2

A Bar in Hell

1995–1997

The most striking objects on the whole of Brooklyn’s waterfront have yet to be mentioned. Just to the north of the Wallabout canal we come to the first of the series of sugar refineries, whose towering outlines on a foggy day, or in the last of the twilight, will suggest the lineaments of a Rhenish castle. We are here in the midst of the greatest sugar refining center in the world, where one establishment will sometimes in a single day convert 4,000,000 pounds of raw material into 12,000 barrels of refined sugar.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 30, 1883

January 1996

The first time I went to Kokie’s Place they wouldn’t let me in. From the outside, it was a drab brick tavern at the corner of North Third and Berry. When I pulled open the heavy door, a short Latino with Marcel waves carded me. I didn’t have ID. You never needed one in Brooklyn.

But I’m thirty years old, I said.

The bouncer shrugged.

On the way home I muttered and scuffed my feet. I couldn’t believe it—I’d gotten bounced from a coke bar named Kokie’s.

The next time I made sure to bring the driver’s license.

We’re closing in fifteen minutes, the same sullen bouncer said. He was lying. The door opened and I stepped inside.

If you lived in Williamsburg you heard about Kokie’s. ‘It’s a coke bar that opens on Thursday night and doesn’t close again until Sunday afternoon.’ Also, ‘There are Puerto Rican gangsters and locals in there. They have these booths in the back with curtains covering them. People wait in line for the booths to do their coke.’ I wanted to see it. New York City in 1996 had plenty of after-hours clubs that sold coke—it had plenty of grocery stores that sold coke—but I liked the hubris of ‘Kokie’s Place’ on the awning.

That night I sat with a three-dollar ten-ounce Bud bottle and studied customers in the bar mirror: cackling middle-aged Latinas with high heels and big asses, a group of young Poles with buzz cuts, two guys in dusty overalls who looked like they had just gotten off a factory shift, and a couple of artist types with their sideburns and thick-framed glasses. It was an ugly room—gray concrete floors, a few pieces of neon, the windows grilled and shuttered. Fluorescent light splashing off the concrete made the bar even uglier. The back room had a few garage-sale tables and chairs. Curtains screened the famous booths but nobody lined up to use them. A hulking janitor with splayed teeth pushed a mop slowly across the floor.

In the previous two months, I’d lost my live-in girlfriend and then my job. Without income or Rebecca’s half of the rent, I flirted with eviction. Urban survival skills kicked in—I jumped subway turnstiles and lived on Campbell’s soup mixed with pasta. At the corner bodega, minestrone and tomato soups cost ninety-nine cents. Vegetable beef was my favorite but it cost a dollar nineteen. I ate minestrone. (No Top Ramen for me; I had standards.) Thirty years old and hoarding pennies. I wrote a piece about the joy of suicide for my column in Cups: The Café Culture Magazine. My subway reading was the Bible—1 Kings. The lavish descriptions of wealth in Kings appealed to me, as did God’s fury: ‘Therefore, behold, I will bring evil upon the house of Jeroboam, and will cut off from Jeroboam him that pisseth against the wall … and will take away the remnant of the house of Jeroboam, as a man taketh away dung, till it be all gone.’ That was a God I understood; like the house of Jeroboam, I was being punished for my sins.

As miserable as I felt, I was free. I wasn’t picking fights at literary parties across the river anymore. Single and broke gave me a different Williamsburg, the Williamsburg of Kokie’s Place and the waterfront. Kokie’s wasn’t a bar for the stable, soon-to-be-married couple. You didn’t spend hours wandering around the waterfront when you had a standing dinner date at home. When you had a home. My apartment was colder without Rebecca—I couldn’t afford to turn on the heat. In the bathroom, I let the shower run hot for ten minutes—hot water was free—before I stripped down and shivered in. On the coldest nights, the shampoo froze in the bottle. It was hard to believe that we’d planned to be newlyweds there.

December 1994

‘I love it!’ Rebecca whispered as we nuzzled in the bathroom. Behind us in the hall the fat Polish landlady droned the enticements of the apartment—five forty a month, utilities included, newly painted, a block from the subway. She didn’t mention that it was a hovel. That we could see for ourselves. The new paint stained our fingers and shoes.

I’d known Rebecca for five months and we’d been dating for two but there we were, lovers looking for a home. Rebecca (not her real name) was witty, she was beautiful, she was a talented poet, she thought I was a great writer: what more could a man want? We talked at speed, rattling over culture, art and the quirks of our friends. Rebecca said: ‘You’re the first guy I’ve dated who’s as smart as I am.’ (We were cocky too.) Nobody I knew in New York had an entire floor, with windows on both sides looking out on quiet yards. So what if the kitchen lacked a sink? All the way back to the realty office we decorated the place—her desk would be in the bedroom, mine in the living room. We could take breaks in bed and read our drafts to each other naked and warm. The shack would be our artists’ colony. We’d be married too. First chance we had, we were going make a quick trip to Brooklyn Borough Hall; it was all so easy.

When I told Rose I was leaving, she threw a book at my head.

First and last—no security deposit—and Rebecca and I moved into 147 North Eighth Street RH (‘rear house’) a few days before the new year of 1995. The quiet rage of a blizzard emptied the streets and her car fishtailed down Union Avenue. The snow-muffled streets celebrated with us.

The apartment was on the first floor of a wood-frame house one block from the Bedford L station and two blocks from the river. On a good day you could be at Union Square in ten minutes, although a half hour jerking and starting between stations was the norm. The rent? Even I could come up with $270 a month. The floors slanted and the thresholds looked like they’d been carved by a drunk with a chain saw but somehow that made it even better. For weeks, the paint stayed wet and smeared our clothes because the landlady hadn’t turned on the heat.

Like the Domino Sugar refinery, our cottage was a fragment of industrial Williamsburg: worker housing, the title deed dated 1905. In the 1930s a five-story apartment building had been squeezed onto the front of the long, narrow lot, leaving us at the back of a concrete courtyard. Our shack showed its age: when we turned on an air conditioner one night, fuses blew and the house went dark. An electrical fire in the subbasement was extinguished by a fortuitous flood (I didn’t know there’d been a fire until I went to the basement and saw scorch marks on the wall). Then there was the day when we came home to the stench of natural gas. The gas line from the front house to our (illegal) wall heater had cracked, venting fuel. The pilot light was burning. A few more minutes and there would have been a crater in the middle of the block. The landlady had installed the heater herself and for months she told us that she was having nightmares about explosions. She didn’t put in a new heater, though; a guilty conscience was cheaper. After that, we avoided temperature intervention, freezing in winter and melting in summer.

We loved the wild grapevines that grew along the walls and fences. We loved the rustic quiet; in deep night I could hear the subway roar in its burrow below the street. All sooty brick and vinyl siding, the Northside had been a factory ghetto for so long that it lacked the residue of gentility you saw in Fort Greene and Bed-Stuy, the Henry Jamesian mansions that made you ask, ‘How did they ever let this place turn into a slum?’ You didn’t say the Northside was ‘charming’ or ‘architecturally significant’; what you said was: ‘It’s so close to the city and so cheap!’ Not long before we moved in, a fire burned through a row of tenements a few blocks north. A Times article about the fire labeled the neighborhood:

… a working-class community with a large population of Polish and Hispanic immigrants, a district of tenement buildings, smoky factories and run-down warehouses that is known for environmental hazards and ranks highest in the city for leukemia in children and other cancers in adults.

The Times couldn’t see the magic in the smoky factories and run-down warehouses. If Williamsburg had been its 1960s self—a thriving factory town—we would never have moved there. Roughneck teens talking shit on the corners, blue-collar bars, trucks jamming the streets, light rail on Metropolitan … There wouldn’t have been space for us. The Times looked at Williamsburg and saw ruin; I looked at it and fell in love.

Rebecca started working at a Midtown literary agency and I watered plants, professionally. Two days a week, I got up at six a.m., caught the L and ran between Midtown and Wall Street with a watering can keeping Ficus benjamina and Epipremnum aureum (devil’s ivy) alive in airline offices, investment banks and a Mercedes dealership. The gig paid just enough to make my end of the rent and bought me time to write. Writing was all that Rebecca and I wanted to do. Playing the game, we went to Manhattan parties for young literary strivers. At one rooftop party, a sub-sub New Yorker editor asked us where we lived.

Oh, Williamsburg, he said. Places there are pretty cheap, right?

He leaned over, his knit tie brushing a small mound of cocaine on top of a central-air unit. He hoovered a line.

Of course, he said, why come to New York if you’re not going to live in Manhattan? That’s the whole point, right?

I guess, I said.

Later he asked me if I read the magazine.

Sure, I said. The New Yorker has great articles. But the fiction is mostly crap. What do you work on there?

Fiction, he said.

By 1995 you could walk home from the L at night and not get jumped by a crackhead. Bedford Avenue pulsed with immigrant vigor: a Polish bakery, a Polish pharmacy, two Polish butchers two doors apart, three Polish restaurants and a Polish florist, the flowers overpriced and wilted (I walked by for years but never saw a customer inside; it all seemed very shady). Even the Puerto Rican bodegas sold Żywiec and Warka, and Poles were buying buildings and becoming landlords. The Polish beachhead met Williamsburg past and Williamsburg to come: a Russian-owned hardware store, a card shop, three bars—Muggs, the Charlestown and the Greenpoint Tavern—and six bodegas, three owned by a feuding Palestinian family.

Rebecca and I had found our apartment through Kenn Firpo, the one Northside Realtor. His tiny office was right around the corner on Bedford. The plaster-smeared walls and battered desk made it seem like he’d set up shop the day before and would disappear in the night one step ahead of creditors and cops. Large and hirsute, Firpo looked like he would happily crack the kneecaps of deadbeat lessees. Old paperbacks lined office shelves; the Northside Realtor was also a used-book dealer. Then there was the L Café, the Northside’s living room.

The café is gentrification’s trading post, where underemployed artists stare into mud and dream of masterpieces.1 Now that cafés have become a strip-mall standard it’s hard to remember how unnatural they were in this country not so long ago. A place where people sit for hours, not spending money or making it, goes against the American grain. In an industrial town like Williamsburg, opening a café didn’t occur to the native. Sure, there were cafés on the other side of the BQE, Old World holdovers where Italian grandfathers gossiped and complained over espressos. The L Café was something new, a sign of climate change sweeping out from the Lower East Side.

In the back of the café next to the bathrooms a cork board listed apartments, performances, junk for sale and bands looking for a ‘drummer. Our influences: Rush, Moby Grape, Hank Williams. Chops a plus but attitude more important. No big hair.’ The vacant storefront next to the L served similar fare, boards over the windows fliered in soft layers inches deep. There was no Craigslist and no Wi-Fi; the L collated us.

