BEN ROSE AT MIDDAY. He’d stayed out most of the night drinking with a couple of buddies in the East Village because he was too embarrassed to deal with his father again. When he stumbled out into the living room, he was relieved to find the old man gone.
He went back into his bedroom, changed into his most nonyuppie clothes—old jeans, a faded black T-shirt, work boots—and emptied his wallet of all but twenty bucks. Then he packed his least expensive camera and set out for the Red Hook Houses.
If anybody tried to jump him, he planned to just hand over the twenty quickly and split. His canvas shoulder bag was old and frayed; he removed anything he didn’t need. Despite these precautions, his stomach knotted as he crossed the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and headed straight into the projects. The day was overcast and foggy.
He wasn’t sure what to expect. Kids flashing gang signs, crack dealers screeching around corners firing Mac-9s? At the least, some poor black and Latino teenagers who would not be happy to see a white guy from the other side of the tracks invading their turf.
Maybe he was secretly hoping for a little excitement. Not to get mugged, certainly, but a chance to put his photojournalistic skills to the test. A documentary report from the front lines, Robert Capa during the Spanish Civil War. It was hard capturing violence on film. With street trouble—a car crash, a punch-out—he usually only saw it out of the corner of his eye, a wild, jagged flash.
As it turned out, no one in the projects seemed to care much about him. People just went about their business: mothers pushed strollers, kids goofed around on bikes, men in green uniforms roamed the grounds picking up trash.
He shot a few minutes of video, but there was little to get excited about.
He wandered east toward the water. As he moved away from the projects and potential danger, his other worry was free to resurface like an ache in a back tooth. Part of him was glad that he’d managed to finally vent some deep, longstanding complaints about his father, but he couldn’t help picturing the crushed look on the old man’s face. He’d been too harsh. Maybe cruel, even. And he hadn’t even been accurate. His mom had never used the word “loser.” What was it she’d said? Something about not being sure if the man was capable of loving anybody. Was that better or worse?
Either way, he felt he ought to apologize.
He thought of heading back to see if his father would come home after work, and he squirmed.
Down on the waterfront, he filmed a tugboat pulling a garbage barge; soon it disappeared into the mist. The Hook today reminded him of the old photographs and he half expected to see tall sails gliding out of the fog.
Later in the day, the sun broke through the clouds. He roamed for hours, enjoying the solitude of the back streets, the beauty of the rust and aging brick. At one point he looked up to discover a white crescent of moon in the blue sky.
As he set out for home, the whole neighborhood glowed honey-orange in the sun’s last rays, and the hush of evening settled down over Red Hook.