Last Night in Brighton

1. The Yawn التثاؤب If I was in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, I was partying on my own. In the celebratory sense, yes. But also, I’d probably smoked a little w**d. And if I was out of w**d, I’d taken one or five shots at a Russian restaurant on the boardwalk. That’s because, if I was in Brighton — which I often was — it didn’t just happen. I couldn’t just will myself there. I had to get there physically, on an hour-long express train from Manhattan, and then mentally, to the spiritual space of Beach House ballads and Costco buttercream cakes. Coat my insides in crushed velour and luxury. It was the w**d that night, at first. Premium. Sensuality, once more. As usual, I went at dusk, before the shops closed. The sky was a clement, monotone periwinkle at that hour. The ocean matched the sky, of course. That’s science. I stood in the ocean, up to my knees in murky, sudsy waves, and I felt the half-hearted clemency of low-tide rush over me . I liked to see the periwinkle of that hour against the grey and brick backdrop of the austere Soviet-style flat blocks. Those buildings signified to me that we are small, in our little cubbies, that only when we are together do we have any heft. I liked to half-see the Coney Island Parachute Jump — the lit-up Bethlehem steel skeleton of a once-great and gaudy attraction — glow in the distance, closer to the Coney Island subway station where I typically arrived, alone, and walked a couple of miles up the coast, to Brighton. That April evening, someone in charge of the lights at Coney Island had set the still and skeletal Parachute Jump in the colours of the American flag, in the way maintenance staff likely put lipstick on Mao, Lenin, and Evita’s embalmed, slowly festering corpses. I was about two miles up the coast from the Parachute Jump when I was partying alone in Brighton. And yet I could see it shimmering in the distance. I was not on the Parachute Jump when I was in Brighton, but I was often in free fall. That’s life. This was a farewell party. I regretted, suddenly, that I was high. I felt an urge to remember. Everything would change the next day. A man on the boardwalk cycled past, a few yards from where I stood in the ocean. I could hear his bicycle tires dancing along the boardwalk planks, and overlaying that, the sound of a radio speaker, probably in his backpack. It played Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? by the Shirelles. A little too perfect, I thought, but still poetic enough that I should write it down somewhere. That’s the predicament of the pot smoker, isn’t it? You have all these powerful, profound thoughts and emotional moments, and even if you have the courage to collect yourself and write them down, they depreciate in value when you sober up and read them over. Slippery thing, meaning. I was not, to be sure, like the protagonist of that song — a sorrowful woman. I am not as she was, begging for tonight to spill over into tomorrow. In fact, I’d already done my best to make certain it would not. Kashkar Cafe was not far from the shoreline, in reality. But time played tricks when I was high. It either sped up or slowed down. When it sped up, that meant I was high enough to forget from one minute to the next that I had been walking from my habitual starting-off point, knee-deep in the waves at Brighton Beach, to Kashkar Cafe. It meant I was too high to care very much about where I was going. If I wasn’t high enough, I’d remember on occasion the forgotten moments from before, and I would feel like I had been walking the same road for an eternity, locked in a haze, like a spiritual prison. It is a sin to wish your life away, but if I had my druthers, time would have always sped up, on the road to Kashkar. Britney Spears said in an interview once that the secret to happiness is a bad memory. I agree. I wanted to forget where I’ve come from, so the trek would be easier. And I was able to choose, horrific as it may seem, to live in a state of perpetual amnesia. I was a constitutionally unsentimental and unafraid person. I did not attend my high school, undergraduate, or masters graduation ceremonies. I never kept in touch with my schoolmates. Or former work colleagues. I liked a good, clean break. No cooing goodbyes. I was tired of those. Nothing precious. No time. At least for me, pot can have a number of side effects. Of course, there’s the hunger, which is another reason why I prefer a quick hike over to Kashkar Cafe. And then, there is the worst possible outcome of 420— the reverse of my intentions: The pot magnifies my usual anxiety ten-fold and seals it with newfound paranoia — the mother of all side effects. Ironically, that night I had taken my pot in the form of a little chocolate biscuit, to calm me. I wondered if I had made a grave mistake. Standing beneath the metro overpass, the sound of the express Q train rushing overhead drove up my heart rate, until I felt myself locked in a fit of frenzy. I squatted down, back against the wall of some bank. I held my head in my hands until the train passed. When I heard the sounds of relative calm, I looked around. To my left, a few metres away, was a rotund woman with a short, bouffant hairdo. She wore a tight black and grey Justin Bieber shirt from one of the Brighton discount clothing shops over a short, frilly, rainbow-coloured skirt. She smoked a long, thin lady cigarette, back against the wall. She looked up at the subway overpass that had become the bane of her existence, with its near-constant noise. I wanted her release. I wanted to see the hot air expel from my chest and disappear. I felt the urge. I had been a smoker for a decade until recently, until the cigarettes and I had abandoned each other, and I came to feel on occasion as though there was a little phantom limb between my index and middle fingers. I yawned. I felt a profusion of oxygen — mixed with the roadside smog and some of the woman’s second-hand smoke — inflate my lungs. The urge subsided. Like magic. I marvelled at how simple it had been. A little yawn. In a moment’s lucid salvation, I recalled Kashkar Cafe. I recalled that I was hungry and that Kashkar was located several blocks to my right, past a synagogue, a few markets, and a surrealist pastry shop that serves cream cakes by the self-service slice. Cakes with all the whimsy of the psychedelic onion-shaped domes atop St. Peters Basilica. A great many things could pull me aside en route to Kashkar, high as I was . That evening, I stayed the course. It took unusual commitment, but I pulled myself together and moved onward. What awaited me on the other side of my journey were meaty, little parcels of something resolutely in-between: Dumplings with noodle dough in the Chinese style, filled with a Turkic sort of seasoned lamb, topped with dill and served with sour cream to suit the Slavic and other post-Soviet palettes of that neighbourhood. Maybe that’s why I love Kashkar Cafe. It was a borderland like Tijuana — a place where all the road signs point elsewhere. A place full of dissatisfied people with the courage to abandon the past for a vast and violent unknown. That night had been a borderland between the me of that day and the next. It was a fitting last supper.