brother , and my Dad yelled, “Quit that skylarking!”, which we later came to understand meant “quit fooling around”.

Our destination was the EJ Korvette department store out on Richmond Ave, New Springville, across from “the Dump,” the notorious Fresh Kills Landfill, where the noxious midsummer stench wasn’t yet in full aromatic flavor, but it was close.

The Mall hadn’t yet been built, although the foundation and some steel were up, and I remembered the Flea market being in the old airfield airplane hanger.

Anyway, we piled into EJ Korvettes, it seemed huge, with so many items that you could easily become confounded, Mom, Dad, me at 9, my sister Brenda age 7, Brother Vincent age 6, sister Chrissie in a stroller at 4 (John and Tommy I don’t think were born yet ). We stared in amazement, and much to my parents’ dismay I tried to push Brenda down the motorized steps of the Escalator (I couldn’t help it; it looked like something from the 1964 World’s Fair at Shea Stadium)

We went past the Phonograph and 8 track section, and I took notice of some of the older girls with the be –hives (I asked my Mom was their hair fake?). In the general goods section my Dad picked out an amateur barber kit (electric shaver, razor, attachments, and brush) to cut our hair and save tons of money on haircuts.

On the way back, we stopped at Al Deppes, a festive fun and games place where we had hot dogs, sodas and (shared) fries, including fighting over the individual allotment of fries per person.

Then it was on home. My Dad volunteered to cut all of the neighborhood kids’ heads, along with his own. Boys and Girls were invited, no one was exempt.

We sat in the side yard, neighbors Richie Jackson, Billy Jones, Timmy Tichoner, Bill Hobson, Vinny, all with great anticipation and the promise of Easter chocolates for our agreeing to be part of Dad’s apprentice barber training.

One by one, we took our turns in the side yard bench by the old redwood picnic table and I went first. When Dad was finished, I had about one sixteenth of an inch of hair on my head, if I was lucky. Everyone got the same treatment, and there was so much buzzing you didn’t need Bees for the rest of the summer. Some of us looked like Marines, some looked like Army infantry, and all of noticed that our heads and scalps were breathing and venting in a way we had not noticed in years (maybe since birth). We noticed who had the largest ears (some of us were really Easter bunnies) and any lumps on scalps were there for all the world to see.

The fun really started about 10 minutes after, when a somewhat cranky Ms. Jackson questioned my Dad’s training and talent for giving her son a Marines haircut, which she described as “horrible”.

Mr. Hobson (an Ex-Navy Man, and chief mechanic/engineer on the S.I. Ferry) nodded with approval, despite his son’s belated protests. He said we all finally looked like men, albeit protein-deficient men.

Then it was Mr. Jones who came to our house with his son in tears and demanded that his son be given his hair back, in some sort of restorative way. Of course, short of installing a hairpiece, this was impossible. Mr. Jones also accused my Dad of switching the razor of his prized hair slasher, which was not true (perhaps he was just jealous of my Dad getting to shorn over a cubic foot of hair from so many kids). There was much jawing, sour words, and flailing of arms. It was very entertaining.

There were numerous gatherings in the neighborhood for years after the Easter haircuts event, but after that fateful day with thousands of hair follicles lost to compost, there was no further talk of saving money with Dad as our barber.

I darted around, swaying from one foot to another, but before I could realize what had happened the elderly woman in line behind me had already scampered around to the newly opened lane. In her shamrock green coat and stiff knit hat, she leaned over carefully to begin taking out her few items – Wonder bread, mustard, laundry detergent – and as she paused to push the glasses farther up on the bridge of her nose, I thought, ugh, bitch.

After all, I was standing there with a baby in tow. I had been in front of her when we were both on the longer line. She didn’t once look back at me – knowing full well what she had done – but if she did, I was there with a few loose strands of unwashed hair hanging in front of my eyes, ready to be puffed aside with a deep, exasperated sigh. This was now the only lane in the whole store big enough to fit my baby’s stroller.

