The Swarm: Cajun Boy In The City

This week on The Swarm, NYC transplant Cajun Boy In The City shares some thoughts on moving to New York, and the transformation that happens after you’re not a tourist anymore.

Have you ever accidentally run across something that you’d written years ago and just felt as though you wanted to recoil into a shell like a frightened turtle when you read it, mainly because it felt like such a rhetorical abortion? A few days ago I was going through an old email account (attempting to fully complete a Yahoo Mail to Gmail conversion if you really want to know) and found myself going through five and six year-old emails, emails that I’d written around the time that I moved here in June 2002, that had been saved into my “sent” folder. In doing so I ran across a few letters that I’d written to family and friends back home in Louisiana that detailed some of what I was seeing, feeling, and experiencing in my first few weeks as a freshly-minted resident of New York City. Truth be told, I wanted to puke when I read some of them.

“Jesus I sounded like a freaking tourist back then!”

And essentially, I was a tourist, and I saw the city through the eyes of a tourist. Even though I was more than a bit repulsed, reading these emails made me feel kind of nostalgic for that time in my life, that time of “Wow, I actually live in New York City” wonderment. So when I was asked to write a guest piece on this here blog, I figured that I’d share a few of those words that I’d written back then.

The following is an excerpt of an email sent to some special people in my life that was written in September 2002. I was in a short-term sublet in Park Slope at the time. In a few weeks I’d move into my first real NYC apartment, a renovated fifth floor walk-up in a rat-infested tenement building on Orchard Street between Rivington and Delancey.

First of all, it’s been kinda cold here, at least to me it is, sweater weather, people walking around in jackets and coats, and the fact that it’s rained steadily for the past four days hasn’t helped any. Autumn in New York is upon us and it is a tender time. The parks here, always beautiful at any time of year, I’m told are never more so than in the fall. The Museum of Natural History and The Metropolitan Museum of Art are hanging big colorful sheets from their facades. I walked past both the other day on a particularly windy day and the giant sheets were billowing with the movements of the wind, I could here them snap as I walked by. People seem to be walking with more spring in their step. I know I sure am. A new season brings new life, and autumn is always a great time, my favorite season of the year.

In my last letter, I touched a bit on how enormously diverse NYC is, and since then a couple of you have asked how that is being that the cost of living here is so high, so I guess that I should amend things a little. For those of you that don’t know, I live in Brooklyn, the Park Slope section of Brooklyn to be precise. Park Slope, along with Williamsburg, Brooklyn Heights,
Boerum Hill and Cobble Hill, is one of the more popular residential areas of Brooklyn, attracting many couples and families, along with a slew of students, artists, writers, actors, and the like. Its streets are lined with many old-style brownstone apartment buildings, many of which were built in the latter part of the 19th century. In these streets play children of many ethnicity’s. On my block there is a group that runs together that consists of a lone black kid, along with a few Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Italians, Polish, and Palestinians. They are a motley crew indeed. On hot days they will invariably open a fire hydrant, spraying water every which way. They’ll run around and play in it, just like you’ve seen in movies or on TV. The kids call them “jimmy pumps.” The elders of the neighborhood refer to them “New York City swimming pools.”

Park Slope also boasts a significant lesbian population. How this happened, I’m not quite sure, it just is the way it is. There are many bars and restaurants that cater to them openly. I just heard about that a new one springing up that’s to be called “Butch’s Butch Bistro.” No kidding! At least that’s what the local pizza guy told me. Then again, he could be playing on my green-ness.

Seriously though, I’ve developed quite an affection for Brooklyn, Park Slope in particular. My block is so eccentric, so eclectic, so diverse, so interesting. Next door to my building is a little grocery market run by a Pakistani guy named Babu. And that is his real name by the way. Those of you Seinfeld fans will get the humor in that (”you’re a very, very baaad man”). I stop in every morning for the paper and a cup of coffee for the train ride into mid-town where I work. Babu always greets me with a big smile and his customary “hey boss” greeting.

He calls me “boss.” I love that.

Next door to Babu’s place is a Mexican Taqueria which serves up a gargantuan sized plate of nachos for 5 bucks. Across the street on the corner is a Polish deli. On the opposite corner is Lizzette’s, a Puerto Rican bakery whose pastries are God-awful and whose employees speak not a lick of English, nor do they seem to be even the slightest bit inclined to learn it, but cooks up a mean breakfast plate of eggs, bacon, and potatoes along with coffee and juice for just $2.50. When a non-Spanish speaking person goes to Lizette’s, they pretty much have to point at the menu to place an order. Special orders? Forget about it, you’re screwed!

As much as reading this horrified me, I really miss feeling like a vulnerable egg whose shell could be easily cracked, spilling its core out all over the place. After five years of being a New Yorker, I sometimes feel like a hard-boiled egg, one that’s been left sitting in a pot of boiling water way too long.

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