It felt like regressing. The four of us sitting in the living room—Jerry, Steph, Paul, and I, a pipe and lighter at the ready. We were in their new apartment—Paul and Steph both transplants from out-of-state. New-wave. Jerry was visiting on his way back home to Fort Worth from Norway and was crashing on their couch. I brought over a six-pack, and there we were, drinking, Paul taking stock of the inventory, Steph fiddling with the projector, and Jerry fishing Sour Patch Kids out of his backpack. We could have been in a movie. Four Asian stoners with time to kill. Like Better Luck Tomorrow.
It took me thirty minutes just to find the place. This, after Paul told me that it was a 5-minute walk from Nostrand Avenue—left on Pacific, right under the LIRR. He couldn't have made it any easier if he tried. I went the opposite way for twenty minutes before doubling back. It was the elevated tracks that tipped me off, crisscrossed metal struts fastened to a wooden track like some ancient roller coaster.
The day before we all got dinner together in Brooklyn Heights. It was the quintessential New York experience—view of the bridge, brick oven pizza, Sinatra on the jukebox. It felt like everyone in there was Italian. New-wave. That is, if you don't count us and the one other table of Asians by the window. And then, even after they left, they put another group of Asians right there in the same spot. Paul joked, “one pipe bomb through the window, and boom, all ten Asians are dead.” He said it so matter-of-fact he could have been talking to a child. “How's that for a 60 Minutes special?”
Before dinner I caught myself taking pictures of the bridge. Imagine that, staring up at the same goddamned bridge I'd seen since before I could think and fussing with my f-stop. I couldn't tell which had changed at that instant: the bridge or me. It was the same feeling I had when I went out with the three of them after dinner for drinks. We drove to Williamsburg, and yes, before you even have to ask, I'll tell you that we had the oysters. The last time I had seen any of them was in Asia—Jerry with me in China, and Paul and Steph living together in Korea. Seeing them here, in my own hometown was like the two halves of my life uniting—the alien and the local, the visitor and the native.
The Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge.
We talked for a long time that night—about what, it's hard to remember. Stupid stuff. The kinds of things friends can pass hours talking about. Movies. Girls. Reminiscing. Hopes and dreams. How nothing had changed. Or everything. How ve could come back from being abroad and feel like strangers to ourselves. And all the while wondering: did we trade in our innocence for a shot at the world? But the whole thing was effortless—like the four of us, all transplants to America, had always known each other like this. It was like going back and forth through time, taking from the past everything we needed to get to that moment.
I woke up in the morning with three words scribbled in my notebook: kaleidoscope so innocent. The memory was fuzzy but still intact. At one point, the visualizer on their projector made a shape like a kaleidoscope—colorful geometric stencils dancing in rhythmic patterns. A kaleidoscope is a child's toy. Children are innocent. Perhaps to a superlatively high degree. Therefore, the kaleidoscope netted innocence of its own. I thought about the last time I looked through an actual kaleidoscope and the whole cognitive process checked out. I was a child. I was innocent. Times had, quite evidently, changed since.
Getting back home from their apartment took just under three hours. This, despite the fact that we lived in the same borough. There's the late night train schedule for you. What does it matter if the subway is 24 hours if there is exactly one train between two and three in the morning? On the way home, I went the opposite way again. I took the A train towards Queens instead of up to Manhattan where I had to change lines. All that trouble just to go back to Brooklyn again. Figures. Sometimes you have to backtrack before you can move forward.
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This is a piece of creative non-fiction, part of a new experimental direction I'm taking with my blog about short semi-fictionalized vignettes from my daily life, lightly polished and greatly embellished for online consumption.
