Bensonhurst - Tumblr Posts
Excerpt
Archetypal city scene-setting, based largely on this Hyde Park/Shanghai hybrid of my imagination.
***
Bensonhurst was an analogous neighborhood as ever there was one. Along the route they walked each day, Roman recognized the residences of politicians and movie stars, gangbangers, university students and corporate warlords all situated within sugar-borrowing distance of each other. Where one red, white and green-clad street ended, another overlaid with idiographic signs declaring dim sum availability began. And while homeless peddlers of progressive rags lay sleeping in the alleys behind five-star restaurants, gated communities stood downwind of El Burrito Palace. Down in Bensonhurst, the squirrels and the pigeons had more meat on their bones than the people.
Roman inhaled the carcinogenic air of his home, exhaled noxious particles of himself. He recalled when he was younger, he would feel his way about Brooklyn in the dark, roaming the streets on Saturday nights binge-drinking, pot-smoking, painting ideological murals on the sides of cargo cars until the early hours of Kubla Khan. Consequently, he would spend most Sundays in bed with the curtains nailed shut, moaning and groaning to the ravages of pickaxe psychedelic organists on his nerves.
But then once he had grown up, had rebuilt his damaged synapses and experienced sufficient heartbreak, Roman woke before dawn most days and started recognizing the city for what it really was without cover of the euphemistic dark.
It was then he started to take notice of the layers upon layers of dust clinging to the sides of iconic skyscrapers, waterlogged American flags heavily hanging on their posts. He started seeing construction scaffolds on every corner, industrial backwash running in the gutters, factory emissions bleeding a graded wash into the empty expanses of the sky where webs of telephone wires, public transport cables, street lights and neon signs coiled like a great wire cage. He liked the idea of it all being a cage—the premise thus implied that people could fly if they wanted to.