Evolution, Vampire-Bat Style
Ten days into October, it’s clear the winds are changing, but we’re slow to catch on. Still out in our flip-flops and drinking iced tea; still clutching straw purses and wearing white after Labor Day, as though if we just will it, wear it, we can bring back those late summer days. Trucks stopped in traffic on Marcus Garvey pause long enough for us to glimpse their drivers beating on the steering wheel to the tune of the rain as we ghost the doorframe of the tasting room, looking to see who’s ventured out. There are a few people in track suits who don’t move any faster even when it begins to pour, and a rabbit-shaped puddle sitting in one of the chairs. With no one else is in sight, we settle in for a long and uneventful day.
Oblivious to the weather, my daughter and nephew take turns jumping off the roots of a tree and over a high fringe of sidewalk weeds while Josh’s sister keeps one eye them and another on the schedule of events for the month. As our unofficial, unpaid event planner, she’s helping us to pivot from wine bar to performance space in the same way the former tenants pivoted from coffee shop to brunch spot. Sometimes evolution is organic, but I suspect it’s more often what Darwin meant when he wrote about the survival of the fittest. The thing about evolving—and I’m pretty sure Darwin would agree with me—is that the degree to which you can change is deeply influenced by what you were at the beginning, and who you meet along the way. Change has sometimes been hard for us to handle, focused as we are on keeping the lights on, but we’ve been grateful to encounter new perspectives on how best to become an integral part of this neighborhood.
When we first opened Carpe Vino, we had no experience running a business, let alone a bar, although Josh seemed to have all the skills necessary to get one up and running. If a toilet broke, he could install a new one; a refrigerator shorted out, he could vacuum the coils and fix it. And when it came to the unknown, friends and acquaintances could be consulted for advice on how to repair an over-foaming tap or an underperforming line chiller. The pieces of this tasting room were harvested from sites across the tri-state area and Frankensteined into being. Recognize the 10-spigot beer tower? It’s from the old-man bar Hanks on 3rd Avenue, which died an old man’s death. The ice maker? Donated by our friends from Nunu’s Chocolates after they closed their Atlantic Avenue store. The 6’x6’walk-in fridge for the kegs has a more corporate history, nonetheless interesting: Josh bought it from a Johnson & Johnson consulting firm out in Long Island that used it only briefly to store a bandaid-making contraption. He had to learn how to drain it, take it apart, lower it down a basement hatch into its new home, and then put it back together again.
As a new business without deep pockets, we’re often in the position of finding new ways to make old things work. It’s a good life skill to have, and I make the point to my daughter and nephew that sometimes you’ve got to work with what you’ve got. Taking them to the Decatur Street Playground just around the corner for a break from the grown-up talk, I learn we have only a whiffle ball and not a bat—only a tennis ball and not a racket—so I roll up The New York Times, summoning my father’s stick-ball days, and encourage them to give it a try. On their own, when the bat proves too short, they decide to throw the ball around egg-toss style, the distance between them lengthening until skill wins out and one of them leaves to do something she does better: hang from the jungle gym, vampire-bat style.
Back at Carpe Vino, seats at the bar have started to fill and a couple with a baby sit under the dripping umbrella. Two long-time customers stop by and sign up to perform with their bands, and an alum from my college comes in to discuss their event, helpfully pointing out that our mailing, rather than physical, address is listed on the building. (“Are they trying to make it harder for you to do business?”) The road that earlier this morning was so uninteresting soon becomes the scene of a bike accident involving a former circus performer who skids in a pool of oil and miraculously rolls over a car and onto the sidewalk as the traffic divides seamlessly around the Citibike he’s abandoned in the middle of the road. We gather again in the the doorway, trying to see if we need to call 911 until a customer sitting at the bar with a beer chides us, “What you looking at? Nothing there to see. Back in my day, in this neighborhood, anybody standing ‘round gawking like that would’ve meant a dead body.” He talks to us a little more about the evolution of the neighborhood and tries to convince the biker, whom we’ve offered some bandages, to sue.
“Sue who?”the biker asks. “You saw me,” he says. “You saw me flip, right?” He seems almost more interested in his ability to turn himself around than in the fact that he could have been seriously injured.
“Three revolutions, man! Did you see me flip?”
And we did see. Three perfect turns. Three revolutions.
Three evolutions.
