BEN LEIGHTNER TURNED ON his stereo and played the first half of the first song of three different CDs. He turned the stereo off.
He picked up a filmmaker’s magazine and flipped through it, unable, for once, to fantasize himself into its pages. The new Orson Welles? The new Scorsese? Tonight he couldn’t even imagine himself the new Ken Burns.
He glanced at his phone, which sat mute on his editing desk, a door laid on two sawhorses. He ran through a mental list of his friends—which didn’t take long—wondering who he might call. One had a new girlfriend and never went out these days. Another had recently taken a job writing for a cable-TV cartoon and couldn’t seem to talk about anything else…He gave up on his list and sat staring at the phone, willing it to ring. The room was so quiet he could hear the clock plunking away the seconds. I got a phone that doesn’t ring—it would make a good line for a blues song, some old Mississippi Delta singer rocking on his porch. Blind Lemon Pledge.
He got up, wandered into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, shut it. He returned to the living room, flopped down on his futon couch, clicked on the TV. For a few minutes he watched a sitcom, the star a young guy his age who sat on his couch in his apartment and was visited by an endless parade of friends and pretty girls and relatives and coworkers. He clicked the set off. Every TV show was about people who always had other people to talk to. You never saw a show about a guy who lived alone and read a lot.
He looked at the phone again, that dead piece of plastic. Dropping all ironic detachment, he sent two deep, silent questions out into the ether. Why am I different? And What’s wrong with me?
He sat limp on the couch for another minute and then finally—disgusted with himself—he got up and turned off the lights. He’d just been avoiding work, was all; he’d feel better once he started. He popped a tape in the VCR, clicked the remote, and the TV sprang to life. On screen, the late-day sun caught the reds and oranges and earth tones of Red Hook’s brick warehouses and bathed them in a special honeyed light.
The Hook was screwed up, but Ben loved it.
Earlier that afternoon, he’d packed up a couple of cameras and set out for the waterfront. With the weight of the camera bag and tripod pressing on his shoulders, he felt as if he were going to work, like his grandfather striding down to the docks with his longshoreman’s hook.
He walked across Smith Street, where black and Latino kids hung out in front of the bodegas; beyond Court Street, where yuppies pushed baby strollers into video stores and cappuccino cafés; on past the swanky brownstones of Cobble Hill. He didn’t see many people outside there, though he could glance into the windows of their brownstones to see them sitting in their living rooms, under expensive Tiffany lamps.
The edge of the neighborhood was marked by a deep gash, a channel cut into the earth for the Gowanus Expressway. He crossed a bridge over the highway into Red Hook. The direct route would have been south-west, but that would have taken him through a giant low-income housing project. The Red Hook Houses stretched for block after block in the center of the neighborhood. He would have loved to film there, but a young white guy wandering around with a camera would undoubtedly raise suspicion. In his mental map of the neighborhood, the Red Hook Houses were an uncharted area, like the edge of an ocean populated by fantastical sea monsters. With drive-by shootings and drug deals gone bad, several people got killed there every year. (Which meant that his father, the Big Homicide Detective, had probably been inside. Ben considered asking if he could tag along sometime, but it had been months since they’d spoken.)
Instead of entering the projects, he turned west toward the waterfront, along a deserted side street called Seabring. He loved the exotic, vaguely Shakespearean names of the streets. Imlay, Verona, and Beard. King and Delavan. Visitation. Pioneer. An old dock-worker had told him that the neighborhood itself was named for an Indian chief, but he researched the matter and found that early Dutch settlers had named it Roode Hoek for the color of the soil and the shape of the land curving out into New York Bay.
Once upon a time, the waterfront had been one of the busiest ports in America. Now it was almost a ghost town. Just across the harbor rose the crazy bustling Erector set of Manhattan’s southern skyline, but the Hook was so quiet that the wind was a presence; it whispered over the cobblestones and flowed around the deserted warehouses; it sifted through primitive, fernlike ailanthus trees. In the distance you might hear the faint fairground tinkling of a Mr. Frostee ice-cream truck, or the ringing of a buoy out in the harbor. Breathe deep and your lungs filled with salty ocean air.
In the Brooklyn Historical Society, a turn-of-the-century mansion paneled with dark, ornately carved wood, he’d sat in front of a computer calling up grainy old photos of the Hook as it had been a hundred years before: humble row houses; ships docked at mist-shrouded piers; horses straining to pull coal wagons; bleak-eyed immigrants staring defiantly at the camera. A world of brick and water and hard manual labor.
He planned to make a film exploring what had happened to the neighborhood. Interviewing old-timers or digging through library files, he liked to think that in his own way he was a detective, like his father. Though Jack Leightner had grown up in the Hook, he never brought his son there—the man seemed to have bad memories of the place and never spoke of his early life.
The Hook was a place of mysteries, not the least of which was his own father’s past.
He stopped in a bodega for some coffee. A chubby little girl next to the counter stared at him—because he was white? Because he was so tall and thin? Because of his acne-scarred face?—but she brightened when he pulled out a Polaroid, took her picture, and handed her the snap.
He walked on past block-long factories, old buildings with rusty shutters more beautiful than any painting in the Museum of Modern Art. The late sun cast shadows through chain-link fences onto vacant yards, or lots filled with sleeping old delivery trucks. There was still some shipping along the waterfront; down at the Brooklyn Marine Terminal a few huge loading cranes reared up over the horizon like dinosaurs. The tin-covered windows of an abandoned warehouse caught the sun and filled with gold, a broken El Dorado. Though Ben was alone here, he never felt lonely.
Near the water, he walked down a narrow cobbled street of little houses, aluminum-sided, working-class. Had his father grown up in one of them? This one with the wild roses growing up the side, or that one with a small American flag flapping listlessly in the breeze?
He pulled out a video camera, set up the tripod, and filmed some wind-chewed leaves shimmying in the branches of an old sycamore tree, its trunk covered with flaking patches (like bad skin). He concentrated so hard on framing the shot that he forgot the world outside the viewfinder. When he looked up, a Latino kid about ten years old was sitting on the curb several yards away. The kid wore a Knicks jersey that hung down over his knees; his hair looked like his mother had trimmed it around a bowl. The boy shifted a jawbreaker from cheek to cheek and squinted up.
“Yo, mistuh. Why you wanna be filming a tree? Ain’t nothin’ up there.”
Ben ignored him.
“You, mistuh,” the kid said. “Why don’t you take my picture?”
Ben grinned. “All right.” He turned the camera and peered through the viewfinder as the kid transformed himself into an awkward little marionette. “Relax,” he said. “I have to focus. I’ll say ‘cheese’ when I’m ready.” The kid let out a big breath and his shoulders slumped. He scratched his head. Ben filmed him while he was waiting.
Now he sat on his couch, reviewing some footage he’d grabbed at the end of the day, a zoom shot down a side street toward the Red Hook Houses. Just a few seconds of tape because a group of sullen homeboys had sauntered down the block in his direction and—panicking—he’d stuffed the camera back into the bag.
If his father had been with him, he wouldn’t have had to worry. But then, there was never a cop around when you needed one.