I had just moved to Brooklyn into the third floor of a brownstone. And now, I had back pain. This was not just a sore back that a little bed-rest or Tylenol would mute. This was unrelenting, pulsating spurts of pain; the type of pain that made me consider purposefully bumping my head or stabbing myself in the hand in order or to distract from the pain at hand. Books I read on the subject had told me, that like a starving baby, this pain wanted something, was crying out for something, and absolutely would not shut up until it got it. I did drugs - Tylenol 3s, Percocets, Diloditts, - but that only muted it, put a big fat piece of duct tape over the baby's mouth, but it would not nourish the baby.
I found the pain to be a handy tool, which when employed properly, served as an excuse to keep me holed up in my apartment, insulated from a city, which from what I knew of it, had felt cold. But on this searing August Sunday I ventured forth from my new apartment, which was far from actually new—the "parquet hardwood floors" were quite soft and came apart like Legos, only one kitchen appliance could run at a time -else the fuse would blow, and the kitchen could have worked as a set piece for That 70s Show. I was en route to reunite with two friends I had not seen in some time, D.J. A. Brown, who was called DJ Brown on account of the ease with which it slips off the tongue, and Co-Pop.
DJ Brown had a white man Basket Ball player's look, tall, with a white man’s afro held taut by a sweat band across the upper part of the forehead. Before coming to The City, he had been on a brief mission somewhere in the south to build houses for the less fortunate as part of a City-Year equivalent program and was now a substitute teacher at a new charter school in Queens. In his spare time he built things, wooden things—a rocking chair that was more like an amusement park ride as it could rock as low as 45 degrees to either side, a cane with a knife on the bottom inspired by the creeper protagonist murderer of the1960 slasher film Peeping Tom, and a version of The Price Is Right’s game “Plinko Chip.” Some considered him an alcoholic, though I took issue with that. He just loved beer, and so he frequently carried one around with him, the same way a child brings around a lollipop. On top of all this, he was also a master of the music play list, which had earned him his name. And Co-Pop was medium height, medium build, with curly brown hair, and often shirtless. As a Peace Corps. volunteer he had been stationed in the Philippines the last few years freaking out the hairless natives with the doormat that covered his chest and back. When I visited him in the Pacific he coached me on how to treat the shy Filipinos. "In the world of the polite and the bashful, the wise ass is king," Co-Pop taught. DJ Brown mixed music, Co-Pop mixed wit. And me, I was just a tall skinny Jewish kid that thought this overwhelming city might offer me a chance to climb a few rungs higher in the film industry than I had in Boston.
Co-pop had come to the city with the insatiable yearning to play ping pong so the three of us converged on the West Village to a place called Fat Cat, a dive billiard room. Before this I had been to downtown New York maybe a handful of times and was always following someone else around. I never truly saw it for what it was until this moment. When I emerged from the F train at the West Fourth Street stop and began walking up 6th avenue I was surprised by how laid back this area felt.
Before I had moved here, Manhattan was engraved in me as being comprised of skyscrapers, world class museums, Central Park, and Donald Trumps. But thanks to deep bedrock that made laying the foundations required for skyscrapers unfeasible, there is a sizable gap in the city skyline in the southern region between the downtown financial district and mid-town. This major section of lower Manhattan is dominated by low-rise buildings and small town houses, which comprise Greenwich, the East, and the West Villages. Though the Jack Keuroac and Allen Ginsberg age is over, it is still coffee-shop New York, poetry reading New York, and off-off-Broadway New York. It’s not quite the center of bohemia any more but there is still a different vibe to this part of the city. The concrete jungle does not swallow up the sun, with each building competing for its light. Here, the sun warmed my shoulders, and the heels, hard leather shoes, and neck-choking ties had given way to jeans, white socks, the occasional mohawk, and stylish clothing like shirts with unnecessarily large buttons.
