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walking in the South Slope
Saturday, August 11 2001
I was out and about on the streets of Park Slope, in the market for another ethernet card, and I ended up walking down Seventh Avenue all the way to 17th Street, then back to Park Slope on 6th Avenue as far as Flatbush Avenue. I noticed the stateliness and attractiveness of the architecture degraded rapidly beyond 9th Street and continued its decline towards the Prospect Expressway, where I eventually ended up in neighborhoods easily as ugly as the ones I'd left behind in Los Angeles. I'm gradually coming to the realization that Gretchen's brownstone is in the absolutely most beautiful and expensive part of Park Slope, the northeastern corner near Grand Army Plaza (also home to New York Senator Charles Schumer). The neighborhoods become progressively seedier both to the west (as I discovered yesterday) and to the south (as I discovered today).
I came home to find Gretchen making whole wheat macaroni and cheese. I was ravenously hungry myself, so I poured a bowl of dried mueslix and proceeded to munch on it. It was a little stale but I didn't much care. When I was about halfway through I thought I felt something crawling on me and looked down to see hundreds of small brown beetles (each about a millimeter in length) swarming up out of the cereal and across my body. I was eating their home! I continued chewing and swallowed my mouthful while Gretchen fetched me a trash can to dispose of my food. I rinsed out my teeshirt and hung it in the backyard and didn't think much else about it. For some reason I don't find the idea of eating hundreds of tiny beetles all that disgusting.
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In the evening Gretchen and I took the subway to the East Village in Manhattan to visit Mikila, one of my long-term readers who began following my stories while a student at the University of Texas back in 1997. Mikila lives above a fratty sort of bar called Bar None. When we'd climbed the stairs from the street we were greeted at the door by a huge but very loveable Rottweiler and Mikila, whom Gretchen thought strongly resembled Joni Mitchell, but in a good way.
While Mikila's boyfriend slept in their bedroom, we three went to a nearby diner place for beers and burgers. By they way, I've yet to be alarmed by the price of eating out in New York City.
Gretchen and Mikila hit if off very well. They have a similar form of humor and have seen all the same movies and such and thus speak a similar cultural language. And while Gretchen is often over-the-top, wide-eyed and relentlessly reactive, Mikila tends to sit back and absorb things for awhile before making her contributions. For my part, I mostly just watched. The one time I really wanted to tell a story, Gretchen reminded me that Mikila had probably already read it.
Mikila was full of all sorts of funny stories. She grew up in upstate Louisiana and her parents, from the way she described them, were endlessly entertaining in that traumatic way that parents can be, a way that is mostly just embarrassing when it is actually happening. There was, for example, the story of the time Mikila's father got on a massive pro-garlic health kick, putting powdered garlic in his drinks and rubbing garlic oil into his scalp "to stimulate the follicles." The house stank of garlic and in protest Mikila and her siblings would walk around with bottles of baby powder held in front of their noses, puffing little white clouds of deodorizing baby-bottom freshness.
Back at Mikila's place, she and I played a round of pool, me succeeding yet again in conclusively demonstrating how not to play the game.
Out on the fire escape, we drank beer and watched busy Saturday Night traffic going north and south on 3rd Avenue. Below us people waited in line to show IDs to the bouncer of Bar None. Given the sights I could see, I thought the fire escape would be an excellent place for a webcam, especially if the website happened to be www.downblouse.com.
Mikila pointed out some actual houses that had been placed on the flat roof of one of the buildings across 3rd Avenue. They were conventional homes, complete with brick chimneys and, in one case, a sloping roof. Mikila didn't know the story behind them, but she'd heard a rumor (a definitely incorrect one) that one of them belongs to Moby.
Meanwhile Mikila's boyfriend, a lanky but muscular hesher dude, had awaken from his slumber and was hanging out with a Bass Ale-drinking friend from Ireland, a lad who mostly watched cutesy animal movies on HBO-Family when he wasn't playing videogames.
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