Who's Sad in America?

THIS GHOST BIKE is.

In Brooklyn, you protect what’s yours, no matter who’s trying to take it. It can be a a girl, a car, a laptop, your hat in a January breeze coming off the Narrows, your dignity.

And in Brooklyn, if you want to keep your bike, the pizza delivery guys and bike shop owners advise to use this type of chain.



But here, someone’s chained up their sadness.

Pedro left the house one day and got collided with by someone else’s cursory car.





And what do you do when you’ve lost your Pedro at the stop sign at 54th and 7th?








I know I have walked past this corner many times and this was not here. Someone perhaps was not moving past the gravity of their missing of Pedro and had to do something. Something was just not right until Pedro’s girlfriend, handball partner or father found the right way to memorialize him without a gravestone.

And now, we all - with our bags of butter, milk or beer - we have to stop. Here. And sit with Pedro’s Ghost Bike. We give pause to the “hit by a car.” We think about the date. We see the white paint crusting and cracking under the spring sunshine and we write the screenplay. Somehow, we assume this was his last bike ride. Or this bike was a routine thing he enjoyed doing or had to do for work. But really, all of it doesn’t matter.

What matters is what we’re left with of Pedro. And we think. And we feel. And we know. And we respect the tragedy of July 10, 2008 of some stranger that I probably stood in line with buying my tomatoes and half-and-half.



There’s an irrepressible movement to sadness that just won’t pass on without its proper due. Loss deserves its place in the sun. Loss needs attention. It deserves eating the whole pizza by yourself. It deserves screwing up on your taxes and your lover and overcompensating at work to keep from going home to the empty nest.

And the sadness that moves us, moves on us, inside us. As our eyes move up and down this memorial of a bike that no longer pedals a life around - whose wheels are painted shut – it is someone’s grief that runs its warm, sweaty hands against us at this impromptu wake locked up at a corner in Sunset Park.

… so dignified … and so sexy. Yes, sexy in its minimalism and stark black and white. And so scary. And so classy, this memorial. So well done. So much pride. Someone thought about it for a while. In this borough of churches, someone chose not just another gravesite that they couldn’t afford anyway. They chose against a graffiti tag or a wall mural clouded by looming condo development. Someone chose vision and permanency. Someone chose grace.

Someone sealed a nobility in defiant anonymity that stole all my breath away, punishing me with taking for granted my own breath by just rolling on.

In the moment that my dog and I stopped and stared, I felt Pedro was just sorta hanging around, crouched on a curb, smoking a cigarette, smiling secretly … softly. Me, who just sort of got stopped by his life in the middle of the sunniest, warmest day yet this spring.

Stopped by the Ghost of Sadness Unrequited. It stopped me, and it moved me to go all the way home, grab my camera and further memorialize it for you.

Pedro got jacked by Life’s Arbitrary DeSelection. Pedro moves among us no longer.

Pedro got stolen.



But somehow, Pedro’s bike moves us still.

###

April 18, 930 AM, The 11th Annual Blessing of the Bikes, New York City

Who's Sad in America?

THESE FORMER HASIDIC GUYS are.

I can't hardly breathe, listening to their story on NPR.