If strollers were not meant for the real world, as the cracked and crumbling sidewalks of New York make it seem, they certainly were not meant to go into a city supermarket. And if you are a mother who decides to push through the blackened and re-frozen slush at the corner (just so you can get to the store to buy food to feed your family, after days of being stuck inside your overheated baby-proof apartment without so much as an inhale of that crisp, bitingly cold air), you are truly alone. No one will help you pull those wheels– once a glorious shiny black, now a beaten charcoal grey – to flat land, just as no one in Trade Fair will step aside when they see that monstrous stroller coming toward them. Most people just lean a bit to one side, allowing you to roll into one half of their puffy winter jacket. But the old ladies of Jackson Heights are stronger than that; they won’t budge.

Excuse me. Smile. I’m sorry, excuse me! Could I just…

No use.

Pathetic attempt to roll out backwards, down the isle. Oh, sorry. I didn’t see you there. Excuse me.

Not a chance.

Cue crying baby. Give her a pale pink tomato to play with until one of the ladies leave room. Strongly suggest to baby that she throw it… well, never mind.

The ladies will use all of their mental energy trying to will you out of their way, with a simple, penetrating, bifocal stare. It is a look they have perfected, having warded off carts, strollers, and swarming crowds of freed schoolchildren for who knows how many years. I’ve only been here in Queens for little more than one year, which makes me a mere amateur, a freshman. I haven’t perfected anything yet.

“Oh my goodness, I’ve forgotten something!” The woman in the shamrock coat again. I watched her check her empty cart once more. “Would you mind, dear, if I ran to get my meat?” She was asking the cashier, who was still fidgeting with the tricky register and permit her to leave. Her voice matched her pointy nose and the two made her seem like a schoolteacher from some children’s book – it sparked in me some feelings of remorse, but my heart was still fluttering with indignation.

“Honey, come here and put your things down.” She began to push aside her few things on the conveyor belt. “I was behind you before anyway.” She stashed a plastic wallet full of coupons into her overcoat and, with a sympathetic smile, waved me toward her. Chin tucked to her neck, positioned as if to say aw, how cute, she looked upon my child adoringly and laughed in my direction as we traded places.

Now I was the one leaning to one side, allowing her to slide past me and my puffy winter jacket.

Uncle Johnny, who lived next door (we called him uncle as a sign of respect though he wasn’t a relative) once told me that the tree had come from a cutting from Sicily. Lots of people on our block claimed to have gotten their fig tree cuttings from relatives in Italy, somehow managing to get them through customs when returning from visits there. As a kid I knew that the trees were a tie to the Old Country. Later I came to see that they also symbolized the sense of abundance and prosperity that these Italian-Americans associated with America. Many people of my parent’s generation had managed to scrimp and save enough money to buy their own houses and to have backyards of their own where they tended vegetable gardens and fruit trees. They had become property owners, just like the padroni back in Italy that their parents used to have to work for and basically genuflect to when they walked by.

My grandfather even told my father that back in the old country when the padrone belched in his presence, he had to say something to the effect of “God bless you padrone”. They didn’t have to do stuff like that in the States. And they had their own fig trees. Somehow those two facts were related.

I remembered that some of the neighbors had different sorts of trees from ours. Jack, who lived a few houses up the block, had three trees: one gave white figs, another green, and then he had a tree that gave black figs that were shaped differently from the ones on our tree. Jack kept a discerning, almost proprietal eye out for all the block’s fig trees. It was almost like they were all part of his grove. He’d make the rounds to neighbors’ houses, going straight into their backyards and looking over their trees. He’d tell people what sort they were and how best to care for them. If someone had gotten too old to care for a tree or if a neighbor was away traveling at summer’s end he’d come to his backyard and throw a net over the tree to keep the birds and squirrels away and of course he’d pick the trees.

