“Move anywhere, when you’re from the Bronx, you’re of the Bronx, it doesn’t shed.”
This is the opening line of this most unusual ghost story. Written in the first person, it’s strangely hypnotic tale, but that has nothing to do with the significance of the quote in this context. Take this quote, shift the words a little and place it in the correct location and it could be the opening line of any of the stories. What this book may be about more than anything—these stories connected to each other and yet not connected enough to make it a novel—is the sense of place. These stories present a hypnotic vision of New York City that is not the usual fare. The significance of location is palpable whether the narrator is describing the Bronx, Flushing or Staten Island and the presence of the giant buildings reaching into the air nearby are always a specter casting a shadow over everything.
Of all the boroughs, it is the only city to stand on its own. Manhattan pretends at self-reliance. You hear of one borough battling another, Brooklyn vs. the Bronx, like that, but here, Queens has enough of its own. We don’t need to import enemies. Among ourselves we’ve got all the fights we can handle.
This quote reveals a layer and depth to the collection’s dependence on setting. The setting of the stories are not limited to geography or time, but dig deeper. The narrator in the story above insists that there is no shedding of the Bronx from a person, but, again, tailor the words and apply the meaning throughout the bustle of the New York City that is neither the glamor of Manhattan nor the mean streets. Street of fire will be found here, in Queens or Brooklyn or the Bronx, for sure, and especially among the marginalized population of the characters inhabiting these stories, but there is something distinctly different to the “feel” of the broader span of the term “New York” in the tales.
In Trinidad I was another boy, not so quick to be venal and petty. I cared some. But when my mother arrived the reality that I would have to return was exhausting, made me panic. In the theater I tried to think how I might stay longer, even a day, an hour.
The magical quality of the city is, however, missing. This is neither a love letter to the outer boroughs across the rivers from Manhattan nor an indictment. It is an authentic portrait of the highs and lows, the fun times and the bad things that happen, but one that is quite noticeable is the number of main character working overtime to get away. The Trinidad that comprises the title of this story actually is Trinidad; it’s not some metaphorical version of a real place like the movie Brazil. Trinidad is as far away from Flushing as the narrator can imagine not so much in terms of mileage but in the realities of everyday life. Those realities are constructed not just of concrete events which occur, but the pulsing tension of expectations always thumping away. What awaits in Trinidad is another life springing from a far different system of values and expectations than what is waiting back home. People are alike all over, the story suggests, but certainly not their situations and situations are ultimately what makes everybody the people they are.