The L’s long decline and fall, the fast-forward changes in everything Williamsburg, efface how central the café was to the neighborhood. During rushes, a human python twisted down the aisles and out the door. If Rebecca and I landed a table on Sunday morning, we felt like lottery winners. We’d drop all four hundred pounds of the Times on the table and dicker over favored sections—book review, week in review, arts, magazine. The sports page was all mine.

In the years after college I’d struggled to write a novel and published a few book reviews, but I wasn’t discouraged. Writing was my religion. It was why I had a clown job and scraped along on $800 a month. Writing was also boring. That’s why there aren’t any good movies about writing, why so many talented people who want to write can’t do it. The boredom breaks them. If you don’t have bipolar disorder like Dickens you turn to coffee and Benzedrine, Adderall and kratom. Cafés are a way to cheat the boredom. A flatmate in San Francisco had started me on the path—I think he was sick of me always being in the house. ‘You should try writing in a café,’ Wolfgang said. He even told me where to go, the International on lower Haight. (As a suave, gay German, he went to Café Flore, a place for the gay and suave.) Wolfgang was right—in the café you found noise, movement, people to flirt with. An asshole critic for the New York Press published a column berating café writers. We were pretentious. We were showing off. We were wasting time. True enough, but so what? For me, the café made the boredom easier to take.

An agent at Rebecca’s agency read my novel and decided to represent me. I finally had an excuse for all the wasted time.

L Café coffee was toxic but the cup was bottomless and two dollars meant I could sit and watch the neighborhood. I got to know my fellow travelers, artists in their twenties and thirties trying to make something out of nothing. A filmmaker who punched me in the face the first time we met. A lawyer who’d bailed on his profession to become a screenwriter. (‘Patent law,’ he said. ‘Just imagine reading your toaster warranty all day long.’) A bearded painter from Iowa whose favorite subjects were boxers, bulldogs and cheerleaders and who drank like a football frat.

Other faces clarified from the blur. A beautiful woman with green animal eyes who Rebecca dubbed ‘Wolf Girl.’ A plump fortune-teller layered in skirts and mascara who went from table to table clutching palms (she told me I had two love lines and no life line). A tense, sweating Thai whose only English seemed to be ‘Tiger’s Balm’ and ‘two dollar’ as he smiled and showed you the tin. Then there was a bum who sprawled without shame against the café storefront on warm days. Sores and scabs marred his naked legs and serous fluid glistened on his shins.

I been dead three times, Frank the Bum told us at the café counter after another hospital sojourn. Gauze swathed his head and his eyes were deleted, as if rough thumbs had popped them free and we looked into all the darkness of skull. Frank detested the café owner but cold weather overcame his principles.

This last time, Frank said, I woke up with a syringe in my chest. I asked the doctor, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘You had no vital signs. We had to give you the injection.’ I told him: ‘The next time I wake up with a syringe in my chest, I’m gonna stick it in your eyeball.’ What have I got to live for?

It was a rhetorical question, one with no comfortable answer, as Frank was homeless on the streets where he’d once swaggered. I will not hesitate to name Frank ‘bum’ in these pages since that’s what he called himself, and his defensive pride strikes me as more honest than any euphemism, his kingdom the strip of sidewalk extending from the bodega on Bedford and North Seventh to the door of the L Café itself, his royal bed wherever he could make it.

There was also a soft-spoken local with copper skin, gangster vines and waist-length dreads. His reserve made him an anti-Frank. Every night around closing he walked in and sipped espresso as chairs were lifted to tabletops. A waitress told me his name was Napoleon.

Napoleon

As the L train barreled along the Fourteenth Street tunnel, Napoleon turned to his friend.

We’re not going to Lorimer, he said. Let’s get off at Bedford and see what’s going on.

Napoleon had noticed a change in the L at the First Avenue stop: all the white people didn’t get off. Poles had always gone through to Bedford but one day a punk rocker stayed on the train. Then Napoleon saw more white guys in paint-splattered overalls do the same. The new faces tended to congregate in the last car.

I kind of asked myself, Napoleon says, ‘What are you doing in the neighborhood?’ I didn’t know. One, two, three, four gradually became like ten in the car. Then twenty.

The Lorimer L stop at Union and Metropolitan marked a division: west of Union and south of Grand you entered a Hispanic world. The other compass points brought you to an Italian neighborhood aging and shrinking away from its old boundaries. Napoleon usually walked west from the Lorimer stop back to his home on South Second. That day, though, he followed the ‘artistic’ people out of the station at Bedford Avenue. Though he lived only ten blocks away, Napoleon hadn’t been on the Northside for years.

We get out, start walking around, Napoleon says. I see Planet Thailand. Okay. I see L Café. I see Veracruz. Mind you, before this the Northside was completely boarded up. Dead. A wasteland. And now you had these little stores.

They passed a Bedford Avenue storefront that had been cleaned, repainted peach and filled with junk from some antebellum grandfather’s basement. It looked like a Catskills yard sale, down to the old dressers and tables stacked on the sidewalk. That was Ugly Luggage.

Napoleon was intrigued enough to go back to the Northside a few days later with the same friend. They ended up at the L Café. After an awkward wait they took a table—waiters didn’t show you to your seats, they weren’t your slaves—and ordered coffee. Napoleon and his friend sat and talked. And sat and talked. For hours. Nobody kicked them out, even though they weren’t spending five dollars between the two of them. In fact, the waiter kept bringing more coffee.

It was great, Napoleon says. But it was also kind of sad. No one spoke to me. Except the waiter. ‘May I take your order? Cup of coffee? Would you like anything else?’ And that’s it.

Other customers greeted the waiter by name. They had long conversations, the waiter leaning against the wall. The guy working the counter shared jokes with regulars. New customers came in and hollered, ‘What’s up?’ to the whole room.

I started thinking, Napoleon says, ‘I’m going to be like that.’ And I told my friend … I was like, ‘See that guy over there? That girl? I’m going to be like that when I come in. Watch. Just give me some time.’

Napoleon was Southside Dominican all the way. His parents had come to the States in the early seventies on a Caribbean tsunami a hundred feet high. Napoleon’s enormous family—his great-grandmother had twenty-four kids—flowed between New York and Santo Domingo. When they went to Coney Island or the Rockaways in the summer, they made their own traffic jam.

It wasn’t two cars, Napoleon says. It was seventeen cars. I remember seeing lines of cars, cars, cars. Everybody was just jammed in. There’d be an old Nova or something with eight people hanging out of it. Like a clown car.

Mostly his family worked in construction or in garment sweatshops as seamstresses, pattern makers and pressers. When garment work shifted to Asia and Mexico and the local sweatshops shut down, they found work as home attendants and car service drivers, or they opened small businesses (Napoleon’s mother had a clothing boutique). Napoleon lived on Havemeyer and South Third until he was seven and his family moved to South Second between Keap and Hooper. His extended family occupied dozens of apartments in the area, making the streets between Grand and South Fourth a vast and comfortable front yard.

In his Southside enclave, Napoleon was closer to Hispaniola than to Manhattan. His parents spoke Spanish at home and sent him to their village in the DR every summer. By the time he came back to P.S. 84, he had forgotten his English and his teachers tried to transfer him to remedial classes.

That was one of my nightmares, Napoleon says. Oh, no, they’re going to put me in bilingual school. ‘I know English,’ I’d tell them. ‘I was born here.’

Bringing English books and tapes with him on vacation solved the language problem but it didn’t take care of his cultural confusion. He wasn’t Dominican to Dominicans or American to his grade school teachers. To Southside Puerto Ricans he was undoubtedly Dominican, which made him the enemy. Coming home from school when he was seven, he had to run a gauntlet of older Puerto Rican kids with a question: Puerto Rican or Dominican?

I told them I was Dominican, Napoleon says. I felt this pride and I couldn’t lie. And they were like, ‘Ohhhh. Ohhhh.’ I said, ‘What are you gonna do? Beat me up for it?’ I started talking in Spanish and they got a little embarrassed. Because a lot of the Puerto Ricans here don’t even speak Spanish.

He was caught in the kids’ version of the turf wars shaking the Southside as Dominican newcomers battled with Puerto Ricans over the drug corners, as heroin’s long reign was threatened by coke, and junkies with steady habits gave way to desperate crackheads. In years to come, Napoleon would see certain of his cousins get involved in everything from machete fights on school playgrounds to drive-by shootings.

With his English under control, Napoleon found himself in honors classes. His main interest was drawing and sketching; Napoleon was the kid whose art pinned by the refrigerator magnet actually impresses someone besides Mom. ‘He’s gonna be an artist,’ Napoleon’s mother would say. ‘A painter or something.’ For junior high he transferred into an accelerated program at the Manhattan Academy of Technology, Jacob Riis, P.S. 126, taking the L into the city every morning. Jacob Riis was full of nerds; on the Southside, nerds got their glasses broken.

Kids will test you on the Southside, Napoleon says. They’ll slap you in the back of the head. If you let it slide, guess what? Fourteen other guys want to slap you in the back of the head. And what are you gonna do after three or four of them do it? You gonna start with the first guy who did it or the last guy? Or the next nine guys who are gonna slap you? I was the quiet dude, so a lot of times guys would come up and I had to show them it was the wrong move.

Meanwhile, Napoleon’s friends from grammar school were back at John D. Wells Junior High on South Third and Driggs having the time of their lives, or at least that’s how they sold it to Napoleon.

They told me, he says, ‘We’re having a blast. We’re wrestling, we’re having water balloon fights in school, we’re cutting out of class and just leaving.’ They made it seem like paradise. So I self-sabotaged.

Napoleon stopped doing homework. He missed classes. He didn’t turn in his reports. Sure enough, he washed out of 126 and transferred to John D. Wells in time for the eighth grade. His test scores still put him in honors classes so he only hung out with his friends at lunch and after school, which was enough. Napoleon planned to send his portfolio to the High School of Art and Design in Midtown but missed the deadline after breaking his leg in a basketball game. So for his freshman year in 1987, he ended up at Eli Whitney on North Sixth and Havemeyer: a bad school in a bad neighborhood. Whores paraded along that block night and day and in a mixture of lust, curiosity and contempt, kids would shout at them from behind the safety of the fence. Napoleon remembers the corner being so rough that he planned his route home to avoid it.

At Eli Whitney, Napoleon studied woodworking, carpentry and industrial design.

It’s not what I wanted to learn, he says. So I started cutting classes and hanging out.

By 1987, thousands of Dominicans lived on the Southside. ‘In factories—Dominicans. Restaurants—Dominicans. In clubs—the Dominicans. Then the streets—Dominicans.’ Napoleon noticed that the roughest guys, the real gangsters, came from Santo Domingo.

They came hungry, Napoleon says. They were like, ‘We’re gonna make ours here.’

They’d brought their connections with them, and gangs and drugs brought danger. When Napoleon left his house, he’d always check the street to see if it was clear.

You never know, Napoleon says, who’d show up being chased by the guys from the Borinquen projects or the Marcy projects or whatever beef came along the way.

