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dub Brooklyn the Promised Land
Friday, April 19 2002On Fridays Gretchen works as a writing tutor at Nassau College in Long Island. I'd arranged to meet her this evening at six for Indian Food, an arrangement whose importance had increased with each shitty thing that happened to her throughout the day. Our chosen point to rendezvous was in front of the dog run in Union Square.
After walking Sally in the park, I saw huge black thunderstorms building up in the west over Manhattan, so I hurried as fast as I could to the Q station while lightning scrawled lines in the sky. As the subway crossed the East River on the Manhattan Bridge, I could see the towers of Manhattan lit in a creepy golden light against the apocalyptic doom of thunderclouds.
Rain was pouring down in an impossible deluge when I went to exit the Union Street station. Despite being go-go New Yorkers with places to be and schedules to keep, almost no one was brave enough to venture forth into the mælströml. People accumulated in a dense crowd at the base of the stairs, teasing one another about whether or not they should proceed. In a way they seemed almost happy to be inconvenienced if only for proof that rain still falls in New York (this was the first honest-to-goodness rain shower I'd seen since moving back east nine months ago).
There were a number of Christians in our midst, and unfortunately they were not content to quietly reflect on their Lord and Savior. No, they took advantage of their captive audience and proselytized. An unhealthily red-faced woman in a frumpy denim dress came up to me and said she had some "good news" for me today. Uninterested, I did my usual rejection-by-groan thing that New York has forced me to master. Then I thought about the term "good news" and I had to ask myself "What, if anything, is new about this news?" The whole Jesus thing has to be about the most stale news still in circulation. Then this other Christian, a tall guy equipped with three short lengths of dirty white rope, called out to the audience saying that he was going to perform a magic trick. But, having an evangelical one track mind, he had no intention of doing anything interesting with his ropes. Instead, as his audience quickly evaporated, he used them as uninspired metaphors for different sorts of sinners. Eventually the repulsive force of the Christians was such that I dashed out into the rain, which was starting to ease up by this point.I went all over Union Square and the surrounding streets looking for Gretchen, since she clearly wasn't going to be waiting for me at the outdoor dog run. After some exploration, I decided that the most likely place would be a covered entrance to subway near the dog run. As I was waiting there, she suddenly appeared, soggy wet from having tried to find me. According to her watch, I was a half hour late. And she was mad about it too. I tried to explain that I was still unfamiliar with the rambling Union Street Subway Station and that I certainly couldn't come above ground duiring a downpour. Gretchen listened with the contemptuous suspicion of a Judge Judy. "The rain didn't stop me!" she shouted, pointed at her matted hair full of catkins and the green petals of tree flowers. "You're taking me OUUUUT!" she added, in a volume calculated to inform the general public. Her day had deteriorated even further since her last email, and she'd even been harassed by a young football-tossing Abercrombie and Fitch adherent.
Straight away we went to that dimly-lit hipster dive bar called the Belmont Lounge (117 East 15th Street). As usual, the sound system was playing an entire CD from start to finish. This time it was the Motley Crue album Dr. Feelgood. "I call this genre of music 'idiot rock'," I observed. A shot of Jameson whiskey put Gretchen in a much better mood, and she seemed almost giddy by the time we made it to Haveli (near 2nd Avenue and 6th Street, just out of the East Village's "micro-Mumbai"). Haveli is the one good Indian restaurant in the area. Unlike the Christmas-light-bedecked funky-smelling establishments nearby, Haveli is a classy place with high ceilings, courteous staff, and high-quality table wine. Of course, such quality comes at a price, and (unlike the other Indian restaurants nearby), the bill at Haveli is comparable to the bills at other fine Manhattan restaurants.
I ordered a whole bottle of white wine to drink with our food, and since Gretchen was already sort of drunk, I ended up drinking the whole thing by myself. We spent most of the meal talking about the situation in Isræl. This is normally a topic that we only discuss when we are drunk, because this is the one topic about which we are most ideologically divided. She has an admittedly tribalistic view of Isræl, and can cite history to support her views. [REDACTED]I'm about as non-tribal as you can get, and I mostly view tribalism as a problem in the world. Don't get me wrong here; I think diversity and ethnicity are a good thing and I've always thought (and my non-Jewish parents taught me) that the Jewish view of the world provided more than its fair share of positive contributions to Western Culture. Nevertheless, I view religious (and/or ethnic) states such as Isræl as anachronisms. How can you ever be modern (or peaceful) if you're that preoccupied with someone's religion and/or ethnicity? True, the Holocaust has Jews jumpy about the intentions of the non-Jewish world, but to my way of thinking, the best solution for Jewish survival has always been to not put all their eggs in one basket. The basket known as Isræl is a sitting duck for just one properly-landed, properly-armed Iraqi Skud. If I were a religious Jew, I'd reinterpret Adonai's promises in the Torah and retroactively dub Brooklyn the Promised Land. [REDACTED] 
Manhattan viewed from over the FDR in the Q Train crossing the Manhattan Bridge.
The weird lighting was caused by the first thunderstorm of 2002.
The woman in the center is a Christian evangelist attempting to give people stale "good news."
The Circle-Q comes through Union Station.
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