The Flat

One morning, several months ago, my flatmate Matt woke up and he couldn’t open his mouth. His jaw was socked tight. Clamped. MuUrggh. MUrggh.

Muuyrymmmouuwwwwtthhwwuoon’’’tttooeuuuppeenn

He said.

He went to the doctor and the doctor said it was stress that had shut his mouth. A strange, bodily reaction – if I try and stop him talking, maybe he won’t get so many troubles that way..? The doctor advised Matt to buy some plants and increase the oxygen and life in his life. So Matt filled the apartment with green, leafy plants. They have been here since I got here. Every couple of days I notice a new one. Yesterday I spotted one hooked high up in the kitchen on the grille which covers the window. There is one on the table in front of me (a very pragmatic, waxy green sort of plant) and one on my right which is nearly seven feet tall. There are plants everywhere in the flat.

Once in a while, Mark, my other flatmate, takes one of the long leaves from one the plants in the living room and pins it on the wall above the telephone and chucks the old one out. I don’t pretend to understand this ritual, and will never attempt to interfere with it. There are two big plants by the telephone, which sometimes makes it hard to find anywhere to put the post. There are three plants in the bathroom. One of which is perched very happily and fulsomely on a silvery unit next to the shower, above the wiry shelves which hold three or four immaculately folded white towels. I don’t know who uses these towels. They have been immaculately folded there, exuding a sort of complacent hotel charm, since I got here. The plant which sits on the shelf above is very happy. I assume it feeds on the rising steam of the shower. Strangely, the two plants in the shower have needed a lot of help over the last couple of weeks. Matt moved them to the bathroom sink to give them cold water I suppose, and they seem to be rallying. On the narrow white shelf above the bathroom sink a black comb sat for many weeks. During that time, Matt has grown a beard, and the other day I saw him scratching it happily with the comb. It’s a chancey idea, just leaving things around until they come in handy. Maybe that’s why Matt grew the beard?

The plant which is seven feet tall is next to “Little Beauty,” the snazzy sofa that Mark found in the street or something. I don’t remember the exact genesis of Little Beauty but she is a wonderful thing, quite my favourite thing in the whole apartment. A two-person green leather sofa in the kitchen. Not leather in the luscious, roomy, soft round sense, but leather in the pert, funky sense with little square steel legs. I lie on Little Beauty next to the plant which is seven foot tall and read by the light of a hideous lamp that Mark also found in the street. The lamp is tall with a huge steel dome-head and it looks like it came out of a Cold War warehouse. When Mark found it, it had a brown, stalk-like bulb in it that none of us recognized. We turned it on and all the lights in the apartment went out, shaking with fear at the new arrival. We swapped the bulb for a normal one and now it works well, shining with much power, so reading by its light is a bit like being interrogated.

Next to the lamp are two BMXs. Matt bought them this summer for him and his model girlfriend, Lauren. But she dumped him the other day and now they stand, propped up against the cupboard and white shelves that we do not use, forlorn, still together but representing something now gone. Right in the corner of the kitchen is a huge clockface, leaning against the wall. I think it came off the front of a company. Matt found it and set about fixing it with impressive purpose for about a day, stripping off the hands, looking on the internet for a new motor and things. The effort has gone a bit quiet now, but I really like the clock, visible, as it is, handless and timeless, behind the foldable kitchen table.

The kitchen, like the whole apartment, slopes from the east to the west. To type on the table, like I am now, you have to get something to prop under the left hand side of the computer, otherwise the screen is at an angle and your head is sloped over to one side. I have a very big desk in my small room. Matt foolishly swapped it for a set of drawers that used to be in my room. The desk makes me feel like a tycoon but because of the slope of the apartment, the drawers pop open and slide out at the slightest provocation. Sitting at my desk, which faces a white wall with a poster on it, I have to reach up because the slope has already started and my chair is very low. Whenever you drop a coin in the kitchen, it rolls for a long away, enjoying the downhill. It doesn’t roll if you drop it in the living room because we have a huge colourful rug.

