In truth, I learned that for all its tough-talk swagger and reputation, Brooklyn had a big, warm heart. Living in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill felt like being in a village where everyone knows your name and people stop on the street to exchange pleasantries along with the latest news on tire slashings. We even had a plant thief on Washington Avenue who was fencing window boxes somewhere in South Brooklyn. My next-door neighbor, a divorcée with a BMW, a very active social life, and no visible means of support, left town one day and never came back, taking with her a baby who’d arrived under mysterious circumstances. Later, I found out that she had tried to sell the child back to the doctor who delivered her. There was never a dull moment.
Which brings us back to Bobby, shot dead in the doorway of an emporium crammed to the rafters with lovely chests of drawers and old Tiffany-style lamps and antique dining tables. The tall, rangy Russian, who was in fact from the Republic of Georgia and usually wore a broad-brimmed leather hat, à la Crocodile Dundee, was one of the many “gentlemen friends” who’d been seen coming and going to the house next to ours. I doubted that he was the one who threw a rock through the window at 6 a.m., necessitating a visit from a patrolman, or the one who set the fire in the foyer. But who knew?
At the time of the murder, rumors flew up and down the streets of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill: Bobby had been shot by his former brother-in-law, with whom he’d been in business until recently; it was someone from the Russian mob in Brighton Beach, from whom he’d borrowed money; it was the husband of one of his paramours—my next-door neighbor was just one of many.
Tillie Asnis, the landlady, had discovered the body in the doorway of the store. I met her when she was selling furniture, emptying the place for a new tenant. As I recall, she said little about the murder itself that day, and instead gossiped about the Russian’s way with the local ladies. That, too, was typical of the neighborhood then: Once a crime had been broadcast on the local grapevine, it was rarely discussed further. Better to keep a lid on things.
A frizzy-haired woman of Russian Jewish ancestry who’d moved to Brooklyn from the Bronx, Tillie lived above the shop with her children and grandchildren. A two-pack-a-day smoker, she reminded me of the characters on
The Honeymooners
, with her husky voice and no-nonsense demeanor. After running a dry cleaning store on the premises with her late husband for many years, she’d let the space to her son-in-law for a bike shop and a locksmith’s business before leasing it to Vladimir. Given his untimely departure, she was back to square one. Life went on, as did the need to pay the bills.
Though horrified by the manner in which the store had been vacated, I asked Tillie about the rent on the space after buying two chairs for fifteen dollars. At the time, I was a book publisher with no experience running restaurants, though I’d worked as a waitress in a country club, a truck stop, an icecream parlor, and an Italian restaurant in high school and college. The oldest in an Irish Catholic family with six children, I was as chronically overscheduled as the West Indian characters in the old
Saturday Night Live
skits.
In an effort to meet people in my new neighborhood, I’d volunteered as a writer and editor for a local quarterly called
The Hill
. A look at back issues alerted me to the previous existence of an espresso place in an old carriage house on Waverly Avenue run by students at Pratt, an art school situated in the neighborhood. What a brilliant idea for a shop in an area full of graphic and fashion designers, architects, and other people who worked at home and had no place to hang out other than the local Greek diners. And the corner of Vanderbilt and DeKalb was just three blocks from the Pratt campus. Didn’t art students and their teachers need cappuccino to fuel their creative efforts?
Though I loved working with writers, I was becoming increasingly disenchanted with corporate publishing, which had its own version of sword-and-knife play. In addition, I had come to relish my involvement in the Fort Greene community, and wanted to make a contribution to a place I felt had a bright future in so many ways, with its diverse population, its proximity to Manhattan, and its history-filled beauty. And if I didn’t take the space, it might become yet another real estate office, of which we had a plethora already.
I put my nest egg where my heart was: Hands shaking, I wrote Tillie Asnis a check for a security deposit and set out to convert an old antiques store into a cozy neighborhood café named in her honor. While I was out of town on a publishing trip, the Jamaican contractor and his Trinidadian crew performed a ceremony involving white rum and chicken feathers to purge the space of any bad spirits left over from the murder of the previous tenant. Despite the Caribbean version of an exorcism, predictions of failure were as common as rain in April. Word on the street was that no one in this neighborhood would pay $1.50 for a cup of coffee when they could buy it across the street at the diner for sixty cents. At the time, DeKalb Avenue had just one restaurant, the beloved Cino’s, a red-sauce fixture since the 1950s, and Starbucks was just beginning its retail march from sea to shining sea.
Fast-forward to the new century. I’d left publishing for freelance life. We’ll move right through the years of light foot traffic, employee theft and subterfuge, and near-bankruptcy at the store. Nothing I’d done in my life had elicited such an honestly enthusiastic and truly grateful response: Area residents stopped me on the corner, in line at the grocery store, and in the post office to tell me how much they loved my shop. Even in Manhattan, people I’d never met called across subway cars, “Hello, Tillie!” By the time we celebrated our tenth year in business in 2007, Tillie’s was considered a neighborhood institution, which made me feel both proud and definitely older.
Though friends and family members saw me as a Pollyanna when I opened the store, the survival of my risky venture validated my view of the neighborhood as a place filled with genuine potential, despite its dicey reputation. I wasn’t getting rich, but nor was I spending my days listening to my boss cavil about so-called “big books.”
By then, many more restaurants and coffee joints had opened not just on DeKalb, but all over the area, and real estate prices in Fort Greene had increased by such leaps and bounds that the
New York Times
real estate section could barely keep up. In 2006, a photo of the side of Tillie’s illustrated an article in the
New York Times
magazine about the death of bohemia and the invasion of the stroller brigade. How far we’d come from the days of Bobby the Russian’s sad demise.
