Sunday, March 18, 2012

Meaning To Leave

Everything changes all the time and there's no sense worrying, I thought. Try to sway things, though, into changing right. You could do that by talking or, better yet, my new intention, writing.

After all, what did politicians do but talk? What were laws but words? What was anything but what you said it was?

God started everything with the Word. He talked all this stuff into being. Why not take a shot yourself?

Don't worry, the things that were really good would never change. The beach, bagels, jokes, the library, Christmas, candy, girls.

The things that were bad, maybe you could help.

I didn't like this war in Vietnam, for instance. They said we had to fight it but they couldn't tell you why. I thought of the older Jewish people in my neighborhood, from Europe, with numbers tattooed on their arms from concentration camps. Someone once in Germany said all that had to happen, too.

I didn't like prejudice. It was kind of a new word for an old thing. Once it was slavery.

I knew about it. There were few black people in my neighborhood and there were none in nicer neighborhoods. There were plenty in neighborhoods east of us, with grimy streets, big projects, no stores, no trees.

I didn't like Brooklyn State Hospital. They had hundreds of mental patients - maybe thousands, counting those you couldn't see, but I'd hear screaming through bars, when I'd walk (illegally) through the grounds.

I knew a lot of the patients from the street, but not any of their names. Did they have names anymore? If no one used them?

I saw a lot get worse, but never better.

So, this was a writer's job. To help things get better. Righting a wrong, or trying to. Or, less grand, just artistically, simply writing a good sentence. Or expressing a thought well. Those were also good goals.

A good sentence was like from super-powers. It existed and you couldn't kill it. Walls couldn't hold it. It could fly: fly anywhere. It could be anywhere and everywhere at the same time.

Words could place me where I was. They could also get me out.

I knew my days were numbered in Brooklyn 3: my daytimes, at the very least. I'd have to go somewhere else for high school. Tilden was our high school and had a good baseball field but beyond that you wanted to know about knives to thrive there, and I was not interested in knife fights on a daily basis.

I'd be gone within 5 years, tops. I could and would leave, but I had things to do first. Didn't I have to prove myself to the place, how good I was? And prove it to anywhere else I would go?

The #46 bus ran through the heart of Brooklyn 3. It had the heaviest ridership of any bus line in the city of New York. There was a reason for that. Brooklyn 3 was a place meant to leave.

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