The apartment is a railroad apartment, which means it is a long line of rooms that you have to walk through to get anywhere. But it has two doors, so late at night, Mark, who lives at the far end of the apartment, can go through via the landing to the bathroom rather than through my room, which is next to the kitchen. Matt’s room is right in the middle, and has a tiny window looking out into the pressed space between our building and next door. The window used to just be a pane of glass, a pothole to the air, but Matt smashed a hole in it to the let the air in. At one end of the apartment, the kitchen looks out over the fire escapes and patios and brave trees that grow in the crevices and pits between the backs of the buildings, at the other, the living room looks out over the tattoo parlours and Mexican restaurants on Fourth Street. Summer is over so someone, Matt I think, pushed the air conditioner out from its place in the window and now it is lying back, like a drunk fallen off a bench, on the fire escape at the front of the building.

The apartment has two radiators, and they run along these two extreme walls of the apartment. Heating in New York apartments is dictatorial. The building man turns it on and it stays on until the Spring. No adjustments, no questions. So our radiators are shrugging off the torpor of the summer, angrily complaining about their treatment. The white one in the kitchen and near my room whistles like the high wind, sometimes sounding like a kettle boiling in a cupboard or a blind rat stuck in a box. It plays cruelly on my dreams. On one of the first nights of the heating season, I stumbled around the kitchen and bathroom, stubbing my toe, looking and listening for the source of this awful whistle, convinced that something embarrassing like the toilet was going to break.

But my radiator, even though it is wilful and whiny, is ok. Mark’s, on the other hand, which is brown and in the living room, is a punk in the pipe. Angry as a genie. Mine whistles and moans, rising and falling, mournfully whoooing and occasionally squeaking its sadness. Mark’s rages, thumping and thunking, brutally surprising you, throwing you off the sofa as you look around, wild-eyed for the junkie-thief who is smashing his way into the apartment. Nothing for a while as you watch Seinfeld and relax and then, tuntunk, tunk, TUNK!!! TUNK!!! And the walls shake. The pipes, it seems, are leaping off the walls, throwing themselves, infested with hooligan ghosts. My dreams could not accommodate those sounds. Perhaps that is why Mark is quieter these days.

Coyotes, Birds and Outrage

On Thursday morning the sky was blue like a big eye and I was in the Bronx, looking for coyotes with David, the head of wildlife for the Bronx. The Bronx is the borough above the island of Manhattan and it stretches to the east and north. People in New York love saying “Only in the New York!” whenever anything out of the ordinary happens, even if they haven’t been anywhere else or aren’t really paying attention. The Bronx has the same effect, with its housing projects, ripgut poverty and big roads. People say, “That’ll be the Bronx…” So I’m trying to find coyotes there (and when I mention it I wait for the little shake and shrug, “Only in…”).

Coyotes are like foxes – good looking wild dogs that eat anything. They crossed from the west to the east during the twentieth century, breeding frighteningly with wolves to become the top predator in the north east. People occasionally run them over in the Bronx or just see them, so I went up to see David and he said we should go looking in Van Cortlandt park, which is a huge rugged park which stretches all the way up to Westchester, which is like Essex or something. I was hoping he would say come along at 4am and we could go properly looking with trail mix and warm socks but he said 9am would be fine, give him a bit of time to get settled.

Even then I was hoping for some grasslands and maybe a coop to hide in and wait for the coyotes but instead we went to Van Cortlandt park public golf course, where David thought we might find some people who had seen them. The golf course was nice and after hearing some tall stories in the golfshop (which had that good smell of new shoes and gloves and rubber), we set out in a golf buggy under the blue sky with the trees turning and the geese messing about in the lake. David was fifty or so, with a notepad in the pocket of his brown flannel shirt. He had a droopy grey moustache that flopped down around the side of his lips and he was awkward and shambly – uh, my gripe with the golf course is, uh, to that, uh, this used to be some pretty good forest – until he saw an animal of some kind, any animal, when he took on a sort of old surfer radness – whooah, nice pipetail monarch… nice butterfly, excuse me!… am I seeing right? Red tailed hawks… wow!

