A Walk On A Bridge

From 6/27/2020

On a gray November morning in 2016 I woke up in my Fort Greene atelier and looked out my window. Condos along Fulton Avenue blocked my view to the west. Thailand and my family lay on the other side of the world.

I hadn't seen my children for over a year. I missed them more and more with each passing day.

Especially little Fenway.

And Angie.

They were growing up without me.

The hurt wouldn't go away. An inner voice spoke a dangerous language. It only had one word.

Jump.

The phone rang.

I answered hoping it might be a job lead.

Instead it was Shannon, my old basketball friend. We hadn't played in a long time.

"You want to join me for a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. We can have lunch in Chinatown."

"I don't know." I hadn’t left my room in three days.

"My treat."

Shannon knew my weakness for a free meal and agreed to meet at the Masonic Temple on Lafayette Avenue.

"Ten minutes." We lived close to each other. Shannon with his wife. Me all alone.

Seeing a friendly face was a good thing.

"So we're walking across the bridge?" I pointed up. The sky was darker than before.

"You scared of a little rain?"

"No." We were both dressed for the weather, although I was wearing sandals instead of boots.

"Then let's go."

"How's work?"

"I don't have any work." I had been laid off from the Plaza store. "No one's buying jewelry."

"Any idea why?"

"My old profession is dying in the new century, but enough talk of business, let's walk."

The Brooklyn Bridge was thirty minutes from Fort Greene. Shannon and I spoke of the past.

Basketball games, fights, and long-gone loves, then he broached a forbidden subject.

"When are you going to Thailand?"

"No time soon." I was living on food stamps and all my money went to my family. I was lucky to spend $40 a day. "I don't know when I'll get there."

"One day you will."

He knew how much I loved my kids.

Shannon had suggested the name 'Fenway' for my son. I had checked online for Fenway Smith. Surprisingly I found none.

"You know I was walking down Lafayette the other day and ran into a guy with a dog wearing a Red Sox hat. I asked him his dog's name. He said, "Fenway." Now I realized why people don't call their kids 'Fenway'. They call their dogs 'Fenway'.

"Sorry." Shannon was a Yankee fan, but a good friend and I said, "I still like the name."

We had reached the pedestrian pathway and climbed onto the bridge. I wished I had worn shoes, but my feets were comfortable in the flip-flops.

Gut Gemacht Berliners - 2014

A white flag has symbolized a call for truce or surrender since the Eastern Han dynasty Any combatants under this flag considered themselves safe from attack, although at the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho elders, women, and children under the protection of a nearby fort were slaughtered by drunken US Calvary despite a white flag. Kit Carson, famed pioneer and Indian fighter, harshly criticized the action by saying, " I tell you what, I don't like a hostile red skin any more than you do. And when they are hostile, I've fought 'em, hard as any man. But I never yet drew a bead on a squaw or papoose, and I despise the man who would."

White flags have been ignored throughout history, but this year on July 22 unknown people exchanged the American flags atop the Brooklyn Bridge towers with two white flags. The NYPD and Homeland Security were embarrassed by the failure to protect the bridge after spending billions of dollars to lock-down New York against any threat of terrorism.

Police were equally perplexed by the lack of a letter or manifesto or video explaining the white flag, but promised to prosecute the perpetrators to the fullest measure of Law and Order.

The War of Terror

Fox News preached fear.

Mohammadans were at it again.

I thought the flags were a call for a truce.

The War of Terror versus peace.

Still no one said nothing until today's admission by two German artists.

“We saw the bridge, which was designed by a German, trained in Berlin, who came to America because it was the place to fulfill his dreams, as the most beautiful expression of a great public space. That beauty was what we were trying to capture.”

Their clandestine feat was carried out well past midnight and said according the the Zionist NY Times that when they removed those flags, they ceremonially folded them, “following the United States flag code.”

Mr. Leinkauf, 37, and Mr. Wermke, 35 have pulled off similar stunts without such recognition and I applaud their effort, although they answered the question 'why' with "There is no why?"

A girlfriend had once said that leaving me.

"Sometimes you don't to know why."

I kicked her in the ass.

A brute.

Same as the NYPD will be, if these two artists venture back to NYC

A white flag is a call for peace.

And a call for peace is not nothing.

Time in our time.

Immer, mein jung Berliners.