Often it was Napoleon’s friends being chased. They’d bonded for years but that didn’t mean Napoleon knew what had them running down Grand Street in the middle of the afternoon. Had they stolen a car? Shot somebody? He had no idea. One night he was standing on the corner of South Second and Havemeyer when somebody said, ‘That’s the fourth time that car with tinted windows went by. Look out.’

All of a sudden, boom, boom, boom—it’s a shootout, Napoleon says. I’m ducking. I’m falling on the ground real quick. I’m going home. I was down with those guys but not like that. People were always trying to recruit me: ‘You want to be down with this posse? You want to be down with my crew?’ I was like, ‘No. I’m my own self.’ I had a lot of friends who did that. Some of them are in jail now.

By Napoleon’s junior year at Whitney, the guidance counselor had seen enough. He called Napoleon into his office and told him that he should consider dropping out.

That surprised me, Napoleon says. I was like, ‘Whoa, you’re my guidance counselor, why are you telling me to drop out?’ And he said, ‘Because I know you’re smart. And because I dropped out, got my GED and went to college.’

A week later, Napoleon took the counselor’s advice. No more morning marches down Havemeyer to woodshop purgatory. College would have to wait, though, while Napoleon went into business on the Southside.

*   *   *

Rebecca and I never made it to Borough Hall. I can still see her sitting in the L wearing her grandmother’s white mink coat, see the thick black curls that corkscrewed over her shoulders framing her green eyes and creamy skin. If I left the table for five minutes, some art-school alley cat would be on her, saying, ‘So you’re a writer. What are you working on?’ I don’t know what makes relationships last but I know all the ways they can go wrong. I can still hear Rebecca yelling and pounding on the bathroom door as I sat on the toilet lid and plugged my ears.

The Irish Catholic cannibal and the Jewish dentist’s daughter were not compatible. That was our failing, but Williamsburg played a supporting role in the wreck. Rebecca loved the Northside, but her friends lived on West End Avenue and in Yorkville and SoHo. They had parents’ money and parents’ expectations. They went to law school if the art thing didn’t work out. Except for the money—a big ‘except’—being privileged seemed like a drag. Me, as long as I had time to write, I was happy with the watering can. Expectations meant that Rebecca tried to do everything—work a forty-hour week at the literary agency, go to grad school full-time, run a reading series at Alt.Coffee on Avenue A. She was smart—smart!—and she had a soul. But she’d never been adrift. She had a tether. Most of the people I got to know in Williamsburg didn’t. We were drifting. When Rebecca left I did something I hadn’t done in almost a decade—I cried, after clamping a pillow to my face so that nobody could hear me.

We didn’t stay in touch. Twelve years later, she published a novel about the Northside. I saw our apartment through the eyes of a ghost. “They lived where they could afford to live without the dreaded parental supplementation: in run-down tenements on narrow Brooklyn blocks, illegal sublets found through friends of friends (who could afford a broker’s fee?), or rickety apartments in crumbling back-houses, let by landlords who’d never heard the word ‘code’ in their miserly lives…” A Williamsburg novel from someone who lived there eleven months said something about the neighborhood in 1995: even passing through you felt the allure.

Marcin

Hammering brought me out of my apartment, the building flapping like a billboard in a hurricane. Downstairs a slender dark-haired man was banging away at his front door.

Hello, he said, presenting a hammer. I am putting on new lock.

The landlady had lost the spare key to his rooms below the stairs. In the future a padlock would hang there, making it look like a stable for a goat, not a home for a man.

You’re Robert, he said in accented English. You live upstairs.

I walked down and gripped a soft hand.

My name is Marcin, he said. It sounded like ‘Martian.’

He was in his mid-twenties, a few inches taller than me but he stooped. Fine dark hair that he obviously cut himself fell over his forehead. His eyes were dark too, deep brown irises merging with shrunken pupils.

Your girlfriend moved out, he said.

Yes, she did, I said. He’d probably heard us fighting.

I’ve seen you around the neighborhood, he said.

That made me uneasy. I wondered where he’d seen me and what I’d been doing. Marcin had replaced another Pole, that one at least six-six and famine thin. I’d only known him from his midnight sessions on Fender Telecaster and the crates of empty beer bottles that appeared outside his door.

We talked for a while, made fun of the landlady and I went back up the stairs.

Takin’ easy, Marcin said as I walked away.

*   *   *

I soon found out that Marcin was a photographer and an unrepentant junkie. Marcin’s addiction and his photos came out of the same distorting blackness. He would become obsessed with people in the neighborhood and follow them, shooting from a distance. They never seemed to notice. He showed me photos he’d taken of me before we met. His theories for why I’d been in the places he’d shot me were generally wrong and often insane. When I told Marcin he was mistaken he’d smile and nod, as if to say that of course he understood why I was deceiving him.

On my way to a temp job one morning, I ran into Marcin in a subway car. He was so blasted on heroin that he couldn’t speak, eyes and nose crusted with mucus. It was eight-thirty.

I’d find the landlady and Marcin gossiping on the stoop.Henryka distrusted Marcin as much as I did but that didn’t keep her from repeating his stories. She’d stop me in the hallway or on the street and say, ‘That girl you were with last week—she is your new girlfriend? Marcin tell me this.’ ‘No,’ I’d say. ‘That was…’ my sister, my cousin. My aunt. Mother Teresa. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘But Marcin tell me that you have very many girls here.’

You can’t trust Marcin, I said. He’s a Gypsy.

She cackled at that: thirty years in New York but still in a Polish village, and Marcin’s shiftiness exactly evoked ‘Gypsy’ to her shrewd, paranoid, bigoted Eastern European mind.

I’d been surprised that the landlady had rented the basement to Marcin in the first place. When Rebecca and I moved in, the building was solidly Polish except for a guy who’d been in the Dictators and two women, flatmates, that I’d gone to college with. An older Polish couple lived in the apartment above ours with their twentysomething nephew (when his aunt and uncle relocated to Greenpoint the nephew came out as gay and hosted all-night parties to frenetic house beats). Whenever Poles moved out the landlady replaced them with young Americans. I asked Henryka why and she said: ‘No more Polish. Polish too much drink.’ It wasn’t a lie—by eight o’clock on Friday night there was always at least one middle-aged Polish man in the Bedford Avenue gutter. Still, I thought ‘not enough money’ mattered more to the landlady than ‘too much drink.’ Marcin had gotten the apartment because Henryka hadn’t registered it with the city. She was a shrewd businesswoman and understood that a Polish junkie on a dubious visa meant less potential for legal trouble than an American kid with professional parents.

Like Ying and Rose, Marcin didn’t fit into the world. Not quite Polish, not quite an artist. But he shared his Williamsburg with me. From Marcin I learned that Raymund’s Place on Bedford and North Eleventh had the best Polish food and that SUV-driving Hasidic men kept the Kent Avenue hookers in business.

Marcin’s apartment made mine look like Lee Iacocca’s suite at the Waldorf. He had lacquered the floors though and was replacing the old floorboards one at a time. Through rectangular gaps, I could see into the flooded subbasement with its dirt foundation. Palmetto bugs (Periplaneta americana) scuttled through his two rooms. The six-foot tinplate ceiling stopped inches short of Marcin’s scalp. When we hung out there, Marcin would do lines of dope off the top of the Alien Lanes CD I’d loaned him.

The Devil and the East River

New York is crowded. Other people always get in your way. You can’t stretch your legs without kicking somebody and you can’t think without static from 8 million other brains. If you can’t afford quiet space you take it where you can get it, in a park or in a library, or you rent it for a few hours in movie-theater dark. But the library closes and the movie ends. In the decades before I came to New York people had left cities by the hundreds of thousands, something that hadn’t happened in the Western world since the Black Death. That exodus brought the frontier to Williamsburg, and one thing the frontier has is plenty of space.

It wasn’t named for coke, the bartender said. That’s the funny thing. I mean, the place opened in the fifties and it sure wasn’t pushing coke back then.

The bartender was thick—thick torso, thick neck, thick skin, fingers like cannolis and that blunt Long Island accent, Brooklynese tempered by a generation in the suburbs. But he could tell a story.

They got this frog in Puerto Rico, he said. It’s called a coqui because of the sound it makes: ‘ko-kee, ko-kee, ko-kee.’ The guy who owned this place was Puerto Rican. Back then, it was some kind of social club. He used to have card games in here, strippers, that kind of thing. I mean he was half a wiseguy anyway. One night he got stabbed in a card game. That was it for him. He was like, ‘I’m seventy years old. I don’t need this shit.’ So he gave the place to his nephew and that’s when it got started. One of the old doormen comes in here and we talk.

The Antique Lounge had opened a couple of months earlier at the end of 2002. Its antique flourishes came courtesy of a restaurant catalog—tin ceiling, exposed brick, classic moldings and a fireplace. The furniture was quicksand plush: you sank right in. Nothing was left from the long reign of Kokie’s.

I’m forty-three years old, the bartender said. I’m in it for the long haul. This place is my dream. I was born in the neighborhood. When I was four my parents moved out to Lynbrook but we stayed connected.

The bartender was also the owner. Blond salon streaks in his hair and his padded face made him look younger.

The Kokie’s crew had a great take in here, he said. Twenty thousand dollars for a four-day week. That’s not bad—even if you include the coke. Of course, you don’t know how many people were getting envelopes. After 9/11 that all changed. Well, the city changed but they didn’t. Everything stayed right out in the open. I mean, if you’re gonna do that, at least be discreet. But no. They had the salsa band in here. The noise at seven a.m. Still, they never got busted. That’s the funny thing. They lost their lease first. They got some kind of three-strikes thing in New York, I don’t know the legal particulars but the landlord was afraid they’d take away his building. So he didn’t renew the lease.2

The owner bought me a drink. The way he talked, I figured that he’d been a Kokie’s customer himself.

The neighbors hated them more than anything, he said. When I took over they came in to check us out. When I told them what I was doing, they thanked me. You know, the Kokie’s crew thought they were being discreet. That’s the funny thing. With the booths in the back and leaning against the wall to put in your order. And the way they used to cut that stuff to shit. Why not have a decent product? But they really stepped on it. What went on with Kokie’s, I couldn’t have that. Most of my family is cops so …

We looked around the quiet lounge—five or six people submerged in the couches and sofas, classic rock playing on the jukebox. We could have been in any of fifty New York City bars. ‘Antique’ was in.

We did all our own renovations. We soundproofed the ceiling. We put in our own hot water—the guy upstairs used to share it. And it’s working out. Couples like it here. We got the couches. It’s romantic. Last week we had fifty dykes for a party. Not too many of them were those lipstick lesbians, I tell you. But nice people. Polite. That’s the kind of place I want. The guy who owns Rain came in here last week. You know what he told me?

Rain Lounge had opened the year before on Bedford and North Fifth. The ‘urban’ vibe made it an anomaly even on a changing Northside—flash cars parked in front, gangster vines, hip-hop thumping, meaty bouncers. The fact that both longtime locals and newcomers disdained the only neighborhood club that catered to African Americans said something about tolerance for ‘diversity.’

