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hybrid completely devoid of the joyful
Monday, September 2 2002
Since today was Labor Day, all sorts of crazy festivities were planned for the city. As This morning as I was walking to the Vale of Cashmere, I passed such robust police presence (much of it of an anti-riot nature) that I feared perhaps martial law had been declared. Huge dump trucks full of rocks had been parked bumper to bumper all along the southeast side of Grand Army Plaza and there appeared to be hundreds of cops deployed. I later learned that this was security for a massive Caribbean carnival scheduled for today. Despite nearly continuous rain, the carnival was a success, at least judging from the sounds heard back here at the brownstone. There must have been several bands playing simultaneously because I could hear an almost perfect mix of at least two of them. Since the songs being played had roughly the same tempo while their keys differed by about a half-step, the combined tune sounded like some weird atonal or minor-key masterpiece, a hybrid completely devoid of the joyful Caribbean flavor of its component halves.
This afternoon Sally, Gretchen and I went to attend a barbecue hosted by Kurt and Joanna, a couple Gretchen knows in nearby Prospect Heights (directly across the street from the Q station). Gretchen first met Kurt and Joanna some years ago while walking Sally in Prospect Park. Subsequently they had a big falling-out, followed eventually by a reconciliation.
On our arrival, there was much wagging and barking from Kurt and Joanna's two dogs Sam and Vivienne. Prospect Park has a way of bringing dog lovers together; Kurt and Joanna met each other there while walking their dogs.
The running joke leading up to today's barbecue was that Joanna didn't think I actually existed. When I was there and she could see that I wasn't a fiction, she seemed rather impressed with me as a specimen and gave me an enthusiastic hug, as though she had known me all along. From that point on the oft-repeated running joke was that I was actually an actor being paid by Gretchen to play the role of her boyfriend.
Part of the reason for the barbecue was to show off some substantial modifications that Kurt had made to the apartment. He moved walls around, restored an old marble fireplace (installing a completely new flue all the way up through the roof), and added a fancy roofdeck. Since the apartment is the topmost unit in the co-op, Kurt was free to completely modify the roof area. He added a small additional rooftop penthouse and installed a steep iron staircase up into it. He then outfitted the penthouse with shingles and clapboards just like a small country cottage, even installing a water collection system from its roof so he and Joanna could water rooftop plants around the deck. Everything was done with great attention to design and the intermeshing of structures.
Eventually we were joined by Kurt's mother, who is a German, and Kurt's mother's boyfriend, a gnomish laid-off programmer/chemist. Then a couple from one of the downstairs units came up and Gretchen rolled her eyes because the woman had an enormous belly swollen not by worms and malnutrition but by a large unborn parasitic human. Happily, though, the couple didn't do the usual pregnant couple thing, that is, seek to restrict our conversation to the subject of their impending parenthood. Nonetheless, the only thing that the pregnant woman could have done to completely redeem herself would have been to drink a glass of wine. Mind you, I'm not advocating a world filled with fetal alcohol syndrome babies, but I think it's time for the pendulum of concern to swing back away from babies and toward the concerns of adults. The pathological contemporary notion of the absolute preciousness and purity of children has caused much harm to our society. Indeed, the most visible effects of perfect parenting on the children of Park Slope is their shameless whining and George W. Bushian sense of entitlement.
It didn't end up being much of a traditional barbecue, since rain pretty much kept us off the rooftop deck. Kurt would go up there now and then and fetch burgers or roasted vegetables off the grill and we'd eat them in front of a crackling fire in the fireplace. Among the available food items was a hot and spicy cabbage salad, which I added to my hamburger and called "Caribbean sauerkraut" for the benefit of Kurt's German mother. Building on the vaguely Caribbean theme of the barbecue, my drink of choice was rum and tonic. Joanna kept refilling my glass reflexively whenever I finished it and I began to fear that I might lose control of my drunkenness, as can easily happen when I'm drinking booze socially.
After the other couples all left, Kurt, Joanna, Gretchen, and I smoked a joint. Gretchen doesn't normally smoke pot, but sometimes she checks in to see if it still makes her paranoid and miserable. Joanna's dog Sam, who looks like a cross between a Rottweiler and my parents' dog Fred, had developed a few dreadlocks which Gretchen and I managed to snip out with a pair of scissors. Periodically Joanna would tell Sam, "Kill him. Kill him a lot!"
Walking back home from the barbecue, we passed a few women on Union Street who had obviously been to the Caribbean carnival. They were all dressed up with masks and skimpy green costumes, as if they'd been to a summertime Mardi Gras. Evidently the robust police presence had been effective, because our block wasn't on fire and no drunken revelers had broken into our apartment and stolen our television. However, there was enough food detritus on the ground in front of the old folks' hospice to distract Sally as we headed to the park for her midnight walk.
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