The drive around the golf course was fine and I was taking notes with my cold fingers. The highlight, though, was Linda, who sold refreshments by the eighth tee. Linda had green eyes and a nice face and she wore a puffy jacket with her hands in the pockets. She didn’t get much conversation out by the eighth with her hotdog stand and cooler boxes. She had a good turn with the boys that came round asking for Bud and hotdogs at ten in the morning but when there were no customers she took the opportunity to treat me and David (who was having a hotdog and Sprite) to a wild stream of nature monologue, leaping from animal to animal to bird to animal, free association Linda talking as she threw bread to the birds and a couple of jumpy rats that went leaping about across the concrete path. It went a bit like this:

“I love animals I don’t understand people that don’t sometimes there are guys and they throw their rocks at the rats I mean rats I don’t like them much but don’t throw your golf balls at them; the birds they come down here and early in the summer I would just take out some bread and throw it in the bushes and soon there would be a hundred birds, the ones with the spots, the sparrows and man, I don’t know they’ve gone now but I used to get these birds I called them the cheesebirds because I used to feed them cheese, American cheese that’s what they liked they loved that cheese those cheesebirds they’d come and jump right up on the barbecue and try and take the cheese off the burgers! I don’t know where the cheesebirds have gone but I don’t mind I’ll feed anything there’s this squirrel who comes every day and he gets up on his hindlegs and makes this eeeh eeeh and I know he wants some food I give him peanuts those squirrels are smart he comes right up I like them more than the rats but I’ll feed the rats this year they came right up here too and the other day I was throwing some bread and I couldn’t understand why no birds were coming I could hear them in the trees and then I saw there was a cat just in the bushes. They are a few cats around and one came around for a few days and I thought I’ll take that home the next time she comes along. Then she didn’t come. I don’t know how I would have fit her in I’ve already got two cats but I just love animals don’t you? The other time I found a hawk it was lying out there on the grass oh this must have been a month ago and I saw it and I thought it was dead I thought oh no it’s dead but then I went over and it moved and it wasn’t dead but it had hurt its foot so I fed it some raw beefburger! That was the right thing to do right? I made a path a trail of raw beefburger to try and get it to come off the grass because they were hitting balls down here and they were going to hit it! They would have killed that bird. I like big birds I like all birds, I really like, oh, I really like humming birds. My sister she lives in Nevada and I was visiting one time and she said, oh, look and I was whooah! There was a humming bird at her feeder and I went and got my camcorder I didn’t care! My sister was just watching but I was screaming and I went to get my camcorder I had to film that. Funny thing is, my sister lives down the road from a llama farm. Now THOSE are beautiful animals we went to see them, they’re breeding them I wonder what they’re breeding them for….”

And then at about 3am on Saturday morning, after a couple of parties – one of which high up in a wonder apartment overlooking central park full of priests and ballet dancers and gossip columnists – I fell asleep on the subway and some crafty or other cut his (or her) way into my jeans and stole my wallet!

Outrage!

Here's the beginning of an article I wrote the other day about a priest with depression and a sad past. This bit ended up cut but it described this memorable (but difficult to easily digest) church service in a Catholic Church in the October grey in Brooklyn:

Sunday morning in Sunset Park. The streets are quiet. St Agatha’s fills the block from 48th to 49th streets on 7th Avenue. There is a murmur audible from the big grey-white church. Open the door and it catches a worshipper’s elbow. It’s gloomy inside. Standing room only. The sudden proximity of the loudspeaker:

“LA PAZ DE SEÑOR ESTE SIEMPRE CON VOSOTROS…”

“It’s an enjoyable liturgy,” said Father Lou, a Catholic priest at St Agatha’s, the day before, “it has a lot of atmosphere. You should come.”

The benches are full and the crowd has spilled through to the gallery at the back of the church. There must be a thousand people inside. Mainly Mexican, wearing coats and suits, shaking hands everywhere, hugs and kisses. Fingers waving making Vs, sharing the peace. Framed in the panels of glass which separate the gallery and the nave, the priest is visible, raised by the altar, hands high, dressed in white. The choir sounds like a pop group, voices railing, coursing with Latin-disco love. The peace ends and the crowd settles but now the pastor is building them up again to the Eucharist.

The Eucharist is a conga, couples and families filing around, mouthing the words, “senor jesus, cual es tu misterio?” to a crooning song.

Soon the service is over and the church empties and the steps of St Agatha’s are full of conversation and gossip. Flowers are sold out of shopping trolleys, not for lovers, but for the statue of the Virgin.