Abuse Scandal Plagues Hasidic Jews In Brooklyn
by Barbara Bradley Hagerty



Keep your empathy electric ... and blood off your prayer shawl.

~~~

A note about the photo: Volunteers from the ultra-Orthodox Zaka rescue organization hold up a victim's bloody prayer shawl in the library of the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva March 6, 2008 in Jerusalem. Eight Jewish students were killed and nine more wounded when a Palestinian gunman infiltrated the seminary and opened fire before he was shot dead by armed students. (Photo by Avi Ohayon/GPO via Getty Images)

Who's Sad in America?

JOSEPHINE is.

It’s 11:34 pm and Josephine is walking with me from the home goods store that we both do time at. She’s bigger than me, older than me, blacker than me, and she’s made this walk many times. She doesn’t need a ride the 3/4 of a mile to the subway in a crumbling and neglected Coney Island, Brooklyn – she is woman enough to walk there in the blank slate of night.

“I put God in front of me wherever I go … so I don’t worry.”

Josephine is from Jamaica and asked me if I’ve heard of it. “Jamaica?? Yes, of course.”













And yet her face is still maternal, gentle in her searching me for what I know about her home. This is at once so humble of a question, asked as if she expected me to either not care or not know of people and places beyond myself. It’s the kind of cautious question, testing to see if I could handle one of her most essential truths. I was both pissed and charmed by this question.

And we pulled our coats tighter around us in wind blowing up over the coast of Coney Island.

“I come from a dangerous country,” she says in my silence. “When it’s your time, there’s no fighting it.

I look at her face, stunned by her conviction, her stillness, her – what I read as a sort of - peace.

“I really believe that,” she says emphatically.

There’s something about what Josephine carries with her that has seen more than just twin towers falling and Brooklyn fighting and teenage mall massacres. There’s a different kind of killing she’s seen.

I get on the D train headed home and can only guess about the kind of violences that she’s witnessed, was drawn into, left.

What I know about Josephine’s home is what any white kid from a flyover state knows. Jamaica is peddled to college students as the bluest part of the Atlantic Ocean and the place to get the best ganja. It’s sold to the 25-45ers as a place to order fruity cocktails and set a Weight Watchers calendar for. It is shocking, this information from Josephine, this serious side to the real Destination Jamaica. I’m so used to American violence of neglect, ideologies and commerce. Here, in America, violence isn’t personal – it’s business. If it’s not historically or federally predicated, it’s generated mostly from our viral need to secure a home for ourselves. And that's big business.

But here, tonight, with Josephine, violence is personal. And an electric stillness passed over us in this cold, windy night.

She’s lived in the United States for some years now, enough to learn to survive on our streets and under our laws and without her most familiar landmarks of childhood. She’s worked at this home goods store for the past few years as a Manager On Duty, and she knows her place, her clientele and her inventory. She is who I ask when I need questions answered because she’s approachable and possesses a certain pride in her retail work.













And no irony is lost when an immigrant gains full-time administrative employment at a corporate home goods chain built on consumers’ need to find more ways to comfort themselves in their own private home tucked away from all the rampages of the world.

She, like many who emigrate away from a tumultuous home, carry with them a certain otherness, a secret of having seen and decided not to live that way. A certain sort of spirit from another life. With that otherness comes also a deep, sinewy want for a place that provides her comfort, belonging, a fashion she understood, a dirt in between her toes that felt right. Why Brooklyn is not really working for her, only she knows.

Later the next week, Josephine, Jermaine (another Manager On Duty) and I were making the walk to the train station. Colder than previous nights, this walk, they start talking about the coming winter, which inevitably leads Brooklynites to muse about where else they’d like to live. Josephine reveals her plan to relocate to Atlanta, Georgia, in a year, which leads Jermaine to offer up, “Aw yeh, for me, it’s Houston.”













I gasped so loud that I quite possibly swallowed a small wayward pigeon. “HOUSTON?? Like, Houston, TEXAS?!” What black man wants to live in Texas?

And I’m fraught with all my Southern mythologies taught to me in fundamentalist Christian havens called college prep secondary schools, and I have to realize that they, like me, have not felt safe in the home they were born into. Me in Memphis, Jermaine in Brooklyn, Josephine in Jamaica. And for some reason, I feel safe in the Brooklyn that Jermaine and Josephine long to leave behind. And Josephine and Jermaine feel safe in the South that I left far behind because it was dangerous for me, in its insidious and emotionally lazy hatefulness that’s tableclothed in AquaNet and crocheted doilies.

And it doesn’t make sense. And it makes me sad that deep in my soul, Brooklyn is the only place that’s really felt like home and for them, it’s not so much. And it’s sad that the Mother’s Face of Home is always changing, distorting and disfiguring our memories of what was at once a soft place to fall.

So in the meantime, we all live in Brooklyn. Josephine’s daughter came home last week complaining about the gunfire she saw in Crown Heights. And last night on Christmas Eve, I was approached by a wild-eyed stranger asking me to sit on his lap on the train. And in the meantime, we close our coats around us, holding ourselves tighter against the wind.

Crime and home. There will always be a certain sadness for the home that reared us and the home that wronged us in the very beginning. For this, we keep packing up our stuff and moving to the next place that will have us.


~~~

Other Links:

If Eminem was Jamaican

Who's Sad in America?

I am.

I am sad. Sad sad sad. Not just depressed, not just a little blue today. Hard core, pulling your heart out through your lungs, then between your skull and your brain, and hurling yourself off Kilimanjaro sad. Dancer in the Dark sad. Scratching the paint off the walls, hanger abortions sad. Motherfucking down, man. I am Sad for Time, a levy looking over the tears of the years and crying competitively.

