Brooklyn: Scratch Tickets, Cigarette Butts & Chewing Gum

This is the first of a two part description of the events of the past weekend that I spent in New York City.

The bus left from just outside Ruggles Station, in the heart of Northeastern University, at 5:30 PM.  It's a nice deal, these buses that stop directly at universities (well, they stop at Northeastern and at Boston University).  The bus ride was long and they showed a terrible movie.  The Four Feathers, starring Heath Ledger.  Horrible, especially because it had the potential to be decent.  But the transitions were confusing, the photography was bad, it was generally very unclear what was going on, and I don't mean that in the cool David Lynch kind of way.

Whatever.  I just sat around and talked to people next to me and tried to sleep.  We got into New York late at night.  The city was bright.  For some reason this bus route drove right through Times Square and dropped us off outside Madison Square Garden.  The two times I've been before, the buses went into Port Authority.  For those of the crowd who had never been to New York before it must have been quite the introduction.  We couldn't stay for long.  It was off to Val's house.

I can't say it was a fun trip.  We had to get on the Subway and wait forever for the right train.  Then we had to walk for seven or eight blocks through the dark and eerily deserted streets of Brooklyn.  Yea, it was weird.  Twenty-two loud college students walking through the dead air of a cramped residential area of the largest city in the nation.  I'm sure we seemed like quite the crowd of ruckus tourists to any of the few people who might have been up to see us.

When we finally got to Val's little Brooklyn house, we all had to arrange ourselves on the floor, come up with sleeping space, etc.  I ended up sleeping under the table.  Instead of going to sleep right away, though, we played with Val's big screen TV for awhile then all walked to the Vegas Diner, two or three blocks away.

It was a sleazy little diner, packed full of such a stereotypical crowd of Italian Brooklynites that I had to laugh.  I ordered bad cheesecake and bad coffee.  They're both still pretty good even when they're bad.  Heck, I've ordered Denny's cheesecake more than once and I live off their coffee.  Other people ordered mozzarella sticks, chocolate chip pancakes, pieces of weird-ass rainbow cake and bacon slathered etceteras.  Fucking delicious.

The waitress was obviously annoyed by having such a large crowd of rowdy tourists in the middle of the night, but we left a large tip and didn't stay for too long.  I was tired of looking up at the TV on the New York sports station and seeing the Knicks highlights, Rangers highlights and Patrick Ewing number retirement ceremony over and over again.  When you're only covering sports from one city, there's often very little to show.

The majority of us got to sleep at something like four in the morning and woke up at ten or eleven.  Enormous bagel wheel sandwiches were supplied for breakfast, with tasty results.  Around noon, we took the subway to just near the promenade.  We disembarked and walked along the water front.  Looking over the water, we got a full view of the skyline of Manhattan.  The Statue of Liberty was off to the left, looking oddly stumpy on its little island, especially compared to all the much taller, and slender buildings towering over the city.

I kind of just stood there, taking it all in for awhile.  I had seen a bit of the city from quite close-up when I'd gone to visit Ed in Manhattan in the past, but I'd never seen such a full panoramic view of it, at least in person.  But then we left the promenade and took some of the seedier "inner-city" streets of Brooklyn as we made our way to the Brooklyn Bridge.

Graffiti covered many of the buildings.  Chain link fences and shuttered windows were featured on many of the decrepit old buildings.  Litter covered the sidewalks, collecting up against the fences and other barriers.  Most of it was a collection cigarette butts and old chewing gum wrappers.  However, there also seemed to be an odd amount of used-up scratch ticket losers.  All this garbage seemed, to me, beautiful at the same time as it was ugly.  A sharp reality that reminded me of the people - dirty, imperfect - who made up the city which seemed so overpoweringly grandiose as we stood on the promenade before, and as we approached the bridge after.

The bridge.  The construction seemed to symbolize the city, a combination of grandness and age.  It was as old and cramped and graffiti-covered and classical as Brooklyn.  And it was as awe-inspiring and breath-taking and powerful and magnificent as Manhattan.  It served as a perfect liaison between the two.

The city, to me, is neither the sleazy Italian American neighborhoods of the Brooklyn nor the glitzy over-commercialism of Times Square.  It's not the lobby of Rockefeller Center and it's not the shady interior of the Vegas Diner.  It's not the over-used symbolism of the Statue of Liberty or the liquor store a block streets of the Bronx.  The city is the walk from Brooklyn's streets, covered with used scratch tickets, cigarette butts and chewing gum to the clean, streamlined towers of lower Manhattan.  The city, to me, is the Brooklyn Bridge.