“We want this to be relevant,” Father Lou had said, “we want them walking out saying ‘Yes, I feel peace, I have experienced the challenge to live better my life.’”

Father Lou Maynard is 61, tall and with big hands. He has an open, honest face and glasses that sit on the end of his nose. He is big but delicate and he shambles around. He was eating an omelette as he spoke. In front of him there were three cups with spoons inside, and, on a napkin, a pile of brightly colored pills.

And, for some of you, the most important thing: Bob Dylan used to live in my building...

Riding with the 72nd.

I went on a ride with the police the other day and we had to write a memo about it. This is what I wrote:

Pulling out knees jammed in, ‘oh fuck here he comes,’ ‘what the?’ Looking over and in the sunlight the captain is jogging over the station forecourt holding two yellow flaps or something. Officer Marrero stops the car. The captain’s holding the two pieces of a bullet proof vest. The brand is “Point Blank.” No one seems to mind which piece is for my front and which is for my back. “Show him what we do boys.”

Pull up alongside a pair of dealers, standing there straight up on the avenue, hands deep in the jeans pockets, hoods over their faces. “People have been calling in about you,” says Officer Cracchiola, “get out of here.” They look at each other. Let’s go this wa-y… No, the other one jerks his head, this way. They go. Marrero notices a car parked by a hydrant. Out comes the summons. “Look at that, so many fucking spaces… that’s an expensive trip to the supermarket.” Hundred and five for the man who comes out and protests with a smile.

“Man unconscious.”

Up the stairs which are red lino and spat-on white, cream walls, grey sludged across the bottom, Marrero climbing in front of me, white socks showing between his small shoes and dark blue trousers. “Every time there’s a 911 they call us as well, whenever they call out the EMS they get us as well, I’m like there’s a heart attack? What the fuck am I going to do about it? I don’t fucking know.” Up the stairs to the top, small line of people around the top landing, quickly, seconds quickly, Marrero says over his shoulder, plainly, “He’s dead.” Paramedics looking tired. One of them is tall and blond with her kit over her neck and shoulders, she seems in the middle of a huge long shrug. The rest of the people look on. In the banisters rests the body of a bike, stripped out, two old wheels and a saggy tyre. Someone, absently, stuck an orange $3.99 price label on the stairs.

Light comes from above. Blue and bright through a skylight. There are family. The sister, who has black hair and glasses, her friend and her daughter, the dead man’s niece, who wears a Montgomery Fire and Rescue sweatshirt baggy over her grey leggings and her ragged red hair. They are milling around the door to the tiny room. Looking in there is a blind over the window and cutting the beautiful afternoon into yellow slats and the long slope down to the water and the tops of the industrial buildings and the line of watertowers and clouds and the strip of grey sea cut narrowly again and again. He’s dead on the bed. Scratchy black hair with its strings of white, feet folded quietly over in their white socks, grey sneakers together at the end of the bed. He’s wearing dark comfortable clothes and he’s facing the wall thank god. The carpet is brown the room is so small you can touch all the walls and there is a stripy towel hanging ever so neatly from a hanger on the cupboard where the dead man’s clothes are. Other cops have arrived. The big man Fusco from community affairs and a small sallow faced sergeant who has seen it all before. The Sergeant comes through and thinks about using the towel for something but the towel is small and so neat and the family are standing right there on the threshold whispering so he doesn’t.

Marrero has got some plastic gloves on, he walks in and out the room, Cracchiola has been down to the car, he’s doing the paperwork on a metal clipboard, getting names and physicians and dates of birth as the door occasionally swings to and open with the slats of the blind and the afternoon sun and the quiet white socks of the dead man sometimes glimpsing through the creased elbows, tie clips and badges of the NYPD. The dead man’s story is coming in bursts and trickles from the family, “methadone…. social security… he just cashed it.. no we’re from out of state…. he goes to… his mother… she’s in a home.. near.. he goes everyday… then she… he stopped… she rang us.. we came… well… we borrowed the key and… we called… funeral parlour? will they need an autopsy… he was on pretha—pros—propan—pretel--adone… I don’t know… the doctor’s name… what?.. we saw it on the bottle.. his meds… is this it? Is this his room?… where’s all his stuff?… 1952… 51”