After getting turned around a handful of times I ran into Christopher Street and found my friends at Fat Cat. The three of us caught up over unforced errors, weak back-hands, and missed slams. Though Fat Cat offers a plethora of great table and arcade games to choose from, it commits the all too frequent blunder of many ping-pong rooms in bars: Not providing enough light. We emerged from the basement dungeon an hour later and replenished the lost calories at a New York pizza joint called Two Boots, a halfway decent chain pizza house. When I say halfway decent, I mean halfway decent for New York, which means anywhere else in the world it was a phenomenal pie. But after being here over a year, I have to say that their ratio of sauce to cheese is askew. We ordered the shrooms and some soda, flirted with a table of girls, and ventured back out into the afternoon heat of Greenwich Village. When I snapped out of my reverie in which Native Americans were hammering away at my lower back with spears, Co-Pop and DJ Brown were walking into a petite thrift shop on West 10th Street.
This was very much a West Village thrift shop, the sort that is of a different vein than say, a Salvation Army, where the middle classes donate their clothes, cheap furniture, and outdated digital goods like VCRs, and lower class mommies and daddies come to outfit themselves and their children in Paco Jeans and elementary school team sports t-shirts. Then of course there are the starving artists and the rich wanna-pretend-to-be-poor hipsters, digging for vintage grandpa vests. In the West Village though it is the wealthy that sell their functional and once stylish couches, coffee tables, vases, and pots in order to make room for the newest and in-est. Instead of broad florescent lights illuminating the store, here, warm track lighting bathed the trinkets, furniture, and books in a yellowy glow. Flying in for the bargain or trendsetting kill were true shoppers, vintage hunters, and the casual frugalite, who were all seemingly well off.
I was doing my usual boutique walk-through, pulling a book off the shelf here, examining an old ice cream maker there, when something caught my eye. It was a couch. Not just any couch, but an enormous cream-colored couch with images of peacocks drawn all over it, their feathers twisting and folding into one another, forming beautiful red, white and indigo flowers. It reminded me of the peacocks my parents would take me to see at the San Francisco zoo when I was just a boy, where they roamed freely throughout the park. I took a seat and slowly melted in as my buttocks drifted down into the fabric. The cushion bent and receded beneath my bottom but then held and supported. Flawless. The price tag read $125. I grabbed DJ Brown whose nose was deep into an old record player.
"Yo Brown, man, what are your thoughts on this couch?"
"Handsome, elegant, and true," Brown said without looking up. He took a sip from a paper bag he had suddenly produced, but then added,
"Yo Nate, you forget you live in Brooklyn, man?" Shit. I was so wrapped up in the perfection of what lay before me; a place I could rest, think, eat, read, write, play backgammon, perhaps masturbate; though probably it was too precious to defile like that. I was watching myself in a montage striking various comfortable poses on the couch as it sat in the living room of my apartment. First I was lying on my back gazing at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, then I was lying on my side with popcorn watching Die Hard, then I was face down getting a massage from my girl friend, and then I was sitting Indian style in a deep meditation.
"Excuse me….EXCUSE ME," I said to the woman working the register. Finally she acknowledged me. "Do you offer delivery with the purchase of your couches?"
"We do, yes."
"Great. Will you deliver this couch to Brooklyn?"
"We certainly will. What part of Brooklyn?"
"Carroll Gardens." The thrift shop employee bent behind the register and lifted up a laminated card that contained a condensed map of the five Burroughs. She consulted it for a moment, running her finger along the card, and then raised her head and stung me in the heart.
"Okay, to Carroll Gardens, That’s a $120 delivery fee." Co-pop emerged from a corner sporting a pink and yellow flamboyant bandana on his head and an open jean jacket over his bear chest, his body hair protruding down his stomach like black spikes.
"Nate, we don't need the van, man, we can carry the thing." I thanked the lady behind the desk and tapped Brown on the shoulder signaling that it was time to leave. He began to follow me out but Co-Pop didn't budge.
"Yo, Nathan, it's no big deal, what is it, like half a mile?" Aside from a small piece of real estate on Good Harbor beach in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where his family resided, and a plot of land in Legazpi, Philippines, Co-Pop had not been out much, especially not in New York.
"It's more like four, maybe five," I said, and proceeded to the door.
"Fine, five, whatever. We could do it. "Hey Ms," Noah said, eagerly glaring at the register gal behind the counter. "HEY MS! Do you have two dollies we could borrow?"
