Staten Island
These are all New York stories, but this isn’t Woody Allen’s New York or rich white girls having sex in the city. As representatives of the more marginalized population, the characters and their stories are and opinions and perspectives are appropriately set off to the margins of the town so nice they named it twice. As a result, one learns a lot about how non-Manhattanites view the big island across the way:
“While Manhattan often seems to cry, Colonize me! long its overcrowded pores, this whole lands shrugs at the ideal. At times it even turns it back.”
Flushing Nights
Nights in Flushing take on a special quality, apparently. Spread across the length of breadth of several different stories is imagery which when collected together, presents quite a vivid portrait of Queens at twilight:
“It was getting dark. That’s how night arrived then, bothering you all at once, bursting into the room…the setting sun’s flames were running down to an orange gasp on the horizon…It was evening in Flushing, Queens, and the buildings got glowing in that setting-sun red…Flushing at night was like Flushing during the day, just darker.”
Not New York
The visceral nature of the city brought to life with imagery is given depth through contrast. One of the stories takes place mostly in Trinidad, but what the reader learns of the island is mostly the result of learning how it isn’t Queens or the Bronx. And yet, even as time seems to travel backward somewhat, the specter of pop culture still infuses the scene:
“Orpheus took me around the back of the house. Bugs attacked my fresh feet. Every three steps I had to knock away some gorged winged insect from a toe. I submitted my feet to the sun. We came to a tree, thicker and taller than the one in front; tied to it were three goats making their noises. The rope binding them was dense and awful; in places it had been chewed…their faces reminded me of Evil Professors; their gray eyes, lids half shut, convinced me they were planning things.”
A Bronx Tale
If you want to make someone who was there immediately go back in time to the Bronx in the late 1970’s, the magic words are “Thurman Munson.” Reggie Jackson may have been the straw that stirred the drink, but Thurman Munson owned the restaurant that served the drink and every Yankee fan knew it and that nearly drove Reggie nutter than the candy bar named after him. The memory of greatness cut short that dropped from the sky still lingers in the Bronx:
“That Thurman Munson poster was still hanging there, on tacks. Todd talked about it incessantly. In it, Thurman was watching something he’d swatted over a fence, standing straight like he wouldn’t run until he’d heard the ball bounce down Bronx streets. The look on his face might have been called intensity but it had been a few years since he’d been in that crash, so to me he seemed to be listening to those game-day clouds as they whispered, You’re going to die up here.”
