my first mistake in life was probably really really really wanting to live in New York. when we were kids, my parents would pile my brothers and me into whatever nearly defunct car it was that we were using at the time and head on down an old Indian foot path turned Revolutionary War troop/carriage/artery turned major cross-Catskill automobile route to the thruway down to the nasty Big Apple praying all the way that our engine wouldn't catch fire (as it often did), or that no real rainfall would impede our expected travel time, since usually, our wipers didn't work.
God, how it smelled back then. it was gloriously gross, and so full of nasty, ripe smells. wherever you were in New York, something was smelling up your face: piss off the homeless, that particular hot subway exhaust that comes charging at you from the grates, ethnic cuisine of some far off exotic yonder sizzling up somewhere, incense, old shit at flea markets, or, my personal favorite, old linoleum mixed with the smell of laundry detergent, God Bless Brooklyn. to this day, catching a whiff of that sunshine as I pass some three-family building in Greenpoint makes my toes curl the way only a really poor happy seven year old can understand.
we went a lot back in the day - there were no ethnic Serbs in the part of the state we lived in, otherwise known as the woods, so it was not infrequent that we'd be making our way through the streets of Manhattan to the huge cathedral on 25th that Edith Wharton had gotten married in back in the day. no, Edith Dubs wasn't Serbian, and neither was the church then, but it was part of the then "uptown" scene. if you have any concept as to the age of innocence, you know what i'm talking about. if you don't, follow Sarah Palin on twitter because that's where you belong. anyway - i couldn't wait to get there, nasty new york, those were the best weekends of my life. everything New York always seemed like the best fucking shit ever to me, except for the time my dad drove through some pretty scabby area and a bunch of people that we weren't really used to surrounded our car. my mom cried and made me hide under a blanket on the floor of the back seat.
i'm smelling beer as i write this, in Brooklyn. beer sucks.