Jack would also bring some of his figs for us to taste, and then we’d be expected to give him some of ours. Lots of people on the block would drop by once in a while with a small plate of figs. They’d stay and talk with my mother for a bit about the news on the block and what was happening in everybody’s families. My dad would put the coffee pot on and bring out some cake for them to have as they talked. Sometimes my mom would speak to them in Neapolitan dialect, a sing-songy form of Italian with seemingly no verb conjugations and a pronunciation style very different from the formal Italian I learned when I lived in Italy after college. I didn’t really notice it at the time but now years later in my memory, it sounds archaic and beautiful. And I very much miss my mother’s Neapolitan hand gestures. I never really learned that language either, a hand language used to punctuate dramatically the points of her speech. The figs were a catalyst for the spirit of neighborliness.

When my mother died and my father got too old and sick to tend to the garden and the fig tree, Dolly or Rose, two other neighbors, would drop by to help. Jack would also come over to put the mesh net over the tree. Sometimes the birds would tear the net and Jack would mend the torn section. Once I was visiting when Jack was doing that. I remember my dad looking out the backyard window, surveying the scene. I remember him sighing and saying to himself, but out loud, “Oh geez, I can’t do stuff like that anymore, everything’s just gonna go to pot from here on in.”

During the last year of his life I moved back in with Dad to keep on top of the household chores. I’d go shopping, shovel the snow off the sidewalks and shovel out the alleyway. That last summer I planted tomatoes, basil and some eggplant in the garden, and I tried to keep on top of the weeding and the fig tree situation. It struck me, living there, that I didn’t see many of the old neighbors anymore. Many had died or moved in with their kids out on the Island or in New Jersey. Jack came by once or twice that summer to exchange figs, Dolly helped me with weeding the garden if she thought I was dropping the ball a little bit with regard to my weeding duties. Everything seemed so quiet in the house; no more boisterous conversations in Neapolitan, no more neighborhood gossip fueled by coffee, cake and plates of figs. By the time my father died all that seemed like it belonged to another time and a different place.

When my father died there were a lot of feelings about what to do with the house. In the end we decided to sell it. My brother told me that he wanted to uproot the fig tree and take it to his place in Long Island. But he never got around to doing that. I think we were all too saddened by dad’s death, and too exhausted from working out the details of inheritance to take on such a big task. So, we left the tree; we didn’t even take a root cutting. For years after at every family gathering we’d talk about the old house and the old neighborhood. Inevitably someone would bring up the subject of the old fig tree and then my brother would recount how he had once planned to take the tree to his place out on the Island.

After my surreptitious visit to the back yard that day I decided to take a drive around the old neighborhood. I especially wanted to see if there were any fig trees left. I saw one in the front yard of a house on 21st Avenue, past 65th street. I remembered that had been there for years and years. And I remembered that the owner would always rap the tree up in canvas in the winter. My father did that to our tree just a couple of times. But he thought it hurt the tree, or at any rate wasn’t worth the trouble. But one year the tree almost died. That was the year New York had all those ice storms. After that winter it took a year for the tree to come back and start sending out branches again. I was really happy that it did.

Anyway, I didn’t see any more trees. Most would have been in people’s backyards so I really don’t know why I was looking in people’s front yards, but I was. I drove back to my old block and stopped the car by Jack’s alleyway. I could see that his fig trees were still in his yard. He had also built some trellises for his grape vines, and I could see that the vines were heavy with fruit. I’ll bet he’s going to make home made wine, I said to myself, something my own family used to do at a little cottage they had out on Long Island. I wondered if Jack had managed to find some new fig trading partners with whom to share his fruit and to exchange news about the neighborhood. I hoped very much that he had.

Babies don’t see very well, especially while lying in a bassinet, but their hearing is acute. One day, during the MTA strike in December 2005, I supplemented with running commentary, in my mind and sometimes aloud addressing Sasha, what she heard. It went something like this.