He told me, the bartender said, ‘I dread going to work. The fights. The girls passed out on E. The guns.’ I told him, ‘You don’t have to do it.’ But he said no. That’s the choice he made. He probably takes in thirty-five hundred on a Friday night. Me, I’m doing good if I get that in a week. Then again, he’s probably paying eight grand a month for that corner. I pay twenty-five hundred. The authorities have it out for him too. I had the fire inspectors in here, the safety marshals. They told me, ‘We got the inspection list for Rain. We’re going to nail them for this and this and this.’ That’s not the crowd I want. I won’t play hip-hop or techno. I’m in it for the long haul.

I went back to the Antique Lounge a few times after that to commune with the ghosts of Kokie’s, but the bar had nothing for me. By the next winter, the Antique Lounge had closed and Rain wasn’t too far behind. Kokie’s business model beat theirs by almost half a century.

The Priceless Gem

In 1987, fifty-seven-year-old Harry Havemeyer took a melancholy drive along the Williamsburg waterfront. To Harry, the patchwork of shuttered factories, empty streets and jungle lots was particularly grim: he knew he was looking at the ruins of an empire.

He knew because he came from the royal family. ‘Harry’ was Henry William Havemeyer, scion of Domino Sugar. His great-grandfather William Havemeyer had opened a sugar refinery on Vandam Street in Manhattan in 1807 and by the end of the century the ‘sugar trust’ under Henry Osborne Havemeyer controlled 98 percent of the refined sugar produced in the United States. The Havemeyers also owned almost every lot on the Williamsburg waterfront between South Fifth and North Tenth Streets. ‘Their fascination with real estate,’ Harry wrote, ‘led them to believe that real estate, rather than sugar, was the priceless gem to be retained in the family.’

For over a century the five black arts—glassmaking, pottery making, printing, refining and cast-iron manufacture—dosed Williamsburg air and water and soil. With its santonin, citric acid and penicillin, Pfizer made another kind of dark magic in a fifteen-acre compound on Flushing Avenue at the neighborhood’s southern verge. Sugar built the castles, though; sugar stoked immigration until a village nestled on the edge of the East River became the most densely populated town in the United States. Post–Civil War America burned west on Williamsburg sugar. In H. O. Havemeyer, Williamsburg had a robber baron out of central casting—Henry even had a moustache to stroke as he bought politicians and spilled blood on the cobblestones of Kent Street when he had police shoot striking refinery workers. The Spanish-American War is sometimes called ‘Havemeyer’s War’ because he promoted it as a shortcut to buying Cuban sugar plantations.

Refined sugar was America’s drug of choice, one that didn’t have to worry about the Untouchables, or that ‘bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus,’ Carrie Nation. Bubble Yum and Coca-Cola and everything Hostess propelled my brothers and me through childhood. Our nickels, dimes and quarters kept the corner stores in business (I remember the glorious day I discovered Chocodiles, and how they still cost only a quarter into my stoner teens). Even our breakfast cereal came with a factory-appliquéd white crust. My mother managed to resist our sugar lust just enough to hold us to one box of sugar cereal a week each. Having to choose was almost unbearable, there were so many delicious options: Sugar Frosted Flakes and Sugar Corn Pops and Sugar Smacks and Super Sugar Crisp, Cap’n Crunch’s Peanut Butter Crunch and Franken Berry, Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries and the short-lived but greatly missed (by me)—Jean LaFoote’s Cinnamon Crunch. Since a box could go in a day, we hunted through the house to raid each other’s stash. The dentist’s drill whined. ‘Kids’ teeth are just cavity-prone,’ he said.

*   *   *

Harry Havemeyer’s melancholy tour didn’t stop at Kokie’s and he doesn’t mention the bar. Yet its influence was everywhere. Mounds of white crystals rose on kitchen tables across Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy, Brownsville and Washington Heights. Every crystal mound had started out as a flowering plant, hundreds of acres of them, thousands of miles to the south. Crushed and processed, the plants shrank and lost color—green to brown to yellow to glittering white. What they lost in color they gained in power, energy concentrated until it could ignite cells and shift bodies at cartoon speeds. Fossil fuel, that black blood of the earth, drove every step of the transformation. By the 1950s, the sugar barons had lost their hold on Williamsburg. H. O. Havemeyer had reigned with a legitimacy that Cali cartel bosses could only envy, but their product ruled the decaying streets. Like the five-and-dimes where my brothers and I scored Charleston Chews, Kokie’s retailed cheap thrills. I careened around the dance floor like I had around the breakfast table on Lorimer Avenue.

I soon figured out how Kokie’s operated. There was no point in going there before two in the morning, when bars like Muggs and the Greenpoint Tavern emptied. You went to Kokie’s on nights when everything was right or everything was wrong and you couldn’t bear to go home. The zombie ogre with the mop was the guy who got the coke for you (or the DJ did). You’d lean against a wall next to the DJ booth, wait for one of them to come over and pass him the cash. A few minutes later he’d amble back and palm you a packet. Bouncers hustled people in and out of the booths so quickly that you’d wind up doing key bumps with complete strangers. I learned that the product at Kokie’s burned like Ajax and shook you like the Coney Island Cyclone. Whatever went into the cut—plaster dust, chalk, aspirin, Pez?—my joke was that they weren’t doing anything illegal since their shit couldn’t possibly be coke.

I spent my share of too-late nights there, nights initiated when someone at a party would bellow ‘Let’s go to Kokie’s!’ We were young and sick with energy, not ready to give up on a night that was almost morning. We wanted to stop time. I found out that you could do your coke in a bathroom stall if the line for the booths was long. I learned that the people I knew from daytime Williamsburg were different when you met them in the night swirl of Kokie’s.

At the end of a too-long New Year’s Eve, I brought a Brit musician to the bar. Spenser’s claim to fame was a stint in the Smiths (he’d been kicked out for too much partying). As we swilled more liquor we didn’t need, a fight broke out and holiday suits and gowns tumbled around the room. Thirty-five seconds later, cops showed up and settled everything down. The bartender slapped the cops on the back and called them by name. As we left, Spenser kept shaking his head.

If there was a bar in hell, he said, it would be Kokie’s.

Hell made for good company: I met all kinds of people in the camaraderie of intoxication—musicians, thugs, stockbrokers, late-shift workers from a nearby factory that made polyethylene bags. I remember talking one night to a local kielbasa maker, a man as square and red as a new brick. He introduced himself as Pat Driscoll.

Yeah, I’m a butcher, he said. Sausage. I’m very good with the smoked meats.

Driscoll reached into his overcoat and pulled out a golden disc with a pig embossed it and the words ‘First Place.’

I got this last week at a big meat product competition, he said. In Wisconsin. Second year in a row. It’s the first time I’ve been out of town in five years. I’m from Greenpoint.

So you must be Polish, I said.

No, he said. That’s the funny thing. It’s all Polish now but not when I was growing up. I’m half Irish, half Italian. All the stores up there are Polish. Most of my friends left years ago. Where do I fit in? I want to move away but I’m stuck here. Where else do they need a sausage maker? Chicago? There’s a lot of Poles in Chicago who can do my job.

In the glow from the drug we were the best of friends, so I tried to cheer him up.

Well, I said, only Brooklyn has Kokie’s.

I’ve been coming to Kokie’s for twenty-five years, he said. It’s changed a lot too. Used to be all Spanish but look at it now.

His arm swept the room, taking in the salsa band, the middle-aged Hispanic women with hennaed hair stepping lightly and the skinny hipster boys staggering around like they were on an obstacle course. Bodies jittered out of the back booths and turned into people I knew—local musicians, bodega clerks, a porcine gallery owner groping women who weren’t his wife.

Kokie’s was the Bella Union Saloon of an urban Deadwood. And there was frontier violence. People got attacked walking through the deserted streets. A friend of mine woke up in the local precinct house covered in blood. The police guessed that he’d been hit with a baseball bat. The last thing he remembered was saying goodnight to the bouncer at Kokie’s.

Esther Bell

A gunshot and the crunch of steel woke up Esther in the predawn gray. From her window she saw a car askew across Berry on North Third. A crumpled fender and the gouged chassis of parked cars showed the path the town car had taken. Esther noticed a figure behind the wheel. It didn’t move. Soon cops arrived to direct traffic and string yellow tape. Whatever had happened, Esther was pretty sure it had something to do with her neighbor three floors below.

In 1996, Esther moved to Williamsburg from the Lower East Side. Rising rent and a breakup sent her east but those weren’t the only reasons. One night on Avenue A she’d come home to find a woman unconscious in her doorway.

I walked over her without blinking an eye, Esther says. Assuming she was another heroin addict. That made me realize I needed to go somewhere else. I just couldn’t believe that it was me that felt normal walking over practically dead people at my door.

Esther schlepped most of the nothing she owned on the L train. ‘Which took like an hour in those days,’ she says. On her last transit she carried a houseplant. The houseplant’s name was Billy.

I was walking down Bedford, Esther says, and there were no shops or anything. But this Polish woman came up to me and started talking about my plant. I told her that I named it ‘Billy’ for ‘Billyburg,’ and she thought that was really funny and she said, ‘Well, welcome to the neighborhood.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, I’ve really entered an entirely different world here.’

Eight years of hopping around Manhattan and no stranger had ever welcomed her to a new home.

Esther took the lease from the sister of a friend. The woman was pregnant and had decided that infant + coke bar = terrible mother. Esther remembers the woman warning her: ‘Maybe you don’t want to hang out downstairs.’ The Northside wasn’t exactly Mayberry but the apartment was big—big living room, big bedroom, kitchen—and it only cost $600 a month. Esther could live alone, finally, and could sublet the place in a minute when she was traveling to make her film, a feature with locations in South Carolina. Life always had trade-offs; in New York they were just more extreme. She’d have to tough out the coke bar part.

In high school, Esther had picked up a Super 8 camera and started making short documentaries. One short about the Southern indie rock scene won an award from TBS, but that didn’t inspire Esther to keep shooting. To her, documentaries weren’t real movies. By the time she reached City College, she’d settled on a serious major—the ancient Near East. She’d kept the camera though. When her Lower East Side roommate introduced her to the designer Stephen Sprouse, they decided to make a series of experimental films. ‘I shot all their beautiful junkie friends,’ Esther says. ‘It was like Warhol but instead of the Factory we had a three-hundred-square-foot loft.’

Esther got to hang out with Debbie Harry but, more important, she saw the camera as a way to make art. By the time she moved to Williamsburg, she hadn’t thought about the ancient Near East in a long time.

Industry wasn’t dead on the Northside and diesel rigs lined North Third through the night. After-hours clubs and truckers kept similar schedules. The truck stop also provided a marketplace for prostitutes.

