Stories of Our Lives: Memory, History, Narrative

2. 7002 Ridge

16 DOI: 10.7330/9780874218930.c02 Two 7002 Ridge Of course, I was born in a place and grew up in a place and I have always felt strongly influenced by place. My early place was New York City. Like virtually everyone, I must have started hearing stories while still young, must have awakened to the power of narrative as I learned about how people communicate. Yet when I think of the quintessential New York story—the story that most evokes my early place—I think of one that I heard only many years later, after I had left the city. Stories have this power to reach back and suddenly illuminate both past and present, to seemingly pull together our sense of ourselves and our history, our grasp of place. This chapter does contain other stories from this specific time period, but what I refer to as “Paul’s story” seems to capture something larger. I heard this story from my wife’s cousin Paul Pettigrew, who at the time was the superintendent of a rural school district in Oklahoma. A former speech and drama teacher in his native Texas, he loved the theater and made intermittent pilgrimages to Broadway and Off Broadway. I do not actually remember him telling this story in the first person, but I have retold it, rendering him a character in his own tale. After first explaining Paul’s identity to those who might not know him, I would tell it something like this: “On one of his New York trips, Paul is walking down the street. Somehow I remember it as Sixth Avenue, but I may have made that up. “And he passes this bizarre figure, like a street guy, wearing a sandwich board and dressed up like a Norseman, complete with a horned helmet. “Maybe it was Moondog, the street poet—who did use to hang out on Sixth Avenue, near the jazz venues on Fifty-Second Street—or maybe not, I really don’t know.1 “Anyway, as Paul passed him, so do these two really blasé New Yorkers, and they give the street figure a quick glance, and one of them says to the other: 7002 Ridge 17 “‘Hunh. Another Viking.’” Another Viking indeed! What more could be said? What more, that is, by a New Yorker, blasé to the point of some cosmic indifference, wrapped in a world full of everything, including an oversupply of Vikings, wrapped in a worldview which has viewed it all—every vice, every treasure looted from somewhere else, every shade of human color, especially every fantasy. But I myself viewed the New York of my childhood and youth (the late 1940s through the early 1960s) not with the jaded sense that I had already seen it all, but rather with the awed and wondrous sense that my city held, in powerfully concentrated form, all that anyone ever needed to see—a confabulation of sights and experience that out-of-towners needed a lifetime of traveling to accumulate: dinosaur skeletons, mysterious gothic mansions behind great iron fences, kosher shops with strange letters posted in their windows, rows of piers that extracted from ships’ holds the world’s wares, enough restaurants to eat a different meal every day of the year, fleets of chauffeured limousines to serve the needs of the rich and smart, and endless miles of subterranean track to serve the needs of the rest, who would take them to neighborhoods with residents who might be beyond their imaginings. Riding the Sea Beach Express—later prosaically renamed the N Train—to Coney Island, one even saw small farms, refutations of the urban that nonetheless confirmed the vastness of this urbs, certified its evident power to encompass existence itself. While I seem to stress its wonders, the New York world of my childhood and youth was, of course, a mixture of the exotic and the mundane. And the mundane predominated because the exotic can only glow against the deep shadow of the everyday. I lived in one of the six-story brick apartment buildings that architecturally defined the Brooklyn of a certain era; ours had certain pretensions to grandeur—an awning; doormen; a “super” named Mr. Carlson, who always wore a three-piece suit; a resident congressman ; and a handyman called Jim, who periodically washed our sixthfloor windows while dangling from a safety belt like a floating, stationary parachutist. The awnings were repeatedly torn off in storms and eventually not replaced. Mr. Carlson turned into several...