Roving to Brooklyn
They were two lost and aimless young girls, growing up in Midland, MI. They used to pretend the one little alley downtown was Harlem. It was actually pretty clean; they tried to make it look urban by breaking a bottle or two, but it just wasn't the same. After that, they would clamber up the iron steps by St. Brigid's and reenact West Side Story. (It was the closest thing to a fire escape.) They longed to be Big City Gals, brush the dust from their saddle shoes.
But the summer of 1989 found our two girls in Brooklyn, with a bona-fide stoop and roof to climb on, and were they happy? Speaking as one of them, I can say, yes, we were. We were happy to finally be in the same city again, a city we had dreamed about, after being separated by college and marriage and whatnot. We were giddy with just the idea of sitting on that roof all night, looking at the Statue of Liberty, checking out Coney Island, taking the bus to Atlantic City. All we wanted to do those months of July and August was ride the Cyclone and set off fireworks in Prospect Park and get chased by a park ranger in a golf cart. Yes, I know it sounds like a cliche; Christ, you don't think I know how it sounds? But that's what we wanted. When you were raised in the desolation of suburbia, even taking the subway can be exotic.
The remainder of the time we spent in the kitchen of the brownstone in Carroll Gardens, playing old 45s and the occasional album. The record we listened to most was this 1950s compilation album, the type with the song titles in little colored bubbles on the cover, definitely the kind your parents would have put on the hi-fi when the gang came over for bridge club. As I recall, it had a few cheesy songs along with some cool ones, like "Mule Train" by Frankie Laine and "Pistol Packin' Mama." The one that stands out, though, is "The Roving Kind," by Guy Mitchell, who sang all those hokey novelty tunes. We loved to sing along with the chorus?
She was a nice girl, a proper girl
But one of the roving kind
We would always change the last lines, however, to "She was a nice girl, a proper girl but?a complete slut!" or "She was a nice girl, a proper girl but?a total hose monkey!" It was just one of those private jokes, something we shared that summer. We also used to joke that we saw more wildlife during those summer months than we ever did in Michigan?we saw a bird attack an old guy in front of the pastry shop on Court St., a white bunny came hopping out of nowhere at midnight when we were up on the roof and we spotted a dolphin in the waters off Hell's Gate.
I had read about the dolphin in the paper. Apparently, the creature was sick and had lost his way and was swimming around the East River. I thought it might be a lark to go up and check it out, just something to do on a sweltering afternoon, like, hey, I hear there's an elf in Central Park, maybe we can catch it. Just an impetuous notion, and it was fun to see that dorsal fin leaping about against that strange urban backdrop.
That summer was a dividing line for me; it marked the time before a lot of things. It was before my divorce, before one of my best friends died of an overdose in a men's shelter on Ward's Island, before I lost my own way myself for a few years. So, was I using that dolphin as some sort of metaphor? No, I can't say that I was, but that song definitely reminds me of when we were still nice girls, proper girls. Maybe we roved a little, but not too much. Or, as my father was fond of saying, we were as pure as the new-fallen snow; we just drifted occasionally.