Every time I walked down Berry Street, Esther says, I was solicited by Hasidic men or truckers because they thought I was a crack whore. I mean, I was actually pretty insulted that they couldn’t tell the difference because I do like to eat and the crack whores don’t, and they have bad fashion sense. So I was thinking, ‘Wow, come on guys, get a clue.’

*   *   *

A photo Esther took from the window on the day of the shooting shows a gray town car—it’s a black-and-white photo—tilted against a Jeep Wagoneer with tinted windows and those trademark wood-grain panels. The angle of the town car and the fact that it has two wheels on the sidewalk suggests collision. An ambulance blocks the street. Uniformed men stand in small groups. The town car stayed in the street all afternoon, corpse languishing at the wheel. Esther worked on her taxes and took window breaks but she didn’t want to go outside.

Late in the day a police detective buzzed Esther’s door and came upstairs. He told Esther that a car service driver had been shot in the head while idling in front of the bar. His foot had pressed the gas pedal and sailed the car across Berry.

Oh, Esther said, I guess the murder probably has something to do with the bar downstairs.

Oh, no, the detective said. No. I don’t think so.

No one was ever charged with the murder.

Esther’s landlord was an ex-cop and rumor had it that his brother was the local precinct captain. The landlord didn’t make any repairs in her apartment—even though an enormous hole in her bathroom floor gaped down on the stairwell—but he did give Esther a brief history of Kokie’s. It had started out in the 1900s as an Italian social club. Then in the 1950s, as Puerto Ricans moved into Williamsburg, it turned into a Spanish club, complete with cockfights. When the grandson of the first Puerto Rican owner took over, the bar wasn’t making any money from old-timers paying a dollar a beer so the grandson turned it into an after-hours club. He knew what he was doing. A local writer tells a story of going to Kokie’s on Halloween and noticing the squad cars parked around the building. ‘I thought, “That’s it,”’ he said. ‘Somebody got shot or they got busted.’ As he waited outside he saw costumed partyers leaving the bar in no particular hurry, so he went in. Eleven years later, what he saw still makes him shake his head. ‘The entire staff,’ he says. ‘Bartenders, bouncer, DJ, everyone, was dressed as a cop. I guess they had a sense of humor.’

*   *   *

I’d be home for a quiet night of work when I’d get frantic, turn up the music and shake out of my skin. I’d have a beer and run into the street looking for contact, who, what, where almost didn’t matter. I spent more late nights at Kokie’s than I should have and I wasn’t the only one: a Swedish painter told me he’d walked into Kokie’s on a Thursday and didn’t leave until Sunday morning (except for a short break to cook ketamine on someone’s stove). We had too much energy and Kokie’s helped to burn it away. Energy had brought us to Williamsburg and our energy was changing the neighborhood. Energy had renovated Stephan’s apartment and had me drinking coffee and trying to write at one a.m. when I had to get up at seven. Energy was taking an abandoned industrial neighborhood and reshaping it. Kokie’s was only the last stop for the energy working on the storefronts and lofts and studios. Our energy had a particular valence, one that was outcompeting the Poles for space on the Northside.

It took a while before I got brave enough to go to Kokie’s sober and alone. That’s when I realized that Kokie’s wasn’t important because it was a place to get wasted, any more than the waterfront mattered as a place to tan. The world is full of places to get fucked-up, and the majority of them don’t serve vodka tonics in Dixie cups. Kokie’s and the waterfront were different in almost every way, but they both set us free. I’d hit Kokie’s before a waterfront ramble or go to the bar to warm myself after the windy shore. As two feet of snow fell on Brooklyn one Saturday night, I went to Kokie’s to find it closed, then tromped down to the water in my boots and stood on the bulkhead watching fat snowflakes dissolve in the East River. Eight million bodies out there and I could have been the only person in the world.

Down by the River

On a warm September day, Marcin knocked on my door.

Are you ready? he said.

The night before we’d been up late talking collaboration. There were stories in Williamsburg, we were sure of that. I’d flipped through Marcin’s prints as he shared his ideas. An underground casino on the Southside. An illegal strip club owned by Hasidim. Then there was the waterfront—if you went there for five minutes, you knew it was a story, and I was hot to be a journalist.

Marcin’s photos were compelling—a wedding at the Russian Orthodox Church on North Eleventh with the cleric wearing more bling than Jay-Z, an explosion of pigeons at McCarren Park, a pretty young Latina waiting alone at a bus kiosk on North Seventh. No one in the photos noticed Marcin; invisibility was the special quality he brought to his art. I didn’t trust him—how could you?—but he had energy and he could see.

We left the basement and walked west through a shabby corridor of row houses. Polish grandmothers in housedresses swept their walks or leaned on padded elbows at their windows. The block before the water the houses gave way to warehouses in varying states of decay. An Italian bar/restaurant, Io, had just opened in a renovated brick building on Kent across from the waste transfer station between North Fifth and Seventh. I’d gone to the bar a couple of times to watch pirated pay-per-view fights. Rumor had it that the restaurant was Mob-owned (rumor said the same thing about Baretti Carting Corporation, which owned the transfer station). A high fence surrounded the lot between North Seventh and Ninth but there was always a hole and we pushed through onto a loading dock.

Late September had gentled the summer—no more crushing sun and clotted air. A breeze bowed the cattails. Across the river Manhattan gleamed. From the rustic fields the towers looked like a hallucination. A seaplane blustered onto the river from some mooring and then rose and arced over our heads. The usual Williamsburg mélange had decamped to the water. Polish women—fat ladies in one-pieces and their daughters in bikinis, sullen and stacked—sunbathed on the loading docks. Latinos with Styrofoam coolers and transistor radios fished off the piers. Couples sat on the long bulkhead wall and dog walkers let their animals roam. From the end of a loading dock came the bleats and blats of musicians at work, horns and bass drum and calls to time. The ragtag players wore the shakos and piped jackets of a high school marching band, mismatched with miniskirts and denim.

Mild weather and open space made everyone amicable, all nods and smiles. The Dominican teenagers didn’t sidearm rocks at the freaks in the band. The art-school refugees didn’t giggle at the homeless. Even the Polish bathing beauties said hello. We’d dropped our city masks for the day. As Marcin and I came to the bulkhead I noticed a man walking into the water from the riprap shore between the bulkhead and the first pier. He was lean, smoothly muscled and no older than thirty, and he was wearing a red Speedo. I’d seen him before—you didn’t forget a red Speedo, not on that waterfront of broken glass. When he got knee-deep he pulled up his goggles, dove and began to swim, a slow crawl out to the end of the pier and back and then out again.

A young black woman watched him from the shore. She wore a ragged sweater and had a short Afro.

Hi there, she said as we walked by.

Hello, I said.

My name is Brandi, she said, and stretched her hands toward the sun. Loose sleeves slid down scabbed arms.

Look at him, she said. Isn’t he handsome?

Definitely, I said, watching the steady strokes out to the pier edge and back.

She leaned closer. Her sweet smile lacked two front teeth.

I’m going to have his baby, she said.

Congratulations, I said.

He’s never touched me sexually, she said, but it would be a beautiful child. He has green eyes. He protects me. This place can be dangerous. One time we found a cut-off arm in the weeds.

There on the shoreline she started to dance. Marcin took photos. Directly behind us was a big Dumpster, one side torn free. Inside were a cot and an armchair—on the Upper East Side you could have rented it for $850 a month. Brandi pirouetted and then her shuffling dance stopped. She hugged herself and rubbed her arms. She looked at me sidelong under her lashes, a little sly.

I’m very fond of the brownies they have at the bakery up the street, she said. Do you think you can give me a dollar?

I found a dollar in my pocket and we walked away from her out to the pier. We watched the swimmer rise from the water and wade to Brandi on the shore.

I see her sometimes, Marcin said. She stands on the corner near Kokie’s. Where there are all the trucks.

Marcin meant that she was one of the prostitutes who worked the side streets around Kent.

Why don’t you write about her? Marcin said.

*   *   *

Most living things, from lowly bacteria to Homo saps, easily convert glucose molecules to energy. In hot, dry factory air, the potential energy stored in sugar inclined toward combustion. Conflagration marked New York sugar history—January 8, 1882, Havemeyer and Elder plant in Williamsburg, destroyed; another Havemeyer plant, in Greenpoint in 1887, blam!; the Dick and Meyer sugar refinery in Williamsburg, September 7, 1889, a Roman candle on the river. Even the refineries that survived couldn’t keep up with replacing windows that the explosions burst. In old photos you see shattered window frames, a premonition of future dereliction. At the refineries the filters and kilns, centrifuges and vacuum pans, needed to be fed, and coal and water poured into steam engines. To bring sugar to alabaster perfection required one final step, a secret ingredient. That ingredient was bone char, also called ‘ivory black.’ Fortunately, the extermination of the buffalo had littered the plains with the perfect raw material. Railroad cars loaded with buffalo skeletons clanked into the Eastern District Station on North Fifth to make sugar pure.

To Harry Havemeyer the Williamsburg waterfront in 1987 was as dead as Bison bison. Between South Second and South Fifth Streets the last of the ‘Rhenish castles,’ the Havemeyer and Elder plant built by Harry’s grandfather, still operated—as Domino Sugar—at a fraction of capacity (over 950 million tons a year). Domino had moved production to Louisiana, to Mexico and Brazil, places where the sun blazed and unions were weak.

Directly north of the diminished refinery, sentry boxes and barbed wire guarded the storage tanks of the New England Petroleum Company. Beyond them stood the white block of the Austin, Nichols & Company Warehouse, built by Havemeyer and Elder in 1915. It ‘appears to be in use,’ Harry wrote after seeing lights in the upper floors. Those lights had been brought by artists living there illegally.

Once a terminal for the Pennsylvania Railroad, the block between North Fourth and North Fifth Streets was ‘a scrap metal yard filled with crushed cars and other junk.’ Farther north on the waterfront Harry found more of the same. ‘The Havemeyer & Elder-Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal property north of North Fifth Street is completely silent. Its few warehouses and office buildings are abandoned, broken and burned-out husks. As a result of railroad bankruptcy, nothing of value is left at all. That waterfront land, the “priceless gem” of past times, is now owned by the City of New York, which took it over in lieu of unpaid taxes.’

Broken windows and marsh grass, bushes and tree roots rupturing loading docks, crumbling piers. Industrial Williamsburg was dead and gone.

‘It is available,’ Havemeyer wrote, ‘to any interested buyer.’

On the Waterfront

Harry Havemeyer was right about the waterfront: it was a gem. I had no particular justification for going there—it didn’t make me smarter or richer, didn’t give me a line on my CV or increase my chances of getting laid. My waterfront ran from the Bayside Fuel Oil tanks on North Twelfth all the way south to Domino Sugar. By year two in the neighborhood I had learned to navigate that corridor. You needed denim and long sleeves because you crawled under fences, vaulted razor wire and pushed through thorns—the shoreline had become second-growth forest. You climbed walls and edged out along broken docks that made a rusty trapeze. On most of the trail the loudest sound was wave-slap against shore, the only witness the gleaming metal face of Manhattan. What you saw made the thorn punctures and wire cuts worthwhile—seabirds, the broken factories of the old order, sweet views of skyscrapers. On the Fourth of July, I’d navigate the fences and trees to a rocky breakwater where I’d sit and watch the fireworks, my private show, so alone, so far from the cops and crowds on Kent Avenue that I felt rich.