A Walk On A Bridge

On a grey November afternoon I was not in the best of moods. I hid my sadness with smiles and buried my sorrow with alcohol.

Life was hardly worth living.

I hadn't seen my children for over a year. I missed them more and more with each passing day.

Especially little Fenway.

And Angie.

They were growing up without me.

The hurt wouldn't go away. An inner voice spoke a dangerous language. It only had one word.

I looked out my window. Condos along Fulton Avenue blocked my view to the west. Thailand and my family lay on the other side of the world. I hadn't left my room in three days.

My phone rang.

I answered hoping it was a job lead.

Instead it was Shannon, my old basketball friend. We hadn't played in a long time.

My legs were gone.

"You wan to join me for a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. We can have lunch in Chinatown."

"I don't know."

"My treat."

Shannon knew my weakness for a free meal and agreed to meet at the Masonic Temple in Fort Greene.

"Ten minutes." We lived close to each other. Shannon with his wife. Me all alone.

Seeing a friendly face was a good thing.

"So we were walking across the bridge?" I pointed up. The sky was darker than before.

"You scared of a little rain?"

"No." We were both dressed for the weather, although I was wearing sandals instead of boots.

"Then let's go."

"How's work?"

"I don't have any work." I had been laid off from the Plaza store. "No one's buying jewelry."

"Any idea why?"

Millions of dollars of diamonds and gems sat in the window.

"My old profession is dying in the new century, but enough talk of business, let's walk."

The Brooklyn Bridge was thirty minutes from Fort Greene. Shannon and I spoke of the past.

Basketball games, fights, and long-gone loves, then he broached a forbidden subject.

"When are you going to Thailand?"

"No time soon." I was living on food stamps and all my money went to my family. I was lucky to spend $40 a day. "I don't know when I'll get there."

"One day you will."

He knew how much I loved my kids.

Shannon had suggested the name 'Fenway' for my son. I had checked online for Fenway Smith. Surprisingly I found none.

"You know I was walking down Lafayette the other day and ran into a guy with a dog wearing a Red Sox hat. I asked him his dog's name. He said, "Fenway." Now I realized why people don't call their kids 'Fenway'. They call their dogs 'Fenway'.

"Sorry." Shannon was a Yankee fan, but a good friend and I said, "I still like the name."

We had reached the pedestrian pathway and climbed onto the bridge.

Few tourists braved the damp mist. Shannon was a faster walker. I lingered at the railing. The height of the wooden walkway was 132 over the water. A thick obscured the city's inner harbor. Its thick grey matched the color of my heart. The dangerous language repeated the only word in its vocabulary, as the wind strummed the steel cables and the grated roadway hummed with traffic.

I thought of Hart Crane's poem about the wind and struggled to recall The Bridge.

One line stuck in my head.

"Under thy shadow by the piers I waited Only in darkness is thy shadow clear."

Darkness was my only friend.

Hart Crane had jumped or drunken sailors had thrown the gay poet off the bow of Orizaba. He drowned in the Caribbean, confirming his prediction.

"The bottom of the sea is cruel."

The height of the bridge was ruthless and the tide said the word.

"Jump."

Shannon looked at me. He read my eyes and said, "The fog leans one last moment on the sill. Under the mistletoe of dreams, a star — As though to join us at some distant hill — Turns in the waking west and goes to sleep.

Shannon had read Crane too.

The poetry mirrored my soul, but Shannon was too far away to stop me other to say, "Fenway."

I didn't budge.

He said another name.

"Angie."

My mother was an Angie.

She was in after-life, but my daughter was here now.

Thousands of miles away, but there same as Fenway.

Shannon shrugged.

He was not playing fair.

Not with my life on the line.

We were standing underneath City Hall.

Are you okay?"

"Better."

"Just remember you have something to live for?"

"I know."

"Bringing Fenway to Fenway Park".

"I'm sure he'd like that."

"Tough getting swept by the Indians in the playoffs." Shannon really was a Yankee fan, but they hadn't been to the World Series since 2009.

"I really touched by your concern."

"Shall we have a drink at your bar."

"The 169."

I was friends with the afternoon bartender.

"We deserve a beer after that walk."

"It'll be good to be off the bridge."

Because I still had places to go.

We had more than one beer.

The 169 had pretty lights.

And pretty lights kept away the darkness.

For sleep and dreams of jumping off a low bridge into the Charles River.

The Charles