Almost ten years ago, I met this guy, David; he had this weird hyphenated last name that I can't remember in its entirety. He was an Ashtanga yoga practitioner, and strange-randomly albeit not creepily, had a massage table in the middle of his apartment. He was in his early forties, which was somewhat old to me in my mid-twenties, but he had an amazing, nineteen-year-old surfer's body. And he was well-read - and weirdly, elegant. He was balding, blonde, and not really my type; like many of his Creative kind, he was a jack-of-all trades, master-of-none. But he was so much fun.On our first date he ordered a bottle of Veuve Clicquot in mid-afternoon at an unmemorable cafe overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge. Out of nowhere, he "Cheers'd" me: I think the bubbly was purchased with a rare and scant seventy bucks within his wallet. Later, I went into Urban Outfitters to buy a pair of shorts and he waited for me patiently as if we were a centuries-old couple. We ate a random, gourmet meal out of his refrigerator condiments, courtesy of his chef neighbor, who entered the apartment via David's living room window via the fire escape. I think ours was the most bizarre and perfect first date ever. So perfect, that I (subconsciously) halted things shortly afterward, in order to preserve the integrity of our fantasy date and all of the things it could never possibly make good on in reality. Ours was at best, a fling.
So candidly, in my first New York summer of love, David Zeller-something was not one who got away: I wish him all good, well and happy things, but by the second or third date in, his lack of direction and cad-like tendencies weren't really in good taste, and they definitely weren't in my taste. The cool quirkiness of the first few hours of our acquaintance started to grate with perceived and exaggerated, metrosexual fayness. And he lived in Flatbush; Flatbush was once a super-bad neighborhood.
The second and last time that I ever left his apartment, there was red-black blood and viscera scattered outside of the Walgreens across the street. It was ugly and common, he told me. We kept walking and walking, faster and faster, toward the train stop. We kissed; it was good-bye. He called me for dinner, I declined. He called me for late night conversations/early morning drinks; I declined, and swiftly, he stopped calling.
I read about Flatbush fairly recently; I think it was in The Times, but I could be wrong. Regardless, Flatbush seems to be a new covenant of hipster. The old and bad neighborhood, Flatbush, is indeed, one place that has gotten away. Go figure: almost ten years, almost half of a half of a generation, can change a lot of things. I read an email dated years ago, almost to the very date, to one of my best friends that I had recently left behind in Minneapolis. We have both left Minneapolis long behind us. In my letter/email and in hers, there was wistfulness, there was energetic youth, and there was no sign of any fear.
There was however, the omnipresent and lurking weight of the unknown and optimism behind each and every action: traveling alone, relaxed and confident to meet a strange man I had just met (and meeting him in his bad neighborhood), along with many other nonchalant and wonderful and alarming things that can only happen if you don't even think about them happening...
The uncharted; the ultimate privilege of experience.
