Rusty Trolleys = Babymaking TimeToday I've decided to forgo the cynical, bombastic attitude all too frequent in these posts, and take a moment to reflect upon more tenderhearted fare. Back in the days before my heart was blackened by the hardscrabble streets of NYC, I used to imagine myself in fifteen or twenty years, as the remarkable person I wished to become. Now don't get me wrong, I was not the type of girl who fantasized about her wedding day, mapping the details of her honeymoon down to every last lace minutiae. I didn't build my dream man from celebrity appendages, nor did I design my own Barbie Dreamhouse. While I feigned infatuation with Joey McIntyre to keep up appearances, I never understood what was so freakin' hot about the New Kids on the Block. Instead, I was the sort of tomboy who had crushes on the Ghostbusters and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, partly because they were so wisecracking and irreverent, but mostly because I secretly wanted to be them. Why crush on a bunch of white boys Roger-Rabbiting around in hammer pants when you have four musclebound mutants kicking a$$ and taking names? Naked, no less. Yeah, that's what I thought.
But when hot fantasies of Raphael and Peter Venkman weren't enough, I would dream about the future. In it, I was always tanner and hotter, with colored contact lenses and breasts like torpedoes. I was perennially strutting in and out of happenin' parties, skipping 'cross continents, working CIA operatives or acting in infomercials. There was an unfortunate phase where I compulsively enacted cleaning infomercials -- Look, Ma! No Streaks! I also had a killer one for Wonderbread, which expounded the merits of making bread balls with your own spit. (Now you see why I had to pretend to like Joey.) The Willa K of the future was running corporations, writing articles for National Geographic and trading dirty stories at the bar. I planned out the apartments I might have, the houses I would own, the flashy cars I'd drive, the people I'd micromanage... and somewhere, beneath all that, there was a husband with a bevy of kids running around, if only because that's what you have when you're twenty-six or thirty-two. It kinda came with the territory.
Fast-forward sixteen years, and BAM. You're suddenly at that wretched age. You know. The age the child-version of you never cared to imagine. Where you're supposed to be all set, basking in the glory of your awesome life. So here you are, all uninspiringly age-ed, and lo and behold, there are no kids. No sexy parties. No six-figure salaries or shiny new Audi's. It's just you, standing on the street trying to figure out where that $81 is going to come from to buy your monthly metrocard. I'd all but given up on those flighty, flimsy dreams long ago, somewhere around my second lay-off, or my third mugging, or the time I went to the emergency room sans health insurance. All visions of nuclear harmony had long been dead and buried, until I happened to find myself in Red Hook.
Yes, Red Hook.
That forgotten land of industrial mayhem, its vestigial warehouses blooming with new life, fresh purpose! Most folk in their reproductive prime aspire to spawn their brood in nurturing, wholesome places like Park Slope or the Upper West Side, the grassy slopes of White Plains, or dare I suggest the likes of Long Island or Montclaire, NJ. Bah! My kids will be reared in the dark recesses of Brooklyn's most curious locale. No sooner had I found my way down those battered trolley tracks and cobblestone alleyways, than I was sold. Now THIS is a place for raising the progeny! It's the Red Hook Romantic. My nouveau pastoral. If Bed-Stuy is the post-apocalyptic phantasm of Ray Bradbury lore, then Red Hook is a decade later in the sequel. I can see it now: Wilhelmina K, AstoriaGirl extraordinaire, meandering about town with her vagabond tots, and a Red Hook man too -- hey, why not? All biceps and bad tattoos, he'd be my Grade A hunk of American beefcake. Revision. Brooklyn Beefcake. Can't you just see it? Don't you see the appeal?
Okay, let's put it this way. There are three things I expect of good child rearing locales. #1. The Sea. #2. Deep-seeded history #3. Strange and provocative people. I'd decided this way back in my 10-year old Gostbuster wisdom, and had forgotten until the fateful day I wandered past the Gowanus. Red Hook, my friends, has the whole shebang.
Of all the wonderments and mysteries of Roode Hoek, perhaps most compelling is the contrast between the architectural remnants of its industrial past and the natural beauty that has survived it. Like a flower reaching its leafy tendril through a crack in the concrete, Red Hook's inhabitants have not only formed a community that is breathtakingly lovely, but also left its historical origins intact. Where else can you find warehouses transformed into lofts, graineries split into habitable dwellings, trolley tracks weatherbeaten into walkways? Not only is it home to the largest Fairway grocery I've seen in my life, but an IKEA's even on the way, its garish Navy and Yellow somehow at home amidst the rubble and rust. Perhaps what's so beautiful about Red Hook is its ugliness, its brokedown past, its crumbling remains. It's a place ripe for exploration and discovery, a place littered with questions and hidden answers, a place with the same uncanny draw as a Coney Island, only quietly so. Its an abandoned stage on which to play, a black canvas to paint stories and people, a place to both fear and learn.
True, Red Hook may not be the safest area in all of B-town, nor are its subway stops terribly convenient. Perhaps in another ten years, we will see some of this change, although I'd hate to see it turn out something like DUMBO. Lucky for me, at the rate I'm going, there won't be any kids until I'm sixty-five, so I should be all set. Until then, I'll just have to work on getting a dog, and explore the capital of singledom, (oh Astoria), by myself.
Or with my AstoriaGirls. You know. Whatever works.
- WILLA K