Facing the dead room, a door is open with a long corridor reaching into the apartment, a stream of people come in and out, a long Mexican family, children with their gameboys. Another woman emerges with a corgi and stands there looking knowing until… “murió?? murió? Henry murió? Quando… ayy,”

“I fucking hate these,” says Marrero standing there in his gloves, “I fucking hate these it’s not our sector but you got to hang around for fucking hours the detectives got to come and see if there was anything suspicious. Then the fucking M.E., they come and sometimes they’re real quick but sometimes they’re fucking, they come in, they flip the body do all this shit and they poke it with their fingers one time I saw this huge guy with the belly all out and you hear all the squelches all the bbraghs and then the smell, the shit they do, man forget about it. We’re lucky this one’s fresh and it’s cool now, man, sometimes they’re in there and they’re cooking, you know what I’m saying, they’re cooking.”

Down by the car, Marrero is still going. Debbie, the dead man’s niece is smoking a long cigarette, two kids are playing, throwing a half pumped mini basket ball against a wall and then throwing it up and letting it bounce on the plastic canopy of a minimarket.

“All this shit, you see what I got to do,” Marrero pulls off the gloves and cleans his hand with a wipe, “fucking gloves and wipes and now they’ll take him down to the morgue and they’ll saw him open cut him up…eergh-urggh-eerghg-urrggh… when we were in the academy they took us down there all these dead bodies and they took out a hand and said, fucking look, here’s a hand.”

The dead man ties up another squad car and we go driving around. Marrero and Cracchiola have been partners for a couple of months. Cracchiola has got a shaved head and narrow forehead which turns straight into a pointy nose with a freckle on it. His eyes are blue and his sentences collapse into “and-we-were-like-oahh.” He’s the scribe of the two, filling out the forms, working his way across, the endless names and dates and zipcodes and phone numbers. He knows a lot about small quantities of time. “And then I’m like talking to the XO and we’re there and Lovitz is there as well and I’m telling him, I was-like-we-were-oahhh, and it took fucking 2 point 3 seconds that’s what I’m telling him you know what I’m saying?” Marrero is younger. He looks young but he drives and he’s slicked down chest out walk with me you seen this shit kid we’ll suit you up and that was fucking legit you wait till it gets dark and then fucking forget about it this shit it’ll be a miracle if we don’t get a collar tonight and no one wants to be a cop no more cos there’s no money and all this paperwork but the Mayor says crime is going down so crime is going down.

Marrero and Cracchiola talk fast in half conversations. They’ve spent a lot of time on these streets listening to classic rock on the radio, heads quietly nodding in time, visible through the grille, lit up by headlights or silhouetted against the lights of stores, swaying into rhythm on the country numbers, rocking forward in Thunder Road and Sympathy for the Devil. They don’t finish sentences. Everything is coordinated for minimum effort.

“What’s next?”
“Depends on…”
“doesn’t depend on shit, let’s just do whatever…”
“you don’t care?”
“just tell me, you got the.”
“Yeah, I got the..”
“so let’s just,”
“ok, five seven oh nine on fifth…”

And Cracchiola turns the music up.

They sit very still when “Central” calls them and despatches them on a job. Moving without thinking their hands slip under the sun visors and pull down pads and pens. Marrero’s goes straight in his mouth as they take the “10-10” or the “10-32” or the MVA we went to with a slight bash to the woman’s car door or the stolen radio and hack license from the Lincoln town car driver in the car park at Home Depot.

The goal is to “clear the board.” Get these waiting jobs cleared off, the “stories” filled out and ready to drop off, the list of incidents and complainants and particulars that take the place of people and their problems in the boxes on official forms. Get these jobs, tickboxes and crime numbers squared away, stuffed under the sun visor or on the clipboard and they’re done. These officers don’t see the consequences. You should have seen them squirm when the family of the dead man wanted to call them the next day, “Can I call you and give you the name of the doctor tomorrow…?” “No, No, mam, we’re just here and then we move on, you give it to him [gesturing towards the detective], you give it to them, they’re doing this now.” They just do the scene and move on. Marrero turned around one point and said, “one time I don’t how the fuck it happened but I’m fucking driving along and I look over on the other side of the road [we’re on busy long fourth avenue and Marrero is pointing to the other side], I look over the other side and this car’s all flipped over and I’m like fuck so I go over and it’s all flipped and the guy’s inside he’s unconscious and bleeding and shit.” Was the guy ok? “I don’t know, the ambulance came and they got him out…. I don’t know… sometimes you want to know what happens next….”

