Brooklyn Bound

By: Cait Weiss

Welcome back to Brooklyn Bound — our developing series of outer-borough investigations. Last week we looked at Williamsburg, the tiny neighborhood to the north that somehow donned a trucker cap, overzealous sideburns, a brief flirtation with keytar rock, and inspired a new line of GAP jeans and an entire subgenre of broken-heart music. Yes, Williamsburg, you are a muse for our modern-day culture, an inspirational holding tank for the post-collegiate, and a clear alternative to the mainstream ambition of the finance, marketing and publicity professions just a slip of the East River away. You are young and you are vibrant, Williamsburg, but unlike the all-pervasive purveyor of skinny jeans and glib t-shirts, we cannot be forever 21.

At some point, or so I have been told, we will all have to grow up.

We will all have to do things we don’t really want to, in the name of maturity and personal progress. You know — things like: securing and maintaining jobs you can’t get too drunk at; buying affordable, though ideally still organic, produce; accepting the existence of children. These things are difficult, daunting, and occasionally disturbing (children, I’m looking at you); still, they are key factors in the real world, and once we’ve left the beautiful bio-dome of Billy-Burg hipness, we will have to face them head on.

Yes, growing up is hard. But growing up in a liberal bastion of creative thought, academic values, and fanatical baby-loving might be a little easier, don’t you think? Which brings us to our next Brooklyn Bound locale — Park Slope, where, with a large enough trust-fund, tenured salary and/or vocabulary, you can still be the Golden Child, no matter your age.

Park Slope is no stranger to popular culture, and The Squid and the Whale (2005) offers one of the most recent and pointed reflections of the neighborhood. Did you see the movie? Did you get it? I bet you did. You’re no “philistine” after all — the dreaded derogatory term with which the father, university professor Bernard, brands all uninitiated non-intellectuals in his path. With his masters in over-education, Bernard had a heart attack and took the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to whisper “degolas” to his wife as the ambulance pulled up…and then upbraided her for missing such an obvious homage to “A Bout de Souffle.” Right. You’re just like that too, aren’t you?

It sounds insane. How could such a pseudo-intellectual, self-aggrandizing place possibly exist? Who on Earth would think to teach their child the term Kafkaesque long before the boy will ever read Kaftka and when his field trips to the library are spent smearing his own pre-teen ejaculate on hardcover classics?

Who on Earth indeed.

Well, the same way GAP jeans won’t make you a Williamsburg hipster, The Squid and the Whale can’t throw you part and parcel into a Park Slope baby carriage. There are real people who live in these neighborhoods, you know. So get onboard, Brooklyn Bound, and enjoy our first-hand (third-person) inspection of a real-live inhabitant of the ever-precious, always-precocious Park Slope.

PARK SLOPE: This is the story of the Golden Boy Dilettante. His apartment just barely falls within the boundaries of Park Slope, his street still young and scrappy enough to intersect 4^th Avenue and its Berkeley-themed bar. Yes, even the neighborhood dives are university themed, and themed for top-tier schools at that.

They have never met — only corresponded over e-mail. He knew the correct usage and earliest mention of the phrase “swan song.” This counts as a turn-on for her. He was a self-identified “Renaissance Man,” and from the jpegs she had seen up to that point, she felt his anachronistic profession looked very sexy. No ponytails, puffy shirts, or sheepgut lyres. Only a warm smile, a kind face, and a manly build. She was sold on these emails and images alone, so she boarded the 4/5 train to Borough Hall to meet him for the first time in the flesh.

He asked her to play bocce with him. As a Renaissance Man, the Golden Boy Dilettante did not work for a living. Instead, he read Claire Messaud, watched Charlie Rose, spun old soul records on his DJ equipment, painted modernist still-lifes, played the ukulele and competed against others at bocce.

She arrived slightly late and was surprised at how nervous she was walking into Floyd. She didn’t know this guy at all. She didn’t know the rules of bocce. What was she getting herself into?

“Hey!” he smiled at her as she walked in, recognizing her from her photo.

He looked like a cross between Jeff Daniels and Joey Fatone. He was dressed in jeans and a blue button-down shirt. A button-down shirt? Quite a change from the hipster dress code she was just getting used to… She smiled.

“So you are the Golden Boy,” she thought, giving him a hug hello. He kissed her on the cheek and they went inside the bar.

“I’m sorry to rush you, but we’re up,” he told her after buying her an Anchor Steam. It turned out that she wouldn’t be competing against the Golden Boy but with him. They were playing three other Brooklynites, all on the local league, The Boccelisms.

“Okay, Cait, just watch me.” The Golden Boy picked up a dark red ball and rolled it down the center of the lane. It rolled just past the halfway point, stopping softly enough to kiss the tiny white ball three-quarters of the way down.

The big ball was close to the little ball, Cait saw.

Even the Boccelism foes complimented his toss.

The big ball should go close to the little ball, Cait learned.

It was Cait’s turn. She threw the ball with what she thought was grace and majesty but what was really, in bocce reality, the strength of fifteen iron workers.

The ball raced to the end of the aisle, hitting the plaster with a startling clap and jumping into the air with its own indignation at being thrown so hard by such an ignorant bocce player.

Cait felt like such a loser. Her ball hit the wall and had to be removed. Her belt was from a thrift shop and her shirt was from Old Navy’s sale bins. No one in this Brooklyn would ever like her.

