Years ago I dated a man who was friendly with a third cousin of mine,
a cousin who felt closer to me because he and my brother were the same age. They had a tight bond as kids and teens. We parted ways necessarily: my brothers and I had destinies that included education and great successes, while he struggled with older family issues like two alcoholic parents who died early on, car theft, and false claims through labor unions for workers compensation, the petty cons he learned early on from the masters themselves.
After I came back from my travels out west, I naturally sought him out, because both before and after Denver, Colorado, I lived in Brooklyn, and he is from Sheepshead Bay. I am the sole remaining family member of my father's line to retain any footing in the city at all, such is the length we have moved outward from it, but such is the place of big media houses and art, so that's where I returned.
And just like my romantic life, I felt I had left behind the traps of working class culture for good, like binge drinking partners, tangles with the law, and domestic violence, but such would not be the case. Like many women of my age, I had a brief marriage to a totally inept partner, only to immediately take up with a man who was slightly better in comparison, then he too fell apart when we left his comfort zone for my urban habitat. I was single, and 37. My cousin's then-girlfriend (now, wife), had just the same experience. Sure, my cousin was a violent, chronic drunk who was always unemployed, but have you been out there lately? Dating is hell! She felt it especially as a large woman, enough to frighten her back into my cousin's arms, even after he disappeared to Ireland with a girl he knocked up when she broke up with him, then returning to Brooklyn, begging her to reunite with him.
I had reconnected with my cousin at a family reunion, listening to his tale over many drinks that day, while pictures of a boy that may or may not be his circulated around a large picnic table.
I had also tried the usual dating outlets available to modern women, like online dating (a cruel joke for brilliant women, if ever there was), and then a prolonged relief from such abuse through intentional, deliberate abstinence. My cousin, knowing this, reintroduced himself into my scene, with (what else?) bait to hook me back into the lifestyle. It was sophisticated baiting, too: his friend was, on the surface, a great catch: Irish American (as I am in part), a business entrepreneur, and a brilliant mechanic. It seemed logical: two advanced tradespeople uniting for mutual benefit. But just like life, he was far from ideal.
He carried around baggage from a prolonged, bitter divorce, his parent's broken family with kids from different fathers and mothers, a raging drinking and cocaine habit (that he had pitched to me as moderate during the courtship stage), and the insular, inbred ignorance of the uneducated, vicious closed-mindedness that marks the isolated clans of Gerritsen Beach. Enter me onto this stage, and you can already imagine the conflict. I kinda stood out. Noooo?! Me?
But, I had been celibate awhile and I was vulnerable to suggestion, so we began a dysfunctional dance that revolved around his baffled incompetence with relationships, coupled with my continued breaks up with him via text messages, like a nightmare version of me as a teenager dating in the Computer Age. It was nonsense, but it was the kind of bullshit I was raised in, so I knew it well.
Just like his typical working class woes, so the block in his neighborhood followed suit. People, okay let's just say it, a string of fucked up drunks, rung his doorbell at all hours of the day and night, and they felt completely justified in doing so. They all knew each other and had intermarried with one another, so it was kind of like the repulsive, convoluted dating done in front of a reality television audience, but with much less monetary compensation. He knew his environment was problematic; he is very intelligent. We bonded early on at a stupid St. Patrick's Day party we were invited to in the Rockaways about the idiotic drunks around us that slobbered and pawed each other while wearing daddy's cop hat as a costume, enacting terrible, deeply ingrained patterns that always got them nowhere but drunk and out of money.
The events of 9/11 were no different for the people there. It was rife with severe, long term mismanagement. Across the street from his house, which was in a permanent state of construction that went on for years, (my then-boyfriend also lived in a state of flux. He had a staircase in his house without a banister, the components of which remained packed away in a long cardboard box on his living room floor, because there was "never enough time" to complete projects), stood a house permanently clothed in Tyvek covering, the stuff that goes on before the actual house siding goes up. We used to muse aloud about when it would be done, but there were never any signs of progress.
He told me that the man of the house had received a huge settlement from the city after 9/11, supposedly for a fireman's service, but John thought he was merely "retired" on disability after winning money from some lawsuit. His drunken lurching about the block in the middle of the day would obviously suggest such a thing happened, such were our awesome powers of observation. And just like any Shanty Irish Mick with a serious addiction, his requisite blond "trophy" wife (no big prize, but she had all the stereotypical attributes like hair dye, nail polish, and leisure suits) had a bright, new, red sports car in the driveway. Such were their priorities in the wake of great trauma: permanently applied workout clothes, shiny sports cars, and a house renovation that went nowhere, a visual reminder of their perpetually stuck state.
I've since moved on successfully, finally closing that chapter in my family's history forever by physically fighting my way out of his reach, which effectively broke many years of culturally supported abuse. When I think back about the events surrounding 9/11, New York, and New Yorkers, I know that I am just one of the millions who made it out of a continual, self-sustaining abusive cycle alive, and for that, I will always be grateful. I fought back and I won, even when no one was in my corner, because I broke his arm when he put his hands on me, even before I learned (and earned belts in) mixed martial arts. I know now that whenever he feels uncertain about his story with me, he will remember me each and every time a rainy day causes his healed fracture to ache, while he tries to repair the trucks in his fleet.
Take care of yourself today, New York.
