Load Giant Load I Love you. Somebody's having a love affair with our laundromat.So where was I before I was rudely interrupted by that stop and frisk operation? Ah yes, laundry day. You know the neighbourhood is gentrifying when you see hipsters washing their sundries at the local laundromat. It used to be just us black, brown and yellow people with the occasional white person thrown in, wearing our everyday clothes pumping the quarters in the machines, folding the sheets. But now (meaning a dramatic showing in the last three months) there are skinny white boys wearing skinny jeans and skin-tight ironic t-shirts, and not so skinny white girls in American Apparel shiny leggings and tops inspired by eighties fashion that barely cover their asses with those scrunchy eighties boots and both sexes sporting expensive layered haircuts with bangs that obscure their eyes. All doing laundry at my laundromat. It looks like some big artsy fartsy loft in Williamsburg got a bed-bug scare and all the residents boarded a bus for Bed-Stuy. Hopefully they left the bed-bugs on the bus. Plus the Muslims now have hipster bootleg dvds for sale at their stand inside the laundromat. Lucky us. I mean you can only watch so many slasher films, action films and slapstick comedies.
Meanwhile, next door Reggie and Celia have new tenants. A young Polish family - mom, dad and baby all quite friendly but they really stand out because they may be the only Polish people in northern Bed-Stuy. And some youngish tenants of indeterminate origin. One of whom I saw do a discreet drug deal (okay this is supposition, I don't know for sure) with some white guy in a van. Here's what I saw, you make the call. I'm sitting on the stoop with my kid in the early evening, and a teenager with wild dark curly hair, seventies hipster musician type, comes out of R+C's house, runs down the stoop to the waiting van, greets the guy at the steering wheel, their hands make quick contact - not quite a handshake, and the teenager runs back in the house and the van zooms off. And the day before I saw a similar transaction take place across the street - two guys in their twenties, one white, one Latino walk down the sidewalk together, suddenly stop make the handshake/pass and then quickly go in different directions, the Latino counting a wad of bills as he walks away. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I need to get a television and stop watching the action on the block. Because it's starting to worry me. It seems that gentrification doesn't mean less drug deals in our hood, just different customers.
So back to the laundromat. Little Joe and I are in there taking the clean clothes out of the dryer when one of the Chinese ladies who works there, the one I've been feeling most sympatico to lately after watching her difficulties with some of the people who come there, stopped by our dryer, patted Little Joe's head (which he absolutely hates) and said to me with a big smile, "He have a girl face. Not a boy face. A girl face!" And then she laughed uproariously and walked away. Little Joe, quite livid at this point, snarled, "What did she say about me?" Wanting to stop him from going completely over the edge, I said, "Nothing. She wasn't talking about you." Weird. Just plain weird.
Clyde was admiring our tree yesterday, commenting on how much it's grown. I beamed, like a proud parent. It has grown. At least two feet. And he's the only person on our block who's noticed or cares. I really do like Clyde sober. He's charming. He also loves his van. Now that the weather's warmer he may be sleeping in there again. I noticed him move a t.v. in there month or so ago. But how can he possibly get any electricity? His home-in-a-van reminds me of when I was kid, and would stand outside in the pouring rain during recess with no one to play with, wet and freezing and wishing I was tiny and had a little heated box that attached to a corner of the building where no one would see it, and I could climb inside and there'd be a t.v. and hot cocoa and big comfy chair. Kind of like Woodstock's fancy pad in the Charlie Brown Easter special before Snoopy gets jealous and destroys it.
We've applied for our block party permit. Should happen in August, weather permitting.
A couple I've never seen before were cleaning up the broken glass and other debris in front of the eternally empty lot on our block, so the kids wouldn't fall in it and hurt themselves. Just took it upon themselves to do a block clean up. This inspired Big Joe so much, he and Little Joe took a garbage can up and down our street last weekend picking up the trash. I got an email back from the sanitation department saying they received my request for trash cans at each corner of our block. Apparently they're assessing the situation and will get back to me. But really, how hard is it to just drop off a couple of trash cans?
And this week is the week we find out which preschool we're able to send our son to. All decided by the great computer in the sky. Well at least the one at the DOE. Our fate is in their hands. Not a comforting thought.
Yesterday's Brooklyn weather: sunny/cloudy/windy. Today's Brooklyn weather: wet and cold.
