New York City, This Week

If you take the F Train in the late afternoon from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and sit on the left side of the train (as I generally like to do) and you look out, past the Kentile Floors sign, from the top of that great arch from 7th Avenue to Carroll Street, and the sun is just setting, everything will be glowing with bright orange light.  If you look the other way — to the South — you’ll see the BQE, the Industrial Park, the blocky blue IKEA, then out there, further still in the Upper Bay, the Statue of Liberty.  From this view, high above the Gowanus Canal, you will see laid out in front of you what I like to think of as Most of Brooklyn.

This view, however, is not Most of Brooklyn.

It is, in fact, a small section of Brooklyn — Red Hook to Cobble Hill, plus Downtown Brooklyn to Park Slope.  Maybe 10 of the total 96 square miles.

Which is to say: a small percentage.

Which is to say: somewhere a long the way, I began to miscalculate.  Or, rather, to misinterpret the data.  When did this start to happen?

I got an email recently from the publicist for my novel, which said that he met my agent at a party, and the agent was currently seeing someone who I knew to be both my ex-boyfriend’s ex-boyfriend, and my current boyfriend’s friend’s cousin.  The publicist was also my ex-boyfriend’s neighbor.  We could see their bedroom window, where they had installed an air conditioner, which was supported from the bottom by a copy of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

Why does this feel like a threat?

When I talk about why I moved from Chattanooga, a town of about 250,000 people, when I was fresh out of high school, my answers have usually something to do with the fact that Chattanooga is, by most calculations — especially by a cultural calculation, and especially for weirdo kids like myself — a small town.

Everyone knows your business.  My mother used to say: “Don’t do things you’re not supposed to do, because someone will see you doing them and they will tell me what you did.”

I’ve lived in New York for almost fifteen years, and have only recently discovered (or, rather, realized) that New York, with all it’s subways and neighborhoods and it’s nearly nine million people, is the smallest town in the world.

On the other hand, if you stand in Madison Square Park in the evening, when it’s dark but not too late at night, you can look up at the Empire State Building and see flashes of light on the Observation Deck.  The flashes of light are from tourist’s cameras.

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