An Italian photographer in a ripped t-shirt plays Carrom, a table-top billiards game, with his friends in the backyard of a an apartment. He drinks Budweiser with a Japanese citrus tincture and smokes hand rolled cigarettes, smiling like someone who just had sex. “To take a shit on the beach is fantastic,” he says in a discussion of where and where not to go to the bathroom in public. “You dig a hole in the sand, and you cover it up, and the sand dries the shit. And you are in nature. Ahhhh. Is amazing.”

*   *   *

What appears to be a family of four, two children, a pre-teen girl and a little boy and two fat parents walk towards the subway. The man and woman are screaming at each other.

“Give me the phone,” shouts the man.
“You know what motherfucker?” shouts the woman. “You know what?” Then she slams the phone down into a sewer grate, where it disappears.

The daughter passes me, her face in a tight expression of repressed disgust and sadness that I know will erupt into chronic emotional problems.

“Mom, why’d you do that?” shouts the boy, on the verge of tears, as he stands next to the man and looks down into the sewer.

“Go ahead!” shouts the man at the woman, who is now descending the stairs to the subway with her daughter. “Why don’t you ask ya husband if he’ll do it for you.”

“Fuck you!” shouts the woman, not looking back. The boys runs off to join her. The man is left alone staring down the sewer grate.

“I’ll get that phone back!” he shouts.

*   *   *

The tattooed owner of a vintage moped shop plays pool with a friend in an indoor mall in a warehouse building whose upper floors have been converted into loft housing by Hasidic real estate developers. The regular Friday night Chabad gathering is beginning in the Chabad clubhouse, and several families of young Hasidic parents are sitting with their children eating take-out Mexican food. Two of the children watch with fascination as the men play pool. The boy tests out his English in a hoarse voice, asking questions about what each player will do next, occasionally losing self-control to touch the pool balls with visible thrill. The players scold him. His pretty mother, who appears to be 29, yells at him in some language that is the first language of the Hasidic community — Hebrew, Yiddish, or an eastern European dialect, I am not sure which. The men eat and ignore the surroundings; one is wearing a very, very wide brimmed black hat one might associate with someone delivering a message a night on horseback to Dracula’s castle in Transylvania. “We don’t really recommend mopeds for people who aren’t willing to learn the basic maintenance, like cleaning a carburator,” says the moped shop owner to me. “It’s a hobby bike.”

*   *   *

Before I’ve rounded the corner to see what it is, I can hear a booming sound on the block with the garbage warehouse and metal shops. When I get there, I see a man kicking a soccer ball from one side of the street onto a cement wall on the other side of the street. Boom. Boom. He kicks with his toe. Then he stops to let me pass. The street is slick with grease so it’s no wonder he’s aiming for the wall. 

*   *   *

Three girls sit in the backyard at Roberta’s, a pizza restaurant in a warehouse decorated like an inn where Rocky Raccoon might have met his match. “I’m leaving tomorrow — no tonight — for St. Tropez. We’re shooting there with Mario Testino. Then we’re going to Paris for 9 days,” says one girl accent. She has ordered fried duck eggs, and just highlighted her hair red, which is popular with her friends. “I’m just like, what the fuck. But it’s cool, I mean, it’s amazing. I’m just like, what the fuck am I doing?” Her friend asks her if she has met any guys she likes. “There was one,” says the girl, explaining some romantic exchange. “But then he was weird…and I don’t know, I talked about it with Sasha and she said ‘watch out, everyone just wants your job.’”

It emerges that two of the girls are from Oregon, where they knew each other growing up. This is confusing, because while the one has an typical west coast accent, the other has a lilt that almost sounds Welsh. She’s studying globalization and education. “I moved here to go to NYU,” she says. “Now I’m trying to figure out how to go about that. I’m writing a lot, mostly.” What is she focused on, in particular? asks the third friend, who has an indulgent tendency to interview the other two about what they like best to talk about. “I’m studying adolescents and emerging adults,” says the girl. Then the one who’s going to France snaps her fingers. “That’s it — 20th century….what did you just say?” The education girl gives several stabs at repeating herself, not picking the right words. Finally she repeats “adolescents and emerging adults.”

“That’s it!” says the one going to France. “20th Century Adolescents and Emerging Adults. That’s your title.”

By the time I leave, the third girl has explained that she is a textile designer and a photographer from California. She wants to die her hair red, too.

*   *   *

I trace straight lines on the horizontal edge of a flyer and fill the spaces in pen with the notice: “Songwriting teacher needed, contact: emilymeehan@gmail.com.” I could not figure out how to swivel the text vertically on Microsoft word. Then I cut the lines, making flaps with contact details that can be ripped off by songwriting teachers. “Are you in a band?” reads my flyer. “If you are, and you write and sing songs, perhaps you can teach me how. I was considering going to some fancy school, but I’m sure they just hire people like you. My music inspirations are diverse, so I’m flexible. Email me a little about your music activities and we can find a time to talk. Thanks.” I walk over to the bulletin boards in front of the grocery story Brooklyn’s Natural and staple them up.

*   *   *

I try to find a bottle of wine so I can sip as I write an essay about foster children. But the wine shop doesn’t open till 2 and the bar is closed, a steel lock chaining shut its steel door. I go into Roberta’s, the Rocky Raccoon haunt. I see my old roommate selling jam and vegetables with her rooftop-farmer boyfriend around the corner. The bartender is tenderly cute, with baby blue eyes and longish brown hair. Another longish haired guy comes in and orders breakfast next to me. The bartender tells him he went camping in the Catskills on Thursday night, and that the foliage is already changing — beautiful.

After we talk about editing sequences in an American Express commercial on the TV in the bar, the breakfast guy and I start talking about how Barack Obama secretly smokes. I ask him if he’s read “Dreams for my Father.” He says he wants to, because he wants to read about people he admires.

I tell him Barack Obama used to be cynical, underachieving, confused and somewhat depressed. “Just like me,” says the breakfast guy. “I know, me too,” I say. Then I tell him how Barack found purpose as a member of the black student union and then as a community organizer and most importantly, found faith when he started going to church, which apparently caused him to stop being depressed, cynical, and underachieving. Except that he still smokes, and he’s still awesome, church or not.

Then two chefs came in to go on Roberta’s radio show. One was going to talk about pork. Apparently, the host of the radio show has a company that sells endangered livestock in order to promote biodiversity. “But can’t some roam free?” I ask about his “heritage” pigs.

“Livestock don’t just roam free,” says one of the chefs. “Pigs are bred to be slaughtered.”

I don’t understand then.