Sparse rustling: That’s the branches and the few crumpled old leaves of the tree beside the balcony. The tree is one of the main reasons your papa and I decided to buy this place. When our real estate agent took us to see the apartment, we looked out the bedroom window and saw the tree, and the blue sky through its branches. We realized this was nothing like our old view into the windows of the building next door. This was life and color.

The tree’s trunk is wide. I wonder how many concentric circles it’s got? What’s its age? There are trees like this one, of impressive girth, lining the long stretch of East 14th street and that means the street has been straight like this for years and years, way before your grandparents even considered immigrating to America.

Shuffling, accompanied by rhythmic taps: That’s two women slowly pacing back and forth down on the street. An elderly Russian woman, pushing a walker, is held under the arm by her black home attendant. The home attendant made it — must have walked to work today. The elderly woman is in a predicament. Many elderly Russians in our neiborhood get home care for free as part of Medicaid/Medicare services for refugees. So she must be grateful for all the help she’s getting, free of charge. But she also must remain almost totally incommunicado, unable to express what she needs except for bare basics to her black, American attendant. Your great-grandma, who has some trouble with speech after her stroke, once called a non-Russian nurse who came for a visit, a “foreigner.” She didn’t say it pejoratively, it’s just that for the Russians in our neighborhood there’s rarely any intersection with English, native English. And it sounds foreign.

Buzzing: The drill of the construction crew up Ave. X. They are finishing up a row of three-story condo buildings like ours. It’s a hot real estate market now. The neighborhood is rising, the Russians and the Chinese are earning more and buying.

Airy thuds: That’s a woman beating dust out of a carpet, which flaps in the wind, flung over the edge of the third-floor balcony across the street. They used to do that in Russia a lot. When your mama was little she saw lots of carpets hanging on clotheslines around her playground. In her then-home people were enamored to carpets, they hung them the Asian way, on the walls, for coziness and definitely for warmth.

Quick taps: That’s a Chinese man pushing a lightweight stroller where a young boy sits. The man’s arms are burdened by red plastic shopping bags. He is coming from Ave U – the main street here for Chinese goods. Maybe he has gotten lobsters, from the aquarium. His wife is walking next to him, holding a parasol over her. Many Chinese consider it low-class, peasant-like, to have a tan.

Trilling: That’s birds singing. Can’t tell you which birds. Don’t know their names in English, nor sure of them in Russian. One day, I bet, you’ll teach me what they are.

Sharp beeps: That’s a truck pulling out from the Italian deli on the corner, around since the 1960s. The Russians and the Chinese don’t go there much, they’ve got their own stores all around the two-block area. The Italian deli and catering is for the American-born of the neighborhood. The firemen come here, the police pick up their lunch. Working the counter, you could see a few Italians from the days of the opening, but mostly, they are Mexicans. One guy used to give your mama extra portions when she was pregnant with you this past summer. He was in Mexico visiting two children for 19 days the time you were born. But he’s back now. Mama doesn’t get extra anymore.

Barking: That’s the dog that scared you the other day as we walked past it. It says guv-guv, in Russian.

And that? That’s the silence of the Q train tracks, two blocks over, above East 16th.

I meet Jim and my younger brother Chris, a Yankee fan, at Penn Station and we head to the Bronx on the D train, cautiously optimistic that the game will be played. It’s a cold, nasty, October-like day in April without the benefit of Bronx playoff buzz. It’s a new season, but something feels wrong about the day. Like all that is happening isn’t supposed to be happening. The Yanks are playing Baltimore. Chacon is pitching. And we don’t have tickets.

On the way uptown, among the grown men dressed in Jeter and Bernie Williams jerseys, Jim tells us about the work ahead. He’s doing all the plumbing and woodwork himself. He’s a plumber, a furniture refinisher, and a potter. I like to think of him of an artisan, in the classic sense. His meticulous nature makes him an anachronism, as does his eschewing of all technological innovations since 1995. Hates cell phones and computers, no email; he lives happily in an earlier time.

