Last Night in Brooklyn by Xochitl Gonzalez

Annotations from "Last Night in Brooklyn" by Xochitl Gonzalez

Everybody in Brooklyn—our kind of Brooklyn—believed in a fair fucking fight. But this, we all knew, had been dirty pool.

La Garza wore too much gold jewelry in her photo shoots. Her nails were too long and too done. She had a perpetual glint in her eye that said, “Oh yeah? Try me.” The kind of attitude you couldn’t “adopt” just because you signed a lease. The kind that I recognized came with being from here.

soon, everyone was asking me what kind of stuff I wanted to work on and mentioning people they knew in the business that they should (and would) connect me to. And for a while, we just shot the shit about our grinds and ambitions. I remember distinctly that it didn’t feel the way it did with my friends from growing up: full of love but self-conscious that I sounded full of myself for wanting a bigger life. But it was also different from being around my acquaintances from Yale, where their lofty opportunities—like publishing books or making films—seemed to materialize effortlessly through connections that made my own aspirations feel further out of reach.

Then one evening in the spring of ’07 I wanted a bottle of wine and didn’t have any cash. And this banal desire set into motion a string of wildly consequential events. Or perhaps it was all inevitable. You don’t have to be good at math to know that two trains hurtling toward each other on the same track are eventually gonna crash.

It was early April, still cool enough to gooseflesh your skin, but the breeze coming across Fort Greene Park was pure spring. Mulch and hyacinths and magnolia leaves crushed by commuters’ feet and all those other smells that get into people’s heads and make them feel invincible after a long winter.

“Honestly, you don’t grow up in Jersey aspiring to live in Brooklyn—no offense. But in Paris, it was all anyone could talk about. “If you’re going back to New York, Brooklyn is the only place the fabulous can be. As close as you can get to Paris!”

New York at that time felt like a game. The objective: have as much fun as possible on your pitiful salary while concurrently advancing at work. Each week offering a fresh opportunity to win. Sleep was irrelevant. The whole thing required strategy and collective teamwork.

Whatever you think of Brooklyn now, historically, this has been home for the ones who make what the city takes. The people who drive buses and empty bedpans and waste pails or eke out a living teaching our children. A place where our famous generosity is a trick the mind learns to play to distract from your own lack. If we don’t need God’s eyes, I don’t know who the hell in New York does. Well, actually, the Bronx. All of the Bronx. But they have Yankee Stadium, and you can’t have everything.

In my impulsive grab for a moment of solitude, I’d condemned myself to a weekend of loneliness. And there is nothing worse, when you cannot stand yourself or the life you seem to have stumbled into, than the torment of your own company.

Meanwhile, Dumbo was a rumor people’d heard but where few New Yorkers had actually been. The recasting of abandoned box and Brillo factories into luxury condos had only just begun. The high-rises that would raze the lofts and dwarf the apex of the Manhattan Bridge? Not even twinkles in a greedy developer’s eye; too busy were they transforming Williamsburg.

My cousin worshiped that truck. It had been a gift from Grandpa Forten during one of my summer visits to the Vineyard when Devon first got his license. It was sent over on the ferry with a bow and everything. Even got him a vanity plate, which Devon had kept: D-3PO, his childhood nickname and the only public nod to his formerly dorkier, Star Wars–loving self. His pure love of this truck the last remnant of the charming boy who, year upon year, had become obfuscated by the growing layers of Devon’s pretensions.

And suddenly, there I was, by myself on a crowded dance floor alone as he and Omar got sucked into the throng. A dance floor, if you don’t know, is one of the most vulnerable places for a single woman to be. A sea lion wearing a “Hello, My Name Is…” sticker at a mixer for hungry sharks. Every two-bit guy with no game at all smells your solitude in the water. Your lack of a male buffer or a dancing girlfriend circle sending a dog whistle to hounds.

“I have no issue with marriage—in theory. I have lots of problems with weddings, though. Too much of people doing and saying shit for no reason other than you’re ‘supposed to.’ And you’re only ‘supposed to’ because people have been doing and saying the same shit before them for generations. I don’t like being a part of it. Makes me uncomfortable.” I thought about the pricey bridesmaid’s dress and the shower and the trip to Jamaica I’d made for Devon’s wedding. And how I’d had no desire to do any of it but had felt no freedom to say no and wondered who had taken that freedom away from me. For the first time, I realized it had been myself. And I recognized that Matteo, in any capacity, could be very fucking dangerous.

“Principles, girl,” I offered with a smile. “That’s gonna be all the difference in your career.” “Or what keeps me broke. We’ll see.”

“Manhattan is full of people like me, in some respects. People who weren’t gonna sit in the circumstance that they were born in. But they get on that island, and they want to act like they were sprouted out of nowhere. Erase their history.

the difference, I could suddenly see, is that these people around me now were not mere transplants; they were replacements. Replacements disguised in euphoric chatter about improvements. Coming here not to make it but to make it over. To bend this place to meet their sense of maximum comfort and delight. This would fix that, and that would make this other thing over here even better. But better, of course, than what?

Perhaps La Garza felt her past life would have eclipsed her future one. Too Dickensian for her—the woman, the artist—to dig herself out from under. Her kind of biography, I suspect she knew, was alien among the soft genesis stories of the power brokers she needed to get behind her. The real story, she likely intuited, might have rendered her too damaged to handle the big time in their eyes. And I don’t think she was wrong. Those who’ve never suffered often mistake scars of survival for defects.

She’d been working at a bar called 8th Avenue Garden, a sports dive across from MSG, “where dreams got pickpocketed before they died.” Except for the rush of sad married dudes heading home on the LIRR or before a sporting event or concert, the place was primarily a social club for pimps. She’d listen to them trade tales and tips, interview potential new girls—“Let me tell you, you learn a lot about how men get over on women by talking to pimps. That was an education.”

When I told my mother about the night nurse, she’d said, not missing a beat, “Pero, how will you make the child feel guilty for shit later if you don’t lose sleep for the monster now?”

It defied explanation, but my flesh goosepimpled then, upset about something my body hadn’t yet told my mind.

it simply was not the Brooklyn way. Fucking people up that you felt wronged you? Yes. Being a bitch and snitching to save yourself from consequence? No.

“Get ready,” Tayo said. “America made history tonight, and white people are gonna ask us to pay them back for the rest of our lives.” (on the election of Obama)