After the dead man another squad car sorts out a knife fight and makes an arrest so suddenly it’s just Cracchiola and Marrero. They’re the only car out in the 72nd. It’s about eight o’clock at night. Call comes in about a burglary. A boy, twelve or so, opens the door and we climb up. These steps are worse than the last ones. Chipped wood stairs, just coming off in chunks, handfuls of dustyfluff caught between the rails under the banisters. White walls slapped in places with blue. Holes stuffed unevenly with plaster and a stool on the plastic floor. Up to the top apartment and into the tiny kitchen. A young boy is at the table eating cheerios soggy in milk, the cereal box huge in front of him on the table. The mother is there, Mexican and speaking Spanish to Marrero, Cracchiola is filling out another form. The doorbell rings. It’s another cop, the finger prints man. What’s missing? $250 in cash, where from? The freezer. The free-ze? “Fugese,” says Cracchiola plainly as he fills out the form. He likes the sound. “Fugese. Someone had to know it was there.” Then he says, “Roaches are the real problems in places like this, fucking horrible.”

The perp came through the window which leads on the fire escape. The mother, looking tired but calm and sagging around her hips, mimes people running over roofs. The TV, the computer, the cds, they are all stacked on a unit not quite facing the brown sofa that runs most of the length of the room. Only the cash is gone. The finger print man has arrived. He’s older, in his forties, grey streaks in his hair, grunting as he climbs on to the fire escape and starts dusting and dabbing with a brush at the dirty dirty window. “Fucksake,” he says, “sometimes you luck out but…” Otherwise he needs something that the perp picked up, the freezer handle won’t do, neither will the drawers. Then the nephew appears. 16 or so Mexican looking with a black ponytail, fuzzy moustache, long jeans shorts that stretch down to mid calf, he’s wearing a red hooded top, “You got robbed?” Cracchiola, Marrero and the fingerprints man look at each other quickly. We leave. Fingerprints man says, “always the top floor” and we pass the nephew and his friends all smirking on the landing. Walking over to the car, Cracchiola says, “when the story’s straight you just want to get straight out of there as fast as you can, write it out in the car where it’s more comfortable.” Beautiful economy.

Then for some tacos and we sit on a quiet street and Cracchiola calls his girlfriend and we turn up the classic rock and turn down the dispatcher and for a few minutes, to the sound of eating and the crunching of foil wrappers and sucking on snapples, Sunset Park is defenceless.

Darker and darker with the long avenues stretching down to the Verrazano bridge and the lines of reds and greens at the stop and go lights. The calls lessen and we cruise to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, heads gently rocking as the next precinct over takes a shooting but they can’t find the body only some blood and Marrero tells me about the Chinese gang killing last weekend. Three men killed a man with a sharpened broom handle. Stabbed him in the liver, “ran for his life for half a block and then dropped down dead.” Then a man exposes himself on eighth avenue. “This is what we’re reduced to.” Pearl Jam come over the radio and Cracchiola is unwilling to let the music down as he takes the complaint off a man in the street, “you call the cops? uh huh, uh huh, you see him? ok… what does he look like… ok… which way did he go…?” We drive around slowly but their hearts aren’t in it. It’s past nine. Any booking now is going to take until two o’clock in the morning. “I want to get home on time,” says Cracchiola. Down onto fourth avenue again, they drop me at the subway.