To all the Brooklyn folks surprised to learn that you live on Long Island (I know you’re out there), please consult a map: New York City is surrounded by water, four of the five boroughs on three islands. Water made the city, from its Dutch trading post days through the 1940s when it was the largest port in the world. As the Commissioners of Streets and Roads noted in 1807 by way of excusing the lack of parkland in their city plan: ‘those large arms of the sea which embrace Manhattan Island, render its situation, in regard to health and pleasure, as well as to convenience and commerce, peculiarly felicitous.’ Translation: who needs parks when you have an ocean?

A strange thing happened in the decades after World War II: New York turned its back on the water. No more ocean liner fleet at the West Side piers, no more freighters nestled up to Brooklyn docks, no more destroyers launching from the navy yard below Vinegar Hill. It became almost impossible to make your way to the shore. Expressways ringed it, cutting off the approaches like an asphalt moat stocked with mechanical crocodiles. Even in the places where you could get through, the water was fifteen feet down the side of a pier and opaque with filth. Joe Mitchell’s 1950s New Yorker pieces about paddling around the harbor talking to fishermen read like science fiction (my literary agency represented his estate and I’d swiped his complete works from the office). By 1995 the Brooklyn waterfront was a toxic wasteland from Newton Creek and its oil spill to the ruined docks of Red Hook. The capital of the twentieth century stood knee-deep in a sewer. Yet the rot provided opportunity. There were holes in the fences. Mitchell had been stopped and grilled at the waterfront by cops infected with Cold War paranoia; we could reach the water without a second look.

The waterfront I navigated in jeans and boots was the waterfront for the daredevil, the urban Indiana Jones. It also contained a more sedentary stretch. Between Bayside Fuel and a ‘waste transfer station’ on North Sixth the waterfront opened. Those five blocks contained three defunct factories, four abandoned warehouses, two concrete loading docks and three piers topped by meadow and forest. In the open spaces nature had returned, all high grass and bushes and marsh. You went there for the breezes and the open space and for the views. The views were as good as the one from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade except that on the Northside the freeway didn’t shake the ground and you could walk all the way to the river.

Beside one of the loading docks an antique fire hydrant leaked into an iron bathtub. Overflow from the tub fed a marshy pool bordered with long grass and cattails. Dragonflies hovered over the pool and flocks of small birds seamed the grass. You could hear wavelets break and gulls croak and traffic hum on the FDR Drive all the way across the East River. I’d walk to the end of the longest pier and step off the edge onto a narrow mooring that led to a piling. The guanoed posts shifted and rocked as I sat looking at tugs and seaplanes. Circle Line tour boats churned by and tourists waved. I waved back.

When I was nine or ten my friends and I made a trail that ran through backyards down our entire block. Parents couldn’t see us there. It was better than the world of school and television; there were newts and millipedes, slopes covered with pine needles and trees to climb. One section of the trail ran across a retaining wall behind a garage. The retaining wall rose fifteen feet above the yard below. A magnolia filled the yard and every spring it turned into a chandelier. I’d sit there and stare at the soundless explosion in purple and white. I didn’t know anything about trees or flowers but the magnolia held me.

The fact that the Williamsburg waterfront stayed open, well, that was a historical accident. Our playground had come within a couple of borough council votes of being a Wal-Mart or a garbage dump. The Manhattan skyline made you appreciate the waterfront even more: you were in a quiet place away from crowds and noise and struggle. Of course the waterfront belonged to somebody—somebody biding his time—and that somebody had put a fence around it. There were plenty of ways around the fence but we cut holes in it to make a point. And when the fences were repaired, we cut new holes. You never saw a cop down there. It wasn’t necessarily safe. If I went at night I’d carry a heavy stick.

All kinds of wannabes and freaks and romantics who’d been priced out of the East Village went to the waterfront. Impromptu sculptures made of paving stones rose over my head. I remember the word-of-mouth outdoor screenings, films projected against the back wall of a warehouse. One of the factories had a sculpture garden in front of it with welded metal and massive broken columns. The sculptor was a black cowboy—ten-gallon hat, boots and all. He told me that he lived in the factory and that the owner tolerated him because he deterred looters. An old truck sheltered under a tin awning next to the factory. The truck was at least thirty years old; you could tell by the antiquated grille. It looked like it had been parked there on the last day of work and forgotten. Brush grew over the cab windows.

I brought dates to the waterfront because there wasn’t a better place to drink a bottle of wine. It was a test for the women; they had to trust that this stranger wasn’t a psychopath. All of them said yes. Over the years, I broke into all the abandoned buildings. In one I found gigantic metal cylinders and chutes. The stairwell of another was so jammed with desks and chairs that you could only get through by climbing over them. In another building neatly made cots lined the clean-swept second floor. It looked like a dormitory—a dormitory with broken windows and million-dollar views. For me the waterfront was the hinterland of the only neighborhood that I’d ever thought of as mine. Exploration turned me into an amateur archaeologist. I wondered what the metal cylinders were for—grain, cement, oil? I tried to understand the impulse that led to the chairs and desks cramming the stairwell—they must have been piled up to keep people out. I considered the cots, sitting there like a peasant camp on the floor of the Colosseum in the eighth century A.D.

The waterfront belonged to me, and to no one—which meant it was used for more than sun worship and band practice. Garbage got dumped in the thick brush, the mounds rising forty bags high. Some drivers from the waste transfer station on the next lot lightened their loads in the open space. Cars ended up there too, dumped and burned, the frames twisted by fire. The charred shells marked the end of joyrides, or so the arsonists wanted their insurance companies to think.

People lived on the waterfront: the ‘deinstitutionalized’ insane, those prostitutes—and their pimps—who worked the truck stop near Kokie’s, migrant Mexicans who broke down old freight containers by hand and sold the aluminum scrap. An Albanian refugee built an elaborate wooden shanty on the edge of a loading dock and painted ‘Fuck the Serbs’ on one plywood wall. Homeless men lived in the buildings or in tents or Dumpsters or shanties made of plywood and debris. They bathed at the iron tub next to the hydrant. Shampoo bottles and soap slivers speckled the ground and soap scum rimed one shore of the pool. On the waterfront all these different groups shaded into one another: I knew art-school kids who crashed there because they were new to town and broke or losing their minds.

Sometimes you couldn’t tell if the odd formations were the work of man or chance. In the warehouses and on a loading dock, I started noticing arrangements of old tin cans, broken dolls, Polaroid snapshots and random auto parts. It wasn’t Joseph Cornell but the impulse was the same. One day I walked into a warehouse to find a Latino with a white cloud of hair arranging trash on the floor, then leaning back to contemplate his handiwork. I’d seen him pushing a bicycle around the neighborhood, sacks filled with bottles and cans tied to handlebars and frame. When he noticed me, he hurried away with his bike and bags and I walked to where he’d been messing around. When I saw the trash I realized that the old man was an artist. To highlight his creation, he’d swept the floor around the offerings.

Chris II

So let’s hang out, one of Chris’s friends would say.

Sounds good, Chris would say. Where?

Your neighborhood. Williamsburg. Greenpoint. I’ll drive over.

Uhhhh … okay, Chris would say. But you do know that there’s nothing to do here. You know that, right?

It’s cool, the friend would say.

Going into Queens College, Chris knew that he wanted to be a writer. He didn’t know what that meant exactly but it gave him a direction and at Queens there were a few other students who read books, and adults who appreciated students who read books. The pop culture zeitgeist had caught up to Chris: grunge, with its metal edge and punk bravado, was the sound he had been waiting for. Chris also had the coolest job any eighteen-year-old could hope for—bike messenger.

I’m riding around in between classes, Chris says, kneeing cabs and shit. I was like Eddie Vedder in combat boots with hair down my back. In rain pouring down, with a messenger bag on my back. I loved it.

But Chris still lived in the great nowhere.

So when his friends came over and there was nothing to do, they did what teenagers do when there’s nothing to do: they roamed. One thing Williamsburg gave them was plenty of space for roaming.

What you would end up doing, Chris says, is just breaking into stuff and exploring it. That’s what I kind of did. And it was pitch-black. Half the lights weren’t really working. Even the waterfront, which was gorgeous, was a shoreline of busted glass. Shining with busted glass everywhere.

They climbed into buildings, skimmed rocks on the river, poked around in the brush. (‘We were like the guys in Stand by Me,’ Chris says. ‘Without the woods.’) They broke into the immense industrial castle of the pencil factory on Franklin Street and played manhunt across the roofs until cops and security guards got into the game. They broke into McCarren Park Pool, because that’s something you had to do if you were a neighborhood kid. A ship had been scuttled off the North Tenth pier and they hopped onto the half-sunken deck. (A few years later, Chris and one of his first girlfriends would have sex there, frequently, her shoulders pressed to the cold steel wall.)

For outsiders, Chris had a special destination: the Semer Sleep Mattress factory over the rock-strewn soccer field on the east side of McCarren Park.

The original frame of that building was six stories, Chris says. Before they built whatever the fuck that is on top of it now [he means condos]. You could easily bust in there by going underneath a fence and climbing up a rickety stairwell in the back. And then we’d climb up to the water towers that were on the top and sit there and the view was just stunning. We had a million-dollar view of the city and nobody gave a fuck. Because nobody else wanted it, it belonged to us.

*   *   *

Cold weather changed the waterfront. The cattails turned yellow. Strong winds blew off the river, and the tarps on the shanties flapped. The sunbathers went away. It was just Marcin and me, Marcin stopping to shoot as I shivered and hopped. On our winter scouting mission we saw a woman crawl out of a hole in a warehouse wall and pull a knit cap down over her ears.

That’s her, Marcin said.

Her? I moved closer. It was Brandi.

Go talk to her, Marcin said.

It felt awkward. I wasn’t much of a journalist. I wondered what I would say: ‘Hey Brandi, remember me? I gave you a dollar for a brownie. So, what’s it like turning tricks for truckers and Hasids?’ Recently, two prostitutes had been murdered near the waterfront. The story was that the Mafia owners of Io hadn’t appreciated whores on parade across from their respectable business. The restaurant was reputed to have been financed by a loan from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. BCCI had funded model citizens like the mujahideen and the contras (Ollie North had several BCCI accounts). The money the prostitutes used to buy crack sold by the Mafia was laundered by BCCI, which gave loans to the mobsters who hired the hit men to kill the prostitutes. In effect, the prostitutes were paying BCCI for their deaths. I wanted to find out more but had no idea how.

Hi, I said after I walked up to her.

