Can You See Manhattan?

29 Aug Can You See Manhattan?

“What direction are you walking in? North or south?,” my Brooklyn Boy asked me.

“What kind of question is that? Who knows that sort of thing?”

“What do you see? Can you see Manhattan?”

“Well, I’m short and there are tall buildings sooo…”

Wouldn’t you have hung up on me if I called you because I was lost in your borough and answered all your questions with some smart reply?

I was on my way to Adrian Griener’s apartment. He lives in Brooklyn on Grand Avenue. Not street, which is where I happened to be standing, sassing my friend trying to give me directions to the event. I told him I was resisting the urge to say Brooklyn sucks. Even though it was my fault that I was in frickin’ Bushwick–where the HBO series Girls is set, and let me tell you, seeing the place gave me a whole new perspective on Hannah and why she dressed the way that she did.

I made it to the event finally and then it starts raining, like a torrential downpour. My walking navigation system is supposed to meet me after, I’m in his hood after all. Yall. We stopped in a grocery store and there were bars around the entrance. BARS.

Right about now, I’m about to quit Brooklyn. I stood there in the rain, confused. How I am I suppose to get in? I watch him sideways shimmy in. Heck no.

This can’t be life.

He looked at me like girl, quit your antics and get in this store. And then proceeds to tell me that in the ’80s “when everyone was on crack, they would steal the shopping carts” and now that “people have moved onto heroin,” the grocery store hasn’t updated in terms of their cart thieves.

Inside, there is a woman who may or may not have been on one of the above substances, yelling at the top of her lungs as I try to select my turkey sausage to include in my lasagna. Brooklyn Boy, always the advocate for his borough, is standing there, handsome but embarrassed in his wet suit. “Why couldn’t this happen not on your first trip to a Brooklyn grocery store?!”

And this my friends is the beauty of the borough Vogue calls Paris’ Left Bank. It’s full of inspiration. You just never know what you’re going to get. I’m into it.

No, but seriously yall, is that normal for a grocery store to have bars around it’s opening?