I cry at the sight of crushing beauty. I laughed and cried in Bowling for Columbine - it was like a Beaches movie for me. I feel loss at most times in the day and can see sadness in the grocery cashier's perfunctory smile and know that she is sealed in a relationship to some secret loss that keeps her scanning barcodes for a living because at least it's a job. I miss my dead mother, my dead boyfriend, my now three dead dogs, my terminally fetal career, and my dead father who treated me like I was dead before he died. I miss the America we had before terrorism, before the 80s, before 'Nam, before the sexual revolution. And as I grow older, the dead people and the dead eras on my list tally up, making sadness old hat.

I have Blue Blood. This is my schtick. Everybody's got something - some are fashion designers, some are cartoonists, some are massacre-ists, some are corporate defense lawyers. Mine's being down in the dumps.

SAD.

And this ain't so Seasonal Affective bullshit. This life of mine ain't nobody's acronym.

Sadness is ...

The feeling of loss. Careful now, because it's not THE loss - the loss is totally different - something that happens - a moment, a verb almost, a second - loss is an event. Sadness is the you you're left with.

It's the feeling of desperation, sobbing that has taken pounds off and makes you look like a blowfish with rosea. Sadness is the ability to see the black and white of lives lived and lives taken. Sadness is a broken heart. Sadness is a dog hit by a car when you just got him housebroken. (Alanis Morrissette would call this ironic. She is Sad, but masquerading as Angry.) Sadness is two towers coming down on a generation of comfort-seekers. Sadness is an unreturned phone call after the first date. Sadness is a mother's first, second and then final miscarriage.

There is loss and we all have it. Big or small. Tragic or planned. It seems our society has all sorts of discomfort and mythological ways of dealing with it. Loss is so enveloping that we must must must shut up the crying self sometimes just to get on with life. It's in the getting on that we discover the fluidity of sadness in all. The grace of it. The inevitable beauty in having had and lossed. The ability for sadness to fit in to most all circumstances, by virture of its propigation. When we cry in the movies, we know it never leaves. Sadness stays and becomes you - a slow bleed that never heals, but only changes in the course of growth. Dr. Phil and all the other pontificators are full of shit, saying that we can move beyond it. It's a trite simplification, promoting the ideal that we can "fix" sadness.

I say EMBRACE YOUR SADNESS.

This is Who I Am. I am a Sad Person. I am a Crier. And I'm coming out of the closet with my blue ribbon pinned to my skin. Proud to be Down. Flaunting my Abandonment, Protesting Viral Happiness, Capitalizing on the Panic of Loneliness and Loss that are as natural as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Not about to give into prescriptions. This is all natural, this thing of mine. My Time is Now. America's Time is Now. There is no better time than the present to be Sad in America. I'm not about to be shamed into toting my sadness around like it's a habit I'm trying to curb by confessing it at anonymous meetings. Not anymore. Nope. No siree. My sadness deserves to see the light of day, to come out and talk with the others, laugh low and guttural and find a place in this world whose very nature is loss and rebirth. Dude, just to get a little color in my skin, you know? Partake in the Seratonin Elite without all the Laura Ashley and Prada fashion.

So I want to encourage you - come out into the Dark. The Goth kids get it. The punks, but not the disaffected hipsters. Grunge music was its turn-of-the-century love child. Elvis impersonators are the embodiment of a loss that's found a fashionable place to kitsch its camp, just like the gay community has cornered the market on being the alternative, whether for good or bad. We give awards to soldiers, firemen, policeman who see the most fighting because we know they've experienced more than their share of loss, and a medal or a ceremony is all we can do to recognize it. We spend the next several years waffling from Ground Zero plan to Ground Zero plan, never confident enough of incapusulating the spiralling loss that happened there, because all we're really left with is is this amorphous sense of sadness that never really ends. But we still yearn to make it right - to justify, to beautify the missing pieces of ourselves. When all that's left swirling in the hole of loss is sadness, within that, you've got to put your hand out and hold on to what's left of you - whether it's a dance, a scream, a life, a mellowing wisdom, or a secret.

But just be, man. You're - I'm - Still Here. And it sucks. And it's Okay. And it's fucked. But UROK, because we're all sad. We're just afraid that if we say so, we'll be standing at the coffee maker alone and fidgeting.