SEND US NEWS TIPS!
blog@nypress.com






BATTY IN BUSHWICK

An innocent late-night car ride becomes a bloody cautionary tale

By Joshua M. Bernstein

One wet, windy Friday night, a magazine editing gig in Midtown kept me correcting commas and adjectives until the witching hour. This is fantastic for freelance bucks, but a death knell for the social calendar.

This usually doesn’t ruffle my feathers. As this publication’s bar columnist, I spend my Tuesdays, Wednesdays and, while I’m being honest, Thursdays drinking in the name of journalism. Fridays are my liver’s night off. Tonight, though, it would receive no rest.

Deep in the bowels of Bushwick, there was a party celebrating two pals’ court-enabled marriage earlier that day. It’s remarkably simple: pay $25, and you’re hitched. Who needs Elvis when the American justice system handles love so cost-efficiently?

The carrot dangling at the end of my late-night copyediting shift is the free Town Car ride. I provide my magazine’s account number, and a driver—typically of Eastern European provenance—will whisk me anywhere.

“Bushwick,” I tell my driver as I hop into the back seat. “And step on it.” Saying that makes me feel important, like a foreign dignitary on the way to an urgent United Nations convention.

My driver swivels around and appraises me. He’s a Russian in his late twenties who looks like Justin Timberlake gone through the KGB ringer.

“Bush … wick?” he asks, his eyebrows arching skeptically.

“Yes. Bushwick.”

“That,” he said, “is a very bad neighborhood. Are you sure you want to go?”

“Uh, yes. I’m going to a wedding celebration!” I say cheerfully, even though I am not a cheerful man. Sometimes it’s good to lie to strangers.

“No, no, very bad. Gunshots, killings, stabbing. South Bronx, East New York, Bushwick; when you hear about the bad things in New York—and I hear about them on 1010 WINS—they almost always happen in these neighborhoods. Very bad.” He turns up 1010 WINS to prove his point. Predictably, there’s a news snippet about a Bronx house fire.

“See! I told you! Dangerous! Where else can I take you?”

“It’s OK. I’m just going for a drink.” I mime drinking with my hands. Pantomiming is a habit I’m trying to break, like hitting passersby with my shoulder when I’m feeling cranky.
“We need to go to Bushwick.”

“Why your friends live there?”

I explain New York City’s rental market, and how young folks are being pushed farther east. My friends wanted to buy an apartment in Park Slope, sure. Who wouldn’t? Historic brownstones, lush trees, schools without metal detectors. Yet their bank accounts would only let them buy in Bushwick, two minutes from the jackhammer-loud overhead train.

“I have money to buy a place in Bushwick, but I won’t. Still, I will take you to your friends’ party. They love each other, yes?”

“I should hope so.” I’m no expert in affairs of the heart. My last girlfriend moved to Mexico to escape me.

“Then we go.”

We cruise through the wilds of Brooklyn and Queens, on expressways named after a baseball player, and through a neighborhood serving as the moniker of a weed-loving hip-hip trio. We hit a red light on one of those fast-food-packed streets that looks a lot like Dayton, Ohio.

“Let me tell you a story,” he says, scratching his scruffy cheeks and looking at me in the rearview mirror. “Last year, I have this friend, a contractor. Contractors, they work a week here, two weeks there. Always all over the place. My friend, he decided to get a couple drinks after work. Then because he no want to drive, he took the bus. He took the bus to the wrong place—Bushwick.”

“Uh ...”

“Bushwick. Very bad. These guys, they jump my friend. And do they shoot him? BANG! BANG!” He turns his finger into a gun and pumps two imaginary bullets into my chest.

“No?”

“No is right. They beat him. With a baseball bat. For more than one hour, until he was bloody and dead. On the streets of Bushwick. Be careful. Be very careful. You take a cab home after this party,” he commands. “You don’t want to end dead in Bushwick like my friend.”

I’m a die-hard contrarian, prone to arguing that it’s cloudy when the skies are ocean blue, but at this I nod vigorously. A silence enters the car, riding shotgun until we reach the party a couple minutes later. Colorful streamers cover the door. Silly String is stuck to the gate. In the fourth floor window, I see people pouring drinks. A long-haired lady tilts back her head to laugh.

My Justin Timberlake-ish driver, too, notices the festivities. He gazes at the window with a wistful, longing glance.
“See,” I want to say, “Bushwick isn’t all baseball bats to the brain! There’s love and laughter! Joy! New York City is a cocktail of good and bad, pleasure and suffering.”

Instead, I exit the car and say, “Have a good night, and be safe.”

My driver looks at me cockeyed and grins devilishly, his lips curling around his canines. He blasts me twice more with his index finger and drives away, disappearing into our town of too much disclosure. 
del.icio.us digg NewsVine