How to Get There

Turn left off Henry onto Middagh Street to see our famous firehouse, home of Engine 205 and Hook & Ladder 118 and home also to the mythic painting “Fire under the Bridge” decorating the corrugated sliding door. The painting depicts a giant American flag wrinkled by wind and dwarfing the famous Brooklyn Bridge as it stretches as best it can to get a purchase on Manhattan. In the distance a few dismal towers and beyond the towers still another river. A little deal table holds a tiny American flag—like the one Foreman held as he bowed to receive gold at the ’68 Olympics in Mexico City—; this actual flag is rooted in a can of hothouse roses going brown at the edges and beginning to shed. There’s a metal collection box bearing the names of those lost during the recent burnings. Should you stop to shake the box— which is none of your business—you’ll hear only a whisper. Perhaps the donations are all hush money, ones, fives, tens, twenties, or more likely there are IOUs and the heart of Brooklyn has gone cold from so much asking. Down the block and across the street, a man sleeps on the sidewalk, an ordinary man, somehow utterly spent, he sleeps through all the usual sounds of a Brooklyn noon. Beside him a dog, a terrier, its muzzle resting on crossed paws, its brown eyes wide and intelligent. Between man and dog sits a take-out coffee cup meant to receive, next to it a picture of Jesus— actually a digital, color photograph of the Lord in his prime, robed and though bearded impossibly young and athletic, and— as always—alone. “Give what you can,” says a hand-lettered cardboard sign to all who pass. If you stand there long enough without giving or receiving the shabby, little terrier will close his eyes. If you stand there long enough the air will thicken with dusk and dust and exhaust and finally with a starless dark. The day will become something it’s never been before, something for which I have no name.