Issue 90: Technology/Winter 2015

Phone Call 1983

It’s 11 o’clock at night and I’ve just gotten home to the floor-through apartment I share with two other comrades in Brooklyn.  We live on the edge of Park Slope, where it’s still mostly Puerto Rican and where it’s impossible to find things we’d gotten used to in our old place in the rapidly gentrifying East Village, like watercress and sun-dried tomatoes.  Still, the neighborhood is beginning to change.  One of my roommates heard that a dog grooming salon is opening up across the street and there’s a sign in the papered over windows of what used to be a little Dominican Barber Shop that says: Coming Soon! My Sister’s Kitchen – Gourmet Delicatessen.  This isn’t good.  And means we’ll probably have to move again in the not-too-distant future to someplace else that has yet to be discovered.  Some place we can afford.  A friend at work told me we should check out a neighborhood called Williamsburg, just one stop into Brooklyn on the double-L train from Manhattan.  More

Phone Call 1983 is from a group memoir in-progress, Red Heads / Red Tales.