Yes, slaughter in Williamsburg.
Alas, their tattooed wrists will grow strong as they push their baby carriages onto the G-Train from Ft. Greene. Alone. These boys are the product of a generation of women who sacrificed everything for their children, and if you want to make it big in digital photography, good for you, just don’t expect them to attend church with you and the kid. They’ve seen you at the overpriced Korean deli’s as the old Italian grandma’s grinned- you picked the unripe tomatoes, plopping them right into that “Green” canvas shopping bag. Tough life…
Hopeless anarchists graffiti “Guns”, and other moronic statements defacing the Hasidic-owned warehouses begin to become abound. You think the Hasidics care? They know the more graffitied up the place gets the more desirable it will become for the post grad Pratt students, so screw you.
They talk about where they want to do mushrooms as opposed to where they have. Drunken high school wimps tip-toe through formerly industrial buildings and to the twilight roofs where they throw beer bottles down at skylights and rip out satellite dishes only to scatter back into the darkness, following the cockroaches into alleyways they saw in “Basquiat,” the old New York, hoping, just hoping a junkie crackhead will pull a knife on them so they can have something to talk about at “Daddy’s.” “Did you hear? Johnny got stabbed. That is so bad ass! Bushwick is so bad ass. It’s still not safe. I told you so!” A shiver runs down their spine in recalling they too have passed by that alleyway. It could have been them. If only they were so fortunate. It could have been their story.
You can piss anywhere in this place- on the silver roof tops, in the doll factory corridors or the haphazardly dry walled rooms where they take acid for the first time and contemplate swimming to Manhattan. Some of them even attempt this, but the current is too strong, they can’t afford the rent, and so they drown.
Just another slaughter in Williamsburg.
At 2:30 am, we reconvene at Union Pool- where the skateboarders perch off girls auditing SVA classes for the summer. Beside the Taco truck, she tries to explain the eminent success of her t-shirt line. But he doesn’t care, and his voice is louder than hers, and he doesn’t even wear glasses. They are merely see-through spectacles, all part of the spectacle of another wimp talking Tarkovsky. She “doesn’t have a television,” and Tarkosvsky has now become synonymous with his daunting trips to Lincoln Center- “59th Street!” “I never go above 14th St,” the bike messenger in training says to her, adding, “Yeah, my hairstylist says it’s better to only wash your hair once a week.” He grabs her hand, and I want to tell her that I just saw him crouching in the far corner latrine where he pissed in private, hoping that nobody would come into the bathroom. But I like to spread my legs out, and so I pissed in the middle stall, right next to him, staring straight forward into the Bic pen gaggle of soon to be erased thoughts. I’m just focused on not hitting the floor. Despite his efforts, he still managed to piss all over himself. You would think he washed his hands, but that’s just not the way people operate around here, and so now his piss stained paws are rubbing against her impressionable face.
There is no room for the prom queen here in the Burg, but they’ve gotten better looking than the bald headed bike messenger chicks who redundantly state “I’ve been here for 6 years. You know, since it was an artists community….”
