I wake up from a nap even though I should just sleep until morning. It’s only seven. I’ve left my bike at the Bedford stop for sixteen hours too long and I need to retrieve it before someone dismembers it – takes my handlebars, steals my tires, makes it unrideable for the duration of my New York summer. And so I leave with no other plans beyond said retrieval, my head fuzzy and my eyes watering from lack of sleep.
The storm has gone away, at least for now. I walk under periwinkle clouds and disappearing daylight. The previous night, thunder shook the windowpanes of the loft I was working in late through the night, lightning snapped across the sky, the inky black momentarily turned an electric blue, clouds lit up like the aftermath of fireworks. It had been raining on and off since then, pouring down in unpredictable torrents and then disappearing as quickly as it came. “The weather is having an identity crisis,” some girl half-heartedly joked while sitting beside me at a casting, wearing her rock and roll tee shirt and her cutoff jeans, her messy hair and grimy boots. It wasn’t a funny joke. Nobody laughed.
I hear it when I turn down Banker Street. It echoes through a canyon of brick walls with aged fissures patched up with mortar lines, graffiti layered over the brokenness. There is a concert at McCarren Park. Beirut. Sharon Van Etten set to open. I listen to her play from a great many blocks, her voice carried across Williamsburg and into Greenpoint through the channels of northern streets.
They’re playing in an asphalt park usually reserved for weekend softball games. You can see the stage from the street. I stand behind the blue and green tennis courts covered in shallow puddles of water, listening to her sad songs through a rubberized chain link fence, singing my life with her words.
Call me aside and I will now be
And I will be fine with that.
Don’t leave me now, you might love me back.
Distance is fine, I know you can’t care
And nothing is big like that.
You don’t see me now. I don’t see you back.
The sun dips lower and Brooklyn gets darker and Sharon Van Etten leaves the stage. The sky and the ground come together like one seamless painting; sweeping gold strokes lay over the sharp white lines of the tennis courts. The tips of Manhattan begin to light up in the distance, little boxes flicking on one by one.
I have moved closer to the stage, still outside of the actual venue, watching for free what people thirty feet in front of me paid $25 to see. People sit down on damp concrete or stand with arms folded. A boy upends a trashcan, using it as a chair.
Beirut comes on. Zach Condon, the lead singer, says something about how it’s nice to be home even though he was born in New Mexico. They used to play here at small venues in the beginning. Now they’re Beirut, big and mentionable. He later says something about how they’ve been around for five years. Five years, I think, and they’ve managed to feel like they’ve been around forever.
In front of me, a man plays with his dog, a copper-colored thing the size of a dachshund, only fluffier and more benign. A toy. I am taken with him immediately, this man with his dog. He has blonde hair and lithe arms. He wears narrow jeans and black shoes with white soles. His forearms are covered in tattoos but I do not stare long enough to catch what of.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watch them both. He gently tosses a tennis ball and lets the dog tackle it with its narrow jaw. When he sits down, the dog crawls into his lap. He ruffles its nape and calls it Louie. Young girls turn around, wearing their summer dresses and their winter boots. “Awww, so cute,” they coo, looking between the dog and its owner. They want him but they don’t know why.
I feel my heart soften in a dangerous way. He continues to play with his dog and I think someone that plays with a dog like that must be a kind person. “You wouldn’t be mean to me,” I think. “Would you?” I’m falling in love with the boy and his dog, not with the reality – because I don’t know their reality – but the concept. This is perhaps what gets me into trouble most often. Projections. Imaginings. False hope. Still, as he feeds his dog treats out of a plastic sandwich bag, I think, “You wouldn’t hurt me. Not you. Not you who loves your dog so much would hurt me like everyone else has.”
I just want someone to be nice to me. I just want someone to be honest with me and not make promises they’re never going to keep. I just want someone to care about my heart instead of pulling it out of my chest.
Don’t say you love me; just fucking love me.
The sky tucks away its color, saving it for tomorrow, distancing itself from yesterday. The air grows colder. I sit on the ground, my long legs stretched out in front of me, my calves touching the wet cement. The boy sits down beside me, just two feet away. We say nothing.
People stand in front of me and I can’t see but I don’t care. In between songs, a convivial chatter pervades, just like in the beginning of that Weezer song. Undone. The Sweater Song. Something like that. My emotional soundtrack will always be the Blue Album, brooding and monotone and yelling at times, grumpy bass lines and lyrics about nothing and everything, loving like teenagers. I am a child of the 90s.
In the darkness I sit under singular stars that are probably planets, the only things bright enough to cut through the smog and city lights. Mars or lost satellites. I don’t know. I watch airplanes ascend and descend in their predictable patterns. They leave Newark. They fly towards JFK. Blinking lights of red and white coming and going in three-mile intervals.
The dog walks in front of me and sniffs my hand. I think if all times to say something to the boy I should say it now. “How old is your dog?” I ask, petting its head. The boy tells me “four and a half months.” He has an accent. French or Brazilian or something. I didn’t expect an accent.
“He’s very spoiled,” he says. “An attention whore.”
I pet the dog until it leaves me and then return my attention to the stage even though it hasn’t really been on the stage at all. We go quiet again.
Two children appear to my right, a little girl and a little boy. The girl is older, but not by much. She has thick hair and square bangs, about my size when I was that age. The boy is about the same size as my brother when he was that age. I watch the two dance under the light of street lamps, blackened shadows and a halo of amber hair. The girl lifts her arms to the music and swings them around, a child intimating a ballerina. The boy, clunking and graceless in his yellow shorts and rain boots, intimates the girl. When he falls over, she picks him up.
Two men, the friend and the father, pick the children up, swinging them around by the arms like a ride at a carnival – the one with the seats that flew around with centrifugal force. Up and down. Up and down. A warped record or the rings of Saturn. I remember that time. Watching them made me sad in an inexplicable way that bordered happiness. Maybe I felt morose. Maybe that’s what it was.
Beirut plays its last song. Zach’s voice bounces off of southern wall of the Automotive High School until it is gone. “That’s literally all we’ve got,” Zach says. Everyone claps. The boy turns to me and asks if this is the only band playing and I say, “Yep, that’s it.” We get up and walk out through the same door and down the same street until we take different roads, just like anyone I’ve ever actually known.
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