He tells us his wife and daughter are moving to his mother-in-law’s house for the summer, or for as long as it takes him to finish the job. He plans to sleep on a cot in the kitchen. It’s a huge job. The entire house, a former summer bungalow, will be torn up and a second floor added. He plans to be exhausted. He plans to live a Spartan life. He’s going into exile and, for the moment, this is his last hurrah.

We scalp tickets because it’s a buyer’s market and because we want to get good seats under an overhang in case it rains, which by the looks of it might happen at any minute. Jim does the talking with the scalper, a man in his 50s, turning him down at first. The scalper leaves and then returns to sell us three of his four ducats. Apparently we’re supposed to follow him to the seats and pay him there. I’m not sure why. On the way, he tells us he’s from Westchester. Jim and Chris live on Long Island. I live in Brooklyn. Jim tells him this. I never find out why our scalper’s at the game alone. I don’t ask.

Once at our seats, we start drinking like sailors on shore leave. After awhile our scalper from Westchester says he sees friends in another section, and bids us adieu. I get the feeling he’s not telling the truth. We wish him luck and he’s on his way.

Miraculously the rain holds off, the game starts on time, and the entirety is played without delay. Again, however, I have an uneasy feeling—guilt—we’re getting away with something, we’re stealing.

In the sixth inning, I win five bucks from Jim when I bet him that Hideki Matsui will come through in the clutch and drive in at least two runs. Matsui hits a double off the left-centerfield wall with the bases loaded. We have no way of knowing that in two weeks he’ll break his wrist, sliding for a ball against the Red Sox, all but ending his season.

In the seventh we start talking about where we’re going next. A few bars in Manhattan and then back to Brooklyn, where Jim and Chris will be able to catch a train home at the LIRR-Flatbush Avenue Station.

By the time we get to Brooklyn the portentous weather has at last arrived, a torrent of rain and ankle-high puddles on 5th and Flatbush. I pull out an umbrella, and I’m lightly ridiculed. It’s my wife’s influence, I’m told. But I just don’t want to get wet.

In a bar on 5th, we continue our drinking. We’re in our mid-thirties now, too old to drink all day and into the night. We’re not supposed to be doing this. I feel foolish. And here is where I recognize the feeling I’ve had all day: I’ve been unconsciously reliving earlier days and nights I’ve spent with my dear friend and brother; days long gone now. I’m stealing time just like Julio Franco, the 47-year-old New York Met—bench player, pinch hitter, oldest player in Major League Baseball.

Chris decides it’s time to go. He’s got an infant daughter at home now. It’s so late in the evening that I don’t see the point, but he leaves anyway. Jim stays on. We drunkenly plug a small fortune into the jukebox, an ad hoc soundtrack from days when we were better-suited and age-appropriate for these antics. The crowd in the bar is, thankfully, not too young. Even they seem a little old to be carrying on the way they are. Jim and I are not the only ones in our thirties.

How tragically hip (not the band) and soaking in self-important irony Brooklyn can seem at times. A pose one outgrows, I once thought, but now I look around and I see poseurs my age still living the dream and it causes me to wonder what’s amiss.

When I told my father people were moving back to Bed-Stuy, where he grew up poor, and that they were young, educated, white people too, he looked at me like I was from Mercury. Move back there?

Sometimes I think Brooklyn is utterly and completely gentrified, and then something happens to make me think Brooklyn today is closer to his Brooklyn than it is to mine, and how that might not necessarily be a bad thing. And it’s not just Brooklyn–this is true of all of New York City.

People from Michigan and Long Island and New Jersey and Canada and Nebraska are moving to the LES. It looks harmless, like a playground, to them. But the next thing you know, last night’s bouncer is dumping a corpse on the side of the Belt Parkway.

Our hipster scene can be amusing however, and I try not to judge—not outwardly anyway—for fear of appearing a curmudgeon. I need to be increasingly careful of that these days, even though I felt the same way at 23.