Everything will Turn Out OK
On Marcus Garvey Boulevard between the bookends of the Bethany Baptist Church and the the Bed Stuy projects, you can swear off drinking and ask Jesus to save your soul or you can down a six pack of Red Stripes and party ‘til the sidewalk seems as good a bed as any; you can buy a pair of zebra hot pants from Lulu’s for five bucks or invest in a socially conscious painting from the Richard Beavers Gallery for 12 grand. And because the highs and lows of any neighborhood in the middle of a transition coexist for a while, you can mourn the road-rage murder of a teenage boy over a parking spot just outside the Decatur Street Playground, or you can celebrate the unveiling of a Black Lives Matter mural on Fulton Street mere days later.
Depending on how you look at it, establishing the Carpe Vino Tasting Room smack in between these two worlds was either an act of tremendous courage or a grand delusion—or maybe it’s both. This Sunday, October 3, is one of those skyless days that has one foot in summer and one in fall, so I’m feeling ambivalent. Like the sirens on the ambulance that goes blaring by, announcing some poor soul’s fate—perhaps we’ll make it; perhaps we won’t. I suppose all businesses start out this way, but after an inauspicious opening on February 29, 2020—exactly two weeks before (former) New York Governor Cuomo shut down all restaurants and bars to slow the first wave of COVID-19—we ‘re taking stock.
There’s a white couple with a five-month-old baby sitting outside drinking draft beer and a vaccinated African-American couple inside listening to Sarah Vaughn’s Golden Hits on the record player. A few weeks ago the situation was reversed, and we had the uncomfortable sensation that COVID was re-instituting segregation as we sat customers highly skeptical of a new vaccine in a post-Tuskegee world outdoors, and ushered in Team Pfizer to sit unmasked at the bar. Over the past 18 months, the pandemic has ravaged this block, so it would be good to see the tide changing. When we first signed the lease, middle and upper class black and white families had been buying up brownstones faster than they could be gutted; and the promise of empty lots being turned into condos—those weedy, impressionist paintings that spring up between buildings as if to sketch out what could be —was the basis upon which the landlord expected to raise our rent not 3 but 5% by the time our five-year contract was up. Now, even though we’re $1,000 behind on rent every month, when the landlord’s henchman stops by, he only asks how we’re doing—glad that we’re sticking it out as long as we can. Many of the apartments above the store have emptied out of people who’ve lost their jobs or decided to move to the suburbs for greener pastures. Well, for any pasture at all. It’s obvious the neighborhood’s sliding backwards, along with the rest of New York City.
“We in the jungle. We all just profiling” yells a disturbed man weaving dangerously close to the rickety teak tables I set out on the double-wide sidewalk this morning. My husband, Josh, comes out to make sure a customer typing away on her marblized Mac hasn’t been disturbed, and waits there until the man wanders into the parking lot next door. Many of these men know Josh as someone who’s lent them $10 when they were down and out or hired them to paint a roll-down gate, and these are the people who will remain in Bed Stuy long after the pandemic becomes endemic—if they survive. There’s a grape vine growing over my head that Josh, a winemaker and former vineyard manager, transplanted into a cart the old tenants left behind. It was (and still is) chained to the building, and has twice been deliberately overturned, once even by one of those men Josh had paid, angry that he’d been so late to pick up the cans he recycles for pocket change that we’d disposed of them ourselves. Being sturdier, the roots survived the replanting, but the tendrils of the vine had to be carefully wound back up the wire that’s strung between the no-parking sign and the gate. As for the trust we once had in Barry, that’ll have to be rebuilt.
“We told you not to use that cart. Your plants will only get stolen,” the owners of the High Line Residential real estate brokerage next door told Josh. But the vine’s blooming again, even going through veraison at about the same time as its Long Island counterparts, and Miss Lulu of Lulu’s, taking her Yorkie for a walk on our side of the street, gazes up at it as “Poopy Butt” (his real name, I swear) wanders ahead trailing his leash. In another few minutes, a gang of motorcycles will zoom crazily up the sidewalk, but by that time, she and her dog will be back in front of their wares, and my daughter and I will watch the danger from the safety of the bar. Despite all that’s happened, despite all that might happen and all that might not, I have to say this about Josh. He’s got faith that everything will turn out OK.
