“ It’s been an artists community since the 80’s,”
If you only knew this was and still is the home of the Napoli’s Genovese crime family stronghold-the most powerful gambling empire in American history.
I’ll take the decent looking 19-year-old over the contrived lesbian any day of the week. There is still hope for them. They’re just discovering this Played Out Pool Party as opposed to defining it as “the birthplace of a movement.” What movement? This has and always will be where dirt bags come with the sole intention of getting you into that photo booth. But you take another picture and put it on your fridge next to your Ralph Waldo Emerson magnets as you try to recall if he wore a condom in that white-tiled, piss-filled bathroom.
I perpetually lie to the 25-year-old from Gary, Indiana. She’s in publishing, and I know what she wants to hear:
“I’ve got a book deal. It’s going great.”
“What’s the book about?”
“You know, the history of sex told vicariously through the front wheel of a track bike…Blade Runner Meets Still Life With Woodpecker.”
“I never do this,” she says while taking a Trojan magnum out of an industrial size bed-side-box.
I wake up in the monstrous loft looking over McCarren Park where just ten years ago, the gangs would be covered in shattered 40 bottles and blood, tip-toeing over syringes and hookers…no longer. Under the cloud of newfound capital and a door man attended building I plow through another SCAD grad, promising a peak into my imaginary manuscript.
Another PBR hangover. Who are we kidding with the lime on top? It’s shit beer, but 9 dollar bar tabs resulting in sex- hipster chicks, you’re selling yourselves short… I would have shelled out for Blue Moon’s.
The light hits my alcohol burnt face. When are they going to put a fucking Apple Store around here? Watch them play Dodgeball in my peripheral. Is how they rebel? I know I used to play the same game when I was four years old.
Yeah, another slaughter in Williamsburg.
I walk underneath the shade of the BQE– past the skateboarders and the “stunt bikers.” How many ways can you pop a wheelie, Napolean Dynamite? I pass by La Piazzetta where Joe Bagels and the old Italians hold Sunday morning court. They look me up and down and smirk- another hipster paying their rent, eating their “imported mozzarella.” I want to tell them I moved here from the Bronx, that I don’t even own a bicycle. Alas, a 19-year-old hottie walks behind me, distracting them from my own tight jeans and Vans sneakers. I too become interested in the passing Bambi. There’s fresh meat in Williamsburg, and if these Blublockers make her feel more comfortable, well, fuck it, I’m a hipster too!
It ain’t so bad around here, actually. As long as my landlord doesn’t raise the rent…as long as the other landlords do. As long as the tattooed bald bike messenger chicks make way for a fresh crop of Connecticut hipsters and bowling alleys. Three out of the four corners of my streets have construction sites. Let’s see what the fresh crop brings in…definitely less parking spots.
No brakes in Brooklyn. It can’t stop, won’t stop. But this ain’t no movement. It’s a suicide ride down the steepest hill in town, and if you’re a bully, this is where you will thrive. Come sell Ghandi shirts on Bedford, laugh it up alongside the Italians, the Polish, the Hasidics. Nevermind the fact that they’re laughing at us too, there’s no competition around here. Pick up the dodge ball and peg away. Start a “Closed Range Chicken Company,” and put a fucking Rambo Chicken as your emblem, pitching these little pussies as having the “toughest chicken in town. You know what these chicken had to do to survive the minefields, the torture? You should be so honored to eat these warrior chicken.” Maybe it will rub off on them, help their dodgeball game, toughen them up a bit?
Well, you know it’s just another slaughter in Williamsburg…