“You did good,” the Golden Boy whispered, seeing her disappointment. “And I’m betting you’ll only get better.”

She thought he was mocking her, but she caught a shot of warmth in his eyes. He stood next to her and their elbows touched.

“Just don’t try to be so strong,” he said.

Holy shit. The Golden Boy was earnest.

She was terrified.

They lost the round, and the next, and the next, and finally, thankfully, went to the bar stools. They talked about how they were in high school, all their tiny dorky secrets. They’d both played the clarinet as kids, both starred in musical theater workshops, both hated intramural sports. They were both writers — he a journalist for the Brooklyn Paper, and she a faulty novelist. They were even both from California.

“I grew up in San Francisco,” he told her, “then moved to D.C.”

They each got another beer.

“Then we went to New England, as my Mother was called to duty by the Ivy Leagues; then I went off to your standard-issue prestigious liberal arts school in the northeast, and finally I moved here.”

She asked why he moved so often as a kid.

“Well,” he started playing with a coaster. “My family…well, it’s kind of intimidating.”

Then, “My Dad’s a Nobel Laureate.”

“Well fuck,” Cait thought. “A man my dad would love.”

The conversation moved to vegetable gardens, the modern novel, volunteering at the Park Slope co-op…but soon the conversation returned to bocce and the pressure such a game could provoke.

“You know,” Cait smiled, “you took a big risk here with this date. Not only did you have to prove your bocce skills but also your snap judgment bar-and-personality matching skills too. It seems like a lot of pressure.”

She was being flirtatious, she thought, but she was floored by his reaction.

“The pressure comes from within me,” he confided without the hint of a smirk. “It’s pressure I put on myself to be the best.”

He paused.

“It’ll never go away, no matter how many fun and exciting adventure-dates I go on.”

She didn’t know how to respond to this deluge of honesty. How stressful could this date really be? Where was his sense of levity? Was she pulling dark truths from the deep here, or what?

“Lucky for both of us,” he continued, looking at his pilsner, “I strive for excellence rather than perfection. I can roll with the twists and turns life throws at me and I don’t stress out if all doesn’t go according to plan.”

What? He was taking this so seriously. Perhaps he didn’t become a dilettante to fill his days with fun and games — perhaps he became a dilettante because, to him, fun and games was a real, legitimate way of life. How could he possibly take all of this so seriously?

She was flummoxed. She was intrigued. But she was also exhausted. It was after midnight and she had to work the next day. Real work — not bocce. They left the bar and he abruptly walked to the curb. All of a sudden, he pulled out a tiny white vintage French bike.

He walked her to the subway station and leaned in to say good-bye. She moved close to give him a hug and, without any mindful shift, their lips were touching. The bike was between them, but he put his hands on her waist and pulled her in. She fell into his kiss, his stomach warm against the metal of the bicycle.

“Whoa,” he said, his eyes crinkling up into half moons as he smiled. “And I don’t ever say that.”

She left him looking down at her with his bicycle as she walked the steps into the station. He was hyper-articulate, creative, nurtured.

“Whoa,” she thought, waiting for the train that would take her back home to the land of Day Jobs, Time Cards, and Bitter Wit.

That was the date with the Golden Boy Dilettante; that was a brief taste of pure Park Slope noblesse — the flipside of the philistines outside the bocce bars and ivory towers.

Really, that first date was great. It led to a substantial romantic relationship full of trips to Napa Vineyards, summer evenings at the country house, debates on Julian Schnabel’s intentions, homemade peach cake in Prospect Park, and weddings down in Mexico (never, however, my own). But like the Bard said, lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds, and breaking up with a Golden Boy stinks. There were toys thrown (those great soul records, to be exact) and some epic displays of foot-stomping and red-faced shouting. One spat even ended with a hole punched through a door. Perpetual youth — ain’t it grand?

Yes, Park Slope is an incredible place where you will see restaurants, bars and sidewalks full of precocious children acting just like little adults, referencing the post-modernists, theorizing about film… Don’t be surprised, though, to find more than a few adults acting like children, whole-heartedly and completely without any sense of perspective. Call me a philistine, call me a degolas — but call me a cab, tantrum-throwing Dilettantes, call it a night, and call me in the morning, when The Squid and the Whale hits slightly less close to home.

In the meantime, should you want to find your own Golden Boy Dilettante, here’s where to go:

Floyd: 131 Atlantic Avenue between Henry and Clinton Streets (off the 4/5/2/3/M/R Borough Hill/Courthouse stop, or the F/A/C/E at Jay Street/Borough Hall). The quintessential Brooklyn Bocce Bar, Floyd is more low-key than its sibling Union Hall, and laid-back enough for the bocce neophyte to learn a few key skills. Patrons here think nothing’s hotter than an undefeated bocce player. Get your ball to kiss the pallino (the little white ball you chase throughout the game), and I bet you won’t go home alone.

Prospect Park: An amazing alternative to Manhattan’s Central Park, Prospect Park is nearly smack dab in the center of Brooklyn, accessible via multiple train lines, and stunning in almost any weather. The cherry trees in late Spring alone make Brooklyn the muse of countless novelists and poets — ideal Golden Boy Dilettante material.

Enjoy the adventure! Next week we’re taking a trip west to the waterfront art scene to visit Mister Blood Diamond of DUMBO. Who knew a New School degree in Anarchist Thought could make for such enjoyable company? Only in DUMBO…and only in Brooklyn.