Walk from my door to the J train. A long enough walk to necessitate a coffee, always a stop at Brooklyn Ball. From the beginning there are oil slicks and rubble monsters, balls of tumble lint bouncing down the street with rats scurrying after them searching for some morsel of decadent left over Win Son. It’s a bright blue day, the sun pulsing down like a lazer beam hot tub made of heat ropes glueing the clothes to my body as sweat begins to envelope me in no time, but yet the strange surreality of the heat is oddly comforting. It’s like being on a perpetual acid trip as the heat bakes my mind into submission and I feel my skin burning in the way that that the faucet feels cold when it is too hot to comprehend. Aya at Brooklyn ball says hello as she looks up and my sweat pouring brow emerges in the cold Blade Runner decor.
Coffee made and poured, milk heated and poured, money transferred from a silver chipped plastic card that exchanges credits like in the RPG video games i once played on my Sega Genesis. I turn and say thank you and onward. Union street comes next, a bizzare cluster of police cars, sour smells, barricades, homeless, addicts, mentally ill, hipsters, young kids covered in black line work tattoos with blond eyebrows and evidence of cutting and snorting and the joys of nihilism that is to be a young weirdo, struggling to survive and moving equally towards awakening and total annihilation each intense day. The police stand and stare, masks hanging from their chins, trying to make sense of a world beyond their grasp, a world that fears and despises and holds them in contempt. I flow through the intersection like a fish breaking from the school having found a current to the next great migration. The train rumbles over head mocking me as it rolls to the station before I can mount the stairs. No sweat, I’ll keep drinking hot coffee in the heat and sit and wait while the smell of magnetic fire and rubber a burnt electricity tickles my nostrils and calms my spirit with its timeless permanence.
The train comes, click and clackin into the station, Hasids maskless in packs getting on talking in Yiddish on their cell phones, swinging their curls in a dance of what seems to be heavy conversation. They sit packed into the bench. A group of Puerto Rican Old Heads with Tri color beads in their hair and on necklaces dangling down their chest stare at them, turning up the Salsa on their small yet mighty blue grated JB mini tube. It’s official, it’s a party, a cultural soundclash for the ages. The Hasids speaking Yiddish louder and louder with one another pointing at the Puerto Ricans, the Puerto Ricans turning the sound tube up louder and louder, flowing back in forth in a constant stream of that so very fast and abrupt and masterful style of Spanish born of the Puerto Rican islands. The two groups, getting louder and louder reach a crescendo when two young Black teens get on the car at Marcy Station, three tall blue tooth speaker in tow, cranking Major Lazer. Its as if the Judge dropped the gavel to clear the court. The decisions of the high court of sound and the ownership of the car has been both taken by and handed two the teenagers, style points dripping from every inch of their hard working chiseled physics.
I am on my twice a week journey to get one of the most perfect things on earth, one of the simplest delights that has ever existed and is the reason for these journeys through the narrative weavings of New York’s five boroughs. I am on a quest for that godly cup of Chinese style bakery coffee, and nothing else will satisfy this, not an itch, but a truly deep desire for the perfection that comes in these cups from these iconic establishments. At this particular moment in the subway car I find myself at the intersection of three cultures three languages three rhythms and three styles, but unbeknownst to me I will soon find myself stopping dead in my tracks to take this photo, and stare in awe at the marching band in their electric blue suits with brandished tuba in the middle of a sidewalk filled with young ultra hip future gentrifiers of chinatown, all surrounded by flowers and the smell of incense. But first, I have to find my bakery.
Chapter 2 coming soon.