Fears of rapid change—of the Manhattanization of Brooklyn by condo and office tower—now fuel the local rumor mill. Friends call friends to discuss not the latest shooting, but the sale prices of houses and coop apartments, and whether or not the area will change irrevocably for the worse when the Atlantic Yards development is built. After years of peace and quiet, there’s been a recent blip upward in the local crime rate, as the “have-nots” eye this newly fertile hunting ground of “haves.” Still, the neighborhood remains positively bucolic in comparison to the bad old days, which some longtime residents refer to with a sense of rueful regret. Though no one condoned burglary or car theft, there was a sense then that we were in it together, battling for a better future. Now that it has arrived, we aren’t all sure we like the way it looks. Fairy tales don’t start with bodies sprawled in doorways.
References to the Borough of Kings now connote not working-class pride or even street style, but a certain kind of city life that is artistically astute, relatively well-off, politically correct, and, yes, self-satisfied. For a taste of the old ways, you have to go further into what friends call “deepest Brooklyn,” where even in an era of drastically reduced crime all over the metropolis, there are still bodies on the ground, almost all dark-skinned.
At the funeral of one of our first customers, Frank Giaco, who sat in front each morning sipping coffee and smoking a smelly cigar, I nearly lost it when I saw a Tillie’s card in his coffin:
Buy ten, get one free
. In the best Brooklyn tradition, we hang on.
In which players who are not
faint of heart assemble atop a structure of any sort—a
fence, low building, rock, etc. One by one, they step forward
to the edge and close their eyes while those behind
give a sudden shove. As the game continues by round, the
ultimate winner is the one player no longer afraid to take
a blind leap.
I
have worked in the New York City courts for more than twenty years. All of that time in Brooklyn. All but one year in Criminal Court or the Criminal Term of Supreme Court.
My coworkers and I have borne witness to a generational slice-of-life of the criminal underclass. One of the things we have learned is that siphoning the antisocial actions of any individual through the filter of a government bureaucracy— however well-intentioned—turns even the most evil behavior into mundane drama.
Most of the defendants I’ve encountered are life’s losers: lost souls who, through bad choices, bad company, or just bad luck, are destined to spend their unhappy lives in courthouses, social service offices, rehab facilities, homeless shelters, and Rikers Island—in such an overlapping, dizzying whirl that I’m certain they often can’t remember which building they’re in on a given day, or why.
Then there are the bad guys: predators whose casual cruelty is too often mistaken for cool in their communities and emulated by kids a few years younger. But their stories, even the worst of them, are drained of passion in the halls of justice. The antiseptic nature of ritual proceedings will inevitably do that. Think of weddings, graduations, religious services, or oaths of office. Even being inducted into the Mafia is probably boring.
But what still gets to me are the snapshots—suckerpunches, facial expressions, snippets of conversation. The snapshots will catch you off guard. Sometimes they will shock and enrage you. Sometimes the snapshots will break your heart.
It can be the look on a mother’s face when her son is denied bail, or on a father’s face when his daughter’s rapist is released on a technicality. It can be the tense moment an innocent man spends in front of the bench pleading guilty to a crime he did not commit, knowing that he cannot roll the dice in hope of an acquittal because of his past record.
There are the elevator stories—complete novels played out in thirty or forty seconds while traveling from courtroom to lobby and back. I’ve made copious notes on them in the tiny spiral-bound journals I’ve always kept tucked in my jacket pockets. As I flip through them now some are meaningless, the memories lost. Others are so vivid I don’t need the prompt. These are the earliest and latest entries.
My fourth day of work:
Still unsure where most courtrooms and offices are, riding
to the lobby to meet the kid who is delivering lunch for a
deliberating jury. There is one other occupant, a young
woman in a business suit with an attaché case. The elevator
stops and she greets another young woman who steps
in, similarly dressed.“Hey, how are you?”
“Great! I just got a rape and kidnapping knocked
down to unlawful imprisonment.”“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Thank God I had a brand-new A.D.A. who
didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. My guy was
guilty as sin. No way I thought he was walking out of that
room.”The elevator doors open. They give each other a highfive
and walk off in different directions.Last month:
Riding down to get a cup of coffee. Two women and a
toddler on the elevator with me. The women stand silently
and the toddler cries. One of the women looks down suddenly
and screams, “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”The little boy looks like he’s been struck open-handed,
and is immediately quiet.“He’s just hungry,” the other woman says.
“I know,” the first woman says. She looks down at the
child. “We gonna go get dollar pizza,” she says to him. He
is looking at the elevator floor.After several seconds of silence, the first woman says,
“I pray Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus; pray that lady can’t
identify him.”“Thought he said he wasn’t there,” the second woman
says.“He wasn’t,” the first woman replies. “Fuckin’ cops
lie. Besides,” she adds as the doors open, “he say it was
dark and she old.”Both women laugh as they walk away.
I am reminded of my first few years on this job when I worked in uniform, searching members of the public as they entered the building. I was shocked at the number of young women with infants, and remarked about it one day to an old-timer.
“Twenty years from now,” he said, taking a slow drag on his cigarette, “I’ll be long gone and you’ll be searching those kids.”
He retired seven years ago, and died a year later, and those infants are in their early twenties now. The ones that haven’t already been killed are coming through my doors, and the only thing that feels different is that you can’t smoke in the building anymore.
In March 2006, two high-profile cases were heard on the same day. One was the arraignment of Darryl Littlejohn, a nightclub bouncer accused of the torture and murder of a young woman named Imette St. Guillen, who had been drinking at the bar where he worked. That case had dominated the tabloid headlines and local news shows for weeks following her death. The other was the trial of two men, Troy Hendrix and Kayson Pearson, for the rape, torture, and murder of another young woman, Romona Moore.