To leave a city for another is to invite a harrowing return. After a year in Bangkok, I returned to Brooklyn, not knowing what to expect and, even worse, not knowing how to move like a local. It is tantamount to saying that I didn’t know what to remember, and it was akin to ending one relationship and beginning another.
I began by buying a bike, an antique Peugeot. I thought perhaps that a bike would lessen the shock of moving from one city to another, would help me forget the streets I missed so much in Asia. Alreay, walking around Brooklyn at night I felt sorely abandoned to myself, sinking like a stone into some clutching boredom, cold and tired and confused. Near State Street where I live, the only rowdy street life I could find was the Salvation Army outlet on Bond, where men high on meth shout along to music and tap-dance opposite the Goodwill donation store. It’s joy of a sort, the nearest thing to the wildness of a Bangkok street.
Brooklyn felt spacious, pious, half-empty. I couldn’t get the hang of it. I couldn’t get over the way the sideways offered ample room for three people abreast, or the way you could rush down them without hurtling into tables piled with cilantro, sugar pots and dancing hookers. I was astonished by the wind, the non-stop sirens, the verticality of those proud, brittle churches. It was like a devout village which has solved even the problem of dog shit - and most surprising of all there was no vice, no decadence, and no sex. Certainly, there were men screaming “Fuck you bitch” on the street outside my bedroom, but that is not quite sex, is it?
Where did one eat guaytio soup on the street at three in the morning? Where did one go for a three hour Hot Stone Massage at midnight? The carnal appetites? You go home quietly, you lock yourself inside your apartment and you pick up a magazine if you suffer a little insomnia. There’s nowhere to go, and so you behave. You behave because you are not ingenious, and because you are afraid of the police.
One of my friends in Bangkok was a Jewish aid worker from Brooklyn called John Purdoe, who works at the main AIDS charity hospital in the Klong Tuey slums. We were driving through a Bangkok traffic jam one night and he confessed to me that he had never missed Brooklyn after a decade in Asia. Why not? A motorbike with two girls flashed past our window, and as they passed us they smiled at him for no reason, as people on two wheels do in Bangkok, with sexual intent with no ulterior motive. “That’s why,” Purdoe said. “The come-hither look.”
No matter. I came back to Brooklyn to try and salvage a failing relationship, and come-hither looks on Bangkok’s streets were immaterial. Perhaps I could salvage something if I survived a summer of biking without losing a leg like the dismal hero of Coetzee’s Slow Man.
The bike turned out to be a stroke of genius, and if the truth be told it was the suggestion of the estranged girlfriend. She must have suggested it as a therapeutic measure to cope with the abrupt end of an already short relation which my absence in Bangkok had rendered impossible. I felt guilty about it, and the bike became a sort of atonement. I cycled hard, pouring out all my misery on two pedals and a pair of brakes.
I raced pointlessly around Red Hook and the waterfronts, around Fort Greene and the anonymous wastelands of Bay Ridge. It was like flogging myself with nailed whips, because the fact is that I dislike bicycles, and I especially dislike the sight of myself on a bicycle, where I look like a war-time British air raid warden waiting for a finalizing bomb. There is something a little sanctimonious about bicycles, something gratingly superior. They are the trusted vehicles of vicars.
But now there developed a strange chemistry between the absence, the girlfriend and bike. And then, out of the blue, the disappearing girlfriend called to ask if we could go on a bike ride together. I didn’t refuse, though I couldn’t see what the point of it now would be - the relation itself was broken beyond repair, and the request made no sense except insofar as it was an invitation to explore something together with the meandering delicasy of a bike ride, which never has a precise objective. It came after months of quarrels and absences and finally silence. What would a bike ride cure?
We exchanged possible routes by email, and this shared virtual map reading itself became a reassurance that neither of us was dead or forgotten to each other, at least not yet. It was not clear why we should do this, or why the back streets and forgotten neighborhoods of Brooklyn should be the places where our love affair could peter out of its own accord, like something pulled by gravity down a long slope towards a resting place from which it will never recover. Look, she seemed to be saying, we could have been doing this while you were wasting us away in Bangkok, a city where I could never have trusted you for a moment, not in the world capital of the come-hither look! But that was not quite it.
We planned to ride to Coney Island, but never did. Other, even more ambitious routes, never came to fruition. I wondered what I would say to her in this moving situation ( in both senses of that adjective ). Can one talk freely and intimately on the bike path, trespassing through traffic lights, avoiding SUV’s and children and overtaking prams? Or was this an invitation to rediscover the city itself, at least a small corner of it - as if I lacked it in some way and by lacking it had missed something on the way to break-up?
There are places in New York that take you back to Bangkok. Vinegar Hill, for example, with its gaunt power stations and warped streets, the sense of industrial decay that has continued too long to rewind. It is the sadness of the nineteenth century, which outside of Europe was a century of imitation and unease. For New York, like Bangkok, was no London or Paris - it was a place of desperate striving and Darwinian commerce and it left behind itself these zones of warehouses and ruins, of canals thick with heavy metals and typhoid. They have a decomposed quality inside which the bicyclist is marked by a sweet pessimism.