She looked at me, her eyes clouded and red.

We met before, I said. Your friend was swimming in the river.

Brandi harrumphed. She scratched. The wind threw icicles at us that never missed. I didn’t know how to ask about dead women or her accommodations or a job description.

I gotta go, she said. She pulled her cap down tight and set off across the field toward the truck stop. Marcin looked at me with disapproval. He was taking pictures, what was I doing?

Since the summer, Brandi’s building had been fortified with a circle of brush and razor wire. The hole was some eight feet up the wall at the top of a dirt mound. It looked like a direct hit from a mortar shell.

Let’s go, Marcin said. I was amenable.

We climbed the rubble to the breach. Pushing our heads through to darkness, we heard guttural barking and something heavy rushed toward us. As we slid back down the mound, a large animal jumped through the hole. Light framed a pit bull, thick and menacing. It scrambled toward us, barking. The photographer and the writer ran across the frozen ground, pit bull at their heels.

Ethical Heroin

The teenage boy sat up in his narrow bed. While Marcin and I looked on, the boy fished a small packet from the top of his nightstand, pried it open and dumped white powder onto a hand mirror. Then he took a short straw from the nightstand and inserted it into a nostril. It was around noon on a Tuesday.

I don’t want to lose any heroin on the sides, Sham said, gesturing at his nose. I want it to go straight to my brain.

When I’d met Sham the previous Saturday, he told me that he was kicking on Monday. But on Monday night he did a speedball and got drunk with ‘some Chicago guys.’

With a half inch of straw protruding from his nose, he leaned over the powder and inhaled deeply. He pulled out the straw, pinched the opposite nostril and snorted again. He threw back his head. Sham was ready to start his day.

The most promising story idea that Marcin brought to me was about teenage Polish heroin addicts. He said that the neighborhood was full of them. He showed me photos of kids like Sham shooting up, including a girl who looked to be about twelve. The photos were dramatic—deep shadow and soft light, arms tied off, intense expressions of children gathered around the needle. I shopped the story to The Village Voice and they were interested. Sham was my first interview.

Those Chicago guys are into some bad stuff, he said. I know, because one day they have no money, and the next day they have a lot.

I soon figured out that ‘bad stuff’ meant stealing cars and selling drugs.

Look at that, he said, pointing to a poster on the wall. That’s from a party I DJ’d a few weeks ago. My real name is …

He said something gutturally Polish along the lines of ‘Prezeminik.’

… but you can call me Sham. That’s my DJ name. DJ Shamrock.

Sure enough, ‘DJ Shamrock’ appeared near the bottom of a poster smeared in Day-Glo colors. Other music posters filled the walls and there was a double DJ turntable on a desk covered in CDs and cassettes. Sham was fifteen and I didn’t think it had been long since the walls of his room had held posters of Conan and Michael Jordan.

My turntables are busted, he said. And I can’t afford new ones. Usually I spin jungle, techno and hardcore grooves. Then I do some mixing and scratching on my tables. Or at least I used to.

He told us that he had designed the poster on his computer illustrator program but, like the turntables, the computer was broken.

I can’t even turn the thing on, he said.

Sham put on a jungle mix, then moved on to his second bag of dope. Just the first bag would have been enough to make me vomit for six hours, but for Sham it was coffee. He pulled out the straw, inhaled one last time and wiped his nose with a forearm.

Those artists who live around here, he said, they do a lot of dope, right?

I’m not sure, I said. Some of them. People lie about it.

What kind of music do they listen to?

As I stammered out an answer, Sham led us into the main room of the apartment. It had a stove and a bathtub three feet apart, and a foldout couch where his mother slept. On a table next to the couch, Mom had left a stack of waffles. A bottle of maple syrup stood next to the stack. Half a dozen sausage links hung from the shower curtain rod, cloth napkins between sausage and rod. Sham noticed my glance.

Kielbasa, he said. You let it hang there for a few days and then you cook it in the microwave.

He smacked his lips.

It tastes fantastic, he said.

The house was on North Fifth and like mine it lay at the back of a narrow lot. Instead of another building screening it, the lot had a yard with a garden and laundry lines. Sham’s mother was at her office job. It was a school day but Sham didn’t seem particularly worried about playing hooky.

I want to get a car, he said. You need a car in New York City.

He smirked.

Of course, he said, to get a car you need a job.

I liked Sham’s energy and sense of humor. So far drugs hadn’t degraded him. He was pale and thin but muscle swelled under his singlet and he was handsome in a Polish way, with high cheekbones and light blue eyes. He poured maple syrup onto a waffle, folded it and ate it in two bites. He said he wanted to get a job. He said he wanted to get his own apartment. In the summer, the Chicago guys were going to take him to the Second City.

They have a Polish neighborhood like Greenpoint, he said. Except stupider.

*   *   *

A few weeks earlier, I’d started seeing a very young, very pretty blonde leaving Marcin’s apartment. It didn’t take long for Marcin to tell me about her—Magda was a model and fifteen (or fourteen, Marcin didn’t keep his story straight). He showed me nude photos of her. She lay on his couch, head tipped back over the armless edge so that her small breasts jutted up from her chest. Every rib showed. For the most part she looked like what she was: a skinny kid. But her eyes were enormous and a color I’d never seen before, a deep, creamy blue. I realized one reason her eyes were so striking was that her pupils were so small, and her pupils were so small because she was high.

Magda and I ran into each other in the courtyard when Marcin was at work. She told me how much she hated modeling—the long waits in offices, the bickering and competition among the girls. ‘It’s tough,’ she said. ‘You don’t make money in New York.’

When Magda wasn’t modeled up in heels and tight skirts she wore a punk uniform of black jeans, T-shirt and smudged black eyeliner. One day when she locked herself out of Marcin’s apartment she invited herself into mine. She crawled through my second-story window and dropped into the backyard so that she could break into his place. Not too many models would have done that.

*   *   *

Two nights after my first ‘interview’ with Sham I went to Greenpoint with him so I could see him score. Sham’s plan was to buy heroin from a dealer who hung out at the park side of Manhattan Avenue. We walked from Norman to Driggs and stopped beside a dark warehouse. No dealer. The commercial strip of Manhattan Avenue ended there. Further east were empty factories and the ruin of McCarren Park Pool.

Give me a cigarette, Sham said.

Sorry, I said. I don’t smoke.

I come here every morning before school, Sham said. All my friends meet on this block. Sometimes we go to the courts. If there’s nothing to do, we just go to school.

We turned down Driggs and crossed into McCarren Park, the fields dark and quiet. A few late-night dog walkers milled around center field, their animals whirling shadows.

Usually my friends chill here, he said. But the cops have been chasing them off.

As we walked, Sham scooped coke from a plastic baggie with his little finger and shoved it up his nose. He hadn’t forgotten about kicking.

I’m a little worried about it, he said. My friend quit and by the next day he was hallucinating. He was so fucked up he left his car in the middle of the street with the door open and the keys in the ignition. He passed out on my couch and when he woke up he started shouting, ‘Where’s my car?’ We spent an hour looking for it. Another friend of mine got out of rehab and the next day he was shooting up again. Did you ever shoot up?

I said that I hadn’t.

Me neither, Sham said. I’m definitely going to try it, though.

I didn’t mention that I’d seen him in Marcin’s photos with a needle in his arm.

Sham led us out of the park onto Bedford. A car booming techno sped by and honked. Sham waved.

That’s some of the Chicago guys, he said. Maybe they can hook us up.

He ran down the street, legs kicking high, trying to catch them at the light on Nassau.

*   *   *

You know, Robert, Marcin said.

We were down in the basement, where the sun was a stranger. I loved the way Marcin pronounced my name, rolling the r’s and stressing the last syllable so that he always sounded happy to see me.

You know, he said, I was the first person to give Prezamik heroin. (Marcin always used Sham’s Polish name.)

I was shooting the Pulaski Day Parade in Greenpoint, he said, when I noticed a group of Polish skater boys coming out of the subway. I started to shoot and they came over. I told them I wanted to shoot them skating and Prezamik was the most interested.

I wanted to see the boys rising from the subway with Marcin’s eyes. They were trying to swagger but their rubber legs and light frames bounced, boards jammed under their arms, the sullen set to their faces cracking at the spectacle of the parade.

Now, Marcin said, more than half of them are heroin addicts.

Marcin told me that he had run into Sham on the street one day and that Sham had offered to get his cool new friend drugs—pot, coke, crack. ‘I don’t use any of that shit,’ Marcin said. ‘But you’re high,’ the ever-observant Sham replied. Marcin reached into his pocket and pulled out a bag. ‘This is what I use,’ he said, and gave Sham a taste.

After that, Sham called Marcin every day, wanting to score. After a few weeks, Marcin took the boy to his favorite corner, South First and Hooper, and made the introductions. Sham in turn became the source for the Polish skate punks of Greenpoint. Then he made a rookie mistake—he brought a friend with him to the corner and broke his own monopoly. Losing his customers stranded Sham with a four-bag-a-day heroin habit: $280 a week, a tough nut for a working-class kid who didn’t have a job.

I watched Marcin absently scratch one leg in junkie default motion. Since we’d started the article, I’d been spending more time in his cave. The rooms held all the paraphernalia of the aspiring artist—piles of novels and art books, odd artifacts like an old-fashioned iron (no electricity necessary; you heated it on the range top), art posters and framed prints of Marcin’s photos on the walls. On the floor you could see where the old floorboards gave way to new planks Marcin had added. Important phone numbers were written on the yellow walls in pink Sharpie.

How many of those kids are addicted? I said.

I don’t know, Marcin said. Maybe fifty.

And they all started getting heroin from you?

Marcin smiled.

Robert, he said. Didn’t you know? I am the divvel.

Some of the kids had jumped straight from cigarettes to dope: no gateway drugs for them.

Marcin had come to the U.S. as a teenager with his mother, a quiet, sickly woman who worked in a Manhattan Avenue bank. After a year in Greenpoint, Marcin had found a share with some local artist kids, including Justin, who had grown up in a basement apartment on Berry. The windows opened to a sewer grate. Justin had gotten Marcin a job at a photo studio, which paid well enough to cover Marcin’s rent and keep him in heroin. A Puerto Rican coworker had brought him to the prime corner.

I was using six bags a day, Marcin said. But I’m much better now. I’m kicking slowly. I still have a problem. But it’s not so bad.

Marcin showed me other photos of Magda—naked except for the rubber tube tying off her arm. Marcin had introduced Magda to heroin also, and she’d gone on to supply other models at her agency on West Broadway. The heroin octopus had stretched his tentacles from a corner on the Southside to Greenpoint, through Marcin’s apartment and across the river to plush Manhattan lobbies where Magda and the other teenage girls waited with their portfolios.