"Sure. We could spare two dollies, but we would have to hold onto your license as a deposit." Once Co-Pop pops an idea into that head of his, it doesn't pop out. He thrives on outrageous dares, sometimes self-imposed, and always with a level of hazard, like jumping into Boston's polluted Charles River at midnight in winter, or snow tubing a black diamond trail at Okemo Mountain in Vermont. His blue eyes became a wild jungle green; this was Co-Pop in focus. "Awesome. Yo, guys, let's do this. Nate, give the lady your license." I wasn't going to let him push me into this. I figured it wouldn’t be long before we were stopped by a cop and forced to turn around or throw it away, or perhaps the peacocks would get torn to bits by an oncoming Mack truck. In such cases it would be my $125 down the drain. Plus my back pain would make it physically impossible for me to take part in this adventure. I voiced these concerns.
"DJ and I will push the couch the whole way, you can lay down on it. If something happens to it, I'll throw you 25 bucks." As I pondered the decision I linked eyes with the thrift store mannequin. She was a beautiful brunette with fair skin and deep almond colored eyes. She was looking right at me, smiling, whispering to me,
"Nathan, don't be such a pussy."
Co-Pop took off the jean jacket he had tried on and handed it to the lady to put back on the shelf, but kept the pink and yellow bandana, which he fixed to his head. I talked the couch down to a flat $100, and slapped my bankcard down on the table feeling a mixture of regret and nervous excitement. Within a minute we were outside on the sidewalk of West 10th st., with a few ominous rain clouds bearing down on us, and in possession of two raggedy wooden dollies and a four-seater peacock decorated, cream colored, sofa, half covered by black trash bags.
We got the dollies in position underneath the couch. Immediately there was a problem. The dollies were not tall enough to keep the bottom of the couch from scraping the sidewalk.
"We need some lumber," said Co-Pop, who was instantly on the case rummaging through a garbage can across the street by the M8 bus stop. I found a few pieces of wood just up the block in front of a dumpster, and Brown found himself a couple of pieces in front of the antique watch store across the way, and then re-entered the thrift store. He emerged with a hammer and nails, and Co-Pop and Brown went to work while I looked nervously up at the sky. Half-hour later we were ready to go.
Sitting up against one armrest and resting my extended legs and crossed ankles on the cushions, I whipped out the guidebook I had found on the street earlier and flipped through the maps section. I was to be the navigator. Co-Pop positioned himself in the front, as the puller, and Brown, the biggest of us, became the pusher. Like a new crew team, our vessel made awkward turns and nearly capsized. The dollies skidded out from under the couch repeatedly, sending me to the pavement and scraping the peacocks. It was clear, our sync was askew. Brown pushed too hard, Co-Pop had no finesse on the pull, and I didn't know where the fuck we were.
I had been told when I moved to the city that getting around here was a cinch on account of the grid system. “Oh, you can’t get lost in The City,” people would all say. Bullshit. Yes, north of 14th street Manhattan is a breeze to navigate but the villages are a maze, especially the west side. Because this area of the city was conceived and built before the commissioner's plan of 1811 where the New York State Legislature called for a grid for areas north of 14th Street, it missed out on this visionary organizational structure. The area may have escaped the monotony of uniform square blocks, which has no doubt added to its rich character, but it is one hell of a place to navigate. The streets are a series of narrow placed diagonal lines with awkward twists that lead to confusing intersections, like where West 4th St. intersects West 12th Street, two streets, which according to the grid system and laws of geometry, should never intersect even if they stretched all the way around the world.
It took us ten minutes just to move the couch one block and Brown and Co-Pop looked beat. On top of that there were more rain clouds than before and after all the preparations we were now deep into the afternoon. No words were exchanged, but our faces said it all. This was a mistake. We stopped in front of a flower shop lined with mini-carnations, tulips, and cheap orchids. We stood hugging a piece of sidewalk, stagnant, staring down at the dazzling peacocks, their feathers outstretched to the sky, while the city moved around us—taxis, bikers, workers, strollers, beggars, none of them batting an eye at our dilemma, just stepping aside to avoid the occlusion.
Until this moment we had all silently harbored a fantasy, that some kind of angel with a truck would notice what we were trying to accomplish and would come to our aid, or that a generous worker impressed by our endeavor would offer us a legitimate dolly suitable for the task. New York was teaching, the same lesson every citizen of the city had grown up with, it was preaching, and we were listening—here, if you want something to move, unless you have money, you’re going to have to make it move by yourself.
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