The streets of Red Hook are even more Bangkokian as they peter out at the water like the broken alleys of a riverside neighborhood like Wang Lang : Van Dyke with its lofty skeletal structures and its Valentino Pier, the battered wharves and destroyed jetties around the Flickinger glassworks and the old North Side bottling center. Thoroughfares like Creamer and Halleck and Otsego with their bird’s nests of cables : it is the same man-made forest look. The canal and its tributaries in Gowanus recall the klongs which run underground all over Bangkok, and which make it a water city.
It was a ride in which little was said, because there is usually very little to say. Riding was a way of getting around this looming silence by filling it up with sight-seeing. We rode down to the very ends of streets like Bond and Court, which are known for their more lively parts inland, and it was satisfying to see how they ended – Bond Street tapers down to a cobbled cul-de-sac by the canal just where the erector-set sign for Kentile Floors rears itself above Robert Moses’ freeway. From this side, the words appear backwards, like some vague threat from 1984. On a sign hung from the canal fence is the following instruction : “If you see discharge during dry weather call 311.” It was not a number I would ever be using.
Here the skies are always brilliant, crossed by soaring trains and by the tracery of dead trees. Strange little companies have their quarters here, things like Fireproof Door Company and Cyberstruct. As we went round and round, we passed the formidable mass of Treasure Island storage on Center Street, which asks you to “Store Your Treasures here” and offers you a large painted palm tree as an incentive. Hardly exchanging a word, we sailed down Bay and Bryant until we were in the shadow of one of the buildings I love most in New York, the abandoned grain terminal. It looks like a Crusader castle in the Middle East, Krak des Chevaliers perhaps, with the mysterious graffiti word BARONE painted across it. Beautiful in its sinister hugeness, it silences the passer-by. And on the far side of it one comes to the humble finale of Court Street, little more than an alley running past loading bays for the Hass oil company and ending at the prickly barriers of the US Coast Guard.
This is the quietest place in the city, so close to the sea but separated from it by a mass of chimnies, warehouses and bright red pipes and taps with fire hazard warnings. Turn a corner and you hear the water lapping at ruins. I rode behind her, and all this time I followed the outline of the body, so familiar in the way it slanted to left and right, the violin form with – so to speak – its tightened strings, and now untouchable, like something moving off in the dark. We stopped at Halleck next to the Keyspan yards, where is a row of chocolate warehouses swept by dried up vines, and there was a tense, squinted glance. It began to occur to me that this wandering was a form of farewell, one in which hands would not be raised or words exchanged. The woman gives her time to the man for this sole purpose.
There were moments to get off and sun, for example at the lovely corner of Sigourney and Otsego, where no-one comes and where metal chimnies stand in shining rows. Further on is Coffrey Street, whose buildings have the liver-red oxide color of African roads. A drink at the Liberty Heights tap room, delightfully estranged as a pub can be, and then a slow meandering down Van Dyke, where stands the Clay Retort and Fire Brick house, built in 1854 by the superbly named Joseph K. Brick. It looks like a small Tuscan church made of grey schist, which was how it was designed, and it reminds you that people once bothered to build brick factories in the image of Tuscan churches.
As the ride progressed, I began to feel happier, more curious about the place where I lived but which I didn’t really know. The love relationship lost its subtle preeminence for a while, and I let my eye drift up tall brick chimnies slender as Egyptian steles, along lines of cemented windows and boxes of Fafard Canadian growing mix piled along a waterfront. There are moments when a city can suddenly acquire all the kinetic qualities of a human being, a person’s moods and expressions, so that she becomes a character of some kind – like a large woman, I often think, half asleep on her side. You find yourself talking to her, asking her questions, pestering her. And living in such a city is a long, monogamous affair, or else a marriage one abandons from time to time. Cities are rarely casual flings.
We went into the new Fairway’s down by the water, which must now be the largest supermarket in Brooklyn. It is a surprising labyrinth of gourmet pretension in such a neighborhood, and we wandered down aisles as long as subway platforms, half lost, perusing and window shopping and bitching about the cherries and not really shopping at all, just passing time and gossiping about the price of grapefruits and favorite coffees and the infuriating stickiness of plastic grocery bags. It was all curiously anticlimactic.
And then we stopped by the cheese counters and there was a moment when I caught her staring down for a moment at a Stilton, and there was something tired and sad in the mouth, an immense age, and I realized that in some way that she had simply been born away by the flow of ordinary life. If I had met her in a restaurant or in the usual bars I would never have seen it, and I would never have seen it if I had never bought an old Peugeot.
Our bike ride was not the last time I saw her, but it was almost the last, and it was the farewell that never otherwise happened. And I thought of Auden’s line the next time I rode alone along Van Dyke, which does not remind me of her at all : “Hearts that we broke long ago have long been breaking others.”
