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For You, Mothers we didn’t mean to upset the neighbors. At first, they thought it was kinda cool. They’d invite friends over, sit out on stoops drinking and smoking and saying, “Holy Mother, you ever seen such a thing?” Actually, to tell the truth, they didn’t just say, you know, “Holy Mother,” this being Brooklyn and all. Anyway, within a week, they’d gotten used to it all -- no holy anything for twin suns diving down into the zone-violating high-rises on Fourth Avenue and exploding, oozing reds and purples so seductive it was surely a sin to look at them. So . . . we offered specials. The “Season’s Greetings” sunset in red and green and my favorite, “The Luck of the Irish,” our St. Paddy’s Day Special, all green, except a rainbow shooting through it, dangling a tiny pot of gold at the end. Word got out, groups of tourists started trouping from the F train past St. Agnes on Hoyt to our premises by the Gowanus Canal, and we went from running an extra sunset here and there to a dozen a day. Folks who pray by the sun were praying more and more often. Knowing some of them that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing but people started to complain. Their kids were growing up too fast. Three-year-old boys swaggering out of their diapers, sprouting beards, piercing their tongues, stealing microphones and rapping about MILF ho’s to God and the entire neighborhood. Trying to make amends, we offered a free “Mother’s Day Special,” all fluffy pink and white ‘round the words: “For you, Mothers.” The neighbors -- apparently hardened by so many sunsets -- picketed it. Thirty-year-old women with white hair and wrinkles, propped up by their husbands who, in turn, leaned on their strapping, over-grown infants, all of them raising their middle fingers to the sky, tschanting, “For you, Motherfuckers!” This is all by way of saying -- my investors and I? We’re broke, uninsurable, old beyond our years, sick of smelling the burned-out Gowanus over-cooking in perpetual daylight -- and, no, we didn’t set the fire in the factory. That’s not to say we couldn’t arrange a sunset or two, for the right price. |
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