Location 3:

On the Water, Saturday and Wednesday

New York has some dirty water. I was writing about it. There’s a stretch called the Gowanus Canal that runs right through Brooklyn. A hundred and fifty years ago people scrabbled in the Gowanus creek for oysters as big as dinner plates and then they sold them. The creek ran from the picturesque sounding Buttermilk Creek off the East River and down to the sea. On Wednesday afternoon I was on the water of New York harbour looking for Buttermilk Creek with Ludger Balan, a talkative swift-of-logic environmentalist who is really into the canal. We were in his red speedboat – one of those big ones with a steering wheel, windscreen and little roof – and gunning around the harbour. Ludger likes to drive fast so were thumping over the waves under the first October sky with the wind cold. Thump, thump and we bounced over the wakes of ferries and huge ships and it was one of those times when the water runs in your eyes and the engine was loud and the sky was grey and there were the skyscrapers at the end of Manhattan just standing up looking very hard indeed. We pulled into the Red Hook Container terminal, a gnat zipping around a huge ship, the Princess Dolorosa or something, a huge green ship stacked with twenty and forty foot containers that looked like matchboxes, hoisted and stacked up there in all their colours and in no particular order. Ludger thought he spotted the start of the creek under a green official sign but we couldn’t be sure. Off to the right was the huge floating corpse of an old Staten Island Ferry, painted yellow but peeling to brown, its hundred windows smashed and darkened, a big soggy shell. We gunned out, all perky, onto the wakes and choppy waves, thumping, me slipping around all over the place as Ludger slowed and speeded us up, my notes are strewn all over the page, spattered in splash. I had to bring in the rubber floats that hang off the side of the speedboat because they were slapping around the side of the boat. Desperate to be seaworthy I staggered around as Ludger looked impatiently over his shoulder, wanting to speed on under the grey sky and find the Buttermilk.

We found it behind another official green sign. A dark hole disappearing under a street and a fence. There was a red truck parked absently next to the river and a warehouse. The creek is now a concrete tunnel under the streets of Brooklyn that emerges in the pump station that drives the water along the canal.

I was at the top of the canal on Saturday, also with Ludger but this time we were in a smaller boat with a few members of the interested public taking part in, you guessed it, National Estuaries Day. Not like Wednesday it was hot and we sat in the boat and Ludger told us it was all an environmental disaster. The pump machinery dates from 1911. It has a big propeller that drives the water along and into the sea, like something off the Titanic. They replaced the propeller in 1999. It had broken down in 1962. Thirty years or more of stagnant water had sudged the canal, sudged and gudged and yudged the canal, filling it with typhoid and cholera and hepatitis and quite truly, unutterable heaps of shit. Now they say there is twenty feet of toxicness on the bottom of the canal before you get to the natural bottom. No my darlings no oysters today. Under the sun on Saturday we puttered along looking at the broken edges of the canal and the seeping rubbish and concrete that is filling it up. We passed under its bridges – rattling car bridges and train bridges – and looked at a tall pile of old broken car parts that reached up to the sky with an advertising stretching up behind and imploring drivers on the raised highway to “Share the Love” as they passed by on their way to Manhattan. We also saw cranes. Beautiful old cranes lifting and sifting from piles of junk, bending over and looking so delicate, tenderly handing huge pieces of this and that to each other, suddenly bending down and ripping strongly into a pile of something and hauling it away to somewhere else. Down on the banks of the canal were the remains of a dead crane, keeled over and gnarled up blacky metal and done over.

But on Wednesday we zoomed. Motoring over, eating up the waves, past the huge empty windows of the Brooklyn Port Authority Grain Terminal, a huge dinosaur skeleton of a building. You just look at its black walls and clouds behind and you get filled with images, great epic filmset images of the New York harbour in the wild old days, flat caps and schooners, providing (someone told me), almost half of the federal government’s income from its customs dues in the 19th century.

In the end, packing up, Ludger went off on a rant against Bush and all that. A fearsome tale he spun up, I think someone should shoot him, said Ludger, as if he had thought out all the options, impeachment, elections etc and thought, no, this one needs a bullet. But Ludger is no lone gunman, Ludger used to make films for PBS. He made a film about the first Gulf War. He’s seen some stuff and he was talking about the courage that people needed to see what was going on – the country is being panned and spanked by this government, hauled into intractable nightmares – and they need to act. And Ludger is saving the canal. At one point we passed an unauthorized pipe spilling liquid from a tile factory. Ludger pulled the boat over and tied it up, ‘back in a minute,’ he said and ran off into the building. I just sat in the boat. I made a phone call. The drain stopped. Ludger came back.

I got off the boat, rocking from our madsplash through the harbour and awkwardly climbed into the yellow school bus Ludger uses to get around. He dropped me off at the subway.