I looked at him, his hands trembling, his rough-cut hair dyed black, the stubble on his cheeks so intermittent you could measure the space between hairs in centimeters. Marcin was a carrier, a disease vector, his thin, pale figure in black jeans bearing heroin between the various cultures of Williamsburg—Poles, artists, Latinos, junkies. The Southside had been a heroin depot since the 1960s and there were plenty of other drugs floating around Greenpoint too (although not much dope). But it took someone like Marcin, young, rootless, curious, amoral, to connect Polish Greenpoint skate kids to sketchy dealers wearing shades and lounging around Borinquen Place, and from there to connect models in SoHo to the Southside.

Yet Marcin was only the most louche harbinger of change. Artists were warping the fabric of the neighborhood with their energies and their tastes. Most of them wanted peace, time to work and a place to call home, more Roger Williams than William Bradford. For the natives the character of the colonizer didn’t matter; they got diphtheria either way. Change was burning through Williamsburg. If you lacked antibodies you’d be pushed out or extinguished; if you had defenses, then you could transform opportunity into gold, which was why immigrants had come to shithole Williamsburg from much deeper shitholes in Santo Domingo and Warsaw.

*   *   *

We need money! a voice said on the speakerphone.

We need money, the voice repeated.

Other voices rose in the background, a distorted bellow.

So we can get dope!

I was in the basement a couple of weeks after Marcin revealed himself as the ‘divvel.’ Magda had dumped him, which seemed to bother Marcin not at all. Magda’s replacement sat with us, listening to Sham holler for drugs. She’d met Marcin in a photography class at the School of Visual Arts. Judith had dark, solemn eyes, plush lips and glossy skin. I’d met her in the courtyard the morning after their punk rock honeymoon, both of them sleepless and reeking of pot and sex, pupils so swollen I assumed they were tripping. Judith moved in days later and she sat on the couch where Magda had stretched for the camera.

You still there, Marcin? Sham said.

I have to go, Marcin said. I call you later.

He hung up and smiled at me.

I had no idea why Sham thought Marcin owed him money and the photographer didn’t enlighten me.

They are having a party tonight, Marcin said. So they want drugs.

I’d talked to the corrections officer for the Greenpoint police precinct. In a brusque Queens accent she told me that, no, she hadn’t noticed any increase in drug abuse among Polish teenagers, and just who was I writing for anyway? That same afternoon, I ran into Sham at a Bedford bodega. In natural light he looked tired and even younger. He asked me for money for his help with the article. When I told him I couldn’t pay him to talk to me, he’d walked out of the store. The entire project was floating beyond my reach.

*   *   *

I have to talk to you, Magda said.

Magda had walked into the L Café with a friend as I sat at my usual station. The friend was another Polish girl, in a long pleated skirt, a little plump, a little dowdy, with zits on her forehead. A normal fifteen-year-old girl. The girls took a table, then Magda came over and knelt beside me, looking up.

It’s about those photos Marcin showed you, she said.

A tight blouse hugged her slender chest. The blouse had horizontal blue and white stripes and matched her blue-and-white knee socks. Ivory thighs emerged from her dark blue skirt. She looked nothing at all like a fifteen-year-old girl.

You know that Marcin is the one who gave me dope for the first time, right? she said. And he taught us all to shoot.

He told me, I said.

He took me with him to score, she said. So I tried it. But I’m not in that place anymore.

I assumed she was telling me that she’d stopped using. It was a very different story from the one she’d given me a few weeks earlier, when she said that she had never used and that Marcin no longer did.

I’m not all the way back, though, she said.

Her teeth were crooked, one canine jutting forward. That couldn’t have helped in her business. But she had perfect skin and full red lips. And those eyes, those big eyes cobalt and cream. Her pupils were dots, specks, flecks. It didn’t seem that they let in enough light for her to see.

I’m not high, she said, suddenly telepathic. My pupils just do that on their own. They’re always small.

I didn’t believe her.

So those photos that Marcin took? The ones with us all shooting up?

Yeah, I said, he showed me those.

The Voice loved Marcin’s photos.

Well, she said. That other girl in the photos. The one with Sham? She would never use. She was just attracted to Marcin, so …

She shrugged.

And Sham, she said, would never use needles.

I’m sure, I said.

I hate this, Magda said. It’s like with my last agency. They were always saying, ‘This client is so hot for you.’ But then they never paid me. I’m with another agency now.

She gave me a hug and said goodbye. I embraced a skeleton with a baby-fat face. Sometimes Magda looked like a child and other times she looked like a Marie Claire moon goddess. Other times she looked like … like an old woman. There was an air of age around her, like her life had been accelerated.

The article was dead. I didn’t have any facts that I could trust, and even if I did, not even The Voice was going to run a piece about how their photographer scored dope for his subjects.

*   *   *

In the following weeks I’d see Marcin and Judith in the yard or hear them through windows that had opened with warm weather. They were busy out there, planting flowers and herbs with spring, uprooting bushes and weeds that had sprouted through the concrete. They chattered and puttered around in old clothes: simple country life at the cottage. One afternoon I heard more banging and looked out to see Marcin shattering concrete with a nine-pound sledgehammer, opening space for a garden. He was making the city bloom. I went out to see if I could take a couple of swings.

Marcin went cold turkey, Judith said. He hasn’t done dope for two weeks.

She beamed at her working man. I didn’t tell her that I’d seen Marcin the day before and he’d called Sham in search of dope. When Judith went inside, I gave him the latest news.

I saw Magda in the L, I said. She told me that those photos of the kids shooting up were all staged. That they weren’t really using.

Marcin smiled his wry smile.

Robert, he said, you have to realize that we are dealing with junkies here. You have to be careful. You can’t trust anything they say.

*   *   *

A few days later I ran into Sham on Bedford. His wifebeater and jeans were encrusted with dirt. The filth came from a good cause.

I worked today, he said.

That’s great, I said.

My cousin got me the job, he said. It was for this builder in Bushwick. Five fifty an hour. Demolition and drywall.

I’ve done that kind of stuff too, I said.

Magda’s been calling me, he said. She wants me to score a bindle for her. I think she needs it because she’s going to England.

So did you hook her up?

I’m quitting, he said. I’m getting two bottles of methadone tonight. From a friend of mine. I’m trading my new skateboard for it.

I knew that he’d gotten the skateboard from Marcin but I didn’t mention it. I was tired of keeping up with their transactions: if Marcin gave Sham the skateboard to cover a debt, if it was a loan, if there really is methadone at the end of the rainbow.

Good luck, man, I said, and shook his hand.

*   *   *

In the yard, Marcin held a paintbrush and laid white strokes on a long wooden table. He was shirtless and thin and I admired the abstract tattoos that wrapped his upper arms. I told him Sham’s methadone story but he had a story to top it.

I went to Beth Israel last week, he said. To enroll in the methadone program they have. If you’re below a certain income level it only costs thirty dollars a week.

He drew smooth lines with the brush, focused on the whitewashing.

But the doctor there told me to kick cold turkey. He said that most addicts end up using both the methadone and heroin at the same time.

Marcin looked up from the table.

The doctor said, ‘You look like a smart guy. So if you really want to quit, that’s the way to do it.’ It’s not fun. You are sick. Very sick. For four or five days. You sweat. You shit. You shiver. The important thing is to stay in the bathtub.

A friend of mine is coming over to help me, Marcin said. In two weeks I’m going to Chicago to visit Judith’s family. I want to be clean before I get there.

He wiped his forehead with the hand holding the brush. White droplets fell to the concrete. I could only imagine what a Jewish suburban doctor would make of the black-eyed Gypsy (but then, I’d been the Gypsy at Rebecca’s holiday dinners in Rockland County).

There’s a big Polish community there, he said. I want to shoot it. You know, what’s going on.

Maybe you should go to some NA meetings, I said.

I gave him the number of a college friend of mine who’d gone down a similar road. In her junkie days she’d helped a boyfriend rob people at ATMs and finally gotten arrested. ‘How can a girl like you, who went to Sarah Lawrence College, stoop to such behavior?’ the judge had intoned. But he let her off with rehab. When I had coffee with her at the L, she told me she was working for CBS.

You know, I saw Sham yesterday on the street, Marcin said. He started yelling at me, threatening to kill me.

For what?

For showing you those needle photos, Marcin said. In the middle of Bedford he was yelling, ‘I’ll kill you myself. I won’t even use another guy.’ He was really upset.

Marcin seemed surprised.

So what are you going to do? I said.

It was nothing, Marcin said. We went to the store and I bought him an ice cream. You know, to raise his blood sugar.

*   *   *

I’m really not addicted, Marcin said.

It was a hot day, the first heat wave of early summer, sidewalk throwing sharp light into my face, sun bludgeoning the back of my head. Marcin was leaving for Chicago the next day and he’d offered to take me to the heroin depot before he left. I’d abandoned all hope for the article but I was still curious. So much had been said about the place, so much trouble had come from it.

We walked east toward Bushwick.

When I stop, Marcin said, it’s not that big a deal. I don’t get sick. I still go to work. I had to do this shoot at MoMA once when I was really strung out. I was shaky and sweating, and I got so dizzy. But I finished the job.

On the other side of the BQE we passed a pool supply store. The words ‘thriving business’ didn’t come to mind when I saw the missing letters on the sign. Not many people in Williamsburg were buying pools. Then came Kellogg’s Diner, favorite late-night haunt of cops, city workers and the gloriously inebriated. Marcin mentioned a local car service office.

I once bought twenty bags there, Marcin said. So they brought me into the back. They had a really nice scale. I felt like I was in a movie.

I’d waited there one night with a friend of Rebecca’s until a car showed up. I believe she was wearing a fur.

*   *   *

One of the skater kids got murdered last week, Marcin said. An older junkie did it. Slit his throat. They haven’t found the body but everybody knows what happened.

I didn’t answer. It could have been a real tragedy or more junkie talk, I couldn’t tell the difference. Of course there was no body; a body would have meant facts. A body would have meant an article. There were facts and then there were facts, and I didn’t have the right kind. Marcin said one thing. Magda said something else. Sham didn’t agree. I couldn’t be everywhere at once and even that wouldn’t be enough. I needed a certain kind of fact to translate their stories into journalism, but the essence of the stories didn’t rest in things I could verify. Dates and names and places didn’t seem to reach what was happening. The story was in the contradictions, in impressions that curled in the air and faded away. I wasn’t a good enough journalist to make an article out of that.

We turned the corner at Grand and walked to South First and Hooper: and there was the spot. My first Williamsburg apartment, the share with Rose, was only a block and a half away. Marcin had finally provided an explanation for the drug zombies I’d always had to dodge at my doorstep. Scaffolding wrapped the tenement building and a few Hispanic men took cover in the shade, not talking to each other, just waiting. I went back up the block and stood across the street from the Apolo Restaurant. When Rose was feeling too lazy to walk the dog, which was often, she would lead him up to the roof to shit. Tattered curtains flounced in the windows. I wondered if she still lived there.

I’m not buying for myself, Marcin said when he reappeared. But please don’t say anything to Judith.