Sunday, 25 August 2002 | Gallery

It was cool and rainy yesterday when I walked through Brooklyn underneath my literal umbrella of isolation and sat on a muggy train decorated with brown prints of shoe bottoms. I was on my way to go to PS1, or Public School 1, the oldest public school in New York. It's no longer a school, but a gallery, and yesterday the area around it was thumping with beats manipulated by DJs. The outdoor dance floor was relatively empty at first but seemed to get more popular as the sky grew dimmer. No one really seemed to notice or care about the rain.

Stuart, Beau, and I would pick people to watch, point them out and give them names, and make guesses about them. One group, especially one guy in particular, I labeled "Fame," since he reminded me so much of Leroy from the movie. Lots of energy, and lots of different ethnic groups there, so many that it almost seemed unreal, like a manufactured commercial.

Most of the people were in their twenties, but there was one old white-haired man who strolled slowly and confidently through the crowd, extending his point-and-shoot camera into the air with one arm, snapping pictures of dancers and objects of interest. I watched him take a picture of a strange concrete creature embedded in the stairs.

I explored only a tiny, impressive corner of the gallery itself, which included the photographs of a man who, over the course of his life, chased rescue ambulances in order to take pictures of crime scenes, auto accidents, train wrecks, natural disasters, suicides. There was so much to see in each picture, and, again, I found myself making guesses about the people inside of the black-and-white rectangles, trapped inside their horrible moments.

***

The man who lives across the street from my building informed my roommates that the place where we live was once, in addition to a mortuary, a casket factory. In fact, when he was a little boy, he remembers peering into the basement windows just after the building had flooded, seeing caskets and bodies float by.

At this moment, I'm in that building, sitting at my computer underneath a caged window. My roommates Bil and Suran are having band practice, David is making his own spaghetti sauce, and Beau is hanging an ironing board on the back of his door. The building has changed duties.